You DON'T love me, you know.
You don't want to serve me.
You only want yourself.'
A shiver of rage went over his veins, at this repeated:
'You don't want to serve me.'
All the paradisal disappeared from him.
'No,' he said, irritated, 'I don't want to serve you, because there is nothing there to serve.
What you want me to serve, is nothing, mere nothing.
It isn't even you, it is your mere female quality.
And I wouldn't give a straw for your female ego—it's a rag doll.'
'Ha!' she laughed in mockery. 'That's all you think of me, is it?
And then you have the impudence to say you love me.'
She rose in anger, to go home.
You want the paradisal unknowing,' she said, turning round on him as he still sat half-visible in the shadow. 'I know what that means, thank you.
You want me to be your thing, never to criticise you or to have anything to say for myself.
You want me to be a mere THING for you!
No thank you! IF you want that, there are plenty of women who will give it to you.
There are plenty of women who will lie down for you to walk over them—GO to them then, if that's what you want—go to them.'
'No,' he said, outspoken with anger. 'I want you to drop your assertive WILL, your frightened apprehensive self-insistence, that is what I want.
I want you to trust yourself so implicitly, that you can let yourself go.'
'Let myself go!' she re-echoed in mockery. 'I can let myself go, easily enough.
It is you who can't let yourself go, it is you who hang on to yourself as if it were your only treasure. YOU—YOU are the Sunday school teacher—YOU—you preacher.'
The amount of truth that was in this made him stiff and unheeding of her.
'I don't mean let yourself go in the Dionysic ecstatic way,' he said. 'I know you can do that.
But I hate ecstasy, Dionysic or any other.
It's like going round in a squirrel cage.
I want you not to care about yourself, just to be there and not to care about yourself, not to insist—be glad and sure and indifferent.'
'Who insists?' she mocked. 'Who is it that keeps on insisting?
It isn't ME!'
There was a weary, mocking bitterness in her voice.
He was silent for some time.
'I know,' he said. 'While ever either of us insists to the other, we are all wrong.
But there we are, the accord doesn't come.'
They sat in stillness under the shadow of the trees by the bank.
The night was white around them, they were in the darkness, barely conscious.
Gradually, the stillness and peace came over them.
She put her hand tentatively on his.
Their hands clasped softly and silently, in peace.
'Do you really love me?' she said.
He laughed.
'I call that your war-cry,' he replied, amused.
'Why!' she cried, amused and really wondering.
'Your insistence—Your war-cry—"A Brangwen, A Brangwen"—an old battle-cry.
Yours is,
"Do you love me?
Yield knave, or die."'
'No,' she said, pleading, 'not like that.
Not like that.
But I must know that you love me, mustn't I?'
'Well then, know it and have done with it.'