第 69 页

them. She was to have her satisfaction.

She became proud and erect, like a flower, putting itself

forth in its proper strength. His warmth invigorated her. His

beauty of form, which seemed to glow out in contrast with the

rest of people, made her proud. It was like deference to her,

and made her feel as if she represented before him all the grace

and flower of humanity. She was no mere Ursula Brangwen. She was

Woman, she was the whole of Woman in the human order.

All-containing, universal, how should she be limited to

individuality?

She was exhilarated, she did not want to go away from him.

She had her place by him. Who should take her away?

They came out of the cafe.

"Is there anything you would like to do?" he said. "Is there

anything we can do?"

It was a dark, windy night in March.

"There is nothing to do," she said.

Which was the answer he wanted.

"Let us walk then--where shall we walk?" he asked.

"Shall we go to the river?" she suggested, timidly.

In a moment they were on the tram, going down to Trent

Bridge. She was so glad. The thought of walking in the dark,

far-reaching water-meadows, beside the full river, transported

her. Dark water flowing in silence through the big, restless

night made her feel wild.

They crossed the bridge, descended, and went away from the

lights. In an instant, in the darkness, he took her hand and

they went in silence, with subtle feet treading the darkness.

The town fumed away on their left, there were strange lights and

sounds, the wind rushed against the trees, and under the bridge.

They walked close together, powerful in unison. He drew her very

close, held her with a subtle, stealthy, powerful passion, as if

they had a secret agreement which held good in the profound

darkness. The profound darkness was their universe.

"It is like it was before," she said.

Yet it was not in the least as it was before. Nevertheless

his heart was perfectly in accord with her. They thought one

thought.

"I knew I should come back," he said at length.

She quivered.

"Did you always love me?" she asked.

The directness of the question overcame him, submerged him

for a moment. The darkness travelled massively along.

"I had to come back to you," he said, as if hypnotized. "You

were always at the back of everything."

She was silent with triumph, like fate.

"I loved you," she said, "always."

The dark flame leaped up in him. He must give her himself. He

must give her the very foundations of himself. He drew her very

close, and they went on in silence.

She started violently, hearing voices. They were near a stile

across the dark meadows.

"It's only lovers," he said to her, softly.

She looked to see the dark figures against the fence,

wondering that the darkness was inhabited.

"Only lovers will walk here to-night," he said.

Then in a low, vibrating voice he told her about Africa, the

strange darkness, the strange, blood fear.

"I am not afraid of the darkness in England," he said. "It is

soft, and natural to me, it is my medium, especially when you

are here. But in Africa it seems massive and fluid with

terror--not fear of anything--just fear. One breathes

it, like the smell of blood. The blacks know it. They worship

it, really, the darkness. One almost likes it--the

fear--something sensual."

She thrilled again to him. He was to her a voice out of the

darkness. He talked to her all the while, in low tones, about

Africa, conveying something strange and sensual to her: the

negro, with his loose, soft passion that could envelop one like

a bath. Gradually he transferred to her the hot, fecund darkness

that possessed his own blood. He was strangely secret. The whole

world must be abolished. He maddened her with his soft,

cajoling, vibrating tones. He wanted her to answer, to

understand. A turgid, teeming night, heavy with fecundity in

which every molecule of matter grew big with increase, secretly

urgent with fecund desire, seemed to come to pass. She quivered,

taut and vibrating, almost pained. And gradually, he ceased

telling her of Africa, there came a silence, whilst they walked

the darkness beside the massive river. Her limbs were rich and

tense, she felt they must be vibrating with a low, profound

vibration. She could scarcely walk. The deep vibration of the

darkness could only be felt, not heard.

Suddenly, as they walked, she turned to him and held him

fast, as if she were turned to steel.

"Do you love me?" she cried in anguish.

"Yes," he said, in a curious, lapping voice, unlike himself.

"Yes, I love you."

