“There’s not much to destroy in him,” said the Pussum. “He’s so thin already, there’s only a fag-end to start on.”
“Oh, isn’t it beautiful! I love reading it! I believe it has cured my hiccup!” squealed Halliday. “Do let me go on. ‘It is a desire for the reduction-process in oneself, a reducing back to the origin, a return along the Flux of Corruption, to the original rudimentary conditions of being—!’ Oh, but I
do
think it is wonderful. It almost supersedes the Bible—”
“Yes—Flux of Corruption,” said the Russian, “I remember that phrase.”
“Oh, he was always talking about Corruption,” said the Pussum. “He must be corrupt himself, to have it so much on his mind.”
“Exactly!” said the Russian.
“Do let me go on! Oh, this is a perfectly wonderful piece! But do listen to this. ‘And in the great retrogression, the reducing back of the created body of life, we get knowledge, and beyond knowledge, the phosphorescent ecstasy of acute sensation.’ Oh, I do think these phrases are too absurdly wonderful. Oh but don’t you think they
are
—they’re nearly as good as Jesus. And if, Julius, you want this ecstasy of reduction with the Pussum, you must go on till it is fulfilled. But surely there is in you also, somewhere, the living desire for positive creation, relationships in ultimate faith, when all this process of active corruption, with all its flowers of mud, is transcended, and more or less finished—’ I do wonder what the flowers of mud are. Pussum, you are a flower of mud.”
“Thank you—and what are you?”
“Oh, I’m another, surely, according to this letter! We’re all flowers of mud—
Fleurs
—
hic
! du mal!
It’s perfectly wonderful, Birkin harrowing Hell—harrowing the Pompadour—
Hic!”
“Go on—go on,” said Maxim. “What comes next? It’s really very interesting.”
“I think it’s awful cheek to write like that,” said the Pussum.
“Yes—yes, so do I,” said the Russian. “He is a megalomaniac, of course, it is a form of religious mania. He thinks he is the Saviour of man—go on reading.”
“Surely,” Halliday intoned, “ ‘surely goodness and mercy hath followed me all the days of my life—’ ” he broke off and giggled. Then he began again, intoning like a clergyman. “ ‘Surely there will come an end in us to this desire—for the constant going apart,—this passion for putting asunder—everything—ourselves, reducing ourselves part from part—reacting in intimacy only for destruction,—using sex as a great reducing agent, reducing the two great elements of male and female from their highly complex unity—reducing the old ideas, going back to the savages for our sensations,—always seeking to lose ourselves in some ultimate black sensation, mindless and infinite—burning only with destructive fires, raging on with the hope of being burnt out utterly—’ ”
“I want to go,” said Gudrun to Gerald, as she signalled the waiter. Her eyes were flashing, her cheeks were flushed. The strange effect of Birkin’s letter read aloud in a perfect clerical sing-song, clear and resonant, phrase by phrase, made the blood mount into her head as if she were mad.
She rose, whilst Gerald was paying the bill, and walked over to Halliday’s table. They all glanced up at her.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Is that a genuine letter you are reading?”
“Oh yes,” said Halliday. “Quite genuine.”
“May I see?”
Smiling foolishly he handed it to her, as if hypnotised.
“Thank you,” she said.
And she turned and walked out of the Café with the letter, all down the brilliant room, between the tables, in her measured fashion. It was some moments before anybody realised what was happening.
From Halliday’s table came half articulate cries, then somebody booed, then all the far end of the place began booing after Gudrun’s retreating form. She was fashionably dressed in blackish-green and silver, her hat was brilliant green, like the sheen on an insect, but the brim was soft dark green, a falling edge with fine silver, her coat was dark green, brilliantly glossy, with a high collar of grey fur, and great fur cuffs, the edge of her dress showed silver and black velvet, her stockings and shoes were silver grey. She moved with slow, fashionable indifference to the door. The porter opened obsequiously for her, and, at her nod, hurried to the edge of the pavement and whistled for a taxi. The two lights of a vehicle almost immediately curved round towards her, like two eyes.
Gerald had followed in wonder, amid all the booing, not having caught her misdeed. He heard the Pussum’s voice saying:
“Go and get it back from her. I never heard of such a thing! Go and get it back from her. Tell Gerald Crich—there he goes—go and make him give it up.”
