Ursula pondered.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘there is no NEED for our great works to be so hideous.’
Instantly he broke into motion.
‘There you are!’ he cried, ‘there you are! There is not only NO NEED for our places of work to be ugly, but their ugliness ruins the work, in the end. Men will not go on submitting to such intolerable ugliness. In the end it will hurt too much, and they will wither because of it. And this will wither the WORK as well. They will think the work itself is ugly: the machines, the very act of labour. Whereas the machinery and the acts of labour are extremely, maddeningly beautiful. But this will be the end of our civilisation, when people will not work because work has become so intolerable to their senses, it nauseates them too much, they would rather starve. THEN we shall see the hammer used only for smashing, then we shall see it. Yet here we are — we have the opportunity to make beautiful factories, beautiful machine-houses — we have the opportunity — ’
Gudrun could only partly understand. She could have cried with vexation.
‘What does he say?’ she asked Ursula. And Ursula translated, stammering and brief. Loerke watched Gudrun’s face, to see her judgment.
‘And do you think then,’ said Gudrun, ‘that art should serve industry?’
‘Art should INTERPRET industry, as art once interpreted religion,’ he said.
‘But does your fair interpret industry?’ she asked him.
‘Certainly. What is man doing, when he is at a fair like this? He is fulfilling the counterpart of labour — the machine works him, instead of he the machine. He enjoys the mechanical motion, in his own body.’
‘But is there nothing but work — mechanical work?’ said Gudrun.
‘Nothing but work!’ he repeated, leaning forward, his eyes two darknesses, with needle-points of light. ‘No, it is nothing but this, serving a machine, or enjoying the motion of a machine — motion, that is all. You have never worked for hunger, or you would know what god governs us.’
Gudrun quivered and flushed. For some reason she was almost in tears.
‘No, I have not worked for hunger,’ she replied, ‘but I have worked!’
‘Travaille — lavorato?’ he asked. ‘E che lavoro — che lavoro? Quel travail est-ce que vous avez fait?’
He broke into a mixture of Italian and French, instinctively using a foreign language when he spoke to her.
‘You have never worked as the world works,’ he said to her, with sarcasm.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have. And I do — I work now for my daily bread.’
He paused, looked at her steadily, then dropped the subject entirely. She seemed to him to be trifling.
‘But have YOU ever worked as the world works?’ Ursula asked him.
He looked at her untrustful.
‘Yes,’ he replied, with a surly bark. ‘I have known what it was to lie in bed for three days, because I had nothing to eat.’
Gudrun was looking at him with large, grave eyes, that seemed to draw the confession from him as the marrow from his bones. All his nature held him back from confessing. And yet her large, grave eyes upon him seemed to open some valve in his veins, and involuntarily he was telling.
‘My father was a man who did not like work, and we had no mother. We lived in Austria, Polish Austria. How did we live? Ha! — somehow! Mostly in a room with three other families — one set in each corner — and the W.C. in the middle of the room — a pan with a plank on it — ha! I had two brothers and a sister — and there might be a woman with my father. He was a free being, in his way — would fight with any man in the town — a garrison town — and was a little man too. But he wouldn’t work for anybody — set his heart against it, and wouldn’t.’
‘And how did you live then?’ asked Ursula.
He looked at her — then, suddenly, at Gudrun.
‘Do you understand?’ he asked.
‘Enough,’ she replied.
Their eyes met for a moment. Then he looked away. He would say no more.
‘And how did you become a sculptor?’ asked Ursula.
‘How did I become a sculptor — ’ he paused. ‘Dunque — ’ he resumed, in a changed manner, and beginning to speak French — ’I became old enough — I used to steal from the market-place. Later I went to work — imprinted the stamp on clay bottles, before they were baked. It was an earthenware-bottle factory. There I began making models. One day, I had had enough. I lay in the sun and did not go to work. Then I walked to Munich — then I walked to Italy — begging, begging everything.’
