Page 474 - women-in-love

ened into a little circle of grass, where there was a small
trickle of water at the bottom of a sloping bank. The car
stopped.
‘We will stay here,’ he said, ‘and put out the lights.’
He extinguished the lamps at once, and it was pure
night, with shadows of trees like realities of other, nightly
being. He threw a rug on to the bracken, and they sat in
stillness and mindless silence. There were faint sounds from
the wood, but no disturbance, no possible disturbance, the
world was under a strange ban, a new mystery had super-
vened. They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her
to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of
her forever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers
upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon
silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mys-
terious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be
seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a
palpable revelation of living otherness.
She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the
maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark,
subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again,
a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery, the reality of
that which can never be known, vital, sensual reality that
can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains
outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety,
the mystic body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled. He
had his desire fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to
her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real
otherness.

474 Women in Love