He dragged on his second shoe. He was shivering violently, and his jaw shook as he spoke.
‘That’s true,’ he said, ‘maybe. But it’s curious how much room there seems, a whole universe under there; and as cold as hell, you’re as helpless as if your head was cut off.’ He could scarcely speak, he shook so violently. ‘There’s one thing about our family, you know,’ he continued. ‘Once anything goes wrong, it can never be put right again—not with us. I’ve noticed it all my life—you can’t put a thing right, once it has gone wrong.’
They were walking across the highroad to the house.
‘And do you know, when you are down there, it is so cold, actually, and so endless, so different really from what it is on top, so endless—you wonder how it is so many are alive, why we’re up here. Are you going? I shall see you again, shan’t I? Good-night, and thank you. Thank you very much!’
The two girls waited a while, to see if there were any hope. The moon shone clearly overhead, with almost impertinent brightness, the small dark boats clustered on the water, there were voices and subdued shouts. But it was all to no purpose. Gudrun went home when Birkin returned.
He was commissioned to open the sluice that let out the water from the lake, which was pierced at one end, near the highroad, thus serving as a reservoir to supply with water the distant mines, in case of necessity. ‘Come with me,’ he said to Ursula, ‘and then I will walk home with you, when I’ve done this.’
He called at the water-keeper’s cottage and took the key of the sluice. They went through a little gate from the highroad, to the head of the water, where was a great stone basin which received the overflow, and a flight of stone steps descended into the depths of the water itself. At the head of the steps was the lock of the sluice- gate.
The night was silver-grey and perfect, save for the scattered restless sound of voices. The grey sheen of the moonlight caught the stretch of water, dark boats plashed and moved. But Ursula’s mind ceased to be receptive, everything was unimportant and unreal.
Birkin fixed the iron handle of the sluice, and turned it with a wrench. The cogs began slowly to rise. He turned and turned, like a slave, his white figure became distinct. Ursula looked away. She could not bear to see him winding heavily and laboriously, bending and rising mechanically like a slave, turning the handle.
Then, a real shock to her, there came a loud splashing of water from out of the dark, tree-filled hollow beyond the road, a splashing that deepened rapidly to a harsh roar, and then became a heavy, booming noise of a great body of water falling solidly all the time. It occupied the whole of the night, this great steady booming of water, everything was drowned within it, drowned and lost. Ursula seemed to have to struggle for her life. She put her hands over her ears, and looked at the high bland moon.
‘Can’t we go now?’ she cried to Birkin, who was watching the water on the steps, to see if it would get any lower. It seemed to fascinate him. He looked at her and nodded.
The little dark boats had moved nearer, people were crowding curiously along the hedge by the highroad, to see what was to be seen. Birkin and Ursula went to the cottage with the key, then turned their backs on the lake. She was in great haste. She could not bear the terrible crushing boom of the escaping water.
‘Do you think they are dead?’ she cried in a high voice, to make herself heard.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘Isn’t it horrible!’
He paid no heed. They walked up the hill, further and further away from the noise.
‘Do you mind very much?’ she asked him.
‘I don’t mind about the dead,’ he said, ‘once they are dead. The worst of it is, they cling on to the living, and won’t let go.’
She pondered for a time.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The FACT of death doesn’t really seem to matter much, does it?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘What does it matter if Diana Crich is alive or dead?’
‘Doesn’t it?’ she said, shocked.
‘No, why should it? Better she were dead—she’ll be much more real. She’ll be positive in death. In life she was a fretting, negated thing.’
‘You are rather horrible,’ murmured Ursula.
‘No! I’d rather Diana Crich were dead. Her living somehow, was all wrong. As for the young man, poor devil— he’ll find his way out quickly instead of slowly. Death is all right—nothing better.’
‘Yet you don’t want to die,’ she challenged him.
He was silent for a time. Then he said, in a voice that was frightening to her in its change:
‘I should like to be through with it—I should like to be through with the death process.’
‘And aren’t you?’ asked Ursula nervously.
They walked on for some way in silence, under the trees. Then he said, slowly, as if afraid:
‘There is life which belongs to death, and there is life which isn’t death. One is tired of the life that belongs to death—our kind of life. But whether it is finished, God knows. I want love that is like sleep, like being born again, vulnerable as a baby that just comes into the world.’
Ursula listened, half attentive, half avoiding what he said. She seemed to catch the drift of his statement, and then she drew away. She wanted to hear, but she did not want to be implicated. She was reluctant to yield there, where he wanted her, to yield as it were her very identity.
‘Why should love be like sleep?’ she asked sadly.
‘I don’t know. So that it is like death—I DO want to die from this life—and yet it is more than life itself. One is delivered over like a naked infant from the womb, all the old defences and the old body gone, and new air around one, that has never been breathed before.’
