Women in Love quotes

“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.

“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 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.

She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, 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.

“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.

“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.

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 aboveground 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.

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.

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.

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 tightrope: but always on a tightrope, pretending nothing but ease.

“I’m sorry we are so late,” he was saying. “We couldn’t find a buttonhook, 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.

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.

“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.

“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.

“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 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 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.”

“How do you make that out?” said Gerald.

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.

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 heartburning 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.

“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?

“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.

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-maché realised selves. We’d rather die than give up our little self-righteous self-opinionated self-will.”

“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-maché realised selves.

We’d rather die than give up our little self-righteous self-opinionated self-will.

”

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.

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 highroad.

“God, what it is to be a man!” she cried.

“What?” exclaimed Ursula in surprise.

“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?

”

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—”

“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.

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.”

This was a whole life! Sometimes she had 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.

“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.

”

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.”

“I know you do,” said Gerald. “Why do you?”

“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.

”

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.”

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—’ ”

“

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.”

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.

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.”

“Yes, but one does have that limitless feeling,” said Gerald. “It’s like getting on top of the mountain and seeing the Pacific.”

“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.

“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.

”

He looked brightly round the company.

“I wonder what the ‘hurriedly’ was,” said Ursula.

They all began to guess.

She trailed off to the rest of the company, only turning to wave her handkerchief to him, and to chuckle with laughter, singing out:

“Goodbye, impudent hag,” he said to himself.

They all went through the park. Hermione wanted to show them the wild daffodils on a little slope. “This way, this way,” sang her leisurely voice at intervals. And they had all to come this way. The daffodils were pretty, but who could see them?

“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.

“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.

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?”

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.

“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.”

“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 Fräulein daintily.

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.

“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.

“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.

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 newfound world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

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.

“

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.”

“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;

What people want is hate—hate and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and love, they get it. They distil 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.

“

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 humanless world. Man is a mistake, he must go.

“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 humanless 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.”

“Quite,” said Birkin sharply. “

Nothing is so detestable as the maudlin attributing of human feelings and consciousness to animals.

”

“

Best to read the terms of the contract, before we sign,

” he said.

The eyes of the stray cat flared round for a moment, like great green fires staring at Birkin. Then she had rushed in a soft swift rush, halfway down the garden. There she paused to look round.

The Mino turned his face in pure superiority to his master, and slowly closed his eyes, standing in statuesque young perfection.

The wild cat’s round, green, wondering eyes were staring all the while like uncanny fires. Then again, like a shadow, she slid towards the kitchen.

“In the housekeeping way, we’ll hope not.

It is disgusting, people marrying for a home.

”

“In outer things, maybe—except to share his bed and bear his children. But essentially, there is just the same need as there ever was.

Only nobody takes the trouble to be essential.

”

“Don’t cant to me,” he replied. “

Love is a direction which excludes all other directions.

It’s a freedom together, if you like.”

“Quite absurd,” he said. “

Suffering bores me, any more.

”

“

Because we can go one better,

” he said, putting his arms round her.

“

So that I can spit it out the more readily,

” he said, pleased by his own retort.

One shouldn’t talk when one is tired and wretched. One Hamletises, and it seems a lie. Only believe me when I show you a bit of healthy pride and insouciance.

I hate myself serious.

”

After all, when one was fulfilled, one was happiest in falling into death, as a bitter fruit plunges in its ripeness downwards.

Death is a great consummation, a consummating experience.

It is a development from life. That we know, while we are yet living. What then need we think for further? One can never see beyond the consummation. It is enough that death is a great and conclusive experience.

How much cleaner and more dignified to be dead! One could not bear any more of this shame of sordid routine and mechanical nullity. One might come to fruit in death. She had had enough. For where was life to be found?

No flowers grow upon busy machinery, there is no sky to a routine, there is no space to a rotary motion.

