“Where are you going?” Gerald asked suddenly, as if just waking up.
“Home,” said Birkin.
“Oh no!” said Gerald imperiously. “We can’t go home while they’re in the water. Turn back again, I’m going to find them.” The women were frightened, his voice was so imperative and dangerous, almost mad, not to be opposed.
“No,” said Birkin. “You can’t.” There was a strange fluid compulsion in his voice. Gerald was silent in a battle of wills. It was as if he would kill the other man. But Birkin rowed evenly and unswerving, with an inhuman inevitability.
“Why should you interfere?” said Gerald, in hate.
Birkin did not answer. He rowed towards the land. And Gerald sat mute, like a dumb beast, panting, his teeth chattering, his arms inert, his head like a seal’s head.
They came to the landing-stage. Wet and naked-looking, Gerald climbed up the few steps. There stood his father, in the night.
“Father!” he said.
“Yes my boy? Go home and get those things off.”
“We shan’t save them, father,” said Gerald.
“There’s hope yet, my boy.”
“I’m afraid not. There’s no knowing where they are. You can’t find them. And there’s a current, as cold as hell.”
“We’ll let the water out,” said the father. “Go home you and look to yourself See that he’s looked after, Rupert,” he added in a neutral voice.
“Well, father, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m afraid it’s my fault. But it can’t be helped; I’ve done what I could for the moment. I could go on diving, of course—not much, though—and not much use—”
He moved away barefoot, on the planks of the platform. Then he trod on something sharp.
“Of course, you’ve got no shoes on,” said Birkin.
“His shoes are here!” cried Gudrun from below. She was making fast her boat.
Gerald waited for them to be brought to him. Gudrun came with them. He pulled them on his feet.
“If you once die,” he said, “then when it’s over, it’s finished. Why come to life again? There’s room under that water there for thousands.”
“Two is enough,” she said murmuring.
He dragged on his second shoe. He was shivering violently, and his jaw shook as he spoke.
“That’s true,” he said, “maybe. But it’s curious how much room there seems, a whole universe under there; and as cold as hell, you’re as helpless as if your head was cut off.” He could scarcely speak, he shook so violently. “There’s one thing about our family, you know,” he continued. “Once anything goes wrong, it can never be put right again—not with us. I’ve noticed it all my life—you can’t put a thing right, once it has gone wrong.”
They were walking across the high-road to the house.
“And do you know, when you are down there, it is so cold, actually, and so endless, so different really from what it is on top, so endless—you wonder how it is so many are alive, why we’re up here. Are you going? I shall see you again, shan’t I? Good-night, and thank you. Thank you very much.”
The two girls waited a while, to see if there were any hope. The moon shone clearly overhead, with almost impertinent brightness, the small dark boats clustered on the water, there were voices and subdued shouts. But it was all to no purpose. Gudrun went home when Birkin returned.
He was commissioned to open the sluice that let out the water from the lake, which was pierced at one end, near the high-road, thus serving as a reservoir to supply with water the distant miles, in case of necessity. “Come with me,” he said to Ursula, “and then I will walk home with you, when I’ve done this.”
He called at the water-keeper’s cottage and took the key of the sluice. They went through a little gate from the high-road, to the head of the water, where was a great stone basin which received the overflow, and a flight of stone steps descended into the depths of the water itself. At the head of the steps was the lock of the sluice-gate.
The night was silver-grey and perfect, save for the scattered restless sound of voices. The grey sheen of the moonlight caught the stretch of water, dark boats plashed and moved. But Ursula’s mind ceased to be receptive, everything was unimportant and unreal.
Birkin fixed the iron handle of the sluice, and turned it with a wrench. The cogs began slowly to rise. He turned and turned, like a slave, his white figure became distinct. Ursula looked away. She could not bear to see him winding heavily and laboriously, bending and rising mechanically like a slave, turning the handle.
