They were soft, blind kisses, perfect in their stillness.Yet she held back from them.It was like strange moths, very soft and silent, settling on her from the darkness of her soul.She was uneasy.She drew away.
`Isn't somebody coming?' she said.
So they looked down the dark road, then set off again walking towards Beldover.Then suddenly, to show him she was no shallow prude, she stopped and held him tight, hard against her, and covered his face with hard, fierce kisses of passion.In spite of his otherness, the old blood beat up in him.
`Not this, not this,' he whimpered to himself, as the first perfect mood of softness and sleep-loveliness ebbed back away from the rushing of passion that came up to his limbs and over his face as she drew him.
And soon he was a perfect hard flame of passionate desire for her.Yet in the small core of the flame was an unyielding anguish of another thing.
But this also was lost; he only wanted her, with an extreme desire that seemed inevitable as death, beyond question.
Then, satisfied and shattered, fulfilled and destroyed, he went home away from her, drifting vaguely through the darkness, lapsed into the old fire of burning passion.Far away, far away, there seemed to be a small lament in the darkness.But what did it matter? What did it matter, what did anything matter save this ultimate and triumphant experience of physical passion, that had blazed up anew like a new spell of life.`I was becoming quite dead-alive, nothing but a word-bag,' he said in triumph, scorning his other self.Yet somewhere far off and small, the other hovered.
The men were still dragging the lake when he got back.He stood on the bank and heard Gerald's voice.The water was still booming in the night, the moon was fair, the hills beyond were elusive.The lake was sinking.
There came the raw smell of the banks, in the night air.
Up at Shortlands there were lights in the windows, as if nobody had gone to bed.On the landing-stage was the old doctor, the father of the young man who was lost.He stood quite silent, waiting.Birkin also stood and watched, Gerald came up in a boat.
`You still here, Rupert?' he said.`We can't get them.The bottom slopes, you know, very steep.The water lies between two very sharp slopes, with little branch valleys, and God knows where the drift will take you.It isn't as if it was a level bottom.You never know where you are, with the dragging.'
`Is there any need for you to be working?' said Birkin.`Wouldn't it be much better if you went to bed?'
`To bed! Good God, do you think I should sleep? We'll find 'em, before I go away from here.'
`But the men would find them just the same without you -- why should you insist?'
Gerald looked up at him.Then he put his hand affectionately on Birkin's shoulder, saying:
`Don't you bother about me, Rupert.If there's anybody's health to think about, it's yours, not mine.How do you feel yourself?'
`Very well.But you, you spoil your own chance of life -- you waste your best self.'
Gerald was silent for a moment.Then he said:
`Waste it? What else is there to do with it?'
`But leave this, won't you? You force yourself into horrors, and put a mill-stone of beastly memories round your neck.Come away now.'
`A mill-stone of beastly memories!' Gerald repeated.Then he put his hand again affectionately on Birkin's shoulder.`God, you've got such a telling way of putting things, Rupert, you have.'
Birkin's heart sank.He was irritated and weary of having a telling way of putting things.
`Won't you leave it? Come over to my place' -- he urged as one urges a drunken man.
`No,' said Gerald coaxingly, his arm across the other man's shoulder.
