“You’d have to have it your own way, wouldn’t you?” she teased. “You
could never take it on trust.”

He changed, laughed softly, and turned and took her in his arms, in the
middle of the road.

“Yes,” he said softly.

And he kissed her face and brow, slowly, gently, with a sort of
delicate happiness which surprised her extremely, and to which she
could not respond. They were soft, blind kisses, perfect in their
stillness. Yet she held back from them. It was like strange moths, very
soft and silent, settling on her from the darkness of her soul. She was
uneasy. She drew away.

“Isn’t somebody coming?” she said.

So they looked down the dark road, then set off again walking towards
Beldover. Then suddenly, to show him she was no shallow prude, she
stopped and held him tight, hard against her, and covered his face with
hard, fierce kisses of passion. In spite of his otherness, the old
blood beat up in him.

“Not this, not this,” he whimpered to himself, as the first perfect
mood of softness and sleep-loveliness ebbed back away from the rushing
of passion that came up to his limbs and over his face as she drew him.
And soon he was a perfect hard flame of passionate desire for her. Yet
in the small core of the flame was an unyielding anguish of another
thing. But this also was lost; he only wanted her, with an extreme
desire that seemed inevitable as death, beyond question.

Then, satisfied and shattered, fulfilled and destroyed, he went home
away from her, drifting vaguely through the darkness, lapsed into the
old fire of burning passion. Far away, far away, there seemed to be a
small lament in the darkness. But what did it matter? What did it
matter, what did anything matter save this ultimate and triumphant
experience of physical passion, that had blazed up anew like a new
spell of life. “I was becoming quite dead-alive, nothing but a
word-bag,” he said in triumph, scorning his other self. Yet somewhere
far off and small, the other hovered.

The men were still dragging the lake when he got back. He stood on the
bank and heard Gerald’s voice. The water was still booming in the
night, the moon was fair, the hills beyond were elusive. The lake was
sinking. There came the raw smell of the banks, in the night air.

Up at Shortlands there were lights in the windows, as if nobody had
gone to bed. On the landing-stage was the old doctor, the father of the
young man who was lost. He stood quite silent, waiting. Birkin also
stood and watched, Gerald came up in a boat.

“You still here, Rupert?” he said. “We can’t get them. The bottom
slopes, you know, very steep. The water lies between two very sharp
slopes, with little branch valleys, and God knows where the drift will
take you. It isn’t as if it was a level bottom. You never know where
you are, with the dragging.”

“Is there any need for you to be working?” said Birkin. “Wouldn’t it be
much better if you went to bed?”

“To bed! Good God, do you think I should sleep? We’ll find ’em, before
I go away from here.”

“But the men would find them just the same without you—why should you
insist?”

Gerald looked up at him. Then he put his hand affectionately on
Birkin’s shoulder, saying:

“Don’t you bother about me, Rupert. If there’s anybody’s health to
think about, it’s yours, not mine. How do you feel yourself?”

“Very well. But you, you spoil your own chance of life—you waste your
best self.”

Gerald was silent for a moment. Then he said:

“Waste it? What else is there to do with it?”

“But leave this, won’t you? You force yourself into horrors, and put a
mill-stone of beastly memories round your neck. Come away now.”

“A mill-stone of beastly memories!” Gerald repeated. Then he put his
hand again affectionately on Birkin’s shoulder. “God, you’ve got such a
telling way of putting things, Rupert, you have.”

Birkin’s heart sank. He was irritated and weary of having a telling way
of putting things.

“Won’t you leave it? Come over to my place”—he urged as one urges a
drunken man.

“No,” said Gerald coaxingly, his arm across the other man’s shoulder.
“Thanks very much, Rupert—I shall be glad to come tomorrow, if that’ll
do. You understand, don’t you? I want to see this job through. But I’ll
come tomorrow, right enough. Oh, I’d rather come and have a chat with
you than—than do anything else, I verily believe. Yes, I would. You
mean a lot to me, Rupert, more than you know.”

“What do I mean, more than I know?” asked Birkin irritably. He was
acutely aware of Gerald’s hand on his shoulder. And he did not want
this altercation. He wanted the other man to come out of the ugly
misery.

“I’ll tell you another time,” said Gerald coaxingly.

“Come along with me now—I want you to come,” said Birkin.

There was a pause, intense and real. Birkin wondered why his own heart
beat so heavily. Then Gerald’s fingers gripped hard and communicative
into Birkin’s shoulder, as he said:

“No, I’ll see this job through, Rupert. Thank you—I know what you mean.
We’re all right, you know, you and me.”

“I may be all right, but I’m sure you’re not, mucking about here,” said
Birkin. And he went away.

The bodies of the dead were not recovered till towards dawn. Diana had
her arms tight round the neck of the young man, choking him.

“She killed him,” said Gerald.

The moon sloped down the sky and sank at last. The lake was sunk to
quarter size, it had horrible raw banks of clay, that smelled of raw
rottenish water. Dawn roused faintly behind the eastern hill. The water
still boomed through the sluice.

As the birds were whistling for the first morning, and the hills at the
back of the desolate lake stood radiant with the new mists, there was a
straggling procession up to Shortlands, men bearing the bodies on a
stretcher, Gerald going beside them, the two grey-bearded fathers
following in silence. Indoors the family was all sitting up, waiting.
Somebody must go to tell the mother, in her room. The doctor in secret
struggled to bring back his son, till he himself was exhausted.

Over all the outlying district was a hush of dreadful excitement on
that Sunday morning. The colliery people felt as if this catastrophe
had happened directly to themselves, indeed they were more shocked and
frightened than if their own men had been killed. Such a tragedy in
Shortlands, the high home of the district! One of the young mistresses,
persisting in dancing on the cabin roof of the launch, wilful young
madam, drowned in the midst of the festival, with the young doctor!
Everywhere on the Sunday morning, the colliers wandered about,
discussing the calamity. At all the Sunday dinners of the people, there
seemed a strange presence. It was as if the angel of death were very
near, there was a sense of the supernatural in the air. The men had
excited, startled faces, the women looked solemn, some of them had been
crying. The children enjoyed the excitement at first. There was an
intensity in the air, almost magical. Did all enjoy it? Did all enjoy
the thrill?

Gudrun had wild ideas of rushing to comfort Gerald. She was thinking
all the time of the perfect comforting, reassuring thing to say to him.
She was shocked and frightened, but she put that away, thinking of how
she should deport herself with Gerald: act her part. That was the real
thrill: how she should act her part.

Ursula was deeply and passionately in love with Birkin, and she was
capable of nothing. She was perfectly callous about all the talk of the
accident, but her estranged air looked like trouble. She merely sat by
herself, whenever she could, and longed to see him again. She wanted
him to come to the house,—she would not have it otherwise, he must come
at once. She was waiting for him. She stayed indoors all day, waiting
for him to knock at the door. Every minute, she glanced automatically
at the window. He would be there.

CHAPTER XV.
SUNDAY EVENING

As the day wore on, the life-blood seemed to ebb away from Ursula, and
within the emptiness a heavy despair gathered. Her passion seemed to
bleed to death, and there was nothing. She sat suspended in a state of
complete nullity, harder to bear than death.

“Unless something happens,” she said to herself, in the perfect
lucidity of final suffering, “I shall die. I am at the end of my line
of life.”

She sat crushed and obliterated in a darkness that was the border of
death. She realised how all her life she had been drawing nearer and
nearer to this brink, where there was no beyond, from which one had to
leap like Sappho into the unknown. The knowledge of the imminence of
death was like a drug. Darkly, without thinking at all, she knew that
she was near to death. She had travelled all her life along the line of
fulfilment, and it was nearly concluded. She knew all she had to know,
she had experienced all she had to experience, she was fulfilled in a
kind of bitter ripeness, there remained only to fall from the tree into
death. And one must fulfil one’s development to the end, must carry the
adventure to its conclusion. And the next step was over the border into
death. So it was then! There was a certain peace in the knowledge.

After all, when one was fulfilled, one was happiest in falling into
death, as a bitter fruit plunges in its ripeness downwards. Death is a
great consummation, a consummating experience. It is a development from
life. That we know, while we are yet living. What then need we think
for further? One can never see beyond the consummation. It is enough
that death is a great and conclusive experience. Why should we ask what
comes after the experience, when the experience is still unknown to us?
Let us die, since the great experience is the one that follows now upon
all the rest, death, which is the next great crisis in front of which
we have arrived. If we wait, if we baulk the issue, we do but hang
about the gates in undignified uneasiness. There it is, in front of us,
as in front of Sappho, the illimitable space. Thereinto goes the
journey. Have we not the courage to go on with our journey, must we cry
‘I daren’t’? On ahead we will go, into death, and whatever death may
mean. If a man can see the next step to be taken, why should he fear
the next but one? Why ask about the next but one? Of the next step we
are certain. It is the step into death.

“I shall die—I shall quickly die,” said Ursula to herself, clear as if
in a trance, clear, calm, and certain beyond human certainty. But
somewhere behind, in the twilight, there was a bitter weeping and a
hopelessness. That must not be attended to. One must go where the
unfaltering spirit goes, there must be no baulking the issue, because
of fear. No baulking the issue, no listening to the lesser voices. If
the deepest desire be now, to go on into the unknown of death, shall
one forfeit the deepest truth for one more shallow?

“Then let it end,” she said to herself. It was a decision. It was not a
question of taking one’s life—she would _never_ kill herself, that was
repulsive and violent. It was a question of _knowing_ the nextcstep.
And the next step led into the space of death. Did it?—or was there—?

Her thoughts drifted into unconsciousness, she sat as if asleep beside
the fire. And then the thought came back. The space of death! Could she
give herself to it? Ah yes—it was a sleep. She had had enough. So long
she had held out; and resisted. Now was the time to relinquish, not to
resist any more.

In a kind of spiritual trance, she yielded, she gave way, and all was
dark. She could feel, within the darkness, the terrible assertion of
her body, the unutterable anguish of dissolution, the only anguish that
is too much, the far-off, awful nausea of dissolution set in within the
body.

“Does the body correspond so immediately with the spirit?” she asked
herself. And she knew, with the clarity of ultimate knowledge, that the
body is only one of the manifestations of the spirit, the transmutation
of the integral spirit is the transmutation of the physical body as
well. Unless I set my will, unless I absolve myself from the rhythm of
life, fix myself and remain static, cut off from living, absolved
within my own will. But better die than live mechanically a life that
is a repetition of repetitions. To die is to move on with the
invisible. To die is also a joy, a joy of submitting to that which is
greater than the known, namely, the pure unknown. That is a joy. But to
live mechanised and cut off within the motion of the will, to live as
an entity absolved from the unknown, that is shameful and ignominious.
There is no ignominy in death. There is complete ignominy in an
unreplenished, mechanised life. Life indeed may be ignominious,
shameful to the soul. But death is never a shame. Death itself, like
the illimitable space, is beyond our sullying.

Tomorrow was Monday. Monday, the beginning of another school-week!
Another shameful, barren school-week, mere routine and mechanical
activity. Was not the adventure of death infinitely preferable? Was not
death infinitely more lovely and noble than such a life? A life of
barren routine, without inner meaning, without any real significance.
How sordid life was, how it was a terrible shame to the soul, to live
now! How much cleaner and more dignified to be dead! One could not bear
any more of this shame of sordid routine and mechanical nullity. One
might come to fruit in death. She had had enough. For where was life to
be found? No flowers grow upon busy machinery, there is no sky to a
routine, there is no space to a rotary motion. And all life was a
rotary motion, mechanised, cut off from reality. There was nothing to
look for from life—it was the same in all countries and all peoples.
The only window was death. One could look out on to the great dark sky
of death with elation, as one had looked out of the classroom window as
a child, and seen perfect freedom in the outside. Now one was not a
child, and one knew that the soul was a prisoner within this sordid
vast edifice of life, and there was no escape, save in death.

But what a joy! What a gladness to think that whatever humanity did, it
could not seize hold of the kingdom of death, to nullify that. The sea
they turned into a murderous alley and a soiled road of commerce,
disputed like the dirty land of a city every inch of it. The air they
claimed too, shared it up, parcelled it out to certain owners, they
trespassed in the air to fight for it. Everything was gone, walled in,
with spikes on top of the walls, and one must ignominiously creep
between the spiky walls through a labyrinth of life.

But the great, dark, illimitable kingdom of death, there humanity was
put to scorn. So much they could do upon earth, the multifarious little
gods that they were. But the kingdom of death put them all to scorn,
they dwindled into their true vulgar silliness in face of it.

How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look
forward to. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt
that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad
refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was
rich, if only in the promise of perfect death. It was a gladness above
all, that this remained to look forward to, the pure inhuman otherness
of death.

Whatever life might be, it could not take away death, the inhuman
transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is
not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human.
And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and
the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we
shall not know. The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward
like heirs to their majority.

Ursula sat quite still and quite forgotten, alone by the fire in the
drawing-room. The children were playing in the kitchen, all the others
were gone to church. And she was gone into the ultimate darkness of her
own soul.

She was startled by hearing the bell ring, away in the kitchen, the
children came scudding along the passage in delicious alarm.

“Ursula, there’s somebody.”

“I know. Don’t be silly,” she replied. She too was startled, almost
frightened. She dared hardly go to the door.

Birkin stood on the threshold, his rain-coat turned up to his ears. He
had come now, now she was gone far away. She was aware of the rainy
night behind him.

