'Dunque, adesso--maintenant--I earn a thousand pounds in a year, or I
earn two thousand--' He looked down at the ground, his voice tailing off into silence.
Gudrun looked at his fine, thin, shiny skin, reddish-brown from the
sun, drawn tight over his full temples; and at his thin hair--and at
the thick, coarse, brush-like moustache, cut short about his mobile,
rather shapeless mouth.
'How old are you?' she asked.
He looked up at her with his full, elfin eyes startled.
'WIE ALT?' he repeated. And he hesitated. It was evidently one of his
reticencies.
'How old are YOU?' he replied, without answering.
'I am twenty-six,' she answered.
'Twenty-six,' he repeated, looking into her eyes. He paused. Then he
said: 'UND IHR HERR GEMAHL, WIE ALT IS ER?' 'Who?' asked Gudrun.
'Your husband,' said Ursula, with a certain irony.
'I haven't got a husband,' said Gudrun in English. In German she
answered, 'He is thirty-one.' But Loerke was watching closely, with his uncanny, full, suspicious
eyes. Something in Gudrun seemed to accord with him. He was really like
one of the 'little people' who have no soul, who has found his mate in
a human being. But he suffered in his discovery. She too was fascinated
by him, fascinated, as if some strange creature, a rabbit or a bat, or
a brown seal, had begun to talk to her. But also, she knew what he was
unconscious of, his tremendous power of understanding, of apprehending
her living motion. He did not know his own power. He did not know how,
with his full, submerged, watchful eyes, he could look into her and see
her, what she was, see her secrets. He would only want her to be
herself--he knew her verily, with a subconscious, sinister knowledge,
devoid of illusions and hopes.
To Gudrun, there was in Loerke the rock-bottom of all life. Everybody
else had their illusion, must have their illusion, their before and
after. But he, with a perfect stoicism, did without any before and
after, dispensed with all illusion. He did not deceive himself in the
last issue. In the last issue he cared about nothing, he was troubled
about nothing, he made not the slightest attempt to be at one with
anything. He existed a pure, unconnected will, stoical and
momentaneous. There was only his work.
It was curious too, how his poverty, the degradation of his earlier
life, attracted her. There was something insipid and tasteless to her,
in the idea of a gentleman, a man who had gone the usual course through
school and university. A certain violent sympathy, however, came up in
her for this mud-child. He seemed to be the very stuff of the
underworld of life. There was no going beyond him.