“Do you do nothing but architectural sculpture?” Gudrun asked him one evening.
“Not now,” he replied. “I have done all sorts—except portraits—I never did portraits. But other things—”
“What kind of things?” asked Gudrun.
He paused a moment, then rose, and went out of the room. He returned almost immediately with a little roll of paper, which he handed to her. She unrolled it. It was a photogravure reproduction of a statuette, signed “F. Loerke.”
“That is quite an early thing—
not
mechanical,” he said, “more popular.”
The statuette was of a naked girl, small, finely made, sitting on a great naked horse. The girl was young and tender, a mere bud. She was sitting sideways on the horse, her face in her hands, as if in shame and grief, in a little abandon. Her hair, which was short and must be flaxen, fell forward, divided, half covering her hands.
Her limbs were young and tender. Her legs, scarcely formed yet, the legs of a maiden just passing towards cruel womanhood, dangled childishly over the side of the powerful horse, pathetically, the small feet folded one over the other, as if to hide. But there was no hiding. There she was exposed naked on the naked flank of the horse.
The horse stood stock still, stretched in a kind of start. It was a massive, magnificent stallion, rigid with pent-up power. Its neck was arched and terrible, like a sickle, its flanks were pressed back, rigid with power.
Gudrun went pale, and a darkness came over her eyes, like shame, she looked up with a certain supplication, almost slave-like. He glanced at her, and jerked his head a little.
“How big is it?” she asked, in a toneless voice, persisting in appearing casual and unaffected.
“How big?” he replied, glancing again at her. “Without pedestal—so high—” he measured with his hand—“with pedestal, so—”
He looked at her steadily. There was a little brusque, turgid contempt for her in his swift gesture, and she seemed to cringe a little.
“And what is it done in?” she asked, throwing back her head and looking at him with affected coldness.
He still gazed at her steadily, and his dominance was not shaken.
“Bronze—green bronze.”
“Green bronze!” repeated Gudrun, coldly accepting his challenge. She was thinking of the slender, immature, tender limbs of the girl, smooth and cold in green bronze.
“Yes, beautiful,” she murmured, looking up at him with a certain dark homage.
He closed his eyes and looked aside, triumphant.
“Why,” said Ursula, “did you make the horse so stiff? It is as stiff as a block.”
“Stiff?” he repeated, in arms at once.
“Yes. Look how stock and stupid and brutal it is. Horses are sensitive, quite delicate and sensitive, really.”
He raised his shoulders, spread his hands in a shrug of slow indifference, as much as to inform her she was an amateur and an impertinent nobody.
“Wissen Sie,” he said, with an insulting patience and condescension in his voice, “that horse is a certain
form
, part of a whole form. It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see—it is part of a work of art, it has no relation to anything outside that work of art.”
Ursula, angry at being treated quite so insultingly
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haut en
bas,
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from the height of esoteric art to the depth of general exoteric amateurism, replied, hotly, flushing and lifting her face.
“But it
is
a picture of a horse, nevertheless.”
He lifted his shoulders in another shrug.
“As you like—it is not a picture of a cow, certainly.”
Here Gudrun broke in, flushed and brilliant, anxious to avoid any more of this, any more of Ursula’s foolish persistence in giving herself away.
“What do you mean by ‘it is a picture of a horse’?” she cried at her sister. “What do you mean by a horse? You mean an idea you have in
your
head, and which you want to see represented. There is another idea altogether, quite another idea. Call it a horse if you like, or say it is not a horse. I have just as much right to say that your horse isn’t a horse, that it is a falsity of your own make-up.”
Ursula wavered, baffled. Then her words came.
“But why does he have this idea of a horse?” she said. “I know it is his idea. I know it is a picture of himself, really—”
Loerke snorted with rage.
“A picture of myself!” he repeated, in derision. “Wissen sie, gnädige Frau, that is a Kunstwerk,
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a work of art. It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you
must not
confuse the relative work of action, with the absolute world of art. That you
must not do
.”
“That is quite true,” cried Gudrun, let loose in a sort of rhapsody. “The two things are quite and permanently apart, they have nothing to do with one another.
I
and my art, they have
nothing
to do with each other. My art stands in another world, I am in this world.”
Her face was flushed and transfigured. Loerke who was sitting with his head ducked, like some creature at bay, looked up at her, swiftly, almost furtively, and murmured:
“Ja—so ist es, so ist es.”
Ursula was silent after this outburst. She was furious. She wanted to poke a hole into them both.
“It isn’t a word of it true, of all this harangue you have made me,” she replied flatly. “The horse is a picture of your own stock, stupid brutality, and the girl was a girl you loved and tortured and then ignored.”
He looked up at her with a small smile of contempt in his eyes. He would not trouble to answer this last charge.
Gudrun too was silent in exasperated contempt. Ursula was such an insufferable outsider, rushing in where angels would fear to tread. But then—fools must be suffered, if not gladly.
But Ursula was persistent too.
“As for your world of art and your world of reality,” she replied, “you have to separate the two, because you can’t bear to know what you are. You can’t bear to realise what a stock, stiff, hide-bound brutality you are really, so you say ‘it’s the world of art.’ The world of art is only the truth about the real world, that’s all—but you are too far gone to see it.”
She was white and trembling, intent. Gudrun and Loerke sat in stiff dislike of her. Gerald too, who had come up in the beginning of the speech, stood looking at her in complete disapproval and opposition. He felt she was undignified, she put a sort of vulgarity over the esotericism which gave man his last distinction. He joined his forces with the other two. They all three wanted her to go away. But she sat on in silence, her soul weeping, throbbing violently, her fingers twisting her handkerchief.
The others maintained a dead silence, letting the display of Ursula’s obtrusiveness pass by. Then Gudrun asked, in a voice that was quite cool and casual, as if resuming a casual conversation:
“Was the girl a model?”
