Chapter I

SISTERS
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the
window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working
and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightlycoloured 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.
’Ursula,’ said Gudrun, ‘don’t you REALLY WANT to
get married?’ Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and
looked up. Her face was calm and considerate.
’I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘It depends how you
mean.’
Gudrun was slightly taken aback. She watched her sister
for some moments.
’Well,’ she said, ironically, ‘it usually means one thing!
But don’t you think anyhow, you’d be—’ she darkened
slightly—’in a better position than you are in now.’
A shadow came over Ursula’s face.
’I might,’ she said. ‘But I’m not sure.’
Again Gudrun paused, slightly irritated. She wanted to
be quite definite.
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’You don’t think one needs the EXPERIENCE of
having been married?’ she asked.
’Do you think it need BE an experience?’ replied
Ursula.
’Bound to be, in some way or other,’ said Gudrun,
coolly. ‘Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an
experience of some sort.’
’Not really,’ said Ursula. ‘More likely to be the end of
experience.’
Gudrun sat very still, to attend to this.
’Of course,’ she said, ‘there’s THAT to consider.’ 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.
’You wouldn’t consider a good offer?’ asked Gudrun.
’I think I’ve rejected several,’ said Ursula.
’REALLY!’ Gudrun flushed dark—’But anything really
worth while? Have you REALLY?’
’A thousand a year, and an awfully nice man. I liked
him awfully,’ said Ursula.
’Really! But weren’t you fearfully tempted?’
’In the abstract but not in the concrete,’ said Ursula.
‘When it comes to the point, one isn’t even tempted—oh,
if I were tempted, I’d marry like a shot. I’m only tempted
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NOT to.’ The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with
amusement.
’Isn’t it an amazing thing,’ cried Gudrun, ‘how strong
the temptation is, not to!’ 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 Ursula’s sensitive expectancy. The
provincial people, intimidated by Gudrun’s perfect sangfroid and exclusive bareness of manner, said of her: ‘She is
a smart woman.’ She had just come back from London,
where she had spent several years, working at an artschool, as a student, and living a studio life.
’I was hoping now for a man to come along,’ Gudrun
said, suddenly catching her underlip between her teeth,
and making a strange grimace, half sly smiling, half
anguish. Ursula was afraid.
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’So you have come home, expecting him here?’ she
laughed.
’Oh my dear,’ cried Gudrun, strident, ‘I wouldn’t go
out of my way to look for him. But if there did happen to
come along a highly attractive individual of sufficient
means—well—’ she tailed off ironically. Then she looked
searchingly at Ursula, as if to probe her. ‘Don’t you find
yourself getting bored?’ she asked of her sister. ‘Don’t you
find, that things fail to materialise? NOTHING
MATERIALISES! Everything withers in the bud.’
’What withers in the bud?’ asked Ursula.
’Oh, everything—oneself—things in general.’ There
was a pause, whilst each sister vaguely considered her fate.
’It does frighten one,’ said Ursula, and again there was a
pause. ‘But do you hope to get anywhere by just
marrying?’
’It seems to be the inevitable next step,’ 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.
’I know,’ she said, ‘it 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 ‘Hello,’ and giving one a kiss—’
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There was a blank pause.
’Yes,’ said Gudrun, in a narrowed voice. ‘It’s just
impossible. The man makes it impossible.’
’Of course there’s children—’ said Ursula doubtfully.
Gudrun’s face hardened.
’Do you REALLY want children, Ursula?’ she asked
coldly. A dazzled, baffled look came on Ursula’s face.
’One feels it is still beyond one,’ she said.
’DO you feel like that?’ asked Gudrun. ‘I get no feeling
whatever from the thought of bearing children.’
Gudrun looked at Ursula with a masklike,
expressionless face. Ursula knitted her brows.
’Perhaps it isn’t genuine,’ she faltered. ‘Perhaps one
doesn’t really want them, in one’s soul—only
superficially.’ A hardness came over Gudrun’s face. She
did not want to be too definite.
