Women in Love

His passion was awful to her, tense and ghastly, and impersonal, like a

destruction, ultimate. She felt it would kill her. She was being

killed.

'My God, my God,' she cried, in anguish, in his embrace, feeling her

life being killed within her. And when he was kissing her, soothing

her, her breath came slowly, as if she were really spent, dying.

'Shall I die, shall I die?' she repeated to herself.

And in the night, and in him, there was no answer to the question.

And yet, next day, the fragment of her which was not destroyed remained

intact and hostile, she did not go away, she remained to finish the

holiday, admitting nothing. He scarcely ever left her alone, but

followed her like a shadow, he was like a doom upon her, a continual

'thou shalt,' 'thou shalt not.' Sometimes it was he who seemed

strongest, whist she was almost gone, creeping near the earth like a

spent wind; sometimes it was the reverse. But always it was this

eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified

because the other was nulled.

'In the end,' she said to herself, 'I shall go away from him.' 'I can be free of her,' he said to himself in his paroxysms of

suffering.

And he set himself to be free. He even prepared to go away, to leave

her in the lurch. But for the first time there was a flaw in his will.

'Where shall I go?' he asked himself.

'Can't you be self-sufficient?' he replied to himself, putting himself

upon his pride.

'Self-sufficient!' he repeated.

It seemed to him that Gudrun was sufficient unto herself, closed round

and completed, like a thing in a case. In the calm, static reason of

his soul, he recognised this, and admitted it was her right, to be

closed round upon herself, self-complete, without desire. He realised

it, he admitted it, it only needed one last effort on his own part, to

win for himself the same completeness. He knew that it only needed one

convulsion of his will for him to be able to turn upon himself also, to

close upon himself as a stone fixes upon itself, and is impervious,

self-completed, a thing isolated.

This knowledge threw him into a terrible chaos. Because, however much

he might mentally WILL to be immune and self-complete, the desire for

this state was lacking, and he could not create it. He could see that,

to exist at all, he must be perfectly free of Gudrun, leave her if she

wanted to be left, demand nothing of her, have no claim upon her.