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Women in Love
D. H. Lawrence
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Women in Love
D. H. Lawrence
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About This Book
A sequel to Lawrence's earlier The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love continues the story of the Brangwen sisters in the coal-mining town of Beldover. Based in part on Lawrence's own stormy marriage to German aristocrat Frieda von Richthofen, the tale is charged with intense feelings and psychological insights.
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Chapter I
SISTERS
URSULA and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their fatherās house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds.
āUrsula,ā said Gudrun, ādonāt you really want to get married?ā Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and considerate.
āI donāt know,ā she replied. āIt depends how you mean.ā
Gudrun was slightly taken aback. She watched her sister for some moments.
āWell,ā she said, ironically, āit usually means one thing! But donāt you think anyhow, youād beāā she darkened slightlyāāin a better position than you are in now.ā
A shadow came over Ursulaās face.
āI might,ā she said. āBut Iām not sure.ā
Again Gudrun paused, slightly irritated. She wanted to be quite definite.
āYou donāt think one needs the experience of having been married?ā she asked.
āDo you think it need be an experience?ā replied Ursula.
āBound to be, in some way or other,ā said Gudrun, coolly. āPossibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort.ā
āNot really,ā said Ursula. āMore likely to be the end of experience.ā
Gudrun sat very still, to attend to this.
āOf course,ā she said, āthereās that to consider.ā This brought the conversation to a close. Gudrun, almost angrily, took up her rubber and began to rub out part of her drawing. Ursula stitched absorbedly.
āYou wouldnāt consider a good offer?ā asked Gudrun.
āI think Iāve rejected several,ā said Ursula.
āReally!ā Gudrun flushed darkāābut anything really worth while? Have you really?ā
āA thousand a year, and an awfully nice man. I liked him awfully,ā said Ursula.
āReally! But werenāt you fearfully tempted?ā
āIn the abstract but not in the concrete,ā said Ursula. āWhen it comes to the point, one isnāt even temptedāoh, if I were tempted, Iād marry like a shot. Iām only tempted not to.ā The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement.
āIsnāt it an amazing thing,ā cried Gudrun, āhow strong the temptation is, not to!ā They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts they were frightened.
There was a long pause, whilst Ursula stitched and Gudrun went on with her sketch. The sisters were women, Ursula twenty-six, and Gudrun twenty-five. But both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of Artemis rather than of Hebe. Gudrun was very beautiful, passive, soft-skinned, soft-limbed. She wore a dress of dark-blue silky stuff, with ruches of blue and green linen lace in the neck and sleeves; and she had emerald-green stockings. Her look of confidence and diffidence contrasted with Ursulaās sensitive expectancy. The provincial people, intimidated by Gudrunās perfect sang-froid and exclusive bareness of manner, said of her: āShe is a smart woman.ā She had just come back from London, where she had spent several years, working at an art-school, as a student, and living a studio life.
āI was hoping now for a man to come along,ā Gudrun said, suddenly catching her underlip between her teeth, and making a strange grimace, half sly smiling, half anguish. Ursula was afraid.
āSo you have come home, expecting him here?ā she laughed.
āOh my dear,ā cried Gudrun, strident, āI wouldnāt go out of my way to look for him. But if there did happen to come along a highly attractive individual of sufficient meansāwellāā she tailed off ironically. Then she looked searchingly at Ursula, as if to probe her. āDonāt you find yourself getting bored?ā she asked of her sister. āDonāt you find, that things fail to materialise? Nothing materialises! Everything withers in the bud.ā
āWhat withers in the bud?ā asked Ursula.
āOh, everythingāoneselfāthings in general.ā There was a pause, whilst each sister vaguely considered her fate.
āIt does frighten one,ā said Ursula, and again there was a pause. āBut do you hope to get anywhere by just marrying?ā
āIt seems to be the inevitable next step,ā said Gudrun. Ursula pondered this, with a little bitterness. She was a class mistress herself, in Willey Green Grammar School, as she had been for some years.
āI know,ā she said, āit seems like that when one thinks in the abstract. But really imagine it: imagine any man one knows, imagine him coming home to one every evening, and saying āHello,ā and giving one a kissāā
There was a blank pause.
āYes,ā said Gudrun, in a narrowed voice. āItās just impossible. The man makes it impossible.ā
āOf course thereās childrenāā said Ursula doubtfully.
Gudrunās face hardened.
āDo you really want children, Ursula?ā she asked coldly. A dazzled, baffled look came on Ursulaās face.
āOne feels it is still beyond one,ā she said.
