He kissed her, and laughed.
It was two days after this that Ursula was to go to fetch her things from the house in Beldover. The removal had taken place, the family had gone. Gudrun had rooms in Willey Green.
Ursula had not seen her parents since her marriage. She wept over the rupture, yet what was the good of making it up! Good or not good, she could not go to them. So her things had been left behind and she and Gudrun were to walk over for them, in the afternoon.
It was a wintry afternoon, with red in the sky, when they arrived at the house. The windows were dark and blank, already the place was frightening. A stark, void entrance-hall struck a chill to the hearts of the girls.
‘I don’t believe I dare have come in alone,’ said Ursula. ‘It frightens me.’
‘Ursula!’ cried Gudrun. ‘Isn’t it amazing! Can you believe you lived in this place and never felt it? How I lived here a day without dying of terror, I cannot conceive!’
They looked in the big diningroom. It was a good-sized room, but now a cell would have been lovelier. The large bay windows were naked, the floor was stripped, and a border of dark polish went round the tract of pale boarding.
In the faded wallpaper were dark patches where furniture had stood, where pictures had hung. The sense of walls, dry, thin, flimsy-seeming walls, and a flimsy flooring, pale with its artificial black edges, was neutralising to the mind. Everything was null to the senses, there was enclosure without substance, for the walls were dry and papery. Where were they standing, on earth, or suspended in some cardboard box? In the hearth was burnt paper, and scraps of half-burnt paper.
‘Imagine that we passed our days here!’ said Ursula.
‘I know,’ cried Gudrun. ‘It is too appalling. What must we be like, if we are the contents of THIS!’
‘Vile!’ said Ursula. ‘It really is.’
And she recognised half-burnt covers of ‘Vogue’—half-burnt representations of women in gowns—lying under the grate.
They went to the drawing-room. Another piece of shut-in air; without weight or substance, only a sense of intolerable papery imprisonment in nothingness. The kitchen did look more substantial, because of the red-tiled floor and the stove, but it was cold and horrid.
The two girls tramped hollowly up the bare stairs. Every sound reechoed under their hearts. They tramped down the bare corridor. Against the wall of Ursula’s bedroom were her things—a trunk, a work-basket, some books, loose coats, a hat-box, standing desolate in the universal emptiness of the dusk.
‘A cheerful sight, aren’t they?’ said Ursula, looking down at her forsaken possessions.
‘Very cheerful,’ said Gudrun.
The two girls set to, carrying everything down to the front door. Again and again they made the hollow, reechoing transit. The whole place seemed to resound about them with a noise of hollow, empty futility. In the distance the empty, invisible rooms sent forth a vibration almost of obscenity. They almost fled with the last articles, into the out-of-door.
But it was cold. They were waiting for Birkin, who was coming with the car. They went indoors again, and upstairs to their parents’ front bedroom, whose windows looked down on the road, and across the country at the black-barred sunset, black and red barred, without light.
They sat down in the window-seat, to wait. Both girls were looking over the room. It was void, with a meaninglessness that was almost dreadful.
‘Really,’ said Ursula, ‘this room COULDN’T be sacred, could it?’
Gudrun looked over it with slow eyes.
‘Impossible,’ she replied.
‘When I think of their lives—father’s and mother’s, their love, and their marriage, and all of us children, and our bringing-up—would you have such a life, Prune?’
‘I wouldn’t, Ursula.’
‘It all seems so NOTHING—their two lives—there’s no meaning in it. Really, if they had NOT met, and NOT married, and not lived together—it wouldn’t have mattered, would it?’
‘Of course—you can’t tell,’ said Gudrun.
‘No. But if I thought my life was going to be like it—Prune,’ she caught Gudrun’s arm, ‘I should run.’
Gudrun was silent for a few moments.
‘As a matter of fact, one cannot contemplate the ordinary life—one cannot contemplate it,’ replied Gudrun. ‘With you, Ursula, it is quite different. You will be out of it all, with Birkin. He’s a special case. But with the ordinary man, who has his life fixed in one place, marriage is just impossible. There may be, and there ARE, thousands of women who want it, and could conceive of nothing else. But the very thought of it sends me MAD. One must be free, above all, one must be free. One may forfeit everything else, but one must be free—one must not become 7, Pinchbeck Street—or Somerset Drive—or Shortlands. No man will be sufficient to make that good—no man! To marry, one must have a free lance, or nothing, a comrade-in-arms, a Glckstritter. A man with a position in the social world—well, it is just impossible, impossible!’
‘What a lovely word—a Glckstritter!’ said Ursula. ‘So much nicer than a soldier of fortune.’
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Gudrun. ‘I’d tilt the world with a Glcksritter. But a home, an establishment! Ursula, what would it mean?—think!’
‘I know,’ said Ursula. ‘We’ve had one home—that’s enough for me.’
‘Quite enough,’ said Gudrun.
‘The little grey home in the west,’ quoted Ursula ironically.