“Oh is it you?” she said.

“I am glad you are at home,” he said in a low voice, entering the
house.

“They are all gone to church.”

He took off his coat and hung it up. The children were peeping at him
round the corner.

“Go and get undressed now, Billy and Dora,” said Ursula. “Mother will
be back soon, and she’ll be disappointed if you’re not in bed.”

The children, in a sudden angelic mood, retired without a word. Birkin
and Ursula went into the drawing-room.

The fire burned low. He looked at her and wondered at the luminous
delicacy of her beauty, and the wide shining of her eyes. He watched
from a distance, with wonder in his heart, she seemed transfigured with
light.

“What have you been doing all day?” he asked her.

“Only sitting about,” she said.

He looked at her. There was a change in her. But she was separate from
him. She remained apart, in a kind of brightness. They both sat silent
in the soft light of the lamp. He felt he ought to go away again, he
ought not to have come. Still he did not gather enough resolution to
move. But he was _de trop_, her mood was absent and separate.

Then there came the voices of the two children calling shyly outside
the door, softly, with self-excited timidity:

“Ursula! Ursula!”

She rose and opened the door. On the threshold stood the two children
in their long nightgowns, with wide-eyed, angelic faces. They were
being very good for the moment, playing the rôle perfectly of two
obedient children.

“Shall you take us to bed!” said Billy, in a loud whisper.

“Why you _are_ angels tonight,” she said softly. “Won’t you come and
say good-night to Mr Birkin?”

The children merged shyly into the room, on bare feet. Billy’s face was
wide and grinning, but there was a great solemnity of being good in his
round blue eyes. Dora, peeping from the floss of her fair hair, hung
back like some tiny Dryad, that has no soul.

“Will you say good-night to me?” asked Birkin, in a voice that was
strangely soft and smooth. Dora drifted away at once, like a leaf
lifted on a breath of wind. But Billy went softly forward, slow and
willing, lifting his pinched-up mouth implicitly to be kissed. Ursula
watched the full, gathered lips of the man gently touch those of the
boy, so gently. Then Birkin lifted his fingers and touched the boy’s
round, confiding cheek, with a faint touch of love. Neither spoke.
Billy seemed angelic like a cherub boy, or like an acolyte, Birkin was
a tall, grave angel looking down to him.

“Are you going to be kissed?” Ursula broke in, speaking to the little
girl. But Dora edged away like a tiny Dryad that will not be touched.

“Won’t you say good-night to Mr Birkin? Go, he’s waiting for you,” said
Ursula. But the girl-child only made a little motion away from him.

“Silly Dora, silly Dora!” said Ursula.

Birkin felt some mistrust and antagonism in the small child. He could
not understand it.

“Come then,” said Ursula. “Let us go before mother comes.”

“Who’ll hear us say our prayers?” asked Billy anxiously.

“Whom you like.”

“Won’t you?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Ursula?”

“Well Billy?”

“Is it _whom_ you like?”

“That’s it.”

“Well what is _whom_?”

“It’s the accusative of who.”

There was a moment’s contemplative silence, then the confiding:

“Is it?”

Birkin smiled to himself as he sat by the fire. When Ursula came down
he sat motionless, with his arms on his knees. She saw him, how he was
motionless and ageless, like some crouching idol, some image of a
deathly religion. He looked round at her, and his face, very pale and
unreal, seemed to gleam with a whiteness almost phosphorescent.

“Don’t you feel well?” she asked, in indefinable repulsion.

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“But don’t you know without thinking about it?”

He looked at her, his eyes dark and swift, and he saw her revulsion. He
did not answer her question.

“Don’t you know whether you are unwell or not, without thinking about
it?” she persisted.

“Not always,” he said coldly.

“But don’t you think that’s very wicked?”

“Wicked?”

“Yes. I think it’s _criminal_ to have so little connection with your
own body that you don’t even know when you are ill.”

He looked at her darkly.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why don’t you stay in bed when you are seedy? You look perfectly
ghastly.”

“Offensively so?” he asked ironically.

“Yes, quite offensive. Quite repelling.”

“Ah!! Well that’s unfortunate.”

“And it’s raining, and it’s a horrible night. Really, you shouldn’t be
forgiven for treating your body like it—you _ought_ to suffer, a man
who takes as little notice of his body as that.”

“—takes as little notice of his body as that,” he echoed mechanically.

This cut her short, and there was silence.

The others came in from church, and the two had the girls to face, then
the mother and Gudrun, and then the father and the boy.

“Good-evening,” said Brangwen, faintly surprised. “Came to see me, did
you?”

“No,” said Birkin, “not about anything, in particular, that is. The day
was dismal, and I thought you wouldn’t mind if I called in.”

“It _has_ been a depressing day,” said Mrs Brangwen sympathetically. At
that moment the voices of the children were heard calling from
upstairs: “Mother! Mother!” She lifted her face and answered mildly
into the distance: “I shall come up to you in a minute, Doysie.” Then
to Birkin: “There is nothing fresh at Shortlands, I suppose? Ah,” she
sighed, “no, poor things, I should think not.”

“You’ve been over there today, I suppose?” asked the father.

“Gerald came round to tea with me, and I walked back with him. The
house is overexcited and unwholesome, I thought.”

“I should think they were people who hadn’t much restraint,” said
Gudrun.

“Or too much,” Birkin answered.

“Oh yes, I’m sure,” said Gudrun, almost vindictively, “one or the
other.”

“They all feel they ought to behave in some unnatural fashion,” said
Birkin. “When people are in grief, they would do better to cover their
faces and keep in retirement, as in the old days.”

“Certainly!” cried Gudrun, flushed and inflammable. “What can be worse
than this public grief—what is more horrible, more false! If _grief_ is
not private, and hidden, what is?”

“Exactly,” he said. “I felt ashamed when I was there and they were all
going about in a lugubrious false way, feeling they must not be natural
or ordinary.”

“Well—” said Mrs Brangwen, offended at this criticism, “it isn’t so
easy to bear a trouble like that.”

And she went upstairs to the children.

He remained only a few minutes longer, then took his leave. When he was
gone Ursula felt such a poignant hatred of him, that all her brain
seemed turned into a sharp crystal of fine hatred. Her whole nature
seemed sharpened and intensified into a pure dart of hate. She could
not imagine what it was. It merely took hold of her, the most poignant
and ultimate hatred, pure and clear and beyond thought. She could not
think of it at all, she was translated beyond herself. It was like a
possession. She felt she was possessed. And for several days she went
about possessed by this exquisite force of hatred against him. It
surpassed anything she had ever known before, it seemed to throw her
out of the world into some terrible region where nothing of her old
life held good. She was quite lost and dazed, really dead to her own
life.

It was so completely incomprehensible and irrational. She did not know
_why_ she hated him, her hate was quite abstract. She had only realised
with a shock that stunned her, that she was overcome by this pure
transportation. He was the enemy, fine as a diamond, and as hard and
jewel-like, the quintessence of all that was inimical.

She thought of his face, white and purely wrought, and of his eyes that
had such a dark, constant will of assertion, and she touched her own
forehead, to feel if she were mad, she was so transfigured in white
flame of essential hate.

It was not temporal, her hatred, she did not hate him for this or for
that; she did not want to do anything to him, to have any connection
with him. Her relation was ultimate and utterly beyond words, the hate
was so pure and gemlike. It was as if he were a beam of essential
enmity, a beam of light that did not only destroy her, but denied her
altogether, revoked her whole world. She saw him as a clear stroke of
uttermost contradiction, a strange gem-like being whose existence
defined her own non-existence. When she heard he was ill again, her
hatred only intensified itself a few degrees, if that were possible. It
stunned her and annihilated her, but she could not escape it. She could
not escape this transfiguration of hatred that had come upon her.

CHAPTER XVI.
MAN TO MAN

He lay sick and unmoved, in pure opposition to everything. He knew how
near to breaking was the vessel that held his life. He knew also how
strong and durable it was. And he did not care. Better a thousand times
take one’s chance with death, than accept a life one did not want. But
best of all to persist and persist and persist for ever, till one were
satisfied in life.

He knew that Ursula was referred back to him. He knew his life rested
with her. But he would rather not live than accept the love she
proffered. The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage, a sort of
conscription. What it was in him he did not know, but the thought of
love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the
horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive.
He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were. The hot
narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent. The way they shut
their doors, these married people, and shut themselves in to their own
exclusive alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. It was
a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or
private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further
immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted: a kaleidoscope of
couples, disjoined, separatist, meaningless entities of married
couples. True, he hated promiscuity even worse than marriage, and a
liaison was only another kind of coupling, reactionary from the legal
marriage. Reaction was a greater bore than action.

On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that
turned a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other
broken half. And he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in
herself. He wanted sex to revert to the level of the other appetites,
to be regarded as a functional process, not as a fulfilment. He
believed in sex marriage. But beyond this, he wanted a further
conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings,
each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like
two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.

He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for
unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. Desire and aspiration
should find their object without all this torture, as now, in a world
of plenty of water, simple thirst is inconsiderable, satisfied almost
unconsciously. And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself,
single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The
merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent
to him.

But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she
had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She
wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be
referred back to her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of
whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be
rendered up.

It filled him with almost insane fury, this calm assumption of the
Magna Mater, that all was hers, because she had borne it. Man was hers
because she had borne him. A Mater Dolorosa, she had borne him, a Magna
Mater, she now claimed him again, soul and body, sex, meaning, and all.
He had a horror of the Magna Mater, she was detestable.

She was on a very high horse again, was woman, the Great Mother. Did he
not know it in Hermione. Hermione, the humble, the subservient, what
was she all the while but the Mater Dolorosa, in her subservience,
claiming with horrible, insidious arrogance and female tyranny, her own
again, claiming back the man she had borne in suffering. By her very
suffering and humility she bound her son with chains, she held him her
everlasting prisoner.

And Ursula, Ursula was the same—or the inverse. She too was the awful,
arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest
depended. He saw the yellow flare in her eyes, he knew the unthinkable
overweening assumption of primacy in her. She was unconscious of it
herself. She was only too ready to knock her head on the ground before
a man. But this was only when she was so certain of her man, that she
could worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of
perfect possession.

It was intolerable, this possession at the hands of woman. Always a man
must be considered as the broken off fragment of a woman, and the sex
was the still aching scar of the laceration. Man must be added on to a
woman, before he had any real place or wholeness.

And why? Why should we consider ourselves, men and women, as broken
fragments of one whole? It is not true. We are not broken fragments of
one whole. Rather we are the singling away into purity and clear being,
of things that were mixed. Rather the sex is that which remains in us
of the mixed, the unresolved. And passion is the further separating of
this mixture, that which is manly being taken into the being of the
man, that which is womanly passing to the woman, till the two are clear
and whole as angels, the admixture of sex in the highest sense
surpassed, leaving two single beings constellated together like two
stars.

In the old age, before sex was, we were mixed, each one a mixture. The
process of singling into individuality resulted into the great
polarisation of sex. The womanly drew to one side, the manly to the
other. But the separation was imperfect even them. And so our
world-cycle passes. There is now to come the new day, when we are
beings each of us, fulfilled in difference. The man is pure man, the
woman pure woman, they are perfectly polarised. But there is no longer
any of the horrible merging, mingling self-abnegation of love. There is
only the pure duality of polarisation, each one free from any
contamination of the other. In each, the individual is primal, sex is
subordinate, but perfectly polarised. Each has a single, separate
being, with its own laws. The man has his pure freedom, the woman hers.
Each acknowledges the perfection of the polarised sex-circuit. Each
admits the different nature in the other.

So Birkin meditated whilst he was ill. He liked sometimes to be ill
enough to take to his bed. For then he got better very quickly, and
things came to him clear and sure.

Whilst he was laid up, Gerald came to see him. The two men had a deep,
uneasy feeling for each other. Gerald’s eyes were quick and restless,
his whole manner tense and impatient, he seemed strung up to some
activity. According to conventionality, he wore black clothes, he
looked formal, handsome and _comme il faut_. His hair was fair almost
to whiteness, sharp like splinters of light, his face was keen and
ruddy, his body seemed full of northern energy. Gerald really loved
Birkin, though he never quite believed in him. Birkin was too
unreal;—clever, whimsical, wonderful, but not practical enough. Gerald
felt that his own understanding was much sounder and safer. Birkin was
delightful, a wonderful spirit, but after all, not to be taken
seriously, not quite to be counted as a man among men.

“Why are you laid up again?” he asked kindly, taking the sick man’s
hand. It was always Gerald who was protective, offering the warm
shelter of his physical strength.

“For my sins, I suppose,” Birkin said, smiling a little ironically.

“For your sins? Yes, probably that is so. You should sin less, and keep
better in health?”

“You’d better teach me.”

He looked at Gerald with ironic eyes.

“How are things with you?” asked Birkin.

“With me?” Gerald looked at Birkin, saw he was serious, and a warm
light came into his eyes.

“I don’t know that they’re any different. I don’t see how they could
be. There’s nothing to change.”

“I suppose you are conducting the business as successfully as ever, and
ignoring the demand of the soul.”

“That’s it,” said Gerald. “At least as far as the business is
concerned. I couldn’t say about the soul, I’am sure.”

“No.”

“Surely you don’t expect me to?” laughed Gerald.

“No. How are the rest of your affairs progressing, apart from the
business?”

