“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.
“Maybe,” 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 fingertips, 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
