Sons and Lovers
Meantime the three children were on the platform at Sethley Bridge, on
the Midland main line, two miles from home. They waited one hour. A
train came—he was not there. Down the line the red and green lights
shone. It was very dark and very cold.
“Ask him if the London train’s come,” said Paul to Annie, when they saw
a man in a tip cap.
“I’m not,” said Annie. “You be quiet—he might send us off.”
But Paul was dying for the man to know they were expecting someone by
the London train: it sounded so grand. Yet he was much too much scared
of broaching any man, let alone one in a peaked cap, to dare to ask.
The three children could scarcely go into the waiting-room for fear of
being sent away, and for fear something should happen whilst they were
off the platform. Still they waited in the dark and cold.
“It’s an hour an’ a half late,” said Arthur pathetically.
“Well,” said Annie, “it’s Christmas Eve.”
They all grew silent. He wasn’t coming. They looked down the darkness
of the railway. There was London! It seemed the utter-most of distance.
They thought anything might happen if one came from London. They were
all too troubled to talk. Cold, and unhappy, and silent, they huddled
together on the platform.
At last, after more than two hours, they saw the lights of an engine
peering round, away down the darkness. A porter ran out. The children
drew back with beating hearts. A great train, bound for Manchester,
drew up. Two doors opened, and from one of them, William. They flew to
him. He handed parcels to them cheerily, and immediately began to
explain that this great train had stopped for _his_ sake at such a
small station as Sethley Bridge: it was not booked to stop.
Meanwhile the parents were getting anxious. The table was set, the chop
was cooked, everything was ready. Mrs. Morel put on her black apron.
She was wearing her best dress. Then she sat, pretending to read. The
minutes were a torture to her.
“H’m!” said Morel. “It’s an hour an’ a ha’ef.”
“And those children waiting!” she said.
“Th’ train canna ha’ come in yet,” he said.
“I tell you, on Christmas Eve they’re _hours_ wrong.”
They were both a bit cross with each other, so gnawed with anxiety. The
ash-tree moaned outside in a cold, raw wind. And all that space of
night from London home! Mrs. Morel suffered. The slight click of the
works inside the clock irritated her. It was getting so late; it was
getting unbearable.
At last there was a sound of voices, and a footstep in the entry.
“Ha’s here!” cried Morel, jumping up.
Then he stood back. The mother ran a few steps towards the door and
waited. There was a rush and a patter of feet, the door burst open.
William was there. He dropped his Gladstone bag and took his mother in
his arms.
“Mater!” he said.
“My boy!” she cried.
And for two seconds, no longer, she clasped him and kissed him. Then
she withdrew and said, trying to be quite normal:
“But how late you are!”
“Aren’t I!” he cried, turning to his father. “Well, dad!”
The two men shook hands.
“Well, my lad!”
Morel’s eyes were wet.
“We thought tha’d niver be commin’,” he said.
“Oh, I’d come!” exclaimed William.
Then the son turned round to his mother.
“But you look well,” she said proudly, laughing.
“Well!” he exclaimed. “I should think so—coming home!”
He was a fine fellow, big, straight, and fearless-looking. He looked
round at the evergreens and the kissing-bunch, and the little tarts
that lay in their tins on the hearth.
“By jove! mother, it’s not different!” he said, as if in relief.
Everybody was still for a second. Then he suddenly sprang forward,
picked a tart from the hearth, and pushed it whole into his mouth.
“Well, did iver you see such a parish oven!” the father exclaimed.
He had brought them endless presents. Every penny he had he had spent
on them. There was a sense of luxury overflowing in the house. For his
mother there was an umbrella with gold on the pale handle. She kept it
to her dying day, and would have lost anything rather than that.
Everybody had something gorgeous, and besides, there were pounds of
unknown sweets: Turkish delight, crystallised pineapple, and such-like
things which, the children thought, only the splendour of London could
provide. And Paul boasted of these sweets among his friends.
“Real pineapple, cut off in slices, and then turned into crystal—fair
grand!”
Everybody was mad with happiness in the family. Home was home, and they
loved it with a passion of love, whatever the suffering had been. There
were parties, there were rejoicings. People came in to see William, to
see what difference London had made to him. And they all found him
“such a gentleman, and _such_ a fine fellow, my word!”
When he went away again the children retired to various places to weep
alone. Morel went to bed in misery, and Mrs. Morel felt as if she were
numbed by some drug, as if her feelings were paralysed. She loved him
passionately.
He was in the office of a lawyer connected with a large shipping firm,
and at the midsummer his chief offered him a trip in the Mediterranean
on one of the boats, for quite a small cost. Mrs. Morel wrote: “Go, go,
my boy. You may never have a chance again, and I should love to think
of you cruising there in the Mediterranean almost better than to have
you at home.” But William came home for his fortnight’s holiday. Not
even the Mediterranean, which pulled at all his young man’s desire to
travel, and at his poor man’s wonder at the glamorous south, could take
him away when he might come home. That compensated his mother for much.
CHAPTER V
PAUL LAUNCHES INTO LIFE
Morel was rather a heedless man, careless of danger. So he had endless
accidents. Now, when Mrs. Morel heard the rattle of an empty coal-cart
cease at her entry-end, she ran into the parlour to look, expecting
almost to see her husband seated in the waggon, his face grey under his
dirt, his body limp and sick with some hurt or other. If it were he,
she would run out to help.
