SNOWED UP
When Ursula and Birkin were gone, Gudrun felt herself free in her
contest with Gerald. As they grew more used to each other, he seemed to
press upon her more and more. At first she could manage him, so that
her own will was always left free. But very soon, he began to ignore
her female tactics, he dropped his respect for her whims and her
privacies, he began to exert his own will blindly, without submitting
to hers.
Already a vital conflict had set in, which frightened them both. But he
was alone, whilst already she had begun to cast round for external
resource.
When Ursula had gone, Gudrun felt her own existence had become stark
and elemental. She went and crouched alone in her bedroom, looking out
of the window at the big, flashing stars. In front was the faint shadow
of the mountain-knot. That was the pivot. She felt strange and
inevitable, as if she were centred upon the pivot of all existence,
there was no further reality.
Presently Gerald opened the door. She knew he would not be long before
he came. She was rarely alone, he pressed upon her like a frost,
deadening her.
“Are you alone in the dark?” he said. And she could tell by his tone he
resented it, he resented this isolation she had drawn round herself.
Yet, feeling static and inevitable, she was kind towards him.
“Would you like to light the candle?” she asked.
He did not answer, but came and stood behind her, in the darkness.
“Look,” she said, “at that lovely star up there. Do you know its name?”
He crouched beside her, to look through the low window.
“No,” he said. “It is very fine.”
“_Isn’t_ it beautiful! Do you notice how it darts different coloured
fires—it flashes really superbly—”
They remained in silence. With a mute, heavy gesture she put her hand
on his knee, and took his hand.
“Are you regretting Ursula?” he asked.
“No, not at all,” she said. Then, in a slow mood, she asked:
“How much do you love me?”
He stiffened himself further against her.
“How much do you think I do?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“But what is your opinion?” he asked.
There was a pause. At length, in the darkness, came her voice, hard and
indifferent:
“Very little indeed,” she said coldly, almost flippant.
His heart went icy at the sound of her voice.
“Why don’t I love you?” he asked, as if admitting the truth of her
accusation, yet hating her for it.
“I don’t know why you don’t—I’ve been good to you. You were in a
_fearful_ state when you came to me.”
Her heart was beating to suffocate her, yet she was strong and
unrelenting.
“When was I in a fearful state?” he asked.
“When you first came to me. I _had_ to take pity on you. But it was
never love.”
It was that statement “It was never love,” which sounded in his ears
with madness.
“Why must you repeat it so often, that there is no love?” he said in a
voice strangled with rage.
“Well you don’t _think_ you love, do you?” she asked.
He was silent with cold passion of anger.
“You don’t think you _can_ love me, do you?” she repeated almost with a
sneer.
“No,” he said.
“You know you never _have_ loved me, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what you mean by the word “love,” he replied.
“Yes, you do. You know all right that you have never loved me. Have
you, do you think?”
“No,” he said, prompted by some barren spirit of truthfulness and
obstinacy.
“And you never _will_ love me,” she said finally, “will you?”
There was a diabolic coldness in her, too much to bear.
“No,” he said.
“Then,” she replied, “what have you against me!”
He was silent in cold, frightened rage and despair. “If only I could
kill her,” his heart was whispering repeatedly. “If only I could kill
her—I should be free.”
It seemed to him that death was the only severing of this Gordian knot.
“Why do you torture me?” he said.
She flung her arms round his neck.
“Ah, I don’t want to torture you,” she said pityingly, as if she were
comforting a child. The impertinence made his veins go cold, he was
insensible. She held her arms round his neck, in a triumph of pity. And
her pity for him was as cold as stone, its deepest motive was hate of
him, and fear of his power over her, which she must always counterfoil.
“Say you love me,” she pleaded. “Say you will love me for ever—won’t
you—won’t you?”
But it was her voice only that coaxed him. Her senses were entirely
apart from him, cold and destructive of him. It was her overbearing
_will_ that insisted.
“Won’t you say you’ll love me always?” she coaxed. “Say it, even if it
isn’t true—say it Gerald, do.”
“I will love you always,” he repeated, in real agony, forcing the words
out.
She gave him a quick kiss.
“Fancy your actually having said it,” she said with a touch of
raillery.
He stood as if he had been beaten.
“Try to love me a little more, and to want me a little less,” she said,
in a half contemptuous, half coaxing tone.
The darkness seemed to be swaying in waves across his mind, great waves
of darkness plunging across his mind. It seemed to him he was degraded
at the very quick, made of no account.
“You mean you don’t want me?” he said.
“You are so insistent, and there is so little grace in you, so little
fineness. You are so crude. You break me—you only waste me—it is
horrible to me.”
“Horrible to you?” he repeated.
“Yes. Don’t you think I might have a room to myself, now Ursula has
gone? You can say you want a dressing room.”
“You do as you like—you can leave altogether if you like,” he managed
to articulate.
“Yes, I know that,” she replied. “So can you. You can leave me whenever
you like—without notice even.”
The great tides of darkness were swinging across his mind, he could
hardly stand upright. A terrible weariness overcame him, he felt he
must lie on the floor. Dropping off his clothes, he got into bed, and
lay like a man suddenly overcome by drunkenness, the darkness lifting
and plunging as if he were lying upon a black, giddy sea. He lay still
in this strange, horrific reeling for some time, purely unconscious.
At length she slipped from her own bed and came over to him. He
remained rigid, his back to her. He was all but unconscious.
She put her arms round his terrifying, insentient body, and laid her
cheek against his hard shoulder.
“Gerald,” she whispered. “Gerald.”
There was no change in him. She caught him against her. She pressed her
breasts against his shoulders, she kissed his shoulder, through the
sleeping jacket. Her mind wondered, over his rigid, unliving body. She
was bewildered, and insistent, only her will was set for him to speak
to her.
“Gerald, my dear!” she whispered, bending over him, kissing his ear.
Her warm breath playing, flying rhythmically over his ear, seemed to
relax the tension. She could feel his body gradually relaxing a little,
losing its terrifying, unnatural rigidity. Her hands clutched his
limbs, his muscles, going over him spasmodically.
The hot blood began to flow again through his veins, his limbs relaxed.
“Turn round to me,” she whispered, forlorn with insistence and triumph.
So at last he was given again, warm and flexible. He turned and
gathered her in his arms. And feeling her soft against him, so
perfectly and wondrously soft and recipient, his arms tightened on her.
She was as if crushed, powerless in him. His brain seemed hard and
invincible now like a jewel, there was no resisting him.
His passion was awful to her, tense and ghastly, and impersonal, like a
destruction, ultimate. She felt it would kill her. She was being
killed.
“My God, my God,” she cried, in anguish, in his embrace, feeling her
life being killed within her. And when he was kissing her, soothing
her, her breath came slowly, as if she were really spent, dying.
“Shall I die, shall I die?” she repeated to herself.
And in the night, and in him, there was no answer to the question.
And yet, next day, the fragment of her which was not destroyed remained
intact and hostile, she did not go away, she remained to finish the
holiday, admitting nothing. He scarcely ever left her alone, but
followed her like a shadow, he was like a doom upon her, a continual
“thou shalt,” “thou shalt not.” Sometimes it was he who seemed
strongest, whist she was almost gone, creeping near the earth like a
spent wind; sometimes it was the reverse. But always it was this
eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified
because the other was nulled.
“In the end,” she said to herself, “I shall go away from him.”
“I can be free of her,” he said to himself in his paroxysms of
suffering.
And he set himself to be free. He even prepared to go away, to leave
her in the lurch. But for the first time there was a flaw in his will.
“Where shall I go?” he asked himself.
“Can’t you be self-sufficient?” he replied to himself, putting himself
upon his pride.
“Self-sufficient!” he repeated.
It seemed to him that Gudrun was sufficient unto herself, closed round
and completed, like a thing in a case. In the calm, static reason of
his soul, he recognised this, and admitted it was her right, to be
closed round upon herself, self-complete, without desire. He realised
it, he admitted it, it only needed one last effort on his own part, to
win for himself the same completeness. He knew that it only needed one
convulsion of his will for him to be able to turn upon himself also, to
close upon himself as a stone fixes upon itself, and is impervious,
self-completed, a thing isolated.
