In the new, superfine bliss, a peace superseding knowledge, there was no I and you, there was only the third, unrealised wonder, the wonder of existing not as oneself, but in a consummation of my being and of her being in a new one, a new, paradisal unit regained from the duality. Nor can I say “I love you,” when I have ceased to be, and you have ceased to be: we are both caught up and transcended into a new oneness where everything is silent, because there is nothing to answer, all is perfect and at one. Speech travels between the separate parts. But in the perfect One there is perfect silence of bliss.
They were married by law on the next day, and she did as he bade her, she wrote to her father and mother. Her mother replied, not her father.
She did not go back to school. She stayed with Birkin in his rooms, or at the Mill, moving with him as he moved. But she did not see anybody, save Gudrun and Gerald. She was all strange and wondering as yet, but relieved as by dawn.
Gerald sat talking to her one afternoon in the warm study down at the Mill. Rupert had not yet come home.
“You are happy?” Gerald asked her, with a smile.
“Very happy!” she cried, shrinking a little in her brightness.
“Yes, one can see it.”
“Can one?” cried Ursula in surprise.
He looked up at her with a communicative smile.
“Oh yes, plainly.”
She was pleased. She meditated a moment.
“And can you see that Rupert is happy as well?”
He lowered his eyelids, and looked aside.
“Oh yes,” he said.
“Really!”
“Oh yes.”
He was very quiet, as if it were something not to be talked about by him. He seemed sad.
She was very sensitive to suggestion. She asked the question he wanted her to ask.
“Why don’t you be happy as well?” she said. “You could be just the same.”
He paused a moment.
“With Gudrun?” he asked.
“Yes!” she cried, her eyes glowing. But there was a strange tension, an emphasis, as if they were asserting their wishes, against the truth.
“You think Gudrun would have me, and we should be happy?” he said.
“Yes, I’m
sure!”
she cried.
Her eyes were round with delight. Yet underneath she was constrained, she knew her own insistence.
“Oh, I’m so glad,” she added.
He smiled.
“What makes you glad?” he said.
“For her sake,” she replied. “I’m sure you’d—you’re the right man for her.”
“You are?” he said. “And do you think she would agree with you?”
“Oh yes!” she exclaimed hastily. Then, upon reconsideration, very uneasy: “Though Gudrun isn’t so very simple, is she? One doesn’t know her in five minutes, does one? She’s not like me in that.” She laughed at him with her strange, open, dazzled face.
“You think she’s not much like you?” Gerald asked.
She knitted her brows.
“Oh, in many ways she is. But I never know what she will do when anything new comes.”
“You don’t?” said Gerald. He was silent for some moments. Then he moved tentatively. “I was going to ask her, in any case, to go away with me at Christmas,” he said, in a very small, cautious voice.
“Go away with you? For a time, you mean?”
“As long as she likes,” he said, with a deprecating movement.
They were both silent for some minutes.
“Of course,” said Ursula at last, “she
might
just be willing to rush into marriage. You can see.”
“Yes,” smiled Gerald. “I can see. But in case she won’t—do you think she would go abroad with me for a few days—or for a fortnight?”
“Oh yes,” said Ursula. “I’d ask her.”
“Do you think we might all go together?”
“All of us?” Again Ursula’s face lighted up. “It would be rather fun, don’t you think?”
“Great fun,” he said.
“And then you could see,” said Ursula.
“What?”
“How things went. I think it is best to take the honeymoon before the wedding—don’t you?”
She was pleased with this
mot.
He laughed.
“In certain cases,” he said. “I’d rather it were so in my own case.”
“Would you!” exclaimed Ursula. Then doubtingly: “Yes, perhaps you’re right. One should please oneself.”
Birkin came in a little later, and Ursula told him what had been said.
“Gudrun!” exclaimed Birkin. “She’s a born mistress, just as Gerald is a born lover—
amant en titre.
1
If as somebody says all women are either wives or mistresses, then Gudrun is a mistress.”
“And all men either lovers or husbands,” cried Ursula. “But why not both?”
“The one excludes the other,” he laughed.
“Then I want a lover,” cried Ursula.
“No you don’t,” he said.
“But I do,” she wailed.
