Sons and Lovers
head, with its great bands of bright brown hair, seemed over large, as
did her pale, heavy face. She wore a dress of green-black cashmere, and
her wrists, coming out of the narrow cuffs, were thin and flat, as she
put down her work nervously. He showed her something that was wrong
with a knee-cap.
“Well,” she said, “you needn’t come blaming it on to me. It’s not my
fault.” Her colour mounted to her cheek.
“I never said it _was_ your fault. Will you do as I tell you?” replied
Mr. Pappleworth shortly.
“You don’t say it’s my fault, but you’d like to make out as it was,”
the hunchback woman cried, almost in tears. Then she snatched the
knee-cap from her “boss”, saying: “Yes, I’ll do it for you, but you
needn’t be snappy.”
“Here’s your new lad,” said Mr. Pappleworth.
Fanny turned, smiling very gently on Paul.
“Oh!” she said.
“Yes; don’t make a softy of him between you.”
“It’s not us as ’ud make a softy of him,” she said indignantly.
“Come on then, Paul,” said Mr. Pappleworth.
“_Au revoy_, Paul,” said one of the girls.
There was a titter of laughter. Paul went out, blushing deeply, not
having spoken a word.
The day was very long. All morning the work-people were coming to speak
to Mr. Pappleworth. Paul was writing or learning to make up parcels,
ready for the midday post. At one o’clock, or, rather, at a quarter to
one, Mr. Pappleworth disappeared to catch his train: he lived in the
suburbs. At one o’clock, Paul, feeling very lost, took his
dinner-basket down into the stockroom in the basement, that had the
long table on trestles, and ate his meal hurriedly, alone in that
cellar of gloom and desolation. Then he went out of doors. The
brightness and the freedom of the streets made him feel adventurous and
happy. But at two o’clock he was back in the corner of the big room.
Soon the work-girls went trooping past, making remarks. It was the
commoner girls who worked upstairs at the heavy tasks of truss-making
and the finishing of artificial limbs. He waited for Mr. Pappleworth,
not knowing what to do, sitting scribbling on the yellow order-paper.
Mr. Pappleworth came at twenty minutes to three. Then he sat and
gossiped with Paul, treating the boy entirely as an equal, even in age.
In the afternoon there was never very much to do, unless it were near
the week-end, and the accounts had to be made up. At five o’clock all
the men went down into the dungeon with the table on trestles, and
there they had tea, eating bread-and-butter on the bare, dirty boards,
talking with the same kind of ugly haste and slovenliness with which
they ate their meal. And yet upstairs the atmosphere among them was
always jolly and clear. The cellar and the trestles affected them.
After tea, when all the gases were lighted, _work_ went more briskly.
There was the big evening post to get off. The hose came up warm and
newly pressed from the workrooms. Paul had made out the invoices. Now
he had the packing up and addressing to do, then he had to weigh his
stock of parcels on the scales. Everywhere voices were calling weights,
there was the chink of metal, the rapid snapping of string, the
hurrying to old Mr. Melling for stamps. And at last the postman came
with his sack, laughing and jolly. Then everything slacked off, and
Paul took his dinner-basket and ran to the station to catch the
eight-twenty train. The day in the factory was just twelve hours long.
His mother sat waiting for him rather anxiously. He had to walk from
Keston, so was not home until about twenty past nine. And he left the
house before seven in the morning. Mrs. Morel was rather anxious about
his health. But she herself had had to put up with so much that she
expected her children to take the same odds. They must go through with
what came. And Paul stayed at Jordan’s, although all the time he was
there his health suffered from the darkness and lack of air and the
long hours.
He came in pale and tired. His mother looked at him. She saw he was
rather pleased, and her anxiety all went.
“Well, and how was it?” she asked.
“Ever so funny, mother,” he replied. “You don’t have to work a bit
hard, and they’re nice with you.”
“And did you get on all right?”
“Yes: they only say my writing’s bad. But Mr. Pappleworth—he’s my
man—said to Mr. Jordan I should be all right. I’m Spiral, mother; you
must come and see. It’s ever so nice.”
Soon he liked Jordan’s. Mr. Pappleworth, who had a certain “saloon bar”
flavour about him, was always natural, and treated him as if he had
been a comrade. Sometimes the “Spiral boss” was irritable, and chewed
more lozenges than ever. Even then, however, he was not offensive, but
one of those people who hurt themselves by their own irritability more
than they hurt other people.
“Haven’t you done that _yet?_” he would cry. “Go on, be a month of
Sundays.”
Again, and Paul could understand him least then, he was jocular and in
high spirits.
“I’m going to bring my little Yorkshire terrier bitch to-morrow,” he
said jubilantly to Paul.
“What’s a Yorkshire terrier?”
“_Don’t_ know what a Yorkshire terrier is? _Don’t know a Yorkshire_—”
Mr. Pappleworth was aghast.
“Is it a little silky one—colours of iron and rusty silver?”
“_That’s_ it, my lad. She’s a gem. She’s had five pounds’ worth of pups
already, and she’s worth over seven pounds herself; and she doesn’t
weigh twenty ounces.”
The next day the bitch came. She was a shivering, miserable morsel.
Paul did not care for her; she seemed so like a wet rag that would
never dry. Then a man called for her, and began to make coarse jokes.
But Mr. Pappleworth nodded his head in the direction of the boy, and
the talk went on _sotto voce_.
Mr. Jordan only made one more excursion to watch Paul, and then the
only fault he found was seeing the boy lay his pen on the counter.
