CHAPTER 29. CONTINETAL

Ursula went on in an unreal suspense, the last weeks before going away.

She was not herself,—she was not anything. She was something that is

going to be—soon—soon—very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.

She went to see her parents. It was a rather stiff, sad meeting, more like a

verification of separateness than a reunion. But they were all vague and

indefinite with one another, stiffened in the fate that moved them apart.

She did not really come to until she was on the ship crossing from Dover

to Ostend. Dimly she had come down to London with Birkin, London

had been a vagueness, so had the train-journey to Dover. It was all like a

sleep.

And now, at last, as she stood in the stern of the ship, in a pitch-dark,

rather blowy night, feeling the motion of the sea, and watching the small,

rather desolate little lights that twinkled on the shores of England, as on

the shores of nowhere, watched them sinking smaller and smaller on the

profound and living darkness, she felt her soul stirring to awake from its

anaesthetic sleep.

'Let us go forward, shall we?' said Birkin. He wanted to be at the tip of

their projection. So they left off looking at the faint sparks that

glimmered out of nowhere, in the far distance, called England, and

turned their faces to the unfathomed night in front.

They went right to the bows of the softly plunging vessel. In the complete

obscurity, Birkin found a comparatively sheltered nook, where a great

rope was coiled up. It was quite near the very point of the ship, near the

black, unpierced space ahead. There they sat down, folded together,

folded round with the same rug, creeping in nearer and ever nearer to

one another, till it seemed they had crept right into each other, and

become one substance. It was very cold, and the darkness was palpable.

One of the ship's crew came along the deck, dark as the darkness, not

really visible. They then made out the faintest pallor of his face. He felt

their presence, and stopped, unsure—then bent forward. When his facewas near them, he saw the faint pallor of their faces. Then he withdrew

like a phantom. And they watched him without making any sound.

They seemed to fall away into the profound darkness. There was no sky,

no earth, only one unbroken darkness, into which, with a soft, sleeping

motion, they seemed to fall like one closed seed of life falling through

dark, fathomless space.

They had forgotten where they were, forgotten all that was and all that

had been, conscious only in their heart, and there conscious only of this

pure trajectory through the surpassing darkness. The ship's prow cleaved

on, with a faint noise of cleavage, into the complete night, without

knowing, without seeing, only surging on.

In Ursula the sense of the unrealised world ahead triumphed over

everything. In the midst of this profound darkness, there seemed to glow

on her heart the effulgence of a paradise unknown and unrealised. Her

heart was full of the most wonderful light, golden like honey of darkness,

sweet like the warmth of day, a light which was not shed on the world,

only on the unknown paradise towards which she was going, a sweetness

of habitation, a delight of living quite unknown, but hers infallibly. In her

transport she lifted her face suddenly to him, and he touched it with his

lips. So cold, so fresh, so sea-clear her face was, it was like kissing a

flower that grows near the surf.

But he did not know the ecstasy of bliss in fore-knowledge that she knew.

To him, the wonder of this transit was overwhelming. He was falling

through a gulf of infinite darkness, like a meteorite plunging across the

chasm between the worlds. The world was torn in two, and he was

plunging like an unlit star through the ineffable rift. What was beyond

was not yet for him. He was overcome by the trajectory.

In a trance he lay enfolding Ursula round about. His face was against her

fine, fragile hair, he breathed its fragrance with the sea and the profound

night. And his soul was at peace; yielded, as he fell into the unknown.

This was the first time that an utter and absolute peace had entered his

heart, now, in this final transit out of life.

When there came some stir on the deck, they roused. They stood up.

How stiff and cramped they were, in the night-time! And yet theparadisal glow on her heart, and the unutterable peace of darkness in

his, this was the all-in-all.

They stood up and looked ahead. Low lights were seen down the

darkness. This was the world again. It was not the bliss of her heart, nor

the peace of his. It was the superficial unreal world of fact. Yet not quite

the old world. For the peace and the bliss in their hearts was enduring.

Strange, and desolate above all things, like disembarking from the Styx

into the desolated underworld, was this landing at night. There was the

raw, half-lighted, covered-in vastness of the dark place, boarded and

hollow underfoot, with only desolation everywhere. Ursula had caught

sight of the big, pallid, mystic letters 'OSTEND,' standing in the

darkness. Everybody was hurrying with a blind, insect-like intentness

through the dark grey air, porters were calling in un-English English,

then trotting with heavy bags, their colourless blouses looking ghostly as

they disappeared; Ursula stood at a long, low, zinc-covered barrier, along

with hundreds of other spectral people, and all the way down the vast,

raw darkness was this low stretch of open bags and spectral people,

whilst, on the other side of the barrier, pallid officials in peaked caps and

moustaches were turning the underclothing in the bags, then scrawling a

chalk-mark.

