Oh, why wasn’t somebody kind to her? Why wasn’t there somebody who would take her in their arms, and hold her to their breast, and give her rest, pure, deep, healing rest. Oh, why wasn’t there somebody to take her in their arms and fold her safe and perfect, for sleep. She wanted so much this perfect enfolded sleep. She lay always so unsheathed in sleep. She would lie always unsheathed in sleep, unrelieved, unsaved. Oh, how could she bear it, this endless unrelief, this eternal unrelief.
Gerald! Could he fold her in his arms and sheathe her in sleep? Ha! He needed putting to sleep himself—poor Gerald. That was all he needed. What did he do, he made the burden for her greater, the burden of her sleep was the more intolerable, when he was there. He was an added weariness upon her unripening nights, her unfruitful slumbers. Perhaps he got some repose from her. Perhaps he did. Perhaps this was what he was always dogging her for, like a child that is famished, crying for the breast. Perhaps this was the secret of his passion, his for ever unquenched desire for her—that he needed her to put him to sleep, to give him repose.
What then! Was she his mother? Had she asked for a child, whom she must nurse through the nights, for her lover. She despised him, she despised him, she hardened her heart. An infant crying in the night, this Don Juan.
O-oh, but how she hated the infant crying in the night. She would murder it gladly. She would stifle it and bury it, as Hetty Sorrell did. No doubt Hetty Sorrell’s infant cried in the night—no doubt Arthur Donnithorne’s infant would. Ha—the Arthur Donnithornes, the Geralds of this world. So manly by day, yet all the while, such a crying of infants in the night. Let them turn into mechanisms, let them. Let them become instruments, pure machines, pure wills, that work like clock-work, in perpetual repetition. Let them be this, let them be taken up entirely in their work, let them be perfect parts of a great machine, having a slumber of constant repetition. Let Gerald manage his firm. There he would be satisfied, as satisfied as a wheel-barrow that goes backwards and forwards along a plank all day—she had seen it.
The wheel-barrow—the one humble wheel—the unit of the firm. Then the cart, with two wheels; then the truck, with four; then the donkey-engine, with eight, then the winding-engine, with sixteen, and so on, till it came to the miner, with a thousand wheels, and then the electrician, with three thousand, and the underground manager, with twenty thousand, and the general manager with a hundred thousand little wheels working away to complete his make-up, and then Gerald, with a million wheels and cogs and axles.
Poor Gerald, such a lot of little wheels to his make-up! He was more intricate than a chronometer-watch. But oh heavens, what weariness! What weariness, God above! A chronometer-watch—a beetle—her soul fainted with utter ennui, from the thought. So many wheels to count and consider and calculate! Enough, enough—there was an end to man’s capacity for complications, even. Or perhaps there was no end.
Meanwhile Gerald sat in his room, reading. When Gudrun was gone, he was left stupefied with arrested desire. He sat on the side of the bed for an hour, stupefied, little strands of consciousness appearing and reappearing. But he did not move, for a long time he remained inert, his head dropped on his breast.
Then he looked up and realised that he was going to bed. He was cold. Soon he was lying down in the dark.
But what he could not bear was the darkness. The solid darkness confronting him drove him mad. So he rose, and made a light. He remained seated for a while, staring in front. He did not think of Gudrun, he did not think of anything.
Then suddenly he went downstairs for a book. He had all his life been in terror of the nights that should come, when he could not sleep. He knew that this would be too much for him, to have to face nights of sleeplessness and of horrified watching the hours.
So he sat for hours in bed, like a statue, reading. His mind, hard and acute, read on rapidly, his body understood nothing. In a state of rigid unconsciousness, he read on through the night, till morning, when, weary and disgusted in spirit, disgusted most of all with himself, he slept for two hours.
Then he got up, hard and full of energy. Gudrun scarcely spoke to him, except at coffee when she said:
“I shall be leaving to-morrow.”
“We will go together as far as Innsbruck, for appearance’s sake?” he asked.
“Perhaps,” she said.
She said “Perhaps” between the sips of her coffee. And the sound of her taking her breath in the word, was nauseous to him. He rose quickly to be away from her.
He went and made arrangements for the departure on the morrow. Then, taking some food, he set out for the day on the skis. Perhaps, he said to the Wirt, he would go up to the Marienhutte, perhaps to the village below.
