He had succeeded. He had converted the industry into a new and terrible purity. There was a greater output of coal than ever, the wonderful and delicate system ran almost perfectly He had a set of really clever engineers, both mining and electrical, and they did not cost much. A highly educated man cost very little more than a workman. His managers, who were all rare men, were no more expensive than the old bungling fools of his father’s days, who were merely colliers promoted. His chief manager, who had twelve hundred a year, saved the firm at least five thousand. The whole system was now so perfect that Gerald was hardly necessary any more.
It was so perfect that sometimes a strange fear came over him, and he did not know what to do. He went on for some years in a sort of trance of activity. What he was doing seemed supreme, he was almost like a divinity. He was a pure and exalted activity.
But now he had succeeded—he had finally succeeded. And once or twice lately, when he was alone in the evening and had nothing to do, he had suddenly stood up in terror, not knowing what he was. And he went to the mirror and looked long and closely at his own face, at his own eyes, seeking for something. He was afraid, in mortal dry fear, but he knew not what of. He looked at his own face. There it was, shapely and healthy and the same as ever, yet somehow, it was not real, it was a mask. He dared not touch it, for fear it should prove to be only a composition mask. His eyes were blue and keen as ever, and as firm in their look. Yet he was not sure that they were not blue false bubbles that would burst in a moment and leave clear annihilation. He could see the darkness in them, as if they were only bubbles of darkness. He was afraid that one day he would break down and be a purely meaningless bubble lapping round a darkness.
But his will yet held good, he was able to go away and read, and think about things. He liked to read books about the primitive man, books of anthropology, and also works of speculative philosophy. His mind was very active. But it was like a bubble floating in the darkness. At any moment it might burst and leave him in chaos. He would not die. He knew that. He would go on living, but the meaning would have collapsed out of him, his divine reason would be gone. In a strangely indifferent, sterile way, he was frightened. But he could not react even to the fear. It was as if his centres of feeling were drying up. He remained calm, calculative and healthy, and quite freely deliberate, even whilst he felt, with faint, small but final sterile horror, that his mystic reason was, breaking, giving way now, at this crisis.
And it was a strain. He knew there was no equilibrium. He would have to go in some direction, shortly, to find relief. Only Birkin kept the fear definitely off him, saved him his quick sufficiency in life, by the odd mobility and changeableness which seemed to contain the quintessence of faith. But then Gerald must always come away from Birkin, as from a Church service, back to the outside real world of work and life. There it was, it did not alter, and words were futilities. He had to keep himself in reckoning with the world of work and material life. And it became more and more difficult, such a strange pressure was upon him, as if the very middle of him were a vacuum, and outside were an awful tension.
He had found his most satisfactory relief in women. After a debauch with some desperate woman, he went on quite easy and forgetful. The devil of it was, it was so hard to keep up his interest in women nowadays. He didn’t care about them any more. A Pussum was all right in her way, but she was an exceptional case, and even she mattered extremely little. No, women, in that sense, were useless to him any more. He felt that his mind needed acute stimulation, before he could be physically roused.
CHAPTER XVIII
Rabbit
GUDRUN KNEW THAT IT was a critical thing for her to go to Shortlands. She knew it was equivalent to accepting Gerald Crich as a lover. And though she hung back, disliking the condition, yet she knew she would go on. She equivocated. She said to herself, in torment recalling the blow and the kiss, “after all, what is it? What is a kiss? What even is a blow? It is an instant, vanished at once. I can go to Shortlands just for a time, before I go away, if only to see what it is like.” For she had an insatiable curiosity to see and to know everything.
She also wanted to know what Winifred was really like. Having heard the child calling from the steamer in the night, she felt some mysterious connection with her.
Gudrun talked with the father in the library. Then he sent for his daughter. She came accompanied by Mademoiselle.
“Winnie, this is Miss Brangwen, who will be so kind as to help you with your drawing and making models of your animals,” said the father.
The child looked at Gudrun for a moment with interest, before she came forward and with face averted offered her hand. There was a complete sangfroid and indifference under Winifred’s childish reserve, a certain irresponsible callousness.
