She could only wait,wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing,withdrawing and contracting,coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone.Whilst all her womb was open and soft,and softly clamouring,like a sea-anemone under the tide,clamouring for him to come in again and make a fulfilment for her.She clung to him unconscious iii passion,and he never quite slipped from her,and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring,and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion,swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness,and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion,but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness,till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling,and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries.The voice out of the uttermost night,the life!The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe,as his life sprang out into her.And as it subsided,he subsided too and lay utterly still,unknowing,while her grip on him slowly relaxed,and she lay inert.
And they lay and knew nothing,not even of each other,both lost.Till at last he began to rouse and become aware of his defenceless nakedness,and she was aware that his body was loosening its clasp on her.He was coming apart;but in her breast she felt she could not bear him to leave her uncovered.He must cover her now for ever.
But he drew away at last,and kissed her and covered her over,and began to cover himself She lay looking up to the boughs of the tree,unable as yet to move.He stood and fastened up his breeches,looking round.All was dense and silent,save for the awed dog that lay with its paws against its nose.He sat down again on the brushwood and took Connie's hand in silence.
She turned and looked at him.'We came off together that time,'he said.
She did not answer.
'It's good when it's like that.Most folks live their lives through and they never know it,'he said,speaking rather dreamily.
She looked into his brooding face.
'Do they?'she said.'Are you glad?'
He looked back into her eyes.'Glad,'he said,'Ay,but never mind.'
He did not want her to talk.And he bent over her and kissed her,and she felt,so he must kiss her for ever.
At last she sat up.
'Don't people often come off together?'she asked with naive curiosity.
'A good many of them never.You can see by the raw look of them.'He spoke unwittingly,regretting he had begun.
'Have you come off like that with other women?'
He looked at her amused.
'I don't know,'he said,'I don't know.'
And she knew he would never tell her anything he didn't want to tell her.She watched his face,and the passion for him moved in her bowels.
She resisted it as far as she could,for it was the loss of herself to herself.
He put on his waistcoat and his coat,and pushed a way through to the path again.
The last level rays of the sun touched the wood.'I won't come with you,'he said;'better not.'
She looked at him wistfully before she turned.His dog was waiting so anxiously for him to go,and he seemed to have nothing whatever to say.
Nothing left.
Connie went slowly home,realizing the depth of the other thing in her.
Another self was alive in her,burning molten and soft in her womb and bowels,and with this self she adored him.She adored him till her knees were weak as she walked.In her womb and bowels she was flowing and alive now and vulnerable,and helpless in adoration of him as the most naive woman.It feels like a child,she said to herself it feels like a child in me.And so it did,as if her womb,that had always been shut,had opened and filled with new life,almost a burden,yet lovely.
'If I had a child!'she thought to herself;'if I had him inside me as a child!'--and her limbs turned molten at the thought,and she realized the immense difference between having a child to oneself and having a child to a man whom one's bowels yearned towards.The former seemed in a sense ordinary:but to have a child to a man whom one adored in one's bowels and one's womb,it made her feel she was very different from her old self and as if she was sinking deep,deep to the centre of all womanhood and the sleep of creation.
It was not the passion that was new to her,it was the yearning adoration.
She knew she had always feared it,for it left her helpless;she feared it still,lest if she adored him too much,then she would lose herself become effaced,and she did not want to be effaced,a slave,like a savage woman.She must not become a slave.She feared her adoration,yet she would not at once fight against it.She knew she could fight it.She had a devil of self-will in her breast that could have fought the full soft heaving adoration of her womb and crushed it.She could even now do it,or she thought so,and she could then take up her passion with her own will.
Ah yes,to be passionate like a Bacchante,like a Bacchanal fleeing through the woods,to call on Iacchos,the bright phallos that had no independent personality behind it,but was pure god-servant to the woman!The man,the individual,let him not dare intrude.He was but a temple-servant,the bearer and keeper of the bright phallos,her own.
So,in the flux of new awakening,the old hard passion flamed in her for a time,and the man dwindled to a contemptible object,the mere phallos-bearer,to be torn to pieces when his service was performed.She felt the force of the Bacchae in her limbs and her body,the woman gleaming and rapid,beating down the male;but while she felt this,her heart was heavy.She did not want it,it was known and barren,birthless;the adoration was her treasure.
It was so fathomless,so soft,so deep and so unknown.No,no,she would give up her hard bright female power;she was weary of it,stiffened with it;she would sink in the new bath of life,in the depths of her womb and her bowels that sang the voiceless song of adoration.It was early yet to begin to fear the man.