'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 sardonically, with his blue, manly, sharp-lighted eyes.
Birkin's eyes were at the moment full of anger.
But swiftly they became troubled, doubtful, then full of a warm, rich affectionateness and laughter.
'It troubles me very much, Gerald,' he said, wrinkling his brows.