Rabbit G UDRUN KNEW that it was a critical thing for her to go to Shortlands.She knew it was equivalent to accepting Gerald Crich as a lover.And though she hung back, disliking the condition, yet she knew she would go on.She equivocated.She said to herself, in torment recalling the blow and the kiss, `after all, what is it? What is a kiss?
What even is a blow? It is an instant, vanished at once.I can go to Shortlands just for a time, before I go away, if only to see what it is like.' For she had an insatiable curiosity to see and to know everything.
She also wanted to know what Winifred was really like.Having heard the child calling from the steamer in the night, she felt some mysterious connection with her.
Gudrun talked with the father in the library.Then he sent for his daughter.
She came accompanied by Mademoiselle.
`Winnie, this is Miss Brangwen, who will be so kind as to help you with your drawing and making models of your animals,' said the father.
The child looked at Gudrun for a moment with interest, before she came forward and with face averted offered her hand.There was a complete sang froid and indifference under Winifred's childish reserve, a certain irresponsible callousness.
`How do you do?' said the child, not lifting her face.
`How do you do?' said Gudrun.
Then Winifred stood aside, and Gudrun was introduced to Mademoiselle.
`You have a fine day for your walk,' said Mademoiselle, in a bright manner.
` Quite fine,' said Gudrun.
Winifred was watching from her distance.She was as if amused, but rather unsure as yet what this new person was like.She saw so many new persons, and so few who became real to her.Mademoiselle was of no count whatever, the child merely put up with her, calmly and easily, accepting her little authority with faint scorn, compliant out of childish arrogance of indifference.
`Well, Winifred,' said the father, `aren't you glad Miss Brangwen has come? She makes animals and birds in wood and in clay, that the people in London write about in the papers, praising them to the skies.'
Winifred smiled slightly.
`Who told you, Daddie?' she asked.
`Who told me? Hermione told me, and Rupert Birkin.'
`Do you know them?' Winifred asked of Gudrun, turning to her with faint challenge.
`Yes,' said Gudrun.
Winifred readjusted herself a little.She had been ready to accept Gudrun as a sort of servant.Now she saw it was on terms of friendship they were intended to meet.She was rather glad.She had so many half inferiors, whom she tolerated with perfect good-humour.
Gudrun was very calm.She also did not take these things very seriously.
A new occasion was mostly spectacular to her.However, Winifred was a detached, ironic child, she would never attach herself.Gudrun liked her and was intrigued by her.The first meetings went off with a certain humiliating clumsiness.Neither Winifred nor her instructress had any social grace.
Soon, however, they met in a kind of make-belief world.Winifred did not notice human beings unless they were like herself, playful and slightly mocking.She would accept nothing but the world of amusement, and the serious people of her life were the animals she had for pets.On those she lavished, almost ironically, her affection and her companionship.To the rest of the human scheme she submitted with a faint bored indifference.
She had a pekinese dog called Looloo, which she loved.
`Let us draw Looloo,' said Gudrun, `and see if we can get his Looliness, shall we?'
`Darling!' cried Winifred, rushing to the dog, that sat with contemplative sadness on the hearth, and kissing its bulging brow.`Darling one, will you be drawn? Shall its mummy draw its portrait?' Then she chuckled gleefully, and turning to Gudrun, said: `Oh let's!'
They proceeded to get pencils and paper, and were ready.
`Beautifullest,' cried Winifred, hugging the dog, `sit still while its mummy draws its beautiful portrait.' The dog looked up at her with grievous resignation in its large, prominent eyes.She kissed it fervently, and said: `I wonder what mine will be like.It's sure to be awful.'
As she sketched she chuckled to herself, and cried out at times:
`Oh darling, you're so beautiful!'
And again chuckling, she rushed to embrace the dog, in penitence, as if she were doing him some subtle injury.He sat all the time with the resignation and fretfulness of ages on his dark velvety face.She drew slowly, with a wicked concentration in her eyes, her head on one side, an intense stillness over her.She was as if working the spell of some enchantment.Suddenly she had finished.She looked at the dog, and then at her drawing, and then cried, with real grief for the dog, and at the same time with a wicked exultation:
`My beautiful, why did they?'
She took her paper to the dog, and held it under his nose.He turned his head aside as in chagrin and mortification, and she impulsively kissed his velvety bulging forehead.
`'s a Loolie, 's a little Loozie! Look at his portrait, darling, look at his portrait, that his mother has done of him.' She looked at her paper and chuckled.Then, kissing the dog once more, she rose and came gravely to Gudrun, offering her the paper.
It was a grotesque little diagram of a grotesque little animal, so wicked and so comical, a slow smile came over Gudrun's face, unconsciously.And at her side Winifred chuckled with glee, and said:
`It isn't like him, is it? He's much lovelier than that.He's so beautiful--mmm, Looloo, my sweet darling.' And she flew off to embrace the chagrined little dog.He looked up at her with reproachful, saturnine eyes, vanquished in his extreme agedness of being.Then she flew back to her drawing, and chuckled with satisfaction.
`It isn't like him, is it?' she said to Gudrun.
`Yes, it's very like him,' Gudrun replied.
The child treasured her drawing, carried it about with her, and showed it, with a silent embarrassment, to everybody.
`Look,' she said, thrusting the paper into her father's hand.