Meanwhile Ursula had wandered on from Willey Water along the course
of the bright little stream. The afternoon was full of larks' singing. On the
bright hill-sides was a subdued smoulder of gorse. A few forget-me-nots
flowered by the water. There was a rousedness and a glancing
everywhere.
She strayed absorbedly on, over the brooks. She wanted to go to the mill-
pond above. The big mill-house was deserted, save for a labourer and his
wife who lived in the kitchen. So she passed through the empty farm-
yard and through the wilderness of a garden, and mounted the bank by
the sluice. When she got to the top, to see the old, velvety surface of the
pond before her, she noticed a man on the bank, tinkering with a punt. It
was Birkin sawing and hammering away.
She stood at the head of the sluice, looking at him. He was unaware of
anybody's presence. He looked very busy, like a wild animal, active and
intent. She felt she ought to go away, he would not want her. He seemed
to be so much occupied. But she did not want to go away. Therefore she
moved along the bank till he would look up.
Which he soon did. The moment he saw her, he dropped his tools and
came forward, saying:
'How do you do? I'm making the punt water-tight. Tell me if you think it
is right.'
She went along with him.
'You are your father's daughter, so you can tell me if it will do,' he said.
She bent to look at the patched punt.
'I am sure I am my father's daughter,' she said, fearful of having to judge.
'But I don't know anything about carpentry. It LOOKS right, don't you think.
hate—hate and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and
love, they get it. They distil themselves with nitroglycerine, all the lot of
them, out of very love. It's the lie that kills. If we want hate, let us have
it—death, murder, torture, violent destruction—let us have it: but not in
the name of love. But I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It
could go, and there would be no ABSOLUTE loss, if every human being
perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched. Nay, it would be
better. The real tree of life would then be rid of the most ghastly, heavy
crop of Dead Sea Fruit, the intolerable burden of myriad simulacra of
people, an infinite weight of mortal lies.'
'So you'd like everybody in the world destroyed?' said Ursula.
'I should indeed.'
'And the world empty of people?'
'Yes truly. You yourself, don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a
world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?'
The pleasant sincerity of his voice made Ursula pause to consider her
own proposition. And really it WAS attractive: a clean, lovely, humanless
world. It was the REALLY desirable. Her heart hesitated, and exulted.
But still, she was dissatisfied with HIM.
'But,' she objected, 'you'd be dead yourself, so what good would it do
you?'
'I would die like a shot, to know that the earth would really be cleaned of
all the people. It is the most beautiful and freeing thought. Then there
would NEVER be another foul humanity created, for a universal
defilement.'
'No,' said Ursula, 'there would be nothing.'
'What! Nothing? Just because humanity was wiped out? You flatter
yourself. There'd be everything.'
'But how, if there were no people?'
'Do you think that creation depends on MAN! It merely doesn't. There
are the trees and the grass and birds. I much prefer to think of the lark
rising up in the morning upon a human-less world. Man is a mistake, hemust go. There is the grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen hosts,
actual angels that go about freely when a dirty humanity doesn't
interrupt them—and good pure-tissued demons: very nice.'
It pleased Ursula, what he said, pleased her very much, as a phantasy. Of
course it was only a pleasant fancy. She herself knew too well the
actuality of humanity, its hideous actuality. She knew it could not
disappear so cleanly and conveniently. It had a long way to go yet, a long
and hideous way. Her subtle, feminine, demoniacal soul knew it well.
'If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would go on so
marvellously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one of the mistakes
of creation—like the ichthyosauri. If only he were gone again, think what
lovely things would come out of the liberated days;—things straight out
of the fire.'
'But man will never be gone,' she said, with insidious, diabolical
knowledge of the horrors of persistence. 'The world will go with him.'
'Ah no,' he answered, 'not so. I believe in the proud angels and the
demons that are our fore-runners. They will destroy us, because we are
not proud enough. The ichthyosauri were not proud: they crawled and
floundered as we do. And besides, look at elder-flowers and bluebells—
they are a sign that pure creation takes place—even the butterfly. But
humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage—it rots in the chrysalis,
it never will have wings. It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.'
