Women in Love

She had a curious sort of allegiance with Loerke, all the while, now,

something insidious and traitorous. Gerald knew of it. But in the

unnatural state of patience, and the unwillingness to harden himself

against her, in which he found himself, he took no notice, although her

soft kindliness to the other man, whom he hated as a noxious insect,

made him shiver again with an access of the strange shuddering that

came over him repeatedly.

He left her alone only when he went skiing, a sport he loved, and which

she did not practise. The he seemed to sweep out of life, to be a

projectile into the beyond. And often, when he went away, she talked to

the little German sculptor. They had an invariable topic, in their art.

They were almost of the same ideas. He hated Mestrovic, was not

satisfied with the Futurists, he liked the West African wooden figures,

the Aztec art, Mexican and Central American. He saw the grotesque, and

a curious sort of mechanical motion intoxicated him, a confusion in

nature. They had a curious game with each other, Gudrun and Loerke, of

infinite suggestivity, strange and leering, as if they had some

esoteric understanding of life, that they alone were initiated into the

fearful central secrets, that the world dared not know. Their whole

correspondence was in a strange, barely comprehensible suggestivity,

they kindled themselves at the subtle lust of the Egyptians or the

Mexicans. The whole game was one of subtle inter-suggestivity, and they

wanted to keep it on the plane of suggestion. From their verbal and

physical nuances they got the highest satisfaction in the nerves, from

a queer interchange of half-suggested ideas, looks, expressions and

gestures, which were quite intolerable, though incomprehensible, to

Gerald. He had no terms in which to think of their commerce, his terms

were much too gross.

The suggestion of primitive art was their refuge, and the inner

mysteries of sensation their object of worship. Art and Life were to

them the Reality and the Unreality.

'Of course,' said Gudrun, 'life doesn't REALLY matter--it is one's art

which is central. What one does in one's life has PEU DE RAPPORT, it

doesn't signify much.' 'Yes, that is so, exactly,' replied the sculptor. 'What one does in

one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's

life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.' It was curious what a sense of elation and freedom Gudrun found in this

communication. She felt established for ever. Of course Gerald was

BAGATELLE. Love was one of the temporal things in her life, except in

so far as she was an artist. She thought of Cleopatra--Cleopatra must

have been an artist; she reaped the essential from a man, she harvested

the ultimate sensation, and threw away the husk; and Mary Stuart, and

the great Rachel, panting with her lovers after the theatre, these were

the exoteric exponents of love. After all, what was the lover but fuel

for the transport of this subtle knowledge, for a female art, the art

of pure, perfect knowledge in sensuous understanding.