Gerald looked at him with eyes blue as the blue-fibred steel of a weapon. He felt awkward, but indifferent. As a matter of fact, he did care terribly, with a great fear.
“Oh,” he said, “I don’t want to die, why should I? But I never trouble. The question doesn’t seem to be on the carpet for me at all. It doesn’t interest me, you know.”
“Timor mortis conturbat me,” quoted Birkin, adding—“No, death doesn’t really seem the point any more. It curiously doesn’t concern one. It’s like an ordinary tomorrow.”
Gerald looked closely at his friend. The eyes of the two men met, and an unspoken understanding was exchanged.
Gerald narrowed his eyes, his face was cool and unscrupulous as he looked at Birkin, impersonally, with a vision that ended in a point in space, strangely keen-eyed and yet blind.
“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.”