She almost wished Gerald were with her to save her from the terror of her own thoughts.Oh, how she suffered, lying there alone, confronted by the terrible clock, with its eternal tick-tack.All life, all life resolved itself into this: tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tack; then the striking of the hour; then the tick-tack, tick-tack, and the twitching of the clock-fingers.
Gerald could not save her from it.He, his body, his motion, his life -- it was the same ticking, the same twitching across the dial, a horrible mechanical twitching forward over the face of the hours.What were his kisses, his embraces.She could hear their tick-tack, tick-tack.
Ha -- ha -- she laughed to herself, so frightened that she was trying to laugh it off -- ha -- ha, how maddening it was, to be sure, to be sure!
Then, with a fleeting self-conscious motion, she wondered if she would be very much surprised, on rising in the morning, to realise that her hair had turned white.She had felt it turning white so often, under the intolerable burden of her thoughts, und her sensations.Yet there it remained, brown as ever, and there she was herself, looking a picture of health.
Perhaps she was healthy.Perhaps it was only her unabateable health that left her so exposed to the truth.If she were sickly she would have her illusions, imaginations.As it was, there was no escape.She must always see and know and never escape.She could never escape.There she was, placed before the clock-face of life.And if she turned round as in a railway station, to look at the bookstall, still she could see, with her very spine, she could see the clock, always the great white clock-face.In vain she fluttered the leaves of books, or made statuettes in clay.She knew she was not really reading.She was not really working.She was watching the fingers twitch across the eternal, mechanical, monotonous clock-face of time.She never really lived, she only watched.Indeed, she was like a little, twelve-hour clock, vis-a-vis with the enormous clock of eternity -- there she was, like Dignity and Impudence, or Impudence and Dignity.
The picture pleased her.Didn't her face really look like a clock dial -- rather roundish and often pale, and impassive.She would have got up to look, in the mirror, but the thought of the sight of her own face, that was like a twelve-hour clock-dial, filled her with such deep terror, that she hastened to think of something else.
Oh, why wasn't somebody kind to her? Why wasn't there somebody who would take her in their arms, and hold her to their breast, and give her rest, pure, deep, healing rest.Oh, why wasn't there somebody to take her in their arms and fold her safe and perfect, for sleep.She wanted so much this perfect enfolded sleep.She lay always so unsheathed in sleep.She would lie always unsheathed in sleep, unrelieved, unsaved.Oh, how could she bear it, this endless unrelief, this eternal unrelief.
Gerald! Could he fold her in his arms and sheathe her in sleep? Ha!
He needed putting to sleep himself -- poor Gerald.That was all he needed.
What did he do, he made the burden for her greater, the burden of her sleep was the more intolerable, when he was there.He was an added weariness upon her unripening nights, her unfruitful slumbers.Perhaps he got some repose from her.Perhaps he did.Perhaps this was what he was always dogging her for, like a child that is famished, crying for the breast.Perhaps this was the secret of his passion, his forever unquenched desire for her -- that he needed her to put him to sleep, to give him repose.
What then! Was she his mother? Had she asked for a child, whom she must nurse through the nights, for her lover.She despised him, she despised him, she hardened her heart.An infant crying in the night, this Don Juan.
Ooh, but how she hated the infant crying in the night.She would murder it gladly.She would stifle it and bury it, as Hetty Sorrell did.No doubt Hetty Sorrell's infant cried in the night -- no doubt Arthur Donnithorne's infant would.Ha -- the Arthur Donnithornes, the Geralds of this world.
So manly by day, yet all the while, such a crying of infants in the night.
Let them turn into mechanisms, let them.Let them become instruments, pure machines, pure wills, that work like clock-work, in perpetual repetition.
Let them be this, let them be taken up entirely in their work, let them be perfect parts of a great machine, having a slumber of constant repetition.
Let Gerald manage his firm.There he would be satisfied, as satisfied as a wheelbarrow that goes backwards and forwards along a plank all day --she had seen it.
The wheel-barrow -- the one humble wheel -- the unit of the firm.Then the cart, with two wheels; then the truck, with four; then the donkey-engine, with eight, then the winding-engine, with sixteen, and so on, till it came to the miner, with a thousand wheels, and then the electrician, with three thousand, and the underground manager, with twenty thousand, and the general manager with a hundred thousand little wheels working away to complete his make-up, and then Gerald, with a million wheels and cogs and axles.
Poor Gerald, such a lot of little wheels to his make-up! He was more intricate than a chronometer-watch.But oh heavens, what weariness! What weariness, God above! A chronometer-watch -- a beetle -- her soul fainted with utter ennui, from the thought.So many wheels to count and consider and calculate! Enough, enough -- there was an end to man's capacity for complications, even.Or perhaps there was no end.
Meanwhile Gerald sat in his room, reading.When Gudrun was gone, he was left stupefied with arrested desire.He sat on the side of the bed for an hour, stupefied, little strands of consciousness appearing and reappearing.
But he did not move, for a long time he remained inert, his head dropped on his breast.
Then he looked up and realised that he was going to bed.He was cold.
Soon he was lying down in the dark.
