But Gudrun lay wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness. She
lay motionless, with wide eyes staring motionless into the darkness,
whilst he was sunk away in sleep, his arms round her.
She seemed to be hearing waves break on a hidden shore, long, slow,
gloomy waves, breaking with the rhythm of fate, so monotonously that it
seemed eternal. This endless breaking of slow, sullen waves of fate
held her life a possession, whilst she lay with dark, wide eyes looking
into the darkness. She could see so far, as far as eternity--yet she
saw nothing. She was suspended in perfect consciousness--and of what
was she conscious?
This mood of extremity, when she lay staring into eternity, utterly
suspended, and conscious of everything, to the last limits, passed and
left her uneasy. She had lain so long motionless. She moved, she became
self-conscious. She wanted to look at him, to see him.
But she dared not make a light, because she knew he would wake, and she
did not want to break his perfect sleep, that she knew he had got of
her.
She disengaged herself, softly, and rose up a little to look at him.
There was a faint light, it seemed to her, in the room. She could just
distinguish his features, as he slept the perfect sleep. In this
darkness, she seemed to see him so distinctly. But he was far off, in
another world. Ah, she could shriek with torment, he was so far off,
and perfected, in another world. She seemed to look at him as at a
pebble far away under clear dark water. And here was she, left with all
the anguish of consciousness, whilst he was sunk deep into the other
element of mindless, remote, living shadow-gleam. He was beautiful,
far-off, and perfected. They would never be together. Ah, this awful,
inhuman distance which would always be interposed between her and the
other being!
There was nothing to do but to lie still and endure. She felt an
overwhelming tenderness for him, and a dark, under-stirring of jealous
hatred, that he should lie so perfect and immune, in an other-world,
whilst she was tormented with violent wakefulness, cast out in the
outer darkness.
She lay in intense and vivid consciousness, an exhausting
superconsciousness. The church clock struck the hours, it seemed to
her, in quick succession. She heard them distinctly in the tension of
her vivid consciousness. And he slept as if time were one moment,
unchanging and unmoving.
She was exhausted, wearied. Yet she must continue in this state of
violent active superconsciousness. She was conscious of everything--her
childhood, her girlhood, all the forgotten incidents, all the
unrealised influences and all the happenings she had not understood,
pertaining to herself, to her family, to her friends, her lovers, her
acquaintances, everybody. It was as if she drew a glittering rope of
knowledge out of the sea of darkness, drew and drew and drew it out of
the fathomless depths of the past, and still it did not come to an end,
there was no end to it, she must haul and haul at the rope of
glittering consciousness, pull it out phosphorescent from the endless
depths of the unconsciousness, till she was weary, aching, exhausted,
and fit to break, and yet she had not done.