“The rest of my affairs? What are those? I couldn’t say; I don’t know
what you refer to.”

“Yes, you do,” said Birkin. “Are you gloomy or cheerful? And what about
Gudrun Brangwen?”

“What about her?” A confused look came over Gerald. “Well,” he added,
“I don’t know. I can only tell you she gave me a hit over the face last
time I saw her.”

“A hit over the face! What for?”

“That I couldn’t tell you, either.”

“Really! But when?”

“The night of the party—when Diana was drowned. She was driving the
cattle up the hill, and I went after her—you remember.”

“Yes, I remember. But what made her do that? You didn’t definitely ask
her for it, I suppose?”

“I? No, not that I know of. I merely said to her, that it was dangerous
to drive those Highland bullocks—as it _is_. She turned in such a way,
and said—‘I suppose you think I’m afraid of you and your cattle, don’t
you?’ So I asked her ‘why,’ and for answer she flung me a back-hander
across the face.”

Birkin laughed quickly, as if it pleased him. Gerald looked at him,
wondering, and began to laugh as well, saying:

“I didn’t laugh at the time, I assure you. I was never so taken aback
in my life.”

“And weren’t you furious?”

“Furious? I should think I was. I’d have murdered her for two pins.”

“H’m!” ejaculated Birkin. “Poor Gudrun, wouldn’t she suffer afterwards
for having given herself away!” He was hugely delighted.

“Would she suffer?” asked Gerald, also amused now.

Both men smiled in malice and amusement.

“Badly, I should think; seeing how self-conscious she is.”

“She is self-conscious, is she? Then what made her do it? For I
certainly think it was quite uncalled-for, and quite unjustified.”

“I suppose it was a sudden impulse.”

“Yes, but how do you account for her having such an impulse? I’d done
her no harm.”

Birkin shook his head.

“The Amazon suddenly came up in her, I suppose,” he said.

“Well,” replied Gerald, “I’d rather it had been the Orinoco.”

They both laughed at the poor joke. Gerald was thinking how Gudrun had
said she would strike the last blow too. But some reserve made him keep
this back from Birkin.

“And you resent it?” Birkin asked.

“I don’t resent it. I don’t care a tinker’s curse about it.” He was
silent a moment, then he added, laughing. “No, I’ll see it through,
that’s all. She seemed sorry afterwards.”

“Did she? You’ve not met since that night?”

Gerald’s face clouded.

“No,” he said. “We’ve been—you can imagine how it’s been, since the
accident.”

“Yes. Is it calming down?”

“I don’t know. It’s a shock, of course. But I don’t believe mother
minds. I really don’t believe she takes any notice. And what’s so
funny, she used to be all for the children—nothing mattered, nothing
whatever mattered but the children. And now, she doesn’t take any more
notice than if it was one of the servants.”

“No? Did it upset _you_ very much?”

“It’s a shock. But I don’t feel it very much, really. I don’t feel any
different. We’ve all got to die, and it doesn’t seem to make any great
difference, anyhow, whether you die or not. I can’t feel any _grief_,
you know. It leaves me cold. I can’t quite account for it.”

“You don’t care if you die or not?” asked Birkin.

Gerald looked at him with eyes blue as the blue-fibred steel of a
weapon. He felt awkward, but indifferent. As a matter of fact, he did
care terribly, with a great fear.

“Oh,” he said, “I don’t want to die, why should I? But I never trouble.
The question doesn’t seem to be on the carpet for me at all. It doesn’t
interest me, you know.”

“_Timor mortis conturbat me_,” quoted Birkin, adding—“No, death doesn’t
really seem the point any more. It curiously doesn’t concern one. It’s
like an ordinary tomorrow.”

Gerald looked closely at his friend. The eyes of the two men met, and
an unspoken understanding was exchanged.

Gerald narrowed his eyes, his face was cool and unscrupulous as he
looked at Birkin, impersonally, with a vision that ended in a point in
space, strangely keen-eyed and yet blind.

“If death isn’t the point,” he said, in a strangely abstract, cold,
fine voice—“what is?” He sounded as if he had been found out.

“What is?” re-echoed Birkin. And there was a mocking silence.

“There’s long way to go, after the point of intrinsic death, before we
disappear,” said Birkin.

“There is,” said Gerald. “But what sort of way?” He seemed to press the
other man for knowledge which he himself knew far better than Birkin
did.

“Right down the slopes of degeneration—mystic, universal degeneration.
There are many stages of pure degradation to go through: agelong. We
live on long after our death, and progressively, in progressive
devolution.”

Gerald listened with a faint, fine smile on his face, all the time, as
if, somewhere, he knew so much better than Birkin, all about this: as
if his own knowledge were direct and personal, whereas Birkin’s was a
matter of observation and inference, not quite hitting the nail on the
head:—though aiming near enough at it. But he was not going to give
himself away. If Birkin could get at the secrets, let him. Gerald would
never help him. Gerald would be a dark horse to the end.

“Of course,” he said, with a startling change of conversation, “it is
father who really feels it. It will finish him. For him the world
collapses. All his care now is for Winnie—he must save Winnie. He says
she ought to be sent away to school, but she won’t hear of it, and
he’ll never do it. Of course she _is_ in rather a queer way. We’re all
of us curiously bad at living. We can do things—but we can’t get on
with life at all. It’s curious—a family failing.”

“She oughtn’t to be sent away to school,” said Birkin, who was
considering a new proposition.

“She oughtn’t. Why?”

“She’s a queer child—a special child, more special even than you. And
in my opinion special children should never be sent away to school.
Only moderately ordinary children should be sent to school—so it seems
to me.”

“I’m inclined to think just the opposite. I think it would probably
make her more normal if she went away and mixed with other children.”

“She wouldn’t mix, you see. _You_ never really mixed, did you? And she
wouldn’t be willing even to pretend to. She’s proud, and solitary, and
naturally apart. If she has a single nature, why do you want to make
her gregarious?”

“No, I don’t want to make her anything. But I think school would be
good for her.”

“Was it good for you?”

Gerald’s eyes narrowed uglily. School had been torture to him. Yet he
had not questioned whether one should go through this torture. He
seemed to believe in education through subjection and torment.

“I hated it at the time, but I can see it was necessary,” he said. “It
brought me into line a bit—and you can’t live unless you do come into
line somewhere.”

“Well,” said Birkin, “I begin to think that you can’t live unless you
keep entirely out of the line. It’s no good trying to toe the line,
when your one impulse is to smash up the line. Winnie is a special
nature, and for special natures you must give a special world.”

“Yes, but where’s your special world?” said Gerald.

“Make it. Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the
world down to fit yourself. As a matter of fact, two exceptional people
make another world. You and I, we make another, separate world. You
don’t _want_ a world same as your brothers-in-law. It’s just the
special quality you value. Do you _want_ to be normal or ordinary! It’s
a lie. You want to be free and extraordinary, in an extraordinary world
of liberty.”

Gerald looked at Birkin with subtle eyes of knowledge. But he would
never openly admit what he felt. He knew more than Birkin, in one
direction—much more. And this gave him his gentle love for the other
man, as if Birkin were in some way young, innocent, child-like: so
amazingly clever, but incurably innocent.

“Yet you are so banal as to consider me chiefly a freak,” said Birkin
pointedly.

“A freak!” exclaimed Gerald, startled. And his face opened suddenly, as
if lighted with simplicity, as when a flower opens out of the cunning
bud. “No—I never consider you a freak.” And he watched the other man
with strange eyes, that Birkin could not understand. “I feel,” Gerald
continued, “that there is always an element of uncertainty about
you—perhaps you are uncertain about yourself. But I’m never sure of
you. You can go away and change as easily as if you had no soul.”

He looked at Birkin with penetrating eyes. Birkin was amazed. He
thought he had all the soul in the world. He stared in amazement. And
Gerald, watching, saw the amazing attractive goodliness of his eyes, a
young, spontaneous goodness that attracted the other man infinitely,
yet filled him with bitter chagrin, because he mistrusted it so much.
He knew Birkin could do without him—could forget, and not suffer. This
was always present in Gerald’s consciousness, filling him with bitter
unbelief: this consciousness of the young, animal-like spontaneity of
detachment. It seemed almost like hypocrisy and lying, sometimes, oh,
often, on Birkin’s part, to talk so deeply and importantly.

Quite other things were going through Birkin’s mind. Suddenly he saw
himself confronted with another problem—the problem of love and eternal
conjunction between two men. Of course this was necessary—it had been a
necessity inside himself all his life—to love a man purely and fully.
Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying
it.

He lay in the bed and wondered, whilst his friend sat beside him, lost
in brooding. Each man was gone in his own thoughts.

“You know how the old German knights used to swear a
_Blutbruderschaft_,” he said to Gerald, with quite a new happy activity
in his eyes.

“Make a little wound in their arms, and rub each other’s blood into the
cut?” said Gerald.

“Yes—and swear to be true to each other, of one blood, all their lives.
That is what we ought to do. No wounds, that is obsolete. But we ought
to swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly, and perfectly,
finally, without any possibility of going back on it.”

He looked at Gerald with clear, happy eyes of discovery. Gerald looked
down at him, attracted, so deeply bondaged in fascinated attraction,
that he was mistrustful, resenting the bondage, hating the attraction.

“We will swear to each other, one day, shall we?” pleaded Birkin. “We
will swear to stand by each other—be true to each
other—ultimately—infallibly—given to each other, organically—without
possibility of taking back.”

Birkin sought hard to express himself. But Gerald hardly listened. His
face shone with a certain luminous pleasure. He was pleased. But he
kept his reserve. He held himself back.

“Shall we swear to each other, one day?” said Birkin, putting out his
hand towards Gerald.

Gerald just touched the extended fine, living hand, as if withheld and
afraid.

“We’ll leave it till I understand it better,” he said, in a voice of
excuse.

Birkin watched him. A little sharp disappointment, perhaps a touch of
contempt came into his heart.

“Yes,” he said. “You must tell me what you think, later. You know what
I mean? Not sloppy emotionalism. An impersonal union that leaves one
free.”

They lapsed both into silence. Birkin was looking at Gerald all the
time. He seemed now to see, not the physical, animal man, which he
usually saw in Gerald, and which usually he liked so much, but the man
himself, complete, and as if fated, doomed, limited. This strange sense
of fatality in Gerald, as if he were limited to one form of existence,
one knowledge, one activity, a sort of fatal halfness, which to himself
seemed wholeness, always overcame Birkin after their moments of
passionate approach, and filled him with a sort of contempt, or
boredom. It was the insistence on the limitation which so bored Birkin
in Gerald. Gerald could never fly away from himself, in real
indifferent gaiety. He had a clog, a sort of monomania.

There was silence for a time. Then Birkin said, in a lighter tone,
letting the stress of the contact pass:

“Can’t you get a good governess for Winifred?—somebody exceptional?”

“Hermione Roddice suggested we should ask Gudrun to teach her to draw
and to model in clay. You know Winnie is astonishingly clever with that
plasticine stuff. Hermione declares she is an artist.” Gerald spoke in
the usual animated, chatty manner, as if nothing unusual had passed.
But Birkin’s manner was full of reminder.

“Really! I didn’t know that. Oh well then, if Gudrun _would_ teach her,
it would be perfect—couldn’t be anything better—if Winifred is an
artist. Because Gudrun somewhere is one. And every true artist is the
salvation of every other.”

“I thought they got on so badly, as a rule.”

“Perhaps. But only artists produce for each other the world that is fit
to live in. If you can arrange _that_ for Winifred, it is perfect.”

“But you think she wouldn’t come?”

“I don’t know. Gudrun is rather self-opinionated. She won’t go cheap
anywhere. Or if she does, she’ll pretty soon take herself back. So
whether she would condescend to do private teaching, particularly here,
in Beldover, I don’t know. But it would be just the thing. Winifred has
got a special nature. And if you can put into her way the means of
being self-sufficient, that is the best thing possible. She’ll never
get on with the ordinary life. You find it difficult enough yourself,
and she is several skins thinner than you are. It is awful to think
what her life will be like unless she does find a means of expression,
some way of fulfilment. You can see what mere leaving it to fate
brings. You can see how much marriage is to be trusted to—look at your
own mother.”

“Do you think mother is abnormal?”

“No! I think she only wanted something more, or other than the common
run of life. And not getting it, she has gone wrong perhaps.”

“After producing a brood of wrong children,” said Gerald gloomily.

“No more wrong than any of the rest of us,” Birkin replied. “The most
normal people have the worst subterranean selves, take them one by
one.”

“Sometimes I think it is a curse to be alive,” said Gerald with sudden
impotent anger.

“Well,” said Birkin, “why not! Let it be a curse sometimes to be
alive—at other times it is anything but a curse. You’ve got plenty of
zest in it really.”

“Less than you’d think,” said Gerald, revealing a strange poverty in
his look at the other man.

There was silence, each thinking his own thoughts.

“I don’t see what she has to distinguish between teaching at the
Grammar School, and coming to teach Win,” said Gerald.

“The difference between a public servant and a private one. The only
nobleman today, king and only aristocrat, is the public, the public.
You are quite willing to serve the public—but to be a private tutor—”

“I don’t want to serve either—”

“No! And Gudrun will probably feel the same.”

Gerald thought for a few minutes. Then he said:

“At all events, father won’t make her feel like a private servant. He
will be fussy and greatful enough.”

