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.
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.
“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.
“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. 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.”
“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?”
“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
