Sons and Lovers - Daimon Club

But Dawes, with rather shaky hand, continued to mix the drink.
"Say when," he said.
"Thanks!" replied the other. "But you've no business to get up."
"It does me good, lad," replied Dawes. "I begin to think
I'm right again, then."
"You are about right, you know."
"I am, certainly I am," said Dawes, nodding to him.
"And Len says he can get you on in Sheffield."
Dawes glanced at him again, with dark eyes that agreed with
everything the other would say, perhaps a trifle dominated by him.
"It's funny," said Paul, "starting again. I feel in a lot
bigger mess than you."
"In what way, lad?"
"I don't know. I don't know. It's as if I was in a tangled
sort of hole, rather dark and dreary, and no road anywhere."
"I know--I understand it," Dawes said, nodding. "But you'll
find it'll come all right."
He spoke caressingly.
"I suppose so," said Paul.
Dawes knocked his pipe in a hopeless fashion.
"You've not done for yourself like I have," he said.
Morel saw the wrist and the white hand of the other man
gripping the stem of the pipe and knocking out 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 re-establish 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.