All Chapters of Women in Love: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

31 Chapters

THRESHOLD

Gudrun was away in London, having a little show of her work, with a friend, and looking round, preparing for flight from Beldover. Come what might she would be on the wing in a very short time. She received a letter from Winifred Crich, ornamented with drawings.“Father also has been to London, to be examined by the doctors. It made him very tired. They say he must rest a very great deal, so he is mostly in bed. He brought me a lovely tropical parrot in faience, of Dresden ware, also a man ploughing, and two mice climbing up a stalk, also in faience. The mice were Copenhagen ware. They are the best, but mice don’t shine so much, otherwise they are very good, their tails are slim and long. They all shine nearly like glass. Of course it is the glaze, but I don’t like it. Gerald likes the man ploughing the best, his trousers are torn, he is ploughing with an ox, being I suppose a German peasant. It is all grey and white, white shirt and grey trousers, but very shiny and clean. Mr Birkin

Last Updated : 2020-03-30

WOMAN TO WOMAN

They came to the town, and left Gerald at the railway station. Gudrun and Winifred were to come to tea with Birkin, who expected Ursula also. In the afternoon, however, the first person to turn up was Hermione. Birkin was out, so she went in the drawing-room, looking at his books and papers, and playing on the piano. Then Ursula arrived. She was surprised, unpleasantly so, to see Hermione, of whom she had heard nothing for some time.“It is a surprise to see you,” she said.“Yes,” said Hermione—“I’ve been away at Aix—”“Oh, for your health?”“Yes.”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

Last Updated : 2020-03-30

EXCURSE

Next day Birkin sought Ursula out. It happened to be the half-day at the Grammar School. He appeared towards the end of the morning, and asked her, would she drive with him in the afternoon. She consented. But her face was closed and unresponding, and his heart sank.The afternoon was fine and dim. He was driving the motor-car, and she sat beside him. But still her face was closed against him, unresponding. When she became like this, like a wall against him, his heart contracted.His life now seemed so reduced, that he hardly cared any more. At moments it seemed to him he did not care a straw whether Ursula or Hermione or anybody else existed or did not exist. Why bother! Why strive for a coherent, satisfied life? Why not drift on in a series of accidents—like a picaresque novel? Why not? Why bother about human relationships? Why take them seriously-male or female? Why form any serious connections at all? Why not be casual, drifting along, taking all for what it was worth?And yet,

Last Updated : 2020-03-30

DEATH AND LOVE

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. Yet his will was unbroken, he was integral, complete. Only he must have perfect stillness about him.Any presence but that of the nurses was a strain and an effort to him now. Every morning Gerald went into the room, hoping to find his father passed away at last. Yet always he saw the same transparent face, the same dread dark hair on the waxen forehead, and the awful, inchoate dark eyes, which seemed to be decomposing into formless darkness, having only a tiny grain of vision within them.And always, as the dark, inchoate eyes turned to him, there passed through Gerald’s bowels a burning stroke of revolt, that seemed to reso

Last Updated : 2020-03-30

MARRIAGE OR NOT

The Brangwen family was going to move from Beldover. It was necessary now for the father to be in town.Birkin had taken out a marriage licence, yet Ursula deferred from day to day. She would not fix any definite time—she still wavered. Her month’s notice to leave the Grammar School was in its third week. Christmas was not far off.Gerald waited for the Ursula-Birkin marriage. It was something crucial to him.“Shall we make it a double-barrelled affair?” he said to Birkin one day.“Who for the second shot?” asked Birkin.“Gudrun and me,” said Gerald, the venturesome twinkle in his eyes.Birkin looked at him steadily, as if somewhat taken aback.“Serious—or joking?” he asked.“Oh, serious. Shall I? Shall Gudrun and I rush in along with you?”“Do by all means,” said Birkin. “I didn’t know you’d got that length.”“What length?” said Gerald, looking at the other man, and laughing.“Oh yes, we’ve gone all the lengths.”“There remains to put it on a broad social basis, and to ach

Last Updated : 2020-03-30

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

Last Updated : 2020-03-30

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

Last Updated : 2020-03-30

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

Last Updated : 2020-03-30

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

Last Updated : 2020-03-30

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

Last Updated : 2020-03-30

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