“Is he?” she said slowly, and with perfect equanimity. “And do you think he will marry?”
The question was so calm and mild, so simple and bare and dispassionate that Ursula was somewhat taken aback, rather attracted. It pleased her almost like a wickedness. There was some delightful naked irony in Hermione.
“Well,” replied Ursula, “He wants to, awfully, but I’m not so sure.”
Hermione watched her with slow calm eyes. She noted this new expression of vaunting. How she envied Ursula a certain unconscious positivity! even her vulgarity
!
“Why aren’t you sure?” she asked, in her easy sing-song. She was perfectly at her ease, perhaps even rather happy in this conversation. “You don’t really love him?”
Ursula flushed a little at the mild impertinence of this question. And yet she could not definitely take offence. Hermione seemed so calmly and sanely candid. After all, it was rather great to be able to be so sane.
“He says it isn’t love he wants,” she replied.
“What is it then?” Hermione was slow and level.
“He wants me really to accept him in marriage.”
Hermione was silent for some time, watching Ursula with slow, pensive eyes.
“Does he?” she said at length, without expression. Then, rousing, “And what is it you don’t want? You don’t want marriage?”
“No—I don’t—not really. I don’t want to give the sort of submission he insists on. He wants me to give myself up—and I simply don’t feel that I can do it.”
Again there was a long pause, before Hermione replied:
“Not if you don’t want to.” Then again there was silence. Hermione shuddered with a strange desire. Ah, if only he had asked her to subserve him, to be his slave! She shuddered with desire.
“You see 1 cant—”
“But exactly in what does—”
They had both begun at once, they both stopped. Then Hermione, assuming priority of speech, resumed as if wearily:
“To what does he want you to submit?”
“He says he wants me to accept him non-emotionally, and finally—I really don’t know what he means. He says he wants the demon part of himself to be mated—physically—not the human being. You see he says one thing one day, and another the next—and he always contradicts himself—”
“And always thinks about himself, and his own dissatisfaction,” said Hermione slowly.
“Yes,” cried Ursula. “As if there were no-one but himself concerned. That makes it so impossible.”
But immediately she began to retract.
“He insists on my accepting God knows what in
him,”
she resumed. “He wants me to accept him as—as an absolute—But it seems to me he doesn’t want to give anything. He doesn’t want real warm intimacy—he won’t have it—he rejects it. He won’t let me think, really, and he won’t let me
feel-he
hates feelings.”
There was a long pause, bitter for Hermione. Ah, if only he would have made this demand of her? Her he drove into thought, drove inexorably into knowledge—and then execrated her for it.
“He wants me to sink myself,” Ursula resumed, “not to have any being of my own—”
“Then why doesn’t he marry an odalisk?” said Hermione in her mild sing-song, “if it is that he wants.” Her long face looked sardonic and amused.
“Yes,” said Ursula vaguely. After all, the tiresome thing was, he did not want an odalisk, he did not want a slave. Hermione would have been his slave—there was in her a horrible desire to prostrate herself before a man—a man who worshipped her, however, and admitted her as the supreme thing. He did not want an odalisk. He wanted a woman to take something from him, to give herself up so much that she could take the last realities of him, the last facts, the last physical facts, physical and unbearable.
And if she did, would he acknowledge her? Would he be able to acknowledge her through everything, or would he use her just as his instrument, use her for his own private satisfaction, not admitting her? That was what the other men had done. They had wanted their own show, and they would not admit her, they turned all she was into nothingness. Just as Hermione now betrayed herself as a woman. Hermione was like a man, she believed only in men’s things. She betrayed the woman in herself. And Birkin, would he acknowledge, or would he deny her?
“Yes,” said Hermione, as each woman came out of her own separate reverie. “It would be a mistake—I think it would be a mistake—”
“To marry him?” asked Ursula.
