Chapter XV.

THE BITTERNESS OF ECSTASY

A storm of industry raged on in the house. Ursula did not go to college

till October. So, with a distinct feeling of responsibility, as if she

must express herself in this house, she laboured arranging,

re-arranging, selecting, contriving.

She could use her father’s ordinary tools, both for woodwork and

metal-work, so she hammered and tinkered. Her mother was quite content

to have the thing done. Brangwen was interested. He had a ready belief

in his daughter. He himself was at work putting up his work-shed in the

garden.

At last she had finished for the time being. The drawing-room was big

and empty. It had the good Wilton carpet, of which the family was so

proud, and the large couch and large chairs covered with shiny chintz,

and the piano, a little sculpture in plaster that Brangwen had done,

and not very much more. It was too large and empty-feeling for the

family to occupy very much. Yet they liked to know it was there, large

and empty.

The home was the dining-room. There the hard rush floor-covering made

the ground light, reflecting light upon the bottom of their hearts; in

the window-bay was a broad, sunny seat, the table was so solid one

could not jostle it, and the chairs so strong one could knock them over

without hurting them. The familiar organ that Brangwen had made stood

on one side, looking peculiarly small, the sideboard was comfortably

reduced to normal proportions. This was the family living-room.

Ursula had a bedroom to herself. It was really a servants’ bedroom,

small and plain. Its window looked over the back garden at other back

gardens, some of them old and very nice, some of them littered with

packing-cases, then at the backs of the houses whose fronts were the

shops in High Street, or the genteel homes of the under-manager or the

chief cashier, facing the chapel.

She had six weeks still before going to college. In this time she

nervously read over some Latin and some botany, and fitfully worked at

some mathematics. She was going into college as a teacher, for her

training. But, having already taken her matriculation examination, she

was entered for a university course. At the end of a year she would sit

for the Intermediate Arts, then two years after for her B.A. So her

case was not that of the ordinary school-teacher. She would be working

among the private students who came only for pure education, not for

mere professional training. She would be of the elect.

For the next three years she would be more or less dependent on her

parents again. Her training was free. All college fees were paid by the

government, she had moreover a few pounds grant every year. This would

just pay for her train fares and her clothing. Her parents would only

have to feed her. She did not want to cost them much. They would not be

well off. Her father would earn only two hundred a year, and a good

deal of her mother’s capital was spent in buying the house. Still,

there was enough to get along with.

Gudrun was attending the Art School at Nottingham. She was working

particularly at sculpture. She had a gift for this. She loved making

little models in clay, of children or of animals. Already some of these

had appeared in the Students’ Exhibition in the Castle, and Gudrun was

a distinguished person. She was chafing at the Art School and wanted to

go to London. But there was not enough money. Neither would her parents

let her go so far.

Theresa had left the High School. She was a great strapping, bold

hussy, indifferent to all higher claims. She would stay at home. The

others were at school, except the youngest. When term started, they

would all be transferred to the Grammar School at Willey Green.

Ursula was excited at making acquaintances in Beldover. The excitement

soon passed. She had tea at the clergyman’s, at the chemist’s, at the

other chemist’s, at the doctor’s, at the under-manager’s—then she knew

practically everybody. She could not take people very seriously, though

at the time she wanted to.

She wandered the country, on foot and on her bicycle, finding it very

beautiful in the forest direction, between Mansfield and Southwell and

Worksop. But she was here only skirmishing for amusement. Her real

exploration would begin in college.

Term began. She went into town each day by train. The cloistered quiet

of the college began to close around her.

She was not at first disappointed. The big college built of stone,

standing in the quiet street, with a rim of grass and lime trees all so

peaceful: she felt it remote, a magic land. Its architecture was

foolish, she knew from her father. Still, it was different from that of

all other buildings. Its rather pretty, plaything, Gothic form was

almost a style, in the dirty industrial town.

She liked the hall, with its big stone chimney-piece and its Gothic

arches supporting the balcony above. To be sure the arches were ugly,

the chimney-piece of cardboard-like carved stone, with its armorial

decoration, looked silly just opposite the bicycle stand and the

radiator, whilst the great notice-board with its fluttering papers

seemed to slam away all sense of retreat and mystery from the far wall.

Nevertheless, amorphous as it might be, there was in it a reminiscence

of the wondrous, cloistral origin of education. Her soul flew straight

back to the mediæval times, when the monks of God held the learning of

men and imparted it within the shadow of religion. In this spirit she

entered college.

The harshness and vulgarity of the lobbies and cloak-rooms hurt her at

first. Why was it not all beautiful? But she could not openly admit her

criticism. She was on holy ground.

She wanted all the students to have a high, pure spirit, she wanted

them to say only the real, genuine things, she wanted their faces to be

still and luminous as the nuns’ and the monks’ faces.

Alas, the girls chattered and giggled and were nervous, they were

dressed up and frizzed, the men looked mean and clownish.

Still, it was lovely to pass along the corridor with one’s books in

one’s hands, to push the swinging, glass-panelled door, and enter the

big room where the first lecture would be given. The windows were large

and lofty, the myriad brown students’ desks stood waiting, the great

blackboard was smooth behind the rostrum.

Ursula sat beside her window, rather far back. Looking down, she saw

the lime trees turning yellow, the tradesman’s boy passing silent down

the still, autumn-sunny street. There was the world, remote, remote.

Here, within the great, whispering sea-shell, that whispered all the

while with reminiscence of all the centuries, time faded away, and the

echo of knowledge filled the timeless silence.

She listened, she scribbled her notes with joy, almost with ecstasy,

never for a moment criticizing what she heard. The lecturer was a

mouth-piece, a priest. As he stood, black-gowned, on the rostrum, some

strands of the whispering confusion of knowledge that filled the whole

place seemed to be singled out and woven together by him, till they

became a lecture.

At first, she preserved herself from criticism. She would not consider

the professors as men, ordinary men who ate bacon, and pulled on their

boots before coming to college. They were the black-gowned priests of

knowledge, serving for ever in a remote, hushed temple. They were the

initiated, and the beginning and the end of the mystery was in their

keeping.

Curious joy she had of the lectures. It was a joy to hear the theory of

education, there was such freedom and pleasure in ranging over the very

stuff of knowledge, and seeing how it moved and lived and had its

being. How happy Racine made her! She did not know why. But as the big

lines of the drama unfolded themselves, so steady, so measured, she

felt a thrill as of being in the realm of the reality. Of Latin, she

was doing Livy and Horace. The curious, intimate, gossiping tone of the

Latin class suited Horace. Yet she never cared for him, nor even Livy.

There was an entire lack of sternness in the gossipy class-room. She

tried hard to keep her old grasp of the Roman spirit. But gradually the

Latin became mere gossip-stuff and artificiality to her, a question of

manners and verbosities.

Her terror was the mathematics class. The lecturer went so fast, her

heart beat excitedly, she seemed to be straining every nerve. And she

struggled hard, during private study, to get the stuff into control.

Then came the lovely, peaceful afternoons in the botany laboratory.

There were few students. How she loved to sit on her high stool before

the bench, with her pith and her razor and her material, carefully

mounting her slides, carefully bringing her microscope into focus, then

turning with joy to record her observation, drawing joyfully in her

book, if the slide were good.

She soon made a college friend, a girl who had lived in Florence, a

girl who wore a wonderful purple or figured scarf draped over a plain,

dark dress. She was Dorothy Russell, daughter of a south-country

advocate. Dorothy lived with a maiden aunt in Nottingham, and spent her

spare moments slaving for the Women’s Social and Political Union. She

was quiet and intense, with an ivory face and dark hair looped plain

over her ears. Ursula was very fond of her, but afraid of her. She

seemed so old and so relentless towards herself. Yet she was only

twenty-two. Ursula always felt her to be a creature of fate, like

Cassandra.

The two girls had a close, stern friendship. Dorothy worked at all

things with the same passion, never sparing herself. She came closest

to Ursula during the botany hours. For she could not draw. Ursula made

beautiful and wonderful drawings of the sections under the microscope,

and Dorothy always came to learn the manner of the drawing.

So the first year went by, in magnificent seclusion and activity of

learning. It was strenuous as a battle, her college life, yet remote as

peace.

She came to Nottingham in the morning with Gudrun. The two sisters were

distinguished wherever they went, slim, strong girls, eager and

extremely sensitive. Gudrun was the more beautiful of the two, with her

sleepy, half-languid girlishness that looked so soft, and yet was

balanced and inalterable underneath. She wore soft, easy clothing, and

hats which fell by themselves into a careless grace.

Ursula was much more carefully dressed, but she was self-conscious,

always falling into depths of admiration of somebody else, and

modelling herself upon this other, and so producing a hopeless

incongruity. When she dressed for practical purposes she always looked

well. In winter, wearing a tweed coat-and-skirt and a small hat of

black fur pulled over her eager, palpitant face, she seemed to move

down the street in a drifting motion of suspense and exceeding

sensitive receptivity.

At the end of the first year Ursula got through her Intermediate Arts

examination, and there came a lull in her eager activities. She

slackened off, she relaxed altogether. Worn nervous and inflammable by

the excitement of the preparation for the examination, and by the sort

of exaltation which carried her through the crisis itself, she now fell

into a quivering passivity, her will all loosened.

The family went to Scarborough for a month. Gudrun and the father were

busy at the handicraft holiday school there, Ursula was left a good

deal with the children. But when she could, she went off by herself.

She stood and looked out over the shining sea. It was very beautiful to

her. The tears rose hot in her heart.

Out of the far, far space there drifted slowly in to her a passionate,

unborn yearning. “There are so many dawns that have not yet risen.” It

seemed as if, from over the edge of the sea, all the unrisen dawns were

appealing to her, all her unborn soul was crying for the unrisen dawns.

As she sat looking out at the tender sea, with its lovely, swift

glimmer, the sob rose in her breast, till she caught her lip suddenly

under her teeth, and the tears were forcing themselves from her. And in

her very sob, she laughed. Why did she cry? She did not want to cry. It

was so beautiful that she laughed. It was so beautiful that she cried.

She glanced apprehensively round, hoping no one would see her in this

state.

Then came a time when the sea was rough. She watched the water

travelling in to the coast, she watched a big wave running unnoticed,

to burst in a shock of foam against a rock, enveloping all in a great

white beauty, to pour away again, leaving the rock emerged black and

teeming. Oh, and if, when the wave burst into whiteness, it were only

set free!

Sometimes she loitered along the harbour, looking at the sea-browned

sailors, who, in their close blue jerseys, lounged on the harbour-wall,

and laughed at her with impudent, communicative eyes.

There was established a little relation between her and them. She never

would speak to them or know any more of them. Yet as she walked by and

they leaned on the sea-wall, there was something between her and them,

something keen and delightful and painful. She liked best the young one

whose fair, salty hair tumbled over his blue eyes. He was so new and

fresh and salt and not of this world.

From Scarborough she went to her Uncle Tom’s. Winifred had a small

baby, born at the end of the summer. She had become strange and alien

to Ursula. There was an unmentionable reserve between the two women.

Tom Brangwen was an attentive father, a very domestic husband. But

there was something spurious about his domesticity, Ursula did not like

him any more. Something ugly, blatant in his nature had come out now,

making him shift everything over to a sentimental basis. A

materialistic unbeliever, he carried it all off by becoming full of

human feeling, a warm, attentive host, a generous husband, a model

citizen. And he was clever enough to rouse admiration everywhere, and

to take in his wife sufficiently. She did not love him. She was glad to

live in a state of complacent self-deception with him, she worked

according to him.

Ursula was relieved to go home. She had still two peaceful years before

her. Her future was settled for two years. She returned to college to

prepare for her final examination.

But during this year the glamour began to depart from college. The

professors were not priests initiated into the deep mysteries of life

and knowledge. After all, they were only middle-men handling wares they

had become so accustomed to that they were oblivious of them. What was

Latin?—So much dry goods of knowledge. What was the Latin class

altogether but a sort of second-hand curio shop, where one bought

curios and learned the market-value of curios; dull curios too, on the

whole. She was as bored by the Latin curiosities as she was by Chinese

and Japanese curiosities in the antique shops. “Antiques”—the very word

made her soul fall flat and dead.

