Women in Love

Chapter I

SISTERS
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the
window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working
and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-
coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a
board which she held on her knee. They were mostly
silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their
minds.
’Ursula,’ said Gudrun, ‘don’t you REALLY WANT to
get married?’ Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and
looked up. Her face was calm and considerate.
’I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘It depends how you
mean.’
Gudrun was slightly taken aback. She watched her sister
for some moments.
’Well,’ she said, ironically, ‘it usually means one thing!
But don’t you think anyhow, you’d be—’ she darkened
slightly—’in a better position than you are in now.’
A shadow came over Ursula’s face.
’I might,’ she said. ‘But I’m not sure.’
Again Gudrun paused, slightly irritated. She wanted to
be quite definite.

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’You don’t think one needs the EXPERIENCE of

having been married?’ she asked.
’Do you think it need BE an experience?’ replied
Ursula.
’Bound to be, in some way or other,’ said Gudrun,
coolly. ‘Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an
experience of some sort.’
’Not really,’ said Ursula. ‘More likely to be the end of
experience.’
Gudrun sat very still, to attend to this.
’Of course,’ she said, ‘there’s THAT to consider.’ This
brought the conversation to a close. Gudrun, almost
angrily, took up her rubber and began to rub out part of
her drawing. Ursula stitched absorbedly.
’You wouldn’t consider a good offer?’ asked Gudrun.
’I think I’ve rejected several,’ said Ursula.
’REALLY!’ Gudrun flushed dark—’But anything really
worth while? Have you REALLY?’
’A thousand a year, and an awfully nice man. I liked
him awfully,’ said Ursula.
’Really! But weren’t you fearfully tempted?’
’In the abstract but not in the concrete,’ said Ursula.
‘When it comes to the point, one isn’t even tempted—oh,
if I were tempted, I’d marry like a shot. I’m only tempted

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NOT to.’ The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with

amusement.
’Isn’t it an amazing thing,’ cried Gudrun, ‘how strong
the temptation is, not to!’ They both laughed, looking at
each other. In their hearts they were frightened.
There was a long pause, whilst Ursula stitched and
Gudrun went on with her sketch. The sisters were
women, Ursula twenty-six, and Gudrun twenty-five. But
both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of
Artemis rather than of Hebe. Gudrun was very beautiful,
passive, soft-skinned, soft-limbed. She wore a dress of
dark-blue silky stuff, with ruches of blue and green linen
lace in the neck and sleeves; and she had emerald-green
stockings. Her look of confidence and diffidence
contrasted with Ursula’s sensitive expectancy. The
provincial people, intimidated by Gudrun’s perfect sang-
froid and exclusive bareness of manner, said of her: ‘She is
a smart woman.’ She had just come back from London,
where she had spent several years, working at an art-
school, as a student, and living a studio life.
’I was hoping now for a man to come along,’ Gudrun
said, suddenly catching her underlip between her teeth,
and making a strange grimace, half sly smiling, half
anguish. Ursula was afraid.

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’So you have come home, expecting him here?’ she

laughed.
’Oh my dear,’ cried Gudrun, strident, ‘I wouldn’t go
out of my way to look for him. But if there did happen to
come along a highly attractive individual of sufficient
means—well—’ she tailed off ironically. Then she looked
searchingly at Ursula, as if to probe her. ‘Don’t you find
yourself getting bored?’ she asked of her sister. ‘Don’t you
find, that things fail to materialise? NOTHING
MATERIALISES! Everything withers in the bud.’
’What withers in the bud?’ asked Ursula.
’Oh, everything—oneself—things in general.’ There
was a pause, whilst each sister vaguely considered her fate.
’It does frighten one,’ said Ursula, and again there was a
pause. ‘But do you hope to get anywhere by just
marrying?’
’It seems to be the inevitable next step,’ said Gudrun.
Ursula pondered this, with a little bitterness. She was a
class mistress herself, in Willey Green Grammar School, as
she had been for some years.
’I know,’ she said, ‘it seems like that when one thinks
in the abstract. But really imagine it: imagine any man one
knows, imagine him coming home to one every evening,
and saying ‘Hello,’ and giving one a kiss—’

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There was a blank pause.

’Yes,’ said Gudrun, in a narrowed voice. ‘It’s just
impossible. The man makes it impossible.’
’Of course there’s children—’ said Ursula doubtfully.
Gudrun’s face hardened.
’Do you REALLY want children, Ursula?’ she asked
coldly. A dazzled, baffled look came on Ursula’s face.
’One feels it is still beyond one,’ she said.
’DO you feel like that?’ asked Gudrun. ‘I get no feeling
whatever from the thought of bearing children.’
Gudrun looked at Ursula with a masklike,
expressionless face. Ursula knitted her brows.
’Perhaps it isn’t genuine,’ she faltered. ‘Perhaps one
doesn’t really want them, in one’s soul—only
superficially.’ A hardness came over Gudrun’s face. She
did not want to be too definite.
’When one thinks of other people’s children—’ said
Ursula.
Again Gudrun looked at her sister, almost hostile.
’Exactly,’ she said, to close the conversation.
The two sisters worked on in silence, Ursula having
always that strange brightness of an essential flame that is
caught, meshed, contravened. She lived a good deal by
herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day,

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and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it

in her own understanding. Her active living was
suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something
was coming to pass. If only she could break through the
last integuments! She seemed to try and put her hands out,
like an infant in the womb, and she could not, not yet.
Still she had a strange prescience, an intimation of
something yet to come.
She laid down her work and looked at her sister. She
thought Gudrun so CHARMING, so infinitely charming,
in her softness and her fine, exquisite richness of texture
and delicacy of line. There was a certain playfulness about
her too, such a piquancy or ironic suggestion, such an
untouched reserve. Ursula admired her with all her soul.
’Why did you come home, Prune?’ she asked.
Gudrun knew she was being admired. She sat back
from her drawing and looked at Ursula, from under her
finely-curved lashes.
’Why did I come back, Ursula?’ she repeated. ‘I have
asked myself a thousand times.’
’And don’t you know?’
’Yes, I think I do. I think my coming back home was
just RECULER POUR MIEUX SAUTER.’

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And she looked with a long, slow look of knowledge at

Ursula.
’I know!’ cried Ursula, looking slightly dazzled and
falsified, and as if she did NOT know. ‘But where can one
jump to?’
’Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ said Gudrun, somewhat
superbly. ‘If one jumps over the edge, one is bound to
land somewhere.’
’But isn’t it very risky?’ asked Ursula.
A slow mocking smile dawned on Gudrun’s face.
’Ah!’ she said laughing. ‘What is it all but words!’ And
so again she closed the conversation. But Ursula was still
brooding.
’And how do you find home, now you have come
back to it?’ she asked.
Gudrun paused for some moments, coldly, before
answering. Then, in a cold truthful voice, she said:
’I find myself completely out of it.’
’And father?’
Gudrun looked at Ursula, almost with resentment, as if
brought to bay.
’I haven’t thought about him: I’ve refrained,’ she said
coldly.

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’Yes,’ wavered Ursula; and the conversation was really

at an end. The sisters found themselves confronted by a
void, a terrifying chasm, as if they had looked over the
edge.
They worked on in silence for some time, Gudrun’s
cheek was flushed with repressed emotion. She resented its
having been called into being.
’Shall we go out and look at that wedding?’ she asked
at length, in a voice that was too casual.
’Yes!’ cried Ursula, too eagerly, throwing aside her
sewing and leaping up, as if to escape something, thus
betraying the tension of the situation and causing a friction
of dislike to go over Gudrun’s nerves.
As she went upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of
her home round about her. And she loathed it, the sordid,
too-familiar place! She was afraid at the depth of her
feeling against the home, the milieu, the whole
atmosphere and condition of this obsolete life. Her feeling
frightened her.
The two girls were soon walking swiftly down the
main road of Beldover, a wide street, part shops, part
dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid, without
poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex,
shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small

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colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went,

through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long
amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed to every stare,
she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was strange
that she should have chosen to come back and test the full
effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why
had she wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to
submit herself to it, the insufferable torture of these ugly,
meaningless people, this defaced countryside? She felt like
a beetle toiling in the dust. She was filled with repulsion.
They turned off the main road, past a black patch of
common-garden, where sooty cabbage stumps stood
shameless. No one thought to be ashamed. No one was
ashamed of it all.
’It is like a country in an underworld,’ said Gudrun.
‘The colliers bring it above-ground with them, shovel it
up. Ursula, it’s marvellous, it’s really marvellous—it’s
really wonderful, another world. The people are all
ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulish
replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled,
everything sordid. It’s like being mad, Ursula.’
The sisters were crossing a black path through a dark,
soiled field. On the left was a large landscape, a valley with
collieries, and opposite hills with cornfields and woods, all

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blackened with distance, as if seen through a veil of crape.

White and black smoke rose up in steady columns, magic
within the dark air. Near at hand came the long rows of
dwellings, approaching curved up the hill-slope, in straight
lines along the brow of the hill. They were of darkened
red brick, brittle, with dark slate roofs. The path on which
the sisters walked was black, trodden-in by the feet of the
recurrent colliers, and bounded from the field by iron
fences; the stile that led again into the road was rubbed
shiny by the moleskins of the passing miners. Now the
two girls were going between some rows of dwellings, of
the poorer sort. Women, their arms folded over their
coarse aprons, standing gossiping at the end of their block,
stared after the Brangwen sisters with that long,
unwearying stare of aborigines; children called out names.
Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were
human life, if these were human beings, living in a
complete world, then what was her own world, outside?
She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-
green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour.
And she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite
unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any minute she
might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid.

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She clung to Ursula, who, through long usage was

inured to this violation of a dark, uncreated, hostile world.
But all the time her heart was crying, as if in the midst of
some ordeal: ‘I want to go back, I want to go away, I
want not to know it, not to know that this exists.’ Yet she
must go forward.
Ursula could feel her suffering.
’You hate this, don’t you?’ she asked.
’It bewilders me,’ stammered Gudrun.
’You won’t stay long,’ replied Ursula.
And Gudrun went along, grasping at release.
They drew away from the colliery region, over the
curve of the hill, into the purer country of the other side,
towards Willey Green. Still the faint glamour of blackness
persisted over the fields and the wooded hills, and seemed
darkly to gleam in the air. It was a spring day, chill, with
snatches of sunshine. Yellow celandines showed out from
the hedge-bottoms, and in the cottage gardens of Willey
Green, currant-bushes were breaking into leaf, and little
flowers were coming white on the grey alyssum that hung
over the stone walls.
Turning, they passed down the high-road, that went
between high banks towards the church. There, in the
lowest bend of the road, low under the trees, stood a little

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group of expectant people, waiting to see the wedding.

The daughter of the chief mine-owner of the district,
Thomas Crich, was getting married to a naval officer.
’Let us go back,’ said Gudrun, swerving away. ‘There
are all those people.’
And she hung wavering in the road.
’Never mind them,’ said Ursula, ‘they’re all right. They
all know me, they don’t matter.’
’But must we go through them?’ asked Gudrun.
’They’re quite all right, really,’ said Ursula, going
forward. And together the two sisters approached the
group of uneasy, watchful common people. They were
chiefly women, colliers’ wives of the more shiftless sort.
They had watchful, underworld faces.
The two sisters held themselves tense, and went straight
towards the gate. The women made way for them, but
barely sufficient, as if grudging to yield ground. The sisters
passed in silence through the stone gateway and up the
steps, on the red carpet, a policeman estimating their
progress.
’What price the stockings!’ said a voice at the back of
Gudrun. A sudden fierce anger swept over the girl, violent
and murderous. She would have liked them all
annihilated, cleared away, so that the world was left clear

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for her. How she hated walking up the churchyard path,

along the red carpet, continuing in motion, in their sight.
’I won’t go into the church,’ she said suddenly, with
such final decision that Ursula immediately halted, turned
round, and branched off up a small side path which led to
the little private gate of the Grammar School, whose
grounds adjoined those of the church.
Just inside the gate of the school shrubbery, outside the
churchyard, Ursula sat down for a moment on the low
stone wall under the laurel bushes, to rest. Behind her, the
large red building of the school rose up peacefully, the
windows all open for the holiday. Over the shrubs, before
her, were the pale roofs and tower of the old church. The
sisters were hidden by the foliage.
Gudrun sat down in silence. Her mouth was shut close,
her face averted. She was regretting bitterly that she had
ever come back. Ursula looked at her, and thought how
amazingly beautiful she was, flushed with discomfiture.
But she caused a constraint over Ursula’s nature, a certain
weariness. Ursula wished to be alone, freed from the
tightness, the enclosure of Gudrun’s presence.
’Are we going to stay here?’ asked Gudrun.

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’I was only resting a minute,’ said Ursula, getting up as

if rebuked. ‘We will stand in the corner by the fives-court,
we shall see everything from there.’
For the moment, the sunshine fell brightly into the
churchyard, there was a vague scent of sap and of spring,
perhaps of violets from off the graves. Some white daisies
were out, bright as angels. In the air, the unfolding leaves
of a copper-beech were blood-red.
Punctually at eleven o’clock, the carriages began to
arrive. There was a stir in the crowd at the gate, a
concentration as a carriage drove up, wedding guests were
mounting up the steps and passing along the red carpet to
the church. They were all gay and excited because the sun
was shining.
Gudrun watched them closely, with objective curiosity.
She saw each one as a complete figure, like a character in a
book, or a subject in a picture, or a marionette in a
theatre, a finished creation. She loved to recognise their
various characteristics, to place them in their true light,
give them their own surroundings, settle them for ever as
they passed before her along the path to the church. She
knew them, they were finished, sealed and stamped and
finished with, for her. There was none that had anything
unknown, unresolved, until the Criches themselves began

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to appear. Then her interest was piqued. Here was

something not quite so preconcluded.
There came the mother, Mrs Crich, with her eldest son
Gerald. She was a queer unkempt figure, in spite of the
attempts that had obviously been made to bring her into
line for the day. Her face was pale, yellowish, with a clear,
transparent skin, she leaned forward rather, her features
were strongly marked, handsome, with a tense, unseeing,
predative look. Her colourless hair was untidy, wisps
floating down on to her sac coat of dark blue silk, from
under her blue silk hat. She looked like a woman with a
monomania, furtive almost, but heavily proud.
Her son was of a fair, sun-tanned type, rather above
middle height, well-made, and almost exaggeratedly well-
dressed. But about him also was the strange, guarded look,
the unconscious glisten, as if he did not belong to the same
creation as the people about him. Gudrun lighted on him
at once. There was something northern about him that
magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair
was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice.
And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic
thing. Perhaps he was thirty years old, perhaps more. His
gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, good-humoured,
smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister

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stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued

temper. ‘His totem is the wolf,’ she repeated to herself.
‘His mother is an old, unbroken wolf.’ And then she
experienced a keen paroxyism, a transport, as if she had
made some incredible discovery, known to nobody else
on earth. A strange transport took possession of her, all her
veins were in a paroxysm of violent sensation. ‘Good
God!’ she exclaimed to herself, ‘what is this?’ And then, a
moment after, she was saying assuredly, ‘I shall know more
of that man.’ She was tortured with desire to see him
again, a nostalgia, a necessity to see him again, to make
sure it was not all a mistake, that she was not deluding
herself, that she really felt this strange and overwhelming
sensation on his account, this knowledge of him in her
essence, this powerful apprehension of him. ‘Am I
REALLY singled out for him in some way, is there really
some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?’
she asked herself. And she could not believe it, she
remained in a muse, scarcely conscious of what was going
on around.
The bridesmaids were here, and yet the bridegroom
had not come. Ursula wondered if something was amiss,
and if the wedding would yet all go wrong. She felt
troubled, as if it rested upon her. The chief bridesmaids

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had arrived. Ursula watched them come up the steps. One

of them she knew, a tall, slow, reluctant woman with a
weight of fair hair and a pale, long face. This was
Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches. Now she
came along, with her head held up, balancing an
enormous flat hat of pale yellow velvet, on which were
streaks of ostrich feathers, natural and grey. She drifted
forward as if scarcely conscious, her long blanched face
lifted up, not to see the world. She was rich. She wore a
dress of silky, frail velvet, of pale yellow colour, and she
carried a lot of small rose-coloured cyclamens. Her shoes
and stockings were of brownish grey, like the feathers on
her hat, her hair was heavy, she drifted along with a
peculiar fixity of the hips, a strange unwilling motion. She
was impressive, in her lovely pale-yellow and brownish-
rose, yet macabre, something repulsive. People were silent
when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet
for some reason silenced. Her long, pale face, that she
carried lifted up, somewhat in the Rossetti fashion, seemed
almost drugged, as if a strange mass of thoughts coiled in
the darkness within her, and she was never allowed to
escape.
Ursula watched her with fascination. She knew her a
little. She was the most remarkable woman in the

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Midlands. Her father was a Derbyshire Baronet of the old

school, she was a woman of the new school, full of
intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness.
She was passionately interested in reform, her soul was
given up to the public cause. But she was a man’s woman,
it was the manly world that held her.
She had various intimacies of mind and soul with
various men of capacity. Ursula knew, among these men,
only Rupert Birkin, who was one of the school-inspectors
of the county. But Gudrun had met others, in London.
Moving with her artist friends in different kinds of society,
Gudrun had already come to know a good many people of
repute and standing. She had met Hermione twice, but
they did not take to each other. It would be queer to meet
again down here in the Midlands, where their social
standing was so diverse, after they had known each other
on terms of equality in the houses of sundry acquaintances
in town. For Gudrun had been a social success, and had
her friends among the slack aristocracy that keeps touch
with the arts.
Hermione knew herself to be well-dressed; she knew
herself to be the social equal, if not far the superior, of
anyone she was likely to meet in Willey Green. She knew
she was accepted in the world of culture and of intellect.

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She was a KULTURTRAGER, a medium for the culture

of ideas. With all that was highest, whether in society or in
thought or in public action, or even in art, she was at one,
she moved among the foremost, at home with them. No
one could put her down, no one could make mock of her,
because she stood among the first, and those that were
against her were below her, either in rank, or in wealth, or
in high association of thought and progress and
understanding. So, she was invulnerable. All her life, she
had sought to make herself invulnerable, unassailable,
beyond reach of the world’s judgment.
And yet her soul was tortured, exposed. Even walking
up the path to the church, confident as she was that in
every respect she stood beyond all vulgar judgment,
knowing perfectly that her appearance was complete and
perfect, according to the first standards, yet she suffered a
torture, under her confidence and her pride, feeling herself
exposed to wounds and to mockery and to despite. She
always felt vulnerable, vulnerable, there was always a secret
chink in her armour. She did not know herself what it
was. It was a lack of robust self, she had no natural
sufficiency, there was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of
being within her.

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And she wanted someone to close up this deficiency, to

close it up for ever. She craved for Rupert Birkin. When
he was there, she felt complete, she was sufficient, whole.
For the rest of time she was established on the sand, built
over a chasm, and, in spite of all her vanity and securities,
any common maid-servant of positive, robust temper
could fling her down this bottomless pit of insufficiency,
by the slightest movement of jeering or contempt. And all
the while the pensive, tortured woman piled up her own
defences of aesthetic knowledge, and culture, and world-
visions, and disinterestedness. Yet she could never stop up
the terrible gap of insufficiency.
If only Birkin would form a close and abiding
connection with her, she would be safe during this fretful
voyage of life. He could make her sound and triumphant,
triumphant over the very angels of heaven. If only he
would do it! But she was tortured with fear, with
misgiving. She made herself beautiful, she strove so hard
to come to that degree of beauty and advantage, when he
should be convinced. But always there was a deficiency.
He was perverse too. He fought her off, he always
fought her off. The more she strove to bring him to her,
the more he battled her back. And they had been lovers
now, for years. Oh, it was so wearying, so aching; she was

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so tired. But still she believed in herself. She knew he was

trying to leave her. She knew he was trying to break away
from her finally, to be free. But still she believed in her
strength to keep him, she believed in her own higher
knowledge. His own knowledge was high, she was the
central touchstone of truth. She only needed his
conjunction with her.
And this, this conjunction with her, which was his
highest fulfilment also, with the perverseness of a wilful
child he wanted to deny. With the wilfulness of an
obstinate child, he wanted to break the holy connection
that was between them.
He would be at this wedding; he was to be groom’s
man. He would be in the church, waiting. He would
know when she came. She shuddered with nervous
apprehension and desire as she went through the church-
door. He would be there, surely he would see how
beautiful her dress was, surely he would see how she had
made herself beautiful for him. He would understand, he
would be able to see how she was made for him, the first,
how she was, for him, the highest. Surely at last he would
be able to accept his highest fate, he would not deny her.
In a little convulsion of too-tired yearning, she entered
the church and looked slowly along her cheeks for him,

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her slender body convulsed with agitation. As best man,

he would be standing beside the altar. She looked slowly,
deferring in her certainty.
And then, he was not there. A terrible storm came over
her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a
devastating hopelessness. And she approached
mechanically to the altar. Never had she known such a
pang of utter and final hopelessness. It was beyond death,
so utterly null, desert.
The bridegroom and the groom’s man had not yet
come. There was a growing consternation outside. Ursula
felt almost responsible. She could not bear it that the bride
should arrive, and no groom. The wedding must not be a
fiasco, it must not.
But here was the bride’s carriage, adorned with ribbons
and cockades. Gaily the grey horses curvetted to their
destination at the church-gate, a laughter in the whole
movement. Here was the quick of all laughter and
pleasure. The door of the carriage was thrown open, to let
out the very blossom of the day. The people on the
roadway murmured faintly with the discontented
murmuring of a crowd.
The father stepped out first into the air of the morning,
like a shadow. He was a tall, thin, careworn man, with a

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thin black beard that was touched with grey. He waited at

the door of the carriage patiently, self-obliterated.
In the opening of the doorway was a shower of fine
foliage and flowers, a whiteness of satin and lace, and a
sound of a gay voice saying:
’How do I get out?’
A ripple of satisfaction ran through the expectant
people. They pressed near to receive her, looking with
zest at the stooping blond head with its flower buds, and at
the delicate, white, tentative foot that was reaching down
to the step of the carriage. There was a sudden foaming
rush, and the bride like a sudden surf-rush, floating all
white beside her father in the morning shadow of trees,
her veil flowing with laughter.
’That’s done it!’ she said.
She put her hand on the arm of her care-worn, sallow
father, and frothing her light draperies, proceeded over the
eternal red carpet. Her father, mute and yellowish, his
black beard making him look more careworn, mounted
the steps stiffly, as if his spirit were absent; but the laughing
mist of the bride went along with him undiminished.
And no bridegroom had arrived! It was intolerable for
her. Ursula, her heart strained with anxiety, was watching
the hill beyond; the white, descending road, that should

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give sight of him. There was a carriage. It was running. It

had just come into sight. Yes, it was he. Ursula turned
towards the bride and the people, and, from her place of
vantage, gave an inarticulate cry. She wanted to warn
them that he was coming. But her cry was inarticulate and
inaudible, and she flushed deeply, between her desire and
her wincing confusion.
The carriage rattled down the hill, and drew near.
There was a shout from the people. The bride, who had
just reached the top of the steps, turned round gaily to see
what was the commotion. She saw a confusion among the
people, a cab pulling up, and her lover dropping out of
the carriage, and dodging among the horses and into the
crowd.
’Tibs! Tibs!’ she cried in her sudden, mocking
excitement, standing high on the path in the sunlight and
waving her bouquet. He, dodging with his hat in his hand,
had not heard.
’Tibs!’ she cried again, looking down to him.
He glanced up, unaware, and saw the bride and her
father standing on the path above him. A queer, startled
look went over his face. He hesitated for a moment. Then
he gathered himself together for a leap, to overtake her.

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’Ah-h-h!’ came her strange, intaken cry, as, on the

reflex, she started, turned and fled, scudding with an
unthinkable swift beating of her white feet and fraying of
her white garments, towards the church. Like a hound the
young man was after her, leaping the steps and swinging
past her father, his supple haunches working like those of a
hound that bears down on the quarry.
’Ay, after her!’ cried the vulgar women below, carried
suddenly into the sport.
She, her flowers shaken from her like froth, was
steadying herself to turn the angle of the church. She
glanced behind, and with a wild cry of laughter and
challenge, veered, poised, and was gone beyond the grey
stone buttress. In another instant the bridegroom, bent
forward as he ran, had caught the angle of the silent stone
with his hand, and had swung himself out of sight, his
supple, strong loins vanishing in pursuit.
Instantly cries and exclamations of excitement burst
from the crowd at the gate. And then Ursula noticed again
the dark, rather stooping figure of Mr Crich, waiting
suspended on the path, watching with expressionless face
the flight to the church. It was over, and he turned round
to look behind him, at the figure of Rupert Birkin, who at
once came forward and joined him.

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’We’ll bring up the rear,’ said Birkin, a faint smile on

his face.
’Ay!’ replied the father laconically. And the two men
turned together up the path.
Birkin was as thin as Mr Crich, pale and ill-looking.
His figure was narrow but nicely made. He went with a
slight trail of one foot, which came only from self-
consciousness. Although he was dressed correctly for his
part, yet there was an innate incongruity which caused a
slight ridiculousness in his appearance. His nature was
clever and separate, he did not fit at all in the conventional
occasion. Yet he subordinated himself to the common
idea, travestied himself.
He affected to be quite ordinary, perfectly and
marvellously commonplace. And he did it so well, taking
the tone of his surroundings, adjusting himself quickly to
his interlocutor and his circumstance, that he achieved a
verisimilitude of ordinary commonplaceness that usually
propitiated his onlookers for the moment, disarmed them
from attacking his singleness.
Now he spoke quite easily and pleasantly to Mr Crich,
as they walked along the path; he played with situations
like a man on a tight-rope: but always on a tight-rope,
pretending nothing but ease.

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’I’m sorry we are so late,’ he was saying. ‘We couldn’t

find a button-hook, so it took us a long time to button
our boots. But you were to the moment.’
’We are usually to time,’ said Mr Crich.
’And I’m always late,’ said Birkin. ‘But today I was
REALLY punctual, only accidentally not so. I’m sorry.’
The two men were gone, there was nothing more to
see, for the time. Ursula was left thinking about Birkin.
He piqued her, attracted her, and annoyed her.
She wanted to know him more. She had spoken with
him once or twice, but only in his official capacity as
inspector. She thought he seemed to acknowledge some
kinship between her and him, a natural, tacit
understanding, a using of the same language. But there had
been no time for the understanding to develop. And
something kept her from him, as well as attracted her to
him. There was a certain hostility, a hidden ultimate
reserve in him, cold and inaccessible.
Yet she wanted to know him.
’What do you think of Rupert Birkin?’ she asked, a
little reluctantly, of Gudrun. She did not want to discuss
him.
’What do I think of Rupert Birkin?’ repeated Gudrun.
‘I think he’s attractive—decidedly attractive. What I can’t

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stand about him is his way with other people—his way of

treating any little fool as if she were his greatest
consideration. One feels so awfully sold, oneself.’
’Why does he do it?’ said Ursula.
’Because he has no real critical faculty—of people, at all
events,’ said Gudrun. ‘I tell you, he treats any little fool as
he treats me or you—and it’s such an insult.’
’Oh, it is,’ said Ursula. ‘One must discriminate.’
’One MUST discriminate,’ repeated Gudrun. ‘But he’s
a wonderful chap, in other respects—a marvellous
personality. But you can’t trust him.’
’Yes,’ said Ursula vaguely. She was always forced to
assent to Gudrun’s pronouncements, even when she was
not in accord altogether.
The sisters sat silent, waiting for the wedding party to
come out. Gudrun was impatient of talk. She wanted to
think about Gerald Crich. She wanted to see if the strong
feeling she had got from him was real. She wanted to have
herself ready.
Inside the church, the wedding was going on.
Hermione Roddice was thinking only of Birkin. He stood
near her. She seemed to gravitate physically towards him.
She wanted to stand touching him. She could hardly be

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sure he was near her, if she did not touch him. Yet she
stood subjected through the wedding service.
She had suffered so bitterly when he did not come, that
still she was dazed. Still she was gnawed as by a neuralgia,
tormented by his potential absence from her. She had
awaited him in a faint delirium of nervous torture. As she
stood bearing herself pensively, the rapt look on her face,
that seemed spiritual, like the angels, but which came from
torture, gave her a certain poignancy that tore his heart
with pity. He saw her bowed head, her rapt face, the face
of an almost demoniacal ecstatic. Feeling him looking, she
lifted her face and sought his eyes, her own beautiful grey
eyes flaring him a great signal. But he avoided her look,
she sank her head in torment and shame, the gnawing at
her heart going on. And he too was tortured with shame,
and ultimate dislike, and with acute pity for her, because
he did not want to meet her eyes, he did not want to
receive her flare of recognition.
The bride and bridegroom were married, the party
went into the vestry. Hermione crowded involuntarily up
against Birkin, to touch him. And he endured it.
Outside, Gudrun and Ursula listened for their father’s
playing on the organ. He would enjoy playing a wedding
march. Now the married pair were coming! The bells

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were ringing, making the air shake. Ursula wondered if

the trees and the flowers could feel the vibration, and what
they thought of it, this strange motion in the air. The
bride was quite demure on the arm of the bridegroom,
who stared up into the sky before him, shutting and
opening his eyes unconsciously, as if he were neither here
nor there. He looked rather comical, blinking and trying
to be in the scene, when emotionally he was violated by
his exposure to a crowd. He looked a typical naval officer,
manly, and up to his duty.
Birkin came with Hermione. She had a rapt,
triumphant look, like the fallen angels restored, yet still
subtly demoniacal, now she held Birkin by the arm. And
he was expressionless, neutralised, possessed by her as if it
were his fate, without question.
Gerald Crich came, fair, good-looking, healthy, with a
great reserve of energy. He was erect and complete, there
was a strange stealth glistening through his amiable, almost
happy appearance. Gudrun rose sharply and went away.
She could not bear it. She wanted to be alone, to know
this strange, sharp inoculation that had changed the whole
temper of her blood.

