Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by D. H. Lawrence

  She drew herself up and set back her throat, her eyes shining yellow and dangerous.

  “I am to myself,” she said, wounded and mortified. “I know I am not to anybody else. You only wanted to bully me—you never cared for my happiness.”

  He was leaning forward watching her, his face intense like a spark.

  “Ursula, what are you saying? Keep your tongue still,” cried her mother.

  Ursula swung round, and the lights in her eyes flashed.

  “No, I won’t,” she cried. “I won’t hold my tongue and be bullied. What does it matter which day I get married—what does it matter! It doesn’t affect anybody but myself.”

  Her father was tense and gathered together like a cat about to spring.

  “Doesn’t it?” he cried, coming nearer to her. She shrank away.

  “No, how can it?” she replied, shrinking but stubborn.

  “It doesn’t matter to me then, what you do—what becomes of you?” he cried, in a strange voice like a cry.

  The mother and Gudrun stood back as if hypnotised.

  “No,” stammered Ursula. Her father was very near to her. “You only want to—”

  She knew it was dangerous, and she stopped. He was gathered together, every muscle ready.

  “What?” he challenged.

  “Bully me,” she muttered, and even as her lips were moving, his hand had caught her smack at the side of the face and she was sent up against the door.

  “Father!” cried Gudrun in a high voice, “it is impossible!”

  He stood unmoving. Ursula recovered, her hand was on the door handle. She slowly drew herself up. He seemed doubtful now.

  “It’s true,” she declared, with brilliant tears in her eyes, her head lifted up in defiance. “What has your love meant, what did it ever mean?—bullying, and denial—it did—”

  He was advancing again with strange, tense movements, and clenched fist, and the face of a murderer. But swift as lightning she had flashed out of the door, and they heard her running upstairs.

  He stood for a moment looking at the door. Then, like a defeated animal, he turned and went back to his seat by the fire.

  Gudrun was very white. Out of the intense silence, the mother’s voice was heard saying, cold and angry:

  “Well, you shouldn’t take so much notice of her.”

  Again the silence fell, each followed a separate set of emotions and thoughts.

  Suddenly the door opened again: Ursula, dressed in hat and furs, with a small valise in her hand.

  “Good-bye!” she said, in her maddening, bright, almost mocking tone. “I’m going.”

  And in the next instant the door was closed, they heard the outer door, then her quick steps down the garden path, then the gate banged, and her light footfall was gone. There was a silence like death in the house.

  Ursula went straight to the station, hastening heedlessly on winged feet. There was no train, she must walk on to the junction. As she went through the darkness, she began to cry, and she wept bitterly, with a dumb, heart-broken, child’s anguish, all the way on the road, and in the train. Time passed unheeded and unknown, she did not know where she was, nor what was taking place. Only she wept from fathomless depths of hopeless, hopeless grief, the terrible grief of a child, that knows no extenuation.

  Yet her voice had the same defensive brightness as she spoke to Birkin’s landlady at the door.

  “Good evening! Is Mr. Birkin in? Can I see him?”

  “Yes, he’s in. He’s in his study.”

  Ursula slipped past the woman. His door opened. He had heard her voice.

  “Hello!” he exclaimed in surprise, seeing her standing there with the valise in her hand, and marks of tears on her face. She was one who wept without showing many traces, like a child.

  “Do I look a sight?” she said, shrinking.

  “No—why? Come in,” he took the bag from her hand and they went into the study.

  There—immediately, her lips began to tremble like those of a child that remembers again, and the tears came rushing up.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, taking her in his arms. She sobbed violently on his shoulder, whilst he held her still, waiting.

  “What’s the matter?” he said again, when she was quieter. But she only pressed her face further into his shoulder, in pain, like a child that cannot tell.

  “What is it, then?” he asked.

  Suddenly she broke away, wiped her eyes, regained her composure, and went and sat in a chair.

  “Father hit me,” she announced, sitting bunched up, rather like a ruffled bird, her eyes very bright.

