________________________________________________
_ 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?'
'Yes, I think. I hope it won't let me to the bottom, that's all. Though
even so, it isn't a great matter, I should come up again. Help me to
get it into the water, will you?'
With combined efforts they turned over the heavy punt and set it
afloat.
'Now,' he said, 'I'll try it and you can watch what happens. Then if it
carries, I'll take you over to the island.'
'Do,' she cried, watching anxiously.
The pond was large, and had that perfect stillness and the dark lustre
of very deep water. There were two small islands overgrown with bushes
and a few trees, towards the middle. Birkin pushed himself off, and
veered clumsily in the pond. Luckily the punt drifted so that he could
catch hold of a willow bough, and pull it to the island.
'Rather overgrown,' he said, looking into the interior, 'but very nice.
I'll come and fetch you. The boat leaks a little.'
In a moment he was with her again, and she stepped into the wet punt.
'It'll float us all right,' he said, and manoeuvred again to the
island.
They landed under a willow tree. She shrank from the little jungle of
rank plants before her, evil-smelling figwort and hemlock. But he
explored into it.
'I shall mow this down,' he said, 'and then it will be romantic--like
Paul et Virginie.'
'Yes, one could have lovely Watteau picnics here,' cried Ursula with
enthusiasm.
His face darkened.
'I don't want Watteau picnics here,' he said.
'Only your Virginie,' she laughed.
'Virginie enough,' he smiled wryly. 'No, I don't want her either.'
Ursula looked at him closely. She had not seen him since Breadalby. He
was very thin and hollow, with a ghastly look in his face.
'You have been ill; haven't you?' she asked, rather repulsed.
'Yes,' he replied coldly.
They had sat down under the willow tree, and were looking at the pond,
from their retreat on the island.
'Has it made you frightened?' she asked.
'What of?' he asked, turning his eyes to look at her. Something in him,
inhuman and unmitigated, disturbed her, and shook her out of her
ordinary self.
'It IS frightening to be very ill, isn't it?' she said.
'It isn't pleasant,' he said. 'Whether one is really afraid of death,
or not, I have never decided. In one mood, not a bit, in another, very
much.'
'But doesn't it make you feel ashamed? I think it makes one so ashamed,
to be ill--illness is so terribly humiliating, don't you think?'
He considered for some minutes.
'May-be,' he said. 'Though one knows all the time one's life isn't
really right, at the source. That's the humiliation. I don't see that
the illness counts so much, after that. One is ill because one doesn't
live properly--can't. It's the failure to live that makes one ill, and
humiliates one.'
'But do you fail to live?' she asked, almost jeering.
'Why yes--I don't make much of a success of my days. One seems always
to be bumping one's nose against the blank wall ahead.'
Ursula laughed. She was frightened, and when she was frightened she
always laughed and pretended to be jaunty.
'Your poor nose!' she said, looking at that feature of his face.
'No wonder it's ugly,' he replied.
She was silent for some minutes, struggling with her own
self-deception. It was an instinct in her, to deceive herself.
'But I'M happy--I think life is AWFULLY jolly,' she said.
'Good,' he answered, with a certain cold indifference.
She reached for a bit of paper which had wrapped a small piece of
chocolate she had found in her pocket, and began making a boat. He
watched her without heeding her. There was something strangely pathetic
and tender in her moving, unconscious finger-tips, that were agitated
and hurt, really.
'I DO enjoy things--don't you?' she asked.
'Oh yes! But it infuriates me that I can't get right, at the really
growing part of me. I feel all tangled and messed up, and I CAN'T get
straight anyhow. I don't know what really to DO. One must do something
somewhere.'
'Why should you always be DOING?' she retorted. 'It is so plebeian. I
think it is much better to be really patrician, and to do nothing but
just be oneself, like a walking flower.'
'I quite agree,' he said, 'if one has burst into blossom. But I can't
get my flower to blossom anyhow. Either it is blighted in the bud, or
has got the smother-fly, or it isn't nourished. Curse it, it isn't even
a bud. It is a contravened knot.'
Again she laughed. He was so very fretful and exasperated. But she was
anxious and puzzled. How was one to get out, anyhow. There must be a
way out somewhere.
There was a silence, wherein she wanted to cry. She reached for another
bit of chocolate paper, and began to fold another boat.
'And why is it,' she asked at length, 'that there is no flowering, no
dignity of human life now?'
'The whole idea is dead. Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really. There
are myriads of human beings hanging on the bush--and they look very
nice and rosy, your healthy young men and women. But they are apples of
Sodom, as a matter of fact, Dead Sea Fruit, gall-apples. It isn't true
that they have any significance--their insides are full of bitter,
corrupt ash.'
'But there ARE good people,' protested Ursula.
'Good enough for the life of today. But mankind is a dead tree, covered
with fine brilliant galls of people.'
Ursula could not help stiffening herself against this, it was too
picturesque and final. But neither could she help making him go on.
'And if it is so, WHY is it?' she asked, hostile. They were rousing
each other to a fine passion of opposition.
'Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because they won't fall
off the tree when they're ripe. They hang on to their old positions
when the position is over-past, till they become infested with little
worms and dry-rot.'
There was a long pause. His voice had become hot and very sarcastic.
Ursula was troubled and bewildered, they were both oblivious of
everything but their own immersion.
'But even if everybody is wrong--where are you right?' she cried,
'where are you any better?'
'I?--I'm not right,' he cried back. 'At least my only rightness lies in
the fact that I know it. I detest what I am, outwardly. I loathe myself
as a human being. Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is
less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the
individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth,
and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is the greatest
thing; they persist in SAYING this, the foul liars, and just look at
what they do! Look at all the millions of people who repeat every
minute that love is the greatest, and charity is the greatest--and see
what they are doing all the time. By their works ye shall know them,
for dirty liars and cowards, who daren't stand by their own actions,
much less by their own words.'
'But,' said Ursula sadly, 'that doesn't alter the fact that love is the
greatest, does it? What they DO doesn't alter the truth of what they
say, does it?'
'Completely, because if what they say WERE true, then they couldn't
help fulfilling it. But they maintain a lie, and so they run amok at
last. It's a lie to say that love is the greatest. You might as well
say that hate is the greatest, since the opposite of everything
balances. What people want is 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, he must 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 the
water'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
become doubtful the next.
'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?
At any 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.' _
Read next: CHAPTER XII. Carpeting
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