Sons and Lovers
the cigarette from his fingers and darted away. He, leaping after her,
seized the comb from her back hair. She turned, threw the cigarette at
him. He picked it up, put it in his mouth, and sat down.
“Nuisance!” she cried. “Give me my comb!”
She was afraid that her hair, specially done for him, would come down.
She stood with her hands to her head. He hid the comb between his
knees.
“I’ve non got it,” he said.
The cigarette trembled between his lips with laughter as he spoke.
“Liar!” she said.
“’S true as I’m here!” he laughed, showing his hands.
“You brazen imp!” she exclaimed, rushing and scuffling for the comb,
which he had under his knees. As she wrestled with him, pulling at his
smooth, tight-covered knees, he laughed till he lay back on the sofa
shaking with laughter. The cigarette fell from his mouth almost
singeing his throat. Under his delicate tan the blood flushed up, and
he laughed till his blue eyes were blinded, his throat swollen almost
to choking. Then he sat up. Beatrice was putting in her comb.
“Tha tickled me, Beat,” he said thickly.
Like a flash her small white hand went out and smacked his face. He
started up, glaring at her. They stared at each other. Slowly the flush
mounted her cheek, she dropped her eyes, then her head. He sat down
sulkily. She went into the scullery to adjust her hair. In private
there she shed a few tears, she did not know what for.
When she returned she was pursed up close. But it was only a film over
her fire. He, with ruffled hair, was sulking upon the sofa. She sat
down opposite, in the armchair, and neither spoke. The clock ticked in
the silence like blows.
“You are a little cat, Beat,” he said at length, half apologetically.
“Well, you shouldn’t be brazen,” she replied.
There was again a long silence. He whistled to himself like a man much
agitated but defiant. Suddenly she went across to him and kissed him.
“Did it, pore fing!” she mocked.
He lifted his face, smiling curiously.
“Kiss?” he invited her.
“Daren’t I?” she asked.
“Go on!” he challenged, his mouth lifted to her.
Deliberately, and with a peculiar quivering smile that seemed to
overspread her whole body, she put her mouth on his. Immediately his
arms folded round her. As soon as the long kiss was finished she drew
back her head from him, put her delicate fingers on his neck, through
the open collar. Then she closed her eyes, giving herself up again in a
kiss.
She acted of her own free will. What she would do she did, and made
nobody responsible.
Paul felt life changing around him. The conditions of youth were gone.
Now it was a home of grown-up people. Annie was a married woman, Arthur
was following his own pleasure in a way unknown to his folk. For so
long they had all lived at home, and gone out to pass their time. But
now, for Annie and Arthur, life lay outside their mother’s house. They
came home for holiday and for rest. So there was that strange,
half-empty feeling about the house, as if the birds had flown. Paul
became more and more unsettled. Annie and Arthur had gone. He was
restless to follow. Yet home was for him beside his mother. And still
there was something else, something outside, something he wanted.
He grew more and more restless. Miriam did not satisfy him. His old mad
desire to be with her grew weaker. Sometimes he met Clara in
Nottingham, sometimes he went to meetings with her, sometimes he saw
her at Willey Farm. But on these last occasions the situation became
strained. There was a triangle of antagonism between Paul and Clara and
Miriam. With Clara he took on a smart, worldly, mocking tone very
antagonistic to Miriam. It did not matter what went before. She might
be intimate and sad with him. Then as soon as Clara appeared, it all
vanished, and he played to the newcomer.
Miriam had one beautiful evening with him in the hay. He had been on
the horse-rake, and having finished, came to help her to put the hay in
cocks. Then he talked to her of his hopes and despairs, and his whole
soul seemed to lie bare before her. She felt as if she watched the very
quivering stuff of life in him. The moon came out: they walked home
together: he seemed to have come to her because he needed her so badly,
and she listened to him, gave him all her love and her faith. It seemed
to her he brought her the best of himself to keep, and that she would
guard it all her life. Nay, the sky did not cherish the stars more
surely and eternally than she would guard the good in the soul of Paul
Morel. She went on home alone, feeling exalted, glad in her faith.
And then, the next day, Clara came. They were to have tea in the
hayfield. Miriam watched the evening drawing to gold and shadow. And
all the time Paul was sporting with Clara. He made higher and higher
heaps of hay that they were jumping over. Miriam did not care for the
game, and stood aside. Edgar and Geoffrey and Maurice and Clara and
Paul jumped. Paul won, because he was light. Clara’s blood was roused.
She could run like an Amazon. Paul loved the determined way she rushed
at the hay-cock and leaped, landed on the other side, her breasts
shaken, her thick hair come undone.
“You touched!” he cried. “You touched!”
“No!” she flashed, turning to Edgar. “I didn’t touch, did I? Wasn’t I
clear?”
“I couldn’t say,” laughed Edgar.
None of them could say.
“But you touched,” said Paul. “You’re beaten.”
“I did _not_ touch!” she cried.
“As plain as anything,” said Paul.
“Box his ears for me!” she cried to Edgar.
“Nay,” Edgar laughed. “I daren’t. You must do it yourself.”
“And nothing can alter the fact that you touched,” laughed Paul.
