“Does he understand Italian?” said Ursula, who knew nothing of the language.
“Yes,” said Hermione at length. “His mother was Italian. She was born in my waste-paper basket in Florence, on the morning of Rupert’s birthday. She was his birthday present.”
Tea was brought in. Birkin poured out for them. It was strange how inviolable was the intimacy which existed between him and Hermione. Ursula felt that she was an outsider. The very tea-cups and the old silver was a bond between Hermione and Birkin. It seemed to belong to an old, past world which they had inhabited together, and in which Ursula was a foreigner. She was almost a par-venue in their old cultured milieu. Her convention was not their convention, their standards were not her standards. But theirs were established, they had the sanction and the grace of age. He and she together, Hermione and Birkin, were people of the same old tradition, the same withered deadening culture. And she, Ursula, was an intruder. So they always made her feel.
Hermione poured a little cream into a saucer. The simple way she assumed her rights in Birkin’s room maddened and discouraged Ursula. There was a fatality about it, as if it were bound to be. Hermione lifted the cat and put the cream before him. He planted his two paws on the edge of the table and bent his gracious young head to drink.
“Siccuro che capisce italiano,” sang Hermione, “non l’avrà dimenticato, la lingua della Mamma.”
She lifted the cat’s head with her long, slow, white fingers, not letting him drink, holding him in her power. It was always the same, this joy in power she manifested, peculiarly in power over any male being. He blinked forbearingly, with a male, bored expression, licking his whiskers. Hermione laughed in her short, grunting fashion.
“Ecco, il bravo ragazzo, come e superbo, questo!”
She made a vivid picture, so calm, and strange with the cat. She had a true static impressiveness, she was a social artist in some ways.
The cat refused to look at her, indifferently avoided her fingers, and began to drink again, his nose down to the cream, perfectly balanced, as he lapped with his odd little click.
“It’s bad for him, teaching him to eat at table,” said Birkin.
“Yes,” said Hermione, easily assenting.
Then, looking down at the cat, she resumed her old, mocking, humorous sing-song.
“Ti imparano fare brutte cose, brutte cose—”
She lifted the Mino’s white chin on her fore-finger, slowly. The young cat looked round with a supremely forbearing air, avoided seeing anything, withdrew his chin, and began to wash his face with his paw. Hermione grunted her laughter, pleased.
“Bel giovanotto—” she said.
The cat reached forward again and put his fine white paw on the edge of the saucer. Hermione lifted it down with delicate slowness. This deliberate, delicate carefulness of movement reminded Ursula of Gudrun.
“No! Non e permesso di mettere il zampino nel tondinetto. Non piace al babbo. Un signor gatto cosi selvatico—!”
And she kept her finger on the softly planted paw of the cat, and her voice had the same whimsical, humorous note of bullying.
Ursula had her nose out of joint. She wanted to go away now. It all seemed no good. Hermione was established for ever, she herself was ephemeral and had not yet even arrived.
“I will go now,” she said suddenly.
Birkin looked at her almost in fear—he so dreaded her anger. “But there is no need for such hurry,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered. “I will go.” And turning to Hermione, before there was time to say any more, she held out her hand and said “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye—” sang Hermione, detaining the hand. “Must you really go now?”
“Yes, I think I’ll go,” said Ursula, her face set, and averted from Hermione’s eyes.
“You think you will—”
But Ursula had got her hand free. She turned to Birkin with a quick, almost jeering: “Good-bye,” and she was opening the door before he had time to do it for her.
When she got outside the house she ran down the road in fury and agitation. It was strange, the unreasoning rage and violence Hermione roused in her, by her very presence. Ursula knew she gave herself away to the other woman, she knew she looked ill-bred, uncouth, exaggerated. But she did not care. She only ran up the road, lest she should go back and jeer in the faces of the two she had left behind. For they outraged her.