‘The Italians were very good to me — they were good and honourable to me. From Bozen to Rome, almost every night I had a meal and a bed, perhaps of straw, with some peasant. I love the Italian people, with all my heart.
‘Dunque, adesso — maintenant — I earn a thousand pounds in a year, or I earn two thousand — ’
He looked down at the ground, his voice tailing off into silence.
Gudrun looked at his fine, thin, shiny skin, reddish-brown from the sun, drawn tight over his full temples; and at his thin hair — and at the thick, coarse, brush-like moustache, cut short about his mobile, rather shapeless mouth.
‘How old are you?’ she asked.
He looked up at her with his full, elfin eyes startled.
‘WIE ALT?’ he repeated. And he hesitated. It was evidently one of his reticencies.
‘How old are YOU?’ he replied, without answering.
‘I am twenty-six,’ she answered.
‘Twenty-six,’ he repeated, looking into her eyes. He paused. Then he said:
‘UND IHR HERR GEMAHL, WIE ALT IS ER?’
‘Who?’ asked Gudrun.
‘Your husband,’ said Ursula, with a certain irony.
‘I haven’t got a husband,’ said Gudrun in English. In German she answered,
‘He is thirty-one.’
But Loerke was watching closely, with his uncanny, full, suspicious eyes. Something in Gudrun seemed to accord with him. He was really like one of the ‘little people’ who have no soul, who has found his mate in a human being. But he suffered in his discovery. She too was fascinated by him, fascinated, as if some strange creature, a rabbit or a bat, or a brown seal, had begun to talk to her. But also, she knew what he was unconscious of, his tremendous power of understanding, of apprehending her living motion. He did not know his own power. He did not know how, with his full, submerged, watchful eyes, he could look into her and see her, what she was, see her secrets. He would only want her to be herself — he knew her verily, with a subconscious, sinister knowledge, devoid of illusions and hopes.
To Gudrun, there was in Loerke the rock-bottom of all life. Everybody else had their illusion, must have their illusion, their before and after. But he, with a perfect stoicism, did without any before and after, dispensed with all illusion. He did not deceive himself in the last issue. In the last issue he cared about nothing, he was troubled about nothing, he made not the slightest attempt to be at one with anything. He existed a pure, unconnected will, stoical and momentaneous. There was only his work.
It was curious too, how his poverty, the degradation of his earlier life, attracted her. There was something insipid and tasteless to her, in the idea of a gentleman, a man who had gone the usual course through school and university. A certain violent sympathy, however, came up in her for this mud-child. He seemed to be the very stuff of the underworld of life. There was no going beyond him.
Ursula too was attracted by Loerke. In both sisters he commanded a certain homage. But there were moments when to Ursula he seemed indescribably inferior, false, a vulgarism.
Both Birkin and Gerald disliked him, Gerald ignoring him with some contempt, Birkin exasperated.
‘What do the women find so impressive in that little brat?’ Gerald asked.
‘God alone knows,’ replied Birkin, ‘unless it’s some sort of appeal he makes to them, which flatters them and has such a power over them.’
Gerald looked
up in surprise.
‘DOES he make an appeal to them?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes,’ replied Birkin. ‘He is the perfectly subjected being, existing almost like a criminal. And the women rush towards that, like a current of air towards a vacuum.’
‘Funny they should rush to that,’ said Gerald.
‘Makes one mad, too,’ said Birkin. ‘But he has the fascination of pity and repulsion for them, a little obscene monster of the darkness that he is.’
Gerald stood still, suspended in thought.
‘What DO women want, at the bottom?’ he asked.
Birkin shrugged his shoulders.
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Some satisfaction in basic repulsion, it seems to me. They seem to creep down some ghastly tunnel of darkness, and will never be satisfied till they’ve come to the end.’
Gerald looked out into the mist of fine snow that was blowing by. Everywhere was blind today, horribly blind.
‘And what is the end?’ he asked.
Birkin shook his head.
‘I’ve not got there yet, so I don’t know. Ask Loerke, he’s pretty near. He is a good many stages further than either you or I can go.’
