They sat down in the window-seat, to wait. Both girls were looking over the room. It was void, with a meaninglessness that was almost dreadful.
“Really,” said Ursula, “this room couldn’t be sacred, could it?”
Gudrun looked over it with slow eyes.
“Impossible,” she replied.
“When I think of their lives—father’s and mother’s, their love, and their marriage, and all of us children, and our bringing-up—would you have such a life, Prune?”
“I wouldn’t, Ursula.”
“It all seems so nothing—their two lives—there’s no meaning in it. Really, if they had not met, and not married, and not lived together—it wouldn’t have mattered, would it?”
“Of course—you can’t tell,” said Gudrun.
“No. But if I thought my life was going to be like it—Prune,” she caught Gudrun’s arm, “I should run.”
Gudrun was silent for a few moments.
“As a matter of fact, one cannot contemplate the ordinary life—one cannot contemplate it,” replied Gudrun. “With you, Ursula, it is quite different. You will be out of it all, with Birkin. He’s a special case. But with the ordinary man, who has his life fixed in one place, marriage is just impossible. There may be, and there are, thousands of women who want it, and could conceive of nothing else. But the very thought of it sends me mad. One must be free, above all, one must be free. One may forfeit everything else, but one must be free—one must not become 7, Pinchbeck Street—or Somerset Drive—or Shortlands. No man will be sufficient to make that good—no man! To marry, one must have a free lance, or nothing, a comrade-in-arms, a Glücksritter.cm A man with a position in the social world—well, it is just impossible, impossible!”
“What a lovely word—a Glücksritter!” said Ursula. “So much nicer than a soldier of fortune.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” said Gudrun. “I’d tilt the world with a Glücksritter. But a home, an establishment! Ursula, what would it mean?—think!”
“I know,” said Ursula. “We’ve had one home—that’s enough for me.”
“Quite enough,” said Gudrun.
“The little grey home in the west,” quoted Ursula ironically.
“Doesn’t it sound grey, too,” said Gudrun grimly.
They were interrupted by the sound of the car. There was Birkin. Ursula was surprised that she felt so lit up, that she became suddenly so free from the problems of grey homes in the west.
They heard his heels click on the hall pavement below.
“Hello!” he called, his voice echoing alive through the house. Ursula smiled to herself. He was frightened of the place too.
“Hello! Here we are,” she called downstairs. And they heard him quickly running up.
“This is a ghostly situation,” he said.
“These houses don’t have ghosts—they’ve never had any personality, and only a place with personality can have a ghost,” said Gudrun.
“I suppose so. Are you both weeping over the past?”
“We are,” said Gudrun, grimly.
Ursula laughed.
“Not weeping that it’s gone, but weeping that it ever was,” she said.
“Oh,” he replied, relieved.
He sat down for a moment. There was something in his presence, Ursula thought, lambent and alive. It made even the impertinent structure of this null house disappear.
“Gudrun says she could not bear to be married and put into a house,” said Ursula meaningful—they knew this referred to Gerald.
He was silent for some moments.
“Well,” he said, “if you know beforehand you couldn’t stand it, you’re safe.”
“Quite!” said Gudrun.
“Why does every woman think her aim in life is to have a hubby and a little grey home in the west? Why is this the goal of life? Why should it be?” said Ursula.
“Il faut avoir le respect de ses bêtises,”cn said Birkin.
“But you needn’t have the respect for the bêtise before you’ve committed it,” laughed Ursula.
“Ah then, des bêtises du papa?”
“Et de la maman,” added Gudrun satirically.
“Et des voisins,” said Ursula.
They all laughed, and rose. It was getting dark. They carried the things to the car. Gudrun locked the door of the empty house. Birkin had lighted the lamps of the automobile. It all seemed very happy, as if they were setting out.
“Do you mind stopping at Coulsons. I have to leave the key there,” said Gudrun.
“Right,” said Birkin, and they moved off.
