Birkin leaned on the fence. A cow was breathing wet hotness on his hand.
“Pretty cattle, very pretty,” said Marshall, one of the brothers-in-law. “They give the best milk you can have.”
“Yes,” said Birkin.
“Eh, my little beauty, eh, my beauty!” said Marshall, in a queer high falsetto voice, that caused the other man to have convulsions of laughter in his stomach.
“Who won the race, Lupton?” he called to the bridegroom, to hide the fact that he was laughing.
The bridegroom took his cigar from his mouth.
“The race?” he exclaimed. Then a rather thin smile came over his face. He did not want to say anything about the flight to the church door. “We got there together. At least she touched first, but I had my hand on her shoulder.”
“What’s this?” asked Gerald.
Birkin told him about the race of the bride and the bridegroom.
“H’m!” said Gerald, in disapproval. “What made you late then?”
“Lupton would talk about the immortality of the soul,” said Birkin, “and then he hadn’t got a button-hook.”
“Oh God!” cried Marshall. “The immortality of the soul on your wedding day! Hadn’t you got anything better to occupy your mind?”
“What’s wrong with it?” asked the bridegroom, a clean-shaven naval man, flushing sensitively.
“Sounds as if you were going to be executed instead of married. The immortality of the soul!” repeated the brother-in-law, with most killing emphasis.
But he fell quite flat.
“And what did you decide?” asked Gerald, at once pricking up his ears at the thought of a metaphysical discussion.
“You don’t want a soul to-day, my boy,” said Marshall. “It’d be in your road.”
“Christ! Marshall, go and talk to somebody else,” cried Gerald, with sudden impatience.
“By God, I’m willing,” said Marshall, in a temper. “Too much bloody soul and talk altogether—”
He withdrew in a dudgeon, Gerald staring after him with angry eyes, that grew gradually calm and amiable as the stoutly-built form of the other man passed into the distance.
“There’s one thing, Lupton,” said Gerald, turning suddenly to the bridegroom. “Laura won’t have brought such a fool into the family as Lottie did.”
“Comfort yourself with that,” laughed Birkin.
“I take no notice of them,” laughed the bridegroom.
“What about this race then—who began it?” Gerald asked.
“We were late. Laura was at the top of the churchyard steps when our cab came up. She saw Lupton bolting towards her. And she fled.—But why do you look so cross? Does it hurt your sense of the family dignity?”
“It does, rather,” said Gerald. “If you’re doing a thing, do it properly, and if you’re not going to do it properly, leave it alone.”
“Very nice aphorism,” said Birkin.
“Don’t you agree?” asked Gerald.
“Quite,” said Birkin. “Only it bores me rather, when you become aphoristic.”
“Damn you, Rupert, you want all the aphorisms your own way,” said Gerald.
“No. I want them out of the way, and you’re always shoving them in it.”
Gerald smiled grimly at this humourism. Then he made a little gesture of dismissal, with his eyebrows.
“You don’t believe in having any standard of behavior at all, do you?” he challenged Birkin, censoriously.
“Standard—no. I hate standards. But they’re necessary for the common ruck. Anybody who is anything can just be himself and do as he likes.”
“But what do you mean by being himself?” said Gerald. “Is that an aphorism or a cliché?”
“I mean just doing what you want to do. I think it was perfect good form in Laura to bolt from Lupton to the church door. It was almost a masterpiece in good form. It’s the hardest thing in the world to act spontaneously on one’s impulses—and it’s the only really gentlemanly thing to do—provided you’re fit to do it.”
“You don’t expect me to take you seriously, do you?” asked Gerald.
“Yes, Gerald, you’re one of the very few people I do expect that f”.
“Then I’m afraid I can’t come up to your expectations here at any rate.—You think people should just do as they like.”
“I think they always do. But I should like them to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. And they only like to do the collective thing.”
“And I,” said Gerald grimly, “shouldn’t like to be in a world of people who acted individually and spontaneously, as you call it. We should have everybody cutting everybody else’s throat in five minutes.”
“That means you would like to be cutting everybody’s throat,” said Birkin.
“How does that follow?” asked Gerald crossly.
“No man,” said Birkin, “cuts another man’s throat unless he wants to cut it, and unless the other man wants it cut. This is a complete truth. It takes two people to make a murderer: a murder and a murderee. And a murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is murderable is a man who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered.”
“Sometimes you talk pure nonsense,” said Gerald to Birkin. “As a matter of fact, none of us wants our throat cut and most other people would like to cut it for us—some time or other—”
“It’s a nasty view of things, Gerald,” said Birkin, “and no wonder you are afraid of yourself and your own unhappiness.”
“How am I afraid of myself?” said Gerald; “and I don’t think I am unhappy.”
“You seem to have a lurking desire to have your gizzard slit, and imagine every man has his knife up his sleeve for you,” Birkin said.
“How do you make that out?” said Gerald.
“From you,” said Birkin.
