ld have fulfilled his
responsibility. And here it could be done. He did not hesitate to
appeal to Gudrun.

Meanwhile, as the father drifted more and more out of life, Gerald
experienced more and more a sense of exposure. His father after all had
stood for the living world to him. Whilst his father lived Gerald was
not responsible for the world. But now his father was passing away,
Gerald found himself left exposed and unready before the storm of
living, like the mutinous first mate of a ship that has lost his
captain, and who sees only a terrible chaos in front of him. He did not
inherit an established order and a living idea. The whole unifying idea
of mankind seemed to be dying with his father, the centralising force
that had held the whole together seemed to collapse with his father,
the parts were ready to go asunder in terrible disintegration. Gerald
was as if left on board of a ship that was going asunder beneath his
feet, he was in charge of a vessel whose timbers were all coming apart.

He knew that all his life he had been wrenching at the frame of life to
break it apart. And now, with something of the terror of a destructive
child, he saw himself on the point of inheriting his own destruction.
And during the last months, under the influence of death, and of
Birkin's talk, and of Gudrun's penetrating being, he had lost entirely
that mechanical certainty that had been his triumph. Sometimes spasms
of hatred came over him, against Birkin and Gudrun and that whole set.
He wanted to go back to the dullest conservatism, to the most stupid of
conventional people. He wanted to revert to the strictest Toryism. But
the desire did not last long enough to carry him into action.

During his childhood and his boyhood he had wanted a sort of savagedom.
The days of Homer were his ideal, when a man was chief of an army of
heroes, or spent his years in wonderful Odyssey. He hated remorselessly
the circumstances of his own life, so much that he never really saw
Beldover and the colliery valley. He turned his face entirely away from
the blackened mining region that stretched away on the right hand of
Shortlands, he turned entirely to the country and the woods beyond
Willey Water. It was true that the panting and rattling of the coal
mines could always be heard at Shortlands. But from his earliest
childhood, Gerald had paid no heed to this. He had ignored the whole of
the industrial sea which surged in coal-blackened tides again