And it seemed to her like a garden, with the peaks for pure flowers, and her heart gathering them.
She had no separate consciousness for Gerald.
She held on to him as they went sheering down over the keen slope.
She felt as if her senses were being whetted on some fine grindstone, that was keen as flame.
The snow sprinted on either side, like sparks from a blade that is being sharpened, the whiteness round about ran swifter, swifter, in pure flame the white slope flew against her, and she fused like one molten, dancing globule, rushed through a white intensity.
Then there was a great swerve at the bottom, when they swung as it were in a fall to earth, in the diminishing motion.
They came to rest.
But when she rose to her feet, she could not stand.
She gave a strange cry, turned and clung to him, sinking her face on his breast, fainting in him.
Utter oblivion came over her, as she lay for a few moments abandoned against him.
'What is it?' he was saying. 'Was it too much for you?'
But she heard nothing.
When she came to, she stood up and looked round, astonished.
Her face was white, her eyes brilliant and large.
'What is it?' he repeated. 'Did it upset you?'
She looked at him with her brilliant eyes that seemed to have undergone some transfiguration, and she laughed, with a terrible merriment.
'No,' she cried, with triumphant joy. 'It was the complete moment of my life.'
And she looked at him with her dazzling, overweening laughter, like one possessed.
A fine blade seemed to enter his heart, but he did not care, or take any notice.
But they climbed up the slope again, and they flew down through the white flame again, splendidly, splendidly.
Gudrun was laughing and flashing, powdered with snow-crystals, Gerald worked perfectly.
He felt he could guide the toboggan to a hair-breadth, almost he could make it pierce into the air and right into the very heart of the sky.
It seemed to him the flying sledge was but his strength spread out, he had but to move his arms, the motion was his own.
They explored the great slopes, to find another slide.
He felt there must be something better than they had known.
And he found what he desired, a perfect long, fierce sweep, sheering past the foot of a rock and into the trees at the base.
It was dangerous, he knew.
But then he knew also he would direct the sledge between his fingers.
The first days passed in an ecstasy of physical motion, sleighing, skiing, skating, moving in an intensity of speed and white light that surpassed life itself, and carried the souls of the human beings beyond into an inhuman abstraction of velocity and weight and eternal, frozen snow.
Gerald's eyes became hard and strange, and as he went by on his skis he was more like some powerful, fateful sigh than a man, his muscles elastic in a perfect, soaring trajectory, his body projected in pure flight, mindless, soulless, whirling along one perfect line of force.
Luckily there came a day of snow, when they must all stay indoors: otherwise Birkin said, they would all lose their faculties, and begin to utter themselves in cries and shrieks, like some strange, unknown species of snow-creatures.
It happened in the afternoon that Ursula sat in the Reunionsaal talking to Loerke.
The latter had seemed unhappy lately.
He was lively and full of mischievous humour, as usual.
But Ursula had thought he was sulky about something.
His partner, too, the big, fair, good-looking youth, was ill at ease, going about as if he belonged to nowhere, and was kept in some sort of subjection, against which he was rebelling.
Loerke had hardly talked to Gudrun.
His associate, on the other hand, had paid her constantly a soft, over-deferential attention.
Gudrun wanted to talk to Loerke.
He was a sculptor, and she wanted to hear his view of his art.
And his figure attracted her.
There was the look of a little wastrel about him, that intrigued her, and an old man's look, that interested her, and then, beside this, an uncanny singleness, a quality of being by himself, not in contact with anybody else, that marked out an artist to her.
He was a chatterer, a magpie, a maker of mischievous word-jokes, that were sometimes very clever, but which often were not.
And she could see in his brown, gnome's eyes, the black look of inorganic misery, which lay behind all his small buffoonery.
His figure interested her—the figure of a boy, almost a street arab.
He made no attempt to conceal it.
He always wore a simple loden suit, with knee breeches.
His legs were thin, and he made no attempt to disguise the fact: which was of itself remarkable, in a German.
And he never ingratiated himself anywhere, not in the slightest, but kept to himself, for all his apparent playfulness.
Leitner, his companion, was a great sportsman, very handsome with his big limbs and his blue eyes.