Birkin also stood and watched, Gerald came up in a boat.
'You still here, Rupert?' he said. 'We can't get them.
The bottom slopes, you know, very steep.
The water lies between two very sharp slopes, with little branch valleys, and God knows where the drift will take you.
It isn't as if it was a level bottom.
You never know where you are, with the dragging.'
'Is there any need for you to be working?' said Birkin. 'Wouldn't it be much better if you went to bed?'
'To bed!
Good God, do you think I should sleep?
We'll find 'em, before I go away from here.'
'But the men would find them just the same without you—why should you insist?'
Gerald looked up at him. Then he put his hand affectionately on Birkin's shoulder, saying:
'Don't you bother about me, Rupert.
If there's anybody's health to think about, it's yours, not mine.
How do you feel yourself?'
'Very well.
But you, you spoil your own chance of life—you waste your best self.'
Gerald was silent for a moment. Then he said:
'Waste it?
What else is there to do with it?'
'But leave this, won't you?
You force yourself into horrors, and put a mill-stone of beastly memories round your neck.
Come away now.'
'A mill-stone of beastly memories!' Gerald repeated.
Then he put his hand again affectionately on Birkin's shoulder. 'God, you've got such a telling way of putting things, Rupert, you have.'
Birkin's heart sank.
He was irritated and weary of having a telling way of putting things.
'Won't you leave it?
Come over to my place'—he urged as one urges a drunken man.
'No,' said Gerald coaxingly, his arm across the other man's shoulder. 'Thanks very much, Rupert—I shall be glad to come tomorrow, if that'll do.
You understand, don't you?
I want to see this job through.
But I'll come tomorrow, right enough.
Oh, I'd rather come and have a chat with you than—than do anything else, I verily believe.
Yes, I would.
You mean a lot to me, Rupert, more than you know.'
'What do I mean, more than I know?' asked Birkin irritably.
He was acutely aware of Gerald's hand on his shoulder.
And he did not want this altercation.
He wanted the other man to come out of the ugly misery.
'I'll tell you another time,' said Gerald coaxingly.
'Come along with me now—I want you to come,' said Birkin.
There was a pause, intense and real.
Birkin wondered why his own heart beat so heavily.
Then Gerald's fingers gripped hard and communicative into Birkin's shoulder, as he said:
'No, I'll see this job through, Rupert.
Thank you—I know what you mean.
We're all right, you know, you and me.'
'I may be all right, but I'm sure you're not, mucking about here,' said Birkin.
And he went away.