Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (63 page)

“Why should we?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said uneasily. “One has a hankering after a sort of further fellowship.”

“But why?” she insisted. “Why should you hanker after other people? Why should you need them?”

This hit him right on the quick. His brows knitted.

“Does it end with just our two selves?” he asked, tense.

“Yes—what more do you want? If anybody likes to come along, let them. But why must you run after them?”

His face was tense and unsatisfied.

“You see,” he said, “I always imagine our being really happy with some few other people—a little freedom with people.”

She pondered for a moment.

“Yes, one does want that. But it must
happen.
You can’t do anything for it with your will. You always seem to think you
can force
the flowers to come out. People must love us because they love us—you can’t
make
them.”

“I know,” he said. “But must one take no steps at all? Must one just go as if one were alone in the world—the only creature in the world?”

“You’ve got me,” she said. “Why should you
need
others? Why must you force people to agree with you? Why can’t you be single by yourself, as you are always saying? You try to bully Gerald—as you tried to bully Hermione. You must learn to be alone. And it’s so horrid of you. You’ve got me. And yet you want to force other people to love you as well. You do try to bully them to love you. And even then, you don’t want their love.”

His face was full of real perplexity.

“Don’t I?” he said. “It’s the problem I can’t solve. I
know
I want a perfect and complete relationship with you: and we’ve nearly got it—we really have. But beyond that.
Do
I want a real, ultimate relationship with Gerald? Do I want a final, almost extra-human relationship with him—a relationship in the ultimate of me and him—or don’t I?”

She looked at him for a long time, with strange bright eyes, but she did not answer.

THAT EVENING URSULA RETURNED home very bright-eyed and wondrous—which irritated her people. Her father came home at supper-time, tired after the evening class, and the long journey home. Gudrun was reading, the mother sat in silence.

Suddenly Ursula said to the company at large in a bright voice: “Rupert and I are going to be married to-morrow.”

Her father turned round, stiffly.

“You what?” he said.

“To-morrow!” echoed Gudrun.

“Indeed!” said the mother.

But Ursula only smiled wonderfully, and did not reply.

“Married to-morrow!” cried her father harshly. “What are you talking about!”

“Yes,” said Ursula. “Why not?” Those two words, from her, always drove him mad. “Everything is all right—we shall go to the registrar’s office—”

There was a second’s hush in the room, after Ursula’s blithe vagueness.

“Really,
Ursula!” said Gudrun.

“Might we ask why there has been all this secrecy?” demanded the mother, rather superbly.

“But there hasn’t,” said Ursula. “You knew.”

“Who knew?” now cried the father. “Who knew? What do you mean by your ‘you knew’?”

He was in one of his stupid rages, she instantly closed against him.

“Of course you knew,” she said coolly. “You knew we were going to get married.”

There was a dangerous pause.

“We knew you were going to get married, did we? Knew! Why then does anybody know anything about
you,
you shifty bitch!”

“Father!” cried Gudrun, flushing deep in violent remonstrance. Then, in a cold, but gentle voice, as if to remind her sister to be tractable. “But isn’t it
a fearfully
sudden decision, Ursula?” she asked.

“No, not really,” replied Ursula, with the same maddening cheer-fulness. “He’s been
wanting
me to agree for weeks—he’s had the license ready. Only I—I wasn’t ready in myself. Now I am ready—is there anything to be disagreeable about?”

“Certainly not,” said Gudrun, but in a tone of cold reproof. “You are perfectly free to do as you like.”

“ ‘Ready in yourself’—
yourself,
that’s all that matters, isn’t it? ‘I wasn’t ready in myself,’” he mimicked her phrase offensively. “You and
yourself,
you’re of some importance, aren’t you?”

She drew herself up and set back her throat, her eyes shining yellow and dangerous.

“I am to myself,” she said, wounded and mortified. “I know I am not to anybody else. You only wanted to
bully
me—you never cared for my happiness.”

He was leaning forward watching her, his face intense like a spark.

“Ursula, what are you saying? Keep your tongue still,” cried her mother.

