'Do you mind very much?' she asked him.
'I don't mind about the dead,' he said, 'once they are dead. The worst
of it is, they cling on to the living, and won't let go.' She pondered for a time.
'Yes,' she said. 'The FACT of death doesn't really seem to matter much,
does it?' 'No,' he said. 'What does it matter if Diana Crich is alive or dead?' 'Doesn't it?' she said, shocked.
'No, why should it? Better she were dead--she'll be much more real.
She'll be positive in death. In life she was a fretting, negated
thing.' 'You are rather horrible,' murmured Ursula.
'No! I'd rather Diana Crich were dead. Her living somehow, was all
wrong. As for the young man, poor devil--he'll find his way out quickly
instead of slowly. Death is all right--nothing better.' 'Yet you don't want to die,' she challenged him.
He was silent for a time. Then he said, in a voice that was frightening
to her in its change: 'I should like to be through with it--I should like to be through with
the death process.' 'And aren't you?' asked Ursula nervously.
They walked on for some way in silence, under the trees. Then he said,
slowly, as if afraid: 'There is life which belongs to death, and there is life which isn't
death. One is tired of the life that belongs to death--our kind of
life. But whether it is finished, God knows. I want love that is like
sleep, like being born again, vulnerable as a baby that just comes into
the world.' Ursula listened, half attentive, half avoiding what he said. She seemed
to catch the drift of his statement, and then she drew away. She wanted
to hear, but she did not want to be implicated. She was reluctant to
yield there, where he wanted her, to yield as it were her very
identity.
'Why should love be like sleep?' she asked sadly.
'I don't know. So that it is like death--I DO want to die from this
life--and yet it is more than life itself. One is delivered over like a
naked infant from the womb, all the old defences and the old body gone,
and new air around one, that has never been breathed before.' She listened, making out what he said. She knew, as well as he knew,
that words themselves do not convey meaning, that they are but a
gesture we make, a dumb show like any other. And she seemed to feel his
gesture through her blood, and she drew back, even though her desire
sent her forward.