Women in Love

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.