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Chapter II

SHORTLANDS
The Brangwens went home to Beldover, the wedding-
party gathered at Shortlands, the Criches’ home. It was a
long, low old house, a sort of manor farm, that spread
along the top of a slope just beyond the narrow little lake
of Willey Water. Shortlands looked across a sloping
meadow that might be a park, because of the large, solitary
trees that stood here and there, across the water of the
narrow lake, at the wooded hill that successfully hid the
colliery valley beyond, but did not quite hide the rising
smoke. Nevertheless, the scene was rural and picturesque,
very peaceful, and the house had a charm of its own.
It was crowded now with the family and the wedding
guests. The father, who was not well, withdrew to rest.
Gerald was host. He stood in the homely entrance hall,
friendly and easy, attending to the men. He seemed to
take pleasure in his social functions, he smiled, and was
abundant in hospitality.
The women wandered about in a little confusion,
chased hither and thither by the three married daughters of
the house. All the while there could be heard the

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characteristic, imperious voice of one Crich woman or

another calling ‘Helen, come here a minute,’ ‘Marjory, I
want you—here.’ ‘Oh, I say, Mrs Witham—.’ There was
a great rustling of skirts, swift glimpses of smartly-dressed
women, a child danced through the hall and back again, a
maidservant came and went hurriedly.
Meanwhile the men stood in calm little groups,
chatting, smoking, pretending to pay no heed to the
rustling animation of the women’s world. But they could
not really talk, because of the glassy ravel of women’s
excited, cold laughter and running voices. They waited,
uneasy, suspended, rather bored. But Gerald remained as if
genial and happy, unaware that he was waiting or
unoccupied, knowing himself the very pivot of the
occasion.
Suddenly Mrs Crich came noiselessly into the room,
peering about with her strong, clear face. She was still
wearing her hat, and her sac coat of blue silk.
’What is it, mother?’ said Gerald.
’Nothing, nothing!’ she answered vaguely. And she
went straight towards Birkin, who was talking to a Crich
brother-in-law.

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’How do you do, Mr Birkin,’ she said, in her low

voice, that seemed to take no count of her guests. She
held out her hand to him.
’Oh Mrs Crich,’ replied Birkin, in his readily-changing
voice, ‘I couldn’t come to you before.’
’I don’t know half the people here,’ she said, in her low
voice. Her son-in-law moved uneasily away.
’And you don’t like strangers?’ laughed Birkin. ‘I myself
can never see why one should take account of people, just
because they happen to be in the room with one: why
SHOULD I know they are there?’
’Why indeed, why indeed!’ said Mrs Crich, in her low,
tense voice. ‘Except that they ARE there. I don’t know
people whom I find in the house. The children introduce
them to me—‘Mother, this is Mr So-and-so.’ I am no
further. What has Mr So-and-so to do with his own
name?—and what have I to do with either him or his
name?’
She looked up at Birkin. She startled him. He was
flattered too that she came to talk to him, for she took
hardly any notice of anybody. He looked down at her
tense clear face, with its heavy features, but he was afraid
to look into her heavy-seeing blue eyes. He noticed
instead how her hair looped in slack, slovenly strands over

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her rather beautiful ears, which were not quite clean.

Neither was her neck perfectly clean. Even in that he
seemed to belong to her, rather than to the rest of the
company; though, he thought to himself, he was always
well washed, at any rate at the neck and ears.
He smiled faintly, thinking these things. Yet he was
tense, feeling that he and the elderly, estranged woman
were conferring together like traitors, like enemies within
the camp of the other people. He resembled a deer, that
throws one ear back upon the trail behind, and one ear
forward, to know what is ahead.
’People don’t really matter,’ he said, rather unwilling to
continue.
The mother looked up at him with sudden, dark
interrogation, as if doubting his sincerity.
’How do you mean, MATTER?’ she asked sharply.
’Not many people are anything at all,’ he answered,
forced to go deeper than he wanted to. ‘They jingle and
giggle. It would be much better if they were just wiped
out. Essentially, they don’t exist, they aren’t there.’
She watched him steadily while he spoke.
’But we didn’t imagine them,’ she said sharply.
’There’s nothing to imagine, that’s why they don’t
exist.’

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’Well,’ she said, ‘I would hardly go as far as that. There

they are, whether they exist or no. It doesn’t rest with me
to decide on their existence. I only know that I can’t be
expected to take count of them all. You can’t expect me
to know them, just because they happen to be there. As
far as I go they might as well not be there.’
’Exactly,’ he replied.
’Mightn’t they?’ she asked again.
’Just as well,’ he repeated. And there was a little pause.
’Except that they ARE there, and that’s a nuisance,’ she
said. ‘There are my sons-in-law,’ she went on, in a sort of
monologue. ‘Now Laura’s got married, there’s another.
And I really don’t know John from James yet. They come
up to me and call me mother. I know what they will
say—‘how are you, mother?’ I ought to say, ‘I am not
your mother, in any sense.’ But what is the use? There
they are. I have had children of my own. I suppose I
know them from another woman’s children.’
’One would suppose so,’ he said.
She looked at him, somewhat surprised, forgetting
perhaps that she was talking to him. And she lost her
thread.

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She looked round the room, vaguely. Birkin could not

guess what she was looking for, nor what she was
thinking. Evidently she noticed her sons.
’Are my children all there?’ she asked him abruptly.
He laughed, startled, afraid perhaps.
’I scarcely know them, except Gerald,’ he replied.
’Gerald!’ she exclaimed. ‘He’s the most wanting of
them all. You’d never think it, to look at him now, would
you?’
’No,’ said Birkin.
The mother looked across at her eldest son, stared at
him heavily for some time.
’Ay,’ she said, in an incomprehensible monosyllable,
that sounded profoundly cynical. Birkin felt afraid, as if he
dared not realise. And Mrs Crich moved away, forgetting
him. But she returned on her traces.
’I should like him to have a friend,’ she said. ‘He has
never had a friend.’
Birkin looked down into her eyes, which were blue,
and watching heavily. He could not understand them.
‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ he said to himself, almost
flippantly.
Then he remembered, with a slight shock, that that was
Cain’s cry. And Gerald was Cain, if anybody. Not that he

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was Cain, either, although he had slain his brother. There

was such a thing as pure accident, and the consequences
did not attach to one, even though one had killed one’s
brother in such wise. Gerald as a boy had accidentally
killed his brother. What then? Why seek to draw a brand
and a curse across the life that had caused the accident? A
man can live by accident, and die by accident. Or can he
not? Is every man’s life subject to pure accident, is it only
the race, the genus, the species, that has a universal
reference? Or is this not true, is there no such thing as
pure accident? Has EVERYTHING that happens a
universal significance? Has it? Birkin, pondering as he
stood there, had forgotten Mrs Crich, as she had forgotten
him.
He did not believe that there was any such thing as
accident. It all hung together, in the deepest sense.
Just as he had decided this, one of the Crich daughters
came up, saying:
’Won’t you come and take your hat off, mother dear?
We shall be sitting down to eat in a minute, and it’s a
formal occasion, darling, isn’t it?’ She drew her arm
through her mother’s, and they went away. Birkin
immediately went to talk to the nearest man.

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The gong sounded for the luncheon. The men looked

up, but no move was made to the dining-room. The
women of the house seemed not to feel that the sound had
meaning for them. Five minutes passed by. The elderly
manservant, Crowther, appeared in the doorway
exasperatedly. He looked with appeal at Gerald. The latter
took up a large, curved conch shell, that lay on a shelf, and
without reference to anybody, blew a shattering blast. It
was a strange rousing noise, that made the heart beat. The
summons was almost magical. Everybody came running, as
if at a signal. And then the crowd in one impulse moved
to the dining-room.
Gerald waited a moment, for his sister to play hostess.
He knew his mother would pay no attention to her duties.
But his sister merely crowded to her seat. Therefore the
young man, slightly too dictatorial, directed the guests to
their places.
There was a moment’s lull, as everybody looked at the
BORS D’OEUVRES that were being handed round. And
out of this lull, a girl of thirteen or fourteen, with her long
hair down her back, said in a calm, self-possessed voice:
’Gerald, you forget father, when you make that
unearthly noise.’

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’Do I?’ he answered. And then, to the company,

‘Father is lying down, he is not quite well.’
’How is he, really?’ called one of the married daughters,
peeping round the immense wedding cake that towered
up in the middle of the table shedding its artificial flowers.
’He has no pain, but he feels tired,’ replied Winifred,
the girl with the hair down her back.
The wine was filled, and everybody was talking
boisterously. At the far end of the table sat the mother,
with her loosely-looped hair. She had Birkin for a
neighbour. Sometimes she glanced fiercely down the rows
of faces, bending forwards and staring unceremoniously.
And she would say in a low voice to Birkin:
’Who is that young man?’
’I don’t know,’ Birkin answered discreetly.
’Have I seen him before?’ she asked.
’I don’t think so. I haven’t,’ he replied. And she was
satisfied. Her eyes closed wearily, a peace came over her
face, she looked like a queen in repose. Then she started, a
little social smile came on her face, for a moment she
looked the pleasant hostess. For a moment she bent
graciously, as if everyone were welcome and delightful.
And then immediately the shadow came back, a sullen,

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eagle look was on her face, she glanced from under her
brows like a sinister creature at bay, hating them all.
’Mother,’ called Diana, a handsome girl a little older
than Winifred, ‘I may have wine, mayn’t I?’
’Yes, you may have wine,’ replied the mother
automatically, for she was perfectly indifferent to the
question.
And Diana beckoned to the footman to fill her glass.
’Gerald shouldn’t forbid me,’ she said calmly, to the
company at large.
’All right, Di,’ said her brother amiably. And she
glanced challenge at him as she drank from her glass.
There was a strange freedom, that almost amounted to
anarchy, in the house. It was rather a resistance to
authority, than liberty. Gerald had some command, by
mere force of personality, not because of any granted
position. There was a quality in his voice, amiable but
dominant, that cowed the others, who were all younger
than he.
Hermione was having a discussion with the bridegroom
about nationality.
’No,’ she said, ‘I think that the appeal to patriotism is a
mistake. It is like one house of business rivalling another
house of business.’

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’Well you can hardly say that, can you?’ exclaimed

Gerald, who had a real PASSION for discussion. ‘You
couldn’t call a race a business concern, could you?—and
nationality roughly corresponds to race, I think. I think it
is MEANT to.’
There was a moment’s pause. Gerald and Hermione
were always strangely but politely and evenly inimical.
’DO you think race corresponds with nationality?’ she
asked musingly, with expressionless indecision.
Birkin knew she was waiting for him to participate.
And dutifully he spoke up.
’I think Gerald is right—race is the essential element in
nationality, in Europe at least,’ he said.
Again Hermione paused, as if to allow this statement to
cool. Then she said with strange assumption of authority:
’Yes, but even so, is the patriotic appeal an appeal to
the racial instinct? Is it not rather an appeal to the
proprietory instinct, the COMMERCIAL instinct? And
isn’t this what we mean by nationality?’
’Probably,’ said Birkin, who felt that such a discussion
was out of place and out of time.
But Gerald was now on the scent of argument.
’A race may have its commercial aspect,’ he said. ‘In
fact it must. It is like a family. You MUST make

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provision. And to make provision you have got to strive

against other families, other nations. I don’t see why you
shouldn’t.’
Again Hermione made a pause, domineering and cold,
before she replied: ‘Yes, I think it is always wrong to
provoke a spirit of rivalry. It makes bad blood. And bad
blood accumulates.’
’But you can’t do away with the spirit of emulation
altogether?’ said Gerald. ‘It is one of the necessary
incentives to production and improvement.’
’Yes,’ came Hermione’s sauntering response. ‘I think
you can do away with it.’
’I must say,’ said Birkin, ‘I detest the spirit of
emulation.’ Hermione was biting a piece of bread, pulling
it from between her teeth with her fingers, in a slow,
slightly derisive movement. She turned to Birkin.
’You do hate it, yes,’ she said, intimate and gratified.
’Detest it,’ he repeated.
’Yes,’ she murmured, assured and satisfied.
’But,’ Gerald insisted, ‘you don’t allow one man to take
away his neighbour’s living, so why should you allow one
nation to take away the living from another nation?’
There was a long slow murmur from Hermione before
she broke into speech, saying with a laconic indifference:

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’It is not always a question of possessions, is it? It is not

all a question of goods?’
Gerald was nettled by this implication of vulgar
materialism.
’Yes, more or less,’ he retorted. ‘If I go and take a
man’s hat from off his head, that hat becomes a symbol of
that man’s liberty. When he fights me for his hat, he is
fighting me for his liberty.’
Hermione was nonplussed.
’Yes,’ she said, irritated. ‘But that way of arguing by
imaginary instances is not supposed to be genuine, is it? A
man does NOT come and take my hat from off my head,
does he?’
’Only because the law prevents him,’ said Gerald.
’Not only,’ said Birkin. ‘Ninety-nine men out of a
hundred don’t want my hat.’
’That’s a matter of opinion,’ said Gerald.
’Or the hat,’ laughed the bridegroom.
’And if he does want my hat, such as it is,’ said Birkin,
‘why, surely it is open to me to decide, which is a greater
loss to me, my hat, or my liberty as a free and indifferent
man. If I am compelled to offer fight, I lose the latter. It is
a question which is worth more to me, my pleasant liberty
of conduct, or my hat.’

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’Yes,’ said Hermione, watching Birkin strangely. ‘Yes.’

’But would you let somebody come and snatch your
hat off your head?’ the bride asked of Hermione.
The face of the tall straight woman turned slowly and
as if drugged to this new speaker.
’No,’ she replied, in a low inhuman tone, that seemed
to contain a chuckle. ‘No, I shouldn’t let anybody take my
hat off my head.’
’How would you prevent it?’ asked Gerald.
’I don’t know,’ replied Hermione slowly. ‘Probably I
should kill him.’
There was a strange chuckle in her tone, a dangerous
and convincing humour in her bearing.
’Of course,’ said Gerald, ‘I can see Rupert’s point. It is
a question to him whether his hat or his peace of mind is
more important.’
’Peace of body,’ said Birkin.
’Well, as you like there,’ replied Gerald. ‘But how are
you going to decide this for a nation?’
’Heaven preserve me,’ laughed Birkin.
’Yes, but suppose you have to?’ Gerald persisted.
’Then it is the same. If the national crown-piece is an
old hat, then the thieving gent may have it.’

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’But CAN the national or racial hat be an old hat?’

insisted Gerald.
’Pretty well bound to be, I believe,’ said Birkin.
’I’m not so sure,’ said Gerald.
’I don’t agree, Rupert,’ said Hermione.
’All right,’ said Birkin.
’I’m all for the old national hat,’ laughed Gerald.
’And a fool you look in it,’ cried Diana, his pert sister
who was just in her teens.
’Oh, we’re quite out of our depths with these old hats,’
cried Laura Crich. ‘Dry up now, Gerald. We’re going to
drink toasts. Let us drink toasts. Toasts—glasses, glasses—
now then, toasts! Speech! Speech!’
Birkin, thinking about race or national death, watched
his glass being filled with champagne. The bubbles broke
at the rim, the man withdrew, and feeling a sudden thirst
at the sight of the fresh wine, Birkin drank up his glass. A
queer little tension in the room roused him. He felt a
sharp constraint.
’Did I do it by accident, or on purpose?’ he asked
himself. And he decided that, according to the vulgar
phrase, he had done it ‘accidentally on purpose.’ He
looked round at the hired footman. And the hired
footman came, with a silent step of cold servant-like

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disapprobation. Birkin decided that he detested toasts, and

footmen, and assemblies, and mankind altogether, in most
of its aspects. Then he rose to make a speech. But he was
somehow disgusted.
At length it was over, the meal. Several men strolled
out into the garden. There was a lawn, and flower-beds,
and at the boundary an iron fence shutting off the little
field or park. The view was pleasant; a highroad curving
round the edge of a low lake, under the trees. In the
spring air, the water gleamed and the opposite woods were
purplish with new life. Charming Jersey cattle came to the
fence, breathing hoarsely from their velvet muzzles at the
human beings, expecting perhaps a crust.
Birkin leaned on the fence. A cow was breathing wet
hotness on his hand.
’Pretty cattle, very pretty,’ said Marshall, one of the
brothers-in-law. ‘They give the best milk you can have.’
’Yes,’ said Birkin.
’Eh, my little beauty, eh, my beauty!’ said Marshall, in a
queer high falsetto voice, that caused the other man to
have convulsions of laughter in his stomach.
’Who won the race, Lupton?’ he called to the
bridegroom, to hide the fact that he was laughing.
The bridegroom took his cigar from his mouth.

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’The race?’ he exclaimed. Then a rather thin smile

came over his face. He did not want to say anything about
the flight to the church door. ‘We got there together. At
least she touched first, but I had my hand on her
shoulder.’
’What’s this?’ asked Gerald.
Birkin told him about the race of the bride and the
bridegroom.
’H’m!’ said Gerald, in disapproval. ‘What made you late
then?’
’Lupton would talk about the immortality of the soul,’
said Birkin, ‘and then he hadn’t got a button-hook.’
’Oh God!’ cried Marshall. ‘The immortality of the soul
on your wedding day! Hadn’t you got anything better to
occupy your mind?’
’What’s wrong with it?’ asked the bridegroom, a clean-
shaven naval man, flushing sensitively.
’Sounds as if you were going to be executed instead of
married. THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL!’
repeated the brother-in-law, with most killing emphasis.
But he fell quite flat.
’And what did you decide?’ asked Gerald, at once
pricking up his ears at the thought of a metaphysical
discussion.

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’You don’t want a soul today, my boy,’ said Marshall.

‘It’d be in your road.’
’Christ! Marshall, go and talk to somebody else,’ cried
Gerald, with sudden impatience.
’By God, I’m willing,’ said Marshall, in a temper. ‘Too
much bloody soul and talk altogether—’
He withdrew in a dudgeon, Gerald staring after him
with angry eyes, that grew gradually calm and amiable as
the stoutly-built form of the other man passed into the
distance.
’There’s one thing, Lupton,’ said Gerald, turning
suddenly to the bridegroom. ‘Laura won’t have brought
such a fool into the family as Lottie did.’
’Comfort yourself with that,’ laughed Birkin.
’I take no notice of them,’ laughed the bridegroom.
’What about this race then—who began it?’ Gerald
asked.
’We were late. Laura was at the top of the churchyard
steps when our cab came up. She saw Lupton bolting
towards her. And she fled. But why do you look so cross?
Does it hurt your sense of the family dignity?’
’It does, rather,’ said Gerald. ‘If you’re doing a thing,
do it properly, and if you’re not going to do it properly,
leave it alone.’

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’Very nice aphorism,’ said Birkin.

’Don’t you agree?’ asked Gerald.
’Quite,’ said Birkin. ‘Only it bores me rather, when
you become aphoristic.’
’Damn you, Rupert, you want all the aphorisms your
own way,’ said Gerald.
’No. I want them out of the way, and you’re always
shoving them in it.’
Gerald smiled grimly at this humorism. Then he made
a little gesture of dismissal, with his eyebrows.
’You don’t believe in having any standard of behaviour
at all, do you?’ he challenged Birkin, censoriously.
’Standard—no. I hate standards. But they’re necessary
for the common ruck. Anybody who is anything can just
be himself and do as he likes.’
’But what do you mean by being himself?’ said Gerald.
‘Is that an aphorism or a cliche?’
’I mean just doing what you want to do. I think it was
perfect good form in Laura to bolt from Lupton to the
church door. It was almost a masterpiece in good form.
It’s the hardest thing in the world to act spontaneously on
one’s impulses—and it’s the only really gentlemanly thing
to do—provided you’re fit to do it.’

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’You don’t expect me to take you seriously, do you?’

asked Gerald.
’Yes, Gerald, you’re one of the very few people I do
expect that of.’
’Then I’m afraid I can’t come up to your expectations
here, at any rate. You think people should just do as they
like.’
’I think they always do. But I should like them to like
the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes
them act in singleness. And they only like to do the
collective thing.’
’And I,’ said Gerald grimly, ‘shouldn’t like to be in a
world of people who acted individually and
spontaneously, as you call it. We should have everybody
cutting everybody else’s throat in five minutes.’
’That means YOU would like to be cutting
everybody’s throat,’ said Birkin.
’How does that follow?’ asked Gerald crossly.
’No man,’ said Birkin, ‘cuts another man’s throat unless
he wants to cut it, and unless the other man wants it
cutting. This is a complete truth. It takes two people to
make a murder: a murderer and a murderee. And a
murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is

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murderable is a man who in a profound if hidden lust

desires to be murdered.’
’Sometimes you talk pure nonsense,’ said Gerald to
Birkin. ‘As a matter of fact, none of us wants our throat
cut, and most other people would like to cut it for us—
some time or other—’
’It’s a nasty view of things, Gerald,’ said Birkin, ‘and no
wonder you are afraid of yourself and your own
unhappiness.’
’How am I afraid of myself?’ said Gerald; ‘and I don’t
think I am unhappy.’
’You seem to have a lurking desire to have your gizzard
slit, and imagine every man has his knife up his sleeve for
you,’ Birkin said.
’How do you make that out?’ said Gerald.
’From you,’ said Birkin.
There was a pause of strange enmity between the two
men, that was very near to love. It was always the same
between them; always their talk brought them into a
deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous intimacy
which was either hate or love, or both. They parted with
apparent unconcern, as if their going apart were a trivial
occurrence. And they really kept it to the level of trivial
occurrence. Yet the heart of each burned from the other.

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They burned with each other, inwardly. This they would

never admit. They intended to keep their relationship a
casual free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to be
so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart-burning
between them. They had not the faintest belief in deep
relationship between men and men, and their disbelief
prevented any development of their powerful but
suppressed friendliness.

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Chapter III

CLASS-ROOM
A school-day was drawing to a close. In the class-room
the last lesson was in progress, peaceful and still. It was
elementary botany. The desks were littered with catkins,
hazel and willow, which the children had been sketching.
But the sky had come overdark, as the end of the
afternoon approached: there was scarcely light to draw any
more. Ursula stood in front of the class, leading the
children by questions to understand the structure and the
meaning of the catkins.
A heavy, copper-coloured beam of light came in at the
west window, gilding the outlines of the children’s heads
with red gold, and falling on the wall opposite in a rich,
ruddy illumination. Ursula, however, was scarcely
conscious of it. She was busy, the end of the day was here,
the work went on as a peaceful tide that is at flood, hushed
to retire.
This day had gone by like so many more, in an activity
that was like a trance. At the end there was a little haste, to
finish what was in hand. She was pressing the children
with questions, so that they should know all they were to

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know, by the time the gong went. She stood in shadow in

front of the class, with catkins in her hand, and she leaned
towards the children, absorbed in the passion of
instruction.
She heard, but did not notice the click of the door.
Suddenly she started. She saw, in the shaft of ruddy,
copper-coloured light near her, the face of a man. It was
gleaming like fire, watching her, waiting for her to be
aware. It startled her terribly. She thought she was going
to faint. All her suppressed, subconscious fear sprang into
being, with anguish.
’Did I startle you?’ said Birkin, shaking hands with her.
‘I thought you had heard me come in.’
’No,’ she faltered, scarcely able to speak. He laughed,
saying he was sorry. She wondered why it amused him.
’It is so dark,’ he said. ‘Shall we have the light?’
And moving aside, he switched on the strong electric
lights. The class-room was distinct and hard, a strange
place after the soft dim magic that filled it before he came.
Birkin turned curiously to look at Ursula. Her eyes were
round and wondering, bewildered, her mouth quivered
slightly. She looked like one who is suddenly wakened.
There was a living, tender beauty, like a tender light of

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dawn shining from her face. He looked at her with a new

pleasure, feeling gay in his heart, irresponsible.
’You are doing catkins?’ he asked, picking up a piece of
hazel from a scholar’s desk in front of him. ‘Are they as far
out as this? I hadn’t noticed them this year.’
He looked absorbedly at the tassel of hazel in his hand.
’The red ones too!’ he said, looking at the flickers of
crimson that came from the female bud.
Then he went in among the desks, to see the scholars’
books. Ursula watched his intent progress. There was a
stillness in his motion that hushed the activities of her
heart. She seemed to be standing aside in arrested silence,
watching him move in another, concentrated world. His
presence was so quiet, almost like a vacancy in the
corporate air.
Suddenly he lifted his face to her, and her heart
quickened at the flicker of his voice.
’Give them some crayons, won’t you?’ he said, ‘so that
they can make the gynaecious flowers red, and the
androgynous yellow. I’d chalk them in plain, chalk in
nothing else, merely the red and the yellow. Outline
scarcely matters in this case. There is just the one fact to
emphasise.’
’I haven’t any crayons,’ said Ursula.

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’There will be some somewhere—red and yellow,

that’s all you want.’
Ursula sent out a boy on a quest.
’It will make the books untidy,’ she said to Birkin,
flushing deeply.
’Not very,’ he said. ‘You must mark in these things
obviously. It’s the fact you want to emphasise, not the
subjective impression to record. What’s the fact?—red
little spiky stigmas of the female flower, dangling yellow
male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the other.
Make a pictorial record of the fact, as a child does when
drawing a face—two eyes, one nose, mouth with teeth—
so—’ And he drew a figure on the blackboard.
At that moment another vision was seen through the
glass panels of the door. It was Hermione Roddice. Birkin
went and opened to her.
’I saw your car,’ she said to him. ‘Do you mind my
coming to find you? I wanted to see you when you were
on duty.’
She looked at him for a long time, intimate and playful,
then she gave a short little laugh. And then only she
turned to Ursula, who, with all the class, had been
watching the little scene between the lovers.

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’How do you do, Miss Brangwen,’ sang Hermione, in

her low, odd, singing fashion, that sounded almost as if she
were poking fun. ‘Do you mind my coming in?’
Her grey, almost sardonic eyes rested all the while on
Ursula, as if summing her up.
’Oh no,’ said Ursula.
’Are you SURE?’ repeated Hermione, with complete
sang froid, and an odd, half-bullying effrontery.
’Oh no, I like it awfully,’ laughed Ursula, a little bit
excited and bewildered, because Hermione seemed to be
compelling her, coming very close to her, as if intimate
with her; and yet, how could she be intimate?
This was the answer Hermione wanted. She turned
satisfied to Birkin.
’What are you doing?’ she sang, in her casual,
inquisitive fashion.
’Catkins,’ he replied.
’Really!’ she said. ‘And what do you learn about them?’
She spoke all the while in a mocking, half teasing fashion,
as if making game of the whole business. She picked up a
twig of the catkin, piqued by Birkin’s attention to it.
She was a strange figure in the class-room, wearing a
large, old cloak of greenish cloth, on which was a raised
pattern of dull gold. The high collar, and the inside of the

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cloak, was lined with dark fur. Beneath she had a dress of
fine lavender-coloured cloth, trimmed with fur, and her
hat was close-fitting, made of fur and of the dull, green-
and-gold figured stuff. She was tall and strange, she looked
as if she had come out of some new, bizarre picture.
’Do you know the little red ovary flowers, that produce
the nuts? Have you ever noticed them?’ he asked her. And
he came close and pointed them out to her, on the sprig
she held.
’No,’ she replied. ‘What are they?’
’Those are the little seed-producing flowers, and the
long catkins, they only produce pollen, to fertilise them.’
’Do they, do they!’ repeated Hermione, looking
closely.
’From those little red bits, the nuts come; if they
receive pollen from the long danglers.’
’Little red flames, little red flames,’ murmured
Hermione to herself. And she remained for some
moments looking only at the small buds out of which the
red flickers of the stigma issued.
’Aren’t they beautiful? I think they’re so beautiful,’ she
said, moving close to Birkin, and pointing to the red
filaments with her long, white finger.
’Had you never noticed them before?’ he asked.

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’No, never before,’ she replied.

’And now you will always see them,’ he said.
’Now I shall always see them,’ she repeated. ‘Thank
you so much for showing me. I think they’re so
beautiful—little red flames—’
Her absorption was strange, almost rhapsodic. Both
Birkin and Ursula were suspended. The little red pistillate
flowers had some strange, almost mystic-passionate
attraction for her.
The lesson was finished, the books were put away, at
last the class was dismissed. And still Hermione sat at the
table, with her chin in her hand, her elbow on the table,
her long white face pushed up, not attending to anything.
Birkin had gone to the window, and was looking from the
brilliantly-lighted room on to the grey, colourless outside,
where rain was noiselessly falling. Ursula put away her
things in the cupboard.
At length Hermione rose and came near to her.
’Your sister has come home?’ she said.
’Yes,’ said Ursula.
’And does she like being back in Beldover?’
’No,’ said Ursula.
’No, I wonder she can bear it. It takes all my strength,
to bear the ugliness of this district, when I stay here.