“Put your pen in your ear, if you’re going to be a clerk. Pen in your
ear!” And one day he said to the lad: “Why don’t you hold your
shoulders straighter? Come down here,” when he took him into the glass
office and fitted him with special braces for keeping the shoulders
square.
But Paul liked the girls best. The men seemed common and rather dull.
He liked them all, but they were uninteresting. Polly, the little brisk
overseer downstairs, finding Paul eating in the cellar, asked him if
she could cook him anything on her little stove. Next day his mother
gave him a dish that could be heated up. He took it into the pleasant,
clean room to Polly. And very soon it grew to be an established custom
that he should have dinner with her. When he came in at eight in the
morning he took his basket to her, and when he came down at one o’clock
she had his dinner ready.
He was not very tall, and pale, with thick chestnut hair, irregular
features, and a wide, full mouth. She was like a small bird. He often
called her a “robinet”. Though naturally rather quiet, he would sit and
chatter with her for hours telling her about his home. The girls all
liked to hear him talk. They often gathered in a little circle while he
sat on a bench, and held forth to them, laughing. Some of them regarded
him as a curious little creature, so serious, yet so bright and jolly,
and always so delicate in his way with them. They all liked him, and he
adored them. Polly he felt he belonged to. Then Connie, with her mane
of red hair, her face of apple-blossom, her murmuring voice, such a
lady in her shabby black frock, appealed to his romantic side.
“When you sit winding,” he said, “it looks as if you were spinning at a
spinning-wheel—it looks ever so nice. You remind me of Elaine in the
‘Idylls of the King’. I’d draw you if I could.”
And she glanced at him blushing shyly. And later on he had a sketch he
prized very much: Connie sitting on the stool before the wheel, her
flowing mane of red hair on her rusty black frock, her red mouth shut
and serious, running the scarlet thread off the hank on to the reel.
With Louie, handsome and brazen, who always seemed to thrust her hip at
him, he usually joked.
Emma was rather plain, rather old, and condescending. But to condescend
to him made her happy, and he did not mind.
“How do you put needles in?” he asked.
“Go away and don’t bother.”
“But I ought to know how to put needles in.”
She ground at her machine all the while steadily.
“There are many things you ought to know,” she replied.
“Tell me, then, how to stick needles in the machine.”
“Oh, the boy, what a nuisance he is! Why, _this_ is how you do it.”
He watched her attentively. Suddenly a whistle piped. Then Polly
appeared, and said in a clear voice:
“Mr. Pappleworth wants to know how much longer you’re going to be down
here playing with the girls, Paul.”
Paul flew upstairs, calling “Good-bye!” and Emma drew herself up.
“It wasn’t _me_ who wanted him to play with the machine,” she said.
As a rule, when all the girls came back at two o’clock, he ran upstairs
to Fanny, the hunchback, in the finishing-off room. Mr. Pappleworth did
not appear till twenty to three, and he often found his boy sitting
beside Fanny, talking, or drawing, or singing with the girls.
Often, after a minute’s hesitation, Fanny would begin to sing. She had
a fine contralto voice. Everybody joined in the chorus, and it went
well. Paul was not at all embarrassed, after a while, sitting in the
room with the half a dozen work-girls.
At the end of the song Fanny would say:
“I know you’ve been laughing at me.”
“Don’t be so soft, Fanny!” cried one of the girls.
Once there was mention of Connie’s red hair.
“Fanny’s is better, to my fancy,” said Emma.
“You needn’t try to make a fool of me,” said Fanny, flushing deeply.
“No, but she has, Paul; she’s got beautiful hair.”
“It’s a treat of a colour,” said he. “That coldish colour like earth,
and yet shiny. It’s like bog-water.”
“Goodness me!” exclaimed one girl, laughing.
“How I do but get criticised,” said Fanny.
“But you should see it down, Paul,” cried Emma earnestly. “It’s simply
beautiful. Put it down for him, Fanny, if he wants something to paint.”
Fanny would not, and yet she wanted to.
“Then I’ll take it down myself,” said the lad.
“Well, you can if you like,” said Fanny.
And he carefully took the pins out of the knot, and the rush of hair,
of uniform dark brown, slid over the humped back.
“What a lovely lot!” he exclaimed.
The girls watched. There was silence. The youth shook the hair loose
from the coil.
“It’s splendid!” he said, smelling its perfume. “I’ll bet it’s worth
pounds.”
“I’ll leave it you when I die, Paul,” said Fanny, half joking.
“You look just like anybody else, sitting drying their hair,” said one
of the girls to the long-legged hunchback.
Poor Fanny was morbidly sensitive, always imagining insults. Polly was
curt and businesslike. The two departments were for ever at war, and
Paul was always finding Fanny in tears. Then he was made the recipient
of all her woes, and he had to plead her case with Polly.
So the time went along happily enough. The factory had a homely feel.
No one was rushed or driven. Paul always enjoyed it when the work got
faster, towards post-time, and all the men united in labour. He liked
to watch his fellow-clerks at work. The man was the work and the work
was the man, one thing, for the time being. It was different with the
girls. The real woman never seemed to be there at the task, but as if
left out, waiting.
From the train going home at night he used to watch the lights of the
town, sprinkled thick on the hills, fusing together in a blaze in the
valleys. He felt rich in life and happy. Drawing farther off, there was
a patch of lights at Bulwell like myriad petals shaken to the ground
from the shed stars; and beyond was the red glare of the furnaces,