“I have felt a horse bolt while I was driving it,” said Gerald, “but it didn’t make me know it had two wills. I only knew it was frightened.”
Hermione had ceased to listen. She simply became oblivious when these subjects were started.
“Why should a horse want to put itself in the human power?” asked Ursula. “That is quite incomprehensible to me. I don’t believe it ever wanted it.”
“Yes it did. It’s the last, perhaps highest, love-impulse: resign your will to the higher being,” said Birkin.
“What curious notions you have of love,” jeered Ursula.
“And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will, she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.”
“Then I’m a bolter,” said Ursula, with a burst of laughter.
“It’s a dangerous thing to domesticate even horses, let alone women,” said Birkin. “The dominant principle has some rare antagonists.”
“Good thing too,” said Ursula.
“Quite,” said Gerald, with a faint smile. “There’s more fun.”
Hermione could bear no more. She rose, saying in her easy singsong:
“Isn’t the evening beautiful! I get filled sometimes with such a great sense of beauty, that I feel I can hardly bear it.”
Ursula, to whom she had appealed, rose with her, moved to the last impersonal depths. And Birkin seemed to her almost a monster of hateful arrogance. She went with Hermione along the bank of the pond, talking of beautiful, soothing things, picking the gentle cowslips.
“Wouldn’t you like a dress,” said Ursula to Hermione, “of this yellow spotted with orange—a cotton dress?”
“Yes,” said Hermione, stopping and looking at the flower, letting the thought come home to her and soothe her. “Wouldn’t it be pretty? I should love it.”
And she turned smiling to Ursula, in a feeling of real affection.
But Gerald remained with Birkin, wanting to probe him to the bottom, to know what he meant by the dual will in horses. A flicker of excitement danced on Gerald’s face.
Hermione and Ursula strayed on together, united in a sudden bond of deep affection and closeness.
“I really do not want to be forced into all this criticism and analysis of life. I really do want to see things in their entirety, with their beauty left to them, and their wholeness, their natural holiness. Don’t you feel it, don’t you feel you can’t be tortured into any more knowledge?” said Hermione, stopping in front of Ursula, and turning to her with clenched fists thrust downwards.
“Yes,” said Ursula. “I do. I am sick of all this poking and prying.”
“I’m so glad you are. Sometimes,” said Hermione, again stopping arrested in her progress and turning to Ursula, “sometimes I wonder if I ought to submit to all this realisation, if I am not being weak in rejecting it. But I feel I can’t—I can’t. It seems to destroy everything. All the beauty and the—and the true holiness is destroyed—and I feel I can’t live without them.”
“And it would be simply wrong to live without them,” cried Ursula. “No, it is so irreverent to think that everything must be realised in the head. Really, something must be left to the Lord, there always is and always will be.”
“Yes,” said Hermione, reassured like a child, “it should, shouldn’t it? And Rupert—” she lifted her face to the sky, in a muse—“he can only tear things to pieces. He really is like a boy who must pull everything to pieces to see how it is made. And I can’t think it is right—it does seem so irreverent, as you say.”
“Like tearing open a bud to see what the flower will be like,” said Ursula.
“Yes. And that kills everything, doesn’t it? It doesn’t allow any possibility of flowering.”
“Of course not,” said Ursula. “It is purely destructive.”
“It is, isn’t it!”
Hermione looked long and slow at Ursula, seeming to accept confirmation from her. Then the two women were silent. As soon as they were in accord, they began mutually to mistrust each other. In spite of herself, Ursula felt herself recoiling from Hermione. It was all she could do to restrain her revulsion.
They returned to the men, like two conspirators who have withdrawn to come to an agreement. Birkin looked up at them. Ursula hated him for his cold watchfulness. But he said nothing.
“Shall we be going?” said Hermione. “Rupert, you are coming to Shortlands to dinner? Will you come at once, will you come now, with us?”
“I’m not dressed,” replied Birkin. “And you know Gerald stickles for convention.”
“I don’t stickle for it,” said Gerald. “But if you’d got as sick as I have of rowdy go-as-you-please in the house, you’d prefer it if people were peaceful and conventional, at least at meals.”
“All right,” said Birkin.
“But can’t we wait for you while you dress?” persisted Hermione.
“If you like.”
He rose to go indoors. Ursula said she would take her leave.
“Only,” she said, turning to Gerald, “I must say that, however man is lord of the beast and the fowl, I still don’t think he has any right to violate the feelings of the inferior creation. I still think it would have been much more sensible and nice of you if you’d trotted back up the road while the train went by, and been considerate.”
“I see,” said Gerald, smiling, but somewhat annoyed. “I must remember another time.”
“They all think I’m an interfering female,” thought Ursula to herself, as she went away. But she was in arms against them.
She ran home plunged in thought. She had been very much moved by Hermione, she had really come into contact with her, so that there was a sort of league between the two women. And yet she could not bear her. But she put the thought away. “She’s really good,” she said to herself. “She really wants what is right.” And she tried to feel at one with Hermione, and to shut off from Birkin.