There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very near to love. It was always the same between them; always their talk brought them into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous intimacy which was either hate or love, or both. They parted with apparent unconcern, as if their going apart were a trivial occurrence. And they really kept it to the level of trivial occurrence. Yet the heart of each burned from the other. They burned with each other, inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their relationship a casual free and easy friendship, they were not going to be so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart-burning between them. They had not the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful but suppressed friendliness.
CHAPTER III
Class-Room
A SCHOOL-DAY WAS DRAWING to a close. In the class-room the last lesson was in progress, peaceful and still. It was elementary botany. The desks were littered with catkins, hazel and willow, which the children had been sketching. But the sky had come over dark, as the end of the afternoon approached: there was scarcely light to draw any more. Ursula stood in front of the class, leading the children by questions to understand the structure and the meaning of the catkins.
A heavy copper-coloured beam of light came in at the west window, gilding the outlines of the children’s heads with red gold, and falling on the wall opposite in a rich, ruddy illumination. Ursula, however, was scarcely conscious of it. She was busy, the end of the day was here, the work went on as a peaceful tide that is at flood, hushed to retire.
This day had gone by like so many more, in an activity that was like a trance. At the end there was a little haste, to finish what was in hand. She was pressing the children with questions, so that they should know all they were to know, by the time the gong went. She stood in shadow in front of the class, with catkins in her hand, and she leaned towards the children, absorbed in the passion of instruction.
She heard, but did not notice the click of the door. Suddenly she started. She saw, in the shaft of ruddy, copper-coloured light near her, the
face of a man. It was gleaming like fire, watching her, waiting for her to be aware. It startled her terribly. She thought she was going to faint. All her suppressed, subconscious fear sprang into being, with anguish.
“Did I startle you?” said Birkin, shaking hands with her. “I thought you had heard me come in.”
“No,” she faltered, scarcely able to speak. He laughed, saying he was sorry. She wondered why it amused him.
“It is so dark,” he said. “Shall we have the light?”
And moving aside, he switched on the strong electric lights. The class-room was distinct and hard, a strange place after the soft dim magic that filled it before he came. Birkin turned curiously to look at Ursula. Her eyes were round and wondering, bewildered, her mouth quivered slightly. She looked like one who is suddenly wakened. There was a living, tender beauty, like a tender light of dawn shining from her face. He looked at her with a new pleasure, feeling gay in his heart, irresponsible.
“You are doing catkins?” he asked, picking up a piece of hazel from a scholar’s desk in front of him. “Are they as far out as this? I hadn’t noticed them this year.”
He looked absorbedly at the tassel of hazel in his hand.
“The red ones too!” he said, looking at the flickers of crimson that came from the female bud.
Then he went in among the desks, to see the scholars’ books. Ursula watched his intent progress. There was a stillness in his motion that hushed the activities of her heart. She seemed to be standing aside in arrested silence, watching him move in another, concentrated world. His presence was so quiet, almost like a vacancy in the corporate air.
Suddenly he lifted his face to her, and her heart quickened at the flicker of his voice.
“Give them some crayons, won’t you?” he said, “so that they can make the gynaeciousg flowers red, and the androgynous† yellow. I’d chalk them in plain, chalk in nothing else, merely the red and the yellow. Outline scarcely matters in this case. There is just the one fact to emphasize.”
“I haven’t any crayons,” said Ursula.
“There will be some somewhere—red and yellow, that’s all you want.”
Ursula sent out a boy on a quest.
“It will make the books untidy,” she said to Birkin, flushing deeply.
“Not very,” he said. “You must mark in these things obviously. It’s the fact you want to emphasize, not the subjective impression to record. What’s the fact?—red little spiky stigmas of the female flower, dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the other. Make a pictorial record of the fact, as a child does when drawing a face—two eyes, one nose, mouth with teeth—so—.” And he drew a figure on the blackboard.
At that moment another vision was seen through the glass panels of the door. It was Hermione Roddice. Birkin went and opened to her.
“I saw your car,” she said to him. “Do you mind my coming to find you? I wanted to see you when you were on duty.”
She looked at him for a long time, intimate and playful, then she gave a short little laugh. And then only she turned to Ursula, who, with all the class, had been watching the little scene between the lovers.
“How do you do, Miss Brangwen,” sang Hermione, in her low, odd, singing fashion, that sounded almost as if she were poking fun. “Do you mind my coming in?”
Her grey, almost sardonic eyes rested all the while on Ursula, as if summing her up.
“Oh no,” said Ursula.
“Are you sure?” repeated Hermione, with complete sangfroid, and an odd, half-bullying effrontery.
“Oh no, I like it awfully,” laughed Ursula, a little bit excited and bewildered, because Hermione seemed to be compelling her, coming very close to her, as if intimate with her; and yet, how could she be intimate?
This was the answer Hermione wanted. She turned satisfied to Birkin.
“What are you doing?” she sang, in her casual, inquisitive fashion.
“Catkins,” he replied.