“Yes,” said Hermione slowly—“I think you need a man—soldierly strong-willed—” Hermione held out her hand and clenched it with rhapsodic intensity. “You should have a man like the old heroes
2
—you need to stand behind him as he goes into battle, you need to see his strength, and to hear his shout—You need a man physically strong, and virile in his will, not a sensitive man—” There was a break, as if the pythoness had uttered the oracle, and now the woman went on, in a rhapsody-wearied voice: “And you see, Rupert isn’t this, he isn’t. He is frail in health and body, he needs great, great care. Then he is so changeable and unsure of himself—it requires the greatest patience and understanding to help him. And I don’t think you are patient. You would have to be prepared to suffer—dreadfully. I can’t tell you how much suffering it would take to make him happy. He lives an intensely spiritual life, at times—too, too wonderful. And then come the reactions. I can’t speak of what I have been through with him. We have been together so long, I really do know him, I do know what he is. And I feel I must say it; I feel it would be perfectly disastrous for you to marry him—for you even more than for him.” Hermione lapsed into bitter reverie. “He is so uncertain, so unstable—he wearies, and then reacts. I couldn’t tell you what his reactions are. I couldn’t tell you the agony of them. That which he affirms and loves one day—a little later he turns on it in a fury of destruction. He is never constant, always this awful, dreadful reaction. Always the quick change from good to bad, bad to good. And nothing is so devastating, nothing—”
“Yes,” said Ursula humbly, “you must have suffered.”
An unearthly light came on Hermione’s face. She clenched her hand like one inspired.
“And one must be willing to suffer—willing to suffer for him hourly, daily—if you are going to help him, if he is to keep true to anything at all—”
“And I don’t want to suffer hourly and daily,” said Ursula. “I don’t, I should be ashamed. I think it is degrading not to be happy.”
Hermione stopped and looked at her a long time.
“Do you?” she said at last. And this utterance seemed to her a mark of Ursula’s far distance from herself. For to Hermione suffering was the greatest reality, come what might. Yet she too had a creed of happiness.
“Yes,” she said. “One should be happy—” But it was a matter of will.
“Yes,” said Hermione, listlessly now, “I can only feel that it would be disastrous, disastrous—at least, to marry in a hurry. Can’t you be together without marriage? Can’t you go away and live somewhere without marriage? I do feel that marriage would be fatal, for both of you. I think for you even more than for him—and I think of his health—”
“Of course,” said Ursula, “
I
don’t care about marriage—it isn’t really important to me—it’s he who wants it.”
“It is his idea for the moment,” said Hermione, with that weary finality, and a sort of
si jeunesse savait
cd
infallibility
There was a pause. Then Ursula broke into faltering challenge.
“You think I’m merely a physical woman, don’t you?”
“No, indeed,” said Hermione. “No, indeed! But I think you are vital and young—it isn’t a question of years, or even of experience—it is almost a question of race. Rupert is race-old, he comes of an old race—and you seem to me so young, you come of a young, inexperienced race.”
“Do I!” said Ursula. “But I think he is awfully young, on one side.”
“Yes, perhaps—childish in many respects. Nevertheless—”
They both lapsed into silence. Ursula was filled with deep resentment and a touch of hopelessness. “It isn’t true,” she said to herself, silently addressing her adversary. “It isn’t true. And it is you who want a physically strong, bullying man, not I. It is you who want an unsensitive man, not I. You
don’t
know anything about Rupert, not really, in spite of the years you have had with him. You don’t give him a woman’s love, you give him an ideal love, and that is why he reacts away from you. You don’t know. You only know the dead things. Any kitchen maid would know something about him, you don’t know. What do you think your knowledge is but dead understanding, that doesn’t mean a thing. You are so false, and untrue, how could you know anything? What is the good of your talking about love—you untrue spectre of a woman! How can you know anything, when you don’t believe? You don’t believe in yourself and your own womanhood, so what good is your conceited, shallow cleverness—!”
The two women sat on in antagonistic silence. Hermione felt injured, that all her good intention, all her offering, only left the other woman in vulgar antagonism. But then, Ursula could not understand, never would understand, could never be more than the usual jealous and unreasonable female, with a good deal of powerful female emotion, female attraction, and a fair amount of female understanding, but no mind. Hermione had decided long ago that where there was no mind, it was useless to appeal for reason—one had merely to ignore the ignorant. And Rupert—he had now reacted towards the strongly female, healthy, selfish woman—it was his reaction for the time being—there was no helping it all. It was all a foolish backward and forward, a violent oscillation that would at length be too violent for his coherency, and he would smash and be dead. There was no saving him. This violent and directionless reaction between animalism and spiritual truth would go on in him till he tore himself in two between the opposite directions, and disappeared meaninglessly out of life. It was no good—he too was without unity, without mind, in the ultimate stages of living; not quite man enough to make a destiny for a woman.