They stopped in the main street. The shops were just lighted, the last miners were passing home along the causeways, half-visible shadows in their grey pit-dirt, moving through the blue air. But their feet rang harshly in manifold sound, along the pavement.
How pleased Gudrun was to come out of the shop, and enter the car, and be borne swiftly away into the down-hill of palpable dusk, with Ursula and Birkin! What an adventure life seemed at this moment ! How deeply, how suddenly she envied Ursula! Life for her was so quick, and an open door—so reckless as if not only this world, but the world that was gone and the world to come were nothing to her. Ah, if she could be just like that, it would be perfect.
For always, except in her moments of excitement, she felt a want within herself. She was unsure. She had felt that now, at last, in Gerald’s strong and violent love, she was living fully and finally. But when she compared herself with Ursula, already her soul was jealous, unsatisfied. She was not satisfied—she was never to be satisfied.
What was she short of now? It was marriage—it was the wonderful stability of marriage. She did want it, let her say what she might. She had been lying. The old idea of marriage was right even now—marriage and the home. Yet her mouth gave a little grimace at the words. She thought of Gerald and Shortlands—marriage and the home! Ah well, let it rest! He meant a great deal to her—but—! Perhaps it was not in her to marry. She was one of life’s outcasts, one of the drifting lives that have no root. No, no—it could not be so. She suddenly conjured up a rosy room, with herself in a beautiful gown, and a handsome man in evening dress who held her in his arms in the firelight, and kissed her. This picture she entitled “Home.” It would have done for the Royal Academy.
“Come with us to tea—do,” said Ursula, as they ran nearer to the cottage of Willey Green.
“Thanks awfully—but I must go in—” said Gudrun. She wanted very much to go on with Ursula and Birkin. That seemed like life indeed to her. Yet a certain perversity would not let her.
“Do come—yes, it would be so nice,” pleaded Ursula.
“I’m awfully sorry—I should love to—but I can’t—really—”
She descended from the car in trembling haste.
“Can’t you really!” came Ursula’s regretful voice.
“No, really I can’t,” responded Gudrun’s pathetic, chagrined words out of the dusk.
“All right, are you?” called Birkin.
“Quite!” said Gudrun. “Good-night!”
“Good-night,” they called.
“Come whenever you like, we shall be glad,” called Birkin.
“Thank you very much,” called Gudrun, in the strange, twanging voice of lonely chagrin that was very puzzling to him. She turned away to her cottage gate, and they drove on. But immediately she stood to watch them, as the car ran vague into the distance. And as she went up the path to her strange house, her heart was full of incomprehensible bitterness.
In her parlour was a long-case clock, and inserted into its dial was a ruddy, round, slant-eyed, joyous-painted face, that wagged over with the most ridiculous ogle when the clock ticked, and back again with the same absurd glad-eye at the next tick. All the time the absurd smooth, brown-ruddy face gave her an obstructive “glad-eye.” She stood for minutes, watching it, till a sort of maddened disgust overcame her, and she laughed at herself hollowly. And still it rocked, and gave her the glad-eye from one side,
then from the other, from one side, then from the other. Ah, how unhappy she was! In the midst of her most active happiness, ah, how unhappy she was! She glanced at the table. Gooseberry jam, and the same home-made cake with too much soda in it! Still, gooseberry jam was good, and one so rarely got it.
All the evening she wanted to go to the Mill. But she coldly refused to allow herself. She went the next afternoon instead. She was happy to find Ursula alone. It was a lovely, intimate secluded atmosphere. They talked endlessly and delightedly. “Aren’t you fearfully happy here?” said Gudrun to her sister glancing at her own bright eyes in the mirror. She always envied, almost with resentment, the strange positive fulness that subsisted in the atmosphere around Ursula and Birkin.
“How really beautifully this room is done,” she said aloud. “This hard plaited matting—what a lovely colour it is, the colour of cool light!”
And it seemed to her perfect.
“Ursula,” she said at length, in a voice of question and detachment, “did you know that Gerald Crich had suggested our going away all together at Christmas?”
