Sons and Lovers
returned with a piece of pork-pie in his fist. It was what Mrs. Morel
had bought for her son.
“Nor was that bought for you. If you can give me no more than
twenty-five shillings, I’m sure I’m not going to buy you pork-pie to
stuff, after you’ve swilled a bellyful of beer.”
“Wha-at—wha-at!” snarled Morel, toppling in his balance. “Wha-at—not
for me?” He looked at the piece of meat and crust, and suddenly, in a
vicious spurt of temper, flung it into the fire.
Paul started to his feet.
“Waste your own stuff!” he cried.
“What—what!” suddenly shouted Morel, jumping up and clenching his fist.
“I’ll show yer, yer young jockey!”
“All right!” said Paul viciously, putting his head on one side. “Show
me!”
He would at that moment dearly have loved to have a smack at something.
Morel was half crouching, fists up, ready to spring. The young man
stood, smiling with his lips.
“Ussha!” hissed the father, swiping round with a great stroke just past
his son’s face. He dared not, even though so close, really touch the
young man, but swerved an inch away.
“Right!” said Paul, his eyes upon the side of his father’s mouth, where
in another instant his fist would have hit. He ached for that stroke.
But he heard a faint moan from behind. His mother was deadly pale and
dark at the mouth. Morel was dancing up to deliver another blow.
“Father!” said Paul, so that the word rang.
Morel started, and stood at attention.
“Mother!” moaned the boy. “Mother!”
She began to struggle with herself. Her open eyes watched him, although
she could not move. Gradually she was coming to herself. He laid her
down on the sofa, and ran upstairs for a little whisky, which at last
she could sip. The tears were hopping down his face. As he kneeled in
front of her he did not cry, but the tears ran down his face quickly.
Morel, on the opposite side of the room, sat with his elbows on his
knees glaring across.
“What’s a-matter with ’er?” he asked.
“Faint!” replied Paul.
“H’m!”
The elderly man began to unlace his boots. He stumbled off to bed. His
last fight was fought in that home.
Paul kneeled there, stroking his mother’s hand.
“Don’t be poorly, mother—don’t be poorly!” he said time after time.
“It’s nothing, my boy,” she murmured.
At last he rose, fetched in a large piece of coal, and raked the fire.
Then he cleared the room, put everything straight, laid the things for
breakfast, and brought his mother’s candle.
“Can you go to bed, mother?”
“Yes, I’ll come.”
“Sleep with Annie, mother, not with him.”
“No. I’ll sleep in my own bed.”
“Don’t sleep with him, mother.”
“I’ll sleep in my own bed.”
She rose, and he turned out the gas, then followed her closely
upstairs, carrying her candle. On the landing he kissed her close.
“Good-night, mother.”
“Good-night!” she said.
He pressed his face upon the pillow in a fury of misery. And yet,
somewhere in his soul, he was at peace because he still loved his
mother best. It was the bitter peace of resignation.
The efforts of his father to conciliate him next day were a great
humiliation to him.
Everybody tried to forget the scene.
CHAPTER IX
DEFEAT OF MIRIAM
Paul was dissatisfied with himself and with everything. The deepest of
his love belonged to his mother. When he felt he had hurt her, or
wounded his love for her, he could not bear it. Now it was spring, and
there was battle between him and Miriam. This year he had a good deal
against her. She was vaguely aware of it. The old feeling that she was
to be a sacrifice to this love, which she had had when she prayed, was
mingled in all her emotions. She did not at the bottom believe she ever
would have him. She did not believe in herself primarily: doubted
whether she could ever be what he would demand of her. Certainly she
never saw herself living happily through a lifetime with him. She saw
tragedy, sorrow, and sacrifice ahead. And in sacrifice she was proud,
in renunciation she was strong, for she did not trust herself to
support everyday life. She was prepared for the big things and the deep
things, like tragedy. It was the sufficiency of the small day-life she
could not trust.
The Easter holidays began happily. Paul was his own frank self. Yet she
felt it would go wrong. On the Sunday afternoon she stood at her
bedroom window, looking across at the oak-trees of the wood, in whose
branches a twilight was tangled, below the bright sky of the afternoon.
Grey-green rosettes of honeysuckle leaves hung before the window, some
already, she fancied, showing bud. It was spring, which she loved and
dreaded.
Hearing the clack of the gate she stood in suspense. It was a bright
grey day. Paul came into the yard with his bicycle, which glittered as
he walked. Usually he rang his bell and laughed towards the house.
To-day he walked with shut lips and cold, cruel bearing, that had
something of a slouch and a sneer in it. She knew him well by now, and
could tell from that keen-looking, aloof young body of his what was
happening inside him. There was a cold correctness in the way he put
his bicycle in its place, that made her heart sink.
She came downstairs nervously. She was wearing a new net blouse that
she thought became her. It had a high collar with a tiny ruff,
reminding her of Mary, Queen of Scots, and making her, she thought,
look wonderfully a woman, and dignified. At twenty she was
full-breasted and luxuriously formed. Her face was still like a soft
rich mask, unchangeable. But her eyes, once lifted, were wonderful. She
was afraid of him. He would notice her new blouse.