’When one thinks of other people’s children—’ said
Ursula.
Again Gudrun looked at her sister, almost hostile.
’Exactly,’ 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,
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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.
’Why did you come home, Prune?’ she asked.
Gudrun knew she was being admired. She sat back
from her drawing and looked at Ursula, from under her
finely-curved lashes.
’Why did I come back, Ursula?’ she repeated. ‘I have
asked myself a thousand times.’
’And don’t you know?’
’Yes, I think I do. I think my coming back home was
just RECULER POUR MIEUX SAUTER.’
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And she looked with a long, slow look of knowledge at
Ursula.
’I know!’ cried Ursula, looking slightly dazzled and
falsified, and as if she did NOT know. ‘But where can one
jump to?’
’Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ said Gudrun, somewhat
superbly. ‘If one jumps over the edge, one is bound to
land somewhere.’
’But isn’t it very risky?’ asked Ursula.
A slow mocking smile dawned on Gudrun’s face.
’Ah!’ she said laughing. ‘What is it all but words!’ And
so again she closed the conversation. But Ursula was still
brooding.
’And how do you find home, now you have come
back to it?’ she asked.
Gudrun paused for some moments, coldly, before
answering. Then, in a cold truthful voice, she said:
’I find myself completely out of it.’
’And father?’
Gudrun looked at Ursula, almost with resentment, as if
brought to bay.
’I haven’t thought about him: I’ve refrained,’ she said
coldly.
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’Yes,’ 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, Gudrun’s
cheek was flushed with repressed emotion. She resented its
having been called into being.
’Shall we go out and look at that wedding?’ she asked
at length, in a voice that was too casual.
’Yes!’ 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 Gudrun’s 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
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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.
’It is like a country in an underworld,’ said Gudrun.
‘The colliers bring it above-ground with them, shovel it
up. Ursula, it’s marvellous, it’s really marvellous—it’s
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. It’s like being mad, Ursula.’
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
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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 grassgreen 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.
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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: ‘I want to go back, I want to go away, I
want not to know it, not to know that this exists.’ Yet she
must go forward.
Ursula could feel her suffering.
’You hate this, don’t you?’ she asked.
’It bewilders me,’ stammered Gudrun.
’You won’t stay long,’ 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
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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.
’Let us go back,’ said Gudrun, swerving away. ‘There
are all those people.’
And she hung wavering in the road.
’Never mind them,’ said Ursula, ‘they’re all right. They
all know me, they don’t matter.’
’But must we go through them?’ asked Gudrun.
’They’re quite all right, really,’ said Ursula, going
forward. And together the two sisters approached the
group of uneasy, watchful common people. They were
chiefly women, colliers’ 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.
’What price the stockings!’ 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
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for her. How she hated walking up the churchyard path,
along the red carpet, continuing in motion, in their sight.
’I won’t go into the church,’ 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 Ursula’s nature, a certain
weariness. Ursula wished to be alone, freed from the
tightness, the enclosure of Gudrun’s presence.
’Are we going to stay here?’ asked Gudrun.
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’I was only resting a minute,’ said Ursula, getting up as
if rebuked. ‘We will stand in the corner by the fives-court,
we shall see everything from there.’
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 o’clock, 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
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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 welldressed. But about him also was the strange, guarded look,
the unconscious glisten, as if he did not belong to the same
creation as the people about him. Gudrun lighted on him
at once. There was something northern about him that
magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair
was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice.
And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic
thing. Perhaps he was thirty years old, perhaps more. His
gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, good-humoured,
smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister
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stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued
temper. ‘His totem is the wolf,’ she repeated to herself.