“Nein, sie war kein Modell. Sie war eine kleine Malschülerin.”
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“An art-student!” replied Gudrun.
And how the situation revealed itself to her! She saw the girl art-student, unformed and of pernicious recklessness, too young, her straight flaxen hair cut short, hanging, just into her neck, curving inwards slightly, because it was rather thick; and Loerke, the well-known master-sculptor, and the girl, probably well-brought-up, and of good family, thinking herself so great to be his mistress. Oh, how well she knew the common callousness of it all. Dresden, Paris, or London, what did it matter? She knew it.
“Where is she now?” Ursula asked.
Loerke raised his shoulders, to convey his complete ignorance and indifference.
“That is already six years ago,” he said. “She will be twenty-three years old, no more good.”
Gerald had picked up the picture and was looking at it. It attracted him also. He saw on the pedestal, that the piece was called “Lady Godiva.”
“But this isn’t Lady Godiva,” he said, smiling good-humouredly. “She was the middle-aged wife of some Earl or other, who covered herself with her long hair.”
“À la Maud Allan,” said Gudrun with a mocking grimace.
“Why Maud Allan?” he replied. “Isn’t it so? I always thought the legend was that.”
“Yes, Gerald dear, I’m quite
sure
you’ve got the legend perfectly.”
She was laughing at him, with a little, mock-caressive contempt.
“To be sure, I’d rather see the woman than the hair,” he laughed in return.
“Wouldn’t you just!” mocked Gudrun.
Ursula rose and went away, leaving the three together.
Gudrun took the picture again from Gerald, and sat looking at it closely.
“Of course,” she said, turning to tease Loerke now, “you understood your little Malschülerin.”
He raised his eyebrows and his shoulders in a complacent shrug.
“The little girl?” asked Gerald, pointing to the figure.
Gudrun was sitting with the picture in her lap. She looked up at Gerald, full into his eyes, so that he seemed to be blinded.
“Didn’t
he understand her!” she said to Gerald, in a slightly mocking, humorous playfulness. “You’ve only to look at the feet—
aren’t
they darling, so pretty and tender—oh, they’re really wonderful, they are really—”
She lifted her eyes slowly, with a hot, flaming look into Loerke’s eyes. His soul was filled with her burning recognition, he seemed to grow more uppish and lordly.
Gerald looked at the small, sculptured feet. They were turned together, half covering each other in pathetic shyness and fear. He looked at them a long time, fascinated. Then, in some pain, he put the picture away from him. He felt full of barrenness.
“What was her name?” Gudrun asked Loerke.
“Annette von Weck,” Loerke replied reminiscent. “Ja, sie war hübsch.
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She was pretty—but she was tiresome. She was a nuisance,—not for a minute would she keep still—not until I’d slapped her hard and made her cry—then she’d sit for five minutes.”
He was thinking over the work, his work, the all important to him.
“Did you really slap her?” asked Gudrun, coolly.
He glanced back at her, reading her challenge.
“Yes, I did,” he said, nonchalant, “harder than I have ever beat anything in my life. I had to, I had to. It was the only way I got the work done.”
Gudrun watched him with large, dark-filled eyes, for some moments. She seemed to be considering his very soul. Then she looked down in silence.
“Why did you have such a young Godiva then?” asked Gerald. “She is so small, besides, on the horse—not big enough for it—such a child.”
A queer spasm went over Loerke’s face.
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t like them any bigger, any older. Then they are beautiful, at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—after that, they are no use to me.”
There was a moment’s pause.
“Why not?” asked Gerald.
Loerke shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t find them interesting—or beautiful—they are no good to me, for my work.”
“Do you mean to say a woman isn’t beautiful after she is twenty?” asked Gerald.
“For me, no. Before twenty, she is small and fresh and tender and slight. After that—let her be what she likes, she has nothing for me. The Venus of Milo is a bourgeoise—so are they all.”
“And you don’t care for women at all after twenty?” asked Gerald.
“They are no good to me, they are of no use in my art,” Loerke repeated impatiently. “I don’t find them beautiful.”
“You are an epicure,” said Gerald, with a slight sarcastic laugh.
“And what about men?” asked Gudrun suddenly.
“Yes, they are good at all ages,” replied Loerke. “A man should be big and powerful—whether he is old or young is of no account, so he has the size, something of massiveness and—and stupid form.”
Ursula went out alone into the world of pure, new snow. But the dazzling whiteness seemed to beat upon her till it hurt her, she felt the cold was slowly strangling her soul. Her head felt dazed and numb.
Suddenly she wanted to go away. It occurred to her like a miracle, that she might go away into another world. She had felt so doomed up here in the eternal snow, as if there were no beyond.
Now suddenly, as by a miracle she remembered that away beyond, below her, lay the dark fruitful earth, that towards the south there were stretches of land dark with orange trees and cypress, grey with olives, that ilex trees lifted wonderful plumy tufts in shadow against a blue sky. Miracle of miracles!—this utterly silent, frozen world of the mountain tops was not universal! One might leave it and have done with it. One might go away.
She wanted to realise the miracle at once. She wanted at this instant to have done with the snow-world, the terrible, static ice-built mountain tops. She wanted to see the dark earth, to smell its earthly fecundity, to see the patient wintry vegetation, to feel the sunshine touch a response in the buds.
She went back gladly to the house, full of hope. Birkin was reading, lying in bed.
“Rupert,” she said, bursting in on him. “I want to go away.”
He looked up at her slowly.
“Do you?” he replied mildly.
She sat by him and put her arms round his neck. It surprised her that he was so little surprised.
“Don’t
you?”
she asked troubled.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” he said. “But I’m sure I do.”