This knowledge threw him into a terrible chaos. Because, however much
he might mentally _will_ to be immune and self-complete, the desire for
this state was lacking, and he could not create it. He could see that,
to exist at all, he must be perfectly free of Gudrun, leave her if she
wanted to be left, demand nothing of her, have no claim upon her.
But then, to have no claim upon her, he must stand by himself, in sheer
nothingness. And his brain turned to nought at the idea. It was a state
of nothingness. On the other hand, he might give in, and fawn to her.
Or, finally, he might kill her. Or he might become just indifferent,
purposeless, dissipated, momentaneous. But his nature was too serious,
not gay enough or subtle enough for mocking licentiousness.
A strange rent had been torn in him; like a victim that is torn open
and given to the heavens, so he had been torn apart and given to
Gudrun. How should he close again? This wound, this strange,
infinitely-sensitive opening of his soul, where he was exposed, like an
open flower, to all the universe, and in which he was given to his
complement, the other, the unknown, this wound, this disclosure, this
unfolding of his own covering, leaving him incomplete, limited,
unfinished, like an open flower under the sky, this was his cruellest
joy. Why then should he forego it? Why should he close up and become
impervious, immune, like a partial thing in a sheath, when he had
broken forth, like a seed that has germinated, to issue forth in being,
embracing the unrealised heavens.
He would keep the unfinished bliss of his own yearning even through the
torture she inflicted upon him. A strange obstinacy possessed him. He
would not go away from her whatever she said or did. A strange, deathly
yearning carried him along with her. She was the determinating
influence of his very being, though she treated him with contempt,
repeated rebuffs, and denials, still he would never be gone, since in
being near her, even, he felt the quickening, the going forth in him,
the release, the knowledge of his own limitation and the magic of the
promise, as well as the mystery of his own destruction and
annihilation.
She tortured the open heart of him even as he turned to her. And she
was tortured herself. It may have been her will was stronger. She felt,
with horror, as if he tore at the bud of her heart, tore it open, like
an irreverent persistent being. Like a boy who pulls off a fly’s wings,
or tears open a bud to see what is in the flower, he tore at her
privacy, at her very life, he would destroy her as an immature bud,
torn open, is destroyed.
She might open towards him, a long while hence, in her dreams, when she
was a pure spirit. But now she was not to be violated and ruined. She
closed against him fiercely.
They climbed together, at evening, up the high slope, to see the
sunset. In the finely breathing, keen wind they stood and watched the
yellow sun sink in crimson and disappear. Then in the east the peaks
and ridges glowed with living rose, incandescent like immortal flowers
against a brown-purple sky, a miracle, whilst down below the world was
a bluish shadow, and above, like an annunciation, hovered a rosy
transport in mid-air.
To her it was so beautiful, it was a delirium, she wanted to gather the
glowing, eternal peaks to her breast, and die. He saw them, saw they
were beautiful. But there arose no clamour in his breast, only a
bitterness that was visionary in itself. He wished the peaks were grey
and unbeautiful, so that she should not get her support from them. Why
did she betray the two of them so terribly, in embracing the glow of
the evening? Why did she leave him standing there, with the ice-wind
blowing through his heart, like death, to gratify herself among the
rosy snow-tips?
“What does the twilight matter?” he said. “Why do you grovel before it?
Is it so important to you?”
She winced in violation and in fury.
“Go away,” she cried, “and leave me to it. It is beautiful, beautiful,”
she sang in strange, rhapsodic tones. “It is the most beautiful thing I
have ever seen in my life. Don’t try to come between it and me. Take
yourself away, you are out of place—”
He stood back a little, and left her standing there, statue-like,
transported into the mystic glowing east. Already the rose was fading,
large white stars were flashing out. He waited. He would forego
everything but the yearning.
“That was the most perfect thing I have ever seen,” she said in cold,
brutal tones, when at last she turned round to him. “It amazes me that
you should want to destroy it. If you can’t see it yourself, why try to
debar me?” But in reality, he had destroyed it for her, she was
straining after a dead effect.
“One day,” he said, softly, looking up at her, “I shall destroy _you_,
as you stand looking at the sunset; because you are such a liar.”
There was a soft, voluptuous promise to himself in the words. She was
chilled but arrogant.
“Ha!” she said. “I am not afraid of your threats!” She denied herself
to him, she kept her room rigidly private to herself. But he waited on,
in a curious patience, belonging to his yearning for her.
“In the end,” he said to himself with real voluptuous promise, “when it
reaches that point, I shall do away with her.” And he trembled
delicately in every limb, in anticipation, as he trembled in his most
violent accesses of passionate approach to her, trembling with too much
desire.
She had a curious sort of allegiance with Loerke, all the while, now,
something insidious and traitorous. Gerald knew of it. But in the
unnatural state of patience, and the unwillingness to harden himself
against her, in which he found himself, he took no notice, although her
soft kindliness to the other man, whom he hated as a noxious insect,
made him shiver again with an access of the strange shuddering that
came over him repeatedly.
He left her alone only when he went skiing, a sport he loved, and which
she did not practise. Then he seemed to sweep out of life, to be a
projectile into the beyond. And often, when he went away, she talked to
the little German sculptor. They had an invariable topic, in their art.
They were almost of the same ideas. He hated Mestrovic, was not
satisfied with the Futurists, he liked the West African wooden figures,
the Aztec art, Mexican and Central American. He saw the grotesque, and
a curious sort of mechanical motion intoxicated him, a confusion in
nature. They had a curious game with each other, Gudrun and Loerke, of
infinite suggestivity, strange and leering, as if they had some
esoteric understanding of life, that they alone were initiated into the
fearful central secrets, that the world dared not know. Their whole
correspondence was in a strange, barely comprehensible suggestivity,
they kindled themselves at the subtle lust of the Egyptians or the
Mexicans. The whole game was one of subtle inter-suggestivity, and they
wanted to keep it on the plane of suggestion. From their verbal and
physical nuances they got the highest satisfaction in the nerves, from
a queer interchange of half-suggested ideas, looks, expressions and
gestures, which were quite intolerable, though incomprehensible, to
Gerald. He had no terms in which to think of their commerce, his terms
were much too gross.
The suggestion of primitive art was their refuge, and the inner
mysteries of sensation their object of worship. Art and Life were to
them the Reality and the Unreality.
“Of course,” said Gudrun, “life doesn’t _really_ matter—it is one’s art
which is central. What one does in one’s life has _peu de rapport_, it
doesn’t signify much.”
“Yes, that is so, exactly,” replied the sculptor. “What one does in
one’s art, that is the breath of one’s being. What one does in one’s
life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.”
It was curious what a sense of elation and freedom Gudrun found in this
communication. She felt established for ever. Of course Gerald was
_bagatelle_. Love was one of the temporal things in her life, except in
so far as she was an artist. She thought of Cleopatra—Cleopatra must
have been an artist; she reaped the essential from a man, she harvested
the ultimate sensation, and threw away the husk; and Mary Stuart, and
the great Rachel, panting with her lovers after the theatre, these were
the exoteric exponents of love. After all, what was the lover but fuel
for the transport of this subtle knowledge, for a female art, the art
of pure, perfect knowledge in sensuous understanding.
One evening Gerald was arguing with Loerke about Italy and Tripoli. The
Englishman was in a strange, inflammable state, the German was excited.
It was a contest of words, but it meant a conflict of spirit between
the two men. And all the while Gudrun could see in Gerald an arrogant
English contempt for a foreigner. Although Gerald was quivering, his
eyes flashing, his face flushed, in his argument there was a
brusqueness, a savage contempt in his manner, that made Gudrun’s blood
flare up, and made Loerke keen and mortified. For Gerald came down like
a sledge-hammer with his assertions, anything the little German said
was merely contemptible rubbish.
At last Loerke turned to Gudrun, raising his hands in helpless irony, a
shrug of ironical dismissal, something appealing and child-like.
“_Sehen sie, gnädige Frau_—” he began.
“_Bitte sagen Sie nicht immer, gnädige Frau_,” cried Gudrun, her eyes
flashing, her cheeks burning. She looked like a vivid Medusa. Her voice
was loud and clamorous, the other people in the room were startled.
“Please don’t call me Mrs Crich,” she cried aloud.
The name, in Loerke’s mouth particularly, had been an intolerable
humiliation and constraint upon her, these many days.
