“You must go, my love.”
But she was sick with terror, sick.
He put his arms round her. Her heart sank.
“But you must go, my love. It’s late.”
“What time is it?” he said.
Strange, his man’s voice. She quivered. It was an intolerable oppression to her.
“Past five o’clock,” she said.
But he only closed his arms round her again. Her heart cried within her in torture. She disengaged herself firmly.
“You really must go,” she said.
“Not for a minute,” he said.
She lay still, nestling against him, but unyielding.
“Not for a minute,” he repeated, clasping her closely.
“Yes,” she said, unyielding. “I’m afraid if you stay any longer.”
There was a certain coldness in her voice that made him release her, and she broke away, rose and lit the candle. That then was the end.
He got up. He was warm and full of life and desire. Yet he felt a little bit ashamed, humiliated, putting on his clothes before her, in the candle-light. For he felt revealed, exposed to her, at a time when she was in some way against him. It was all very difficult to understand. He dressed himself quickly, without collar or tie. Still he felt full and complete, perfected. She thought it humiliating to see a man dressing: the ridiculous shirt, the ridiculous trousers and braces. But again an idea saved her.
“It is like a workman getting up to go to work,” thought Gudrun. “And I am like a workman’s wife.” But an ache like nausea was upon her: a nausea of him.
He pushed his collar and tie into his overcoat pocket. Then he sat down and pulled on his boots. They were sodden, as were his socks and trouser-bottoms. But he himself was quick and warm.
“Perhaps you ought to have put your boots on downstairs,” she said.
At once, without answering, he pulled them off again, and stood holding them in his hand. She had thrust her feet into slippers, and flung a loose robe round her. She was ready. She looked at him as he stood waiting, his black coat buttoned to the chin, his cap pulled down, his boots in his hand. And the passionate almost hateful fascination revived in her for a moment. It was not exhausted. His face was so warm-looking, wide-eyed and full of newness, so perfect. She felt old, old. She went to him heavily, to be kissed. He kissed her quickly. She wished his warm, expressionless beauty did not so fatally put a spell on her, compel her and subjugate her. It was a burden upon her, that she resented, but could not escape. Yet when she looked at his straight man’s brows, and at his rather small, well-shaped nose, and at his blue, indifferent eyes, she knew her passion for him was not yet satisfied, perhaps never could be satisfied. Only now she was weary, with an ache like nausea. She wanted him gone.
They went downstairs quickly. It seemed they made a prodigious noise. He followed her as, wrapped in her vivid green wrap, she preceded him with the light. She suffered badly with fear, lest her people should be roused. He hardly cared. He did not care now who knew. And she hated this in him. One must be cautious. One must preserve oneself.
She led the way to the kitchen. It was neat and tidy, as the woman had left it. He looked up at the clock—twenty minutes past five! Then he sat down on a chair to put on his boots. She waited, watching his every movement. She wanted it to be over, it was a great nervous strain on her.
He stood up—she unbolted the back door, and looked out. A cold, raw night, not yet dawn, with a piece of a moon in the vague sky. She was glad she need not go out.
“Good-bye then,” he murmured.
“I’ll come to the gate,” she said.
And again she hurried on in front, to warn him of the steps. And at the gate, once more she stood on the step whilst he stood below her.
“Good-bye,” she whispered.
He kissed her dutifully, and turned away.
She suffered torments hearing his firm tread going so distinctly down the road. Ah, the insensitiveness of that firm tread!
She closed the gate, and crept quickly and noiselessly back to bed. When she was in her room, and the door closed, and all safe, she breathed freely, and a great weight fell off her. She nestled down in bed, in the groove his body had made, in the warmth he had left. And excited, worn-out, yet still satisfied, she fell soon into a deep, heavy sleep.
Gerald walked quickly through the raw darkness of the coming dawn. He met nobody. His mind was beautifully still and thoughtless, like a still pool, and his body full and warm and rich. He went quickly along towards Shortlands, in a grateful self-sufficiency.
