'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.