Women in Love

Ursula went on in an unreal suspense, the last weeks before going away.

She was not herself,--she was not anything. She was something that is

going to be--soon--soon--very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.

She went to see her parents. It was a rather stiff, sad meeting, more

like a verification of separateness than a reunion. But they were all

vague and indefinite with one another, stiffened in the fate that moved

them apart.

She did not really come to until she was on the ship crossing from

Dover to Ostend. Dimly she had come down to London with Birkin, London

had been a vagueness, so had the train-journey to Dover. It was all

like a sleep.

And now, at last, as she stood in the stern of the ship, in a

pitch-dark, rather blowy night, feeling the motion of the sea, and

watching the small, rather desolate little lights that twinkled on the

shores of England, as on the shores of nowhere, watched them sinking

smaller and smaller on the profound and living darkness, she felt her

soul stirring to awake from its anaesthetic sleep.

'Let us go forward, shall we?' said Birkin. He wanted to be at the tip

of their projection. So they left off looking at the faint sparks that

glimmered out of nowhere, in the far distance, called England, and

turned their faces to the unfathomed night in front.

They went right to the bows of the softly plunging vessel. In the

complete obscurity, Birkin found a comparatively sheltered nook, where

a great rope was coiled up. It was quite near the very point of the

ship, near the black, unpierced space ahead. There they sat down,

folded together, folded round with the same rug, creeping in nearer and

ever nearer to one another, till it seemed they had crept right into

each other, and become one substance. It was very cold, and the

darkness was palpable.

One of the ship's crew came along the deck, dark as the darkness, not

really visible. They then made out the faintest pallor of his face. He

felt their presence, and stopped, unsure--then bent forward. When his

face was near them, he saw the faint pallor of their faces. Then he

withdrew like a phantom. And they watched him without making any sound.

They seemed to fall away into the profound darkness. There was no sky,

no earth, only one unbroken darkness, into which, with a soft, sleeping

motion, they seemed to fall like one closed seed of life falling

through dark, fathomless space.

They had forgotten where they were, forgotten all that was and all that

had been, conscious only in their heart, and there conscious only of

this pure trajectory through the surpassing darkness. The ship's prow

cleaved on, with a faint noise of cleavage, into the complete night,

without knowing, without seeing, only surging on.