第 71 页

he belonged to by rights? How did he come to be thrown on this

refuse-heap where he was?

He was as if mad. The horror of the brick buildings, of the

tram-car, of the ashen-grey people in the street made him

reeling and blind as if drunk. He went mad. He had lived with

her in a close, living, pulsing world, where everything pulsed

with rich being. Now he found himself struggling amid an

ashen-dry, cold world of rigidity, dead walls and mechanical

traffic, and creeping, spectre-like people. The life was

extinct, only ash moved and stirred or stood rigid, there was a

horrible, clattering activity, a rattle like the falling of dry

slag, cold and sterile. It was as if the sunshine that fell were

unnatural light exposing the ash of the town, as if the lights

at night were the sinister gleam of decomposition.

Quite mad, beside himself, he went to his club and sat with a

glass of whisky, motionless, as if turned to clay. He felt like

a corpse that is inhabited with just enough life to make it

appear as any other of the spectral, unliving beings which we

call people in our dead language. Her absence was worse than

pain to him. It destroyed his being.

Dead, he went on from lunch to tea. His face was all the time

fixed and stiff and colourless, his life was a dry, mechanical

movement. Yet even he wondered slightly at the awful misery that

had overcome him. How could he be so ashlike and extinct? He

wrote her a letter.

I have been thinking that we must get married before long. My

pay will be more when I get out to India, we shall be able to

get along. Or if you don't want to go to India, I could very

probably stay here in England. But I think you would like India.

You could ride, and you would know just everybody out there.

Perhaps if you stay on to take your degree, we might marry

immediately after that. I will write to your father as soon as I

hear from you----

He went on, disposing of her. If only he could be with her!

All he wanted now was to marry her, to be sure of her. Yet all

the time he was perfectly, perfectly hopeless, cold, extinct,

without emotion or connection.

He felt as if his life were dead. His soul was extinct. The

whole being of him had become sterile, he was a spectre,

divorced from life. He had no fullness, he was just a flat

shape. Day by day the madness accumulated in him. The horror of

not-being possessed him.

He went here, there, and everywhere. But whatever he did, he

knew that only the cipher of him was there, nothing was filled

in. He went to the theatre; what he heard and saw fell upon a

cold surface of consciousness, which was now all that he was,

there was nothing behind it, he could have no experience of any

sort. Mechanical registering took place in him, no more. He had

no being, no contents. Neither had the people he came into

contact with. They were mere permutations of known quantities.

There was no roundness or fullness in this world he now

inhabited, everything was a dead shape mental arrangement,

without life or being.

Much of the time, he was with friends and comrades. Then he

forgot everything. Their activities made up for his own

negation, they engaged his negative horror.

He only became happy when he drank, and he drank a good deal.

Then he was just the opposite to what he had been. He became a

warm, diffuse, glowing cloud, in a warm, diffuse formless

fashion. Everything melted down into a rosy glow, and he was the

glow, and everything was the glow, everybody else was the glow,

and it was very nice, very nice. He would sing songs, it was so

nice.

Ursula went back to Beldover shut and firm. She loved

Skrebensky, of that she was resolved. She would allow nothing

else.

She read his long, obsessed letter about getting married and

going to India, without any particular response. She seemed to

ignore what he said about marriage. It did not come home to her.

He seemed, throughout the greater part of his letter, to be

talking without much meaning.

She replied to him pleasantly and easily. She rarely wrote

long letters.

India sounds lovely. I can just see myself on an elephant

swaying between lanes of obsequious natives. But I don't know if

father would let me go. We must see.

I keep living over again the lovely times we have had. But I

don't think you liked me quite so much towards the end, did you?

You did not like me when we left Paris. Why didn't you?

I love you very much. I love your body. It is so clear and

fine. I am glad you do not go naked, or all the women would fall

in love with you. I am very jealous of it, I love it so

much.

He was more or less satisfied with this letter. But day after

day he was walking about, dead, non-existent.

He could not come again to Nottingham until the end of April.

Then he persuaded her to go with him for a week-end to a

friend's house near Oxford. By this time they were engaged. He

had written to her father, and the thing was settled. He brought

her an emerald ring, of which she was very proud.

Her people treated her now with a little distance, as if she

had already left them. They left her very much alone.

She went with him for the three days in the country house

near Oxford. It was delicious, and she was very happy. But the

thing she remembered most was when, getting up in the morning

after he had gone back quietly to his own room, having spent the

night with her, she found herself very rich in being alone, and

enjoying to the full her solitary room, she drew up her blind

and saw the plum trees in the garden below all glittering and

snowy and delighted with the sunshine, in full bloom under a

blue sky. They threw out their blossom, they flung it out under

the blue heavens, the whitest blossom! How excited it made

her.

She had to hurry through her dressing to go and walk in the

garden under the plum trees, before anyone should come and talk

to her. Out she slipped, and paced like a queen in fairy

pleasaunces. The blossom was silver-shadowy when she looked up

from under the tree at the blue sky. There was a faint scent, a

faint noise of bees, a wonderful quickness of happy morning.

She heard the breakfast gong and went indoors.

"Where have you been?" asked the others.

"I had to go out under the plum trees," she said, her face

glowing like a flower. "It is so lovely."

A shadow of anger crossed Skrebensky's soul. She had not

wanted him to be there. He hardened his will.

At night there was a moon, and the blossom glistened ghostly,

they went together to look at it. She saw the moonlight on his

face as he waited near her, and his features were like silver

and his eyes in shadow were unfathomable. She was in love with

him. He was very quiet.

They went indoors and she pretended to be tired. So she went

quickly to bed.

