Sons and Lovers
they answered with brutality and also with a sneering superciliousness.
Paul was just opening out from childhood into manhood. This atmosphere,
where everything took a religious value, came with a subtle fascination
to him. There was something in the air. His own mother was logical.
Here there was something different, something he loved, something that
at times he hated.
Miriam quarrelled with her brothers fiercely. Later in the afternoon,
when they had gone away again, her mother said:
“You disappointed me at dinner-time, Miriam.”
The girl dropped her head.
“They are such _brutes!_” she suddenly cried, looking up with flashing
eyes.
“But hadn’t you promised not to answer them?” said the mother. “And I
believed in you. I _can’t_ stand it when you wrangle.”
“But they’re so hateful!” cried Miriam, “and—and _low_.”
“Yes, dear. But how often have I asked you not to answer Edgar back?
Can’t you let him say what he likes?”
“But why should he say what he likes?”
“Aren’t you strong enough to bear it, Miriam, if even for my sake? Are
you so weak that you must wrangle with them?”
Mrs. Leivers stuck unflinchingly to this doctrine of “the other cheek”.
She could not instil it at all into the boys. With the girls she
succeeded better, and Miriam was the child of her heart. The boys
loathed the other cheek when it was presented to them. Miriam was often
sufficiently lofty to turn it. Then they spat on her and hated her. But
she walked in her proud humility, living within herself.
There was always this feeling of jangle and discord in the Leivers
family. Although the boys resented so bitterly this eternal appeal to
their deeper feelings of resignation and proud humility, yet it had its
effect on them. They could not establish between themselves and an
outsider just the ordinary human feeling and unexaggerated friendship;
they were always restless for the something deeper. Ordinary folk
seemed shallow to them, trivial and inconsiderable. And so they were
unaccustomed, painfully uncouth in the simplest social intercourse,
suffering, and yet insolent in their superiority. Then beneath was the
yearning for the soul-intimacy to which they could not attain because
they were too dumb, and every approach to close connection was blocked
by their clumsy contempt of other people. They wanted genuine intimacy,
but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they
scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which
forms common human intercourse.
Paul fell under Mrs. Leivers’s spell. Everything had a religious and
intensified meaning when he was with her. His soul, hurt, highly
developed, sought her as if for nourishment. Together they seemed to
sift the vital fact from an experience.
Miriam was her mother’s daughter. In the sunshine of the afternoon
mother and daughter went down the fields with him. They looked for
nests. There was a jenny wren’s in the hedge by the orchard.
“I _do_ want you to see this,” said Mrs. Leivers.
He crouched down and carefully put his finger through the thorns into
the round door of the nest.
“It’s almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of the bird,”
he said, “it’s so warm. They say a bird makes its nest round like a cup
with pressing its breast on it. Then how did it make the ceiling round,
I wonder?”
The nest seemed to start into life for the two women. After that,
Miriam came to see it every day. It seemed so close to her. Again,
going down the hedgeside with the girl, he noticed the celandines,
scalloped splashes of gold, on the side of the ditch.
“I like them,” he said, “when their petals go flat back with the
sunshine. They seemed to be pressing themselves at the sun.”
And then the celandines ever after drew her with a little spell.
Anthropomorphic as she was, she stimulated him into appreciating things
thus, and then they lived for her. She seemed to need things kindling
in her imagination or in her soul before she felt she had them. And she
was cut off from ordinary life by her religious intensity which made
the world for her either a nunnery garden or a paradise, where sin and
knowledge were not, or else an ugly, cruel thing.
So it was in this atmosphere of subtle intimacy, this meeting in their
common feeling for something in Nature, that their love started.
Personally, he was a long time before he realised her. For ten months
he had to stay at home after his illness. For a while he went to
Skegness with his mother, and was perfectly happy. But even from the
seaside he wrote long letters to Mrs. Leivers about the shore and the
sea. And he brought back his beloved sketches of the flat Lincoln
coast, anxious for them to see. Almost they would interest the Leivers
more than they interested his mother. It was not his art Mrs. Morel
cared about; it was himself and his achievement. But Mrs. Leivers and
her children were almost his disciples. They kindled him and made him
glow to his work, whereas his mother’s influence was to make him
quietly determined, patient, dogged, unwearied.
He soon was friends with the boys, whose rudeness was only superficial.
They had all, when they could trust themselves, a strange gentleness
and lovableness.
“Will you come with me on to the fallow?” asked Edgar, rather
hesitatingly.
Paul went joyfully, and spent the afternoon helping to hoe or to single
turnips with his friend. He used to lie with the three brothers in the
hay piled up in the barn and tell them about Nottingham and about
Jordan’s. In return, they taught him to milk, and let him do little
jobs—chopping hay or pulping turnips—just as much as he liked. At
midsummer he worked all through hay-harvest with them, and then he
loved them. The family was so cut off from the world actually. They
seemed, somehow, like “_les derniers fils d’une race épuisée_”. Though
the lads were strong and healthy, yet they had all that
over-sensitiveness and hanging-back which made them so lonely, yet also
such close, delicate friends once their intimacy was won. Paul loved
them dearly, and they him.
