Women in Love

'Did he hurt you?' he asked.

'No,' she said.

'He's an insensible beast,' he said, turning his face away.

They came to the little court, which was shut in by old red walls in

whose crevices wall-flowers were growing. The grass was soft and fine

and old, a level floor carpeting the court, the sky was blue overhead.

Gerald tossed the rabbit down. It crouched still and would not move.

Gudrun watched it with faint horror.

'Why doesn't it move?' she cried.

'It's skulking,' he said.

She looked up at him, and a slight sinister smile contracted her white

face.

'Isn't it a FOOL!' she cried. 'Isn't it a sickening FOOL ?' The

vindictive mockery in her voice made his brain quiver. Glancing up at

him, into his eyes, she revealed again the mocking, white-cruel

recognition. There was a league between them, abhorrent to them both.

They were implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries.

'How many scratches have you?' he asked, showing his hard forearm,

white and hard and torn in red gashes.

'How really vile!' she cried, flushing with a sinister vision. 'Mine is

nothing.' She lifted her arm and showed a deep red score down the silken white

flesh.

'What a devil!' he exclaimed. But it was as if he had had knowledge of

her in the long red rent of her forearm, so silken and soft. He did not

want to touch her. He would have to make himself touch her,

deliberately. The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own

brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting

through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond,

the obscene beyond.

'It doesn't hurt you very much, does it?' he asked, solicitous.

'Not at all,' she cried.

And suddenly the rabbit, which had been crouching as if it were a

flower, so still and soft, suddenly burst into life. Round and round

the court it went, as if shot from a gun, round and round like a furry

meteorite, in a tense hard circle that seemed to bind their brains.

They all stood in amazement, smiling uncannily, as if the rabbit were

obeying some unknown incantation. Round and round it flew, on the grass

under the old red walls like a storm.

And then quite suddenly it settled down, hobbled among the grass, and

sat considering, its nose twitching like a bit of fluff in the wind.

After having considered for a few minutes, a soft bunch with a black,

open eye, which perhaps was looking at them, perhaps was not, it

hobbled calmly forward and began to nibble the grass with that mean

motion of a rabbit's quick eating.