The two men looked at her in amazement. Gerald went white at the
cheek-bones.
“What shall I say, then?” asked Loerke, with soft, mocking insinuation.
“_Sagen Sie nur nicht das_,” she muttered, her cheeks flushed crimson.
“Not that, at least.”
She saw, by the dawning look on Loerke’s face, that he had understood.
She was _not_ Mrs Crich! So-o-, that explained a great deal.
“_Soll ich Fräulein sagen?_” he asked, malevolently.
“I am not married,” she said, with some hauteur.
Her heart was fluttering now, beating like a bewildered bird. She knew
she had dealt a cruel wound, and she could not bear it.
Gerald sat erect, perfectly still, his face pale and calm, like the
face of a statue. He was unaware of her, or of Loerke or anybody. He
sat perfectly still, in an unalterable calm. Loerke, meanwhile, was
crouching and glancing up from under his ducked head.
Gudrun was tortured for something to say, to relieve the suspense. She
twisted her face in a smile, and glanced knowingly, almost sneering, at
Gerald.
“Truth is best,” she said to him, with a grimace.
But now again she was under his domination; now, because she had dealt
him this blow; because she had destroyed him, and she did not know how
he had taken it. She watched him. He was interesting to her. She had
lost her interest in Loerke.
Gerald rose at length, and went over in a leisurely still movement, to
the Professor. The two began a conversation on Goethe.
She was rather piqued by the simplicity of Gerald’s demeanour this
evening. He did not seem angry or disgusted, only he looked curiously
innocent and pure, really beautiful. Sometimes it came upon him, this
look of clear distance, and it always fascinated her.
She waited, troubled, throughout the evening. She thought he would
avoid her, or give some sign. But he spoke to her simply and
unemotionally, as he would to anyone else in the room. A certain peace,
an abstraction possessed his soul.
She went to his room, hotly, violently in love with him. He was so
beautiful and inaccessible. He kissed her, he was a lover to her. And
she had extreme pleasure of him. But he did not come to, he remained
remote and candid, unconscious. She wanted to speak to him. But this
innocent, beautiful state of unconsciousness that had come upon him
prevented her. She felt tormented and dark.
In the morning, however, he looked at her with a little aversion, some
horror and some hatred darkening into his eyes. She withdrew on to her
old ground. But still he would not gather himself together, against
her.
Loerke was waiting for her now. The little artist, isolated in his own
complete envelope, felt that here at last was a woman from whom he
could get something. He was uneasy all the while, waiting to talk with
her, subtly contriving to be near her. Her presence filled him with
keenness and excitement, he gravitated cunningly towards her, as if she
had some unseen force of attraction.
He was not in the least doubtful of himself, as regards Gerald. Gerald
was one of the outsiders. Loerke only hated him for being rich and
proud and of fine appearance. All these things, however, riches, pride
of social standing, handsome physique, were externals. When it came to
the relation with a woman such as Gudrun, he, Loerke, had an approach
and a power that Gerald never dreamed of.
How should Gerald hope to satisfy a woman of Gudrun’s calibre? Did he
think that pride or masterful will or physical strength would help him?
Loerke knew a secret beyond these things. The greatest power is the one
that is subtle and adjusts itself, not one which blindly attacks. And
he, Loerke, had understanding where Gerald was a calf. He, Loerke,
could penetrate into depths far out of Gerald’s knowledge. Gerald was
left behind like a postulant in the ante-room of this temple of
mysteries, this woman. But he Loerke, could he not penetrate into the
inner darkness, find the spirit of the woman in its inner recess, and
wrestle with it there, the central serpent that is coiled at the core
of life.
What was it, after all, that a woman wanted? Was it mere social effect,
fulfilment of ambition in the social world, in the community of
mankind? Was it even a union in love and goodness? Did she want
“goodness”? Who but a fool would accept this of Gudrun? This was but
the street view of her wants. Cross the threshold, and you found her
completely, completely cynical about the social world and its
advantages. Once inside the house of her soul and there was a pungent
atmosphere of corrosion, an inflamed darkness of sensation, and a
vivid, subtle, critical consciousness, that saw the world distorted,
horrific.
What then, what next? Was it sheer blind force of passion that would
satisfy her now? Not this, but the subtle thrills of extreme sensation
in reduction. It was an unbroken will reacting against her unbroken
will in a myriad subtle thrills of reduction, the last subtle
activities of analysis and breaking down, carried out in the darkness
of her, whilst the outside form, the individual, was utterly unchanged,
even sentimental in its poses.
But between two particular people, any two people on earth, the range
of pure sensational experience is limited. The climax of sensual
reaction, once reached in any direction, is reached finally, there is
no going on. There is only repetition possible, or the going apart of
the two protagonists, or the subjugating of the one will to the other,
or death.
Gerald had penetrated all the outer places of Gudrun’s soul. He was to
her the most crucial instance of the existing world, the _ne plus
ultra_ of the world of man as it existed for her. In him she knew the
world, and had done with it. Knowing him finally she was the Alexander
seeking new worlds. But there _were_ no new worlds, there were no more
_men_, there were only creatures, little, ultimate _creatures_ like
Loerke. The world was finished now, for her. There was only the inner,
individual darkness, sensation within the ego, the obscene religious
mystery of ultimate reduction, the mystic frictional activities of
diabolic reducing down, disintegrating the vital organic body of life.
All this Gudrun knew in her subconsciousness, not in her mind. She knew
her next step—she knew what she should move on to, when she left
Gerald. She was afraid of Gerald, that he might kill her. But she did
not intend to be killed. A fine thread still united her to him. It
should not be _her_ death which broke it. She had further to go, a
further, slow exquisite experience to reap, unthinkable subtleties of
sensation to know, before she was finished.
Of the last series of subtleties, Gerald was not capable. He could not
touch the quick of her. But where his ruder blows could not penetrate,
the fine, insinuating blade of Loerke’s insect-like comprehension
could. At least, it was time for her now to pass over to the other, the
creature, the final craftsman. She knew that Loerke, in his innermost
soul, was detached from everything, for him there was neither heaven
nor earth nor hell. He admitted no allegiance, he gave no adherence
anywhere. He was single and, by abstraction from the rest, absolute in
himself.
Whereas in Gerald’s soul there still lingered some attachment to the
rest, to the whole. And this was his limitation. He was limited,
_borné_, subject to his necessity, in the last issue, for goodness, for
righteousness, for oneness with the ultimate purpose. That the ultimate
purpose might be the perfect and subtle experience of the process of
death, the will being kept unimpaired, that was not allowed in him. And
this was his limitation.
There was a hovering triumph in Loerke, since Gudrun had denied her
marriage with Gerald. The artist seemed to hover like a creature on the
wing, waiting to settle. He did not approach Gudrun violently, he was
never ill-timed. But carried on by a sure instinct in the complete
darkness of his soul, he corresponded mystically with her,
imperceptibly, but palpably.
For two days, he talked to her, continued the discussions of art, of
life, in which they both found such pleasure. They praised the by-gone
things, they took a sentimental, childish delight in the achieved
perfections of the past. Particularly they liked the late eighteenth
century, the period of Goethe and of Shelley, and Mozart.
They played with the past, and with the great figures of the past, a
sort of little game of chess, or marionettes, all to please themselves.
They had all the great men for their marionettes, and they two were the
God of the show, working it all. As for the future, that they never
mentioned except one laughed out some mocking dream of the destruction
of the world by a ridiculous catastrophe of man’s invention: a man
invented such a perfect explosive that it blew the earth in two, and
the two halves set off in different directions through space, to the
dismay of the inhabitants: or else the people of the world divided into
two halves, and each half decided _it_ was perfect and right, the other
half was wrong and must be destroyed; so another end of the world. Or
else, Loerke’s dream of fear, the world went cold, and snow fell
everywhere, and only white creatures, polar-bears, white foxes, and men
like awful white snow-birds, persisted in ice cruelty.
Apart from these stories, they never talked of the future. They
delighted most either in mocking imaginations of destruction, or in
sentimental, fine marionette-shows of the past. It was a sentimental
delight to reconstruct the world of Goethe at Weimar, or of Schiller
and poverty and faithful love, or to see again Jean Jacques in his
quakings, or Voltaire at Ferney, or Frederick the Great reading his own
poetry.
