“How fearful!” cried Gudrun. “But it is long ago?”
“Oh, yes, they were quite boys,” said Ursula. “I think it is one of the most horrible stories I know.”
“And he, of course, did not know that the gun was loaded?”
“Yes. You see it was an old thing that had been lying in the stable for years. Nobody dreamed it would ever go off, and of course, no one imagined it was loaded. But isn’t it dreadful, that it should happen?”
“Frightful!” cried Gudrun. “And isn’t it horrible too to think of such a thing happening to one, when one was a child, and having to carry the responsibility of it all through one’s life. Imagine it, two boys playing together—then this comes upon them, for no reason whatever—out of the air. Ursula, it’s very frightening! Oh, it’s one of the things I can’t bear. Murder, that is thinkable, because there’s a will behind it. But a thing like that to happen to one—”
“Perhaps there was an unconscious will behind it,” said Ursula. “This playing at killing has some primitive desire for killing in it, don’t you think?”
“Desire!” said Gudrun, coldly, stiffening a little. “I can’t see that they were even playing at killing. I suppose one boy said to the other, ‘You look down the barrel while I pull the trigger, and see what happens.’ It seems to me the purest form of accident.”
“No,” said Ursula. “I couldn’t pull the trigger of the emptiest gun in the world, not if someone were looking down the barrel. One instinctively doesn’t do it—one can’t.”
Gudrun was silent for some moments, in sharp disagreement.
“Of course,” she said coldly. “If one is a woman, and grown up, one’s instinct prevents one. But I cannot see how that applies to a couple of boys playing together.”
Her voice was cold and angry.
“Yes,” persisted Ursula. At that moment they heard a woman’s voice a few yards off say loudly:
“Oh, damn the thing!” They went forward and saw Laura Crich and Hermione Roddice in the field on the other side of the hedge, and Laura Crich struggling with the gate, to get out. Ursula at once hurried up and helped to lift the gate.
“Thanks so much,” said Laura, looking up flushed and amazon-like, yet rather confused. “It isn’t right on the hinges.”
“No,” said Ursula. “And they’re so heavy.”
“Surprising!” cried Laura.
“How do you do,” sang Hermione, from out of the field, the moment she could make her voice heard. “It’s nice now. Are you going for a walk? Yes. Isn’t the young green beautiful? So beautiful—quite burning. Good morning—good morning—you’ll come and see me? Thank you so much—next week—yes—good-bye, g-o-o-d-b-y-e.”
Gudrun and Ursula stood and watched her slowly waving her head up and down, and waving her hand slowly in dismissal, smiling a strange affected smile, making a tall queer, frightening figure, with her heavy fair hair slipping to her eyes. Then they moved off, as if they had been dismissed like inferiors. The four women parted.
As soon as they had gone far enough, Ursula said, her cheeks burning:
“I do think she’s impudent.”
“Who, Hermione Roddice?” asked Gudrun. “Why?”
“The way she treats one—impudence!”
“Why, Ursula, what did you notice that was so impudent?” asked Gudrun rather coldly.
“Her whole manner. Oh, it’s impossible, the way she tries to bully one. Pure bullying. She’s an impudent woman. ‘You’ll come and see me,’ as if we should be falling over ourselves for the privilege.”
“I can’t understand, Ursula, what you are so much put out about,” said Gudrun, in some exasperation. “One knows those women are impudent—these free women who have emancipated themselves from the aristocracy.”
“But it is so unnecessary—so vulgar,” cried Ursula.
“No, I don’t see it. And if I did—pour moi, elle n’existe pas.l I don’t grant her the power to be impudent to me.”
“Do you think she likes you?” asked Ursula.
“Well, no, I shouldn’t think she did.”
“Then why does she ask you to go to Breadalby and stay with her?”
Gudrun lifted her shoulders in a low shrug.
“After all, she’s got the sense to know we’re not just the ordinary run,” said Gudrun. “Whatever she is, she’s not a fool. And I’d rather have somebody I detested, than the ordinary woman who keeps to her own set. Hermione Roddice does risk herself in some respects.”
Ursula pondered this for a time.
“I doubt it,” she replied. “Really she risks nothing. I suppose we ought to admire her for knowing she can invite us—school teachers—and risk nothing.”
“Precisely!” said Gudrun. “Think of the myriads of women that daren’t do it. She makes the most of her privileges—that’s something. I suppose, really, we should do the same, in her place.”
“No,” said Ursula. “No. It would bore me. I couldn’t spend my time playing her games. It’s infra dig.”
The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything that came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against the other.
“Of course,” cried Ursula suddenly, “she ought to thank her stars if we will go and see her. You are perfectly beautiful, a thousand times more beautiful than ever she is or was, and to my thinking, a thousand times more beautifully dressed, for she never looks fresh and natural, like a flower, always old, thought-out; and we are more intelligent than most people.”
“Undoubtedly!” said Gudrun.
“And it ought to be admitted, simply,” said Ursula.