Ursula watched him as he talked. There seemed a certain impatient fury
in him, all the while, and at the same time a great amusement in
everything, and a final tolerance. And it was this tolerance she
mistrusted, not the fury. She saw that, all the while, in spite of himself,
he would have to be trying to save the world. And this knowledge, whilst
it comforted her heart somewhere with a little self-satisfaction, stability,
yet filled her with a certain sharp contempt and hate of him. She wanted
him to herself, she hated the Salvator Mundi touch. It was something
diffuse and generalised about him, which she could not stand. He would
behave in the same way, say the same things, give himself as completely
to anybody who came along, anybody and everybody who liked to appeal
to him. It was despicable, a very insidious form of prostitution.
'But,' she said, 'you believe in individual love, even if you don't believe in
loving humanity—?'
'I don't believe in love at all—that is, any more than I believe in hate, or
in grief. Love is one of the emotions like all the others—and so it is all
right whilst you feel it But I can't see how it becomes an absolute. It is
just part of human relationships, no more. And it is only part of ANY
human relationship. And why one should be required ALWAYS to feel it,
any more than one always feels sorrow or distant joy, I cannot conceive.
Love isn't a desideratum—it is an emotion you feel or you don't feel,
according to circumstance.'
'Then why do you care about people at all?' she asked, 'if you don't
believe in love? Why do you bother about humanity?'
'Why do I? Because I can't get away from it.'
'Because you love it,' she persisted.
It irritated him.
'If I do love it,' he said, 'it is my disease.'
'But it is a disease you don't want to be cured of,' she said, with some
cold sneering.
He was silent now, feeling she wanted to insult him.
'And if you don't believe in love, what DO you believe in?' she asked
mocking. 'Simply in the end of the world, and grass?'
He was beginning to feel a fool.
'I believe in the unseen hosts,' he said.
'And nothing else? You believe in nothing visible, except grass and birds?
Your world is a poor show.'
'Perhaps it is,' he said, cool and superior now he was offended, assuming
a certain insufferable aloof superiority, and withdrawing into his
distance.
Ursula disliked him. But also she felt she had lost something. She looked
at him as he sat crouched on the bank. There was a certain priggish.
Sunday-school stiffness over him, priggish and detestable. And yet, at
the same time, the moulding of him was so quick and attractive, it gave
such a great sense of freedom: the moulding of his brows, his chin, his
whole physique, something so alive, somewhere, in spite of the look of
sickness.
And it was this duality in feeling which he created in her, that made a
fine hate of him quicken in her bowels. There was his wonderful,
desirable life-rapidity, the rare quality of an utterly desirable man: and
there was at the same time this ridiculous, mean effacement into a
Salvator Mundi and a Sunday-school teacher, a prig of the stiffest type.
He looked up at her. He saw her face strangely enkindled, as if suffused
from within by a powerful sweet fire. His soul was arrested in wonder.
She was enkindled in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder and in pure,
perfect attraction, he moved towards her. She sat like a strange queen,
almost supernatural in her glowing smiling richness.
'The point about love,' he said, his consciousness quickly adjusting itself,
'is that we hate the word because we have vulgarised it. It ought to be
prescribed, tabooed from utterance, for many years, till we get a new,
better idea.'
There was a beam of understanding between them.
'But it always means the same thing,' she said.
'Ah God, no, let it not mean that any more,' he cried. 'Let the old
meanings go.'
'But still it is love,' she persisted. A strange, wicked yellow light shone at
him in her eyes.
He hesitated, baffled, withdrawing.
'No,' he said, 'it isn't. Spoken like that, never in the world. You've no
business to utter the word.'
'I must leave it to you, to take it out of the Ark of the Covenant at the
right moment,' she mocked.
Again they looked at each other. She suddenly sprang up, turned her
back to him, and walked away. He too rose slowly and went to thewater's edge, where, crouching, he began to amuse himself
unconsciously. Picking a daisy he dropped it on the pond, so that the
stem was a keel, the flower floated like a little water lily, staring with its
open face up to the sky. It turned slowly round, in a slow, slow Dervish
dance, as it veered away.
He watched it, then dropped another daisy into the water, and after that
another, and sat watching them with bright, absolved eyes, crouching
near on the bank. Ursula turned to look. A strange feeling possessed her,
as if something were taking place. But it was all intangible. And some
sort of control was being put on her. She could not know. She could only
watch the brilliant little discs of the daisies veering slowly in travel on
the dark, lustrous water. The little flotilla was drifting into the light, a
company of white specks in the distance.
