The next day however, he felt wistful and yearning. He thought he had been wrong, perhaps. Perhaps he had been wrong to go to her with an idea of what he wanted. Was it really only an idea, or was it the interpretation of a profound yearning? If the latter, how was it he was always talking about sensual fulfilment? The two did not agree very well.
Suddenly he found himself face to face with a situation. It was as simple as this: fatally simple. On the one hand, he knew he did not want a further sensual experience—something deeper, darker, than ordinary life could give. He remembered the African fetishes he had seen at Halliday’s so often. There came back to him one, a statuette about two feet high, a tall, slim, elegant figure from West Africa, in dark wood, glossy and suave. It was a woman, with hair dressed high, like a melon-shaped dome. He remembered her vividly: she was one of his soul’s intimates. Her body was long and elegant, her face was crushed tiny like a beetle’s, she had rows of round heavy collars, like a column of quoits, on her neck. He remembered her: her astonishing cultured elegance, her diminished, beetle face, the astounding long elegant body, on short, ugly legs, with such protuberant buttocks, so weighty and unexpected below her slim long loins. She knew what he himself did not know. She had thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge behind her. It must have been thousands of years since her race had died, mystically: that is, since the relation between the senses and the outspoken mind had broken, leaving the experience all in one sort, mystically sensual. Thousands of years ago, that which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these Africans: the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge in one sort, mindless progressive knowledge through the senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as the beetles have, which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution. This was why her face looked like a beetle’s: this was why the Egyptians worshipped the ball-rolling scarab: because of the principle of knowledge in dissolution and corruption.
There is a long way we can travel, after the death-break: after that point when the soul in intense suffering breaks, breaks away from its organic hold like a leaf that falls. We fall from the connection with life and hope, we lapse from pure integral being, from creation and liberty, and we fall into the long, long African process of purely sensual understanding, knowledge in the mystery of dissolution.
He realised now that this is a long process—thousands of years it takes, after the death of the creative spirit. He realised that there were great mysteries to be unsealed, sensual, mindless, dreadful mysteries, far beyond the phallic cult. How far, in their inverted culture, had these West Africans gone beyond phallic knowledge? Very, very far. Birkin recalled again the female figure: the elongated, long, long body, the curious unexpected heavy buttocks, the long, imprisoned neck, the face with tiny features like a beetle’s. This was far beyond any phallic knowledge, sensual subtle realities far beyond the scope of phallic investigation.
There remained this way, this awful African process, to be fulfilled. It would be done differently by the white races. The white races, having the arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, would fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation. Whereas the West Africans, controlled by the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara, had been fulfilled in sun-destruction, the putrescent mystery of sun-rays.
Was this then all that remained? Was there left now nothing but to break off from the happy creative being, was the time up? Is our day of creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution, the African knowledge, but different in us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north?
Birkin thought of Gerald. He was one of these strange white wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? Was he a messenger, an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow?
Birkin was frightened. He was tired too, when he had reached this length of speculation. Suddenly his strange, strained attention gave way, he could not attend to these mysteries any more. There was another way, the way of freedom. There was the paradisal entry into pure, single being, the individual soul taking precedence over love and desire for union, stronger than any pangs of emotion, a lovely state of free proud singleness, which accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields.
There was the other way, the remaining way. And he must run to follow it. He thought of Ursula, how sensitive and delicate she really was, her skin so over-fine, as if one skin were wanting. She was really so marvellously gentle and sensitive. Why did he ever forget it? He must go to her at once. He must ask her to marry him. They must marry at once, and so make a definite pledge, enter into a definite communion. He must set out at once and ask her, this moment. There was no moment to spare.
He drifted on swiftly to Beldover, half-unconscious of his own movement. He saw the town on the slope of the hill, not straggling, but as if walled-in with the straight, final streets of miners’ dwellings, making a great square, and it looked like Jerusalem to his fancy. The world was all strange and transcendent.