“So he ought. And so ought all of you. Do you think you can hire a
woman like Gudrun Brangwen with money? She is your equal like
anything—probably your superior.”

“Is she?” said Gerald.

“Yes, and if you haven’t the guts to know it, I hope she’ll leave you
to your own devices.”

“Nevertheless,” said Gerald, “if she is my equal, I wish she weren’t a
teacher, because I don’t think teachers as a rule are my equal.”

“Nor do I, damn them. But am I a teacher because I teach, or a parson
because I preach?”

Gerald laughed. He was always uneasy on this score. He did not _want_
to claim social superiority, yet he _would_ not claim intrinsic
personal superiority, because he would never base his standard of
values on pure being. So he wobbled upon a tacit assumption of social
standing. No, Birkin wanted him to accept the fact of intrinsic
difference between human beings, which he did not intend to accept. It
was against his social honour, his principle. He rose to go.

“I’ve been neglecting my business all this while,” he said smiling.

“I ought to have reminded you before,” Birkin replied, laughing and
mocking.

“I knew you’d say something like that,” laughed Gerald, rather
uneasily.

“Did you?”

“Yes, Rupert. It wouldn’t do for us all to be like you are—we should
soon be in the cart. When I am above the world, I shall ignore all
businesses.”

“Of course, we’re not in the cart now,” said Birkin, satirically.

“Not as much as you make out. At any rate, we have enough to eat and
drink—”

“And be satisfied,” added Birkin.

Gerald came near the bed and stood looking down at Birkin whose throat
was exposed, whose tossed hair fell attractively on the warm brow,
above the eyes that were so unchallenged and still in the satirical
face. Gerald, full-limbed and turgid with energy, stood unwilling to
go, he was held by the presence of the other man. He had not the power
to go away.

“So,” said Birkin. “Good-bye.” And he reached out his hand from under
the bed-clothes, smiling with a glimmering look.

“Good-bye,” said Gerald, taking the warm hand of his friend in a firm
grasp. “I shall come again. I miss you down at the mill.”

“I’ll be there in a few days,” said Birkin.

The eyes of the two men met again. Gerald’s, that were keen as a
hawk’s, were suffused now with warm light and with unadmitted love,
Birkin looked back as out of a darkness, unsounded and unknown, yet
with a kind of warmth, that seemed to flow over Gerald’s brain like a
fertile sleep.

“Good-bye then. There’s nothing I can do for you?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

Birkin watched the black-clothed form of the other man move out of the
door, the bright head was gone, he turned over to sleep.

CHAPTER XVII.
THE INDUSTRIAL MAGNATE

In Beldover, there was both for Ursula and for Gudrun an interval. It
seemed to Ursula as if Birkin had gone out of her for the time, he had
lost his significance, he scarcely mattered in her world. She had her
own friends, her own activities, her own life. She turned back to the
old ways with zest, away from him.

And Gudrun, after feeling every moment in all her veins conscious of
Gerald Crich, connected even physically with him, was now almost
indifferent to the thought of him. She was nursing new schemes for
going away and trying a new form of life. All the time, there was
something in her urging her to avoid the final establishing of a
relationship with Gerald. She felt it would be wiser and better to have
no more than a casual acquaintance with him.

She had a scheme for going to St Petersburg, where she had a friend who
was a sculptor like herself, and who lived with a wealthy Russian whose
hobby was jewel-making. The emotional, rather rootless life of the
Russians appealed to her. She did not want to go to Paris. Paris was
dry, and essentially boring. She would like to go to Rome, Munich,
Vienna, or to St Petersburg or Moscow. She had a friend in St
Petersburg and a friend in Munich. To each of these she wrote, asking
about rooms.

She had a certain amount of money. She had come home partly to save,
and now she had sold several pieces of work, she had been praised in
various shows. She knew she could become quite the “go’ if she went to
London. But she knew London, she wanted something else. She had seventy
pounds, of which nobody knew anything. She would move soon, as soon as
she heard from her friends. Her nature, in spite of her apparent
placidity and calm, was profoundly restless.

The sisters happened to call in a cottage in Willey Green to buy honey.
Mrs Kirk, a stout, pale, sharp-nosed woman, sly, honied, with something
shrewish and cat-like beneath, asked the girls into her too cosy, too
tidy kitchen. There was a cat-like comfort and cleanliness everywhere.

“Yes, Miss Brangwen,” she said, in her slightly whining, insinuating
voice, “and how do you like being back in the old place, then?”

Gudrun, whom she addressed, hated her at once.

“I don’t care for it,” she replied abruptly.

“You don’t? Ay, well, I suppose you found a difference from London. You
like life, and big, grand places. Some of us has to be content with
Willey Green and Beldover. And what do you think of our Grammar School,
as there’s so much talk about?”

“What do I think of it?” Gudrun looked round at her slowly. “Do you
mean, do I think it’s a good school?”

“Yes. What is your opinion of it?”

“I _do_ think it’s a good school.”

Gudrun was very cold and repelling. She knew the common people hated
the school.

“Ay, you do, then! I’ve heard so much, one way and the other. It’s nice
to know what those that’s in it feel. But opinions vary, don’t they? Mr
Crich up at Highclose is all for it. Ay, poor man, I’m afraid he’s not
long for this world. He’s very poorly.”

“Is he worse?” asked Ursula.

“Eh, yes—since they lost Miss Diana. He’s gone off to a shadow. Poor
man, he’s had a world of trouble.”

“Has he?” asked Gudrun, faintly ironic.

“He has, a world of trouble. And as nice and kind a gentleman as ever
you could wish to meet. His children don’t take after him.”

“I suppose they take after their mother?” said Ursula.

“In many ways.” Mrs Krik lowered her voice a little. “She was a proud
haughty lady when she came into these parts—my word, she was that! She
mustn’t be looked at, and it was worth your life to speak to her.” The
woman made a dry, sly face.

“Did you know her when she was first married?”

“Yes, I knew her. I nursed three of her children. And proper little
terrors they were, little fiends—that Gerald was a demon if ever there
was one, a proper demon, ay, at six months old.” A curious malicious,
sly tone came into the woman’s voice.

“Really,” said Gudrun.

“That wilful, masterful—he’d mastered one nurse at six months. Kick,
and scream, and struggle like a demon. Many’s the time I’ve pinched his
little bottom for him, when he was a child in arms. Ay, and he’d have
been better if he’d had it pinched oftener. But she wouldn’t have them
corrected—no-o, wouldn’t hear of it. I can remember the rows she had
with Mr Crich, my word. When he’d got worked up, properly worked up
till he could stand no more, he’d lock the study door and whip them.
But she paced up and down all the while like a tiger outside, like a
tiger, with very murder in her face. She had a face that could _look_
death. And when the door was opened, she’d go in with her hands
lifted—‘What have you been doing to _my_ children, you coward.’ She was
like one out of her mind. I believe he was frightened of her; he had to
be driven mad before he’d lift a finger. Didn’t the servants have a
life of it! And didn’t we used to be thankful when one of them caught
it. They were the torment of your life.”

“Really!” said Gudrun.

“In every possible way. If you wouldn’t let them smash their pots on
the table, if you wouldn’t let them drag the kitten about with a string
round its neck, if you wouldn’t give them whatever they asked for,
every mortal thing—then there was a shine on, and their mother coming
in asking—‘What’s the matter with him? What have you done to him? What
is it, Darling?’ And then she’d turn on you as if she’d trample you
under her feet. But she didn’t trample on me. I was the only one that
could do anything with her demons—for she wasn’t going to be bothered
with them herself. No, _she_ took no trouble for them. But they must
just have their way, they mustn’t be spoken to. And Master Gerald was
the beauty. I left when he was a year and a half, I could stand no
more. But I pinched his little bottom for him when he was in arms, I
did, when there was no holding him, and I’m not sorry I did—”

Gudrun went away in fury and loathing. The phrase, “I pinched his
little bottom for him,” sent her into a white, stony fury. She could
not bear it, she wanted to have the woman taken out at once and
strangled. And yet there the phrase was lodged in her mind for ever,
beyond escape. She felt, one day, she would _have_ to tell him, to see
how he took it. And she loathed herself for the thought.

But at Shortlands the life-long struggle was coming to a close. The
father was ill and was going to die. He had bad internal pains, which
took away all his attentive life, and left him with only a vestige of
his consciousness. More and more a silence came over him, he was less
and less acutely aware of his surroundings. The pain seemed to absorb
his activity. He knew it was there, he knew it would come again. It was
like something lurking in the darkness within him. And he had not the
power, or the will, to seek it out and to know it. There it remained in
the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being
silent. And when it tore him he crouched in silent subjection under it,
and when it left him alone again, he refused to know of it. It was
within the darkness, let it remain unknown. So he never admitted it,
except in a secret corner of himself, where all his never-revealed
fears and secrets were accumulated. For the rest, he had a pain, it
went away, it made no difference. It even stimulated him, excited him.

But it gradually absorbed his life. Gradually it drew away all his
potentiality, it bled him into the dark, it weaned him of life and drew
him away into the darkness. And in this twilight of his life little
remained visible to him. The business, his work, that was gone
entirely. His public interests had disappeared as if they had never
been. Even his family had become extraneous to him, he could only
remember, in some slight non-essential part of himself, that such and
such were his children. But it was historical fact, not vital to him.
He had to make an effort to know their relation to him. Even his wife
barely existed. She indeed was like the darkness, like the pain within
him. By some strange association, the darkness that contained the pain
and the darkness that contained his wife were identical. All his
thoughts and understandings became blurred and fused, and now his wife
and the consuming pain were the same dark secret power against him,
that he never faced. He never drove the dread out of its lair within
him. He only knew that there was a dark place, and something inhabiting
this darkness which issued from time to time and rent him. But he dared
not penetrate and drive the beast into the open. He had rather ignore
its existence. Only, in his vague way, the dread was his wife, the
destroyer, and it was the pain, the destruction, a darkness which was
one and both.

He very rarely saw his wife. She kept her room. Only occasionally she
came forth, with her head stretched forward, and in her low, possessed
voice, she asked him how he was. And he answered her, in the habit of
more than thirty years: “Well, I don’t think I’m any the worse, dear.”
But he was frightened of her, underneath this safeguard of habit,
frightened almost to the verge of death.

But all his life, he had been so constant to his lights, he had never
broken down. He would die even now without breaking down, without
knowing what his feelings were, towards her. All his life, he had said:
“Poor Christiana, she has such a strong temper.” With unbroken will, he
had stood by this position with regard to her, he had substituted pity
for all his hostility, pity had been his shield and his safeguard, and
his infallible weapon. And still, in his consciousness, he was sorry
for her, her nature was so violent and so impatient.

But now his pity, with his life, was wearing thin, and the dread almost
amounting to horror, was rising into being. But before the armour of
his pity really broke, he would die, as an insect when its shell is
cracked. This was his final resource. Others would live on, and know
the living death, the ensuing process of hopeless chaos. He would not.
He denied death its victory.

He had been so constant to his lights, so constant to charity, and to
his love for his neighbour. Perhaps he had loved his neighbour even
better than himself—which is going one further than the commandment.
Always, this flame had burned in his heart, sustaining him through
everything, the welfare of the people. He was a large employer of
labour, he was a great mine-owner. And he had never lost this from his
heart, that in Christ he was one with his workmen. Nay, he had felt
inferior to them, as if they through poverty and labour were nearer to
God than he. He had always the unacknowledged belief, that it was his
workmen, the miners, who held in their hands the means of salvation. To
move nearer to God, he must move towards his miners, his life must
gravitate towards theirs. They were, unconsciously, his idol, his God
made manifest. In them he worshipped the highest, the great,
sympathetic, mindless Godhead of humanity.

And all the while, his wife had opposed him like one of the great
demons of hell. Strange, like a bird of prey, with the fascinating
beauty and abstraction of a hawk, she had beat against the bars of his
philanthropy, and like a hawk in a cage, she had sunk into silence. By
force of circumstance, because all the world combined to make the cage
unbreakable, he had been too strong for her, he had kept her prisoner.
And because she was his prisoner, his passion for her had always
remained keen as death. He had always loved her, loved her with
intensity. Within the cage, she was denied nothing, she was given all
licence.

But she had gone almost mad. Of wild and overweening temper, she could
not bear the humiliation of her husband’s soft, half-appealing kindness
to everybody. He was not deceived by the poor. He knew they came and
sponged on him, and whined to him, the worse sort; the majority,
luckily for him, were much too proud to ask for anything, much too
independent to come knocking at his door. But in Beldover, as
everywhere else, there were the whining, parasitic, foul human beings
who come crawling after charity, and feeding on the living body of the
public like lice. A kind of fire would go over Christiana Crich’s
brain, as she saw two more pale-faced, creeping women in objectionable
black clothes, cringing lugubriously up the drive to the door. She
wanted to set the dogs on them, “Hi Rip! Hi Ring! Ranger! At ’em boys,
set ’em off.” But Crowther, the butler, with all the rest of the
servants, was Mr Crich’s man. Nevertheless, when her husband was away,
she would come down like a wolf on the crawling supplicants:

“What do you people want? There is nothing for you here. You have no
business on the drive at all. Simpson, drive them away and let no more
of them through the gate.”

The servants had to obey her. And she would stand watching with an eye
like the eagle’s, whilst the groom in clumsy confusion drove the
lugubrious persons down the drive, as if they were rusty fowls,
scuttling before him.

