You do the same. If you are of high importance to humanity you are of high importance to yourself. That is why you work so hard at the mines. If you can produce coal to cook five thousand dinners a day, you are five thousand times more important than if you cooked only your own dinner.’
‘I suppose I am,’ laughed Gerald.
‘Can’t you see,’ said Birkin, ‘that to help my neighbour to eat is no more than eating myself. “I eat, thou eatest, he eats, we eat, you eat, they eat”— and what then? Why should every man decline the whole verb. First person singular is enough for me.’
‘You’ve got to start with material things,’ said Gerald. Which statement Birkin ignored.
‘And we’ve got to live for SOMETHING, we’re not just cattle that can graze and have done with it,’ said Gerald.
‘Tell me,’ said Birkin. ‘What do you live for?’
Gerald’s face went baffled.
‘What do I live for?’ he repeated. ‘I suppose I live to work, to produce something, in so far as I am a purposive being. Apart from that, I live because I am living.’
‘And what’s your work? Getting so many more thousands of tons of coal out of the earth every day. And when we’ve got all the coal we want, and all the plush furniture, and pianofortes, and the rabbits are all stewed and eaten, and we’re all warm and our bellies are filled and we’re listening to the young lady performing on the pianoforte — what then? What then, when you’ve made a real fair start with your material things?’
Gerald sat laughing at the words and the mocking humour of the other man. But he was cogitating too.
‘We haven’t got there yet,’ he replied. ‘A good many people are still waiting for the rabbit and the fire to cook it.’
‘So while you get the coal I must chase the rabbit?’ said Birkin, mocking at Gerald.
‘Something like that,’ said Gerald.
Birkin watched him narrowly. He saw the perfect good-humoured callousness, even strange, glistening malice, in Gerald, glistening through the plausible ethics of productivity.
‘Gerald,’ he said, ‘I rather hate you.’
‘I know you do,’ said Gerald. ‘Why do you?’
Birkin mused inscrutably for some minutes.
‘I should like to know if you are conscious of hating me,’ he said at last. ‘Do you ever consciously detest me — hate me with mystic hate? There are odd moments when I hate you starrily.’
Gerald was rather taken aback, even a little disconcerted. He did not quite know what to say.
‘I may, of course, hate you sometimes,’ he said. ‘But I’m not aware of it — never acutely aware of it, that is.’
‘So much the worse,’ said Birkin.
Gerald watched him with curious eyes. He could not quite make him out.
‘So much the worse, is it?’ he repeated.
There was a silence between the two men for some time, as the train ran on. In Birkin’s face was a little irritable tension, a sharp knitting of the brows, keen and difficult. Gerald watched him warily, carefully, rather calculatingly, for he could not decide what he was after.
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 off-hand,’ 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