‘And what is the other?’ asked Birkin quickly.
Gerald looked up at him with hot, strangely-conscious eyes, that the other man could not understand.
‘I can’t say,’ he replied. ‘If I knew THAT—’ He moved uneasily on his feet, and did not finish.
‘You mean if you knew the alternative?’ asked Birkin. ‘And since you don’t know it, marriage is a PIS ALLER.’
Gerald looked up at Birkin with the same hot, constrained eyes.
‘One does have the feeling that marriage is a PIS ALLER,’ he admitted.
‘Then don’t do it,’ said Birkin. ‘I tell you,’ he went on, ‘the same as I’ve said before, marriage in the old sense seems to me repulsive. EGOISME A DEUX is nothing to it. It’s a sort of tacit hunting in couples: the world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests, and stewing in its own little privacy— it’s the most repulsive thing on earth.’
‘I quite agree,’ said Gerald. ‘There’s something inferior about it. But as I say, what’s the alternative.’
‘One should avoid this HOME instinct. It’s not an instinct, it’s a habit of cowardliness. One should never have a HOME.’
‘I agree really,’ said Gerald. ‘But there’s no alternative.’
‘We’ve got to find one. I do believe in a permanent union between a man and a woman. Chopping about is merely an exhaustive process. But a permanent relation between a man and a woman isn’t the last word—it certainly isn’t.’
‘Quite,’ said Gerald.
‘In fact,’ said Birkin, ‘because the relation between man and woman is made the supreme and exclusive relationship, that’s where all the tightness and meanness and insufficiency comes in.’
‘Yes, I believe you,’ said Gerald.
‘You’ve got to take down the love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal. We want something broader. I believe in the ADDITIONAL perfect relationship between man and man—additional to marriage.’
‘I can never see how they can be the same,’ said Gerald.
‘Not the same—but equally important, equally creative, equally sacred, if you like.’
‘I know,’ said Gerald, ‘you believe something like that. Only I can’t FEEL it, you see.’ He put his hand on Birkin’s arm, with a sort of deprecating affection. And he smiled as if triumphantly.
He was ready to be doomed. Marriage was like a doom to him. He was willing to condemn himself in marriage, to become like a convict condemned to the mines of the underworld, living no life in the sun, but having a dreadful subterranean activity. He was willing to accept this. And marriage was the seal of his condemnation. He was willing to be sealed thus in the underworld, like a soul damned but living forever in damnation. But he would not make any pure relationship with any other soul. He could not. Marriage was not the committing of himself into a relationship with Gudrun. It was a committing of himself in acceptance of the established world, he would accept the established order, in which he did not livingly believe, and then he would retreat to the underworld for his life. This he would do.
The other way was to accept Rupert’s offer of alliance, to enter into the bond of pure trust and love with the other man, and then subsequently with the woman. If he pledged himself with the man he would later be able to pledge himself with the woman: not merely in legal marriage, but in absolute, mystic marriage.
Yet he could not accept the offer. There was a numbness upon him, a numbness either of unborn, absent volition, or of atrophy. Perhaps it was the absence of volition. For he was strangely elated at Rupert’s offer. Yet he was still more glad to reject it, not to be committed.
CHAPTER XXVI.
A CHAIR
There was a jumble market every Monday afternoon in the old market-place in town. Ursula and Birkin strayed down there one afternoon. They had been talking of furniture, and they wanted to see if there was any fragment they would like to buy, amid the heaps of rubbish collected on the cobble-stones.
The old market-square was not very large, a mere bare patch of granite setts, usually with a few fruit-stalls under a wall. It was in a poor quarter of the town. Meagre houses stood down one side, there was a hosiery factory, a great blank with myriad oblong windows, at the end, a street of little shops with flagstone pavement down the other side, and, for a crowning monument, the public baths, of new red brick, with a clock-tower. The people who moved about seemed stumpy and sordid, the air seemed to smell rather dirty, there was a sense of many mean streets ramifying off into warrens of meanness. Now and again a great chocolate-and-yellow tramcar ground round a difficult bend under the hosiery factory.
Ursula was superficially thrilled when she found herself out among the common people, in the jumbled place piled with old bedding, heaps of old iron, shabby crockery in pale lots, muffled lots of unthinkable clothing. She and Birkin went unwillingly down the narrow aisle between the rusty wares. He was looking at the goods, she at the people.
She excitedly watched a young woman, who was going to have a baby, and who was turning over a mattress and making a young man, down-at-heel and dejected, feel it also. So secretive and active and anxious the young woman seemed, so reluctant, slinking, the young man. He was going to marry her because she was having a child.
When they had felt the mattress, the young woman asked the old man seated on a stool among his wares, how much it was. He told her, and she turned to the young man. The latter was ashamed, and selfconscious. He turned his face away, though he left his body standing there, and muttered aside. And again the woman anxiously and actively fingered the mattress and added up in her mind and bargained with the old, unclean man. All the while, the young man stood by, shamefaced and down-at-heel, submitting.
‘Look,’ said Birkin, ‘there is a pretty chair.’
‘Charming!’ cried Ursula. ‘Oh, charming.’
It was an arm-chair of simple wood, probably birch, but of such fine delicacy of grace, standing there on the