But they learned to know, from the lodge-keeper, when Mrs Crich was
away, and they timed their visits. How many times, in the first years,
would Crowther knock softly at the door: “Person to see you, sir.”

“What name?”

“Grocock, sir.”

“What do they want?” The question was half impatient, half gratified.
He liked hearing appeals to his charity.

“About a child, sir.”

“Show them into the library, and tell them they shouldn’t come after
eleven o’clock in the morning.”

“Why do you get up from dinner?—send them off,” his wife would say
abruptly.

“Oh, I can’t do that. It’s no trouble just to hear what they have to
say.”

“How many more have been here today? Why don’t you establish open house
for them? They would soon oust me and the children.”

“You know dear, it doesn’t hurt me to hear what they have to say. And
if they really are in trouble—well, it is my duty to help them out of
it.”

“It’s your duty to invite all the rats in the world to gnaw at your
bones.”

“Come, Christiana, it isn’t like that. Don’t be uncharitable.”

But she suddenly swept out of the room, and out to the study. There sat
the meagre charity-seekers, looking as if they were at the doctor’s.

“Mr Crich can’t see you. He can’t see you at this hour. Do you think he
is your property, that you can come whenever you like? You must go
away, there is nothing for you here.”

The poor people rose in confusion. But Mr Crich, pale and black-bearded
and deprecating, came behind her, saying:

“Yes, I don’t like you coming as late as this. I’ll hear any of you in
the morning part of the day, but I can’t really do with you after.
What’s amiss then, Gittens. How is your Missis?”

“Why, she’s sunk very low, Mester Crich, she’s a’most gone, she is—”

Sometimes, it seemed to Mrs Crich as if her husband were some subtle
funeral bird, feeding on the miseries of the people. It seemed to her
he was never satisfied unless there was some sordid tale being poured
out to him, which he drank in with a sort of mournful, sympathetic
satisfaction. He would have no _raison d’être_ if there were no
lugubrious miseries in the world, as an undertaker would have no
meaning if there were no funerals.

Mrs Crich recoiled back upon herself, she recoiled away from this world
of creeping democracy. A band of tight, baleful exclusion fastened
round her heart, her isolation was fierce and hard, her antagonism was
passive but terribly pure, like that of a hawk in a cage. As the years
went on, she lost more and more count of the world, she seemed rapt in
some glittering abstraction, almost purely unconscious. She would
wander about the house and about the surrounding country, staring
keenly and seeing nothing. She rarely spoke, she had no connection with
the world. And she did not even think. She was consumed in a fierce
tension of opposition, like the negative pole of a magnet.

And she bore many children. For, as time went on, she never opposed her
husband in word or deed. She took no notice of him, externally. She
submitted to him, let him take what he wanted and do as he wanted with
her. She was like a hawk that sullenly submits to everything. The
relation between her and her husband was wordless and unknown, but it
was deep, awful, a relation of utter inter-destruction. And he, who
triumphed in the world, he became more and more hollow in his vitality,
the vitality was bled from within him, as by some hæmorrhage. She was
hulked like a hawk in a cage, but her heart was fierce and undiminished
within her, though her mind was destroyed.

So to the last he would go to her and hold her in his arms sometimes,
before his strength was all gone. The terrible white, destructive light
that burned in her eyes only excited and roused him. Till he was bled
to death, and then he dreaded her more than anything. But he always
said to himself, how happy he had been, how he had loved her with a
pure and consuming love ever since he had known her. And he thought of
her as pure, chaste; the white flame which was known to him alone, the
flame of her sex, was a white flower of snow to his mind. She was a
wonderful white snow-flower, which he had desired infinitely. And now
he was dying with all his ideas and interpretations intact. They would
only collapse when the breath left his body. Till then they would be
pure truths for him. Only death would show the perfect completeness of
the lie. Till death, she was his white snow-flower. He had subdued her,
and her subjugation was to him an infinite chastity in her, a virginity
which he could never break, and which dominated him as by a spell.

She had let go the outer world, but within herself she was unbroken and
unimpaired. She only sat in her room like a moping, dishevelled hawk,
motionless, mindless. Her children, for whom she had been so fierce in
her youth, now meant scarcely anything to her. She had lost all that,
she was quite by herself. Only Gerald, the gleaming, had some existence
for her. But of late years, since he had become head of the business,
he too was forgotten. Whereas the father, now he was dying, turned for
compassion to Gerald. There had always been opposition between the two
of them. Gerald had feared and despised his father, and to a great
extent had avoided him all through boyhood and young manhood. And the
father had felt very often a real dislike of his eldest son, which,
never wanting to give way to, he had refused to acknowledge. He had
ignored Gerald as much as possible, leaving him alone.

Since, however, Gerald had come home and assumed responsibility in the
firm, and had proved such a wonderful director, the father, tired and
weary of all outside concerns, had put all his trust of these things in
his son, implicitly, leaving everything to him, and assuming a rather
touching dependence on the young enemy. This immediately roused a
poignant pity and allegiance in Gerald’s heart, always shadowed by
contempt and by unadmitted enmity. For Gerald was in reaction against
Charity; and yet he was dominated by it, it assumed supremacy in the
inner life, and he could not confute it. So he was partly subject to
that which his father stood for, but he was in reaction against it. Now
he could not save himself. A certain pity and grief and tenderness for
his father overcame him, in spite of the deeper, more sullen hostility.

The father won shelter from Gerald through compassion. But for love he
had Winifred. She was his youngest child, she was the only one of his
children whom he had ever closely loved. And her he loved with all the
great, overweening, sheltering love of a dying man. He wanted to
shelter her infinitely, infinitely, to wrap her in warmth and love and
shelter, perfectly. If he could save her she should never know one
pain, one grief, one hurt. He had been so right all his life, so
constant in his kindness and his goodness. And this was his last
passionate righteousness, his love for the child Winifred. Some things
troubled him yet. The world had passed away from him, as his strength
ebbed. There were no more poor and injured and humble to protect and
succour. These were all lost to him. There were no more sons and
daughters to trouble him, and to weigh on him as an unnatural
responsibility. These too had faded out of reality. All these things
had fallen out of his hands, and left him free.

There remained the covert fear and horror of his wife, as she sat
mindless and strange in her room, or as she came forth with slow,
prowling step, her head bent forward. But this he put away. Even his
life-long righteousness, however, would not quite deliver him from the
inner horror. Still, he could keep it sufficiently at bay. It would
never break forth openly. Death would come first.

Then there was Winifred! If only he could be sure about her, if only he
could be sure. Since the death of Diana, and the development of his
illness, his craving for surety with regard to Winifred amounted almost
to obsession. It was as if, even dying, he must have some anxiety, some
responsibility of love, of Charity, upon his heart.

She was an odd, sensitive, inflammable child, having her father’s dark
hair and quiet bearing, but being quite detached, momentaneous. She was
like a changeling indeed, as if her feelings did not matter to her,
really. She often seemed to be talking and playing like the gayest and
most childish of children, she was full of the warmest, most delightful
affection for a few things—for her father, and for her animals in
particular. But if she heard that her beloved kitten Leo had been run
over by the motor-car she put her head on one side, and replied, with a
faint contraction like resentment on her face: “Has he?” Then she took
no more notice. She only disliked the servant who would force bad news
on her, and wanted her to be sorry. She wished not to know, and that
seemed her chief motive. She avoided her mother, and most of the
members of her family. She _loved_ her Daddy, because he wanted her
always to be happy, and because he seemed to become young again, and
irresponsible in her presence. She liked Gerald, because he was so
self-contained. She loved people who would make life a game for her.
She had an amazing instinctive critical faculty, and was a pure
anarchist, a pure aristocrat at once. For she accepted her equals
wherever she found them, and she ignored with blithe indifference her
inferiors, whether they were her brothers and sisters, or whether they
were wealthy guests of the house, or whether they were the common
people or the servants. She was quite single and by herself, deriving
from nobody. It was as if she were cut off from all purpose or
continuity, and existed simply moment by moment.

The father, as by some strange final illusion, felt as if all his fate
depended on his ensuring to Winifred her happiness. She who could never
suffer, because she never formed vital connections, she who could lose
the dearest things of her life and be just the same the next day, the
whole memory dropped out, as if deliberately, she whose will was so
strangely and easily free, anarchistic, almost nihilistic, who like a
soulless bird flits on its own will, without attachment or
responsibility beyond the moment, who in her every motion snapped the
threads of serious relationship with blithe, free hands, really
nihilistic, because never troubled, she must be the object of her
father’s final passionate solicitude.

When Mr Crich heard that Gudrun Brangwen might come to help Winifred
with her drawing and modelling he saw a road to salvation for his
child. He believed that Winifred had talent, he had seen Gudrun, he
knew that she was an exceptional person. He could give Winifred into
her hands as into the hands of a right being. Here was a direction and
a positive force to be lent to his child, he need not leave her
directionless and defenceless. If he could but graft the girl on to
some tree of utterance before he died, he would have fulfilled his
responsibility. And here it could be done. He did not hesitate to
appeal to Gudrun.

Meanwhile, as the father drifted more and more out of life, Gerald
experienced more and more a sense of exposure. His father after all had
stood for the living world to him. Whilst his father lived Gerald was
not responsible for the world. But now his father was passing away,
Gerald found himself left exposed and unready before the storm of
living, like the mutinous first mate of a ship that has lost his
captain, and who sees only a terrible chaos in front of him. He did not
inherit an established order and a living idea. The whole unifying idea
of mankind seemed to be dying with his father, the centralising force
that had held the whole together seemed to collapse with his father,
the parts were ready to go asunder in terrible disintegration. Gerald
was as if left on board of a ship that was going asunder beneath his
feet, he was in charge of a vessel whose timbers were all coming apart.

He knew that all his life he had been wrenching at the frame of life to
break it apart. And now, with something of the terror of a destructive
child, he saw himself on the point of inheriting his own destruction.
And during the last months, under the influence of death, and of
Birkin’s talk, and of Gudrun’s penetrating being, he had lost entirely
that mechanical certainty that had been his triumph. Sometimes spasms
of hatred came over him, against Birkin and Gudrun and that whole set.
He wanted to go back to the dullest conservatism, to the most stupid of
conventional people. He wanted to revert to the strictest Toryism. But
the desire did not last long enough to carry him into action.

During his childhood and his boyhood he had wanted a sort of savagedom.
The days of Homer were his ideal, when a man was chief of an army of
heroes, or spent his years in wonderful Odyssey. He hated remorselessly
the circumstances of his own life, so much that he never really saw
Beldover and the colliery valley. He turned his face entirely away from
the blackened mining region that stretched away on the right hand of
Shortlands, he turned entirely to the country and the woods beyond
Willey Water. It was true that the panting and rattling of the coal
mines could always be heard at Shortlands. But from his earliest
childhood, Gerald had paid no heed to this. He had ignored the whole of
the industrial sea which surged in coal-blackened tides against the
grounds of the house. The world was really a wilderness where one
hunted and swam and rode. He rebelled against all authority. Life was a
condition of savage freedom.

Then he had been sent away to school, which was so much death to him.
He refused to go to Oxford, choosing a German university. He had spent
a certain time at Bonn, at Berlin, and at Frankfurt. There, a curiosity
had been aroused in his mind. He wanted to see and to know, in a
curious objective fashion, as if it were an amusement to him. Then he
must try war. Then he must travel into the savage regions that had so
attracted him.

The result was, he found humanity very much alike everywhere, and to a
mind like his, curious and cold, the savage was duller, less exciting
than the European. So he took hold of all kinds of sociological ideas,
and ideas of reform. But they never went more than skin-deep, they were
never more than a mental amusement. Their interest lay chiefly in the
reaction against the positive order, the destructive reaction.

He discovered at last a real adventure in the coal-mines. His father
asked him to help in the firm. Gerald had been educated in the science
of mining, and it had never interested him. Now, suddenly, with a sort
of exultation, he laid hold of the world.

There was impressed photographically on his consciousness the great
industry. Suddenly, it was real, he was part of it. Down the valley ran
the colliery railway, linking mine with mine. Down the railway ran the
trains, short trains of heavily laden trucks, long trains of empty
wagons, each one bearing in big white letters the initials:

“C. B. & Co.”

These white letters on all the wagons he had seen since his first
childhood, and it was as if he had never seen them, they were so
familiar, and so ignored. Now at last he saw his own name written on
the wall. Now he had a vision of power.

So many wagons, bearing his initial, running all over the country. He
saw them as he entered London in the train, he saw them at Dover. So
far his power ramified. He looked at Beldover, at Selby, at Whatmore,
at Lethley Bank, the great colliery villages which depended entirely on
his mines. They were hideous and sordid, during his childhood they had
been sores in his consciousness. And now he saw them with pride. Four
raw new towns, and many ugly industrial hamlets were crowded under his
dependence. He saw the stream of miners flowing along the causeways
from the mines at the end of the afternoon, thousands of blackened,
slightly distorted human beings with red mouths, all moving subjugate
to his will. He pushed slowly in his motor-car through the little
market-top on Friday nights in Beldover, through a solid mass of human
beings that were making their purchases and doing their weekly
spending. They were all subordinate to him. They were ugly and uncouth,
but they were his instruments. He was the God of the machine. They made
way for his motor-car automatically, slowly.

He did not care whether they made way with alacrity, or grudgingly. He
did not care what they thought of him. His vision had suddenly
crystallised. Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of
mankind. There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of
sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings
of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions,
like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the
individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else
mattered.