CHAPTER XXIII
NEXT DAY BIRKIN SOUGHT Ursula out. It happened to be the half-day at the Grammar School. He appeared towards the end of the morning, and asked her, would she drive with him in the afternoon. She consented. But her face was closed and unresponding, and his heart sank.
The afternoon was fine and dim. He was driving the motorcar, and she sat beside him. But still her face was closed against him, unresponding. When she became like this, like a wall against him, his heart contracted.
His life now seemed so reduced, that he hardly cared any more. At moments it seemed to him he did not care a straw whether Ursula or Hermione or anybody else existed or did not exist. Why bother! Why strive for a coherent, satisfied life? Why not drift on in a series of accidents—like a picaresque novel? Why not? Why bother about human relationships? Why take them seriously—male or female? Why form any serious connections at all? Why not be casual, drifting along, taking all for what it was worth?
And yet, still, he was damned and doomed to the old effort at serious living.
“Look,” he said, “what I bought.” The car was running along a broad white road, between autumn trees.
He gave her a little bit of screwed-up paper. She took it and opened it.
“How lovely,” she cried.
She examined the gift.
“How perfectly lovely!” she cried again. “But why do you give them me?” She put the question offensively.
His face flickered with bored irritation. He shrugged his shoulders slightly.
“I wanted to,” he said, coolly.
“But why? Why should you?”
“Am I called on to find reasons?” he asked.
There was a silence, whilst she examined the rings that had been screwed up in the paper.
“I think they are
beautiful,”
she said, “especially this. This is wonderful—”
It was a round opal, red and fiery, set in a circle of tiny rubies.
“You like that best?” he said.
“I think I do.”
“I like the sapphire,” he said.
“This?”
It was a rose-shaped, beautiful sapphire, with small brilliants.
“Yes,” she said, “it is lovely.” She held it in the light. “Yes, perhaps it is the best—”
“The blue—” he said.
“Yes, wonderful—”
He suddenly swung the car out of the way of a farm-cart. It tilted on the bank. He was a careless driver, yet very quick. But Ursula was frightened. There was always that something regardless in him which terrified her. She suddenly felt he might kill her, by making some dreadful accident with the motor-car. For a moment she was stony with fear.
“Isn’t it rather dangerous, the way you drive?” she asked him.
“No, it isn’t dangerous,” he said. And then, after a pause: “Don’t you like the yellow ring at all?”
It was a squarish topaz set in a frame of steel, or some other similar mineral, finely wrought.
“Yes,” she said, “I do like it. But why did you buy these rings?”
“I wanted them. They are second-hand.”
“You bought them for yourself?”
“No. Rings look wrong on my hands.”
“Why did you buy them then?”
“I bought them to give to you.”
“But why? Surely you ought to give them to Hermione! You belong to her.”
He did not answer. She remained with the jewels shut in her hand. She wanted to try them on her fingers, but something in her would not let her. And moreover, she was afraid her hands were too large, she shrank from the mortification of a failure to put them on any but her little finger. They travelled in silence through the empty lanes.
Driving in a motor-car excited her, she forgot his presence even.
“Where are we?” she asked suddenly.
“Not far from Worksop.”
“And where are we going?”
“Anywhere.”
It was the answer she liked.
She opened her hand to look at the rings. They gave her such pleasure, as they lay, the three circles, with their knotted jewels, entangled in her palm. She would have to try them on. She did so secretly, unwilling to let him see, so that he should not know her finger was too large for them. But he saw nevertheless. He always saw, if she wanted him not to. It was another of his hateful, watchful characteristics.
Only the opal, with its thin wire loop, would go on her ring finger. And she was superstitious. No, there was ill-portent enough, she would not accept this ring from him in pledge.
“Look,” she said, putting forward her hand, that was half-closed and shrinking. “The others don’t fit me.”
He looked at the red-glinting, soft stone, on her over-sensitive skin.
“Yes,” he said.
“But opals are unlucky, aren’t they?” she said wistfully.
“No. I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don’t.”
“But why?” she laughed.