He kissed her, and laughed.
It was two days after this that Ursula was to go to fetch her things from the house in Beldover. The removal had taken place, the family had gone. Gudrun had rooms in Willey Green.
Ursula had not seen her parents since her marriage. She wept over the rupture, yet what was the good of making it up! Good or not good, she could not go to them. So her things had been left behind and she and Gudrun were to walk over for them, in the afternoon.
It was a wintry afternoon, with red in the sky, when they arrived at the house. The windows were dark and blank, already the place was frightening. A stark, void entrance-hall struck a chill to the hearts of the girls.
“I don’t believe I dare have come in alone,” said Ursula. “It frightens me.”
“Ursula!” cried Gudrun. “Isn’t it amazing! Can you believe you lived in this place and never felt it? How I lived here a day without dying of terror, I cannot conceive!”
They looked in the big dining-room. It was a good-sized room, but now a cell would have been lovelier. The large bay windows were naked, the floor was stripped, and a border of dark polish went round the tract of pale boarding. In the faded wall-paper were dark patches where furniture had stood, where pictures had hung. The sense of walls, dry, thin, flimsy-seeming walls, and a flimsy flooring, pale with its artificial black edges, was neutralising to the mind. Everything was null to the senses, there was enclosure without substance, for the walls were dry and papery. Where were they standing, on earth, or suspended in some card-board box? In the hearth was burnt paper, and scraps of half-burnt paper.
“Imagine that we passed our days here!” said Ursula.
“I know,” cried Gudrun. “It is too appalling. What must we be like, if we are the contents of
this!”
“Vile!” said Ursula. “It really is.”
And she recognised half-burnt covers of “Vogue”—half-burnt representations of women in gowns—lying under the grate.
They went to the drawing-room. Another piece of shut-in air; without weight or substance, only a sense of intolerable papery imprisonment in nothingness. The kitchen did look more substantial, because of the red-tiled floor and the stove, but it was cold and horrid.
The two girls tramped hollowly up the bare stairs. Every sound re-echoed under their hearts. They tramped down the bare corridor. Against the wall of Ursula’s bedroom were her things—a trunk, a work-basket, some books, loose coats, a hat-box, standing desolate in the universal emptiness of the dusk.
“A cheerful sight, aren’t they?” said Ursula, looking down at her forsaken possessions.
“Very cheerful,” said Gudrun.
The two girls set to, carrying everything down to the front door. Again and again they made the hollow, re-echoing transit. The whole place seemed to resound about them with a noise of hollow, empty futility. In the distance the empty, invisible rooms sent forth a vibration almost of obscenity. They almost fled with the last articles, into the out-of-door.
But it was cold. They were waiting for Birkin, who was coming with the car. They went indoors again, and upstairs to their parents’ front bedroom, whose windows looked down on the road, across the country at the black-barred sunset, black and red barred, without light.
They sat down in the window-seat, to wait. Both girls were looking over the room. It was void, with a meaninglessness that was almost dreadful.
“Really,” said Ursula, “this room
couldn’t
be sacred, could it?”
Gudrun looked over it with slow eyes.
“Impossible,” she replied.
“When I think of their lives—father’s and mother’s, their love, and their marriage, and all of us children, and our bringing-up—would you have such a life, Prune?”
“I wouldn’t, Ursula.”
“It all seems so
nothing
—their two lives—there’s no meaning in it. Really, if they had
not
met, and
not
married, and not lived together—it wouldn’t have mattered, would it?”
“Of course—you can’t tell,” said Gudrun.
“No. But if I thought my life was going to be like it—Prune,” she caught Gudrun’s arm, “I should run.”
Gudrun was silent for a few moments.
“As a matter of fact, one cannot contemplate the ordinary life—one cannot contemplate it,” replied Gudrun. “With you, Ursula, it is quite different. You will be out of it all, with Birkin. He’s a special case. But with the ordinary man, who has his life fixed in one place, marriage is just impossible. There may be, and there are, thousands of women who want it, and could conceive of nothing else. But the very thought of it sends me
mad.
