Birkin laughed quickly, as if it pleased him. Gerald looked at him, wondering, and began to laugh as well, saying:
“I didn’t laugh at the time, I assure you. I was never so taken aback in my life.”
“And weren’t you furious?”
“Furious? I should think I was. I’d have murdered her for two pins.”
“H’m!” ejaculated Birkin. “Poor Gudrun, wouldn’t she suffer afterwards for having given herself away!” He was hugely delighted.
“Would she suffer?” asked Gerald, also amused now.
Both men smiled in malice and amusement.
“Badly, I should think; seeing how self-conscious she is.”
“She is self-conscious, is she? Then what made her do it? For I certainly think it was quite uncalled-for, and quite unjustified.”
“I suppose it was a sudden impulse.”
“Yes, but how do you account for her having such an impulse? I’d done her no harm.”
Birkin shook his head.
“The Amazon suddenly came up in her, I suppose,” he said.
“Well,” replied Gerald, “I’d rather it had been the Orinoco.”
They both laughed at the poor joke. Gerald was thinking how Gudrun had said she would strike the last blow too. But some reserve made him keep this back from Birkin.
“And you resent it?” Birkin asked.
“I don’t resent it. I don’t care a tinker’s curse about it.” He was silent a moment, then he added, laughing. “No, I’ll see it through, that’s all. She seemed sorry afterwards.”
“Did she? You’ve not met since that night?”
Gerald’s face clouded.
“No,” he said. “We’ve been—you can imagine how it’s been, since the accident.”
“Yes. Is it calming down?”
“I don’t know. It’s a shock, of course. But I don’t believe mother minds. I really don’t believe she takes any notice. And what’s so funny, she used to be all for the children—nothing mattered, nothing whatever mattered but the children. And now, she doesn’t take any more notice than if it was one of the servants.”
“No? Did it upset you very much?”
“It’s a shock. But I don’t feel it very much, really. I don’t feel any different. We’ve all got to die, and it doesn’t seem to make any great difference, anyhow, whether you die or not. I can’t feel any grief, you know. It leaves me cold. I can’t quite account for it.”
“You don’t care if you die or not?” asked Birkin.
Gerald looked at him with eyes blue as the blue-fibred steel of a weapon. He felt awkward, but indifferent. As a matter of fact, he did care terribly, with a great fear.
“Oh,” he said, “I don’t want to die, why should I? But I never trouble. The question doesn’t seem to be on the carpet for me at all. It doesn’t interest me, you know.”
“Timor mortis conturbat me,” quoted Birkin, adding—“No, death doesn’t really seem the point any more. It curiously doesn’t concern one. It’s like an ordinary tomorrow.”
Gerald looked closely at his friend. The eyes of the two men met, and an unspoken understanding was exchanged.
Gerald narrowed his eyes, his face was cool and unscrupulous as he looked at Birkin, impersonally, with a vision that ended in a point in space, strangely keen-eyed and yet blind.
“If death isn’t the point,” he said, in a strangely abstract, cold, fine voice—“what is?” He sounded as if he had been found out.
“What is?” reechoed Birkin. And there was a mocking silence.
“There’s long way to go, after the point of intrinsic death, before we disappear,” said Birkin.
“There is,” said Gerald. “But what sort of way?” He seemed to press the other man for knowledge which he himself knew far better than Birkin did.
“Right down the slopes of degeneration—mystic, universal degeneration. There are many stages of pure degradation to go through: agelong. We live on long after our death, and progressively, in progressive devolution.”
Gerald listened with a faint, fine smile on his face, all the time, as if, somewhere, he knew so much better than Birkin, all about this: as if his own knowledge were direct and personal, whereas Birkin’s was a matter of observation and inference, not quite hitting the nail on the head:—though aiming near enough at it. But he was not going to give himself away. If Birkin could get at the secrets, let him. Gerald would never help him. Gerald would be a dark horse to the end.
“Of course,” he said, with a startling change of conversation, “it is father who really feels it. It will finish him. For him the world collapses. All his care now is for Winnie—he must save Winnie. He says she ought to be sent away to school, but she won’t hear of it, and he’ll never do it. Of course she is in rather a queer way. We’re all of us curiously bad at living. We can do things—but we can’t get on with life at all. It’s curious—a family failing.”
“She oughtn’t to be sent away to school,” said Birkin, who was considering a new proposition.
“She oughtn’t. Why?”
“She’s a queer child—a special child, more special even than you. And in my opinion special children should never be sent away to school. Only moderately ordinary children should be sent to school—so it seems to me.”
“I’m inclined to think just the opposite. I think it would probably make her more normal if she went away and mixed with other children.”
“She wouldn’t mix, you see. You never really mixed, did you? And she wouldn’t be willing even to pretend to. She’s proud, and solitary, and naturally apart. If she has a single nature, why do you want to make her gregarious?”
“No, I don’t want to make her anything. But I think school would be good for her.”
“Was it good for you?”
Gerald’s eyes narrowed uglily. School had been torture to him. Yet he had not questioned whether one should go through
