She turned and was gone again. She had been wearing a loose dressing-gown of purple silk, tied round her waist. She looked so small and childish and vulnerable, almost pitiful. And yet the black looks of her eyes made Gerald feel drowned in some potent darkness that almost frightened him.
The men lit another cigarette and talked casually.
CHAPTER VII.
FETISH
In the morning Gerald woke late. He had slept heavily. Pussum was still asleep, sleeping childishly and pathetically. There was something small and curled up and defenceless about her, that roused an unsatisfied flame of passion in the young man’s blood, a devouring avid pity. He looked at her again. But it would be too cruel to wake her. He subdued himself, and went away.
Hearing voices coming from the sitting-room, Halliday talking to Libidnikov, he went to the door and glanced in. He had on a silk wrap of a beautiful bluish colour, with an amethyst hem.
To his surprise he saw the two young men by the fire, stark naked. Halliday looked up, rather pleased.
“Good-morning,” he said. “Oh—did you want towels?” And stark naked he went out into the hall, striding a strange, white figure between the unliving furniture. He came back with the towels, and took his former position, crouching seated before the fire on the fender.
“Don’t you love to feel the fire on your skin?” he said.
“It is rather pleasant,” said Gerald.
“How perfectly splendid it must be to be in a climate where one could do without clothing altogether,” said Halliday.
“Yes,” said Gerald, “if there weren’t so many things that sting and bite.”
“That’s a disadvantage,” murmured Maxim.
Gerald looked at him, and with a slight revulsion saw the human animal, golden skinned and bare, somehow humiliating. Halliday was different. He had a rather heavy, slack, broken beauty, white and firm. He was like a Christ in a Pietà. The animal was not there at all, only the heavy, broken beauty. And Gerald realised how Halliday’s eyes were beautiful too, so blue and warm and confused, broken also in their expression. The fireglow fell on his heavy, rather bowed shoulders, he sat slackly crouched on the fender, his face was uplifted, weak, perhaps slightly disintegrate, and yet with a moving beauty of its own.
“Of course,” said Maxim, “you’ve been in hot countries where the people go about naked.”
“Oh really!” exclaimed Halliday. “Where?”
“South America—Amazon,” said Gerald.
“Oh but how perfectly splendid! It’s one of the things I want most to do—to live from day to day without ever putting on any sort of clothing whatever. If I could do that, I should feel I had lived.”
“But why?” said Gerald. “I can’t see that it makes so much difference.”
“Oh, I think it would be perfectly splendid. I’m sure life would be entirely another thing—entirely different, and perfectly wonderful.”
“But why?” asked Gerald. “Why should it?”
“Oh—one would feel things instead of merely looking at them. I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I’m sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual—we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I’m sure that is entirely wrong.”
“Yes, that is true, that is true,” said the Russian.
Gerald glanced at him, and saw him, his suave, golden coloured body with the black hair growing fine and freely, like tendrils, and his limbs like smooth plant-stems. He was so healthy and well-made, why did he make one ashamed, why did one feel repelled? Why should Gerald even dislike it, why did it seem to him to detract from his own dignity. Was that all a human being amounted to? So uninspired! thought Gerald.
Birkin suddenly appeared in the doorway, in white pyjamas and wet hair, and a towel over his arm. He was aloof and white, and somehow evanescent.
“There’s the bath-room now, if you want it,” he said generally, and was going away again, when Gerald called:
“I say, Rupert!”
“What?” The single white figure appeared again, a presence in the room.
“What do you think of that figure there? I want to know,” Gerald asked.
Birkin, white and strangely ghostly, went over to the carved figure of the negro woman in labour. Her nude, protuberant body crouched in a strange, clutching posture, her hands gripping the ends of the band, above her breast.
“It is art,” said Birkin.
“Very beautiful, it’s very beautiful,” said the Russian.
They all drew near to look. Gerald looked at the group of men, the Russian golden and like a water-plant, Halliday tall and heavily, brokenly beautiful, Birkin very white and indefinite, not to be assigned, as he looked closely at the carven woman. Strangely elated, Gerald also lifted his eyes to the face of the wooden figure. And his heart contracted.
He saw vividly with his spirit the grey, forward-stretching face of the negro woman, African and tense, abstracted in utter physical stress. It was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath. He saw the Pussum in it. As in a dream, he knew her.
“Why is it art?” Gerald asked, shocked, resentful.
“It conveys a complete truth,” said Birkin. “It contains the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.”
“But you can’t call it high art,” said Gerald.
“High! There are centuries and hundreds of centuries of development in a straight line, behind that carving; it is an awful pitch of culture, of a definite sort.”
“What culture?” Gerald asked, in opposition. He hated the sheer African thing.
“Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final, supreme.”
But Gerald resented it. He wanted to keep certain illusions, certain ideas like clothing.
“You like the wrong things, Rupert,” he said, “things against yourself.”
“Oh, I know, this isn’t everything,” Birkin replied, moving away.
When Gerald went back to his room from the bath, he also carried his clothes. He was so conventional at home, that when he was really away, and on the loose, as now, he enjoyed nothing so much as full outrageousness. So he strode with his blue silk wrap over his arm and felt defiant.
The Pussum lay in her bed, motionless, her round, dark eyes like black, unhappy pools. He could only see the black, bottomless pools of her eyes. Perhaps she suffered. The sensation of her inchoate suffering roused the old sharp flame in him, a mordant pity, a passion almost of cruelty.
“You are awake now,” he said to her.
“What time is it?” came her muted voice.
She seemed to flow back, almost like liquid, from his approach, to sink helplessly away from him. Her inchoate look