HE LAY sick and unmoved, in pure opposition to everything. He knew how near to breaking was the vessel that held his life. He knew also how strong and durable it was. And he did not care. Better a thousand times take one's chance with death, than accept a life one did not want. But best of all to persist and persist and persist for ever, till one were satisfied in life.

He knew that Ursula was referred back to him. He knew his life rested with her. But he would rather not live than accept the love she proffered. The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage, a sort of conscription. What it was in him he did not know, but the thought of love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive. He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were. The hot narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent. The way they shut their doors, these married people, and shut themselves in to their own exclusive alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. It was a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted: a kaleidoscope of couples, disjoined, separatist, meaningless entities of married couples. True, he hated promiscuity even worse than marriage, and a liaison was only another kind of coupling, reactionary from the legal marriage. Reaction was a greater bore than action.

On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other broken half. And he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in herself. He wanted sex to revert to the level of the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional process, not as a fulfilment. He believed in sex marriage. But beyond this, he wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.

He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. Desire and aspiration should find their object without all this torture, as now, in a world of plenty of water, simple thirst is inconsiderable, satisfied almost unconsciously. And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him.

But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up.

It filled him with almost insane fury, this calm assumption of the Magna Mater, that all was hers, because she had borne it. Man was hers because she had borne him. A Mater Dolorosa, she had borne him, a Magna Mater, she now claimed him again, soul and body, sex, meaning, and all. He had a horror of the Magna Mater, she was detestable.

She was on a very high horse again, was woman, the Great Mother. Did he not know it in Hermione. Hermione, the humble, the subservient, what was she all the while but the Mater Dolorosa, in her subservience, claiming with horrible, insidious arrogance and female tyranny, her own again, claiming back the man she had borne in suffering. By her very suffering and humility she bound her son with chains, she held him her everlasting prisoner.

And Ursula, Ursula was the same -- or the inverse. She too was the awful, arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest depended. He saw the yellow flare in her eyes, he knew the unthinkable overweening assumption of primacy in her. She was unconscious of it herself. She was only too ready to knock her head on the ground before a man. But this was only when she was so certain of her man, that she could worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of perfect possession.

It was intolerable, this possession at the hands of woman. Always a man must be considered as the broken off fragment of a woman, and the sex was the still aching scar of the laceration. Man must be added on to a woman, before he had any real place or wholeness.

And why? Why should we consider ourselves, men and women, as broken fragments of one whole? It is not true. We are not broken fragments of one whole. Rather we are the singling away into purity and clear being, of things that were mixed. Rather the sex is that which remains in us of the mixed, the unresolved. And passion is the further separating of this mixture, that which is manly being taken into the being of the man, that which is womanly passing to the woman, till the two are clear and whole as angels, the admixture of sex in the highest sense surpassed, leaving two single beings constellated together like two stars.

In the old age, before sex was, we were mixed, each one a mixture. The process of singling into individuality resulted into the great polarisation of sex. The womanly drew to one side, the manly to the other. But the separation was imperfect even them. And so our world-cycle passes. There is now to come the new day, when we are beings each of us, fulfilled in difference. The man is pure man, the woman pure woman, they are perfectly polarised. But there is no longer any of the horrible merging, mingling self-abnegation of love. There is only the pure duality of polarisation, each one free from any contamination of the other. In each, the individual is primal, sex is subordinate, but perfectly polarised. Each has a single, separate being, with its own laws. The man has his pure freedom, the woman hers. Each acknowledges the perfection of the polarised sex-circuit. Each admits the different nature in the other.

So Birkin meditated whilst he was ill. He liked sometimes to be ill enough to take to his bed. For then he got better very quickly, and things came to him clear and sure.

Whilst he was laid up, Gerald came to see him. The two men had a deep, uneasy feeling for each other. Gerald's eyes were quick and restless, his whole manner tense and impatient, he seemed strung up to some activity. According to conventionality, he wore black clothes, he looked formal, handsome and comme il faut. His hair was fair almost to whiteness, sharp like splinters of light, his face was keen and ruddy, his body seemed full of northern energy. Gerald really loved Birkin, though he never quite believed in him. Birkin was too unreal; -- clever, whimsical, wonderful, but not practical enough. Gerald felt that his own understanding was much sounder and safer. Birkin was delightful, a wonderful spirit, but after all, not to be taken seriously, not quite to be counted as a man among men.

`Why are you laid up again?' he asked kindly, taking the sick man's hand. It was always Gerald who was protective, offering the warm shelter of his physical strength.

`For my sins, I suppose,' Birkin said, smiling a little ironically.

`For your sins? Yes, probably that is so. You should sin less, and keep better in health?'

`You'd better teach me.'

He looked at Gerald with ironic eyes.

`How are things with you?' asked Birkin.

`With me?' Gerald looked at Birkin, saw he was serious, and a warm light came into his eyes.

