Women in Love

'God cannot do without man.' It was a saying of some great French

religious teacher. But surely this is false. God can do without man.

God could do without the ichthyosauri and the mastodon. These monsters

failed creatively to develop, so God, the creative mystery, dispensed

with them. In the same way the mystery could dispense with man, should

he too fail creatively to change and develop. The eternal creative

mystery could dispose of man, and replace him with a finer created

being. Just as the horse has taken the place of the mastodon.

It was very consoling to Birkin, to think this. If humanity ran into a

CUL DE SAC and expended itself, the timeless creative mystery would

bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more

lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation. The game was never

up. The mystery of creation was fathomless, infallible, inexhaustible,

forever. Races came and went, species passed away, but ever new species

arose, more lovely, or equally lovely, always surpassing wonder. The

fountain-head was incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits. It

could bring forth miracles, create utter new races and new species, in

its own hour, new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units

of being. To be man was as nothing compared to the possibilities of the

creative mystery. To have one's pulse beating direct from the mystery,

this was perfection, unutterable satisfaction. Human or inhuman

mattered nothing. The perfect pulse throbbed with indescribable being,

miraculous unborn species.

Birkin went home again to Gerald. He went into the room, and sat down

on the bed. Dead, dead and cold!

Imperial Caesar dead, and turned to clay Would stop a hole to keep the wind away.

There was no response from that which had been Gerald. Strange,

congealed, icy substance--no more. No more!

Terribly weary, Birkin went away, about the day's business. He did it

all quietly, without bother. To rant, to rave, to be tragic, to make

situations--it was all too late. Best be quiet, and bear one's soul in

patience and in fullness.

But when he went in again, at evening, to look at Gerald between the

candles, because of his heart's hunger, suddenly his heart contracted,

his own candle all but fell from his hand, as, with a strange

whimpering cry, the tears broke out. He sat down in a chair, shaken by

a sudden access. Ursula who had followed him, recoiled aghast from him,

as he sat with sunken head and body convulsively shaken, making a

strange, horrible sound of tears.

'I didn't want it to be like this--I didn't want it to be like this,'

he cried to himself. Ursula could but think of the Kaiser's: 'Ich habe

as nicht gewollt.' She looked almost with horror on Birkin.