“I wanted to see if I could make it be quite gone off the pond,” he said.
“Yes, it was horrible, really. Why should you hate the moon? It hasn’t done you any harm, has it?”
“Was it hate?” he said.
And they were silent for a few minutes.
“When did you come back?” she said.
“To-day.”
“Why did you never write?”
“I could find nothing to say.”
“Why was there nothing to say?”
“I don’t know. Why are there no daffodils now?”
“No.”
Again there was a space of silence. Ursula looked at the moon. It had gathered itself together, and was quivering slightly.
“Was it good for you, to be alone?” she asked.
“Perhaps. Not that I know much. But I got over a good deal. Did you do anything important?”
“No. I looked at England, and thought I’d done with it.”
“Why England?” he asked in surprise.
“I don’t know, it came like that.”
“It isn’t a question of nations,” he said. “France is far worse.”
“Yes, I know. I felt I’d done with it all.”
They went and sat down on the roots of the trees, in the shadow. And being silent, he remembered the beauty of her eyes, which were sometimes filled with light, like spring, suffused with wonderful promise. So he said to her, slowly, with difficulty:
“There is a golden light in you, which I wish you would give me.” It was as if he had been thinking of this for some time.
She was startled, she seemed to leap clear of him. Yet also she was pleased.
“What kind of a light?” she asked.
But he was shy, and did not say any more. So the moment passed for this time. And gradually a feeling of sorrow came over her.
“My life is unfulfilled,” she said.
“Yes,” he answered briefly, not wanting to hear this.
“And I feel as if nobody could ever really love me,” she said.
But he did not answer.
“You think, don’t you,” she said slowly, “that I only want physical things? It isn’t true. I want you to serve my spirit.”
“I know you do. I know you don’t want physical things by themselves. But, I want you to give me—to give your spirit to me—that golden light which is you—which you don’t know—give it me—”
After a moment’s silence she replied:
“But how can I, you don’t love me! You only want your own ends. You don’t want to serve me, and yet you want me to serve you. It is so one-sided!”
It was a great effort to him to maintain this conversation, and to press for the thing he wanted from her, the surrender of her spirit.
“It is different,” he said. “The two kinds of service are so different. I serve you in another way—not through yourself,—somewhere else. But I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves—to be really together because we are together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.”
“No,” she said, pondering. “You are just egocentric. You never have any enthusiasm, you never come out with any spark towards me. You want yourself, really, and your own affairs. And you want me just to be there, to serve you.”
But this only made him shut off from her.
“Ah well,” he said, “words make no matter, any way. The thing is between us, or it isn’t.”
“You don’t even love me,” she cried.
“I do,” he said angrily. “But I want—” His mind saw again the lovely golden light of spring transfused through her eyes, as through some wonderful window. And he wanted her to be with him there, in this world of proud indifference. But what was the good of telling her he wanted this company in proud indifference? What was the good of talking, any way? It must happen beyond the sound of words. It was merely ruinous to try to work her by conviction. This was a paradisal bird that could never be netted, it must fly by itself to the heart.
“I always think I am going to be loved—and then I am let down. You don’t love me, you know. You don’t want to serve me. You only want yourself.”
A shiver of rage went over his veins, at this repeated:
“You don’t want to serve me.” All the paradisal disappeared from him.
“No,” he said irritated, “I don’t want to serve you, because there is nothing there to serve. What you want me to serve, is nothing, mere nothing. It isn’t even you, it is your mere female quality. And I wouldn’t give a straw for your female ego—its a rag doll.”
“Ha!” she laughed in mockery. “That’s all you think of me, is it? And then you have the impudence to say you love me!”
She rose in anger, to go home.
“You want the paradisal unknowing,” she said, turning round on him as he still sat half-visible in the shadow. “I know what that means, thank you. You want me to be your thing, never to criticise you or to have anything to say for myself. You want me to be a mere thing for you! No thank you! If you want that, there are plenty of women who will give it to you. There are plenty of women who will lie down for you to walk over them—go to them then, if that’s what you want—go to them.”
“No,” he said, outspoken with anger. “I want you to drop your assertive will, your frightened apprehensive self-insistence, that is what I want. I want you to trust yourself so implicitly, that you can let yourself go.”
“Let myself go!” she re-echoed in mockery. “I can let myself go, easily enough. It is you who can’t let yourself go, it is you who hang on to yourself as if it were your only treasure. You—you are the Sunday school teacher—You—you preacher.”
The amount of truth that was in this made him stiff and unheeding of her.
“I don’t mean let yourself go in the Dionysic ecstatic way,”bw he said. “I know you can do that. But I hate ecstasy, Dionysic or any other. It’s like going round in a squirrel cage. I want you not to care about yourself, just to be there and not to care about yourself, not to insist—be glad and sure and indifferent.”
