Women in Love

'That's one way of putting it,' she said.

The terrible swooning burden on his mind, the awful swooning, the loss

of all his control, was too much for him. He grasped her arm in his one

hand, as if his hand were iron.

'It's all right, then, is it?' he said, holding her arrested.

She looked at the face with the fixed eyes, set before her, and her

blood ran cold.

'Yes, it's all right,' she said softly, as if drugged, her voice

crooning and witch-like.

He walked on beside her, a striding, mindless body. But he recovered a

little as he went. He suffered badly. He had killed his brother when a

boy, and was set apart, like Cain.

They found Birkin and Ursula sitting together by the boats, talking and

laughing. Birkin had been teasing Ursula.

'Do you smell this little marsh?' he said, sniffing the air. He was

very sensitive to scents, and quick in understanding them.

'It's rather nice,' she said.

'No,' he replied, 'alarming.' 'Why alarming?' she laughed.

'It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness,' he said, 'putting forth

lilies and snakes, and the ignis fatuus, and rolling all the time

onward. That's what we never take into count--that it rolls onwards.' 'What does?' 'The other river, the black river. We always consider the silver river

of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on

and on to heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea, a heaven of angels

thronging. But the other is our real reality--' 'But what other? I don't see any other,' said Ursula.

'It is your reality, nevertheless,' he said; 'that dark river of

dissolution. You see it rolls in us just as the other rolls--the black

river of corruption. And our flowers are of this--our sea-born

Aphrodite, all our white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection,

all our reality, nowadays.' 'You mean that Aphrodite is really deathly?' asked Ursula.

'I mean she is the flowering mystery of the death-process, yes,' he

replied. 'When the stream of synthetic creation lapses, we find

ourselves part of the inverse process, the blood of destructive

creation. Aphrodite is born in the first spasm of universal

dissolution--then the snakes and swans and lotus--marsh-flowers--and

Gudrun and Gerald--born in the process of destructive creation.' 'And you and me--?' she asked.

'Probably,' he replied. 'In part, certainly. Whether we are that, in

toto, I don't yet know.' 'You mean we are flowers of dissolution--fleurs du mal? I don't feel as

if I were,' she protested.