"Don't be long coming to me," she whispered, as she was

supposed to be kissing him good night.

And he waited, intent, obsessed, for the moment when he could

come to her.

She enjoyed him, she made much of him. She liked to put her

fingers on the soft skin of his sides, or on the softness of his

back, when he made the muscles hard underneath, the muscles

developed very strong through riding; and she had a great thrill

of excitement and passion, because of the unimpressible hardness

of his body, that was so soft and smooth under her fingers, that

came to her with such absolute service.

She owned his body and enjoyed it with all the delight and

carelessness of a possessor. But he had become gradually afraid

of her body. He wanted her, he wanted her endlessly. But there

had come a tension into his desire, a constraint which prevented

his enjoying the delicious approach and the lovable close of the

endless embrace. He was afraid. His will was always tense,

fixed.

Her final examination was at midsummer. She insisted on

sitting for it, although she had neglected her work during the

past months. He also wanted her to go in for the degree. Then,

he thought, she would be satisfied. Secretly he hoped she would

fail, so that she would be more glad of him.

"Would you rather live in India or in England when we are

married?" he asked her.

"Oh, in India, by far," she said, with a careless lack of

consideration which annoyed him.

Once she said, with heat:

"I shall be glad to leave England. Everything is so meagre

and paltry, it is so unspiritual--I hate democracy."

He became angry to hear her talk like this, he did not know

why. Somehow, he could not bear it, when she attacked things. It

was as if she were attacking him.

"What do you mean?" he asked her, hostile. "Why do you hate

democracy?"

"Only the greedy and ugly people come to the top in a

democracy," she said, "because they're the only people who will

push themselves there. Only degenerate races are

democratic."

"What do you want then--an aristocracy?" he asked,

secretly moved. He always felt that by rights he belonged to the

ruling aristocracy. Yet to hear her speak for his class pained

him with a curious, painful pleasure. He felt he was acquiescing

in something illegal, taking to himself some wrong,

reprehensible advantages.

"I do want an aristocracy," she cried. "And I'd far

rather have an aristocracy of birth than of money. Who are the

aristocrats now--who are chosen as the best to rule? Those

who have money and the brains for money. It doesn't matter what

else they have: but they must have money-brains,--because

they are ruling in the name of money."

"The people elect the government," he said.

"I know they do. But what are the people? Each one of them is

a money-interest. I hate it, that anybody is my equal who has

the same amount of money as I have. I know I am better

than all of them. I hate them. They are not my equals. I hate

equality on a money basis. It is the equality of dirt."

Her eyes blazed at him, he felt as if she wanted to destroy

him. She had gripped him and was trying to break him. His anger

sprang up, against her. At least he would fight for his

existence with her. A hard, blind resistance possessed him.

"I don't care about money," he said, "neither do I

want to put my finger in the pie. I am too sensitive about my

finger."

"What is your finger to me?" she cried, in a passion. "You

with your dainty fingers, and your going to India because you

will be one of the somebodies there! It's a mere dodge, your

going to India."

"In what way a dodge?" he cried, white with anger and

fear.

"You think the Indians are simpler than us, and so you'll

enjoy being near them and being a lord over them," she said.

"And you'll feel so righteous, governing them for their own

good. Who are you, to feel righteous? What are you righteous

about, in your governing? Your governing stinks. What do you

govern for, but to make things there as dead and mean as they

are here!"

"I don't feel righteous in the least," he said.

"Then what do you feel? It's all such a nothingness,

what you feel and what you don't feel."

"What do you feel yourself?" he said. "Aren't you righteous

in your own mind?"

"Yes, I am, because I'm against you, and all your old, dead

things," she cried.

She seemed, with the last words, uttered in hard knowledge,

to strike down the flag that he kept flying. He felt cut off at

the knees, a figure made worthless. A horrible sickness gripped

him, as if his legs were really cut away, and he could not move,

but remained a crippled trunk, dependent, worthless. The ghastly

sense of helplessness, as if he were a mere figure that did not

exist vitally, made him mad, beside himself.

Now, even whilst he was with her, this death of himself came

over him, when he walked about like a body from which all

individual life is gone. In this state he neither heard nor saw

nor felt, only the mechanism of his life continued.

He hated her, as far as, in this state, he could hate. His

cunning suggested to him all the ways of making her esteem him.

For she did not esteem him. He left her and did not write to

her. He flirted with other women, with Gudrun.

This last made her very fierce. She was still fiercely

jealous of his body. In passionate anger she upbraided him

because, not being man enough to satisfy one woman, he hung

round others.

["Don't I satisfy you?" he asked of her, again going white to the throat.

"No," she said. "You've never satisfied me since the first week in London.

You never satisfy me now. What does it mean to me, your having me--"]

She lifted her shoulders and turned aside her face in a motion of cold,

indifferent worthlessness. He felt he would kill her.

When she had roused him to a pitch of madness, when she saw

his eyes all dark and mad with suffering, then a great suffering

overcame her soul, a great, inconquerable suffering. And she

loved him. For, oh, she wanted to love him. Stronger than life

or death was her craving to be able to love him.

And at such moments, when he was made with her destroying

him, when all his complacency was destroyed, all his everyday

self was broken, and only the stripped, rudimentary, primal man

remained, demented with torture, her passion to love him became

love, she took him again, they came together in an overwhelming

passion, in which he knew he satisfied her.

But it all contained a developing germ of death. After each

contact, her anguished desire for him or for that which she

never had from him was stronger, her love was more hopeless.

After each contact his mad dependence on her was deepened, his

hope of standing strong and taking her in his own strength was

weakened. He felt himself a mere attribute of her.

Whitsuntide came, just before her examination. She was to