Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [181]
“You! You and your enemies and your bows! A pretty picture you make of yourself. But it takes nobody in but yourself. I jealous! I! What I say,” her voice sprang into flame, “I say because it is true, do you see, because you are you, a foul and false liar, a whited sepulchre. That’s why I say it. And you hear it.”
“And be grateful,” he added, with a satirical grimace.
“Yes,” she cried, “and if you have a spark of decency in you, be grateful.”
“Not having a spark of decency, however—” he retorted.
“No,” she cried, “you haven’t a spark. And so you can go your way, and I’ll go mine. It’s no good, not the slightest. So you can leave me now, I don’t want to go any further with you—leave me—”
“You don’t even know where you are,” he said.
“Oh, don’t bother, I assure you I shall be all right. I’ve got ten shillings in my purse, and that will take me back from anywhere you have brought me to.” She hesitated. The rings were still on her fingers, two on her little finger, one on her ring finger. Still she hesitated.
“Very good,” he said. “The only hopeless thing is a fool.”
“You are quite right,” she said.
Still she hesitated. Then an ugly, malevolent look came over her face, she pulled the rings from her fingers, and tossed them at him. One touched his face, the others hit his coat, and they scattered into the mud.
“And take your rings,” she said, “and go and buy yourself a female elsewhere—there are plenty to be had, who will be quite glad to share your spiritual mess,—or to have your physical mess, and leave your spiritual mess to Hermione.”
With which she walked away, desultorily, up the road. He stood motionless, watching her sullen, rather ugly walk. She was sullenly picking and pulling at the twigs of the hedge as she passed. She grew smaller, she seemed to pass out of his sight. A darkness came over his mind. Only a small, mechanical speck of consciousness hovered near him.
He felt tired and weak. Yet also he was relieved. He gave up his old position. He went and sat on the bank. No doubt Ursula was right. It was true, really, what she said. He knew that his spirituality was concomitant of a process of depravity, a sort of pleasure in self-destruction. There really was a certain stimulant in self-destruction, for him—especially when it was translated spiritually. But then he knew it—he knew it, and had done. And was not Ursula’s way of emotional intimacy, emotional and physical, was it not just as dangerous as Hermione’s abstract spiritual intimacy? Fusion, fusion, this horrible fusion of two beings, which every woman and most men insisted on, was it not nauseous and horrible anyhow, whether it was a fusion of the spirit or of the emotional body? Hermione saw herself as the perfect Idea, to which all men must come: And Ursula was the perfect Womb, the bath of birth, to which all men must come! And both were horrible. Why could they not remain individuals, limited by their own limits? Why this dreadful all-comprehensiveness, this hateful tyranny? Why not leave the other being free, why try to absorb, or melt, or merge? One might abandon oneself utterly to the moments, but not to any other being.
He could not bear to see the rings lying in the pale mud of the road. He picked them up, and wiped them unconsciously on his hands. They were the little tokens of the reality of beauty, the reality of happiness in warm creation. But he had made his hands all dirty and gritty.
There was a darkness over his mind. The terrible knot of consciousness that had persisted there like an obsession was broken, gone, his life was dissolved in darkness over his limbs and his body. But there was a point of anxiety in his heart now. He wanted her to come back. He breathed lightly and regularly like an infant, that breathes innocently, beyond the touch of responsibility.
She