“I hope so,” he said, ironically.
“—To propose to you, according to all accounts,” said her father.
“Oh,” said Ursula.
“Oh,” mocked her father, imitating her. “Have you nothing more to say?”
She winced as if violated.
“Did you really come to propose to me?” she asked of Birkin, as if it were a joke.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I came to propose.” He seemed to fight shy of the last word.
“Did you?” she cried, with her vague radiance. He might have been saying anything whatsoever. She seemed pleased.
“Yes,” he answered. “I wanted to—I wanted you to agree to marry me.”
She looked at him. His eyes were flickering with mixed lights, wanting something of her, yet not wanting it. She shrank a little, as if she were exposed to his eyes, and as if it were a pain to her. She darkened, her soul clouded over, she turned aside. She had been driven out of her own radiant, single world. And she dreaded contact, it was almost unnatural to her at these times.
“Yes,” she said vaguely, in a doubting, absent voice.
Birkin’s heart contracted swiftly, in a sudden fire of bitterness. It all meant nothing to her. He had been mistaken again. She was in some self-satisfied world of her own. He and his hopes were accidentals, violations to her. It drove her father to a pitch of mad exasperation. He had had to put up with this all his life, from her.
“Well, what do you say?” he cried.
She winced. Then she glanced down at her father, half-frightened, and she said:
“I didn’t speak, did I?” as if she were afraid she might have committed herself.
“No,” said her father, exasperated. “But you needn’t look like an idiot. You’ve got your wits, haven’t you?”
She ebbed away in silent hostility.
“I’ve got my wits, what does that mean?” she repeated, in a sullen voice of antagonism.
“You heard what was asked you, didn’t you?” cried her father in anger.
“Of course I heard.”
“Well, then, can’t you answer?” thundered her father.
“Why should I?”
At the impertinence of this retort, he went stiff. But he said nothing.
“No,” said Birkin, to help out the occasion, “there’s no need to answer at once. You can say when you like.”
Her eyes flashed with a powerful light.
“Why should I say anything?” she cried. “You do this off your own bat, it has nothing to do with me. Why do you both want to bully me?”
“Bully you! Bully you!” cried her father, in bitter, rancorous anger. “Bully you! Why, it’s a pity you can’t be bullied into some sense and decency. Bully you! You’ll see to that, you self-willed creature.”
She stood suspended in the middle of the room, her face glimmering and dangerous. She was set in satisfied defiance. Birkin looked up at her. He too was angry.
“But no-one is bullying you,” he said, in a very soft dangerous voice also.
“Oh, yes,” she cried. “You both want to force me into something.”
“That is an illusion of yours,” he said ironically.
“Illusion!” cried her father. “A self-opinionated fool, that’s what she is.”
Birkin rose, saying:
“However, we’ll leave it for the time being.”
And without another word, he walked out of the house.
“You fool! You fool!” her father cried to her, with extreme bitterness. She left the room, and went upstairs, singing to herself. But she was terribly fluttered, as after some dreadful fight. From her window, she could see Birkin going up the road. He went in such a blithe drift of rage, that her mind wondered over him. He was ridiculous, but she was afraid of him. She was as if escaped from some danger.
Her father sat below, powerless in humiliation and chagrin. It was as if he were possessed with all the devils, after one of these unaccountable conflicts with Ursula. He hated her as if his only reality were in hating her to the last degree. He had all hell in his heart. But he went away, to escape himself. He knew he must despair, yield, give in to despair, and have done.
Ursula’s face closed, she completed herself against them all. Recoiling upon herself, she became hard and self-completed, like a jewel. She was bright and invulnerable, quite free and happy, perfectly liberated in her self-possession. Her father had to learn not to see her blithe obliviousness, or it would have sent him mad. She was so radiant with all things, in her possession of perfect hostility.
She would go on now for days like this, in this bright frank state of seemingly pure spontaneity, so essentially oblivious of the existence of anything but herself, but so ready and facile in her interest. Ah it was a bitter thing for a man to be near her, and her father cursed his fatherhood. But he must learn not to see her, not to know.
