Gerald and Gudrun were very kind to the two who were departing, solicitous for their welfare as if they were two children. Gudrun came to Ursula's bedroom with three pairs of the coloured stockings for which she was notorious, and she threw them on the bed. But these were thick silk stockings, vermilion, cornflower blue, and grey, bought in Paris. The grey ones were knitted, seamless and heavy. Ursula was in raptures. She knew Gudrun must be feeling VERY loving, to give away such treasures.
'I can't take them from you, Prune,' she cried. 'I can't possibly deprive you of them—the jewels.'
'AREN'T they jewels!' cried Gudrun, eyeing her gifts with an envious eye. 'AREN'T they real lambs!'
'Yes, you MUST keep them,' said Ursula.
'I don't WANT them, I've got three more pairs. I WANT you to keep them—I want you to have them. They're yours, there—'
And with trembling, excited hands she put the coveted stockings under Ursula's pillow.
'One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings,' said Ursula.
'One does,' replied Gudrun; 'the greatest joy of all.'
And she sat down in the chair. It was evident she had come for a last talk. Ursula, not knowing what she wanted, waited in silence.
'Do you FEEL, Ursula,' Gudrun began, rather sceptically, that you are going-away-for-ever, never-to-return, sort of thing?'
'Oh, we shall come back,' said Ursula. 'It isn't a question of train-journeys.'
'Yes, I know. But spiritually, so to speak, you are going away from us all?'
Ursula quivered.
'I don't know a bit what is going to happen,' she said. 'I only know we are going somewhere.'
Gudrun waited.
'And you are glad?' she asked.
Ursula meditated for a moment.
'I believe I am VERY glad,' she replied.
But Gudrun read the unconscious brightness on her sister's face, rather than the uncertain tones of her speech.
'But don't you think you'll WANT the old connection with the world—father and the rest of us, and all that it means, England and the world of thought—don't you think you'll NEED that, really to make a world?'
Ursula was silent, trying to imagine.
'I think,' she said at length, involuntarily, 'that Rupert is right—one wants a new space to be in, and one falls away from the old.'
Gudrun watched her sister with impassive face and steady eyes.
'One wants a new space to be in, I quite agree,' she said. 'But I think that a new world is a development from this world, and that to isolate oneself with one other person, isn't to find a new world at all, but only to secure oneself in one's illusions.'
Ursula looked out of the window. In her soul she began to wrestle, and she was frightened. She was always frightened of words, because she knew that mere word-force could always make her believe what she did not believe.
'Perhaps,' she said, full of mistrust, of herself and everybody. 'But,' she added, 'I do think that one can't have anything new whilst one cares for the old—do you know what I mean?—even fighting the old is belonging to it. I know, one is tempted to stop with the world, just to fight it. But then it isn't worth it.'
Gudrun considered herself.
'Yes,' she said. 'In a way, one is of the world if one lives in it. But isn't it really an illusion to think you can get out of it? After all, a cottage in the Abruzzi, or wherever it may be, isn't a new world. No, the only thing to do with the world, is to see it through.'
Ursula looked away. She was so frightened of argument.
'But there CAN be something else, can't there?' she said. 'One can see it through in one's soul, long enough before it sees itself through in actuality. And then, when one has seen one's soul, one is something else.'
'CAN one see it through in one's soul?' asked Gudrun. 'If you mean that you can see to the end of what will happen, I don't agree. I really can't agree. And anyhow, you can't suddenly fly off on to a new planet, because you think you can see to the end of this.'
Ursula suddenly straightened herself.
'Yes,' she said. 'Yes—one knows. One has no more connections here. One has a sort of other self, that belongs to a new planet, not to this. You've got to hop off.'
Gudrun reflected for a few moments. Then a smile of ridicule, almost of contempt, came over her face.
'And what will happen when you find yourself in space?' she cried in derision. 'After all, the great ideas of the world are the same there. You above everybody can't get away from the fact that love, for instance, is the supreme thing, in space as well as on earth.'