“Who insists?” she mocked. “Who is it that keeps on insisting? It isn’t me!”
There was a weary, mocking bitterness in her voice. He was silent for some time.
“I know,” he said. “While ever either of us insists to the other, we are all wrong. But there we are, the accord doesn’t come.”
They sat in stillness under the shadow of the trees by the bank. The night was white around them, they were in the darkness, barely conscious.
Gradually, the stillness and peace came over them. She put her hand tentatively on his. Their hands clasped softly and silently, in peace.
“Do you really love me?” she said.
He laughed.
“I call that your war-cry,” he replied, amused.
“Why!” she cried, amused and really wondering.
“Your insistence—Your war-cry—‘A Brangwen, A Brangwen,’—an old battle-cry. Yours is ‘Do you love me? Yield knave, or die.’ ”
“No,” she said, pleading, “not like that. Not like that. But I must know that you love me, mustn’t I?”
“Well, then, know it and have done with it.”
“But do you?”
“Yes, I do. I love you, and I know it’s final. It is final, so why say any more about it.”
She was silent for some moments, in delight and doubt.
“Are you sure?” she said, nestling happily near to him.
“Quite sure—so now have done—accept it and have done.”
She was nestled quite close to him.
“Have done with what?” she murmured, happily.
“With bothering,” he said.
She clung nearer to him. He held her close, and kissed her softly, gently. It was such peace and heavenly freedom, just to fold her and kiss her gently, and not to have any thoughts or any desires or any will, just to be still with her, to be perfectly still and tog
ether, in a peace that was not sleep, but content in bliss. To be content in bliss, without desire or insistence anywhere, this was heaven: to be together in happy stillness.
For a long time she nestled to him, and he kissed her softly, her hair, her face, her ears, gently, softly, like dew falling. But this warm breath on her ears disturbed her again, kindled the old destructive fires. She cleaved to him, and he could feel his blood changing like quicksilver.
“But we’ll be still, shall we?” he said.
“Yes,” she said, as if submissively.
And she continued to nestle against him.
But in a little while she drew away and looked at him.
“I must be going home,” she said.
“Must you—how sad,” he replied.
She leaned forward and put up her mouth to be kissed.
“Are you really sad?” she murmured, smiling.
“Yes,” he said, “I wish we could stay as we were, always.”
“Always! Do you?” she murmured, as he kissed her. And then, out of a full throat, she crooned “Kiss me! Kiss me!” And she cleaved close to him. He kissed her many times. But he too had his idea and his will. He wanted only gentle communion, no other, no passion now. So that soon she drew away, put on her hat and went home.
The next day, however, he felt wistful and yearning. He thought he had been wrong, perhaps. Perhaps he had been wrong to go to her with an idea of what he wanted. Was it really only an idea, or was it the interpretation of a profound yearning? If the latter, how was it he was always talking about sensual fulfilment? The two did not agree very well.
Suddenly he found himself face to face with a situation. It was as simple as this: fatally simple. On the one hand, he knew he did want a further sensual experience—something deeper, darker, than ordinary life could give. He remembered the African fetishes he had seen at Halliday’s so often. There came back to him one, a statuette about two feet high, a tall, slim, elegant figure from West Africa, in dark wood, glossy and suave.3 It was a woman, with hair dressed high, like a melon-shaped dome. He remembered her vividly: she was one of his soul’s intimates. Her body was long and elegant, her face was crushed tiny like a beetle’s, she had rows of round heavy collars, like a column of quoits, on her neck. He remembered her: her astonishing cultured elegance, her diminished, beetle face, the astounding long elegant body, on short, ugly legs, with such protuberant buttocks, so weighty and unexpected below her slim long loins. She knew what he himself did not know. She had thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge behind her. It must have been thousands of years since her race had died, mystically: that is, since the relation between the senses and the outspoken mind had broken, leaving the experience all in one sort, mystically sensual. Thousands of years ago, that which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these Africans: the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge in one sort, mindless progressive knowledge through the senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as the beetles have, which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution. This was why her face looked like a beetle’s: this was why the Egyptians worshipped the ball-rolling scarab: because of the principle of knowledge in dissolution and corruption.
There is a long way we can travel, after the death-break: after that point when the soul in intense suffering breaks, breaks away from its organic hold like a leaf that falls. We fall from the connection with life and hope, we lapse from pure integral being, from creation and liberty, and we fall into the long, long African process of purely sensual understanding, knowledge in the mystery of dissolution.
