‘What responsibilities?’ she asked, wondering.
‘We must drop our jobs, like a shot.’
A new understanding dawned into her face.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘there’s that.’
‘We must get out,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for it but to get out, quick.’
She looked at him doubtfully across the table.
‘But where?’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘We’ll just wander about for a bit.’
Again she looked at him quizzically.
‘I should be perfectly happy at the Mill,’ she said.
‘It’s very near the old thing,’ he said. ‘Let us wander a bit.’
His voice could be so soft and happy-go-lucky, it went through her veins like an exhilaration. Nevertheless she dreamed of a valley, and wild gardens, and peace. She had a desire too for splendour — an aristocratic extravagant splendour. Wandering seemed to her like restlessness, dissatisfaction.
‘Where will you wander to?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. I feel as if I would just meet you and we’d set off — just towards the distance.’
‘But where can one go?’ she asked anxiously. ‘After all, there is only the world, and none of it is very distant.’
‘Still,’ he said, ‘I should like to go with you — nowhere. It would be rather wandering just to nowhere. That’s the place to get to — nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.’
Still she meditated.
‘You see, my love,’ she said, ‘I’m so afraid that while we are only people, we’ve got to take the world that’s given — because there isn’t any other.’
‘Yes there is,’ he said. ‘There’s somewhere where we can be free — somewhere where one needn’t wear much clothes — none even — where one meets a few people who have gone through enough, and can take things for granted — where you be yourself, without bothering. There is somewhere — there are one or two people — ’
‘But where — ?’ she sighed.
‘Somewhere — anywhere. Let’s wander off. That’s the thing to do — let’s wander off.’
‘Yes — ’ she said, thrilled at the thought of travel. But to her it was only travel.
‘To be free,’ he said. ‘To be free, in a free place, with a few other people!’
‘Yes,’ she said wistfully. Those ‘few other people’ depressed her.
‘It isn’t really a locality, though,’ he said. ‘It’s a perfected relation between you and me, and others — the perfect relation — so that we are free together.’
‘It is, my love, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘It’s you and me. It’s you and me, isn’t it?’ She stretched out her arms to him. He went across and stooped to kiss her face. Her arms closed round him again, her hands spread upon his shoulders, moving slowly there, moving slowly on his back, down his back slowly, with a strange recurrent, rhythmic motion, yet moving slowly down, pressing mysteriously over his loins, over his flanks. The sense of the awfulness of riches that could never be impaired flooded her mind like a swoon, a death in most marvellous possession, mystic-sure. She possessed him so utterly and intolerably, that she herself lapsed out. And yet she was only sitting still in the chair, with her hands pressed upon him, and lost.
Again he softly kissed her.
‘We shall never go apart again,’ he murmured quietly. And she did not speak, but only pressed her hands firmer down upon the source of darkness in him.
They decided, when they woke again from the pure swoon, to write their resignations from the world of work there and then. She wanted this.
He rang the bell, and ordered note-paper without a printed address. The waiter cleared the table.
‘Now then,’ he said, ‘yours first. Put your home address, and the date — then “Director of Education, Town Hall — Sir — ” Now then! — I don’t know how one really stands — I suppose one could get out of it in less than month — Anyhow “Sir — I beg to resign my post as classmistress in the Willey Green Grammar School. I should be very grateful if you would liberate me as soon as possible, without waiting for the expiration of the month’s notice.” That’ll do. Have you got it? Let me look. “Ursula Brangwen.” Good! Now I’ll write mine. I ought to give them three months, but I can plead health. I can arrange it all right.’
He sat and wrote out his formal resignation.
‘Now,’ he said, when the envelopes were sealed and addressed, ‘shall we post them here, both together? I know Jackie will say, “Here’s a coincidence!” when he receives them in all their identity. Shall we let him say it, or not?’
‘I don’t care,’ she said.
‘No — ?’ he said, pondering.
‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Their imaginations shall not work on us. I’ll post yours here, mine after. I cannot be implicated in their imaginings.’
He looked at her with his strange, non-human singleness.
‘Yes, you are right,’ she said.
She lifted her face to him, all shining and open. It was as if he might enter straight into the source of her radiance. His face became a little distracted.
‘Shall we go?’ he said.
‘As you like,’ she replied.
They were soon out of the little town, and running through the uneven lanes of the country. Ursula nestled near him, into his constant warmth, and watched the pale-lit revelation racing ahead, the visible night. Sometimes it was a wide old road, with grass-spaces on either side, flying magic and elfin in the greenish illumination, sometimes it was trees looming overhead, sometimes it was bramble bushes, sometimes the walls of a crew-yard and the butt of a barn.
‘Are you going to Shortlands to dinner?’ Ursula asked him suddenly. He started.
