第 74 页

with the party.

She went rather reluctantly. Her marriage was more or less

fixed for the twenty-eighth of the month. They were to sail for

India on September the fifth. One thing she knew, in her

subconsciousness, and that was, she would never sail for

India.

She and Anton, being important guests on account of the

coming marriage, had rooms in the large bungalow. It was a big

place, with a great central hall, two smaller writing-rooms, and

then two corridors from which opened eight or nine bedrooms.

Skrebensky was put on one corridor, Ursula on the other. They

felt very lost, in the crowd.

Being lovers, however, they were allowed to be out alone

together as much as they liked. Yet she felt very strange, in

this crowd of strange people, uneasy, as if she had no privacy.

She was not used to these homogeneous crowds. She was

afraid.

She felt different from the rest of them, with their hard,

easy, shallow intimacy, that seemed to cost them so little. She

felt she was not pronounced enough. It was a kind of

hold-your-own unconventional atmosphere.

She did not like it. In crowds, in assemblies of people, she

liked formality. She felt she did not produce the right effect.

She was not effective: she was not beautiful: she was nothing.

Even before Skrebensky she felt unimportant, almost inferior. He

could take his part very well with the rest.

He and she went out into the night. There was a moon behind

clouds, shedding a diffused light, gleaming now and again in

bits of smoky mother-of-pearl. So they walked together on the

wet, ribbed sands near the sea, hearing the run of the long,

heavy waves, that made a ghostly whiteness and a whisper.

He was sure of himself. As she walked, the soft silk of her

dress--she wore a blue shantung, full-skirted--blew

away from the sea and flapped and clung to her legs. She wished

it would not. Everything seemed to give her away, and she could

not rouse herself to deny, she was so confused.

He would lead her away to a pocket in the sand-hills, secret

amid the grey thorn-bushes and the grey, glassy grass. He held

her close against him, felt all her firm, unutterably desirable

mould of body through the fine fibre of the silk that fell about

her limbs. The silk, slipping fierily on the hidden, yet

revealed roundness and firmness of her body, her loins, seemed

to run in him like fire, make his brain burn like brimstone. She

liked it, the electric fire of the silk under his hands upon her

limbs, the fire flew over her, as he drew nearer and nearer to

discovery. She vibrated like a jet of electric, firm fluid in

response. Yet she did not feel beautiful. All the time, she felt

she was not beautiful to him, only exciting. [She let him take her,

and he seemed mad, mad with excited passion. But she, as she lay

afterwards on the cold, soft sand, looking up at the blotted,

faintly luminous sky, felt that she was as cold now as she

had been before. Yet he, breathing heavily, seemed almost savagely

satisfied. He seemed revenged.

A little wind wafted the sea grass and passed over her face. Where was the

supreme fulfilment she would never enjoy? Why was she so cold, so

unroused, so indifferent?

As they went home, and she saw the many, hateful lights of the bungalow,

of several bungalows in a group, he said softly:

"Don't lock your door."

"I'd rather, here," she said.

"No, don't. We belong to each other. Don't let us deny it."

She did not answer. He took her silence for consent.

He shared his room with another man.

"I suppose," he said, "it won't alarm the house if I go across to happier

regions."

"So long as you don't make a great row going, and don't try the wrong

door," said the other man, turning in to sleep.

Skrebensky went out in his wide-striped sleeping suit. He crossed the big

dining hall, whose low firelight smelled of cigars and whisky and coffee,

entered the other corridor and found Ursula's room. She was lying awake,

wide-eyed and suffering. She was glad he had come, if only for

consolation. It was consolation to be held in his arms, to feel his body

against hers. Yet how foreign his arms and body were! Yet still, not so

horribly foreign and hostile as the rest of the house felt to her.

She did not know how she suffered in this house. She was

healthy and exorbitantly full of interest. So she played tennis

and learned golf, she rowed out and swam in the deep sea, and

enjoyed it very much indeed, full of zest. Yet all the time,

among those others, she felt shocked and wincing, as if her

violently-sensitive nakedness were exposed to the hard, brutal,

material impact of the rest of the people.