It was done. Birkin snapped the hand bags, off they went, the porter

coming behind. They were through a great doorway, and in the open

night again—ah, a railway platform! Voices were still calling in inhuman

agitation through the dark-grey air, spectres were running along the

darkness between the train.

'Koln—Berlin—' Ursula made out on the boards hung on the high train

on one side.

'Here we are,' said Birkin. And on her side she saw: 'Elsass—

Lothringen—Luxembourg, Metz—Basle.'

'That was it, Basle!'

The porter came up.

'A Bale—deuxieme classe?—Voila!' And he clambered into the high train.

They followed. The compartments were already some of them taken. Butmany were dim and empty. The luggage was stowed, the porter was

tipped.

'Nous avons encore—?' said Birkin, looking at his watch and at the

porter.

'Encore une demi-heure.' With which, in his blue blouse, he disappeared.

He was ugly and insolent.

'Come,' said Birkin. 'It is cold. Let us eat.'

There was a coffee-wagon on the platform. They drank hot, watery

coffee, and ate the long rolls, split, with ham between, which were such a

wide bite that it almost dislocated Ursula's jaw; and they walked beside

the high trains. It was all so strange, so extremely desolate, like the

underworld, grey, grey, dirt grey, desolate, forlorn, nowhere—grey,

dreary nowhere.

At last they were moving through the night. In the darkness Ursula made

out the flat fields, the wet flat dreary darkness of the Continent. They

pulled up surprisingly soon—Bruges! Then on through the level

darkness, with glimpses of sleeping farms and thin poplar trees and

deserted high-roads. She sat dismayed, hand in hand with Birkin. He

pale, immobile like a REVENANT himself, looked sometimes out of the

window, sometimes closed his eyes. Then his eyes opened again, dark as

the darkness outside.

A flash of a few lights on the darkness—Ghent station! A few more

spectres moving outside on the platform—then the bell—then motion

again through the level darkness. Ursula saw a man with a lantern come

out of a farm by the railway, and cross to the dark farm-buildings. She

thought of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm-life at Cossethay. My God,

how far was she projected from her childhood, how far was she still to

go! In one life-time one travelled through aeons. The great chasm of

memory from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of

Cossethay and the Marsh Farm—she remembered the servant Tilly, who

used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar, in the old

living-room where the grandfather clock had two pink roses in a basket

painted above the figures on the face—and now when she was travelling

into the unknown with Birkin, an utter stranger—was so great, that it'No. There's something final about this. And Gudrun seems like the end,

to me. I don't know—but she seems so soft, her skin like silk, her arms

heavy and soft. And it withers my consciousness, somehow, it burns the

pith of my mind.' He went on a few paces, staring ahead, his eyes fixed,

looking like a mask used in ghastly religions of the barbarians. 'It blasts

your soul's eye,' he said, 'and leaves you sightless. Yet you WANT to be

sightless, you WANT to be blasted, you don't want it any different.'

He was speaking as if in a trance, verbal and blank. Then suddenly he

braced himself up with a kind of rhapsody, and looked at Birkin with

vindictive, cowed eyes, saying:

'Do you know what it is to suffer when you are with a woman? She's so

beautiful, so perfect, you find her SO GOOD, it tears you like a silk, and

every stroke and bit cuts hot—ha, that perfection, when you blast

yourself, you blast yourself! And then—' he stopped on the snow and

suddenly opened his clenched hands—'it's nothing—your brain might

have gone charred as rags—and—' he looked round into the air with a

queer histrionic movement 'it's blasting—you understand what I mean—

it is a great experience, something final—and then—you're shrivelled as if

struck by electricity.' He walked on in silence. It seemed like bragging,

but like a man in extremity bragging truthfully.

'Of course,' he resumed, 'I wouldn't NOT have had it! It's a complete

experience. And she's a wonderful woman. But—how I hate her

somewhere! It's curious—'

Birkin looked at him, at his strange, scarcely conscious face. Gerald

seemed blank before his own words.

'But you've had enough now?' said Birkin. 'You have had your

experience. Why work on an old wound?'

'Oh,' said Gerald, 'I don't know. It's not finished—'

And the two walked on.

'I've loved you, as well as Gudrun, don't forget,' said Birkin bitterly.

Gerald looked at him strangely, abstractedly.

'Have you?' he said, with icy scepticism. 'Or do you think you have?' He

was hardly responsible for what he said.The sledge came. Gudrun dismounted and they all made their farewell.

They wanted to go apart, all of them. Birkin took his place, and the

sledge drove away leaving Gudrun and Gerald standing on the snow,

waving. Something froze Birkin's heart, seeing them standing there in

the isolation of the snow, growing smaller and more isolated.