He, being in a hard, ironical mood, was entertaining the family to a
description of a service given in the Primitive Methodist Chapel,
conducted by one of the well-known preachers of the sect. He sat at the
head of the table, his mobile face, with the eyes that could be so
beautiful, shining with tenderness or dancing with laughter, now taking
on one expression and then another, in imitation of various people he
was mocking. His mockery always hurt her; it was too near the reality.
He was too clever and cruel. She felt that when his eyes were like
this, hard with mocking hate, he would spare neither himself nor
anybody else. But Mrs. Leivers was wiping her eyes with laughter, and
Mr. Leivers, just awake from his Sunday nap, was rubbing his head in
amusement. The three brothers sat with ruffled, sleepy appearance in
their shirt-sleeves, giving a guffaw from time to time. The whole
family loved a “take-off” more than anything.
He took no notice of Miriam. Later, she saw him remark her new blouse,
saw that the artist approved, but it won from him not a spark of
warmth. She was nervous, could hardly reach the teacups from the
shelves.
When the men went out to milk, she ventured to address him personally.
“You were late,” she said.
“Was I?” he answered.
There was silence for a while.
“Was it rough riding?” she asked.
“I didn’t notice it.”
She continued quickly to lay the table. When she had finished—
“Tea won’t be for a few minutes. Will you come and look at the
daffodils?” she said.
He rose without answering. They went out into the back garden under the
budding damson-trees. The hills and the sky were clean and cold.
Everything looked washed, rather hard. Miriam glanced at Paul. He was
pale and impassive. It seemed cruel to her that his eyes and brows,
which she loved, could look so hurting.
“Has the wind made you tired?” she asked. She detected an underneath
feeling of weariness about him.
“No, I think not,” he answered.
“It must be rough on the road—the wood moans so.”
“You can see by the clouds it’s a south-west wind; that helps me here.”
“You see, I don’t cycle, so I don’t understand,” she murmured.
“Is there need to cycle to know that!” he said.
She thought his sarcasms were unnecessary. They went forward in
silence. Round the wild, tussocky lawn at the back of the house was a
thorn hedge, under which daffodils were craning forward from among
their sheaves of grey-green blades. The cheeks of the flowers were
greenish with cold. But still some had burst, and their gold ruffled
and glowed. Miriam went on her knees before one cluster, took a
wild-looking daffodil between her hands, turned up its face of gold to
her, and bowed down, caressing it with her mouth and cheeks and brow.
He stood aside, with his hands in his pockets, watching her. One after
another she turned up to him the faces of the yellow, bursten flowers
appealingly, fondling them lavishly all the while.
“Aren’t they magnificent?” she murmured.
“Magnificent! It’s a bit thick—they’re pretty!”
She bowed again to her flowers at his censure of her praise. He watched
her crouching, sipping the flowers with fervid kisses.
“Why must you always be fondling things?” he said irritably.
“But I love to touch them,” she replied, hurt.
“Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted to
pull the heart out of them? Why don’t you have a bit more restraint, or
reserve, or something?”
She looked up at him full of pain, then continued slowly to stroke her
lips against a ruffled flower. Their scent, as she smelled it, was so
much kinder than he; it almost made her cry.
“You wheedle the soul out of things,” he said. “I would never
wheedle—at any rate, I’d go straight.”
He scarcely knew what he was saying. These things came from him
mechanically. She looked at him. His body seemed one weapon, firm and
hard against her.
“You’re always begging things to love you,” he said, “as if you were a
beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them—”
Rhythmically, Miriam was swaying and stroking the flower with her
mouth, inhaling the scent which ever after made her shudder as it came
to her nostrils.
“You don’t want to love—your eternal and abnormal craving is to be
loved. You aren’t positive, you’re negative. You absorb, absorb, as if
you must fill yourself up with love, because you’ve got a shortage
somewhere.”
She was stunned by his cruelty, and did not hear. He had not the
faintest notion of what he was saying. It was as if his fretted,
tortured soul, run hot by thwarted passion, jetted off these sayings
like sparks from electricity. She did not grasp anything he said. She
only sat crouched beneath his cruelty and his hatred of her. She never
realised in a flash. Over everything she brooded and brooded.
After tea he stayed with Edgar and the brothers, taking no notice of
Miriam. She, extremely unhappy on this looked-for holiday, waited for
him. And at last he yielded and came to her. She was determined to
track this mood of his to its origin. She counted it not much more than
a mood.
“Shall we go through the wood a little way?” she asked him, knowing he
never refused a direct request.
They went down to the warren. On the middle path they passed a trap, a
narrow horseshoe hedge of small fir-boughs, baited with the guts of a
rabbit. Paul glanced at it frowning. She caught his eye.
“Isn’t it dreadful?” she asked.
“I don’t know! Is it worse than a weasel with its teeth in a rabbit’s
throat? One weasel or many rabbits? One or the other must go!”
He was taking the bitterness of life badly. She was rather sorry for
him.
“We will go back to the house,” he said. “I don’t want to walk out.”
They went past the lilac-tree, whose bronze leaf-buds were coming
unfastened. Just a fragment remained of the haystack, a monument
squared and brown, like a pillar of stone. There was a little bed of
hay from the last cutting.
“Let us sit here a minute,” said Miriam.
He sat down against his will, resting his back against the hard wall of
hay. They faced the amphitheatre of round hills that glowed with
sunset, tiny white farms standing out, the meadows golden, the woods