“How do you do?” said the child, not lifting her face.
“How do you do?” said Gudrun.
Then Winifred stood aside, and Gudrun was introduced to Mademoiselle.
“You have a fine day for your walk,” said Mademoiselle, in a bright manner.
“Quite fine,” said Gudrun.
Winifred was watching from her distance. She was as if amused, but rather unsure as yet what this new person was like. She saw so many new persons, and so few who became real to her. Mademoiselle was of no count whatever, the child merely put up with her, calmly and easily, accepting her little authority with faint scorn, compliant out of childish arrogance of indifference.
“Well, Winifred,” said the father, “aren’t you glad Miss Brangwen has come? She makes animals and birds in wood and in clay, that the people in London write about in the papers, praising them to the skies.”
Winifred smiled slightly.
“Who told you, Daddie?” she asked.
“Who told me? Hermione told me, and Rupert Birkin.”
“Do you know them?” Winifred asked of Gudrun, turning to her with faint challenge.
“Yes,” said Gudrun.
Winifred readjusted herself a little. She had been ready to accept Gudrun as a sort of servant. Now she saw it was on terms of friendship they were intended to meet. She was rather glad. She had so many half inferiors, whom she tolerated with perfect good-humour.
Gudrun was very calm. She also did not take these things very seriously. A new occasion was mostly spectacular to her. However, Winifred was a detached, ironic child, she would never attach herself. Gudrun liked her and was intrigued by her. The first meetings went off with a certain humiliating clumsiness. Neither Winifred nor her instructress had any social grace.
Soon, however, they met in a kind of make-belief world. Winifred did not notice human beings unless they were like herself, playful and slightly mocking. She would accept nothing but the world of amusement, and the serious people of her life were the animals she had for pets. On those she lavished, almost ironically, her affection and her companionship. To the rest of the human scheme she submitted with a faint bored indifference.
She had a Pekinese dog called Looloo, which she loved.
“Let us draw Looloo,” said Gudrun, “and see if we can get his Looliness, shall we?”
“Darling!” cried Winifred, rushing to the dog, that sat with contemplative sadness on the hearth, and kissing its bulging brow. “Darling one, will you be drawn? Shall its mummy draw its portrait?” Then she chuckled gleefully, and turning to Gudrun, said: “Oh, let’s!”
They proceeded to get pencils and paper, and were ready.
“Beautifullest,” cried Winifred, hugging the dog, “sit still while its mummy draws its beautiful portrait.” The dog looked up at her with grievous resignation in its large, prominent eyes. She kissed it fervently, and said: “I wonder what mine will be like. It’s sure to be awful.”
As she sketched she chuckled to herself, and cried out at times:
“Oh, darling, you’re so beautiful!”
And again chuckling, she rushed to embrace the dog, in penitence, as if she were doing him some subtle injury. He sat all the time w
ith the resignation and fretfulness of ages on his dark velvety face. She drew slowly, with a wicked concentration in her eyes, her head on one side, an intense stillness over her. She was as if working the spell of some enchantment. Suddenly she had finished. She looked at the dog, and then at her drawing, and then cried, with real grief for the dog, and at the same time with a wicked exultation:
“My beautiful, why did they?”
She took her paper to the dog, and held it under his nose. He turned his head aside as in chagrin and mortification, and she impulsively kissed his velvety bulging forehead.
“ ’s a Loolie,’s a little Loozie! Look at his portrait, darling, look at his portrait, that his mother has done of him.” She looked at her paper and chuckled. Then, kissing the dog once more, she rose and came gravely to Gudrun, offering her the paper.
It was a grotesque little diagram of a grotesque little animal, so wicked and so comical, a slow smile came over Gudrun’s face, unconsciously. And at her side Winifred chuckled with glee, and said:
“It isn’t like him, is it? He’s much lovelier than that. He’s so beautiful—mmm, Looloo, my sweet darling.” And she flew off to embrace the chagrined little dog. He looked up at her with reproachful, saturnine eyes, vanquished in his extreme agedness of being. Then she flew back to her drawing, and chuckled with satisfaction.
