Women in Love

Gerald bent above her and was looking out over her shoulder. Already he

felt he was alone. She was gone. She was completely gone, and there was

icy vapour round his heart. He saw the blind valley, the great

cul-de-sac of snow and mountain peaks, under the heaven. And there was

no way out. The terrible silence and cold and the glamorous whiteness

of the dusk wrapped him round, and she remained crouching before the

window, as at a shrine, a shadow.

'Do you like it?' he asked, in a voice that sounded detached and

foreign. At least she might acknowledge he was with her. But she only

averted her soft, mute face a little from his gaze. And he knew that

there were tears in her eyes, her own tears, tears of her strange

religion, that put him to nought.

Quite suddenly, he put his hand under her chin and lifted up her face

to him. Her dark blue eyes, in their wetness of tears, dilated as if

she was startled in her very soul. They looked at him through their

tears in terror and a little horror. His light blue eyes were keen,

small-pupilled and unnatural in their vision. Her lips parted, as she

breathed with difficulty.

The passion came up in him, stroke after stroke, like the ringing of a

bronze bell, so strong and unflawed and indomitable. His knees

tightened to bronze as he hung above her soft face, whose lips parted

and whose eyes dilated in a strange violation. In the grasp of his hand

her chin was unutterably soft and silken. He felt strong as winter, his

hands were living metal, invincible and not to be turned aside. His

heart rang like a bell clanging inside him.

He took her up in his arms. She was soft and inert, motionless. All the

while her eyes, in which the tears had not yet dried, were dilated as

if in a kind of swoon of fascination and helplessness. He was

superhumanly strong, and unflawed, as if invested with supernatural

force.

He lifted her close and folded her against him. Her softness, her

inert, relaxed weight lay against his own surcharged, bronze-like limbs

in a heaviness of desirability that would destroy him, if he were not

fulfilled. She moved convulsively, recoiling away from him. His heart

went up like a flame of ice, he closed over her like steel. He would

destroy her rather than be denied.

But the overweening power of his body was too much for her. She relaxed

again, and lay loose and soft, panting in a little delirium. And to

him, she was so sweet, she was such bliss of release, that he would

have suffered a whole eternity of torture rather than forego one second

of this pang of unsurpassable bliss.