Page 608 - women-in-love

Anton Skrebensky.
Oh, God, could one bear it, this past which was gone
down the abyss? Could she bear, that it ever had been! She
looked round this silent, upper world of snow and stars and
powerful cold. There was another world, like views on a
magic lantern; The Marsh, Cossethay, Ilkeston, lit up with
a common, unreal light. There was a shadowy unreal Ur-
sula, a whole shadow-play of an unreal life. It was as unreal,
and circumscribed, as a magic-lantern show. She wished
the slides could all be broken. She wished it could be gone
for ever, like a lantern-slide which was broken. She wanted
to have no past. She wanted to have come down from the
slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have toiled
out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slow-
ly, all soiled. She felt that memory was a dirty trick played
upon her. What was this decree, that she should ‘remember’!
Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any
recollections or blemish of a past life. She was with Birkin,
she had just come into life, here in the high snow, against
the stars. What had she to do with parents and antecedents?
She knew herself new and unbegotten, she had no father,
no mother, no anterior connections, she was herself, pure
and silvery, she belonged only to the oneness with Birkin,
a oneness that struck deeper notes, sounding into the heart
of the universe, the heart of reality, where she had never ex-
isted before.
Even Gudrun was a separate unit, separate, separate,
having nothing to do with this self, this Ursula, in her new
world of reality. That old shadow-world, the actuality of the

608 Women in Love