‘Yes, but stages further in what?’ cried Gerald, irritated.
Birkin sighed, and gathered his brows into a knot of anger.
‘Stages further in social hatred,’ he said. ‘He lives like a rat, in the river of corruption, just where it falls over into the bottomless pit. He’s further on than we are. He hates the ideal more acutely. He HATES the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him. I expect he is a Jew — or part Jewish.’
‘Probably,’ said Gerald.
‘He is a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.’
‘But why does anybody care about him?’ cried Gerald.
‘Because they hate the ideal also, in their souls. They want to explore the sewers, and he’s the wizard rat that swims ahead.’
Still Gerald stood and stared at the blind haze of snow outside.
‘I don’t understand your terms, really,’ he said, in a flat, doomed voice. ‘But it sounds a rum sort of desire.’
‘I suppose we want the same,’ said Birkin. ‘Only we want to take a quick jump downwards, in a sort of ecstasy — and he ebbs with the stream, the sewer stream.’
Meanwhile Gudrun and Ursula waited for the next opportunity to talk to Loerke. It was no use beginning when the men were there. Then they could get into no touch with the isolated little sculptor. He had to be alone with them. And he preferred Ursula to be there, as a sort of transmitter to Gudrun.
‘Do you do nothing but architectural sculpture?’ Gudrun asked him one evening.
‘Not now,’ he replied. ‘I have done all sorts — except portraits — I never did portraits. But other things — ’
‘What kind of things?’ asked Gudrun.
He paused a moment, then rose, and went out of the room. He returned almost immediately with a little roll of paper, which he handed to her. She unrolled it. It was a photogravure reproduction of a statuette, signed F. Loerke.
‘That is quite an early thing — NOT mechanical,’ he said, ‘more popular.’
The statuette was of a naked girl, small, finely made, sitting on a great naked horse. The girl was young and tender, a mere bud. She was sitting sideways on the horse, her face in her hands, as if in shame and grief, in a little abandon. Her hair, which was short and must be flaxen, fell forward, divided, half covering her hands.
Her limbs were young and tender. Her legs, scarcely formed yet, the legs of a maiden just passing towards cruel womanhood, dangled childishly over the side of the powerful horse, pathetically, the small feet folded one over the other, as if to hide. But there was no hiding. There she was exposed naked on the naked flank of the horse.
The horse stood stock still, stretched in a kind of start. It was a massive, magnificent stallion, rigid with pent-up power. Its neck was arched and terrible, like a sickle, its flanks were pressed back, rigid with power.
Gudrun went pale, and a darkness came over her eyes, like shame, she looked up with a certain supplication, almost slave-like. He glanced at her, and jerked his head a little.
‘How big is it?’ she asked, in a toneless voice, persisting in appearing casual and unaffected.
‘How big?’ he replied, glancing again at her. ‘Without pedestal — so high — ’ he measured with his hand — ’with pedestal, so — ’
He looked at her steadily. There was a little brusque, turgid contempt for her in his swift gesture, and she seemed to cringe a little.
‘And what is it done in?’ she asked, throwing back her head and looking at him with affected coldness.
He still gazed at her steadily, and his dominance was not shaken.
‘Bronze — green bronze.’
‘Green bronze!’ repeated Gudrun, coldly accepting his challenge. She was thinking of the slender, immature, tender limbs of the girl, smooth and cold in green bronze.
‘Yes, beautiful,’ she murmured, looking up at him with a certain dark homage.
He closed his eyes and looked aside, triumphant.
‘Why,’ said Ursula, ‘did you make the horse so stiff? It is as stiff as a block.’
‘Stiff?’ he repeated, in arms at once.
‘Yes. LOOK how stock and stupid and brutal it is. Horses are sensitive, quite delicate and sensitive, really.’
He raised his shoulders, spread his hands in a shrug of slow indifference, as much as to inform her she was an amateur and an impertinent nobody.
