'How really vile!' she cried, flushing with a sinister vision. 'Mine is nothing.'
She lifted her arm and showed a deep red score down the silken white flesh.
'What a devil!' he exclaimed.
But it was as if he had had knowledge of her in the long red rent of her forearm, so silken and soft.
He did not want to touch her.
He would have to make himself touch her, deliberately.
The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond.
'It doesn't hurt you very much, does it?' he asked, solicitous.
'Not at all,' she cried.
And suddenly the rabbit, which had been crouching as if it were a flower, so still and soft, suddenly burst into life.
Round and round the court it went, as if shot from a gun, round and round like a furry meteorite, in a tense hard circle that seemed to bind their brains.
They all stood in amazement, smiling uncannily, as if the rabbit were obeying some unknown incantation.
Round and round it flew, on the grass under the old red walls like a storm.
And then quite suddenly it settled down, hobbled among the grass, and sat considering, its nose twitching like a bit of fluff in the wind.
After having considered for a few minutes, a soft bunch with a black, open eye, which perhaps was looking at them, perhaps was not, it hobbled calmly forward and began to nibble the grass with that mean motion of a rabbit's quick eating.
'It's mad,' said Gudrun. 'It is most decidedly mad.'
He laughed.
'The question is,' he said, 'what is madness?
I don't suppose it is rabbit-mad.'
'Don't you think it is?' she asked.
'No.
That's what it is to be a rabbit.'
There was a queer, faint, obscene smile over his face.
She looked at him and saw him, and knew that he was initiate as she was initiate.
This thwarted her, and contravened her, for the moment.
'God be praised we aren't rabbits,' she said, in a high, shrill voice.
The smile intensified a little, on his face.
'Not rabbits?' he said, looking at her fixedly.
Slowly her face relaxed into a smile of obscene recognition.
'Ah Gerald,' she said, in a strong, slow, almost man-like way. '-All that, and more.' Her eyes looked up at him with shocking nonchalance.
He felt again as if she had torn him across the breast, dully, finally.
He turned aside.
'Eat, eat my darling!' Winifred was softly conjuring the rabbit, and creeping forward to touch it.
It hobbled away from her. 'Let its mother stroke its fur then, darling, because it is so mysterious-'
Chapter 19 Moony
After his illness Birkin went to the south of France for a time.
He did not write, nobody heard anything of him.
Ursula, left alone, felt as if everything were lapsing out.
There seemed to be no hope in the world.
One was a tiny little rock with the tide of nothingness rising higher and higher She herself was real, and only herself—just like a rock in a wash of flood-water.
The rest was all nothingness.
She was hard and indifferent, isolated in herself.
There was nothing for it now, but contemptuous, resistant indifference.
All the world was lapsing into a grey wish-wash of nothingness, she had no contact and no connection anywhere.
She despised and detested the whole show. From the bottom of her heart, from the bottom of her soul, she despised and detested people, adult people.
She loved only children and animals: children she loved passionately, but coldly.
They made her want to hug them, to protect them, to give them life.
But this very love, based on pity and despair, was only a bondage and a pain to her.
She loved best of all the animals, that were single and unsocial as she herself was.
She loved the horses and cows in the field.