Page 271 - women-in-love

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 want-
ed 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 de-
livered 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 mean-
ing, 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.
‘But,’ she said gravely, ‘didn’t you say you wanted some-
thing that was NOT love—something beyond love?’
He turned in confusion. There was always confusion in
speech. Yet it must be spoken. Whichever way one moved, if
one were to move forwards, one must break a way through.
And to know, to give utterance, was to break a way through
the walls of the prison as the infant in labour strives through
the walls of the womb. There is no new movement now,
without the breaking through of the old body, deliberately,
in knowledge, in the struggle to get out.
‘I don’t want love,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to know you. I
want to be gone out of myself, and you to be lost to your-

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