“I hated it at the time, but I can see it was necessary,” he said. “It brought me into line a bit—and you can’t live unless you do come into line somewhere.”
“Well,” said Birkin, “I begin to think that you can’t live unless you keep entirely out of the line. It’s no good trying to toe the line, when your one impulse is to smash up the line. Winnie is a special nature, and for special natures you must give a special world.”
“Yes, but where’s your special world?” said Gerald.
“Make it. Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself. As a matter of fact, two exceptional people make another world. You and I, we make another, separate world. You don’t want a world same as your brothers-in-law. It’s just the special quality you value. Do you want to be normal or ordinary! It’s a lie. You want to be free and extraordinary, in an extraordinary world of liberty.”
Gerald looked at Birkin with subtle eyes of knowledge. But he would never openly admit what he felt. He knew more than Birkin, in one direction—much more. And this gave him his gentle love for the other man, as if Birkin were in some way young, innocent, childlike: so amazingly clever, but incurably innocent.
“Yet you are so banal as to consider me chiefly a freak,” said Birkin pointedly.
“A freak!” exclaimed Gerald, startled. And his face opened suddenly, as if lighted with simplicity, as when a flower opens out of the cunning bud. “No—I never consider you a freak.” And he watched the other man with strange eyes, that Birkin could not understand. “I feel,” Gerald continued, “that there is always an element of uncertainty about you—perhaps you are uncertain about yourself. But I’m never sure of you. You can go away and change as easily as if you had no soul.”
He looked at Birkin with penetrating eyes. Birkin was amazed. He thought he had all the soul in the world. He stared in amazement. And Gerald, watching, saw the amazing attractive goodliness of his eyes, a young, spontaneous goodness that attracted the other man infinitely, yet filled him with bitter chagrin, because he mistrusted it so much. He knew Birkin could do without him—could forget, and not suffer. This was always present in Gerald’s consciousness, filling him with bitter unbelief: this consciousness of the young, animal-like spontaneity of detachment. It seemed almost like hypocrisy and lying, sometimes, oh, often, on Birkin’s part, to talk so deeply and importantly.
Quite other things were going through Birkin’s mind. Suddenly he saw himself confronted with another problem—the problem of love and eternal conjunction between two men. Of course this was necessary—it had been a necessity inside himself all his life—to love a man purely and fully. Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it.
He lay in the bed and wondered, whilst his friend sat beside him, lost in brooding. Each man was gone in his own thoughts.
“You know how the old German knights used to swear a Blutbruderschaft,” he said to Gerald, with quite a new happy activity in his eyes.
“Make a little wound in their arms, and rub each other’s blood into the cut?” said Gerald.
“Yes—and swear to be true to each other, of one blood, all their lives. That is what we ought to do. No wounds, that is obsolete. But we ought to swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly, and perfectly, finally, without any possibility of going back on it.”
He looked at Gerald with clear, happy eyes of discovery. Gerald looked down at him, attracted, so deeply bondaged in fascinated attraction, that he was mistrustful, resenting the bondage, hating the attraction.
“We will swear to each other, one day, shall we?” pleaded Birkin. “We will swear to stand by each other—be true to each other—ultimately—infallibly—given to each other, organically—without possibility of taking back.”
Birkin sought hard to express himself. But Gerald hardly listened. His face shone with a certain luminous pleasure. He was pleased. But he kept his reserve. He held himself back.
“Shall we swear to each other, one day?” said Birkin, putting out his hand towards Gerald.
Gerald just touched the extended fine, living hand, as if withheld and afraid.
“We’ll leave it till I understand it better,” he said, in a voice of excuse.
Birkin watched him. A little sharp disappointment, perhaps a touch of contempt came into his heart.
“Yes,” he said. “You must tell me what you think, later. You know what I mean? Not sloppy emotionalism. An impersonal union that leaves one free.”
They lapsed both into silence. Birkin was looking at Gerald all the time. He seemed now to see, not the physical, animal man, which he usually saw in Gerald, and which usually he liked so much, but the man himself, complete, and as if fated, doomed, limited. This strange sense of fatality in Gerald, as if he were limited to one form of existence, one knowledge, one activity, a sort of fatal halfness, which to himself seemed wholeness, always overcame Birkin after their moments of passionate approach, and filled him with a sort of contempt, or boredom. It was the insistence on the limitation which so bored Birkin in Gerald. Gerald could never fly away from himself, in real indifferent gaiety. He had a clog, a sort of monomania.
There was silence for a time. Then Birkin said, in a lighter tone, letting the stress of the contact pass:
“Can’t you get a good governess for Winifred?—somebody exceptional?”
“Hermione Roddice suggested we should ask Gudrun to teach her to draw and to model in clay. You know Winnie is astonishingly clever with that plasticine stuff. Hermione declares she is an artist.” Gerald spoke in the usual animated, chatty manner, as if nothing unusual had passed. But Birkin’s manner was full of reminder.
“Really! I didn’t know that. Oh well then, if Gudrun would teach her, it would