They talked together for hours, of literature and sculpture and
painting, amusing themselves with Flaxman and Blake and Fuseli, with
tenderness, and with Feuerbach and Böcklin. It would take them a
life-time, they felt to live again, _in petto_, the lives of the great
artists. But they preferred to stay in the eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries.
They talked in a mixture of languages. The ground-work was French, in
either case. But he ended most of his sentences in a stumble of English
and a conclusion of German, she skilfully wove herself to her end in
whatever phrase came to her. She took a peculiar delight in this
conversation. It was full of odd, fantastic expression, of double
meanings, of evasions, of suggestive vagueness. It was a real physical
pleasure to her to make this thread of conversation out of the
different-coloured strands of three languages.
And all the while they two were hovering, hesitating round the flame of
some invisible declaration. He wanted it, but was held back by some
inevitable reluctance. She wanted it also, but she wanted to put it
off, to put it off indefinitely, she still had some pity for Gerald,
some connection with him. And the most fatal of all, she had the
reminiscent sentimental compassion for herself in connection with him.
Because of what _had_ been, she felt herself held to him by immortal,
invisible threads—because of what _had_ been, because of his coming to
her that first night, into her own house, in his extremity, because—
Gerald was gradually overcome with a revulsion of loathing for Loerke.
He did not take the man seriously, he despised him merely, except as he
felt in Gudrun’s veins the influence of the little creature. It was
this that drove Gerald wild, the feeling in Gudrun’s veins of Loerke’s
presence, Loerke’s being, flowing dominant through her.
“What makes you so smitten with that little vermin?” he asked, really
puzzled. For he, man-like, could not see anything attractive or
important _at all_ in Loerke. Gerald expected to find some handsomeness
or nobleness, to account for a woman’s subjection. But he saw none
here, only an insect-like repulsiveness.
Gudrun flushed deeply. It was these attacks she would never forgive.
“What do you mean?” she replied. “My God, what a mercy I am _not_
married to you!”
Her voice of flouting and contempt scotched him. He was brought up
short. But he recovered himself.
“Tell me, only tell me,” he reiterated in a dangerous narrowed
voice—“tell me what it is that fascinates you in him.”
“I am not fascinated,” she said, with cold repelling innocence.
“Yes, you are. You are fascinated by that little dry snake, like a bird
gaping ready to fall down its throat.”
She looked at him with black fury.
“I don’t choose to be discussed by you,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter whether you choose or not,” he replied, “that
doesn’t alter the fact that you are ready to fall down and kiss the
feet of that little insect. And I don’t want to prevent you—do it, fall
down and kiss his feet. But I want to know, what it is that fascinates
you—what is it?”
She was silent, suffused with black rage.
“How _dare_ you come brow-beating me,” she cried, “how dare you, you
little squire, you bully. What right have you over me, do you think?”
His face was white and gleaming, she knew by the light in his eyes that
she was in his power—the wolf. And because she was in his power, she
hated him with a power that she wondered did not kill him. In her will
she killed him as he stood, effaced him.
“It is not a question of right,” said Gerald, sitting down on a chair.
She watched the change in his body. She saw his clenched, mechanical
body moving there like an obsession. Her hatred of him was tinged with
fatal contempt.
“It’s not a question of my right over you—though I _have_ some right,
remember. I want to know, I only want to know what it is that
subjugates you to that little scum of a sculptor downstairs, what it is
that brings you down like a humble maggot, in worship of him. I want to
know what you creep after.”
She stood over against the window, listening. Then she turned round.
“Do you?” she said, in her most easy, most cutting voice. “Do you want
to know what it is in him? It’s because he has some understanding of a
woman, because he is not stupid. That’s why it is.”
A queer, sinister, animal-like smile came over Gerald’s face.
“But what understanding is it?” he said. “The understanding of a flea,
a hopping flea with a proboscis. Why should you crawl abject before the
understanding of a flea?”
There passed through Gudrun’s mind Blake’s representation of the soul
of a flea. She wanted to fit it to Loerke. Blake was a clown too. But
it was necessary to answer Gerald.
“Don’t you think the understanding of a flea is more interesting than
the understanding of a fool?” she asked.
“A fool!” he repeated.
“A fool, a conceited fool—a _Dummkopf_,” she replied, adding the German
word.
“Do you call me a fool?” he replied. “Well, wouldn’t I rather be the
fool I am, than that flea downstairs?”
She looked at him. A certain blunt, blind stupidity in him palled on
her soul, limiting her.
“You give yourself away by that last,” she said.
He sat and wondered.
“I shall go away soon,” he said.
She turned on him.
“Remember,” she said, “I am completely independent of you—completely.
You make your arrangements, I make mine.”
He pondered this.
“You mean we are strangers from this minute?” he asked.
She halted and flushed. He was putting her in a trap, forcing her hand.
She turned round on him.
“Strangers,” she said, “we can never be. But if you _want_ to make any
movement apart from me, then I wish you to know you are perfectly free
to do so. Do not consider me in the slightest.”
Even so slight an implication that she needed him and was depending on
him still was sufficient to rouse his passion. As he sat a change came
over his body, the hot, molten stream mounted involuntarily through his
veins. He groaned inwardly, under its bondage, but he loved it. He
looked at her with clear eyes, waiting for her.
She knew at once, and was shaken with cold revulsion. _How_ could he
look at her with those clear, warm, waiting eyes, waiting for her, even
now? What had been said between them, was it not enough to put them
worlds asunder, to freeze them forever apart! And yet he was all
transfused and roused, waiting for her.
It confused her. Turning her head aside, she said:
“I shall always _tell_ you, whenever I am going to make any change—”
And with this she moved out of the room.
He sat suspended in a fine recoil of disappointment, that seemed
gradually to be destroying his understanding. But the unconscious state
of patience persisted in him. He remained motionless, without thought
or knowledge, for a long time. Then he rose, and went downstairs, to
play at chess with one of the students. His face was open and clear,
with a certain innocent _laisser-aller_ that troubled Gudrun most, made
her almost afraid of him, whilst she disliked him deeply for it.
It was after this that Loerke, who had never yet spoken to her
personally, began to ask her of her state.
“You are not married at all, are you?” he asked.
She looked full at him.
“Not in the least,” she replied, in her measured way. Loerke laughed,
wrinkling up his face oddly. There was a thin wisp of his hair straying
on his forehead, she noticed that his skin was of a clear brown colour,
his hands, his wrists. And his hands seemed closely prehensile. He
seemed like topaz, so strangely brownish and pellucid.
“Good,” he said.
Still it needed some courage for him to go on.
“Was Mrs Birkin your sister?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And was _she_ married?”
“She was married.”
“Have you parents, then?”
“Yes,” said Gudrun, “we have parents.”
And she told him, briefly, laconically, her position. He watched her
closely, curiously all the while.
“So!” he exclaimed, with some surprise. “And the Herr Crich, is he
rich?”
“Yes, he is rich, a coal owner.”
“How long has your friendship with him lasted?”
“Some months.”
There was a pause.
“Yes, I am surprised,” he said at length. “The English, I thought they
were so—cold. And what do you think to do when you leave here?”
“What do I think to do?” she repeated.
“Yes. You cannot go back to the teaching. No—” he shrugged his
shoulders—“that is impossible. Leave that to the _canaille_ who can do
nothing else. You, for your part—you know, you are a remarkable woman,
_eine seltsame Frau_. Why deny it—why make any question of it? You are
an extraordinary woman, why should you follow the ordinary course, the
ordinary life?”
Gudrun sat looking at her hands, flushed. She was pleased that he said,
so simply, that she was a remarkable woman. He would not say that to
flatter her—he was far too self-opinionated and objective by nature. He
said it as he would say a piece of sculpture was remarkable, because he
knew it was so.
And it gratified her to hear it from him. Other people had such a
passion to make everything of one degree, of one pattern. In England it
was chic to be perfectly ordinary. And it was a relief to her to be
acknowledged extraordinary. Then she need not fret about the common
standards.
“You see,” she said, “I have no money whatsoever.”
“Ach, money!” he cried, lifting his shoulders. “When one is grown up,
money is lying about at one’s service. It is only when one is young
that it is rare. Take no thought for money—that always lies to hand.”