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Won’t you come and see me? Won’t you come with your
sister to stay at Breadalby for a few days?—do—’
’Thank you very much,’ said Ursula.
’Then I will write to you,’ said Hermione. ‘You think
your sister will come? I should be so glad. I think she is
wonderful. I think some of her work is really wonderful. I
have two water-wagtails, carved in wood, and painted—
perhaps you have seen it?’
’No,’ said Ursula.
’I think it is perfectly wonderful—like a flash of
instinct.’
’Her little carvings ARE strange,’ said Ursula.
’Perfectly beautiful—full of primitive passion—’
’Isn’t it queer that she always likes little things?—she
must always work small things, that one can put between
one’s hands, birds and tiny animals. She likes to look
through the wrong end of the opera glasses, and see the
world that way—why is it, do you think?’
Hermione looked down at Ursula with that long,
detached scrutinising gaze that excited the younger
woman.
’Yes,’ said Hermione at length. ‘It is curious. The little
things seem to be more subtle to her—’

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’But they aren’t, are they? A mouse isn’t any more

subtle than a lion, is it?’
Again Hermione looked down at Ursula with that long
scrutiny, as if she were following some train of thought of
her own, and barely attending to the other’s speech.
’I don’t know,’ she replied.
’Rupert, Rupert,’ she sang mildly, calling him to her.
He approached in silence.
’Are little things more subtle than big things?’ she
asked, with the odd grunt of laughter in her voice, as if
she were making game of him in the question.
’Dunno,’ he said.
’I hate subtleties,’ said Ursula.
Hermione looked at her slowly.
’Do you?’ she said.
’I always think they are a sign of weakness,’ said Ursula,
up in arms, as if her prestige were threatened.
Hermione took no notice. Suddenly her face puckered,
her brow was knit with thought, she seemed twisted in
troublesome effort for utterance.
’Do you really think, Rupert,’ she asked, as if Ursula
were not present, ‘do you really think it is worth while?
Do you really think the children are better for being
roused to consciousness?’

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A dark flash went over his face, a silent fury. He was

hollow-cheeked and pale, almost unearthly. And the
woman, with her serious, conscience-harrowing question
tortured him on the quick.
’They are not roused to consciousness,’ he said.
‘Consciousness comes to them, willy-nilly.’
’But do you think they are better for having it
quickened, stimulated? Isn’t it better that they should
remain unconscious of the hazel, isn’t it better that they
should see as a whole, without all this pulling to pieces, all
this knowledge?’
’Would you rather, for yourself, know or not know,
that the little red flowers are there, putting out for the
pollen?’ he asked harshly. His voice was brutal, scornful,
cruel.
Hermione remained with her face lifted up, abstracted.
He hung silent in irritation.
’I don’t know,’ she replied, balancing mildly. ‘I don’t
know.’
’But knowing is everything to you, it is all your life,’ he
broke out. She slowly looked at him.
’Is it?’ she said.

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’To know, that is your all, that is your life—you have

only this, this knowledge,’ he cried. ‘There is only one
tree, there is only one fruit, in your mouth.’
Again she was some time silent.
’Is there?’ she said at last, with the same untouched
calm. And then in a tone of whimsical inquisitiveness:
‘What fruit, Rupert?’
’The eternal apple,’ he replied in exasperation, hating
his own metaphors.
’Yes,’ she said. There was a look of exhaustion about
her. For some moments there was silence. Then, pulling
herself together with a convulsed movement, Hermione
resumed, in a sing-song, casual voice:
’But leaving me apart, Rupert; do you think the
children are better, richer, happier, for all this knowledge;
do you really think they are? Or is it better to leave them
untouched, spontaneous. Hadn’t they better be animals,
simple animals, crude, violent, ANYTHING, rather than
this self-consciousness, this incapacity to be spontaneous.’
They thought she had finished. But with a queer
rumbling in her throat she resumed, ‘Hadn’t they better be
anything than grow up crippled, crippled in their souls,
crippled in their feelings—so thrown back—so turned
back on themselves—incapable—’ Hermione clenched her

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fist like one in a trance—’of any spontaneous action,

always deliberate, always burdened with choice, never
carried away.’
Again they thought she had finished. But just as he was
going to reply, she resumed her queer rhapsody—’never
carried away, out of themselves, always conscious, always
self-conscious, always aware of themselves. Isn’t
ANYTHING better than this? Better be animals, mere
animals with no mind at all, than this, this
NOTHINGNESS—’
’But do you think it is knowledge that makes us
unliving and selfconscious?’ he asked irritably.
She opened her eyes and looked at him slowly.
’Yes,’ she said. She paused, watching him all the while,
her eyes vague. Then she wiped her fingers across her
brow, with a vague weariness. It irritated him bitterly. ‘It
is the mind,’ she said, ‘and that is death.’ She raised her
eyes slowly to him: ‘Isn’t the mind—’ she said, with the
convulsed movement of her body, ‘isn’t it our death?
Doesn’t it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are
not the young people growing up today, really dead
before they have a chance to live?’
’Not because they have too much mind, but too little,’
he said brutally.

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’Are you SURE?’ she cried. ‘It seems to me the

reverse. They are overconscious, burdened to death with
consciousness.’
’Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts,’ he
cried.
But she took no notice of this, only went on with her
own rhapsodic interrogation.
’When we have knowledge, don’t we lose everything
but knowledge?’ she asked pathetically. ‘If I know about
the flower, don’t I lose the flower and have only the
knowledge? Aren’t we exchanging the substance for the
shadow, aren’t we forfeiting life for this dead quality of
knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What
does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing.’
’You are merely making words,’ he said; ‘knowledge
means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want
it in your head. You don’t want to BE an animal, you
want to observe your own animal functions, to get a
mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary—and
more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism.
What is it but the worst and last form of intellectualism,
this love of yours for passion and the animal instincts?
Passion and the instincts—you want them hard enough,
but through your head, in your consciousness. It all takes

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place in your head, under that skull of yours. Only you

won’t be conscious of what ACTUALLY is: you want the
lie that will match the rest of your furniture.’
Hermione set hard and poisonous against this attack.
Ursula stood covered with wonder and shame. It
frightened her, to see how they hated each other.
’It’s all that Lady of Shalott business,’ he said, in his
strong abstract voice. He seemed to be charging her before
the unseeing air. ‘You’ve got that mirror, your own fixed
will, your immortal understanding, your own tight
conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There, in
the mirror, you must have everything. But now you have
come to all your conclusions, you want to go back and be
like a savage, without knowledge. You want a life of pure
sensation and ‘passion.‘‘
He quoted the last word satirically against her. She sat
convulsed with fury and violation, speechless, like a
stricken pythoness of the Greek oracle.
’But your passion is a lie,’ he went on violently. ‘It isn’t
passion at all, it is your WILL. It’s your bullying will. You
want to clutch things and have them in your power. You
want to have things in your power. And why? Because
you haven’t got any real body, any dark sensual body of
life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and

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your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to

KNOW.’
He looked at her in mingled hate and contempt, also in
pain because she suffered, and in shame because he knew
he tortured her. He had an impulse to kneel and plead for
forgiveness. But a bitterer red anger burned up to fury in
him. He became unconscious of her, he was only a
passionate voice speaking.
’Spontaneous!’ he cried. ‘You and spontaneity! You,
the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled!
You’d be verily deliberately spontaneous—that’s you.
Because you want to have everything in your own
volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. You
want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought
to be cracked like a nut. For you’ll be the same till it is
cracked, like an insect in its skin. If one cracked your skull
perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman
out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is
pornography—looking at yourself in mirrors, watching
your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have
it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.’
There was a sense of violation in the air, as if too much
was said, the unforgivable. Yet Ursula was concerned now

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only with solving her own problems, in the light of his

words. She was pale and abstracted.
’But do you really WANT sensuality?’ she asked,
puzzled.
Birkin looked at her, and became intent in his
explanation.
’Yes,’ he said, ‘that and nothing else, at this point. It is
a fulfilment—the great dark knowledge you can’t have in
your head—the dark involuntary being. It is death to one’s
self—but it is the coming into being of another.’
’But how? How can you have knowledge not in your
head?’ she asked, quite unable to interpret his phrases.
’In the blood,’ he answered; ‘when the mind and the
known world is drowned in darkness everything must
go—there must be the deluge. Then you find yourself a
palpable body of darkness, a demon—’
’But why should I be a demon—?’ she asked.
’’WOMAN WAILING FOR HER DEMON
LOVER’—’ he quoted—’why, I don’t know.’
Hermione roused herself as from a death—annihilation.
’He is such a DREADFUL satanist, isn’t he?’ she
drawled to Ursula, in a queer resonant voice, that ended
on a shrill little laugh of pure ridicule. The two women
were jeering at him, jeering him into nothingness. The

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laugh of the shrill, triumphant female sounded from

Hermione, jeering him as if he were a neuter.
’No,’ he said. ‘You are the real devil who won’t let life
exist.’
She looked at him with a long, slow look, malevolent,
supercilious.
’You know all about it, don’t you?’ she said, with slow,
cold, cunning mockery.
’Enough,’ he replied, his face fixing fine and clear like
steel. A horrible despair, and at the same time a sense of
release, liberation, came over Hermione. She turned with
a pleasant intimacy to Ursula.
’You are sure you will come to Breadalby?’ she said,
urging.
’Yes, I should like to very much,’ replied Ursula.
Hermione looked down at her, gratified, reflecting, and
strangely absent, as if possessed, as if not quite there.
’I’m so glad,’ she said, pulling herself together. ‘Some
time in about a fortnight. Yes? I will write to you here, at
the school, shall I? Yes. And you’ll be sure to come? Yes. I
shall be so glad. Good-bye! Good-bye!’
Hermione held out her hand and looked into the eyes
of the other woman. She knew Ursula as an immediate
rival, and the knowledge strangely exhilarated her. Also

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she was taking leave. It always gave her a sense of strength,

advantage, to be departing and leaving the other behind.
Moreover she was taking the man with her, if only in
hate.
Birkin stood aside, fixed and unreal. But now, when it
was his turn to bid good-bye, he began to speak again.
’There’s the whole difference in the world,’ he said,
‘between the actual sensual being, and the vicious mental-
deliberate profligacy our lot goes in for. In our night-time,
there’s always the electricity switched on, we watch
ourselves, we get it all in the head, really. You’ve got to
lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is,
lapse into unknowingness, and give up your volition.
You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to learn not-to-be, before
you can come into being.
’But we have got such a conceit of ourselves—that’s
where it is. We are so conceited, and so unproud. We’ve
got no pride, we’re all conceit, so conceited in our own
papier-mache realised selves. We’d rather die than give up
our little self-righteous self-opinionated self-will.’
There was silence in the room. Both women were
hostile and resentful. He sounded as if he were addressing
a meeting. Hermione merely paid no attention, stood with
her shoulders tight in a shrug of dislike.

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Ursula was watching him as if furtively, not really

aware of what she was seeing. There was a great physical
attractiveness in him—a curious hidden richness, that
came through his thinness and his pallor like another
voice, conveying another knowledge of him. It was in the
curves of his brows and his chin, rich, fine, exquisite
curves, the powerful beauty of life itself. She could not say
what it was. But there was a sense of richness and of
liberty.
’But we are sensual enough, without making ourselves
so, aren’t we?’ she asked, turning to him with a certain
golden laughter flickering under her greenish eyes, like a
challenge. And immediately the queer, careless, terribly
attractive smile came over his eyes and brows, though his
mouth did not relax.
’No,’ he said, ‘we aren’t. We’re too full of ourselves.’
’Surely it isn’t a matter of conceit,’ she cried.
’That and nothing else.’
She was frankly puzzled.
’Don’t you think that people are most conceited of all
about their sensual powers?’ she asked.
’That’s why they aren’t sensual—only sensuous—which
is another matter. They’re ALWAYS aware of
themselves—and they’re so conceited, that rather than

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release themselves, and live in another world, from

another centre, they’d—’
’You want your tea, don’t you,’ said Hermione,
turning to Ursula with a gracious kindliness. ‘You’ve
worked all day—’
Birkin stopped short. A spasm of anger and chagrin
went over Ursula. His face set. And he bade good-bye, as
if he had ceased to notice her.
They were gone. Ursula stood looking at the door for
some moments. Then she put out the lights. And having
done so, she sat down again in her chair, absorbed and
lost. And then she began to cry, bitterly, bitterly weeping:
but whether for misery or joy, she never knew.

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Chapter IV

DIVER
The week passed away. On the Saturday it rained, a
soft drizzling rain that held off at times. In one of the
intervals Gudrun and Ursula set out for a walk, going
towards Willey Water. The atmosphere was grey and
translucent, the birds sang sharply on the young twigs, the
earth would be quickening and hastening in growth. The
two girls walked swiftly, gladly, because of the soft, subtle
rush of morning that filled the wet haze. By the road the
black-thorn was in blossom, white and wet, its tiny amber
grains burning faintly in the white smoke of blossom.
Purple twigs were darkly luminous in the grey air, high
hedges glowed like living shadows, hovering nearer,
coming into creation. The morning was full of a new
creation.
When the sisters came to Willey Water, the lake lay all
grey and visionary, stretching into the moist, translucent
vista of trees and meadow. Fine electric activity in sound
came from the dumbles below the road, the birds piping
one against the other, and water mysteriously plashing,
issuing from the lake.

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The two girls drifted swiftly along. In front of them, at

the corner of the lake, near the road, was a mossy boat-
house under a walnut tree, and a little landing-stage where
a boat was moored, wavering like a shadow on the still
grey water, below the green, decayed poles. All was
shadowy with coming summer.
Suddenly, from the boat-house, a white figure ran out,
frightening in its swift sharp transit, across the old landing-
stage. It launched in a white arc through the air, there was
a bursting of the water, and among the smooth ripples a
swimmer was making out to space, in a centre of faintly
heaving motion. The whole otherworld, wet and remote,
he had to himself. He could move into the pure
translucency of the grey, uncreated water.
Gudrun stood by the stone wall, watching.
’How I envy him,’ she said, in low, desirous tones.
’Ugh!’ shivered Ursula. ‘So cold!’
’Yes, but how good, how really fine, to swim out
there!’ The sisters stood watching the swimmer move
further into the grey, moist, full space of the water, pulsing
with his own small, invading motion, and arched over
with mist and dim woods.
’Don’t you wish it were you?’ asked Gudrun, looking
at Ursula.

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’I do,’ said Ursula. ‘But I’m not sure—it’s so wet.’

’No,’ said Gudrun, reluctantly. She stood watching the
motion on the bosom of the water, as if fascinated. He,
having swum a certain distance, turned round and was
swimming on his back, looking along the water at the two
girls by the wall. In the faint wash of motion, they could
see his ruddy face, and could feel him watching them.
’It is Gerald Crich,’ said Ursula.
’I know,’ replied Gudrun.
And she stood motionless gazing over the water at the
face which washed up and down on the flood, as he swam
steadily. From his separate element he saw them and he
exulted to himself because of his own advantage, his
possession of a world to himself. He was immune and
perfect. He loved his own vigorous, thrusting motion, and
the violent impulse of the very cold water against his
limbs, buoying him up. He could see the girls watching
him a way off, outside, and that pleased him. He lifted his
arm from the water, in a sign to them.
’He is waving,’ said Ursula.
’Yes,’ replied Gudrun. They watched him. He waved
again, with a strange movement of recognition across the
difference.

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’Like a Nibelung,’ laughed Ursula. Gudrun said

nothing, only stood still looking over the water.
Gerald suddenly turned, and was swimming away
swiftly, with a side stroke. He was alone now, alone and
immune in the middle of the waters, which he had all to
himself. He exulted in his isolation in the new element,
unquestioned and unconditioned. He was happy, thrusting
with his legs and all his body, without bond or connection
anywhere, just himself in the watery world.
Gudrun envied him almost painfully. Even this
momentary possession of pure isolation and fluidity
seemed to her so terribly desirable that she felt herself as if
damned, out there on the high-road.
’God, what it is to be a man!’ she cried.
’What?’ exclaimed Ursula in surprise.
’The freedom, the liberty, the mobility!’ cried Gudrun,
strangely flushed and brilliant. ‘You’re a man, you want to
do a thing, you do it. You haven’t the THOUSAND
obstacles a woman has in front of her.’
Ursula wondered what was in Gudrun’s mind, to
occasion this outburst. She could not understand.
’What do you want to do?’ she asked.
’Nothing,’ cried Gudrun, in swift refutation. ‘But
supposing I did. Supposing I want to swim up that water.

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It is impossible, it is one of the impossibilities of life, for

me to take my clothes off now and jump in. But isn’t it
RIDICULOUS, doesn’t it simply prevent our living!’
She was so hot, so flushed, so furious, that Ursula was
puzzled.
The two sisters went on, up the road. They were
passing between the trees just below Shortlands. They
looked up at the long, low house, dim and glamorous in
the wet morning, its cedar trees slanting before the
windows. Gudrun seemed to be studying it closely.
’Don’t you think it’s attractive, Ursula?’ asked Gudrun.
’Very,’ said Ursula. ‘Very peaceful and charming.’
’It has form, too—it has a period.’
’What period?’
’Oh, eighteenth century, for certain; Dorothy
Wordsworth and Jane Austen, don’t you think?’
Ursula laughed.
’Don’t you think so?’ repeated Gudrun.
’Perhaps. But I don’t think the Criches fit the period. I
know Gerald is putting in a private electric plant, for
lighting the house, and is making all kinds of latest
improvements.’
Gudrun shrugged her shoulders swiftly.
’Of course,’ she said, ‘that’s quite inevitable.’

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’Quite,’ laughed Ursula. ‘He is several generations of

youngness at one go. They hate him for it. He takes them
all by the scruff of the neck, and fairly flings them along.
He’ll have to die soon, when he’s made every possible
improvement, and there will be nothing more to improve.
He’s got GO, anyhow.’
’Certainly, he’s got go,’ said Gudrun. ‘In fact I’ve never
seen a man that showed signs of so much. The unfortunate
thing is, where does his GO go to, what becomes of it?’
’Oh I know,’ said Ursula. ‘It goes in applying the latest
appliances!’
’Exactly,’ said Gudrun.
’You know he shot his brother?’ said Ursula.
’Shot his brother?’ cried Gudrun, frowning as if in
disapprobation.
’Didn’t you know? Oh yes!—I thought you knew. He
and his brother were playing together with a gun. He told
his brother to look down the gun, and it was loaded, and
blew the top of his head off. Isn’t it a horrible story?’
’How fearful!’ cried Gudrun. ‘But it is long ago?’
’Oh yes, they were quite boys,’ said Ursula. ‘I think it
is one of the most horrible stories I know.’
’And he of course did not know that the gun was
loaded?’

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’Yes. You see it was an old thing that had been lying in
the stable for years. Nobody dreamed it would ever go off,
and of course, no one imagined it was loaded. But isn’t it
dreadful, that it should happen?’
’Frightful!’ cried Gudrun. ‘And isn’t it horrible too to
think of such a thing happening to one, when one was a
child, and having to carry the responsibility of it all
through one’s life. Imagine it, two boys playing
together—then this comes upon them, for no reason
whatever—out of the air. Ursula, it’s very frightening! Oh,
it’s one of the things I can’t bear. Murder, that is
thinkable, because there’s a will behind it. But a thing like
that to HAPPEN to one—’
’Perhaps there WAS an unconscious will behind it,’
said Ursula. ‘This playing at killing has some primitive
DESIRE for killing in it, don’t you think?’
’Desire!’ said Gudrun, coldly, stiffening a little. ‘I can’t
see that they were even playing at killing. I suppose one
boy said to the other, ‘You look down the barrel while I
pull the trigger, and see what happens.’ It seems to me the
purest form of accident.’
’No,’ said Ursula. ‘I couldn’t pull the trigger of the
emptiest gun in the world, not if some-one were looking

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down the barrel. One instinctively doesn’t do it—one

can’t.’
Gudrun was silent for some moments, in sharp
disagreement.
’Of course,’ she said coldly. ‘If one is a woman, and
grown up, one’s instinct prevents one. But I cannot see
how that applies to a couple of boys playing together.’
Her voice was cold and angry.
’Yes,’ persisted Ursula. At that moment they heard a
woman’s voice a few yards off say loudly:
’Oh damn the thing!’ They went forward and saw
Laura Crich and Hermione Roddice in the field on the
other side of the hedge, and Laura Crich struggling with
the gate, to get out. Ursula at once hurried up and helped
to lift the gate.
’Thanks so much,’ said Laura, looking up flushed and
amazon-like, yet rather confused. ‘It isn’t right on the
hinges.’
’No,’ said Ursula. ‘And they’re so heavy.’
’Surprising!’ cried Laura.
’How do you do,’ sang Hermione, from out of the
field, the moment she could make her voice heard. ‘It’s
nice now. Are you going for a walk? Yes. Isn’t the young
green beautiful? So beautiful—quite burning. Good

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morning—good morning—you’ll come and see me?—

thank you so much—next week—yes—good-bye, g-o-o-
d b-y-e.’
Gudrun and Ursula stood and watched her slowly
waving her head up and down, and waving her hand
slowly in dismissal, smiling a strange affected smile, making
a tall queer, frightening figure, with her heavy fair hair
slipping to her eyes. Then they moved off, as if they had
been dismissed like inferiors. The four women parted.
As soon as they had gone far enough, Ursula said, her
cheeks burning,
’I do think she’s impudent.’
’Who, Hermione Roddice?’ asked Gudrun. ‘Why?’
’The way she treats one—impudence!’
’Why, Ursula, what did you notice that was so
impudent?’ asked Gudrun rather coldly.
’Her whole manner. Oh, It’s impossible, the way she
tries to bully one. Pure bullying. She’s an impudent
woman. ‘You’ll come and see me,’ as if we should be
falling over ourselves for the privilege.’
’I can’t understand, Ursula, what you are so much put
out about,’ said Gudrun, in some exasperation. ‘One
knows those women are impudent—these free women
who have emancipated themselves from the aristocracy.’

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’But it is so UNNECESSARY—so vulgar,’ cried

Ursula.
’No, I don’t see it. And if I did—pour moi, elle
n’existe pas. I don’t grant her the power to be impudent
to me.’
’Do you think she likes you?’ asked Ursula.
’Well, no, I shouldn’t think she did.’
’Then why does she ask you to go to Breadalby and
stay with her?’
Gudrun lifted her shoulders in a low shrug.
’After all, she’s got the sense to know we’re not just the
ordinary run,’ said Gudrun. ‘Whatever she is, she’s not a
fool. And I’d rather have somebody I detested, than the
ordinary woman who keeps to her own set. Hermione
Roddice does risk herself in some respects.’
Ursula pondered this for a time.
’I doubt it,’ she replied. ‘Really she risks nothing. I
suppose we ought to admire her for knowing she CAN
invite us—school teachers—and risk nothing.’
’Precisely!’ said Gudrun. ‘Think of the myriads of
women that daren’t do it. She makes the most of her
privileges—that’s something. I suppose, really, we should
do the same, in her place.’

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’No,’ said Ursula. ‘No. It would bore me. I couldn’t

spend my time playing her games. It’s infra dig.’
The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off
everything that came athwart them; or like a knife and a
whetstone, the one sharpened against the other.
’Of course,’ cried Ursula suddenly, ‘she ought to thank
her stars if we will go and see her. You are perfectly
beautiful, a thousand times more beautiful than ever she is
or was, and to my thinking, a thousand times more
beautifully dressed, for she never looks fresh and natural,
like a flower, always old, thought-out; and we ARE more
intelligent than most people.’
’Undoubtedly!’ said Gudrun.
’And it ought to be admitted, simply,’ said Ursula.
’Certainly it ought,’ said Gudrun. ‘But you’ll find that
the really chic thing is to be so absolutely ordinary, so
perfectly commonplace and like the person in the street,
that you really are a masterpiece of humanity, not the
person in the street actually, but the artistic creation of
her—’
’How awful!’ cried Ursula.
’Yes, Ursula, it IS awful, in most respects. You daren’t
be anything that isn’t amazingly A TERRE, SO much A
TERRE that it is the artistic creation of ordinariness.’

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’It’s very dull to create oneself into nothing better,’

laughed Ursula.
’Very dull!’ retorted Gudrun. ‘Really Ursula, it is dull,
that’s just the word. One longs to be high-flown, and
make speeches like Corneille, after it.’
Gudrun was becoming flushed and excited over her
own cleverness.
’Strut,’ said Ursula. ‘One wants to strut, to be a swan
among geese.’
’Exactly,’ cried Gudrun, ‘a swan among geese.’
’They are all so busy playing the ugly duckling,’ cried
Ursula, with mocking laughter. ‘And I don’t feel a bit like
a humble and pathetic ugly duckling. I do feel like a swan
among geese—I can’t help it. They make one feel so. And
I don’t care what THEY think of me. FE M’EN FICHE.’
Gudrun looked up at Ursula with a queer, uncertain
envy and dislike.
’Of course, the only thing to do is to despise them all—
just all,’ she said.
The sisters went home again, to read and talk and
work, and wait for Monday, for school. Ursula often
wondered what else she waited for, besides the beginning
and end of the school week, and the beginning and end of
the holidays. This was a whole life! Sometimes she had

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periods of tight horror, when it seemed to her that her life

would pass away, and be gone, without having been more
than this. But she never really accepted it. Her spirit was
active, her life like a shoot that is growing steadily, but
which has not yet come above ground.

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Chapter V

IN THE TRAIN
One day at this time Birkin was called to London. He
was not very fixed in his abode. He had rooms in
Nottingham, because his work lay chiefly in that town.
But often he was in London, or in Oxford. He moved
about a great deal, his life seemed uncertain, without any
definite rhythm, any organic meaning.
On the platform of the railway station he saw Gerald
Crich, reading a newspaper, and evidently waiting for the
train. Birkin stood some distance off, among the people. It
was against his instinct to approach anybody.
From time to time, in a manner characteristic of him,
Gerald lifted his head and looked round. Even though he
was reading the newspaper closely, he must keep a
watchful eye on his external surroundings. There seemed
to be a dual consciousness running in him. He was
thinking vigorously of something he read in the
newspaper, and at the same time his eye ran over the
surfaces of the life round him, and he missed nothing.
Birkin, who was watching him, was irritated by his
duality. He noticed too, that Gerald seemed always to be

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at bay against everybody, in spite of his queer, genial,

social manner when roused.
Now Birkin started violently at seeing this genial look
flash on to Gerald’s face, at seeing Gerald approaching
with hand outstretched.
’Hallo, Rupert, where are you going?’
’London. So are you, I suppose.’
’Yes—’
Gerald’s eyes went over Birkin’s face in curiosity.
’We’ll travel together if you like,’ he said.
’Don’t you usually go first?’ asked Birkin.
’I can’t stand the crowd,’ replied Gerald. ‘But third’ll
be all right. There’s a restaurant car, we can have some
tea.’
The two men looked at the station clock, having
nothing further to say.
’What were you reading in the paper?’ Birkin asked.
Gerald looked at him quickly.
’Isn’t it funny, what they DO put in the newspapers,’
he said. ‘Here are two leaders—’ he held out his DAILY
TELEGRAPH, ‘full of the ordinary newspaper cant—’ he
scanned the columns down—’and then there’s this little—
I dunno what you’d call it, essay, almost—appearing with
the leaders, and saying there must arise a man who will

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give new values to things, give us new truths, a new

attitude to life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness
in a few years, a country in ruin—’
’I suppose that’s a bit of newspaper cant, as well,’ said
Birkin.
’It sounds as if the man meant it, and quite genuinely,’
said Gerald.
’Give it to me,’ said Birkin, holding out his hand for
the paper.
The train came, and they went on board, sitting on
either side a little table, by the window, in the restaurant
car. Birkin glanced over his paper, then looked up at
Gerald, who was waiting for him.
’I believe the man means it,’ he said, ‘as far as he means
anything.’
’And do you think it’s true? Do you think we really
want a new gospel?’ asked Gerald.
Birkin shrugged his shoulders.
’I think the people who say they want a new religion
are the last to accept anything new. They want novelty
right enough. But to stare straight at this life that we’ve
brought upon ourselves, and reject it, absolutely smash up
the old idols of ourselves, that we sh’ll never do. You’ve

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got very badly to want to get rid of the old, before

anything new will appear—even in the self.’
Gerald watched him closely.
’You think we ought to break up this life, just start and
let fly?’ he asked.
’This life. Yes I do. We’ve got to bust it completely, or
shrivel inside it, as in a tight skin. For it won’t expand any
more.’
There was a queer little smile in Gerald’s eyes, a look of
amusement, calm and curious.
’And how do you propose to begin? I suppose you
mean, reform the whole order of society?’ he asked.
Birkin had a slight, tense frown between the brows. He
too was impatient of the conversation.
’I don’t propose at all,’ he replied. ‘When we really
want to go for something better, we shall smash the old.
Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no
more than a tiresome game for self-important people.’
The little smile began to die out of Gerald’s eyes, and
he said, looking with a cool stare at Birkin:
’So you really think things are very bad?’
’Completely bad.’
The smile appeared again.
’In what way?’

