“Do you?” she said, in her most easy, most cutting voice. “Do you want to know what it is in him? It’s because he has some understanding of a woman, because he is not stupid. That’s why it is.”
A queer, sinister, animal-like smile came over Gerald’s face.
“But what understanding is it?” he said. “The understanding of a flea, a hopping flea with a proboscis. Why should you crawl abject before the understanding of a flea?”
There passed through Gudrun’s mind Blake’s representation of the soul of a flea. She wanted to fit it to Loerke. Blake was a clown too. But it was necessary to answer Gerald.
“Don’t you think the understanding of a flea is more interesting than the understanding of a fool?” she asked.
“A fool!” he repeated.
“A fool, a conceited fool—a Dummkopf,” she replied, adding the German word.
“Do you call me a fool?” he replied. “Well, wouldn’t I rather be the fool I am, than that flea downstairs?”
She looked at him. A certain blunt, blind stupidity in him palled on her soul, limiting her.
“You give yourself away by that last,” she said.
He sat and wondered.
“I shall go away soon,” he said.
She turned on him.
“Remember,” she said, “I am completely independent of you—completely. You make your arrangements, I make mine.”
He pondered this.
“You mean we are strangers from this minute?” he asked.
She halted and flushed. He was putting her in a trap, forcing her hand. She turned round on him.
“Strangers,” she said, “we can never be. But if you want to make any movement apart from me, then I wish you to know you are perfectly free to do so. Do not consider me in the slightest.”
Even so slight an implication that she needed him and was depending on him still was sufficient to rouse his passion. As he sat a change came over his body, the hot, molten stream mounted involuntarily through his veins. He groaned inwardly, under its bondage, but he loved it. He looked at her with clear eyes, waiting for her.
She knew at once, and was shaken with cold revulsion. How could he look at her with those clear, warm, waiting eyes, waiting for her, even now? What had been said between them, was it not enough to put them worlds asunder, to freeze them forever apart! And yet he was all transfused and roused, waiting for her.
It confused her. Turning her head aside, she said:
“I shall always tell you, whenever I am going to make any change—”
And with this she moved out of the room.
He sat suspended in a fine recoil of disappointment, that seemed gradually to be destroying his understanding. But the unconscious state of patience persisted in him. He remained motionless, without thought or knowledge, for a long time. Then he rose, and went downstairs, to play at chess with one of the students. His face was open and clear, with a certain innocent laisser-aller that troubled Gudrun most, made her almost afraid of him, whilst she disliked him deeply for it.
It was after this that Loerke, who had never yet spoken to her personally, began to ask her of her state.
“You are not married at all, are you?” he asked.
She looked full at him.
“Not in the least,” she replied, in her measured way. Loerke laughed, wrinkling up his face oddly. There was a thin wisp of his hair straying on his forehead, she noticed that his skin was of a clear brown colour, his hands, his wrists. And his hands seemed closely prehensile. He seemed like topaz, so strangely brownish and pellucid.
“Good,” he said.
Still it needed some courage for him to go on.
“Was Mrs. Birkin your sister?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And was she married?”
“She was married.”
“Have you parents, then?”
“Yes,” said Gudrun, “we have parents.”
And she told him, briefly, laconically, her position. He watched her closely, curiously all the while.
“So!” he exclaimed, with some surprise. “And the Herr Crich, is he rich?”
“Yes, he is rich, a coal owner.”
“How long has your friendship with him lasted?”
“Some months.”
There was a pause.
“Yes, I am surprised,” he said at length. “The English, I thought they were so—cold. And what do you think to do when you leave here?”
“What do I think to do?” she repeated.
“Yes. You cannot go back to the teaching. No—” he shrugged his shoulders—“that is impossible. Leave that to the canaille who can do nothing else. You, for your part—you know, you are a remarkable woman, eine seltsame Frau. Why deny it—why make any question of it? You are an extraordinary woman, why should you follow the ordinary course, the ordinary life?”
Gudrun sat looking at her hands, flushed. She was pleased that he said, so simply, that she was a remarkable woman. He would not say that to flatter her—he was far too self-opinionated and objective by nature. He said it as he would say a piece of sculpture was remarkable, because he knew it was so.
And it gratified her to hear it from him. Other people had such a passion to make everything of one degree, of one pattern. In England it was chic to be perfectly ordinary. And it was a relief to her to be acknowledged extraordinary. Then she need not fret about the common standards.
“You see,” she said, “I have no money whatsoever.”
“Ach, money!” he cried, lifting his shoulders. “When one is grown up, money is lying about at one’s service. It is only when one is young that it is rare. Take no thought for money—that always lies to hand.”
“Does it?” she said, laughing.
“Always. The Gerald will give you a sum, if you ask him for it—”
She flushed deeply.
“I will ask anybody else,” she said, with some difficulty—“but not him.”
Loerke looked closely at her.
“Good,” he said. “Then let it be somebody else. Only don’t go back to that England, that school. No, that is stupid.”
Again there was a pause. He was afraid to ask her outright to go with him, he was not even quite sure he wanted her; and she was afraid to be
