They found Birkin and Ursula sitting together by the boats, talking and laughing. Birkin had been teasing Ursula.
`Do you smell this little marsh?' he said, sniffing the air. He was very sensitive to scents, and quick in understanding them.
`It's rather nice,' she said.
`No,' he replied, `alarming.'
`Why alarming?' she laughed.
`It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness,' he said, `putting forth lilies and snakes, and the ignis fatuus, and rolling all the time onward. That's what we never take into count -- that it rolls onwards.'
`What does?'
`The other river, the black river. We always consider the silver river of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on and on to heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea, a heaven of angels thronging. But the other is our real reality --'
`But what other? I don't see any other,' said Ursula.
`It is your reality, nevertheless,' he said; `that dark river of dissolution. You see it rolls in us just as the other rolls -- the black river of corruption. And our flowers are of this -- our sea-born Aphrodite, all our white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection, all our reality, nowadays.'
`You mean that Aphrodite is really deathly?' asked Ursula.
`I mean she is the flowering mystery of the death-process, yes,' he replied. `When the stream of synthetic creation lapses, we find ourselves part of the inverse process, the blood of destructive creation. Aphrodite is born in the first spasm of universal dissolution -- then the snakes and swans and lotus -- marsh-flowers -- and Gudrun and Gerald -- born in the process of destructive creation.'
`And you and me --?' she asked.
`Probably,' he replied. `In part, certainly. Whether we are that, in toto, I don't yet know.'
`You mean we are flowers of dissolution -- fleurs du mal? I don't feel as if I were,' she protested.
He was silent for a time.
`I don't feel as if we were, altogether,' he replied. `Some people are pure flowers of dark corruption -- lilies. But there ought to be some roses, warm and flamy. You know Herakleitos says "a dry soul is best." I know so well what that means. Do you?'
`I'm not sure,' Ursula replied. `But what if people are all flowers of dissolution -- when they're flowers at all -- what difference does it make?'
`No difference -- and all the difference. Dissolution rolls on, just as production does,' he said. `It is a progressive process -- and it ends in universal nothing -- the end of the world, if you like. But why isn't the end of the world as good as the beginning?'
`I suppose it isn't,' said Ursula, rather angry.
`Oh yes, ultimately,' he said. `It means a new cycle of creation after -- but not for us. If it is the end, then we are of the end -- fleurs du mal if you like. If we are fleurs du mal, we are not roses of happiness, and there you are.'
`But I think I am,' said Ursula. `I think I am a rose of happiness.'
`Ready-made?' he asked ironically.
`No -- real,' she said, hurt.
`If we are the end, we are not the beginning,' he said.
`Yes we are,' she said. `The beginning comes out of the end.'
`After it, not out of it. After us, not out of us.'
`You are a devil, you know, really,' she said. `You want to destroy our hope. You want us to be deathly.'
`No,' he said, `I only want us to know what we are.'
`Ha!' she cried in anger. `You only want us to know death.'