Ursula swung round, and the lights in her eyes flashed.

“No, I won’t,” she cried. “I won’t hold my tongue and be bullied. What does it matter which day I get married—what does it
matter!
It doesn’t affect anybody but myself.”

Her father was tense and gathered together like a cat about to spring.

“Doesn’t it?” he cried, coming nearer to her. She shrank away.

“No, how can it?” she replied, shrinking but stubborn.

“It doesn’t matter to
me
then, what you do—what becomes of you?” he cried, in a strange voice like a cry.

The mother and Gudrun stood back as if hypnotised.

“No,” stammered Ursula. Her father was very near to her. “You only want to—”

She knew it was dangerous, and she stopped. He was gathered together, every muscle ready.

“What?” he challenged.

“Bully me,” she muttered, and even as her lips were moving, his hand had caught her smack at the side of the face and she was sent up against the door.

“Father!” cried Gudrun in a high voice, “it is impossible!”

He stood unmoving. Ursula recovered, her hand was on the door handle. She slowly drew herself up. He seemed doubtful now.

“It’s true,” she declared, with brilliant tears in her eyes, her head lifted up in defiance. “What has your love meant, what did it ever mean?—bullying, and denial—it did—”

He was advancing again with strange, tense movements, and clenched fist, and the face of a murderer. But swift as lightning she had flashed out of the door, and they heard her running upstairs.

He stood for a moment looking at the door. Then, like a defeated animal, he turned and went back to his seat by the fire.

Gudrun was very white. Out of the intense silence, the mother’s voice was heard saying, cold and angry:

“Well, you shouldn’t take so much notice of her.”

Again the silence fell, each followed a separate set of emotions and thoughts.

Suddenly the door opened again: Ursula, dressed in hat and furs, with a small valise in her hand.

“Good-bye!” she said, in her maddening, bright, almost mocking tone. “I’m going.”

And in the next instant the door was closed, they heard the outer door, then her quick steps down the garden path, then the gate banged, and her light footfall was gone. There was a silence like death in the house.

Ursula went straight to the station, hastening heedlessly on winged feet. There was no train, she must walk on to the junction. As she went through the darkness, she began to cry, and she wept bitterly, with a dumb, heart-broken, child’s anguish, all the way on the road, and in the train. Time passed unheeded and unknown, she did not know where she was, nor what was taking place. Only she wept from fathomless depths of hopeless, hopeless grief, the terrible grief of a child, that knows no extenuation.

Yet her voice had the same defensive brightness as she spoke to Birkin’s landlady at the door.

“Good evening! Is Mr. Birkin in? Can I see him?”

“Yes, he’s in. He’s in his study.”

Ursula slipped past the woman. His door opened. He had heard her voice.

“Hello!” he exclaimed in surprise, seeing her standing there with the valise in her hand, and marks of tears on her face. She was one who wept without showing many traces, like a child.

“Do I look a sight?” she said, shrinking.

“No—why? Come in,” he took the bag from her hand and they went into the study.

There—immediately, her lips began to tremble like those of a child that remembers again, and the tears came rushing up.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, taking her in his arms. She sobbed violently on his shoulder, whilst he held her still, waiting.

“What’s the matter?” he said again, when she was quieter. But she only pressed her face further into his shoulder, in pain, like a child that cannot tell.

“What is it, then?” he asked.

Suddenly she broke away, wiped her eyes, regained her composure, and went and sat in a chair.

“Father hit me,” she announced, sitting bunched up, rather like a ruffled bird, her eyes very bright.

“What for?” he said.

She looked away, and would not answer. There was a pitiful redness about her sensitive nostrils, and her quivering lips.

“Why?” he repeated, in his strange, soft, penetrating voice.

She looked round at him, rather defiantly.

“Because I said I was going to be married to-morrow, and he bullied me.”

“Why did he bully you?”

Her mouth dropped again, she remembered the scene once more, the tears came up.