And all life was a rotary motion, mechanised, cut off from reality. There was nothing to look for from life—it was the same in all countries and all peoples. The only window was death.

a kaleidoscope of couples, disjoined, separatist, meaningless entities of married couples. True, he hated promiscuity even worse than marriage, and a liaison was only another kind of coupling, reactionary from the legal marriage.

Reaction was a greater bore than action.

On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other broken half. And he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in herself.

For him the world collapses. All his care now is for Winnie—he must save Winnie. He says she ought to be sent away to school, but she won’t hear of it, and he’ll never do it. Of course she is in rather a queer way.

We’re all of us curiously bad at living.

We can do things—but we can’t get on with life at all. It’s curious—a family failing.”

“Make it.

Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.

As a matter of fact, two exceptional people make another world. You and I, we make another, separate world. You don’t want a world same as your brothers-in-law. It’s just the special quality you value. Do you want to be normal or ordinary!

“No more wrong than any of the rest of us,” Birkin replied. “

The most normal people have the worst subterranean selves, take them one by one.

”

He did not care what they thought of him. His vision had suddenly crystallised. Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of mankind. There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous.

The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions, like the weather.

What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else mattered.

There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions, like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual.

As a man as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else mattered.

Everything in the world has its function, and is good or not good in so far as it fulfils this function more or less perfectly. Was a miner a good miner? Then he was complete. Was a manager a good manager? That was enough.

Seething masses of miners met daily, carried away by a new religious impulse. The idea flew through them: “All men are equal on earth,” and they would carry the idea to its material fulfilment. After all, is it not the teaching of Christ?

And what is an idea, if not the germ of action in the material world.

“All men are equal in spirit, they are all sons of God. Whence then this obvious disquality?” It was a religious creed pushed to its material conclusion. Thomas Crich at least had no answer.

“

No. That’s what it is to be a rabbit.

”

“

God be praised we aren’t rabbits

,” she said, in a high, shrill voice.

But what was the good of telling her he wanted this company in proud indifference. What was the good of talking, anyway? It must happen beyond the sound of words. It was merely ruinous to try to work her by conviction.

This was a paradisal bird that could never be netted, it must fly by itself to the heart.

“I always think I am going to be loved—and then I am let down. You don’t love me, you know. You don’t want to serve me. You only want yourself.”

“No,” he said, outspoken with anger. “I want you to drop your assertive will, your frightened apprehensive self-insistence, that is what I want.

I want you to trust yourself so implicitly, that you can let yourself go.

”

“Your insistence—Your war-cry—‘A Brangwen, A Brangwen’—an old battle-cry.

Yours is, ‘Do you love me? Yield knave, or die.’

”

“

Well then, know it and have done with it.

”

He was not a parent. A slip of living flesh had been transmitted through him, but the spirit had not come from him. The spirit had not come from any ancestor, it had come out of the unknown.

A child is the child of the mystery, or it is uncreated.

“The weather’s not so bad as it has been,” said Brangwen, after waiting a moment. There was no connection between the two men.

There was a complete silence, because of the utter failure in mutual understanding. Birkin felt bored.

Her father was not a coherent human being, he was a roomful of old echoes.

The eyes of the younger man rested on the face of the elder. Brangwen looked up, and saw Birkin looking at him. His face was covered with inarticulate anger and humiliation and sense of inferiority in strength.

They are of another world. How stupid anthropomorphism is! Gudrun is really impudent, insolent, making herself the measure of everything, making everything come down to human standards. Rupert is quite right, human beings are boring, painting the universe with their own image.

The universe is nonhuman, thank God.

” It seemed to her irreverence, destructive of all true life, to make little Lloyd Georges of the birds. It was such a lie towards the robins, and such a defamation. Yet she had done it herself. But under Gudrun’s influence: so she exonerated herself.

Rupert is quite right, human beings are boring, painting the universe with their own image. The universe is nonhuman, thank God.” It seemed to her irreverence, destructive of all true life, to make little Lloyd Georges of the birds.

It was such a lie towards the robins, and such a defamation.

