Chapter XXV

MARRIAGE OR NOT

The Brangwen family was going to move from Beldover. It was necessary now for the father to be in town.

Birkin had taken out a marriage licence, yet Ursula deferred from day to day. She would not fix any definite time—she still wavered. Her month’s notice to leave the Grammar School was in its third week. Christmas was not far off.

Gerald waited for the Ursula-Birkin marriage. It was something crucial to him.

“Shall we make it a double-barrelled affair?” he said to Birkin one day.

“Who for the second shot?” asked Birkin.

“Gudrun and me,” said Gerald, the venturesome twinkle in his eyes.

Birkin looked at him steadily, as if somewhat taken aback.

“Serious—or joking?” he asked.

“Oh, serious. Shall I? Shall Gudrun and I rush in along with you?”

“Do by all means,” said Birkin. “I didn’t know you’d got that length.”

“What length?” said Gerald, looking at the other man, and laughing.

“Oh yes, we’ve gone all the lengths.”

“There remains to put it on a broad social basis, and to achieve a high moral purpose,” said Birkin.

“Something like that: the length and breadth and height of it,” replied Gerald, smiling.

“Oh well,” said Birkin, “it’s a very admirable step to take, I should say.”

Gerald looked at him closely.

“Why aren’t you enthusiastic?” he asked. “I thought you were such dead nuts on marriage.”

Birkin lifted his shoulders.

“One might as well be dead nuts on noses. There are all sorts of noses, snub and otherwise—”

Gerald laughed.

“And all sorts of marriage, also snub and otherwise?” he said.

“That’s it.”

“And you think if I marry, it will be snub?” asked Gerald quizzically, his head a little on one side.

Birkin laughed quickly.

“How do I know what it will be!” he said. “Don’t lambaste me with my own parallels—”

Gerald pondered a while.

“But I should like to know your opinion, exactly,” he said.

“On your marriage?—or marrying? Why should you want my opinion? I’ve got no opinions. I’m not interested in legal marriage, one way or another. It’s a mere question of convenience.”

Still Gerald watched him closely.

“More than that, I think,” he said seriously. “However you may be bored by the ethics of marriage, yet really to marry, in one’s own personal case, is something critical, final—”

“You mean there is something final in going to the registrar with a woman?”

“If you’re coming back with her, I do,” said Gerald. “It is in some way irrevocable.”

“Yes, I agree,” said Birkin.

“No matter how one regards legal marriage, yet to enter into the married state, in one’s own personal instance, is final—”

“I believe it is,” said Birkin, “somewhere.”

“The question remains then, should one do it,” said Gerald.

Birkin watched him narrowly, with amused eyes.

“You are like Lord Bacon, Gerald,” he said. “You argue it like a lawyer—or like Hamlet’s to-be-or-not-to-be. If I were you I would not marry: but ask Gudrun, not me. You’re not marrying me, are you?”

Gerald did not heed the latter part of this speech.

“Yes,” he said, “one must consider it coldly. It is something critical. One comes to the point where one must take a step in one direction or another. And marriage is one direction—”

“And what is the other?” asked Birkin quickly.

Gerald looked up at him with hot, strangely-conscious eyes, that the other man could not understand.

“I can’t say,” he replied. “If I knew that—” He moved uneasily on his feet, and did not finish.

“You mean if you knew the alternative?” asked Birkin. “And since you don’t know it, marriage is a pis aller.”

Gerald looked up at Birkin with the same hot, constrained eyes.

“One does have the feeling that marriage is a pis aller,” he admitted.

“Then don’t do it,” said Birkin. “I tell you,” he went on, “the same as I’ve said before, marriage in the old sense seems to me repulsive. Égoïsme à deux is nothing to it. It’s a sort of tacit hunting in couples: the world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests, and stewing in its own little privacy—it’s the most repulsive thing on earth.”

“I quite agree,” said Gerald. “There’s something inferior about it. But as I say, what’s the alternative.”

“One should avoid this home instinct. It’s not an instinct, it’s a habit of cowardliness. One should never have a home.”

“I agree really,” said Gerald. “But there’s no alternative.”

“We’ve got to find one. I do believe in a permanent union between a man and a woman. Chopping about is merely an exhaustive process. But a permanent relation between a man and a woman isn’t the last word—it certainly isn’t.”

“Quite,” said Gerald.

“In fact,” said Birkin, “because the relation between man and woman is made the supreme and exclusive relationship, that’s where all the tightness and meanness and insufficiency comes in.”

“Yes, I believe you,” said Gerald.

“You’ve got to take down the love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal. We want something broader. I believe in the additional perfect relationship between man and man—additional to marriage.”

“I can never see how they can be the same,” said Gerald.

“Not the same—but equally important, equally creative, equally sacred, if you like.”

“I know,” said Gerald, “you believe something like that. Only I can’t feel it, you see.” He put his hand on Birkin’s arm, with a sort of deprecating affection. And he smiled as if triumphantly.

He was ready to be doomed. Marriage was like a doom to him. He was willing to condemn himself in marriage, to become like a convict condemned to the mines of the underworld, living no life in the sun, but having a dreadful subterranean activity. He was willing to accept this. And marriage was the seal of his condemnation. He was willing to be sealed thus in the underworld, like a soul damned but living forever in damnation. But he would not make any pure relationship with any other soul. He could not. Marriage was not the committing of himself into a relationship with Gudrun. It was a committing of himself in acceptance of the established world, he would accept the established order, in which he did not livingly believe, and then he would retreat to the underworld for his life. This he would do.

The other way was to accept Rupert’s offer of alliance, to enter into the bond of pure trust and love with the other man, and then subsequently with the woman. If he pledged himself with the man he would later be able to pledge himself with the woman: not merely in legal marriage, but in absolute, mystic marriage.

Yet he could not accept the offer. There was a numbness upon him, a numbness either of unborn, absent volition, or of atrophy. Perhaps it was the absence of volition. For he was strangely elated at Rupert’s offer. Yet he was still more glad to reject it, not to be committed.