  “What for?” he said.

  She looked away, and would not answer. There was a pitiful redness about her sensitive nostrils, and her quivering lips.

  “Why?” he repeated, in his strange, soft, penetrating voice.

  She looked round at him, rather defiantly.

  “Because I said I was going to be married to-morrow, and he bullied me.”

  “Why did he bully you?”

  Her mouth dropped again, she remembered the scene once more, the tears came up.

  “Because I said he didn’t care—and he doesn’t, it’s only his domineeringness that’s hurt—” she said, her mouth pulled awry by her weeping, all the time she spoke, so that he almost smiled, it seemed so childish. Yet it was not childish, it was a mortal conflict, a deep wound.

  “It isn’t quite true,” he said. “And even so, you shouldn’t say it.”

  “It is true—it is true,” she wept, “and I won’t be bullied by his pretending it’s love—when it isn‘t—he doesn’t care, how can he—no, he can’t—”

  He sat in silence. She moved him beyond himself.

  “Then you shouldn’t rouse him, if he can’t,” replied Birkin quietly.

  “And I have loved him, I have,” she wept. “I’ve loved him always, and he’s always done this to me, he has—”

  “It’s been a love of opposition, then,” he said. “Never mind—it will be all right. It’s nothing desperate.”

  “Yes,” she wept, “it is, it is.”

  “Why?”

  “I shall never see him again—”

  “Not immediately. Don’t cry, you had to break with him, it had to be—don’t cry.”

  He went over to her and kissed her fine, fragile hair, touching her wet cheeks gently.

  “Don’t cry,” he repeated, “don’t cry any more.”

  He held her head close against him, very close and quiet.

  At last she was still. Then she looked up, her eyes wide and frightened.

  “Don’t you want me?” she asked.

  “Want you?” His darkened, steady eyes puzzled her and did not give her play.

  “Do you wish I hadn’t come?” she asked, anxious now again for fear she might be out of place.

  “No,” he said. “I wish there hadn’t been the violence—so much ugliness—but perhaps it was inevitable.”

  She watched him in silence. He seemed deadened.

  “But where shall I stay?” she asked, feeling humiliated.

  He thought for a moment.

  “Here, with me,” he said. “We’re married as much to-day as we shall be to-morrow.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll tell Mrs. Varley,” he said. “Never mind now.”

  He sat looking at her. She could feel his darkened steady eyes looking at her all the time. It made her a little bit frightened. She pushed her hair off her forehead nervously.

  “Do I look ugly?” she said.

  And she blew her nose again.

  A small smile came round his eyes.

  “No,” he said, “fortunately.”

  And he went across to her, and gathered her like a belonging in his arms. She was so tenderly beautiful, he could not bear to see her, he could only bear to hide her against himself.

  Now, washed all clean by her tears, she was new and frail like a flower just unfolded, a flower so new, so tender
, so made perfect by inner light, that he could not bear to look at her, he must hide her against himself, cover his eyes against her. She had the perfect candour of creation, something translucent and simple, like a radiant, shining flower that moment unfolded in primal blessedness. She was so new, so wonder-clear, so undimmed. And he was so old, so steeped in heavy memories. Her soul was new, undefined and glimmering with the unseen. And his soul was dark and gloomy, it had only one grain of living hope, like a grain of mustard seed. But this one living grain in him matched the perfect youth in her.

  “I love you,” he whispered as he kissed her, and trembled with pure hope, like a man who is born again to a wonderful, lively hope far exceeding the bounds of death.

  She could not know how much it meant to him, how much he meant by the few words. Almost childish, she wanted proof, and statement, even over-statement, for everything seemed still uncertain, unfixed to her.

  But the passion of gratitude with which he received her into his soul, the extreme, unthinkable gladness of knowing himself living and fit to unite with her, he, who was so nearly dead, who was so near to being gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death, could never be understood by her. He worshipped her as age worships youth, he gloried in her, because, in his one grain of faith, he was young as she, he was her proper mate. This marriage with her was his resurrection and his life.