‘His mother is an old, unbroken wolf.’ And then she
experienced a keen paroxyism, a transport, as if she had
made some incredible discovery, known to nobody else
on earth. A strange transport took possession of her, all her
veins were in a paroxysm of violent sensation. ‘Good
God!’ she exclaimed to herself, ‘what is this?’ And then, a
moment after, she was saying assuredly, ‘I shall know more
of that man.’ She was tortured with desire to see him
again, a nostalgia, a necessity to see him again, to make
sure it was not all a mistake, that she was not deluding
herself, that she really felt this strange and overwhelming
sensation on his account, this knowledge of him in her
essence, this powerful apprehension of him. ‘Am I
REALLY singled out for him in some way, is there really
some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?’
she asked herself. And she could not believe it, she
remained in a muse, scarcely conscious of what was going
on around.
The bridesmaids were here, and yet the bridegroom
had not come. Ursula wondered if something was amiss,
and if the wedding would yet all go wrong. She felt
troubled, as if it rested upon her. The chief bridesmaids
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had arrived. Ursula watched them come up the steps. One
of them she knew, a tall, slow, reluctant woman with a
weight of fair hair and a pale, long face. This was
Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches. Now she
came along, with her head held up, balancing an
enormous flat hat of pale yellow velvet, on which were
streaks of ostrich feathers, natural and grey. She drifted
forward as if scarcely conscious, her long blanched face
lifted up, not to see the world. She was rich. She wore a
dress of silky, frail velvet, of pale yellow colour, and she
carried a lot of small rose-coloured cyclamens. Her shoes
and stockings were of brownish grey, like the feathers on
her hat, her hair was heavy, she drifted along with a
peculiar fixity of the hips, a strange unwilling motion. She
was impressive, in her lovely pale-yellow and brownishrose, yet macabre, something repulsive. People were silent
when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet
for some reason silenced. Her long, pale face, that she
carried lifted up, somewhat in the Rossetti fashion, seemed
almost drugged, as if a strange mass of thoughts coiled in
the darkness within her, and she was never allowed to
escape.
Ursula watched her with fascination. She knew her a
little. She was the most remarkable woman in the
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Midlands. Her father was a Derbyshire Baronet of the old
school, she was a woman of the new school, full of
intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness.
She was passionately interested in reform, her soul was
given up to the public cause. But she was a man’s woman,
it was the manly world that held her.
She had various intimacies of mind and soul with
various men of capacity. Ursula knew, among these men,
only Rupert Birkin, who was one of the school-inspectors
of the county. But Gudrun had met others, in London.
Moving with her artist friends in different kinds of society,
Gudrun had already come to know a good many people of
repute and standing. She had met Hermione twice, but
they did not take to each other. It would be queer to meet
again down here in the Midlands, where their social
standing was so diverse, after they had known each other
on terms of equality in the houses of sundry acquaintances
in town. For Gudrun had been a social success, and had
her friends among the slack aristocracy that keeps touch
with the arts.
Hermione knew herself to be well-dressed; she knew
herself to be the social equal, if not far the superior, of
anyone she was likely to meet in Willey Green. She knew
she was accepted in the world of culture and of intellect.
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She was a KULTURTRAGER, a medium for the culture
of ideas. With all that was highest, whether in society or in
thought or in public action, or even in art, she was at one,
she moved among the foremost, at home with them. No
one could put her down, no one could make mock of her,
because she stood among the first, and those that were
against her were below her, either in rank, or in wealth, or
in high association of thought and progress and
understanding. So, she was invulnerable. All her life, she
had sought to make herself invulnerable, unassailable,
beyond reach of the world’s judgment.
And yet her soul was tortured, exposed. Even walking
up the path to the church, confident as she was that in
every respect she stood beyond all vulgar judgment,
knowing perfectly that her appearance was complete and
perfect, according to the first standards, yet she suffered a
torture, under her confidence and her pride, feeling herself
exposed to wounds and to mockery and to despite. She
always felt vulnerable, vulnerable, there was always a secret
chink in her armour. She did not know herself what it
was. It was a lack of robust self, she had no natural
sufficiency, there was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of
being within her.