The life went out of her studies, why, she did not know. But the whole

thing seemed sham, spurious; spurious Gothic arches, spurious peace,

spurious Latinity, spurious dignity of France, spurious naïveté of

Chaucer. It was a second-hand dealer’s shop, and one bought an

equipment for an examination. This was only a little side-show to the

factories of the town. Gradually the perception stole into her. This

was no religious retreat, no perception of pure learning. It was a

little apprentice-shop where one was further equipped for making money.

The college itself was a little, slovenly laboratory for the factory.

A harsh and ugly disillusion came over her again, the same darkness and

bitter gloom from which she was never safe now, the realization of the

permanent substratum of ugliness under everything. As she came to the

college in the afternoon, the lawns were frothed with daisies, the lime

trees hung tender and sunlit and green; and oh, the deep, white froth

of the daisies was anguish to see.

For inside, inside the college, she knew she must enter the sham

workshop. All the while, it was a sham store, a sham warehouse, with a

single motive of material gain, and no productivity. It pretended to

exist by the religious virtue of knowledge. But the religious virtue of

knowledge was become a flunkey to the god of material success.

A sort of inertia came over her. Mechanically, from habit, she went on

with her studies. But it was almost hopeless. She could scarcely attend

to anything. At the Anglo-Saxon lecture in the afternoon, she sat

looking down, out of the window, hearing no word, of Beowulf or of

anything else. Down below, in the street, the sunny grey pavement went

beside the palisade. A woman in a pink frock, with a scarlet sunshade,

crossed the road, a little white dog running like a fleck of light

about her. The woman with the scarlet sunshade came over the road, a

lilt in her walk, a little shadow attending her. Ursula watched

spell-bound. The woman with the scarlet sunshade and the flickering

terrier was gone—and whither? Whither?

In what world of reality was the woman in the pink dress walking? To

what warehouse of dead unreality was she herself confined?

What good was this place, this college? What good was Anglo-Saxon, when

one only learned it in order to answer examination questions, in order

that one should have a higher commercial value later on? She was sick

with this long service at the inner commercial shrine. Yet what else

was there? Was life all this, and this only? Everywhere, everything was

debased to the same service. Everything went to produce vulgar things,

to encumber material life.

Suddenly she threw over French. She would take honours in botany. This

was the one study that lived for her. She had entered into the lives of

the plants. She was fascinated by the strange laws of the vegetable

world. She had here a glimpse of something working entirely apart from

the purpose of the human world.

College was barren, cheap, a temple converted to the most vulgar, petty

commerce. Had she not gone to hear the echo of learning pulsing back to

the source of the mystery?—The source of mystery! And barrenly, the

professors in their gowns offered commercial commodity that could be

turned to good account in the examination room; ready-made stuff too,

and not really worth the money it was intended to fetch; which they all

knew.

All the time in the college now, save when she was labouring in her

botany laboratory, for there the mystery still glimmered, she felt she

was degrading herself in a kind of trade of sham jewjaws.

Angry and stiff, she went through her last term. She would rather be

out again earning her own living. Even Brinsley Street and Mr. Harby

seemed real in comparison. Her violent hatred of the Ilkeston School

was nothing compared with the sterile degradation of college. But she

was not going back to Brinsley Street either. She would take her B.A.,

and become a mistress in some Grammar School for a time.

The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She

could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of

disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the

same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always

the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active

and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and

then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of

amorphous, squalid activity.

No matter! Every hill-top was a little different, every valley was

somehow new. Cossethay and her childhood with her father; the Marsh and

the little Church school near the Marsh, and her grandmother and her

uncles; the High School at Nottingham and Anton Skrebensky; Anton

Skrebensky and the dance in the moonlight between the fires; then the

time she could not think of without being blasted, Winifred Inger, and

the months before becoming a school-teacher; then the horrors of

Brinsley Street, lapsing into comparative peacefulness, Maggie, and

Maggie’s brother, whose influence she could still feel in her veins,

when she conjured him up; then college, and Dorothy Russell, who was

now in France, then the next move into the world again!

Already it was a history. In every phase she was so different. Yet she

was always Ursula Brangwen. But what did it mean, Ursula Brangwen? She

did not know what she was. Only she was full of rejection, of refusal.

Always, always she was spitting out of her mouth the ash and grit of

disillusion, of falsity. She could only stiffen in rejection, in

rejection. She seemed always negative in her action.

That which she was, positively, was dark and unrevealed, it could not

come forth. It was like a seed buried in dry ash. This world in which

she lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp. This lighted area, lit

up by man’s completest consciousness, she thought was all the world:

that here all was disclosed for ever. Yet all the time, within the

darkness she had been aware of points of light, like the eyes of wild

beasts, gleaming, penetrating, vanishing. And her soul had acknowledged

in a great heave of terror only the outer darkness. This inner circle

of light in which she lived and moved, wherein the trains rushed and

the factories ground out their machine-produce and the plants and the

animals worked by the light of science and knowledge, suddenly it

seemed like the area under an arc-lamp, wherein the moths and children

played in the security of blinding light, not even knowing there was

any darkness, because they stayed in the light.

But she could see the glimmer of dark movement just out of range, she

saw the eyes of the wild beast gleaming from the darkness, watching the

vanity of the camp fire and the sleepers; she felt the strange, foolish

vanity of the camp, which said “Beyond our light and our order there is

nothing,” turning their faces always inward towards the sinking fire of

illuminating consciousness, which comprised sun and stars, and the

Creator, and the System of Righteousness, ignoring always the vast

darkness that wheeled round about, with half-revealed shapes lurking on

the edge.

Yea, and no man dared even throw a firebrand into the darkness. For if

he did he was jeered to death by the others, who cried “Fool,

anti-social knave, why would you disturb us with bogeys? There _is_ no

darkness. We move and live and have our being within the light, and

unto us is given the eternal light of knowledge, we comprise and

comprehend the innermost core and issue of knowledge. Fool and knave,

how dare you belittle us with the darkness?”

Nevertheless the darkness wheeled round about, with grey shadow-shapes

of wild beasts, and also with dark shadow-shapes of the angels, whom

the light fenced out, as it fenced out the more familiar beasts of

darkness. And some, having for a moment seen the darkness, saw it

bristling with the tufts of the hyena and the wolf; and some having

given up their vanity of the light, having died in their own conceit,

saw the gleam in the eyes of the wolf and the hyena, that it was the

flash of the sword of angels, flashing at the door to come in, that the

angels in the darkness were lordly and terrible and not to be denied,

like the flash of fangs.

It was a little while before Easter, in her last year of college, when

Ursula was twenty-two years old, that she heard again from Skrebensky.

He had written to her once or twice from South Africa, during the first

months of his service out there in the war, and since had sent her a

post-card every now and then, at ever longer intervals. He had become a

first lieutenant, and had stayed out in Africa. She had not heard of

him now for more than two years.

Often her thoughts returned to him. He seemed like the gleaming dawn,

yellow, radiant, of a long, grey, ashy day. The memory of him was like

the thought of the first radiant hours of morning. And here was the

blank grey ashiness of later daytime. Ah, if he had only remained true

to her, she might have known the sunshine, without all this toil and

hurt and degradation of a spoiled day. He would have been her angel. He

held the keys of the sunshine. Still he held them. He could open to her

the gates of succeeding freedom and delight. Nay, if he had remained

true to her, he would have been the doorway to her, into the boundless

sky of happiness and plunging, inexhaustible freedom which was the

paradise of her soul. Ah, the great range he would have opened to her,

the illimitable endless space for self-realization and delight for

ever.

The one thing she believed in was in the love she had held for him. It

remained shining and complete, a thing to hark back to. And she said to

herself, when present things seemed a failure:

“Ah, I _was_ fond of him,” as if with him the leading flower of her

life had died.

Now she heard from him again. The chief effect was pain. The pleasure,

the spontaneous joy was not there any longer. But her _will_ rejoiced.

Her will had fixed itself to him. And the old excitement of her dreams

stirred and woke up. He was come, the man with the wondrous lips that

could send the kiss wavering to the very end of all space. Was he come

back to her? She did not believe.

My dear Ursula, I am back in England again for a few months before

going out again, this time to India. I wonder if you still keep

the memory of our times together. I have still got the little

photograph of you. You must be changed since then, for it is about

six years ago. I am fully six years older,—I have lived through

another life since I knew you at Cossethay. I wonder if you would

care to see me. I shall come up to Derby next week, and I would

call in Nottingham, and we might have tea together. Will you let

me know? I shall look for your answer.

Anton Skrebensky

Ursula had taken this letter from the rack in the hall at college, and

torn it open as she crossed to the Women’s room. The world seemed to

dissolve away from around her, she stood alone in clear air.

Where could she go, to be alone? She fled away, upstairs, and through

the private way to the reference library. Seizing a book, she sat down

and pondered the letter. Her heart beat, her limbs trembled. As in a

dream, she heard one gong sound in the college, then, strangely,

another. The first lecture had gone by.

Hurriedly she took one of her note-books and began to write.

“Dear Anton, Yes, I still have the ring. I should be very glad to

see you again. You can come here to college for me, or I will meet

you somewhere in the town. Will you let me know? Your sincere

friend——”

Trembling, she asked the librarian, who was her friend, if he would

give her an envelope. She sealed and addressed her letter, and went

out, bare-headed, to post it. When it was dropped into the pillar-box,

the world became a very still, pale place, without confines. She

wandered back to college, to her pale dream, like a first wan light of

dawn.

Skrebensky came one afternoon the following week. Day after day, she

had hurried swiftly to the letter-rack on her arrival at college in the

morning, and during the intervals between lectures. Several times,

swiftly, with secretive fingers, she had plucked his letter down from

its public prominence, and fled across the hall holding it fast and

hidden. She read her letters in the botany laboratory, where her corner

was always reserved to her.

Several letters, and then he was coming. It was Friday afternoon he

appointed. She worked over her microscope with feverish activity, able

to give only half her attention, yet working closely and rapidly. She

had on her slide some special stuff come up from London that day, and

the professor was fussy and excited about it. At the same time, as she

focused the light on her field, and saw the plant-animal lying shadowy

in a boundless light, she was fretting over a conversation she had had

a few days ago with Dr. Frankstone, who was a woman doctor of physics

in the college.

“No, really,” Dr. Frankstone had said, “I don’t see why we should

attribute some special mystery to life—do you? We don’t understand it

as we understand electricity, even, but that doesn’t warrant our saying

it is something special, something different in kind and distinct from

everything else in the universe—do you think it does? May it not be

that life consists in a complexity of physical and chemical activities,

of the same order as the activities we already know in science? I don’t

see, really, why we should imagine there is a special order of life,

and life alone——”

The conversation had ended on a note of uncertainty, indefinite,

wistful. But the purpose, what was the purpose? Electricity had no

soul, light and heat had no soul. Was she herself an impersonal force,

or conjunction of forces, like one of these? She looked still at the

unicellular shadow that lay within the field of light, under her

microscope. It was alive. She saw it move—she saw the bright mist of

its ciliary activity, she saw the gleam of its nucleus, as it slid

across the plane of light. What then was its will? If it was a

conjunction of forces, physical and chemical, what held these forces

unified, and for what purpose were they unified?

For what purpose were the incalculable physical and chemical activities

nodalized in this shadowy, moving speck under her microscope? What was

the will which nodalized them and created the one thing she saw? What

was its intention? To be itself? Was its purpose just mechanical and

limited to itself?

It intended to be itself. But what self? Suddenly in her mind the world

gleamed strangely, with an intense light, like the nucleus of the

creature under the microscope. Suddenly she had passed away into an

intensely-gleaming light of knowledge. She could not understand what it

all was. She only knew that it was not limited mechanical energy, nor

mere purpose of self-preservation and self-assertion. It was a

consummation, a being infinite. Self was a oneness with the infinite.

To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity.

Ursula sat abstracted over her microscope, in suspense. Her soul was

busy, infinitely busy, in the new world. In the new world, Skrebensky

was waiting for her—he would be waiting for her. She could not go yet,

because her soul was engaged. Soon she would go.

A stillness, like passing away, took hold of her. Far off, down the

corridors, she heard the gong booming five o’clock. She must go. Yet

she sat still.

The other students were pushing back their stools and putting their

microscopes away. Everything broke into turmoil. She saw, through the

window, students going down the steps, with books under their arms,

talking, all talking.

A great craving to depart came upon her. She wanted also to be gone.

She was in dread of the material world, and in dread of her own

transfiguration. She wanted to run to meet Skrebensky—the new life, the

reality.

