'Well--' rumbled Hermione, 'I don't know. To me the pleasure of knowing
is so great, so WONDERFUL--nothing has meant so much to me in all life,
as certain knowledge--no, I am sure--nothing.'
'What knowledge, for example, Hermione?' asked Alexander.
Hermione lifted her face and rumbled--
'M--m--m--I don't know . . . But one thing was the stars, when I really
understood something about the stars. One feels so UPLIFTED, so
UNBOUNDED . . .'
Birkin looked at her in a white fury.
'What do you want to feel unbounded for?' he said sarcastically. 'You
don't want to BE unbounded.'
Hermione recoiled in offence.
'Yes, but one does have that limitless feeling,' said Gerald. 'It's
like getting on top of the mountain and seeing the Pacific.'
'Silent upon a peak in Dariayn,' murmured the Italian, lifting her face
for a moment from her book.
'Not necessarily in Dariayn,' said Gerald, while Ursula began to laugh.
Hermione waited for the dust to settle, and then she said, untouched:
'Yes, it is the greatest thing in life--to KNOW. It is really to be
happy, to be FREE.'
'Knowledge is, of course, liberty,' said Mattheson.
'In compressed tabloids,' said Birkin, looking at the dry, stiff little
body of the Baronet. Immediately Gudrun saw the famous sociologist as a
flat bottle, containing tabloids of compressed liberty. That pleased
her. Sir Joshua was labelled and placed forever in her mind.
'What does that mean, Rupert?' sang Hermione, in a calm snub.
'You can only have knowledge, strictly,' he replied, 'of things
concluded, in the past. It's like bottling the liberty of last summer
in the bottled gooseberries.'
'CAN one have knowledge only of the past?' asked the Baronet,
pointedly. 'Could we call our knowledge of the laws of gravitation for
instance, knowledge of the past?'
'Yes,' said Birkin.
'There is a most beautiful thing in my book,' suddenly piped the little
Italian woman. 'It says the man came to the door and threw his eyes
down the street.'
There was a general laugh in the company. Miss Bradley went and looked
over the shoulder of the Contessa.
'See!' said the Contessa.
'Bazarov came to the door and threw his eyes hurriedly down the
street,' she read.
Again there was a loud laugh, the most startling of which was the
Baronet's, which rattled out like a clatter of falling stones.
'What is the book?' asked Alexander, promptly.
'Fathers and Sons, by Turgenev,' said the little foreigner, pronouncing
every syllable distinctly. She looked at the cover, to verify herself.
'An old American edition,' said Birkin.
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