Women in Love

Gerald! Could he fold her in his arms and sheathe her in sleep? Ha! He

needed putting to sleep himself--poor Gerald. That was all he needed.

What did he do, he made the burden for her greater, the burden of her

sleep was the more intolerable, when he was there. He was an added

weariness upon her unripening nights, her unfruitful slumbers. Perhaps

he got some repose from her. Perhaps he did. Perhaps this was what he

was always dogging her for, like a child that is famished, crying for

the breast. Perhaps this was the secret of his passion, his forever

unquenched desire for her--that he needed her to put him to sleep, to

give him repose.

What then! Was she his mother? Had she asked for a child, whom she must

nurse through the nights, for her lover. She despised him, she despised

him, she hardened her heart. An infant crying in the night, this Don

Juan.

Ooh, but how she hated the infant crying in the night. She would murder

it gladly. She would stifle it and bury it, as Hetty Sorrell did. No

doubt Hetty Sorrell's infant cried in the night--no doubt Arthur

Donnithorne's infant would. Ha--the Arthur Donnithornes, the Geralds of

this world. So manly by day, yet all the while, such a crying of

infants in the night. Let them turn into mechanisms, let them. Let them

become instruments, pure machines, pure wills, that work like

clock-work, in perpetual repetition. Let them be this, let them be

taken up entirely in their work, let them be perfect parts of a great

machine, having a slumber of constant repetition. Let Gerald manage his

firm. There he would be satisfied, as satisfied as a wheelbarrow that

goes backwards and forwards along a plank all day--she had seen it.

The wheel-barrow--the one humble wheel--the unit of the firm. Then the

cart, with two wheels; then the truck, with four; then the

donkey-engine, with eight, then the winding-engine, with sixteen, and

so on, till it came to the miner, with a thousand wheels, and then the

electrician, with three thousand, and the underground manager, with

twenty thousand, and the general manager with a hundred thousand little

wheels working away to complete his make-up, and then Gerald, with a

million wheels and cogs and axles.

Poor Gerald, such a lot of little wheels to his make-up! He was more

intricate than a chronometer-watch. But oh heavens, what weariness!

What weariness, God above! A chronometer-watch--a beetle--her soul

fainted with utter ennui, from the thought. So many wheels to count and

consider and calculate! Enough, enough--there was an end to man's

capacity for complications, even. Or perhaps there was no end.