Page 634 - women-in-love

‘I am twenty-six,’ she answered.
‘Twenty-six,’ he repeated, looking into her eyes. He
paused. Then he said:
‘UND IHR HERR GEMAHL, WIE ALT IS ER?’
‘Who?’ asked Gudrun.
‘Your husband,’ said Ursula, with a certain irony.
‘I haven’t got a husband,’ said Gudrun in English. In
German she answered,
‘He is thirty-one.’
But Loerke was watching closely, with his uncanny, full,
suspicious eyes. Something in Gudrun seemed to accord
with him. He was really like one of the ‘little people’ who
have no soul, who has found his mate in a human being. But
he suffered in his discovery. She too was fascinated by him,
fascinated, as if some strange creature, a rabbit or a bat, or
a brown seal, had begun to talk to her. But also, she knew
what he was unconscious of, his tremendous power of un-
derstanding, of apprehending her living motion. He did not
know his own power. He did not know how, with his full,
submerged, watchful eyes, he could look into her and see
her, what she was, see her secrets. He would only want her to
be herself—he knew her verily, with a subconscious, sinister
knowledge, devoid of illusions and hopes.
To Gudrun, there was in Loerke the rock-bottom of all
life. Everybody else had their illusion, must have their illu-
sion, their before and after. But he, with a perfect stoicism,
did without any before and after, dispensed with all illusion.
He did not deceive himself in the last issue. In the last issue
he cared about nothing, he was troubled about nothing, he

634 Women in Love