He had succeeded.He had converted the industry into a new and terrible purity.There was a greater output of coal than ever, the wonderful and delicate system ran almost perfectly.He had a set of really clever engineers, both mining and electrical, and they did not cost much.A highly educated man cost very little more than a workman.His managers, who were all rare men, were no more expensive than the old bungling fools of his father's days, who were merely colliers promoted.His chief manager, who had twelve hundred a year, saved the firm at least five thousand.The whole system was now so perfect that Gerald was hardly necessary any more.
It was so perfect that sometimes a strange fear came over him, and he did not know what to do.He went on for some years in a sort of trance of activity.What he was doing seemed supreme, he was almost like a divinity.
He was a pure and exalted activity.
But now he had succeeded -- he had finally succeeded.And once or twice lately, when he was alone in the evening and had nothing to do, he had suddenly stood up in terror, not knowing what he was.And he went to the mirror and looked long and closely at his own face, at his own eyes, seeking for something.He was afraid, in mortal dry fear, but he knew not what of.He looked at his own face.There it was, shapely and healthy and the same as ever, yet somehow, it was not real, it was a mask.He dared not touch it, for fear it should prove to be only a composition mask.His eyes were blue and keen as ever, and as firm in their sockets.Yet he was not sure that they were not blue false bubbles that would burst in a moment and leave clear annihilation.He could see the darkness in them, as if they were only bubbles of darkness.He was afraid that one day he would break down and be a purely meaningless babble lapping round a darkness.
But his will yet held good, he was able to go away and read, and think about things.He liked to read books about the primitive man, books of anthropology, and also works of speculative philosophy.His mind was very active.But it was like a bubble floating in the darkness.At any moment it might burst and leave him in chaos.He would not die.He knew that.
He would go on living, but the meaning would have collapsed out of him, his divine reason would be gone.In a strangely indifferent, sterile way, he was frightened.But he could not react even to the fear.It was as if his centres of feeling were drying up.He remained calm, calculative and healthy, and quite freely deliberate, even whilst he felt, with faint, small but final sterile horror, that his mystic reason was breaking, giving way now, at this crisis.
And it was a strain.He knew there was no equilibrium.He would have to go in some direction, shortly, to find relief.Only Birkin kept the fear definitely off him, saved him his quick sufficiency in life, by the odd mobility and changeableness which seemed to contain the quintessence of faith.But then Gerald must always come away from Birkin, as from a Church service, back to the outside real world of work and life.There it was, it did not alter, and words were futilities.He had to keep himself in reckoning with the world of work and material life.And it became more and more difficult, such a strange pressure was upon him, as if the very middle of him were a vacuum, and outside were an awful tension.
He had found his most satisfactory relief in women.After a debauch with some desperate woman, he went on quite easy and forgetful.The devil of it was, it was so hard to keep up his interest in women nowadays.He didn't care about them any more.A Pussum was all right in her way, but she was an exceptional case, and even she mattered extremely little.No, women, in that sense, were useless to him any more.He felt that his mind needed acute stimulation, before he could be physically roused.