“What is it?” she said, in her high, repellent voice. “Don’t ask me!—I know nothing about ultimate marriage, I assure you: or even penultimate.”
“Only the ordinary unwarrantable brand!” replied Gerald. “Just so—same here. I am no expert on marriage, and degrees of ultimateness. It seems to be a bee that buzzes loudly in Rupert’s bonnet.”
“Exactly! But that is his trouble, exactly! Instead of wanting a woman for herself, he wants his ideas fulfilled. Which, when it comes to actual practice, is not good enough.”
“Oh no. Best go slap for what’s womanly in woman, like a bull at a gate.” Then he seemed to glimmer in himself. “You think love is the ticket, do you?” he asked.
“Certainly, while it lasts—you only can’t insist on permanency,” came Gudrun’s voice, strident above the noise.
“Marriage or no marriage, ultimate or penultimate or just so-so?—take the love as you find it.”
“As you please, or as you don’t please,” she echoed. “Marriage is a social arrangement, I take it, and has nothing to do with the question of love.”
His eyes were flickering on her all the time. She felt as is he were kissing her freely and malevolently. It made the colour burn in her cheeks, but her heart was quite firm and unfailing.
“You think Rupert is off his head a bit?” Gerald asked.
Her eyes flashed with acknowledgment.
“As regards a woman, yes,” she said, “I do. There is such a thing as two people being in love for the whole of their lives—perhaps. But marriage is neither here nor there, even then. If they are in love, well and good. If not—why break eggs about it!”
“Yes,” said Gerald. “That’s how it strikes me. But what about Rupert?”
“I can’t make out—neither can he nor anybody. He seems to think that if you marry you can get through marriage into a third heaven, or something—all very vague.”
“Very! And who wants a third heaven? As a matter of fact, Rupert has a great yearning to be safe—to tie himself to the mast.”
“Yes. It seems to me he’s mistaken there too,” said Gudrun. “I’m sure a mistress is more likely to be faithful than a wife—just because she is her own mistress. No—he says he believes that a man and wife can go further than any other two beings—but where, is not explained. They can know each other, heavenly and hellish, but particularly hellish, so perfectly that they go beyond heaven and hell—into—there it all breaks down—into nowhere.”
“Into Paradise, he says,” laughed Gerald.
Gudrun shrugged her shoulders. “Je m’en fiche of your Paradise!” she said.
“Not being a Mohammedan,” said Gerald. Birkin sat motionless, driving the car, quite unconscious of what they said. And Gudrun, sitting immediately behind him, felt a sort of ironic pleasure in thus exposing him.
“He says,” she added, with a grimace of irony, “that you can find an eternal equilibrium in marriage, if you accept the unison, and still leave yourself separate, don’t try to fuse.”
“Doesn’t inspire me,” said Gerald.
“That’s just it,” said Gudrun.
“I believe in love, in a real abandon, if you’re capable of it,” said Gerald.
“So do I,” said she.
“And so does Rupert, too—though he is always shouting.”
“No,” said Gudrun. “He won’t abandon himself to the other person. You can’t be sure of him. That’s the trouble I think.”
“Yet he wants marriage! Marriage—et puis?”
“Le paradis!” mocked Gudrun.
Birkin, as he drove, felt a creeping of the spine, as if somebody was threatening his neck. But he shrugged with indifference. It began to rain. Here was a change. He stopped the car and got down to put up the hood.
XXII
Woman to Woman
They came to the town, and left Gerald at the railway station. Gudrun and Winifred were to come to tea with Birkin, who expected Ursula also. In the afternoon, however, the first person to turn up was Hermione. Birkin was out, so she went in the drawing-room, looking at his books and papers, and playing on the piano. Then Ursula arrived. She was surprised, unpleasantly so, to see Hermione, of whom she had heard nothing for some time.
“It is a surprise to see you,” she said.
“Yes,” said Hermione—“I’ve been away at Aix—”
“Oh, for your health?”
“Yes.”
The two women looked at each other. Ursula resented Hermione’s long, grave, downward-looking face. There was something of the stupidity and the unenlightened self-esteem of a horse in it. “She’s got a horse-face,” Ursula said to herself, “she runs between blinkers.” It did seem as if Hermione, like the moon, had only one side to her penny. There was no obverse. She stared out all the time on the narrow, but to her, complete world of the extant consciousness. In the darkness, she did not exist. Like the moon, one half of her was lost to life. Her self was all in her head, she did not know what it was spontaneously to run or move, like a fish in the water, or a weasel on the grass. She must always know.
But Ursula only suffered from Hermione’s one-sidedness. She only felt Hermione’s cool evidence, which seemed to put her down as nothing. Hermione, who brooded and brooded till she was exhausted with the ache of her effort at consciousness, spent and ashen in her body, who gained so slowly and with such effort her final and barren conclusions of knowledge, was apt, in the presence of other women, whom she thought simply female, to wear the conclusions of her bitter assurance like jewels which conferred on her an unquestionable distinction, established her in a higher order of life. She was apt, mentally, to condescend to women such as Ursula, whom she regarded as purely emotional. Poor Hermione, it was her one possession, this aching certainty of hers, it was her only justification. She must be confident here, for God knows, she felt rejected and deficient enough elsewhere. In the life of thought, of the spirit, she was one of the elect. And