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’Every way,’ said Birkin. ‘We are such dreary liars. Our
one idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a
perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we
cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like
insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a
pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a
motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we
can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the
Sunday newspapers. It is very dreary.’
Gerald took a little time to re-adjust himself after this
tirade.
’Would you have us live without houses—return to
nature?’ he asked.
’I would have nothing at all. People only do what they
want to do—and what they are capable of doing. If they
were capable of anything else, there would be something
else.’
Again Gerald pondered. He was not going to take
offence at Birkin.
’Don’t you think the collier’s PIANOFORTE, as you
call it, is a symbol for something very real, a real desire for
something higher, in the collier’s life?’
’Higher!’ cried Birkin. ‘Yes. Amazing heights of
upright grandeur. It makes him so much higher in his

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neighbouring collier’s eyes. He sees himself reflected in

the neighbouring opinion, like in a Brocken mist, several
feet taller on the strength of the pianoforte, and he is
satisfied. He lives for the sake of that Brocken spectre, the
reflection of himself in the human opinion. You do the
same. If you are of high importance to humanity you are
of high importance to yourself. That is why you work so
hard at the mines. If you can produce coal to cook five
thousand dinners a day, you are five thousand times more
important than if you cooked only your own dinner.’
’I suppose I am,’ laughed Gerald.
’Can’t you see,’ said Birkin, ‘that to help my neighbour
to eat is no more than eating myself. ‘I eat, thou eatest, he
eats, we eat, you eat, they eat’—and what then? Why
should every man decline the whole verb. First person
singular is enough for me.’
’You’ve got to start with material things,’ said Gerald.
Which statement Birkin ignored.
’And we’ve got to live for SOMETHING, we’re not
just cattle that can graze and have done with it,’ said
Gerald.
’Tell me,’ said Birkin. ‘What do you live for?’
Gerald’s face went baffled.

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’What do I live for?’ he repeated. ‘I suppose I live to

work, to produce something, in so far as I am a purposive
being. Apart from that, I live because I am living.’
’And what’s your work? Getting so many more
thousands of tons of coal out of the earth every day. And
when we’ve got all the coal we want, and all the plush
furniture, and pianofortes, and the rabbits are all stewed
and eaten, and we’re all warm and our bellies are filled and
we’re listening to the young lady performing on the
pianoforte—what then? What then, when you’ve made a
real fair start with your material things?’
Gerald sat laughing at the words and the mocking
humour of the other man. But he was cogitating too.
’We haven’t got there yet,’ he replied. ‘A good many
people are still waiting for the rabbit and the fire to cook
it.’
’So while you get the coal I must chase the rabbit?’ said
Birkin, mocking at Gerald.
’Something like that,’ said Gerald.
Birkin watched him narrowly. He saw the perfect
good-humoured callousness, even strange, glistening
malice, in Gerald, glistening through the plausible ethics of
productivity.
’Gerald,’ he said, ‘I rather hate you.’

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’I know you do,’ said Gerald. ‘Why do you?’

Birkin mused inscrutably for some minutes.
’I should like to know if you are conscious of hating
me,’ he said at last. ‘Do you ever consciously detest me—
hate me with mystic hate? There are odd moments when I
hate you starrily.’
Gerald was rather taken aback, even a little
disconcerted. He did not quite know what to say.
’I may, of course, hate you sometimes,’ he said. ‘But
I’m not aware of it—never acutely aware of it, that is.’
’So much the worse,’ said Birkin.
Gerald watched him with curious eyes. He could not
quite make him out.
’So much the worse, is it?’ he repeated.
There was a silence between the two men for some
time, as the train ran on. In Birkin’s face was a little
irritable tension, a sharp knitting of the brows, keen and
difficult. Gerald watched him warily, carefully, rather
calculatingly, for he could not decide what he was after.
Suddenly Birkin’s eyes looked straight and
overpowering into those of the other man.
’What do you think is the aim and object of your life,
Gerald?’ he asked.

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Again Gerald was taken aback. He could not think

what his friend was getting at. Was he poking fun, or not?
’At this moment, I couldn’t say off-hand,’ he replied,
with faintly ironic humour.
’Do you think love is the be-all and the end-all of life?’
Birkin asked, with direct, attentive seriousness.
’Of my own life?’ said Gerald.
’Yes.’
There was a really puzzled pause.
’I can’t say,’ said Gerald. ‘It hasn’t been, so far.’
’What has your life been, so far?’
’Oh—finding out things for myself—and getting
experiences—and making things GO.’
Birkin knitted his brows like sharply moulded steel.
’I find,’ he said, ‘that one needs some one REALLY
pure single activity—I should call love a single pure
activity. But I DON’T really love anybody—not now.’
’Have you ever really loved anybody?’ asked Gerald.
’Yes and no,’ replied Birkin.
’Not finally?’ said Gerald.
’Finally—finally—no,’ said Birkin.
’Nor I,’ said Gerald.
’And do you want to?’ said Birkin.

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Gerald looked with a long, twinkling, almost sardonic

look into the eyes of the other man.
’I don’t know,’ he said.
’I do—I want to love,’ said Birkin.
’You do?’
’Yes. I want the finality of love.’
’The finality of love,’ repeated Gerald. And he waited
for a moment.
’Just one woman?’ he added. The evening light,
flooding yellow along the fields, lit up Birkin’s face with a
tense, abstract steadfastness. Gerald still could not make it
out.
’Yes, one woman,’ said Birkin.
But to Gerald it sounded as if he were insistent rather
than confident.
’I don’t believe a woman, and nothing but a woman,
will ever make my life,’ said Gerald.
’Not the centre and core of it—the love between you
and a woman?’ asked Birkin.
Gerald’s eyes narrowed with a queer dangerous smile as
he watched the other man.
’I never quite feel it that way,’ he said.
’You don’t? Then wherein does life centre, for you?’

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’I don’t know—that’s what I want somebody to tell

me. As far as I can make out, it doesn’t centre at all. It is
artificially held TOGETHER by the social mechanism.’
Birkin pondered as if he would crack something.
’I know,’ he said, ‘it just doesn’t centre. The old ideals
are dead as nails—nothing there. It seems to me there
remains only this perfect union with a woman—sort of
ultimate marriage—and there isn’t anything else.’
’And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s
nothing?’ said Gerald.
’Pretty well that—seeing there’s no God.’
’Then we’re hard put to it,’ said Gerald. And he turned
to look out of the window at the flying, golden landscape.
Birkin could not help seeing how beautiful and
soldierly his face was, with a certain courage to be
indifferent.
’You think its heavy odds against us?’ said Birkin.
’If we’ve got to make our life up out of a woman, one
woman, woman only, yes, I do,’ said Gerald. ‘I don’t
believe I shall ever make up MY life, at that rate.’
Birkin watched him almost angrily.
’You are a born unbeliever,’ he said.
’I only feel what I feel,’ said Gerald. And he looked
again at Birkin almost sardonically, with his blue, manly,

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sharp-lighted eyes. Birkin’s eyes were at the moment full

of anger. But swiftly they became troubled, doubtful, then
full of a warm, rich affectionateness and laughter.
’It troubles me very much, Gerald,’ he said, wrinkling
his brows.
’I can see it does,’ said Gerald, uncovering his mouth in
a manly, quick, soldierly laugh.
Gerald was held unconsciously by the other man. He
wanted to be near him, he wanted to be within his sphere
of influence. There was something very congenial to him
in Birkin. But yet, beyond this, he did not take much
notice. He felt that he, himself, Gerald, had harder and
more durable truths than any the other man knew. He felt
himself older, more knowing. It was the quick-changing
warmth and venality and brilliant warm utterance he loved
in his friend. It was the rich play of words and quick
interchange of feelings he enjoyed. The real content of the
words he never really considered: he himself knew better.
Birkin knew this. He knew that Gerald wanted to be
FOND of him without taking him seriously. And this
made him go hard and cold. As the train ran on, he sat
looking at the land, and Gerald fell away, became as
nothing to him.

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Birkin looked at the land, at the evening, and was

thinking: ‘Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is
destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening
with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That
which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After
all, what is mankind but just one expression of the
incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will
only mean that this particular expression is completed and
done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be
expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is, in the shining
evening. Let mankind pass away—time it did. The
creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there.
Humanity doesn’t embody the utterance of the
incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter.
There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let
humanity disappear as quick as possible.’
Gerald interrupted him by asking,
’Where are you staying in London?’
Birkin looked up.
’With a man in Soho. I pay part of the rent of a flat,
and stop there when I like.’
’Good idea—have a place more or less your own,’ said
Gerald.

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’Yes. But I don’t care for it much. I’m tired of the

people I am bound to find there.’
’What kind of people?’
’Art—music—London Bohemia—the most
pettifogging calculating Bohemia that ever reckoned its
pennies. But there are a few decent people, decent in
some respects. They are really very thorough rejecters of
the world—perhaps they live only in the gesture of
rejection and negation—but negatively something, at any
rate.’
’What are they?—painters, musicians?’
’Painters, musicians, writers—hangers-on, models,
advanced young people, anybody who is openly at outs
with the conventions, and belongs to nowhere
particularly. They are often young fellows down from the
University, and girls who are living their own lives, as
they say.’
’All loose?’ said Gerald.
Birkin could see his curiosity roused.
’In one way. Most bound, in another. For all their
shockingness, all on one note.’
He looked at Gerald, and saw how his blue eyes were
lit up with a little flame of curious desire. He saw too how
good-looking he was. Gerald was attractive, his blood

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seemed fluid and electric. His blue eyes burned with a

keen, yet cold light, there was a certain beauty, a beautiful
passivity in all his body, his moulding.
’We might see something of each other—I am in
London for two or three days,’ said Gerald.
’Yes,’ said Birkin, ‘I don’t want to go to the theatre, or
the music hall—you’d better come round to the flat, and
see what you can make of Halliday and his crowd.’
’Thanks—I should like to,’ laughed Gerald. ‘What are
you doing tonight?’
’I promised to meet Halliday at the Pompadour. It’s a
bad place, but there is nowhere else.’
’Where is it?’ asked Gerald.
’Piccadilly Circus.’
’Oh yes—well, shall I come round there?’
’By all means, it might amuse you.’
The evening was falling. They had passed Bedford.
Birkin watched the country, and was filled with a sort of
hopelessness. He always felt this, on approaching London.
His dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind,
amounted almost to an illness.
’’Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles Miles
and miles—‘‘ he was murmuring to himself, like a man

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condemned to death. Gerald, who was very subtly alert,

wary in all his senses, leaned forward and asked smilingly:
’What were you saying?’ Birkin glanced at him,
laughed, and repeated:
’’Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles, Over pastures where the something
something sheep Half asleep—‘‘
Gerald also looked now at the country. And Birkin,
who, for some reason was now tired and dispirited, said to
him:
’I always feel doomed when the train is running into
London. I feel such a despair, so hopeless, as if it were the
end of the world.’
’Really!’ said Gerald. ‘And does the end of the world
frighten you?’
Birkin lifted his shoulders in a slow shrug.
’I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It does while it hangs
imminent and doesn’t fall. But people give me a bad
feeling—very bad.’
There was a roused glad smile in Gerald’s eyes.
’Do they?’ he said. And he watched the other man
critically.
In a few minutes the train was running through the
disgrace of outspread London. Everybody in the carriage

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was on the alert, waiting to escape. At last they were

under the huge arch of the station, in the tremendous
shadow of the town. Birkin shut himself together—he was
in now.
The two men went together in a taxi-cab.
’Don’t you feel like one of the damned?’ asked Birkin,
as they sat in a little, swiftly-running enclosure, and
watched the hideous great street.
’No,’ laughed Gerald.
’It is real death,’ said Birkin.

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Chapter VI

CREME DE MENTHE
They met again in the cafe several hours later. Gerald
went through the push doors into the large, lofty room
where the faces and heads of the drinkers showed dimly
through the haze of smoke, reflected more dimly, and
repeated ad infinitum in the great mirrors on the walls, so
that one seemed to enter a vague, dim world of shadowy
drinkers humming within an atmosphere of blue tobacco
smoke. There was, however, the red plush of the seats to
give substance within the bubble of pleasure.
Gerald moved in his slow, observant, glistening-
attentive motion down between the tables and the people
whose shadowy faces looked up as he passed. He seemed
to be entering in some strange element, passing into an
illuminated new region, among a host of licentious souls.
He was pleased, and entertained. He looked over all the
dim, evanescent, strangely illuminated faces that bent
across the tables. Then he saw Birkin rise and signal to
him.
At Birkin’s table was a girl with dark, soft, fluffy hair
cut short in the artist fashion, hanging level and full almost

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like the Egyptian princess’s. She was small and delicately

made, with warm colouring and large, dark hostile eyes.
There was a delicacy, almost a beauty in all her form, and
at the same time a certain attractive grossness of spirit, that
made a little spark leap instantly alight in Gerald’s eyes.
Birkin, who looked muted, unreal, his presence left
out, introduced her as Miss Darrington. She gave her hand
with a sudden, unwilling movement, looking all the while
at Gerald with a dark, exposed stare. A glow came over
him as he sat down.
The waiter appeared. Gerald glanced at the glasses of
the other two. Birkin was drinking something green, Miss
Darrington had a small liqueur glass that was empty save
for a tiny drop.
’Won’t you have some more—?’
’Brandy,’ she said, sipping her last drop and putting
down the glass. The waiter disappeared.
’No,’ she said to Birkin. ‘He doesn’t know I’m back.
He’ll be terrified when he sees me here.’
She spoke her r’s like w’s, lisping with a slightly babyish
pronunciation which was at once affected and true to her
character. Her voice was dull and toneless.
’Where is he then?’ asked Birkin.

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’He’s doing a private show at Lady Snellgrove’s,’ said

the girl. ‘Warens is there too.’
There was a pause.
’Well, then,’ said Birkin, in a dispassionate protective
manner, ‘what do you intend to do?’
The girl paused sullenly. She hated the question.
’I don’t intend to do anything,’ she replied. ‘I shall look
for some sittings tomorrow.’
’Who shall you go to?’ asked Birkin.
’I shall go to Bentley’s first. But I believe he’s angwy
with me for running away.’
’That is from the Madonna?’
’Yes. And then if he doesn’t want me, I know I can get
work with Carmarthen.’
’Carmarthen?’
’Lord Carmarthen—he does photographs.’
’Chiffon and shoulders—’
’Yes. But he’s awfully decent.’ There was a pause.
’And what are you going to do about Julius?’ he asked.
’Nothing,’ she said. ‘I shall just ignore him.’
’You’ve done with him altogether?’ But she turned
aside her face sullenly, and did not answer the question.
Another young man came hurrying up to the table.

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’Hallo Birkin! Hallo PUSSUM, when did you come

back?’ he said eagerly.
’Today.’
’Does Halliday know?’
’I don’t know. I don’t care either.’
’Ha-ha! The wind still sits in that quarter, does it? Do
you mind if I come over to this table?’
’I’m talking to Wupert, do you mind?’ she replied,
coolly and yet appealingly, like a child.
’Open confession—good for the soul, eh?’ said the
young man. ‘Well, so long.’
And giving a sharp look at Birkin and at Gerald, the
young man moved off, with a swing of his coat skirts.
All this time Gerald had been completely ignored. And
yet he felt that the girl was physically aware of his
proximity. He waited, listened, and tried to piece together
the conversation.
’Are you staying at the flat?’ the girl asked, of Birkin.
’For three days,’ replied Birkin. ‘And you?’
’I don’t know yet. I can always go to Bertha’s.’ There
was a silence.
Suddenly the girl turned to Gerald, and said, in a rather
formal, polite voice, with the distant manner of a woman

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who accepts her position as a social inferior, yet assumes

intimate CAMARADERIE with the male she addresses:
’Do you know London well?’
’I can hardly say,’ he laughed. ‘I’ve been up a good
many times, but I was never in this place before.’
’You’re not an artist, then?’ she said, in a tone that
placed him an outsider.
’No,’ he replied.
’He’s a soldier, and an explorer, and a Napoleon of
industry,’ said Birkin, giving Gerald his credentials for
Bohemia.
’Are you a soldier?’ asked the girl, with a cold yet lively
curiosity.
’No, I resigned my commission,’ said Gerald, ‘some
years ago.’
’He was in the last war,’ said Birkin.
’Were you really?’ said the girl.
’And then he explored the Amazon,’ said Birkin, ‘and
now he is ruling over coal-mines.’
The girl looked at Gerald with steady, calm curiosity.
He laughed, hearing himself described. He felt proud too,
full of male strength. His blue, keen eyes were lit up with
laughter, his ruddy face, with its sharp fair hair, was full of
satisfaction, and glowing with life. He piqued her.

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’How long are you staying?’ she asked him.

’A day or two,’ he replied. ‘But there is no particular
hurry.’
Still she stared into his face with that slow, full gaze
which was so curious and so exciting to him. He was
acutely and delightfully conscious of himself, of his own
attractiveness. He felt full of strength, able to give off a sort
of electric power. And he was aware of her dark, hot-
looking eyes upon him. She had beautiful eyes, dark,
fully-opened, hot, naked in their looking at him. And on
them there seemed to float a film of disintegration, a sort
of misery and sullenness, like oil on water. She wore no
hat in the heated cafe, her loose, simple jumper was strung
on a string round her neck. But it was made of rich peach-
coloured crepe-de-chine, that hung heavily and softly
from her young throat and her slender wrists. Her
appearance was simple and complete, really beautiful,
because of her regularity and form, her soft dark hair
falling full and level on either side of her head, her
straight, small, softened features, Egyptian in the slight
fulness of their curves, her slender neck and the simple,
rich-coloured smock hanging on her slender shoulders.
She was very still, almost null, in her manner, apart and
watchful.

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She appealed to Gerald strongly. He felt an awful,

enjoyable power over her, an instinctive cherishing very
near to cruelty. For she was a victim. He felt that she was
in his power, and he was generous. The electricity was
turgid and voluptuously rich, in his limbs. He would be
able to destroy her utterly in the strength of his discharge.
But she was waiting in her separation, given.
They talked banalities for some time. Suddenly Birkin
said:
’There’s Julius!’ and he half rose to his feet, motioning
to the newcomer. The girl, with a curious, almost evil
motion, looked round over her shoulder without moving
her body. Gerald watched her dark, soft hair swing over
her ears. He felt her watching intensely the man who was
approaching, so he looked too. He saw a pale, full-built
young man with rather long, solid fair hair hanging from
under his black hat, moving cumbrously down the room,
his face lit up with a smile at once naive and warm, and
vapid. He approached towards Birkin, with a haste of
welcome.
It was not till he was quite close that he perceived the
girl. He recoiled, went pale, and said, in a high squealing
voice:
’Pussum, what are YOU doing here?’

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The cafe looked up like animals when they hear a cry.

Halliday hung motionless, an almost imbecile smile
flickering palely on his face. The girl only stared at him
with a black look in which flared an unfathomable hell of
knowledge, and a certain impotence. She was limited by
him.
’Why have you come back?’ repeated Halliday, in the
same high, hysterical voice. ‘I told you not to come back.’
The girl did not answer, only stared in the same
viscous, heavy fashion, straight at him, as he stood
recoiled, as if for safety, against the next table.
’You know you wanted her to come back—come and
sit down,’ said Birkin to him.
’No I didn’t want her to come back, and I told her not
to come back. What have you come for, Pussum?’
’For nothing from YOU,’ she said in a heavy voice of
resentment.
’Then why have you come back at ALL?’ cried
Halliday, his voice rising to a kind of squeal.
’She comes as she likes,’ said Birkin. ‘Are you going to
sit down, or are you not?’
’No, I won’t sit down with Pussum,’ cried Halliday.

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’I won’t hurt you, you needn’t be afraid,’ she said to

him, very curtly, and yet with a sort of protectiveness
towards him, in her voice.
Halliday came and sat at the table, putting his hand on
his heart, and crying:
’Oh, it’s given me such a turn! Pussum, I wish you
wouldn’t do these things. Why did you come back?’
’Not for anything from you,’ she repeated.
’You’ve said that before,’ he cried in a high voice.
She turned completely away from him, to Gerald
Crich, whose eyes were shining with a subtle amusement.
’Were you ever vewy much afwaid of the savages?’ she
asked in her calm, dull childish voice.
’No—never very much afraid. On the whole they’re
harmless—they’re not born yet, you can’t feel really afraid
of them. You know you can manage them.’
’Do you weally? Aren’t they very fierce?’
’Not very. There aren’t many fierce things, as a matter
of fact. There aren’t many things, neither people nor
animals, that have it in them to be really dangerous.’
’Except in herds,’ interrupted Birkin.
’Aren’t there really?’ she said. ‘Oh, I thought savages
were all so dangerous, they’d have your life before you
could look round.’

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’Did you?’ he laughed. ‘They are over-rated, savages.

They’re too much like other people, not exciting, after
the first acquaintance.’
’Oh, it’s not so very wonderfully brave then, to be an
explorer?’
’No. It’s more a question of hardships than of terrors.’
’Oh! And weren’t you ever afraid?’
’In my life? I don’t know. Yes, I’m afraid of some
things—of being shut up, locked up anywhere—or being
fastened. I’m afraid of being bound hand and foot.’
She looked at him steadily with her dark eyes, that
rested on him and roused him so deeply, that it left his
upper self quite calm. It was rather delicious, to feel her
drawing his self-revelations from him, as from the very
innermost dark marrow of his body. She wanted to know.
And her dark eyes seemed to be looking through into his
naked organism. He felt, she was compelled to him, she
was fated to come into contact with him, must have the
seeing him and knowing him. And this roused a curious
exultance. Also he felt, she must relinquish herself into his
hands, and be subject to him. She was so profane, slave-
like, watching him, absorbed by him. It was not that she
was interested in what he said; she was absorbed by his

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self-revelation, by HIM, she wanted the secret of him, the

experience of his male being.
Gerald’s face was lit up with an uncanny smile, full of
light and rousedness, yet unconscious. He sat with his arms
on the table, his sunbrowned, rather sinister hands, that
were animal and yet very shapely and attractive, pushed
forward towards her. And they fascinated her. And she
knew, she watched her own fascination.
Other men had come to the table, to talk with Birkin
and Halliday. Gerald said in a low voice, apart, to Pussum:
’Where have you come back from?’
’From the country,’ replied Pussum, in a very low, yet
fully resonant voice. Her face closed hard. Continually she
glanced at Halliday, and then a black flare came over her
eyes. The heavy, fair young man ignored her completely;
he was really afraid of her. For some moments she would
be unaware of Gerald. He had not conquered her yet.
’And what has Halliday to do with it?’ he asked, his
voice still muted.
She would not answer for some seconds. Then she said,
unwillingly:
’He made me go and live with him, and now he wants
to throw me over. And yet he won’t let me go to anybody

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else. He wants me to live hidden in the country. And then

he says I persecute him, that he can’t get rid of me.’
’Doesn’t know his own mind,’ said Gerald.
’He hasn’t any mind, so he can’t know it,’ she said. ‘He
waits for what somebody tells him to do. He never does
anything he wants to do himself—because he doesn’t
know what he wants. He’s a perfect baby.’
Gerald looked at Halliday for some moments, watching
the soft, rather degenerate face of the young man. Its very
softness was an attraction; it was a soft, warm, corrupt
nature, into which one might plunge with gratification.
’But he has no hold over you, has he?’ Gerald asked.
’You see he MADE me go and live with him, when I
didn’t want to,’ she replied. ‘He came and cried to me,
tears, you never saw so many, saying HE COULDN’T
bear it unless I went back to him. And he wouldn’t go
away, he would have stayed for ever. He made me go
back. Then every time he behaves in this fashion. And
now I’m going to have a baby, he wants to give me a
hundred pounds and send me into the country, so that he
would never see me nor hear of me again. But I’m not
going to do it, after—’
A queer look came over Gerald’s face.

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’Are you going to have a child?’ he asked incredulous.

It seemed, to look at her, impossible, she was so young
and so far in spirit from any child-bearing.
She looked full into his face, and her dark, inchoate
eyes had now a furtive look, and a look of a knowledge of
evil, dark and indomitable. A flame ran secretly to his
heart.
’Yes,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it beastly?’
’Don’t you want it?’ he asked.
’I don’t,’ she replied emphatically.
’But—’ he said, ‘how long have you known?’
’Ten weeks,’ she said.
All the time she kept her dark, inchoate eyes full upon
him. He remained silent, thinking. Then, switching off
and becoming cold, he asked, in a voice full of considerate
kindness:
’Is there anything we can eat here? Is there anything
you would like?’
’Yes,’ she said, ‘I should adore some oysters.’
’All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll have oysters.’ And he
beckoned to the waiter.
Halliday took no notice, until the little plate was set
before her. Then suddenly he cried:

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’Pussum, you can’t eat oysters when you’re drinking

brandy.’
’What has it go to do with you?’ she asked.
’Nothing, nothing,’ he cried. ‘But you can’t eat oysters
when you’re drinking brandy.’
’I’m not drinking brandy,’ she replied, and she
sprinkled the last drops of her liqueur over his face. He
gave an odd squeal. She sat looking at him, as if
indifferent.
’Pussum, why do you do that?’ he cried in panic. He
gave Gerald the impression that he was terrified of her,
and that he loved his terror. He seemed to relish his own
horror and hatred of her, turn it over and extract every
flavour from it, in real panic. Gerald thought him a strange
fool, and yet piquant.
’But Pussum,’ said another man, in a very small, quick
Eton voice, ‘you promised not to hurt him.’
’I haven’t hurt him,’ she answered.
’What will you drink?’ the young man asked. He was
dark, and smooth-skinned, and full of a stealthy vigour.
’I don’t like porter, Maxim,’ she replied.
’You must ask for champagne,’ came the whispering,
gentlemanly voice of the other.
Gerald suddenly realised that this was a hint to him.

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’Shall we have champagne?’ he asked, laughing.

’Yes please, dwy,’ she lisped childishly.
Gerald watched her eating the oysters. She was delicate
and finicking in her eating, her fingers were fine and
seemed very sensitive in the tips, so she put her food apart
with fine, small motions, she ate carefully, delicately. It
pleased him very much to see her, and it irritated Birkin.
They were all drinking champagne. Maxim, the prim
young Russian with the smooth, warm-coloured face and
black, oiled hair was the only one who seemed to be
perfectly calm and sober. Birkin was white and abstract,
unnatural, Gerald was smiling with a constant bright,
amused, cold light in his eyes, leaning a little protectively
towards the Pussum, who was very handsome, and soft,
unfolded like some red lotus in dreadful flowering
nakedness, vainglorious now, flushed with wine and with
the excitement of men. Halliday looked foolish. One glass
of wine was enough to make him drunk and giggling. Yet
there was always a pleasant, warm naivete about him, that
made him attractive.
’I’m not afwaid of anything except black-beetles,’ said
the Pussum, looking up suddenly and staring with her
black eyes, on which there seemed an unseeing film of
flame, fully upon Gerald. He laughed dangerously, from

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the blood. Her childish speech caressed his nerves, and her
burning, filmed eyes, turned now full upon him, oblivious
of all her antecedents, gave him a sort of licence.
’I’m not,’ she protested. ‘I’m not afraid of other things.
But black-beetles—ugh!’ she shuddered convulsively, as if
the very thought were too much to bear.
’Do you mean,’ said Gerald, with the punctiliousness of
a man who has been drinking, ‘that you are afraid of the
sight of a black-beetle, or you are afraid of a black-beetle
biting you, or doing you some harm?’
’Do they bite?’ cried the girl.
’How perfectly loathsome!’ exclaimed Halliday.
’I don’t know,’ replied Gerald, looking round the table.
‘Do black-beetles bite? But that isn’t the point. Are you
afraid of their biting, or is it a metaphysical antipathy?’
The girl was looking full upon him all the time with
inchoate eyes.
’Oh, I think they’re beastly, they’re horrid,’ she cried.
‘If I see one, it gives me the creeps all over. If one were to
crawl on me, I’m SURE I should die—I’m sure I should.’
’I hope not,’ whispered the young Russian.
’I’m sure I should, Maxim,’ she asseverated.
’Then one won’t crawl on you,’ said Gerald, smiling
and knowing. In some strange way he understood her.

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’It’s metaphysical, as Gerald says,’ Birkin stated.

There was a little pause of uneasiness.
’And are you afraid of nothing else, Pussum?’ asked the
young Russian, in his quick, hushed, elegant manner.
’Not weally,’ she said. ‘I am afwaid of some things, but
not weally the same. I’m not afwaid of BLOOD.’
’Not afwaid of blood!’ exclaimed a young man with a
thick, pale, jeering face, who had just come to the table
and was drinking whisky.
The Pussum turned on him a sulky look of dislike, low
and ugly.
’Aren’t you really afraid of blud?’ the other persisted, a
sneer all over his face.
’No, I’m not,’ she retorted.
’Why, have you ever seen blood, except in a dentist’s
spittoon?’ jeered the young man.
’I wasn’t speaking to you,’ she replied rather superbly.
’You can answer me, can’t you?’ he said.
For reply, she suddenly jabbed a knife across his thick,
pale hand. He started up with a vulgar curse.
’Show’s what you are,’ said the Pussum in contempt.
’Curse you,’ said the young man, standing by the table
and looking down at her with acrid malevolence.
’Stop that,’ said Gerald, in quick, instinctive command.

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The young man stood looking down at her with

sardonic contempt, a cowed, self-conscious look on his
thick, pale face. The blood began to flow from his hand.
’Oh, how horrible, take it away!’ squealed Halliday,
turning green and averting his face.
’D’you feel ill?’ asked the sardonic young man, in some
concern. ‘Do you feel ill, Julius? Garn, it’s nothing, man,
don’t give her the pleasure of letting her think she’s
performed a feat—don’t give her the satisfaction, man—
it’s just what she wants.’
’Oh!’ squealed Halliday.
’He’s going to cat, Maxim,’ said the Pussum warningly.
The suave young Russian rose and took Halliday by the
arm, leading him away. Birkin, white and diminished,
looked on as if he were displeased. The wounded,
sardonic young man moved away, ignoring his bleeding
hand in the most conspicuous fashion.
’He’s an awful coward, really,’ said the Pussum to
Gerald. ‘He’s got such an influence over Julius.’
’Who is he?’ asked Gerald.
’He’s a Jew, really. I can’t bear him.’
’Well, he’s quite unimportant. But what’s wrong with
Halliday?’

