As the day wore on, the life-blood seemed to ebb away from Ursula, and
within the emptiness a heavy despair gathered. Her passion seemed to
bleed to death, and there was nothing. She sat suspended in a state of
complete nullity, harder to bear than death.
'Unless something happens,' she said to herself, in the perfect
lucidity of final suffering, 'I shall die. I am at the end of my line
of life.' She sat crushed and obliterated in a darkness that was the border of
death. She realised how all her life she had been drawing nearer and
nearer to this brink, where there was no beyond, from which one had to
leap like Sappho into the unknown. The knowledge of the imminence of
death was like a drug. Darkly, without thinking at all, she knew that
she was near to death. She had travelled all her life along the line of
fulfilment, and it was nearly concluded. She knew all she had to know,
she had experienced all she had to experience, she was fulfilled in a
kind of bitter ripeness, there remained only to fall from the tree into
death. And one must fulfil one's development to the end, must carry the
adventure to its conclusion. And the next step was over the border into
death. So it was then! There was a certain peace in the knowledge.
After all, when one was fulfilled, one was happiest in falling into
death, as a bitter fruit plunges in its ripeness downwards. Death is a
great consummation, a consummating experience. It is a development from
life. That we know, while we are yet living. What then need we think
for further? One can never see beyond the consummation. It is enough
that death is a great and conclusive experience. Why should we ask what
comes after the experience, when the experience is still unknown to us?
Let us die, since the great experience is the one that follows now upon
all the rest, death, which is the next great crisis in front of which
we have arrived. If we wait, if we baulk the issue, we do but hang
about the gates in undignified uneasiness. There it is, in front of us,
as in front of Sappho, the illimitable space. Thereinto goes the
journey. Have we not the courage to go on with our journey, must we cry
'I daren't'? On ahead we will go, into death, and whatever death may
mean. If a man can see the next step to be taken, why should he fear
the next but one? Why ask about the next but one? Of the next step we
are certain. It is the step into death.