Moony A FTER 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.Each was single and to itself, magical.It was not referred away to some detestable social principle.
It was incapable of soulfulness and tragedy, which she detested so profoundly.
She could be very pleasant and flattering, almost subservient, to people she met.But no one was taken in.Instinctively each felt her contemptuous mockery of the human being in himself, or herself.She had a profound grudge against the human being.That which the word `human' stood for was despicable and repugnant to her.
Mostly her heart was closed in this hidden, unconscious strain of contemptuous ridicule.She thought she loved, she thought she was full of love.This was her idea of herself.But the strange brightness of her presence, a marvellous radiance of intrinsic vitality, was a luminousness of supreme repudiation, nothing but repudiation.
Yet, at moments, she yielded and softened, she wanted pure love, only pure love.This other, this state of constant unfailing repudiation, was a strain, a suffering also.A terrible desire for pure love overcame her again.
She went out one evening, numbed by this constant essential suffering.
Those who are timed for destruction must die now.The knowledge of this reached a finality, a finishing in her.And the finality released her.
If fate would carry off in death or downfall all those who were timed to go, why need she trouble, why repudiate any further.She was free of it all, she could seek a new union elsewhere.
Ursula set off to Willey Green, towards the mill.She came to Willey Water.It was almost full again, after its period of emptiness.Then she turned off through the woods.The night had fallen, it was dark.But she forgot to be afraid, she who had such great sources of fear.Among the trees, far from any human beings, there was a sort of magic peace.The more one could find a pure loneliness, with no taint of people, the better one felt.She was in reality terrified, horrified in her apprehension of people.
She started, noticing something on her right hand, between the tree trunks.It was like a great presence, watching her, dodging her.She started violently.It was only the moon, risen through the thin trees.But it seemed so mysterious, with its white and deathly smile.And there was no avoiding it.Night or day, one could not escape the sinister face, triumphant and radiant like this moon, with a high smile.She hurried on, cowering from the white planet.She would just see the pond at the mill before she went home.
Not wanting to go through the yard, because of the dogs, she turned off along the hill-side to descend on the pond from above.The moon was transcendent over the bare, open space, she suffered from being exposed to it.There was a glimmer of nightly rabbits across the ground.The night was as clear as crystal, and very still.She could hear a distant coughing of a sheep.
So she swerved down to the steep, tree-hidden bank above the pond, where the alders twisted their roots.She was glad to pass into the shade out of the moon.There she stood, at the top of the fallen-away bank, her hand on the rough trunk of a tree, looking at the water, that was perfect in its stillness, floating the moon upon it.But for some reason she disliked it.It did not give her anything.She listened for the hoarse rustle of the sluice.And she wished for something else out of the night, she wanted another night, not this moon-brilliant hardness.She could feel her soul crying out in her, lamenting desolately.
She saw a shadow moving by the water.It would be Birkin.He had come back then, unawares.She accepted it without remark, nothing mattered to her.She sat down among the roots of the alder tree, dim and veiled, hearing the sound of the sluice like dew distilling audibly into the night.The islands were dark and half revealed, the reeds were dark also, only some of them had a little frail fire of reflection.A fish leaped secretly, revealing the light in the pond.This fire of the chill night breaking constantly on to the pure darkness, repelled her.She wished it were perfectly dark, perfectly, and noiseless and without motion.Birkin, small and dark also, his hair tinged with moonlight, wandered nearer.He was quite near, and yet he did not exist in her.He did not know she was there.Supposing he did something he would not wish to be seen doing, thinking he was quite private? But there, what did it matter? What did the small priyacies matter?
How could it matter, what he did? How can there be any secrets, we are all the same organisms? How can there be any secrecy, when everything is known to all of us?
He was touching unconsciously the dead husks of flowers as he passed by, and talking disconnectedly to himself.
`You can't go away,' he was saying.`There is no away.You only withdraw upon yourself.'
He threw a dead flower-husk on to the water.