  All this she could not know. She wanted to be made much of, to be adored. There were infinite distances of silence between them. How could he tell her of the immanence of her beauty, that was not form, or weight, or colour, but something like a strange, golden light! How could he know himself what her beauty lay in, for him. He said “Your nose is beautiful, your chin is adorable.” But it sounded like lies, and she was disappointed, hurt. Even when he said, whispering with truth, “I love you, I love you,” it was not the real truth. It was something beyond love, such a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence. How could he say “I” when he was something new and unknown, not himself at all? This I, this old formula of the age, was a dead letter.

  In the new, superfine bliss, a peace superseding knowledge, there was no I and you, there was only the third, unrealised wonder, the wonder of existing not as oneself, but in a consummation of my being and of her being in a new one, a new, paradisal unit regained from the duality. Nor can I say “I love you,” when I have ceased to be, and you have ceased to be: we are both caught up and transcended into a new oneness where everything is silent, because there is nothing to answer, all is perfect and at one. Speech travels between the separate parts. But in the perfect One there is perfect silence of bliss.

  They were married by law on the next day, and she did as he bade her, she wrote to her father and mother. Her mother replied, not her father.

  She did not go back to school. She stayed with Birkin in his rooms, or at the Mill, moving with him as he moved. But she did not see anybody, save Gudrun and Gerald. She was all strange and wondering as yet, but relieved as by dawn.

  Gerald sat talking to her one afternoon in the warm study down at the Mill. Rupert had not yet come home.

  “You are happy?” Gerald asked her, with a smile.

  “Very happy!” she cried, shrinking a little in her brightness.

  “Yes, one can see it.”

  “Can one?” cried Ursula in surprise.

  He looked up at her with a communicative smile.

  “Oh yes, plainly.”

  She was pleased. She meditated a moment.

  “And can you see that Rupert is happy as well?”

  He lowered his eyelids, and looked aside.

  “Oh yes,” he said.

  “Really!”

  “Oh yes.”

  He was very quiet, as if it were something not to be talked about by him. He seemed sad.

  She was very sensitive to suggestion. She asked the question he wanted her to ask.

  “Why don’t you be happy as well?” she said. “You could be just the same.”

  He paused a moment.

  “With Gudrun?” he asked.

  “Yes!” she cried, her eyes glowing. But there was a strange tension, an emphasis, as if they were asserting their wishes, against the truth.

  “You think Gudrun would have me, and we should be happy?” he said.

  “Yes, I’m sure!” she cried.

  Her eyes were round with delight. Yet underneath she was constrained, she knew her own insistence.

  “Oh, I’m so glad,” she added.

  He smiled.

  “What makes you glad?” he said.

  “For her sake,” she replied. “I’m sure you’d—you’re the right man for her.”

  “You are?” he said. “And do you think she would agree with you?”

  “Oh yes!” she exclaimed hastily. Then, upon reconsideration, very uneasy: “Though Gudrun isn’t so very simple, is she? One doesn’t know her in five minutes, does one? She’s not like me in that.” She laughed at him with her strange, open, dazzled face.

  “You think she’s not much like you?” Gerald asked.

  She knitted her brows.

  “Oh, in many ways she is. But I never know what she will do when anything new comes.”

  “You don’t?” said Gerald. He was silent for some moments. Then he moved tentatively. “I was going to ask her, in any case, to go away with me at Christmas,” he said, in a very small, cautious voice.

  “Go away with you? For a time, you mean?”

  “As long as she likes,” he said, with a deprecating movement.

  They were both silent for some minutes.

  “Of course,” said Ursula at last, “she might just be willing to rush into marriage. You can see.”

  “Yes,” smiled Gerald. “I can see. But in case she won’t—do you think she would go abroad with me for a few days—or for a fortnight?”

  “Oh yes,” said Ursula. “I’d ask her.”

