For two days, he talked to her, continued the discussions of art, of life, in which they both found such pleasure. They praised the bygone things, they took a sentimental, childish delight in the achieved perfections of the past. Particularly they liked the late eighteenth century, the period of Goethe and of Shelley, and Mozart.
They played with the past, and with the great figures of the past, a sort of little game of chess, or marionettes, all to please themselves. They had all the great men for their marionettes, and they two were the God of the show, working it all. As for the future, that they never mentioned except one laughed out some mocking dream of the destruction of the world by a ridiculous catastrophe of man’s invention: a man invented such a perfect explosive that it blew the earth in two, and the two halves set off in different directions through space, to the dismay of the inhabitants: or else the people of the world divided into two halves, and each half decided it was perfect and right, the other half was wrong and must be destroyed; so another end of the world. Or else, Loerke’s dream of fear, the world went cold, and snow fell everywhere, and only white creatures, polar-bears, white foxes, and men like awful white snowbirds, persisted in ice cruelty.
Apart from these stories, they never talked of the future. They delighted most either in mocking imaginations of destruction, or in sentimental, fine marionette-shows of the past. It was a sentimental delight to reconstruct the world of Goethe at Weimar, or of Schiller and poverty and faithful love, or to see again Jean Jacques in his quakings, or Voltaire at Ferney, or Frederick the Great reading his own poetry.
They talked together for hours, of literature and sculpture and painting, amusing themselves with Flaxman and Blake and Fuseli, with tenderness, and with Feuerbach and Böcklin. It would take them a lifetime, they felt to live again, in petto, the lives of the great artists. But they preferred to stay in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.
They talked in a mixture of languages. The groundwork was French, in either case. But he ended most of his sentences in a stumble of English and a conclusion of German, she skilfully wove herself to her end in whatever phrase came to her. She took a peculiar delight in this conversation. It was full of odd, fantastic expression, of double meanings, of evasions, of suggestive vagueness. It was a real physical pleasure to her to make this thread of conversation out of the different-coloured strands of three languages.
And all the while they two were hovering, hesitating round the flame of some invisible declaration. He wanted it, but was held back by some inevitable reluctance. She wanted it also, but she wanted to put it off, to put it off indefinitely, she still had some pity for Gerald, some connection with him. And the most fatal of all, she had the reminiscent sentimental compassion for herself in connection with him. Because of what had been, she felt herself held to him by immortal, invisible threads—because of what had been, because of his coming to her that first night, into her own house, in his extremity, because—
Gerald was gradually overcome with a revulsion of loathing for Loerke. He did not take the man seriously, he despised him merely, except as he felt in Gudrun’s veins the influence of the little creature. It was this that drove Gerald wild, the feeling in Gudrun’s veins of Loerke’s presence, Loerke’s being, flowing dominant through her.
“What makes you so smitten with that little vermin?” he asked, really puzzled. For he, manlike, could not see anything attractive or important at all in Loerke. Gerald expected to find some handsomeness or nobleness, to account for a woman’s subjection. But he saw none here, only an insect-like repulsiveness.
Gudrun flushed deeply. It was these attacks she would never forgive.
“What do you mean?” she replied. “My God, what a mercy I am not married to you!”
Her voice of flouting and contempt scotched him. He was brought up short. But he recovered himself.
“Tell me, only tell me,” he reiterated in a dangerous narrowed voice—“tell me what it is that fascinates you in him.”
“I am not fascinated,” she said, with cold repelling innocence.
“Yes, you are. You are fascinated by that little dry snake, like a bird gaping ready to fall down its throat.”
She looked at him with black fury.
“I don’t choose to be discussed by you,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter whether you choose or not,” he replied, “that doesn’t alter the fact that you are ready to fall down and kiss the feet of that little insect. And I don’t want to prevent you—do it, fall down and kiss his feet. But I want to know, what it is that fascinates you—what is it?”
She was silent, suffused with black rage.
“How dare you come browbeating me,” she cried, “how dare you, you little squire, you bully. What right have you over me, do you think?”
His face was white and gleaming, she knew by the light in his eyes that she was in his power—the wolf. And because she was in his power, she hated him with a power that she wondered did not kill him. In her will she killed him as he stood, effaced him.
“It is not a question of right,” said Gerald, sitting down on a chair. She watched the change in his body. She saw his clenched, mechanical body moving there like an obsession. Her hatred of him was tinged with fatal contempt.
“It’s not a question of my right over you—though I have some right, remember. I want to know, I only want to know what it is that subjugates you to that little scum of a sculptor downstairs, what it is that brings you down like a humble maggot, in worship of him. I want to know what you creep after.”
She stood over against
