Page 667 - women-in-love

They were almost of the same ideas. He hated Mestrovic,
was not satisfied with the Futurists, he liked the West Af-
rican wooden figures, the Aztec art, Mexican and Central
American. He saw the grotesque, and a curious sort of
mechanical motion intoxicated him, a confusion in na-
ture. They had a curious game with each other, Gudrun
and Loerke, of infinite suggestivity, strange and leering, as
if they had some esoteric understanding of life, that they
alone were initiated into the fearful central secrets, that the
world dared not know. Their whole correspondence was
in a strange, barely comprehensible suggestivity, they kin-
dled themselves at the subtle lust of the Egyptians or the
Mexicans. The whole game was one of subtle inter-sugges-
tivity, and they wanted to keep it on the plane of suggestion.
From their verbal and physical nuances they got the high-
est satisfaction in the nerves, from a queer interchange of
half-suggested ideas, looks, expressions and gestures, which
were quite intolerable, though incomprehensible, to Gerald.
He had no terms in which to think of their commerce, his
terms were much too gross.
The suggestion of primitive art was their refuge, and the
inner mysteries of sensation their object of worship. Art and
Life were to them the Reality and the Unreality.
‘Of course,’ said Gudrun, ‘life doesn’t REALLY matter—
it is one’s art which is central. What one does in one’s life
has PEU DE RAPPORT, it doesn’t signify much.’
‘Yes, that is so, exactly,’ replied the sculptor. ‘What one
does in one’s art, that is the breath of one’s being. What one
does in one’s life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss

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