Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (best short novels .txt) 📕

the ash, as if he had given up.

“How old are you?” Paul asked.

“Thirty-nine,” replied Dawes, glancing at him.

Those brown eyes, full of the consciousness of failure, almost pleading for reassurance, for someone to reestablish the man in himself, to warm him, to set him up firm again, troubled Paul.

“You’ll just be in your prime,” said Morel. “You don’t look as if much life had gone out of you.”

The brown eyes of the other flashed suddenly.

“It hasn’t,” he said. “The go is there.”

Paul looked up and laughed.

“We’ve both got plenty of life in us yet to make things fly,” he said.

The eyes of the two men met. They exchanged one look. Having recognised the stress of passion each in the other, they both drank their whisky.

“Yes, begod!” said Dawes, breathless.

There was a pause.

“And I don’t see,” said Paul, “why you shouldn’t go on where you left off.”

“What⁠—” said Dawes, suggestively.

“Yes⁠—fit your old home together again.”

Dawes hid his face and shook his head.

“Couldn’t be done,” he said, and looked up with an ironic smile.

“Why? Because you don’t want?”

“Perhaps.”

They smoked in silence. Dawes showed his teeth as he bit his pipe stem.

“You mean you don’t want her?” asked Paul.

Dawes stared up at the picture with a caustic expression on his face.

“I hardly know,” he said.

The smoke floated softly up.

“I believe she wants you,” said Paul.

“Do you?” replied the other, soft, satirical, abstract.

“Yes. She never really hitched on to me⁠—you were always there in the background. That’s why she wouldn’t get a divorce.”

Dawes continued to stare in a satirical fashion at the picture over the mantelpiece.

“That’s how women are with me,” said Paul. “They want me like mad, but they don’t want to belong to me. And she belonged to you all the time. I knew.”

The triumphant male came up in Dawes. He showed his teeth more distinctly.

“Perhaps I was a fool,” he said.

“You were a big fool,” said Morel.

“But perhaps even then you were a bigger fool,” said Dawes.

There was a touch of triumph and malice in it.

“Do you think so?” said Paul.

They were silent for some time.

“At any rate, I’m clearing out tomorrow,” said Morel.

“I see,” answered Dawes.

Then they did not talk any more. The instinct to murder each other had returned. They almost avoided each other.

They shared the same bedroom. When they retired Dawes seemed abstract, thinking of something. He sat on the side of the bed in his shirt, looking at his legs.

“Aren’t you getting cold?” asked Morel.

“I was lookin’ at these legs,” replied the other.

“What’s up with ’em? They look all right,” replied Paul, from his bed.

“They look all right. But there’s some water in ’em yet.”

“And what about it?”

“Come and look.”

Paul reluctantly got out of bed and went to look at the rather handsome legs of the other man that were covered with glistening, dark gold hair.

“Look here,” said Dawes, pointing to his shin. “Look at the water under here.”

“Where?” said Paul.

The man pressed in his fingertips. They left little dents that filled up slowly.

“It’s nothing,” said Paul.

“You feel,” said Dawes.

Paul tried with his fingers. It made little dents.

“H’m!” he said.

“Rotten, isn’t it?” said Dawes.

“Why? It’s nothing much.”

“You’re not much of a man with water in your legs.”

“I can’t see as it makes any difference,” said Morel. “I’ve got a weak chest.”

He returned to his own bed.

“I suppose the rest of me’s all right,” said Dawes, and he put out the light.

In the morning it was raining. Morel packed his bag. The sea was grey and shaggy and dismal. He seemed to be cutting himself off from life more and more. It gave him a wicked pleasure to do it.

The two men were at the station. Clara stepped out of the train, and came along the platform, very erect and coldly composed. She wore a long coat and a tweed hat. Both men hated her for her composure. Paul shook hands with her at the barrier. Dawes was leaning against the bookstall, watching. His black overcoat was buttoned up to the chin because of the rain. He was pale, with almost a touch of nobility in his quietness. He came forward, limping slightly.

“You ought to look better than this,” she said.

“Oh, I’m all right now.”

The three stood at a loss. She kept the two men hesitating near her.

“Shall we go to the lodging straight off,” said Paul, “or somewhere else?”

“We may as well go home,” said Dawes.

Paul walked on the outside of the pavement, then Dawes, then Clara. They made polite conversation. The sitting-room faced the sea, whose tide, grey and shaggy, hissed not far off.

Morel swung up the big armchair.

“Sit down, Jack,” he said.

“I don’t want that chair,” said Dawes.

“Sit down!” Morel repeated.

Clara took off her things and laid them on the couch. She had a slight air of resentment. Lifting her hair with her fingers, she sat down, rather aloof and composed. Paul ran downstairs to speak to the landlady.

“I should think you’re cold,” said Dawes to his wife. “Come nearer to the fire.”

“Thank you, I’m quite warm,” she answered.

She looked out of the window at the rain and at the sea.

“When are you going back?” she asked.

“Well, the rooms are taken until tomorrow, so he wants me to stop. He’s going back tonight.”

“And then you’re thinking of going to Sheffield?”

“Yes.”

“Are you fit to start work?”

“I’m going to start.”

“You’ve really got a place?”

“Yes⁠—begin on Monday.”

“You don’t look fit.”

“Why don’t I?”

She looked again out of the window instead of answering.

“And have you got lodgings in Sheffield?”

“Yes.”

Again she looked away out of the window. The panes were blurred with streaming rain.

“And can you manage all right?” she asked.

“I s’d think so. I s’ll have to!”

They were silent when Morel returned.

“I shall go by the four-twenty,” he said as he entered.

Nobody answered.

“I wish you’d take your boots off,” he said to Clara.

“There’s a pair of slippers of mine.”

“Thank you,” she said. “They aren’t wet.”

He put the slippers near her feet. She left them there.

Morel sat down. Both the men seemed helpless, and each of them had a rather hunted