‘Shall you take us to bed!’ said Billy, in a loud whisper.
‘Why you ARE angels tonight,’ she said softly. ‘Won’t you come and say good-night to Mr Birkin?’
The children merged shyly into the room, on bare feet. Billy’s face was wide and grinning, but there was a great solemnity of being good in his round blue eyes. Dora, peeping from the floss of her fair hair, hung back like some tiny Dryad, that has no soul.
‘Will you say good-night to me?’ asked Birkin, in a voice that was strangely soft and smooth. Dora drifted away at once, like a leaf lifted on a breath of wind. But Billy went softly forward, slow and willing, lifting his pinched-up mouth implicitly to be kissed. Ursula watched the full, gathered lips of the man gently touch those of the boy, so gently. Then Birkin lifted his fingers and touched the boy’s round, confiding cheek, with a faint touch of love. Neither spoke. Billy seemed angelic like a cherub boy, or like an acolyte, Birkin was a tall, grave angel looking down to him.
‘Are you going to be kissed?’ Ursula broke in, speaking to the little girl. But Dora edged away like a tiny Dryad that will not be touched.
‘Won’t you say good-night to Mr Birkin? Go, he’s waiting for you,’ said Ursula. But the girl-child only made a little motion away from him.
‘Silly Dora, silly Dora!’ said Ursula.
Birkin felt some mistrust and antagonism in the small child. He could not understand it.
‘Come then,’ said Ursula. ‘Let us go before mother comes.’
‘Who’ll hear us say our prayers?’ asked Billy anxiously.
‘Whom you like.’
‘Won’t you?’
‘Yes, I will.’
‘Ursula?’
‘Well Billy?’
‘Is it WHOM you like?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Well what is WHOM?’
‘It’s the accusative of who.’
There was a moment’s contemplative silence, then the confiding:
‘Is it?’
Birkin smiled to himself as he sat by the fire. When Ursula came down he sat motionless, with his arms on his knees. She saw him, how he was motionless and ageless, like some crouching idol, some image of a deathly religion. He looked round at her, and his face, very pale and unreal, seemed to gleam with a whiteness almost phosphorescent.
‘Don’t you feel well?’ she asked, in indefinable repulsion.
‘I hadn’t thought about it.’
‘But don’t you know without thinking about it?’
He looked at her, his eyes dark and swift, and he saw her revulsion. He did not answer her question.
‘Don’t you know whether you are unwell or not, without thinking about it?’ she persisted.
‘Not always,’ he said coldly.
‘But don’t you think that’s very wicked?’
‘Wicked?’
‘Yes. I think it’s CRIMINAL to have so little connection with your own body that you don’t even know when you are ill.’
He looked at her darkly.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you stay in bed when you are seedy? You look perfectly ghastly.’
‘Offensively so?’ he asked ironically.
‘Yes, quite offensive. Quite repelling.’
‘Ah!! Well that’s unfortunate.’
‘And it’s raining, and it’s a horrible night. Really, you shouldn’t be forgiven for treating your body like it—you OUGHT to suffer, a man who takes as little notice of his body as that.’
‘—takes as little notice of his body as that,’ he echoed mechanically.
This cut her short, and there was silence.
The others came in from church, and the two had the girls to face, then the mother and Gudrun, and then the father and the boy.
‘Good-evening,’ said Brangwen, faintly surprised. ‘Came to see me, did you?’