About a year after William went to London, and just after Paul had left
school, before he got work, Mrs. Morel was upstairs and her son was
painting in the kitchen—he was very clever with his brush—when there
came a knock at the door. Crossly he put down his brush to go. At the
same moment his mother opened a window upstairs and looked down.
A pit-lad in his dirt stood on the threshold.
“Is this Walter Morel’s?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Morel. “What is it?”
But she had guessed already.
“Your mester’s got hurt,” he said.
“Eh, dear me!” she exclaimed. “It’s a wonder if he hadn’t, lad. And
what’s he done this time?”
“I don’t know for sure, but it’s ’is leg somewhere. They ta’ein’ ’im
ter th’ ’ospital.”
“Good gracious me!” she exclaimed. “Eh, dear, what a one he is! There’s
not five minutes of peace, I’ll be hanged if there is! His thumb’s
nearly better, and now—Did you see him?”
“I seed him at th’ bottom. An’ I seed ’em bring ’im up in a tub, an’ ’e
wor in a dead faint. But he shouted like anythink when Doctor Fraser
examined him i’ th’ lamp cabin—an’ cossed an’ swore, an’ said as ’e wor
goin’ to be ta’en whoam—’e worn’t goin’ ter th’ ’ospital.”
The boy faltered to an end.
“He _would_ want to come home, so that I can have all the bother. Thank
you, my lad. Eh, dear, if I’m not sick—sick and surfeited, I am!”
She came downstairs. Paul had mechanically resumed his painting.
“And it must be pretty bad if they’ve taken him to the hospital,” she
went on. “But what a _careless_ creature he is! _Other_ men don’t have
all these accidents. Yes, he _would_ want to put all the burden on me.
Eh, dear, just as we _were_ getting easy a bit at last. Put those
things away, there’s no time to be painting now. What time is there a
train? I know I s’ll have to go trailing to Keston. I s’ll have to
leave that bedroom.”
“I can finish it,” said Paul.
“You needn’t. I shall catch the seven o’clock back, I should think. Oh,
my blessed heart, the fuss and commotion he’ll make! And those granite
setts at Tinder Hill—he might well call them kidney pebbles—they’ll
jolt him almost to bits. I wonder why they can’t mend them, the state
they’re in, an’ all the men as go across in that ambulance. You’d think
they’d have a hospital here. The men bought the ground, and, my sirs,
there’d be accidents enough to keep it going. But no, they must trail
them ten miles in a slow ambulance to Nottingham. It’s a crying shame!
Oh, and the fuss he’ll make! I know he will! I wonder who’s with him.
Barker, I s’d think. Poor beggar, he’ll wish himself anywhere rather.
But he’ll look after him, I know. Now there’s no telling how long he’ll
be stuck in that hospital—and _won’t_ he hate it! But if it’s only his
leg it’s not so bad.”
All the time she was getting ready. Hurriedly taking off her bodice,
she crouched at the boiler while the water ran slowly into her
lading-can.
“I wish this boiler was at the bottom of the sea!” she exclaimed,
wriggling the handle impatiently. She had very handsome, strong arms,
rather surprising on a smallish woman.
Paul cleared away, put on the kettle, and set the table.
“There isn’t a train till four-twenty,” he said. “You’ve time enough.”
“Oh no, I haven’t!” she cried, blinking at him over the towel as she
wiped her face.
“Yes, you have. You must drink a cup of tea at any rate. Should I come
with you to Keston?”
“Come with me? What for, I should like to know? Now, what have I to
take him? Eh, dear! His clean shirt—and it’s a blessing it _is_ clean.
But it had better be aired. And stockings—he won’t want them—and a
towel, I suppose; and handkerchiefs. Now what else?”
“A comb, a knife and fork and spoon,” said Paul. His father had been in
the hospital before.
“Goodness knows what sort of state his feet were in,” continued Mrs.
Morel, as she combed her long brown hair, that was fine as silk, and
was touched now with grey. “He’s very particular to wash himself to the
waist, but below he thinks doesn’t matter. But there, I suppose they
see plenty like it.”
Paul had laid the table. He cut his mother one or two pieces of very
thin bread and butter.
“Here you are,” he said, putting her cup of tea in her place.
“I can’t be bothered!” she exclaimed crossly.
“Well, you’ve got to, so there, now it’s put out ready,” he insisted.
So she sat down and sipped her tea, and ate a little, in silence. She
was thinking.
In a few minutes she was gone, to walk the two and a half miles to
Keston Station. All the things she was taking him she had in her
bulging string bag. Paul watched her go up the road between the
hedges—a little, quick-stepping figure, and his heart ached for her,
that she was thrust forward again into pain and trouble. And she,
tripping so quickly in her anxiety, felt at the back of her her son’s
heart waiting on her, felt him bearing what part of the burden he
could, even supporting her. And when she was at the hospital, she
thought: “It _will_ upset that lad when I tell him how bad it is. I’d
better be careful.” And when she was trudging home again, she felt he
was coming to share her burden.
“Is it bad?” asked Paul, as soon as she entered the house.
“It’s bad enough,” she replied.
“What?”
She sighed and sat down, undoing her bonnet-strings. Her son watched
her face as it was lifted, and her small, work-hardened hands fingering
at the bow under her chin.
“Well,” she answered, “it’s not really dangerous, but the nurse says
it’s a dreadful smash. You see, a great piece of rock fell on his
leg—here—and it’s a compound fracture. There are pieces of bone
sticking through—”
“Ugh—how horrid!” exclaimed the children.
“And,” she continued, “of course he says he’s going to die—it wouldn’t