'But we'll be still, shall we?' he said.
'Yes,' she said, as if submissively.
And she continued to nestle against him.
But in a little while she drew away and looked at him.
'I must be going home,' she said.
'Must you--how sad,' he replied.
She leaned forward and put up her mouth to be kissed.
'Are you really sad?' she murmured, smiling.
'Yes,' he said, 'I wish we could stay as we were, always.' 'Always! Do you?' she murmured, as he kissed her. And then, out of a
full throat, she crooned 'Kiss me! Kiss me!' And she cleaved close to
him. He kissed her many times. But he too had his idea and his will. He
wanted only gentle communion, no other, no passion now. So that soon
she drew away, put on her hat and went home.
The next day however, he felt wistful and yearning. He thought he had
been wrong, perhaps. Perhaps he had been wrong to go to her with an
idea of what he wanted. Was it really only an idea, or was it the
interpretation of a profound yearning? If the latter, how was it he was
always talking about sensual fulfilment? The two did not agree very
well.
Suddenly he found himself face to face with a situation. It was as
simple as this: fatally simple. On the one hand, he knew he did not
want a further sensual experience--something deeper, darker, than
ordinary life could give. He remembered the African fetishes he had
seen at Halliday's so often. There came back to him one, a statuette
about two feet high, a tall, slim, elegant figure from West Africa, in
dark wood, glossy and suave. It was a woman, with hair dressed high,
like a melon-shaped dome. He remembered her vividly: she was one of his
soul's intimates. Her body was long and elegant, her face was crushed
tiny like a beetle's, she had rows of round heavy collars, like a
column of quoits, on her neck. He remembered her: her astonishing
cultured elegance, her diminished, beetle face, the astounding long
elegant body, on short, ugly legs, with such protuberant buttocks, so
weighty and unexpected below her slim long loins. She knew what he
himself did not know. She had thousands of years of purely sensual,
purely unspiritual knowledge behind her. It must have been thousands of
years since her race had died, mystically: that is, since the relation
between the senses and the outspoken mind had broken, leaving the
experience all in one sort, mystically sensual. Thousands of years ago,
that which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these
Africans: the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and
productive happiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for
knowledge in one sort, mindless progressive knowledge through the
senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge
in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as the beetles have,
which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution.
This was why her face looked like a beetle's: this was why the
Egyptians worshipped the ball-rolling scarab: because of the principle
of knowledge in dissolution and corruption.