To Gudrun this day was full of a promise like spring. She felt an approaching release, a new fountain of life rising up in her. It gave her pleasure to dawdle through her packing, it gave her pleasure to dip into books, to try on her different garments, to look at herself in the glass. She felt a new lease of life was come upon her, and she was happy like a child, very attractive and beautiful to everybody, with her soft, luxuriant figure, and her happiness. Yet underneath was death itself.
In the afternoon she had to go out with Loerke. Her to-morrow was perfectly vague before her. This was what gave her pleasure. She might be going to England with Gerald, she might be going to Dresden with Loerke, she might be going to Munich, to a girl-friend she had there. Anything might come to pass on the morrow. And today was the white, snowy iridescent threshold of all possibility. All possibility—that was the charm to her, the lovely, iridescent, indefinite charm,—pure illusion. All possibility—because death was inevitable, and nothing was possible but death.
She did not want things to materialise, to take any definite shape. She wanted, suddenly, at one moment of the journey to-morrow, to be wafted into an utterly new course, by some utterly unforeseen event, or motion. So that, although she wanted to go out with Loerke for the last time into the snow, she did not want to be serious or business-like.
And Loerke was not a serious figure. In his brown velvet cap, that made his head as round as a chestnut, with the brown-velvet flaps loose and wild over his ears, and a wisp of elf-like, thin black hair blowing above his full, elf-like dark eyes, the shiny, transparent brown skin crinkling up into odd grimaces on his small-featured face, he looked an odd little boy-man, a bat. But in his figure, in the greeny loden suit, he looked
chetif
and puny, still strangely different from the rest.
He had taken a little toboggan, for the two of them, and they trudged between the blinding slopes of snow, that burned their now hardening faces, laughing in an endless sequence of quips and jests and polyglot fancies. The fancies were the reality to both of them, they were both so happy, tossing about the little coloured balls of verbal humour and whimsicality. Their natures seemed to sparkle in full interplay, they were enjoying a pure game. And they wanted to keep it on the level of a game, their relationship: such a fine game.
Loerke did not take the tobogganning very seriously. He put no fire and intensity into it, as Gerald did. Which pleased Gudrun. She was weary, oh so weary of Gerald’s gripped intensity of physical motion. Loerke let the sledge go wildly, and gaily, like a flying leaf, and when, at a bend, he pitched both her and him out into the snow, he only waited for them both to pick themselves up unhurt off the keen white ground, to be laughing and pert as a pixie. She knew he would be making ironical, playful remarks as he wandered in hell—if he were in the humour. And that pleased her immensely. It seemed like a rising above the dreariness of actuality, the monotony of contingencies.
They played till the sun went down, in pure amusement, careless and timeless. Then, as the little sledge twirled riskily to rest at the bottom of the slope:
“Wait!” he said suddenly, and he produced from somewhere a large thermos flask, a packet of Keks, and a bottle of Schnapps.
ds
“Oh Loerke,” she cried. “What an inspiration! What a
comble de joie
dt
indeed. What is the Schnapps?”
He looked at it, and laughed.
“No! From the bilberries under the snow. Doesn’t it look as if it were distilled from snow. Can you—” she sniffed, and sniffed at the bottle—“can you smell bilberries? Isn’t it wonderful? It is exactly as if one could smell them through the snow.”
She stamped her foot lightly on the ground. He kneeled down and whistled, and put his ear to the snow. As he did so his black eyes twinkled up.
“Ha! Ha!” she laughed, warmed by the whimsical way in which he mocked at her verbal extravagances. He was always teasing her, mocking her ways. But as he in his mockery was even more absurd than she in her extravagancies, what could one do but laugh and feel liberated.
She could feel their voices, hers and his, ringing silvery like bells in the frozen, motionless air of the first twilight. How perfect it was, how very perfect it was, this silvery isolation and interplay.
She sipped the hot coffee, whose fragrance flew around them like bees murmuring around flowers, in the snowy air, she drank tiny sips of the Heidelbeerwasser,
dv
she ate the cold, sweet, creamy wafers. How good everything was! How perfect everything tasted and smelled and sounded, here in this utter stillness of snow and falling twilight.
“You are going away to-morrow?” his voice came at last.
“Yes.”