āDo you feel like that?ā asked Gudrun. āI get no feeling whatever from the thought of bearing children.ā
Gudrun looked at Ursula with a masklike, expressionless face. Ursula knitted her brows.
āPerhaps it isnāt genuine,ā she faltered. āPerhaps one doesnāt really want them, in oneās soulāonly superficially.ā A hardness came over Gudrunās face. She did not want to be too definite.
āWhen one thinks of other peopleās childrenāā said Ursula.
Again Gudrun looked at her sister, almost hostile.
āExactly,ā she said, to close the conversation.
The two sisters worked on in silence. Ursula having always that strange brightness of an essential flame that is caught, meshed, contravened. She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments! She seemed to try and put her hands out, like an infant in the womb, and she could not, not yet. Still she had a strange prescience, an intimation of something yet to come.
She laid down her work and looked at her sister. She thought Gudrun so charming, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine, exquisite richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain playfulness about her too, such a piquancy or ironic suggestion, such an untouched reserve. Ursula admired her with all her soul.
āWhy did you come home, Prune?ā she asked.
Gudrun knew she was being admired. She sat back from her drawing and looked at Ursula, from under her finely-curved lashes.
āWhy did I come back, Ursula?ā she repeated. āI have asked myself a thousand times.ā
āAnd donāt you know?ā
āYes, I think I do. I think my coming back home was just reculer pour mieux sauter.ā
And she looked with a long, slow look of knowledge at Ursula.
āI know!ā cried Ursula, looking slightly dazzled and falsified, and as if she did not know. āBut where can one jump to?ā
āOh, it doesnāt matter,ā said Gudrun, somewhat superbly. āIf one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.ā
āBut isnāt it very risky?ā asked Ursula.
A slow mocking smile dawned on Gudrunās face.
āAh!ā she said laughing. āWhat is it all but words!ā And so again she closed the conversation. But Ursula was still brooding.
āAnd how do you find home, now you have come back to it?ā she asked.
Gudrun paused for some moments, coldly, before answering. Then, in a cold truthful voice, she said:
āI find myself completely out of it.ā
āAnd father?ā
Gudrun looked at Ursula, almost with resentment, as if brought to bay.
āI havenāt thought about him: Iāve refrained,ā she said coldly.
āYes,ā wavered Ursula; and the conversation was really at an end. The sisters found themselves confronted by a void, a terrifying chasm, as if they had looked over the edge.
They worked on in silence for some time, Gudrunās cheek was flushed with repressed emotion. She resented its having been called into being.
āShall we go out and look at that wedding?ā she asked at length, in a voice that was too casual.
āYes!ā cried Ursula, too eagerly, throwing aside her sewing and leaping up, as if to escape something, thus betraying the tension of the situation and causing a friction of dislike to go over Gudrunās nerves.
As she went upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of her home round about her. And she loathed it, the sordid, too-familiar place! She was afraid at the depth of her feeling against the home, the milieu, the whole atmosphere and condition of this obsolete life. Her feeling frightened her.
The two girls were soon walking swiftly down the main road of Beldover, a wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the full effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why had she wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to submit herself to it, the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced countryside? She felt like a beetle toiling in the dust. She was filled with repulsion.
They turned off the main road, past a black patch of common-garden, where sooty cabbage stumps stood shameless. No one thought to be ashamed. No one was ashamed of it all.
āIt is like a country in an underworld,ā said Gudrun. āThe colliers bring it above-ground with them, shovel it up. Ursula, itās marvellous, itās really marvellousāitās really wonderful, another world. The people are all ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulish replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled, everything sordid. Itās like being mad, Ursula.ā
The sisters were crossing a black path through a dark, soiled field. On the left was a large landscape, a valley with collieries, and opposite hills with cornfields and woods, all blackened with distance, as if seen through a veil of crape. White and black smoke rose up in steady columns, magic within the dark air. Near at hand came the long rows of dwellings, approaching curved up the hill-slope, in straight lines along the brow of the hill. They were of darkened red brick, brittle, with dark slate roofs. The path on which the sisters walked was black, trodden-in by the feet of the recurrent colliers, and bounded from the field by iron fences; the stile that led again into the road was rubbed shiny by the moleskins of the passing miners. Now the two girls were going between some rows of dwellings, of the poorer sort. Women, their arms folded over their coarse aprons, standing gossiping at the end of their block, stared after the Brangwen sisters with that long, unwearying stare of aborigines; children called out names.
Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world, outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid.
She clung to Ursula, who, through long usage was inured to this violation of a dark, uncreated, hostile world. But all the time her heart was crying, as if in the midst of some ordeal: āI want to go back, I want to go away, I want not to know it, not to know that this exists.ā Yet she must go forward.