Then, a real shock to her, there came a loud splashing of water from out of the dark, tree-filled hollow beyond the road, a splashing that deepened rapidly to a harsh roar, and then became a heavy, booming noise of a great body of water falling solidly all the time. It occupied the whole of the night, this great steady booming of water, everything was drowned within it, drowned and lost. Ursula seemed to have to struggle for her life. She put her hands over her ears, and looked at the high bland moon.
“Can’t we go now?” she cried to Birkin, who was watching the water on the steps, to see if it would get any lower. It seemed to fascinate him. He looked at her and nodded.
The little dark boats had moved nearer, people were crowding curiously along the hedge by the high-road, to see what was to be seen. Birkin and Ursula went to the cottage with the key, then turned their backs on the lake. She was in great haste. She could not bear the terrible crushing boom of the escaping water.
“Do you think they are dead?” she cried in a high voice, to make herself heard.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Isn’t it horrible!”
He paid no heed. They walked up the hill, further and further away from the noise.
“Do you mind very much?” she asked him.
“I don’t mind about the dead,” he said, “once they are dead. The worst of it is, they cling on to the living, and won’t let go.”
She pondered for a time.
“Yes,” she said. “The fact of death doesn’t really seem to matter much, does it?”
“No,” he said. “What does it matter if Diana Crich is alive or dead?”
“Doesn’t it?” she said, shocked.
“No, why should it? Better she were dead—she’ll be much more real. She’ll be positive in death. In life she was a fretting, negated thing.”
“You are rather horrible,” murmured Ursula.
“No! I’d rather Diana Crich were dead. Her living somehow was all wrong. As for the young man, poor devil—he’ll find his way out quickly instead of slowly. Death is all right—nothing better.”
“Yet you don’t want to die,” she challenged him.
He was silent for a time. Then he said, in a voice that was frightening to her in its change:
“I should like to be through with it—I should like to be through with the death process.”
“And aren’t you?” asked Ursula nervously.
They walked on for some way in silence, under the trees. Then he said, slowly, as if afraid:
“There is life which belongs to death, and there is life which isn’t death. One is tired of the life that belongs to death—our kind of life. But whether it is finished, God knows. I want love that is like sleep, like being born again, vulnerable as a baby that just comes into the world.”
Ursula listened, half attentive, half avoiding what he said. She seemed to catch the drift of his statement, and then she drew away. She wanted to hear, but she did not want to be implicated. She was reluctant to yield there, where he wanted her, to yield as it were, her very identity.
“Why should love be like sleep?” she asked sadly.
“I don’t know. So that it is like death—I do want to die from this life—and yet it is more than life itself. One is delivered over like a naked infant from the womb, all the old defences and the old body gone, and new air around one, that has never been breathed before.”
She listened, making out what he said. She knew, as well
as he knew, that words themselves do not convey meaning, that they are but a gesture we make, a dumb show like any other. And she seemed to feel his gesture through her blood, and she drew back, even though her desire sent her forward.
“But,” she said gravely, “didn’t you say you wanted something that was not love—something beyond love?”
He turned in confusion. There was always confusion in speech. Yet it must be spoken. Which ever way one moved, if one were to move forwards, one must break a way through. And to know, to give utterance, was to break a way through the walls of the prison as the infant in labour strives through the walls of the womb. There is no new movement now, without the breaking through of the old body, deliberately, in knowledge, in the struggle to get out.
“I don’t want love,” he said. “I don’t want to know you. I want to be gone out of myself, and you to be lost to yourself, so we are found different. One shouldn’t talk when one is tired and wretched. One Hamletises, and it seems a lie. Only believe me when I show you a bit of healthy pride and insouciance. I hate myself serious.”
“Why shouldn’t you be serious?” she said.
He thought for a minute, then he said, sulkily:
“I don’t know.” Then they walked on in silence, at outs. He was vague and lost.
“Isn’t it strange,” she said, suddenly putting her hand on his arm, with a loving impulse, “how we always talk like this! I suppose we do love each other, in some way.”
