‘And do you think it’s true? Do you think we really want a new gospel?’ asked Gerald.
Birkin shrugged his shoulders.
‘I think the people who say they want a new religion are the last to accept anything new. They want novelty right enough. But to stare straight at this life that we’ve brought upon ourselves, and reject it, absolutely smash up the old idols of ourselves, that we sh’ll never do. You’ve got very badly to want to get rid of the old, before anything new will appear—even in the self.’
Gerald watched him closely.
‘You think we ought to break up this life, just start and let fly?’ he asked.
‘This life. Yes I do. We’ve got to bust it completely, or shrivel inside it, as in a tight skin. For it won’t expand any more.’
There was a queer little smile in Gerald’s eyes, a look of amusement, calm and curious.
‘And how do you propose to begin? I suppose you mean, reform the whole order of society?’ he asked.
Birkin had a slight, tense frown between the brows. He too was impatient of the conversation.
‘I don’t propose at all,’ he replied. ‘When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.’
The little smile began to die out of Gerald’s eyes, and he said, looking with a cool stare at Birkin:
‘So you really think things are very bad?’
‘Completely bad.’
The smile appeared again.
‘In what way?’
‘Every way,’ said Birkin. ‘We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the Sunday newspapers. It is very dreary.’
Gerald took a little time to readjust himself after this tirade.
‘Would you have us live without houses—return to nature?’ he asked.
‘I would have nothing at all. People only do what they want to do—and what they are capable of doing. If they were capable of anything else, there would be something else.’
Again Gerald pondered. He was not going to take offence at Birkin.
‘Don’t you think the collier’s PIANOFORTE, as you call it, is a symbol for something very real, a real desire for something higher, in the collier’s life?’
‘Higher!’ cried Birkin. ‘Yes. Amazing heights of upright grandeur. It makes him so much higher in his neighbouring collier’s eyes. He sees himself reflected in the neighbouring opinion, like in a Brocken mist, several feet taller on the strength of the pianoforte, and he is satisfied. He lives for the sake of that Brocken spectre, the reflection of himself in the human opinion. You do the same. If you are of high importance to humanity you are of high importance to yourself. That is why you work so hard at the mines. If you can produce coal to cook five thousand dinners a day, you are five thousand times more important than if you cooked only your own dinner.’
‘I suppose I am,’ laughed Gerald.
‘Can’t you see,’ said Birkin, ‘that to help my neighbour to eat is no more than eating myself. “I eat, thou eatest, he eats, we eat, you eat, they eat”—and what then? Why should every man decline the whole verb. First person singular is enough for me.’
‘You’ve got to start with material things,’ said Gerald. Which statement Birkin ignored.
‘And we’ve got to live for SOMETHING, we’re not just cattle that can graze and have done with it,’ said Gerald.
‘Tell me,’ said Birkin. ‘What do you live for?’
Gerald’s face went baffled.
‘What do I live for?’ he repeated. ‘I suppose I live to work, to produce something, in so far as I am a purposive being. Apart from that, I live because I am living.’
‘And what’s your work? Getting so many more thousands of tons of coal out of the earth every day. And when we’ve got all the coal we want, and all the plush furniture, and pianofortes, and the rabbits are all stewed and eaten, and we’re all warm and our bellies are filled and we’re listening to the young lady performing on the pianoforte—what then? What then, when you’ve made a real fair start with your material things?’
Gerald sat laughing at the words and the mocking humour of the other man. But he was cogitating too.
‘We haven’t got there yet,’ he replied. ‘A good many people are still waiting for the rabbit and the fire to cook it.’
‘So while you get the coal I must chase the rabbit?’ said Birkin, mocking at Gerald.
‘Something like that,’ said Gerald.
Birkin watched him narrowly. He saw the perfect good-humoured callousness, even strange, glistening malice, in Gerald, glistening through the plausible ethics of productivity.
‘Gerald,’ he said, ‘I rather hate you.’
‘I know you do,’ said Gerald. ‘Why do you?’