He seemed like the living darkness upon her, she was in the

embrace of the strong darkness. He held her enclosed, soft,

unutterably soft, and with the unrelaxing softness of fate, the

relentless softness of fecundity. She quivered, and quivered,

like a tense thing that is struck. But he held her all the time,

soft, unending, like darkness closed upon her, omnipresent as

the night. He kissed her, and she quivered as if she were being

destroyed, shattered. The lighted vessel vibrated, and broke in

her soul, the light fell, struggled, and went dark. She was all

dark, will-less, having only the receptive will.

He kissed her, with his soft, enveloping kisses, and she

responded to them completely, her mind, her soul gone out.

Darkness cleaving to darkness, she hung close to him, pressed

herself into soft flow of his kiss, pressed herself down, down

to the source and core of his kiss, herself covered and

enveloped in the warm, fecund flow of his kiss, that travelled

over her, flowed over her, covered her, flowed over the last

fibre of her, so they were one stream, one dark fecundity, and

she clung at the core of him, with her lips holding open the

very bottommost source of him.

So they stood in the utter, dark kiss, that triumphed over

them both, subjected them, knitted them into one fecund nucleus

of the fluid darkness.

It was bliss, it was the nucleolating of the fecund darkness.

Once the vessel had vibrated till it was shattered, the light of

consciousness gone, then the darkness reigned, and the

unutterable satisfaction.

They stood enjoying the unmitigated kiss, taking it, giving

to it endlessly, and still it was not exhausted. Their veins

fluttered, their blood ran together as one stream.

Till gradually a sleep, a heaviness settled on them, a

drowse, and out of the drowse, a small light of consciousness

woke up. Ursula became aware of the night around her, the water

lapping and running full just near, the trees roaring and

soughing in gusts of wind.

She kept near to him, in contact with him, but she became

ever more and more herself. And she knew she must go to catch

her train. But she did not want to draw away from contact with

him.

At length they roused and set out. No longer they existed in

the unblemished darkness. There was the glitter of a bridge, the

twinkle of lights across the river, the big flare of the town in

front and on their right.

But still, dark and soft and incontestable, their bodies

walked untouched by the lights, darkness supreme and

arrogant.

"The stupid lights," Ursula said to herself, in her dark

sensual arrogance. "The stupid, artificial, exaggerated town,

fuming its lights. It does not exist really. It rests upon the

unlimited darkness, like a gleam of coloured oil on dark water,

but what is it?--nothing, just nothing."

In the tram, in the train, she felt the same. The lights, the

civic uniform was a trick played, the people as they moved or

sat were only dummies exposed. She could see, beneath their

pale, wooden pretence of composure and civic purposefulness, the

dark stream that contained them all. They were like little paper

ships in their motion. But in reality each one was a dark,

blind, eager wave urging blindly forward, dark with the same

homogeneous desire. And all their talk and all their behaviour

was sham, they were dressed-up creatures. She was reminded of

the Invisible Man, who was a piece of darkness made visible only

by his clothes.

During the next weeks, all the time she went about in the

same dark richness, her eyes dilated and shining like the eyes

of a wild animal, a curious half-smile which seemed to be gibing

at the civic pretence of all the human life about her.

"What are you, you pale citizens?" her face seemed to say,

gleaming. "You subdued beast in sheep's clothing, you primeval

darkness falsified to a social mechanism."

She went about in the sensual sub-consciousness all the time,

mocking at the ready-made, artificial daylight of the rest.

"They assume selves as they assume suits of clothing," she

said to herself, looking in mocking contempt at the stiffened,

neutralized men. "They think it better to be clerks or

professors than to be the dark, fertile beings that exist in the

potential darkness. What do you think you are?" her soul asked

of the professor as she sat opposite him in class. "What do you

think you are, as you sit there in your gown and your

spectacles? You are a lurking, blood-sniffing creature with eyes

peering out of the jungle darkness, snuffing for your desires.