Rosalind opened the door to him. She started slightly, as a young girl will, and said:
“Oh, I’ll tell father.”
With which she disappeared, leaving Birkin in the hall, looking at some reproductions from Picasso, lately introduced by Gudrun. He was admiring the almost wizard, sensuous apprehension of the earth, when Will Brangwen appeared, rolling down his shirt sleeves.
“Well,” said Brangwen, “I’ll get a coat.” And he too disappeared for a moment. Then he returned, and opened the door of the drawing-room, saying:
“You must excuse me, I was just doing a bit of work in the shed. Come inside, will you.”
Birkin entered and sat down. He looked at the bright, reddish face of the other man, at the narrow brow and the very bright eyes, and at the rather sensual lips that unrolled wide and expansive under the black cropped moustache. How curious it was that this was a human being! What Brangwen thought himself to be, how meaningless it was, confronted with the reality of him. Birkin could see only a strange, inexplicable, almost patternless collection of passions and desires and suppressions and traditions and mechanical ideas, all cast unfused and disunited into this slender, bright-faced man of nearly fifty, who was as unresolved now as he was at twenty, and as uncreated. How could he be the parent of Ursula, when he was not created himself. 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.
“No,” said Birkin. “It was full moon two days ago.”
“Oh! You believe in the moon then, affecting the weather?”
“No, I don’t think I do. I don’t really know enough about it.”
“You know what they say? The moon and the weather may change together, but the change of the moon won’t change the weather.”
“Is that it?” said Birkin. “I hadn’t heard it.”
There was a pause. Then Birkin said:
“Am I hindering you? I called to see Ursula, really. Is she at home?”
“I don’t believe she is. I believe she’s gone to the library. I’ll just see.”
Birkin could hear him enquiring in the dining-room.
“No,” he said, coming back. “But she won’t be long. You wanted to speak to her?”
Birkin looked across at the other man with curious calm, clear eyes.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I wanted to ask her to marry me.”
A point of light came on the golden-brown eyes of the elder man.
“O-oh?” he said, looking at Birkin, then dropping his eyes before the calm, steadily watching look of the other: “Was she expecting you then?”
“No,” said Birkin.
“No? I didn’t know anything of this sort was on foot—” Brangwen smiled awkwardly.
Birkin looked back at him, and said to himself: “I wonder why it should be ‘on foot’!” Aloud he said:
“No, it’s perhaps rather sudden.” At which, thinking of his relationship with Ursula, he added—“but I don’t know—”
“Quite sudden, is it? Oh!” said Brangwen, rather baffled and annoyed.
“In one way,” replied Birkin, “—not in another.”
There was a moment’s pause, after which Brangwen said:
“Well, she pleases herself—”
“Oh yes!” said Birkin, calmly.
A vibration came into Brangwen’s strong voice, as he replied:
“Though I shouldn’t want her to be in too big a hurry, either. It’s no good looking round afterwards, when it’s too late.”
“Oh, it need never be too late,” said Birkin, “as far as that goes.”
“How do you mean?” asked the father.
“If one repents being married, the marriage is at an end,” said Birkin.
“You think so?”
“Yes.”
“Ay, well that may be your way of looking at it.”
Birkin, in silence, thought to himself: “So it may. As for your way of looking at it, William Brangwen, it needs a little explaining.”
“I suppose,” said Brangwen, “you know what sort of people we are? What sort of a bringing-up she’s had?”
“‘She’,” thought Birkin to himself, remembering his childhood’s corrections, “is the cat’s mother.”
“Do I know what sort of a bringing-up she’s had?” he said aloud.
He seemed to annoy Brangwen intentionally.
“Well,” he said, “she’s had everything that’s right for a girl to have—as far as possible, as far as we could give it her.”
“I’m sure she has,” said Birkin, which caused a perilous full-stop. The father was becoming exasperated. There was something naturally irritant to him in Birkin’s mere presence.
“And I don’t want to see her going back on it all,” he said, in a clanging voice.