“Oh yes,” he said; “too much.”
She laughed almost gaily.
“You’d have to have it your own way, wouldn’t you?” she teased. “You could never take it on trust.”
He changed, laughed softly, and turned and took her in his arms, in the middle of the road.
“Yes,” he said softly.
And he kissed her face and brow, slowly, gently, with a sort of delicate happiness which surprised her extremely, and to which she could not respond. They were soft, blind kisses, perfect in their stillness. Yet she held back from them. It was like strange moths, very soft and silent, settling on her from the darkness of her soul. She was uneasy. She drew away.
“Isn’t somebody coming?” she said.
So they looked down the dark road, then set off again walking towards Beldover. Then suddenly, to show him she was no shallow prude, she stopped and held him tight, hard against her, and covered his face with hard, fierce kisses of passion. In spite of his otherness, the old blood beat up in him.
“Not this, not this,” he whimpered to himself, as the first perfect mood of softness and sleep-loveliness ebbed back away from the rushing of passion that came up to his limbs and over his face as she drew him. And soon he was a perfect hard flame of passionate desire for her. Yet in the small core of the flame was an unyielding anguish of another thing. But this also was lost; he only wanted her, with an extreme desire that seemed inevitable as death, beyond question.
Then, satisfied and shattered, fulfilled and destroyed, he went home away from her, drifting vaguely through the darkness, lapsed into the old fire of burning passion. Far away, far away, there seemed to be a small lament in the darkness. But what did it matter? What did it matter, what did anything matter save this ultimate and triumphant experience of physical passion, that had blazed up anew like a new spell of life. “I was becoming quite dead-alive, nothing but a word-bag,” he said in triumph, scorning his other self. Yet somewhere far off and small, the other hovered.
The men were still dragging the lake when he got back. He stood on the bank and heard Gerald’s voice. The water was still booming in the night, the moon was fair, the hills beyond were elusive. The lake was sinking. There came the raw smell of the banks, in the night air.
Up at Shortlands there were lights in the windows, as if nobody had gone to bed. On the landing-stage was the old doctor, the father of the young man who was lost. He stood quite silent, waiting. Birkin also stood and watched. Gerald came up in a boat.
“You still here, Rupert?” he said. “We can’t get them. The bottom slopes, you know, very steep. The water lies between two very sharp slopes, with little branch valleys, and God knows where the drift will take you. It isn’t as if it was a level bottom. You never know where you are, with the dragging.”
“Is there any need for you to be working?” said Birkin. “Wouldn’t it be much better if you went to bed?”
“To bed! Good God, do you think I should sleep? We’ll find them, before I go away from here.”
“But the men would find them just the same without you—why should you insist?”
Gerald looked up at him. Then he put his hand affectionately on Birkin’s shoulder, saying:
“Don’t you bother about me, Rupert. If there’s anybody’s health to think about, it’s yours, not mine. How do you feel yourself?”
“Very well. But you, you spoil your own chance of life—you waste your best self.”
Gerald was silent for a moment. Then he said:
“Waste it? What else is there to do with it?”
“But leave this, won’t you? You force yourself into horrors, and put a mill-stone of beastly memories round your neck. Come away now.”
“A mill-stone of beastly memories!” Gerald repeated. Then he put his hand again affectionately on Birkin’s shoulder. “God, you’ve got such a telling way of putting things, Rupert, you have.”
Birkin’s heart sank. He was irritated and weary of having a telling way of putting things.
“Won’t you leave it? Come over to my place”—he urged as one urges a drunken man.
“No,” said Gerald coaxingly, his arm across the other man’s shoulder. “Thanks very much, Rupert—I shall be glad to come to-morrow, if that’ll do. You understand, don’t you? I want to see this job through. But I’ll come to-morrow, right enough. Oh, I’d rather come and have a chat with you than—than do anything else, I verily believe. Yes, I would. You mean a lot to me, Rupert, more than you know.”
