Gudrun rose, came over to Ursula and put her arm round her neck.
‘Go and find your new world, dear,’ she said, her voice clanging with false benignity. ‘After all, the happiest voyage is the quest of Rupert’s Blessed Isles.’
Her arm rested round Ursula’s neck, her fingers on Ursula’s cheek for a few moments. Ursula was supremely uncomfortable meanwhile. There was an insult in Gudrun’s protective patronage that was really too hurting. Feeling her sister’s resistance, Gudrun drew awkwardly away, turned over the pillow, and disclosed the stockings again.
‘Ha—ha!’ she laughed, rather hollowly. ‘How we do talk indeed—new worlds and old—!’
And they passed to the familiar worldly subjects.
Gerald and Birkin had walked on ahead, waiting for the sledge to overtake them, conveying the departing guests.
‘How much longer will you stay here?’ asked Birkin, glancing up at Gerald’s very red, almost blank face.
‘Oh, I can’t say,’ Gerald replied. ‘Till we get tired of it.’
‘You’re not afraid of the snow melting first?’ asked Birkin.
Gerald laughed.
‘Does it melt?’ he said.
‘Things are all right with you then?’ said Birkin.
Gerald screwed up his eyes a little.
‘All right?’ he said. ‘I never know what those common words mean. All right and all wrong, don’t they become synonymous, somewhere?’
‘Yes, I suppose. How about going back?’ asked Birkin.
‘Oh, I don’t know. We may never get back. I don’t look before and after,’ said Gerald.
‘NOR pine for what is not,’ said Birkin.
Gerald looked into the distance, with the small-pupilled, abstract eyes of a hawk.
‘No. There’s something final about this. And Gudrun seems like the end, to me. I don’t know—but she seems so soft, her skin like silk, her arms heavy and soft. And it withers my consciousness, somehow, it burns the pith of my mind.’ He went on a few paces, staring ahead, his eyes fixed, looking like a mask used in ghastly religions of the barbarians. ‘It blasts your soul’s eye,’ he said, ‘and leaves you sightless. Yet you WANT to be sightless, you WANT to be blasted, you don’t want it any different.’
He was speaking as if in a trance, verbal and blank. Then suddenly he braced himself up with a kind of rhapsody, and looked at Birkin with vindictive, cowed eyes, saying:
‘Do you know what it is to suffer when you are with a woman? She’s so beautiful, so perfect, you find her SO GOOD, it tears you like a silk, and every stroke and bit cuts hot—ha, that perfection, when you blast yourself, you blast yourself! And then—’ he stopped on the snow and suddenly opened his clenched hands—’it’s nothing—your brain might have gone charred as rags—and—’ he looked round into the air with a queer histrionic movement ‘it’s blasting—you understand what I mean—it is a great experience, something final—and then—you’re shrivelled as if struck by electricity.’ He walked on in silence. It seemed like bragging, but like a man in extremity bragging truthfully.
‘Of course,’ he resumed, ‘I wouldn’t NOT have had it! It’s a complete experience. And she’s a wonderful woman. But—how I hate her somewhere! It’s curious—’
Birkin looked at him, at his strange, scarcely conscious face. Gerald seemed blank before his own words.
‘But you’ve had enough now?’ said Birkin. ‘You have had your experience. Why work on an old wound?’
‘Oh,’ said Gerald, ‘I don’t know. It’s not finished—’
And the two walked on.
‘I’ve loved you, as well as Gudrun, don’t forget,’ said Birkin bitterly. Gerald looked at him strangely, abstractedly.
‘Have you?’ he said, with icy scepticism. ‘Or do you think you have?’ He was hardly responsible for what he said.
The sledge came. Gudrun dismounted and they all made their farewell. They wanted to go apart, all of them. Birkin took his place, and the sledge drove away leaving Gudrun and Gerald standing on the snow, waving. Something froze Birkin’s heart, seeing them standing there in the isolation of the snow, growing smaller and more isolated.
CHAPTER XXX.
SNOWED UP
When Ursula and Birkin were gone, Gudrun felt herself free in her contest with Gerald. As they grew more used to each other, he seemed to press upon her more and more. At first she could manage him, so that her own will was always left free. But very soon, he began to ignore her female tactics, he dropped his respect for her whims and her privacies, he began to exert his own will blindly, without submitting to hers.
Already a vital conflict had set in, which frightened them both. But he was alone, whilst already she had begun to cast round for external resource.
When Ursula had gone, Gudrun felt her own existence had become stark and elemental. She went and crouched alone in her bedroom, looking out of the window at the big, flashing stars. In front was the faint shadow of the mountain-knot. That was the pivot. She felt strange and inevitable, as if she were centred upon the pivot of all existence, there was no further reality.
Presently Gerald opened the door. She knew he would not be long before he came. She was rarely alone, he pressed upon her like a frost, deadening her.