`I don't know that they're any different. I don't see how they could be. There's nothing to change.'

`I suppose you are conducting the business as successfully as ever, and ignoring the demand of the soul.'

`That's it,' said Gerald. `At least as far as the business is concerned. I couldn't say about the soul, I'am sure.'

`No.'

`Surely you don't expect me to?' laughed Gerald.

`No. How are the rest of your affairs progressing, apart from the business?'

`The rest of my affairs? What are those? I couldn't say; I don't know what you refer to.'

`Yes, you do,' said Birkin. `Are you gloomy or cheerful? And what about Gudrun Brangwen?'

`What about her?' A confused look came over Gerald. `Well,' he added, `I don't know. I can only tell you she gave me a hit over the face last time I saw her.'

`A hit over the face! What for?'

`That I couldn't tell you, either.'

`Really! But when?'

`The night of the party -- when Diana was drowned. She was driving the cattle up the hill, and I went after her -- you remember.'

`Yes, I remember. But what made her do that? You didn't definitely ask her for it, I suppose?'

`I? No, not that I know of. I merely said to her, that it was dangerous to drive those Highland bullocks -- as it is. She turned in such a way, and said -- "I suppose you think I'm afraid of you and your cattle, don't you?" So I asked her "why," and for answer she flung me a backhander across the face.'

Birkin laughed quickly, as if it pleased him. Gerald looked at him, wondering, and began to laugh as well, saying:

`I didn't laugh at the time, I assure you. I was never so taken aback in my life.'

`And weren't you furious?'

`Furious? I should think I was. I'd have murdered her for two pins.'

`H'm!' ejaculated Birkin. `Poor Gudrun, wouldn't she suffer afterwards for having given herself away!' He was hugely delighted.

`Would she suffer?' asked Gerald, also amused now.

Both men smiled in malice and amusement.

`Badly, I should think; seeing how self-conscious she is.'

`She is self-conscious, is she? Then what made her do it? For I certainly think it was quite uncalled-for, and quite unjustified.'

`I suppose it was a sudden impulse.'

`Yes, but how do you account for her having such an impulse? I'd done her no harm.'

Birkin shook his head.

`The Amazon suddenly came up in her, I suppose,' he said.

`Well,' replied Gerald, `I'd rather it had been the Orinoco.'

They both laughed at the poor joke. Gerald was thinking how Gudrun had said she would strike the last blow too. But some reserve made him keep this back from Birkin.

`And you resent it?' Birkin asked.

`I don't resent it. I don't care a tinker's curse about it.' He was silent a moment, then he added, laughing. `No, I'll see it through, that's all. She seemed sorry afterwards.'

`Did she? You've not met since that night?'

Gerald's face clouded.

`No,' he said. `We've been -- you can imagine how it's been, since the accident.'

`Yes. Is it calming down?'

`I don't know. It's a shock, of course. But I don't believe mother minds. I really don't believe she takes any notice. And what's so funny, she used to be all for the children -- nothing mattered, nothing whatever mattered but the children. And now, she doesn't take any more notice than if it was one of the servants.'

`No? Did it upset you very much?'

`It's a shock. But I don't feel it very much, really. I don't feel any different. We've all got to die, and it doesn't seem to make any great difference, anyhow, whether you die or not. I can't feel any grief you know. It leaves me cold. I can't quite account for it.'

`You don't care if you die or not?' asked Birkin.

Gerald looked at him with eyes blue as the blue-fibred steel of a weapon. He felt awkward, but indifferent. As a matter of fact, he did care terribly, with a great fear.

`Oh,' he said, `I don't want to die, why should I? But I never trouble. The question doesn't seem to be on the carpet for me at all. It doesn't interest me, you know.'

`Timor mortis conturbat me,' quoted Birkin, adding -- `No, death doesn't really seem the point any more. It curiously doesn't concern one. It's like an ordinary tomorrow.'

Gerald looked closely at his friend. The eyes of the two men met, and an unspoken understanding was exchanged.

Gerald narrowed his eyes, his face was cool and unscrupulous as he looked at Birkin, impersonally, with a vision that ended in a point in space, strangely keen-eyed and yet blind.

`If death isn't the point,' he said, in a strangely abstract, cold, fine voice -- `what is?' He sounded as if he had been found out.

`What is?' re-echoed Birkin. And there was a mocking silence.

`There's long way to go, after the point of intrinsic death, before we disappear,' said Birkin.

`There is,' said Gerald. `But what sort of way?' He seemed to press the other man for knowledge which he himself knew far better than Birkin did.

`Right down the slopes of degeneration -- mystic, universal degeneration. There are many stages of pure degradation to go through: agelong. We live on long after our death, and progressively, in progressive devolution.'

Gerald listened with a faint, fine smile on his face, all the time, as if, somewhere, he knew so much better than Birkin, all about this: as if his own knowledge were direct and personal, whereas ............