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And she wanted someone to close up this deficiency, to
close it up for ever. She craved for Rupert Birkin. When
he was there, she felt complete, she was sufficient, whole.
For the rest of time she was established on the sand, built
over a chasm, and, in spite of all her vanity and securities,
any common maid-servant of positive, robust temper
could fling her down this bottomless pit of insufficiency,
by the slightest movement of jeering or contempt. And all
the while the pensive, tortured woman piled up her own
defences of aesthetic knowledge, and culture, and worldvisions, and disinterestedness. Yet she could never stop up
the terrible gap of insufficiency.
If only Birkin would form a close and abiding
connection with her, she would be safe during this fretful
voyage of life. He could make her sound and triumphant,
triumphant over the very angels of heaven. If only he
would do it! But she was tortured with fear, with
misgiving. She made herself beautiful, she strove so hard
to come to that degree of beauty and advantage, when he
should be convinced. But always there was a deficiency.
He was perverse too. He fought her off, he always
fought her off. The more she strove to bring him to her,
the more he battled her back. And they had been lovers
now, for years. Oh, it was so wearying, so aching; she was
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so tired. But still she believed in herself. She knew he was
trying to leave her. She knew he was trying to break away
from her finally, to be free. But still she believed in her
strength to keep him, she believed in her own higher
knowledge. His own knowledge was high, she was the
central touchstone of truth. She only needed his
conjunction with her.
And this, this conjunction with her, which was his
highest fulfilment also, with the perverseness of a wilful
child he wanted to deny. With the wilfulness of an
obstinate child, he wanted to break the holy connection
that was between them.
He would be at this wedding; he was to be groom’s
man. He would be in the church, waiting. He would
know when she came. She shuddered with nervous
apprehension and desire as she went through the churchdoor. He would be there, surely he would see how
beautiful her dress was, surely he would see how she had
made herself beautiful for him. He would understand, he
would be able to see how she was made for him, the first,
how she was, for him, the highest. Surely at last he would
be able to accept his highest fate, he would not deny her.
In a little convulsion of too-tired yearning, she entered
the church and looked slowly along her cheeks for him,
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her slender body convulsed with agitation. As best man,
he would be standing beside the altar. She looked slowly,
deferring in her certainty.
And then, he was not there. A terrible storm came over
her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a
devastating hopelessness. And she approached
mechanically to the altar. Never had she known such a
pang of utter and final hopelessness. It was beyond death,
so utterly null, desert.
The bridegroom and the groom’s man had not yet
come. There was a growing consternation outside. Ursula
felt almost responsible. She could not bear it that the bride
should arrive, and no groom. The wedding must not be a
fiasco, it must not.
But here was the bride’s carriage, adorned with ribbons
and cockades. Gaily the grey horses curvetted to their
destination at the church-gate, a laughter in the whole
movement. Here was the quick of all laughter and
pleasure. The door of the carriage was thrown open, to let
out the very blossom of the day. The people on the
roadway murmured faintly with the discontented
murmuring of a crowd.
The father stepped out first into the air of the morning,
like a shadow. He was a tall, thin, careworn man, with a
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thin black beard that was touched with grey. He waited at
the door of the carriage patiently, self-obliterated.
In the opening of the doorway was a shower of fine
foliage and flowers, a whiteness of satin and lace, and a
sound of a gay voice saying:
’How do I get out?’
A ripple of satisfaction ran through the expectant
people. They pressed near to receive her, looking with
zest at the stooping blond head with its flower buds, and at
the delicate, white, tentative foot that was reaching down
to the step of the carriage. There was a sudden foaming
rush, and the bride like a sudden surf-rush, floating all
white beside her father in the morning shadow of trees,
her veil flowing with laughter.
’That’s done it!’ she said.
She put her hand on the arm of her care-worn, sallow
father, and frothing her light draperies, proceeded over the
eternal red carpet. Her father, mute and yellowish, his
black beard making him look more careworn, mounted
the steps stiffly, as if his spirit were absent; but the laughing
mist of the bride went along with him undiminished.