That is what you are, though nobody would believe it, and

you would be the very last to allow it."

Her soul mocked at all this pretence. Herself, she kept on

pretending. She dressed herself and made herself fine, she

attended her lectures and scribbled her notes. But all in a mood

of superficial, mocking facility. She understood well enough

their two-and-two-make-four tricks. She was as clever as they

were. But care!--did she care about their monkey tricks of

knowledge or learning or civic deportment? She did not care in

the least.

There was Skrebensky, there was her dark, vital self. Outside

the college, the outer darkness, Skrebensky was waiting. On the

edge of the night, he was attentive. Did he care?

She was free as a leopard that sends up its raucous cry in

the night. She had the potent, dark stream of her own blood, she

had the glimmering core of fecundity, she had her mate, her

complement, her sharer in fruition. So, she had all,

everything.

Skrebensky was staying in Nottingham all the time. He too was

free. He knew no one in this town, he had no civic self to

maintain. He was free. Their trams and markets and theatres and

public meetings were a shaken kaleidoscope to him, he watched as

a lion or a tiger may lie with narrowed eyes watching the people

pass before its cage, the kaleidoscopic unreality of people, or

a leopard lie blinking, watching the incomprehensible feats of

the keepers. He despised it all--it was all non-existent.

Their good professors, their good clergymen, their good

political speakers, their good, earnest women--all the time

he felt his soul was grinning, grinning at the sight of them. So

many performing puppets, all wood and rag for the

performance!

He watched the citizen, a pillar of society, a model, saw the

stiff goat's legs, which have become almost stiffened to wood in

the desire to make them puppet in their action, he saw the

trousers formed to the puppet-action: man's legs, but man's legs

become rigid and deformed, ugly, mechanical.

He was curiously happy, being alone, now. The glimmering grin

was on his face. He had no longer any necessity to take part in

the performing tricks of the rest. He had discovered the clue to

himself, he had escaped from the show, like a wild beast escaped

straight back into its jungle. Having a room in a quiet hotel,

he hired a horse and rode out into the country, staying

sometimes for the night in some village, and returning the next

day.

He felt rich and abundant in himself. Everything he did was a

voluptuous pleasure to him--either to ride on horseback, or

to walk, or to lie in the sun, or to drink in a public-house. He

had no use for people, nor for words. He had an amused pleasure

in everything, a great sense of voluptuous richness in himself,

and of the fecundity of the universal night he inhabited. The

puppet shapes of people, their wood-mechanical voices, he was

remote from them.

For there were always his meetings with Ursula. Very often,

she did not go to college in the afternoon, but walked with him

instead. Or he took a motor-car or a dog-cart and they drove

into the country, leaving the car and going away by themselves

into the woods. He had not taken her yet. With subtle,

instinctive economy, they went to the end of each kiss, each

embrace, each pleasure in intimate contact, knowing

subconsciously that the last was coming. It was to be their

final entry into the source of creation.

She took him home, and he stayed a week-end at Beldover with

her family. She loved having him in the house. Strange how he

seemed to come into the atmosphere of her family, with his

laughing, insidious grace. They all loved him, he was kin to

them. His raillery, his warm, voluptuous mocking presence was

meat and joy to the Brangwen household. For this house was

always quivering with darkness, they put off their puppet form

when they came home, to lie and drowse in the sun.

There was a sense of freedom amongst them all, of the

undercurrent of darkness among them all. Yet here, at home,

Ursula resented it. It became distasteful to her. And she knew

that if they understood the real relationship between her and

Skrebensky, her parents, her father in particular, would go mad

with rage. So subtly, she seemed to be like any other girl who

is more or less courted by a man. And she was like any other

girl. But in her, the antagonism to the social imposition was

for the time complete and final.

She waited, every moment of the day, for his next kiss. She

admitted it to herself in shame and bliss. Almost consciously,

she waited. He waited, but, until the time came, more