‘Good God!’ he said. ‘Shortlands! Never again. Not that. Besides we should be too late.’
‘Where are we going then — to the Mill?’
‘If you like. Pity to go anywhere on this good dark night. Pity to come out of it, really. Pity we can’t stop in the good darkness. It is better than anything ever would be — this good immediate darkness.’
She sat wondering. The car lurched and swayed. She knew there was no leaving him, the darkness held them both and contained them, it was not to be surpassed Besides she had a full mystic knowledge of his suave loins of darkness, dark-clad and suave, and in this knowledge there was some of the inevitability and the beauty of fate, fate which one asks for, which one accepts in full.
He sat still like an Egyptian Pharoah, driving the car. He felt as if he were seated in immemorial potency, like the great carven statues of real Egypt, as real and as fulfilled with subtle strength, as these are, with a vague inscrutable smile on the lips. He knew what it was to have the strange and magical current of force in his back and loins, and down his legs, force so perfect that it stayed him immobile, and left his face subtly, mindlessly smiling. He knew what it was to be awake and potent in that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind. And from this source he had a pure and magic control, magical, mystical, a force in darkness, like electricity.
It was very difficult to speak, it was so perfect to sit in this pure living silence, subtle, full of unthinkable knowledge and unthinkable force, upheld immemorially in timeless force, like the immobile, supremely potent Egyptians, seated forever in their living, subtle silence.
‘We need not go home,’ he said. ‘This car has seats that let down and make a bed, and we can lift the hood.’
She was glad and frightened. She cowered near to him.
‘But what about them at home?’ she said.
‘Send a telegram.’
Nothing more was said. They ran on in silence. But with a sort of second consciousness he steered the car towards a destination. For he had the free intelligence to direct his own ends. His arms and his breast and his head were rounded and living like those of the Greek, he had
not the unawakened straight arms of the Egyptian, nor the sealed, slumbering head. A lambent intelligence played secondarily above his pure Egyptian concentration in darkness.
They came to a village that lined along the road. The car crept slowly along, until he saw the post-office. Then he pulled up.
‘I will send a telegram to your father,’ he said. ‘I will merely say “spending the night in town,” shall I?’
‘Yes,’ she answered. She did not want to be disturbed into taking thought.
She watched him move into the post-office. It was also a shop, she saw. Strange, he was. Even as he went into the lighted, public place he remained dark and magic, the living silence seemed the body of reality in him, subtle, potent, indiscoverable. There he was! In a strange uplift of elation she saw him, the being never to be revealed, awful in its potency, mystic and real. This dark, subtle reality of him, never to be translated, liberated her into perfection, her own perfected being. She too was dark and fulfilled in silence.
He came out, throwing some packages into the car.
‘There is some bread, and cheese, and raisins, and apples, and hard chocolate,’ he said, in his voice that was as if laughing, because of the unblemished stillness and force which was the reality in him. She would have to touch him. To speak, to see, was nothing. It was a travesty to look and to comprehend the man there. Darkness and silence must fall perfectly on her, then she could know mystically, in unrevealed touch. She must lightly, mindlessly connect with him, have the knowledge which is death of knowledge, the reality of surety in not-knowing.
Soon they had run on again into the darkness. She did not ask where they were going, she did not care. She sat in a fullness and a pure potency that was like apathy, mindless and immobile. She was next to him, and hung in a pure rest, as a star is hung, balanced unthinkably. Still there remained a dark lambency of anticipation. She would touch him. With perfect fine finger-tips of reality she would touch the reality in him, the suave, pure, untranslatable reality of his loins of darkness. To touch, mindlessly in darkness to come in pure touching upon the living reality of him, his suave perfect loins and thighs of darkness, this was her sustaining anticipation.
And he too waited in the magical steadfastness of suspense, for her to take this knowledge of him as he had taken it of her. He knew her darkly, with the fullness of dark knowledge. Now she would know him, and he too would be liberated. He would be night-free, like an Egyptian, steadfast in perfectly suspended equilibrium, pure mystic nodality of physical being. They would give each other this star-equilibrium which alone is freedom.
She saw that they were running among trees — great old trees with dying bracken undergrowth. The palish, gnarled trunks showed ghostly, and like old priests in the hovering distance, the fern rose magical and mysterious. It was a night all darkness, with low cloud. The motor-car advanced slowly.
‘Where are we?’ she whispered.
‘In Sherwood Forest.’
It was evident he knew the place. He drove softly, watching. Then they came to a green road between the trees. They turned cautiously round, and were advancing between the oaks of the forest, down a green lane. The green lane widened into a little circle of grass, where there was a small trickle of water at the bottom of a sloping bank. The car stopped.
‘We will stay here,’ he said, ‘and put out the lights.’