“It isn’t like him, is it?” she said to Gudrun.
“Yes, it’s very like him,” Gudrun replied.
The child treasured her drawing, carried it about with her, and showed it, with a silent embarrassment, to everybody.
“Look,” she said, thrusting the paper into her father’s hand.
“Why that’s Looloo!” he exclaimed. And he looked down in surprise, hearing the almost inhuman chuckle of the child at his side.
Gerald was away from home when Gudrun first came to Shortlands. But the first morning he came back he watched for her. It was a sunny, soft morning, and he lingered in the garden paths, looking at the flowers that had come out during his absence. He was clean and fit as ever, shaven, his fair hair scrupulously parted at the side, bright in the sunshine, his short, fair moustache closely clipped, his eyes with their humorous kind twinkle, which was so deceptive. He was dressed in black, his clothes sat well on his well-nourished body. Yet as he lingered before the flower-beds in the morning sunshine, there was a certain isolation, a fear about him, as of something wanting.
Gudrun came up quickly, unseen. She was dressed in blue, with woollen yellow stockings, like the Bluecoat boys.br He glanced up in surprise. Her stockings always disconcerted him, the pale-yellow stockings and the heavy heavy black shoes. Winifred, who had been playing about the garden with Mademoiselle and the dogs, came flitting towards Gudrun. The child wore a dress of black-and-white stripes. Her hair was rather short, cut round and hanging level in her neck.
“We’re going to do Bismarck,bs aren’t we?” she said, linking her hand through Gudrun’s arm.
“Yes, we’re going to do Bismarck. Do you want to?”
“Oh yes—oh I do! I want most awfully to do Bismarck. He looks so splendid this morning, so fierce. He’s almost as big as a lion.” And the child chuckled sardonically at her own hyperbole. “He’s a real king, he really is.”
“Bon jour, Mademoiselle,” said the little French governess, wavering up with a slight bow, a bow of the sort that Gudrun loathed, insolent.
“Winifred veut tant faire le portrait de Bismarck—! Oh, mais toute le matinée—‘We will do Bismarck this morning!’—Bismarck, Bismarck, toujours Bismarck! C‘est un lapin, n’est-ce pas, mademoiselle?”
“Oui, c‘est un grand lapin blanc et noir. Vous ne l’avez pas vu?”bt said Gudrun in her good, but rather heavy French.
“Non, mademoiselle, Winifred n‘a jamais voulu me le faire voir. Tant de fois je le lui ai demandé, ‘Qu‘est ce done que ce Bismarck, Winifred?’ Mais elle n‘a pas voulu me le dire. Son Bismarck, c’était un mystère.”
“Oui, c’est un mystère, vraiment un mystère!bu Miss Brangwen, say that Bismarck is a mystery,” cried Winifred.
“Bismarck is a mystery, Bismarck, c’est un mystère, der Bismarck, er ist ein Wunder,” said Gudrun, in mocking incantation.
“Ja er ist ein Wunder,” repeated Winifred, with odd seriousness, under which lay a wicked chuckle.
“Ist er auch ein Wunder?” came the slightly insolent sneering of Mademoiselle.
“Doch!” said Winifred briefly, indifferent.
“Doch ist er nicht ein König. Beesmarck, he was not a king, Winifred, as you have said. He was only—il n’était que chancelier.” bv
“Qu‘est ce qu’un chancelier?” said Winifred, with slightly contemptuous indifference.
“A chancelier is a chancellor, and a chancellor is, I believe, a sort of judge,” said Gerald, coming up and shaking hands with Gudrun. “You’ll have made a song of Bismarck soon,” said he.
Mademoiselle waited, and discreetly made her inclination, and her greeting.
“So they wouldn’t let you see Bismarck, Mademoiselle?” he said.
“Non, Monsieur.”
“Ay, very mean of them. What are you going to do to him, Miss Brangwen? I want him sent to the kitchen and cooked.”
“Oh no,” cried Winifred.
“We’re going to draw him,” said Gudrun.
“Draw him and quarter him and dish him up,” he said, being purposely fatuous.
“Oh no,” cried Winifred with emphasis, chuckling.
