Sons and Lovers
Round the broken top of the tower the ivy bushed out, old and handsome.
Also, there were a few chill gillivers, in pale cold bud. Miriam wanted
to lean over for some ivy, but he would not let her. Instead, she had
to wait behind him, and take from him each spray as he gathered it and
held it to her, each one separately, in the purest manner of chivalry.
The tower seemed to rock in the wind. They looked over miles and miles
of wooded country, and country with gleams of pasture.
The crypt underneath the manor was beautiful, and in perfect
preservation. Paul made a drawing: Miriam stayed with him. She was
thinking of Mary Queen of Scots looking with her strained, hopeless
eyes, that could not understand misery, over the hills whence no help
came, or sitting in this crypt, being told of a God as cold as the
place she sat in.
They set off again gaily, looking round on their beloved manor that
stood so clean and big on its hill.
“Supposing you could have _that_ farm,” said Paul to Miriam.
“Yes!”
“Wouldn’t it be lovely to come and see you!”
They were now in the bare country of stone walls, which he loved, and
which, though only ten miles from home, seemed so foreign to Miriam.
The party was straggling. As they were crossing a large meadow that
sloped away from the sun, along a path embedded with innumerable tiny
glittering points, Paul, walking alongside, laced his fingers in the
strings of the bag Miriam was carrying, and instantly she felt Annie
behind, watchful and jealous. But the meadow was bathed in a glory of
sunshine, and the path was jewelled, and it was seldom that he gave her
any sign. She held her fingers very still among the strings of the bag,
his fingers touching; and the place was golden as a vision.
At last they came into the straggling grey village of Crich, that lies
high. Beyond the village was the famous Crich Stand that Paul could see
from the garden at home. The party pushed on. Great expanse of country
spread around and below. The lads were eager to get to the top of the
hill. It was capped by a round knoll, half of which was by now cut
away, and on the top of which stood an ancient monument, sturdy and
squat, for signalling in old days far down into the level lands of
Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire.
It was blowing so hard, high up there in the exposed place, that the
only way to be safe was to stand nailed by the wind to the wan of the
tower. At their feet fell the precipice where the limestone was
quarried away. Below was a jumble of hills and tiny villages—Mattock,
Ambergate, Stoney Middleton. The lads were eager to spy out the church
of Bestwood, far away among the rather crowded country on the left.
They were disgusted that it seemed to stand on a plain. They saw the
hills of Derbyshire fall into the monotony of the Midlands that swept
away South.
Miriam was somewhat scared by the wind, but the lads enjoyed it. They
went on, miles and miles, to Whatstandwell. All the food was eaten,
everybody was hungry, and there was very little money to get home with.
But they managed to procure a loaf and a currant-loaf, which they
hacked to pieces with shut-knives, and ate sitting on the wall near the
bridge, watching the bright Derwent rushing by, and the brakes from
Matlock pulling up at the inn.
Paul was now pale with weariness. He had been responsible for the party
all day, and now he was done. Miriam understood, and kept close to him,
and he left himself in her hands.
They had an hour to wait at Ambergate Station. Trains came, crowded
with excursionists returning to Manchester, Birmingham, and London.
“We might be going there—folk easily might think we’re going that far,”
said Paul.
They got back rather late. Miriam, walking home with Geoffrey, watched
the moon rise big and red and misty. She felt something was fulfilled
in her.
She had an elder sister, Agatha, who was a school-teacher. Between the
two girls was a feud. Miriam considered Agatha worldly. And she wanted
herself to be a school-teacher.
One Saturday afternoon Agatha and Miriam were upstairs dressing. Their
bedroom was over the stable. It was a low room, not very large, and
bare. Miriam had nailed on the wall a reproduction of Veronese’s “St.
Catherine”. She loved the woman who sat in the window, dreaming. Her
own windows were too small to sit in. But the front one was dripped
over with honeysuckle and virginia creeper, and looked upon the
tree-tops of the oak-wood across the yard, while the little back
window, no bigger than a handkerchief, was a loophole to the east, to
the dawn beating up against the beloved round hills.
The two sisters did not talk much to each other. Agatha, who was fair
and small and determined, had rebelled against the home atmosphere,
against the doctrine of “the other cheek”. She was out in the world
now, in a fair way to be independent. And she insisted on worldly
values, on appearance, on manners, on position, which Miriam would fain
have ignored.
Both girls liked to be upstairs, out of the way, when Paul came. They
preferred to come running down, open the stair-foot door, and see him
watching, expectant of them. Miriam stood painfully pulling over her
head a rosary he had given her. It caught in the fine mesh of her hair.
But at last she had it on, and the red-brown wooden beads looked well
against her cool brown neck. She was a well-developed girl, and very
handsome. But in the little looking-glass nailed against the
whitewashed wall she could only see a fragment of herself at a time.
Agatha had bought a little mirror of her own, which she propped up to
suit herself. Miriam was near the window. Suddenly she heard the
well-known click of the chain, and she saw Paul fling open the gate,
push his bicycle into the yard. She saw him look at the house, and she
shrank away. He walked in a nonchalant fashion, and his bicycle went
with him as if it were a live thing.
