As if in a painful dream, she waited suspended, unresolved.
She did not know, she could not understand. Only she felt that
all the threads of her fate were being held taut, in suspense.
She only wept sometimes as she went about, saying blindly: "I am so fond of him, I am so fond of him."
He came. But why did he come? She looked at him for a sign.
He gave no sign. He did not even kiss her. He behaved as if he
were an affable, usual acquaintance. This was superficial, but
what did it hide? She waited for him, she wanted him to make
some sign.
So the whole of the day they wavered and avoided contact,
until evening. Then, laughing, saying he would be back in six
months' time and would tell them all about it, he shook hands
with her mother and took his leave.
Ursula accompanied him into the lane. The night was windy,
the yew trees seethed and hissed and vibrated. The wind seemed
to rush about among the chimneys and the church-tower. It was
dark.
The wind blew Ursula's face, and her clothes cleaved to her
limbs. But it was a surging, turgid wind, instinct with
compressed vigour of life. And she seemed to have lost
Skrebensky. Out there in the strong, urgent night she could not
find him.
"Where are you?" she asked.
"Here," came his bodiless voice.
And groping, she touched him. A fire like lightning drenched
them.
"Anton?" she said.
"What?" he answered.
She held him with her hands in the darkness, she felt his
body again with hers.
"Don't leave me--come back to me," she said.
"Yes," he said, holding her in his arms.
But the male in him was scotched by the knowledge that she
was not under his spell nor his influence. He wanted to go away
from her. He rested in the knowledge that to-morrow he was going
away, his life was really elsewhere. His life was
elsewhere--his life was elsewhere--the centre of his
life was not what she would have. She was different--there
was a breach between them. They were hostile worlds.
"You will come back to me?" she reiterated.
"Yes," he said. And he meant it. But as one keeps an
appointment, not as a man returning to his fulfilment.
So she kissed him, and went indoors, lost. He walked down to
the Marsh abstracted. The contact with her hurt him, and
threatened him. He shrank, he had to be free of her spirit. For
she would stand before him, like the angel before Balaam, and
drive him back with a sword from the way he was going, into a
wilderness.
The next day she went to the station to see him go. She
looked at him, she turned to him, but he was always so strange
and null--so null. He was so collected. She thought it was
that which made him null. Strangely nothing he was.