“Does it?” she said, laughing.
“Always. The Gerald will give you a sum, if you ask him for it—”
She flushed deeply.
“I will ask anybody else,” she said, with some difficulty—“but not
him.”
Loerke looked closely at her.
“Good,” he said. “Then let it be somebody else. Only don’t go back to
that England, that school. No, that is stupid.”
Again there was a pause. He was afraid to ask her outright to go with
him, he was not even quite sure he wanted her; and she was afraid to be
asked. He begrudged his own isolation, was _very_ chary of sharing his
life, even for a day.
“The only other place I know is Paris,” she said, “and I can’t stand
that.”
She looked with her wide, steady eyes full at Loerke. He lowered his
head and averted his face.
“Paris, no!” he said. “Between the _réligion d’amour_, and the latest
’ism, and the new turning to Jesus, one had better ride on a carrousel
all day. But come to Dresden. I have a studio there—I can give you
work,—oh, that would be easy enough. I haven’t seen any of your things,
but I believe in you. Come to Dresden—that is a fine town to be in, and
as good a life as you can expect of a town. You have everything there,
without the foolishness of Paris or the beer of Munich.”
He sat and looked at her, coldly. What she liked about him was that he
spoke to her simple and flat, as to himself. He was a fellow craftsman,
a fellow being to her, first.
“No—Paris,” he resumed, “it makes me sick. Pah—_l’amour_. I detest it.
_L’amour, l’amore, die Liebe_—I detest it in every language. Women and
love, there is no greater tedium,” he cried.
She was slightly offended. And yet, this was her own basic feeling.
Men, and love—there was no greater tedium.
“I think the same,” she said.
“A bore,” he repeated. “What does it matter whether I wear this hat or
another. So love. I needn’t wear a hat at all, only for convenience.
Neither need I love except for convenience. I tell you what, _gnädige
Frau_—” and he leaned towards her—then he made a quick, odd gesture, as
of striking something aside—“_gnädige Fräulein_, never mind—I tell you
what, I would give everything, everything, all your love, for a little
companionship in intelligence—” his eyes flickered darkly, evilly at
her. “You understand?” he asked, with a faint smile. “It wouldn’t
matter if she were a hundred years old, a thousand—it would be all the
same to me, so that she can _understand_.” He shut his eyes with a
little snap.
Again Gudrun was rather offended. Did he not think her good looking,
then? Suddenly she laughed.
“I shall have to wait about eighty years to suit you, at that!” she
said. “I am ugly enough, aren’t I?”
He looked at her with an artist’s sudden, critical, estimating eye.
“You are beautiful,” he said, “and I am glad of it. But it isn’t
that—it isn’t that,” he cried, with emphasis that flattered her. “It is
that you have a certain wit, it is the kind of understanding. For me, I
am little, _chétif_, insignificant. Good! Do not ask me to be strong
and handsome, then. But it is the _me_—” he put his fingers to his
mouth, oddly—“it is the _me_ that is looking for a mistress, and my
_me_ is waiting for the _thee_ of the mistress, for the match to my
particular intelligence. You understand?”
“Yes,” she said, “I understand.”
“As for the other, this _amour_—” he made a gesture, dashing his hand
aside, as if to dash away something troublesome—“it is unimportant,
unimportant. Does it matter, whether I drink white wine this evening,
or whether I drink nothing? It _does not matter_, it does not matter.
So this love, this _amour_, this _baiser_. Yes or no, _soit ou soit
pas_, today, tomorrow, or never, it is all the same, it does not
matter—no more than the white wine.”
He ended with an odd dropping of the head in a desperate negation.
Gudrun watched him steadily. She had gone pale.
Suddenly she stretched over and seized his hand in her own.
“That is true,” she said, in rather a high, vehement voice, “that is
true for me too. It is the understanding that matters.”
He looked up at her almost frightened, furtive. Then he nodded, a
little sullenly. She let go his hand: he had made not the lightest
response. And they sat in silence.
“Do you know,” he said, suddenly looking at her with dark,
self-important, prophetic eyes, “your fate and mine, they will run
together, till—” and he broke off in a little grimace.
“Till when?” she asked, blanched, her lips going white. She was
terribly susceptible to these evil prognostications, but he only shook
his head.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know.”
Gerald did not come in from his skiing until nightfall, he missed the
coffee and cake that she took at four o’clock. The snow was in perfect
condition, he had travelled a long way, by himself, among the snow
ridges, on his skis, he had climbed high, so high that he could see
over the top of the pass, five miles distant, could see the
Marienhütte, the hostel on the crest of the pass, half buried in snow,
and over into the deep valley beyond, to the dusk of the pine trees.
One could go that way home; but he shuddered with nausea at the thought
of home;—one could travel on skis down there, and come to the old
imperial road, below the pass. But why come to any road? He revolted at
the thought of finding himself in the world again. He must stay up
there in the snow forever. He had been happy by himself, high up there
alone, travelling swiftly on skis, taking far flights, and skimming
past the dark rocks veined with brilliant snow.
But he felt something icy gathering at his heart. This strange mood of
patience and innocence which had persisted in him for some days, was
passing away, he would be left again a prey to the horrible passions
and tortures.
So he came down reluctantly, snow-burned, snow-estranged, to the house
in the hollow, between the knuckles of the mountain tops. He saw its
lights shining yellow, and he held back, wishing he need not go in, to
confront those people, to hear the turmoil of voices and to feel the
confusion of other presences. He was isolated as if there were a vacuum
round his heart, or a sheath of pure ice.
The moment he saw Gudrun something jolted in his soul. She was looking
rather lofty and superb, smiling slowly and graciously to the Germans.
A sudden desire leapt in his heart, to kill her. He thought, what a
perfect voluptuous fulfilment it would be, to kill her. His mind was
absent all the evening, estranged by the snow and his passion. But he
kept the idea constant within him, what a perfect voluptuous
consummation it would be to strangle her, to strangle every spark of
life out of her, till she lay completely inert, soft, relaxed for ever,
a soft heap lying dead between his hands, utterly dead. Then he would
have had her finally and for ever; there would be such a perfect
voluptuous finality.
Gudrun was unaware of what he was feeling, he seemed so quiet and
amiable, as usual. His amiability even made her feel brutal towards
him.
She went into his room when he was partially undressed. She did not
notice the curious, glad gleam of pure hatred, with which he looked at
her. She stood near the door, with her hand behind her.
“I have been thinking, Gerald,” she said, with an insulting
nonchalance, “that I shall not go back to England.”
“Oh,” he said, “where will you go then?”
But she ignored his question. She had her own logical statement to
make, and it must be made as she had thought it.
“I can’t see the use of going back,” she continued. “It is over between
me and you—”
She paused for him to speak. But he said nothing. He was only talking
to himself, saying “Over, is it? I believe it is over. But it isn’t
finished. Remember, it isn’t finished. We must put some sort of a
finish on it. There must be a conclusion, there must be finality.”
So he talked to himself, but aloud he said nothing whatever.
“What has been, has been,” she continued. “There is nothing that I
regret. I hope you regret nothing—”
She waited for him to speak.
“Oh, I regret nothing,” he said, accommodatingly.
“Good then,” she answered, “good then. Then neither of us cherishes any
regrets, which is as it should be.”
“Quite as it should be,” he said aimlessly.
She paused to gather up her thread again.
“Our attempt has been a failure,” she said. “But we can try again,
elsewhere.”
A little flicker of rage ran through his blood. It was as if she were
rousing him, goading him. Why must she do it?
“Attempt at what?” he asked.
“At being lovers, I suppose,” she said, a little baffled, yet so
trivial she made it all seem.
“Our attempt at being lovers has been a failure?” he repeated aloud.
To himself he was saying, “I ought to kill her here. There is only this
left, for me to kill her.” A heavy, overcharged desire to bring about
her death possessed him. She was unaware.
“Hasn’t it?” she asked. “Do you think it has been a success?”
Again the insult of the flippant question ran through his blood like a
current of fire.
“It had some of the elements of success, our relationship,” he replied.
“It—might have come off.”
But he paused before concluding the last phrase. Even as he began the
sentence, he did not believe in what he was going to say. He knew it
never could have been a success.
