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 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 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 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 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 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-maché 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.
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
