“I’m sure it isn’t,” she said at length. There always seemed an interval, a strange split between what she seemed to feel and experience, and what she actually said and thought. She seemed to catch her thoughts at length from off the surface of a maelstrom of chaotic black emotions and reactions, and Birkin was always filled with repulsion, she caught so infallibly, her will never failed her. Her voice was always dispassionate and tense, and perfectly confident. Yet she shuddered with a sense of nausea, a sort of seasickness that always threatened to overwhelm her mind. But her mind remained unbroken, her will was still perfect. It almost sent Birkin mad. But he would never, never dare to break her will, and let loose the maelstrom of her subconsciousness, and see her in her ultimate madness. Yet he was always striking at her.
“And of course,” he said to Gerald, “horses
haven’t
got a complete will, like human beings. A horse has no
one
will. Every horse, strictly, has two wills. With one will, it wants to put itself in the human power completely—and with the other, it wants to be free, wild. The two wills sometimes lock—you know that, if ever you’ve felt a horse bolt, while you’ve been driving it.”
“I have felt a horse bolt while I was driving it,” said Gerald, “but it didn’t make me know it had two wills. I only knew it was frightened.”
Hermione had ceased to listen. She simply became oblivious when these subjects were started.
“Why should a horse want to put itself in the human power?” asked Ursula. “That is quite incomprehensible to me. I don’t believe it ever wanted it.”
“Yes it did. It’s the last, perhaps highest, love-impulse: resign your will to the higher being,” said Birkin.
“What curious notions you have of love,” jeered Ursula.
“And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will, she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.”
“Then I’m a bolter,” said Ursula, with a burst of laughter.
“It’s a dangerous thing to domesticate even horses, let alone women,” said Birkin. “The dominant principle has some rare antagonists.”
“Good thing too,” said Ursula.
“Quite,” said Gerald, with a faint smile. “There’s more fun.”
Hermione could bear no more. She rose, saying in her easy sing-song :
“Isn’t the evening beautiful! I get filled sometimes with such a great sense of beauty, that I feel I can hardly bear it.”
Ursula, to whom she had appealed, rose with her, moved to the last impersonal depths. And Birkin seemed to her almost a monster of hateful arrogance. She went with Hermione along the bank of the pond, talking of beautiful, soothing things, picking the gentle cowslips.
“Wouldn’t you like a dress,” said Ursula to Hermione, “of this yellow spotted with orange—a cotton dress?”
“Yes,” said Hermione, stopping and looking at the flower, letting the thought come home to her and soothe her. “Wouldn’t it be pretty? I should
love
it.”
And she turned smiling to Ursula, in a feeling of real affection.
But Gerald remained with Birkin, wanting to probe him to the bottom, to know what he meant by the dual will in horses. A flicker of excitement danced on Gerald’s face.
Hermione and Ursula strayed on together, united in a sudden bond of deep affection and closeness.
“I really do not want to be forced into all this criticism and analysis of life. I really do want to see things in their entirety, with their beauty left to them, and their wholeness, their natural holiness. Don’t you feel it, don’t you feel you
can’t
be tortured into any more knowledge?” said Hermione, stopping in front of Ursula, and turning to her with clenched fists thrust downwards.
“Yes,” said Ursula. “I do. I am sick of all this poking and prying.”
“I’m so glad you are. Sometimes,” said Hermione, again stopping arrested in her progress and turning to Ursula, “sometimes I wonder if I
ought
to submit to all this realisation, if I am not being weak in rejecting it. But I feel I
can’t
—I
can’t.
It seems to destroy
everything.
All the beauty and the—and the true holiness is destroyed,—and I feel I can’t live without them.”
“And it would be simply wrong to live without them,” cried Ursula. “No, it is so
irreverent
to think that everything must be realised in the head. Really, something must be left to the Lord, there always is and always will be.”
“Yes,” said Hermione, reassured like a child, “it should, shouldn’t it? And Rupert—” she lifted her face to the sky, in a muse—“he can only tear things to pieces. He really is like a boy who must pull everything to pieces to see how it is made. And I can’t think it is right—it does seem so irreverent, as you say.”
“Like tearing open a bud to see what the flower will be like,” said Ursula.
“Yes. And that kills everything, doesn’t it? It doesn’t allow any possibility of flowering.”
“Of course not,” said Ursula. “It is purely destructive.”
“It is, isn’t it!”
Hermione looked long and slow at Ursula, seeming to accept confirmation from her. Then the two women were silent. As soon as they were in accord, they began mutually to mistrust each other. In spite of herself, Ursula felt herself recoiling from Hermione. It was all she could do to restrain her revulsion.
They returned to the men, like two conspirators who have withdrawn to come to an agreement. Birkin looked up at them. Ursula hated him for his cold watchfulness. But he said nothing.
“Shall we be going?” said Hermione. “Rupert, you are coming to Shortlands to dinner? Will you come at once, will you come now, with us?”
“I’m not dressed,” replied Birkin. “And you know Gerald stickles for convention.”
“I don’t stickle for it,” said Gerald. “But if you’d got as sick as I have of rowdy go-as-you-please in the house, you’d prefer it if people were peaceful and conventional, at least at meals.”
“All right,” said Birkin.
“But can’t we wait for you while you dress?” persisted Hermione.
“If you like.”
He rose to go indoors. Ursula said she would take her leave.
