Page:Women in Love, Lawrence, 1920.djvu/69

 WOMEN IN LOVE 61 him go hard and cold. As the train ran on, he sat looking at the land, and Gerald fell away, became as nothing to him. Birkin looked at the land, at the evening, and was think- ing: "Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is man- kind but just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression, is completed and done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is, in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away — time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn't embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as quick as possible." Gerald interrupted him by asking: "Where are you staying in London?" Birkin looked up. "With a man in Soho. I pay part of the rent of a flat, and stop there when I like." "Good idea — have a place more or less your own," said G.-rald. "Yes. But I don't care for it much. I'm tired of the people I am bound to find there." "What kind of people?" "Art — music — London Bohemia — the most pettifogging calculating Bohemia that ever reckoned its pennies. But there are a few decent people, decent in some respects. They are really very thorough rejecters of the world — perhaps they live only in the gesture of rejection and negation — but negatively something, at any rate." "What are they? Painters, musicians?" "Painters, musicians, writers — hangers-on, models, ad- vanced young people, anybody who is openly at outs with the conventions, and belongs to nowhere particularly. They are often young fellows down from the University, and girls who an- living their own lives, as they say."