Everything in the world has its function, and is good or not good in so
far as it fulfils this function more or less perfectly. Was a miner a
good miner? Then he was complete. Was a manager a good manager? That
was enough. Gerald himself, who was responsible for all this industry,
was he a good director? If he were, he had fulfilled his life. The rest
was by-play.

The mines were there, they were old. They were giving out, it did not
pay to work the seams. There was talk of closing down two of them. It
was at this point that Gerald arrived on the scene.

He looked around. There lay the mines. They were old, obsolete. They
were like old lions, no more good. He looked again. Pah! the mines were
nothing but the clumsy efforts of impure minds. There they lay,
abortions of a half-trained mind. Let the idea of them be swept away.
He cleared his brain of them, and thought only of the coal in the under
earth. How much was there?

There was plenty of coal. The old workings could not get at it, that
was all. Then break the neck of the old workings. The coal lay there in
its seams, even though the seams were thin. There it lay, inert matter,
as it had always lain, since the beginning of time, subject to the will
of man. The will of man was the determining factor. Man was the archgod
of earth. His mind was obedient to serve his will. Man’s will was the
absolute, the only absolute.

And it was his will to subjugate Matter to his own ends. The
subjugation itself was the point, the fight was the be-all, the fruits
of victory were mere results. It was not for the sake of money that
Gerald took over the mines. He did not care about money, fundamentally.
He was neither ostentatious nor luxurious, neither did he care about
social position, not finally. What he wanted was the pure fulfilment of
his own will in the struggle with the natural conditions. His will was
now, to take the coal out of the earth, profitably. The profit was
merely the condition of victory, but the victory itself lay in the feat
achieved. He vibrated with zest before the challenge. Every day he was
in the mines, examining, testing, he consulted experts, he gradually
gathered the whole situation into his mind, as a general grasps the
plan of his campaign.

Then there was need for a complete break. The mines were run on an old
system, an obsolete idea. The initial idea had been, to obtain as much
money from the earth as would make the owners comfortably rich, would
allow the workmen sufficient wages and good conditions, and would
increase the wealth of the country altogether. Gerald’s father,
following in the second generation, having a sufficient fortune, had
thought only of the men. The mines, for him, were primarily great
fields to produce bread and plenty for all the hundreds of human beings
gathered about them. He had lived and striven with his fellow owners to
benefit the men every time. And the men had been benefited in their
fashion. There were few poor, and few needy. All was plenty, because
the mines were good and easy to work. And the miners, in those days,
finding themselves richer than they might have expected, felt glad and
triumphant. They thought themselves well-off, they congratulated
themselves on their good-fortune, they remembered how their fathers had
starved and suffered, and they felt that better times had come. They
were grateful to those others, the pioneers, the new owners, who had
opened out the pits, and let forth this stream of plenty.

But man is never satisfied, and so the miners, from gratitude to their
owners, passed on to murmuring. Their sufficiency decreased with
knowledge, they wanted more. Why should the master be so
out-of-all-proportion rich?

There was a crisis when Gerald was a boy, when the Masters’ Federation
closed down the mines because the men would not accept a reduction.
This lock-out had forced home the new conditions to Thomas Crich.
Belonging to the Federation, he had been compelled by his honour to
close the pits against his men. He, the father, the Patriarch, was
forced to deny the means of life to his sons, his people. He, the rich
man who would hardly enter heaven because of his possessions, must now
turn upon the poor, upon those who were nearer Christ than himself,
those who were humble and despised and closer to perfection, those who
were manly and noble in their labours, and must say to them: “Ye shall
neither labour nor eat bread.”

It was this recognition of the state of war which really broke his
heart. He wanted his industry to be run on love. Oh, he wanted love to
be the directing power even of the mines. And now, from under the cloak
of love, the sword was cynically drawn, the sword of mechanical
necessity.

This really broke his heart. He must have the illusion and now the
illusion was destroyed. The men were not against _him_, but they were
against the masters. It was war, and willy nilly he found himself on
the wrong side, in his own conscience. Seething masses of miners met
daily, carried away by a new religious impulse. The idea flew through
them: “All men are equal on earth,” and they would carry the idea to
its material fulfilment. After all, is it not the teaching of Christ?
And what is an idea, if not the germ of action in the material world.
“All men are equal in spirit, they are all sons of God. Whence then
this obvious _disquality_?” It was a religious creed pushed to its
material conclusion. Thomas Crich at least had no answer. He could but
admit, according to his sincere tenets, that the disquality was wrong.
But he could not give up his goods, which were the stuff of disquality.
So the men would fight for their rights. The last impulses of the last
religious passion left on earth, the passion for equality, inspired
them.

Seething mobs of men marched about, their faces lighted up as for holy
war, with a smoke of cupidity. How disentangle the passion for equality
from the passion of cupidity, when begins the fight for equality of
possessions? But the God was the machine. Each man claimed equality in
the Godhead of the great productive machine. Every man equally was part
of this Godhead. But somehow, somewhere, Thomas Crich knew this was
false. When the machine is the Godhead, and production or work is
worship, then the most mechanical mind is purest and highest, the
representative of God on earth. And the rest are subordinate, each
according to his degree.

Riots broke out, Whatmore pit-head was in flames. This was the pit
furthest in the country, near the woods. Soldiers came. From the
windows of Shortlands, on that fatal day, could be seen the flare of
fire in the sky not far off, and now the little colliery train, with
the workmen’s carriages which were used to convey the miners to the
distant Whatmore, was crossing the valley full of soldiers, full of
redcoats. Then there was the far-off sound of firing, then the later
news that the mob was dispersed, one man was shot dead, the fire was
put out.

Gerald, who was a boy, was filled with the wildest excitement and
delight. He longed to go with the soldiers to shoot the men. But he was
not allowed to go out of the lodge gates. At the gates were stationed
sentries with guns. Gerald stood near them in delight, whilst gangs of
derisive miners strolled up and down the lanes, calling and jeering:

“Now then, three ha’porth o’ coppers, let’s see thee shoot thy gun.”
Insults were chalked on the walls and the fences, the servants left.

And all this while Thomas Crich was breaking his heart, and giving away
hundreds of pounds in charity. Everywhere there was free food, a
surfeit of free food. Anybody could have bread for asking, and a loaf
cost only three-ha’pence. Every day there was a free tea somewhere, the
children had never had so many treats in their lives. On Friday
afternoon great basketfuls of buns and cakes were taken into the
schools, and great pitchers of milk, the schoolchildren had what they
wanted. They were sick with eating too much cake and milk.

And then it came to an end, and the men went back to work. But it was
never the same as before. There was a new situation created, a new idea
reigned. Even in the machine, there should be equality. No part should
be subordinate to any other part: all should be equal. The instinct for
chaos had entered. Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having
or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one
part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of
being. But the desire for chaos had risen, and the idea of mechanical
equality was the weapon of disruption which should execute the will of
man, the will for chaos.

Gerald was a boy at the time of the strike, but he longed to be a man,
to fight the colliers. The father however was trapped between two
half-truths, and broken. He wanted to be a pure Christian, one and
equal with all men. He even wanted to give away all he had, to the
poor. Yet he was a great promoter of industry, and he knew perfectly
that he must keep his goods and keep his authority. This was as divine
a necessity in him, as the need to give away all he possessed—more
divine, even, since this was the necessity he acted upon. Yet because
he did _not_ act on the other ideal, it dominated him, he was dying of
chagrin because he must forfeit it. He wanted to be a father of loving
kindness and sacrificial benevolence. The colliers shouted to him about
his thousands a year. They would not be deceived.

When Gerald grew up in the ways of the world, he shifted the position.
He did not care about the equality. The whole Christian attitude of
love and self-sacrifice was old hat. He knew that position and
authority were the right thing in the world, and it was useless to cant
about it. They were the right thing, for the simple reason that they
were functionally necessary. They were not the be-all and the end-all.
It was like being part of a machine. He himself happened to be a
controlling, central part, the masses of men were the parts variously
controlled. This was merely as it happened. As well get excited because
a central hub drives a hundred outer wheels or because the whole
universe wheels round the sun. After all, it would be mere silliness to
say that the moon and the earth and Saturn and Jupiter and Venus have
just as much right to be the centre of the universe, each of them
separately, as the sun. Such an assertion is made merely in the desire
of chaos.

Without bothering to _think_ to a conclusion, Gerald jumped to a
conclusion. He abandoned the whole democratic-equality problem as a
problem of silliness. What mattered was the great social productive
machine. Let that work perfectly, let it produce a sufficiency of
everything, let every man be given a rational portion, greater or less
according to his functional degree or magnitude, and then, provision
made, let the devil supervene, let every man look after his own
amusements and appetites, so long as he interfered with nobody.

So Gerald set himself to work, to put the great industry in order. In
his travels, and in his accompanying readings, he had come to the
conclusion that the essential secret of life was harmony. He did not
define to himself at all clearly what harmony was. The word pleased
him, he felt he had come to his own conclusions. And he proceeded to
put his philosophy into practice by forcing order into the established
world, translating the mystic word harmony into the practical word
organisation.

Immediately he _saw_ the firm, he realised what he could do. He had a
fight to fight with Matter, with the earth and the coal it enclosed.
This was the sole idea, to turn upon the inanimate matter of the
underground, and reduce it to his will. And for this fight with matter,
one must have perfect instruments in perfect organisation, a mechanism
so subtle and harmonious in its workings that it represents the single
mind of man, and by its relentless repetition of given movement, will
accomplish a purpose irresistibly, inhumanly. It was this inhuman
principle in the mechanism he wanted to construct that inspired Gerald
with an almost religious exaltation. He, the man, could interpose a
perfect, changeless, godlike medium between himself and the Matter he
had to subjugate. There were two opposites, his will and the resistant
Matter of the earth. And between these he could establish the very
expression of his will, the incarnation of his power, a great and
perfect machine, a system, an activity of pure order, pure mechanical
repetition, repetition _ad infinitum_, hence eternal and infinite. He
found his eternal and his infinite in the pure machine-principle of
perfect co-ordination into one pure, complex, infinitely repeated
motion, like the spinning of a wheel; but a productive spinning, as the
revolving of the universe may be called a productive spinning, a
productive repetition through eternity, to infinity. And this is the
God-motion, this productive repetition _ad infinitum_. And Gerald was
the God of the machine, _Deus ex Machina_. And the whole productive
will of man was the Godhead.

He had his life-work now, to extend over the earth a great and perfect
system in which the will of man ran smooth and unthwarted, timeless, a
Godhead in process. He had to begin with the mines. The terms were
given: first the resistant Matter of the underground; then the
instruments of its subjugation, instruments human and metallic; and
finally his own pure will, his own mind. It would need a marvellous
adjustment of myriad instruments, human, animal, metallic, kinetic,
dynamic, a marvellous casting of myriad tiny wholes into one great
perfect entirety. And then, in this case there was perfection attained,
the will of the highest was perfectly fulfilled, the will of mankind
was perfectly enacted; for was not mankind mystically
contra-distinguished against inanimate Matter, was not the history of
mankind just the history of the conquest of the one by the other?

The miners were overreached. While they were still in the toils of
divine equality of man, Gerald had passed on, granted essentially their
case, and proceeded in his quality of human being to fulfil the will of
mankind as a whole. He merely represented the miners in a higher sense
when he perceived that the only way to fulfil perfectly the will of man
was to establish the perfect, inhuman machine. But he represented them
very essentially, they were far behind, out of date, squabbling for
their material equality. The desire had already transmuted into this
new and greater desire, for a perfect intervening mechanism between man
and Matter, the desire to translate the Godhead into pure mechanism.

As soon as Gerald entered the firm, the convulsion of death ran through
the old system. He had all his life been tortured by a furious and
destructive demon, which possessed him sometimes like an insanity. This
temper now entered like a virus into the firm, and there were cruel
eruptions. Terrible and inhuman were his examinations into every
detail; there was no privacy he would spare, no old sentiment but he
would turn it over. The old grey managers, the old grey clerks, the
doddering old pensioners, he looked at them, and removed them as so
much lumber. The whole concern seemed like a hospital of invalid
employees. He had no emotional qualms. He arranged what pensions were
necessary, he looked for efficient substitutes, and when these were
found, he substituted them for the old hands.

“I’ve a pitiful letter here from Letherington,” his father would say,
in a tone of deprecation and appeal. “Don’t you think the poor fellow
might keep on a little longer. I always fancied he did very well.”

“I’ve got a man in his place now, father. He’ll be happier out of it,
believe me. You think his allowance is plenty, don’t you?”

“It is not the allowance that he wants, poor man. He feels it very
much, that he is superannuated. Says he thought he had twenty more
years of work in him yet.”

“Not of this kind of work I want. He doesn’t understand.”

The father sighed. He wanted not to know any more. He believed the pits
would have to be overhauled if they were to go on working. And after
all, it would be worst in the long run for everybody, if they must
close down. So he could make no answer to the appeals of his old and
trusty servants, he could only repeat “Gerald says.”

So the father drew more and more out of the light. The whole frame of
the real life was broken for him. He had been right according to his
lights. And his lights had been those of the great religion. Yet they
seemed to have become obsolete, to be superseded in the world. He could
not understand. He only withdrew with his lights into an inner room,
into the silence. The beautiful candles of belief, that would not do to
light the world any more, they would still burn sweetly and
sufficiently in the inner room of his soul, and in the silence of his
retirement.

