But he was really impersonal, he had the fineness of an elegant piece of machinery.
He was too cold, too destructive to care really for women, too great an egoist.
He was polarised by the men.
Individually he detested and despised them. In the mass they fascinated him, as machinery fascinated him.
They were a new sort of machinery to him—but incalculable, incalculable.
So Gudrun strolled the streets with Palmer, or went to the cinema with him.
And his long, pale, rather elegant face flickered as he made his sarcastic remarks.
There they were, the two of them: two elegants in one sense: in the other sense, two units, absolutely adhering to the people, teeming with the distorted colliers.
The same secret seemed to be working in the souls of all alike, Gudrun, Palmer, the rakish young bloods, the gaunt, middle-aged men.
All had a secret sense of power, and of inexpressible destructiveness, and of fatal half-heartedness, a sort of rottenness in the will.
Sometimes Gudrun would start aside, see it all, see how she was sinking in.
And then she was filled with a fury of contempt and anger.
She felt she was sinking into one mass with the rest—all so close and intermingled and breathless.
It was horrible.
She stifled.
She prepared for flight, feverishly she flew to her work.
But soon she let go.
She started off into the country—the darkish, glamorous country.
The spell was beginning to work again.
Chapter 10 Sketch-book
One morning the sisters were sketching by the side of Willey Water, at the remote end of the lake.
Gudrun had waded out to a gravelly shoal, and was seated like a Buddhist, staring fixedly at the water-plants that rose succulent from the mud of the low shores.
What she could see was mud, soft, oozy, watery mud, and from its festering chill, water-plants rose up, thick and cool and fleshy, very straight and turgid, thrusting out their leaves at right angles, and having dark lurid colours, dark green and blotches of black-purple and bronze.
But she could feel their turgid fleshy structure as in a sensuous vision, she KNEW how they rose out of the mud, she KNEW how they thrust out from themselves, how they stood stiff and succulent against the air.
Ursula was watching the butterflies, of which there were dozens near the water, little blue ones suddenly snapping out of nothingness into a jewel-life, a large black-and-red one standing upon a flower and breathing with his soft wings, intoxicatingly, breathing pure, ethereal sunshine; two white ones wrestling in the low air; there was a halo round them; ah, when they came tumbling nearer they were orangetips, and it was the orange that had made the halo.
Ursula rose and drifted away, unconscious like the butterflies.
Gudrun, absorbed in a stupor of apprehension of surging water-plants, sat crouched on the shoal, drawing, not looking up for a long time, and then staring unconsciously, absorbedly at the rigid, naked, succulent stems.
Her feet were bare, her hat lay on the bank opposite.
She started out of her trance, hearing the knocking of oars.
She looked round.
There was a boat with a gaudy Japanese parasol, and a man in white, rowing.
The woman was Hermione, and the man was Gerald.
She knew it instantly.
And instantly she perished in the keen FRISSON of anticipation, an electric vibration in her veins, intense, much more intense than that which was always humming low in the atmosphere of Beldover.
Gerald was her escape from the heavy slough of the pale, underworld, automatic colliers.
He started out of the mud.
He was master.
She saw his back, the movement of his white loins.
But not that—it was the whiteness he seemed to enclose as he bent forwards, rowing.
He seemed to stoop to something.
His glistening, whitish hair seemed like the electricity of the sky.
'There's Gudrun,' came Hermione's voice floating distinct over the water. 'We will go and speak to her. Do you mind?'
Gerald looked round and saw the girl standing by the water's edge, looking at him.
He pulled the boat towards her, magnetically, without thinking of her.
In his world, his conscious world, she was still nobody.
He knew that Hermione had a curious pleasure in treading down all the social differences, at least apparently, and he left it to her.
'How do you do, Gudrun?' sang Hermione, using the Christian name in the fashionable manner. 'What are you doing?'
'How do you do, Hermione?
I WAS sketching.'
'Were you?' The boat drifted nearer, till the keel ground on the bank. 'May we see?