Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [104]
“What do I care?” she said.
“I cared though,” he replied, “seeing that they’re my cattle.”
“How are they yours! You haven’t swallowed them. Give me one of them now,” she said, holding out her hand.
“You know where they are,” he said, pointing over the hill. “You can have one if you’d like it sent to you later on.”
She looked at him inscrutably.
“You think I’m afraid of you and your cattle, don’t you?” she asked.
His eyes narrowed dangerously. There was a faint domineering smile on his face.
“Why should I think that?” he said.
She was watching him all the time with her dark, dilated, inchoate eyes. She leaned forward and swung round her arm, catching him a blow on the face with the back of her hand.
“That’s why,” she said.
And she felt in her soul an unconquerable lust for deep brutality against him. She shut off the fear and dismay that filled her conscious mind. She wanted to do as she did, she was not going to be afraid.
He recoiled from the heavy blow across the face. He became deadly pale, and a dangerous flame darkened his eyes. For some seconds he could not speak, his lungs were so suffused with blood, his heart stretched almost to bursting with a great gush of ungovernable rage. It was as if some reservoir of black anger had burst within him, and swamped him.
“You have struck the first blow,”3 he said at last, forcing the words from his lungs, in a voice so soft and low, it sounded like a dream within her, not spoken in the outer air.
“And I shall strike the last,” she retorted involuntarily, with confident assurance. He was silent, he did not contradict her.
She stood negligently, staring away from him, into the distance. On the edge of her consciousness the question was asking itself, automatically:
“Why are you behaving in this impossible and ridiculous fashion?” But she was sullen, she half shoved the question out of herself. She could not get it clean away, so she felt self-conscious.
Gerald, very pale, was watching her closely. His eyes were lit up with intent lights, absorbed and gleaming. She turned suddenly on him.
“It’s you who make me behave like this, you know,” she said, almost suggestive.
“I? How?” he said.
But she turned away, and set off towards the lake. Below, on the water, lanterns were coming alight, faint ghosts of warm flame floating in the pallor of the first twilight. The earth was spread with darkness, like lacquer, overhead was a pale sky, all primrose, and the lake was pale as milk in one part. Away at the landing stage, tiniest points of coloured rays were stringing themselves in the dusk. The launch was being illuminated. All round, shadow was gathering from the trees.
Gerald, white like a presence in his summer clothes, was following down the open grassy slope. Gudrun waited for him to come up. Then she softly put out her hand and touched him, saying softly:
“Don’t be angry with me.”
A flame flew over him, and he was unconscious. Yet he stammered:
“I’m not angry with you. I’m in love with you.”
His mind was gone, he grasped for sufficient mechanical control, to save himself. She laughed a silvery little mockery, yet intolerably caressive.
“That’s one way of putting it,” she said.
The terrible swooning burden on his mind, the awful swooning, the loss of all his control, was too much for him.
He grasped her arm in his one hand, as if his hand were iron.
“It’s all right, then, is it?” he said, holding her arrested.
She looked at the face with the fixed eyes, set before her, and her blood ran cold.
“Yes, it’s all right,” she said softly, as if drugged, her voice crooning and witch-like.
He walked on beside her, a striding, mindless body. But he recovered a little as he went. He suffered badly. He had killed his brother when a boy, and was set apart, like Cain.
They found Birkin and Ursula sitting together by the boats, talking and laughing. Birkin had been teasing Ursula.
“Do you smell this little marsh?” he said, sniffing the air. He was very sensitive to scents, and quick in understanding them.
“It’s rather nice,