They came to the little court, which was shut in by old red walls in whose crevices wall-flowers were growing. The grass was soft and fine and old, a level floor carpeting the court, the sky was blue overhead. Gerald tossed the rabbit down. It crouched still and would not move. Gudrun watched it with faint horror.
“Why doesn’t it move?” she cried.
“It’s skulking,” he said.
She looked up at him, and a slight sinister smile contracted her white face.
“Isn’t it a fool!” she cried. “Isn’t it a sickening fool?” The vindictive mockery in her voice made his brain quiver. Glancing up at him, into his eyes, she revealed again the mocking, white-cruel recognition. There was a league between them, abhorrent to them both. They were implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries.
“How many scratches have you?” he asked, showing his hard forearm, white and hard and torn in red gashes.
“How really vile!” she cried, flushing with a sinister vision. “Mine is nothing.”
She lifted her arm and showed a deep red score down the silken white flesh.
“What a devil!” he exclaimed. But it was as if he had had knowledge of her in the long red rent of her forearm, so silken and soft. He did not want to touch her. He would have to make himself touch her, deliberately. The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond.
“It doesn’t hurt you very much, does it?” he asked, solicitous.