themselves—incapable—’ Hermione clenched her fist like one in a trance—’of any spontaneous action, always deliberate, always burdened with choice, never carried away.’
Again they thought she had finished. But just as he was going to reply, she resumed her queer rhapsody —’never carried away, out of themselves, always conscious, always selfconscious, always aware of themselves. Isn’t ANYTHING better than this? Better be animals, mere animals with no mind at all, than this, this NOTHINGNESS—’
‘But do you think it is knowledge that makes us unliving and selfconscious?’ he asked irritably.
She opened her eyes and looked at him slowly.
‘Yes,’ she said. She paused, watching him all the while, her eyes vague. Then she wiped her fingers across her brow, with a vague weariness. It irritated him bitterly. ‘It is the mind,’ she said, ‘and that is death.’ She raised her eyes slowly to him: ‘Isn’t the mind—’ she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, ‘isn’t it our death? Doesn’t it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before they have a chance to live?’
‘Not because they have too much mind, but too little,’ he said brutally.
‘Are you SURE?’ she cried. ‘It seems to me the reverse. They are overconscious, burdened to death with consciousness.’
‘Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts,’ he cried.
But she took no notice of this, only went on with her own rhapsodic interrogation.
‘When we have knowledge, don’t we lose everything but knowledge?’ she asked pathetically. ‘If I know about the flower, don’t I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren’t we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren’t we forfeiting life for this dead quality of knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing.’
‘You are merely making words,’ he said; ‘knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don’t want to BE an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary—and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism. What is it but the worst and last form of intellectualism, this love of yours for passion and the animal instincts? Passion and the instincts—you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness. It all takes place in your head, under that skull of yours. Only you won’t be conscious of what ACTUALLY is: you want the lie that will match the rest of your furniture.’
Hermione set hard and poisonous against this attack. Ursula stood covered with wonder and shame. It frightened her, to see how they hated each other.
‘It’s all that Lady of Shalott business,’ he said, in his strong abstract voice. He seemed to be charging her before the unseeing air. ‘You’ve got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There, in the mirror, you must have everything. But now you have come to all your conclusions, you want to go back and be like a savage, without knowledge. You want a life of pure sensation and “passion.”’
He quoted the last word satirically against her. She sat convulsed with fury and violation, speechless, like a stricken pythoness of the Greek oracle.
‘But your passion is a lie,’ he went on violently. ‘It isn’t passion at all, it is your WILL. It’s your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have them in your power. You want to have things in your power. And why? Because you haven’t got any real body, any dark sensual body of life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to KNOW.’
He looked at her in mingled hate and contempt, also in pain because she suffered, and in shame because he knew he tortured her. He had an impulse to kneel and plead for forgiveness. But a bitterer red anger burned up to fury in him. He became unconscious of her, he was only a passionate voice speaking.
‘Spontaneous!’ he cried. ‘You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! You’d be verily deliberately spontaneous—that’s you. Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut. For you’ll be the same till it is cracked, like an insect in its skin. If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography—looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.’
There was a sense of violation in the air, as if too much was said, the unforgivable. Yet Ursula was concerned now only with solving her own problems, in the light of his words. She was pale and abstracted.
‘But do you really WANT sensuality?’ she asked, puzzled.
Birkin looked at her, and became intent in his explanation.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that and nothing else, at this point. It is a fulfilment—the great dark knowledge you can’t have in your head—the dark involuntary being. It is death to one’s self—but it is the coming into being of another.’
‘But how? How can you have knowledge not in your head?’ she asked, quite unable to interpret his phrases.
‘In the blood,’ he answered; ‘when the mind and the known world is drowned in darkness everything must go —there must be the deluge. Then you find yourself a palpable body of darkness, a demon—’
‘But why should I be a demon—?’ she asked.
‘“WOMAN WAILING FOR HER DEMON LOVER”—’ he quoted—’why, I don’t know.’
Hermione roused herself as from a death—annihilation.
‘He is such a DREADFUL satanist, isn’t he?’ she drawled to Ursula, in a queer resonant voice, that ended on a shrill little laugh of pure ridicule. The two women were jeering at him, jeering him into nothingness. The laugh of the shrill, triumphant female sounded from Hermione, jeering him as if he were a neuter.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You are the real devil who won’t let life exist.’
She looked at him with a long, slow look, malevolent, supercilious.