“Yes, he’s spoken to Rupert.”
A deep flush dyed Gudrun’s cheek. She was silent a moment, as if taken aback, and not knowing what to say.
“But don’t you think,” she said at last, “it is amazingly cool!”
Ursula laughed.
“I like him for it,” she said.
Gudrun was silent. It was evident that, whilst she was almost mortified by Gerald’s taking the liberty of making such a suggestion to Birkin, yet the idea itself attracted her strongly.
“There’s a rather lovely simplicity about Gerald, I think,” said Ursula, “so defiant, somehow! Oh, I think he’s very lovable.”
Gudrun did not reply for some moments. She had still to get over the feeling of insult at the liberty taken with her freedom.
“What did Rupert say—do you know?” she asked.
“He said it would be most awfully jolly,” said Ursula.
Again Gudrun looked down, and was silent.
“Don’t you think it would?” said Ursula, tentatively. She was never quite sure how many defences Gudrun was having round herself.
Gudrun raised her face with difficulty and held it averted.
“I think it might be awfully jolly, as you say,” she replied. “But don’t you think it was an unpardonable liberty to take—to talk of such things to Rupert—who after all—you see what I mean, Ursula—they might have been two men arranging an outing with some little typeco they’d picked up. Oh, I think it’s unforgivable, quite!” She used the French word “type.”
Her eyes flashed, her soft face was flushed and sullen. Ursula looked on, rather frightened, frightened most of all because she thought Gudrun seemed rather common, really like a little type. But she had not the courage quite to think this—not right out.
“Oh no,” she cried, stammering. “Oh no—not at all like that—oh no! No, I think it’s rather beautiful, the friendship between Rupert and Gerald. They just are simple—they say anything to each other, like brothers.”
Gudrun flushed deeper. She could not bear it that Gerald gave her away—even to Birkin.
“But do you think even brothers have any right to exchange confidences of that sort?” she asked, with deep anger.
“Oh yes,” said Ursula. “There’s never anything said that isn’t perfectly straightforward. No, the thing that’s amazed me most in Gerald—how perfectly simple and direct he can be! And you know, it takes rather a big man. Most of them must be indirect, they are such cowards.”
But Gudrun was still silent with anger. She wanted the absolute secrecy kept, with regard to her movements.
“Won’t you go?” said Ursula. “Do, we might all be so happy! There is something I love about Gerald—he’s much more lovable than I thought him. He’s free, Gudrun, he really is.”
Gudrun’s mouth was still closed, sullen and ugly. She opened it at length.
“Do you know where he proposes to go?” she asked.
“Yes—to the Tyrol, where he used to go when he was in Germany—a lovely place where students go, small and rough and lovely, for winter sport!”
Through Gudrun’s mind went the angry thought—“they know everything.”
“Yes,” she said aloud, “about forty kilometres from Innsbruck, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know exactly where—but it would be lovely, don’t you think, high in the perfect snow—?”
“Very lovely!” said Gudrun, sarcastically.
Ursula was put out.
“Of course,” she said, “I think Gerald spoke to Rupert so that it shouldn’t seem like an outing with a type—”
“I know, of course,” said Gudrun, “that he quite commonly does take up with that sort.”
“Does he!” said Ursula. “Why how do you know?”
“I know of a model in Chelsea,” said Gudrun coldly.
Now Ursula was silent.
“Well,” she said at last, with a doubtful laugh, “I hope he has a good time with her.” At which Gudrun looked more glum.
CHAPTER XXVIII
In the Pompadour1
CHRISTMAS DREW NEAR, ALL four prepared for flight. Birkin and Ursula were busy packing their few personal things, making them ready to be sent off, to whatever country and whatever place they might choose at last. Gudrun was very much excited. She loved to be on the wing.
She and Gerald, being ready first, set off via London and Paris to Innsbruck, where they would meet Ursula and Birkin. In London they stayed one night. They went to the music-hall and afterwards to the Pompadour Café.
