Sons and Lovers
“Owing to a leakage in the hold of this vessel, the sugar had set, and
become converted into rock. It needed hacking—”
He was quite unconscious. It had been his business to examine some such
cargo of sugar in the Port of London.
“How long has he been like this?” the mother asked the landlady.
“He got home at six o’clock on Monday morning, and he seemed to sleep
all day; then in the night we heard him talking, and this morning he
asked for you. So I wired, and we fetched the doctor.”
“Will you have a fire made?”
Mrs. Morel tried to soothe her son, to keep him still.
The doctor came. It was pneumonia, and, he said, a peculiar erysipelas,
which had started under the chin where the collar chafed, and was
spreading over the face. He hoped it would not get to the brain.
Mrs. Morel settled down to nurse. She prayed for William, prayed that
he would recognise her. But the young man’s face grew more discoloured.
In the night she struggled with him. He raved, and raved, and would not
come to consciousness. At two o’clock, in a dreadful paroxysm, he died.
Mrs. Morel sat perfectly still for an hour in the lodging bedroom; then
she roused the household.
At six o’clock, with the aid of the charwoman, she laid him out; then
she went round the dreary London village to the registrar and the
doctor.
At nine o’clock to the cottage on Scargill Street came another wire:
“William died last night. Let father come, bring money.”
Annie, Paul, and Arthur were at home; Mr. Morel was gone to work. The
three children said not a word. Annie began to whimper with fear; Paul
set off for his father.
It was a beautiful day. At Brinsley pit the white steam melted slowly
in the sunshine of a soft blue sky; the wheels of the headstocks
twinkled high up; the screen, shuffling its coal into the trucks, made
a busy noise.
“I want my father; he’s got to go to London,” said the boy to the first
man he met on the bank.
“Tha wants Walter Morel? Go in theer an’ tell Joe Ward.”
Paul went into the little top office.
“I want my father; he’s got to go to London.”
“Thy feyther? Is he down? What’s his name?”
“Mr. Morel.”
“What, Walter? Is owt amiss?”
“He’s got to go to London.”
The man went to the telephone and rang up the bottom office.
“Walter Morel’s wanted, number 42, Hard. Summat’s amiss; there’s his
lad here.”
Then he turned round to Paul.
“He’ll be up in a few minutes,” he said.
Paul wandered out to the pit-top. He watched the chair come up, with
its wagon of coal. The great iron cage sank back on its rest, a full
carfle was hauled off, an empty tram run on to the chair, a bell
ting’ed somewhere, the chair heaved, then dropped like a stone.
Paul did not realise William was dead; it was impossible, with such a
bustle going on. The puller-off swung the small truck on to the
turn-table, another man ran with it along the bank down the curving
lines.
“And William is dead, and my mother’s in London, and what will she be
doing?” the boy asked himself, as if it were a conundrum.
He watched chair after chair come up, and still no father. At last,
standing beside a wagon, a man’s form! the chair sank on its rests,
Morel stepped off. He was slightly lame from an accident.
“Is it thee, Paul? Is ’e worse?”
“You’ve got to go to London.”
The two walked off the pit-bank, where men were watching curiously. As
they came out and went along the railway, with the sunny autumn field
on one side and a wall of trucks on the other, Morel said in a
frightened voice:
“’E’s niver gone, child?”
“Yes.”
“When wor’t?”
“Last night. We had a telegram from my mother.”
Morel walked on a few strides, then leaned up against a truck-side, his
hand over his eyes. He was not crying. Paul stood looking round,
waiting. On the weighing machine a truck trundled slowly. Paul saw
everything, except his father leaning against the truck as if he were
tired.
Morel had only once before been to London. He set off, scared and
peaked, to help his wife. That was on Tuesday. The children were left
alone in the house. Paul went to work, Arthur went to school, and Annie
had in a friend to be with her.
On Saturday night, as Paul was turning the corner, coming home from
Keston, he saw his mother and father, who had come to Sethley Bridge
Station. They were walking in silence in the dark, tired, straggling
apart. The boy waited.
“Mother!” he said, in the darkness.
Mrs. Morel’s small figure seemed not to observe. He spoke again.
“Paul!” she said, uninterestedly.
She let him kiss her, but she seemed unaware of him.
In the house she was the same—small, white, and mute. She noticed
nothing, she said nothing, only:
“The coffin will be here to-night, Walter. You’d better see about some
help.” Then, turning to the children: “We’re bringing him home.”
Then she relapsed into the same mute looking into space, her hands
folded on her lap. Paul, looking at her, felt he could not breathe. The
house was dead silent.
“I went to work, mother,” he said plaintively.
“Did you?” she answered, dully.
After half an hour Morel, troubled and bewildered, came in again.
“Wheer s’ll we ha’e him when he _does_ come?” he asked his wife.
“In the front-room.”
“Then I’d better shift th’ table?”
“Yes.”
“An’ ha’e him across th’ chairs?”
“You know there—Yes, I suppose so.”
Morel and Paul went, with a candle, into the parlour. There was no gas
there. The father unscrewed the top of the big mahogany oval table, and
cleared the middle of the room; then he arranged six chairs opposite
each other, so that the coffin could stand on their beds.
“You niver seed such a length as he is!” said the miner, and watching
anxiously as he worked.
