`Come then,' said Ursula.`Let us go before mother comes.'
`Who'll hear us say our prayers?' asked Billy anxiously.
`Whom you like.'
`Won't you?'
`Yes, I will.'
`Ursula?'
`Well Billy?'
`Is it whom you like?'
`That's it.'
`Well what is whom ?'
`It's the accusative of who.'
There was a moment's contemplative silence, then the confiding:
`Is it?'
Birkin smiled to himself as he sat by the fire.When Ursula came down he sat motionless, with his arms on his knees.She saw him, how he was motionless and ageless, like some crouching idol, some image of a deathly religion.He looked round at her, and his face, very pale and unreal, seemed to gleam with a whiteness almost phosphorescent.
`Don't you feel well?' she asked, in indefinable repulsion.
`I hadn't thought about it.'
`But don't you know without thinking about it?'
He looked at her, his eyes dark and swift, and he saw her revulsion.
He did not answer her question.
`Don't you know whether you are unwell or not, without thinking about it?' she persisted.
`Not always,' he said coldly.
`But don't you think that's very wicked?'
`Wicked?'
`Yes.I think it's criminal to have so little connection with your own body that you don't even know when you are ill.'
He looked at her darkly.
`Yes,' he said.
`Why don't you stay in bed when you are seedy? You look perfectly ghastly.'
`Offensively so?' he asked ironically.
`Yes, quite offensive.Quite repelling.'
`Ah!! Well that's unfortunate.'
`And it's raining, and it's a horrible night.Really, you shouldn't be forgiven for treating your body like it -- you ought to suffer, a man who takes as little notice of his body as that.'
`-- takes as little notice of his body as that,' he echoed mechanically.
This cut her short, and there was silence.
The others came in from church, and the two had the girls to face, then the mother and Gudrun, and then the father and the boy.
`Good-evening,' said Brangwen, faintly surprised.`Came to see me, did you?'
`No,' said Birkin, `not about anything, in particular, that is.The day was dismal, and I thought you wouldn't mind if I called in.'
`It has been a depressing day,' said Mrs Brangwen sympathetically.
At that moment the voices of the children were heard calling from upstairs:
`Mother! Mother!' She lifted her face and answered mildly into the distance:
`I shall come up to you in a minute, Doysie.' Then to Birkin: `There is nothing fresh at Shortlands, I suppose? Ah,' she sighed, `no, poor things, I should think not.'
`You've been over there today, I suppose?' asked the father.
`Gerald came round to tea with me, and I walked back with him.The house is overexcited and unwholesome, I thought.'
`I should think they were people who hadn't much restraint,' said Gudrun.
`Or too much,' Birkin answered.
`Oh yes, I'm sure,' said Gudrun, almost vindictively, `one or the other.'
`They all feel they ought to behave in some unnatural fashion,' said Birkin.`When people are in grief, they would do better to cover their faces and keep in retirement, as in the old days.'
`Certainly!' cried Gudrun, flushed and inflammable.`What can be worse than this public grief -- what is more horrible, more false! If grief is not private, and hidden, what is?'
`Exactly,' he said.`I felt ashamed when I was there and they were all going about in a lugubrious false way, feeling they must not be natural or ordinary.'
`Well --' said Mrs Brangwen, offended at this criticism, `it isn't so easy to bear a trouble like that.'
And she went upstairs to the children.
He remained only a few minutes longer, then took his leave.When he was gone Ursula felt such a poignant hatred of him, that all her brain seemed turned into a sharp crystal of fine hatred.Her whole nature seemed sharpened and intensified into a pure dart of hate.She could not imagine what it was.It merely took hold of her, the most poignant and ultimate hatred, pure and clear and beyond thought.She could not think of it at all, she was translated beyond herself.It was like a possession.She felt she was possessed.And for several days she went about possessed by this exquisite force of hatred against him.It surpassed anything she had ever known before, it seemed to throw her out of the world into some terrible region where nothing of her old life held good.She was quite lost and dazed, really dead to her own life.
It was so completely incomprehensible and irrational.She did not know why she hated him, her hate was quite abstract.She had only realised with a shock that stunned her, that she was overcome by this pure transportation.
He was the enemy, fine as a diamond, and as hard and jewel-like, the quintessence of all that was inimical.
She thought of his face, white and purely wrought, and of his eyes that had such a dark, constant will of assertion, and she touched her own forehead, to feel if she were mad, she was so transfigured in white flame of essential hate.
It was not temporal, her hatred, she did not hate him for this or for that; she did not want to do anything to him, to have any connection with him.Her relation was ultimate and utterly beyond words, the hate was so pure and gemlike.It was as if he were a beam of essential enmity, a beam of light that did not only destroy her, but denied her altogether, revoked her whole world.She saw him as a clear stroke of uttermost contradiction, a strange gem-like being whose existence defined her own non-existence.
When she heard he was ill again, her hatred only intensified itself a few degrees, if that were possible.It stunned her and annihilated her, but she could not escape it.She could not escape this transfiguration of hatred that had come upon her.