Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [200]
Ursula was subdued into angry silence. She did not heed what he said. She was rebelling against something else.
“And I hate your past. I’m sick of it,” she cried. “I believe I even hate that old chair, though it is beautiful. It isn’t my sort of beauty. I wish it had been smashed up when its day was over, not left to preach the beloved past to us. I’m sick of the beloved past.”
“Not so sick as I am of the accursed present,” he said.
“Yes, just the same. I hate the present—but I don’t want the past to take its place—I don’t want that old chair.”
He was rather angry for a moment. Then he looked at the sky shining beyond the tower of the public baths, and he seemed to get over it all. He laughed.
“All right,” he said, “then let us not have it. I’m sick of it all, too. At any rate, one can’t go on living on the old bones of beauty.”
“One can’t,” she cried. “I don’t want old things.”
“The truth is, we don’t want things at all,” he replied. “The thought of a house and furniture of my own is hateful to me.”
This startled her for a moment. Then she replied:
“So it is to me. But one must live somewhere.”
“Not somewhere—anywhere,” he said. “One should just live anywhere—not have a definite place. I don’t want a definite place. As soon as you get a room, and it is complete, you want to run from it. Now my rooms at the Mill are quite complete, I want them at the bottom of the sea. It is a horrible tyranny of a fixed milieu, where each piece of furniture is a co mmandment-stone.”
She clung to his arm as they walked away from the market.
“But what are we going to do?” she said. “We must live somehow. And I do want some beauty in my surroundings. I want a sort of natural grandeur even, splendour.”
“You’ll never get it in houses and furniture—or even clothes. Houses and furniture and clothes, they are all terms of an old base world, a detestable society of man. And if you have a Tudor house and old, beautiful furniture, it is only the past perpetuated on top of you, horrible. And if you have a perfect modern house done for you by Poiret, it is something else perpetuated on top of you.2 It is all horrible. It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalisation. You have to be like Rodin, Michael Angelo, and leave a piece of raw rock unfinished to your figure.3 You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside.”
She stood in the street contemplating.
“And we are never to have a complete place of our own—never a home?” she said.
“Pray God, in this world, no,” he answered.
“But there’s only this world,” she objected.
He spread out his hands with a gesture of indifference.
“Meanwhile, then, we’ll avoid having things of our own,” he said.
“But you’ve just bought a chair,” she said.
“I can tell the man I don’t want it,” he replied.
She pondered again. Then a queer little movement twitched her face.
“No,” she said, “we don’t want it. I’m sick of old things.”
“New ones as well,” he said.
They retraced their steps.
There—in front of some furniture, stood the young couple, the woman who was going to have a baby, and the narrow-faced youth. She was fair, rather short, stout. He was of medium height, attractively built. His dark hair fell sideways over his brow, from under his cap, he stood strangely aloof, like one of the damned.
“Let us give it to them,” whispered Ursula. “Look, they are getting a home together.”
“I won’t aid and abet them in it,” he said petulantly, instantly sympathising with the aloof, furtive youth, against the active, procreant female.
“Oh yes,” cried Ursula. “It’s right for them—there’s nothing else for them.”
“Very well,” said Birkin, “you offer it to them. I’ll watch.”
Ursula went rather nervously to the young couple, who were discussing an iron washstand—or rather, the man was glancing furtively and wonderingly, like a prisoner, at the abominable article, whilst the woman was arguing.