When Ursula had gone, Gudrun felt her own existence had become stark and elemental. She went and crouched alone in her bedroom, looking out of the window at the big, flashing stars. In front was the faint shadow of the mountain-knot. That was the pivot. She felt strange and inevitable, as if she were centered upon the pivot of all existence, there was no further reality.
Presently Gerald opened the door. She knew he would not be long before he came. She was rarely alone, he pressed upon her like a frost, deadening her.
“Are you alone in the dark?” he said. And she could tell by his tone he resented it, he resented this isolation she had drawn round herself. Yet, feeling static and inevitable, she was kind towards him.
“Would you like to light the candle?” she asked.
He did not answer, but came and stood behind her, in the darkness.
“Look,” she said, “at that lovely star up there. Do you know its name?”
He crouched beside her, to look through the low window.
“No,” he said. “It is very fine.”
“Isn’t
it beautiful! Do you notice how it darts different coloured fires—it flashes really superbly—”
They remained in silence. With a mute, heavy gesture she put her hand on his knee, and took his hand.
“Are you regretting Ursula?” he asked.
“No, not at all,” she said. Then, in a slow mood, she asked:
“How much do you love me?”
He stiffened himself further against her.
“How much do you think I do?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“But what is your opinion?” he asked.
There was a pause. At length, in the darkness, came her voice, hard and indifferent:
“Very little indeed,” she said coldly, almost flippant.
His heart went icy at the sound of her voice.
“Why don’t I love you?” he asked, as if admitting the truth of her accusation, yet hating her for it.
“I don’t know why you don’t—I’ve been good to you. You were in
a fearful
state when you came to me.”
Her heart was beating to suffocate her, yet she was strong and unrelenting.
“When was I in a fearful state?” he asked.
“When you first came to me. I
had
to take pity on you. But it was never love.”
It was that statement “It was never love,” which sounded in his ears with madness.
“Why must you repeat it so often, that there is no love?” he said in a voice strangled with rage.
“Well you don’t
think
you love, do you?” she asked.
He was silent with cold passion of anger.
“You don’t think you
can
love me, do you?” she repeated almost with a sneer.
“No,” he said.
“You know you never
have
loved me, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what you mean by the word ‘love,’ ” he replied.
“Yes, you do. You know all right that you have never loved me. Have you, do you think?”
“No,” he said, prompted by some barren spirit of truthfulness and obstinacy.
“And you never
will
love me,” she said finally, “will you?”
There was a diabolic coldness in her, too much to bear.
“No,” he said.
“Then,” she replied, “what have you against me?”
He was silent in cold, frightened rage and despair. “If only I could kill her,” his heart was whispering repeatedly. “If only I could kill her—I should be free.”
It seemed to him that death was the only severing of this Gordian knot.
“Why do you torture me?” he said.
She flung her arms round his neck.
“Ah, I don’t want to torture you,” she said pityingly, as if she were comforting a child. The impertinence made his veins go cold, he was insensible. She held her arms round his neck, in a triumph of pity. And her pity for him was as cold as stone, its deepest motive was hate of him, and fear of his power over her, which she must always counterfoil.
“Say you love me,” she pleaded. “Say you will love me for ever—won’t you—won’t you?”
But it was her voice only that coaxed him. Her senses were entirely apart from him, cold and destructive of him. It was her overbearing
will
that insisted.
“Won’t you say you’ll love me always?” she coaxed. “Say it, even if it isn’t true—say it Gerald, do.”
“I will love you always,” he repeated, in real agony, forcing the words out.
She gave him a quick kiss.
“Fancy your actually having said it,” she said with a touch of raillery.
He stood as if he had been beaten.
“Try to love me a little more, and to want me a little less,” she said, in a half contemptuous, half coaxing tone.
The darkness seemed to be swaying in waves across his mind, great waves of darkness plunging across his mind. It seemed to him he was degraded at the very quick, made of no account.
“You mean you don’t want me?” he said.
“You are so insistent, and there is so little grace in you, so little fineness. You are so crude. You break me—you only waste me—it is horrible to me.”
“Horrible to you?” he repeated.
“Yes. Don’t you think I might have a room to myself, now Ursula has gone? You can say you want a dressing-room.”
“You do as you like—you can leave altogether if you like,” he managed to articulate.
“Yes, I know that,” she replied. “So can you. You can leave me whenever you like—without notice even.”
The great tides of darkness were swinging across his mind, he could hardly stand upright. A terrible weariness overcame him, he felt he must lie on the floor. Dropping off his clothes, he got into bed, and lay like a man suddenly overcome by drunkenness, the darkness lifting and plunging as if he were lying upon a black, giddy sea. He lay still in this strange, horrific reeling for some time, purely unconscious.
At length she slipped from her own bed and came over to him. He remained rigid, his back to her. He was all but unconscious.
She put her arms round his terrifying, insentient body, and laid her cheek against his hard shoulder.
“Gerald,” she whispered. “Gerald.”
There was no change in him. She caught him against her. She pressed her breasts against his shoulders, she kissed his shoulder, through the sleeping jacket. Her mind wondered, over his rigid, unliving body. She was bewildered, and insistent, only her will was set for him to speak to her.
“Gerald, my dear!” she whispered, bending over him, kissing his ear.
Her warm breath playing, flying rhythmically over his ear, seemed to relax the tension. She could feel his body gradually relaxing a little, losing its terrifying, unnatural rigidity. Her hands clutched his limbs, his muscles, going over him spasmodically.
The hot blood began to flow again through his veins, his limbs relaxed.
“Turn round to me,” she whispered, forlorn with insistence and triumph.
