Women in Love

One morning the sisters were sketching by the side of Willey Water, at

the remote end of the lake. Gudrun had waded out to a gravelly shoal,

and was seated like a Buddhist, staring fixedly at the water-plants

that rose succulent from the mud of the low shores. What she could see

was mud, soft, oozy, watery mud, and from its festering chill,

water-plants rose up, thick and cool and fleshy, very straight and

turgid, thrusting out their leaves at right angles, and having dark

lurid colours, dark green and blotches of black-purple and bronze. But

she could feel their turgid fleshy structure as in a sensuous vision,

she KNEW how they rose out of the mud, she KNEW how they thrust out

from themselves, how they stood stiff and succulent against the air.

Ursula was watching the butterflies, of which there were dozens near

the water, little blue ones suddenly snapping out of nothingness into a

jewel-life, a large black-and-red one standing upon a flower and

breathing with his soft wings, intoxicatingly, breathing pure, ethereal

sunshine; two white ones wrestling in the low air; there was a halo

round them; ah, when they came tumbling nearer they were orangetips,

and it was the orange that had made the halo. Ursula rose and drifted

away, unconscious like the butterflies.

Gudrun, absorbed in a stupor of apprehension of surging water-plants,

sat crouched on the shoal, drawing, not looking up for a long time, and

then staring unconsciously, absorbedly at the rigid, naked, succulent

stems. Her feet were bare, her hat lay on the bank opposite.

She started out of her trance, hearing the knocking of oars. She looked

round. There was a boat with a gaudy Japanese parasol, and a man in

white, rowing. The woman was Hermione, and the man was Gerald. She knew

it instantly. And instantly she perished in the keen FRISSON of

anticipation, an electric vibration in her veins, intense, much more

intense than that which was always humming low in the atmosphere of

Beldover.

Gerald was her escape from the heavy slough of the pale, underworld,

automatic colliers. He started out of the mud. He was master. She saw

his back, the movement of his white loins. But not that--it was the

whiteness he seemed to enclose as he bent forwards, rowing. He seemed

to stoop to something. His glistening, whitish hair seemed like the

electricity of the sky.

'There's Gudrun,' came Hermione's voice floating distinct over the

water. 'We will go and speak to her. Do you mind?' Gerald looked round and saw the girl standing by the water's edge,

looking at him. He pulled the boat towards her, magnetically, without

thinking of her. In his world, his conscious world, she was still

nobody. He knew that Hermione had a curious pleasure in treading down

all the social differences, at least apparently, and he left it to her.