'Spontaneous!' he cried. 'You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate

thing that ever walked or crawled! You'd be verily deliberately

spontaneous--that's you. Because you want to have everything in your

own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. You want it all

in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like

a nut. For you'll be the same till it is cracked, like an insect in its

skin. 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

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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.




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