FETISH

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• Women in Love   EXEUNT

  When they brought the body home, the next morning, Gudrun was shut up in her room. From her window she saw men coming along with a burden, over the snow. She sat still and let the minutes go by.There came a tap at her door. She opened. There stood a woman, saying softly, oh, far too reverently:“They have found him, madam!”“Il est mort?”“Yes—hours ago.”Gudrun did not know what to say. What should she say? What should she feel? What should she do? What did they expect of her? She was coldly at a loss.“Thank you,” she said, and she shut the door of her room. The woman went away mortified. Not a word, not a tear—ha! Gudrun was cold, a cold woman.Gudrun sat on in her room, her face pale and impassive. What was she to do? She could not weep and make a scene. She could not alter herself. She sat motionless, hiding from people. Her one motive was to avoid actual contact with events. She only wrote out a long telegram to Ursula and Birkin.In the afternoon, however, she rose sudd

• Women in Love   SNOWED UP

  When Ursula and Birkin were gone, Gudrun felt herself free in her contest with Gerald. As they grew more used to each other, he seemed to press upon her more and more. At first she could manage him, so that her own will was always left free. But very soon, he began to ignore her female tactics, he dropped his respect for her whims and her privacies, he began to exert his own will blindly, without submitting to hers.Already a vital conflict had set in, which frightened them both. But he was alone, whilst already she had begun to cast round for external resource.When Ursula had gone, Gudrun felt her own existence had become stark and elemental. She went and crouched alone in her bedroom, looking out of the window at the big, flashing stars. In front was the faint shadow of the mountain-knot. That was the pivot. She felt strange and inevitable, as if she were centred upon the pivot of all existence, there was no further reality.Presently Gerald opened the door. She knew he would not

• Women in Love   CONTINENTAL

  Ursula went on in an unreal suspense, the last weeks before going away. She was not herself,—she was not anything. She was something that is going to be—soon—soon—very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.She went to see her parents. It was a rather stiff, sad meeting, more like a verification of separateness than a reunion. But they were all vague and indefinite with one another, stiffened in the fate that moved them apart.She did not really come to until she was on the ship crossing from Dover to Ostend. Dimly she had come down to London with Birkin, London had been a vagueness, so had the train-journey to Dover. It was all like a sleep.And now, at last, as she stood in the stern of the ship, in a pitch-dark, rather blowy night, feeling the motion of the sea, and watching the small, rather desolate little lights that twinkled on the shores of England, as on the shores of nowhere, watched them sinking smaller and smaller on the profound and living darkness, she felt her soul

• Women in Love   GUDRUN IN THE POMPADOUR

  Christmas drew near, all four prepared for flight. Birkin and Ursula were busy packing their few personal things, making them ready to be sent off, to whatever country and whatever place they might choose at last. Gudrun was very much excited. She loved to be on the wing.She and Gerald, being ready first, set off via London and Paris to Innsbruck, where they would meet Ursula and Birkin. In London they stayed one night. They went to the music-hall, and afterwards to the Pompadour Café.Gudrun hated the Café, yet she always went back to it, as did most of the artists of her acquaintance. She loathed its atmosphere of petty vice and petty jealousy and petty art. Yet she always called in again, when she was in town. It was as if she had to return to this small, slow, central whirlpool of disintegration and dissolution: just give it a look.She sat with Gerald drinking some sweetish liqueur, and staring with black, sullen looks at the various groups of people at the tables. She would g

• Women in Love   FLITTING

  That evening Ursula returned home very bright-eyed and wondrous—which irritated her people. Her father came home at suppertime, tired after the evening class, and the long journey home. Gudrun was reading, the mother sat in silence.Suddenly Ursula said to the company at large, in a bright voice, “Rupert and I are going to be married tomorrow.”Her father turned round, stiffly.“You what?” he said.“Tomorrow!” echoed Gudrun.“Indeed!” said the mother.But Ursula only smiled wonderfully, and did not reply.“Married tomorrow!” cried her father harshly. “What are you talking about.”“Yes,” said Ursula. “Why not?” Those two words, from her, always drove him mad. “Everything is all right—we shall go to the registrar’s office—”There was a second’s hush in the room, after Ursula’s blithe vagueness.“Really, Ursula!” said Gudrun.“Might we ask why there has been all this secrecy?” demanded the mother, rather superbly.“But there hasn’t,” said Ursula. “You knew.”“Who knew?” now c

• Women in Love   A CHAIR

  There was a jumble market every Monday afternoon in the old market-place in town. Ursula and Birkin strayed down there one afternoon. They had been talking of furniture, and they wanted to see if there was any fragment they would like to buy, amid the heaps of rubbish collected on the cobble-stones.The old market-square was not very large, a mere bare patch of granite setts, usually with a few fruit-stalls under a wall. It was in a poor quarter of the town. Meagre houses stood down one side, there was a hosiery factory, a great blank with myriad oblong windows, at the end, a street of little shops with flagstone pavement down the other side, and, for a crowning monument, the public baths, of new red brick, with a clock-tower. The people who moved about seemed stumpy and sordid, the air seemed to smell rather dirty, there was a sense of many mean streets ramifying off into warrens of meanness. Now and again a great chocolate-and-yellow tramcar ground round a difficult bend under the h