So at last he was given again, warm and flexible. He turned and gathered her in his arms. And feeling her soft against him, so perfectly and wondrously soft and recipient, his arms tightened on her. She was as if crushed, powerless in him. His brain seemed hard and invincible now like a jewel, there was no resisting him.
His passion was awful to her, tense and ghastly, and impersonal, like a destruction, ultimate. She felt it would kill her. She was being killed.
“My God, my God,” she cried, in anguish, in his embrace, feeling her life being killed within her. And when he was kissing her, soothing her, her breath came slowly, as if she were really spent, dying.
“Shall I die, shall I die?” she repeated to herself.
And in the night, and in him, there was no answer to the question.
And yet, next day, the fragment of her which was not destroyed remained intact and hostile, she did not go away, she remained to finish the holiday, admitting nothing. He scarcely ever left her alone, but followed her like a shadow, he was like a doom upon her, a continual “thou shalt,” “thou shalt not.” Sometimes it was he who seemed strongest, whilst she was almost gone, creeping near the earth like a spent wind; sometimes it was the reverse. But always it was this eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified because the other was nulled.
“In the end,” she said to herself, “I shall go away from him.”
“I can be free of her,” he said to himself in his paroxysms of suf fering.
And he set himself to be free. He even prepared to go away, to leave her in the lurch. But for the first time there was a flaw in his will.
“Where shall I go?” he asked himself.
“Can’t you be self-sufficient?” he replied to himself, putting himself upon his pride.
“Self-sufficient!” he repeated.
It seemed to him that Gudrun was sufficient unto herself, closed round and completed, like a thing in a case. In the calm, static reason of his soul, he recognised this, and admitted it was her right, to be closed round upon herself, self-complete, without desire. He realised it, he admitted it, it only needed one last effort on his own part, to win for himself the same completeness. He knew that it only needed one convulsion of his will for him to be able to turn upon himself also, to close upon himself as a stone fixes upon itself, and is impervious, self-completed, a thing isolated.
This knowledge threw him into a terrible chaos. Because, however much he might mentally
will
to be immune and self-complete, the desire for this state was lacking, and he could not create it. He could see that, to exist at all, he must be perfectly free of Gudrun, leave her if she wanted to be left, demand nothing of her, have no claim upon her.
But then, to have no claim upon her, he must stand by himself, in sheer nothingness. And his brain turned to nought at the idea. It was a state of nothingness. On the other hand, he might give in, and fawn to her. Or, finally, he might kill her. Or he might become just indifferent, purposeless, dissipated, momentaneous. But his nature was too serious, not gay enough or subtle enough for mocking licentiousness.
A strange rent had been torn in him; like a victim that is torn open and given to the heavens, so he had been torn apart and given to Gudrun. How should he close again? This wound, this strange, infinitely-sensitive opening of his soul, where he was exposed, like an open flower, to all the universe, and in which he was given to his complement, the other, the unknown, this wound, this disclosure, this unfolding of his own covering, leaving him incomplete, limited, unfinished, like an open flower under the sky, this was his cruellest joy. Why then should he forgo it? Why should he close up and become impervious, immune, like a partial thing in a sheath, when he had broken forth, like a seed that has germinated, to issue forth in being, embracing the unrealised heavens.
He would keep the unfinished bliss of his own yearning even through the torture she inflicted upon him. A strange obstinacy possessed him. He would not go away from her whatever she said or did. A strange, deathly yearning carried him along with her. She was the determinating influence of his very being, though she treated him with contempt, repeated rebuffs, and denials, still he would never be gone, since in being near her, even, he felt the quickening, the going forth in him, the release, the knowledge of his own limitation and the magic of the promise, as well as the mystery of his own destruction and annihilation.
She tortured the open heart of him even as he turned to her. And she was tortured herself. It may have been her will was stronger. She felt, with horror, as if he tore at the bud of her heart, tore it open, like an irreverent persistent being. Like a boy who pulls off a fly’s wings, or tears open a bud to see what is in the flower, he tore at her privacy, at her very life, he would destroy her as an immature bud, torn open, is destroyed.
She might open towards him, a long while hence, in her dreams, when she was a pure spirit. But now she was not to be violated and ruined. She closed against him fiercely.
They climbed together, at evening, up the high slope, to see the sun set. In the finely breathing, keen wind they stood and watched the yellow sun sink in crimson and disappear. Then in the east the peaks and ridges glowed with living rose, incandescent like immortal flowers against a brown-purple sky, a miracle, whilst down below the world was a bluish shadow, and above, like an annunciation, hovered a rosy transport in mid air.
To her it was so beautiful, it was a delirium, she wanted to gather the glowing, eternal peaks to her breast, and die. He saw them, saw they were beautiful. But there arose no clamour in his breast, only a bitterness that was visionary in itself. He wished the peaks were grey and unbeautiful, so that she should not get her support from them. Why did she betray the two of them so terribly, in embracing the glow of the evening? Why did she leave him standing there, with the ice-wind blowing through his heart, like death, to gratify herself among the rosy snow-tips?
“What does the twilight matter?” he said. “Why do you grovel before it? Is it so important to you?”
She winced in violation and in fury.
“Go away,” she cried, “and leave me to it. It is beautiful, beautiful,” she sang in strange, rhapsodic tones. “It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. Don’t try to come between it and me. Take yourself away, you are out of place—”
He stood back a little, and left her standing there, statue-like, transported into the mystic glowing east. Already the rose was fading, large white stars were flashing out. He waited. He would forgo everything but the yearning.
“That was the most perfect thing I have ever seen,” she said in cold, brutal tones, when at last she turned round to him. “It amazes me that you should want to destroy it. If you can’t see it yourself, why try to debar me?” But in reality, he had destroyed it for her, she was straining after a dead effect.