Very rapidly she wiped her slides and put them back, cleared her place

at the bench, active, active, active. She wanted to run to meet

Skrebensky, hasten—hasten. She did not know what she was to meet. But

it would be a new beginning. She must hurry.

She flitted down the corridor on swift feet, her razor and note-books

and pencil in one hand, her pinafore over her arm. Her face was lifted

and tense with eagerness. He might not be there.

Issuing from the corridor, she saw him at once. She knew him at once.

Yet he was so strange. He stood with the curious self-effacing

diffidence which so frightened her in well-bred young men whom she

knew. He stood as if he wished to be unseen. He was very well-dressed.

She would not admit to herself the chill like a sunshine of frost that

came over her. This was he, the key, the nucleus to the new world.

He saw her coming swiftly across the hall, a slim girl in a white

flannel blouse and dark skirt, with some of the abstraction and gleam

of the unknown upon her, and he started, excited. He was very nervous.

Other students were loitering about the hall.

She laughed, with a blind, dazzled face, as she gave him her hand. He

too could not perceive her.

In a moment she was gone, to get her outdoor things. Then again, as

when she had been at school, they walked out into the town to tea. And

they went to the same tea-shop.

She knew a great difference in him. The kinship was there, the old

kinship, but he had belonged to a different world from hers. It was as

if they had cried a state of truce between him and her, and in this

truce they had met. She knew, vaguely, in the first minute, that they

were enemies come together in a truce. Every movement and word of his

was alien to her being.

Yet still she loved the fine texture of his face, of his skin. He was

rather browner, physically stronger. He was a man now. She thought his

manliness made the strangeness in him. When he was only a youth, fluid,

he was nearer to her. She thought a man must inevitably set into this

strange separateness, cold otherness of being. He talked, but not to

her. She tried to speak to him, but she could not reach him.

He seemed so balanced and sure, he made such a confident presence. He

was a great rider, so there was about him some of a horseman’s sureness

and habitual definiteness of decision, also some of the horseman’s

animal darkness. Yet his soul was only the more wavering, vague. He

seemed made up of a set of habitual actions and decisions. The

vulnerable, variable quick of the man was inaccessible. She knew

nothing of it. She could only feel the dark, heavy fixity of his animal

desire.

This dumb desire on his part had brought him to her? She was puzzled,

hurt by some hopeless fixity in him, that terrified her with a cold

feeling of despair. What did he want? His desires were so underground.

Why did he not admit himself? What did he want? He wanted something

that should be nameless. She shrank in fear.

Yet she flashed with excitement. In his dark, subterranean male soul,

he was kneeling before her, darkly exposing himself. She quivered, the

dark flame ran over her. He was waiting at her feet. He was helpless,

at her mercy. She could take or reject. If she rejected him, something

would die in him. For him it was life or death. And yet, all must be

kept so dark, the consciousness must admit nothing.

“How long,” she said, “are you staying in England?”

“I am not sure—but not later than July, I believe.”

Then they were both silent. He was here, in England, for six months.

They had a space of six months between them. He waited. The same iron

rigidity, as if the world were made of steel, possessed her again. It

was no use turning with flesh and blood to this arrangement of forged

metal.

Quickly, her imagination adjusted itself to the situation.

“Have you an appointment in India?” she asked.

“Yes—I have just the six months’ leave.”

“Will you like being out there?”

“I think so—there’s a good deal of social life, and plenty going

on—hunting, polo—and always a good horse—and plenty of work, any amount

of work.”

He was always side-tracking, always side-tracking his own soul. She

could see him so well out there, in India—one of the governing class,

superimposed upon an old civilization, lord and master of a clumsier

civilization than his own. It was his choice. He would become again an

aristocrat, invested with authority and responsibility, having a great

helpless populace beneath him. One of the ruling class, his whole being

would be given over to the fulfilling and the executing of the better

idea of the state. And in India, there would be real work to do. The

country did need the civilization which he himself represented: it did

need his roads and bridges, and the enlightenment of which he was part.

He would go to India. But that was not her road.

Yet she loved him, the body of him, whatever his decisions might be. He

seemed to want something of her. He was waiting for her to decide of

him. It had been decided in her long ago, when he had kissed her first.

He was her lover, though good and evil should cease. Her will never

relaxed, though her heart and soul must be imprisoned and silenced. He

waited upon her, and she accepted him. For he had come back to her.

A glow came into his face, into his fine, smooth skin, his eyes,

gold-grey, glowed intimately to her. He burned up, he caught fire and

became splendid, royal, something like a tiger. She caught his

brilliant, burnished glamour. Her heart and her soul were shut away

fast down below, hidden. She was free of them. She was to have her

satisfaction.

She became proud and erect, like a flower, putting itself forth in its

proper strength. His warmth invigorated her. His beauty of form, which

seemed to glow out in contrast with the rest of people, made her proud.

It was like deference to her, and made her feel as if she represented

before him all the grace and flower of humanity. She was no mere Ursula

Brangwen. She was Woman, she was the whole of Woman in the human order.

All-containing, universal, how should she be limited to individuality?

She was exhilarated, she did not want to go away from him. She had her

place by him. Who should take her away?

They came out of the café.

“Is there anything you would like to do?” he said. “Is there anything

we _can_ do?”

It was a dark, windy night in March.

“There is nothing to do,” she said.

Which was the answer he wanted.

“Let us walk then—where shall we walk?” he asked.

“Shall we go to the river?” she suggested, timidly.

In a moment they were on the tram, going down to Trent Bridge. She was

so glad. The thought of walking in the dark, far-reaching

water-meadows, beside the full river, transported her. Dark water

flowing in silence through the big, restless night made her feel wild.

They crossed the bridge, descended, and went away from the lights. In

an instant, in the darkness, he took her hand and they went in silence,

with subtle feet treading the darkness. The town fumed away on their

left, there were strange lights and sounds, the wind rushed against the

trees, and under the bridge. They walked close together, powerful in

unison. He drew her very close, held her with a subtle, stealthy,

powerful passion, as if they had a secret agreement which held good in

the profound darkness. The profound darkness was their universe.

“It is like it was before,” she said.

Yet it was not in the least as it was before. Nevertheless his heart

was perfectly in accord with her. They thought one thought.

“I knew I should come back,” he said at length.

She quivered.

“Did you always love me?” she asked.

The directness of the question overcame him, submerged him for a

moment. The darkness travelled massively along.

“I had to come back to you,” he said, as if hypnotized. “You were

always at the back of everything.”

She was silent with triumph, like fate.

“I loved you,” she said, “always.”

The dark flame leaped up in him. He must give her himself. He must give

her the very foundations of himself. He drew her very close, and they

went on in silence.

She started violently, hearing voices. They were near a stile across

the dark meadows.

“It’s only lovers,” he said to her, softly.

She looked to see the dark figures against the fence, wondering that

the darkness was inhabited.

“Only lovers will walk here to-night,” he said.

Then in a low, vibrating voice he told her about Africa, the strange

darkness, the strange, blood fear.

“I am not afraid of the darkness in England,” he said. “It is soft, and

natural to me, it is my medium, especially when you are here. But in

Africa it seems massive and fluid with terror—not fear of anything—just

fear. One breathes it, like the smell of blood. The blacks know it.

They worship it, really, the darkness. One almost likes it—the

fear—something sensual.”

She thrilled again to him. He was to her a voice out of the darkness.

He talked to her all the while, in low tones, about Africa, conveying

something strange and sensual to her: the negro, with his loose, soft

passion that could envelop one like a bath. Gradually he transferred to

her the hot, fecund darkness that possessed his own blood. He was

strangely secret. The whole world must be abolished. He maddened her

with his soft, cajoling, vibrating tones. He wanted her to answer, to

understand. A turgid, teeming night, heavy with fecundity in which

every molecule of matter grew big with increase, secretly urgent with

fecund desire, seemed to come to pass. She quivered, taut and

vibrating, almost pained. And gradually, he ceased telling her of

Africa, there came a silence, whilst they walked the darkness beside

the massive river. Her limbs were rich and tense, she felt they must be

vibrating with a low, profound vibration. She could scarcely walk. The

deep vibration of the darkness could only be felt, not heard.

Suddenly, as they walked, she turned to him and held him fast, as if

she were turned to steel.

“_Do_ you love me?” she cried in anguish.

“Yes,” he said, in a curious, lapping voice, unlike himself. “Yes, I

love you.”

He seemed like the living darkness upon her, she was in the embrace of

the strong darkness. He held her enclosed, soft, unutterably soft, and

with the unrelaxing softness of fate, the relentless softness of

fecundity. She quivered, and quivered, like a tense thing that is

struck. But he held her all the time, soft, unending, like darkness

closed upon her, omnipresent as the night. He kissed her, and she

quivered as if she were being destroyed, shattered. The lighted vessel

vibrated, and broke in her soul, the light fell, struggled, and went

dark. She was all dark, will-less, having only the receptive will.

He kissed her, with his soft, enveloping kisses, and she responded to

them completely, her mind, her soul gone out. Darkness cleaving to

darkness, she hung close to him, pressed herself into soft flow of his

kiss, pressed herself down, down to the source and core of his kiss,

herself covered and enveloped in the warm, fecund flow of his kiss,

that travelled over her, flowed over her, covered her, flowed over the

last fibre of her, so they were one stream, one dark fecundity, and she

clung at the core of him, with her lips holding open the very

bottommost source of him.

So they stood in the utter, dark kiss, that triumphed over them both,

subjected them, knitted them into one fecund nucleus of the fluid

darkness.

It was bliss, it was the nucleolating of the fecund darkness. Once the

vessel had vibrated till it was shattered, the light of consciousness

gone, then the darkness reigned, and the unutterable satisfaction.

They stood enjoying the unmitigated kiss, taking it, giving to it

endlessly, and still it was not exhausted. Their veins fluttered, their

blood ran together as one stream.

Till gradually a sleep, a heaviness settled on them, a drowse, and out

of the drowse, a small light of consciousness woke up. Ursula became

aware of the night around her, the water lapping and running full just

near, the trees roaring and soughing in gusts of wind.

She kept near to him, in contact with him, but she became ever more and

more herself. And she knew she must go to catch her train. But she did

not want to draw away from contact with him.

At length they roused and set out. No longer they existed in the

unblemished darkness. There was the glitter of a bridge, the twinkle of

lights across the river, the big flare of the town in front and on

their right.

But still, dark and soft and incontestable, their bodies walked

untouched by the lights, darkness supreme and arrogant.

“The stupid lights,” Ursula said to herself, in her dark sensual

arrogance. “The stupid, artificial, exaggerated town, fuming its

lights. It does not exist really. It rests upon the unlimited darkness,

like a gleam of coloured oil on dark water, but what is it?—nothing,

just nothing.”

In the tram, in the train, she felt the same. The lights, the civic

uniform was a trick played, the people as they moved or sat were only

dummies exposed. She could see, beneath their pale, wooden pretence of

composure and civic purposefulness, the dark stream that contained them

all. They were like little paper ships in their motion. But in reality

each one was a dark, blind, eager wave urging blindly forward, dark

with the same homogeneous desire. And all their talk and all their

behaviour was sham, they were dressed-up creatures. She was reminded of

the Invisible Man, who was a piece of darkness made visible only by his

clothes.

During the next weeks, all the time she went about in the same dark

richness, her eyes dilated and shining like the eyes of a wild animal,

a curious half-smile which seemed to be gibing at the civic pretence of

all the human life about her.

“What are you, you pale citizens?” her face seemed to say, gleaming.

“You subdued beast in sheep’s clothing, you primeval darkness falsified

to a social mechanism.”

She went about in the sensual sub-consciousness all the time, mocking

at the ready-made, artificial daylight of the rest.

“They assume selves as they assume suits of clothing,” she said to

herself, looking in mocking contempt at the stiffened, neutralized men.

“They think it better to be clerks or professors than to be the dark,

fertile beings that exist in the potential darkness. What do you think

you are?” her soul asked of the professor as she sat opposite him in

class. “What do you think you are, as you sit there in your gown and

your spectacles? You are a lurking, blood-sniffing creature with eyes

peering out of the jungle darkness, snuffing for your desires. That is

what you _are,_ though nobody would believe it, and you would be the

very last to allow it.”

Her soul mocked at all this pretence. Herself, she kept on pretending.

