Already they were rarely together. Leitner ran attaching himself to somebody or other, always deferring, Loerke was a good deal alone. Out of doors he wore a Westphalian cap, a close brown-velvet head with big brown velvet flaps down over his ears, so that he looked like a lop-eared rabbit, or a troll. His face was brown-red, with a dry, bright skin, that seemed to crinkle with his mobile expressions. His eyes were arresting—brown, full, like a rabbit‘s, or like a troll’s, or like the eyes of a lost being, having a strange, dumb, depraved look of knowledge, and a quick spark of uncanny fire. Whenever Gudrun had tried to talk to him he had shied away unresponsive, looking at her with his watchful dark eyes, but entering into no relation with her. He had made her feel that her slow French and her slower German, were hateful to him. As for his own inadequate English, he was much too awkward to try it at all. But he understood a good deal of what was said, nevertheless. And Gudrun, piqued, left him alone.
This afternoon, however, she came into the lounge as he was talking to Ursula. His fine, black hair somehow reminded her of a bat, thin as it was on his full, sensitive-looking head, and worn away at the temples. He sat hunched up, as if his spirit were bat-like. And Gudrun could see he was making some slow confidence to Ursula, unwilling, a slow, grudging, scanty self-revelation. She went and sat by her sister.
He looked at her, then looked away again, as if he took no notice of her. But as a matter of fact, she interested him deeply.
“Isn’t it interesting, Prune,” said Ursula, turning to her sister, “Herr Loerke is doing a great frieze for a factory in Cologne, for the outside, the street.”
She looked at him, at his thin, brown, nervous hands, that were prehensile, and somehow like talons, like “griffes,” inhuman.
“What
in?”
she asked.
“Aus was?”
repeated Ursula.
It had become immediately a laconic series of question and answer between fellow craftsmen.
“What is the relief?” asked Gudrun.
“And at what height?”
It was very interesting to Gudrun to think of his making the great granite frieze for a great granite factory in Cologne. She got from him some notion of the design. It was a representation of a fair, with peasants and artisans in an orgy of enjoyment, drunk and absurd in their modern dress, whirling ridiculously in roundabouts, gaping at shows, kissing and staggering and rolling in knots, swinging in swing-boats, and firing down shooting galleries, a frenzy of chaotic motion.
There was a swift discussion of technicalities. Gudrun was very much impressed.
“But how wonderful, to have such a factory!” cried Ursula. “Is the whole building fine?”
“Oh yes,” he replied. “The frieze is part of the whole architecture. Yes, it is a colossal thing.”
Then he seemed to stiffen, shrugged his shoulders, and went on:
“Sculpture and architecture must go together. The day for irrelevant statues, as for wall pictures, is over. As a matter of fact sculpture is always part of an architectural conception. And since churches are all museum stuff, since industry is our business, now, then let us make our places of industry our art—our factory-area our Parthenon,
ecco!”
Ursula pondered.
“I suppose,” she said, “there is no need for our great works to be so hideous.”
Instantly he broke into motion.
“There you are!” he cried, “there you are! There is not only no need for our places of work to be ugly, but their ugliness ruins the work, in the end. Men will not go on submitting to such intolerable ugliness. In the end it will hurt too much, and they will wither because of it. And this will wither the work as well. They will think the work itself is ugly: the machines, the very act of labour. Whereas the machinery and the acts of labour are extremely, maddeningly beautiful. But this will be the end of our civilisation, when people will not work because work has become so intolerable to their senses, it nauseates them too much, they would rather starve. Then we shall see the hammer used only for smashing, then we shall see it. Yet here we are—we have the opportunity to make beautiful factories, beautiful machine-houses—we have the opportunity—”
Gudrun could only partly understand. She could have cried with vexation.
“What does he say?” she asked Ursula. And Ursula translated, stammering and brief. Loerke watched Gudrun’s face, to see her judgment.
“And do you think then,” said Gudrun, “that art should serve industry?”
