‘M—m—m—I don’t know … But one thing was the stars, when I really understood something about the stars. One feels so UPLIFTED, so UNBOUNDED …’
Birkin looked at her in a white fury.
‘What do you want to feel unbounded for?’ he said sarcastically. ‘You don’t want to BE unbounded.’
Hermione recoiled in offence.
‘Yes, but one does have that limitless feeling,’ said Gerald. ‘It’s like getting on top of the mountain and seeing the Pacific.’
‘Silent upon a peak in Dariayn,’ murmured the Italian, lifting her face for a moment from her book.
‘Not necessarily in Dariayn,’ said Gerald, while Ursula began to laugh.
Hermione waited for the dust to settle, and then she said, untouched:
‘Yes, it is the greatest thing in life—to KNOW. It is really to be happy, to be FREE.’
‘Knowledge is, of course, liberty,’ said Mattheson.
‘In compressed tabloids,’ said Birkin, looking at the dry, stiff little body of the Baronet. Immediately Gudrun saw the famous sociologist as a flat bottle, containing tabloids of compressed liberty. That pleased her. Sir Joshua was labelled and placed forever in her mind.
‘What does that mean, Rupert?’ sang Hermione, in a calm snub.
‘You can only have knowledge, strictly,’ he replied, ‘of things concluded, in the past. It’s like bottling the liberty of last summer in the bottled gooseberries.’
‘CAN one have knowledge only of the past?’ asked the Baronet, pointedly. ‘Could we call our knowledge of the laws of gravitation for instance, knowledge of the past?’
‘Yes,’ said Birkin.
‘There is a most beautiful thing in my book,’ suddenly piped the little Italian woman. ‘It says the man came to the door and threw his eyes down the street.’
There was a general laugh in the company. Miss Bradley went and looked over the shoulder of the Contessa.
‘See!’ said the Contessa.
‘Bazarov came to the door and threw his eyes hurriedly down the street,’ she read.
Again there was a loud laugh, the most startling of which was the Baronet’s, which rattled out like a clatter of falling stones.
‘What is the book?’ asked Alexander, promptly.
‘Fathers and Sons, by Turgenev,’ said the little foreigner, pronouncing every syllable distinctly. She looked at the cover, to verify herself.
‘An old American edition,’ said Birkin.
‘Ha!—of course—translated from the French,’ said Alexander, with a fine declamatory voice. ‘Bazarov ouvra la porte et jeta les yeux dans la rue.’
He looked brightly round the company.
‘I wonder what the “hurriedly” was,’ said Ursula.
They all began to guess.
And then, to the amazement of everybody, the maid came hurrying with a large tea-tray. The afternoon had passed so swiftly.
After tea, they were all gathered for a walk.
‘Would you like to come for a walk?’ said Hermione to each of them, one by one. And they all said yes, feeling somehow like prisoners marshalled for exercise. Birkin only refused.
‘Will you come for a walk, Rupert?’
‘No, Hermione.’
‘But are you SURE?’
‘Quite sure.’ There was a second’s hesitation.
‘And why not?’ sang Hermione’s question. It made her blood run sharp, to be thwarted in even so trifling a matter. She intended them all to walk with her in the park.
‘Because I don’t like trooping off in a gang,’ he said.
Her voice rumbled in her throat for a moment. Then she said, with a curious stray calm:
‘Then we’ll leave a little boy behind, if he’s sulky.’
And she looked really gay, while she insulted him. But it merely made him stiff.
She trailed off to the rest of the company, only turning to wave her handkerchief to him, and to chuckle with laughter, singing out:
‘Good-bye, good-bye, little boy.’
‘Good-bye, impudent hag,’ he said to himself.
