Sons and Lovers
led uphill, under the tall hedge between the burning glow of the cut
pastures. The sky overhead throbbed and pulsed with light. The glow
sank quickly off the field; the earth and the hedges smoked dusk. As it
grew dark, a ruddy glare came out on the hilltop, and out of the glare
the diminished commotion of the fair.
Sometimes, down the trough of darkness formed by the path under the
hedges, men came lurching home. One young man lapsed into a run down
the steep bit that ended the hill, and went with a crash into the
stile. Mrs. Morel shuddered. He picked himself up, swearing viciously,
rather pathetically, as if he thought the stile had wanted to hurt him.
She went indoors, wondering if things were never going to alter. She
was beginning by now to realise that they would not. She seemed so far
away from her girlhood, she wondered if it were the same person walking
heavily up the back garden at the Bottoms as had run so lightly up the
breakwater at Sheerness ten years before.
“What have _I_ to do with it?” she said to herself. “What have I to do
with all this? Even the child I am going to have! It doesn’t seem as if
_I_ were taken into account.”
Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes
one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were
slurred over.
“I wait,” Mrs. Morel said to herself—“I wait, and what I wait for can
never come.”
Then she straightened the kitchen, lit the lamp, mended the fire,
looked out the washing for the next day, and put it to soak. After
which she sat down to her sewing. Through the long hours her needle
flashed regularly through the stuff. Occasionally she sighed, moving to
relieve herself. And all the time she was thinking how to make the most
of what she had, for the children’s sakes.
At half-past eleven her husband came. His cheeks were very red and very
shiny above his black moustache. His head nodded slightly. He was
pleased with himself.
“Oh! Oh! waitin’ for me, lass? I’ve bin ’elpin’ Anthony, an’ what’s
think he’s gen me? Nowt b’r a lousy hae’f-crown, an’ that’s ivry
penny—”
“He thinks you’ve made the rest up in beer,” she said shortly.
“An’ I ’aven’t—that I ’aven’t. You b’lieve me, I’ve ’ad very little
this day, I have an’ all.” His voice went tender. “Here, an’ I browt
thee a bit o’ brandysnap, an’ a cocoanut for th’ children.” He laid the
gingerbread and the cocoanut, a hairy object, on the table. “Nay, tha
niver said thankyer for nowt i’ thy life, did ter?”
As a compromise, she picked up the cocoanut and shook it, to see if it
had any milk.
“It’s a good un, you may back yer life o’ that. I got it fra’ Bill
Hodgkisson. ‘Bill,’ I says, ‘tha non wants them three nuts, does ter?
Arena ter for gi’ein’ me one for my bit of a lad an’ wench?’ ‘I ham,
Walter, my lad,’ ’e says; ‘ta’e which on ’em ter’s a mind.’ An’ so I
took one, an’ thanked ’im. I didn’t like ter shake it afore ’is eyes,
but ’e says, ‘Tha’d better ma’e sure it’s a good un, Walt.’ An’ so, yer
see, I knowed it was. He’s a nice chap, is Bill Hodgkisson, e’s a nice
chap!”
“A man will part with anything so long as he’s drunk, and you’re drunk
along with him,” said Mrs. Morel.
“Eh, tha mucky little ’ussy, who’s drunk, I sh’d like ter know?” said
Morel. He was extraordinarily pleased with himself, because of his
day’s helping to wait in the Moon and Stars. He chattered on.
Mrs. Morel, very tired, and sick of his babble, went to bed as quickly
as possible, while he raked the fire.
Mrs. Morel came of a good old burgher family, famous independents who
had fought with Colonel Hutchinson, and who remained stout
Congregationalists. Her grandfather had gone bankrupt in the
lace-market at a time when so many lace-manufacturers were ruined in
Nottingham. Her father, George Coppard, was an engineer—a large,
handsome, haughty man, proud of his fair skin and blue eyes, but more
proud still of his integrity. Gertrude resembled her mother in her
small build. But her temper, proud and unyielding, she had from the
Coppards.
George Coppard was bitterly galled by his own poverty. He became
foreman of the engineers in the dockyard at Sheerness. Mrs.
Morel—Gertrude—was the second daughter. She favoured her mother, loved
her mother best of all; but she had the Coppards’ clear, defiant blue
eyes and their broad brow. She remembered to have hated her father’s
overbearing manner towards her gentle, humorous, kindly-souled mother.
She remembered running over the breakwater at Sheerness and finding the
boat. She remembered to have been petted and flattered by all the men
when she had gone to the dockyard, for she was a delicate, rather proud
child. She remembered the funny old mistress, whose assistant she had
become, whom she had loved to help in the private school. And she still
had the Bible that John Field had given her. She used to walk home from
chapel with John Field when she was nineteen. He was the son of a
well-to-do tradesman, had been to college in London, and was to devote
himself to business.
She could always recall in detail a September Sunday afternoon, when
they had sat under the vine at the back of her father’s house. The sun
came through the chinks of the vine-leaves and made beautiful patterns,
like a lace scarf, falling on her and on him. Some of the leaves were
clean yellow, like yellow flat flowers.
“Now sit still,” he had cried. “Now your hair, I don’t know what it
_is_ like! It’s as bright as copper and gold, as red as burnt copper,
and it has gold threads where the sun shines on it. Fancy their saying
it’s brown. Your mother calls it mouse-colour.”
She had met his brilliant eyes, but her clear face scarcely showed the
elation which rose within her.
