She put her arms round his terrifying, insentient body, and laid her cheek against his hard shoulder.
`Gerald,' she whispered.`Gerald.'
There was no change in him.She caught him against her.She pressed her breasts against his shoulders, she kissed his shoulder, through the sleeping jacket.Her mind wondered, over his rigid, unliving body.She was bewildered, and insistent, only her will was set for him to speak to her.
`Gerald, my dear!' she whispered, bending over him, kissing his ear.
Her warm breath playing, flying rhythmically over his ear, seemed to relax the tension.She could feel his body gradually relaxing a little, losing its terrifying, unnatural rigidity.Her hands clutched his limbs, his muscles, going over him spasmodically.
The hot blood began to flow again through his veins, his limbs relaxed.
`Turn round to me,' she whispered, forlorn with insistence and triumph.
So at last he was given again, warm and flexible.He turned and gathered her in his arms.And feeling her soft against him, so perfectly and wondrously soft and recipient, his arms tightened on her.She was as if crushed, powerless in him.His brain seemed hard and invincible now like a jewel, there was no resisting him.
His passion was awful to her, tense and ghastly, and impersonal, like a destruction, ultimate.She felt it would kill her.She was being killed.
`My God, my God,' she cried, in anguish, in his embrace, feeling her life being killed within her.And when he was kissing her, soothing her, her breath came slowly, as if she were really spent, dying.
`Shall I die, shall I die?' she repeated to herself.
And in the night, and in him, there was no answer to the question.
And yet, next day, the fragment of her which was not destroyed remained intact and hostile, she did not go away, she remained to finish the holiday, admitting nothing.He scarcely ever left her alone, but followed her like a shadow, he was like a doom upon her, a continual `thou shalt,' `thou shalt not.' Sometimes it was he who seemed strongest, whist she was almost gone, creeping near the earth like a spent wind; sometimes it was the reverse.
But always it was this eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified because the other was nulled.
`In the end,' she said to herself, `I shall go away from him.'
`I can be free of her,' he said to himself in his paroxysms of suffering.
And he set himself to be free.He even prepared to go away, to leave her in the lurch.But for the first time there was a flaw in his will.
`Where shall I go?' he asked himself.
`Can't you be self-sufficient?' he replied to himself, putting himself upon his pride.
`Self-sufficient!' he repeated.
It seemed to him that Gudrun was sufficient unto herself, closed round and completed, like a thing in a case.In the calm, static reason of his soul, he recognised this, and admitted it was her right, to be closed round upon herself, self-complete, without desire.He realised it, he admitted it, it only needed one last effort on his own part, to win for himself the same completeness.He knew that it only needed one convulsion of his will for him to be able to turn upon himself also, to close upon himself as a stone fixes upon itself, and is impervious, self-completed, a thing isolated.
This knowledge threw him into a terrible chaos.Because, however much he might mentally will to be immune and self-complete, the desire for this state was lacking, and he could not create it.He could see that, to exist at all, he must be perfectly free of Gudrun, leave her if she wanted to be left, demand nothing of her, have no claim upon her.
But then, to have no claim upon her, he must stand by himself, in sheer nothingness.And his brain turned to nought at the idea.It was a state of nothingness.On the other hand, he might give in, and fawn to her.Or, finally, he might kill her.Or he might become just indifferent, purposeless, dissipated, momentaneous.But his nature was too serious, not gay enough or subtle enough for mocking licentiousness.
A strange rent had been torn in him; like a victim that is torn open and given to the heavens, so he had been torn apart and given to Gudrun.
How should he close again? This wound, this strange, infinitely-sensitive opening of his soul, where he was exposed, like an open flower, to all the universe, and in which he was given to his complement, the other, the unknown, this wound, this disclosure, this unfolding of his own covering, leaving him incomplete, limited, unfinished, like an open flower under the sky, this was his cruellest joy.Why then should he forego it? Why should he close up and become impervious, immune, like a partial thing in a sheath, when he had broken forth, like a seed that has germinated, to issue forth in being, embracing the unrealised heavens.
He would keep the unfinished bliss of his own yearning even through the torture she inflicted upon him.A strange obstinacy possessed him.
He would not go away from her whatever she said or did.A strange, deathly yearning carried him along with her.She was the determinating influence of his very being, though she treated him with contempt, repeated rebuffs, and denials, still he would never be gone, since in being near her, even, he felt the quickening, the going forth in him, the release, the knowledge of his own limitation and the magic of the promise, as well as the mystery of his own destruction and annihilation.
She tortured the open heart of him even as he turned to her.And she was tortured herself.It may have been her will was stronger.She felt, with horror, as if he tore at the bud of her heart, tore it open, like an irreverent persistent being.Like a boy who pulls off a fly's wings, or tears open a bud to see what is in the flower, he tore at her privacy, at her very life, he would destroy her as an immature bud, torn open, is destroyed.
She might open towards him, a long while hence, in her dreams, when she was a pure spirit.But now she was not to be violated and ruined.She closed against him fiercely.