Women in Love

He reached and touched the dead face. And the sharp, heavy bruise of

ice bruised his living bowels. He wondered if he himself were freezing

too, freezing from the inside. In the short blond moustache the

life-breath was frozen into a block of ice, beneath the silent

nostrils. And this was Gerald!

Again he touched the sharp, almost glittering fair hair of the frozen

body. It was icy-cold, hair icy-cold, almost venomous. Birkin's heart

began to freeze. He had loved Gerald. Now he looked at the shapely,

strange-coloured face, with the small, fine, pinched nose and the manly

cheeks, saw it frozen like an ice-pebble--yet he had loved it. What was

one to think or feel? His brain was beginning to freeze, his blood was

turning to ice-water. So cold, so cold, a heavy, bruising cold pressing

on his arms from outside, and a heavier cold congealing within him, in

his heart and in his bowels.

He went over the snow slopes, to see where the death had been. At last

he came to the great shallow among the precipices and slopes, near the

summit of the pass. It was a grey day, the third day of greyness and

stillness. All was white, icy, pallid, save for the scoring of black

rocks that jutted like roots sometimes, and sometimes were in naked

faces. In the distance a slope sheered down from a peak, with many

black rock-slides.

It was like a shallow pot lying among the stone and snow of the upper

world. In this pot Gerald had gone to sleep. At the far end, the guides

had driven iron stakes deep into the snow-wall, so that, by means of

the great rope attached, they could haul themselves up the massive

snow-front, out on to the jagged summit of the pass, naked to heaven,

where the Marienhutte hid among the naked rocks. Round about, spiked,

slashed snow-peaks pricked the heaven.

Gerald might have found this rope. He might have hauled himself up to

the crest. He might have heard the dogs in the Marienhutte, and found

shelter. He might have gone on, down the steep, steep fall of the

south-side, down into the dark valley with its pines, on to the great

Imperial road leading south to Italy.

He might! And what then? The Imperial road! The south? Italy? What

then? Was it a way out? It was only a way in again. Birkin stood high

in the painful air, looking at the peaks, and the way south. Was it any

good going south, to Italy? Down the old, old Imperial road?

He turned away. Either the heart would break, or cease to care. Best

cease to care. Whatever the mystery which has brought forth man and the

universe, it is a non-human mystery, it has its own great ends, man is

not the criterion. Best leave it all to the vast, creative, non-human

mystery. Best strive with oneself only, not with the universe.