“Certainly it ought,” said Gudrun. “But you’ll find that the really chic thing is to be so absolutely ordinary, so perfectly commonplace and like the person in the street, that you really are a masterpiece of humanity, not the person in the street actually, but the artistic creation 0 fh er- ”
“How awful!” cried Ursula.
“Yes, Ursula, it is awful in most respects. You daren’t be anything that isn’t amazingly à terre,m so much à terre that it is the artistic creation of ordinariness.”
“It’s very dull to create oneself into nothing better,” laughed Ursula.
“Very dull!” retorted Gudrun. “Really, Ursula, it is dull, that’s just the word. One longs to be high-flown, and make speeches like Corneille,nafter it.”
Gudrun was becoming flushed and excited over her own cleverness.
“Strut,” said Ursula. “One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese.”
“Exactly,” cried Gudrun, “a swan among geese.”
“They are all so busy playing the ugly duckling,” cried Ursula, with mocking laughter. “And I don’t feel a bit like a humble and pathetic ugly duckling. I do feel like a swan among geese—I can’t help it. They make one feel so. And I don’t care what they think of me. Je m’en fiche.”o
Gudrun looked up at Ursula with a queer, uncertain envy and dislike.
“Of course, the only thing to do is to despise them all—just all,” she said.
The sisters went home again, to read and talk and work, and wait for Monday, for school. Ursula often wondered what else she waited for, besides the beginning and end of the school week, and the beginning and end of the holidays. This was a whole life! Sometimes she had periods of tight horror, when it seemed to her that life would pass away, and be gone, without having been more than this. But she never really accepted it. Her spirit was active, her life like a shoot that is growing steadily, but which has not yet come above ground.
CHAPTER V
In the Train
ONE DAY AT THIS time Birkin was called to London. He was not very fixed in his abode. He had rooms in Nottingham, because his work lay chiefly in that town. But often he was in London, or in Oxford. He moved about a great deal, his life seemed uncertain, without any definite rhythm, any organic meaning.
On the platform of the railway station he saw Gerald Crich, readi
ng a newspaper, and evidently waiting for the train. Birkin stood some distance off, among the people. It was against his instinct to approach anybody.
From time to time, in a manner characteristic of him, Gerald lifted his head and looked round. Even though he was reading the newspaper closely, he must keep a watchful eye on his external surroundings. There seemed to be a dual consciousness running in him. He was thinking vigorously of something he read in the newspaper, and at the same time his eye ran over the surfaces of the life round him, and he missed nothing. Birkin, who was watching him, was irritated by his duality. He noticed, too, that Gerald seemed always to be at bay against everybody, in spite of his queer, genial, social manner when roused.
Now Birkin started violently at seeing this genial look flash on to Gerald’s face, at seeing Gerald approaching him hand outstretched.1
“Hallo, Rupert, where are you going?”
“London. So are you, I suppose.”
“Yes—”
Gerald’s eyes went over Birkin’s face in curiosity.
“We’ll travel together if you like,” he said.
“Don’t you usually go first?” asked Birkin.
“I can’t stand the crowd,” replied Gerald. “But third’ll be all right. There’s a restaurant car, we can have some tea.”
The two men looked at the station clock, having nothing further to say.
“What were you reading in the paper?” Birkin asked.
Gerald looked at him quickly.
“Isn’t it funny, what they do put in the newspapers,” he said. “Here are two leaders—” he held out his Daily Telegraph, “full of the ordinary newspaper cant—” he scanned the columns down—“and then there’s this little—I dunno what you’d call it, essay, almost—appearing with the leaders, and saying there must arise a man who will give new values to things, give us new truths, a new attitude to life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness in a few years, a country in ruin—”
“I suppose that’s a bit of newspaper cant, as well,” said Birkin.
“It sounds as if the man meant it, and quite genuinely,” said Gerald.
“Give it to me,” said Birkin, holding out his hand for the paper.
The train came, and they went on board, sitting on either side a little table, by the window, in the restaurant car. Birkin glanced over his paper, then looked up at Gerald, who was waiting for him.
“I believe the man means it,” he said, “as far as he means anything.”
“And do you think it’s true? Do you think we really want a new gospel?” asked Gerald.
Birkin shrugged his shoulders.
“I think the people who say they want a new religion are the last to accept anything new. They want novelty right enough. But to stare straight at this life that we’ve brought upon ourselves, and reject it, absolutely smash up the old idols of ourselves, that we sh’ll never do. You’ve got very badly to want to get rid of the old, before anything new will appear—even in the self.”
Gerald watched him closely.
“You think we ought to break up this life, just start and let fly?” he asked.
“This life. Yes, I do. We’ve got to bust it completely, or shrivel inside it, as in a tight skin. For it won’t expand any more.”
There was a queer little smile in Gerald’s eyes, a look of amusement, calm and curious.
“And how do you propose to begin? I suppose you mean, reform the whole order of society?” he asked.
Birkin had a slight, tense frown between the brows. He too was impatient of the conversation.
