“You are doing catkins?” he asked, picking up a piece of hazel from a scholar’s desk in front of him. “Are they as far out as this? I hadn’t noticed them this year.”
He looked absorbedly at the tassel of hazel in his hand.
“The red ones too!” he said, looking at the flickers of crimson that came from the female bud.
Then he went in among the desks, to see the scholars’ books. Ursula watched his intent progress. There was a stillness in his motion that hushed the activities of her heart. She seemed to be standing aside in arrested silence, watching him move in another, concentrated world. His presence was so quiet, almost like a vacancy in the corporate air.
Suddenly he lifted his face to her, and her heart quickened at the flicker of his voice.
“Give them some crayons, won’t you?” he said, “so that they can make the gynaecious
g
flowers red, and the androgynous
†
yellow. I’d chalk them in plain, chalk in nothing else, merely the red and the yellow. Outline scarcely matters in this case. There is just the one fact to emphasize.”
“I haven’t any crayons,” said Ursula.
“There will be some somewhere—red and yellow, that’s all you want.”
Ursula sent out a boy on a quest.
“It will make the books untidy,” she said to Birkin, flushing deeply.
“Not very,” he said. “You must mark in these things obviously. It’s the fact you want to emphasize, not the subjective impression to record. What’s the fact?—red little spiky stigmas of the female flower, dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the other. Make a pictorial record of the fact, as a child does when drawing a face—two eyes, one nose, mouth with teeth—so—.” And he drew a figure on the blackboard.
At that moment another vision was seen through the glass panels of the door. It was Hermione Roddice. Birkin went and opened to her.
“I saw your car,” she said to him. “Do you mind my coming to find you? I wanted to see you when you were on duty.”
She looked at him for a long time, intimate and playful, then she gave a short little laugh. And then only she turned to Ursula, who, with all the class, had been watching the little scene between the lovers.
“How do you do, Miss Brangwen,” sang Hermione, in her low, odd, singing fashion, that sounded almost as if she were poking fun. “Do you mind my coming in?”
Her grey, almost sardonic eyes rested all the while on Ursula, as if summing her up.
“Oh no,” said Ursula.
“Are you
sure?”
repeated Hermione, with complete sangfroid, and an odd, half-bullying effrontery.
“Oh no, I like it awfully,” laughed Ursula, a little bit excited and bewildered, because Hermione seemed to be compelling her, coming very close to her, as if intimate with her; and yet, how could she be intimate?
This was the answer Hermione wanted. She turned satisfied to Birkin.
“What are you doing?” she sang, in her casual, inquisitive fashion.
“Catkins,” he replied.
“Really!” she said. “And what do you learn about them?” She spoke all the while in a mocking, half-teasing fashion, as if making game of the whole business. She picked up a twig of the catkin, piqued by Birkin’s attention to it.
She was a strange figure in the class-room, wearing a large, old cloak of greenish cloth, on which was a raised pattern of dull gold. The high collar, and the inside of the cloak was lined with dark fur. Beneath she had a dress of fine lavender-coloured cloth, trimmed with fur, and her hat was close-fitting, made of fur and of the dull, green-and-gold figured stuff. She was tall and strange, she looked as if she had come out of some new, bizarre picture.
“Do you know the little red ovary flowers, that produce the nuts? Have you ever noticed them?” he asked her. And he came close and pointed them out to her, on the sprig she held.
“No,” she replied. “What are they?”
“Those are the little seed-producing flowers, and the long catkins, they only produce pollen, to fertilise them.”
“Do they, do they!” repeated Hermione, looking closely.
“From those little red bits, the nuts come; if they receive pollen from the long danglers.”
“Little red flames, little red flames,” murmured Hermione to herself. And she remained for some moments looking only at the small buds out of which the red flickers of the stigma issued.
“Aren’t they beautiful? I think they’re so beautiful,” she said, moving close to Birkin, and pointing to the red filaments with her long, white finger.
“Had you never noticed them before?” he asked.
“No, never before,” she replied.
“And now you will always see them,” he said.
“Now I shall always see them,” she repeated. “Thank you so much for showing me. I think they’re so beautiful—little red flames—”
Her absorption was strange, almost rhapsodic. Both Birkin and Ursula were suspended. The little red pistillate flowers had some strange, almost mystic-passionate attraction for her.
The lesson was finished, the books were put away, at last the class was dismissed. And still Hermione sat at the table, with her chin in her hand, her elbow on the table, her long white face pushed up, not attending to anything. Birkin had gone to the window, and was looking from the brilliantly-lighted room on to the grey, colourless outside, where rain was noiselessly falling. Ursula put away her things in the cupboard.
At length Hermione rose and came near to her.
“Your sister has come home?” she said.
“Yes,” said Ursula.
“And does she like being back in Beldover?”
“No,” said Ursula.
“No, I wonder she can bear it. It takes all my strength to bear the ugliness of this district, when I stay here. Won’t you come and see me? Won’t you come with your sister to stay at Breadalby for a few days?—do—”
“Thank you very much,” said Ursula.
“Then I will write to you,” said Hermione. “You think your sister will come? I should be so glad. I think she is wonderful. I think some of her work is really wonderful. I have two water-wagtails, carved in wood, and painted—perhaps you have seen it?”
“No,” said Ursula.
“I think it is perfectly wonderful—like a flash of instinct—”
“Her little carvings are strange,” said Ursula.
“Perfectly beautiful—full of primitive passion—”
“Isn’t it queer that she always likes little things?—she must always work small things, that one can put between one’s hands, birds and tiny animals. She likes to look through the wrong end of the opera glasses, and see the world that way—why is it, do you think?”
