He was leaning forward watching her, his face intense like a spark.
“Ursula, what are you saying? Keep your tongue still,” cried her mother.
Ursula swung round, and the lights in her eyes flashed.
“No, I won’t,” she cried. “I won’t hold my tongue and be bullied. What does it matter which day I get married—what does it matter! It doesn’t affect anybody but myself.”
Her father was tense and gathered together like a cat about to spring.
“Doesn’t it?” he cried, coming nearer to her. She shrank away.
“No, how can it?” she replied, shrinking but stubborn.
“It doesn’t matter to me then, what you do—what becomes of you?” he cried, in a strange voice like a cry.
The mother and Gudrun stood back as if hypnotised.
“No,” stammered Ursula. Her father was very near to her. “You only want to—”
She knew it was dangerous, and she stopped. He was gathered together, every muscle ready.
“What?” he challenged.
“Bully me,” she muttered, and even as her lips were moving, his hand had caught her smack at the side of the face and she was sent up against the door.
“Father!” cried Gudrun in a high voice, “it is impossible!”
He stood unmoving. Ursula recovered, her hand was on the door handle. She slowly drew herself up. He seemed doubtful now.
“It’s true,” she declared, with brilliant tears in her eyes, her head lifted up in defiance. “What has your love meant, what did it ever mean?—bullying, and denial—it did—”
He was advancing again with strange, tense movements, and clenched fist, and the face of a murderer. But swift as lightning she had flashed out of the door, and they heard her running upstairs.
He stood for a moment looking at the door. Then, like a defeated animal, he turned and went back to his seat by the fire.
Gudrun was very white. Out of the intense silence, the mother’s voice was heard saying, cold and angry:
“Well, you shouldn’t take so much notice of her.”
Again the silence fell, each followed a separate set of emotions and thoughts.
Suddenly the door opened again: Ursula, dressed in hat and furs, with a small valise in her hand:
“Goodbye!” she said, in her maddening, bright, almost mocking tone. “I’m going.”
And in the next instant the door was closed, they heard the outer door, then her quick steps down the garden path, then the gate banged, and her light footfall was gone. There was a silence like death in the house.
Ursula went straight to the station, hastening heedlessly on winged feet. There was no train, she must walk on to the junction. As she went through the darkness, she began to cry, and she wept bitterly, with a dumb, heartbroken, child’s anguish, all the way on the road, and in the train. Time passed unheeded and unknown, she did not know where she was, nor what was taking place. Only she wept from fathomless depths of hopeless, hopeless grief, the terrible grief of a child, that knows no extenuation.
Yet her voice had the same defensive brightness as she spoke to Birkin’s landlady at the door.
“Good evening! Is Mr. Birkin in? Can I see him?”
“Yes, he’s in. He’s in his study.”
Ursula slipped past the woman. His door opened. He had heard her voice.
“Hello!” he exclaimed in surprise, seeing her standing there with the valise in her hand, and marks of tears on her face. She was one who wept without showing many traces, like a child.
“Do I look a sight?” she said, shrinking.
“No—why? Come in,” he took the bag from her hand and they went into the study.
There—immediately, her lips began to tremble like those of a child that remembers again, and the tears came rushing up.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, taking her in his arms. She sobbed violently on his shoulder, whilst he held her still, waiting.
“What’s the matter?” he said again, when she was quieter. But she only pressed her face further into his shoulder, in pain, like a child that cannot tell.
“What is it, then?” he asked. Suddenly she broke away, wiped her eyes, regained her composure, and went and sat in a chair.
“Father hit me,” she announced, sitting bunched up, rather like a ruffled bird, her eyes very bright.
“What for?” he said.
She looked away, and would not answer. There was a pitiful redness about her sensitive nostrils, and her quivering lips.
“Why?” he repeated, in his strange, soft, penetrating voice.
She looked round at him, rather defiantly.
“Because I said I was going to be married tomorrow, and he bullied me.”
“Why did he bully you?”
Her mouth dropped again, she remembered the scene once more, the tears came up.
“Because I said he didn’t care—and he doesn’t, it’s only his domineeringness that’s hurt—” she said, her mouth pulled awry by her weeping, all the time she spoke, so that he almost smiled, it seemed so childish. Yet it was not childish, it was a mortal conflict, a deep wound.
“It isn’t quite true,” he said. “And even so, you shouldn’t say it.”
“It is true—it is true,” she wept, “and I won’t be bullied by his pretending it’s love—when it isn’t—he doesn’t care, how can he—no, he can’t—”
He sat in silence. She moved him beyond himself.
“Then you shouldn’t rouse him, if he can’t,” replied Birkin quietly.
“And I have loved him, I have,” she wept. “I’ve loved him always, and he’s always done this to me, he has—”
“It’s been a love of opposition, then,” he said. “Never mind—it will be all right. It’s nothing desperate.”
“Yes,” she wept, “it is, it is.”
“Why?”
“I shall never see him again—”
“Not immediately. Don’t cry, you had to break with him, it had to be—don’t cry.”
He went over to her and kissed her fine, fragile hair, touching her wet cheeks gently.
“Don’t cry,” he repeated, “don’t cry any more.”
He held her head close against him, very close and quiet.
At last she was still. Then she looked up, her eyes wide and frightened.
“Don’t you want me?” she asked.
“Want you?” His darkened,