And no bridegroom had arrived! It was intolerable for
her. Ursula, her heart strained with anxiety, was watching
the hill beyond; the white, descending road, that should
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give sight of him. There was a carriage. It was running. It
had just come into sight. Yes, it was he. Ursula turned
towards the bride and the people, and, from her place of
vantage, gave an inarticulate cry. She wanted to warn
them that he was coming. But her cry was inarticulate and
inaudible, and she flushed deeply, between her desire and
her wincing confusion.
The carriage rattled down the hill, and drew near.
There was a shout from the people. The bride, who had
just reached the top of the steps, turned round gaily to see
what was the commotion. She saw a confusion among the
people, a cab pulling up, and her lover dropping out of
the carriage, and dodging among the horses and into the
crowd.
’Tibs! Tibs!’ she cried in her sudden, mocking
excitement, standing high on the path in the sunlight and
waving her bouquet. He, dodging with his hat in his hand,
had not heard.
’Tibs!’ she cried again, looking down to him.
He glanced up, unaware, and saw the bride and her
father standing on the path above him. A queer, startled
look went over his face. He hesitated for a moment. Then
he gathered himself together for a leap, to overtake her.
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’Ah-h-h!’ came her strange, intaken cry, as, on the
reflex, she started, turned and fled, scudding with an
unthinkable swift beating of her white feet and fraying of
her white garments, towards the church. Like a hound the
young man was after her, leaping the steps and swinging
past her father, his supple haunches working like those of a
hound that bears down on the quarry.
’Ay, after her!’ cried the vulgar women below, carried
suddenly into the sport.
She, her flowers shaken from her like froth, was
steadying herself to turn the angle of the church. She
glanced behind, and with a wild cry of laughter and
challenge, veered, poised, and was gone beyond the grey
stone buttress. In another instant the bridegroom, bent
forward as he ran, had caught the angle of the silent stone
with his hand, and had swung himself out of sight, his
supple, strong loins vanishing in pursuit.
Instantly cries and exclamations of excitement burst
from the crowd at the gate. And then Ursula noticed again
the dark, rather stooping figure of Mr Crich, waiting
suspended on the path, watching with expressionless face
the flight to the church. It was over, and he turned round
to look behind him, at the figure of Rupert Birkin, who at
once came forward and joined him.
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’We’ll bring up the rear,’ said Birkin, a faint smile on
his face.
’Ay!’ replied the father laconically. And the two men
turned together up the path.
Birkin was as thin as Mr Crich, pale and ill-looking.
His figure was narrow but nicely made. He went with a
slight trail of one foot, which came only from selfconsciousness. Although he was dressed correctly for his
part, yet there was an innate incongruity which caused a
slight ridiculousness in his appearance. His nature was
clever and separate, he did not fit at all in the conventional
occasion. Yet he subordinated himself to the common
idea, travestied himself.
He affected to be quite ordinary, perfectly and
marvellously commonplace. And he did it so well, taking
the tone of his surroundings, adjusting himself quickly to
his interlocutor and his circumstance, that he achieved a
verisimilitude of ordinary commonplaceness that usually
propitiated his onlookers for the moment, disarmed them
from attacking his singleness.
Now he spoke quite easily and pleasantly to Mr Crich,
as they walked along the path; he played with situations
like a man on a tight-rope: but always on a tight-rope,
pretending nothing but ease.
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’I’m sorry we are so late,’ he was saying. ‘We couldn’t
find a button-hook, so it took us a long time to button
our boots. But you were to the moment.’
’We are usually to time,’ said Mr Crich.
’And I’m always late,’ said Birkin. ‘But today I was
REALLY punctual, only accidentally not so. I’m sorry.’
The two men were gone, there was nothing more to
see, for the time. Ursula was left thinking about Birkin.
He piqued her, attracted her, and annoyed her.
