Gudrun looked at her in silent loathing.
“Well—” rumbled Hermione, “I don’t know. To me the pleasure of knowing is so great, so wonderful—nothing has meant so much to me in all life, as certain knowledge—no, I am sure—nothing.”
“What knowledge, for example, Hermione?” asked Alexander.
Hermione lifted her face and rumbled—
“M—m—m—I don’t know … But one thing was the stars, when I really understood something about the stars. One feels so uplifted, so unbounded …”
Birkin looked at her in a white fury.
“What do you want to feel unbounded for?” he said sarcastically. “You don’t want to be unbounded.”
Hermione recoiled in offence.
“Yes, but one does have that limitless feeling,” said Gerald. “It’s like getting on top of the mountain and seeing the Pacific.”
“Silent upon a peak in Dariayn,” murmured the Italian, lifting her face for a moment from her book.
“Not necessarily in Dariayn,” said Gerald, while Ursula began to laugh.
Hermione waited for the dust to settle, and then she said, untouched:
“Yes, it is the greatest thing in life—to know. It is really to be happy, to be free.”
“Knowledge is, of course, liberty,” said Mattheson.
“In compressed tabloids,” said Birkin, looking at the dry, stiff little body of the Baronet. Immediately Gudrun saw the famous sociologist as a flat bottle, containing tabloids of compressed liberty. That pleased her. Sir Joshua was labelled and placed forever in her mind.
“What does that mean, Rupert?” sang Hermione, in a calm snub.
“You can only have knowledge, strictly,” he replied, “of things concluded, in the past. It’s like bottling the liberty of last summer in the bottled gooseberries.”
“Can one have knowledge only of the past?” asked the Baronet, pointedly. “Could we call our knowledge of the laws of gravitation for instance, knowledge of the past?”
“Yes,” said Birkin.
“There is a most beautiful thing in my book,” suddenly piped the little Italian woman. “It says the man came to the door and threw his eyes down the street.”
There was a general laugh in the company. Miss Bradley went and looked over the shoulder of the Contessa.
“See!” said the Contessa.
“Bazarov came to the door and threw his eyes hurriedly down the street,” she read.
Again there was a loud laugh, the most startling of which was the Baronet’s, which rattled out like a clatter of falling stones.
“What is the book?” asked Alexander, promptly.
“Fathers and Sons, by Turgenev,” said the little foreigner, pronouncing every syllable distinctly. She looked at the cover, to verify herself.
“An old American edition,” said Birkin.
“Ha!—of course—translated from the French,” said Alexander, with a fine declamatory voice. “Bazarov ouvra la porte et jeta les yeux dans la rue.”
He looked brightly round the company.
“I wonder what the ‘hurriedly’ was,” said Ursula.
They all began to guess.
And then, to the amazement of everybody, the maid came hurrying with a large tea-tray. The afternoon had passed so swiftly.
After tea, they were all gathered for a walk.
“Would you like to come for a walk?” said Hermione to each of them, one by one. And they all said yes, feeling somehow like prisoners marshalled for exercise. Birkin only refused.
“Will you come for a walk, Rupert?”
“No, Hermione.”
“But are you sure?”
“Quite sure.” There was a second’s hesitation.
“And why not?” sang Hermione’s question. It made her blood run sharp, to be thwarted in even so trifling a matter. She intended them all to walk with her in the park.
“Because I don’t like trooping off in a gang,” he said.
Her voice rumbled in her throat for a moment. Then she said, with a curious stray calm:
“Then we’ll leave a little boy behind, if he’s sulky.”
And she looked really gay, while she insulted him. But it merely made him stiff.
She trailed off to the rest of the company, only turning to wave her handkerchief to him, and to chuckle with laughter, singing out:
“Goodbye, goodbye, little boy.”
“Goodbye, impudent hag,” he said to himself.
They all went through the park. Hermione wanted to show them the wild daffodils on a little slope. “This way, this way,” sang her leisurely voice at intervals. And they had all to come this way. The daffodils were pretty, but who could see them? Ursula was stiff all over with resentment by this time, resentment of the whole atmosphere. Gudrun, mocking and objective, watched and registered everything.
They looked at the shy deer, and Hermione talked to the stag, as if he too were a boy she wanted to wheedle and fondle. He was male, so she must exert some kind of power over him. They trailed home by the fishponds, and Hermione told them about the quarrel of two male swans, who had striven for the love of the one lady. She chuckled and laughed as she told how the ousted lover had sat with his head buried under his wing, on the gravel.
When they arrived back at the house, Hermione stood on the lawn and sang out, in a strange, small, high voice that carried very far:
“Rupert! Rupert!” The first syllable was high and slow, the second dropped down. “Roo‑o‑opert.”
But there was no answer. A maid appeared.
“Where is Mr. Birkin, Alice?” asked the mild straying voice of Hermione. But under the straying voice, what a persistent, almost insane will!
“I think he’s in his room, madam.”
“Is he?”
Hermione went slowly up the stairs, along the corridor, singing out in her high, small call:
“Ru-oo-pert! Ru-oo pert!”
She came to his door, and tapped, still crying: “Roo‑pert.”
“Yes,” sounded his voice at last.
“What are you doing?”
The question was mild and curious.
There was no answer. Then he opened the door.
“We’ve come back,” said Hermione. “The daffodils are so beautiful.”
“Yes,” he said, “I’ve seen them.”
She looked at him with her long, slow, impassive look, along her cheeks.
“Have you?” she echoed. And she remained looking at him. She was stimulated above all things by this conflict with him, when he was like a sulky boy, helpless, and she had him safe at Breadalby. But underneath she knew the split was coming, and her hatred of him was subconscious and intense.
“What were you doing?” she reiterated, in her mild, indifferent tone.