Yet she had done it herself. But under Gudrun’s influence: so she exonerated herself.

He could go out in the car, he could run to town. But he did not want to go out in the car, he did not want to run to town, he did not want to call on the Thirlbys.

He was suspended motionless, in an agony of inertia, like a machine that is without power.

This was very bitter to Gerald, who had never known what boredom was, who had gone from activity to activity, never at a loss. Now, gradually, everything seemed to be stopping in him. He did not want any more to do the things that offered.

“

You should try hitting something,

” he said.

“All cold eggs,” said Gerald. “

In sleep, you dream, in drink you curse, and in travel you yell at a porter.

No, work and love are the two. When you’re not at work you should be in love.”

“No.

One ought to wrestle and strive and be physically close. It makes one sane.

”

They, laughing at her anxiety and gravity, came with her into the hall. The manservant came hastening to the door, and there he was, relieving Gudrun of her umbrella, and then of her raincoat. The welcoming party hung back till their visitor entered the hall.

Gudrun was flushed with the rain, her hair was blown in loose little curls, she was like a flower just opened in the rain, the heart of the blossom just newly visible, seeming to emit a warmth of retained sunshine.

Gerald winced in spirit, seeing her so beautiful and unknown. She was wearing a soft blue dress, and her stockings were of dark red.

“

Best to dance while Rome burns, since it must burn, don’t you think?

” he said.

The two women looked at each other. Ursula resented Hermione’s long, grave, downward-looking face. There was something of the stupidity and the unenlightened self-esteem of a horse in it. “She’s got a horse-face,” Ursula said to herself, “she runs between blinkers.”

It did seem as if Hermione, like the moon, had only one side to her penny. There was no obverse.

She stared out all the time on the narrow, but to her, complete world of the extant consciousness. In the darkness, she did not exist. Like the moon, one half of her was lost to life.

There was no obverse. She stared out all the time on the narrow, but to her, complete world of the extant consciousness. In the darkness, she did not exist. Like the moon, one half of her was lost to life.

Her self was all in her head, she did not know what it was spontaneously to run or move, like a fish in the water, or a weasel on the grass.

She must always know.

She did not believe in the inner life—it was a trick, not a reality. She did not believe in the spiritual world—it was an affectation. In the last resort, she believed in Mammon, the flesh, and the devil—these at least were not sham.

She was a priestess without belief, without conviction, suckled in a creed outworn, and condemned to the reiteration of mysteries that were not divine to her.

Yet there was no escape. She was a leaf upon a dying tree. What help was there then, but to fight still for the old, withered truths, to die for the old, outworn belief, to be a sacred and inviolate priestess of desecrated mysteries?

She was apt, mentally, to condescend to women such as Ursula, whom she regarded as purely emotional.

Poor Hermione, it was her one possession, this aching certainty of hers, it was her only justification.

She must be confident here, for God knows, she felt rejected and deficient enough elsewhere. In the life of thought, of the spirit, she was one of the elect. And she wanted to be universal.

“And I don’t want to suffer hourly and daily,” said Ursula. “I don’t, I should be ashamed.

I think it is degrading not to be happy.

”

“

No. I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar.

Who wants what luck would bring? I don’t.”

“You!” she cried. “You! You truth-lover! You purity-monger!

It stinks, your truth and your purity.

It stinks of the offal you feed on, you scavenger dog, you eater of corpses. You are foul, foul—and you must know it. Your purity, your candour, your goodness—yes, thank you, we’ve had some.

And both were horrible. Why could they not remain individuals, limited by their own limits? Why this dreadful all-comprehensiveness, this hateful tyranny? Why not leave the other being, free, why try to absorb, or melt, or merge?

One might abandon oneself utterly to the moments, but not to any other being.

He could not bear to see the rings lying in the pale mud of the road. He picked them up, and wiped them unconsciously on his hands. They were the little tokens of the reality of beauty, the reality of happiness in warm creation.

