Death and Love T HOMAS C RICH died slowly, terribly slowly.It seemed impossible to everybody that the thread of life could be drawn out so thin, and yet not break.The sick man lay unutterably weak and spent, kept alive by morphia and by drinks, which he sipped slowly.
He was only half conscious -- a thin strand of consciousness linking the darkness of death with the light of day.Yet his will was unbroken, he was integral, complete.Only he must have perfect stillness about him.
Any presence but that of the nurses was a strain and an effort to him now.Every morning Gerald went into the room, hoping to find his father passed away at last.Yet always he saw the same transparent face, the same dread dark hair on the waxen forehead, and the awful, inchoate dark eyes, which seemed to be decomposing into formless darkness, having only a tiny grain of vision within them.
And always, as the dark, inchoate eyes turned to him, there passed through Gerald's bowels a burning stroke of revolt, that seemed to resound through his whole being, threatening to break his mind with its clangour, and making him mad.
Every morning, the son stood there, erect and taut with life, gleaming in his blondness.The gleaming blondness of his strange, imminent being put the father into a fever of fretful irritation.He could not bear to meet the uncanny, downward look of Gerald's blue eyes.But it was only for a moment.Each on the brink of departure, the father and son looked at each other, then parted.
For a long time Gerald preserved a perfect sang froid, he remained quite collected.But at last, fear undermined him.He was afraid of some horrible collapse in himself.He had to stay and see this thing through.Some perverse will made him watch his father drawn over the borders of life.And yet, now, every day, the great red-hot stroke of horrified fear through the bowels of the son struck a further inflammation.Gerald went about all day with a tendency to cringe, as if there were the point of a sword of Damocles pricking the nape of his neck.
There was no escape -- he was bound up with his father, he had to see him through.And the father's will never relaxed or yielded to death.It would have to snap when death at last snapped it, -- if it did not persist after a physical death.In the same way, the will of the son never yielded.
He stood firm and immune, he was outside this death and this dying.
It was a trial by ordeal.Could he stand and see his father slowly dissolve and disappear in death, without once yielding his will, without once relenting before the omnipotence of death.Like a Red Indian undergoing torture, Gerald would experience the whole process of slow death without wincing or flinching.He even triumphed in it.He somehow wanted this death, even forced it.It was as if he himself were dealing the death, even when he most recoiled in horror.Still, he would deal it, he would triumph through death.
But in the stress of this ordeal, Gerald too lost his hold on the outer, daily life.That which was much to him, came to mean nothing.Work, pleasure -- it was all left behind.He went on more or less mechanically with his business, but this activity was all extraneous.The real activity was this ghastly wrestling for death in his own soul.And his own will should triumph.
Come what might, he would not bow down or submit or acknowledge a master.
He had no master in death.
But as the fight went on, and all that he had been and was continued to be destroyed, so that life was a hollow shell all round him, roaring and clattering like the sound of the sea, a noise in which he participated externally, and inside this hollow shell was all the darkness and fearful space of death, he knew he would have to find reinforcements, otherwise he would collapse inwards upon the great dark void which circled at the centre of his soul.His will held his outer life, his outer mind, his outer being unbroken and unchanged.But the pressure was too great.He would have to find something to make good the equilibrium.Something must come with him into the hollow void of death in his soul, fill it up, and so equalise the pressure within to the pressure without.For day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with darkness, round which whirled the iridescence of his consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the outer life, roared vastly.
In this extremity his instinct led him to Gudrun.He threw away everything now -- he only wanted the relation established with her.He would follow her to the studio, to be near her, to talk to her.He would stand about the room, aimlessly picking up the implements, the lumps of clay, the little figures she had cast -- they were whimsical and grotesque -- looking at them without perceiving them.And she felt him following her, dogging her heels like a doom.She held away from him, and yet she knew he drew always a little nearer, a little nearer.
`I say,' he said to her one evening, in an odd, unthinking, uncertain way, `won't you stay to dinner tonight? I wish you would.'
She started slightly.He spoke to her like a man making a request of another man.
`They'll be expecting me at home,' she said.
`Oh, they won't mind, will they?' he said.`I should be awfully glad if you'd stay.'
Her long silence gave consent at last.
`I'll tell Thomas, shall I?' he said.
`I must go almost immediately after dinner,' she said.
It was a dark, cold evening.There was no fire in the drawing-room, they sat in the library.He was mostly silent, absent, and Winifred talked little.But when Gerald did rouse himself, he smiled and was pleasant and ordinary with her.Then there came over him again the long blanks, of which he was not aware.
She was very much attracted by him.He looked so preoccupied, and his strange, blank silences, which she could not read, moved her and made her wonder over him, made her feel reverential towards him.