Apart from these stories, they never talked of the future. They
delighted most either in mocking imaginations of destruction, or in
sentimental, fine marionette-shows of the past. It was a sentimental
delight to reconstruct the world of Goethe at Weimar, or of Schiller
and poverty and faithful love, or to see again Jean Jacques in his
quakings, or Voltaire at Ferney, or Frederick the Great reading his own
poetry.
They talked together for hours, of literature and sculpture and
painting, amusing themselves with Flaxman and Blake and Fuseli, with
tenderness, and with Feuerbach and Bocklin. It would take them a
life-time, they felt to live again, IN PETTO, the lives of the great
artists. But they preferred to stay in the eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries.
They talked in a mixture of languages. The ground-work was French, in
either case. But he ended most of his sentences in a stumble of English
and a conclusion of German, she skilfully wove herself to her end in
whatever phrase came to her. She took a peculiar delight in this
conversation. It was full of odd, fantastic expression, of double
meanings, of evasions, of suggestive vagueness. It was a real physical
pleasure to her to make this thread of conversation out of the
different-coloured stands of three languages.
And all the while they two were hovering, hesitating round the flame of
some invisible declaration. He wanted it, but was held back by some
inevitable reluctance. She wanted it also, but she wanted to put it
off, to put it off indefinitely, she still had some pity for Gerald,
some connection with him. And the most fatal of all, she had the
reminiscent sentimental compassion for herself in connection with him.
Because of what HAD been, she felt herself held to him by immortal,
invisible threads-because of what HAD been, because of his coming to
her that first night, into her own house, in his extremity, because-Gerald was gradually overcome with a revulsion of loathing for Loerke.
He did not take the man seriously, he despised him merely, except as he
felt in Gudrun's veins the influence of the little creature. It was
this that drove Gerald wild, the feeling in Gudrun's veins of Loerke's
presence, Loerke's being, flowing dominant through her.
'What makes you so smitten with that little vermin?' he asked, really
puzzled. For he, man-like, could not see anything attractive or
important AT ALL in Loerke. Gerald expected to find some handsomeness
or nobleness, to account for a woman's subjection. But he saw none
here, only an insect-like repulsiveness.
Gudrun flushed deeply. It was these attacks she would never forgive.