There was a pause, when the evening seemed to rise in its silent, ringing pallor infinitely high, to the infinite which was near at hand.
“Wobin?”
That was the question—
wohin?
Whither?
Wohin?
What a lovely word! She never wanted it answered. Let it chime for ever.
“I don’t know,” she said, smiling at him.
He caught the smile from her.
“One never does,” he said.
“One never does,” she repeated.
There was a silence, wherein he ate biscuits rapidly, as a rabbit eats leaves.
“But,” he laughed, “where will you take a ticket to?”
“Oh heaven!” she cried. “One must take a ticket.”
Here was a blow. She saw herself at the wicket, at the railway station. Then a relieving thought came to her. She breathed freely.
“But one needn’t go,” she cried.
“Certainly not,” he said.
“I mean one needn’t go where one’s ticket says.”
That struck him. One might take a ticket, so as not to travel to the destination it indicated. One might break off, and avoid the destination. A point located. That was an idea!
“Then take a ticket to London,” he said. “One should never go there.”
“Right,” she answered.
He poured a little coffee into a tin can.
“You won’t tell me where you will go?” he asked.
“Really and truly,” she said, “I don’t know. It depends which way the wind blows.”
He looked at her quizzically, then he pursed up his lips, like Zephyrus, blowing across the snow.
“It goes towards Germany,” he said.
“I believe so,” she laughed.
Suddenly, they were aware of a vague white figure near them. It was Gerald. Gudrun’s heart leapt in sudden terror, profound terror. She rose to her feet.
“They told me where you were,” came Gerald’s voice, like a judgment in the whitish air of twilight.
“Maria!
You come like a ghost,” exclaimed Loerke.
Gerald did not answer. His presence was unnatural and ghostly to them.
Loerke shook the nask—then he held it inverted over the snow. Only a few brown drops trickled out.
“All gone!” he said.
To Gerald, the smallish, odd figure of the German was distinct and objective, as if seen through field glasses. And he disliked the small figure exceedingly, he wanted it removed.
Then Loerke rattled the box which held the biscuits.
“Biscuits there are still,” he said.
And reaching from his seated posture in the sledge, he handed them to Gudrun. She fumbled, and took one. He would have held them to Gerald, but Gerald so definitely did not want to be offered a biscuit, that Loerke, rather vaguely, put the box aside. Then he took up the small bottle, and held it to the light.
“Also there is some Schnapps,” he said to himself.
Then suddenly, he elevated the bottle gallantly in the air, a strange grotesque figure leaning towards Gudrun, and said: “Gnädiges Fräulein,” he said, “wohl—”
There was a crack, the bottle was flying, Loerke had started back, the three stood quivering in violent emotion.
Loerke turned to Gerald, a devilish leer on his bright-skinned face.
“Well done!” he said, in a satirical demoniac frenzy. “C’est le sport, sans doute.”
dw
The next instant he was sitting ludicrously in the snow, Gerald’s fist having rung against the side of his head. But Loerke pulled himself together, rose, quivering, looking full at Gerald, his body weak and furtive, but his eyes demoniacal with satire.
But he flinched, as, in a black flash Gerald’s fist came upon him, banged into the other side of his head, and sent him aside like a broken straw.
But Gudrun moved forward. She raised her clenched hand high, and brought it down, with a great downward stroke on to the face and on to the breast of Gerald.
A great astonishment burst upon him, as if the air had broken. Wide, wide his soul opened, in wonder, feeling the pain. Then it laughed, turning, with strong hands outstretched, at last to take the apple of his desire. At last he could finish his desire.
He took the throat of Gudrun between his hands, that were hard and indomitably powerful. And her throat was beautifully, so beautifully soft, save that, within, he could feel the slippery chords of her life. And this he crushed, this he could crush. What bliss! Oh what bliss, at last, what satisfaction, at last! The pure zest of satisfaction filled his soul. He was watching the unconsciousness come into her swollen face, watching the eyes roll back. How ugly she was! What a fulfilment, what a satisfaction! How good this was, oh how good it was, what a God-given gratification, at last! He was unconscious of her fighting and struggling. The struggling was her reciprocal lustful passion in this embrace, the more violent it became, the greater the frenzy of delight, till the zenith was reached, the crisis, the struggle was overborne, her movement became softer, appeased.