“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.