Page 440 - sons-and-lovers

Later it began to rain. The pine-trees smelled very strong.
Paul lay with his head on the ground, on the dead pine nee-
dles, listening to the sharp hiss of the rain—a steady, keen
noise. His heart was down, very heavy. Now he realised that
she had not been with him all the time, that her soul had
stood apart, in a sort of horror. He was physically at rest,
but no more. Very dreary at heart, very sad, and very tender,
his fingers wandered over her face pitifully. Now again she
loved him deeply. He was tender and beautiful.
‘The rain!’ he said.
‘Yes—is it coming on you?’
She put her hands over him, on his hair, on his shoulders,
to feel if the raindrops fell on him. She loved him dearly.
He, as he lay with his face on the dead pine-leaves, felt ex-
traordinarily quiet. He did not mind if the raindrops came
on him: he would have lain and got wet through: he felt
as if nothing mattered, as if his living were smeared away
into the beyond, near and quite lovable. This strange, gentle
reaching-out to death was new to him.
‘We must go,’ said Miriam.
‘Yes,’ he answered, but did not move.
To him now, life seemed a shadow, day a white shadow;
night, and death, and stillness, and inaction, this seemed
like BEING. To be alive, to be urgent and insistent—that
was NOT-TO-BE. The highest of all was to melt out into the
darkness and sway there, identified with the great Being.
‘The rain is coming in on us,’ said Miriam.
He rose, and assisted her.
‘It is a pity,’ he said.