  “Do you think we might all go together?”

  “All of us?” Again Ursula’s face lighted up. “It would be rather fun, don’t you think?”

  “Great fun,” he said.

  “And then you could see,” said Ursula.

  “What?”

  “How things went. I think it is best to take the honeymoon before the wedding—don’t you?”

  She was pleased with this mot. He laughed.

  “In certain cases,” he said. “I’d rather it were so in my own case.”

  “Would you!” exclaimed Ursula. Then doubtingly: “Yes, perhaps you’re right. One should please oneself.”

  Birkin came in a little later, and Ursula told him what had been said.

  “Gudrun!” exclaimed Birkin. “She’s a born mistress, just as Gerald is a born lover—amant en titre.1 If as somebody says all women are either wives or mistresses, then Gudrun is a mistress.”

  “And all men either lovers or husbands,” cried Ursula. “But why not both?”

  “The one excludes the other,” he laughed.

  “Then I want a lover,” cried Ursula.

  “No you don’t,” he said.

  “But I do,” she wailed.

  He kissed her, and laughed.

  It was two days after this that Ursula was to go to fetch her things from the house in Beldover. The removal had taken place, the family had gone. Gudrun had rooms in Willey Green.

  Ursula had not seen her parents since her marriage. She wept over the rupture, yet what was the good of making it up! Good or not good, she could not go to them. So her things had been left behind and she and Gudrun were to walk over for them, in the afternoon.

  It was a wintry afternoon, with red in the sky, when they arrived at the house. The windows were dark and blank, already the place was frightening. A stark, void entrance-hall struck a chill to the hearts of the girls.

  “I don’t believe I dare have come in alone,” said Ursula. “It frightens me.”

  “Ursula!” cried Gudrun. “Isn’t it amazin
g! Can you believe you lived in this place and never felt it? How I lived here a day without dying of terror, I cannot conceive!”

  They looked in the big dining-room. It was a good-sized room, but now a cell would have been lovelier. The large bay windows were naked, the floor was stripped, and a border of dark polish went round the tract of pale boarding. In the faded wall-paper were dark patches where furniture had stood, where pictures had hung. The sense of walls, dry, thin, flimsy-seeming walls, and a flimsy flooring, pale with its artificial black edges, was neutralising to the mind. Everything was null to the senses, there was enclosure without substance, for the walls were dry and papery. Where were they standing, on earth, or suspended in some card-board box? In the hearth was burnt paper, and scraps of half-burnt paper.

  “Imagine that we passed our days here!” said Ursula.

  “I know,” cried Gudrun. “It is too appalling. What must we be like, if we are the contents of this!”

  “Vile!” said Ursula. “It really is.”

  And she recognised half-burnt covers of “Vogue”—half-burnt representations of women in gowns—lying under the grate.

  They went to the drawing-room. Another piece of shut-in air; without weight or substance, only a sense of intolerable papery imprisonment in nothingness. The kitchen did look more substantial, because of the red-tiled floor and the stove, but it was cold and horrid.

  The two girls tramped hollowly up the bare stairs. Every sound re-echoed under their hearts. They tramped down the bare corridor. Against the wall of Ursula’s bedroom were her things—a trunk, a work-basket, some books, loose coats, a hat-box, standing desolate in the universal emptiness of the dusk.

  “A cheerful sight, aren’t they?” said Ursula, looking down at her forsaken possessions.

  “Very cheerful,” said Gudrun.

  The two girls set to, carrying everything down to the front door. Again and again they made the hollow, re-echoing transit. The whole place seemed to resound about them with a noise of hollow, empty futility. In the distance the empty, invisible rooms sent forth a vibration almost of obscenity. They almost fled with the last articles, into the out-of-door.

  But it was cold. They were waiting for Birkin, who was coming with the car. They went indoors again, and upstairs to their parents’ front bedroom, whose windows looked down on the road, across the country at the black-barred sunset, black and red barred, without light.