“But you say you don’t like business,” she pursued.
“I don’t. I hate it!” he cried hotly.
“And you would like to go into the ministry,” she half implored.
“I should. I should love it, if I thought I could make a first-rate
preacher.”
“Then why don’t you—why _don’t_ you?” Her voice rang with defiance. “If
_I_ were a man, nothing would stop me.”
She held her head erect. He was rather timid before her.
“But my father’s so stiff-necked. He means to put me into the business,
and I know he’ll do it.”
“But if you’re a _man?_” she had cried.
“Being a man isn’t everything,” he replied, frowning with puzzled
helplessness.
Now, as she moved about her work at the Bottoms, with some experience
of what being a man meant, she knew that it was _not_ everything.
At twenty, owing to her health, she had left Sheerness. Her father had
retired home to Nottingham. John Field’s father had been ruined; the
son had gone as a teacher in Norwood. She did not hear of him until,
two years later, she made determined inquiry. He had married his
landlady, a woman of forty, a widow with property.
And still Mrs. Morel preserved John Field’s Bible. She did not now
believe him to be—— Well, she understood pretty well what he might or
might not have been. So she preserved his Bible, and kept his memory
intact in her heart, for her own sake. To her dying day, for
thirty-five years, she did not speak of him.
When she was twenty-three years old, she met, at a Christmas party, a
young man from the Erewash Valley. Morel was then twenty-seven years
old. He was well set-up, erect, and very smart. He had wavy black hair
that shone again, and a vigorous black beard that had never been
shaved. His cheeks were ruddy, and his red, moist mouth was noticeable
because he laughed so often and so heartily. He had that rare thing, a
rich, ringing laugh. Gertrude Coppard had watched him, fascinated. He
was so full of colour and animation, his voice ran so easily into comic
grotesque, he was so ready and so pleasant with everybody. Her own
father had a rich fund of humour, but it was satiric. This man’s was
different: soft, non-intellectual, warm, a kind of gambolling.
She herself was opposite. She had a curious, receptive mind which found
much pleasure and amusement in listening to other folk. She was clever
in leading folk to talk. She loved ideas, and was considered very
intellectual. What she liked most of all was an argument on religion or
philosophy or politics with some educated man. This she did not often
enjoy. So she always had people tell her about themselves, finding her
pleasure so.
In her person she was rather small and delicate, with a large brow, and
dropping bunches of brown silk curls. Her blue eyes were very straight,
honest, and searching. She had the beautiful hands of the Coppards. Her
dress was always subdued. She wore dark blue silk, with a peculiar
silver chain of silver scallops. This, and a heavy brooch of twisted
gold, was her only ornament. She was still perfectly intact, deeply
religious, and full of beautiful candour.
Walter Morel seemed melted away before her. She was to the miner that
thing of mystery and fascination, a lady. When she spoke to him, it was
with a southern pronunciation and a purity of English which thrilled
him to hear. She watched him. He danced well, as if it were natural and
joyous in him to dance. His grandfather was a French refugee who had
married an English barmaid—if it had been a marriage. Gertrude Coppard
watched the young miner as he danced, a certain subtle exultation like
glamour in his movement, and his face the flower of his body, ruddy,
with tumbled black hair, and laughing alike whatever partner he bowed
above. She thought him rather wonderful, never having met anyone like
him. Her father was to her the type of all men. And George Coppard,
proud in his bearing, handsome, and rather bitter; who preferred
theology in reading, and who drew near in sympathy only to one man, the
Apostle Paul; who was harsh in government, and in familiarity ironic;
who ignored all sensuous pleasure:—he was very different from the
miner. Gertrude herself was rather contemptuous of dancing; she had not
the slightest inclination towards that accomplishment, and had never
learned even a Roger de Coverley. She was puritan, like her father,
high-minded, and really stern. Therefore the dusky, golden softness of
this man’s sensuous flame of life, that flowed off his flesh like the
flame from a candle, not baffled and gripped into incandescence by
thought and spirit as her life was, seemed to her something wonderful,
beyond her.
He came and bowed above her. A warmth radiated through her as if she
had drunk wine.
“Now do come and have this one wi’ me,” he said caressively. “It’s
easy, you know. I’m pining to see you dance.”
She had told him before she could not dance. She glanced at his
humility and smiled. Her smile was very beautiful. It moved the man so
that he forgot everything.
“No, I won’t dance,” she said softly. Her words came clean and ringing.
Not knowing what he was doing—he often did the right thing by
instinct—he sat beside her, inclining reverentially.
“But you mustn’t miss your dance,” she reproved.
“Nay, I don’t want to dance that—it’s not one as I care about.”
“Yet you invited me to it.”
He laughed very heartily at this.
“I never thought o’ that. Tha’rt not long in taking the curl out of
me.”
It was her turn to laugh quickly.
“You don’t look as if you’d come much uncurled,” she said.
“I’m like a pig’s tail, I curl because I canna help it,” he laughed,
rather boisterously.
“And you are a miner!” she exclaimed in surprise.
“Yes. I went down when I was ten.”
She looked at him in wondering dismay.
“When you were ten! And wasn’t it very hard?” she asked.
“You soon get used to it. You live like th’ mice, an’ you pop out at
night to see what’s going on.”
“It makes me feel blind,” she frowned.
“Like a moudiwarp!” he laughed. “Yi, an’ there’s some chaps as does go