She could not get it clean away, so she felt self-conscious.
Gerald, very pale, was watching her closely.His eyes were lit up with intent lights, absorbed and gleaming.She turned suddenly on him.
`It's you who make me behave like this, you know,' she said, almost suggestive.
`I? How?' he said.
But she turned away, and set off towards the lake.Below, on the water, lanterns were coming alight, faint ghosts of warm flame floating in the pallor of the first twilight.The earth was spread with darkness, like lacquer, overhead was a pale sky, all primrose, and the lake was pale as milk in one part.Away at the landing stage, tiniest points of coloured rays were stringing themselves in the dusk.The launch was being illuminated.
All round, shadow was gathering from the trees.
Gerald, white like a presence in his summer clothes, was following down the open grassy slope.Gudrun waited for him to come up.Then she softly put out her hand and touched him, saying softly:
`Don't be angry with me.'
A flame flew over him, and he was unconscious.Yet he stammered:
`I'm not angry with you.I'm in love with you.'
His mind was gone, he grasped for sufficient mechanical control, to save himself.She laughed a silvery little mockery, yet intolerably caressive.
`That's one way of putting it,' she said.
The terrible swooning burden on his mind, the awful swooning, the loss of all his control, was too much for him.He grasped her arm in his one hand, as if his hand were iron.
`It's all right, then, is it?' he said, holding her arrested.
She looked at the face with the fixed eyes, set before her, and her blood ran cold.
`Yes, it's all right,' she said softly, as if drugged, her voice crooning and witch-like.
He walked on beside her, a striding, mindless body.But he recovered a little as he went.He suffered badly.He had killed his brother when a boy, and was set apart, like Cain.
They found Birkin and Ursula sitting together by the boats, talking and laughing.Birkin had been teasing Ursula.
`Do you smell this little marsh?' he said, sniffing the air.He was very sensitive to scents, and quick in understanding them.
`It's rather nice,' she said.
`No,' he replied, `alarming.'
`Why alarming?' she laughed.
`It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness,' he said, `putting forth lilies and snakes, and the ignis fatuus, and rolling all the time onward.
That's what we never take into count -- that it rolls onwards.'
`What does?'
`The other river, the black river.We always consider the silver river of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on and on to heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea, a heaven of angels thronging.
But the other is our real reality --'
`But what other? I don't see any other,' said Ursula.
`It is your reality, nevertheless,' he said; `that dark river of dissolution.
You see it rolls in us just as the other rolls -- the black river of corruption.
And our flowers are of this -- our sea-born Aphrodite, all our white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection, all our reality, nowadays.'
`You mean that Aphrodite is really deathly?' asked Ursula.
`I mean she is the flowering mystery of the death-process, yes,' he replied.`When the stream of synthetic creation lapses, we find ourselves part of the inverse process, the blood of destructive creation.Aphrodite is born in the first spasm of universal dissolution -- then the snakes and swans and lotus -- marsh-flowers -- and Gudrun and Gerald -- born in the process of destructive creation.'
`And you and me --?' she asked.
`Probably,' he replied.`In part, certainly.Whether we are that, in toto, I don't yet know.'
`You mean we are flowers of dissolution -- fleurs du mal? I don't feel as if I were,' she protested.
He was silent for a time.
`I don't feel as if we were, altogether ,' he replied.`Some people are pure flowers of dark corruption -- lilies.But there ought to be some roses, warm and flamy.You know Herakleitos says "a dry soul is best."I know so well what that means.Do you?'
`I'm not sure,' Ursula replied.`But what if people are all flowers of dissolution -- when they're flowers at all -- what difference does it make?'
`No difference -- and all the difference.Dissolution rolls on, just as production does,' he said.`It is a progressive process -- and it ends in universal nothing -- the end of the world, if you like.But why isn't the end of the world as good as the beginning?'
`I suppose it isn't,' said Ursula, rather angry.
`Oh yes, ultimately,' he said.`It means a new cycle of creation after -- but not for us.If it is the end, then we are of the end -- fleurs du mal if you like.If we are fleurs du mal, we are not roses of happiness, and there you are.'
`But I think I am,' said Ursula.`I think I am a rose of happiness.'
`Ready-made?' he asked ironically.
`No -- real,' she said, hurt.
`If we are the end, we are not the beginning,' he said.
`Yes we are,' she said.`The beginning comes out of the end.'
`After it, not out of it.After us, not out of us.'
`You are a devil, you know, really,' she said.`You want to destroy our hope.You want us to be deathly.'
`No,' he said, `I only want us to know what we are.'
`Ha!' she cried in anger.`You only want us to know death.'
`You're quite right,' said the soft voice of Gerald, out of the dusk behind.
Birkin rose.Gerald and Gudrun came up.They all began to smoke, in the moments of silence.One after another, Birkin lighted their cigarettes.
The match flickered in the twilight, and they were all smoking peacefully by the water-side.The lake was dim, the light dying from off it, in the midst of the dark land.The air all round was intangible, neither here nor there, and there was an unreal noise of banjoes, or suchlike music.