“Because I said he didn’t care—and he doesn’t, it’s only his domineeringness that’s hurt—” she said, her mouth pulled awry by her weeping, all the time she spoke, so that he almost smiled, it seemed so childish. Yet it was not childish, it was a mortal conflict, a deep wound.

“It isn’t quite true,” he said. “And even so, you shouldn’t
say
it.”

“It is true—it
is
true,” she wept, “and I won’t be bullied by his pretending it’s love—when it
isn‘t
—he doesn’t care, how can he—no, he can’t—”

He sat in silence. She moved him beyond himself.

“Then you shouldn’t rouse him, if he can’t,” replied Birkin quietly.

“And I
have
loved him, I have,” she wept. “I’ve loved him always, and he’s always done this to me, he has—”

“It’s been a love of opposition, then,” he said. “Never mind—it will be all right. It’s nothing desperate.”

“Yes,” she wept, “it is, it is.”

“Why?”

“I shall never see him again—”

“Not immediately. Don’t cry, you had to break with him, it had to be—don’t cry.”

He went over to her and kissed her fine, fragile hair, touching her wet cheeks gently.

“Don’t cry,” he repeated, “don’t cry any more.”

He held her head close against him, very close and quiet.

At last she was still. Then she looked up, her eyes wide and frightened.

“Don’t you want me?” she asked.

“Want you?” His darkened, steady eyes puzzled her and did not give her play.

“Do you wish I hadn’t come?” she asked, anxious now again for fear she might be out of place.

“No,” he said. “I wish there hadn’t been the violence—so much ugliness—but perhaps it was inevitable.”

She watched him in silence. He seemed deadened.

“But where shall I stay?” she asked, feeling humiliated.

He thought for a moment.

“Here, with me,” he said. “We’re married as much to-day as we shall be to-morrow.”

“But—”

“I’ll tell Mrs. Varley,” he said. “Never mind now.”

He sat looking at her. She could feel his darkened steady eyes looking at her all the time. It made her a little bit frightened. She pushed her hair off her forehead nervously.

“Do I look ugly?” she said.

And she blew her nose again.

A small smile came round his eyes.

“No,” he said, “fortunately.”

And he went across to her, and gathered her like a belonging in his arms. She was so tenderly beautiful, he could not bear to see her, he could only bear to hide her against himself.

Now, washed all clean by her tears, she was new and frail like a flower just unfolded, a flower so new, so tender, so made perfect by inner light, that he could not bear to look at her, he must hide her against himself, cover his eyes against her. She had the perfect candour of creation, something translucent and simple, like a radiant, shining flower that moment unfolded in primal blessedness. She was so new, so wonder-clear, so undimmed. And he was so old, so steeped in heavy memories. Her soul was new, undefined and glimmering with the unseen. And his soul was dark and gloomy, it had only one grain of living hope, like a grain of mustard seed. But this one living grain in him matched the perfect youth in her.

“I love you,” he whispered as he kissed her, and trembled with pure hope, like a man who is born again to a wonderful, lively hope far exceeding the bounds of death.

She could not know how much it meant to him, how much he meant by the few words. Almost childish, she wanted proof, and statement, even over-statement, for everything seemed still uncertain, unfixed to her.

But the passion of gratitude with which he received her into his soul, the extreme, unthinkable gladness of knowing himself living and fit to unite with her, he, who was so nearly dead, who was so near to being gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death, could never be understood by her. He worshipped her as age worships youth, he gloried in her, because, in his one grain of faith, he was young as she, he was her proper mate. This marriage with her was his resurrection and his life.

All this she could not know. She wanted to be made much of, to be adored. There were infinite distances of silence between them. How could he tell her of the immanence of her beauty, that was not form, or weight, or colour, but something like a strange, golden light! How could he know himself what her beauty lay in, for him. He said “Your nose is beautiful, your chin is adorable.” But it sounded like lies, and she was disappointed, hurt. Even when he said, whispering with truth, “I love you, I love you,” it was not the real truth. It was something beyond love, such a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence. How could he say “I” when he was something new and unknown, not himself at all? This I, this old formula of the age, was a dead letter.