He reached and touched the dead face. And the sharp, heavy bruise of
ice bruised his living bowels. He wondered if he himself were freezing
too, freezing from the inside. In the short blond moustache the
life-breath was frozen into a block of ice, beneath the silent
nostrils. And this was Gerald!
Again he touched the sharp, almost glittering fair hair of the frozen
body. It was icy-cold, hair icy-cold, almost venomous. Birkin's heart
began to freeze. He had loved Gerald. Now he looked at the shapely,
strange-coloured face, with the small, fine, pinched nose and the manly
cheeks, saw it frozen like an ice-pebble--yet he had loved it. What was
one to think or feel? His brain was beginning to freeze, his blood was
turning to ice-water. So cold, so cold, a heavy, bruising cold pressing
on his arms from outside, and a heavier cold congealing within him, in
his heart and in his bowels.
He went over the snow slopes, to see where the death had been. At last
he came to the great shallow among the precipices and slopes, near the
summit of the pass. It was a grey day, the third day of greyness and
stillness. All was white, icy, pallid, save for the scoring of black
rocks that jutted like roots sometimes, and sometimes were in naked
faces. In the distance a slope sheered down from a peak, with many
black rock-slides.
It was like a shallow pot lying among the stone and snow of the upper
world. In this pot Gerald had gone to sleep. At the far end, the guides
had driven iron stakes deep into the snow-wall, so that, by means of
the great rope attached, they could haul themselves up the massive
snow-front, out on to the jagged summit of the pass, naked to heaven,
where the Marienhutte hid among the naked rocks. Round about, spiked,
slashed snow-peaks pricked the heaven.
Gerald might have found this rope. He might have hauled himself up to
the crest. He might have heard the dogs in the Marienhutte, and found
shelter. He might have gone on, down the steep, steep fall of the
south-side, down into the dark valley with its pines, on to the great
Imperial road leading south to Italy.
He might! And what then? The Imperial road! The south? Italy? What
then? Was it a way out? It was only a way in again. Birkin stood high
in the painful air, looking at the peaks, and the way south. Was it any
good going south, to Italy? Down the old, old Imperial road?
He turned away. Either the heart would break, or cease to care. Best
cease to care. Whatever the mystery which has brought forth man and the
universe, it is a non-human mystery, it has its own great ends, man is
not the criterion. Best leave it all to the vast, creative, non-human
mystery. Best strive with oneself only, not with the universe.