'I don't propose at all,' he replied. 'When we really want to go for
something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of
proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for
self-important people.'
The little smile began to die out of Gerald's eyes, and he said,
looking with a cool stare at Birkin:
'So you really think things are very bad?'
'Completely bad.'
The smile appeared again.
'In what way?'
'Every way,' said Birkin. 'We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to
lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and
straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a
blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier
can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a
motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the
Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the Sunday newspapers. It is very
dreary.'
Gerald took a little time to re-adjust himself after this tirade.
'Would you have us live without houses--return to nature?' he asked.
'I would have nothing at all. People only do what they want to do--and
what they are capable of doing. If they were capable of anything else,
there would be something else.'
Again Gerald pondered. He was not going to take offence at Birkin.
'Don't you think the collier's PIANOFORTE, as you call it, is a symbol
for something very real, a real desire for something higher, in the
collier's life?'
'Higher!' cried Birkin. 'Yes. Amazing heights of upright grandeur. It
makes him so much higher in his neighbouring collier's eyes. He sees
himself reflected in the neighbouring opinion, like in a Brocken mist,
several feet taller on the strength of the pianoforte, and he is
satisfied. He lives for the sake of that Brocken spectre, the
reflection of himself in the human opinion. You do the same. If you are
of high importance to humanity you are of high importance to yourself.
That is why you work so hard at the mines. If you can produce coal to
cook five thousand dinners a day, you are five thousand times more
important than if you cooked only your own dinner.'
'I suppose I am,' laughed Gerald.
'Can't you see,' said Birkin, 'that to help my neighbour to eat is no
more than eating myself. "I eat, thou eatest, he eats, we eat, you eat,
they eat"--and what then? Why should every man decline the whole verb.
First person singular is enough for me.'
'You've got to start with material things,' said Gerald. Which
statement Birkin ignored.
'And we've got to live for SOMETHING, we're not just cattle that can
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