She dressed herself and made herself fine, she attended her lectures

and scribbled her notes. But all in a mood of superficial, mocking

facility. She understood well enough their two-and-two-make-four

tricks. She was as clever as they were. But care!—did she care about

their monkey tricks of knowledge or learning or civic deportment? She

did not care in the least.

There was Skrebensky, there was her dark, vital self. Outside the

college, the outer darkness, Skrebensky was waiting. On the edge of the

night, he was attentive. Did he care?

She was free as a leopard that sends up its raucous cry in the night.

She had the potent, dark stream of her own blood, she had the

glimmering core of fecundity, she had her mate, her complement, her

sharer in fruition. So, she had all, everything.

Skrebensky was staying in Nottingham all the time. He too was free. He

knew no one in this town, he had no civic self to maintain. He was

free. Their trams and markets and theatres and public meetings were a

shaken kaleidoscope to him, he watched as a lion or a tiger may lie

with narrowed eyes watching the people pass before its cage, the

kaleidoscopic unreality of people, or a leopard lie blinking, watching

the incomprehensible feats of the keepers. He despised it all—it was

all non-existent. Their good professors, their good clergymen, their

good political speakers, their good, earnest women—all the time he felt

his soul was grinning, grinning at the sight of them. So many

performing puppets, all wood and rag for the performance!

He watched the citizen, a pillar of society, a model, saw the stiff

goat’s legs, which have become almost stiffened to wood in the desire

to make them puppet in their action, he saw the trousers formed to the

puppet-action: man’s legs, but man’s legs become rigid and deformed,

ugly, mechanical.

He was curiously happy, being alone, now. The glimmering grin was on

his face. He had no longer any necessity to take part in the performing

tricks of the rest. He had discovered the clue to himself, he had

escaped from the show, like a wild beast escaped straight back into its

jungle. Having a room in a quiet hotel, he hired a horse and rode out

into the country, staying sometimes for the night in some village, and

returning the next day.

He felt rich and abundant in himself. Everything he did was a

voluptuous pleasure to him—either to ride on horseback, or to walk, or

to lie in the sun, or to drink in a public-house. He had no use for

people, nor for words. He had an amused pleasure in everything, a great

sense of voluptuous richness in himself, and of the fecundity of the

universal night he inhabited. The puppet shapes of people, their

wood-mechanical voices, he was remote from them.

For there were always his meetings with Ursula. Very often, she did not

go to college in the afternoon, but walked with him instead. Or he took

a motor-car or a dog-cart and they drove into the country, leaving the

car and going away by themselves into the woods. He had not taken her

yet. With subtle, instinctive economy, they went to the end of each

kiss, each embrace, each pleasure in intimate contact, knowing

subconsciously that the last was coming. It was to be their final entry

into the source of creation.

She took him home, and he stayed a week-end at Beldover with her

family. She loved having him in the house. Strange how he seemed to

come into the atmosphere of her family, with his laughing, insidious

grace. They all loved him, he was kin to them. His raillery, his warm,

voluptuous mocking presence was meat and joy to the Brangwen household.

For this house was always quivering with darkness, they put off their

puppet form when they came home, to lie and drowse in the sun.

There was a sense of freedom amongst them all, of the undercurrent of

darkness among them all. Yet here, at home, Ursula resented it. It

became distasteful to her. And she knew that if they understood the

real relationship between her and Skrebensky, her parents, her father

in particular, would go mad with rage. So subtly, she seemed to be like

any other girl who is more or less courted by a man. And she was like

any other girl. But in her, the antagonism to the social imposition was

for the time complete and final.

She waited, every moment of the day, for his next kiss. She admitted it

to herself in shame and bliss. Almost consciously, she waited. He

waited, but, until the time came, more unconsciously. When the time

came that he should kiss her again, a prevention was an annihilation to

him. He felt his flesh go grey, he was heavy with a corpse-like

inanition, he did not exist, if the time passed unfulfilled.

He came to her finally in a superb consummation. It was very dark, and

again a windy, heavy night. They had come down the lane towards

Beldover, down to the valley. They were at the end of their kisses, and

there was the silence between them. They stood as at the edge of a

cliff, with a great darkness beneath.

Coming out of the lane along the darkness, with the dark space

spreading down to the wind, and the twinkling lights of the station

below, the far-off windy chuff of a shunting train, the tiny

clink-clink-clink of the wagons blown between the wind, the light of

Beldover-edge twinkling upon the blackness of the hill opposite, the

glow of the furnaces along the railway to the right, their steps began

to falter. They would soon come out of the darkness into the lights. It

was like turning back. It was unfulfilment. Two quivering, unwilling

creatures, they lingered on the edge of the darkness, peering out at

the lights and the machine-glimmer beyond. They could not turn back to

the world—they could not.

So lingering along, they came to a great oak tree by the path. In all

its budding mass it roared to the wind, and its trunk vibrated in every

fibre, powerful, indomitable.

“We will sit down,” he said.

And in the roaring circle under the tree, that was almost invisible yet

whose powerful presence received them, they lay a moment looking at the

twinkling lights on the darkness opposite, saw the sweeping brand of a

train past the edge of their darkened field.

Then he turned and kissed her, and she waited for him. The pain to her

was the pain she wanted, the agony was the agony she wanted. She was

caught up, entangled in the powerful vibration of the night. The man,

what was he?—a dark, powerful vibration that encompassed her. She

passed away as on a dark wind, far, far away, into the pristine

darkness of paradise, into the original immortality. She entered the

dark fields of immortality.

When she rose, she felt strangely free, strong. She was not

ashamed,—why should she be? He was walking beside her, the man who had

been with her. She had taken him, they had been together. Whither they

had gone, she did not know. But it was as if she had received another

nature. She belonged to the eternal, changeless place into which they

had leapt together.

Her soul was sure and indifferent of the opinion of the world of

artificial light. As they went up the steps of the foot-bridge over the

railway, and met the train-passengers, she felt herself belonging to

another world, she walked past them immune, a whole darkness dividing

her from them. When she went into the lighted dining-room at home, she

was impervious to the lights and the eyes of her parents. Her everyday

self was just the same. She merely had another, stronger self that knew

the darkness.

This curious separate strength, that existed in darkness and pride of

night, never forsook her. She had never been more herself. It could not

occur to her that anybody, not even the young man of the world,

Skrebensky, should have anything at all to do with her permanent self.

As for her temporal, social self, she let it look after itself.

Her whole soul was implicated with Skrebensky—not the young man of the

world, but the undifferentiated man he was. She was perfectly sure of

herself, perfectly strong, stronger than all the world. The world was

not strong—she was strong. The world existed only in a secondary

sense:—she existed supremely.

She continued at college, in her ordinary routine, merely as a cover to

her dark, powerful under-life. The fact of herself, and with her

Skrebensky, was so powerful, that she took rest in the other. She went

to college in the morning, and attended her classes, flowering, and

remote.

She had lunch with him in his hotel; every evening she spent with him,

either in town, at his rooms, or in the country. She made the excuse at

home of evening study for her degree. But she paid not the slightest

attention to her study.

They were both absolute and happy and calm. The fact of their own

consummate being made everything else so entirely subordinate that they

were free. The only thing they wanted, as the days went by, was more

time to themselves. They wanted the time to be absolutely their own.

The Easter vacation was approaching. They agreed to go right away. It

would not matter if they did not come back. They were indifferent to

the actual facts.

“I suppose we ought to get married,” he said, rather wistfully. It

_was_ so magnificently free and in a deeper world, as it was. To make

public their connection would be to put it in range with all the things

which nullified him, and from which he was for the moment entirely

dissociated. If he married he would have to assume his social self. And

the thought of assuming his social self made him at once diffident and

abstract. If she were his social wife, if she were part of that

complication of dead reality, then what had his under-life to do with

her? One’s social wife was almost a material symbol. Whereas now she

was something more vivid to him than anything in conventional life

could be. She gave the complete lie to all conventional life, he and

she stood together, dark, fluid, infinitely potent, giving the living

lie to the dead whole which contained them.

He watched her pensive, puzzled face.

“I don’t think I want to marry you,” she said, her brow clouded.

It piqued him rather.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Let’s think about it afterwards, shall we?” she said.

He was crossed, yet he loved her violently.

“You’ve got a _museau,_ not a face,” he said.

“Have I?” she cried, her face lighting up like a pure flame. She

thought she had escaped. Yet he returned—he was not satisfied.

“Why?” he asked, “why don’t you want to marry me?”

“I don’t want to be with other people,” she said. “I want to be like

this. I’ll tell you if ever I want to marry you.”

“All right,” he said.

He would rather the thing was left indefinite, and that she took the

responsibility.

They talked of the Easter vacation. She thought only of complete

enjoyment.

They went to an hotel in Piccadilly. She was supposed to be his wife.

They bought a wedding-ring for a shilling, from a shop in a poor

quarter.

They had revoked altogether the ordinary mortal world. Their confidence

was like a possession upon them. They were possessed. Perfectly and

supremely free they felt, proud beyond all question, and surpassing

mortal conditions.

They were perfect, therefore nothing else existed. The world was a

world of servants whom one civilly ignored. Wherever they went, they

were the sensuous aristocrats, warm, bright, glancing with pure pride

of the senses.

The effect upon other people was extraordinary. The glamour was cast

from the young couple upon all they came into contact with, waiters or

chance acquaintances.

_“Oui, Monsieur le baron,”_ she would reply with a mocking courtesy to

her husband.

So they came to be treated as titled people. He was an officer in the

engineers. They were just married, going to India immediately.

Thus a tissue of romance was round them. She believed she was a young

wife of a titled husband on the eve of departure for India. This, the

social fact, was a delicious make-belief. The living fact was that he

and she were man and woman, absolute and beyond all limitation.

The days went by—they were to have three weeks together—in perfect

success. All the time, they themselves were reality, all outside was

tribute to them. They were quite careless about money, but they did

nothing very extravagant. He was rather surprised when he found that he

had spent twenty pounds in a little under a week, but it was only the

irritation of having to go to the bank. The machinery of the old system

lasted for him, not the system. The money simply did not exist.

Neither did any of the old obligations. They came home from the

theatre, had supper, then flitted about in their dressing-gowns. They

had a large bedroom and a corner sitting-room high up, remote and very

cosy. They ate all their meals in their own rooms, attended by a young

German called Hans, who thought them both wonderful, and answered

assiduously:

_“Gewiss, Herr Baron—bitte sehr, Frau Baronin.”_

Often, they saw the pink of dawn away across the park. The tower of

Westminster Cathedral was emerging, the lamps of Piccadilly, stringing

away beside the trees of the park, were becoming pale and moth-like,

the morning traffic was clock-clocking down the shadowy road, which had

gleamed all night like metal, down below, running far ahead into the

night, beneath the lamps, and which was now vague, as in a mist,

because of the dawn.

Then, as the flush of dawn became stronger, they opened the glass doors

and went on to the giddy balcony, feeling triumphant as two angels in

bliss, looking down at the still sleeping world, which would wake to a

dutiful, rumbling, sluggish turmoil of unreality.

[But the air was cold. They went into their bedroom, and bathed before

going to bed, leaving the partition doors of the bathroom open, so that

the vapour came into the bedroom and faintly dimmed the mirror. She was

always in bed first. She watched him as he bathed, his quick,

unconscious movements, the electric light glinting on his wet

shoulders. He stood out of the bath, his hair all washed flat over his

forehead, and pressed the water out of his eyes. He was slender, and,

to her, perfect, a clean, straight-cut youth, without a grain of

superfluous body. The brown hair on his body was soft and fine and

adorable, he was all beautifully flushed, as he stood in the white

bath-apartment.

He saw her warm, dark, lit-up face watching him from the pillow—yet he

did not see it—it was always present, and was to him as his own eyes.

He was never aware of the separate being of her. She was like his own

eyes and his own heart beating to him.

So he went across to her, to get his sleeping suit. It was always a

perfect adventure to go near to her. She put her arms round him, and

snuffed his warm, softened skin.

“Scent,” she said.

“Soap,” he answered.

“Soap,” she repeated, looking up with bright eyes. They were both

laughing, always laughing.]

Soon they were fast asleep, asleep till midday, close together,

sleeping one sleep. Then they awoke to the ever-changing reality of

their state. They alone inhabited the world of reality. All the rest

lived on a lower sphere.