Gudrun stood at the door of the taxi, which the man held open for her.
“To the hotel?” she asked, as Gerald came out, hurriedly.
“Where you like,” he answered.
“Right!” she said. Then to the driver: “Wagstaff’s—Barton Street.”
The driver bowed his head, and put down the flag.
Gudrun entered the taxi, with the deliberate cold movement of a woman who is well-dressed and contemptuous in her soul. Yet she was frozen with overwrought feelings. Gerald followed her.
“You’ve forgotten the man,” she said coolly, with a slight nod of her hat. Gerald gave the porter a shilling. The man saluted. They were in motion.
“What was all the row about?” asked Gerald, in wondering excitement.
“I walked away with Birkin’s letter,” she said, and he saw the crushed paper in her hand.
His eyes glittered with satisfaction.
“Ah!” he said. “Splendid! A set of jackasses!”
“I could have
killed
them!” she cried in passion.
“Dogs!—
they are dogs! Why is Rupert such
a fool
as to write such letters to them? Why does he give himself away to such canaille? It’s a thing that
cannot be borne.”
Gerald wondered over her strange passion.
And she could not rest any longer in London. They must go by the morning train from Charing Cross. As they drew over the bridge, in the train, having glimpses of the river between the great iron girders, she cried:
“I feel I could
never
see this foul town again—I couldn’t
bear
to come back to it.”
CHAPTER XXIX
Continental
URSULA WENT ON IN an unreal suspense, the last weeks before going away. She was not herself—she was not anything. She was something that is going to be—soon—soon—very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.
She went to see her parents. It was a rather stiff, sad meeting, more like a verification of separateness than a reunion. But they were all vague and indefinite with one another, stiffened in the fate that moved them apart.
She did not really come to until she was on the ship crossing from Dover to Ostend. Dimly she had come down to London with Birkin, London had been a vagueness, so had the train-journey to Dover. It was all like a sleep.
And now, at last, as she stood in the stern of the ship, in a pitch-dark, rather blowy night, feeling the motion of the sea, and watching the small, rather desolate little lights that twinkled on the shores of England, as on the shores of nowhere, watched them sinking smaller and smaller on the profound and living darkness, she felt her soul stirring to awake from its anæasthetic sleep.
“Let us go forward, shall we?” said Birkin. He wanted to be at the tip of their projection. So they left off looking at the faint sparks that glimmered out of nowhere, in the far distance, called England, and turned their faces to the unfathomed night in front.
They went right to the bow of the softly plunging vessel. In the complete obscurity, Birkin found a comparatively sheltered nook, where a great rope was coiled up. It was quite near the very point of the ship, near the black, unpierced space ahead. Here they sat down, folded together, folded round with the same rug, creeping in nearer and ever nearer to one another, till it seemed they had crept right into each other, and become one substance. It was very cold, and the darkness was palpable.
One of the ship’s crew came along the deck, dark as the darkness, not really visible. They then made out the faintest pallor of his face. He felt their presence, and stopped, unsure—then bent forward. When his face was near them, he saw the faint pallor of their faces. Then he withdrew like a phantom. And they watched him without making any sound.
They seemed to fall away into the profound darkness. There was no sky, no earth, only one unbroken darkness, into which, with a soft, sleeping motion, they seemed to fall like one closed seed of life falling through dark, fathomless space.
They had forgotten where they were, forgotten all that was and all that had been, conscious only in their heart, and there conscious only of this pure trajectory through the surpassing darkness. The ship’s prow cleaved on, with a faint noise of cleavage, into the complete night, without knowing, without seeing, only surging on.
In Ursula the sense of the unrealised world ahead triumphed over everything. In the midst of this profound darkness, there seemed to glow on her heart the effulgence of a paradise unknown and unrealised. Her heart was full of the most wonderful light, golden like honey of darkness, sweet like the warmth of day, a light which was not shed on the world, only on the unknown paradise towards which she was going, a sweetness of habitation, a delight of living quite unknown, but hers infallibly. In her transport she lifted her face suddenly to him, and he touched it with his lips. So cold, so fresh, so sea-clear her face was, it was like kissing a flower that grows near the surf.