“Really!” she said. “And what do you learn about them?” She spoke all the while in a mocking, half-teasing fashion, as if making game of the whole business. She picked up a twig of the catkin, piqued by Birkin’s attention to it.
She was a strange figure in the class-room, wearing a large, old cloak of greenish cloth, on which was a raised pattern of dull gold. The high collar, and the inside of the cloak was lined with dark fur. Beneath she had a dress of fine lavender-coloured cloth, trimmed with fur, and her hat was close-fitting, made of fur and of the dull, green-and-gold figured stuff. She was tall and strange, she looked as if she had come out of some new, bizarre picture.
“Do you know the little red ovary flowers, that produce the nuts? Have you ever noticed them?” he asked her. And he came close and pointed them out to her, on the sprig she held.
“No,” she replied. “What are they?”
“Those are the little seed-producing flowers, and the long catkins, they only produce pollen, to fertilise them.”
“Do they, do they!” repeated Hermione, looking closely.
“From those little red bits, the nuts come; if they receive pollen from the long danglers.”
“Little red flames, little red flames,” murmured Hermione to herself. And she remained for some moments looking only at the small buds out of which the red flickers of the stigma issued.
“Aren’t they beautiful? I think they’re so beautiful,” she said, moving close to Birkin, and pointing to the red filaments with her long, white finger.
“Had you never noticed them before?” he asked.
“No, never before,” she replied.
“And now you will always see them,” he said.
“Now I shall always see them,” she repeated. “Thank you so much for showing me. I think they’re so beautiful—little red flames—”
Her absorption was strange, almost rhapsodic. Both Birkin and Ursula were suspended. The little red pistillate flowers had some strange, almost mystic-passionate attraction for her.
The lesson was finished, the books were put away, at last the class was dismissed. And still Hermione sat at the table, with her chin in her hand, her elbow on the table, her long white face pushed up, not attending to anything. Birkin had gone to the window, and was looking from the brilliantly-lighted room on to the grey, colourless outside, where rain was noiselessly falling. Ursula put away her things in the cupboard.
At length Hermione rose and came near to her.
“Your sister has come home?” she said.
“Yes,” said Ursula.
“And does she like being back in Beldover?”
“No,” said Ursula.
“No, I wonder she can bear it. It takes all my strength to bear the ugliness of this district, when I stay here. Won’t you come and see me? Won’t you come with your sister to stay at Breadalby for a few days?—do—”
“Thank you very much,” said Ursula.
“Then I will write to you,” said Hermione. “You think your sister will come? I should be so glad. I think she is wonderful. I think some of her work is really wonderful. I have two water-wagtails, carved in wood, and painted—perhaps you have seen it?”
“No,” said Ursula.
“I think it is perfectly wonderful—like a flash of instinct—”
“Her little carvings are strange,” said Ursula.
“Perfectly beautiful—full of primitive passion—”
“Isn’t it queer that she always likes little things?—she must always work small things, that one can put between one’s hands, birds and tiny animals. She likes to look through the wrong end of the opera glasses, and see the world that way—why is it, do you think?”
Hermione looked down at Ursula with that long, detached scrutinising gaze that excited the younger woman.
“Yes,” said Hermione at length. “It is curious. The little things seem to be more subtle to her—”
“But they aren’t, are they? A mouse isn’t any more subtle than a lion, is it?”
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“Rupert, Rupert,” she sang mildly, calling him to her. He approached in silence.
“Are little things more subtle than big things?” she asked, with the odd grunt of laughter in her voice, as if she were making game of him in the question.
“Dunno,” he said.
“I hate subtleties,” said Ursula.
Hermione looked at her slowly.
“Do you?” she said.
“I always think they are a sign of weakness,” said Ursula, up in arms, as if her prestige were threatened.
Hermione took no notice. Suddenly her face puckered, her brow was knit with thought, she seemed twisted in trouble—some effort for utterance.
“Do you really think, Rupert,” she asked, as if Ursula were not present, “do you really think it is worth while? Do you really think the children are better for being roused to consciousness?”1
A dark flash went over his face, a silent fury. He was hollow-cheeked and pale, almost unearthly. And the woman, with her serious, conscience-harrowing question tortured him on the quick.
“They are not roused to consciousness,” he said. “Consciousness comes to them, willy-nilly.”
“But do you think they are better for having it quickened, stimulated? Isn’t it better that they should remain unconscious of the hazel, isn’t it better that they should see as a whole, without all this pulling to pieces, all this knowledge?”
“Would you rather, for yourself, know or not know, that the little red flowers are there, putting out for the pollen?” he asked harshly. His voice was brutal, scornful, cruel.
Hermione remained with her face lifted up, abstracted. He hung silent in irritation.
“I don’t know,” she replied, balancing mildly. “I don’t know.”
“But knowing is everything to you, it is all your life,” he broke out. She slowly looked at him.
“Is it?” she said.
“To know, that is your all, that is your life—you have only this, this knowledge,” he cried. “There is only one tree, there is only one fruit, in your mouth.”
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