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’Julius’s the most awful coward you’ve ever seen,’ she

cried. ‘He always faints if I lift a knife—he’s tewwified of
me.’
’H’m!’ said Gerald.
’They’re all afwaid of me,’ she said. ‘Only the Jew
thinks he’s going to show his courage. But he’s the biggest
coward of them all, really, because he’s afwaid what
people will think about him—and Julius doesn’t care
about that.’
’They’ve a lot of valour between them,’ said Gerald
good-humouredly.
The Pussum looked at him with a slow, slow smile.
She was very handsome, flushed, and confident in dreadful
knowledge. Two little points of light glinted on Gerald’s
eyes.
’Why do they call you Pussum, because you’re like a
cat?’ he asked her.
’I expect so,’ she said.
The smile grew more intense on his face.
’You are, rather; or a young, female panther.’
’Oh God, Gerald!’ said Birkin, in some disgust.
They both looked uneasily at Birkin.
’You’re silent tonight, Wupert,’ she said to him, with a
slight insolence, being safe with the other man.

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Halliday was coming back, looking forlorn and sick.

’Pussum,’ he said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do these
things—Oh!’ He sank in his chair with a groan.
’You’d better go home,’ she said to him.
’I WILL go home,’ he said. ‘But won’t you all come
along. Won’t you come round to the flat?’ he said to
Gerald. ‘I should be so glad if you would. Do—that’ll be
splendid. I say?’ He looked round for a waiter. ‘Get me a
taxi.’ Then he groaned again. ‘Oh I do feel—perfectly
ghastly! Pussum, you see what you do to me.’
’Then why are you such an idiot?’ she said with sullen
calm.
’But I’m not an idiot! Oh, how awful! Do come,
everybody, it will be so splendid. Pussum, you are
coming. What? Oh but you MUST come, yes, you must.
What? Oh, my dear girl, don’t make a fuss now, I feel
perfectly—Oh, it’s so ghastly—Ho!—er! Oh!’
’You know you can’t drink,’ she said to him, coldly.
’I tell you it isn’t drink—it’s your disgusting behaviour,
Pussum, it’s nothing else. Oh, how awful! Libidnikov, do
let us go.’
’He’s only drunk one glass—only one glass,’ came the
rapid, hushed voice of the young Russian.

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They all moved off to the door. The girl kept near to
Gerald, and seemed to be at one in her motion with him.
He was aware of this, and filled with demon-satisfaction
that his motion held good for two. He held her in the
hollow of his will, and she was soft, secret, invisible in her
stirring there.
They crowded five of them into the taxi-cab. Halliday
lurched in first, and dropped into his seat against the other
window. Then the Pussum took her place, and Gerald sat
next to her. They heard the young Russian giving orders
to the driver, then they were all seated in the dark,
crowded close together, Halliday groaning and leaning out
of the window. They felt the swift, muffled motion of the
car.
The Pussum sat near to Gerald, and she seemed to
become soft, subtly to infuse herself into his bones, as if
she were passing into him in a black, electric flow. Her
being suffused into his veins like a magnetic darkness, and
concentrated at the base of his spine like a fearful source of
power. Meanwhile her voice sounded out reedy and
nonchalant, as she talked indifferently with Birkin and
with Maxim. Between her and Gerald was this silence and
this black, electric comprehension in the darkness. Then
she found his hand, and grasped it in her own firm, small

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clasp. It was so utterly dark, and yet such a naked

statement, that rapid vibrations ran through his blood and
over his brain, he was no longer responsible. Still her
voice rang on like a bell, tinged with a tone of mockery.
And as she swung her head, her fine mane of hair just
swept his face, and all his nerves were on fire, as with a
subtle friction of electricity. But the great centre of his
force held steady, a magnificent pride to him, at the base
of his spine.
They arrived at a large block of buildings, went up in a
lift, and presently a door was being opened for them by a
Hindu. Gerald looked in surprise, wondering if he were a
gentleman, one of the Hindus down from Oxford,
perhaps. But no, he was the man-servant.
’Make tea, Hasan,’ said Halliday.
’There is a room for me?’ said Birkin.
To both of which questions the man grinned, and
murmured.
He made Gerald uncertain, because, being tall and
slender and reticent, he looked like a gentleman.
’Who is your servant?’ he asked of Halliday. ‘He looks
a swell.’
’Oh yes—that’s because he’s dressed in another man’s
clothes. He’s anything but a swell, really. We found him

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in the road, starving. So I took him here, and another man

gave him clothes. He’s anything but what he seems to
be—his only advantage is that he can’t speak English and
can’t understand it, so he’s perfectly safe.’
’He’s very dirty,’ said the young Russian swiftly and
silently.
Directly, the man appeared in the doorway.
’What is it?’ said Halliday.
The Hindu grinned, and murmured shyly:
’Want to speak to master.’
Gerald watched curiously. The fellow in the doorway
was goodlooking and clean-limbed, his bearing was calm,
he looked elegant, aristocratic. Yet he was half a savage,
grinning foolishly. Halliday went out into the corridor to
speak with him.
’What?’ they heard his voice. ‘What? What do you say?
Tell me again. What? Want money? Want MORE
money? But what do you want money for?’ There was the
confused sound of the Hindu’s talking, then Halliday
appeared in the room, smiling also foolishly, and saying:
’He says he wants money to buy underclothing. Can
anybody lend me a shilling? Oh thanks, a shilling will do
to buy all the underclothes he wants.’ He took the money
from Gerald and went out into the passage again, where

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they heard him saying, ‘You can’t want more money, you
had three and six yesterday. You mustn’t ask for any more.
Bring the tea in quickly.’
Gerald looked round the room. It was an ordinary
London sitting-room in a flat, evidently taken furnished,
rather common and ugly. But there were several negro
statues, wood-carvings from West Africa, strange and
disturbing, the carved negroes looked almost like the
foetus of a human being. One was a woman sitting naked
in a strange posture, and looking tortured, her abdomen
stuck out. The young Russian explained that she was
sitting in child-birth, clutching the ends of the band that
hung from her neck, one in each hand, so that she could
bear down, and help labour. The strange, transfixed,
rudimentary face of the woman again reminded Gerald of
a foetus, it was also rather wonderful, conveying the
suggestion of the extreme of physical sensation, beyond
the limits of mental consciousness.
’Aren’t they rather obscene?’ he asked, disapproving.
’I don’t know,’ murmured the other rapidly. ‘I have
never defined the obscene. I think they are very good.’
Gerald turned away. There were one or two new
pictures in the room, in the Futurist manner; there was a
large piano. And these, with some ordinary London

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lodging-house furniture of the better sort, completed the

whole.
The Pussum had taken off her hat and coat, and was
seated on the sofa. She was evidently quite at home in the
house, but uncertain, suspended. She did not quite know
her position. Her alliance for the time being was with
Gerald, and she did not know how far this was admitted
by any of the men. She was considering how she should
carry off the situation. She was determined to have her
experience. Now, at this eleventh hour, she was not to be
baulked. Her face was flushed as with battle, her eye was
brooding but inevitable.
The man came in with tea and a bottle of Kummel. He
set the tray on a little table before the couch.
’Pussum,’ said Halliday, ‘pour out the tea.’
She did not move.
’Won’t you do it?’ Halliday repeated, in a state of
nervous apprehension.
’I’ve not come back here as it was before,’ she said. ‘I
only came because the others wanted me to, not for your
sake.’
’My dear Pussum, you know you are your own
mistress. I don’t want you to do anything but use the flat

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for your own convenience—you know it, I’ve told you so

many times.’
She did not reply, but silently, reservedly reached for
the tea-pot. They all sat round and drank tea. Gerald
could feel the electric connection between him and her so
strongly, as she sat there quiet and withheld, that another
set of conditions altogether had come to pass. Her silence
and her immutability perplexed him. HOW was he going
to come to her? And yet he felt it quite inevitable. He
trusted completely to the current that held them. His
perplexity was only superficial, new conditions reigned,
the old were surpassed; here one did as one was possessed
to do, no matter what it was.
Birkin rose. It was nearly one o’clock.
’I’m going to bed,’ he said. ‘Gerald, I’ll ring you up in
the morning at your place or you ring me up here.’
’Right,’ said Gerald, and Birkin went out.
When he was well gone, Halliday said in a stimulated
voice, to Gerald:
’I say, won’t you stay here—oh do!’
’You can’t put everybody up,’ said Gerald.
’Oh but I can, perfectly—there are three more beds
besides mine—do stay, won’t you. Everything is quite

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ready—there is always somebody here—I always put

people up—I love having the house crowded.’
’But there are only two rooms,’ said the Pussum, in a
cold, hostile voice, ‘now Rupert’s here.’
’I know there are only two rooms,’ said Halliday, in his
odd, high way of speaking. ‘But what does that matter?’
He was smiling rather foolishly, and he spoke eagerly,
with an insinuating determination.
’Julius and I will share one room,’ said the Russian in
his discreet, precise voice. Halliday and he were friends
since Eton.
’It’s very simple,’ said Gerald, rising and pressing back
his arms, stretching himself. Then he went again to look at
one of the pictures. Every one of his limbs was turgid with
electric force, and his back was tense like a tiger’s, with
slumbering fire. He was very proud.
The Pussum rose. She gave a black look at Halliday,
black and deadly, which brought the rather foolishly
pleased smile to that young man’s face. Then she went out
of the room, with a cold good-night to them all generally.
There was a brief interval, they heard a door close, then
Maxim said, in his refined voice:
’That’s all right.’

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He looked significantly at Gerald, and said again, with a

silent nod:
’That’s all right—you’re all right.’
Gerald looked at the smooth, ruddy, comely face, and
at the strange, significant eyes, and it seemed as if the voice
of the young Russian, so small and perfect, sounded in the
blood rather than in the air.
’I’M all right then,’ said Gerald.
’Yes! Yes! You’re all right,’ said the Russian.
Halliday continued to smile, and to say nothing.
Suddenly the Pussum appeared again in the door, her
small, childish face looking sullen and vindictive.
’I know you want to catch me out,’ came her cold,
rather resonant voice. ‘But I don’t care, I don’t care how
much you catch me out.’
She turned and was gone again. She had been wearing
a loose dressing-gown of purple silk, tied round her waist.
She looked so small and childish and vulnerable, almost
pitiful. And yet the black looks of her eyes made Gerald
feel drowned in some potent darkness that almost
frightened him.
The men lit another cigarette and talked casually.

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Chapter VII

FETISH
In the morning Gerald woke late. He had slept heavily.
Pussum was still asleep, sleeping childishly and pathetically.
There was something small and curled up and defenceless
about her, that roused an unsatisfied flame of passion in
the young man’s blood, a devouring avid pity. He looked
at her again. But it would be too cruel to wake her. He
subdued himself, and went away.
Hearing voices coming from the sitting-room, Halliday
talking to Libidnikov, he went to the door and glanced in.
He had on a silk wrap of a beautiful bluish colour, with an
amethyst hem.
To his surprise he saw the two young men by the fire,
stark naked. Halliday looked up, rather pleased.
’Good-morning,’ he said. ‘Oh—did you want towels?’
And stark naked he went out into the hall, striding a
strange, white figure between the unliving furniture. He
came back with the towels, and took his former position,
crouching seated before the fire on the fender.
’Don’t you love to feel the fire on your skin?’ he said.
’It IS rather pleasant,’ said Gerald.

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’How perfectly splendid it must be to be in a climate

where one could do without clothing altogether,’ said
Halliday.
’Yes,’ said Gerald, ‘if there weren’t so many things that
sting and bite.’
’That’s a disadvantage,’ murmured Maxim.
Gerald looked at him, and with a slight revulsion saw
the human animal, golden skinned and bare, somehow
humiliating. Halliday was different. He had a rather heavy,
slack, broken beauty, white and firm. He was like a Christ
in a Pieta. The animal was not there at all, only the heavy,
broken beauty. And Gerald realised how Halliday’s eyes
were beautiful too, so blue and warm and confused,
broken also in their expression. The fireglow fell on his
heavy, rather bowed shoulders, he sat slackly crouched on
the fender, his face was uplifted, weak, perhaps slightly
disintegrate, and yet with a moving beauty of its own.
’Of course,’ said Maxim, ‘you’ve been in hot countries
where the people go about naked.’
’Oh really!’ exclaimed Halliday. ‘Where?’
’South America—Amazon,’ said Gerald.
’Oh but how perfectly splendid! It’s one of the things I
want most to do—to live from day to day without EVER

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putting on any sort of clothing whatever. If I could do

that, I should feel I had lived.’
’But why?’ said Gerald. ‘I can’t see that it makes so
much difference.’
’Oh, I think it would be perfectly splendid. I’m sure life
would be entirely another thing—entirely different, and
perfectly wonderful.’
’But why?’ asked Gerald. ‘Why should it?’
’Oh—one would FEEL things instead of merely
looking at them. I should feel the air move against me,
and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to
look at them. I’m sure life is all wrong because it has
become much too visual—we can neither hear nor feel
nor understand, we can only see. I’m sure that is entirely
wrong.’
’Yes, that is true, that is true,’ said the Russian.
Gerald glanced at him, and saw him, his suave, golden
coloured body with the black hair growing fine and freely,
like tendrils, and his limbs like smooth plant-stems. He
was so healthy and well-made, why did he make one
ashamed, why did one feel repelled? Why should Gerald
even dislike it, why did it seem to him to detract from his
own dignity. Was that all a human being amounted to? So
uninspired! thought Gerald.

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Birkin suddenly appeared in the doorway, in white

pyjamas and wet hair, and a towel over his arm. He was
aloof and white, and somehow evanescent.
’There’s the bath-room now, if you want it,’ he said
generally, and was going away again, when Gerald called:
’I say, Rupert!’
’What?’ The single white figure appeared again, a
presence in the room.
’What do you think of that figure there? I want to
know,’ Gerald asked.
Birkin, white and strangely ghostly, went over to the
carved figure of the negro woman in labour. Her nude,
protuberant body crouched in a strange, clutching posture,
her hands gripping the ends of the band, above her breast.
’It is art,’ said Birkin.
’Very beautiful, it’s very beautiful,’ said the Russian.
They all drew near to look. Gerald looked at the group
of men, the Russian golden and like a water-plant,
Halliday tall and heavily, brokenly beautiful, Birkin very
white and indefinite, not to be assigned, as he looked
closely at the carven woman. Strangely elated, Gerald also
lifted his eyes to the face of the wooden figure. And his
heart contracted.

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He saw vividly with his spirit the grey, forward-

stretching face of the negro woman, African and tense,
abstracted in utter physical stress. It was a terrible face,
void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by
the weight of sensation beneath. He saw the Pussum in it.
As in a dream, he knew her.
’Why is it art?’ Gerald asked, shocked, resentful.
’It conveys a complete truth,’ said Birkin. ‘It contains
the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.’
’But you can’t call it HIGH art,’ said Gerald.
’High! There are centuries and hundreds of centuries of
development in a straight line, behind that carving; it is an
awful pitch of culture, of a definite sort.’
’What culture?’ Gerald asked, in opposition. He hated
the sheer African thing.
’Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical
consciousness, really ultimate PHYSICAL consciousness,
mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final,
supreme.’
But Gerald resented it. He wanted to keep certain
illusions, certain ideas like clothing.
’You like the wrong things, Rupert,’ he said, ‘things
against yourself.’

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’Oh, I know, this isn’t everything,’ Birkin replied,

moving away.
When Gerald went back to his room from the bath, he
also carried his clothes. He was so conventional at home,
that when he was really away, and on the loose, as now,
he enjoyed nothing so much as full outrageousness. So he
strode with his blue silk wrap over his arm and felt defiant.
The Pussum lay in her bed, motionless, her round, dark
eyes like black, unhappy pools. He could only see the
black, bottomless pools of her eyes. Perhaps she suffered.
The sensation of her inchoate suffering roused the old
sharp flame in him, a mordant pity, a passion almost of
cruelty.
’You are awake now,’ he said to her.
’What time is it?’ came her muted voice.
She seemed to flow back, almost like liquid, from his
approach, to sink helplessly away from him. Her inchoate
look of a violated slave, whose fulfilment lies in her further
and further violation, made his nerves quiver with acutely
desirable sensation. After all, his was the only will, she was
the passive substance of his will. He tingled with the
subtle, biting sensation. And then he knew, he must go
away from her, there must be pure separation between
them.

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It was a quiet and ordinary breakfast, the four men all

looking very clean and bathed. Gerald and the Russian
were both correct and COMME IL FAUT in appearance
and manner, Birkin was gaunt and sick, and looked a
failure in his attempt to be a properly dressed man, like
Gerald and Maxim. Halliday wore tweeds and a green
flannel shirt, and a rag of a tie, which was just right for
him. The Hindu brought in a great deal of soft toast, and
looked exactly the same as he had looked the night before,
statically the same.
At the end of the breakfast the Pussum appeared, in a
purple silk wrap with a shimmering sash. She had
recovered herself somewhat, but was mute and lifeless still.
It was a torment to her when anybody spoke to her. Her
face was like a small, fine mask, sinister too, masked with
unwilling suffering. It was almost midday. Gerald rose and
went away to his business, glad to get out. But he had not
finished. He was coming back again at evening, they were
all dining together, and he had booked seats for the party,
excepting Birkin, at a music-hall.
At night they came back to the flat very late again,
again flushed with drink. Again the man-servant—who
invariably disappeared between the hours of ten and
twelve at night—came in silently and inscrutably with tea,

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bending in a slow, strange, leopard-like fashion to put the

tray softly on the table. His face was immutable,
aristocratic-looking, tinged slightly with grey under the
skin; he was young and good-looking. But Birkin felt a
slight sickness, looking at him, and feeling the slight
greyness as an ash or a corruption, in the aristocratic
inscrutability of expression a nauseating, bestial stupidity.
Again they talked cordially and rousedly together. But
already a certain friability was coming over the party,
Birkin was mad with irritation, Halliday was turning in an
insane hatred against Gerald, the Pussum was becoming
hard and cold, like a flint knife, and Halliday was laying
himself out to her. And her intention, ultimately, was to
capture Halliday, to have complete power over him.
In the morning they all stalked and lounged about
again. But Gerald could feel a strange hostility to himself,
in the air. It roused his obstinacy, and he stood up against
it. He hung on for two more days. The result was a nasty
and insane scene with Halliday on the fourth evening.
Halliday turned with absurd animosity upon Gerald, in the
cafe. There was a row. Gerald was on the point of
knocking-in Halliday’s face; when he was filled with
sudden disgust and indifference, and he went away,
leaving Halliday in a foolish state of gloating triumph, the

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Pussum hard and established, and Maxim standing clear.

Birkin was absent, he had gone out of town again.
Gerald was piqued because he had left without giving
the Pussum money. It was true, she did not care whether
he gave her money or not, and he knew it. But she would
have been glad of ten pounds, and he would have been
VERY glad to give them to her. Now he felt in a false
position. He went away chewing his lips to get at the ends
of his short clipped moustache. He knew the Pussum was
merely glad to be rid of him. She had got her Halliday
whom she wanted. She wanted him completely in her
power. Then she would marry him. She wanted to marry
him. She had set her will on marrying Halliday. She never
wanted to hear of Gerald again; unless, perhaps, she were
in difficulty; because after all, Gerald was what she called a
man, and these others, Halliday, Libidnikov, Birkin, the
whole Bohemian set, they were only half men. But it was
half men she could deal with. She felt sure of herself with
them. The real men, like Gerald, put her in her place too
much.
Still, she respected Gerald, she really respected him. She
had managed to get his address, so that she could appeal to
him in time of distress. She knew he wanted to give her

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money. She would perhaps write to him on that inevitable

rainy day.

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Chapter VIII

BREADALBY
Breadalby was a Georgian house with Corinthian
pillars, standing among the softer, greener hills of
Derbyshire, not far from Cromford. In front, it looked
over a lawn, over a few trees, down to a string of fish-
ponds in the hollow of the silent park. At the back were
trees, among which were to be found the stables, and the
big kitchen garden, behind which was a wood.
It was a very quiet place, some miles from the high-
road, back from the Derwent Valley, outside the show
scenery. Silent and forsaken, the golden stucco showed
between the trees, the house-front looked down the park,
unchanged and unchanging.
Of late, however, Hermione had lived a good deal at
the house. She had turned away from London, away from
Oxford, towards the silence of the country. Her father was
mostly absent, abroad, she was either alone in the house,
with her visitors, of whom there were always several, or
she had with her her brother, a bachelor, and a Liberal
member of Parliament. He always came down when the
House was not sitting, seemed always to be present in

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Breadalby, although he was most conscientious in his

attendance to duty.
The summer was just coming in when Ursula and
Gudrun went to stay the second time with Hermione.
Coming along in the car, after they had entered the park,
they looked across the dip, where the fish-ponds lay in
silence, at the pillared front of the house, sunny and small
like an English drawing of the old school, on the brow of
the green hill, against the trees. There were small figures
on the green lawn, women in lavender and yellow moving
to the shade of the enormous, beautifully balanced cedar
tree.
’Isn’t it complete!’ said Gudrun. ‘It is as final as an old
aquatint.’ She spoke with some resentment in her voice, as
if she were captivated unwillingly, as if she must admire
against her will.
’Do you love it?’ asked Ursula.
’I don’t LOVE it, but in its way, I think it is quite
complete.’
The motor-car ran down the hill and up again in one
breath, and they were curving to the side door. A parlour-
maid appeared, and then Hermione, coming forward with
her pale face lifted, and her hands outstretched, advancing
straight to the new-comers, her voice singing:

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’Here you are—I’m so glad to see you—’ she kissed

Gudrun—’so glad to see you—’ she kissed Ursula and
remained with her arm round her. ‘Are you very tired?’
’Not at all tired,’ said Ursula.
’Are you tired, Gudrun?’
’Not at all, thanks,’ said Gudrun.
’No—’ drawled Hermione. And she stood and looked
at them. The two girls were embarrassed because she
would not move into the house, but must have her little
scene of welcome there on the path. The servants waited.
’Come in,’ said Hermione at last, having fully taken in
the pair of them. Gudrun was the more beautiful and
attractive, she had decided again, Ursula was more
physical, more womanly. She admired Gudrun’s dress
more. It was of green poplin, with a loose coat above it, of
broad, dark-green and dark-brown stripes. The hat was of
a pale, greenish straw, the colour of new hay, and it had a
plaited ribbon of black and orange, the stockings were
dark green, the shoes black. It was a good get-up, at once
fashionable and individual. Ursula, in dark blue, was more
ordinary, though she also looked well.
Hermione herself wore a dress of prune-coloured silk,
with coral beads and coral coloured stockings. But her
dress was both shabby and soiled, even rather dirty.

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’You would like to see your rooms now, wouldn’t you!

Yes. We will go up now, shall we?’
Ursula was glad when she could be left alone in her
room. Hermione lingered so long, made such a stress on
one. She stood so near to one, pressing herself near upon
one, in a way that was most embarrassing and oppressive.
She seemed to hinder one’s workings.
Lunch was served on the lawn, under the great tree,
whose thick, blackish boughs came down close to the
grass. There were present a young Italian woman, slight
and fashionable, a young, athletic-looking Miss Bradley, a
learned, dry Baronet of fifty, who was always making
witticisms and laughing at them heartily in a harsh, horse-
laugh, there was Rupert Birkin, and then a woman
secretary, a Fraulein Marz, young and slim and pretty.
The food was very good, that was one thing. Gudrun,
critical of everything, gave it her full approval. Ursula
loved the situation, the white table by the cedar tree, the
scent of new sunshine, the little vision of the leafy park,
with far-off deer feeding peacefully. There seemed a magic
circle drawn about the place, shutting out the present,
enclosing the delightful, precious past, trees and deer and
silence, like a dream.

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But in spirit she was unhappy. The talk went on like a

rattle of small artillery, always slightly sententious, with a
sententiousness that was only emphasised by the continual
crackling of a witticism, the continual spatter of verbal jest,
designed to give a tone of flippancy to a stream of
conversation that was all critical and general, a canal of
conversation rather than a stream.
The attitude was mental and very wearying. Only the
elderly sociologist, whose mental fibre was so tough as to
be insentient, seemed to be thoroughly happy. Birkin was
down in the mouth. Hermione appeared, with amazing
persistence, to wish to ridicule him and make him look
ignominious in the eyes of everybody. And it was
surprising how she seemed to succeed, how helpless he
seemed against her. He looked completely insignificant.
Ursula and Gudrun, both very unused, were mostly silent,
listening to the slow, rhapsodic sing-song of Hermione, or
the verbal sallies of Sir Joshua, or the prattle of Fraulein, or
the responses of the other two women.
Luncheon was over, coffee was brought out on the
grass, the party left the table and sat about in lounge chairs,
in the shade or in the sunshine as they wished. Fraulein
departed into the house, Hermione took up her
embroidery, the little Contessa took a book, Miss Bradley

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was weaving a basket out of fine grass, and there they all
were on the lawn in the early summer afternoon, working
leisurely and spattering with half-intellectual, deliberate
talk.
Suddenly there was the sound of the brakes and the
shutting off of a motor-car.
’There’s Salsie!’ sang Hermione, in her slow, amusing
sing-song. And laying down her work, she rose slowly,
and slowly passed over the lawn, round the bushes, out of
sight.
’Who is it?’ asked Gudrun.
’Mr Roddice—Miss Roddice’s brother—at least, I
suppose it’s he,’ said Sir Joshua.
’Salsie, yes, it is her brother,’ said the little Contessa,
lifting her head for a moment from her book, and
speaking as if to give information, in her slightly
deepened, guttural English.
They all waited. And then round the bushes came the
tall form of Alexander Roddice, striding romantically like
a Meredith hero who remembers Disraeli. He was cordial
with everybody, he was at once a host, with an easy,
offhand hospitality that he had learned for Hermione’s
friends. He had just come down from London, from the
House. At once the atmosphere of the House of

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Commons made itself felt over the lawn: the Home

Secretary had said such and such a thing, and he, Roddice,
on the other hand, thought such and such a thing, and had
said so-and-so to the PM.
Now Hermione came round the bushes with Gerald
Crich. He had come along with Alexander. Gerald was
presented to everybody, was kept by Hermione for a few
moments in full view, then he was led away, still by
Hermione. He was evidently her guest of the moment.
There had been a split in the Cabinet; the minister for
Education had resigned owing to adverse criticism. This
started a conversation on education.
’Of course,’ said Hermione, lifting her face like a
rhapsodist, ‘there CAN be no reason, no EXCUSE for
education, except the joy and beauty of knowledge in
itself.’ She seemed to rumble and ruminate with
subterranean thoughts for a minute, then she proceeded:
‘Vocational education ISN’T education, it is the close of
education.’
Gerald, on the brink of discussion, sniffed the air with
delight and prepared for action.
’Not necessarily,’ he said. ‘But isn’t education really
like gymnastics, isn’t the end of education the production
of a well-trained, vigorous, energetic mind?’

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’Just as athletics produce a healthy body, ready for

anything,’ cried Miss Bradley, in hearty accord.
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.

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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.’

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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.

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’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:
’Good-bye, good-bye, little boy.’
’Good-bye, impudent hag,’ he said to himself.

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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 fish-ponds,
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.