But he did not know the ecstasy of bliss in fore-knowledge that she knew. To him, the wonder of this transit was overwhelming. He was falling through a gulf of infinite darkness, like a meteorite plunging across the chasm between the worlds. The world was torn in two, and he was plunging like an unlit star through the ineffable rift. What was beyond was not yet for him. He was overcome by the trajectory.
In a trance he lay enfolding Ursula round about. His face was against her fine, fragile hair, he breathed its fragrance with the sea and the profound night. And his soul was at peace; yielded, as he fell into the unknown. This was the first time that an utter and absolute peace had entered his heart, now, in this final transit out of life.
When there came some stir on the deck, they roused. They stood up. How stiff and cramped they were, in the night-time! And yet the paradisal glow on her heart, and the unutterable peace of darkness in his, this was the all-in-all.
They stood up and looked ahead. Low lights were seen down the darkness. This was the world again. It was not the bliss of her heart, nor the peace of his. It was the superficial unreal world of fact. Yet not quite the old world. For the peace and the bliss in their hearts was enduring.
Strange, and desolate above all things, like disembarking from the Styx into the desolated underworld, was this landing at night. There was the raw, half-lighted, covered-in vastness of the dark place, boarded and hollow under-foot, with only desolation everywhere. Ursula had caught sight of the big, pallid, mystic letters “OSTEND,” standing in the darkness. Everybody was hurrying with a blind, insect-like intentness through the dark grey air, porters were calling in un-English English, then trotting with heavy bags, their colourless blouses looking ghostly as they disappeared; Ursula stood at a long, low, zinc-covered barrier, along with hundreds of other spectral people, and all the way down the vast, raw darkness was this low stretch of open bags and spectral people, whilst, on the other side of the barrier, pallid officials in peaked caps and moustaches were turning the underclothing in the bags, then scrawling a chalk-mark.
It was done. Birkin snapped the hand bags, off they went, the porter coming behind. They were through a great doorway, and in the open night again—ah, a railway platform! Voices were still calling in inhuman agitation through the dark-grey air, spectres were running along the darkness between the train.
“Köln—Berlin—” Ursula made out on the boards hung on the high train on one side.
“Here we are,” said Birkin. And on her side she saw: “Elsass—Lothringen
cp
—Luxembourg, Metz—Basle.”
“That was it, Basle!”
The porter came up.
“À Bâle—deuxième classe?—voilà.”
cq
And he clambered into the high train. They followed. The compartments were already some of them taken. But many were dim and empty. The luggage was stowed, the porter was tipped.
“Nous avons encore—?” said Birkin, looking at his watch and at the porter.
“Encore une demi-heure.”
cr
With which, in his blue blouse, he disappeared. He was ugly and insolent.
“Come,” said Birkin. “It is cold. Let us eat.”
There was a coffee-wagon on the platform. They drank hot, watery coffee, and ate the long rolls, split, with ham between, which were such a wide bite, that it almost dislocated Ursula’s jaw; and they walked beside the high trains. It was all so strange, so extremely desolate, like the underworld, grey, grey, dirt grey, desolate, forlorn, nowhere—grey, dreary nowhere.
At last they were moving through the night. In the darkness Ursula made out the flat fields, the wet flat dreary darkness of the Continent. They pulled up surprisingly soon—Bruges! Then on through the level darkness, with glimpses of sleeping farms and thin poplar trees and deserted highroads. She sat dismayed, hand in hand with Birkin. He pale, immobile like a
revenant
himself, looked sometimes out of the window, sometimes closed his eyes. Then his eyes opened again, dark as the darkness outside.
A flash of a few lights on the darkness—Ghent station! A few more spectres moving outside on the platform—then the bell—then motion again through the level darkness. Ursula saw a man with a lantern come out of a farm by the railway, and cross to the dark farm-buildings. She thought of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm-life at Cossethay. My God, how far was she projected from her childhood, how far was she still to go! In one life-time one travelled through aeons. The great chasm of memory from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of Cossethay and the Marsh Farm—she remembered the servant Tilly, who used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar, in the old living-room where the grandfather clock had two pink roses in a basket painted above the figures on the face—and now when she was traveling into the unknown with Birkin, an utter stranger—was so great, that it seemed she had no identity, that the child she had been, playing in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not really herself.