“No,” she replied. “You cannot love.”
“And you?” he asked.
Her wide, dark-filled eyes were fixed on him, like two moons of
darkness.
“I couldn’t love _you_,” she said, with stark cold truth.
A blinding flash went over his brain, his body jolted. His heart had
burst into flame. His consciousness was gone into his wrists, into his
hands. He was one blind, incontinent desire, to kill her. His wrists
were bursting, there would be no satisfaction till his hands had closed
on her.
But even before his body swerved forward on her, a sudden, cunning
comprehension was expressed on her face, and in a flash she was out of
the door. She ran in one flash to her room and locked herself in. She
was afraid, but confident. She knew her life trembled on the edge of an
abyss. But she was curiously sure of her footing. She knew her cunning
could outwit him.
She trembled, as she stood in her room, with excitement and awful
exhilaration. She knew she could outwit him. She could depend on her
presence of mind, and on her wits. But it was a fight to the death, she
knew it now. One slip, and she was lost. She had a strange, tense,
exhilarated sickness in her body, as one who is in peril of falling
from a great height, but who does not look down, does not admit the
fear.
“I will go away the day after tomorrow,” she said.
She only did not want Gerald to think that she was afraid of him, that
she was running away because she was afraid of him. She was not afraid
of him, fundamentally. She knew it was her safeguard to avoid his
physical violence. But even physically she was not afraid of him. She
wanted to prove it to him. When she had proved it, that, whatever he
was, she was not afraid of him; when she had proved _that_, she could
leave him forever. But meanwhile the fight between them, terrible as
she knew it to be, was inconclusive. And she wanted to be confident in
herself. However many terrors she might have, she would be unafraid,
uncowed by him. He could never cow her, nor dominate her, nor have any
right over her; this she would maintain until she had proved it. Once
it was proved, she was free of him forever.
But she had not proved it yet, neither to him nor to herself. And this
was what still bound her to him. She was bound to him, she could not
live beyond him. She sat up in bed, closely wrapped up, for many hours,
thinking endlessly to herself. It was as if she would never have done
weaving the great provision of her thoughts.
“It isn’t as if he really loved me,” she said to herself. “He doesn’t.
Every woman he comes across he wants to make her in love with him. He
doesn’t even know that he is doing it. But there he is, before every
woman he unfurls his male attractiveness, displays his great
desirability, he tries to make every woman think how wonderful it would
be to have him for a lover. His very ignoring of the women is part of
the game. He is never _unconscious_ of them. He should have been a
cockerel, so he could strut before fifty females, all his subjects. But
really, his Don Juan does _not_ interest me. I could play Dona Juanita
a million times better than he plays Juan. He bores me, you know. His
maleness bores me. Nothing is so boring, so inherently stupid and
stupidly conceited. Really, the fathomless conceit of these men, it is
ridiculous—the little strutters.
“They are all alike. Look at Birkin. Built out of the limitation of
conceit they are, and nothing else. Really, nothing but their
ridiculous limitation and intrinsic insignificance could make them so
conceited.
“As for Loerke, there is a thousand times more in him than in a Gerald.
Gerald is so limited, there is a dead end to him. He would grind on at
the old mills forever. And really, there is no corn between the
millstones any more. They grind on and on, when there is nothing to
grind—saying the same things, believing the same things, acting the
same things. Oh, my God, it would wear out the patience of a stone.
“I don’t worship Loerke, but at any rate, he is a free individual. He
is not stiff with conceit of his own maleness. He is not grinding
dutifully at the old mills. Oh God, when I think of Gerald, and his
work—those offices at Beldover, and the mines—it makes my heart sick.
What _have_ I to do with it—and him thinking he can be a lover to a
woman! One might as well ask it of a self-satisfied lamp-post. These
men, with their eternal jobs—and their eternal mills of God that keep
on grinding at nothing! It is too boring, just boring. However did I
come to take him seriously at all!
“At least in Dresden, one will have one’s back to it all. And there
will be amusing things to do. It will be amusing to go to these
eurythmic displays, and the German opera, the German theatre. It _will_
be amusing to take part in German Bohemian life. And Loerke is an
artist, he is a free individual. One will escape from so much, that is
the chief thing, escape so much hideous boring repetition of vulgar
actions, vulgar phrases, vulgar postures. I don’t delude myself that I
shall find an elixir of life in Dresden. I know I shan’t. But I shall
get away from people who have their own homes and their own children
and their own acquaintances and their own this and their own that. I
shall be among people who _don’t_ own things and who _haven’t_ got a
home and a domestic servant in the background, who haven’t got a
standing and a status and a degree and a circle of friends of the same.
Oh God, the wheels within wheels of people, it makes one’s head tick
like a clock, with a very madness of dead mechanical monotony and
meaninglessness. How I _hate_ life, how I hate it. How I hate the
Geralds, that they can offer one nothing else.
“Shortlands!—Heavens! Think of living there, one week, then the next,
and _then the third_—
“No, I won’t think of it—it is too much—”
And she broke off, really terrified, really unable to bear any more.
The thought of the mechanical succession of day following day, day
following day, _ad infintum_, was one of the things that made her heart
palpitate with a real approach of madness. The terrible bondage of this
tick-tack of time, this twitching of the hands of the clock, this
eternal repetition of hours and days—oh God, it was too awful to
contemplate. And there was no escape from it, no escape.
She almost wished Gerald were with her to save her from the terror of
her own thoughts. Oh, how she suffered, lying there alone, confronted
by the terrible clock, with its eternal tick-tack. All life, all life
resolved itself into this: tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tack; then the
striking of the hour; then the tick-tack, tick-tack, and the twitching
of the clock-fingers.
Gerald could not save her from it. He, his body, his motion, his
life—it was the same ticking, the same twitching across the dial, a
horrible mechanical twitching forward over the face of the hours. What
were his kisses, his embraces. She could hear their tick-tack,
tick-tack.
Ha—ha—she laughed to herself, so frightened that she was trying to
laugh it off—ha—ha, how maddening it was, to be sure, to be sure!
Then, with a fleeting self-conscious motion, she wondered if she would
be very much surprised, on rising in the morning, to realise that her
hair had turned white. She had _felt_ it turning white so often, under
the intolerable burden of her thoughts, and her sensations. Yet there
it remained, brown as ever, and there she was herself, looking a
picture of health.
Perhaps she was healthy. Perhaps it was only her unabateable health
that left her so exposed to the truth. If she were sickly she would
have her illusions, imaginations. As it was, there was no escape. She
must always see and know and never escape. She could never escape.
There she was, placed before the clock-face of life. And if she turned
round as in a railway station, to look at the bookstall, still she
could see, with her very spine, she could see the clock, always the
great white clock-face. In vain she fluttered the leaves of books, or
made statuettes in clay. She knew she was not _really_ reading. She was
not _really_ working. She was watching the fingers twitch across the
eternal, mechanical, monotonous clock-face of time. She never really
lived, she only watched. Indeed, she was like a little, twelve-hour
clock, vis-à-vis with the enormous clock of eternity—there she was,
like Dignity and Impudence, or Impudence and Dignity.
The picture pleased her. Didn’t her face really look like a clock
dial—rather roundish and often pale, and impassive. She would have got
up to look, in the mirror, but the thought of the sight of her own
face, that was like a twelve-hour clock-dial, filled her with such deep
terror, that she hastened to think of something else.
Oh, why wasn’t somebody kind to her? Why wasn’t there somebody who
would take her in their arms, and hold her to their breast, and give
her rest, pure, deep, healing rest. Oh, why wasn’t there somebody to
take her in their arms and fold her safe and perfect, for sleep. She
wanted so much this perfect enfolded sleep. She lay always so
unsheathed in sleep. She would lie always unsheathed in sleep,
unrelieved, unsaved. Oh, how could she bear it, this endless unrelief,
this eternal unrelief.
Gerald! Could he fold her in his arms and sheathe her in sleep? Ha! He
needed putting to sleep himself—poor Gerald. That was all he needed.
What did he do, he made the burden for her greater, the burden of her
sleep was the more intolerable, when he was there. He was an added
weariness upon her unripening nights, her unfruitful slumbers. Perhaps
he got some repose from her. Perhaps he did. Perhaps this was what he
was always dogging her for, like a child that is famished, crying for
the breast. Perhaps this was the secret of his passion, his forever
unquenched desire for her—that he needed her to put him to sleep, to
give him repose.