She wanted to know him more. She had spoken with
him once or twice, but only in his official capacity as
inspector. She thought he seemed to acknowledge some
kinship between her and him, a natural, tacit
understanding, a using of the same language. But there had
been no time for the understanding to develop. And
something kept her from him, as well as attracted her to
him. There was a certain hostility, a hidden ultimate
reserve in him, cold and inaccessible.
Yet she wanted to know him.
’What do you think of Rupert Birkin?’ she asked, a
little reluctantly, of Gudrun. She did not want to discuss
him.
’What do I think of Rupert Birkin?’ repeated Gudrun.
‘I think he’s attractive—decidedly attractive. What I can’t
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stand about him is his way with other people—his way of
treating any little fool as if she were his greatest
consideration. One feels so awfully sold, oneself.’
’Why does he do it?’ said Ursula.
’Because he has no real critical faculty—of people, at all
events,’ said Gudrun. ‘I tell you, he treats any little fool as
he treats me or you—and it’s such an insult.’
’Oh, it is,’ said Ursula. ‘One must discriminate.’
’One MUST discriminate,’ repeated Gudrun. ‘But he’s
a wonderful chap, in other respects—a marvellous
personality. But you can’t trust him.’
’Yes,’ said Ursula vaguely. She was always forced to
assent to Gudrun’s pronouncements, even when she was
not in accord altogether.
The sisters sat silent, waiting for the wedding party to
come out. Gudrun was impatient of talk. She wanted to
think about Gerald Crich. She wanted to see if the strong
feeling she had got from him was real. She wanted to have
herself ready.
Inside the church, the wedding was going on.
Hermione Roddice was thinking only of Birkin. He stood
near her. She seemed to gravitate physically towards him.
She wanted to stand touching him. She could hardly be
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sure he was near her, if she did not touch him. Yet she
stood subjected through the wedding service.
She had suffered so bitterly when he did not come, that
still she was dazed. Still she was gnawed as by a neuralgia,
tormented by his potential absence from her. She had
awaited him in a faint delirium of nervous torture. As she
stood bearing herself pensively, the rapt look on her face,
that seemed spiritual, like the angels, but which came from
torture, gave her a certain poignancy that tore his heart
with pity. He saw her bowed head, her rapt face, the face
of an almost demoniacal ecstatic. Feeling him looking, she
lifted her face and sought his eyes, her own beautiful grey
eyes flaring him a great signal. But he avoided her look,
she sank her head in torment and shame, the gnawing at
her heart going on. And he too was tortured with shame,
and ultimate dislike, and with acute pity for her, because
he did not want to meet her eyes, he did not want to
receive her flare of recognition.
The bride and bridegroom were married, the party
went into the vestry. Hermione crowded involuntarily up
against Birkin, to touch him. And he endured it.
Outside, Gudrun and Ursula listened for their father’s
playing on the organ. He would enjoy playing a wedding
march. Now the married pair were coming! The bells
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were ringing, making the air shake. Ursula wondered if
the trees and the flowers could feel the vibration, and what
they thought of it, this strange motion in the air. The
bride was quite demure on the arm of the bridegroom,
who stared up into the sky before him, shutting and
opening his eyes unconsciously, as if he were neither here
nor there. He looked rather comical, blinking and trying
to be in the scene, when emotionally he was violated by
his exposure to a crowd. He looked a typical naval officer,
manly, and up to his duty.
Birkin came with Hermione. She had a rapt,
triumphant look, like the fallen angels restored, yet still
subtly demoniacal, now she held Birkin by the arm. And
he was expressionless, neutralised, possessed by her as if it
were his fate, without question.
Gerald Crich came, fair, good-looking, healthy, with a
great reserve of energy. He was erect and complete, there
was a strange stealth glistening through his amiable, almost
happy appearance. Gudrun rose sharply and went away.
She could not bear it. She wanted to be alone, to know
this strange, sharp inoculation that had changed the whole
temper of her blood.