Women in Love

When Mr Crich heard that Gudrun Brangwen might come to help Winifred

with her drawing and modelling he saw a road to salvation for his

child. He believed that Winifred had talent, he had seen Gudrun, he

knew that she was an exceptional person. He could give Winifred into

her hands as into the hands of a right being. Here was a direction and

a positive force to be lent to his child, he need not leave her

directionless and defenceless. If he could but graft the girl on to

some tree of utterance before he died, he would have fulfilled his

responsibility. And here it could be done. He did not hesitate to

appeal to Gudrun.

Meanwhile, as the father drifted more and more out of life, Gerald

experienced more and more a sense of exposure. His father after all had

stood for the living world to him. Whilst his father lived Gerald was

not responsible for the world. But now his father was passing away,

Gerald found himself left exposed and unready before the storm of

living, like the mutinous first mate of a ship that has lost his

captain, and who sees only a terrible chaos in front of him. He did not

inherit an established order and a living idea. The whole unifying idea

of mankind seemed to be dying with his father, the centralising force

that had held the whole together seemed to collapse with his father,

the parts were ready to go asunder in terrible disintegration. Gerald

was as if left on board of a ship that was going asunder beneath his

feet, he was in charge of a vessel whose timbers were all coming apart.

He knew that all his life he had been wrenching at the frame of life to

break it apart. And now, with something of the terror of a destructive

child, he saw himself on the point of inheriting his own destruction.

And during the last months, under the influence of death, and of

Birkin's talk, and of Gudrun's penetrating being, he had lost entirely

that mechanical certainty that had been his triumph. Sometimes spasms

of hatred came over him, against Birkin and Gudrun and that whole set.

He wanted to go back to the dullest conservatism, to the most stupid of

conventional people. He wanted to revert to the strictest Toryism. But

the desire did not last long enough to carry him into action.

During his childhood and his boyhood he had wanted a sort of savagedom.

The days of Homer were his ideal, when a man was chief of an army of

heroes, or spent his years in wonderful Odyssey. He hated remorselessly

the circumstances of his own life, so much that he never really saw

Beldover and the colliery valley. He turned his face entirely away from

the blackened mining region that stretched away on the right hand of

Shortlands, he turned entirely to the country and the woods beyond

Willey Water. It was true that the panting and rattling of the coal

mines could always be heard at Shortlands. But from his earliest

childhood, Gerald had paid no heed to this. He had ignored the whole of

the industrial sea which surged in coal-blackened tides against the

grounds of the house. The world was really a wilderness where one

hunted and swam and rode. He rebelled against all authority. Life was a

condition of savage freedom.