“No,” she cried, “no—never. It isn’t democratic.”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s the golden mob of the proletariat, surrounded by a showy white fence of the idle rich.”
“How hateful—your hateful social orders!” she cried.
“Quite! It’s a daisy—we’ll leave it alone.”
“Do. Let it be a dark horse for once,” she said: “if anything can be a dark horse to you,” she added satirically.
They stood aside, forgetful. As if a little stunned, they both were motionless, barely conscious. The little conflict into which they had fallen had torn their consciousness and left them like two impersonal forces, there in contact.
He became aware of the lapse. He wanted to say something, to get on to a new more ordinary footing.
“You know,” he said, “that I am having rooms here at the mill? Don’t you think we can have some good times?”
“Oh are you?” she said, ignoring all his implication of admitted intimacy.
He adjusted himself at once, became normally distant.
“If I find I can live sufficiently by myself,” he continued, “I shall give up my work altogether. It has become dead to me. I don’t believe in the humanity I pretend to be part of, I don’t care a straw for the social ideals I live by, I hate the dying organic form of social mankind—so it can’t be anything but trumpery, to work at education. I shall drop it as soon as I am clear enough—tomorrow perhaps—and be by myself.”
“Have you enough to live on?” asked Ursula.
“Yes—I’ve about four hundred a year. That makes it easy for me.”
There was a pause.
“And what about Hermione?” asked Ursula.
“That’s over, finally—a pure failure, and never could have been anything else.”
“But you still know each other?”
“We could hardly pretend to be strangers, could we?”
There was a stubborn pause.
“But isn’t that a half-measure?” asked Ursula at length.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You’ll be able to tell me if it is.”
Again there was a pause of some minutes’ duration. He was thinking.
“One must throw everything away, everything—let everything go, to get the one last thing one wants,” he said.
“What thing?” she asked in challenge.
“I don’t know—freedom together,” he said.
She had wanted him to say love.
There was heard a loud barking of the dogs below. He seemed disturbed by it. She did not notice. Only she thought he seemed uneasy.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, in rather a small voice, “I believe that is Hermione come now, with Gerald Crich. She wanted to see the rooms before they are furnished.”
“I know,” said Ursula. “She will superintend the furnishing for you.”
“Probably. Does it matter?”
“Oh no, I should think not,” said Ursula. “Though personally, I can’t bear her. I think she is a lie, if you like, you who are always talking about lies.” Then she ruminated for a moment, when she broke out: “Yes, and I do mind if she furnishes your rooms—I do mind. I mind that you keep her hanging on at all.”
He was silent now, frowning.
“Perhaps,” he said. “I don’t want her to furnish the rooms here—and I don’t keep her hanging on. Only, I needn’t be churlish to her, need I? At any rate, I shall have to go down and see them now. You’ll come, won’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” she said coldly and irresolutely.
“Won’t you? Yes do. Come and see the rooms as well. Do come.”
XII
Carpeting
He set off down the bank, and she went unwillingly with him. Yet she would not have stayed away, either.
“We know each other well, you and I, already,” he said. She did not answer.
In the large darkish kitchen of the mill, the labourer’s wife was talking shrilly to Hermione and Gerald, who stood, he in white and she in a glistening bluish foulard, strangely luminous in the dusk of the room; whilst from the cages on the walls, a dozen or more canaries sang at the top of their voices. The cages were all placed round a small square window at the back, where the sunshine came in, a beautiful beam, filtering through green leaves of a tree. The voice of Mrs. Salmon shrilled against the noise of the birds, which rose ever more wild and triumphant, and the woman’s voice went up and up against them, and the birds replied with wild animation.
“Here’s Rupert!” shouted Gerald in the midst of the din. He was suffering badly, being very sensitive in the ear.
“O‑o‑h them birds, they won’t let you speak—!” shrilled the labourer’s wife in disgust. “I’ll cover them up.”
And she darted here and there, throwing a duster, an apron, a towel, a tablecloth over the cages of the birds.
“Now will you stop it, and let a body speak for your row,” she said, still in a voice that was too high.
The party watched her. Soon the cages were covered, they had a strange funereal look. But from under the towels odd defiant trills and bubblings still shook out.
“Oh, they won’t go on,” said Mrs. Salmon reassuringly. “They’ll go to sleep now.”
“Really,” said Hermione, politely.
“They will,” said Gerald. “They will go to sleep automatically, now the impression of evening is produced.”
“Are they so easily deceived?” cried Ursula.
“Oh, yes,” replied Gerald. “Don’t you know the story of Fabre, who, when he was a boy, put a hen’s head under her wing, and she straight away went to sleep? It’s quite true.”
“And did that make him a naturalist?” asked Birkin.
“Probably,” said Gerald.
Meanwhile Ursula was peeping under one of the cloths. There sat the canary in a corner, bunched and fluffed up for sleep.
“How ridiculous!” she cried. “It really thinks the night has come! How absurd! Really, how can one have any respect for a creature that is so easily taken in!”
“Yes,” sang Hermione, coming also to look. She put her hand on Ursula’s arm and chuckled a low laugh. “Yes, doesn’t he look comical?” she chuckled. “Like a stupid husband.”
Then, with her hand still on Ursula’s