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’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

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split was coming, and her hatred of him was subconscious

and intense.
’What were you doing?’ she reiterated, in her mild,
indifferent tone. He did not answer, and she made her
way, almost unconsciously into his room. He had taken a
Chinese drawing of geese from the boudoir, and was
copying it, with much skill and vividness.
’You are copying the drawing,’ she said, standing near
the table, and looking down at his work. ‘Yes. How
beautifully you do it! You like it very much, don’t you?’
’It’s a marvellous drawing,’ he said.
’Is it? I’m so glad you like it, because I’ve always been
fond of it. The Chinese Ambassador gave it me.’
’I know,’ he said.
’But why do you copy it?’ she asked, casual and sing-
song. ‘Why not do something original?’
’I want to know it,’ he replied. ‘One gets more of
China, copying this picture, than reading all the books.’
’And what do you get?’
She was at once roused, she laid as it were violent
hands on him, to extract his secrets from him. She MUST
know. It was a dreadful tyranny, an obsession in her, to
know all he knew. For some time he was silent, hating to
answer her. Then, compelled, he began:

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’I know what centres they live from—what they

perceive and feel—the hot, stinging centrality of a goose
in the flux of cold water and mud—the curious bitter
stinging heat of a goose’s blood, entering their own blood
like an inoculation of corruptive fire—fire of the cold-
burning mud—the lotus mystery.’
Hermione looked at him along her narrow, pallid
cheeks. Her eyes were strange and drugged, heavy under
their heavy, drooping lids. Her thin bosom shrugged
convulsively. He stared back at her, devilish and
unchanging. With another strange, sick convulsion, she
turned away, as if she were sick, could feel dissolution
setting-in in her body. For with her mind she was unable
to attend to his words, he caught her, as it were, beneath
all her defences, and destroyed her with some insidious
occult potency.
’Yes,’ she said, as if she did not know what she were
saying. ‘Yes,’ and she swallowed, and tried to regain her
mind. But she could not, she was witless, decentralised.
Use all her will as she might, she could not recover. She
suffered the ghastliness of dissolution, broken and gone in
a horrible corruption. And he stood and looked at her
unmoved. She strayed out, pallid and preyed-upon like a
ghost, like one attacked by the tomb-influences which dog

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us. And she was gone like a corpse, that has no presence,
no connection. He remained hard and vindictive.
Hermione came down to dinner strange and sepulchral,
her eyes heavy and full of sepulchral darkness, strength.
She had put on a dress of stiff old greenish brocade, that
fitted tight and made her look tall and rather terrible,
ghastly. In the gay light of the drawing-room she was
uncanny and oppressive. But seated in the half-light of the
diningroom, sitting stiffly before the shaded candles on the
table, she seemed a power, a presence. She listened and
attended with a drugged attention.
The party was gay and extravagant in appearance,
everybody had put on evening dress except Birkin and
Joshua Mattheson. The little Italian Contessa wore a dress
of tissue, of orange and gold and black velvet in soft wide
stripes, Gudrun was emerald green with strange net-work,
Ursula was in yellow with dull silver veiling, Miss Bradley
was of grey, crimson and jet, Fraulein Marz wore pale
blue. It gave Hermione a sudden convulsive sensation of
pleasure, to see these rich colours under the candle-light.
She was aware of the talk going on, ceaselessly, Joshua’s
voice dominating; of the ceaseless pitter-patter of women’s
light laughter and responses; of the brilliant colours and
the white table and the shadow above and below; and she

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seemed in a swoon of gratification, convulsed with

pleasure and yet sick, like a REVENANT. She took very
little part in the conversation, yet she heard it all, it was all
hers.
They all went together into the drawing-room, as if
they were one family, easily, without any attention to
ceremony. Fraulein handed the coffee, everybody smoked
cigarettes, or else long warden pipes of white clay, of
which a sheaf was provided.
’Will you smoke?—cigarettes or pipe?’ asked Fraulein
prettily. There was a circle of people, Sir Joshua with his
eighteenth-century appearance, Gerald the amused,
handsome young Englishman, Alexander tall and the
handsome politician, democratic and lucid, Hermione
strange like a long Cassandra, and the women lurid with
colour, all dutifully smoking their long white pipes, and
sitting in a half-moon in the comfortable, soft-lighted
drawing-room, round the logs that flickered on the marble
hearth.
The talk was very often political or sociological, and
interesting, curiously anarchistic. There was an
accumulation of powerful force in the room, powerful and
destructive. Everything seemed to be thrown into the
melting pot, and it seemed to Ursula they were all

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witches, helping the pot to bubble. There was an elation

and a satisfaction in it all, but it was cruelly exhausting for
the new-comers, this ruthless mental pressure, this
powerful, consuming, destructive mentality that emanated
from Joshua and Hermione and Birkin and dominated the
rest.
But a sickness, a fearful nausea gathered possession of
Hermione. There was a lull in the talk, as it was arrested
by her unconscious but all-powerful will.
’Salsie, won’t you play something?’ said Hermione,
breaking off completely. ‘Won’t somebody dance?
Gudrun, you will dance, won’t you? I wish you would.
Anche tu, Palestra, ballerai?—si, per piacere. You too,
Ursula.’
Hermione rose and slowly pulled the gold-embroidered
band that hung by the mantel, clinging to it for a moment,
then releasing it suddenly. Like a priestess she looked,
unconscious, sunk in a heavy half-trance.
A servant came, and soon reappeared with armfuls of
silk robes and shawls and scarves, mostly oriental, things
that Hermione, with her love for beautiful extravagant
dress, had collected gradually.
’The three women will dance together,’ she said.
’What shall it be?’ asked Alexander, rising briskly.

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’Vergini Delle Rocchette,’ said the Contessa at once.

’They are so languid,’ said Ursula.
’The three witches from Macbeth,’ suggested Fraulein
usefully. It was finally decided to do Naomi and Ruth and
Orpah. Ursula was Naomi, Gudrun was Ruth, the
Contessa was Orpah. The idea was to make a little ballet,
in the style of the Russian Ballet of Pavlova and Nijinsky.
The Contessa was ready first, Alexander went to the
piano, a space was cleared. Orpah, in beautiful oriental
clothes, began slowly to dance the death of her husband.
Then Ruth came, and they wept together, and lamented,
then Naomi came to comfort them. It was all done in
dumb show, the women danced their emotion in gesture
and motion. The little drama went on for a quarter of an
hour.
Ursula was beautiful as Naomi. All her men were dead,
it remained to her only to stand alone in indomitable
assertion, demanding nothing. Ruth, woman-loving,
loved her. Orpah, a vivid, sensational, subtle widow,
would go back to the former life, a repetition. The
interplay between the women was real and rather
frightening. It was strange to see how Gudrun clung with
heavy, desperate passion to Ursula, yet smiled with subtle
malevolence against her, how Ursula accepted silently,

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unable to provide any more either for herself or for the

other, but dangerous and indomitable, refuting her grief.
Hermione loved to watch. She could see the Contessa’s
rapid, stoat-like sensationalism, Gudrun’s ultimate but
treacherous cleaving to the woman in her sister, Ursula’s
dangerous helplessness, as if she were helplessly weighted,
and unreleased.
’That was very beautiful,’ everybody cried with one
accord. But Hermione writhed in her soul, knowing what
she could not know. She cried out for more dancing, and
it was her will that set the Contessa and Birkin moving
mockingly in Malbrouk.
Gerald was excited by the desperate cleaving of Gudrun
to Naomi. The essence of that female, subterranean
recklessness and mockery penetrated his blood. He could
not forget Gudrun’s lifted, offered, cleaving, reckless, yet
withal mocking weight. And Birkin, watching like a
hermit crab from its hole, had seen the brilliant frustration
and helplessness of Ursula. She was rich, full of dangerous
power. She was like a strange unconscious bud of
powerful womanhood. He was unconsciously drawn to
her. She was his future.
Alexander played some Hungarian music, and they all
danced, seized by the spirit. Gerald was marvellously

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exhilarated at finding himself in motion, moving towards

Gudrun, dancing with feet that could not yet escape from
the waltz and the two-step, but feeling his force stir along
his limbs and his body, out of captivity. He did not know
yet how to dance their convulsive, rag-time sort of
dancing, but he knew how to begin. Birkin, when he
could get free from the weight of the people present,
whom he disliked, danced rapidly and with a real gaiety.
And how Hermione hated him for this irresponsible
gaiety.
’Now I see,’ cried the Contessa excitedly, watching his
purely gay motion, which he had all to himself. ‘Mr
Birkin, he is a changer.’
Hermione looked at her slowly, and shuddered,
knowing that only a foreigner could have seen and have
said this.
’Cosa vuol’dire, Palestra?’ she asked, sing-song.
’Look,’ said the Contessa, in Italian. ‘He is not a man,
he is a chameleon, a creature of change.’
’He is not a man, he is treacherous, not one of us,’ said
itself over in Hermione’s consciousness. And her soul
writhed in the black subjugation to him, because of his
power to escape, to exist, other than she did, because he
was not consistent, not a man, less than a man. She hated

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him in a despair that shattered her and broke her down, so

that she suffered sheer dissolution like a corpse, and was
unconscious of everything save the horrible sickness of
dissolution that was taking place within her, body and
soul.
The house being full, Gerald was given the smaller
room, really the dressing-room, communicating with
Birkin’s bedroom. When they all took their candles and
mounted the stairs, where the lamps were burning
subduedly, Hermione captured Ursula and brought her
into her own bedroom, to talk to her. A sort of constraint
came over Ursula in the big, strange bedroom. Hermione
seemed to be bearing down on her, awful and inchoate,
making some appeal. They were looking at some Indian
silk shirts, gorgeous and sensual in themselves, their shape,
their almost corrupt gorgeousness. And Hermione came
near, and her bosom writhed, and Ursula was for a
moment blank with panic. And for a moment Hermione’s
haggard eyes saw the fear on the face of the other, there
was again a sort of crash, a crashing down. And Ursula
picked up a shirt of rich red and blue silk, made for a
young princess of fourteen, and was crying mechanically:
’Isn’t it wonderful—who would dare to put those two
strong colours together—’

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Then Hermione’s maid entered silently and Ursula,

overcome with dread, escaped, carried away by powerful
impulse.
Birkin went straight to bed. He was feeling happy, and
sleepy. Since he had danced he was happy. But Gerald
would talk to him. Gerald, in evening dress, sat on
Birkin’s bed when the other lay down, and must talk.
’Who are those two Brangwens?’ Gerald asked.
’They live in Beldover.’
’In Beldover! Who are they then?’
’Teachers in the Grammar School.’
There was a pause.
’They are!’ exclaimed Gerald at length. ‘I thought I had
seen them before.’
’It disappoints you?’ said Birkin.
’Disappoints me! No—but how is it Hermione has
them here?’
’She knew Gudrun in London—that’s the younger
one, the one with the darker hair—she’s an artist—does
sculpture and modelling.’
’She’s not a teacher in the Grammar School, then—
only the other?’
’Both—Gudrun art mistress, Ursula a class mistress.’
’And what’s the father?’

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’Handicraft instructor in the schools.’

’Really!’
’Class-barriers are breaking down!’
Gerald was always uneasy under the slightly jeering
tone of the other.
’That their father is handicraft instructor in a school!
What does it matter to me?’
Birkin laughed. Gerald looked at his face, as it lay there
laughing and bitter and indifferent on the pillow, and he
could not go away.
’I don’t suppose you will see very much more of
Gudrun, at least. She is a restless bird, she’ll be gone in a
week or two,’ said Birkin.
’Where will she go?’
’London, Paris, Rome—heaven knows. I always expect
her to sheer off to Damascus or San Francisco; she’s a bird
of paradise. God knows what she’s got to do with
Beldover. It goes by contraries, like dreams.’
Gerald pondered for a few moments.
’How do you know her so well?’ he asked.
’I knew her in London,’ he replied, ‘in the Algernon
Strange set. She’ll know about Pussum and Libidnikov and
the rest—even if she doesn’t know them personally. She

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was never quite that set—more conventional, in a way.

I’ve known her for two years, I suppose.’
’And she makes money, apart from her teaching?’ asked
Gerald.
’Some—irregularly. She can sell her models. She has a
certain reclame.’
’How much for?’
’A guinea, ten guineas.’
’And are they good? What are they?’
’I think sometimes they are marvellously good. That is
hers, those two wagtails in Hermione’s boudoir—you’ve
seen them—they are carved in wood and painted.’
’I thought it was savage carving again.’
’No, hers. That’s what they are—animals and birds,
sometimes odd small people in everyday dress, really rather
wonderful when they come off. They have a sort of
funniness that is quite unconscious and subtle.’
’She might be a well-known artist one day?’ mused
Gerald.
’She might. But I think she won’t. She drops her art if
anything else catches her. Her contrariness prevents her
taking it seriously—she must never be too serious, she
feels she might give herself away. And she won’t give
herself away—she’s always on the defensive. That’s what I

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can’t stand about her type. By the way, how did things go
off with Pussum after I left you? I haven’t heard anything.’
’Oh, rather disgusting. Halliday turned objectionable,
and I only just saved myself from jumping in his stomach,
in a real old-fashioned row.’
Birkin was silent.
’Of course,’ he said, ‘Julius is somewhat insane. On the
one hand he’s had religious mania, and on the other, he is
fascinated by obscenity. Either he is a pure servant,
washing the feet of Christ, or else he is making obscene
drawings of Jesus—action and reaction—and between the
two, nothing. He is really insane. He wants a pure lily,
another girl, with a baby face, on the one hand, and on
the other, he MUST have the Pussum, just to defile
himself with her.’
’That’s what I can’t make out,’ said Gerald. ‘Does he
love her, the Pussum, or doesn’t he?’
’He neither does nor doesn’t. She is the harlot, the
actual harlot of adultery to him. And he’s got a craving to
throw himself into the filth of her. Then he gets up and
calls on the name of the lily of purity, the baby-faced girl,
and so enjoys himself all round. It’s the old story—action
and reaction, and nothing between.’

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’I don’t know,’ said Gerald, after a pause, ‘that he does

insult the Pussum so very much. She strikes me as being
rather foul.’
’But I thought you liked her,’ exclaimed Birkin. ‘I
always felt fond of her. I never had anything to do with
her, personally, that’s true.’
’I liked her all right, for a couple of days,’ said Gerald.
‘But a week of her would have turned me over. There’s a
certain smell about the skin of those women, that in the
end is sickening beyond words—even if you like it at
first.’
’I know,’ said Birkin. Then he added, rather fretfully,
‘But go to bed, Gerald. God knows what time it is.’
Gerald looked at his watch, and at length rose off the
bed, and went to his room. But he returned in a few
minutes, in his shirt.
’One thing,’ he said, seating himself on the bed again.
‘We finished up rather stormily, and I never had time to
give her anything.’
’Money?’ said Birkin. ‘She’ll get what she wants from
Halliday or from one of her acquaintances.’
’But then,’ said Gerald, ‘I’d rather give her her dues
and settle the account.’
’She doesn’t care.’

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’No, perhaps not. But one feels the account is left

open, and one would rather it were closed.’
’Would you?’ said Birkin. He was looking at the white
legs of Gerald, as the latter sat on the side of the bed in his
shirt. They were white-skinned, full, muscular legs,
handsome and decided. Yet they moved Birkin with a sort
of pathos, tenderness, as if they were childish.
’I think I’d rather close the account,’ said Gerald,
repeating himself vaguely.
’It doesn’t matter one way or another,’ said Birkin.
’You always say it doesn’t matter,’ said Gerald, a little
puzzled, looking down at the face of the other man
affectionately.
’Neither does it,’ said Birkin.
’But she was a decent sort, really—’
’Render unto Caesarina the things that are Caesarina’s,’
said Birkin, turning aside. It seemed to him Gerald was
talking for the sake of talking. ‘Go away, it wearies me—
it’s too late at night,’ he said.
’I wish you’d tell me something that DID matter,’ said
Gerald, looking down all the time at the face of the other
man, waiting for something. But Birkin turned his face
aside.

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’All right then, go to sleep,’ said Gerald, and he laid his

hand affectionately on the other man’s shoulder, and went
away.
In the morning when Gerald awoke and heard Birkin
move, he called out: ‘I still think I ought to give the
Pussum ten pounds.’
’Oh God!’ said Birkin, ‘don’t be so matter-of-fact.
Close the account in your own soul, if you like. It is there
you can’t close it.’
’How do you know I can’t?’
’Knowing you.’
Gerald meditated for some moments.
’It seems to me the right thing to do, you know, with
the Pussums, is to pay them.’
’And the right thing for mistresses: keep them. And the
right thing for wives: live under the same roof with them.
Integer vitae scelerisque purus—’ said Birkin.
’There’s no need to be nasty about it,’ said Gerald.
’It bores me. I’m not interested in your peccadilloes.’
’And I don’t care whether you are or not—I am.’
The morning was again sunny. The maid had been in
and brought the water, and had drawn the curtains.
Birkin, sitting up in bed, looked lazily and pleasantly out
on the park, that was so green and deserted, romantic,

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belonging to the past. He was thinking how lovely, how

sure, how formed, how final all the things of the past
were—the lovely accomplished past—this house, so still
and golden, the park slumbering its centuries of peace.
And then, what a snare and a delusion, this beauty of static
things—what a horrible, dead prison Breadalby really was,
what an intolerable confinement, the peace! Yet it was
better than the sordid scrambling conflict of the present. If
only one might create the future after one’s own heart—
for a little pure truth, a little unflinching application of
simple truth to life, the heart cried out ceaselessly.
’I can’t see what you will leave me at all, to be
interested in,’ came Gerald’s voice from the lower room.
‘Neither the Pussums, nor the mines, nor anything else.’
’You be interested in what you can, Gerald. Only I’m
not interested myself,’ said Birkin.
’What am I to do at all, then?’ came Gerald’s voice.
’What you like. What am I to do myself?’
In the silence Birkin could feel Gerald musing this fact.
’I’m blest if I know,’ came the good-humoured answer.
’You see,’ said Birkin, ‘part of you wants the Pussum,
and nothing but the Pussum, part of you wants the mines,
the business, and nothing but the business—and there you
are—all in bits—’

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’And part of me wants something else,’ said Gerald, in a

queer, quiet, real voice.
’What?’ said Birkin, rather surprised.
’That’s what I hoped you could tell me,’ said Gerald.
There was a silence for some time.
’I can’t tell you—I can’t find my own way, let alone
yours. You might marry,’ Birkin replied.
’Who—the Pussum?’ asked Gerald.
’Perhaps,’ said Birkin. And he rose and went to the
window.
’That is your panacea,’ said Gerald. ‘But you haven’t
even tried it on yourself yet, and you are sick enough.’
’I am,’ said Birkin. ‘Still, I shall come right.’
’Through marriage?’
’Yes,’ Birkin answered obstinately.
’And no,’ added Gerald. ‘No, no, no, my boy.’
There was a silence between them, and a strange
tension of hostility. They always kept a gap, a distance
between them, they wanted always to be free each of the
other. Yet there was a curious heart-straining towards each
other.
’Salvator femininus,’ said Gerald, satirically.
’Why not?’ said Birkin.

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’No reason at all,’ said Gerald, ‘if it really works. But

whom will you marry?’
’A woman,’ said Birkin.
’Good,’ said Gerald.
Birkin and Gerald were the last to come down to
breakfast. Hermione liked everybody to be early. She
suffered when she felt her day was diminished, she felt she
had missed her life. She seemed to grip the hours by the
throat, to force her life from them. She was rather pale and
ghastly, as if left behind, in the morning. Yet she had her
power, her will was strangely pervasive. With the entrance
of the two young men a sudden tension was felt.
She lifted her face, and said, in her amused sing-song:
’Good morning! Did you sleep well? I’m so glad.’
And she turned away, ignoring them. Birkin, who
knew her well, saw that she intended to discount his
existence.
’Will you take what you want from the sideboard?’ said
Alexander, in a voice slightly suggesting disapprobation. ‘I
hope the things aren’t cold. Oh no! Do you mind putting
out the flame under the chafingdish, Rupert? Thank you.’
Even Alexander was rather authoritative where
Hermione was cool. He took his tone from her,
inevitably. Birkin sat down and looked at the table. He

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was so used to this house, to this room, to this

atmosphere, through years of intimacy, and now he felt in
complete opposition to it all, it had nothing to do with
him. How well he knew Hermione, as she sat there, erect
and silent and somewhat bemused, and yet so potent, so
powerful! He knew her statically, so finally, that it was
almost like a madness. It was difficult to believe one was
not mad, that one was not a figure in the hall of kings in
some Egyptian tomb, where the dead all sat immemorial
and tremendous. How utterly he knew Joshua Mattheson,
who was talking in his harsh, yet rather mincing voice,
endlessly, endlessly, always with a strong mentality
working, always interesting, and yet always known,
everything he said known beforehand, however novel it
was, and clever. Alexander the up-to-date host, so
bloodlessly free-and-easy, Fraulein so prettily chiming in
just as she should, the little Italian Countess taking notice
of everybody, only playing her little game, objective and
cold, like a weasel watching everything, and extracting her
own amusement, never giving herself in the slightest; then
Miss Bradley, heavy and rather subservient, treated with
cool, almost amused contempt by Hermione, and
therefore slighted by everybody—how known it all was,
like a game with the figures set out, the same figures, the

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Queen of chess, the knights, the pawns, the same now as

they were hundreds of years ago, the same figures moving
round in one of the innumerable permutations that make
up the game. But the game is known, its going on is like a
madness, it is so exhausted.
There was Gerald, an amused look on his face; the
game pleased him. There was Gudrun, watching with
steady, large, hostile eyes; the game fascinated her, and she
loathed it. There was Ursula, with a slightly startled look
on her face, as if she were hurt, and the pain were just
outside her consciousness.
Suddenly Birkin got up and went out.
’That’s enough,’ he said to himself involuntarily.
Hermione knew his motion, though not in her
consciousness. She lifted her heavy eyes and saw him lapse
suddenly away, on a sudden, unknown tide, and the waves
broke over her. Only her indomitable will remained static
and mechanical, she sat at the table making her musing,
stray remarks. But the darkness had covered her, she was
like a ship that has gone down. It was finished for her too,
she was wrecked in the darkness. Yet the unfailing
mechanism of her will worked on, she had that activity.
’Shall we bathe this morning?’ she said, suddenly
looking at them all.

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’Splendid,’ said Joshua. ‘It is a perfect morning.’

’Oh, it is beautiful,’ said Fraulein.
’Yes, let us bathe,’ said the Italian woman.
’We have no bathing suits,’ said Gerald.
’Have mine,’ said Alexander. ‘I must go to church and
read the lessons. They expect me.’
’Are you a Christian?’ asked the Italian Countess, with
sudden interest.
’No,’ said Alexander. ‘I’m not. But I believe in keeping
up the old institutions.’
’They are so beautiful,’ said Fraulein daintily.
’Oh, they are,’ cried Miss Bradley.
They all trailed out on to the lawn. It was a sunny, soft
morning in early summer, when life ran in the world
subtly, like a reminiscence. The church bells were ringing
a little way off, not a cloud was in the sky, the swans were
like lilies on the water below, the peacocks walked with
long, prancing steps across the shadow and into the
sunshine of the grass. One wanted to swoon into the by-
gone perfection of it all.
’Good-bye,’ called Alexander, waving his gloves
cheerily, and he disappeared behind the bushes, on his way
to church.
’Now,’ said Hermione, ‘shall we all bathe?’

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’I won’t,’ said Ursula.

’You don’t want to?’ said Hermione, looking at her
slowly.
’No. I don’t want to,’ said Ursula.
’Nor I,’ said Gudrun.
’What about my suit?’ asked Gerald.
’I don’t know,’ laughed Hermione, with an odd,
amused intonation. ‘Will a handkerchief do—a large
handkerchief?’
’That will do,’ said Gerald.
’Come along then,’ sang Hermione.
The first to run across the lawn was the little Italian,
small and like a cat, her white legs twinkling as she went,
ducking slightly her head, that was tied in a gold silk
kerchief. She tripped through the gate and down the grass,
and stood, like a tiny figure of ivory and bronze, at the
water’s edge, having dropped off her towelling, watching
the swans, which came up in surprise. Then out ran Miss
Bradley, like a large, soft plum in her dark-blue suit. Then
Gerald came, a scarlet silk kerchief round his loins, his
towels over his arms. He seemed to flaunt himself a little
in the sun, lingering and laughing, strolling easily, looking
white but natural in his nakedness. Then came Sir Joshua,
in an overcoat, and lastly Hermione, striding with stiff

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grace from out of a great mantle of purple silk, her head

tied up in purple and gold. Handsome was her stiff, long
body, her straight-stepping white legs, there was a static
magnificence about her as she let the cloak float loosely
away from her striding. She crossed the lawn like some
strange memory, and passed slowly and statelily towards
the water.
There were three ponds, in terraces descending the
valley, large and smooth and beautiful, lying in the sun.
The water ran over a little stone wall, over small rocks,
splashing down from one pond to the level below. The
swans had gone out on to the opposite bank, the reeds
smelled sweet, a faint breeze touched the skin.
Gerald had dived in, after Sir Joshua, and had swum to
the end of the pond. There he climbed out and sat on the
wall. There was a dive, and the little Countess was
swimming like a rat, to join him. They both sat in the sun,
laughing and crossing their arms on their breasts. Sir
Joshua swam up to them, and stood near them, up to his
arm-pits in the water. Then Hermione and Miss Bradley
swam over, and they sat in a row on the embankment.
’Aren’t they terrifying? Aren’t they really terrifying?’
said Gudrun. ‘Don’t they look saurian? They are just like
great lizards. Did you ever see anything like Sir Joshua?

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But really, Ursula, he belongs to the primeval world,

when great lizards crawled about.’
Gudrun looked in dismay on Sir Joshua, who stood up
to the breast in the water, his long, greyish hair washed
down into his eyes, his neck set into thick, crude
shoulders. He was talking to Miss Bradley, who, seated on
the bank above, plump and big and wet, looked as if she
might roll and slither in the water almost like one of the
slithering sealions in the Zoo.
Ursula watched in silence. Gerald was laughing happily,
between Hermione and the Italian. He reminded her of
Dionysos, because his hair was really yellow, his figure so
full and laughing. Hermione, in her large, stiff, sinister
grace, leaned near him, frightening, as if she were not
responsible for what she might do. He knew a certain
danger in her, a convulsive madness. But he only laughed
the more, turning often to the little Countess, who was
flashing up her face at him.
They all dropped into the water, and were swimming
together like a shoal of seals. Hermione was powerful and
unconscious in the water, large and slow and powerful.
Palestra was quick and silent as a water rat, Gerald
wavered and flickered, a white natural shadow. Then, one
after the other, they waded out, and went up to the house.

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But Gerald lingered a moment to speak to Gudrun.

’You don’t like the water?’ he said.
She looked at him with a long, slow inscrutable look,
as he stood before her negligently, the water standing in
beads all over his skin.
’I like it very much,’ she replied.
He paused, expecting some sort of explanation.
’And you swim?’
’Yes, I swim.’
Still he would not ask her why she would not go in
then. He could feel something ironic in her. He walked
away, piqued for the first time.
’Why wouldn’t you bathe?’ he asked her again, later,
when he was once more the properly-dressed young
Englishman.
She hesitated a moment before answering, opposing his
persistence.
’Because I didn’t like the crowd,’ she replied.
He laughed, her phrase seemed to re-echo in his
consciousness. The flavour of her slang was piquant to
him. Whether he would or not, she signified the real
world to him. He wanted to come up to her standards,
fulfil her expectations. He knew that her criterion was the
only one that mattered. The others were all outsiders,

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instinctively, whatever they might be socially. And Gerald

could not help it, he was bound to strive to come up to
her criterion, fulfil her idea of a man and a human-being.
After lunch, when all the others had withdrawn,
Hermione and Gerald and Birkin lingered, finishing their
talk. There had been some discussion, on the whole quite
intellectual and artificial, about a new state, a new world
of man. Supposing this old social state WERE broken and
destroyed, then, out of the chaos, what then?
The great social idea, said Sir Joshua, was the SOCIAL
equality of man. No, said Gerald, the idea was, that every
man was fit for his own little bit of a task—let him do that,
and then please himself. The unifying principle was the
work in hand. Only work, the business of production,
held men together. It was mechanical, but then society
WAS a mechanism. Apart from work they were isolated,
free to do as they liked.
’Oh!’ cried Gudrun. ‘Then we shan’t have names any
more—we shall be like the Germans, nothing but Herr
Obermeister and Herr Untermeister. I can imagine it—‘I
am Mrs Colliery-Manager Crich—I am Mrs Member-of-
Parliament Roddice. I am Miss Art-Teacher Brangwen.’
Very pretty that.’

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’Things would work very much better, Miss Art-

Teacher Brangwen,’ said Gerald.
’What things, Mr Colliery-Manager Crich? The
relation between you and me, PAR EXEMPLE?’
’Yes, for example,’ cried the Italian. ‘That which is
between men and women—!’
’That is non-social,’ said Birkin, sarcastically.
’Exactly,’ said Gerald. ‘Between me and a woman, the
social question does not enter. It is my own affair.’
’A ten-pound note on it,’ said Birkin.
’You don’t admit that a woman is a social being?’ asked
Ursula of Gerald.
’She is both,’ said Gerald. ‘She is a social being, as far as
society is concerned. But for her own private self, she is a
free agent, it is her own affair, what she does.’
’But won’t it be rather difficult to arrange the two
halves?’ asked Ursula.
’Oh no,’ replied Gerald. ‘They arrange themselves
naturally—we see it now, everywhere.’
’Don’t you laugh so pleasantly till you’re out of the
wood,’ said Birkin.
Gerald knitted his brows in momentary irritation.
’Was I laughing?’ he said.

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’IF,’ said Hermione at last, ‘we could only realise, that

in the SPIRIT we are all one, all equal in the spirit, all
brothers there—the rest wouldn’t matter, there would be
no more of this carping and envy and this struggle for
power, which destroys, only destroys.’
This speech was received in silence, and almost
immediately the party rose from the table. But when the
others had gone, Birkin turned round in bitter
declamation, saying:
’It is just the opposite, just the contrary, Hermione. We
are all different and unequal in spirit—it is only the
SOCIAL differences that are based on accidental material
conditions. We are all abstractly or mathematically equal,
if you like. Every man has hunger and thirst, two eyes,
one nose and two legs. We’re all the same in point of
number. But spiritually, there is pure difference and
neither equality nor inequality counts. It is upon these two
bits of knowledge that you must found a state. Your
democracy is an absolute lie—your brotherhood of man is
a pure falsity, if you apply it further than the mathematical
abstraction. We all drank milk first, we all eat bread and
meat, we all want to ride in motor-cars—therein lies the
beginning and the end of the brotherhood of man. But no
equality.

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’But I, myself, who am myself, what have I to do with

equality with any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am
as separate as one star is from another, as different in
quality and quantity. Establish a state on THAT. One man
isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal,
but because they are intrinsically OTHER, that there is no
term of comparison. The minute you begin to compare,
one man is seen to be far better than another, all the
inequality you can imagine is there by nature. I want
every man to have his share in the world’s goods, so that I
am rid of his importunity, so that I can tell him: ‘Now
you’ve got what you want—you’ve got your fair share of
the world’s gear. Now, you one-mouthed fool, mind
yourself and don’t obstruct me.‘‘
Hermione was looking at him with leering eyes, along
her cheeks. He could feel violent waves of hatred and
loathing of all he said, coming out of her. It was dynamic
hatred and loathing, coming strong and black out of the
unconsciousness. She heard his words in her unconscious
self, CONSCIOUSLY she was as if deafened, she paid no
heed to them.
’It SOUNDS like megalomania, Rupert,’ said Gerald,
genially.

