Sons and Lovers
William was white to the lips, and his fists were clenched. He waited
until the children were silent, watching with children’s rage and hate;
then he said:
“You coward, you daren’t do it when I was in.”
But Morel’s blood was up. He swung round on his son. William was
bigger, but Morel was hard-muscled, and mad with fury.
“Dossn’t I?” he shouted. “Dossn’t I? Ha’e much more o’ thy chelp, my
young jockey, an’ I’ll rattle my fist about thee. Ay, an’ I sholl that,
dost see?”
Morel crouched at the knees and showed his fist in an ugly, almost
beast-like fashion. William was white with rage.
“Will yer?” he said, quiet and intense. “It ’ud be the last time,
though.”
Morel danced a little nearer, crouching, drawing back his fist to
strike. William put his fists ready. A light came into his blue eyes,
almost like a laugh. He watched his father. Another word, and the men
would have begun to fight. Paul hoped they would. The three children
sat pale on the sofa.
“Stop it, both of you,” cried Mrs. Morel in a hard voice. “We’ve had
enough for _one_ night. And _you_,” she said, turning on to her
husband, “look at your children!”
Morel glanced at the sofa.
“Look at the children, you nasty little bitch!” he sneered. “Why, what
have _I_ done to the children, I should like to know? But they’re like
yourself; you’ve put ’em up to your own tricks and nasty ways—you’ve
learned ’em in it, you ’ave.”
She refused to answer him. No one spoke. After a while he threw his
boots under the table and went to bed.
“Why didn’t you let me have a go at him?” said William, when his father
was upstairs. “I could easily have beaten him.”
“A nice thing—your own father,” she replied.
“‘_Father!_’” repeated William. “Call _him my_ father!”
“Well, he is—and so—”
“But why don’t you let me settle him? I could do, easily.”
“The idea!” she cried. “It hasn’t come to _that_ yet.”
“No,” he said, “it’s come to worse. Look at yourself. _Why_ didn’t you
let me give it him?”
“Because I couldn’t bear it, so never think of it,” she cried quickly.
And the children went to bed, miserably.
When William was growing up, the family moved from the Bottoms to a
house on the brow of the hill, commanding a view of the valley, which
spread out like a convex cockle-shell, or a clamp-shell, before it. In
front of the house was a huge old ash-tree. The west wind, sweeping
from Derbyshire, caught the houses with full force, and the tree
shrieked again. Morel liked it.
“It’s music,” he said. “It sends me to sleep.”
But Paul and Arthur and Annie hated it. To Paul it became almost a
demoniacal noise. The winter of their first year in the new house their
father was very bad. The children played in the street, on the brim of
the wide, dark valley, until eight o’clock. Then they went to bed.
Their mother sat sewing below. Having such a great space in front of
the house gave the children a feeling of night, of vastness, and of
terror. This terror came in from the shrieking of the tree and the
anguish of the home discord. Often Paul would wake up, after he had
been asleep a long time, aware of thuds downstairs. Instantly he was
wide awake. Then he heard the booming shouts of his father, come home
nearly drunk, then the sharp replies of his mother, then the bang, bang
of his father’s fist on the table, and the nasty snarling shout as the
man’s voice got higher. And then the whole was drowned in a piercing
medley of shrieks and cries from the great, wind-swept ash-tree. The
children lay silent in suspense, waiting for a lull in the wind to hear
what their father was doing. He might hit their mother again. There was
a feeling of horror, a kind of bristling in the darkness, and a sense
of blood. They lay with their hearts in the grip of an intense anguish.
The wind came through the tree fiercer and fiercer. All the chords of
the great harp hummed, whistled, and shrieked. And then came the horror
of the sudden silence, silence everywhere, outside and downstairs. What
was it? Was it a silence of blood? What had he done?
The children lay and breathed the darkness. And then, at last, they
heard their father throw down his boots and tramp upstairs in his
stockinged feet. Still they listened. Then at last, if the wind
allowed, they heard the water of the tap drumming into the kettle,
which their mother was filling for morning, and they could go to sleep
in peace.
So they were happy in the morning—happy, very happy playing, dancing at
night round the lonely lamp-post in the midst of the darkness. But they
had one tight place of anxiety in their hearts, one darkness in their
eyes, which showed all their lives.
Paul hated his father. As a boy he had a fervent private religion.
“Make him stop drinking,” he prayed every night. “Lord, let my father
die,” he prayed very often. “Let him not be killed at pit,” he prayed
when, after tea, the father did not come home from work.
That was another time when the family suffered intensely. The children
came from school and had their teas. On the hob the big black saucepan
was simmering, the stew-jar was in the oven, ready for Morel’s dinner.
He was expected at five o’clock. But for months he would stop and drink
every night on his way from work.
In the winter nights, when it was cold, and grew dark early, Mrs. Morel
would put a brass candlestick on the table, light a tallow candle to
save the gas. The children finished their bread-and-butter, or
dripping, and were ready to go out to play. But if Morel had not come
they faltered. The sense of his sitting in all his pit-dirt, drinking,
after a long day’s work, not coming home and eating and washing, but
sitting, getting drunk, on an empty stomach, made Mrs. Morel unable to
bear herself. From her the feeling was transmitted to the other
children. She never suffered alone any more: the children suffered with
her.