CHAPTER XXV
Marriage or Not
THE BRANGWEN FAMILY WAS going to move from Beldover. It was necessary now for the father to be in town.
Birkin had taken out a marriage licence, yet Ursula deferred from day to day. She would not fix any definite time—she still wavered. Her month’s notice to leave the Grammar School was in its third week. Christmas was not far off.
Gerald waited for the Ursula-Birkin marriage. It was something crucial to him.
“Shall we make it a double-barrelled affair?” he said to Birkin one day.
“Who for the second shot?” asked Birkin.
“Gudrun and me,” said Gerald, the venturesome twinkle in his eyes.
Birkin looked at him steadily, as if somewhat taken aback.
“Serious—or joking?” he asked.
“Oh, serious. Shall I? Shall Gudrun and I rush in along with you?”
“Do by all means,” said Birkin. “I didn’t know you’d got that length.”
“What length?” said Gerald, looking at the other man, and laughing.
“Oh, yes, we’ve gone all the lengths.”
“There remains to put it on a broad social basis, and to achieve a high moral purpose,” said Birkin.
“Something like that: the length and breadth and height of it,” replied Gerald, smiling.
“Oh, well,” said Birkin, “it’s a very admirable step to take, I should say.”
Gerald looked at him closely.
“Why aren’t you enthusiastic?” he asked. “I thought you were such dead nuts on marriage.”
Birkin lifted his shoulders.
“One might as well be dead nuts on noses. There are all sorts of noses, snub and otherwise—”
Gerald laughed.
“And all sorts of marriage, also snub and otherwise?” he said.
“That’s it.”
“And you think if I marry, it will be snub?” asked Gerald quizzically, his head a little on one side.
Birkin laughed quickly.
“How do I know what it will be!” he said. “Don’t lambaste me with my own parallels—”
Gerald pondered a while.
“But I should like to know your opinion, exactly,” he said.
“On your marriage?—or marrying? Why should you want my opinion? I’ve got no opinions. I’m not interested in legal marriage, one way or another. It’s a mere question of convenience.”
Still Gerald watched him closely.
“More than that, I think,” he said seriously. “However, you may be bored by the ethics of marriage, yet really to marry, in one’s own personal case, is something critical, final—
“You mean there is something final in going to the registrar with a woman?”
“If you’re coming back with her, I do,” said Gerald. “It is in some way irrevocable.”
“Yes, I agree,” said Birkin.
“No matter how one regards legal marriage, yet to enter into the married state, in one’s own personal instance, is nnal—”
“I believe it is,” said Birkin, “somewhere.”
“The question remains then, should one do it,” said Gerald.
Birkin watched him narrowly, with amused eyes.
“You are like Lord Bacon, Gerald,” he said. “You argue it like a lawyer—or like Hamlet’s to-be-or-not-to-be.1 If I were you I would not marry: but ask Gudrun, not me. You’re not marrying m
e, are you?”
Gerald did not heed the latter part of this speech.
“Yes,” he said, “one must consider it coldly. It is something critical. One comes to the point where one must take a step in one direction or another. And marriage is one direction—”
“And what is the other?” asked Birkin quickly.
Gerald looked up at him with hot, strangely-conscious eyes, that the other man could not understand.
“I can’t say,” he replied. “If I knew that—” He moved uneasily on his feet, and did not finish.
“You mean if you knew the alternative?” asked Birkin. “And since you don’t know it, marriage is a pis aller.”ck
Gerald looked up at Birkin with the same hot, constrained eyes.
“One does have the feeling that marriage is a pis aller,” he admitted.
“Then don’t do it,” said Birkin. “I tell you,” he went on, “the same as I’ve said before, marriage in the old sense seems to me repulsive. Egoïsme à deux is nothing to it.2 It’s a sort of tacit hunting in couples: the world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests, and stewing in its own little privacy—it’s the most repulsive thing on earth.”
