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