She was perfectly stable in resistance when she was in this state: so bright and radiant and attractive in her pure opposition, so very pure, and yet mistrusted by everybody, disliked on every hand. It was her voice, curiously clear and repellant, that gave her away. Only Gudrun was in accord with her. It was at these times that the intimacy between the two sisters was most complete, as if their intelligence were one. They felt a strong, bright bond of understanding between them, surpassing everything else. And during all these days of blind bright abstraction and intimacy of his two daughters, the father seemed to breathe an air of death, as if he were destroyed in his very being. He was irritable to madness, he could not rest, his daughters seemed to be destroying him. But he was inarticulate and helpless against them. He was forced to breathe the air of his own death. He cursed them in his soul, and only wanted, that they should be removed from him.
They continued radiant in their easy female transcendancy, beautiful to look at. They exchanged confidences, they were intimate in their revelations to the last degree, giving each other at last every secret. They withheld nothing, they told everything, till they were over the border of evil. And they armed each other with knowledge, they extracted the subtlest flavours from the apple of knowledge. It was curious how their knowledge was complementary, that of each to that of the other.
Ursula saw her men as sons, pitied their yearning and admired their courage, and wondered over them as a mother wonders over her child, with a certain delight in their novelty. But to Gudrun, they were the opposite camp. She feared them and despised them, and respected their activities even overmuch.
“Of course,” she said easily, “there is a quality of life in Birkin which is quite remarkable. There is an extraordinary rich spring of life in him, really amazing, the way he can give himself to things. But there are so many things in life that he simply doesn’t know. Either he is not aware of their existence at all, or he dismisses them as merely negligible—things which are vital to the other person. In a way, he is not clever enough, he is too intense in spots.”
“Yes,” cried Ursula, “too much of a preacher. He is really a priest.”
“Exactly! He can’t hear what anybody else has to say—he simply cannot hear. His own voice is so loud.”
“Yes. He cries you down.”
“He cries you down,” repeated Gudrun. “And by mere force of violence. And of course it is hopeless. Nobody is convinced by violence. It makes talking to him impossible—and living with him I should think would be more than impossible.”
“You don’t think one could live with him?” asked Ursula.
“I think it would be too wearing, too exhausting. One would be shouted down every time, and rushed into his way without any choice. He would want to control you entirely. He cannot allow that there is any other mind than his own. And then the real clumsiness of his mind, is its lack of self-criticism. No, I think it would be perfectly intolerable.”
“Yes,” assented Ursula vaguely. She only half agreed with Gudrun. “The nuisance is,” she said, “that one would find almost any man intolerable after a fortnight.”
“It’s perfectly dreadful,” said Gudrun. “But Birkin—he is too positive. He couldn’t bear it if you called your soul your own. Of him that is strictly true.”
“Yes,” said Ursula. “You must have
his
soul.”
“Exactly! And what can you conceive more deadly?” This was all so true, that Ursula felt jarred to the bottom of her soul with ugly distaste.
She went on, with the discord jarring and jolting through her, in the most barren of misery.
Then there started a revulsion from Gudrun. She finished life off so thoroughly, she made things so ugly and so final. As a matter of fact, even if it were as Gudrun said, about Birkin, other things were true as well. But Gudrun would draw two lines under him and cross him out like an account that is settled. There he was, summed up, paid for, settled, done with. And it was such a lie. This finality of Gudrun’s, this dispatching of people and things in a sentence, it was all such a lie. Ursula began to revolt from her sister.
One day as they were walking along the lane, they saw a robin sitting on the top twig of a bush, singing shrilly. The sisters stood to look at him. An ironical smile flickered on Gudrun’s face.
“Doesn’t he feel important?” smiled Gudrun.
“Doesn’t he!” exclaimed Ursula, with a little ironical grimace. “Isn’t he a little Lloyd George of the air!”