“I quite agree,” said Gerald. “There’s something inferior about it. But as I say, what’s the alternative?”
“One should avoid this home instinct. It’s not an instinct, it’s a habit of cowardliness. One should never have a home.”
“I agree really,” said Gerald. “But there’s no alternative.”
“We’ve got to find one. I do believe in a permanent union between a man and a woman. Chopping about is merely an exhaustive process. But a permanent relation between a man and a woman isn’t the last word—it certainly isn’t.”
“Quite,” said Gerald.
“In fact,” said Birkin, “because the relation between man and woman is made the supreme and exclusive relationship, that’s where all the tightness and meanness and insufficiency comes in.”
“Yes, I believe you,” said Gerald.
“You’ve got to take down the love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal. We want something broader. I believe in the additional perfect relationship between man and man—additional to marriage.”
“I can never see how they can be the same,” said Gerald.
“Not the same—but equally important, equally creative, equally sacred, if you like.”
Gerald moved uneasily. “You know, I can’t feel that,” said he. “Surely there can never be anything as strong between man and man as sex love is between man and woman. Nature doesn’t provide the basis.”
“Well, of course, I think she does. And I don’t think we shall ever be happy till we establish ourselves on this basis. You’ve got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love. And you’ve got to admit the unadmitted love of man for man. It makes for a greater freedom for everybody, a greater power of individuality both in men and women.”
“I know,” said Gerald, “you believe something like that. Only I can’t feel it, you see.” He put his hand on Birkin’s arm, with a sort of deprecating affection. And he smiled as if triumphantly.
He was ready to be doomed. Marriage was like a doom to him. He was willing to condemn himself in marriage, to become like a convict condemned to the mines of the underworld, living no life in the sun, but having a dreadful subterranean activity. He was willing to accept this. And marriage was the seal of his condemnation. He was willing to be sealed thus in the underworld, like a soul damned but living forever in damnation. But he would not make any pure relationship with any other soul. He could not. Marriage was not the committing of himself into a relationship with Gudrun. It was a committing of himself in acceptance of the established world, he would accept the established order, in which he did not livingly believe, and then he would retreat to the underworld for his life. This he would do.
The other way was to accept Rupert’s offer of alliance, to enter into the bond of pure trust and love with the other man, and then subsequently with the woman. If he pledged himself with the man he would later be able to pledge himself with the woman: not merely in legal marriage, but in absolute, mystic marriage.
Yet he could not accept the offer. There was a numbness upon him, a numbness either of unborn, absent volition, or of atrophy. Perhaps it was the absence of volition. For he was strangely elated at Rupert’s offer. Yet he was still more glad to reject it, not to be committed.
CHAPTER XXVI
A Chair1
THERE WAS A JUMBLE market every Monday afternoon in the old market-place in town. Ursula and Birkin strayed down there one afternoon. They had been talking of furniture, and they wanted to see if there was any fragment they would like to buy, amid the heaps of rubbish collected on the cobblestones.
The old market-square was not very large, a mere bare patch of granite setts, usually with a few fruit-stalls, under a wall. It was in a poor quarter of the town. Meagre houses stood down one side, there was a hosiery factory, a great blank with myriad oblong windows, at the end, a street of little shops with flagstone pavement down the other side, and, for a crowning monument, the public baths, of new red brick, with a clock-tower. The people who moved about seemed stumpy and sordid, the air seemed to smell rather dirty, there was a sense of many mean streets ramifying off into warrens of meanness. Now and again a great chocolate-and-yellow tramcar ground round a difficult bend under the hosiery factory.
Ursula was superficially thrilled when she found herself out among the common people, in the jumbled place piled with old bedding, heaps of old iron, shabby crockery in pale lots, muffled lots of unthinkable clothing. She and Birkin went unwillingly down the narrow aisle between the rusty wares. He was looking at the goods, she at the people.