“Art should
interpret
industry, as art once interpreted religion,” he said.
“But does your fair interpret industry?” she asked him.
“Certainly. What is man doing, when he is at a fair like this? He is fulfilling the counterpart of labour—the machine works him, instead of he the machine. He enjoys the mechanical motion, in his own body.”
“But is there nothing but work—mechanical work?” said Gudrun.
“Nothing but work!” he repeated, leaning forward, his eyes two darknesses, with needle-points of light. “No, it is nothing but this, serving a machine, or enjoying the motion of a machine—motion, that is all. You have never worked for hunger, or you would know what god governs us.”
Gudrun quivered and flushed. For some reason she was almost in tears.
“No, I have not worked for hunger,” she replied, “but I have worked!”
“Travaillé—lavorato?” he asked. “E che lavoro—che lavoro? Quel travail est-ce que vous avez fait?”
cv
He broke into a mixture of Italian and French, instinctively using a foreign language when he spoke to her.
“You have never worked as the world works,” he said to her, with sarcasm.
“Yes,” she said. “I have. And I do—I work now for my daily bread.”
He paused, looked at her steadily, then dropped the subject entirely. She seemed to him to be trifling.
“But have
you
ever worked as the world works?” Ursula asked him.
He looked at her untrustful.
“Yes,” he replied, with a surly bark. “I have known what it was to lie in bed for three days, because I had nothing to eat.”
Gudrun was looking at him with large, grave eyes, that seemed to draw the confession from him as the marrow from his bones. All his nature held him back from confessing. And yet her large, grave eyes upon him seemed to open some valve in his veins, and involuntarily he was telling:
“My father was a man who did not like work, and we had no mother. We lived in Austria, Polish Austria. How did we live? Ha!—somehow! Mostly in a room with three other families—one set in each corner—and the W.C. in the middle of the room—a pan with a plank on it—ha! I had two brothers and a sister—and there might be a woman with my father. He was a free being, in his way—would fight with any man in the town—a garrison town—and was a little man too. But he wouldn’t work for anybody—set his heart against it, and wouldn’t.”
“And how did you live then?” asked Ursula.
He looked at her—then, suddenly, at Gudrun.
“Do you understand?” he asked.
“Enough,” she replied.
Their eyes met for a moment. Then he looked away. He would say no more.
“And how did you become a sculptor?” asked Ursula.
“How did I become a sculptor—” he paused. “Dunque—”
cw
he resumed, in a changed manner, and beginning to speak French—“I became old enough—I used to steal from the market-place. Later I went to work—imprinted the stamp on clay bottles, before they were baked. It was an earthenware-bottle factory. There I began making models. One day, I had had enough. I lay in the sun and did not go to work. Then I walked to Munich—then I walked to Italy—begging, begging everything.
“The Italians were very good to me—they were good and honourable to me. From Bozen to Rome, almost every night I had a meal and a bed, perhaps of straw, with some peasant. I love the Italian people, with all my heart.
“Dunque, adesso—maintenant
cx
—I earn a thousand pounds in a year, or I earn two thousand—”
He looked down at the ground, his voice tailing off into silence.
Gudrun looked at his fine, thin, shiny skin, reddish-brown from the sun, drawn tight over his full temples; and at his thin hair, and at the thick, coarse, brush-like moustache, cut short about his mobile, rather shapeless mouth.
“How old are you?” she asked.
He looked up at her with his full, elfin eyes startled.
“Wie alt?”
cy
he repeated. And he hesitated. It was evidently one of his reticencies.
“How old are
you?”
he replied, without answering.
“I am twenty-six,” she answered.
“Twenty-six,” he repeated, looking into her eyes. He paused. Then he said:
“Und Ihr Herr Gemahl, wie alt is er?”
cz
“Who?” asked Gudrun.
“Your husband,” said Ursula, with a certain irony.
“I haven’t got a husband,” said Gudrun in English. In German she answered,
“He is thirty-one.”