And, consumed with a desire to see how the other rings would look on her hand, she put them on her little finger.
“They can be made a little bigger,” he said.
“Yes,” she replied, doubtfully. And she sighed. She knew that, in accepting the rings, she was accepting a pledge. Yet fate seemed more than herself. She looked again at the jewels. They were very beautiful to her eyes—not as ornament, or wealth, but as tiny fragments of loveliness.
“I’m glad you bought them,” she said, putting her hand, half unwillingly, gently on his arm.
He smiled, slightly. He wanted her to come to him. But he was angry at the bottom of his soul, and indifferent. He knew she had a passion for him, really. But it was not finally interesting. There were depths of passion when one became impersonal and indifferent, unemotional. Whereas Ursula was still at the emotional personal level—always so abominably personal. He had taken her as he had never been taken himself. He had taken her at the roots of her darkness and shame—like a demon, laughing over the fountain of mystic corruption which was one of the sources of her being, laughing, shrugging, accepting, accepting finally. As for her, when would she so much go beyond herself as to accept him at the quick of death?
She now became quite happy. The motor-car ran on, the afternoon was soft and dim. She talked with lively interest, analysing people and their motives—Gudrun, Gerald. He answered vaguely. He was not very much interested any more in personalities and in people—people were all different, but they were all enclosed in a definite limitation, he said; there were only about two great ideas, two great streams of activity, with various forms of reaction therefrom. The reactions were all varied in various people, but they followed a few great laws, and intrinsically there was no difference. They acted and reacted involuntarily according to a few great laws, and once the laws, the great principles, were known, people were no longer mystically interesting. They were all essentially alike, the differences were only variations on a theme. None of them transcended the given terms.
Ursula did not agree—people were still an adventure to her—but—perhaps not as much as she tried to persuade herself. Perhaps there was something mechanical, now, in her interest. Perhaps also her interest was destructive, her analysing was a real tearing to pieces. There was an underspace in her where she did not care for people and their idiosyncrasies, even to destroy them. She seemed to touch for a moment this undersilence in herself, she became still, and she turned for a moment purely to Birkin.
“Won’t it be lovely to go home in the dark?” she said. “We might have tea rather late—shall we?—and have high tea? Wouldn’t that be rather nice?”
“I promised to be at Shortlands for dinner,” he said.
“But—it doesn’t matter—you can go to-morrow—”
“Hermione is there,” he said, in rather an uneasy voice. “She is going away in two days. I suppose I ought to say good-bye to her. I shall never see her again.”
Ursula drew away, closed in a violent silence. He knitted his brows, and his eyes began to sparkle again in anger.
“You don’t mind, do you?” he asked irritably.
“No, I don’t care. Why should I? Why should I mind?” Her tone was jeering and offensive.
“That’s what I ask myself,” he said, “why should you mind! But you seem to.” His brows were tense with violent irritation.
“I assure you I don’t, I don’t mind in the least. Go where you belong—it’s what I want you to do.”
“Ah, you fool!” he cried, “with your ‘go where you belong.’ It’s finished between Hermione and me. She means much more to you, if it comes to that, than she does to me. For you can only revolt in pure reaction from her—and to be her opposite is to be her counterpart.”
“Ah, opposite!” cried Ursula. “I know your dodges. I am not taken in by your word-twisting. You belong to Hermione and her dead show. Well, if you do, you do. I don’t blame you. But then you’ve nothing to do with me.”
In his inflamed, overwrought exasperation, he stopped the car, and they sat there, in the middle of the country lane, to have it out. It was a crisis of war between them, so they did not see the ridiculousness of their situation.
“If you weren’t a fool, if only you weren’t a fool,” he cried in bitter despair, “you’d see that one could be decent, even when one has been wrong. I was wrong to go on all those years with Hermione—it was a deathly process. But after all, one can have a little human decency. But no, you would tear my soul out with your jealousy at the very mention of Hermione’s name.”