Sons and Lovers
be him if he didn’t. ‘I’m done for, my lass!’ he said, looking at me.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ I said to him. ‘You’re not going to die of a
broken leg, however badly it’s smashed.’ ‘I s’ll niver come out of ’ere
but in a wooden box,’ he groaned. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if you want them to
carry you into the garden in a wooden box, when you’re better, I’ve no
doubt they will.’ ‘If we think it’s good for him,’ said the Sister.
She’s an awfully nice Sister, but rather strict.”
Mrs. Morel took off her bonnet. The children waited in silence.
“Of course, he _is_ bad,” she continued, “and he will be. It’s a great
shock, and he’s lost a lot of blood; and, of course, it _is_ a very
dangerous smash. It’s not at all sure that it will mend so easily. And
then there’s the fever and the mortification—if it took bad ways he’d
quickly be gone. But there, he’s a clean-blooded man, with wonderful
healing flesh, and so I see no reason why it _should_ take bad ways. Of
course there’s a wound—”
She was pale now with emotion and anxiety. The three children realised
that it was very bad for their father, and the house was silent,
anxious.
“But he always gets better,” said Paul after a while.
“That’s what I tell him,” said the mother.
Everybody moved about in silence.
“And he really looked nearly done for,” she said. “But the Sister says
that is the pain.”
Annie took away her mother’s coat and bonnet.
“And he looked at me when I came away! I said: ‘I s’ll have to go now,
Walter, because of the train—and the children.’ And he looked at me. It
seems hard.”
Paul took up his brush again and went on painting. Arthur went outside
for some coal. Annie sat looking dismal. And Mrs. Morel, in her little
rocking-chair that her husband had made for her when the first baby was
coming, remained motionless, brooding. She was grieved, and bitterly
sorry for the man who was hurt so much. But still, in her heart of
hearts, where the love should have burned, there was a blank. Now, when
all her woman’s pity was roused to its full extent, when she would have
slaved herself to death to nurse him and to save him, when she would
have taken the pain herself, if she could, somewhere far away inside
her, she felt indifferent to him and to his suffering. It hurt her most
of all, this failure to love him, even when he roused her strong
emotions. She brooded awhile.
“And there,” she said suddenly, “when I’d got halfway to Keston, I
found I’d come out in my working boots—and _look_ at them.” They were
an old pair of Paul’s, brown and rubbed through at the toes. “I didn’t
know what to do with myself, for shame,” she added.
In the morning, when Annie and Arthur were at school, Mrs. Morel talked
again to her son, who was helping her with her housework.
“I found Barker at the hospital. He did look bad, poor little fellow!
‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘what sort of a journey did you have with him?’
‘Dunna ax me, missis!’ he said. ‘Ay,’ I said, ‘I know what he’d be.’
‘But it _wor_ bad for him, Mrs. Morel, it _wor_ that!’ he said. ‘I
know,’ I said. ‘At ivry jolt I thought my ’eart would ha’ flown clean
out o’ my mouth,’ he said. ‘An’ the scream ’e gives sometimes! Missis,
not for a fortune would I go through wi’ it again.’ ‘I can quite
understand it,’ I said. ‘It’s a nasty job, though,’ he said, ‘an’ one
as’ll be a long while afore it’s right again.’ ‘I’m afraid it will,’ I
said. I like Mr. Barker—I _do_ like him. There’s something so manly
about him.”
Paul resumed his task silently.
“And of course,” Mrs. Morel continued, “for a man like your father, the
hospital _is_ hard. He _can’t_ understand rules and regulations. And he
won’t let anybody else touch him, not if he can help it. When he
smashed the muscles of his thigh, and it had to be dressed four times a
day, _would_ he let anybody but me or his mother do it? He wouldn’t.
So, of course, he’ll suffer in there with the nurses. And I didn’t like
leaving him. I’m sure, when I kissed him an’ came away, it seemed a
shame.”
So she talked to her son, almost as if she were thinking aloud to him,
and he took it in as best he could, by sharing her trouble to lighten
it. And in the end she shared almost everything with him without
knowing.
Morel had a very bad time. For a week he was in a critical condition.
Then he began to mend. And then, knowing he was going to get better,
the whole family sighed with relief, and proceeded to live happily.
They were not badly off whilst Morel was in the hospital. There were
fourteen shillings a week from the pit, ten shillings from the sick
club, and five shillings from the Disability Fund; and then every week
the butties had something for Mrs. Morel—five or seven shillings—so
that she was quite well to do. And whilst Morel was progressing
favourably in the hospital, the family was extraordinarily happy and
peaceful. On Saturdays and Wednesdays Mrs. Morel went to Nottingham to
see her husband. Then she always brought back some little thing: a
small tube of paints for Paul, or some thick paper; a couple of
postcards for Annie, that the whole family rejoiced over for days
before the girl was allowed to send them away; or a fret-saw for
Arthur, or a bit of pretty wood. She described her adventures into the
big shops with joy. Soon the folk in the picture-shop knew her, and
knew about Paul. The girl in the book-shop took a keen interest in her.
Mrs. Morel was full of information when she got home from Nottingham.
The three sat round till bed-time, listening, putting in, arguing. Then
Paul often raked the fire.
