Women in Love

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.