“Why?” said Birkin.
This monosyllable exploded in Brangwen’s brain like a shot.
“Why! I don’t believe in your new-fangled ways and new-fangled ideas—in and out like a frog in a gallipot. It would never do for me.”
Birkin watched him with steady emotionless eyes. The radical antagnoism in the two men was rousing.
“Yes, but are my ways and ideas new-fangled?” asked Birkin.
“Are they?” Brangwen caught himself up. “I’m not speaking of you in particular,” he said. “What I mean is that my children have been brought up to think and do according to the religion I was brought up in myself, and I don’t want to see them going away from that.”
There was a dangerous pause.
“And beyond that—?” asked Birkin.
The father hesitated, he was in a nasty position.
“Eh? What do you mean? All I want to say is that my daughter”—he tailed off into silence, overcome by futility. He knew that in some way he was off the track.
“Of course,” said Birkin, “I don’t want to hurt anybody or influence anybody. Ursula does exactly as she pleases.”
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.
“And as for beliefs, that’s one thing,” he said. “But I’d rather see my daughters dead tomorrow than that they should be at the beck and call of the first man that likes to come and whistle for them.”
A queer painful light came into Birkin’s eyes.
“As to that,” he said, “I only know that it’s much more likely that it’s I who am at the beck and call of the woman, than she at mine.”
Again there was a pause. The father was somewhat bewildered.
“I know,” he said, “she’ll please herself—she always has done. I’ve done my best for them, but that doesn’t matter. They’ve got themselves to please, and if they can help it they’ll please nobody but themselves. But she’s a right to consider her mother, and me as well—”
Brangwen was thinking his own thoughts.
“And I tell you this much, I would rather bury them, than see them getting into a lot of loose ways such as you see everywhere nowadays. I’d rather bury them—”
“Yes but, you see,” said Birkin slowly, rather wearily, bored again by this new turn, “they won’t give either you or me the chance to bury them, because they’re not to be buried.”
Brangwen looked at him in a sudden flare of impotent anger.
“Now, Mr Birkin,” he said, “I don’t know what you’ve come here for, and I don’t know what you’re asking for. But my daughters are my daughters—and it’s my business to look after them while I can.”
Birkin’s brows knitted suddenly, his eyes concentrated in mockery. But he remained perfectly stiff and still. There was a pause.
“I’ve nothing against your marrying Ursula,” Brangwen began at length. “It’s got nothing to do with me, she’ll do as she likes, me or no me.”
Birkin turned away, looking out of the window and letting go his consciousness. After all, what good was this? It was hopeless to keep it up. He would sit on till Ursula came home, then speak to her, then go away. He would not accept trouble at the hands of her father. It was all unnecessary, and he himself need not have provoked it.
The two men sat in complete silence, Birkin almost unconscious of his own whereabouts. He had come to ask her to marry him—well then, he would wait on, and ask her. As for what she said, whether she accepted or not, he did not think about it. He would say what he had come to say, and that was all he was conscious of. He accepted the complete insignificance of this household, for him. But everything now was as if fated. He could see one thing ahead, and no more. From the rest, he was absolved entirely for the time being. It had to be left to fate and chance to resolve the issues.
At length they heard the gate. They saw her coming up the steps with a bundle of books under her arm. Her face was bright and abstracted as usual, with the abstraction, that look of being not quite there, not quite present to the facts of reality, that galled her father so much. She had a maddening faculty of assuming a light of her own, which excluded the reality, and within which she looked radiant as if in sunshine.
They heard her go into the dining-room, and drop her armful of books on the table.
“Did you bring me that Girl’s Own?” cried Rosalind.
“Yes, I brought it. But I forgot which one it was you wanted.”
“You would,” cried Rosalind angrily. “It’s right for a wonder.”
Then they heard her say something in a lowered tone.
“Where?” cried Ursula.
Again her sister’s voice was muffled.
Brangwen opened the door, and called, in his strong, brazen voice:
“Ursula.”