What then! Was she his mother? Had she asked for a child, whom she must
nurse through the nights, for her lover. She despised him, she despised
him, she hardened her heart. An infant crying in the night, this Don
Juan.
Ooh, but how she hated the infant crying in the night. She would murder
it gladly. She would stifle it and bury it, as Hetty Sorrell did. No
doubt Hetty Sorrell’s infant cried in the night—no doubt Arthur
Donnithorne’s infant would. Ha—the Arthur Donnithornes, the Geralds of
this world. So manly by day, yet all the while, such a crying of
infants in the night. Let them turn into mechanisms, let them. Let them
become instruments, pure machines, pure wills, that work like
clock-work, in perpetual repetition. Let them be this, let them be
taken up entirely in their work, let them be perfect parts of a great
machine, having a slumber of constant repetition. Let Gerald manage his
firm. There he would be satisfied, as satisfied as a wheelbarrow that
goes backwards and forwards along a plank all day—she had seen it.
The wheel-barrow—the one humble wheel—the unit of the firm. Then the
cart, with two wheels; then the truck, with four; then the
donkey-engine, with eight, then the winding-engine, with sixteen, and
so on, till it came to the miner, with a thousand wheels, and then the
electrician, with three thousand, and the underground manager, with
twenty thousand, and the general manager with a hundred thousand little
wheels working away to complete his make-up, and then Gerald, with a
million wheels and cogs and axles.
Poor Gerald, such a lot of little wheels to his make-up! He was more
intricate than a chronometer-watch. But oh heavens, what weariness!
What weariness, God above! A chronometer-watch—a beetle—her soul
fainted with utter ennui, from the thought. So many wheels to count and
consider and calculate! Enough, enough—there was an end to man’s
capacity for complications, even. Or perhaps there was no end.
Meanwhile Gerald sat in his room, reading. When Gudrun was gone, he was
left stupefied with arrested desire. He sat on the side of the bed for
an hour, stupefied, little strands of consciousness appearing and
reappearing. But he did not move, for a long time he remained inert,
his head dropped on his breast.
Then he looked up and realised that he was going to bed. He was cold.
Soon he was lying down in the dark.
But what he could not bear was the darkness. The solid darkness
confronting him drove him mad. So he rose, and made a light. He
remained seated for a while, staring in front. He did not think of
Gudrun, he did not think of anything.
Then suddenly he went downstairs for a book. He had all his life been
in terror of the nights that should come, when he could not sleep. He
knew that this would be too much for him, to have to face nights of
sleeplessness and of horrified watching the hours.
So he sat for hours in bed, like a statue, reading. His mind, hard and
acute, read on rapidly, his body understood nothing. In a state of
rigid unconsciousness, he read on through the night, till morning,
when, weary and disgusted in spirit, disgusted most of all with
himself, he slept for two hours.
Then he got up, hard and full of energy. Gudrun scarcely spoke to him,
except at coffee when she said:
“I shall be leaving tomorrow.”
“We will go together as far as Innsbruck, for appearance’s sake?” he
asked.
“Perhaps,” she said.
She said ‘Perhaps’ between the sips of her coffee. And the sound of her
taking her breath in the word, was nauseous to him. He rose quickly to
be away from her.
He went and made arrangements for the departure on the morrow. Then,
taking some food, he set out for the day on the skis. Perhaps, he said
to the Wirt, he would go up to the Marienhütte, perhaps to the village
below.
To Gudrun this day was full of a promise like spring. She felt an
approaching release, a new fountain of life rising up in her. It gave
her pleasure to dawdle through her packing, it gave her pleasure to dip
into books, to try on her different garments, to look at herself in the
glass. She felt a new lease of life was come upon her, and she was
happy like a child, very attractive and beautiful to everybody, with
her soft, luxuriant figure, and her happiness. Yet underneath was death
itself.
In the afternoon she had to go out with Loerke. Her tomorrow was
perfectly vague before her. This was what gave her pleasure. She might
be going to England with Gerald, she might be going to Dresden with
Loerke, she might be going to Munich, to a girl-friend she had there.
Anything might come to pass on the morrow. And today was the white,
snowy iridescent threshold of all possibility. All possibility—that was
the charm to her, the lovely, iridescent, indefinite charm,—pure
illusion. All possibility—because death was inevitable, and _nothing_
was possible but death.
She did not want things to materialise, to take any definite shape. She
wanted, suddenly, at one moment of the journey tomorrow, to be wafted
into an utterly new course, by some utterly unforeseen event, or
motion. So that, although she wanted to go out with Loerke for the last
time into the snow, she did not want to be serious or businesslike.
And Loerke was not a serious figure. In his brown velvet cap, that made
his head as round as a chestnut, with the brown-velvet flaps loose and
wild over his ears, and a wisp of elf-like, thin black hair blowing
above his full, elf-like dark eyes, the shiny, transparent brown skin
crinkling up into odd grimaces on his small-featured face, he looked an
odd little boy-man, a bat. But in his figure, in the greeny loden suit,
he looked _chétif_ and puny, still strangely different from the rest.
He had taken a little toboggan, for the two of them, and they trudged
between the blinding slopes of snow, that burned their now hardening
faces, laughing in an endless sequence of quips and jests and polyglot
fancies. The fancies were the reality to both of them, they were both
so happy, tossing about the little coloured balls of verbal humour and
whimsicality. Their natures seemed to sparkle in full interplay, they
were enjoying a pure game. And they wanted to keep it on the level of a
game, their relationship: _such_ a fine game.
Loerke did not take the toboganning very seriously. He put no fire and
intensity into it, as Gerald did. Which pleased Gudrun. She was weary,
oh so weary of Gerald’s gripped intensity of physical motion. Loerke
let the sledge go wildly, and gaily, like a flying leaf, and when, at a
bend, he pitched both her and him out into the snow, he only waited for
them both to pick themselves up unhurt off the keen white ground, to be
laughing and pert as a pixie. She knew he would be making ironical,
playful remarks as he wandered in hell—if he were in the humour. And
that pleased her immensely. It seemed like a rising above the
dreariness of actuality, the monotony of contingencies.
They played till the sun went down, in pure amusement, careless and
timeless. Then, as the little sledge twirled riskily to rest at the
bottom of the slope,
“Wait!” he said suddenly, and he produced from somewhere a large
thermos flask, a packet of Keks, and a bottle of Schnapps.
“Oh Loerke,” she cried. “What an inspiration! What a _comble de joie
indeed!_ What is the Schnapps?”
He looked at it, and laughed.
“_Heidelbeer!_” he said.
“No! From the bilberries under the snow. Doesn’t it look as if it were
distilled from snow. Can you—” she sniffed, and sniffed at the
bottle—“can you smell bilberries? Isn’t it wonderful? It is exactly as
if one could smell them through the snow.”
She stamped her foot lightly on the ground. He kneeled down and
whistled, and put his ear to the snow. As he did so his black eyes
twinkled up.
“Ha! Ha!” she laughed, warmed by the whimsical way in which he mocked
at her verbal extravagances. He was always teasing her, mocking her
ways. But as he in his mockery was even more absurd than she in her
extravagances, what could one do but laugh and feel liberated.
She could feel their voices, hers and his, ringing silvery like bells
in the frozen, motionless air of the first twilight. How perfect it
was, how _very_ perfect it was, this silvery isolation and interplay.
She sipped the hot coffee, whose fragrance flew around them like bees
murmuring around flowers, in the snowy air, she drank tiny sips of the
_Heidelbeerwasser_, she ate the cold, sweet, creamy wafers. How good
everything was! How perfect everything tasted and smelled and sounded,
here in this utter stillness of snow and falling twilight.
“You are going away tomorrow?” his voice came at last.
“Yes.”
There was a pause, when the evening seemed to rise in its silent,
ringing pallor infinitely high, to the infinite which was near at hand.
“_Wohin?_”
That was the question—_wohin?_ Whither? _Wohin?_ What a lovely word!
She _never_ wanted it answered. Let it chime for ever.
“I don’t know,” she said, smiling at him.
He caught the smile from her.
