Ursula went on in an unreal suspense, the last weeks before going away.
She was not herself,--she was not anything. She was something that is
going to be--soon--soon--very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.
She went to see her parents. It was a rather stiff, sad meeting, more
like a verification of separateness than a reunion. But they were all
vague and indefinite with one another, stiffened in the fate that moved
them apart.
She did not really come to until she was on the ship crossing from
Dover to Ostend. Dimly she had come down to London with Birkin, London
had been a vagueness, so had the train-journey to Dover. It was all
like a sleep.
And now, at last, as she stood in the stern of the ship, in a
pitch-dark, rather blowy night, feeling the motion of the sea, and
watching the small, rather desolate little lights that twinkled on the
shores of England, as on the shores of nowhere, watched them sinking
smaller and smaller on the profound and living darkness, she felt her
soul stirring to awake from its anaesthetic sleep.
'Let us go forward, shall we?' said Birkin. He wanted to be at the tip
of their projection. So they left off looking at the faint sparks that
glimmered out of nowhere, in the far distance, called England, and
turned their faces to the unfathomed night in front.
They went right to the bows of the softly plunging vessel. In the
complete obscurity, Birkin found a comparatively sheltered nook, where
a great rope was coiled up. It was quite near the very point of the
ship, near the black, unpierced space ahead. There they sat down,
folded together, folded round with the same rug, creeping in nearer and
ever nearer to one another, till it seemed they had crept right into
each other, and become one substance. It was very cold, and the
darkness was palpable.
One of the ship's crew came along the deck, dark as the darkness, not
really visible. They then made out the faintest pallor of his face. He
felt their presence, and stopped, unsure--then bent forward. When his
face was near them, he saw the faint pallor of their faces. Then he
withdrew like a phantom. And they watched him without making any sound.
They seemed to fall away into the profound darkness. There was no sky,
no earth, only one unbroken darkness, into which, with a soft, sleeping
motion, they seemed to fall like one closed seed of life falling
through dark, fathomless space.
They had forgotten where they were, forgotten all that was and all that
had been, conscious only in their heart, and there conscious only of
this pure trajectory through the surpassing darkness. The ship's prow
cleaved on, with a faint noise of cleavage, into the complete night,
without knowing, without seeing, only surging on.