'Do let us go to the shore, to follow them,' she said, afraid of being any
longer imprisoned on the island. And they pushed off in the punt.
She was glad to be on the free land again. She went along the bank
towards the sluice. The daisies were scattered broadcast on the pond,
tiny radiant things, like an exaltation, points of exaltation here and there.
Why did they move her so strongly and mystically?
'Look,' he said, 'your boat of purple paper is escorting them, and they are
a convoy of rafts.'
Some of the daisies came slowly towards her, hesitating, making a shy
bright little cotillion on the dark clear water. Their gay bright candour
moved her so much as they came near, that she was almost in tears.
'Why are they so lovely,' she cried. 'Why do I think them so lovely?'
'They are nice flowers,' he said, her emotional tones putting a constraint
on him.
'You know that a daisy is a company of florets, a concourse, become
individual. Don't the botanists put it highest in the line of development?
I believe they do.'
'The compositae, yes, I think so,' said Ursula, who was never very sure of
anything. Things she knew perfectly well, at one moment, seemed to. 'Explain it so, then,' he said. 'The daisy is a perfect little democracy, so
it's the highest of flowers, hence its charm.'
'No,' she cried, 'no—never. It isn't democratic.'
'No,' he admitted. 'It's the golden mob of the proletariat, surrounded by a
showy white fence of the idle rich.'
'How hateful—your hateful social orders!' she cried.
'Quite! It's a daisy—we'll leave it alone.'
'Do. Let it be a dark horse for once,' she said: 'if anything can be a dark
horse to you,' she added satirically.
They stood aside, forgetful. As if a little stunned, they both were
motionless, barely conscious. The little conflict into which they had
fallen had torn their consciousness and left them like two impersonal
forces, there in contact.
He became aware of the lapse. He wanted to say something, to get on to
a new more ordinary footing.
'You know,' he said, 'that I am having rooms here at the mill? Don't you
think we can have some good times?'
'Oh are you?' she said, ignoring all his implication of admitted intimacy.
He adjusted himself at once, became normally distant.
'If I find I can live sufficiently by myself,' he continued, 'I shall give up
my work altogether. It has become dead to me. I don't believe in the
humanity I pretend to be part of, I don't care a straw for the social ideals
I live by, I hate the dying organic form of social mankind—so it can't be
anything but trumpery, to work at education. I shall drop it as soon as I
am clear enough—tomorrow perhaps—and be by myself.'
'Have you enough to live on?' asked Ursula.
'Yes—I've about four hundred a year. That makes it easy for me.'
There was a pause.
'And what about Hermione?' asked Ursula.
'That's over, finally—a pure failure, and never could have been anything
else.'
'But you still know each other?'
'We could hardly pretend to be strangers, could we?'
There was a stubborn pause.
'But isn't that a half-measure?' asked Ursula at length.
'I don't think so,' he said. 'You'll be able to tell me if it is.'
Again there was a pause of some minutes' duration. He was thinking.
'One must throw everything away, everything—let everything go, to get
the one last thing one wants,' he said.
'What thing?' she asked in challenge.
'I don't know—freedom together,' he said.
She had wanted him to say 'love.'
There was heard a loud barking of the dogs below. He seemed disturbed
by it. She did not notice. Only she thought he seemed uneasy.
'As a matter of fact,' he said, in rather a small voice, 'I believe that is
Hermione come now, with Gerald Crich. She wanted to see the rooms
before they are furnished.'
'I know,' said Ursula. 'She will superintend the furnishing for you.'
'Probably. Does it matter?'
'Oh no, I should think not,' said Ursula. 'Though personally, I can't bear
her. I think she is a lie, if you like, you who are always talking about lies.'
Then she ruminated for a moment, when she broke out: 'Yes, and I do
mind if she furnishes your rooms—I do mind. I mind that you keep her
hanging on at all.'
He was silent now, frowning.
'Perhaps,' he said. 'I don't WANT her to furnish the rooms here—and I
don't keep her hanging on. Only, I needn't be churlish to her, need I? Atany rate, I shall have to go down and see them now. You'll come, won't
you?'
'I don't think so,' she said coldly and irresolutely.
'Won't you? Yes do. Come and see the rooms as well. Do come.'