“Do you feel, Ursula,” Gudrun began, rather sceptically, “that you are going-away-forever, never-to-return, sort of thing?”
“Oh, we shall come back,” said Ursula. “It isn’t a question of train-journeys.”
“Yes, I know. But spiritually, so to speak, you are going away from us all?”
Ursula quivered.
“I don’t know a bit what is going to happen,” she said. “I only know we are going somewhere.”
Gudrun waited.
“And you are glad?” she asked.
Ursula meditated for a moment.
“I believe I am very glad,” she replied.
But Gudrun read the unconscious brightness on her sister’s face, rather than the uncertain tones of her speech.
“But don’t you think you’ll want the old connection with the world—father and the rest of us, and all that it means, England and the world of thought—don’t you think you’ll need that, really to make a world?”
Ursula was silent, trying to imagine.
“I think,” she said at length, involuntarily, “that Rupert is right—one wants a new space to be in, and one falls away from the old.”
Gudrun watched her sister with impassive face and steady eyes.
“One wants a new space to be in, I quite agree,” she said. “But I think that a new world is a development from this world, and that to isolate oneself with one other person, isn’t to find a new world at all, but only to secure oneself in one’s illusions.”
Ursula looked out of the window. In her soul she began to wrestle, and she was frightened. She was always frightened of words, because she knew that mere word-force could always make her believe what she did not believe.
“Perhaps,” she said, full of mistrust, of herself and everybody. “But,” she added, “I do think that one can’t have anything new whilst one cares for the old—do you know what I mean?—even fighting the old is belonging to it. I know, one is tempted to stop with the world, just to fight it. But then it isn’t worth it.”
Gudrun considered herself.
“Yes,” she said. “In a way, one is of the world if one lives in it. But isn’t it really an illusion to think you can get out of it? After all, a cottage in the Abruzzi, or wherever it may be, isn’t a new world. No, the only thing to do with the world, is to see it through.”
Ursula looked away. She was so frightened of argument.
“But there can be something else, can’t there?” she said. “One can see it through in one’s soul, long enough before it sees itself through in actuality. And then, when one has seen one’s soul, one is something else.”
“Can one see it through in one’s soul?” asked Gudrun. “If you mean that you can see to the end of what will happen, I don’t agree. I really can’t agree. And anyhow, you can’t suddenly fly off on to a new planet, because you think you can see to the end of this.”
Ursula suddenly straightened herself.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes—one knows. One has no more connections here. One has a sort of other self, that belongs to a new planet, not to this. You’ve got to hop off.”
Gudrun reflected for a few moments. Then a smile of ridicule, almost of contempt, came over her face.
“And what will happen when you find yourself in space?” she cried in derision. “After all, the great ideas of the world are the same there. You above everybody can’t get away from the fact that love, for instance, is the supreme thing, in space as well as on earth.”
“No,” said Ursula, “it isn’t. Love is too human and little. I believe in something inhuman, of which love is only a little part. I believe what we must fulfil comes out of the unknown to us, and it is something infinitely more than love. It isn’t so merely human.”
Gudrun looked at Ursula with steady, balancing eyes. She admired and despised her sister so much, both! Then, suddenly she averted her face, saying coldly, uglily:
“Well, I’ve got no further than love, yet.”
Over Ursula’s mind flashed the thought: “Because you never have loved, you can’t get beyond it.”
Gudrun rose, came over to Ursula and put her arm round her neck.
“Go and find your new world, dear,” she said, her voice clanging with false benignity. “After all, the happiest voyage is the quest of Rupert’s Blessed Isles.”
Her arm rested round Ursula’s neck, her fingers on Ursula’s cheek for a few moments. Ursula was supremely uncomfortable meanwhile. There was an insult in Gudrun’s protective patronage that was really too hurting. Feeling her sister’s resistance, Gudrun drew awkwardly away, turned over the pillow, and disclosed the stockings again.
“Ha—ha!” she laughed, rather hollowly. “How we do talk indeed—new worlds and old—!”
And they passed to the familiar worldly subjects.
Gerald and Birkin had walked on ahead, waiting for the sledge to overtake them, conveying the departing guests.
“How much longer will you stay here?” asked Birkin, glancing up at Gerald’s very red, almost blank face.
“Oh, I can’t say,” Gerald replied. “Till we get tired of it.”
“You’re not afraid of the snow melting first?” asked Birkin.
Gerald laughed.
“Does it melt?” he said.
“Things are all right with you then?” said Birkin.
Gerald screwed up his eyes a little.
“All right?” he said. “I never know what those common words mean. All right and all wrong, don’t they become synonymous, somewhere?”
“Yes, I suppose. How about going back?” asked Birkin.
“Oh, I don’t know. We may never get back. I don’t look before and after,” said Gerald.
“Nor pine for what is not,” said Birkin.
Gerald looked into the distance, with the small-pupilled, abstract eyes of a hawk.
“No. There’s something final about this. And Gudrun seems like the end, to me. I don’t know—but she seems so soft, her skin like silk, her arms heavy and soft. And it withers my consciousness, somehow, it burns the pith of my mind.” He went on a few paces, staring ahead, his eyes fixed, looking like a mask used in ghastly religions of the