He realised now that this is a long process—thousands of years it takes, after the death of the creative spirit. He realised that there were great mysteries to be unsealed, sensual, mindless, dreadful mysteries, far beyond the phallic cult. How far, in their inverted culture, had these West Africans gone beyond phallic knowledge? Very, very far. Birkin recalled again the female figure: the elongated, long, long body, the curious unexpected heavy buttocks, the long, imprisoned neck, the face with tiny features like a beetle’s. This was far beyond any phallic knowledge, sensual subtle realities far beyond the scope of phallic investigation.
There remained this way, this awful African process, to be fulfilled. It would be done differently by the white races. The white races, having the arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, would fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation. Whereas the West Africans, controlled by the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara, had been fulfilled in sun-destruction, the putrescent mystery of sun-rays.
Was this then all that remained? Was there left now nothing but to break off from the happy creative being, was the time up? Is our day of creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution, the African knowledge, but different in us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north?
Birkin thought of Gerald. He was one of these strange white wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? Was he a messenger, an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow?
Birkin was frightened. He was tired, too, when he had reached this length of speculation. Suddenly his strange, strained attention gave way, he could not attend to these mysteries any more. There was another way, the way of freedom. There was the paradisal entry into pure, single being, the individual soul taking precedence over love and desire for union, stronger than any pangs of emotion, a lovely state of free proud singleness, which accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields.
There was the other way, the remaining way. And he must run to follow it. He thought of Ursula, how sensitive and delicate she really was, her skin so over-fine, as if one skin were wanting. She was really so marvellously gentle and sensitive. Why did he ever forget it? He must go to her at once. He must ask her to marry him. They must marry at once, and so make a definite pledge, enter into a definite communion. He must set out at once and ask her, this moment. There was no moment to spare.
He drifted on swiftly to Beldover, half-unconscious of his own movement. He saw the town on the slope of the hill, not straggling, but as if walled-in with the straight, final streets of miners’ dwellings, making a great square, and it looked like Jerusalem to his fancy. The world was all strange and transcendent.
Rosalind opened the door to him. She started slightly, as a young girl will, and said:
“Oh, I’ll tell father.”
With which she disappeared, leaving Birkin in the hall, looking at some reproductions from Picasso, lately introduced by Gudrun. He was admiring the almost wizard, sensuous apprehension of the earth, when Will Brangwen appeared, rolling down his shirt sleeves.
“Well,” said Brangwen, “I’ll get a coat.” And he too disappeared for a moment. Then he returned, and opened the door of the drawing-room, saying:
“You must excuse me, I was just doing a bit of work in the shed. Come inside, will you.”
Birkin entered and sat down. He looked at the bright, reddish face of the other man, at the narrow brow and the very bright eyes, and at the rather sensual lips that unrolled wide and expansive under the black cropped moustache. How curious it was that this was a human being! What Brangwen thought himself to be, how meaningless it was, confronted with the reality of him. Birkin could see only a strange, inexplicable almost patternless collection of passions and desires and suppressions and traditions and mechanical ideas, all cast unfused and disunited into this slender, bright-faced man of nearly fifty, who was as unresolved now as he was at twenty, a
nd as uncreated. How could he be the parent of Ursula, when he was not created himself. He was not a parent. A slip of living flesh had been transmitted through him, but the spirit had not come from him. The spirit had not come from any ancestor, it had come out of the unknown. A child is the child of the mystery, or it is uncreated.
“The weather’s not so bad as it has been,” said Brangwen, after waiting a moment. There was no connection between the two men.
“No,” said Birkin. “It was full moon two days ago.”
“Oh! You believe in the moon then, affecting the weather?”
“No, I don’t think I do. I don’t really know enough about it.”
“You know what they say? The moon and the weather may change together, but the change of the moon won’t change the weather.”
“Is that it?” said Birkin. “I hadn’t heard it.”
There was a pause. Then Birkin said:
“Am I hindering you? I called to see Ursula, really. Is she at home?”
“I don’t believe she is. I believe she’s gone to the library. I’ll just see.”
Birkin could hear him enquiring in the dining-room.
“No,” he said, coming back. “But she won’t be long. You wanted to speak to her?”
Birkin looked across at the other man with curious calm, clear eyes.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I wanted to ask her to marry me.”
A point of light came on the golden-brown eyes of the elder man.
“O-oh?” he said, looking at Birkin, then dropping his eyes before the calm, steadily watching look of the other: “Was she expecting you then?”
“No,” said Birkin.
“No? I didn’t know anything of this sort was on foot—” Brangwen smiled awkwardly.
Birkin looked back at him, and said to himself: “I wonder why it should be ‘on foot’!” Aloud he said:
“No, it’s perhaps rather sudden.” At which, thinking of his relationship with Ursula, he added—“but I don’t know—”
“Quite sudden, is it? Oh!” said Brangwen, rather baffled and annoyed.
“In one way,” replied Birkin, “—not in another.”
Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 35