In the midst of this profound darkness, there seemed to glow on her heart the effulgence of a paradise unknown and unrealised. In Ursula the sense of the unrealised world ahead triumphed over everything. The ship's prow cleaved on, with a faint noise of cleavage, into the complete night, without knowing, without seeing, only surging on. They had forgotten where they were, forgotten all that was and all that had been, conscious only in their heart, and there conscious only of this pure trajectory through the surpassing darkness.
There was no sky, no earth, only one unbroken darkness, into which, with a soft, sleeping motion, they seemed to fall like one closed seed of life falling through dark, fathomless space. They seemed to fall away into the profound darkness. And they watched him without making any sound. When his face was near them, he saw the faint pallor of their faces. He felt their presence, and stopped, unsure-then bent forward. They then made out the faintest pallor of his face. One of the ship's crew came along the deck, dark as the darkness, not really visible. It was very cold, and the darkness was palpable. There they sat down, folded together, folded round with the same rug, creeping in nearer and ever nearer to one another, till it seemed they had crept right into each other, and become one substance. It was quite near the very point of the ship, near the black, unpierced space ahead. In the complete obscurity, Birkin found a comparatively sheltered nook, where a great rope was coiled up.
They went right to the bows of the softly plunging vessel. So they left off looking at the faint sparks that glimmered out of nowhere, in the far distance, called England, and turned their faces to the unfathomed night in front. He wanted to be at the tip of their projection. 'Let us go forward, shall we?' said Birkin. And now, at last, as she stood in the stern of the ship, in a pitch-dark, rather blowy night, feeling the motion of the sea, and watching the small, rather desolate little lights that twinkled on the shores of England, as on the shores of nowhere, watched them sinking smaller and smaller on the profound and living darkness, she felt her soul stirring to awake from its anaesthetic sleep. Dimly she had come down to London with Birkin, London had been a vagueness, so had the train-journey to Dover.
She did not really come to until she was on the ship crossing from Dover to Ostend. But they were all vague and indefinite with one another, stiffened in the fate that moved them apart. It was a rather stiff, sad meeting, more like a verification of separateness than a reunion.
She was something that is going to be-soon-soon-very soon. She was not herself,-she was not anything. CONTINENTAL Ursula went on in an unreal suspense, the last weeks before going away.
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