Women in Love

But Gudrun lay wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness. She

lay motionless, with wide eyes staring motionless into the darkness,

whilst he was sunk away in sleep, his arms round her.

She seemed to be hearing waves break on a hidden shore, long, slow,

gloomy waves, breaking with the rhythm of fate, so monotonously that it

seemed eternal. This endless breaking of slow, sullen waves of fate

held her life a possession, whilst she lay with dark, wide eyes looking

into the darkness. She could see so far, as far as eternity--yet she

saw nothing. She was suspended in perfect consciousness--and of what

was she conscious?

This mood of extremity, when she lay staring into eternity, utterly

suspended, and conscious of everything, to the last limits, passed and

left her uneasy. She had lain so long motionless. She moved, she became

self-conscious. She wanted to look at him, to see him.

But she dared not make a light, because she knew he would wake, and she

did not want to break his perfect sleep, that she knew he had got of

her.

She disengaged herself, softly, and rose up a little to look at him.

There was a faint light, it seemed to her, in the room. She could just

distinguish his features, as he slept the perfect sleep. In this

darkness, she seemed to see him so distinctly. But he was far off, in

another world. Ah, she could shriek with torment, he was so far off,

and perfected, in another world. She seemed to look at him as at a

pebble far away under clear dark water. And here was she, left with all

the anguish of consciousness, whilst he was sunk deep into the other

element of mindless, remote, living shadow-gleam. He was beautiful,

far-off, and perfected. They would never be together. Ah, this awful,

inhuman distance which would always be interposed between her and the

other being!

There was nothing to do but to lie still and endure. She felt an

overwhelming tenderness for him, and a dark, under-stirring of jealous

hatred, that he should lie so perfect and immune, in an other-world,

whilst she was tormented with violent wakefulness, cast out in the

outer darkness.

She lay in intense and vivid consciousness, an exhausting

superconsciousness. The church clock struck the hours, it seemed to

her, in quick succession. She heard them distinctly in the tension of

her vivid consciousness. And he slept as if time were one moment,

unchanging and unmoving.

She was exhausted, wearied. Yet she must continue in this state of

violent active superconsciousness. She was conscious of everything--her

childhood, her girlhood, all the forgotten incidents, all the

unrealised influences and all the happenings she had not understood,

pertaining to herself, to her family, to her friends, her lovers, her

acquaintances, everybody. It was as if she drew a glittering rope of

knowledge out of the sea of darkness, drew and drew and drew it out of

the fathomless depths of the past, and still it did not come to an end,

there was no end to it, she must haul and haul at the rope of

glittering consciousness, pull it out phosphorescent from the endless

depths of the unconsciousness, till she was weary, aching, exhausted,

and fit to break, and yet she had not done.