“Don’t you love to be in this place?” cried Gudrun. “Isn’t the snow wonderful! Do you notice how it exalts everything? It is simply marvellous. One really does feel übermenschlich—more than human.”
“One does,” cried Ursula. “But isn’t that partly the being out of England?”
“Oh, of course,” cried Gudrun. “One could never feel like this in England, for the simple reason that the damper is never lifted off one, there. It is quite impossible really to let go, in England, of that I am assured.”
And she turned again to the food she was eating. She was fluttering with vivid intensity.
“It’s quite true,” said Gerald, “it never is quite the same in England. But perhaps we don’t want it to be—perhaps it’s like bringing the light a little too near the powder-magazine, to let go altogether, in England. One is afraid what might happen, if everybody else let go.”
“My God!” cried Gudrun. “But wouldn’t it be wonderful, if all England did suddenly go off like a display of fireworks.”
“It couldn’t,” said Ursula. “They are all too damp, the powder is damp in them.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Gerald.
“Nor I,” said Birkin. “When the English really begin to go off, en masse, it’ll be time to shut your ears and run.”
“They never will,” said Ursula.
“We’ll see,” he replied.
“Isn’t it marvellous,” said Gudrun, “how thankful one can be, to be out of one’s country. I cannot believe myself, I am so transported, the moment I set foot on a foreign shore. I say to myself ‘Here steps a new creature into life.’ ”
“Don’t be too hard on poor old England,” said Gerald. “Though we curse it, we love it really.”
To Ursula, there seemed a fund of cynicism in these words.
“We may,” said Birkin. “But it’s a damnably uncomfortable love: like a love for an aged parent who suffers horribly from a complication of diseases, for which there is no hope.”
Gudrun looked at him with dilated dark eyes.
“You think there is no hope?” she asked, in her pertinent fashion.
But Birkin backed away. He would not answer such a question.
“Any hope of England’s becoming real? God knows. It’s a great actual unreality now, an aggregation into unreality. It might be real, if there were no Englishmen.”
“You think the English will have to disappear?” persisted Gudrun. It was strange, her pointed interest in his answer. It might have been her own fate she was inquiring after. Her dark, dilated eyes rested on Birkin, as if she could conjure the truth of the future out of him, as out of some instrument of divination.
He was pale. Then, reluctantly, he answered:
“Well—what else is in front of them, but disappearance? They’ve got to disappear from their own special brand of Englishness, anyhow.”
Gudrun watched him as if in a hypnotic state, her eyes wide and fixed on him.
“But in what way do you mean, disappear?—” she persisted.
“Yes, do you mean a change of heart?” put in Gerald.
“I don’t mean anything, why should I?” said Birkin. “I’m an Englishman, and I’ve paid the price of it. I can’t talk about England—I can only speak for myself.”
“Yes,” said Gudrun slowly, “you love England immensely, immensely, Rupert.”
“And leave her,” he replied.
“No, not for good. You’ll come back,” said Gerald, nodding sagely.
“They say the lice crawl off a dying body,” said Birkin, with a glare of bitterness. “So I leave England.”
“Ah, but you’ll come back,” said Gudrun, with a sardonic smile.
“Tant pis pour moi,” he replied.
“Isn’t he angry with his mother country!” laughed Gerald, amused.
“Ah, a patriot!” said Gudrun, with something like a sneer.
Birkin refused to answer any more.
Gudrun watched him still for a few seconds. Then she turned away. It was finished, her spell of divination in him. She felt already purely cynical. She looked at Gerald. He was wonderful like a piece of radium to her. She felt she could consume herself and know all, by means of this fatal, living metal. She smiled to herself at her fancy. And what would she do with herself, when she had destroyed herself? For if spirit, if integral being is destructible, Matter is indestructible.
He was looking bright and abstracted, puzzled, for the moment. She stretched out her beautiful arm, with its fluff of green tulle, and touched his chin with her subtle, artist’s fingers.
“What are they then?” she asked, with a strange, knowing smile.
“What?” he replied, his eyes suddenly dilating with wonder.
“Your thoughts.”
Gerald looked like a man coming awake.
“I think I had none,” he said.
“Really!” she said, with grave laughter in her voice.
And to Birkin it was as if she killed Gerald, with that touch.
“Ah but,” cried Gudrun, “let us drink to Britannia—let us drink to Britannia.”
It seemed there was wild despair in her voice. Gerald laughed, and filled the glasses.
“I think Rupert means,” he said, “that nationally all Englishmen must die, so that they can exist individually and—”
“Super-nationally—” put in Gudrun, with a slight ironic grimace, raising her glass.
The next day, they descended at the tiny railway station of Hohenhausen, at the end of the tiny valley railway. It was snow everywhere, a white, perfect cradle of snow, new and frozen, sweeping up on either side, black crags, and white sweeps of silver towards the blue pale heavens.
As they stepped out on the naked platform, with only snow around and above, Gudrun shrank as if it chilled her heart.
“My God, Jerry,” she said, turning to Gerald with sudden intimacy, “you’ve done it now.”
“What?”
She made a faint gesture, indicating the world on either hand.
“Look at it!”
She seemed afraid to go on. He laughed.
They were in the heart of the mountains. From high above, on either side, swept down the white fold of snow, so that one seemed small and tiny in a valley of pure concrete heaven, all strangely radiant and changeless and silent.
“It makes one feel so small and alone,” said Ursula, turning to Birkin and laying her hand on his arm.
“You’re not sorry you’ve come, are you?” said Gerald to
