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“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, and 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,da 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.

Ursula too was attracted by Loerke. In both sisters he commanded a certain homage. But there were moments when to Ursula he seemed indescribably inferior, false, a vulgarism.

Both Birkin and Gerald disliked him, Gerald ignoring him with some contempt, Birkin exasperated.

“What do the women find so impressive in that little brat?” Gerald asked.

“God alone knows,” replied Birkin, “unless it’s some sort of appeal he makes to them, which flatters them and has such a power over them.”

Gerald looked up in surprise.

“Does he make an appeal to them?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” replied Birkin. “He is the perfectly subjected being, existing almost like a criminal. And the women rush towards that, like a current of air towards a vacuum.”

“Funny they should rush to that,” said Gerald.

“Makes one mad, too,” said Birkin. “But he has the fascination of pity and repulsion for them, a little obscene monster of the darkness that he is.”

Gerald stood still, suspended in thought.

“What do women want, at the bottom?” he asked.

Birkin shrugged his shoulders.

“God knows,” he said. “Some satisfaction in basic repulsion, it seems to me. They seem to creep down some ghastly tunnel of darkness, and will never be satisfied till they’ve come to the end.”

Gerald looked out into the mist of fine snow that was blowing by. Everywhere was blind to-day, horribly blind.

“And what is the end?” he asked.

Birkin shook his head.

“I’ve not got there yet, so I don’t know. Ask Loerke, he’s pretty near. He is a good many stages further than either you or I can go.

“Yes, but stages further in what?” cried Gerald, irritated.

Birkin sighed, and gathered his brows into a knot of anger.

“Stages further in social hatred,” he said. “He lives like a rat, in the river of corruption, just where it falls over into the bottomless pit. He’s further on than we are. He hates the ideal more acutely. He hates the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him. I expect he is a Jew—or part Jewish.”

“Probably,” said Gerald.

“He is a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.”

“But why does anybody care about him?” cried Gerald.

“Because they hate the ideal also, in their souls. They want to explore the sewers, and he’s the wizard rat that swims ahead.”

Still Gerald