She appeared in a moment, wearing her hat.
“Oh how do you do!” she cried, seeing Birkin, and all dazzled as if taken by surprise. He wondered at her, knowing she was aware of his presence. She had her queer, radiant, breathless manner, as if confused by the actual world, unreal to it, having a complete bright world of her self alone.
“Have I interrupted a conversation?” she asked.
“No, only a complete silence,” said Birkin.
“Oh,” said Ursula, vaguely, absent. Their presence was not vital to her, she was withheld, she did not take them in. It was a subtle insult that never failed to exasperate her father.
“Mr Birkin came to speak to you, not to me,” said her father.
“Oh, did he!” she exclaimed vaguely, as if it did not concern her. Then, recollecting herself, she turned to him rather radiantly, but still quite superficially, and said: “Was it anything special?”
“I hope so,” he said, ironically.
“—To propose to you, according to all accounts,” said her father.
“Oh,” said Ursula.
“Oh,” mocked her father, imitating her. “Have you nothing more to say?”
She winced as if violated.
“Did you really come to propose to me?” she asked of Birkin, as if it were a joke.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I came to propose.” He seemed to fight shy of the last word.
“Did you?” she cried, with her vague radiance. He might have been saying anything whatsoever. She seemed pleased.
“Yes,” he answered. “I wanted to—I wanted you to agree to marry me.”
She looked at him. His eyes were flickering with mixed lights, wanting something of her, yet not wanting it. She shrank a little, as if she were exposed to his eyes, and as if it were a pain to her. She darkened, her soul clouded over, she turned aside. She had been driven out of her own radiant, single world. And she dreaded contact, it was almost unnatural to her at these times.
“Yes,” she said vaguely, in a doubting, absent voice.
Birkin’s heart contracted swiftly, in a sudden fire of bitterness. It all meant nothing to her. He had been mistaken again. She was in some self-satisfied world of her own. He and his hopes were accidentals, violations to her. It drove her father to a pitch of mad exasperation. He had had to put up with this all his life, from her.
“Well, what do you say?” he cried.
She winced. Then she glanced down at her father, half-frightened, and she said:
“I didn’t speak, did I?” as if she were afraid she might have committed herself.
“No,” said her father, exasperated. “But you needn’t look like an idiot. You’ve got your wits, haven’t you?”
She ebbed away in silent hostility.
“I’ve got my wits, what does that mean?” she repeated, in a sullen voice of antagonism.
“You heard what was asked you, didn’t you?” cried her father in anger.
“Of course I heard.”
“Well then, can’t you answer?” thundered her father.
“Why should I?”
At the impertinence of this retort, he went stiff. But he said nothing.
“No,” said Birkin, to help out the occasion, “there’s no need to answer at once. You can say when you like.”
Her eyes flashed with a powerful light.
“Why should I say anything?” she cried. “You do this off your own bat, it has nothing to do with me. Why do you both want to bully me?”
“Bully you! Bully you!” cried her father, in bitter, rancorous anger. “Bully you! Why, it’s a pity you can’t be bullied into some sense and decency. Bully you! You’ll see to that, you self-willed creature.”
She stood suspended in the middle of the room, her face glimmering and dangerous. She was set in satisfied defiance. Birkin looked up at her. He too was angry.
“But none is bullying you,” he said, in a very soft dangerous voice also.
“Oh yes,” she cried. “You both want to force me into something.”
“That is an illusion of yours,” he said ironically.
“Illusion!” cried her father. “A self-opinionated fool, that’s what she is.”
Birkin rose, saying:
“However, we’ll leave it for the time being.”
And without another word, he walked out of the house.
“You fool! You fool!” her father cried to her, with extreme bitterness. She left the room, and went upstairs, singing to herself. But she was terribly fluttered, as after some dreadful fight. From her window, she could see Birkin going up the road. He went in such a blithe drift of rage, that her mind wondered over him. He was ridiculous, but she was afraid of him. She was as if escaped from some danger.
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