Women in Love

Yet the sledges ran up in fine style, people came to the door laughing

and excited, the floor of the hostel rang hollow, the passage was wet

with snow, it was a real, warm interior.

The new-comers tramped up the bare wooden stairs, following the serving

woman. Gudrun and Gerald took the first bedroom. In a moment they found

themselves alone in a bare, smallish, close-shut room that was all of

golden-coloured wood, floor, walls, ceiling, door, all of the same warm

gold panelling of oiled pine. There was a window opposite the door, but

low down, because the roof sloped. Under the slope of the ceiling were

the table with wash-hand bowl and jug, and across, another table with

mirror. On either side the door were two beds piled high with an

enormous blue-checked overbolster, enormous.

This was all--no cupboard, none of the amenities of life. Here they

were shut up together in this cell of golden-coloured wood, with two

blue checked beds. They looked at each other and laughed, frightened by

this naked nearness of isolation.

A man knocked and came in with the luggage. He was a sturdy fellow with

flattish cheek-bones, rather pale, and with coarse fair moustache.

Gudrun watched him put down the bags, in silence, then tramp heavily

out.

'It isn't too rough, is it?' Gerald asked.

The bedroom was not very warm, and she shivered slightly.

'It is wonderful,' she equivocated. 'Look at the colour of this

panelling--it's wonderful, like being inside a nut.' He was standing watching her, feeling his short-cut moustache, leaning

back slightly and watching her with his keen, undaunted eyes, dominated

by the constant passion, that was like a doom upon him.

She went and crouched down in front of the window, curious.

'Oh, but this--!' she cried involuntarily, almost in pain.

In front was a valley shut in under the sky, the last huge slopes of

snow and black rock, and at the end, like the navel of the earth, a

white-folded wall, and two peaks glimmering in the late light. Straight

in front ran the cradle of silent snow, between the great slopes that

were fringed with a little roughness of pine-trees, like hair, round

the base. But the cradle of snow ran on to the eternal closing-in,

where the walls of snow and rock rose impenetrable, and the mountain

peaks above were in heaven immediate. This was the centre, the knot,

the navel of the world, where the earth belonged to the skies, pure,

unapproachable, impassable.

It filled Gudrun with a strange rapture. She crouched in front of the

window, clenching her face in her hands, in a sort of trance. At last

she had arrived, she had reached her place. Here at last she folded her

venture and settled down like a crystal in the navel of snow, and was

gone.