“Only,” she said, turning to Gerald, “I must say that, however man is lord of the beast and the fowl,
ay
I still don’t think he has any right to violate the feelings of the inferior creation. I still think it would have been much more sensible and nice if you’d trotted back up the road while the train went by, and been considerate.”
“I see,” said Gerald, smiling, but somewhat annoyed. “I must remember another time.”
“They all think I’m an interfering female,” thought Ursula to herself, as she went away. But she was in arms against them.
She ran home plunged in thought. She had been very much moved by Hermione, she had really come into contact with her, so that there was a sort of league between the two women. And yet she could not bear her. But she put the thought away. “She’s really good,” she said to herself. “She really wants what is right.” And she tried to feel at one with Hermione, and to shut off from Birkin. She was strictly hostile to him. But she was held to him by some bond, some deep principle. This at once irritated her and saved her.
Only now and again, violent little shudders would come over her, out of her subconsciousness, and she knew it was the fact that she had stated her challenge to Birkin, and he had, consciously or unconsciously, accepted. It was a fight to the death between them—or to new life: though in what the conflict lay, no one could say.
CHAPTER XIII
Mino
THE DAYS WENT BY, and she received no sign. Was he going to ignore her, was he going to take no further notice of her secret? A dreary weight of anxiety and acrid bitterness settled on her. And yet Ursula knew she was only deceiving herself, and that he
would
proceed. She said no word to anybody.
Then, sure enough, there came a note from him, asking if she would come to tea, with Gudrun, to his rooms in town.
“Why does he ask Gudrun as well?” she asked herself at once. “Does he want to protect himself, or does he think I would not go alone?”
She was tormented by the thought that he wanted to protect himself. But at the end of all, she only said to herself:
“I don’t want Gudrun to be there, because I want him to say something more to me. So I shan’t tell Gudrun anything about it, and I shall go alone. Then I shall know.”
She found herself sitting in the tram-car, mounting up the hill going out of the town, to the place where he had his lodging. She seemed to have passed into a kind of dream world, absolved from the conditions of actuality. She watched the sordid streets of the town go by beneath her, as if she were a spirit disconnected from the material universe. What had it all to do with her? She was palpitating and formless within the flux of the ghost life. She could not consider any more, what anybody would say of her or think about her. People had passed out of her range, she was absolved. She had fallen strange and dim, out of the sheath of the material life, as a berry falls from the only world it has ever known, down out of the sheath on to the real unknown.
Birkin was standing in the middle of the room, when she was shown in by the landlady. He too was moved outside himself. She saw him agitated and shaken, a frail, unsubstantial body silent like the node of some violent force, that came out from him and shook her almost into a swoon.
“You are alone?” he said.
“Yes—Gudrun could not come.”
He instantly guessed why.
And they were both seated in silence, in the terrible tension of the room. She was aware that it was a pleasant room, full of light and very restful in its form—aware also of a fuchsia tree, with dangling scarlet and purple flowers.
“How nice the fuchsias are!” she said, to break the silence.
“Aren’t they! Did you think I had forgotten what I said?”
A swoon went over Ursula’s mind.
“I don’t want you to remember it—if you don’t want to,” she struggled to say, through the dark mist that covered her.
There was silence for some moments.
“No,” he said. “It isn’t that. Only—if we are going to know each other, we must pledge ourselves for ever. If we are going to make a relationship, even of friendship, there must be something final and infallible about it.”
There was a clang of mistrust and almost anger in his voice. She did not answer. Her heart was too much contracted. She could not have spoken.
Seeing she was not going to reply, he continued, almost bitterly, giving himself away:
“I can’t say it is love I have to offer—and it isn’t love I want. It is something much more impersonal and harder—and rarer.”
There was a silence, out of which she said:
“You mean you don’t love me?”
She suffered furiously, saying that.
“Yes, if you like to put it like that. Though perhaps that isn’t true. I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t feel the emotion of love for you—no, and I don’t want to. Because it gives out in the last issues.”
“Love gives out in the last issues?” she asked, feeling numb to the lips.
“Yes, it does. At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn’t. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does
not
meet and mingle, and never can.”
She watched him with wide, troubled eyes. His face was incandescent in its abstract earnestness.
“And you mean you can’t love?” she asked, in trepidation.
“Yes, if you like. I have loved. But there is a beyond, where there is not love.”
She could not submit to this. She felt it swooning over her. But she could not submit.
“But how do you know—if you have never
really
loved?” she asked.
“It is true, what I say; there is a beyond, in you, in me, which is further than love, beyond the scope, as stars are beyond the scope of vision, some of them.”
“Then there is no love,” cried Ursula.
“Ultimately, no, there is something else. But, ultimately, there is no love.”
Ursula was given over to this statement for some moments. Then she half rose from her chair, saying, in a final, repellant voice:
“Then let me go home—what am I doing here?”
“There is the door,” he said. “You are a free agent.”
He was suspended finely and perfectly in this extremity. She hung motionless for some seconds, then she sat down again.
“If there is no love, what is there?” she cried, almost jeering.
“Something,” he said, looking at her, battling with his soul, with all his might.
“What?”
He was silent for a long time, unable to be in communication with her while she was in this state of opposition.
“There is,” he said, in a voice of pure abstraction, “a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you—not in the emotional, loving plane—but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me.—And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman,—so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever—because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.”
Ursula listened to this speech, her mind dumb and almost senseless, what he said was so unexpected and so untoward.