“Isn’t he! Little Lloyd George of the air! That’s just what they are,” cried Gudrun in delight. Then for days, Ursula saw the persistent, obtrusive birds as stout, short politicians lifting up their voices from the platform, little men who must make themselves heard at any cost.
But even from this there came the revulsion. Some yellow-hammers suddenly shot along the road in front of her. And they looked to her so uncanny and inhuman, like flaring yellow barbs shooting through the air on some weird, living errand, that she said to herself: “After all, it is impudence to call them little Lloyd Georges. They are really unknown to us, they are the unknown forces. It is impudence to look at them as if they were the same as human beings. They are of another world. How stupid anthropomorphism is! Gudrun is really impudent, insolent, making herself the measure of everything, making everything come down to human standards. Rupert is quite right, human beings are boring, painting the universe with their own image. The universe is non-human, thank God.” It seemed to her irreverence, destructive of all true life, to make little Lloyd Georges of the birds. It was such a lie towards the robins, and such a defamation. Yet she had done it herself. But under Gudrun’s influence: so she exonerated herself.
So she withdrew away from Gudrun and from that which she stood for, she turned in spirit towards Birkin again. She had not seen him since the fiasco of his proposal. She did not want to, because she did not want the question of her acceptance thrust upon her. She knew what Birkin meant when he asked her to marry him; vaguely, without putting it into speech, she knew. She knew what kind of love, what kind of surrender he wanted. And she was not at all sure that this was the kind of love that she herself wanted. She was not at all sure that it was this mutual unison in separateness that she wanted. She wanted unspeakable intimacies. She wanted to have him, utterly, finally to have him as her own, oh, so unspeakably, in intimacy. To drink him down—ah, like a life-draught. She made great professions, to herself, of her willingness to warm his foot-soles between her breasts, after the fashion of the nauseous Meredith poem. But only on condition that he, her lover, loved her absolutely, with complete self-abandon. And subtly enough, she knew he would never abandon himself
finally
to her. He did not believe in final self-abandonment. He said it openly. It was his challenge. She was prepared to fight him for it. For she believed that love far surpassed the individual. He said the individual was more than love, or than any relationship. For him, the bright, single soul accepted love as one of its conditions, a condition of its own equilibrium. She believed that love was everything. Man must render himself up to her. He must be quaffed to the dregs by her. Let him be her man utterly, and she in return would be his humble slave—whether she wanted it or not.
CHAPTER XX
AFTER THE FIASCO OF the proposal, Birkin had hurried blindly away from Beldover, in a whirl of fury. He felt he had been a complete fool, that the whole scene had been a farce of the first water. But that did not trouble him at all. He was deeply, mockingly angry that Ursula persisted always in this old cry: “Why do you want to bully me?” and in her bright, insolent abstraction.
He went straight to Shortlands. There he found Gerald standing with his back to the fire, in the library, as motionless as a man is, who is completely and emptily restless, utterly hollow. He had done all the work he wanted to do—and now there was nothing. He could go out in the car, he could run to town. But he did not want to go out in the car, he did not want to run to town, he did not want to call on the Thirlbys. He was suspended motionless, in an agony of inertia, like a machine that is without power.
This was very bitter to Gerald, who had never known what boredom was, who had gone from activity to activity, never at a loss. Now, gradually, everything seemed to be stopping in him. He did not want any more to do the things that offered. Something dead within him just refused to respond to any suggestion. He cast over in his mind, what it would be possible to do, to save himself from this misery of nothingness, relieve the stress of this hollowness. And there were only three things left, that would rouse him, make him live. One was to drink or smoke hashish, the other was to be soothed by Birkin, and the third was women. And there was no-one for the moment to drink with. Nor was there a woman. And he knew Birkin was out. So there was nothing to do but to bear the stress of his own emptiness.
When he saw Birkin his face lit up in a sudden, wonderful smile.
“By God, Rupert,” he said, “I’d just come to the conclusion that nothing in the world mattered except somebody to take the edge off one’s being alone: the right somebody.”