“He knew he did not want further sensual experience, he thought. His mind reverted to the African statues in Halliday's rooms. They displayed their thousand upon thousand of years of sensual knowledge, purely unspiritual. Thousands of years ago that which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these Africans. This is what was imminent in him; the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge in one sort, mindless, progressive knowledge through the senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution. Is the day of our creative life finished or are we not ready for the sensual understanding, the knowledge in the mystery of dissolution? The man Ursula would take must be quaffed to the dregs by her, he must render himself up to her. She believed that love surpassed the individual. She believed in an absolute surrender to love. He didn't.”
They then have a violent verbal altercation in which Ursula tells him what she thinks of his obscenity and perverseness in words that admit of no misunderstanding. She then leaves him in a state of wrath and resentment after having thrown the topaz engagement ring, bought from a second-hand dealer, in his face. But her ardour conquers her righteousness and she goes back to him, saying, “See what a flower I found you.” And then it is settled quietly and as if they were normal humans. They go to a hotel and there they have super-corporeal contact that beggars description. As far as can be made out, there is no consortion in the ordinary sense. It is neither love nor passion.
“She had established a rich new circuit, a new current of passional electric energy, between the two of them released from the darkest poles of the body and established in perfect circuit, and she had done this in some mysterious ways by tracing the back of his thighs with her sensitive fingertips, his mysterious loins and his thighs. Something more mystically-physically satisfying than anything she had imagined or known—though she had had some experience—was realised. She had thought that there was no source deeper than the phallic source, but now from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs came the flood of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches.”
They laughed and went to the meal provided. And this is what they had:
“There was a venison pasty, of all things, a large broad-faced cut ham, eggs and cresses, and red beet root, and medlars and apple tart, and tea.”
There is a deep, dark significance in this meal, which the Freudian will understand perfectly, but which to the uninitiated will seem quite meaningless, even after Ursula says, “What good things. How noble it looks.”
There is a lot more about the full mystic knowledge that she gets from his suave loins of darkness, the strange, magical current of force in his back and his loins, that fills with nausea. They finish by driving to Sherwood Forest, taking all their clothes off and beginning anew their effort for fulfilment.
“She was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real utterance.”
I have neither the strength nor the inclination to follow Gudrun in her search for her amatory Glückeritter, or to hear further exposition of the credo of the strange freak of nature that Mr. Lawrence strives to apotheosise. Suffice it to say that the precious quartette go off to the Tyrol, Ursula and Birkin having gone through the formality of marriage; Gudrun and Gerald dispensing with it. And there Gudrun begins writhings which are designed to put all the others in the shade. And in a way they do, because Gerald's violent death is required to facilitate her supreme moment. They introduce a super-degenerate Loerke, a sculptor, who represents the rock bottom of all life to Gudrun.
“There was the look of a little wastrel about him that intrigued her, and an old man's look, that interested her, and then, besides this, an uncanny singleness, that marked out an artist to her. He had come up from a street Arab. He was twenty-six, had thieved, sounded every depth. He saw in Gudrun his soul-mate. He knew her with a subconscious, sinister knowledge, devoid of illusions and hopes. The degradation of his early life also attracted her. He seemed to be the very stuff of the underworld of life. There was no going beyond him. Birkin understood why they should like him, the little obscene monster of the darkness that he is. He is a Jew who lives like a rat, in the river of corruption.”