To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one's belly and cover one's back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman;and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs;and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one's breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges -- this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying.Nothing else would do, nothing else would satisfy, except this coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling into one's blood.
How fortunate he was, that there was this lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, waiting for him, as he waited for it; how fulfilled he was, how happy!
As he dried himself a little with his handkerchief, he thought about Hermione and the blow.He could feel a pain on the side of his head.But after all, what did it matter? What did Hermione matter, what did people matter altogether? There was this perfect cool loneliness, so lovely and fresh and unexplored.Really, what a mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people, thinking he wanted a woman.He did not want a woman -- not in the least.The leaves and the primroses and the trees, they were really lovely and cool and desirable, they really came into the blood and were added on to him.He was enrichened now immeasurably, and so glad.
It was quite right of Hermione to want to kill him.What had he to do with her? Why should he pretend to have anything to do with human beings at all? Here was his world, he wanted nobody and nothing but the lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, and himself, his own living self.
It was necessary to go back into the world.That was true.But that did not matter, so one knew where one belonged.He knew now where he belonged.
This was his place, his marriage place.The world was extraneous.
He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were mad.But if so, he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity.He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free.He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive.He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness.
It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.
As for the certain grief he felt at the same time, in his soul, that was only the remains of an old ethic, that bade a human being adhere to humanity.But he was weary of the old ethic, of the human being, and of humanity.He loved now the soft, delicate vegetation, that was so cool and perfect.He would overlook the old grief, he would put away the old ethic, he would be free in his new state.
He was aware of the pain in his head becoming more and more difficult every minute.He was walking now along the road to the nearest station.
It was raining and he had no hat.But then plenty of cranks went out nowadays without hats, in the rain.
He wondered again how much of his heaviness of heart, a certain depression, was due to fear, fear lest anybody should have seen him naked lying against the vegetation.What a dread he had of mankind, of other people! It amounted almost to horror, to a sort of dream terror -- his horror of being observed by some other people.If he were on an island, like Alexander Selkirk, with only the creatures and the trees, he would be free and glad, there would be none of this heaviness, this misgiving.He could love the vegetation and be quite happy and unquestioned, by himself.
He had better send a note to Hermione: she might trouble about him, and he did not want the onus of this.So at the station, he wrote saying:
I will go on to town -- I don't want to come back to Breadalby for the present.But it is quite all right -- I don't want you to mind having biffed me, in the least.Tell the others it is just one of my moods.You were quite right, to biff me -- because I know you wanted to.So there's the end of it.
In the train, however, he felt ill.Every motion was insufferable pain, and he was sick.He dragged himself from the station into a cab, feeling his way step by step, like a blind man, and held up only by a dim will.
For a week or two he was ill, but he did not let Hermione know, and she thought he was sulking; there was a complete estrangement between them.
She became rapt, abstracted in her conviction of exclusive righteousness.
She lived in and by her own self-esteem, conviction of her own rightness of spirit.