He extinguished the lamps at once, and it was pure night, with shadows of trees like realities of other, nightly being. He threw a rug on to the bracken, and they sat in stillness and mindless silence. There were faint sounds from the wood, but no disturbance, no possible disturbance, the world was under a strange ban, a new mystery had supervened. They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness.
She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.
They slept the chilly night through under the hood of the car, a night of unbroken sleep. It was already high day when he awoke. They looked at each other and laughed, then looked away, filled with darkness and secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered the magnificence of the night. It was so magnificent, such an inheritance of a universe of dark reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember. They hid away the remembrance and the knowledge.
CHAPTER XXIV.
DEATH AND LOVE
Thomas Crich died slowly, terribly slowly. It seemed impossible to everybody that the thread of life could be drawn out so thin, and yet not break. The sick man lay unutterably weak and spent, kept alive by morphia and by drinks, which he sipped slowly. He was only half conscious — a thin strand of consciousness linking the darkness of death with the light of day. Yet his will was unbroken, he was integral, complete. Only he must have perfect stillness about him.
Any presence but that of the nurses was a strain and an effort to him now. Every morning Gerald went into the room, hoping to find his father passed away at last. Yet always he saw the same transparent face, the same dread dark hair on the waxen forehead, and the awful, inchoate dark eyes, which seemed to be decomposing into formless darkness, having only a tiny grain of vision within them.
And always, as the dark, inchoate eyes turned to him, there passed through Gerald’s bowels a burning stroke of revolt, that seemed to resound through his whole being, threatening to break his mind with its clangour, and making him mad.
Every morning, the son stood there, erect and taut with life, gleaming in his blondness. The gleaming blondness of his strange, imminent being put the father into a fever of fretful irritation. He could not bear to meet the uncanny, downward look of Gerald’s blue eyes. But it was only for a moment. Each on the brink of departure, the father and son looked at each other, then parted.
For a long time Gerald preserved a perfect sang froid, he remained quite collected. But at last, fear undermined him. He was afraid of some horrible collapse in himself. He had to stay and see this thing through. Some perverse will made him watch his father drawn over the borders of life. And yet, now, every day, the great red-hot stroke of horrified fear through the bowels of the son struck a further inflammation. Gerald went about all day with a tendency to cringe, as if there were the point of a sword of Damocles pricking the nape of his neck.
There was no escape — he was bound up with his father, he had to see him through. And the father’s will never relaxed or yielded to death. It would have to snap when death at last snapped it, — if it did not persist after a physical death. In the same way, the will of the son never yielded. He stood firm and immune, he was outside this death and this dying.
It was a trial by ordeal. Could he stand and see his father slowly dissolve and disappear in death, without once yielding his will, without once relenting before the omnipotence of death. Like a Red Indian undergoing torture, Gerald would experience the whole process of slow death without wincing or flinching. He even triumphed in it. He somehow WANTED this death, even forced it. It was as if he himself were dealing the death, even when he most recoiled in horror. Still, he would deal it, he would triumph through death.
But in the stress of this ordeal, Gerald too lost his hold on the outer, daily life. That which was much to him, came to mean nothing. Work, pleasure — it wa
s all left behind. He went on more or less mechanically with his business, but this activity was all extraneous. The real activity was this ghastly wrestling for death in his own soul. And his own will should triumph. Come what might, he would not bow down or submit or acknowledge a master. He had no master in death.
But as the fight went on, and all that he had been and was continued to be destroyed, so that life was a hollow shell all round him, roaring and clattering like the sound of the sea, a noise in which he participated externally, and inside this hollow shell was all the darkness and fearful space of death, he knew he would have to find reinforcements, otherwise he would collapse inwards upon the great dark void which circled at the centre of his soul. His will held his outer life, his outer mind, his outer being unbroken and unchanged. But the pressure was too great. He would have to find something to make good the equilibrium. Something must come with him into the hollow void of death in his soul, fill it up, and so equalise the pressure within to the pressure without. For day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with darkness, round which whirled the iridescence of his consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the outer life, roared vastly.
In this extremity his instinct led him to Gudrun. He threw away everything now — he only wanted the relation established with her. He would follow her to the studio, to be near her, to talk to her. He would stand about the room, aimlessly picking up the implements, the lumps of clay, the little figures she had cast — they were whimsical and grotesque — looking at them without perceiving them. And she felt him following her, dogging her heels like a doom. She held away from him, and yet she knew he drew always a little nearer, a little nearer.
‘I say,’ he said to her one evening, in an odd, unthinking, uncertain way, ‘won’t you stay to dinner tonight? I wish you would.’
She started slightly. He spoke to her like a man making a request of another man.
‘They’ll be expecting me at home,’ she said.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 205