'The red ones too!' he said, looking at the flickers of crimson that
came from the female bud.
Then he went in among the desks, to see the scholars' books. Ursula
watched his intent progress. There was a stillness in his motion that
hushed the activities of her heart. She seemed to be standing aside in
arrested silence, watching him move in another, concentrated world. His
presence was so quiet, almost like a vacancy in the corporate air.
Suddenly he lifted his face to her, and her heart quickened at the
flicker of his voice.
'Give them some crayons, won't you?' he said, 'so that they can make
the gynaecious flowers red, and the androgynous yellow. I'd chalk them
in plain, chalk in nothing else, merely the red and the yellow. Outline
scarcely matters in this case. There is just the one fact to
emphasise.' 'I haven't any crayons,' said Ursula.
'There will be some somewhere--red and yellow, that's all you want.' Ursula sent out a boy on a quest.
'It will make the books untidy,' she said to Birkin, flushing deeply.
'Not very,' he said. 'You must mark in these things obviously. It's the
fact you want to emphasise, not the subjective impression to record.
What's the fact?--red little spiky stigmas of the female flower,
dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the
other. Make a pictorial record of the fact, as a child does when
drawing a face--two eyes, one nose, mouth with teeth--so--' And he drew
a figure on the blackboard.
At that moment another vision was seen through the glass panels of the
door. It was Hermione Roddice. Birkin went and opened to her.
'I saw your car,' she said to him. 'Do you mind my coming to find you?
I wanted to see you when you were on duty.' She looked at him for a long time, intimate and playful, then she gave
a short little laugh. And then only she turned to Ursula, who, with all
the class, had been watching the little scene between the lovers.
'How do you do, Miss Brangwen,' sang Hermione, in her low, odd, singing
fashion, that sounded almost as if she were poking fun. 'Do you mind my
coming in?' Her grey, almost sardonic eyes rested all the while on Ursula, as if
summing her up.
'Oh no,' said Ursula.
'Are you SURE?' repeated Hermione, with complete sang froid, and an
odd, half-bullying effrontery.
'Oh no, I like it awfully,' laughed Ursula, a little bit excited and
bewildered, because Hermione seemed to be compelling her, coming very
close to her, as if intimate with her; and yet, how could she be
intimate?