And what's so funny, she used to be all for the children—nothing mattered, nothing whatever mattered but the children.
And now, she doesn't take any more notice than if it was one of the servants.'
'No?
Did it upset YOU very much?'
'It's a shock.
But I don't feel it very much, really.
I don't feel any different.
We've all got to die, and it doesn't seem to make any great difference, anyhow, whether you die or not.
I can't feel any GRIEF you know.
It leaves me cold.
I can't quite account for it.'
'You don't care if you die or not?' asked Birkin.
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.'
Gerald listened with a faint, fine smile on his face, all the time, as if, somewhere, he knew so much better than Birkin, all about this: as if his own knowledge were direct and personal, whereas Birkin's was a matter of observation and inference, not quite hitting the nail on the head:—though aiming near enough at it.
But he was not going to give himself away.
If Birkin could get at the secrets, let him.
Gerald would never help him.
Gerald would be a dark horse to the end.
'Of course,' he said, with a startling change of conversation, 'it is father who really feels it.
It will finish him.
For him the world collapses.
All his care now is for Winnie—he must save Winnie.
He says she ought to be sent away to school, but she won't hear of it, and he'll never do it.
Of course she IS in rather a queer way.
We're all of us curiously bad at living.
We can do things—but we can't get on with life at all.
It's curious—a family failing.'
'She oughtn't to be sent away to school,' said Birkin, who was considering a new proposition.