Oh, God, could one bear it, this past which was gone down the abyss?
Could she bear, that it ever had been! She looked round this silent,
upper world of snow and stars and powerful cold. There was another
world, like views on a magic lantern; The Marsh, Cossethay, Ilkeston,
lit up with a common, unreal light. There was a shadowy unreal Ursula,
a whole shadow-play of an unreal life. It was as unreal, and
circumscribed, as a magic-lantern show. She wished the slides could all
be broken. She wished it could be gone for ever, like a lantern-slide
which was broken. She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come
down from the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have
toiled out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all
soiled. She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her. What
was this decree, that she should 'remember'! Why not a bath of pure
oblivion, a new birth, without any recollections or blemish of a past
life. She was with Birkin, she had just come into life, here in the
high snow, against the stars. What had she to do with parents and
antecedents? She knew herself new and unbegotten, she had no father, no
mother, no anterior connections, she was herself, pure and silvery, she
belonged only to the oneness with Birkin, a oneness that struck deeper
notes, sounding into the heart of the universe, the heart of reality,
where she had never existed before.
Even Gudrun was a separate unit, separate, separate, having nothing to
do with this self, this Ursula, in her new world of reality. That old
shadow-world, the actuality of the past--ah, let it go! She rose free
on the wings of her new condition.
Gudrun and Gerald had not come in. They had walked up the valley
straight in front of the house, not like Ursula and Birkin, on to the
little hill at the right. Gudrun was driven by a strange desire. She
wanted to plunge on and on, till she came to the end of the valley of
snow. Then she wanted to climb the wall of white finality, climb over,
into the peaks that sprang up like sharp petals in the heart of the
frozen, mysterious navel of the world. She felt that there, over the
strange blind, terrible wall of rocky snow, there in the navel of the
mystic world, among the final cluster of peaks, there, in the infolded
navel of it all, was her consummation. If she could but come there,
alone, and pass into the infolded navel of eternal snow and of
uprising, immortal peaks of snow and rock, she would be a oneness with
all, she would be herself the eternal, infinite silence, the sleeping,
timeless, frozen centre of the All.