He stood up and looked into her face. It was new and oh, so delicate in its luminous wonder and fear. He put his arms round her, and she hid her face on his shoulder.

It was peace, just simple peace, as he stood folding her quietly there on the open lane.

It was peace at last. The old, detestable world of tension had passed away at last, his soul was strong and at ease.

She hid her face on his shoulder, hiding before him, because he could see her so completely. She knew he loved her, and she was afraid, she was in a strange element, a new heaven round about her.

She wished he were passionate, because in passion she was at home. But this was so still and frail, as space is more frightening than force.

Again, quickly, she lifted her head.

Thomas Crich died slowly, terribly slowly.

It seemed impossible to everybody that the thread of life could be drawn out so thin, and yet not break. The sick man lay unutterably weak and spent, kept alive by morphia and by drinks, which he sipped slowly.

Thomas Crich died slowly, terribly slowly.

It seemed impossible to everybody that the thread of life could be drawn out so thin, and yet not break.

The sick man lay unutterably weak and spent, kept alive by morphia and by drinks, which he sipped slowly. He was only half conscious—a thin strand of consciousness linking the darkness of death with the light of day.

But the pressure was too great. He would have to find something to make good the equilibrium. Something must come with him into the hollow void of death in his soul, fill it up, and so equalise the pressure within to the pressure without.

For day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with darkness, round which whirled the iridescence of his consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the outer life, roared vastly.

In this extremity his instinct led him to Gudrun. He threw away everything now—he only wanted the relation established with her. He would follow her to the studio, to be near her, to talk to her.

“Have they? Have they?” answered his mother rapidly. “Why should you take it on yourself? What have you got to do, seeing it through.

It will see itself through. You are not needed.

”

And even he was glad to be checked, rebuked, held back.

For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.

They walked on towards the town, towards where the lamps threaded singly, at long intervals down the dark highroad of the valley. They came at length to the gate of the drive.

She turned and looked full in his eyes. Then she lifted her hands in a strange half-gesture of mad despair.

“Pray!” she said strongly. “Pray for yourselves to God, for there’s no help for you from your parents.”

“Oh mother!” cried her daughters wildly.

In this darkness, she seemed to see him so distinctly. But he was far off, in another world. Ah, she could shriek with torment, he was so far off, and perfected, in another world.

She seemed to look at him as at a pebble far away under clear dark water.

And here was she, left with all the anguish of consciousness, whilst he was sunk deep into the other element of mindless, remote, living shadow-gleam. He was beautiful, far-off, and perfected. They would never be together.

“I know,” said Gerald, “you believe something like that. Only I can’t feel it, you see.” He put his hand on Birkin’s arm, with a sort of deprecating affection. And he smiled as if triumphantly.

He was ready to be doomed. Marriage was like a doom to him.

He was willing to condemn himself in marriage, to become like a convict condemned to the mines of the underworld, living no life in the sun, but having a dreadful subterranean activity. He was willing to accept this.

And if you have a perfect modern house done for you by Poiret, it is something else perpetuated on top of you. It is all horrible.

It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalisation.

You have to be like Rodin, Michelangelo, and leave a piece of raw rock unfinished to your figure. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.”

It is all horrible. It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalisation. You have to be like Rodin, Michelangelo, and leave a piece of raw rock unfinished to your figure.

You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.

”

And yet he was somewhere indomitable and separate, like a quick, vital rat.

He had a queer, subterranean beauty, repulsive too.

“How strange they are!” said Ursula.

“Then what are we going to do?” she asked. “We’re not like them—are we? We’re not the meek?”

“No. We’ve got to live in the chinks they leave us.”

“How horrible!” cried Ursula. “I don’t want to live in chinks.”

“How horrible!” cried Ursula. “I don’t want to live in chinks.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “They are the children of men, they like marketplaces and street-corners best. That leaves plenty of chinks.”

“All the world,” she said.

There was a long silence. Her face was radiant like gold, as she sat thinking.

