Page 248 - women-in-love

were lit up with intent lights, absorbed and gleaming. She
turned suddenly on him.
‘It’s you who make me behave like this, you know,’ she
said, almost suggestive.
‘I? How?’ he said.
But she turned away, and set off towards the lake. Below,
on the water, lanterns were coming alight, faint ghosts of
warm flame floating in the pallor of the first twilight. The
earth was spread with darkness, like lacquer, overhead was
a pale sky, all primrose, and the lake was pale as milk in one
part. Away at the landing stage, tiniest points of coloured
rays were stringing themselves in the dusk. The launch was
being illuminated. All round, shadow was gathering from
the trees.
Gerald, white like a presence in his summer clothes,
was following down the open grassy slope. Gudrun waited
for him to come up. Then she softly put out her hand and
touched him, saying softly:
‘Don’t be angry with me.’
A flame flew over him, and he was unconscious. Yet he
stammered:
‘I’m not angry with you. I’m in love with you.’
His mind was gone, he grasped for sufficient mechanical
control, to save himself. She laughed a silvery little mockery,
yet intolerably caressive.
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ she said.
The terrible swooning burden on his mind, the awful
swooning, the loss of all his control, was too much for him.
He grasped her arm in his one hand, as if his hand were

248 Women in Love