Whatever they wanted to do, they did. They saw a few people—Dorothy,

whose guest she was supposed to be, and a couple of friends of

Skrebensky, young Oxford men, who called her Mrs. Skrebensky with

entire simplicity. They treated her, indeed, with such respect, that

she began to think she was really quite of the whole universe, of the

old world as well as of the new. She forgot she was outside the pale of

the old world. She thought she had brought it under the spell of her

own, real world. And so she had.

In such ever-changing reality the weeks went by. All the time, they

were an unknown world to each other. Every movement made by the one was

a reality and an adventure to the other. They did not want outside

excitements. They went to very few theatres, they were often in their

sitting-room high up over Piccadilly, with windows open on two sides,

and the door open on to the balcony, looking over the Green Park, or

down upon the minute travelling of the traffic.

Then suddenly, looking at a sunset, she wanted to go. She must be gone.

She must be gone at once. And in two hours’ time they were at Charing

Cross taking train for Paris. Paris was his suggestion. She did not

care where it was. The great joy was in setting out. And for a few days

she was happy in the novelty of Paris.

Then, for some reason, she must call in Rouen on the way back to

London. He had an instinctive mistrust of her desire for the place.

But, perversely, she wanted to go there. It was as if she wanted to try

its effect upon her.

For the first time, in Rouen, he had a cold feeling of death; not

afraid of any other man, but of her. She seemed to leave him. She

followed after something that was not him. She did not want him. The

old streets, the cathedral, the age and the monumental peace of the

town took her away from him. She turned to it as if to something she

had forgotten, and wanted. This was now the reality; this great stone

cathedral slumbering there in its mass, which knew no transience nor

heard any denial. It was majestic in its stability, its splendid

absoluteness.

Her soul began to run by itself. He did not realize, nor did she. Yet

in Rouen he had the first deadly anguish, the first sense of the death

towards which they were wandering. And she felt the first heavy

yearning, heavy, heavy hopeless warning, almost like a deep, uneasy

sinking into apathy, hopelessness.

They returned to London. But still they had two days. He began to

tremble, he grew feverish with the fear of her departure. She had in

her some fatal prescience, that made her calm. What would be, would be.

He remained fairly easy, however, still in his state of heightened

glamour, till she had gone, and he had turned away from St. Pancras,

and sat on the tram-car going up Pimlico to the “Angel”, to Moorgate

Street on Sunday evening.

Then the cold horror gradually soaked into him. He saw the horror of

the City Road, he realized the ghastly cold sordidness of the tram-car

in which he sat. Cold, stark, ashen sterility had him surrounded. Where

then was the luminous, wonderful world he belonged to by rights? How

did he come to be thrown on this refuse-heap where he was?

He was as if mad. The horror of the brick buildings, of the tram-car,

of the ashen-grey people in the street made him reeling and blind as if

drunk. He went mad. He had lived with her in a close, living, pulsing

world, where everything pulsed with rich being. Now he found himself

struggling amid an ashen-dry, cold world of rigidity, dead walls and

mechanical traffic, and creeping, spectre-like people. The life was

extinct, only ash moved and stirred or stood rigid, there was a

horrible, clattering activity, a rattle like the falling of dry slag,

cold and sterile. It was as if the sunshine that fell were unnatural

light exposing the ash of the town, as if the lights at night were the

sinister gleam of decomposition.

Quite mad, beside himself, he went to his club and sat with a glass of

whisky, motionless, as if turned to clay. He felt like a corpse that is

inhabited with just enough life to make it appear as any other of the

spectral, unliving beings which we call people in our dead language.

Her absence was worse than pain to him. It destroyed his being.

Dead, he went on from lunch to tea. His face was all the time fixed and

stiff and colourless, his life was a dry, mechanical movement. Yet even

he wondered slightly at the awful misery that had overcome him. How

could he be so ashlike and extinct? He wrote her a letter.

“I have been thinking that we must get married before long. My pay will

be more when I get out to India, we shall be able to get along. Or if

you don’t want to go to India, I could very probably stay here in

England. But I think you would like India. You could ride, and you

would know just everybody out there. Perhaps if you stay on to take

your degree, we might marry immediately after that. I will write to

your father as soon as I hear from you——”

He went on, disposing of her. If only he could be with her! All he

wanted now was to marry her, to be sure of her. Yet all the time he was

perfectly, perfectly hopeless, cold, extinct, without emotion or

connection.

He felt as if his life were dead. His soul was extinct. The whole being

of him had become sterile, he was a spectre, divorced from life. He had

no fullness, he was just a flat shape. Day by day the madness

accumulated in him. The horror of not-being possessed him.

He went here, there, and everywhere. But whatever he did, he knew that

only the cipher of him was there, nothing was filled in. He went to the

theatre; what he heard and saw fell upon a cold surface of

consciousness, which was now all that he was, there was nothing behind

it, he could have no experience of any sort. Mechanical registering

took place in him, no more. He had no being, no contents. Neither had

the people he came into contact with. They were mere permutations of

known quantities. There was no roundness or fullness in this world he

now inhabited, everything was a dead shape mental arrangement, without

life or being.

Much of the time, he was with friends and comrades. Then he forgot

everything. Their activities made up for his own negation, they engaged

his negative horror.

He only became happy when he drank, and he drank a good deal. Then he

was just the opposite to what he had been. He became a warm, diffuse,

glowing cloud, in a warm, diffuse formless fashion. Everything melted

down into a rosy glow, and he was the glow, and everything was the

glow, everybody else was the glow, and it was very nice, very nice. He

would sing songs, it was so nice.

Ursula went back to Beldover shut and firm. She loved Skrebensky, of

that she was resolved. She would allow nothing else.

She read his long, obsessed letter about getting married and going to

India, without any particular response. She seemed to ignore what he

said about marriage. It did not come home to her. He seemed, throughout

the greater part of his letter, to be talking without much meaning.

She replied to him pleasantly and easily. She rarely wrote long

letters.

“India sounds lovely. I can just see myself on an elephant swaying

between lanes of obsequious natives. But I don’t know if father would

let me go. We must see.

“I keep living over again the lovely times we have had. But I don’t

think you liked me quite so much towards the end, did you? You did not

like me when we left Paris. Why didn’t you?

“I love you very much. I love your body. It is so clear and fine. I am

glad you do not go naked, or all the women would fall in love with you.

I am very jealous of it, I love it so much.”

He was more or less satisfied with this letter. But day after day he

was walking about, dead, non-existent.

He could not come again to Nottingham until the end of April. Then he

persuaded her to go with him for a week-end to a friend’s house near

Oxford. By this time they were engaged. He had written to her father,

and the thing was settled. He brought her an emerald ring, of which she

was very proud.

Her people treated her now with a little distance, as if she had

already left them. They left her very much alone.

She went with him for the three days in the country house near Oxford.

It was delicious, and she was very happy. But the thing she remembered

most was when, getting up in the morning after he had gone back quietly

to his own room, having spent the night with her, she found herself

very rich in being alone, and enjoying to the full her solitary room,

she drew up her blind and saw the plum trees in the garden below all

glittering and snowy and delighted with the sunshine, in full bloom

under a blue sky. They threw out their blossom, they flung it out under

the blue heavens, the whitest blossom! How excited it made her.

She had to hurry through her dressing to go and walk in the garden

under the plum trees, before anyone should come and talk to her. Out

she slipped, and paced like a queen in fairy pleasaunces. The blossom

was silver-shadowy when she looked up from under the tree at the blue

sky. There was a faint scent, a faint noise of bees, a wonderful

quickness of happy morning.

She heard the breakfast gong and went indoors.

“Where have you been?” asked the others.

“I had to go out under the plum trees,” she said, her face glowing like

a flower. “It is so lovely.”

A shadow of anger crossed Skrebensky’s soul. She had not wanted him to

be there. He hardened his will.

At night there was a moon, and the blossom glistened ghostly, they went

together to look at it. She saw the moonlight on his face as he waited

near her, and his features were like silver and his eyes in shadow were

unfathomable. She was in love with him. He was very quiet.

They went indoors and she pretended to be tired. So she went quickly to

bed.

“Don’t be long coming to me,” she whispered, as she was supposed to be

kissing him good night.

And he waited, intent, obsessed, for the moment when he could come to

her.

She enjoyed him, she made much of him. She liked to put her fingers on

the soft skin of his sides, or on the softness of his back, when he

made the muscles hard underneath, the muscles developed very strong

through riding; and she had a great thrill of excitement and passion,

because of the unimpressible hardness of his body, that was so soft and

smooth under her fingers, that came to her with such absolute service.

She owned his body and enjoyed it with all the delight and carelessness

of a possessor. But he had become gradually afraid of her body. He

wanted her, he wanted her endlessly. But there had come a tension into

his desire, a constraint which prevented his enjoying the delicious

approach and the lovable close of the endless embrace. He was afraid.

His will was always tense, fixed.

Her final examination was at midsummer. She insisted on sitting for it,

although she had neglected her work during the past months. He also

wanted her to go in for the degree. Then, he thought, she would be

satisfied. Secretly he hoped she would fail, so that she would be more

glad of him.

“Would you rather live in India or in England when we are married?” he

asked her.

“Oh, in India, by far,” she said, with a careless lack of consideration

which annoyed him.

Once she said, with heat:

“I shall be glad to leave England. Everything is so meagre and paltry,

it is so unspiritual—I hate democracy.”

He became angry to hear her talk like this, he did not know why.

Somehow, he could not bear it, when she attacked things. It was as if

she were attacking him.

“What do you mean?” he asked her, hostile. “Why do you hate democracy?”

“Only the greedy and ugly people come to the top in a democracy,” she

said, “because they’re the only people who will push themselves there.

Only degenerate races are democratic.”

“What do you want then—an aristocracy?” he asked, secretly moved. He

always felt that by rights he belonged to the ruling aristocracy. Yet

to hear her speak for his class pained him with a curious, painful

pleasure. He felt he was acquiescing in something illegal, taking to

himself some wrong, reprehensible advantages.

“I _do_ want an aristocracy,” she cried. “And I’d far rather have an

aristocracy of birth than of money. Who are the aristocrats now—who are

chosen as the best to rule? Those who have money and the brains for

money. It doesn’t matter what else they have: but they must have

money-brains,—because they are ruling in the name of money.”

“The people elect the government,” he said.

“I know they do. But what are the people? Each one of them is a

money-interest. I hate it, that anybody is my equal who has the same

amount of money as I have. I _know_ I am better than all of them. I

hate them. They are not my equals. I hate equality on a money basis. It

is the equality of dirt.”

Her eyes blazed at him, he felt as if she wanted to destroy him. She

had gripped him and was trying to break him. His anger sprang up,

against her. At least he would fight for his existence with her. A

hard, blind resistance possessed him.

“_I_ don’t care about money,” he said, “neither do I want to put my

finger in the pie. I am too sensitive about my finger.”

“What is your finger to me?” she cried, in a passion. “You with your

dainty fingers, and your going to India because you will be one of the

somebodies there! It’s a mere dodge, your going to India.”

“In what way a dodge?” he cried, white with anger and fear.

“You think the Indians are simpler than us, and so you’ll enjoy being

near them and being a lord over them,” she said. “And you’ll feel so

righteous, governing them for their own good. Who are you, to feel

righteous? What are you righteous about, in your governing? Your

governing stinks. What do you govern for, but to make things there as

dead and mean as they are here!”

“I don’t feel righteous in the least,” he said.

“Then what _do_ you feel? It’s all such a nothingness, what you feel

and what you don’t feel.”

“What do you feel yourself?” he said. “Aren’t you righteous in your own

mind?”

“Yes, I am, because I’m against you, and all your old, dead things,”

she cried.

She seemed, with the last words, uttered in hard knowledge, to strike

down the flag that he kept flying. He felt cut off at the knees, a

figure made worthless. A horrible sickness gripped him, as if his legs

were really cut away, and he could not move, but remained a crippled

trunk, dependent, worthless. The ghastly sense of helplessness, as if

he were a mere figure that did not exist vitally, made him mad, beside

himself.

Now, even whilst he was with her, this death of himself came over him,

when he walked about like a body from which all individual life is

gone. In this state he neither heard nor saw nor felt, only the

mechanism of his life continued.

He hated her, as far as, in this state, he could hate. His cunning

suggested to him all the ways of making her esteem him. For she did not

esteem him. He left her and did not write to her. He flirted with other

women, with Gudrun.

