There'd be everything.'
'But how, if there were no people?'
'Do you think that creation depends on MAN!
It merely doesn't.
There are the trees and the grass and birds.
I much prefer to think of the lark rising up in the morning upon a human-less world.
Man is a mistake, he must go.
There is the grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen hosts, actual angels that go about freely when a dirty humanity doesn't interrupt them—and good pure-tissued demons: very nice.'
It pleased Ursula, what he said, pleased her very much, as a phantasy.
Of course it was only a pleasant fancy.
She herself knew too well the actuality of humanity, its hideous actuality.
She knew it could not disappear so cleanly and conveniently.
It had a long way to go yet, a long and hideous way.
Her subtle, feminine, demoniacal soul knew it well.
'If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would go on so marvellously, with a new start, non-human.
Man is one of the mistakes of creation—like the ichthyosauri.
If only he were gone again, think what lovely things would come out of the liberated days;—things straight out of the fire.'
'But man will never be gone,' she said, with insidious, diabolical knowledge of the horrors of persistence. 'The world will go with him.'
'Ah no,' he answered, 'not so.
I believe in the proud angels and the demons that are our fore-runners.
They will destroy us, because we are not proud enough.
The ichthyosauri were not proud: they crawled and floundered as we do.
And besides, look at elder-flowers and bluebells—they are a sign that pure creation takes place—even the butterfly.
But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage—it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.
It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.'
Ursula watched him as he talked.
There seemed a certain impatient fury in him, all the while, and at the same time a great amusement in everything, and a final tolerance. And it was this tolerance she mistrusted, not the fury.
She saw that, all the while, in spite of himself, he would have to be trying to save the world.
And this knowledge, whilst it comforted her heart somewhere with a little self-satisfaction, stability, yet filled her with a certain sharp contempt and hate of him.
She wanted him to herself, she hated the Salvator Mundi touch.
It was something diffuse and generalised about him, which she could not stand.
He would behave in the same way, say the same things, give himself as completely to anybody who came along, anybody and everybody who liked to appeal to him.
It was despicable, a very insidious form of prostitution.
'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.