'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.
'You know how the old German knights used to swear a BLUTBRUDERSCHAFT,'
he said to Gerald, with quite a new happy activity in his eyes.
'Make a little wound in their arms, and rub each other's blood into the
cut?' said Gerald.
'Yes--and swear to be true to each other, of one blood, all their
lives. That is what we ought to do. No wounds, that is obsolete. But we
ought to swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly, and
perfectly, finally, without any possibility of going back on it.' He looked at Gerald with clear, happy eyes of discovery. Gerald looked
down at him, attracted, so deeply bondaged in fascinated attraction,
that he was mistrustful, resenting the bondage, hating the attraction.
'We will swear to each other, one day, shall we?' pleaded Birkin. 'We
will swear to stand by each other--be true to each other--ultimately--
infallibly--given to each other, organically--without possibility of
taking back.' Birkin sought hard to express himself. But Gerald hardly listened. His
face shone with a certain luminous pleasure. He was pleased. But he
kept his reserve. He held himself back.