This last made her very fierce. She was still fiercely jealous of his

body. In passionate anger she upbraided him because, not being man

enough to satisfy one woman, he hung round others.

[“Don’t I satisfy you?” he asked of her, again going white to the

throat.

“No,” she said. “You’ve never satisfied me since the first week in

London. You never satisfy me now. What does it mean to me, your having

me—”] She lifted her shoulders and turned aside her face in a motion of

cold, indifferent worthlessness. He felt he would kill her.

When she had roused him to a pitch of madness, when she saw his eyes

all dark and mad with suffering, then a great suffering overcame her

soul, a great, inconquerable suffering. And she loved him. For, oh, she

wanted to love him. Stronger than life or death was her craving to be

able to love him.

And at such moments, when he was made with her destroying him, when all

his complacency was destroyed, all his everyday self was broken, and

only the stripped, rudimentary, primal man remained, demented with

torture, her passion to love him became love, she took him again, they

came together in an overwhelming passion, in which he knew he satisfied

her.

But it all contained a developing germ of death. After each contact,

her anguished desire for him or for that which she never had from him

was stronger, her love was more hopeless. After each contact his mad

dependence on her was deepened, his hope of standing strong and taking

her in his own strength was weakened. He felt himself a mere attribute

of her.

Whitsuntide came, just before her examination. She was to have a few

days of rest. Dorothy had inherited her patrimony, and had taken a

cottage in Sussex. She invited them to stay with her.

They went down to Dorothy’s neat, low cottage at the foot of the downs.

Here they could do as they liked. Ursula was always yearning to go to

the top of the downs. The white track wound up to the rounded summit.

And she must go.

Up there, she could see the Channel a few miles away, the sea raised up

and faintly glittering in the sky, the Isle of Wight a shadow lifted in

the far distance, the river winding bright through the patterned plain

to seaward, Arundel Castle a shadowy bulk, and then the rolling of the

high, smooth downs, making a high, smooth land under heaven,

acknowledging only the heavens in their great, sun-glowing strength,

and suffering only a few bushes to trespass on the intercourse between

their great, unabateable body and the changeful body of the sky.

Below she saw the villages and the woods of the weald, and the train

running bravely, a gallant little thing, running with all the

importance of the world over the water meadows and into the gap of the

downs, waving its white steam, yet all the while so little. So little,

yet its courage carried it from end to end of the earth, till there was

no place where it did not go. Yet the downs, in magnificent

indifference, bearing limbs and body to the sun, drinking sunshine and

sea-wind and sea-wet cloud into its golden skin, with superb stillness

and calm of being, was not the downs still more wonderful? The blind,

pathetic, energetic courage of the train as it steamed tinily away

through the patterned levels to the sea’s dimness, so fast and so

energetic, made her weep. Where was it going? It was going nowhere, it

was just going. So blind, so without goal or aim, yet so hasty! She sat

on an old prehistoric earth-work and cried, and the tears ran down her

face. The train had tunnelled all the earth, blindly, and uglily.

And she lay face downwards on the downs, that were so strong, that

cared only for their intercourse with the everlasting skies, and she

wished she could become a strong mound smooth under the sky, bosom and

limbs bared to all winds and clouds and bursts of sunshine.

But she must get up again and look down from her foothold of sunshine,

down and away at the patterned, level earth, with its villages and its

smoke and its energy. So shortsighted the train seemed, running to the

distance, so terrifying in their littleness the villages, with such

pettiness in their activity.

Skrebensky wandered dazed, not knowing where he was or what he was

doing with her. All her passion seemed to be to wander up there on the

downs, and when she must descend to earth, she was heavy. Up there she

was exhilarated and free.

She would not love him in a house any more. She said she hated houses,

and particularly she hated beds. There was something distasteful in his

coming to her bed.

She would stay the night on the downs, up there, he with her. It was

midsummer, the days were glamorously long. At about half-past ten, when

the bluey-black darkness had at last fallen, they took rugs and climbed

the steep track to the summit of the downs, he and she.

Up there, the stars were big, the earth below was gone into darkness.

She was free up there with the stars. Far out they saw tiny yellow

lights—but it was very far out, at sea, or on land. She was free up

among the stars.

She took off her clothes, and made him take off all his, and they ran

over the smooth, moonless turf, a long way, more than a mile from where

they had left their clothing, running in the dark, soft wind, utterly

naked, as naked as the downs themselves. Her hair was loose and blew

about her shoulders, she ran swiftly, wearing sandals when she set off

on the long run to the dew-pond.

In the round dew-pond the stars were untroubled. She ventured softly

into the water, grasping at the stars with her hands.

And then suddenly she started back, running swiftly. He was there,

beside her, but only on sufferance. He was a screen for her fears. He

served her. She took him, she clasped him, clenched him close, but her

eyes were open looking at the stars, it was as if the stars were lying

with her and entering the unfathomable darkness of her womb, fathoming

her at last. It was not him.

The dawn came. They stood together on a high place, an earthwork of the

stone-age men, watching for the light. It came over the land. But the

land was dark. She watched a pale rim on the sky, away against the

darkened land. The darkness became bluer. A little wind was running in

from the sea behind. It seemed to be running to the pale rift of the

dawn. And she and he darkly, on an outpost of the darkness, stood

watching for the dawn.

The light grew stronger, gushing up against the dark sapphire of the

transparent night. The light grew stronger, whiter, then over it

hovered a flush of rose. A flush of rose, and then yellow, pale,

new-created yellow, the whole quivering and poising momentarily over

the fountain on the sky’s rim.

The rose hovered and quivered, burned, fused to flame, to a transient

red, while the yellow urged out in great waves, thrown from the

ever-increasing fountain, great waves of yellow flinging into the sky,

scattering its spray over the darkness, which became bluer and bluer,

paler, till soon it would itself be a radiance, which had been

darkness.

The sun was coming. There was a quivering, a powerful terrifying swim

of molten light. Then the molten source itself surged forth, revealing

itself. The sun was in the sky, too powerful to look at.

And the ground beneath lay so still, so peaceful. Only now and again a

cock crew. Otherwise, from the distant yellow hills to the pine trees

at the foot of the downs, everything was newly washed into being, in a

flood of new, golden creation.

It was so unutterably still and perfect with promise, the

golden-lighted, distinct land, that Ursula’s soul rocked and wept.

Suddenly he glanced at her. The tears were running over her cheeks, her

mouth was working strangely.

“What is the matter?” he asked.

After a moment’s struggle with her voice.

“It is so beautiful,” she said, looking at the glowing, beautiful land.

It was so beautiful, so perfect, and so unsullied.

He too realized what England would be in a few hours’ time—a blind,

sordid, strenuous activity, all for nothing, fuming with dirty smoke

and running trains and groping in the bowels of the earth, all for

nothing. A ghastliness came over him.

He looked at Ursula. Her face was wet with tears, very bright, like a

transfiguration in the refulgent light. Nor was his the hand to wipe

away the burning, bright tears. He stood apart, overcome by a cruel

ineffectuality.

Gradually a great, helpless sorrow was rising in him. But as yet he was

fighting it away, he was struggling for his own life. He became very

quiet and unaware of the things about him, awaiting, as it were, her

judgment on him.

They returned to Nottingham, the time of her examination came. She must

go to London. But she would not stay with him in an hotel. She would go

to a quiet little pension near the British Museum.

Those quiet residential squares of London made a great impression on

her mind. They were very complete. Her mind seemed imprisoned in their

quietness. Who was going to liberate her?

In the evening, her practical examinations being over, he went with her

to dinner at one of the hotels down the river, near Richmond. It was

golden and beautiful, with yellow water and white and scarlet-striped

boat-awnings, and blue shadows under the trees.

“When shall we be married?” he asked her, quietly, simply, as if it

were a mere question of comfort.

She watched the changing pleasure-traffic of the river. He looked at

her golden, puzzled _museau._ The knot gathered in his throat.

“I don’t know,” she said.

A hot grief gripped his throat.

“Why don’t you know—don’t you want to be married?” he asked her.

Her head turned slowly, her face, puzzled, like a boy’s face,

expressionless because she was trying to think, looked towards his

face. She did not see him, because she was pre-occupied. She did not

quite know what she was going to say.

“I don’t think I want to be married,” she said, and her naïve,

troubled, puzzled eyes rested a moment on his, then travelled away,

pre-occupied.

“Do you mean never, or not just yet?” he asked.

The knot in his throat grew harder, his face was drawn as if he were

being strangled.

“I mean never,” she said, out of some far self which spoke for once

beyond her.

His drawn, strangled face watched her blankly for a few moments, then a

strange sound took place in his throat. She started, came to herself,

and, horrified, saw him. His head made a queer motion, the chin jerked

back against the throat, the curious, crowing, hiccupping sound came

again, his face twisted like insanity, and he was crying, crying blind

and twisted as if something were broken which kept him in control.

“Tony—don’t,” she cried, starting up.

It tore every one of her nerves to see him. He made groping movements

to get out of his chair. But he was crying uncontrollably, noiselessly,

with his face twisted like a mask, contorted and the tears running down

the amazing grooves in his cheeks. Blindly, his face always this

horrible working mask, he groped for his hat, for his way down from the

terrace. It was eight o’clock, but still brightly light. The other

people were staring. In great agitation, part of which was

exasperation, she stayed behind, paid the waiter with a half-sovereign,

took her yellow silk coat, then followed Skrebensky.

She saw him walking with brittle, blind steps along the path by the

river. She could tell by the strange stiffness and brittleness of his

figure that he was still crying. Hurrying after him, running, she took

his arm.

“Tony,” she cried, “don’t! Why are you like this? What are you doing

this for? Don’t. It’s not necessary.”

He heard, and his manhood was cruelly, coldly defaced. Yet it was no

good. He could not gain control of his face. His face, his breast, were

weeping violently, as if automatically. His will, his knowledge had

nothing to do with it. He simply could not stop.

She walked holding his arm, silent with exasperation and perplexity and

pain. He took the uncertain steps of a blind man, because his mind was

blind with weeping.

“Shall we go home? Shall we have a taxi?” she said.

He could pay no attention. Very flustered, very agitated, she signalled

indefinitely to a taxi-cab that was going slowly by. The driver saluted

and drew up. She opened the door and pushed Skrebensky in, then took

her own place. Her face was uplifted, the mouth closed down, she looked

hard and cold and ashamed. She winced as the driver’s dark red face was

thrust round upon her, a full-blooded, animal face with black eyebrows

and a thick, short-cut moustache.

“Where to, lady?” he said, his white teeth showing. Again for a moment

she was flustered.

“Forty, Rutland Square,” she said.

He touched his cap and stolidly set the car in motion. He seemed to

have a league with her to ignore Skrebensky.

The latter sat as if trapped within the taxi-cab, his face still

working, whilst occasionally he made quick slight movements of the

head, to shake away his tears. He never moved his hands. She could not

bear to look at him. She sat with face uplifted and averted to the

window.

At length, when she had regained some control over herself, she turned

again to him. He was much quieter. His face was wet, and twitched

occasionally, his hands still lay motionless. But his eyes were quite

still, like a washed sky after rain, full of a wan light, and quite

steady, almost ghost-like.

A pain flamed in her womb, for him.

“I didn’t think I should hurt you,” she said, laying her hand very

lightly, tentatively, on his arm. “The words came without my knowing.

They didn’t mean anything, really.”

He remained quite still, hearing, but washed all wan and without

feeling. She waited, looking at him, as if he were some curious,

not-understandable creature.

“You won’t cry again, will you, Tony?”

Some shame and bitterness against her burned him in the question. She

noticed how his moustache was soddened wet with tears. Taking her

handkerchief, she wiped his face. The driver’s heavy, stolid back

remained always turned to them, as if conscious but indifferent.

Skrebensky sat motionless whilst Ursula wiped his face, softly,

carefully, and yet clumsily, not as well as he would have wiped it

himself.

Her handkerchief was too small. It was soon wet through. She groped in

his pocket for his own. Then, with its more ample capacity, she

carefully dried his face. He remained motionless all the while. Then

she drew his cheek to hers and kissed him. His face was cold. Her heart

was hurt. She saw the tears welling quickly to his eyes again. As if he

were a child, she again wiped away his tears. By now she herself was on

the point of weeping. Her underlip was caught between her teeth.