The days went by unmarked, in a full, almost strenuous

enjoyment of one's own physique. Skrebensky was one among the

others, till evening came, and he took her for himself. She was

allowed a great deal of freedom and was treated with a good deal

of respect, as a girl on the eve of marriage, about to depart

for another continent.

The trouble began at evening. Then a yearning for something

unknown came over her, a passion for something she knew not

what. She would walk the foreshore alone after dusk, expecting,

expecting something, as if she had gone to a rendezvous. The

salt, bitter passion of the sea, its indifference to the earth,

its swinging, definite motion, its strength, its attack, and its

salt burning, seemed to provoke her to a pitch of madness,

tantalizing her with vast suggestions of fulfilment. And then,

for personification, would come Skrebensky, Skrebensky, whom she

knew, whom she was fond of, who was attractive, but whose soul

could not contain her in its waves of strength, nor his breast

compel her in burning, salty passion.

One evening they went out after dinner, across the low golf

links to the dunes and the sea. The sky had small, faint stars,

all was still and faintly dark. They walked together in silence,

then ploughed, labouring, through the heavy loose sand of the

gap between the dunes. They went in silence under the even,

faint darkness, in the darker shadow of the sandhills.

Suddenly, cresting the heavy, sandy pass, Ursula lifted her

head, and shrank back, momentarily frightened. There was a great

whiteness confronting her, the moon was incandescent as a round

furnace door, out of which came the high blast of moonlight,

over the seaward half of the world, a dazzling, terrifying glare

of white light. They shrank back for a moment into shadow,

uttering a cry. He felt his chest laid bare, where the secret

was heavily hidden. He felt himself fusing down to nothingness,

like a bead that rapidly disappears in an incandescent

flame.

"How wonderful!" cried Ursula, in low, calling tones. "How

wonderful!"

And she went forward, plunging into it. He followed behind.

She too seemed to melt into the glare, towards the moon.

The sands were as ground silver, the sea moved in solid

brightness, coming towards them, and she went to meet the

advance of the flashing, buoyant water. [She gave her breast

to the moon, her belly to the flashing, heaving water.] He stood

behind, encompassed, a shadow ever dissolving.

She stood on the edge of the water, at the edge of the solid,

flashing body of the sea, and the wave rushed over her feet.

"I want to go," she cried, in a strong, dominant voice. "I

want to go."

He saw the moonlight on her face, so she was like metal, he

heard her ringing, metallic voice, like the voice of a harpy to

him.

She prowled, ranging on the edge of the water like a

possessed creature, and he followed her. He saw the froth of the

wave followed by the hard, bright water swirl over her feet and

her ankles, she swung out her arms, to balance, he expected

every moment to see her walk into the sea, dressed as she was,

and be carried swimming out.

But she turned, she walked to him.

"I want to go," she cried again, in the high, hard voice,

like the scream of gulls.

"Where?" he asked.

"I don't know."

And she seized hold of his arm, held him fast, as if captive,

and walked him a little way by the edge of the dazzling, dazing

water.

Then there in the great flare of light, she clinched hold of

him, hard, as if suddenly she had the strength of destruction,

she fastened her arms round him and tightened him in her grip,

whilst her mouth sought his in a hard, rending, ever-increasing

kiss, till his body was powerless in her grip, his heart melted

in fear from the fierce, beaked, harpy's kiss. The water washed

again over their feet, but she took no notice. She seemed

unaware, she seemed to be pressing in her beaked mouth till she

had the heart of him. Then, at last, she drew away and looked at

him--looked at him. He knew what she wanted. He took her by

the hand and led her across the foreshore, back to the

sandhills. She went silently. He felt as if the ordeal of proof

was upon him, for life or death. He led her to a dark

hollow.