“I’m the man in the house now,” he used to say to his mother with joy.
They learned how perfectly peaceful the home could be. And they almost
regretted—though none of them would have owned to such callousness—that
their father was soon coming back.
Paul was now fourteen, and was looking for work. He was a rather small
and rather finely-made boy, with dark brown hair and light blue eyes.
His face had already lost its youthful chubbiness, and was becoming
somewhat like William’s—rough-featured, almost rugged—and it was
extraordinarily mobile. Usually he looked as if he saw things, was full
of life, and warm; then his smile, like his mother’s, came suddenly and
was very lovable; and then, when there was any clog in his soul’s quick
running, his face went stupid and ugly. He was the sort of boy that
becomes a clown and a lout as soon as he is not understood, or feels
himself held cheap; and, again, is adorable at the first touch of
warmth.
He suffered very much from the first contact with anything. When he was
seven, the starting school had been a nightmare and a torture to him.
But afterwards he liked it. And now that he felt he had to go out into
life, he went through agonies of shrinking self-consciousness. He was
quite a clever painter for a boy of his years, and he knew some French
and German and mathematics that Mr. Heaton had taught him. But nothing
he had was of any commercial value. He was not strong enough for heavy
manual work, his mother said. He did not care for making things with
his hands, preferred racing about, or making excursions into the
country, or reading, or painting.
“What do you want to be?” his mother asked.
“Anything.”
“That is no answer,” said Mrs. Morel.
But it was quite truthfully the only answer he could give. His
ambition, as far as this world’s gear went, was quietly to earn his
thirty or thirty-five shillings a week somewhere near home, and then,
when his father died, have a cottage with his mother, paint and go out
as he liked, and live happy ever after. That was his programme as far
as doing things went. But he was proud within himself, measuring people
against himself, and placing them, inexorably. And he thought that
_perhaps_ he might also make a painter, the real thing. But that he
left alone.
“Then,” said his mother, “you must look in the paper for the
advertisements.”
He looked at her. It seemed to him a bitter humiliation and an anguish
to go through. But he said nothing. When he got up in the morning, his
whole being was knotted up over this one thought:
“I’ve got to go and look for advertisements for a job.”
It stood in front of the morning, that thought, killing all joy and
even life, for him. His heart felt like a tight knot.
And then, at ten o’clock, he set off. He was supposed to be a queer,
quiet child. Going up the sunny street of the little town, he felt as
if all the folk he met said to themselves: “He’s going to the Co-op.
reading-room to look in the papers for a place. He can’t get a job. I
suppose he’s living on his mother.” Then he crept up the stone stairs
behind the drapery shop at the Co-op., and peeped in the reading-room.
Usually one or two men were there, either old, useless fellows, or
colliers “on the club”. So he entered, full of shrinking and suffering
when they looked up, seated himself at the table, and pretended to scan
the news. He knew they would think: “What does a lad of thirteen want
in a reading-room with a newspaper?” and he suffered.
Then he looked wistfully out of the window. Already he was a prisoner
of industrialism. Large sunflowers stared over the old red wall of the
garden opposite, looking in their jolly way down on the women who were
hurrying with something for dinner. The valley was full of corn,
brightening in the sun. Two collieries, among the fields, waved their
small white plumes of steam. Far off on the hills were the woods of
Annesley, dark and fascinating. Already his heart went down. He was
being taken into bondage. His freedom in the beloved home valley was
going now.
The brewers’ waggons came rolling up from Keston with enormous barrels,
four a side, like beans in a burst bean-pod. The waggoner, throned
aloft, rolling massively in his seat, was not so much below Paul’s eye.
The man’s hair, on his small, bullet head, was bleached almost white by
the sun, and on his thick red arms, rocking idly on his sack apron, the
white hairs glistened. His red face shone and was almost asleep with
sunshine. The horses, handsome and brown, went on by themselves,
looking by far the masters of the show.
Paul wished he were stupid. “I wish,” he thought to himself, “I was fat
like him, and like a dog in the sun. I wish I was a pig and a brewer’s
waggoner.”
Then, the room being at last empty, he would hastily copy an
advertisement on a scrap of paper, then another, and slip out in
immense relief. His mother would scan over his copies.
“Yes,” she said, “you may try.”
William had written out a letter of application, couched in admirable
business language, which Paul copied, with variations. The boy’s
handwriting was execrable, so that William, who did all things well,
got into a fever of impatience.
The elder brother was becoming quite swanky. In London he found that he
could associate with men far above his Bestwood friends in station.
Some of the clerks in the office had studied for the law, and were more
or less going through a kind of apprenticeship. William always made
friends among men wherever he went, he was so jolly. Therefore he was
soon visiting and staying in houses of men who, in Bestwood, would have
looked down on the unapproachable bank manager, and would merely have
called indifferently on the Rector. So he began to fancy himself as a
great gun. He was, indeed, rather surprised at the ease with which he
became a gentleman.
His mother was glad, he seemed so pleased. And his lodging in
Walthamstow was so dreary. But now there seemed to come a kind of fever
into the young man’s letters. He was unsettled by all the change, he
did not stand firm on his own feet, but seemed to spin rather giddily
on the quick current of the new life. His mother was anxious for him.