Suddenly Birkin’s eyes looked straight and overpowering into those of the other man.
“What do you think is the aim and object of your life, Gerald?” he asked.
Again Gerald was taken aback. He could not think what his friend was getting at. Was he poking fun, or not?
“At this moment, I couldn’t say offhand,” he replied, with faintly ironic humour.
“Do you think love is the be-all and the end-all of life?” Birkin asked, with direct, attentive seriousness.
“Of my own life?” said Gerald.
“Yes.”
There was a really puzzled pause.
“I can’t say,” said Gerald. “It hasn’t been, so far.”
“What has your life been, so far?”
“Oh—finding out things for myself—and getting experiences—and making things go.”
Birkin knitted his brows like sharply moulded steel.
“I find,” he said, “that one needs some one really pure single activity—I should call love a single pure activity. But I don’t really love anybody—not now.”
“Have you ever really loved anybody?” asked Gerald.
“Yes and no,” replied Birkin.
“Not finally?” said Gerald.
“Finally—finally—no,” said Birkin.
“Nor I,” said Gerald.
“And do you want to?” said Birkin.
Gerald looked with a long, twinkling, almost sardonic look into the eyes of the other man.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I do—I want to love,” said Birkin.
“You do?”
“Yes. I want the finality of love.”
“The finality of love,” repeated Gerald. And he waited for a moment.
“Just one woman?” he added. The evening light, flooding yellow along the fields, lit up Birkin’s face with a tense, abstract steadfastness. Gerald still could not make it out.
“Yes, one woman,” said Birkin.
But to Gerald it sounded as if he were insistent rather than confident.
“I don’t believe a woman, and nothing but a woman, will ever make my life,” said Gerald.
“Not the centre and core of it—the love between you and a woman?” asked Birkin.
Gerald’s eyes narrowed with a queer dangerous smile as he watched the other man.
“I never quite feel it that way,” he said.
“You don’t? Then wherein does life centre, for you?”
“I don’t know—that’s what I want somebody to tell me. As far as I can make out, it doesn’t centre at all. It is artificially held together by the social mechanism.”
Birkin pondered as if he would crack something.
“I know,” he said, “it just doesn’t centre. The old ideals are dead as nails—nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman—sort of ultimate marriage—and there isn’t anything else.”
“And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s nothing?” said Gerald.
“Pretty well that—seeing there’s no God.”
“Then we’re hard put to it,” said Gerald. And he turned to look out of the window at the flying, golden landscape.
Birkin could not help seeing how beautiful and soldierly his face was, with a certain courage to be indifferent.
“You think its heavy odds against us?” said Birkin.
“If we’ve got to make our life up out of a woman, one woman, woman only, yes, I do,” said Gerald. “I don’t believe I shall ever make up my life, at that rate.”
Birkin watched him almost angrily.
“You are a born unbeliever,” he said.
“I only feel what I feel,” said Gerald. And he looked again at Birkin almost sardonically, with his blue, manly, sharp-lighted eyes. Birkin’s eyes were at the moment full of anger. But swiftly they became troubled, doubtful, then full of a warm, rich affectionateness and laughter.
“It troubles me very much, Gerald,” he said, wrinkling his brows.
“I can see it does,” said Gerald, uncovering his mouth in a manly, quick, soldierly laugh.
Gerald was held unconsciously by the other man. He wanted to be near him, he wanted to be within his sphere of influence. There was something very congenial to him in Birkin. But yet, beyond this, he did not take much notice. He felt that he, himself, Gerald, had harder and more durable truths than any the other man knew. He felt himself older, more knowing. It was the quick-changing warmth and venality and brilliant warm utterance he loved in his friend. It was the rich play of words and quick interchange of feelings he enjoyed. The real content of the words he never really considered: he himself knew better.
Birkin knew this. He knew that Gerald wanted to be fond of him without taking him seriously. And this made him go hard and cold. As the train ran on, he sat looking at the land, and Gerald fell away, became as nothing to him.
Birkin looked at the land, at the evening, and was thinking: “Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression is completed and done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is, in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away—time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn’t embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as quick as possible.”
Gerald interrupted him by asking,
“Where are you staying in London?”
Birkin looked up.
“With a man in Soho. I pay part of the rent of a flat, and stop there when I like.”
“Good idea—have a place more or less your own,” said Gerald.
“Yes. But I don’t care for it much. I’m tired of the people I am bound to find there.”
“What kind of people?”
“Art—music—London Bohemia—the most pettifogging calculating Bohemia that ever reckoned its pennies. But there are a few decent people, decent in some respects. They are really very thorough rejecters of the world—perhaps they live only in the gesture of rejection and negation—but negatively something, at any rate.”
“What are they?—painters, musicians?”
“Painters, musicians, writers—hangers-on, models, advanced young people, anybody who is openly at outs with the conventions, and belongs to nowhere particularly. They are