So she sat still, for fear of her own tears, sitting close by him,

holding his hand warm and close and loving. Meanwhile the car ran on,

and a soft, midsummer dusk began to gather. For a long while they sat

motionless. Only now and again her hand closed more closely, lovingly,

over his hand, then gradually relaxed.

The dusk began to fall. One or two lights appeared. The driver drew up

to light his lamps. Skrebensky moved for the first time, leaning

forward to watch the driver. His face had always the same still,

clarified, almost childlike look, impersonal.

They saw the driver’s strange, full, dark face peering into the lamps

under drawn brows. Ursula shuddered. It was the face almost of an

animal yet of a quick, strong, wary animal that had them within its

knowledge, almost within its power. She clung closer to Krebensky.

“My love?” she said to him, questioningly, when the car was again

running in full motion.

He made no movement or sound. He let her hold his hand, he let her

reach forward, in the gathering darkness, and kiss his still cheek. The

crying had gone by—he would not cry any more. He was whole and himself

again.

“My love,” she repeated, trying to make him notice her. But as yet he

could not.

He watched the road. They were running by Kensington Gardens. For the

first time his lips opened.

“Shall we get out and go into the park,” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, quietly, not sure what was coming.

After a moment he took the tube from its peg. She saw the stout,

strong, self-contained driver lean his head.

“Stop at Hyde Park Corner.”

The dark head nodded, the car ran on just the same.

Presently they pulled up. Skrebensky paid the man. Ursula stood back.

She saw the driver salute as he received his tip, and then, before he

set the car in motion, turn and look at her, with his quick, powerful,

animal’s look, his eyes very concentrated and the whites of his eyes

flickering. Then he drove away into the crowd. He had let her go. She

had been afraid.

Skrebensky turned with her into the park. A band was still playing and

the place was thronged with people. They listened to the ebbing music,

then went aside to a dark seat, where they sat closely, hand in hand.

Then at length, as out of the silence, she said to him, wondering:

“What hurt you so?”

She really did not know, at this moment.

“When you said you wanted never to marry me,” he replied, with a

childish simplicity.

“But why did that hurt you so?” she said. “You needn’t mind everything

I say so particularly.”

“I don’t know—I didn’t want to do it,” he said, humbly, ashamed.

She pressed his hand warmly. They sat close together, watching the

soldiers go by with their sweethearts, the lights trailing in myriads

down the great thoroughfares that beat on the edge of the park.

“I didn’t know you cared so much,” she said, also humbly.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I was knocked over myself.—But I care—all the

world.”

His voice was so quiet and colourless, it made her heart go pale with

fear.

“My love!” she said, drawing near to him. But she spoke out of fear,

not out of love.

“I care all the world—I care for nothing else—neither in life nor in

death,” he said, in the same steady, colourless voice of essential

truth.

“Than for what?” she murmured duskily.

“Than for you—to be with me.”

And again she was afraid. Was she to be conquered by this? She cowered

close to him, very close to him. They sat perfectly still, listening to

the great, heavy, beating sound of the town, the murmur of lovers going

by, the footsteps of soldiers.

She shivered against him.

“You are cold?” he said.

“A little.”

“We will go and have some supper.”

He was now always quiet and decided and remote, very beautiful. He

seemed to have some strange, cold power over her.

They went to a restaurant, and drank chianti. But his pale, wan look

did not go away.

“Don’t leave me to-night,” he said at length, looking at her, pleading.

He was so strange and impersonal, she was afraid.

“But the people of my place,” she said, quivering.

“I will explain to them—they know we are engaged.”

She sat pale and mute. He waited.

“Shall we go?” he said at length.

“Where?”

“To an hotel.”

Her heart was hardened. Without answering, she rose to acquiesce. But

she was now cold and unreal. Yet she could not refuse him. It seemed

like fate, a fate she did not want.

They went to an Italian hotel somewhere, and had a sombre bedroom with

a very large bed, clean, but sombre. The ceiling was painted with a

bunch of flowers in a big medallion over the bed. She thought it was

pretty.

He came to her, and cleaved to her very close, like steel cleaving and

clinching on to her. Her passion was roused, it was fierce but cold.

But it was fierce, and extreme, and good, their passion this night. He

slept with her fast in his arms. All night long he held her fast

against him. She was passive, acquiscent. But her sleep was not very

deep nor very real.

She woke in the morning to a sound of water dashed on a courtyard, to

sunlight streaming through a lattice. She thought she was in a foreign

country. And Skrebensky was there an incubus upon her.

She lay still, thinking, whilst his arm was round her, his head against

her shoulders, his body against hers, just behind her. He was still

asleep.

She watched the sunshine coming in bars through the _persiennes,_ and

her immediate surroundings again melted away.

She was in some other land, some other world, where the old restraints

had dissolved and vanished, where one moved freely, not afraid of one’s

fellow men, nor wary, nor on the defensive, but calm, indifferent, at

one’s ease. Vaguely, in a sort of silver light, she wandered at large

and at ease. The bonds of the world were broken. This world of England

had vanished away. She heard a voice in the yard below calling:

“O Giovann’—O’-O’-O’-Giovann’——!”

And she knew she was in a new country, in a new life. It was very

delicious to lie thus still, with one’s soul wandering freely and

simply in the silver light of some other, simpler, more finely natural

world.

But always there was a foreboding waiting to command her. She became

more aware of Skrebensky. She knew he was waking up. She must modify

her soul, depart from her further world, for him.

She knew he was awake. He lay still, with a concrete stillness, not as

when he slept. Then his arm tightened almost convulsively upon her, and

he said, half timidly:

“Did you sleep well?”

“Very well.”

“So did I.”

There was a pause.

“And do you love me?” he asked.

She turned and looked at him searchingly. He seemed outside her.

“I do,” she said.

But she said it out of complacency and a desire not to be harried.

There was a curious breach of silence between them, which frightened

him.

They lay rather late, then he rang for breakfast. She wanted to be able

to go straight downstairs and away from the place, when she got up. She

was happy in this room, but the thought of the publicity of the hall

downstairs rather troubled her.

A young Italian, a Sicilian, dark and slightly pock-marked, buttoned up

in a sort of grey tunic, appeared with the tray. His face had an almost

African imperturbability, impassive, incomprehensible.

“One might be in Italy,” Skrebensky said to him, genially. A vacant

look, almost like fear, came on the fellow’s face. He did not

understand.

“This is like Italy,” Skrebensky explained.

The face of the Italian flashed with a non-comprehending smile, he

finished setting out the tray, and was gone. He did not understand: he

would understand nothing: he disappeared from the door like a

half-domesticated wild animal. It made Ursula shudder slightly, the

quick, sharp-sighted, intent animality of the man.

Skrebensky was beautiful to her this morning, his face softened and

transfused with suffering and with love, his movements very still and

gentle. He was beautiful to her, but she was detached from him by a

chill distance. Always she seemed to be bearing up against the distance

that separated them. But he was unaware. This morning he was transfused

and beautiful. She admired his movements, the way he spread honey on

his roll, or poured out the coffee.

When breakfast was over, she lay still again on the pillows, whilst he

went through his toilet. She watched him, as he sponged himself, and

quickly dried himself with the towel. His body was beautiful, his

movements intent and quick, she admired him and she appreciated him

without reserve. He seemed completed now. He aroused no fruitful

fecundity in her. He seemed added up, finished. She knew him all round,

not on any side did he lead into the unknown. Poignant, almost

passionate appreciation she felt for him, but none of the dreadful

wonder, none of the rich fear, the connection with the unknown, or the

reverence of love. He was, however, unaware this morning. His body was

quiet and fulfilled, his veins complete with satisfaction, he was

happy, finished.

Again she went home. But this time he went with her. He wanted to stay

by her. He wanted her to marry him. It was already July. In early

September he must sail for India. He could not bear to think of going

alone. She must come with him. Nervously, he kept beside her.

Her examination was finished, her college career was over. There

remained for her now to marry or to work again. She applied for no

post. It was concluded she would marry. India tempted her—the strange,

strange land. But with the thought of Calcutta, or Bombay, or of Simla,

and of the European population, India was no more attractive to her

than Nottingham.

She had failed in her examination: she had gone down: she had not taken

her degree. It was a blow to her. It hardened her soul.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What are the odds, whether you are a

Bachelor of Arts or not, according to the London University? All you

know, you know, and if you are Mrs. Skrebensky, the B.A. is

meaningless.”

Instead of consoling her, this made her harder, more ruthless. She was

now up against her own fate. It was for her to choose between being

Mrs. Skrebensky, even Baroness Skrebensky, wife of a lieutenant in the

Royal Engineers, the Sappers, as he called them, living with the

European population in India—or being Ursula Brangwen, spinster,

school-mistress. She was qualified by her Intermediate Arts

examination. She would probably even now get a post quite easily as

assistant in one of the higher grade schools, or even in Willey Green

School. Which was she to do?

She hated most of all entering the bondage of teaching once more. Very

heartily she detested it. Yet at the thought of marriage and living

with Skrebensky amid the European population in India, her soul was

locked and would not budge. She had very little feeling about it: only

there was a deadlock.

Skrebensky waited, she waited, everybody waited for the decision. When

Anton talked to her, and seemed insidiously to suggest himself as a

husband to her, she knew how utterly locked out he was. On the other

hand, when she saw Dorothy, and discussed the matter, she felt she

would marry him promptly, at once, as a sharp disavowal of adherence

with Dorothy’s views.

The situation was almost ridiculous.

“But do you love him?” asked Dorothy.

“It isn’t a question of loving him,” said Ursula. “I love him well

enough—certainly more than I love anybody else in the world. And I

shall never love anybody else the same again. We have had the flower of

each other. But I don’t care about love. I don’t value it. I don’t care

whether I love or whether I don’t, whether I have love or whether I

haven’t. What is it to me?”

And she shrugged her shoulders in fierce, angry contempt.

Dorothy pondered, rather angry and afraid.

“Then what _do_ you care about?” she asked, exasperated.

“I don’t know,” said Ursula. “But something impersonal.

Love—love—love—what does it mean—what does it amount to? So much

personal gratification. It doesn’t lead anywhere.”

“It isn’t supposed to lead anywhere, is it?” said Dorothy, satirically.

“I thought it was the one thing which is an end in itself.”

“Then what does it matter to me?” cried Ursula. “As an end in itself, I

could love a hundred men, one after the other. Why should I end with a

Skrebensky? Why should I not go on, and love all the types I fancy, one

after another, if love is an end in itself? There are plenty of men who

aren’t Anton, whom I could love—whom I would like to love.”

“Then you don’t love _him,”_ said Dorothy.

“I tell you I do;—quite as much, and perhaps more than I should love

any of the others. Only there are plenty of things that aren’t in Anton

that I would love in the other men.”

“What, for instance?”

“It doesn’t matter. But a sort of strong understanding, in some men,

and then a dignity, a directness, something unquestioned that there is

in working men, and then a jolly, reckless passionateness that you

see—a man who could really let go——”

Dorothy could feel that Ursula was already hankering after something

else, something that this man did not give her.

“The question is, what _do_ you want,” propounded Dorothy. “Is it just

other men?”

Ursula was silenced. This was her own dread. Was she just promiscuous?

“Because if it is,” continued Dorothy, “you’d better marry Anton. The

other can only end badly.”

So out of fear of herself Ursula was to marry Skrebensky.

He was very busy now, preparing to go to India. He must visit relatives

and contract business. He was almost sure of Ursula now. She seemed to

have given in. And he seemed to become again an important, self-assured

man.

It was the first week in August, and he was one of a large party in a

bungalow on the Lincolnshire coast. It was a tennis, golf, motor-car,

motor-boat party, given by his great-aunt, a lady of social

pretensions. Ursula was invited to spend the week with the party.

She went rather reluctantly. Her marriage was more or less fixed for

the twenty-eighth of the month. They were to sail for India on

September the fifth. One thing she knew, in her subconsciousness, and

that was, she would never sail for India.

She and Anton, being important guests on account of the coming

marriage, had rooms in the large bungalow. It was a big place, with a

great central hall, two smaller writing-rooms, and then two corridors

from which opened eight or nine bedrooms. Skrebensky was put on one

corridor, Ursula on the other. They felt very lost, in the crowd.

Being lovers, however, they were allowed to be out alone together as

much as they liked. Yet she felt very strange, in this crowd of strange

people, uneasy, as if she had no privacy. She was not used to these

homogeneous crowds. She was afraid.