“I don’t propose at all,” he replied. “When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.”
The little smile began to die out of Gerald’s eyes, and he said, looking with a cool stare at Birkin:
“So you really think things are very bad?”
“Completely bad.”
The smile appeared again.
“In what way?”
“Every way,” said Birkin. “We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motorcar in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the Ritz,por the Empire, Gaby Deslysq and the Sunday newspapers. It is very dreary.”
Gerald took a little time to re-adjust himself after this tirade.
“Would you have us live without houses—return to nature?” he asked.
“I would have nothing at all. People only do what they want to do—and what they are capable of doing. If they were capable of anything else, there would be something else.”
Again Gerald pondered. He was not going to take offence at Birkin.
“Don’t you think the collier’s pianoforte, as you call it, is a symbol for something very real, a real desire for something higher, in the collier’s life?”
“Higher!” cried Birkin. “Yes. Amazing heights of upright grandeur. It makes him so much higher in his neighbouring collier’s eyes. He sees himself reflected in the neighbouring opinion, like in a Brocken mist,r several feet taller on the strength of the pianoforte, and he is satisfied. He lives for the sake of that Brocken spectre, the reflection of himself in the human opinion. You do the same. If you are of high importance to humanity you are of high importance to yourself. That is why you work so hard at the mines. If you can produce coal to cook five thousand dinners a day, you are five thousand times more important than if you cooked only your own dinner.”
“I suppose I am,” laughed Gerald.
“Can’t you see,” said Birkin, “that to help my neighbours to eat is no more than eating myself. ‘I eat, thou eatest, he eats, we eat, you eat, they eat’—and what then? Why should every man decline the whole verb. First person singular is enough for me.”
“You’ve got to start with material things,” said Gerald. Which statement Birkin ignored.
“And we’ve got to live for something, we’re not just cattle that can graze and have done with it,” said Gerald.
“Tell me,” said Birkin. “What do you live for?”
Gerald’s face went baffled.
“What do I live for?” he repeated. “I suppose I live to work, to produce something, in so far as I am a purposive being. Apart from that, I live because I am living.”
“And what’s your work? Getting so many more thousands of tons of coal out of the earth every day. And when we’ve got all the coal we want, and all the plush furniture, and pianofortes, and the rabbits are all stewed and eaten, and we’re all warm and our bellies are filled and we’re listening to the young lady performing on the pianoforte—what then? What then, when you’ve made a real fair start with your material things?”
Gerald sat laughing at the words and the mocking humour of the other man. But he was cogitating too.
“We haven’t got there yet,” he replied. “A good many people are still waiting for the rabbit and the fire to cook it.”
“So while you get the coal I must chase the rabbit?” said Birkin, mocking at Gerald.
“Something like that,” said Gerald.
Birkin watched him narrowly. He saw the perfect good-humoured callousness, even strange, glistening malice, in Gerald, glistening through the plausible ethics of productivity.
“Gerald,” he said, “I rather hate you.”
“I know you do,” said Gerald. “Why do you?”
Birkin mused inscrutably for some minutes.
“I should like to know if you are conscious of hating me,” he said at last. “Do you ever consciously detest me—hate me with mystic hate? There are odd moments when I hate you starrily.”
Gerald was rather taken aback, even a little disconcerted. He did not quite know what to say.
/>
“I may, of course, hate you sometimes,” he said. “But I’m not aware of it—never acutely aware of it, that is.”
“So much the worse,” said Birkin.
Gerald watched him with curious eyes. He could not quite make him out.
“So much the worse, is it?” he repeated.
There was a silence between the two men for some time, as the train ran on. In Birkin’s face was a little irritable tension, a sharp knitting of the brows, keen and difficult. Gerald watched him warily, carefully, rather calculatingly, for he could not decide what he was after.
Suddenly Birkin’s eyes looked straight and overpowering into those of the other man.
“What do you think is the aim and object of your life, Gerald?” he asked.
Again Gerald was taken aback. He could not think what his friend was getting at. Was he poking fun, or not?
“At this moment, I couldn’t say off-hand,” he replied, with faintly ironic humour.
“Do you think love is the be-all and the end-all of life?” Birkin asked, with direct, attentive seriousness.
“Of my own life?” said Gerald.
“Yes.”
There was a really puzzled pause.
“I can’t say,” said Gerald. “It hasn’t been, so far.”
“What has your life been, so far?” so far.
“What has your life been, so far?”
“Oh—finding out things for myself—and getting experiences—and making things go.”
Birkin knitted his brows like sharply moulded steel.
“I find,” he said, “that one needs some one really pure single activity—I should call love a single pure activity. But I don’t really love anybody—not now.”
“Have you ever really loved anybody?” asked Gerald.
“Yes and no,” replied Birkin.
“Not finally?” said Gerald.
“Finally—finally—no,” said Birkin.
“Nor I,” said Gerald.
“And do you want to?” said Birkin.
Gerald looked with a long, twinkling, almost sardonic look into the eyes of the other man.
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