'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.