Hermione looked down at Ursula with that long, detached scrutinising gaze that excited the younger woman.
“Yes,” said Hermione at length. “It is curious. The little things seem to be more subtle to her—”
“But they aren’t, are they? A mouse isn’t any more subtle than a lion, is it?”
Again Hermione looked down at Ursula with that long scrutiny, as if she were following some train of thought of her own, and barely attending to the other’s speech.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“Rupert, Rupert,” she sang mildly, calling him to her. He approached in silence.
“Are little things more subtle than big things?” she asked, with the odd grunt of laughter in her voice, as if she were making game of him in the question.
“Dunno,” he said.
“I hate subtleties,” said Ursula.
Hermione looked at her slowly.
“Do you?” she said.
“I always think they are a sign of weakness,” said Ursula, up in arms, as if her prestige were threatened.
Hermione took no notice. Suddenly her face puckered, her brow was knit with thought, she seemed twisted in trouble—some effort for utterance.
“Do you really think, Rupert,” she asked, as if Ursula were not present, “do you really think it is worth while? Do you really think the children are better for being roused to consciousness?”
1
A dark flash went over his face, a silent fury. He was hollow-cheeked and pale, almost unearthly. And the woman, with her serious, conscience-harrowing question tortured him on the quick.
“They are not roused to consciousness,” he said. “Consciousness comes to them, willy-nilly.”
“But do you think they are better for having it quickened, stimulated? Isn’t it better that they should remain unconscious of the hazel, isn’t it better that they should see as a whole, without all this pulling to pieces, all this knowledge?”
“Would you rather, for yourself, know or not know, that the little red flowers are there, putting out for the pollen?” he asked harshly. His voice was brutal, scornful, cruel.
Hermione remained with her face lifted up, abstracted. He hung silent in irritation.
“I don’t know,” she replied, balancing mildly. “I don’t know.”
“But knowing is everything to you, it is all your life,” he broke out. She slowly looked at him.
“Is it?” she said.
“To know, that is your all, that is your life—you have only this, this knowledge,” he cried. “There is only one tree, there is only one fruit, in your mouth.”
Again she was some time silent.
“Is there?” she said at last, with the same untouched calm. And then in a tone of whimsical inquisitiveness: “What fruit, Rupert?”
“The eternal apple,”
h
he replied in exasperation, hating his own metaphors.
“Yes,” she said. There was a look of exhaustion about her. For some moments there was silence. Then, pulling herself together with a convulsed movement, Hermione resumed, in a sing-song, casual voice:
“But leaving me apart, Rupert; do you think the children are better, richer, happier, for all this knowledge; do you really think they are? Or is it better to leave them untouched, spontaneous. Hadn’t they better be animals, simple animals, crude, violent,
anything,
rather than this self-consciousness, this incapacity to be spontaneous.”
They thought she had finished. But with a queer rumbling in her throat she resumed, “Hadn’t they better be anything than grow up crippled, crippled in their souls, crippled in their feelings—so thrown back—so turned back on themselves—incapable—” Hermione clenched her fist like one in a trance—“of any spontaneous action, always deliberate, always burdened with choice, never carried away.”
Again they thought she had finished. But just as he was going to reply, she resumed her queer rhapsody—“never carried away, out of themselves, always conscious, always self-conscious, always aware of themselves. Isn’t
anything
better than this? Better be animals, mere animals with no mind at all, than this, this
nothingness
—
”
“But do you think it is knowledge that makes us unliving and self-conscious?” he asked irritably.
She opened her eyes and looked at him slowly.
“Yes,” she said. She paused, watching him all the while, her eyes vague. Then she wiped her fingers across her brow, with a vague weariness. It irritated him bitterly. “It is the mind,” she said, “and that is death.” She raised her eyes slowly to him: “Isn’t the mind—” she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, “isn’t it our death? Doesn’t it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up to-day, really dead before they have a chance to live?”
“Not because they have too much mind, but too little,” he said brutally.
“Are you
sure?”
she cried. “It seems to me the reverse. They are over-conscious, burdened to death with consciousness.”
“Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts,” he cried.
But she took no notice of this, only went on with her own rhapsodic interrogation.
“When we have knowledge, don’t we lose everything but knowledge?” she asked pathetically. “If I know about the flower, don’t I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren’t we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren’t we forfeiting life for this dead quality of knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing.”
“You are merely making words,” he said; “knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don’t want to
be
an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary—and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism. What is it but the worst and last form of intellectualism, this love of yours for passion and the animal instincts? Passion and the instincts—you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness. It all takes place in your head, under that skull of yours. Only you won’t be conscious of what
actually
is: you want the lie that will match the rest of your furniture.”
Hermione set hard and poisonous against this attack. Ursula stood covered with wonder and shame. It frightened her, to see how they hated each other.
“It’s all that Lady of Shalott
i
business,” he said, in his strong abstract voice. He seemed to be charging her before the unseeing air. “You’ve got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There, in the mirror, you must have everything. But now you have come to all your conclusions, you want to go back and be like a savage, without knowledge. You want a life of pure sensation and ‘passion.’ ”
He quoted the last word satirically against her. She sat convulsed with fury and violation, speechless, like a stricken pythoness of the Greek oracle.
j
“But your passion is a lie,” he went on violently. “It isn’t passion at all, it is your
will.
It’s your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have them in your power. You want to have things in your power. And why? Because you haven’t got any real body, any dark sensual body of life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to
know.”