Page:Women in Love, Lawrence, 1920.djvu/50

42 He quoted the last word satirically against her. She sat convulsed with fury and violation, speechless, like a stricken pythoness of the Greek oracle.

"But your passion is a lie," he went on violently. "It isn't passion at all, it is your will. It's your bullying will, You want to clutch things and have them in your power. You want to have things in your power. And why? Because you haven't got any real body, any dark sensual body of life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to know."

He looked at her in mingled hate and contempt, also in pain because she suffered, and in shame because he knew he tortured her. He had an impulse to kneel and plead for forgiveness. But a bitterer red anger burned up to fury in him. He became unconscious of her, he was only a passionate voice speaking.

"Spontaneous!" he cried. "You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled ! You'd be verily deliberately spontaneous — that's you. — Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. — You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut. For you'll be the same till it is cracked, like an insect in its skin. If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography — looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental." There was a sense of violation in the air, as if too much was said, the unforgivable. Yet Ursula was concerned now only with solving her own problems, in the light of his words. She was pale and abstracted.

"But do you really want sensuality?" she asked, puzzled.

Birkin looked at her, and became intent in his explanation.

"Yes," he said, "that and nothing else, at this point. It is a fulfilment — the great dark knowledge you can't have in your head — the dark unvoluntary being. It is death to one self — but it is the coming into being of another."