Gerald rushed into the reform of the firm, beginning with the office.
It was needful to economise severely, to make possible the great
alterations he must introduce.

“What are these widows’ coals?” he asked.

“We have always allowed all widows of men who worked for the firm a
load of coals every three months.”

“They must pay cost price henceforward. The firm is not a charity
institution, as everybody seems to think.”

Widows, these stock figures of sentimental humanitarianism, he felt a
dislike at the thought of them. They were almost repulsive. Why were
they not immolated on the pyre of the husband, like the sati in India?
At any rate, let them pay the cost of their coals.

In a thousand ways he cut down the expenditure, in ways so fine as to
be hardly noticeable to the men. The miners must pay for the cartage of
their coals, heavy cartage too; they must pay for their tools, for the
sharpening, for the care of lamps, for the many trifling things that
made the bill of charges against every man mount up to a shilling or so
in the week. It was not grasped very definitely by the miners, though
they were sore enough. But it saved hundreds of pounds every week for
the firm.

Gradually Gerald got hold of everything. And then began the great
reform. Expert engineers were introduced in every department. An
enormous electric plant was installed, both for lighting and for
haulage underground, and for power. The electricity was carried into
every mine. New machinery was brought from America, such as the miners
had never seen before, great iron men, as the cutting machines were
called, and unusual appliances. The working of the pits was thoroughly
changed, all the control was taken out of the hands of the miners, the
butty system was abolished. Everything was run on the most accurate and
delicate scientific method, educated and expert men were in control
everywhere, the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments.
They had to work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible
and heart-breaking in its mechanicalness.

But they submitted to it all. The joy went out of their lives, the hope
seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanised. And yet they
accepted the new conditions. They even got a further satisfaction out
of them. At first they hated Gerald Crich, they swore to do something
to him, to murder him. But as time went on, they accepted everything
with some fatal satisfaction. Gerald was their high priest, he
represented the religion they really felt. His father was forgotten
already. There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman,
but satisfying in its very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to
belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed
them. It was what they wanted. It was the highest that man had
produced, the most wonderful and superhuman. They were exalted by
belonging to this great and superhuman system which was beyond feeling
or reason, something really godlike. Their hearts died within them, but
their souls were satisfied. It was what they wanted. Otherwise Gerald
could never have done what he did. He was just ahead of them in giving
them what they wanted, this participation in a great and perfect system
that subjected life to pure mathematical principles. This was a sort of
freedom, the sort they really wanted. It was the first great step in
undoing, the first great phase of chaos, the substitution of the
mechanical principle for the organic, the destruction of the organic
purpose, the organic unity, and the subordination of every organic unit
to the great mechanical purpose. It was pure organic disintegration and
pure mechanical organisation. This is the first and finest state of
chaos.

Gerald was satisfied. He knew the colliers said they hated him. But he
had long ceased to hate them. When they streamed past him at evening,
their heavy boots slurring on the pavement wearily, their shoulders
slightly distorted, they took no notice of him, they gave him no
greeting whatever, they passed in a grey-black stream of unemotional
acceptance. They were not important to him, save as instruments, nor he
to them, save as a supreme instrument of control. As miners they had
their being, he had his being as director. He admired their qualities.
But as men, personalities, they were just accidents, sporadic little
unimportant phenomena. And tacitly, the men agreed to this. For Gerald
agreed to it in himself.

He had succeeded. He had converted the industry into a new and terrible
purity. There was a greater output of coal than ever, the wonderful and
delicate system ran almost perfectly. He had a set of really clever
engineers, both mining and electrical, and they did not cost much. A
highly educated man cost very little more than a workman. His managers,
who were all rare men, were no more expensive than the old bungling
fools of his father’s days, who were merely colliers promoted. His
chief manager, who had twelve hundred a year, saved the firm at least
five thousand. The whole system was now so perfect that Gerald was
hardly necessary any more.

It was so perfect that sometimes a strange fear came over him, and he
did not know what to do. He went on for some years in a sort of trance
of activity. What he was doing seemed supreme, he was almost like a
divinity. He was a pure and exalted activity.

But now he had succeeded—he had finally succeeded. And once or twice
lately, when he was alone in the evening and had nothing to do, he had
suddenly stood up in terror, not knowing what he was. And he went to
the mirror and looked long and closely at his own face, at his own
eyes, seeking for something. He was afraid, in mortal dry fear, but he
knew not what of. He looked at his own face. There it was, shapely and
healthy and the same as ever, yet somehow, it was not real, it was a
mask. He dared not touch it, for fear it should prove to be only a
composition mask. His eyes were blue and keen as ever, and as firm in
their sockets. Yet he was not sure that they were not blue false
bubbles that would burst in a moment and leave clear annihilation. He
could see the darkness in them, as if they were only bubbles of
darkness. He was afraid that one day he would break down and be a
purely meaningless babble lapping round a darkness.

But his will yet held good, he was able to go away and read, and think
about things. He liked to read books about the primitive man, books of
anthropology, and also works of speculative philosophy. His mind was
very active. But it was like a bubble floating in the darkness. At any
moment it might burst and leave him in chaos. He would not die. He knew
that. He would go on living, but the meaning would have collapsed out
of him, his divine reason would be gone. In a strangely indifferent,
sterile way, he was frightened. But he could not react even to the
fear. It was as if his centres of feeling were drying up. He remained
calm, calculative and healthy, and quite freely deliberate, even whilst
he felt, with faint, small but final sterile horror, that his mystic
reason was breaking, giving way now, at this crisis.

And it was a strain. He knew there was no equilibrium. He would have to
go in some direction, shortly, to find relief. Only Birkin kept the
fear definitely off him, saved him his quick sufficiency in life, by
the odd mobility and changeableness which seemed to contain the
quintessence of faith. But then Gerald must always come away from
Birkin, as from a Church service, back to the outside real world of
work and life. There it was, it did not alter, and words were
futilities. He had to keep himself in reckoning with the world of work
and material life. And it became more and more difficult, such a
strange pressure was upon him, as if the very middle of him were a
vacuum, and outside were an awful tension.

He had found his most satisfactory relief in women. After a debauch
with some desperate woman, he went on quite easy and forgetful. The
devil of it was, it was so hard to keep up his interest in women
nowadays. He didn’t care about them any more. A Pussum was all right in
her way, but she was an exceptional case, and even she mattered
extremely little. No, women, in that sense, were useless to him any
more. He felt that his _mind_ needed acute stimulation, before he could
be physically roused.

CHAPTER XVIII.
RABBIT

Gudrun knew that it was a critical thing for her to go to Shortlands.
She knew it was equivalent to accepting Gerald Crich as a lover. And
though she hung back, disliking the condition, yet she knew she would
go on. She equivocated. She said to herself, in torment recalling the
blow and the kiss, “after all, what is it? What is a kiss? What even is
a blow? It is an instant, vanished at once. I can go to Shortlands just
for a time, before I go away, if only to see what it is like.” For she
had an insatiable curiosity to see and to know everything.

She also wanted to know what Winifred was really like. Having heard the
child calling from the steamer in the night, she felt some mysterious
connection with her.

Gudrun talked with the father in the library. Then he sent for his
daughter. She came accompanied by Mademoiselle.

“Winnie, this is Miss Brangwen, who will be so kind as to help you with
your drawing and making models of your animals,” said the father.

The child looked at Gudrun for a moment with interest, before she came
forward and with face averted offered her hand. There was a complete
_sang-froid_ and indifference under Winifred’s childish reserve, a
certain irresponsible callousness.

“How do you do?” said the child, not lifting her face.

“How do you do?” said Gudrun.

Then Winifred stood aside, and Gudrun was introduced to Mademoiselle.

“You have a fine day for your walk,” said Mademoiselle, in a bright
manner.

“_Quite_ fine,” said Gudrun.

Winifred was watching from her distance. She was as if amused, but
rather unsure as yet what this new person was like. She saw so many new
persons, and so few who became real to her. Mademoiselle was of no
count whatever, the child merely put up with her, calmly and easily,
accepting her little authority with faint scorn, compliant out of
childish arrogance of indifference.

“Well, Winifred,” said the father, “aren’t you glad Miss Brangwen has
come? She makes animals and birds in wood and in clay, that the people
in London write about in the papers, praising them to the skies.”

Winifred smiled slightly.

“Who told you, Daddie?” she asked.

“Who told me? Hermione told me, and Rupert Birkin.”

“Do you know them?” Winifred asked of Gudrun, turning to her with faint
challenge.

“Yes,” said Gudrun.

Winifred readjusted herself a little. She had been ready to accept
Gudrun as a sort of servant. Now she saw it was on terms of friendship
they were intended to meet. She was rather glad. She had so many half
inferiors, whom she tolerated with perfect good-humour.

Gudrun was very calm. She also did not take these things very
seriously. A new occasion was mostly spectacular to her. However,
Winifred was a detached, ironic child, she would never attach herself.
Gudrun liked her and was intrigued by her. The first meetings went off
with a certain humiliating clumsiness. Neither Winifred nor her
instructress had any social grace.

Soon, however, they met in a kind of make-belief world. Winifred did
not notice human beings unless they were like herself, playful and
slightly mocking. She would accept nothing but the world of amusement,
and the serious people of her life were the animals she had for pets.
On those she lavished, almost ironically, her affection and her
companionship. To the rest of the human scheme she submitted with a
faint bored indifference.

She had a pekinese dog called Looloo, which she loved.

“Let us draw Looloo,” said Gudrun, “and see if we can get his
Looliness, shall we?”

“Darling!” cried Winifred, rushing to the dog, that sat with
contemplative sadness on the hearth, and kissing its bulging brow.
“Darling one, will you be drawn? Shall its mummy draw its portrait?”
Then she chuckled gleefully, and turning to Gudrun, said: “Oh let’s!”

They proceeded to get pencils and paper, and were ready.

“Beautifullest,” cried Winifred, hugging the dog, “sit still while its
mummy draws its beautiful portrait.” The dog looked up at her with
grievous resignation in its large, prominent eyes. She kissed it
fervently, and said: “I wonder what mine will be like. It’s sure to be
awful.”

As she sketched she chuckled to herself, and cried out at times:

“Oh darling, you’re so beautiful!”

And again chuckling, she rushed to embrace the dog, in penitence, as if
she were doing him some subtle injury. He sat all the time with the
resignation and fretfulness of ages on his dark velvety face. She drew
slowly, with a wicked concentration in her eyes, her head on one side,
an intense stillness over her. She was as if working the spell of some
enchantment. Suddenly she had finished. She looked at the dog, and then
at her drawing, and then cried, with real grief for the dog, and at the
same time with a wicked exultation:

“My beautiful, why did they?”

She took her paper to the dog, and held it under his nose. He turned
his head aside as in chagrin and mortification, and she impulsively
kissed his velvety bulging forehead.

“’s a Loolie, ’s a little Loozie! Look at his portrait, darling, look
at his portrait, that his mother has done of him.” She looked at her
paper and chuckled. Then, kissing the dog once more, she rose and came
gravely to Gudrun, offering her the paper.

It was a grotesque little diagram of a grotesque little animal, so
wicked and so comical, a slow smile came over Gudrun’s face,
unconsciously. And at her side Winifred chuckled with glee, and said:

“It isn’t like him, is it? He’s much lovelier than that. He’s _so_
beautiful-mmm, Looloo, my sweet darling.” And she flew off to embrace
the chagrined little dog. He looked up at her with reproachful,
saturnine eyes, vanquished in his extreme agedness of being. Then she
flew back to her drawing, and chuckled with satisfaction.

“It isn’t like him, is it?” she said to Gudrun.

“Yes, it’s very like him,” Gudrun replied.

The child treasured her drawing, carried it about with her, and showed
it, with a silent embarrassment, to everybody.

“Look,” she said, thrusting the paper into her father’s hand.

“Why that’s Looloo!” he exclaimed. And he looked down in surprise,
hearing the almost inhuman chuckle of the child at his side.

Gerald was away from home when Gudrun first came to Shortlands. But the
first morning he came back he watched for her. It was a sunny, soft
morning, and he lingered in the garden paths, looking at the flowers
that had come out during his absence. He was clean and fit as ever,
shaven, his fair hair scrupulously parted at the side, bright in the
sunshine, his short, fair moustache closely clipped, his eyes with
their humorous kind twinkle, which was so deceptive. He was dressed in
black, his clothes sat well on his well-nourished body. Yet as he
lingered before the flower-beds in the morning sunshine, there was a
certain isolation, a fear about him, as of something wanting.

Gudrun came up quickly, unseen. She was dressed in blue, with woollen
yellow stockings, like the Bluecoat boys. He glanced up in surprise.
Her stockings always disconcerted him, the pale-yellow stockings and
the heavy heavy black shoes. Winifred, who had been playing about the
garden with Mademoiselle and the dogs, came flitting towards Gudrun.
The child wore a dress of black-and-white stripes. Her hair was rather
short, cut round and hanging level in her neck.

“We’re going to do Bismarck, aren’t we?” she said, linking her hand
through Gudrun’s arm.

“Yes, we’re going to do Bismarck. Do you want to?”

“Oh yes-oh I do! I want most awfully to do Bismarck. He looks _so_
splendid this morning, so _fierce_. He’s almost as big as a lion.” And
the child chuckled sardonically at her own hyperbole. “He’s a real
king, he really is.”

