Page 470 - women-in-love

‘Shall we go?’ he said.
‘As you like,’ she replied.
They were soon out of the little town, and running
through the uneven lanes of the country. Ursula nestled
near him, into his constant warmth, and watched the pale-
lit revelation racing ahead, the visible night. Sometimes it
was a wide old road, with grass-spaces on either side, fly-
ing magic and elfin in the greenish illumination, sometimes
it was trees looming overhead, sometimes it was bramble
bushes, sometimes the walls of a crew-yard and the butt of
a barn.
‘Are you going to Shortlands to dinner?’ Ursula asked
him suddenly. He started.
‘Good God!’ he said. ‘Shortlands! Never again. Not that.
Besides we should be too late.’
‘Where are we going then—to the Mill?’
‘If you like. Pity to go anywhere on this good dark night.
Pity to come out of it, really. Pity we can’t stop in the good
darkness. It is better than anything ever would be—this
good immediate darkness.’
She sat wondering. The car lurched and swayed. She knew
there was no leaving him, the darkness held them both and
contained them, it was not to be surpassed Besides she had
a full mystic knowledge of his suave loins of darkness, dark-
clad and suave, and in this knowledge there was some of the
inevitability and the beauty of fate, fate which one asks for,
which one accepts in full.
He sat still like an Egyptian Pharoah, driving the car.
He felt as if he were seated in immemorial potency, like the

470 Women in Love