Women in Love

In Ursula the sense of the unrealised world ahead triumphed over

everything. In the midst of this profound darkness, there seemed to

glow on her heart the effulgence of a paradise unknown and unrealised.

Her heart was full of the most wonderful light, golden like honey of

darkness, sweet like the warmth of day, a light which was not shed on

the world, only on the unknown paradise towards which she was going, a

sweetness of habitation, a delight of living quite unknown, but hers

infallibly. In her transport she lifted her face suddenly to him, and

he touched it with his lips. So cold, so fresh, so sea-clear her face

was, it was like kissing a flower that grows near the surf.

But he did not know the ecstasy of bliss in fore-knowledge that she

knew. To him, the wonder of this transit was overwhelming. He was

falling through a gulf of infinite darkness, like a meteorite plunging

across the chasm between the worlds. The world was torn in two, and he

was plunging like an unlit star through the ineffable rift. What was

beyond was not yet for him. He was overcome by the trajectory.

In a trance he lay enfolding Ursula round about. His face was against

her fine, fragile hair, he breathed its fragrance with the sea and the

profound night. And his soul was at peace; yielded, as he fell into the

unknown. This was the first time that an utter and absolute peace had

entered his heart, now, in this final transit out of life.

When there came some stir on the deck, they roused. They stood up. How

stiff and cramped they were, in the night-time! And yet the paradisal

glow on her heart, and the unutterable peace of darkness in his, this

was the all-in-all.

They stood up and looked ahead. Low lights were seen down the darkness.

This was the world again. It was not the bliss of her heart, nor the

peace of his. It was the superficial unreal world of fact. Yet not

quite the old world. For the peace and the bliss in their hearts was

enduring.

Strange, and desolate above all things, like disembarking from the Styx

into the desolated underworld, was this landing at night. There was the

raw, half-lighted, covered-in vastness of the dark place, boarded and

hollow underfoot, with only desolation everywhere. Ursula had caught

sight of the big, pallid, mystic letters 'OSTEND,' standing in the

darkness. Everybody was hurrying with a blind, insect-like intentness

through the dark grey air, porters were calling in un-English English,

then trotting with heavy bags, their colourless blouses looking ghostly

as they disappeared; Ursula stood at a long, low, zinc-covered barrier,

along with hundreds of other spectral people, and all the way down the

vast, raw darkness was this low stretch of open bags and spectral

people, whilst, on the other side of the barrier, pallid officials in

peaked caps and moustaches were turning the underclothing in the bags,

then scrawling a chalk-mark.