The bodies of the dead were not recovered till towards dawn.
Diana had her arms tight round the neck of the young man, choking him.
'She killed him,' said Gerald.
The moon sloped down the sky and sank at last.
The lake was sunk to quarter size, it had horrible raw banks of clay, that smelled of raw rottenish water.
Dawn roused faintly behind the eastern hill.
The water still boomed through the sluice.
As the birds were whistling for the first morning, and the hills at the back of the desolate lake stood radiant with the new mists, there was a straggling procession up to Shortlands, men bearing the bodies on a stretcher, Gerald going beside them, the two grey-bearded fathers following in silence.
Indoors the family was all sitting up, waiting.
Somebody must go to tell the mother, in her room.
The doctor in secret struggled to bring back his son, till he himself was exhausted.
Over all the outlying district was a hush of dreadful excitement on that Sunday morning.
The colliery people felt as if this catastrophe had happened directly to themselves, indeed they were more shocked and frightened than if their own men had been killed.
Such a tragedy in Shortlands, the high home of the district!
One of the young mistresses, persisting in dancing on the cabin roof of the launch, wilful young madam, drowned in the midst of the festival, with the young doctor!
Everywhere on the Sunday morning, the colliers wandered about, discussing the calamity.
At all the Sunday dinners of the people, there seemed a strange presence.
It was as if the angel of death were very near, there was a sense of the supernatural in the air.
The men had excited, startled faces, the women looked solemn, some of them had been crying.
The children enjoyed the excitement at first.
There was an intensity in the air, almost magical.
Did all enjoy it?
Did all enjoy the thrill?
Gudrun had wild ideas of rushing to comfort Gerald.
She was thinking all the time of the perfect comforting, reassuring thing to say to him.
She was shocked and frightened, but she put that away, thinking of how she should deport herself with Gerald: act her part.
That was the real thrill: how she should act her part.
Ursula was deeply and passionately in love with Birkin, and she was capable of nothing.
She was perfectly callous about all the talk of the accident, but her estranged air looked like trouble.
She merely sat by herself, whenever she could, and longed to see him again.
She wanted him to come to the house,—she would not have it otherwise, he must come at once.
She was waiting for him.
She stayed indoors all day, waiting for him to knock at the door.
Every minute, she glanced automatically at the window.
He would be there.
Chapter 15 Sunday Evening
As the day wore on, the life-blood seemed to ebb away from Ursula, and within the emptiness a heavy despair gathered.
Her passion seemed to bleed to death, and there was nothing.
She sat suspended in a state of complete nullity, harder to bear than death.
'Unless something happens,' she said to herself, in the perfect lucidity of final suffering, 'I shall die.
I am at the end of my line of life.'
She sat crushed and obliterated in a darkness that was the border of death.
She realised how all her life she had been drawing nearer and nearer to this brink, where there was no beyond, from which one had to leap like Sappho into the unknown.
The knowledge of the imminence of death was like a drug.
Darkly, without thinking at all, she knew that she was near to death.
She had travelled all her life along the line of fulfilment, and it was nearly concluded.
She knew all she had to know, she had experienced all she had to experience, she was fulfilled in a kind of bitter ripeness, there remained only to fall from the tree into death.
And one must fulfil one's development to the end, must carry the adventure to its conclusion.
And the next step was over the border into death.
So it was then!