If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality.
As it is, what you want is pornography—looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.'
There was a sense of violation in the air, as if too much was said, the unforgivable.
Yet Ursula was concerned now only with solving her own problems, in the light of his words.
She was pale and abstracted.
'But do you really WANT sensuality?' she asked, puzzled.
Birkin looked at her, and became intent in his explanation.
'Yes,' he said, 'that and nothing else, at this point.
It is a fulfilment—the great dark knowledge you can't have in your head—the dark involuntary being.
It is death to one's self—but it is the coming into being of another.'
'But how?
How can you have knowledge not in your head?' she asked, quite unable to interpret his phrases.
'In the blood,' he answered; 'when the mind and the known world is drowned in darkness everything must go—there must be the deluge.
Then you find yourself a palpable body of darkness, a demon—'
'But why should I be a demon—?' she asked.
'"WOMAN WAILING FOR HER DEMON LOVER"—' he quoted—'why, I don't know.'
Hermione roused herself as from a death—annihilation.
'He is such a DREADFUL satanist, isn't he?' she drawled to Ursula, in a queer resonant voice, that ended on a shrill little laugh of pure ridicule.
The two women were jeering at him, jeering him into nothingness.
The laugh of the shrill, triumphant female sounded from Hermione, jeering him as if he were a neuter.
'No,' he said. 'You are the real devil who won't let life exist.'
She looked at him with a long, slow look, malevolent, supercilious.
'You know all about it, don't you?' she said, with slow, cold, cunning mockery.
'Enough,' he replied, his face fixing fine and clear like steel.
A horrible despair, and at the same time a sense of release, liberation, came over Hermione.
She turned with a pleasant intimacy to Ursula.
'You are sure you will come to Breadalby?' she said, urging.
'Yes, I should like to very much,' replied Ursula.
Hermione looked down at her, gratified, reflecting, and strangely absent, as if possessed, as if not quite there.
'I'm so glad,' she said, pulling herself together. 'Some time in about a fortnight.
Yes?
I will write to you here, at the school, shall I?
Yes.
And you'll be sure to come?
Yes. I shall be so glad.
Good-bye!
Good-bye!'
Hermione held out her hand and looked into the eyes of the other woman.
She knew Ursula as an immediate rival, and the knowledge strangely exhilarated her.
Also she was taking leave. It always gave her a sense of strength, advantage, to be departing and leaving the other behind.
Moreover she was taking the man with her, if only in hate.
Birkin stood aside, fixed and unreal.
But now, when it was his turn to bid good-bye, he began to speak again.
'There's the whole difference in the world,' he said, 'between the actual sensual being, and the vicious mental-deliberate profligacy our lot goes in for.
In our night-time, there's always the electricity switched on, we watch ourselves, we get it all in the head, really.
You've got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unknowingness, and give up your volition.
You've got to do it.
You've got to learn not-to-be, before you can come into being.
'But we have got such a conceit of ourselves—that's where it is.
We are so conceited, and so unproud.