Women in Love

After his illness Birkin went to the south of France for a time. He did

not write, nobody heard anything of him. Ursula, left alone, felt as if

everything were lapsing out. There seemed to be no hope in the world.

One was a tiny little rock with the tide of nothingness rising higher

and higher She herself was real, and only herself--just like a rock in

a wash of flood-water. The rest was all nothingness. She was hard and

indifferent, isolated in herself.

There was nothing for it now, but contemptuous, resistant indifference.

All the world was lapsing into a grey wish-wash of nothingness, she had

no contact and no connection anywhere. She despised and detested the

whole show. From the bottom of her heart, from the bottom of her soul,

she despised and detested people, adult people. She loved only children

and animals: children she loved passionately, but coldly. They made her

want to hug them, to protect them, to give them life. But this very

love, based on pity and despair, was only a bondage and a pain to her.

She loved best of all the animals, that were single and unsocial as she

herself was. She loved the horses and cows in the field. Each was

single and to itself, magical. It was not referred away to some

detestable social principle. It was incapable of soulfulness and

tragedy, which she detested so profoundly.

She could be very pleasant and flattering, almost subservient, to

people she met. But no one was taken in. Instinctively each felt her

contemptuous mockery of the human being in himself, or herself. She had

a profound grudge against the human being. That which the word 'human'

stood for was despicable and repugnant to her.

Mostly her heart was closed in this hidden, unconscious strain of

contemptuous ridicule. She thought she loved, she thought she was full

of love. This was her idea of herself. But the strange brightness of

her presence, a marvellous radiance of intrinsic vitality, was a

luminousness of supreme repudiation, nothing but repudiation.

Yet, at moments, she yielded and softened, she wanted pure love, only

pure love. This other, this state of constant unfailing repudiation,

was a strain, a suffering also. A terrible desire for pure love

overcame her again.

She went out one evening, numbed by this constant essential suffering.

Those who are timed for destruction must die now. The knowledge of this

reached a finality, a finishing in her. And the finality released her.

If fate would carry off in death or downfall all those who were timed

to go, why need she trouble, why repudiate any further. She was free of

it all, she could seek a new union elsewhere.