`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?' re-echoed 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 this torture.He seemed to believe in education through subjection and torment.
`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, child-like: 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.'