“_Bonjour, Mademoiselle,_” said the little French governess, wavering
up with a slight bow, a bow of the sort that Gudrun loathed, insolent.

“_Winifred veut tant faire le portrait de Bismarck—! Oh, mais toute la
matiné_e—‘We will do Bismarck this morning!’—_Bismarck, Bismarck,
toujours Bismarck! C’est un lapin, n’est-ce pas, mademoiselle?_”

“_Oui, c’est un grand lapin blanc et noir. Vous ne l’avez pas vu?_”
said Gudrun in her good, but rather heavy French.

“_Non, mademoiselle, Winifred n’a jamais voulu me le faire voir. Tant
de fois je le lui ai demandé, ‘Qu’est ce donc que ce Bismarck,
Winifred?’ Mais elle n’a pas voulu me le dire. Son Bismarck, c’etait un
mystère._”

“_Oui, c’est un mystère, vraiment un mystère!_ Miss Brangwen, say that
Bismarck is a mystery,” cried Winifred.

“Bismarck, is a mystery, _Bismarck, c’est un mystère, der Bismarck, er
ist ein Wunder_,” said Gudrun, in mocking incantation.

“_Ja, er ist ein Wunder_,” repeated Winifred, with odd seriousness,
under which lay a wicked chuckle.

“_Ist er auch ein Wunder?_” came the slightly insolent sneering of
Mademoiselle.

“_Doch!_” said Winifred briefly, indifferent.

“_Doch ist er nicht ein König._ Beesmarck, he was not a king, Winifred,
as you have said. He was only—_il n’était que chancelier._”

“_Qu’est ce qu’un chancelier?_” said Winifred, with slightly
contemptuous indifference.

“A _chancelier_ is a chancellor, and a chancellor is, I believe, a sort
of judge,” said Gerald coming up and shaking hands with Gudrun. “You’ll
have made a song of Bismarck soon,” said he.

Mademoiselle waited, and discreetly made her inclination, and her
greeting.

“So they wouldn’t let you see Bismarck, Mademoiselle?” he said.

“_Non, Monsieur._”

“Ay, very mean of them. What are you going to do to him, Miss Brangwen?
I want him sent to the kitchen and cooked.”

“Oh no,” cried Winifred.

“We’re going to draw him,” said Gudrun.

“Draw him and quarter him and dish him up,” he said, being purposely
fatuous.

“Oh no,” cried Winifred with emphasis, chuckling.

Gudrun detected the tang of mockery in him, and she looked up and
smiled into his face. He felt his nerves caressed. Their eyes met in
knowledge.

“How do you like Shortlands?” he asked.

“Oh, very much,” she said, with nonchalance.

“Glad you do. Have you noticed these flowers?”

He led her along the path. She followed intently. Winifred came, and
the governess lingered in the rear. They stopped before some veined
salpiglossis flowers.

“Aren’t they wonderful?” she cried, looking at them absorbedly. Strange
how her reverential, almost ecstatic admiration of the flowers caressed
his nerves. She stooped down, and touched the trumpets, with infinitely
fine and delicate-touching finger-tips. It filled him with ease to see
her. When she rose, her eyes, hot with the beauty of the flowers,
looked into his.

“What are they?” she asked.

“Sort of petunia, I suppose,” he answered. “I don’t really know them.”

“They are quite strangers to me,” she said.

They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was
in love with her.

She was aware of Mademoiselle standing near, like a little French
beetle, observant and calculating. She moved away with Winifred, saying
they would go to find Bismarck.

Gerald watched them go, looking all the while at the soft, full, still
body of Gudrun, in its silky cashmere. How silky and rich and soft her
body must be. An excess of appreciation came over his mind, she was the
all-desirable, the all-beautiful. He wanted only to come to her,
nothing more. He was only this, this being that should come to her, and
be given to her.

At the same time he was finely and acutely aware of Mademoiselle’s
neat, brittle finality of form. She was like some elegant beetle with
thin ankles, perched on her high heels, her glossy black dress
perfectly correct, her dark hair done high and admirably. How repulsive
her completeness and her finality was! He loathed her.

Yet he did admire her. She was perfectly correct. And it did rather
annoy him, that Gudrun came dressed in startling colours, like a macaw,
when the family was in mourning. Like a macaw she was! He watched the
lingering way she took her feet from the ground. And her ankles were
pale yellow, and her dress a deep blue. Yet it pleased him. It pleased
him very much. He felt the challenge in her very attire—she challenged
the whole world. And he smiled as to the note of a trumpet.

Gudrun and Winifred went through the house to the back, where were the
stables and the out-buildings. Everywhere was still and deserted. Mr
Crich had gone out for a short drive, the stableman had just led round
Gerald’s horse. The two girls went to the hutch that stood in a corner,
and looked at the great black-and-white rabbit.

“Isn’t he beautiful! Oh, do look at him listening! Doesn’t he look
silly!” she laughed quickly, then added “Oh, do let’s do him listening,
do let us, he listens with so much of himself;—don’t you darling
Bismarck?”

“Can we take him out?” said Gudrun.

“He’s very strong. He really is extremely strong.” She looked at
Gudrun, her head on one side, in odd calculating mistrust.

“But we’ll try, shall we?”

“Yes, if you like. But he’s a fearful kicker!”

They took the key to unlock the door. The rabbit exploded in a wild
rush round the hutch.

“He scratches most awfully sometimes,” cried Winifred in excitement.
“Oh do look at him, isn’t he wonderful!” The rabbit tore round the
hutch in a hurry. “Bismarck!” cried the child, in rousing excitement.
“How _dreadful_ you are! You are beastly.” Winifred looked up at Gudrun
with some misgiving in her wild excitement. Gudrun smiled sardonically
with her mouth. Winifred made a strange crooning noise of unaccountable
excitement. “Now he’s still!” she cried, seeing the rabbit settled down
in a far corner of the hutch. “Shall we take him now?” she whispered
excitedly, mysteriously, looking up at Gudrun and edging very close.
“Shall we get him now?—” she chuckled wickedly to herself.

They unlocked the door of the hutch. Gudrun thrust in her arm and
seized the great, lusty rabbit as it crouched still, she grasped its
long ears. It set its four feet flat, and thrust back. There was a long
scraping sound as it was hauled forward, and in another instant it was
in mid-air, lunging wildly, its body flying like a spring coiled and
released, as it lashed out, suspended from the ears. Gudrun held the
black-and-white tempest at arms’ length, averting her face. But the
rabbit was magically strong, it was all she could do to keep her grasp.
She almost lost her presence of mind.

“Bismarck, Bismarck, you are behaving terribly,” said Winifred in a
rather frightened voice, “Oh, do put him down, he’s beastly.”

Gudrun stood for a moment astounded by the thunder-storm that had
sprung into being in her grip. Then her colour came up, a heavy rage
came over her like a cloud. She stood shaken as a house in a storm, and
utterly overcome. Her heart was arrested with fury at the mindlessness
and the bestial stupidity of this struggle, her wrists were badly
scored by the claws of the beast, a heavy cruelty welled up in her.

Gerald came round as she was trying to capture the flying rabbit under
her arm. He saw, with subtle recognition, her sullen passion of
cruelty.

“You should let one of the men do that for you,” he said hurrying up.

“Oh, he’s _so_ horrid!” cried Winifred, almost frantic.

He held out his nervous, sinewy hand and took the rabbit by the ears,
from Gudrun.

“It’s most _fearfully_ strong,” she cried, in a high voice, like the
crying a seagull, strange and vindictive.

The rabbit made itself into a ball in the air, and lashed out, flinging
itself into a bow. It really seemed demoniacal. Gudrun saw Gerald’s
body tighten, saw a sharp blindness come into his eyes.

“I know these beggars of old,” he said.

The long, demon-like beast lashed out again, spread on the air as if it
were flying, looking something like a dragon, then closing up again,
inconceivably powerful and explosive. The man’s body, strung to its
efforts, vibrated strongly. Then a sudden sharp, white-edged wrath came
up in him. Swift as lightning he drew back and brought his free hand
down like a hawk on the neck of the rabbit. Simultaneously, there came
the unearthly abhorrent scream of a rabbit in the fear of death. It
made one immense writhe, tore his wrists and his sleeves in a final
convulsion, all its belly flashed white in a whirlwind of paws, and
then he had slung it round and had it under his arm, fast. It cowered
and skulked. His face was gleaming with a smile.

“You wouldn’t think there was all that force in a rabbit,” he said,
looking at Gudrun. And he saw her eyes black as night in her pallid
face, she looked almost unearthly. The scream of the rabbit, after the
violent tussle, seemed to have torn the veil of her consciousness. He
looked at her, and the whitish, electric gleam in his face intensified.

“I don’t really like him,” Winifred was crooning. “I don’t care for him
as I do for Loozie. He’s hateful really.”

A smile twisted Gudrun’s face, as she recovered. She knew she was
revealed. “Don’t they make the most fearful noise when they scream?”
she cried, the high note in her voice, like a seagull’s cry.

“Abominable,” he said.

“He shouldn’t be so silly when he has to be taken out,” Winifred was
saying, putting out her hand and touching the rabbit tentatively, as it
skulked under his arm, motionless as if it were dead.

“He’s not dead, is he Gerald?” she asked.

“No, he ought to be,” he said.

“Yes, he ought!” cried the child, with a sudden flush of amusement. And
she touched the rabbit with more confidence. “His heart is beating _so_
fast. Isn’t he funny? He really is.”

“Where do you want him?” asked Gerald.

“In the little green court,” she said.

Gudrun looked at Gerald with strange, darkened eyes, strained with
underworld knowledge, almost supplicating, like those of a creature
which is at his mercy, yet which is his ultimate victor. He did not
know what to say to her. He felt the mutual hellish recognition. And he
felt he ought to say something, to cover it. He had the power of
lightning in his nerves, she seemed like a soft recipient of his
magical, hideous white fire. He was unconfident, he had qualms of fear.

“Did he hurt you?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“He’s an insensible beast,” he said, turning his face away.

They came to the little court, which was shut in by old red walls in
whose crevices wall-flowers were growing. The grass was soft and fine
and old, a level floor carpeting the court, the sky was blue overhead.
Gerald tossed the rabbit down. It crouched still and would not move.
Gudrun watched it with faint horror.

“Why doesn’t it move?” she cried.

“It’s skulking,” he said.

She looked up at him, and a slight sinister smile contracted her white
face.

“Isn’t it a _fool!_” she cried. “Isn’t it a sickening _fool?_” The
vindictive mockery in her voice made his brain quiver. Glancing up at
him, into his eyes, she revealed again the mocking, white-cruel
recognition. There was a league between them, abhorrent to them both.
They were implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries.

“How many scratches have you?” he asked, showing his hard forearm,
white and hard and torn in red gashes.

“How really vile!” she cried, flushing with a sinister vision. “Mine is
nothing.”

She lifted her arm and showed a deep red score down the silken white
flesh.

“What a devil!” he exclaimed. But it was as if he had had knowledge of
her in the long red rent of her forearm, so silken and soft. He did not
want to touch her. He would have to make himself touch her,
deliberately. The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own
brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting
through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond,
the obscene beyond.

“It doesn’t hurt you very much, does it?” he asked, solicitous.

“Not at all,” she cried.

And suddenly the rabbit, which had been crouching as if it were a
flower, so still and soft, suddenly burst into life. Round and round
the court it went, as if shot from a gun, round and round like a furry
meteorite, in a tense hard circle that seemed to bind their brains.
They all stood in amazement, smiling uncannily, as if the rabbit were
obeying some unknown incantation. Round and round it flew, on the grass
under the old red walls like a storm.

And then quite suddenly it settled down, hobbled among the grass, and
sat considering, its nose twitching like a bit of fluff in the wind.
After having considered for a few minutes, a soft bunch with a black,
open eye, which perhaps was looking at them, perhaps was not, it
hobbled calmly forward and began to nibble the grass with that mean
motion of a rabbit’s quick eating.

“It’s mad,” said Gudrun. “It is most decidedly mad.”

He laughed.

“The question is,” he said, “what is madness? I don’t suppose it is
rabbit-mad.”

“Don’t you think it is?” she asked.

“No. That’s what it is to be a rabbit.”

There was a queer, faint, obscene smile over his face. She looked at
him and saw him, and knew that he was initiate as she was initiate.
This thwarted her, and contravened her, for the moment.

“God be praised we aren’t rabbits,” she said, in a high, shrill voice.

The smile intensified a little, on his face.

“Not rabbits?” he said, looking at her fixedly.

Slowly her face relaxed into a smile of obscene recognition.

“Ah Gerald,” she said, in a strong, slow, almost man-like way. “—All
that, and more.” Her eyes looked up at him with shocking nonchalance.

He felt again as if she had torn him across the breast, dully, finally.
He turned aside.

“Eat, eat my darling!” Winifred was softly conjuring the rabbit, and
creeping forward to touch it. It hobbled away from her. “Let its mother
stroke its fur then, darling, because it is so mysterious—”

CHAPTER XIX.
MOONY

After his illness Birkin went to the south of France for a time. He did
not write, nobody heard anything of him. Ursula, left alone, felt as if
everything were lapsing out. There seemed to be no hope in the world.
One was a tiny little rock with the tide of nothingness rising higher
and higher She herself was real, and only herself—just like a rock in a
wash of flood-water. The rest was all nothingness. She was hard and
indifferent, isolated in herself.