They sat on till Birkin came in and found them together. He felt at once the antagonism in the atmosphere, something radical and insuperable, and he bit his lip. But he affected a bluff manner.
“Hello, Hermione, are you back again? How do you feel?”
“Oh, better. And how are you—you don’t look well—”
“Oh!—I believe Gudrun and Winnie Crich are coming in to tea. At least they said they were. We shall be a tea-party. What train did you come by, Ursula?”
It was rather annoying to see him trying to placate both women at once. Both women watched him, Hermione with deep resentment and pity for him, Ursula very impatient. He was nervous and apparently in quite good spirits, chattering the conventional commonplaces. Ursula was amazed and indignant at the way he made small-talk; he was adept as
any fat
ce
in Christendom. She became quite stiff, she would not answer. It all seemed to her so false and so belittling. And still Gudrun did not appear.
“I think I shall go to Florence for the winter,” said Hermione at length.
“Will you?” he answered. “But it is so cold there.”
“Yes, but I shall stay with Palestra. It is quite comfortable.”
“What takes you to Florence?”
“I don’t know,” said Hermione slowly. Then she looked at him with her slow, heavy gaze. “Barnes is starting his school of æsthetics, and Olandese is going to give a set of discourses on the Italian national policy—”
“Both rubbish,” he said.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Hermione.
“Which do you admire, then?”
“I admire both. Barnes is a pioneer. And then I am interested in Italy, in her coming to national consciousness.”
“I wish she’d come to something different from national consciousness, then,” said Birkin, “especially as it only means a sort of commercial-industrial consciousness. I hate Italy and her national rant. And I think Barnes is an amateur.”
Hermione was silent for some moments, in a state of hostility. But yet, she had got Birkin back again into her world! How subtle her influence was, she seemed to start his irritable attention into her direction exclusively, in one minute. He was her creature.
“No,” she said, “you are wrong.” Then a sort of tension came over her, she raised her face like the pythoness inspired with oracles, and went on, in rhapsodic manner: “Il Sandro mi scrive che ha accolto il piu grande entusiasmo, tutte i giovani, e fanciulle e ragazzi, sono tutti—”
cf
She went on in Italian, as if, in thinking of the Italians she thought in their language.
He listened with a shade of distaste to her rhapsody, then he said:
“For all that, I don’t like it. Their nationalism is just industrialism—that and a shallow jealousy I detest so much.”
“I think you are wrong—I think you are wrong—” said Hermione. “It seems to me purely spontaneous and beautiful, the modern Italian’s passion, for it is a passion, for Italy, L’ltalia—”
“Do you know Italy well?” Ursula asked of Hermione. Hermione hated to be broken in upon in this manner. Yet she answered mildly:
“Yes, pretty well. I spent several years of my girlhood there, with my mother. My mother died in Florence.”
“Oh.”
There was a pause, painful to Ursula and to Birkin. Hermione however seemed abstracted and calm. Birkin was white, his eyes glowed as if he were in a fever, he was far too overwrought. How Ursula suffered in this tense atmosphere of strained wills! Her head seemed bound round by iron bands.
Birkin rang the bell for tea. They could not wait for Gudrun any longer. When the door was opened, the cat walked in.
“Micio! Micio!” called Hermione, in her slow, deliberate sing-song. The young cat turned to look at her, then, with his slow and stately walk he advanced to her side.
“Vieni—vieni quá,” Hermione was saying, in her strange caressive, protective voice, as if she were always the elder, the mother superior. “Vieni dire Buon’ Giorno all zia. Mi ricorde, mi ricorde bene—non è vero, piccolo? E vero che mi ricordi? E vero?” And slowly she rubbed his head, slowly and with ironic indifference.