'But,' she said gravely, 'didn't you say you wanted something that was
NOT love--something beyond love?' He turned in confusion. There was always confusion in speech. Yet it
must be spoken. Whichever way one moved, if one were to move forwards,
one must break a way through. And to know, to give utterance, was to
break a way through the walls of the prison as the infant in labour
strives through the walls of the womb. There is no new movement now,
without the breaking through of the old body, deliberately, in
knowledge, in the struggle to get out.
'I don't want love,' he said. 'I don't want to know you. I want to be
gone out of myself, and you to be lost to yourself, so we are found
different. One shouldn't talk when one is tired and wretched. One
Hamletises, and it seems a lie. Only believe me when I show you a bit
of healthy pride and insouciance. I hate myself serious.' 'Why shouldn't you be serious?' she said.
He thought for a minute, then he said, sulkily: 'I don't know.' Then they walked on in silence, at outs. He was vague
and lost.
'Isn't it strange,' she said, suddenly putting her hand on his arm,
with a loving impulse, 'how we always talk like this! I suppose we do
love each other, in some way.' 'Oh yes,' he said; 'too much.' She laughed almost gaily.
'You'd have to have it your own way, wouldn't you?' she teased. 'You
could never take it on trust.' He changed, laughed softly, and turned and took her in his arms, in the
middle of the road.
'Yes,' he said softly.
And he kissed her face and brow, slowly, gently, with a sort of
delicate happiness which surprised her extremely, and to which she
could not respond. They were soft, blind kisses, perfect in their
stillness. Yet she held back from them. It was like strange moths, very
soft and silent, settling on her from the darkness of her soul. She was
uneasy. She drew away.
'Isn't somebody coming?' she said.
So they looked down the dark road, then set off again walking towards
Beldover. Then suddenly, to show him she was no shallow prude, she
stopped and held him tight, hard against her, and covered his face with
hard, fierce kisses of passion. In spite of his otherness, the old
blood beat up in him.
'Not this, not this,' he whimpered to himself, as the first perfect
mood of softness and sleep-loveliness ebbed back away from the rushing
of passion that came up to his limbs and over his face as she drew him.
And soon he was a perfect hard flame of passionate desire for her. Yet
in the small core of the flame was an unyielding anguish of another
thing. But this also was lost; he only wanted her, with an extreme
desire that seemed inevitable as death, beyond question.