'No,' said Ursula, 'it isn't. Love is too human and little. I believe in something inhuman, of which love is only a little part. I believe what we must fulfil comes out of the unknown to us, and it is something infinitely more than love. It isn't so merely HUMAN.'
Gudrun looked at Ursula with steady, balancing eyes. She admired and despised her sister so much, both! Then, suddenly she averted her face, saying coldly, uglily:
'Well, I've got no further than love, yet.'
Over Ursula's mind flashed the thought: 'Because you never HAVE loved, you can't get beyond it.'
Gudrun rose, came over to Ursula and put her arm round her neck.
'Go and find your new world, dear,' she said, her voice clanging with false benignity. 'After all, the happiest voyage is the quest of Rupert's Blessed Isles.'
Her arm rested round Ursula's neck, her fingers on Ursula's cheek for a few moments. Ursula was supremely uncomfortable meanwhile. There was an insult in Gudrun's protective patronage that was really too hurting. Feeling her sister's resistance, Gudrun drew awkwardly away, turned over the pillow, and disclosed the stockings again.
'Ha—ha!' she laughed, rather hollowly. 'How we do talk indeed—new worlds and old—!'
And they passed to the familiar worldly subjects.
Gerald and Birkin had walked on ahead, waiting for the sledge to overtake them, conveying the departing guests.
'How much longer will you stay here?' asked Birkin, glancing up at Gerald's very red, almost blank face.
'Oh, I can't say,' Gerald replied. 'Till we get tired of it.'
'You're not afraid of the snow melting first?' asked Birkin.
Gerald laughed.
'Does it melt?' he said.
'Things are all right with you then?' said Birkin.
Gerald screwed up his eyes a little.
'All right?' he said. 'I never know what those common words mean. All right and all wrong, don't they become synonymous, somewhere?'
'Yes, I suppose. How about going back?' asked Birkin.
'Oh, I don't know. We may never get back. I don't look before and after,' said Gerald.
'NOR pine for what is not,' said Birkin.
Gerald looked into the distance, with the small-pupilled, abstract eyes of a hawk.
'No. There's something final about this. And Gudrun seems like the end, to me. I don't know—but she seems so soft, her skin like silk, her arms heavy and soft. And it withers my consciousness, somehow, it burns the pith of my mind.' He went on a few paces, staring ahead, his eyes fixed, looking like a mask used in ghastly religions of the barbarians. 'It blasts your soul's eye,' he said, 'and leaves you sightless. Yet you WANT to be sightless, you WANT to be blasted, you don't want it any different.'
He was speaking as if in a trance, verbal and blank. Then suddenly he braced himself up with a kind of rhapsody, and looked at Birkin with vindictive, cowed eyes, saying:
'Do you know what it is to suffer when you are with a woman? She's so beautiful, so perfect, you find her SO GOOD, it tears you like a silk, and every stroke and bit cuts hot—ha, that perfection, when you blast yourself, you blast yourself! And then—' he stopped on the snow and suddenly opened his clenched hands—'it's nothing—your brain might have gone charred as rags—and—' he looked round into the air with a queer histrionic movement 'it's blasting—you understand what I mean—it is a great experience, something final—and then—you're shrivelled as if struck by electricity.' He walked on in silence. It seemed like bragging, but like a man in extremity bragging truthfully.
'Of course,' he resumed, 'I wouldn't NOT have had it! It's a complete experience. And she's a wonderful woman. But—how I hate her somewhere! It's curious—'
Birkin looked at him, at his strange, scarcely conscious face. Gerald seemed blank before his own words.
'But you've had enough now?' said Birkin. 'You have had your experience. Why work on an old wound?'
'Oh,' said Gerald, 'I don't know. It's not finished—'
And the two walked on.
'I've loved you, as well as Gudrun, don't forget,' said Birkin bitterly. Gerald looked at him strangely, abstractedly.
'Have you?' he said, with icy scepticism. 'Or do you think you have?' He was hardly responsible for what he said.