“What do I mean, more than I know?” asked Birkin irritably. He was acutely aware of Gerald’s hand on his shoulder. And he did not want this altercation. He wanted the other man to come out of the ugly misery.
“I’ll tell you another time,” said Gerald coaxingly.
“Come along with me now—I want you to come,” said Birkin.
There was a pause, intense and real. Birkin wondered why his own heart beat so heavily. Then Gerald’s fingers gripped hard and communicative into Birkin’s shoulder, as he said:
“No, I’ll see this job through, Rupert. Thank you—I know what you mean. We’re all right, you know, you and me.”
“I may be all right, but I’m sure you’re not, mucking about here,” said Birkin. And he went away.
The bodies of the dead were not recovered till towards dawn. Diana had her arms tight round the neck of the young man, choking him.
“She killed him,” said Gerald.
The moon sloped down the sky and sank at last. The lake was sunk to quarter size, it had horrible raw banks of clay, that smelled of raw rottenish water. Dawn roused faintly behind the eastern hill. The water still boomed through the sluice.
As the birds were whistling for the first morning, and the hills at the back of the desolate lake stood radiant with the new mists, there was a straggling procession up to Shortlands, men bearing the bodies on a stretcher, Gerald going beside them, the two grey-bearded fathers following in silence. Indoors the family was all sitting up, waiting. Somebody must go to tell the mother, in her room. The doctor in secret struggled to bring back his son, till he himself was exhausted.
Over all the outlying district was a hush of dreadful excitement on that Sunday morning. The colliery people felt as if this catastrophe had happened directly to themselves, indeed they were more shocked and frightened than if their own men had been killed. Such a tragedy in Shortlands, the high home of the district! One of the young mistresses, persisting in dancing on the cabin roof of the launch, wilful young madam, drowned in the midst of
the festival, with the young doctor! Everywhere on the Sunday morning, the colliers wandered about, discussing the calamity. At all the Sunday dinners of the people, there seemed a strange presence. It was as if the angel of death were very near, there was a sense of the supernatural in the air. The men had excited, startled faces, the women looked solemn, some of them had been crying. The children enjoyed the excitement at first. There was an intensity in the air, almost magical. Did all enjoy it? Did all enjoy the thrill?
Gudrun had wild ideas of rushing to comfort Gerald. She was thinking all the time of the perfect comforting, reassuring thing to say to him. She was shocked and frightened, but she put that away, thinking of how she should deport herself with Gerald: act her part. That was the real thrill: how she should act her part.
Ursula was deeply and passionately in love with Birkin, and she was capable of nothing. She was perfectly callous about all the talk of the accident, but her estranged air looked like trouble. She merely sat by herself, whenever she could, and longed to see him again. She wanted him to come to the house,—she would not have it otherwise, he must come at once. She was waiting for him. She stayed indoors all day, waiting for him to knock at the door. Every minute, she glanced automatically at the window. He would be there.
CHAPTER XV
Sunday Evening
As THE DAY WORE on, the life-blood seemed to ebb away from Ursula, and within the emptiness a heavy despair gathered. Her passion seemed to bleed to death, and there was nothing. She sat suspended in a state of complete nullity, harder to bear than death.
“Unless something happens,” she said to herself, in the perfect lucidity of final suffering, “I shall die. I am at the end of my line of life.”
She sat crushed and obliterated in a darkness that was the border of death. She realised how all her life she had been drawing nearer and nearer to this brink, where there was no beyond, from which one had to leap like Sappho into the unknown.1 The knowledge of the imminence of death was like a drug. Darkly, without thinking at all, she knew that she was near to death. She had travelled all her life along the line of fulfilment, and it was nearly concluded. She knew all she had to know, she had experienced all she had to experience, she was fulfilled in a kind of bitter ripeness, there remained only to fall from the tree into death. And one must fulfil one’s development to the end, must carry the adventure to its conclusion. And the next step was over the border into death. So it was then! There was a certain peace in the knowledge.
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