She was furious with him. Her little triumph before these lads and men
was gone. She had forgotten herself in the game. Now he was to humble
her.
“I think you are despicable!” she said.
And again he laughed, in a way that tortured Miriam.
“And I _knew_ you couldn’t jump that heap,” he teased.
She turned her back on him. Yet everybody could see that the only
person she listened to, or was conscious of, was he, and he of her. It
pleased the men to see this battle between them. But Miriam was
tortured.
Paul could choose the lesser in place of the higher, she saw. He could
be unfaithful to himself, unfaithful to the real, deep Paul Morel.
There was a danger of his becoming frivolous, of his running after his
satisfaction like any Arthur, or like his father. It made Miriam bitter
to think that he should throw away his soul for this flippant traffic
of triviality with Clara. She walked in bitterness and silence, while
the other two rallied each other, and Paul sported.
And afterwards, he would not own it, but he was rather ashamed of
himself, and prostrated himself before Miriam. Then again he rebelled.
“It’s not religious to be religious,” he said. “I reckon a crow is
religious when it sails across the sky. But it only does it because it
feels itself carried to where it’s going, not because it thinks it is
being eternal.”
But Miriam knew that one should be religious in everything, have God,
whatever God might be, present in everything.
“I don’t believe God knows such a lot about Himself,” he cried. “God
doesn’t _know_ things, He _is_ things. And I’m sure He’s not soulful.”
And then it seemed to her that Paul was arguing God on to his own side,
because he wanted his own way and his own pleasure. There was a long
battle between him and her. He was utterly unfaithful to her even in
her own presence; then he was ashamed, then repentant; then he hated
her, and went off again. Those were the ever-recurring conditions.
She fretted him to the bottom of his soul. There she remained—sad,
pensive, a worshipper. And he caused her sorrow. Half the time he
grieved for her, half the time he hated her. She was his conscience;
and he felt, somehow, he had got a conscience that was too much for
him. He could not leave her, because in one way she did hold the best
of him. He could not stay with her because she did not take the rest of
him, which was three-quarters. So he chafed himself into rawness over
her.
When she was twenty-one he wrote her a letter which could only have
been written to her.
“May I speak of our old, worn love, this last time. It, too, is
changing, is it not? Say, has not the body of that love died, and left
you its invulnerable soul? You see, I can give you a spirit love, I
have given it you this long, long time; but not embodied passion. See,
you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun—as a
mystic monk to a mystic nun. Surely you esteem it best. Yet you
regret—no, have regretted—the other. In all our relations no body
enters. I do not talk to you through the senses—rather through the
spirit. That is why we cannot love in the common sense. Ours is not an
everyday affection. As yet we are mortal, and to live side by side with
one another would be dreadful, for somehow with you I cannot long be
trivial, and, you know, to be always beyond this mortal state would be
to lose it. If people marry, they must live together as affectionate
humans, who may be commonplace with each other without feeling
awkward—not as two souls. So I feel it.
“Ought I to send this letter?—I doubt it. But there—it is best to
understand. Au revoir.”
Miriam read this letter twice, after which she sealed it up. A year
later she broke the seal to show her mother the letter.
“You are a nun—you are a nun.” The words went into her heart again and
again. Nothing he ever had said had gone into her so deeply, fixedly,
like a mortal wound.
She answered him two days after the party.
“‘Our intimacy would have been all-beautiful but for one little
mistake,’” she quoted. “Was the mistake mine?”
Almost immediately he replied to her from Nottingham, sending her at
the same time a little “Omar Khayyám.”
“I am glad you answered; you are so calm and natural you put me to
shame. What a ranter I am! We are often out of sympathy. But in
fundamentals we may always be together I think.
“I must thank you for your sympathy with my painting and drawing. Many
a sketch is dedicated to you. I do look forward to your criticisms,
which, to my shame and glory, are always grand appreciations. It is a
lovely joke, that. Au revoir.”
This was the end of the first phase of Paul’s love affair. He was now
about twenty-three years old, and, though still virgin, the sex
instinct that Miriam had over-refined for so long now grew particularly
strong. Often, as he talked to Clara Dawes, came that thickening and
quickening of his blood, that peculiar concentration in the breast, as
if something were alive there, a new self or a new centre of
consciousness, warning him that sooner or later he would have to ask
one woman or another. But he belonged to Miriam. Of that she was so
fixedly sure that he allowed her right.
CHAPTER X
CLARA
When he was twenty-three years old, Paul sent in a landscape to the
winter exhibition at Nottingham Castle. Miss Jordan had taken a good
deal of interest in him, and invited him to her house, where he met
other artists. He was beginning to grow ambitious.
One morning the postman came just as he was washing in the scullery.
Suddenly he heard a wild noise from his mother. Rushing into the
kitchen, he found her standing on the hearthrug wildly waving a letter
and crying “Hurrah!” as if she had gone mad. He was shocked and
frightened.
“Why, mother!” he exclaimed.
She flew to him, flung her arms round him for a moment, then waved the
letter, crying:
“Hurrah, my boy! I knew we should do it!”
He was afraid of her—the small, severe woman with graying hair suddenly
bursting out in such frenzy. The postman came running back, afraid
something had happened. They saw his tipped cap over the short