Women in Love

But in the stress of this ordeal, Gerald too lost his hold on the

outer, daily life. That which was much to him, came to mean nothing.

Work, pleasure--it was all left behind. He went on more or less

mechanically with his business, but this activity was all extraneous.

The real activity was this ghastly wrestling for death in his own soul.

And his own will should triumph. Come what might, he would not bow down

or submit or acknowledge a master. He had no master in death.

But as the fight went on, and all that he had been and was continued to

be destroyed, so that life was a hollow shell all round him, roaring

and clattering like the sound of the sea, a noise in which he

participated externally, and inside this hollow shell was all the

darkness and fearful space of death, he knew he would have to find

reinforcements, otherwise he would collapse inwards upon the great dark

void which circled at the centre of his soul. His will held his outer

life, his outer mind, his outer being unbroken and unchanged. But the

pressure was too great. He would have to find something to make good

the equilibrium. Something must come with him into the hollow void of

death in his soul, fill it up, and so equalise the pressure within to

the pressure without. For day by day he felt more and more like a

bubble filled with darkness, round which whirled the iridescence of his

consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the

outer life, roared vastly.

In this extremity his instinct led him to Gudrun. He threw away

everything now--he only wanted the relation established with her. He

would follow her to the studio, to be near her, to talk to her. He

would stand about the room, aimlessly picking up the implements, the

lumps of clay, the little figures she had cast--they were whimsical and

grotesque--looking at them without perceiving them. And she felt him

following her, dogging her heels like a doom. She held away from him,

and yet she knew he drew always a little nearer, a little nearer.

'I say,' he said to her one evening, in an odd, unthinking, uncertain

way, 'won't you stay to dinner tonight? I wish you would.' She started slightly. He spoke to her like a man making a request of

another man.

'They'll be expecting me at home,' she said.

'Oh, they won't mind, will they?' he said. 'I should be awfully glad if

you'd stay.' Her long silence gave consent at last.