‘Wissen Sie,’ he said, with an insulting patience and condescension in his voice, ‘that horse is a certain FORM, part of a whole form. It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see — it is part of a work of art, it has no relation to anything outside that work of art.’
Ursula, angry at being treated quite so insultingly DE HAUT EN BAS, from the height of esoteric art to the depth of general exoteric amateurism, replied, hotly, flushing and lifting her face.
‘But it IS a picture of a horse, nevertheless.’
He lifted his shoulders in another shrug.
‘As you like — it is not a picture of a cow, certainly.’
Here Gudrun broke in, flushed and brilliant, anxious to avoid any more of this, any more of Ursula’s foolish persistence in giving herself away.
‘What do you mean by “it is a picture of a horse?”‘ she cried at her sister. ‘What do you mean by a horse? You mean an idea you have in YOUR head, and which you want to see represented. There is another idea altogether, quite another idea. Call it a horse if you like, or say it is not a horse. I have just as much right to say that YOUR horse isn’t a horse, that it is a falsity of your own make-up.’
Ursula wavered, baffled. Then her words came.
‘But why does he have this idea of a horse?’ she said. ‘I know it is his idea. I know it is a picture of himself, really — ’
Loerke snorted with rage.
‘A picture of myself!’ he repeated, in derision. ‘Wissen sie, gnadige Frau, that is a Kunstwerk, a work of art. It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you MUST NOT confuse the relative work of action, with the absolute world of art. That you MUST NOT DO.’
‘That is quite true,’ cried Gudrun, let loose in a sort of rhapsody. ‘The two things are quite and permanently apart, they have NOTHING to do with one another. I and my art, they have nothing to do with each other. My art stands in another world, I am in this world.’
Her face was flushed and transfigured. Loerke who was sitting with his head ducked, like some
creature at bay, looked up at her, swiftly, almost furtively, and murmured,
‘Ja — so ist es, so ist es.’
Ursula was silent after this outburst. She was furious. She wanted to poke a hole into them both.
‘It isn’t a word of it true, of all this harangue you have made me,’ she replied flatly. ‘The horse is a picture of your own stock, stupid brutality, and the girl was a girl you loved and tortured and then ignored.’
He looked up at her with a small smile of contempt in his eyes. He would not trouble to answer this last charge.
Gudrun too was silent in exasperated contempt. Ursula WAS such an insufferable outsider, rushing in where angels would fear to tread. But then — fools must be suffered, if not gladly.
But Ursula was persistent too.
‘As for your world of art and your world of reality,’ she replied, ‘you have to separate the two, because you can’t bear to know what you are. You can’t bear to realise what a stock, stiff, hide-bound brutality you ARE really, so you say “it’s the world of art.” The world of art is only the truth about the real world, that’s all — but you are too far gone to see it.’
She was white and trembling, intent. Gudrun and Loerke sat in stiff dislike of her. Gerald too, who had come up in the beginning of the speech, stood looking at her in complete disapproval and opposition. He felt she was undignified, she put a sort of vulgarity over the esotericism which gave man his last distinction. He joined his forces with the other two. They all three wanted her to go away. But she sat on in silence, her soul weeping, throbbing violently, her fingers twisting her handkerchief.
The others maintained a dead silence, letting the display of Ursula’s obtrusiveness pass by. Then Gudrun asked, in a voice that was quite cool and casual, as if resuming a casual conversation:
‘Was the girl a model?’
‘Nein, sie war kein Modell. Sie war eine kleine Malschulerin.’
‘An art-student!’ replied Gudrun.
And how the situation revealed itself to her! She saw the girl art-student, unformed and of pernicious recklessness, too young, her straight flaxen hair cut short, hanging just into her neck, curving inwards slightly, because it was rather thick; and Loerke, the well-known master-sculptor, and the girl, probably well-brought-up, and of good family, thinking herself so great to be his mistress. Oh how well she knew the common callousness of it all. Dresden, Paris, or London, what did it matter? She knew it.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 218