Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [144]
Gudrun came up quickly, unseen. She was dressed in blue, with woollen yellow stockings, like the Bluecoat boys.br He glanced up in surprise. Her stockings always disconcerted him, the pale-yellow stockings and the heavy heavy black shoes. Winifred, who had been playing about the garden with Mademoiselle and the dogs, came flitting towards Gudrun. The child wore a dress of black-and-white stripes. Her hair was rather short, cut round and hanging level in her neck.
“We’re going to do Bismarck,bs aren’t we?” she said, linking her hand through Gudrun’s arm.
“Yes, we’re going to do Bismarck. Do you want to?”
“Oh yes—oh I do! I want most awfully to do Bismarck. He looks so splendid this morning, so fierce. He’s almost as big as a lion.” And the child chuckled sardonically at her own hyperbole. “He’s a real king, he really is.”
“Bon jour, Mademoiselle,” said the little French governess, wavering up with a slight bow, a bow of the sort that Gudrun loathed, insolent.
“Winifred veut tant faire le portrait de Bismarck—! Oh, mais toute le matinée—‘We will do Bismarck this morning!’—Bismarck, Bismarck, toujours Bismarck! C‘est un lapin, n’est-ce pas, mademoiselle?”
“Oui, c‘est un grand lapin blanc et noir. Vous ne l’avez pas vu?”bt said Gudrun in her good, but rather heavy French.
“Non, mademoiselle, Winifred n‘a jamais voulu me le faire voir. Tant de fois je le lui ai demandé, ‘Qu‘est ce done que ce Bismarck, Winifred?’ Mais elle n‘a pas voulu me le dire. Son Bismarck, c’était un mystère.”
“Oui, c’est un mystère, vraiment un mystère!bu Miss Brangwen, say that Bismarck is a mystery,” cried Winifred.
“Bismarck is a mystery, Bismarck, c’est un mystère, der Bismarck, er ist ein Wunder,” said Gudrun, in mocking incantation.
“Ja er ist ein Wunder,” repeated Winifred, with odd seriousness, under which lay a wicked chuckle.
“Ist er auch ein Wunder?” came the slightly insolent sneering of Mademoiselle.
“Doch!” said Winifred briefly, indifferent.
“Doch ist er nicht ein König. Beesmarck, he was not a king, Winifred, as you have said. He was only—il n’était que chancelier.” bv
“Qu‘est ce qu’un chancelier?” said Winifred, with slightly contemptuous indifference.
“A chancelier is a chancellor, and a chancellor is, I believe, a sort of judge,” said Gerald, coming up and shaking hands with Gudrun. “You’ll have made a song of Bismarck soon,” said he.
Mademoiselle waited, and discreetly made her inclination, and her greeting.
“So they wouldn’t let you see Bismarck, Mademoiselle?” he said.
“Non, Monsieur.”
“Ay, very mean of them. What are you going to do to him, Miss Brangwen? I want him sent to the kitchen and cooked.”
“Oh no,” cried Winifred.
“We’re going to draw him,” said Gudrun.
“Draw him and quarter him and dish him up,” he said, being purposely fatuous.
“Oh no,” cried Winifred with emphasis, chuckling.
Gudrun detected the tang of mockery in him, and she looked up and smiled into his face. He felt his nerves caressed. Their eyes met in knowledge.
“How do you like Shortlands?” he asked.
“Oh, very much,” she said, with nonchalance.
“Glad you do. Have you noticed these flowers?”
He led her along the path. She followed intently. Winifred came, and the governess lingered in the rear. They stopped before some veined salpiglossis flowers.
“Aren’t they wonderful!” she cried, looking at them absorbedly. Strange how her reverential, almost ecstatic admiration of the flowers caressed his nerves. She stooped down, and touched the trumpets, with infinitely fine and delicate-touching finger-tips. It filled him with ease to see her. When she rose, her eyes, hot with the beauty of the flowers, looked into his.
“What are they?” she asked.
“Sort of petunia, I suppose,” he answered. “I don’t really know them.”
“They are quite strangers to me,” she said.
They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.
She was aware of Mademoiselle standing near,