“I don’t want to inherit the earth,” she said. “I don’t want to inherit anything.”

He closed his hand over hers.

He closed his hand over hers.

“Neither do I. I want to be disinherited.”

She clasped his fingers closely.

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.

“We are,” said Gudrun, grimly.

“Not weeping that it’s gone, but weeping that it ever was,” she said.

He sat down for a moment. There was something in his presence, Ursula thought, lambent and alive. It made even the impertinent structure of this null house disappear.

“

Why does every woman think her aim in life is to have a hubby and a little grey home in the west?

Why is this the goal of life? Why should it be?” said Ursula.

No, no it could not be so. She suddenly conjured up a rosy room, with herself in a beautiful gown, and a handsome man in evening dress who held her in his arms in the firelight, and kissed her.

This picture she entitled “Home.” It would have done for the Royal Academy.

“Come with us to tea—do,” said Ursula, as they ran nearer to the cottage of Willey Green.

And still it rocked, and gave her the glad-eye from one side, then from the other, from one side, then from the other. Ah, how unhappy she was!

In the midst of her most active happiness, ah, how unhappy she was!

She glanced at the table. Gooseberry jam, and the same homemade cake with too much soda in it! Still, gooseberry jam was good, and one so rarely got it.

She thought of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm-life at Cossethay. My God, how far was she projected from her childhood, how far was she still to go!

In one lifetime one travelled through aeons.

The great chasm of memory from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of Cossethay and the Marsh Farm—she remembered the servant Tilly, who used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar, in the old living-room where the grandfather clock had two …

It was curious, the delight of the sisters in each other, at this meeting.

It was as if they met in exile, and united their solitary forces against all the world.

Birkin looked on with some mistrust and wonder.

When they had bathed and changed, Gerald came in.

He looked shining like the sun on frost.

“Go with Gerald and smoke,” said Ursula to Birkin. “Gudrun and I want to talk.”

“Gerald! Oh, my word, he came out like a dandelion in the sun! He’s a whole saturnalia in himself, once he is roused. I shouldn’t like to say whose waist his arm did not go round.

Really, Ursula, he seems to reap the women like a harvest.

There wasn’t one that would have resisted him. It was too amazing! Can you understand it?”

To Ursula, there seemed a fund of cynicism in these words.

“We may,” said Birkin. “But it’s a damnably uncomfortable love: like a love for an aged parent who suffers horribly from a complication of diseases, for which there is no hope.”

Gudrun looked at him with dilated dark eyes.

then the snow-buried silent sawmill by the roofed bridge, which crossed the hidden stream, over which they ran into the very depth of the untouched sheets of snow.

It was a silence and a sheer whiteness exhilarating to madness. But the perfect silence was most terrifying, isolating the soul, surrounding the heart with frozen air.

“It’s a marvellous place, for all that,” said Gudrun, looking into his eyes with a strange, meaning look. His soul leapt.

“Why? Why should it be?” she asked. He only stood still, in the terribly cold air that moved invisibly over the mountain tops, folding her round with his arms.

“I couldn’t bear this cold, eternal place without you,” he said. “I couldn’t bear it, it would kill the quick of my life.”

She kissed him again, suddenly.

She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have toiled out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled.

She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her.

What was this decree, that she should remember! Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any recollections or blemish of a past life. She was with Birkin, she had just come into life, here in the high snow, against the stars.

She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her. What was this decree, that she should remember!

Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any recollections or blemish of a past life.

She was with Birkin, she had just come into life, here in the high snow, against the stars. What had she to do with parents and antecedents?

What did she care? The worn-out concern and the rapid, splendidly organised industry, they were bad money. Yet of course, she cared a great deal, outwardly—and outwardly was all that mattered, for inwardly was a bad joke.

Everything was intrinsically a piece of irony to her.