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Hermione gave a queer, grunting sound. Birkin stood

back.
’Yes, let it,’ he said suddenly, the whole tone gone out
of his voice, that had been so insistent, bearing everybody
down. And he went away.
But he felt, later, a little compunction. He had been
violent, cruel with poor Hermione. He wanted to
recompense her, to make it up. He had hurt her, he had
been vindictive. He wanted to be on good terms with her
again.
He went into her boudoir, a remote and very cushiony
place. She was sitting at her table writing letters. She lifted
her face abstractedly when he entered, watched him go to
the sofa, and sit down. Then she looked down at her
paper again.
He took up a large volume which he had been reading
before, and became minutely attentive to his author. His
back was towards Hermione. She could not go on with
her writing. Her whole mind was a chaos, darkness
breaking in upon it, and herself struggling to gain control
with her will, as a swimmer struggles with the swirling
water. But in spite of her efforts she was borne down,
darkness seemed to break over her, she felt as if her heart

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was bursting. The terrible tension grew stronger and

stronger, it was most fearful agony, like being walled up.
And then she realised that his presence was the wall, his
presence was destroying her. Unless she could break out,
she must die most fearfully, walled up in horror. And he
was the wall. She must break down the wall—she must
break him down before her, the awful obstruction of him
who obstructed her life to the last. It must be done, or she
must perish most horribly.
Terribly shocks ran over her body, like shocks of
electricity, as if many volts of electricity suddenly struck
her down. She was aware of him sitting silently there, an
unthinkable evil obstruction. Only this blotted out her
mind, pressed out her very breathing, his silent, stooping
back, the back of his head.
A terrible voluptuous thrill ran down her arms—she
was going to know her voluptuous consummation. Her
arms quivered and were strong, immeasurably and
irresistibly strong. What delight, what delight in strength,
what delirium of pleasure! She was going to have her
consummation of voluptuous ecstasy at last. It was
coming! In utmost terror and agony, she knew it was
upon her now, in extremity of bliss. Her hand closed on a
blue, beautiful ball of lapis lazuli that stood on her desk for

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a paper-weight. She rolled it round in her hand as she rose

silently. Her heart was a pure flame in her breast, she was
purely unconscious in ecstasy. She moved towards him
and stood behind him for a moment in ecstasy. He, closed
within the spell, remained motionless and unconscious.
Then swiftly, in a flame that drenched down her body
like fluid lightning and gave her a perfect, unutterable
consummation, unutterable satisfaction, she brought down
the ball of jewel stone with all her force, crash on his head.
But her fingers were in the way and deadened the blow.
Nevertheless, down went his head on the table on which
his book lay, the stone slid aside and over his ear, it was
one convulsion of pure bliss for her, lit up by the crushed
pain of her fingers. But it was not somehow complete. She
lifted her arm high to aim once more, straight down on
the head that lay dazed on the table. She must smash it, it
must be smashed before her ecstasy was consummated,
fulfilled for ever. A thousand lives, a thousand deaths
mattered nothing now, only the fulfilment of this perfect
ecstasy.
She was not swift, she could only move slowly. A
strong spirit in him woke him and made him lift his face
and twist to look at her. Her arm was raised, the hand
clasping the ball of lapis lazuli. It was her left hand, he

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realised again with horror that she was left-handed.

Hurriedly, with a burrowing motion, he covered his head
under the thick volume of Thucydides, and the blow
came down, almost breaking his neck, and shattering his
heart.
He was shattered, but he was not afraid. Twisting
round to face her he pushed the table over and got away
from her. He was like a flask that is smashed to atoms, he
seemed to himself that he was all fragments, smashed to
bits. Yet his movements were perfectly coherent and clear,
his soul was entire and unsurprised.
’No you don’t, Hermione,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I
don’t let you.’
He saw her standing tall and livid and attentive, the
stone clenched tense in her hand.
’Stand away and let me go,’ he said, drawing near to
her.
As if pressed back by some hand, she stood away,
watching him all the time without changing, like a
neutralised angel confronting him.
’It is not good,’ he said, when he had gone past her. ‘It
isn’t I who will die. You hear?’
He kept his face to her as he went out, lest she should
strike again. While he was on his guard, she dared not

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move. And he was on his guard, she was powerless. So he

had gone, and left her standing.
She remained perfectly rigid, standing as she was for a
long time. Then she staggered to the couch and lay down,
and went heavily to sleep. When she awoke, she
remembered what she had done, but it seemed to her, she
had only hit him, as any woman might do, because he
tortured her. She was perfectly right. She knew that,
spiritually, she was right. In her own infallible purity, she
had done what must be done. She was right, she was pure.
A drugged, almost sinister religious expression became
permanent on her face.
Birkin, barely conscious, and yet perfectly direct in his
motion, went out of the house and straight across the
park, to the open country, to the hills. The brilliant day
had become overcast, spots of rain were falling. He
wandered on to a wild valley-side, where were thickets of
hazel, many flowers, tufts of heather, and little clumps of
young firtrees, budding with soft paws. It was rather wet
everywhere, there was a stream running down at the
bottom of the valley, which was gloomy, or seemed
gloomy. He was aware that he could not regain his
consciousness, that he was moving in a sort of darkness.

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Yet he wanted something. He was happy in the wet

hillside, that was overgrown and obscure with bushes and
flowers. He wanted to touch them all, to saturate himself
with the touch of them all. He took off his clothes, and sat
down naked among the primroses, moving his feet softly
among the primroses, his legs, his knees, his arms right up
to the arm-pits, lying down and letting them touch his
belly, his breasts. It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all
over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact.
But they were too soft. He went through the long grass
to a clump of young fir-trees, that were no higher than a
man. The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved
in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of
drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of
soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him
vividly, but not too much, because all his movements
were too discriminate and soft. To lie down and roll in the
sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one’s belly and
cover one’s back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a
breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the
touch of any woman; and then to sting one’s thigh against
the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel
the light whip of the hazel on one’s shoulders, stinging,
and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one’s

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breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and

ridges—this was good, this was all very good, very
satisfying. Nothing else would do, nothing else would
satisfy, except this coolness and subtlety of vegetation
travelling into one’s blood. How fortunate he was, that
there was this lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, waiting
for him, as he waited for it; how fulfilled he was, how
happy!
As he dried himself a little with his handkerchief, he
thought about Hermione and the blow. He could feel a
pain on the side of his head. But after all, what did it
matter? What did Hermione matter, what did people
matter altogether? There was this perfect cool loneliness,
so lovely and fresh and unexplored. Really, what a mistake
he had made, thinking he wanted people, thinking he
wanted a woman. He did not want a woman—not in the
least. The leaves and the primroses and the trees, they
were really lovely and cool and desirable, they really came
into the blood and were added on to him. He was
enrichened now immeasurably, and so glad.
It was quite right of Hermione to want to kill him.
What had he to do with her? Why should he pretend to
have anything to do with human beings at all? Here was
his world, he wanted nobody and nothing but the lovely,

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subtle, responsive vegetation, and himself, his own living

self.
It was necessary to go back into the world. That was
true. But that did not matter, so one knew where one
belonged. He knew now where he belonged. This was his
place, his marriage place. The world was extraneous.
He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were
mad. But if so, he preferred his own madness, to the
regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was
free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which
was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found
world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so
satisfying.
As for the certain grief he felt at the same time, in his
soul, that was only the remains of an old ethic, that bade a
human being adhere to humanity. But he was weary of
the old ethic, of the human being, and of humanity. He
loved now the soft, delicate vegetation, that was so cool
and perfect. He would overlook the old grief, he would
put away the old ethic, he would be free in his new state.
He was aware of the pain in his head becoming more
and more difficult every minute. He was walking now
along the road to the nearest station. It was raining and he

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had no hat. But then plenty of cranks went out nowadays

without hats, in the rain.
He wondered again how much of his heaviness of
heart, a certain depression, was due to fear, fear lest
anybody should have seen him naked lying against the
vegetation. What a dread he had of mankind, of other
people! It amounted almost to horror, to a sort of dream
terror—his horror of being observed by some other
people. If he were on an island, like Alexander Selkirk,
with only the creatures and the trees, he would be free and
glad, there would be none of this heaviness, this misgiving.
He could love the vegetation and be quite happy and
unquestioned, by himself.
He had better send a note to Hermione: she might
trouble about him, and he did not want the onus of this.
So at the station, he wrote saying:
I will go on to town—I don’t want to come back to
Breadalby for the present. But it is quite all right—I don’t
want you to mind having biffed me, in the least. Tell the
others it is just one of my moods. You were quite right, to
biff me—because I know you wanted to. So there’s the
end of it.
In the train, however, he felt ill. Every motion was
insufferable pain, and he was sick. He dragged himself

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from the station into a cab, feeling his way step by step,
like a blind man, and held up only by a dim will.
For a week or two he was ill, but he did not let
Hermione know, and she thought he was sulking; there
was a complete estrangement between them. She became
rapt, abstracted in her conviction of exclusive
righteousness. She lived in and by her own self-esteem,
conviction of her own rightness of spirit.

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Chapter IX

COAL-DUST
Going home from school in the afternoon, the
Brangwen girls descended the hill between the picturesque
cottages of Willey Green till they came to the railway
crossing. There they found the gate shut, because the
colliery train was rumbling nearer. They could hear the
small locomotive panting hoarsely as it advanced with
caution between the embankments. The one-legged man
in the little signal-hut by the road stared out from his
security, like a crab from a snail-shell.
Whilst the two girls waited, Gerald Crich trotted up on
a red Arab mare. He rode well and softly, pleased with the
delicate quivering of the creature between his knees. And
he was very picturesque, at least in Gudrun’s eyes, sitting
soft and close on the slender red mare, whose long tail
flowed on the air. He saluted the two girls, and drew up at
the crossing to wait for the gate, looking down the railway
for the approaching train. In spite of her ironic smile at his
picturesqueness, Gudrun liked to look at him. He was
well-set and easy, his face with its warm tan showed up his

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whitish, coarse moustache, and his blue eyes were full of

sharp light as he watched the distance.
The locomotive chuffed slowly between the banks,
hidden. The mare did not like it. She began to wince
away, as if hurt by the unknown noise. But Gerald pulled
her back and held her head to the gate. The sharp blasts of
the chuffing engine broke with more and more force on
her. The repeated sharp blows of unknown, terrifying
noise struck through her till she was rocking with terror.
She recoiled like a spring let go. But a glistening, half-
smiling look came into Gerald’s face. He brought her back
again, inevitably.
The noise was released, the little locomotive with her
clanking steel connecting-rod emerged on the highroad,
clanking sharply. The mare rebounded like a drop of
water from hot iron. Ursula and Gudrun pressed back into
the hedge, in fear. But Gerald was heavy on the mare, and
forced her back. It seemed as if he sank into her
magnetically, and could thrust her back against herself.
’The fool!’ cried Ursula loudly. ‘Why doesn’t he ride
away till it’s gone by?’
Gudrun was looking at him with black-dilated,
spellbound eyes. But he sat glistening and obstinate,
forcing the wheeling mare, which spun and swerved like a

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wind, and yet could not get out of the grasp of his will,
nor escape from the mad clamour of terror that resounded
through her, as the trucks thumped slowly, heavily,
horrifying, one after the other, one pursuing the other,
over the rails of the crossing.
The locomotive, as if wanting to see what could be
done, put on the brakes, and back came the trucks
rebounding on the iron buffers, striking like horrible
cymbals, clashing nearer and nearer in frightful strident
concussions. The mare opened her mouth and rose slowly,
as if lifted up on a wind of terror. Then suddenly her fore
feet struck out, as she convulsed herself utterly away from
the horror. Back she went, and the two girls clung to each
other, feeling she must fall backwards on top of him. But
he leaned forward, his face shining with fixed amusement,
and at last he brought her down, sank her down, and was
bearing her back to the mark. But as strong as the pressure
of his compulsion was the repulsion of her utter terror,
throwing her back away from the railway, so that she spun
round and round, on two legs, as if she were in the centre
of some whirlwind. It made Gudrun faint with poignant
dizziness, which seemed to penetrate to her heart.
’No—! No—! Let her go! Let her go, you fool, you
FOOL—!’ cried Ursula at the top of her voice, completely

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outside herself. And Gudrun hated her bitterly for being

outside herself. It was unendurable that Ursula’s voice was
so powerful and naked.
A sharpened look came on Gerald’s face. He bit himself
down on the mare like a keen edge biting home, and
FORCED her round. She roared as she breathed, her
nostrils were two wide, hot holes, her mouth was apart,
her eyes frenzied. It was a repulsive sight. But he held on
her unrelaxed, with an almost mechanical relentlessness,
keen as a sword pressing in to her. Both man and horse
were sweating with violence. Yet he seemed calm as a ray
of cold sunshine.
Meanwhile the eternal trucks were rumbling on, very
slowly, treading one after the other, one after the other,
like a disgusting dream that has no end. The connecting
chains were grinding and squeaking as the tension varied,
the mare pawed and struck away mechanically now, her
terror fulfilled in her, for now the man encompassed her;
her paws were blind and pathetic as she beat the air, the
man closed round her, and brought her down, almost as if
she were part of his own physique.
’And she’s bleeding! She’s bleeding!’ cried Ursula,
frantic with opposition and hatred of Gerald. She alone
understood him perfectly, in pure opposition.

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Gudrun looked and saw the trickles of blood on the

sides of the mare, and she turned white. And then on the
very wound the bright spurs came down, pressing
relentlessly. The world reeled and passed into nothingness
for Gudrun, she could not know any more.
When she recovered, her soul was calm and cold,
without feeling. The trucks were still rumbling by, and the
man and the mare were still fighting. But she herself was
cold and separate, she had no more feeling for them. She
was quite hard and cold and indifferent.
They could see the top of the hooded guard’s-van
approaching, the sound of the trucks was diminishing,
there was hope of relief from the intolerable noise. The
heavy panting of the half-stunned mare sounded
automatically, the man seemed to be relaxing confidently,
his will bright and unstained. The guard’s-van came up,
and passed slowly, the guard staring out in his transition on
the spectacle in the road. And, through the man in the
closed wagon, Gudrun could see the whole scene
spectacularly, isolated and momentary, like a vision
isolated in eternity.
Lovely, grateful silence seemed to trail behind the
receding train. How sweet the silence is! Ursula looked
with hatred on the buffers of the diminishing wagon. The

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gatekeeper stood ready at the door of his hut, to proceed

to open the gate. But Gudrun sprang suddenly forward, in
front of the struggling horse, threw off the latch and flung
the gates asunder, throwing one-half to the keeper, and
running with the other half, forwards. Gerald suddenly let
go the horse and leaped forwards, almost on to Gudrun.
She was not afraid. As he jerked aside the mare’s head,
Gudrun cried, in a strange, high voice, like a gull, or like a
witch screaming out from the side of the road:
’I should think you’re proud.’
The words were distinct and formed. The man,
twisting aside on his dancing horse, looked at her in some
surprise, some wondering interest. Then the mare’s hoofs
had danced three times on the drum-like sleepers of the
crossing, and man and horse were bounding springily,
unequally up the road.
The two girls watched them go. The gate-keeper
hobbled thudding over the logs of the crossing, with his
wooden leg. He had fastened the gate. Then he also
turned, and called to the girls:
’A masterful young jockey, that; ‘ll have his own road,
if ever anybody would.’
’Yes,’ cried Ursula, in her hot, overbearing voice.
‘Why couldn’t he take the horse away, till the trucks had

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gone by? He’s a fool, and a bully. Does he think it’s

manly, to torture a horse? It’s a living thing, why should
he bully it and torture it?’
There was a pause, then the gate-keeper shook his
head, and replied:
’Yes, it’s as nice a little mare as you could set eyes on—
beautiful little thing, beautiful. Now you couldn’t see his
father treat any animal like that—not you. They’re as
different as they welly can be, Gerald Crich and his
father—two different men, different made.’
Then there was a pause.
’But why does he do it?’ cried Ursula, ‘why does he?
Does he think he’s grand, when he’s bullied a sensitive
creature, ten times as sensitive as himself?’
Again there was a cautious pause. Then again the man
shook his head, as if he would say nothing, but would
think the more.
’I expect he’s got to train the mare to stand to
anything,’ he replied. ‘A pure-bred Harab—not the sort of
breed as is used to round here—different sort from our
sort altogether. They say as he got her from
Constantinople.’

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’He would!’ said Ursula. ‘He’d better have left her to

the Turks, I’m sure they would have had more decency
towards her.’
The man went in to drink his can of tea, the girls went
on down the lane, that was deep in soft black dust.
Gudrun was as if numbed in her mind by the sense of
indomitable soft weight of the man, bearing down into the
living body of the horse: the strong, indomitable thighs of
the blond man clenching the palpitating body of the mare
into pure control; a sort of soft white magnetic
domination from the loins and thighs and calves, enclosing
and encompassing the mare heavily into unutterable
subordination, soft blood-subordination, terrible.
On the left, as the girls walked silently, the coal-mine
lifted its great mounds and its patterned head-stocks, the
black railway with the trucks at rest looked like a harbour
just below, a large bay of railroad with anchored wagons.
Near the second level-crossing, that went over many
bright rails, was a farm belonging to the collieries, and a
great round globe of iron, a disused boiler, huge and rusty
and perfectly round, stood silently in a paddock by the
road. The hens were pecking round it, some chickens
were balanced on the drinking trough, wagtails flew away
in among trucks, from the water.

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On the other side of the wide crossing, by the road-

side, was a heap of pale-grey stones for mending the roads,
and a cart standing, and a middle-aged man with whiskers
round his face was leaning on his shovel, talking to a
young man in gaiters, who stood by the horse’s head.
Both men were facing the crossing.
They saw the two girls appear, small, brilliant figures in
the near distance, in the strong light of the late afternoon.
Both wore light, gay summer dresses, Ursula had an
orange-coloured knitted coat, Gudrun a pale yellow,
Ursula wore canary yellow stockings, Gudrun bright rose,
the figures of the two women seemed to glitter in progress
over the wide bay of the railway crossing, white and
orange and yellow and rose glittering in motion across a
hot world silted with coal-dust.
The two men stood quite still in the heat, watching.
The elder was a short, hard-faced energetic man of middle
age, the younger a labourer of twenty-three or so. They
stood in silence watching the advance of the sisters. They
watched whilst the girls drew near, and whilst they passed,
and whilst they receded down the dusty road, that had
dwellings on one side, and dusty young corn on the other.
Then the elder man, with the whiskers round his face,
said in a prurient manner to the young man:

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’What price that, eh? She’ll do, won’t she?’

’Which?’ asked the young man, eagerly, with laugh.
’Her with the red stockings. What d’you say? I’d give
my week’s wages for five minutes; what!—just for five
minutes.’
Again the young man laughed.
’Your missis ‘ud have summat to say to you,’ he
replied.
Gudrun had turned round and looked at the two men.
They were to her sinister creatures, standing watching
after her, by the heap of pale grey slag. She loathed the
man with whiskers round his face.
’You’re first class, you are,’ the man said to her, and to
the distance.
’Do you think it would be worth a week’s wages?’ said
the younger man, musing.
’Do I? I’d put ‘em bloody-well down this second—’
The younger man looked after Gudrun and Ursula
objectively, as if he wished to calculate what there might
be, that was worth his week’s wages. He shook his head
with fatal misgiving.
’No,’ he said. ‘It’s not worth that to me.’
’Isn’t?’ said the old man. ‘By God, if it isn’t to me!’
And he went on shovelling his stones.

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The girls descended between the houses with slate roofs

and blackish brick walls. The heavy gold glamour of
approaching sunset lay over all the colliery district, and the
ugliness overlaid with beauty was like a narcotic to the
senses. On the roads silted with black dust, the rich light
fell more warmly, more heavily, over all the amorphous
squalor a kind of magic was cast, from the glowing close
of day.
’It has a foul kind of beauty, this place,’ said Gudrun,
evidently suffering from fascination. ‘Can’t you feel in
some way, a thick, hot attraction in it? I can. And it quite
stupifies me.’
They were passing between blocks of miners’
dwellings. In the back yards of several dwellings, a miner
could be seen washing himself in the open on this hot
evening, naked down to the loins, his great trousers of
moleskin slipping almost away. Miners already cleaned
were sitting on their heels, with their backs near the walls,
talking and silent in pure physical well-being, tired, and
taking physical rest. Their voices sounded out with strong
intonation, and the broad dialect was curiously caressing to
the blood. It seemed to envelop Gudrun in a labourer’s
caress, there was in the whole atmosphere a resonance of
physical men, a glamorous thickness of labour and

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maleness, surcharged in the air. But it was universal in the

district, and therefore unnoticed by the inhabitants.
To Gudrun, however, it was potent and half-repulsive.
She could never tell why Beldover was so utterly different
from London and the south, why one’s whole feelings
were different, why one seemed to live in another sphere.
Now she realised that this was the world of powerful,
underworld men who spent most of their time in the
darkness. In their voices she could hear the voluptuous
resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld,
mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like strange
machines, heavy, oiled. The voluptuousness was like that
of machinery, cold and iron.
It was the same every evening when she came home,
she seemed to move through a wave of disruptive force,
that was given off from the presence of thousands of
vigorous, underworld, half-automatised colliers, and
which went to the brain and the heart, awaking a fatal
desire, and a fatal callousness.
There came over her a nostalgia for the place. She
hated it, she knew how utterly cut off it was, how hideous
and how sickeningly mindless. Sometimes she beat her
wings like a new Daphne, turning not into a tree but a
machine. And yet, she was overcome by the nostalgia. She

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struggled to get more and more into accord with the

atmosphere of the place, she craved to get her satisfaction
of it.
She felt herself drawn out at evening into the main
street of the town, that was uncreated and ugly, and yet
surcharged with this same potent atmosphere of intense,
dark callousness. There were always miners about. They
moved with their strange, distorted dignity, a certain
beauty, and unnatural stillness in their bearing, a look of
abstraction and half resignation in their pale, often gaunt
faces. They belonged to another world, they had a strange
glamour, their voices were full of an intolerable deep
resonance, like a machine’s burring, a music more
maddening than the siren’s long ago.
She found herself, with the rest of the common
women, drawn out on Friday evenings to the little market.
Friday was pay-day for the colliers, and Friday night was
market night. Every woman was abroad, every man was
out, shopping with his wife, or gathering with his pals.
The pavements were dark for miles around with people
coming in, the little market-place on the crown of the hill,
and the main street of Beldover were black with thickly-
crowded men and women.

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It was dark, the market-place was hot with kerosene

flares, which threw a ruddy light on the grave faces of the
purchasing wives, and on the pale abstract faces of the
men. The air was full of the sound of criers and of people
talking, thick streams of people moved on the pavements
towards the solid crowd of the market. The shops were
blazing and packed with women, in the streets were men,
mostly men, miners of all ages. Money was spent with
almost lavish freedom.
The carts that came could not pass through. They had
to wait, the driver calling and shouting, till the dense
crowd would make way. Everywhere, young fellows from
the outlying districts were making conversation with the
girls, standing in the road and at the corners. The doors of
the public-houses were open and full of light, men passed
in and out in a continual stream, everywhere men were
calling out to one another, or crossing to meet one
another, or standing in little gangs and circles, discussing,
endlessly discussing. The sense of talk, buzzing, jarring,
half-secret, the endless mining and political wrangling,
vibrated in the air like discordant machinery. And it was
their voices which affected Gudrun almost to swooning.
They aroused a strange, nostalgic ache of desire, something
almost demoniacal, never to be fulfilled.

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Like any other common girl of the district, Gudrun

strolled up and down, up and down the length of the
brilliant two-hundred paces of the pavement nearest the
market-place. She knew it was a vulgar thing to do; her
father and mother could not bear it; but the nostalgia came
over her, she must be among the people. Sometimes she
sat among the louts in the cinema: rakish-looking,
unattractive louts they were. Yet she must be among
them.
And, like any other common lass, she found her ‘boy.’
It was an electrician, one of the electricians introduced
according to Gerald’s new scheme. He was an earnest,
clever man, a scientist with a passion for sociology. He
lived alone in a cottage, in lodgings, in Willey Green. He
was a gentleman, and sufficiently well-to-do. His landlady
spread the reports about him; he WOULD have a large
wooden tub in his bedroom, and every time he came in
from work, he WOULD have pails and pails of water
brought up, to bathe in, then he put on clean shirt and
under-clothing EVERY day, and clean silk socks;
fastidious and exacting he was in these respects, but in
every other way, most ordinary and unassuming.
Gudrun knew all these things. The Brangwen’s house
was one to which the gossip came naturally and inevitably.

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Palmer was in the first place a friend of Ursula’s. But in his

pale, elegant, serious face there showed the same nostalgia
that Gudrun felt. He too must walk up and down the
street on Friday evening. So he walked with Gudrun, and
a friendship was struck up between them. But he was not
in love with Gudrun; he REALLY wanted Ursula, but for
some strange reason, nothing could happen between her
and him. He liked to have Gudrun about, as a fellow-
mind—but that was all. And she had no real feeling for
him. He was a scientist, he had to have a woman to back
him. But he was really impersonal, he had the fineness of
an elegant piece of machinery. He was too cold, too
destructive to care really for women, too great an egoist.
He was polarised by the men. Individually he detested and
despised them. In the mass they fascinated him, as
machinery fascinated him. They were a new sort of
machinery to him—but incalculable, incalculable.
So Gudrun strolled the streets with Palmer, or went to
the cinema with him. And his long, pale, rather elegant
face flickered as he made his sarcastic remarks. There they
were, the two of them: two elegants in one sense: in the
other sense, two units, absolutely adhering to the people,
teeming with the distorted colliers. The same secret
seemed to be working in the souls of all alike, Gudrun,

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Palmer, the rakish young bloods, the gaunt, middle-aged

men. All had a secret sense of power, and of inexpressible
destructiveness, and of fatal half-heartedness, a sort of
rottenness in the will.
Sometimes Gudrun would start aside, see it all, see how
she was sinking in. And then she was filled with a fury of
contempt and anger. She felt she was sinking into one
mass with the rest—all so close and intermingled and
breathless. It was horrible. She stifled. She prepared for
flight, feverishly she flew to her work. But soon she let go.
She started off into the country—the darkish, glamorous
country. The spell was beginning to work again.

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Chapter X

SKETCH-BOOK
One morning the sisters were sketching by the side of
Willey Water, at the remote end of the lake. Gudrun had
waded out to a gravelly shoal, and was seated like a
Buddhist, staring fixedly at the water-plants that rose
succulent from the mud of the low shores. What she could
see was mud, soft, oozy, watery mud, and from its
festering chill, water-plants rose up, thick and cool and
fleshy, very straight and turgid, thrusting out their leaves at
right angles, and having dark lurid colours, dark green and
blotches of black-purple and bronze. But she could feel
their turgid fleshy structure as in a sensuous vision, she
KNEW how they rose out of the mud, she KNEW how
they thrust out from themselves, how they stood stiff and
succulent against the air.
Ursula was watching the butterflies, of which there
were dozens near the water, little blue ones suddenly
snapping out of nothingness into a jewel-life, a large
black-and-red one standing upon a flower and breathing
with his soft wings, intoxicatingly, breathing pure, ethereal
sunshine; two white ones wrestling in the low air; there

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was a halo round them; ah, when they came tumbling

nearer they were orangetips, and it was the orange that
had made the halo. Ursula rose and drifted away,
unconscious like the butterflies.
Gudrun, absorbed in a stupor of apprehension of
surging water-plants, sat crouched on the shoal, drawing,
not looking up for a long time, and then staring
unconsciously, absorbedly at the rigid, naked, succulent
stems. Her feet were bare, her hat lay on the bank
opposite.
She started out of her trance, hearing the knocking of
oars. She looked round. There was a boat with a gaudy
Japanese parasol, and a man in white, rowing. The woman
was Hermione, and the man was Gerald. She knew it
instantly. And instantly she perished in the keen
FRISSON of anticipation, an electric vibration in her
veins, intense, much more intense than that which was
always humming low in the atmosphere of Beldover.
Gerald was her escape from the heavy slough of the
pale, underworld, automatic colliers. He started out of the
mud. He was master. She saw his back, the movement of
his white loins. But not that—it was the whiteness he
seemed to enclose as he bent forwards, rowing. He

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seemed to stoop to something. His glistening, whitish hair

seemed like the electricity of the sky.
’There’s Gudrun,’ came Hermione’s voice floating
distinct over the water. ‘We will go and speak to her. Do
you mind?’
Gerald looked round and saw the girl standing by the
water’s edge, looking at him. He pulled the boat towards
her, magnetically, without thinking of her. In his world,
his conscious world, she was still nobody. He knew that
Hermione had a curious pleasure in treading down all the
social differences, at least apparently, and he left it to her.
’How do you do, Gudrun?’ sang Hermione, using the
Christian name in the fashionable manner. ‘What are you
doing?’
’How do you do, Hermione? I WAS sketching.’
’Were you?’ The boat drifted nearer, till the keel
ground on the bank. ‘May we see? I should like to SO
much.’
It was no use resisting Hermione’s deliberate intention.
’Well—’ said Gudrun reluctantly, for she always hated
to have her unfinished work exposed—’there’s nothing in
the least interesting.’
’Isn’t there? But let me see, will you?’