Gudrun detected the tang of mockery in him, and she looked up and smiled into his face. He felt his nerves caressed. Their eyes met in knowledge.
“How do you like Shortlands?” he asked.
“Oh, very much,” she said, with nonchalance.
“Glad you do. Have you noticed these flowers?”
He led her along the path. She followed intently. Winifred came, and the governess lingered in the rear. They stopped before some veined salpiglossis flowers.
“Aren’t they wonderful!” she cried, looking at them absorbedly. Strange how her reverential, almost ecstatic admiration of the flowers caressed his nerves. She stooped down, and touched the trumpets, with infinitely fine and delicate-touching finger-tips. It filled him with ease to see her. When she rose, her eyes, hot with the beauty of the flowers, looked into his.
“What are they?” she asked.
“Sort of petunia, I suppose,” he answered. “I don’t really know them.”
“They are quite strangers to me,” she said.
They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.
She was aware of Mademoiselle standing near, like a little French beetle, observant and calculating. She moved away with Winifred, saying they would go to find Bismarck.
Gerald watched them go, looking all the while at the soft, full, still body of Gudrun, in its silky cashmere. How silky and rich and soft her body must be. An excess of appreciation came over his mind, she was the all-desirable, the all-beautiful. He wanted only to come to her, nothing more. He was only this, this being that should come to her, and be given to her.
At the same time he was finely and acutely aware of Mademoiselle’s neat, brittle finality of form. She was like some elegant beetle with thin ankles, perched on her high heels, her glossy black dress perfectly correct, her dark hair done high and admirably. How repulsive her completeness and her finality was! He loathed her.
Yet he did admire her. She was perfectly correct. And it did rather annoy him, that Gudrun came dressed in startling colours, like a macaw, when the family was in mourning. Like a macaw she was! He watched the lingering way she took her feet from the ground. And her ankles were pale yellow, and her dress a deep blue. Yet it pleased him. It pleased him very much. He felt the challenge in her very attire—she challenged the whole world. And he smiled as to the note of a trumpet.
Gudrun and Winifred went through the house to the back, where were the stables and the out-buildings. Everywhere wa
s still and deserted. Mr. Crich had gone out for a short drive, the stable-man had just led round Gerald’s horse. The two girls went to the hutch that stood in a corner, and looked at the great black-and-white rabbit.
“Isn’t he beautiful! Oh, do look at him listening! Doesn’t he look silly!” she laughed quickly, then added, “Oh, do let’s do him listening, do let us, he listens with so much of himself;—don’t you darling Bismarck?”
“Can we take him out?” said Gudrun.
“He’s very strong. He really is extremely strong.” She looked at Gudrun, her head on one side, in odd calculating mistrust.
“But we’ll try, shall we?”
“Yes, if you like. But he’s a fearful kicker!”
They took the key to unlock the door. The rabbit exploded in a wild rush round the hutch.
“He scratches most awfully sometimes,” cried Winifred in excitement. “Oh do look at him, isn’t he wonderful!” The rabbit tore round the hutch in a flurry. “Bismarck!” cried the child, in rousing excitement. “How dreadful you are! You are beastly.” Winifred looked up at Gudrun with some misgiving in her wild excitement. Gudrun smiled sardonically with her mouth. Winifred made a strange crooning noise of unaccountable excitement. “Now he’s still!” she cried, seeing the rabbit settled down in a far corner of the hutch. “Shall we take him now?” she whispered excitedly, mysteriously, looking up at Gudrun and edging very close. “Shall we get him now?—” she chuckled wickedly to herself.
They unlocked the door of the hutch. Gudrun thrust in her arm and seized the great, lusty rabbit as it crouched still, she grasped its long ears. It set its four feet flat, and thrust back. There was a long scraping sound as it was hauled forward, and in another instant it was in mid-air, lunging wildly, its body flying like a spring coiled and released, as it lashed out, suspended from the ears. Gudrun held the black-and-white tempest at arms’ length, averting her face. But the rabbit was magically strong, it was all she could do to keep her grasp. She almost lost her presence of mind.
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