"No, here," she said, going out to the slope full under the

moonshine. She lay motionless, with wide-open eyes looking at

the moon. He came direct to her, without preliminaries. She held

him pinned down at the chest, awful. The fight, the struggle for

consummation was terrible. It lasted till it was agony to his

soul, till he succumbed, till he gave way as if dead, lay with

his face buried, partly in her hair, partly in the sand,

motionless, as if he would be motionless now for ever, hidden

away in the dark, buried, only buried, he only wanted to be

buried in the goodly darkness, only that, and no more.

He seemed to swoon. It was a long time before he came to

himself. He was aware of an unusual motion of her breast. He

looked up. Her face lay like an image in the moonlight, the eyes

wide open, rigid. But out of the eyes, slowly, there rolled a

tear, that glittered in the moonlight as it ran down her

cheek.

He felt as if as the knife were being pushed into his already

dead body. With head strained back, he watched, drawn tense, for

some minutes, watched the unaltering, rigid face like metal in

the moonlight, the fixed, unseeing eye, in which slowly the

water gathered, shook with glittering moonlight, then

surcharged, brimmed over and ran trickling, a tear with its

burden of moonlight, into the darkness, to fall in the sand.

He drew gradually away as if afraid, drew away--she did

not move. He glanced at her--she lay the same. Could he

break away? He turned, saw the open foreshore, clear in front of

him, and he plunged away, on and on, ever farther from the

horrible figure that lay stretched in the moonlight on the sands

with the tears gathering and travelling on the motionless,

eternal face.

He felt, if ever he must see her again, his bones must be

broken, his body crushed, obliterated for ever. And as yet, he

had the love of his own living body. He wandered on a long, long

way, till his brain drew dark and he was unconscious with

weariness. Then he curled in the deepest darkness he could find,

under the sea-grass, and lay there without consciousness.

She broke from her tense cramp of agony gradually, though

each movement was a goad of heavy pain. Gradually, she lifted

her dead body from the sands, and rose at last. There was now no

moon for her, no sea. All had passed away. She trailed her dead

body to the house, to her room, where she lay down inert.

Morning brought her a new access of superficial life. But all

within her was cold, dead, inert. Skrebensky appeared at

breakfast. He was white and obliterated. They did not look at

each other nor speak to each other. Apart from the ordinary,

trivial talk of civil people, they were separate, they did not

speak of what was between them during the remaining two days of

their stay. They were like two dead people who dare not

recognize, dare not see each other.

Then she packed her bag and put on her things. There were

several guests leaving together, for the same train. He would

have no opportunity to speak to her.

He tapped at her bedroom door at the last minute. She stood

with her umbrella in her hand. He closed the door. He did not

know what to say.

"Have you done with me?" he asked her at length, lifting his

head.

"It isn't me," she said. "You have done with me--we have

done with each other."

He looked at her, at the closed face, which he thought so

cruel. And he knew he could never touch her again. His will was

broken, he was seared, but he clung to the life of his body.

"Well, what have I done?" he asked, in a rather querulous

voice.

"I don't know," she said, in the same dull, feelingless

voice. "It is finished. It had been a failure."

He was silent. The words still burned his bowels.

"Is it my fault?" he said, looking up at length, challenging

the last stroke.

"You couldn't----" she began. But she broke

down.

He turned away, afraid to hear more. She began to gather her

bag, her handkerchief, her umbrella. She must be gone now. He

was waiting for her to be gone.

At length the carriage came and she drove away with the rest.

When she was out of sight, a great relief came over him, a

pleasant banality. In an instant, everything was obliterated. He

was childishly amiable and companionable all the day long. He

was astonished that life could be so nice. It was better than it

had been before. What a simple thing it was to be rid of her!

How friendly and simple everything felt to him. What false thing

had she been forcing on him?

But at night he dared not be alone. His room-mate had gone,

and the hours of darkness were an agony to him. He watched the

window in suffering and terror. When would this horrible

darkness be lifted off him? Setting all his nerves, he endured

it. He went to sleep with the dawn.

He never thought of her. Only his terror of the hours of