One must be free, above all, one must be free. One may forfeit everything else, but one must be free—one must not become 7, Pinchbeck Street—or Somerset Drive—or Shortlands. No man will be sufficient to make that good—no man! To marry, one must have a free lance, or nothing, a comrade-in-arms, a Glücksritter.
cm
A man with a position in the social world—well, it is just impossible, impossible!”
“What a lovely word—a Glücksritter!” said Ursula. “So much nicer than a soldier of fortune.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” said Gudrun. “I’d tilt the world with a Glücksritter. But a home, an establishment! Ursula, what would it mean?—think!”
“I know,” said Ursula. “We’ve had one home—that’s enough for me.”
“Quite enough,” said Gudrun.
“The little grey home in the west,” quoted Ursula ironically.
“Doesn’t it sound grey, too,” said Gudrun grimly.
They were interrupted by the sound of the car. There was Birkin. Ursula was surprised that she felt so lit up, that she became suddenly so free from the problems of grey homes in the west.
They heard his heels click on the hall pavement below.
“Hello!” he called, his voice echoing alive through the house. Ursula smiled to herself.
He
was frightened of the place too.
“Hello! Here we are,” she called downstairs. And they heard him quickly running up.
“This is a ghostly situation,” he said.
“These houses don’t have ghosts—they’ve never had any personality, and only a place with personality can have a ghost,” said Gudrun.
“I suppose so. Are you both weeping over the past?”
“We are,” said Gudrun, grimly.
Ursula laughed.
“Not weeping that it’s gone, but weeping that it ever
was,”
she said.
“Oh,” he replied, relieved.
He sat down for a moment. There was something in his presence, Ursula thought, lambent and alive. It made even the impertinent structure of this null house disappear.
“Gudrun says she could not bear to be married and put into a house,” said Ursula meaningful—they knew this referred to Gerald.
He was silent for some moments.
“Well,” he said, “if you know beforehand you couldn’t stand it, you’re safe.”
“Quite!” said Gudrun.
“Why
does
every woman think her aim in life is to have a hubby and a little grey home in the west? Why is this the goal of life? Why should it be?” said Ursula.
“Il faut avoir le respect de ses bêtises,”
cn
said Birkin.
“But you needn’t have the respect for the
bêtise
before you’ve committed it,” laughed Ursula.
“Ah then, des bêtises du papa?”
“Et de la maman,” added Gudrun satirically.
“Et des voisins,” said Ursula.
They all laughed, and rose. It was getting dark. They carried the things to the car. Gudrun locked the door of the empty house. Birkin had lighted the lamps of the automobile. It all seemed very happy, as if they were setting out.
“Do you mind stopping at Coulsons. I have to leave the key there,” said Gudrun.
“Right,” said Birkin, and they moved off.
They stopped in the main street. The shops were just lighted, the last miners were passing home along the causeways, half-visible shadows in their grey pit-dirt, moving through the blue air. But their feet rang harshly in manifold sound, along the pavement.
How pleased Gudrun was to come out of the shop, and enter the car, and be borne swiftly away into the down-hill of palpable dusk, with Ursula and Birkin! What an adventure life seemed at this moment ! How deeply, how suddenly she envied Ursula! Life for her was so quick, and an open door—so reckless as if not only this world, but the world that was gone and the world to come were nothing to her. Ah, if she could be
just like that,
it would be perfect.
For always, except in her moments of excitement, she felt a want within herself. She was unsure. She had felt that now, at last, in Gerald’s strong and violent love, she was living fully and finally. But when she compared herself with Ursula, already her soul was jealous, unsatisfied. She was not satisfied—she was never to be satisfied.
What was she short of now? It was marriage—it was the wonderful stability of marriage. She did want it, let her say what she might. She had been lying. The old idea of marriage was right even now—marriage and the home. Yet her mouth gave a little grimace at the words. She thought of Gerald and Shortlands—marriage and the home! Ah well, let it rest! He meant a great deal to her—but—! Perhaps it was not in her to marry. She was one of life’s outcasts, one of the drifting lives that have no root. No, no—it could not be so. She suddenly conjured up a rosy room, with herself in a beautiful gown, and a handsome man in evening dress who held her in his arms in the firelight, and kissed her. This picture she entitled “Home.” It would have done for the Royal Academy.