Women in Love

It was done. Birkin snapped the hand bags, off they went, the porter

coming behind. They were through a great doorway, and in the open night

again--ah, a railway platform! Voices were still calling in inhuman

agitation through the dark-grey air, spectres were running along the

darkness between the train.

'Koln--Berlin--' Ursula made out on the boards hung on the high train

on one side.

'Here we are,' said Birkin. And on her side she saw:

'Elsass--Lothringen--Luxembourg, Metz--Basle.' 'That was it, Basle!' The porter came up.

'A Bale--deuxieme classe?--Voila!' And he clambered into the high

train. They followed. The compartments were already some of them taken.

But many were dim and empty. The luggage was stowed, the porter was

tipped.

'Nous avons encore--?' said Birkin, looking at his watch and at the

porter.

'Encore une demi-heure.' With which, in his blue blouse, he

disappeared. He was ugly and insolent.

'Come,' said Birkin. 'It is cold. Let us eat.' There was a coffee-wagon on the platform. They drank hot, watery

coffee, and ate the long rolls, split, with ham between, which were

such a wide bite that it almost dislocated Ursula's jaw; and they

walked beside the high trains. It was all so strange, so extremely

desolate, like the underworld, grey, grey, dirt grey, desolate,

forlorn, nowhere--grey, dreary nowhere.

At last they were moving through the night. In the darkness Ursula made

out the flat fields, the wet flat dreary darkness of the Continent.

They pulled up surprisingly soon--Bruges! Then on through the level

darkness, with glimpses of sleeping farms and thin poplar trees and

deserted high-roads. She sat dismayed, hand in hand with Birkin. He

pale, immobile like a REVENANT himself, looked sometimes out of the

window, sometimes closed his eyes. Then his eyes opened again, dark as

the darkness outside.

A flash of a few lights on the darkness--Ghent station! A few more

spectres moving outside on the platform--then the bell--then motion

again through the level darkness. Ursula saw a man with a lantern come

out of a farm by the railway, and cross to the dark farm-buildings. She

thought of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm-life at Cossethay. My God,

how far was she projected from her childhood, how far was she still to

go! In one life-time one travelled through aeons. The great chasm of

memory from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of

Cossethay and the Marsh Farm--she remembered the servant Tilly, who

used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar, in the

old living-room where the grandfather clock had two pink roses in a

basket painted above the figures on the face--and now when she was

travelling into the unknown with Birkin, an utter stranger--was so

great, that it seemed she had no identity, that the child she had been,

playing in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not

really herself.