‘It troubles me very much, Gerald,’ he said, wrinkling his brows.
‘I can see it does,’ said Gerald, uncovering his mouth in a manly, quick, soldierly laugh.
Gerald was held unconsciously by the other man. He wanted to be near him, he wanted to be within his sphere of influence. There was something very congenial to him in Birkin. But yet, beyond this, he did not take much notice. He felt that he, himself, Gerald, had harder and more durable truths than any the other man knew. He felt himself older, more knowing. It was the quick-changing warmth and venality and brilliant warm utterance he loved in his friend. It was the rich play of words and quick interchange of feelings he enjoyed. The real content of the words he never really considered: he himself knew better.
Birkin knew this. He knew that Gerald wanted to be FOND of him without taking him seriously. And this made him go hard and cold. As the train ran on, he sat looking at the land, and Gerald fell away, became as nothing to him.
Birkin looked at the land, at the evening, and was thinking: ‘Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression is completed and done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is, in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away — time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn’t embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as quick as possible.’
Gerald interrupted him by asking,
‘Where are you staying in London?’
Birkin looked up.
‘With a man in Soho. I pay part of the rent of a flat, and stop there when I like.’
‘Good idea — have a place more or less your own,’ said Gerald.
‘Yes. But I don’t care for it much. I’m tired of the people I am bound to find there.’
‘What kind of people?’
‘Art — music — London Bohemia — the most pettifogging calculating Bohemia that ever reckoned its pennies. But there are a few decent people, decent in some respects. They are really very thorough rejecters of the world — perhaps they live only in the gesture of rejection and negation — but negatively something, at any rate.’
‘What are they? — painters, musicians?’
‘Painters, musicians, writers — hangers-on, models, advanced young people, anybody who is openly at outs with the conventions, and belongs to nowhere particularly. They are often young fellows down from the University, and girls who are living their own lives, as they say.’
‘All loose?’ said Gerald.
Birkin could see his curiosity roused.
‘In one way. Most bound, in another. For all their shockingness, all on one note.’
He looked at Gerald, and saw how his blue eyes were lit up with a little flame of curious desire. He saw too how good-looking he was. Gerald was attractive, his blood seemed fluid and electric. His blue eyes burned with a keen, yet cold light, there was a certain beauty, a beautiful passivity in all his body, his moulding.
‘We might see something of each other — I am in London for two or three days,’ said Gerald.
‘Yes,’ said Birkin, ‘I don’t want to go to the theatre, or the music hall — you’d better come round to the flat, and see what you can make of Halliday and his crowd.’
‘Thanks — I should like to,’ laughed Gerald. ‘What are you doing tonight?’
‘I promised to meet Halliday at the Pompadour. It’s a bad place, but there is nowhere else.’
‘Where is it?’ asked Gerald.
‘Piccadilly Circus.’
‘Oh yes — well, shall I come round there?’
‘By all means, it might amuse you.’
The evening was falling. They had passed Bedford. Birkin watched the country, and was filled with a sort of hopelessness. He always felt this, on approaching London.
His dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to an illness.
‘“Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles Miles and miles —”’ he was murmuring to himself, like a man condemned to death. Gerald, who was very subtly alert, wary in all his senses, leaned forward and asked smilingly:
‘What were you saying?’ Birkin glanced at him, laughed, and repeated:
‘“Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles, Miles and miles, Over pastures where the something something sheep Half asleep —”’
Gerald also looked now at the country. And Birkin, who, for some reason was now tired and dispirited, said to him:
‘I always feel doomed when the train is running into London. I feel such a despair, so hopeless, as if it were the end of the world.’
‘Really!’ said Gerald. ‘And does the end of the world frighten you?’
Birkin lifted his shoulders in a slow shrug.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It does while it hangs imminent and doesn’t fall. But people give me a bad feeling — very bad.’
There was a roused glad smile in Gerald’s eyes.
‘Do they?’ he said. And he watched the other man critically.
In a few minutes the train was running through the disgrace of outspread London. Everybody in the carriage was on the alert, waiting to escape. At last they were under the huge arch of the station, in the tremendous shadow of the town. Birkin shut himself together — he was in now.
The two men went together in a taxi-cab.
‘Don’t you feel like one of the damned?’ asked Birkin, as they sat in a little, swiftly-running enclosure, and watched the hideous great street.
‘No,’ laughed Gerald.
‘It is real death,’ said Birkin.
Chapter 6
Creme De Menthe
They met again in the cafe several hours later. Gerald went through the push doors into the large, lofty room where the faces and heads of the drinkers showed dimly through the haze of smoke, reflected more dimly, and repeated ad infinitum in the great mirrors on the walls, so that one seemed to enter a vague, dim world of shadowy drinkers humming within an atmosphere of blue tobacco smoke. There was, however, the red plush of the seats to give substance within the bubble of pleasure.
Gerald moved in his slow, observant, glistening-attentive motion down between the tables and the people whose shadowy faces looked up as he passed. He seemed to be entering in some strange element, passing into an illuminated new region, among a host of licentious souls. He was pleased, and entertained. He looked over all the dim, evanescent, strangely illuminated faces that bent across the tables. Then he saw Birkin rise and signal to him.
At Birkin’s table was a girl with dark, soft, fluffy hair cut short in the artist fashion, hanging level and full almost like the Egyptian princess’s. She was small and delicately made, with warm colouring and large, dark hostile eyes. There was a delicacy, almost a beauty in all her form, and at the same time a certain attractive grossness of spirit, that made a little spark leap instantly alight