Page:Women in Love, Lawrence, 1920.djvu/212

204 "You are rather horrible," murmured Ursula.

"No! I'd rather Diana Crich were dead. Her living, somehow, was all wrong. As for the young man, poor devil—he'll find his way out quickly instead of slowly. Death is all right—nothing better."

"Yet you don't want to die," she challenged him.

He was silent for a time. Then he said, in a voice that was frightening to her in its change:

"I should like to be through with it—I should like to be through with the death process."

"And aren't you?" asked Ursula nervously.

They walked on for some way in silence, under the trees. Then he said, slowly, as if afraid:

"There is life which belongs to death, and there is life which isn't death. One is tired of the life that belongs to death—our kind of life. But whether it is finished, God knows. I want love that is like sleep, like being born again, vulnerable as a baby that just comes into the world."

Ursula listened, half attentive, half avoiding what he said. She seemed to catch the drift of his statement, and then she drew away. She wanted to hear, but she did not want to be implicated. She was reluctant to yield there, where he wanted her, to yield as it were, her very identity.

"Why should love be like sleep?" she asked sadly.

"I don't know. So that it is like death—I do want to die from this life—and yet it is more than life itself. One is delivered over like a naked infant from the womb, all the old defences and the old body gone, and new air around one, that has never been breathed before."

She listened, making out what he said. She knew, as well as he knew, that words themselves do not convey meaning, that they are but a gesture we make, a dumb show like any other. And she seemed to feel his gesture through her blood, and she drew back, even though her desire sent her forward.

"But," she said gravely, "didn't you say you wanted something that was not love—something beyond love?"

He turned in confusion. There was always confusion in speech. Yet it must be spoken. Whichever way one