She felt different from the rest of them, with their hard, easy,

shallow intimacy, that seemed to cost them so little. She felt she was

not pronounced enough. It was a kind of hold-your-own unconventional

atmosphere.

She did not like it. In crowds, in assemblies of people, she liked

formality. She felt she did not produce the right effect. She was not

effective: she was not beautiful: she was nothing. Even before

Skrebensky she felt unimportant, almost inferior. He could take his

part very well with the rest.

He and she went out into the night. There was a moon behind clouds,

shedding a diffused light, gleaming now and again in bits of smoky

mother-of-pearl. So they walked together on the wet, ribbed sands near

the sea, hearing the run of the long, heavy waves, that made a ghostly

whiteness and a whisper.

He was sure of himself. As she walked, the soft silk of her dress—she

wore a blue shantung, full-skirted—blew away from the sea and flapped

and clung to her legs. She wished it would not. Everything seemed to

give her away, and she could not rouse herself to deny, she was so

confused.

He would lead her away to a pocket in the sand-hills, secret amid the

grey thorn-bushes and the grey, glassy grass. He held her close against

him, felt all her firm, unutterably desirable mould of body through the

fine fibre of the silk that fell about her limbs. The silk, slipping

fierily on the hidden, yet revealed roundness and firmness of her body,

her loins, seemed to run in him like fire, make his brain burn like

brimstone. She liked it, the electric fire of the silk under his hands

upon her limbs, the fire flew over her, as he drew nearer and nearer to

discovery. She vibrated like a jet of electric, firm fluid in response.

Yet she did not feel beautiful. All the time, she felt she was not

beautiful to him, only exciting. [She let him take her, and he seemed

mad, mad with excited passion. But she, as she lay afterwards on the

cold, soft sand, looking up at the blotted, faintly luminous sky, felt

that she was as cold now as she had been before. Yet he, breathing

heavily, seemed almost savagely satisfied. He seemed revenged.

A little wind wafted the sea grass and passed over her face. Where was

the supreme fulfilment she would never enjoy? Why was she so cold, so

unroused, so indifferent?

As they went home, and she saw the many, hateful lights of the

bungalow, of several bungalows in a group, he said softly:

“Don’t lock your door.”

“I’d rather, here,” she said.

“No, don’t. We belong to each other. Don’t let us deny it.”

She did not answer. He took her silence for consent.

He shared his room with another man.

“I suppose,” he said, “it won’t alarm the house if I go across to

happier regions.”

“So long as you don’t make a great row going, and don’t try the wrong

door,” said the other man, turning in to sleep.

Skrebensky went out in his wide-striped sleeping suit. He crossed the

big dining hall, whose low firelight smelled of cigars and whisky and

coffee, entered the other corridor and found Ursula’s room. She was

lying awake, wide-eyed and suffering. She was glad he had come, if only

for consolation. It was consolation to be held in his arms, to feel his

body against hers. Yet how foreign his arms and body were! Yet still,

not so horribly foreign and hostile as the rest of the house felt to

her.]

She did not know how she suffered in this house. She was healthy and

exorbitantly full of interest. So she played tennis and learned golf,

she rowed out and swam in the deep sea, and enjoyed it very much

indeed, full of zest. Yet all the time, among those others, she felt

shocked and wincing, as if her violently-sensitive nakedness were

exposed to the hard, brutal, material impact of the rest of the people.

The days went by unmarked, in a full, almost strenuous enjoyment of

one’s own physique. Skrebensky was one among the others, till evening

came, and he took her for himself. She was allowed a great deal of

freedom and was treated with a good deal of respect, as a girl on the

eve of marriage, about to depart for another continent.

The trouble began at evening. Then a yearning for something unknown

came over her, a passion for something she knew not what. She would

walk the foreshore alone after dusk, expecting, expecting something, as

if she had gone to a rendezvous. The salt, bitter passion of the sea,

its indifference to the earth, its swinging, definite motion, its

strength, its attack, and its salt burning, seemed to provoke her to a

pitch of madness, tantalizing her with vast suggestions of fulfilment.

And then, for personification, would come Skrebensky, Skrebensky, whom

she knew, whom she was fond of, who was attractive, but whose soul

could not contain her in its waves of strength, nor his breast compel

her in burning, salty passion.

One evening they went out after dinner, across the low golf links to

the dunes and the sea. The sky had small, faint stars, all was still

and faintly dark. They walked together in silence, then ploughed,

labouring, through the heavy loose sand of the gap between the dunes.

They went in silence under the even, faint darkness, in the darker

shadow of the sandhills.

Suddenly, cresting the heavy, sandy pass, Ursula lifted her head, and

shrank back, momentarily frightened. There was a great whiteness

confronting her, the moon was incandescent as a round furnace door, out

of which came the high blast of moonlight, over the seaward half of the

world, a dazzling, terrifying glare of white light. They shrank back

for a moment into shadow, uttering a cry. He felt his chest laid bare,

where the secret was heavily hidden. He felt himself fusing down to

nothingness, like a bead that rapidly disappears in an incandescent

flame.

“How wonderful!” cried Ursula, in low, calling tones. “How wonderful!”

And she went forward, plunging into it. He followed behind. She too

seemed to melt into the glare, towards the moon.

The sands were as ground silver, the sea moved in solid brightness,

coming towards them, and she went to meet the advance of the flashing,

buoyant water. [She gave her breast to the moon, her belly to the

flashing, heaving water.] He stood behind, encompassed, a shadow ever

dissolving.

She stood on the edge of the water, at the edge of the solid, flashing

body of the sea, and the wave rushed over her feet.

“I want to go,” she cried, in a strong, dominant voice. “I want to go.”

He saw the moonlight on her face, so she was like metal, he heard her

ringing, metallic voice, like the voice of a harpy to him.

She prowled, ranging on the edge of the water like a possessed

creature, and he followed her. He saw the froth of the wave followed by

the hard, bright water swirl over her feet and her ankles, she swung

out her arms, to balance, he expected every moment to see her walk into

the sea, dressed as she was, and be carried swimming out.

But she turned, she walked to him.

“I want to go,” she cried again, in the high, hard voice, like the

scream of gulls.

“Where?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

And she seized hold of his arm, held him fast, as if captive, and

walked him a little way by the edge of the dazzling, dazing water.

Then there in the great flare of light, she clinched hold of him, hard,

as if suddenly she had the strength of destruction, she fastened her

arms round him and tightened him in her grip, whilst her mouth sought

his in a hard, rending, ever-increasing kiss, till his body was

powerless in her grip, his heart melted in fear from the fierce,

beaked, harpy’s kiss. The water washed again over their feet, but she

took no notice. She seemed unaware, she seemed to be pressing in her

beaked mouth till she had the heart of him. Then, at last, she drew

away and looked at him—looked at him. He knew what she wanted. He took

her by the hand and led her across the foreshore, back to the

sandhills. She went silently. He felt as if the ordeal of proof was

upon him, for life or death. He led her to a dark hollow.

“No, here,” she said, going out to the slope full under the moonshine.

She lay motionless, with wide-open eyes looking at the moon. He came

direct to her, without preliminaries. She held him pinned down at the

chest, awful. The fight, the struggle for consummation was terrible. It

lasted till it was agony to his soul, till he succumbed, till he gave

way as if dead, lay with his face buried, partly in her hair, partly in

the sand, motionless, as if he would be motionless now for ever, hidden

away in the dark, buried, only buried, he only wanted to be buried in

the goodly darkness, only that, and no more.

He seemed to swoon. It was a long time before he came to himself. He

was aware of an unusual motion of her breast. He looked up. Her face

lay like an image in the moonlight, the eyes wide open, rigid. But out

of the eyes, slowly, there rolled a tear, that glittered in the

moonlight as it ran down her cheek.

He felt as if as the knife were being pushed into his already dead

body. With head strained back, he watched, drawn tense, for some

minutes, watched the unaltering, rigid face like metal in the

moonlight, the fixed, unseeing eye, in which slowly the water gathered,

shook with glittering moonlight, then surcharged, brimmed over and ran

trickling, a tear with its burden of moonlight, into the darkness, to

fall in the sand.

He drew gradually away as if afraid, drew away—she did not move. He

glanced at her—she lay the same. Could he break away? He turned, saw

the open foreshore, clear in front of him, and he plunged away, on and

on, ever farther from the horrible figure that lay stretched in the

moonlight on the sands with the tears gathering and travelling on the

motionless, eternal face.

He felt, if ever he must see her again, his bones must be broken, his

body crushed, obliterated for ever. And as yet, he had the love of his

own living body. He wandered on a long, long way, till his brain drew

dark and he was unconscious with weariness. Then he curled in the

deepest darkness he could find, under the sea-grass, and lay there

without consciousness.

She broke from her tense cramp of agony gradually, though each movement

was a goad of heavy pain. Gradually, she lifted her dead body from the

sands, and rose at last. There was now no moon for her, no sea. All had

passed away. She trailed her dead body to the house, to her room, where

she lay down inert.

Morning brought her a new access of superficial life. But all within

her was cold, dead, inert. Skrebensky appeared at breakfast. He was

white and obliterated. They did not look at each other nor speak to

each other. Apart from the ordinary, trivial talk of civil people, they

were separate, they did not speak of what was between them during the

remaining two days of their stay. They were like two dead people who

dare not recognize, dare not see each other.

Then she packed her bag and put on her things. There were several

guests leaving together, for the same train. He would have no

opportunity to speak to her.

He tapped at her bedroom door at the last minute. She stood with her

umbrella in her hand. He closed the door. He did not know what to say.

“Have you done with me?” he asked her at length, lifting his head.

“It isn’t me,” she said. “You have done with me—we have done with each

other.”

He looked at her, at the closed face, which he thought so cruel. And he

knew he could never touch her again. His will was broken, he was

seared, but he clung to the life of his body.

“Well, what have I done?” he asked, in a rather querulous voice.

“I don’t know,” she said, in the same dull, feelingless voice. “It is

finished. It had been a failure.”

He was silent. The words still burned his bowels.

“Is it my fault?” he said, looking up at length, challenging the last

stroke.

“You couldn’t——” she began. But she broke down.

He turned away, afraid to hear more. She began to gather her bag, her

handkerchief, her umbrella. She must be gone now. He was waiting for

her to be gone.

At length the carriage came and she drove away with the rest. When she

was out of sight, a great relief came over him, a pleasant banality. In

an instant, everything was obliterated. He was childishly amiable and

companionable all the day long. He was astonished that life could be so

nice. It was better than it had been before. What a simple thing it was

to be rid of her! How friendly and simple everything felt to him. What

false thing had she been forcing on him?

But at night he dared not be alone. His room-mate had gone, and the

hours of darkness were an agony to him. He watched the window in

suffering and terror. When would this horrible darkness be lifted off

him? Setting all his nerves, he endured it. He went to sleep with the

dawn.

He never thought of her. Only his terror of the hours of night grew on

him, obsessed him like a mania. He slept fitfully, with constant

wakings of anguish. The fear wore away the core of him.

His plan was to sit up very late: drink in company until one or

half-past one in the morning; then he would get three hours of sleep,

of oblivion. It was light by five o’clock. But he was shocked almost to

madness if he opened his eyes on the darkness.

In the daytime he was all right, always occupied with the thing of the

moment, adhering to the trivial present, which seemed to him ample and

satisfying. No matter how little and futile his occupations were, he

gave himself to them entirely, and felt normal and fulfilled. He was

always active, cheerful, gay, charming, trivial. Only he dreaded the

darkness and silence of his own bedroom, when the darkness should

challenge him upon his own soul. That he could not bear, as he could

not bear to think about Ursula. He had no soul, no background. He never

thought of Ursula, not once, he gave her no sign. She was the darkness,

the challenge, the horror. He turned to immediate things. He wanted to

marry quickly, to screen himself from the darkness, the challenge of

his own soul. He would marry his Colonel’s daughter. Quickly, without

hesitation, pursued by his obsession for activity, he wrote to this

girl, telling her his engagement was broken—it had been a temporary

infatuation which he less than any one else could understand now it was

over—and could he see his very dear friend soon? He would not be happy

till he had an answer.

He received a rather surprised reply from the girl, but she would be

glad to see him. She was living with her aunt. He went down to her at

once, and proposed to her the first evening. He was accepted. The

marriage took place quietly within fourteen days’ time. Ursula was not

notified of the event. In another week, Skrebensky sailed with his new

wife to India.