“Paul’s come!” she exclaimed.
“Aren’t you glad?” said Agatha cuttingly.
Miriam stood still in amazement and bewilderment.
“Well, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, but I’m not going to let him see it, and think I wanted him.”
Miriam was startled. She heard him putting his bicycle in the stable
underneath, and talking to Jimmy, who had been a pit-horse, and who was
seedy.
“Well, Jimmy my lad, how are ter? Nobbut sick an’ sadly, like? Why,
then, it’s a shame, my owd lad.”
She heard the rope run through the hole as the horse lifted its head
from the lad’s caress. How she loved to listen when he thought only the
horse could hear. But there was a serpent in her Eden. She searched
earnestly in herself to see if she wanted Paul Morel. She felt there
would be some disgrace in it. Full of twisted feeling, she was afraid
she did want him. She stood self-convicted. Then came an agony of new
shame. She shrank within herself in a coil of torture. Did she want
Paul Morel, and did he know she wanted him? What a subtle infamy upon
her. She felt as if her whole soul coiled into knots of shame.
Agatha was dressed first, and ran downstairs. Miriam heard her greet
the lad gaily, knew exactly how brilliant her grey eyes became with
that tone. She herself would have felt it bold to have greeted him in
such wise. Yet there she stood under the self-accusation of wanting
him, tied to that stake of torture. In bitter perplexity she kneeled
down and prayed:
“O Lord, let me not love Paul Morel. Keep me from loving him, if I
ought not to love him.”
Something anomalous in the prayer arrested her. She lifted her head and
pondered. How could it be wrong to love him? Love was God’s gift. And
yet it caused her shame. That was because of him, Paul Morel. But,
then, it was not his affair, it was her own, between herself and God.
She was to be a sacrifice. But it was God’s sacrifice, not Paul Morel’s
or her own. After a few minutes she hid her face in the pillow again,
and said:
“But, Lord, if it is Thy will that I should love him, make me love
him—as Christ would, who died for the souls of men. Make me love him
splendidly, because he is Thy son.”
She remained kneeling for some time, quite still, and deeply moved, her
black hair against the red squares and the lavender-sprigged squares of
the patchwork quilt. Prayer was almost essential to her. Then she fell
into that rapture of self-sacrifice, identifying herself with a God who
was sacrificed, which gives to so many human souls their deepest bliss.
When she went downstairs Paul was lying back in an armchair, holding
forth with much vehemence to Agatha, who was scorning a little painting
he had brought to show her. Miriam glanced at the two, and avoided
their levity. She went into the parlour to be alone.
It was tea-time before she was able to speak to Paul, and then her
manner was so distant he thought he had offended her.
Miriam discontinued her practice of going each Thursday evening to the
library in Bestwood. After calling for Paul regularly during the whole
spring, a number of trifling incidents and tiny insults from his family
awakened her to their attitude towards her, and she decided to go no
more. So she announced to Paul one evening she would not call at his
house again for him on Thursday nights.
“Why?” he asked, very short.
“Nothing. Only I’d rather not.”
“Very well.”
“But,” she faltered, “if you’d care to meet me, we could still go
together.”
“Meet you where?”
“Somewhere—where you like.”
“I shan’t meet you anywhere. I don’t see why you shouldn’t keep calling
for me. But if you won’t, I don’t want to meet you.”
So the Thursday evenings which had been so precious to her, and to him,
were dropped. He worked instead. Mrs. Morel sniffed with satisfaction
at this arrangement.
He would not have it that they were lovers. The intimacy between them
had been kept so abstract, such a matter of the soul, all thought and
weary struggle into consciousness, that he saw it only as a platonic
friendship. He stoutly denied there was anything else between them.
Miriam was silent, or else she very quietly agreed. He was a fool who
did not know what was happening to himself. By tacit agreement they
ignored the remarks and insinuations of their acquaintances.
“We aren’t lovers, we are friends,” he said to her. “_We_ know it. Let
them talk. What does it matter what they say.”
Sometimes, as they were walking together, she slipped her arm timidly
into his. But he always resented it, and she knew it. It caused a
violent conflict in him. With Miriam he was always on the high plane of
abstraction, when his natural fire of love was transmitted into the
fine stream of thought. She would have it so. If he were jolly and, as
she put it, flippant, she waited till he came back to her, till the
change had taken place in him again, and he was wrestling with his own
soul, frowning, passionate in his desire for understanding. And in this
passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to
herself. But he must be made abstract first.
Then, if she put her arm in his, it caused him almost torture. His
consciousness seemed to split. The place where she was touching him ran
hot with friction. He was one internecine battle, and he became cruel
to her because of it.
One evening in midsummer Miriam called at the house, warm from
climbing. Paul was alone in the kitchen; his mother could be heard
moving about upstairs.
“Come and look at the sweet-peas,” he said to the girl.
They went into the garden. The sky behind the townlet and the church
was orange-red; the flower-garden was flooded with a strange warm light
that lifted every leaf into significance. Paul passed along a fine row
of sweet-peas, gathering a blossom here and there, all cream and pale
blue. Miriam followed, breathing the fragrance. To her, flowers