Women in Love

'My God,' he said to her, his face drawn and strange, transfigured,

'what next?' She lay perfectly still, with a still, child-like face and dark eyes,

looking at him. She was lost, fallen right away.

'I shall always love you,' he said, looking at her.

But she did not hear. She lay, looking at him as at something she could

never understand, never: as a child looks at a grown-up person, without

hope of understanding, only submitting.

He kissed her, kissed her eyes shut, so that she could not look any

more. He wanted something now, some recognition, some sign, some

admission. But she only lay silent and child-like and remote, like a

child that is overcome and cannot understand, only feels lost. He

kissed her again, giving up.

'Shall we go down and have coffee and Kuchen?' he asked.

The twilight was falling slate-blue at the window. She closed her eyes,

closed away the monotonous level of dead wonder, and opened them again

to the every-day world.

'Yes,' she said briefly, regaining her will with a click. She went

again to the window. Blue evening had fallen over the cradle of snow

and over the great pallid slopes. But in the heaven the peaks of snow

were rosy, glistening like transcendent, radiant spikes of blossom in

the heavenly upper-world, so lovely and beyond.

Gudrun saw all their loveliness, she KNEW how immortally beautiful they

were, great pistils of rose-coloured, snow-fed fire in the blue

twilight of the heaven. She could SEE it, she knew it, but she was not

of it. She was divorced, debarred, a soul shut out.

With a last look of remorse, she turned away, and was doing her hair.

He had unstrapped the luggage, and was waiting, watching her. She knew

he was watching her. It made her a little hasty and feverish in her

precipitation.

They went downstairs, both with a strange other-world look on their

faces, and with a glow in their eyes. They saw Birkin and Ursula

sitting at the long table in a corner, waiting for them.

'How good and simple they look together,' Gudrun thought, jealously.

She envied them some spontaneity, a childish sufficiency to which she

herself could never approach. They seemed such children to her.

'Such good Kranzkuchen!' cried Ursula greedily. 'So good!' 'Right,' said Gudrun. 'Can we have Kaffee mit Kranzkuchen?' she added

to the waiter.

And she seated herself on the bench beside Gerald. Birkin, looking at

them, felt a pain of tenderness for them.

'I think the place is really wonderful, Gerald,' he said; 'prachtvoll

and wunderbar and wunderschon and unbeschreiblich and all the other

German adjectives.' Gerald broke into a slight smile.