Gudrun hated the Café, yet she always went back to it, as did most of the artists of her acquaintance. She loathed its atmosphere of petty vice and petty jealousy and petty art. Yet she always called in again, when she was in town. It was as if she had to return to this small, slow, central whirlpool of disintegration and dissolution: just give it a look.
She sat with Gerald drinking some sweetish liqueur, and staring with black, sullen looks at the various groups of people at the tables. She would greet nobody, but young men nodded to her frequently, with a kind of sneering familiarity. She cut them all. And it gave her pleasure to sit there, cheeks flushed, eyes black and sullen, seeing them all objectively, as put away from her, like creatures in some menagerie of apish degraded souls. God, what a foul crew they were! Her blood beat black and thick in her veins with rage and loathing. Yet she must sit and watch, watch. One or two people came to speak to her. From every side of the Café, eyes turned half furtively, half jeeringly at her, men looking over their shoulders, women under their hats.
The old crowd was there, Carlyon in his corner with his pupils and his girl, Halliday and Libidnikov and the Pussum—they were all there. Gudrun watched Gerald. She watched his eyes linger a moment on Halliday, on Halliday’s party. These last were on the look-out—they nodded to him, he nodded again. They giggled and whispered among themselves. Gerald watched them with the steady twinkle in his eyes. They were urging the Pussum to something.
She at last rose. She was wearing a curious dress of dark silk splashed and spattered with different colours, a curious motley effect. She was thinner, her eyes were perhaps hotter, more disintegrated. Otherwise she was just the same. Gerald watched her with the same steady twinkle in his eyes as she came across. She held out her thin brown hand to him.
“How are you?” she said.
He shook hands with her, but remained seated, and let her stand near him, against the table. She nodded blackly to Gudrun, whom she did not know to speak to, but well enough by sight and reputation.
“I am very well,” said Gerald. “And you?”
“Oh I’m all wight. What about Wupert?”
“Rupert? He’s very well, too.”
“Yes, I don’t mean that. What about him being married?”
“Oh—yes, he is married.”
The Pussum’s eyes had a hot flash.
“Oh, he’
s weally bwought it off then, has he? When was he married?”
“A week or two ago.”
“Weally! He’s never written.”
“No.”
“No. Don’t you think it’s too bad?”
This last was in a tone of challenge. The Pussum let it be known by her tone, that she was aware of Gudrun’s listening.
“I suppose he didn’t feel like it,” replied Gerald.
“But why didn’t he?” pursued the Pussum.
This was received in silence. There was an ugly, mocking persistence in the small, beautiful figure of the depraved girl, as she stood near Gerald.
“Are you staying in town long?” she asked.
“To-night only.”
“Oh, only to-night. Are you coming over to speak to Julius?”
“Not to-night.”
“Oh very well. I’ll tell him then.” Then came her touch of diablerie. “You’re looking awf’lly fit.”
“Yes—I feel it.” Gerald was quite calm and easy, a spark of satiric amusement in his eye.
“Are you having a good time?”
This was a direct blow for Gudrun, spoken in a level, toneless voice of callous ease.
“Yes,” he replied, quite colourlessly.
“I’m awf’lly sorry you aren’t coming round to the flat. You aren’t very faithful to your fwiends.”
“Not very,” he said.
She nodded them both “Good-night,” and went back slowly to her own set. Gudrun watched her curious walk, stiff and jerking at the loins. They heard her level, toneless voice distinctly.
“He won’t come over;—he is otherwise engaged,” it said. There was more laughter and lowered voices and mockery at the table.
“Is she a friend of yours?” said Gudrun, looking calmly at Gerald.
“I’ve stayed at Halliday’s flat with Birkin,” he said, meeting her slow, calm eyes. And she knew that the Pussum was one of his mistresses—and he knew she knew.
She looked round, and called for the waiter. She wanted an iced cocktail, of all things. This amused Gerald—he wondered what was up.
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