“One never does,” he said.
“One never does,” she repeated.
There was a silence, wherein he ate biscuits rapidly, as a rabbit eats
leaves.
“But,” he laughed, “where will you take a ticket to?”
“Oh heaven!” she cried. “One must take a ticket.”
Here was a blow. She saw herself at the wicket, at the railway station.
Then a relieving thought came to her. She breathed freely.
“But one needn’t go,” she cried.
“Certainly not,” he said.
“I mean one needn’t go where one’s ticket says.”
That struck him. One might take a ticket, so as not to travel to the
destination it indicated. One might break off, and avoid the
destination. A point located. That was an idea!
“Then take a ticket to London,” he said. “One should never go there.”
“Right,” she answered.
He poured a little coffee into a tin can.
“You won’t tell me where you will go?” he asked.
“Really and truly,” she said, “I don’t know. It depends which way the
wind blows.”
He looked at her quizzically, then he pursed up his lips, like
Zephyrus, blowing across the snow.
“It goes towards Germany,” he said.
“I believe so,” she laughed.
Suddenly, they were aware of a vague white figure near them. It was
Gerald. Gudrun’s heart leapt in sudden terror, profound terror. She
rose to her feet.
“They told me where you were,” came Gerald’s voice, like a judgment in
the whitish air of twilight.
“_Maria!_ You come like a ghost,” exclaimed Loerke.
Gerald did not answer. His presence was unnatural and ghostly to them.
Loerke shook the flask—then he held it inverted over the snow. Only a
few brown drops trickled out.
“All gone!” he said.
To Gerald, the smallish, odd figure of the German was distinct and
objective, as if seen through field glasses. And he disliked the small
figure exceedingly, he wanted it removed.
Then Loerke rattled the box which held the biscuits.
“Biscuits there are still,” he said.
And reaching from his seated posture in the sledge, he handed them to
Gudrun. She fumbled, and took one. He would have held them to Gerald,
but Gerald so definitely did not want to be offered a biscuit, that
Loerke, rather vaguely, put the box aside. Then he took up the small
bottle, and held it to the light.
“Also there is some Schnapps,” he said to himself.
Then suddenly, he elevated the bottle gallantly in the air, a strange,
grotesque figure leaning towards Gudrun, and said:
“_Gnädiges Fräulein_,” he said, “_wohl_—”
There was a crack, the bottle was flying, Loerke had started back, the
three stood quivering in violent emotion.
Loerke turned to Gerald, a devilish leer on his bright-skinned face.
“Well done!” he said, in a satirical demoniac frenzy. “_C’est le sport,
sans doute._”
The next instant he was sitting ludicrously in the snow, Gerald’s fist
having rung against the side of his head. But Loerke pulled himself
together, rose, quivering, looking full at Gerald, his body weak and
furtive, but his eyes demoniacal with satire.
“_Vive le héros, vive_—”
But he flinched, as, in a black flash Gerald’s fist came upon him,
banged into the other side of his head, and sent him aside like a
broken straw.
But Gudrun moved forward. She raised her clenched hand high, and
brought it down, with a great downward stroke on to the face and on to
the breast of Gerald.
A great astonishment burst upon him, as if the air had broken. Wide,
wide his soul opened, in wonder, feeling the pain. Then it laughed,
turning, with strong hands outstretched, at last to take the apple of
his desire. At last he could finish his desire.
He took the throat of Gudrun between his hands, that were hard and
indomitably powerful. And her throat was beautifully, so beautifully
soft, save that, within, he could feel the slippery chords of her life.
And this he crushed, this he could crush. What bliss! Oh what bliss, at
last, what satisfaction, at last! The pure zest of satisfaction filled
his soul. He was watching the unconsciousness come unto her swollen
face, watching the eyes roll back. How ugly she was! What a fulfilment,
what a satisfaction! How good this was, oh how good it was, what a
God-given gratification, at last! He was unconscious of her fighting
and struggling. The struggling was her reciprocal lustful passion in
this embrace, the more violent it became, the greater the frenzy of
delight, till the zenith was reached, the crisis, the struggle was
overborne, her movement became softer, appeased.
Loerke roused himself on the snow, too dazed and hurt to get up. Only
his eyes were conscious.
“_Monsieur!_” he said, in his thin, roused voice: “_Quand vous aurez
fini_—”
A revulsion of contempt and disgust came over Gerald’s soul. The
disgust went to the very bottom of him, a nausea. Ah, what was he
doing, to what depths was he letting himself go! As if he cared about
her enough to kill her, to have her life on his hands!
A weakness ran over his body, a terrible relaxing, a thaw, a decay of
strength. Without knowing, he had let go his grip, and Gudrun had
fallen to her knees. Must he see, must he know?
A fearful weakness possessed him, his joints were turned to water. He
drifted, as on a wind, veered, and went drifting away.
“I didn’t want it, really,” was the last confession of disgust in his
soul, as he drifted up the slope, weak, finished, only sheering off
unconsciously from any further contact. “I’ve had enough—I want to go
to sleep. I’ve had enough.” He was sunk under a sense of nausea.
He was weak, but he did not want to rest, he wanted to go on and on, to
the end. Never again to stay, till he came to the end, that was all the
desire that remained to him. So he drifted on and on, unconscious and
weak, not thinking of anything, so long as he could keep in action.
The twilight spread a weird, unearthly light overhead, bluish-rose in
colour, the cold blue night sank on the snow. In the valley below,
behind, in the great bed of snow, were two small figures: Gudrun
dropped on her knees, like one executed, and Loerke sitting propped up
near her. That was all.
Gerald stumbled on up the slope of snow, in the bluish darkness, always
climbing, always unconsciously climbing, weary though he was. On his
left was a steep slope with black rocks and fallen masses of rock and
veins of snow slashing in and about the blackness of rock, veins of
snow slashing vaguely in and about the blackness of rock. Yet there was
no sound, all this made no noise.
To add to his difficulty, a small bright moon shone brilliantly just
ahead, on the right, a painful brilliant thing that was always there,
unremitting, from which there was no escape. He wanted so to come to
the end—he had had enough. Yet he did not sleep.
He surged painfully up, sometimes having to cross a slope of black
rock, that was blown bare of snow. Here he was afraid of falling, very
much afraid of falling. And high up here, on the crest, moved a wind
that almost overpowered him with a sleep-heavy iciness. Only it was not
here, the end, and he must still go on. His indefinite nausea would not
let him stay.
Having gained one ridge, he saw the vague shadow of something higher in
front. Always higher, always higher. He knew he was following the track
towards the summit of the slopes, where was the Marienhütte, and the
descent on the other side. But he was not really conscious. He only
wanted to go on, to go on whilst he could, to move, to keep going, that
was all, to keep going, until it was finished. He had lost all his
sense of place. And yet in the remaining instinct of life, his feet
sought the track where the skis had gone.
He slithered down a sheer snow slope. That frightened him. He had no
alpenstock, nothing. But having come safely to rest, he began to walk
on, in the illuminated darkness. It was as cold as sleep. He was
between two ridges, in a hollow. So he swerved. Should he climb the
other ridge, or wander along the hollow? How frail the thread of his
being was stretched! He would perhaps climb the ridge. The snow was
firm and simple. He went along. There was something standing out of the
snow. He approached, with dimmest curiosity.
It was a half-buried Crucifix, a little Christ under a little sloping
hood, at the top of a pole. He sheered away. Somebody was going to
murder him. He had a great dread of being murdered. But it was a dread
which stood outside him, like his own ghost.
Yet why be afraid? It was bound to happen. To be murdered! He looked
round in terror at the snow, the rocking, pale, shadowy slopes of the
upper world. He was bound to be murdered, he could see it. This was the
moment when the death was uplifted, and there was no escape.
Lord Jesus, was it then bound to be—Lord Jesus! He could feel the blow
descending, he knew he was murdered. Vaguely wandering forward, his
hands lifted as if to feel what would happen, he was waiting for the
moment when he would stop, when it would cease. It was not over yet.
He had come to the hollow basin of snow, surrounded by sheer slopes and
precipices, out of which rose a track that brought one to the top of
the mountain. But he wandered unconsciously, till he slipped and fell
down, and as he fell something broke in his soul, and immediately he
went to sleep.