“Say you love me,” she pleaded. “Say you will love me forever—won’t you—won’t you?”
But it was her voice only that coaxed him. Her senses were entirely apart from him, cold and destructive of him. It was her overbearing will that insisted.
“Won’t you say you’ll love me always?” she coaxed. “Say it, even if it isn’t true—say it Gerald, do.”
“I will love you always,” he repeated, in real agony, forcing the words out.
She gave him a quick kiss.
“Fancy your actually having said it,” she said with a touch of raillery.
He stood as if he had been beaten.
“Try to love me a little more, and to want me a little less,” she said, in a half contemptuous, half coaxing tone.
The darkness seemed to be swaying in waves across his mind, great waves of darkness plunging across his mind. It seemed to him he was degraded at the very quick, made of no account.
“You mean you don’t want me?” he said.
“You are so insistent, and there is so little grace in you, so little fineness. You are so crude. You break me—you only waste me—it is horrible to me.”
“Horrible to you?” he repeated.
“Yes. Don’t you think I might have a room to myself, now Ursula has gone? You can say you want a dressing room.”
“You do as you like—you can leave altogether if you like,” he managed to articulate.
“Yes, I know that,” she replied. “So can you. You can leave me whenever you like—without notice even.”
The great tides of darkness were swinging across his mind, he could hardly stand upright. A terrible weariness overcame him, he felt he must lie on the floor. Dropping off his clothes, he got into bed, and lay like a man suddenly overcome by drunkenness, the darkness lifting and plunging as if he were lying upon a black, giddy sea. He lay still in this strange, horrific reeling for some time, purely unconscious.
At length she slipped from her own bed and came over to him. He remained rigid, his back to her. He was all but unconscious.
She put her arms round his terrifying, insentient body, and laid her cheek against his hard shoulder.
“Gerald,” she whispered. “Gerald.”
There was no change in him. She caught him against her. She pressed her breasts against his shoulders, she kissed his shoulder, through the sleeping jacket. Her mind wondered, over his rigid, unliving body. She was bewildered, and insistent, only her will was set for him to speak to her.
“Gerald, my dear!” she whispered, bending over him, kissing his ear.
Her warm breath playing, flying rhythmically over his ear, seemed to relax the tension. She could feel his body gradually relaxing a little, losing its terrifying, unnatural rigidity. Her hands clutched his limbs, his muscles, going over him spasmodically.
The hot blood began to flow again through his veins, his limbs relaxed.
“Turn round to me,” she whispered, forlorn with insistence and triumph.
So at last he was given again, warm and flexible. He turned and gathered her in his arms. And feeling her soft against him, so perfectly and wondrously soft and recipient, his arms tightened on her. She was as if crushed, powerless in him. His brain seemed hard and invincible now like a jewel, there was no resisting him.
His passion was awful to her, tense and ghastly, and impersonal, like a destruction, ultimate. She felt it would kill her. She was being killed.
“My God, my God,” she cried, in anguish, in his embrace, feeling her life being killed within her. And when he was kissing her, soothing her, her breath came slowly, as if she were really spent, dying.
“Shall I die, shall I die?” she repeated to herself.
And in the night, and in him, there was no answer to the question.
And yet, next day, the fragment of her which was not destroyed remained intact and hostile, she did not go away, she remained to finish the holiday, admitting nothing. He scarcely ever left her alone, but followed her like a shadow, he was like a doom upon her, a continual “thou shalt,” “thou shalt not.” Sometimes it was he who seemed strongest, whist she was almost gone, creeping near the earth like a spent wind; sometimes it was the reverse. But always it was this eternal seesaw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified because the other was nulled.
“In the end,” she said to herself, “I shall go away from him.”
“I can be free of her,” he said to himself in his paroxysms of suffering.
And he set himself to be free. He even prepared to go away, to leave her in the lurch. But for the first time there was a flaw in his will.
“Where shall I go?” he asked himself.
“Can’t you be self-sufficient?” he replied to himself, putting himself upon his pride.
“Self-sufficient!” he repeated.
It seemed to him that Gudrun was sufficient unto herself, closed round and completed, like a thing in a case. In the calm, static reason of his soul, he recognised this, and admitted it was her right, to be closed round upon herself, self-complete, without desire. He realised it, he admitted it, it only needed one last effort on his own part, to win for himself the same completeness. He knew that it only needed one convulsion of his will for him to be able to turn upon himself also, to close upon himself as a stone fixes upon itself, and is impervious, self-completed, a thing isolated.
This knowledge threw him into a terrible chaos. Because, however much he might mentally will to be immune and self-complete, the desire for this state was lacking, and he could not create it. He could see that,