Paul went to the bay window and looked out. The ash-tree stood
monstrous and black in front of the wide darkness. It was a faintly
luminous night. Paul went back to his mother.
At ten o’clock Morel called:
“He’s here!”
Everyone started. There was a noise of unbarring and unlocking the
front door, which opened straight from the night into the room.
“Bring another candle,” called Morel.
Annie and Arthur went. Paul followed with his mother. He stood with his
arm round her waist in the inner doorway. Down the middle of the
cleared room waited six chairs, face to face. In the window, against
the lace curtains, Arthur held up one candle, and by the open door,
against the night, Annie stood leaning forward, her brass candlestick
glittering.
There was the noise of wheels. Outside in the darkness of the street
below Paul could see horses and a black vehicle, one lamp, and a few
pale faces; then some men, miners, all in their shirt-sleeves, seemed
to struggle in the obscurity. Presently two men appeared, bowed beneath
a great weight. It was Morel and his neighbour.
“Steady!” called Morel, out of breath.
He and his fellow mounted the steep garden step, heaved into the
candlelight with their gleaming coffin-end. Limbs of other men were
seen struggling behind. Morel and Burns, in front, staggered; the great
dark weight swayed.
“Steady, steady!” cried Morel, as if in pain.
All the six bearers were up in the small garden, holding the great
coffin aloft. There were three more steps to the door. The yellow lamp
of the carriage shone alone down the black road.
“Now then!” said Morel.
The coffin swayed, the men began to mount the three steps with their
load. Annie’s candle flickered, and she whimpered as the first men
appeared, and the limbs and bowed heads of six men struggled to climb
into the room, bearing the coffin that rode like sorrow on their living
flesh.
“Oh, my son—my son!” Mrs. Morel sang softly, and each time the coffin
swung to the unequal climbing of the men: “Oh, my son—my son—my son!”
“Mother!” Paul whimpered, his hand round her waist.
She did not hear.
“Oh, my son—my son!” she repeated.
Paul saw drops of sweat fall from his father’s brow. Six men were in
the room—six coatless men, with yielding, struggling limbs, filling the
room and knocking against the furniture. The coffin veered, and was
gently lowered on to the chairs. The sweat fell from Morel’s face on
its boards.
“My word, he’s a weight!” said a man, and the five miners sighed,
bowed, and, trembling with the struggle, descended the steps again,
closing the door behind them.
The family was alone in the parlour with the great polished box.
William, when laid out, was six feet four inches long. Like a monument
lay the bright brown, ponderous coffin. Paul thought it would never be
got out of the room again. His mother was stroking the polished wood.
They buried him on the Monday in the little cemetery on the hillside
that looks over the fields at the big church and the houses. It was
sunny, and the white chrysanthemums frilled themselves in the warmth.
Mrs. Morel could not be persuaded, after this, to talk and take her old
bright interest in life. She remained shut off. All the way home in the
train she had said to herself: “If only it could have been me!”
When Paul came home at night he found his mother sitting, her day’s
work done, with hands folded in her lap upon her coarse apron. She
always used to have changed her dress and put on a black apron, before.
Now Annie set his supper, and his mother sat looking blankly in front
of her, her mouth shut tight. Then he beat his brains for news to tell
her.
“Mother, Miss Jordan was down to-day, and she said my sketch of a
colliery at work was beautiful.”
But Mrs. Morel took no notice. Night after night he forced himself to
tell her things, although she did not listen. It drove him almost
insane to have her thus. At last:
“What’s a-matter, mother?” he asked.
She did not hear.
“What’s a-matter?” he persisted. “Mother, what’s a-matter?”
“You know what’s the matter,” she said irritably, turning away.
The lad—he was sixteen years old—went to bed drearily. He was cut off
and wretched through October, November and December. His mother tried,
but she could not rouse herself. She could only brood on her dead son;
he had been let to die so cruelly.
At last, on December 23, with his five shillings Christmas-box in his
pocket, Paul wandered blindly home. His mother looked at him, and her
heart stood still.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I’m badly, mother!” he replied. “Mr. Jordan gave me five shillings for
a Christmas-box!”
He handed it to her with trembling hands. She put it on the table.
“You aren’t glad!” he reproached her; but he trembled violently.
“Where hurts you?” she said, unbuttoning his overcoat.
It was the old question.
“I feel badly, mother.”
She undressed him and put him to bed. He had pneumonia dangerously, the
doctor said.
“Might he never have had it if I’d kept him at home, not let him go to
Nottingham?” was one of the first things she asked.
“He might not have been so bad,” said the doctor.
Mrs. Morel stood condemned on her own ground.
“I should have watched the living, not the dead,” she told herself.
Paul was very ill. His mother lay in bed at nights with him; they could
not afford a nurse. He grew worse, and the crisis approached. One night
he tossed into consciousness in the ghastly, sickly feeling of
dissolution, when all the cells in the body seem in intense
irritability to be breaking down, and consciousness makes a last flare
of struggle, like madness.
“I s’ll die, mother!” he cried, heaving for breath on the pillow.
She lifted him up, crying in a small voice:
“Oh, my son—my son!”
That brought him to. He realised her. His whole will rose up and
arrested him. He put his head on her breast, and took ease of her for
love.
“For some things,” said his aunt, “it was a good thing Paul was ill
that Christmas. I believe it saved his mother.”