But Loerke was watching closely, with his uncanny, full, suspicious eyes. Something in Gudrun seemed to accord with him. He was really like one of the “little people” who have no soul, and has found his mate in a human being. But he suffered in his discovery. She too was fascinated by him, fascinated, as if some strange creature, a rabbit or a bat, or a brown seal,
da
had begun to talk to her. But also, she knew what he was unconscious of, his tremendous power of understanding, of apprehending her living motion. He did not know his own power. He did not know how, with his full, submerged, watchful eyes, he could look into her and see her, what she was, see her secrets. He would only want her to be herself—he knew her verily, with a subconscious, sinister knowledge, devoid of illusions and hopes.
To Gudrun, there was in Loerke the rock-bottom of all life. Everybody else had their illusion, must have their illusion, their before and after. But he, with a perfect stoicism, did without any before and after, dispensed with all illusion. He did not deceive himself in the last issue. In the last issue he cared about nothing, he was troubled about nothing, he made not the slightest attempt to be at one with anything. He existed a pure, unconnected will, stoical and momentaneous. There was only his work.
It was curious, too, how his poverty, the degradation of his earlier life, attracted her. There was something insipid and tasteless to her, in the idea of a gentleman, a man who had gone the usual course through school and university. A certain violent sympathy, however, came up in her for this mud-child. He seemed to be the very stuff of the underworld of life. There was no going beyond him.
Ursula too was attracted by Loerke. In both sisters he commanded a certain homage. But there were moments when to Ursula he seemed indescribably inferior, false, a vulgarism.
Both Birkin and Gerald disliked him, Gerald ignoring him with some contempt, Birkin exasperated.
“What do the women find so impressive in that little brat?” Gerald asked.
“God alone knows,” replied Birkin, “unless it’s some sort of appeal he makes to them, which flatters them and has such a power over them.”
Gerald looked up in surprise.
“Does
he make an appeal to them?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” replied Birkin. “He is the perfectly subjected being, existing almost like a criminal. And the women rush towards that, like a current of air towards a vacuum.”
“Funny they should rush to that,” said Gerald.
“Makes one mad, too,” said Birkin. “But he has the fascination of pity and repulsion for them, a little obscene monster of the darkness that he is.”
Gerald stood still, suspended in thought.
“What do women want, at the bottom?” he asked.
Birkin shrugged his shoulders.
“God knows,” he said. “Some satisfaction in basic repulsion, it seems to me. They seem to creep down some ghastly tunnel of darkness, and will never be satisfied till they’ve come to the end.”
Gerald looked out into the mist of fine snow that was blowing by. Everywhere was blind to-day, horribly blind.
“And what is the end?” he asked.
Birkin shook his head.
“I’ve not got there yet, so I don’t know. Ask Loerke, he’s pretty near. He is a good many stages further than either you or I can go.
“Yes, but stages further in what?” cried Gerald, irritated.
Birkin sighed, and gathered his brows into a knot of anger.
“Stages further in social hatred,” he said. “He lives like a rat, in the river of corruption, just where it falls over into the bottomless pit. He’s further on than we are. He hates the ideal more acutely. He hates the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him. I expect he is a Jew—or part Jewish.”
“Probably,” said Gerald.
“He is a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.”
“But why does anybody care about him?” cried Gerald.
“Because they hate the ideal also, in their souls. They want to explore the sewers, and he’s the wizard rat that swims ahead.”
Still Gerald stood and stared at the blind haze of snow outside.
“I don’t understand your terms, really,” he said, in a flat, doomed voice. “But it sounds a rum sort of desire.”
“I suppose you want the same,” said Birkin. “Only you want to take a quick jump downwards, in a sort of ecstasy—and he ebbs with the stream, the sewer stream.”
Meanwhile Gudrun and Ursula waited for the next opportunity to talk to Loerke. It was no use beginning when the men were there. Then they could get into no touch with the isolated little sculptor. He had to be alone with them. And he preferred Ursula to be there, as a sort of transmitter to Gudrun.