Ursula could feel her suffering.
āYou hate this, donāt you?ā she asked.
āIt bewilders me,ā stammered Gudrun.
āYou wonāt stay long,ā replied Ursula.
And Gudrun went along, grasping at release.
They drew away from the colliery region, over the curve of the hill, into the purer country of the other side, towards Willey Green. Still the faint glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and the wooded hills, and seemed darkly to gleam in the air. It was a spring day, chill, with snatches of sunshine. Yellow celandines showed out from the hedge-bottoms, and in the cottage gardens of Willey Green, currant-bushes were breaking into leaf, and little flowers were coming white on the grey alyssum that hung over the stone walls.
Turning, they passed down the high-road, that went between high banks towards the church. There, in the lowest bend of the road, low under the trees, stood a little group of expectant people, waiting to see the wedding. The daughter of the chief mine-owner of the district, Thomas Crich, was getting married to a naval officer.
āLet us go back,ā said Gudrun, swerving away. āThere are all those people.ā
And she hung wavering in the road.
āNever mind them,ā said Ursula, ātheyāre all right. They all know me, they donāt matter.ā
āBut must we go through them?ā asked Gudrun.
āTheyāre quite all right, really,ā said Ursula, going forward. And together the two sisters approached the group of uneasy, watchful common people. They were chiefly women, colliersā wives of the more shiftless sort. They had watchful, underworld faces.
The two sisters held themselves tense, and went straight towards the gate. The women made way for them, but barely sufficient, as if grudging to yield ground. The sisters passed in silence through the stone gateway and up the steps, on the red carpet, a policeman estimating their progress.
āWhat price the stockings!ā said a voice at the back of Gudrun. A sudden fierce anger swept over the girl, violent and murderous. She would have liked them all annihilated, cleared away, so that the world was left clear for her. How she hated walking up the churchyard path, along the red carpet, continuing in motion, in their sight.
āI wonāt go into the church,ā she said suddenly, with such final decision that Ursula immediately halted, turned round, and branched off up a small side path which led to the little private gate of the Grammar School, whose grounds adjoined those of the church.
Just inside the gate of the school shrubbery, outside the churchyard, Ursula sat down for a moment on the low stone wall under the laurel bushes, to rest. Behind her, the large red building of the school rose up peacefully, the windows all open for the holiday. Over the shrubs, before her, were the pale roofs and tower of the old church. The sisters were hidden by the foliage.
Gudrun sat down in silence. Her mouth was shut close, her face averted. She was regretting bitterly that she had ever come back. Ursula looked at her, and thought how amazingly beautiful she was, flushed with discomfiture. But she caused a constraint over Ursulaās nature, a certain weariness. Ursula wished to be alone, freed from the tightness, the enclosure of Grudrunās presence.
āAre we going to stay here?ā asked Gudrun.
āI was only resting a minute,ā said Ursula, getting up as if rebuked. āWe will stand in the corner by the fives-court, we shall see everything from there.ā
For the moment, the sunshine fell brightly into the churchyard, there was a vague scent of sap and of spring, perhaps of violets from off the graves. Some white daisies were out, bright as angels. In the air, the unfolding leaves of a copper-beech were blood-red.
Punctually at eleven oāclock, the carriages began to arrive. There was a stir in the crowd at the gate, a concentration as a carriage drove up, wedding guests were mounting up the steps and passing along the red carpet to the church. They were all gay and excited because the sun was shining.
Gudrun watched them closely, with objective curiosity. She saw each one as a complete figure, like a character in a book, or a subject in a picture, or a marionette in a theatre, a finished creation. She loved to recognise their various characteristics, to place them in their true light, give them their own surroundings, settle them for ever as they passed before her along the path to the church. She knew them, they were finished, sealed and stamped and finished with, for her. There was none that had anything unknown, unresolved, until the Criches themselves began to appear. Then her interest was piqued. Here was something not quite so preconcluded.
There came the mother, Mrs. Crich, with her eldest son Gerald. She was a queer unkempt figure, in spite of the attempts that had obviously been made to bring her into line for the day. Her face was pale, yellowish, with a clear, transparent skin, she leaned forward rather, her features were strongly marked, handsome, with a tense, unseeing, predative look. Her colourless hair was untidy, wisps floating down on to her sac coat of dark blue silk, from under her blue silk hat. She looked like a woman with a monomania, furtive almost, but heavily proud.
Her son was of a fair, sun-tanned type, rather above middle-height, well-made, and almost exaggeratedly well-dressed. But about him also was the strange, guarded look, the unconscious glisten, as if he did not be...