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Gudrun reached out the sketch-book, Gerald stretched

from the boat to take it. And as he did so, he remembered
Gudrun’s last words to him, and her face lifted up to him
as he sat on the swerving horse. An intensification of pride
went over his nerves, because he felt, in some way she was
compelled by him. The exchange of feeling between them
was strong and apart from their consciousness.
And as if in a spell, Gudrun was aware of his body,
stretching and surging like the marsh-fire, stretching
towards her, his hand coming straight forward like a stem.
Her voluptuous, acute apprehension of him made the
blood faint in her veins, her mind went dim and
unconscious. And he rocked on the water perfectly, like
the rocking of phosphorescence. He looked round at the
boat. It was drifting off a little. He lifted the oar to bring it
back. And the exquisite pleasure of slowly arresting the
boat, in the heavy-soft water, was complete as a swoon.
’THAT’S what you have done,’ said Hermione,
looking searchingly at the plants on the shore, and
comparing with Gudrun’s drawing. Gudrun looked round
in the direction of Hermione’s long, pointing finger. ‘That
is it, isn’t it?’ repeated Hermione, needing confirmation.
’Yes,’ said Gudrun automatically, taking no real heed.

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’Let me look,’ said Gerald, reaching forward for the

book. But Hermione ignored him, he must not presume,
before she had finished. But he, his will as unthwarted and
as unflinching as hers, stretched forward till he touched the
book. A little shock, a storm of revulsion against him,
shook Hermione unconsciously. She released the book
when he had not properly got it, and it tumbled against
the side of the boat and bounced into the water.
’There!’ sang Hermione, with a strange ring of
malevolent victory. ‘I’m so sorry, so awfully sorry. Can’t
you get it, Gerald?’
This last was said in a note of anxious sneering that
made Gerald’s veins tingle with fine hate for her. He
leaned far out of the boat, reaching down into the water.
He could feel his position was ridiculous, his loins exposed
behind him.
’It is of no importance,’ came the strong, clanging
voice of Gudrun. She seemed to touch him. But he
reached further, the boat swayed violently. Hermione,
however, remained unperturbed. He grasped the book,
under the water, and brought it up, dripping.
’I’m so dreadfully sorry—dreadfully sorry,’ repeated
Hermione. ‘I’m afraid it was all my fault.’

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’It’s of no importance—really, I assure you—it doesn’t

matter in the least,’ said Gudrun loudly, with emphasis,
her face flushed scarlet. And she held out her hand
impatiently for the wet book, to have done with the
scene. Gerald gave it to her. He was not quite himself.
’I’m so dreadfully sorry,’ repeated Hermione, till both
Gerald and Gudrun were exasperated. ‘Is there nothing
that can be done?’
’In what way?’ asked Gudrun, with cool irony.
’Can’t we save the drawings?’
There was a moment’s pause, wherein Gudrun made
evident all her refutation of Hermione’s persistence.
’I assure you,’ said Gudrun, with cutting distinctness,
‘the drawings are quite as good as ever they were, for my
purpose. I want them only for reference.’
’But can’t I give you a new book? I wish you’d let me
do that. I feel so truly sorry. I feel it was all my fault.’
’As far as I saw,’ said Gudrun, ‘it wasn’t your fault at all.
If there was any FAULT, it was Mr Crich’s. But the
whole thing is ENTIRELY trivial, and it really is
ridiculous to take any notice of it.’
Gerald watched Gudrun closely, whilst she repulsed
Hermione. There was a body of cold power in her. He
watched her with an insight that amounted to

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clairvoyance. He saw her a dangerous, hostile spirit, that

could stand undiminished and unabated. It was so finished,
and of such perfect gesture, moreover.
’I’m awfully glad if it doesn’t matter,’ he said; ‘if there’s
no real harm done.’
She looked back at him, with her fine blue eyes, and
signalled full into his spirit, as she said, her voice ringing
with intimacy almost caressive now it was addressed to
him:
’Of course, it doesn’t matter in the LEAST.’
The bond was established between them, in that look,
in her tone. In her tone, she made the understanding
clear—they were of the same kind, he and she, a sort of
diabolic freemasonry subsisted between them.
Henceforward, she knew, she had her power over him.
Wherever they met, they would be secretly associated.
And he would be helpless in the association with her. Her
soul exulted.
’Good-bye! I’m so glad you forgive me. Gooood-bye!’
Hermione sang her farewell, and waved her hand.
Gerald automatically took the oar and pushed off. But he
was looking all the time, with a glimmering, subtly-
smiling admiration in his eyes, at Gudrun, who stood on
the shoal shaking the wet book in her hand. She turned

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away and ignored the receding boat. But Gerald looked

back as he rowed, beholding her, forgetting what he was
doing.
’Aren’t we going too much to the left?’ sang
Hermione, as she sat ignored under her coloured parasol.
Gerald looked round without replying, the oars
balanced and glancing in the sun.
’I think it’s all right,’ he said good-humouredly,
beginning to row again without thinking of what he was
doing. And Hermione disliked him extremely for his
good-humoured obliviousness, she was nullified, she could
not regain ascendancy.

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Chapter XI

AN ISLAND
Meanwhile Ursula had wandered on from Willey
Water along the course of the bright little stream. The
afternoon was full of larks’ singing. On the bright hill-sides
was a subdued smoulder of gorse. A few forget-me-nots
flowered by the water. There was a rousedness and a
glancing everywhere.
She strayed absorbedly on, over the brooks. She wanted
to go to the mill-pond above. The big mill-house was
deserted, save for a labourer and his wife who lived in the
kitchen. So she passed through the empty farm-yard and
through the wilderness of a garden, and mounted the bank
by the sluice. When she got to the top, to see the old,
velvety surface of the pond before her, she noticed a man
on the bank, tinkering with a punt. It was Birkin sawing
and hammering away.
She stood at the head of the sluice, looking at him. He
was unaware of anybody’s presence. He looked very busy,
like a wild animal, active and intent. She felt she ought to
go away, he would not want her. He seemed to be so
much occupied. But she did not want to go away.

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Therefore she moved along the bank till he would look

up.
Which he soon did. The moment he saw her, he
dropped his tools and came forward, saying:
’How do you do? I’m making the punt water-tight.
Tell me if you think it is right.’
She went along with him.
’You are your father’s daughter, so you can tell me if it
will do,’ he said.
She bent to look at the patched punt.
’I am sure I am my father’s daughter,’ she said, fearful
of having to judge. ‘But I don’t know anything about
carpentry. It LOOKS right, don’t you think?’
’Yes, I think. I hope it won’t let me to the bottom,
that’s all. Though even so, it isn’t a great matter, I should
come up again. Help me to get it into the water, will
you?’
With combined efforts they turned over the heavy punt
and set it afloat.
’Now,’ he said, ‘I’ll try it and you can watch what
happens. Then if it carries, I’ll take you over to the island.’
’Do,’ she cried, watching anxiously.
The pond was large, and had that perfect stillness and
the dark lustre of very deep water. There were two small

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islands overgrown with bushes and a few trees, towards

the middle. Birkin pushed himself off, and veered clumsily
in the pond. Luckily the punt drifted so that he could
catch hold of a willow bough, and pull it to the island.
’Rather overgrown,’ he said, looking into the interior,
‘but very nice. I’ll come and fetch you. The boat leaks a
little.’
In a moment he was with her again, and she stepped
into the wet punt.
’It’ll float us all right,’ he said, and manoeuvred again to
the island.
They landed under a willow tree. She shrank from the
little jungle of rank plants before her, evil-smelling figwort
and hemlock. But he explored into it.
’I shall mow this down,’ he said, ‘and then it will be
romantic—like Paul et Virginie.’
’Yes, one could have lovely Watteau picnics here,’
cried Ursula with enthusiasm.
His face darkened.
’I don’t want Watteau picnics here,’ he said.
’Only your Virginie,’ she laughed.
’Virginie enough,’ he smiled wryly. ‘No, I don’t want
her either.’

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Ursula looked at him closely. She had not seen him

since Breadalby. He was very thin and hollow, with a
ghastly look in his face.
’You have been ill; haven’t you?’ she asked, rather
repulsed.
’Yes,’ he replied coldly.
They had sat down under the willow tree, and were
looking at the pond, from their retreat on the island.
’Has it made you frightened?’ she asked.
’What of?’ he asked, turning his eyes to look at her.
Something in him, inhuman and unmitigated, disturbed
her, and shook her out of her ordinary self.
’It IS frightening to be very ill, isn’t it?’ she said.
’It isn’t pleasant,’ he said. ‘Whether one is really afraid
of death, or not, I have never decided. In one mood, not a
bit, in another, very much.’
’But doesn’t it make you feel ashamed? I think it makes
one so ashamed, to be ill—illness is so terribly humiliating,
don’t you think?’
He considered for some minutes.
’May-be,’ he said. ‘Though one knows all the time
one’s life isn’t really right, at the source. That’s the
humiliation. I don’t see that the illness counts so much,
after that. One is ill because one doesn’t live properly—

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can’t. It’s the failure to live that makes one ill, and
humiliates one.’
’But do you fail to live?’ she asked, almost jeering.
’Why yes—I don’t make much of a success of my days.
One seems always to be bumping one’s nose against the
blank wall ahead.’
Ursula laughed. She was frightened, and when she was
frightened she always laughed and pretended to be jaunty.
’Your poor nose!’ she said, looking at that feature of his
face.
’No wonder it’s ugly,’ he replied.
She was silent for some minutes, struggling with her
own self-deception. It was an instinct in her, to deceive
herself.
’But I’M happy—I think life is AWFULLY jolly,’ she
said.
’Good,’ he answered, with a certain cold indifference.
She reached for a bit of paper which had wrapped a
small piece of chocolate she had found in her pocket, and
began making a boat. He watched her without heeding
her. There was something strangely pathetic and tender in
her moving, unconscious finger-tips, that were agitated
and hurt, really.
’I DO enjoy things—don’t you?’ she asked.

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’Oh yes! But it infuriates me that I can’t get right, at

the really growing part of me. I feel all tangled and messed
up, and I CAN’T get straight anyhow. I don’t know what
really to DO. One must do something somewhere.’
’Why should you always be DOING?’ she retorted. ‘It
is so plebeian. I think it is much better to be really
patrician, and to do nothing but just be oneself, like a
walking flower.’
’I quite agree,’ he said, ‘if one has burst into blossom.
But I can’t get my flower to blossom anyhow. Either it is
blighted in the bud, or has got the smother-fly, or it isn’t
nourished. Curse it, it isn’t even a bud. It is a contravened
knot.’
Again she laughed. He was so very fretful and
exasperated. But she was anxious and puzzled. How was
one to get out, anyhow. There must be a way out
somewhere.
There was a silence, wherein she wanted to cry. She
reached for another bit of chocolate paper, and began to
fold another boat.
’And why is it,’ she asked at length, ‘that there is no
flowering, no dignity of human life now?’
’The whole idea is dead. Humanity itself is dry-rotten,
really. There are myriads of human beings hanging on the

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bush—and they look very nice and rosy, your healthy

young men and women. But they are apples of Sodom, as
a matter of fact, Dead Sea Fruit, gall-apples. It isn’t true
that they have any significance—their insides are full of
bitter, corrupt ash.’
’But there ARE good people,’ protested Ursula.
’Good enough for the life of today. But mankind is a
dead tree, covered with fine brilliant galls of people.’
Ursula could not help stiffening herself against this, it
was too picturesque and final. But neither could she help
making him go on.
’And if it is so, WHY is it?’ she asked, hostile. They
were rousing each other to a fine passion of opposition.
’Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because
they won’t fall off the tree when they’re ripe. They hang
on to their old positions when the position is over-past, till
they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.’
There was a long pause. His voice had become hot and
very sarcastic. Ursula was troubled and bewildered, they
were both oblivious of everything but their own
immersion.
’But even if everybody is wrong—where are you
right?’ she cried, ‘where are you any better?’

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’I?—I’m not right,’ he cried back. ‘At least my only

rightness lies in the fact that I know it. I detest what I am,
outwardly. I loathe myself as a human being. Humanity is
a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small
truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because
the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and
humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is the
greatest thing; they persist in SAYING this, the foul liars,
and just look at what they do! Look at all the millions of
people who repeat every minute that love is the greatest,
and charity is the greatest—and see what they are doing all
the time. By their works ye shall know them, for dirty liars
and cowards, who daren’t stand by their own actions,
much less by their own words.’
’But,’ said Ursula sadly, ‘that doesn’t alter the fact that
love is the greatest, does it? What they DO doesn’t alter
the truth of what they say, does it?’
’Completely, because if what they say WERE true,
then they couldn’t help fulfilling it. But they maintain a
lie, and so they run amok at last. It’s a lie to say that love is
the greatest. You might as well say that hate is the greatest,
since the opposite of everything balances. What people
want is hate—hate and nothing but hate. And in the name
of righteousness and love, they get it. They distil

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themselves with nitroglycerine, all the lot of them, out of

very love. It’s the lie that kills. If we want hate, let us have
it—death, murder, torture, violent destruction—let us
have it: but not in the name of love. But I abhor
humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there
would be no ABSOLUTE loss, if every human being
perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched.
Nay, it would be better. The real tree of life would then
be rid of the most ghastly, heavy crop of Dead Sea Fruit,
the intolerable burden of myriad simulacra of people, an
infinite weight of mortal lies.’
’So you’d like everybody in the world destroyed?’ said
Ursula.
’I should indeed.’
’And the world empty of people?’
’Yes truly. You yourself, don’t you find it a beautiful
clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted
grass, and a hare sitting up?’
The pleasant sincerity of his voice made Ursula pause
to consider her own proposition. And really it WAS
attractive: a clean, lovely, humanless world. It was the
REALLY desirable. Her heart hesitated, and exulted. But
still, she was dissatisfied with HIM.

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’But,’ she objected, ‘you’d be dead yourself, so what

good would it do you?’
’I would die like a shot, to know that the earth would
really be cleaned of all the people. It is the most beautiful
and freeing thought. Then there would NEVER be
another foul humanity created, for a universal defilement.’
’No,’ said Ursula, ‘there would be nothing.’
’What! Nothing? Just because humanity was wiped
out? You flatter yourself. There’d be everything.’
’But how, if there were no people?’
’Do you think that creation depends on MAN! It
merely doesn’t. There are the trees and the grass and birds.
I much prefer to think of the lark rising up in the morning
upon a human-less world. Man is a mistake, he must go.
There is the grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen
hosts, actual angels that go about freely when a dirty
humanity doesn’t interrupt them—and good pure-tissued
demons: very nice.’
It pleased Ursula, what he said, pleased her very much,
as a phantasy. Of course it was only a pleasant fancy. She
herself knew too well the actuality of humanity, its
hideous actuality. She knew it could not disappear so
cleanly and conveniently. It had a long way to go yet, a

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long and hideous way. Her subtle, feminine, demoniacal

soul knew it well.
’If only man was swept off the face of the earth,
creation would go on so marvellously, with a new start,
non-human. Man is one of the mistakes of creation—like
the ichthyosauri. If only he were gone again, think what
lovely things would come out of the liberated days;—
things straight out of the fire.’
’But man will never be gone,’ she said, with insidious,
diabolical knowledge of the horrors of persistence. ‘The
world will go with him.’
’Ah no,’ he answered, ‘not so. I believe in the proud
angels and the demons that are our fore-runners. They
will destroy us, because we are not proud enough. The
ichthyosauri were not proud: they crawled and floundered
as we do. And besides, look at elder-flowers and
bluebells—they are a sign that pure creation takes place—
even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the
caterpillar stage—it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have
wings. It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.’
Ursula watched him as he talked. There seemed a
certain impatient fury in him, all the while, and at the
same time a great amusement in everything, and a final
tolerance. And it was this tolerance she mistrusted, not the

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fury. She saw that, all the while, in spite of himself, he

would have to be trying to save the world. And this
knowledge, whilst it comforted her heart somewhere with
a little self-satisfaction, stability, yet filled her with a certain
sharp contempt and hate of him. She wanted him to
herself, she hated the Salvator Mundi touch. It was
something diffuse and generalised about him, which she
could not stand. He would behave in the same way, say
the same things, give himself as completely to anybody
who came along, anybody and everybody who liked to
appeal to him. It was despicable, a very insidious form of
prostitution.
’But,’ she said, ‘you believe in individual love, even if
you don’t believe in loving humanity—?’
’I don’t believe in love at all—that is, any more than I
believe in hate, or in grief. Love is one of the emotions
like all the others—and so it is all right whilst you feel it
But I can’t see how it becomes an absolute. It is just part
of human relationships, no more. And it is only part of
ANY human relationship. And why one should be
required ALWAYS to feel it, any more than one always
feels sorrow or distant joy, I cannot conceive. Love isn’t a
desideratum—it is an emotion you feel or you don’t feel,
according to circumstance.’

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’Then why do you care about people at all?’ she asked,

‘if you don’t believe in love? Why do you bother about
humanity?’
’Why do I? Because I can’t get away from it.’
’Because you love it,’ she persisted.
It irritated him.
’If I do love it,’ he said, ‘it is my disease.’
’But it is a disease you don’t want to be cured of,’ she
said, with some cold sneering.
He was silent now, feeling she wanted to insult him.
’And if you don’t believe in love, what DO you
believe in?’ she asked mocking. ‘Simply in the end of the
world, and grass?’
He was beginning to feel a fool.
’I believe in the unseen hosts,’ he said.
’And nothing else? You believe in nothing visible,
except grass and birds? Your world is a poor show.’
’Perhaps it is,’ he said, cool and superior now he was
offended, assuming a certain insufferable aloof superiority,
and withdrawing into his distance.
Ursula disliked him. But also she felt she had lost
something. She looked at him as he sat crouched on the
bank. There was a certain priggish Sunday-school stiffness
over him, priggish and detestable. And yet, at the same

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time, the moulding of him was so quick and attractive, it

gave such a great sense of freedom: the moulding of his
brows, his chin, his whole physique, something so alive,
somewhere, in spite of the look of sickness.
And it was this duality in feeling which he created in
her, that made a fine hate of him quicken in her bowels.
There was his wonderful, desirable life-rapidity, the rare
quality of an utterly desirable man: and there was at the
same time this ridiculous, mean effacement into a Salvator
Mundi and a Sunday-school teacher, a prig of the stiffest
type.
He looked up at her. He saw her face strangely
enkindled, as if suffused from within by a powerful sweet
fire. His soul was arrested in wonder. She was enkindled
in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder and in pure,
perfect attraction, he moved towards her. She sat like a
strange queen, almost supernatural in her glowing smiling
richness.
’The point about love,’ he said, his consciousness
quickly adjusting itself, ‘is that we hate the word because
we have vulgarised it. It ought to be prescribed, tabooed
from utterance, for many years, till we get a new, better
idea.’
There was a beam of understanding between them.

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’But it always means the same thing,’ she said.

’Ah God, no, let it not mean that any more,’ he cried.
‘Let the old meanings go.’
’But still it is love,’ she persisted. A strange, wicked
yellow light shone at him in her eyes.
He hesitated, baffled, withdrawing.
’No,’ he said, ‘it isn’t. Spoken like that, never in the
world. You’ve no business to utter the word.’
’I must leave it to you, to take it out of the Ark of the
Covenant at the right moment,’ she mocked.
Again they looked at each other. She suddenly sprang
up, turned her back to him, and walked away. He too rose
slowly and went to the water’s edge, where, crouching, he
began to amuse himself unconsciously. Picking a daisy he
dropped it on the pond, so that the stem was a keel, the
flower floated like a little water lily, staring with its open
face up to the sky. It turned slowly round, in a slow, slow
Dervish dance, as it veered away.
He watched it, then dropped another daisy into the
water, and after that another, and sat watching them with
bright, absolved eyes, crouching near on the bank. Ursula
turned to look. A strange feeling possessed her, as if
something were taking place. But it was all intangible.
And some sort of control was being put on her. She could

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not know. She could only watch the brilliant little discs of
the daisies veering slowly in travel on the dark, lustrous
water. The little flotilla was drifting into the light, a
company of white specks in the distance.
’Do let us go to the shore, to follow them,’ she said,
afraid of being any longer imprisoned on the island. And
they pushed off in the punt.
She was glad to be on the free land again. She went
along the bank towards the sluice. The daisies were
scattered broadcast on the pond, tiny radiant things, like
an exaltation, points of exaltation here and there. Why did
they move her so strongly and mystically?
’Look,’ he said, ‘your boat of purple paper is escorting
them, and they are a convoy of rafts.’
Some of the daisies came slowly towards her, hesitating,
making a shy bright little cotillion on the dark clear water.
Their gay bright candour moved her so much as they
came near, that she was almost in tears.
’Why are they so lovely,’ she cried. ‘Why do I think
them so lovely?’
’They are nice flowers,’ he said, her emotional tones
putting a constraint on him.

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’You know that a daisy is a company of florets, a

concourse, become individual. Don’t the botanists put it
highest in the line of development? I believe they do.’
’The compositae, yes, I think so,’ said Ursula, who was
never very sure of anything. Things she knew perfectly
well, at one moment, seemed to become doubtful the
next.
’Explain it so, then,’ he said. ‘The daisy is a perfect little
democracy, so it’s the highest of flowers, hence its charm.’
’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.

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’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.

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’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

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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.’

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Chapter 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.’

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And she darted here and there, throwing a duster, an

apron, a towel, a table-cloth 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.

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’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 arm, she drew her
away, saying, in her mild sing-song:
’How did you come here? We saw Gudrun too.’
’I came to look at the pond,’ said Ursula, ‘and I found
Mr Birkin there.’
’Did you? This is quite a Brangwen land, isn’t it!’
’I’m afraid I hoped so,’ said Ursula. ‘I ran here for
refuge, when I saw you down the lake, just putting off.’
’Did you! And now we’ve run you to earth.’
Hermione’s eyelids lifted with an uncanny movement,
amused but overwrought. She had always her strange, rapt
look, unnatural and irresponsible.
’I was going on,’ said Ursula. ‘Mr Birkin wanted me to
see the rooms. Isn’t it delightful to live here? It is perfect.’
’Yes,’ said Hermione, abstractedly. Then she turned
right away from Ursula, ceased to know her existence.

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’How do you feel, Rupert?’ she sang in a new,

affectionate tone, to Birkin.
’Very well,’ he replied.
’Were you quite comfortable?’ The curious, sinister,
rapt look was on Hermione’s face, she shrugged her
bosom in a convulsed movement, and seemed like one
half in a trance.
’Quite comfortable,’ he replied.
There was a long pause, whilst Hermione looked at
him for a long time, from under her heavy, drugged
eyelids.
’And you think you’ll be happy here?’ she said at last.
’I’m sure I shall.’
’I’m sure I shall do anything for him as I can,’ said the
labourer’s wife. ‘And I’m sure our master will; so I HOPE
he’ll find himself comfortable.’
Hermione turned and looked at her slowly.
’Thank you so much,’ she said, and then she turned
completely away again. She recovered her position, and
lifting her face towards him, and addressing him
exclusively, she said:
’Have you measured the rooms?’
’No,’ he said, ‘I’ve been mending the punt.’

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’Shall we do it now?’ she said slowly, balanced and

dispassionate.
’Have you got a tape measure, Mrs Salmon?’ he said,
turning to the woman.
’Yes sir, I think I can find one,’ replied the woman,
bustling immediately to a basket. ‘This is the only one I’ve
got, if it will do.’
Hermione took it, though it was offered to him.
’Thank you so much,’ she said. ‘It will do very nicely.
Thank you so much.’ Then she turned to Birkin, saying
with a little gay movement: ‘Shall we do it now, Rupert?’
’What about the others, they’ll be bored,’ he said
reluctantly.
’Do you mind?’ said Hermione, turning to Ursula and
Gerald vaguely.
’Not in the least,’ they replied.
’Which room shall we do first?’ she said, turning again
to Birkin, with the same gaiety, now she was going to DO
something with him.
’We’ll take them as they come,’ he said.
’Should I be getting your teas ready, while you do
that?’ said the labourer’s wife, also gay because SHE had
something to do.

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’Would you?’ said Hermione, turning to her with the

curious motion of intimacy that seemed to envelop the
woman, draw her almost to Hermione’s breast, and which
left the others standing apart. ‘I should be so glad. Where
shall we have it?’
’Where would you like it? Shall it be in here, or out on
the grass?’
’Where shall we have tea?’ sang Hermione to the
company at large.
’On the bank by the pond. And WE’LL carry the
things up, if you’ll just get them ready, Mrs Salmon,’ said
Birkin.
’All right,’ said the pleased woman.
The party moved down the passage into the front
room. It was empty, but clean and sunny. There was a
window looking on to the tangled front garden.
’This is the dining room,’ said Hermione. ‘We’ll
measure it this way, Rupert—you go down there—’
’Can’t I do it for you,’ said Gerald, coming to take the
end of the tape.
’No, thank you,’ cried Hermione, stooping to the
ground in her bluish, brilliant foulard. It was a great joy to
her to DO things, and to have the ordering of the job,
with Birkin. He obeyed her subduedly. Ursula and Gerald

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looked on. It was a peculiarity of Hermione’s, that at

every moment, she had one intimate, and turned all the
rest of those present into onlookers. This raised her into a
state of triumph.
They measured and discussed in the dining-room, and
Hermione decided what the floor coverings must be. It
sent her into a strange, convulsed anger, to be thwarted.
Birkin always let her have her way, for the moment.
Then they moved across, through the hall, to the other
front room, that was a little smaller than the first.
’This is the study,’ said Hermione. ‘Rupert, I have a
rug that I want you to have for here. Will you let me give
it to you? Do—I want to give it you.’
’What is it like?’ he asked ungraciously.
’You haven’t seen it. It is chiefly rose red, then blue, a
metallic, mid-blue, and a very soft dark blue. I think you
would like it. Do you think you would?’
’It sounds very nice,’ he replied. ‘What is it? Oriental?
With a pile?’
’Yes. Persian! It is made of camel’s hair, silky. I think it
is called Bergamos—twelve feet by seven—. Do you think
it will do?’

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’It would DO,’ he said. ‘But why should you give me

an expensive rug? I can manage perfectly well with my old
Oxford Turkish.’
’But may I give it to you? Do let me.’
’How much did it cost?’
She looked at him, and said:
’I don’t remember. It was quite cheap.’
He looked at her, his face set.
’I don’t want to take it, Hermione,’ he said.
’Do let me give it to the rooms,’ she said, going up to
him and putting her hand on his arm lightly, pleadingly. ‘I
shall be so disappointed.’
’You know I don’t want you to give me things,’ he
repeated helplessly.
’I don’t want to give you THINGS,’ she said teasingly.
‘But will you have this?’
’All right,’ he said, defeated, and she triumphed.
They went upstairs. There were two bedrooms to
correspond with the rooms downstairs. One of them was
half furnished, and Birkin had evidently slept there.
Hermione went round the room carefully, taking in every
detail, as if absorbing the evidence of his presence, in all
the inanimate things. She felt the bed and examined the
coverings.

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’Are you SURE you were quite comfortable?’ she said,

pressing the pillow.
’Perfectly,’ he replied coldly.
’And were you warm? There is no down quilt. I am
sure you need one. You mustn’t have a great pressure of
clothes.’
’I’ve got one,’ he said. ‘It is coming down.’
They measured the rooms, and lingered over every
consideration. Ursula stood at the window and watched
the woman carrying the tea up the bank to the pond. She
hated the palaver Hermione made, she wanted to drink
tea, she wanted anything but this fuss and business.
At last they all mounted the grassy bank, to the picnic.
Hermione poured out tea. She ignored now Ursula’s
presence. And Ursula, recovering from her ill-humour,
turned to Gerald saying:
’Oh, I hated you so much the other day, Mr Crich,’
’What for?’ said Gerald, wincing slightly away.
’For treating your horse so badly. Oh, I hated you so
much!’
’What did he do?’ sang Hermione.
’He made his lovely sensitive Arab horse stand with
him at the railway-crossing whilst a horrible lot of trucks
went by; and the poor thing, she was in a perfect frenzy, a

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perfect agony. It was the most horrible sight you can

imagine.’
’Why did you do it, Gerald?’ asked Hermione, calm
and interrogative.
’She must learn to stand—what use is she to me in this
country, if she shies and goes off every time an engine
whistles.’
’But why inflict unnecessary torture?’ said Ursula.
‘Why make her stand all that time at the crossing? You
might just as well have ridden back up the road, and saved
all that horror. Her sides were bleeding where you had
spurred her. It was too horrible—!’
Gerald stiffened.
’I have to use her,’ he replied. ‘And if I’m going to be
sure of her at ALL, she’ll have to learn to stand noises.’
’Why should she?’ cried Ursula in a passion. ‘She is a
living creature, why should she stand anything, just
because you choose to make her? She has as much right to
her own being, as you have to yours.’
’There I disagree,’ said Gerald. ‘I consider that mare is
there for my use. Not because I bought her, but because
that is the natural order. It is more natural for a man to
take a horse and use it as he likes, than for him to go

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down on his knees to it, begging it to do as it wishes, and

to fulfil its own marvellous nature.’
Ursula was just breaking out, when Hermione lifted
her face and began, in her musing sing-song:
’I do think—I do really think we must have the
COURAGE to use the lower animal life for our needs. I
do think there is something wrong, when we look on
every living creature as if it were ourselves. I do feel, that
it is false to project our own feelings on every animate
creature. It is a lack of discrimination, a lack of criticism.’
’Quite,’ said Birkin sharply. ‘Nothing is so detestable as
the maudlin attributing of human feelings and
consciousness to animals.’
’Yes,’ said Hermione, wearily, ‘we must really take a
position. Either we are going to use the animals, or they
will use us.’
’That’s a fact,’ said Gerald. ‘A horse has got a will like a
man, though it has no MIND strictly. And if your will
isn’t master, then the horse is master of you. And this is a
thing I can’t help. I can’t help being master of the horse.’
’If only we could learn how to use our will,’ said
Hermione, ‘we could do anything. The will can cure
anything, and put anything right. That I am convinced
of—if only we use the will properly, intelligibly.’

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