She leaned over Gerald and said in her heart, with compassion:

Everything was intrinsically a piece of irony to her. She leaned over Gerald and said in her heart, with compassion:

“Oh, my dear, my dear, the game isn’t worth even you. You are a fine thing really⁠—why should you be used on such a poor show!”

Her heart was breaking with pity and grief for him. And at the same moment, a grimace came over her mouth, of mocking irony at her own unspoken tirade. Ah, what a farce it was! She thought of Parnell and Katherine O’Shea. Parnell!

After all, who can take the nationalisation of Ireland seriously? Who can take political Ireland really seriously, whatever it does? And who can take political England seriously? Who can? Who can care a straw, really, how the old patched-up Constitution is tinkered at any more?

Who cares a button for our national ideas, any more than for our national bowler hat? Aha, it is all old hat, it is all old bowler hat!

That’s all it is, Gerald, my young hero. At any rate we’ll spare ourselves the nausea of stirring the old broth any more. You be beautiful, my Gerald, and reckless. There are perfect moments. Wake up, Gerald, wake up, convince me of the perfect moments.

She looked at him with her brilliant eyes that seemed to have undergone some transfiguration, and she laughed, with a terrible merriment.

“No,” she cried, with triumphant joy. “It was the complete moment of my life.”

And she looked at him with her dazzling, overweening laughter, like one possessed. A fine blade seemed to enter his heart, but he did not care, or take any notice.

“And do you think then,” said Gudrun, “that art should serve industry?”

“Art should interpret industry, as art once interpreted religion,” he said.

“But does your fair interpret industry?” she asked him.

Gudrun looked at Ursula with steady, balancing eyes. She admired and despised her sister so much, both! Then, suddenly she averted her face, saying coldly, uglily:

“Well, I’ve got no further than love, yet.”

Over Ursula’s mind flashed the thought: “Because you never have loved, you can’t get beyond it.”

And the two walked on.

“I’ve loved you, as well as Gudrun, don’t forget,” said Birkin bitterly.

Gerald looked at him strangely, abstractedly.

“Won’t you say you’ll love me always?” she coaxed.

“Say it, even if it isn’t true⁠—say it Gerald, do.”

“I will love you always,” he repeated, in real agony, forcing the words out.

He stood as if he had been beaten.

“Try to love me a little more, and to want me a little less,” she said, in a half contemptuous, half coaxing tone.

The darkness seemed to be swaying in waves across his mind, great waves of darkness plunging across his mind. It seemed to him he was degraded at the very quick, made of no account.

“It amazes me that you should want to destroy it. If you can’t see it yourself, why try to debar me?” But in reality, he had destroyed it for her, she was straining after a dead effect.

“One day,” he said, softly, looking up at her, “I shall destroy you, as you stand looking at the sunset; because you are such a liar.”

There was a soft, voluptuous promise to himself in the words. She was chilled but arrogant.

The suggestion of primitive art was their refuge, and the inner mysteries of sensation their object of worship.

Art and Life were to them the Reality and the Unreality.

“Of course,” said Gudrun, “life doesn’t really matter—it is one’s art which is central. What one does in one’s life has peu de rapport, it doesn’t signify much.”

“Bitte sagen Sie nicht immer, gnädige Frau,” cried Gudrun, her eyes flashing, her cheeks burning. She looked like a vivid Medusa. Her voice was loud and clamorous, the other people in the room were startled.

“Please don’t call me Mrs. Crich,” she cried aloud.

The name, in Loerke’s mouth particularly, had been an intolerable humiliation and constraint upon her, these many days.

“What do you mean?” she replied.

“My God, what a mercy I am not married to you!”

Her voice of flouting and contempt scotched him. He was brought up short. But he recovered himself.

There passed through Gudrun’s mind Blake’s representation of the soul of a flea. She wanted to fit it to Loerke. Blake was a clown too. But it was necessary to answer Gerald.

“Don’t you think the understanding of a flea is more interesting than the understanding of a fool?” she asked.

“A fool, a conceited fool—a Dummkopf,” she replied, adding the German word.