But his will yet held good, he was able to go away and read, and think
about things. He liked to read books about the primitive man, books of
anthropology, and also works of speculative philosophy. His mind was
very active. But it was like a bubble floating in the darkness. At any
moment it might burst and leave him in chaos. He would not die. He knew
that. He would go on living, but the meaning would have collapsed out
of him, his divine reason would be gone. In a strangely indifferent,
sterile way, he was frightened. But he could not react even to the
fear. It was as if his centres of feeling were drying up. He remained
calm, calculative and healthy, and quite freely deliberate, even whilst
he felt, with faint, small but final sterile horror, that his mystic
reason was breaking, giving way now, at this crisis.
And it was a strain. He knew there was no equilibrium. He would have to
go in some direction, shortly, to find relief. Only Birkin kept the
fear definitely off him, saved him his quick sufficiency in life, by
the odd mobility and changeableness which seemed to contain the
quintessence of faith. But then Gerald must always come away from
Birkin, as from a Church service, back to the outside real world of
work and life. There it was, it did not alter, and words were
futilities. He had to keep himself in reckoning with the world of work
and material life. And it became more and more difficult, such a
strange pressure was upon him, as if the very middle of him were a
vacuum, and outside were an awful tension.
He had found his most satisfactory relief in women. After a debauch
with some desperate woman, he went on quite easy and forgetful. The
devil of it was, it was so hard to keep up his interest in women
nowadays. He didn't care about them any more. A Pussum was all right in
her way, but she was an exceptional case, and even she mattered
extremely little. No, women, in that sense, were useless to him any
more. He felt that his MIND needed acute stimulation, before he could
be physically roused.