'Good idea--have a place more or less your own,' said Gerald.
'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, advanced 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 are living their own lives, as they say.'
'All loose?' said Gerald.
Birkin could see his curiosity roused.
'In one way. Most bound, in another. For all their shockingness, all on
one note.'
He looked at Gerald, and saw how his blue eyes were lit up with a
little flame of curious desire. He saw too how good-looking he was.
Gerald was attractive, his blood seemed fluid and electric. His blue
eyes burned with a keen, yet cold light, there was a certain beauty, a
beautiful passivity in all his body, his moulding.
'We might see something of each other--I am in London for two or three
days,' said Gerald.
'Yes,' said Birkin, 'I don't want to go to the theatre, or the music
hall--you'd better come round to the flat, and see what you can make of
Halliday and his crowd.'
'Thanks--I should like to,' laughed Gerald. 'What are you doing
tonight?'
'I promised to meet Halliday at the Pompadour. It's a bad place, but
there is nowhere else.'
'Where is it?' asked Gerald.
'Piccadilly Circus.'
'Oh yes--well, shall I come round there?'
'By all means, it might amuse you.'
The evening was falling. They had passed Bedford. Birkin watched the
country, and was filled with a sort of hopelessness. He always felt
this, on approaching London.
His dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to an
illness.
'"Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles Miles and miles--"' he
was murmuring to himself, like a man condemned to death. Gerald, who
was very subtly alert, wary in all his senses, leaned forward and asked
smilingly:
'What were you saying?' Birkin glanced at him, laughed, and repeated:
'"Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles, Miles and miles,
Over pastures where the something something sheep Half asleep--"'
Gerald also looked now at the country. And Birkin, who, for some reason
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