The sledge came. Gudrun dismounted and they all made their farewell. They wanted to go apart, all of them. Birkin took his place, and the sledge drove away leaving Gudrun and Gerald standing on the snow, waving. Something froze Birkin's heart, seeing them standing there in the isolation of the snow, growing smaller and more isolated.
CHAPTER XXX.
SNOWED UP
When Ursula and Birkin were gone, Gudrun felt herself free in her contest with Gerald. As they grew more used to each other, he seemed to press upon her more and more. At first she could manage him, so that her own will was always left free. But very soon, he began to ignore her female tactics, he dropped his respect for her whims and her privacies, he began to exert his own will blindly, without submitting to hers.
Already a vital conflict had set in, which frightened them both. But he was alone, whilst already she had begun to cast round for external resource.
When Ursula had gone, Gudrun felt her own existence had become stark and elemental. She went and crouched alone in her bedroom, looking out of the window at the big, flashing stars. In front was the faint shadow of the mountain-knot. That was the pivot. She felt strange and inevitable, as if she were centred upon the pivot of all existence, there was no further reality.
Presently Gerald opened the door. She knew he would not be long before he came. She was rarely alone, he pressed upon her like a frost, deadening her.
'Are you alone in the dark?' he said. And she could tell by his tone he resented it, he resented this isolation she had drawn round herself. Yet, feeling static and inevitable, she was kind towards him.
'Would you like to light the candle?' she asked.
He did not answer, but came and stood behind her, in the darkness.
'Look,' she said, 'at that lovely star up there. Do you know its name?'
He crouched beside her, to look through the low window.
'No,' he said. 'It is very fine.'
'ISN'T it beautiful! Do you notice how it darts different coloured fires—it flashes really superbly—'
They remained in silence. With a mute, heavy gesture she put her hand on his knee, and took his hand.
'Are you regretting Ursula?' he asked.
'No, not at all,' she said. Then, in a slow mood, she asked:
'How much do you love me?'
He stiffened himself further against her.
'How much do you think I do?' he asked.
'I don't know,' she replied.
'But what is your opinion?' he asked.
There was a pause. At length, in the darkness, came her voice, hard and indifferent:
'Very little indeed,' she said coldly, almost flippant.
His heart went icy at the sound of her voice.
'Why don't I love you?' he asked, as if admitting the truth of her accusation, yet hating her for it.
'I don't know why you don't—I've been good to you. You were in a FEARFUL state when you came to me.'
Her heart was beating to suffocate her, yet she was strong and unrelenting.
'When was I in a fearful state?' he asked.
'When you first came to me. I HAD to take pity on you. But it was never love.'
It was that statement 'It was never love,' which sounded in his ears with madness.
'Why must you repeat it so often, that there is no love?' he said in a voice strangled with rage.
'Well you don't THINK you love, do you?' she asked.
He was silent with cold passion of anger.
'You don't think you CAN love me, do you?' she repeated almost with a sneer.
'No,' he said.
'You know you never HAVE loved me, don't you?'
'I don't know what you mean by the word 'love,' he replied.
'Yes, you do. You know all right that you have never loved me. Have you, do you think?'
'No,' he said, prompted by some barren spirit of truthfulness and obstinacy.
'And you never WILL love me,' she said finally, 'will you?'
There was a diabolic coldness in her, too much to bear.
'No,' he said.
'Then,' she replied, 'what have you against me!'
He was silent in cold, frightened rage and despair. 'If only I could kill her,' his heart was whispering repeatedly. 'If only I could kill her—I should be free.'
It seemed to him that death was the only severing of this Gordian knot.
'Why do you torture me?' he said.
She flung her arms round his neck.
'Ah, I don't want to torture you,' she said pityingly, as if she were comforting a child. The impertinence made his veins go cold, he was insensible. She held her arms round his neck, in a triumph of pity. And her pity for him was as cold as stone, its deepest motive was hate of him, and fear of his power over her, which she must always counterfoil.
'Say you love me,' she pleaded. 'Say you will love me for ever—won't you—won't you?'