She excitedly watched a young woman, who was going to have a baby, and who was turning over a mattress and making a young man, down-at-heel and dejected, feel it also. So secretive and active and anxious the young woman seemed, so reluctant, slinking, the young man. He was going to marry her because she was having a child.
When they had felt the mattress, the young woman asked the old man seated on a stool among his wares, how much it was. He told her, and she turned to the young man. The latter was ashamed, and self-conscious. He turned his face away, though he left his body standing there, and muttered aside. And again the woman anxiously and actively fingered the mattress and added up in her mind and bargained with the old, unclean man. All the while, the young man stood by, shamefaced and down-at-heel, submitting.
“Look,” said Birkin, “there is a pretty chair.”
“Charming!” cried Ursula. “Oh, charming.”
It was an arm-chair of simple wood, probably birch, but of such fine delicacy of grace, standing there on the sordid stones, it almost brought tears to the eyes. It was square in shape, of the purest, slender lines, and four short lines of wood in the back, that reminded Ursula of harpstrings.
“It was once,” said Birkin, “gilded—and it had a cane seat. Somebody has nailed this wooden seat in. Look, here is a trifle of the red that underlay the gilt. The rest is all black, except where the wood is worn pure and glossy. It is the fine unity of the lines that is so attractive. Look, how they run and meet and counteract. But of course the wooden seat is wrong—it destroys the perfect lightness and unity in tension the cane gave. I like it though—”
“Ah yes,” said Ursula, “so do I.”
“How much is it?” Birkin asked the man.
“Ten shillings.”
“And you will send it—?”
It was bought.
“So beautiful, so pure!” Birkin said. “It almost breaks my heart.” They walked along between the heaps of rubbish. “My beloved country—it had something to express even when it made that chair.”
“And hasn’t it now?” asked Ursula. She was always angry when he took this tone.
“No, it hasn’t. When I see that clear, beautiful chair, and I think of England, eve
n Jane Austen’s England—it had living thoughts to unfold even then, and pure happiness in unfolding them. And now, we can only fish among the rubbish heaps for the remnants of their old expression. There is no production in us now, only sordid and foul mechanicalness.”
“It isn’t true,” cried Ursula. “Why must you always praise the past, at the expense of the present? Really, I don’t think so much of Jane Austen’s England. It was materialistic enough, if you like—”
“It could afford to be materialistic,” said Birkin, “because it had the power to be something other—which we haven’t. We are materialistic because we haven’t the power to be anything else—try as we may, we can’t bring off anything but materialism: mechanism, the very soul of materialism.”
Ursula was subdued into angry silence. She did not heed what he said. She was rebelling against something else.
“And I hate your past. I’m sick of it,” she cried. “I believe I even hate that old chair, though it is beautiful. It isn’t my sort of beauty. I wish it had been smashed up when its day was over, not left to preach the beloved past to us. I’m sick of the beloved past.”
“Not so sick as I am of the accursed present,” he said.
“Yes, just the same. I hate the present—but I don’t want the past to take its place—I don’t want that old chair.”
He was rather angry for a moment. Then he looked at the sky shining beyond the tower of the public baths, and he seemed to get over it all. He laughed.
“All right,” he said, “then let us not have it. I’m sick of it all, too. At any rate, one can’t go on living on the old bones of beauty.”
“One can’t,” she cried. “I don’t want old things.”
“The truth is, we don’t want things at all,” he replied. “The thought of a house and furniture of my own is hateful to me.”
This startled her for a moment. Then she replied:
“So it is to me. But one must live somewhere.”
“Not somewhere—anywhere,” he said. “One should just live anywhere—not have a definite place. I don’t want a definite place. As soon as you get a room, and it is complete, you want to run from it. Now my rooms at the Mill are quite complete, I want them at the bottom of the sea. It is a horrible tyranny of a fixed milieu, where each piece of furniture is a co mmandment-stone.”
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