Paul went out to play with the rest. Down in the great trough of
twilight, tiny clusters of lights burned where the pits were. A few
last colliers straggled up the dim field path. The lamplighter came
along. No more colliers came. Darkness shut down over the valley; work
was done. It was night.
Then Paul ran anxiously into the kitchen. The one candle still burned
on the table, the big fire glowed red. Mrs. Morel sat alone. On the hob
the saucepan steamed; the dinner-plate lay waiting on the table. All
the room was full of the sense of waiting, waiting for the man who was
sitting in his pit-dirt, dinnerless, some mile away from home, across
the darkness, drinking himself drunk. Paul stood in the doorway.
“Has my dad come?” he asked.
“You can see he hasn’t,” said Mrs. Morel, cross with the futility of
the question.
Then the boy dawdled about near his mother. They shared the same
anxiety. Presently Mrs. Morel went out and strained the potatoes.
“They’re ruined and black,” she said; “but what do I care?”
Not many words were spoken. Paul almost hated his mother for suffering
because his father did not come home from work.
“What do you bother yourself for?” he said. “If he wants to stop and
get drunk, why don’t you let him?”
“Let him!” flashed Mrs. Morel. “You may well say ‘let him’.”
She knew that the man who stops on the way home from work is on a quick
way to ruining himself and his home. The children were yet young, and
depended on the breadwinner. William gave her the sense of relief,
providing her at last with someone to turn to if Morel failed. But the
tense atmosphere of the room on these waiting evenings was the same.
The minutes ticked away. At six o’clock still the cloth lay on the
table, still the dinner stood waiting, still the same sense of anxiety
and expectation in the room. The boy could not stand it any longer. He
could not go out and play. So he ran in to Mrs. Inger, next door but
one, for her to talk to him. She had no children. Her husband was good
to her but was in a shop, and came home late. So, when she saw the lad
at the door, she called:
“Come in, Paul.”
The two sat talking for some time, when suddenly the boy rose, saying:
“Well, I’ll be going and seeing if my mother wants an errand doing.”
He pretended to be perfectly cheerful, and did not tell his friend what
ailed him. Then he ran indoors.
Morel at these times came in churlish and hateful.
“This is a nice time to come home,” said Mrs. Morel.
“Wha’s it matter to yo’ what time I come whoam?” he shouted.
And everybody in the house was still, because he was dangerous. He ate
his food in the most brutal manner possible, and, when he had done,
pushed all the pots in a heap away from him, to lay his arms on the
table. Then he went to sleep.
Paul hated his father so. The collier’s small, mean head, with its
black hair slightly soiled with grey, lay on the bare arms, and the
face, dirty and inflamed, with a fleshy nose and thin, paltry brows,
was turned sideways, asleep with beer and weariness and nasty temper.
If anyone entered suddenly, or a noise were made, the man looked up and
shouted:
“I’ll lay my fist about thy y’ead, I’m tellin’ thee, if tha doesna stop
that clatter! Dost hear?”
And the two last words, shouted in a bullying fashion, usually at
Annie, made the family writhe with hate of the man.
He was shut out from all family affairs. No one told him anything. The
children, alone with their mother, told her all about the day’s
happenings, everything. Nothing had really taken place in them until it
was told to their mother. But as soon as the father came in, everything
stopped. He was like the scotch in the smooth, happy machinery of the
home. And he was always aware of this fall of silence on his entry, the
shutting off of life, the unwelcome. But now it was gone too far to
alter.
He would dearly have liked the children to talk to him, but they could
not. Sometimes Mrs. Morel would say:
“You ought to tell your father.”
Paul won a prize in a competition in a child’s paper. Everybody was
highly jubilant.
“Now you’d better tell your father when he comes in,” said Mrs. Morel.
“You know how he carries on and says he’s never told anything.”
“All right,” said Paul. But he would almost rather have forfeited the
prize than have to tell his father.
“I’ve won a prize in a competition, dad,” he said. Morel turned round
to him.
“Have you, my boy? What sort of a competition?”
“Oh, nothing—about famous women.”
“And how much is the prize, then, as you’ve got?”
“It’s a book.”
“Oh, indeed!”
“About birds.”
“Hm—hm!”
And that was all. Conversation was impossible between the father and
any other member of the family. He was an outsider. He had denied the
God in him.
The only times when he entered again into the life of his own people
was when he worked, and was happy at work. Sometimes, in the evening,
he cobbled the boots or mended the kettle or his pit-bottle. Then he
always wanted several attendants, and the children enjoyed it. They
united with him in the work, in the actual doing of something, when he
was his real self again.
He was a good workman, dexterous, and one who, when he was in a good
humour, always sang. He had whole periods, months, almost years, of
friction and nasty temper. Then sometimes he was jolly again. It was
nice to see him run with a piece of red-hot iron into the scullery,
crying:
“Out of my road—out of my road!”
Then he hammered the soft, red-glowing stuff on his iron goose, and
made the shape he wanted. Or he sat absorbed for a moment, soldering.
Then the children watched with joy as the metal sank suddenly molten,
and was shoved about against the nose of the soldering-iron, while the
room was full of a scent of burnt resin and hot tin, and Morel was
silent and intent for a minute. He always sang when he mended boots