Women in Love

And he too waited in the magical steadfastness of suspense, for her to

take this knowledge of him as he had taken it of her. He knew her

darkly, with the fullness of dark knowledge. Now she would know him,

and he too would be liberated. He would be night-free, like an

Egyptian, steadfast in perfectly suspended equilibrium, pure mystic

nodality of physical being. They would give each other this

star-equilibrium which alone is freedom.

She saw that they were running among trees--great old trees with dying

bracken undergrowth. The palish, gnarled trunks showed ghostly, and

like old priests in the hovering distance, the fern rose magical and

mysterious. It was a night all darkness, with low cloud. The motor-car

advanced slowly.

'Where are we?' she whispered.

'In Sherwood Forest.' It was evident he knew the place. He drove softly, watching. Then they

came to a green road between the trees. They turned cautiously round,

and were advancing between the oaks of the forest, down a green lane.

The green lane widened into a little circle of grass, where there was a

small trickle of water at the bottom of a sloping bank. The car

stopped.

'We will stay here,' he said, 'and put out the lights.' He extinguished the lamps at once, and it was pure night, with shadows

of trees like realities of other, nightly being. He threw a rug on to

the bracken, and they sat in stillness and mindless silence. There were

faint sounds from the wood, but no disturbance, no possible

disturbance, the world was under a strange ban, a new mystery had

supervened. They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him,

and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible

flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were

the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon

the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never

to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a

palpable revelation of living otherness.

She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of

unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a

magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a

mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual

reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains

outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic

body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire

fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial

magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.