Miriam came later. But he had come into her life before she made any
mark on his. One dull afternoon, when the men were on the land and the
rest at school, only Miriam and her mother at home, the girl said to
him, after having hesitated for some time:
“Have you seen the swing?”
“No,” he answered. “Where?”
“In the cowshed,” she replied.
She always hesitated to offer or to show him anything. Men have such
different standards of worth from women, and her dear things—the
valuable things to her—her brothers had so often mocked or flouted.
“Come on, then,” he replied, jumping up.
There were two cowsheds, one on either side of the barn. In the lower,
darker shed there was standing for four cows. Hens flew scolding over
the manger-wall as the youth and girl went forward for the great thick
rope which hung from the beam in the darkness overhead, and was pushed
back over a peg in the wall.
“It’s something like a rope!” he exclaimed appreciatively; and he sat
down on it, anxious to try it. Then immediately he rose.
“Come on, then, and have first go,” he said to the girl.
“See,” she answered, going into the barn, “we put some bags on the
seat;” and she made the swing comfortable for him. That gave her
pleasure. He held the rope.
“Come on, then,” he said to her.
“No, I won’t go first,” she answered.
She stood aside in her still, aloof fashion.
“Why?”
“You go,” she pleaded.
Almost for the first time in her life she had the pleasure of giving up
to a man, of spoiling him. Paul looked at her.
“All right,” he said, sitting down. “Mind out!”
He set off with a spring, and in a moment was flying through the air,
almost out of the door of the shed, the upper half of which was open,
showing outside the drizzling rain, the filthy yard, the cattle
standing disconsolate against the black cartshed, and at the back of
all the grey-green wall of the wood. She stood below in her crimson
tam-o’-shanter and watched. He looked down at her, and she saw his blue
eyes sparkling.
“It’s a treat of a swing,” he said.
“Yes.”
He was swinging through the air, every bit of him swinging, like a bird
that swoops for joy of movement. And he looked down at her. Her crimson
cap hung over her dark curls, her beautiful warm face, so still in a
kind of brooding, was lifted towards him. It was dark and rather cold
in the shed. Suddenly a swallow came down from the high roof and darted
out of the door.
“I didn’t know a bird was watching,” he called.
He swung negligently. She could feel him falling and lifting through
the air, as if he were lying on some force.
“Now I’ll die,” he said, in a detached, dreamy voice, as though he were
the dying motion of the swing. She watched him, fascinated. Suddenly he
put on the brake and jumped out.
“I’ve had a long turn,” he said. “But it’s a treat of a swing—it’s a
real treat of a swing!”
Miriam was amused that he took a swing so seriously and felt so warmly
over it.
“No; you go on,” she said.
“Why, don’t you want one?” he asked, astonished.
“Well, not much. I’ll have just a little.”
She sat down, whilst he kept the bags in place for her.
“It’s so ripping!” he said, setting her in motion. “Keep your heels up,
or they’ll bang the manger-wall.”
She felt the accuracy with which he caught her, exactly at the right
moment, and the exactly proportionate strength of his thrust, and she
was afraid. Down to her bowels went the hot wave of fear. She was in
his hands. Again, firm and inevitable came the thrust at the right
moment. She gripped the rope, almost swooning.
“Ha!” she laughed in fear. “No higher!”
“But you’re not a _bit_ high,” he remonstrated.
“But no higher.”
He heard the fear in her voice, and desisted. Her heart melted in hot
pain when the moment came for him to thrust her forward again. But he
left her alone. She began to breathe.
“Won’t you really go any farther?” he asked. “Should I keep you there?”
“No; let me go by myself,” she answered.
He moved aside and watched her.
“Why, you’re scarcely moving,” he said.
She laughed slightly with shame, and in a moment got down.
“They say if you can swing you won’t be sea-sick,” he said, as he
mounted again. “I don’t believe I should ever be sea-sick.”
Away he went. There was something fascinating to her in him. For the
moment he was nothing but a piece of swinging stuff; not a particle of
him that did not swing. She could never lose herself so, nor could her
brothers. It roused a warmth in her. It was almost as if he were a
flame that had lit a warmth in her whilst he swung in the middle air.
And gradually the intimacy with the family concentrated for Paul on
three persons—the mother, Edgar, and Miriam. To the mother he went for
that sympathy and that appeal which seemed to draw him out. Edgar was
his very close friend. And to Miriam he more or less condescended,
because she seemed so humble.
But the girl gradually sought him out. If he brought up his
sketch-book, it was she who pondered longest over the last picture.
Then she would look up at him. Suddenly, her dark eyes alight like
water that shakes with a stream of gold in the dark, she would ask:
“Why do I like this so?”
Always something in his breast shrank from these close, intimate,
dazzled looks of hers.
“Why _do_ you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It seems so true.”
“It’s because—it’s because there is scarcely any shadow in it; it’s
more shimmery, as if I’d painted the shimmering protoplasm in the
leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems
dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a
dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.”