“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
