‘Only,’ she said, turning to Gerald, ‘I must say that, however man is lord of the beast and the fowl, I still don’t think he has any right to violate the feelings of the inferior creation. I still think it would have been much more sensible and nice of you if you’d trotted back up the road while the train went by, and been considerate.’
‘I see,’ said Gerald, smiling, but somewhat annoyed. ‘I must remember another time.’
‘They all think I’m an interfering female,’ thought Ursula to herself, as she went away. But she was in arms against them.
She ran home plunged in thought. She had been very much moved by Hermione, she had really come into contact with her, so that there was a sort of league between the two women. And yet she could not bear her. But she put the thought away. ‘She’s really good,’ she said to herself. ‘She really wants what is right.’ And she tried to feel at one with Hermione, and to shut off from Birkin. She was strictly hostile to him. But she was held to him by some bond, some deep principle. This at once irritated her and saved her.
Only now and again, violent little shudders would come over her, out of her subconsciousness, and she knew it was the fact that she had stated her challenge to Birkin, and he had, consciously or unconsciously, accepted. It was a fight to the death between them—or to new life: though in what the conflict lay, no one could say.
CHAPTER XIII.
MINO
The days went by, and she received no sign. Was he going to ignore her, was he going to take no further notice of her secret? A dreary weight of anxiety and acrid bitterness settled on her. And yet Ursula knew she was only deceiving herself, and that he would proceed. She said no word to anybody.
Then, sure enough, there came a note from him, asking if she would come to tea with Gudrun, to his rooms in town.
‘Why does he ask Gudrun as well?’ she asked herself at once. ‘Does he want to protect himself, or does he think I would not go alone?’ She was tormented by the thought that he wanted to protect himself. But at the end of all, she only said to herself:
‘I don’t want Gudrun to be there, because I want him to say something more to me. So I shan’t tell Gudrun anything about it, and I shall go alone. Then I shall know.’
She found herself sitting on the tramcar, mounting up the hill going out of the town, to the place where he had his lodging. She seemed to have passed into a kind of dream world, absolved from the conditions of actuality. She watched the sordid streets of the town go by beneath her, as if she were a spirit disconnected from the material universe. What had it all to do with her? She was palpitating and formless within the flux of the ghost life. She could not consider any more, what anybody would say of her or think about her. People had passed out of her range, she was absolved. She had fallen strange and dim, out of the sheath of the material life, as a berry falls from the only world it has ever known, down out of the sheath on to the real unknown.
Birkin was standing in the middle of the room, when she was shown in by the landlady. He too was moved outside himself. She saw him agitated and shaken, a frail, unsubstantial body silent like the node of some violent force, that came out from him and shook her almost into a swoon.
‘You are alone?’ he said.
‘Yes—Gudrun could not come.’
He instantly guessed why.
And they were both seated in silence, in the terrible tension of the room. She was aware that it was a pleasant room, full of light and very restful in its form—aware also of a fuchsia tree, with dangling scarlet and purple flowers.
‘How nice the fuchsias are!’ she said, to break the silence.
‘Aren’t they! Did you think I had forgotten what I said?’
A swoon went over Ursula’s mind.
‘I don’t want you to remember it—if you don’t want to,’ she struggled to say, through the dark mist that covered her.
There was silence for some moments.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It isn’t that. Only—if we are going to know each other, we must pledge ourselves for ever. If we are going to make a relationship, even of friendship, there must be something final and infallible about it.’
There was a clang of mistrust and almost anger in his voice. She did not answer. Her heart was too much contracted. She could not have spoken.
Seeing she was not going to reply, he continued, almost bitterly, giving himself away:
‘I can’t say it is love I have to offer—and it isn’t love I want. It is something much more impersonal and harder—and rarer.’
There was a silence, out of which she said:
‘You mean you don’t love me?’
She suffered furiously, saying that.
‘Yes, if you like to put it like that. Though perhaps that isn’t true. I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t feel the emotion of love for you—no, and I don’t want to. Because it gives out in the last issues.’
‘Love gives out in the last issues?’ she asked, feeling numb to the lips.
‘Yes, it does. At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn’t. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does NOT meet and mingle, and never can.’
She watched him with wide, troubled eyes. His face was incandescent in its abstract earnestness.
‘And you mean you can’t love?’ she asked, in trepidation.
