Hare Sitting Up Read Free Page B

It’s been proved again and again that the most surprising people will pack up under strain. And I think Gavin is right with his twilight of the gods stuff. And then, you know – I’m not sure if it’s the same thing – there are people obsessed with a violent pathological loathing of the whole human species. I have one in my own family, as a matter of fact. Imagine giving Jonathan Swift a hydrogen bomb.’
    ‘Jonathan Swift?’ Arthur asked. ‘Is that a chap at Balliol?’
    ‘He wrote a book called Gulliver’s Travels ,’ Jean said crushingly. ‘As it’s a nursery book when the awkward bits have been expurgated, even you might be supposed to have heard of it.’
    ‘All right, all right,’ Arthur said, slightly abashed. ‘But there is a Jonathan Swift at Balliol. I’ve played squash with him.’
    ‘And have you ever,’ Gavin asked, ‘played squash with D H Lawrence?’
    ‘A bearded chap at Trinity,’ Toby added gravely.
    ‘Of course if you have to talk like idiots–’ Arthur said, gravely offended, and reached for a newspaper.
    ‘Perhaps you’d prefer a book?’ Gavin asked, and held out the volume he had opened at the beginning of the journey. ‘I’ll show you at which end to begin.’
    Without rising to this childish insult, Arthur took the book and glanced at the title. ‘ Women in Love ? I’ve read that one.’
    They had all, it seemed, read Women in Love – a fact that surprised Juniper a good deal. But he remembered having been told that, for this generation, Lawrence was the sole novelist to have survived from the beginning of the century.
    ‘Is there something relevant,’ he asked Gavin, ‘in Women in Love ?’
    ‘Something frightfully relevant, if you ask me. Do you remember a character called Rupert Birkin? He ends up all cosy and smug with something he calls an ultimate marriage, while his unenlightened friend Gerald Critch walks out into the snow and gets frozen dead like a rabbit. That’s the story. But, earlier on, Birkin has this hating mankind in the guts neurosis pretty badly.’
    ‘Lawrence had it himself,’ Alice interrupted. And added conscientiously: ‘On one side of his complex nature, that is.’
    ‘Birkin,’ Gavin continued, ‘invites this girl he’s going to have his ultimate marriage with to agree that humanity is dry-rotten, and that healthy young men and women are in fact apples of Sodom with insides full of bitter, corrupt ash. Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and things would be better if every human being perished tomorrow. He asks her – this girl he’s going to sleep with, mind you – whether she doesn’t find this a beautiful clean thought. No more people. Just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up.’
    ‘A hare sitting up?’ Toby asked. ‘And nobody with a gun?’
    ‘The beast will degenerate,’ Arthur said. ‘Nothing to bolt from.’
    ‘And there’s a good deal more of it,’ Gavin went on. ‘Birkin is fanatical. He says he would be ready to die like a shot, to know that the earth would really be swept clean of people. The question is: is there a real mentality like that, or is Lawrence just making it up?’ He turned to Juniper, as if in direct challenge. ‘What do you think, sir?’
    ‘I think that Birkin is putting in rather a tall order. In point of discrimination, I mean. You remember that we were talking about that? Well, it seems that nowadays getting rid of the human beings wouldn’t be too difficult. But I’m not so sure about sparing the hare, or even the grass.’
    ‘Who cares?’ Jean asked. ‘A lot of Women in Love is quite terrific. But Birkin on the hares and the grass is sentimental tosh. I remember Bertrand Russell doing a radio talk about the bomb, and saying something about the innocent birds and trees. Perhaps there are people with whom that sort of thing goes home. But – although, as it happens, I’m rather keen on birds – I’m not one of them. This strikes me as a human world, or nothing.’ Jean