Sons and Lovers
went almost distracted when the baby, which was delicate, cried or gave
trouble. He grumbled for hours to his mother. She only said: “Well, my
lad, you did it yourself, now you must make the best of it.” And then
the grit came out in him. He buckled to work, undertook his
responsibilities, acknowledged that he belonged to his wife and child,
and did make a good best of it. He had never been very closely inbound
into the family. Now he was gone altogether.
The months went slowly along. Paul had more or less got into connection
with the Socialist, Suffragette, Unitarian people in Nottingham, owing
to his acquaintance with Clara. One day a friend of his and of Clara’s,
in Bestwood, asked him to take a message to Mrs. Dawes. He went in the
evening across Sneinton Market to Bluebell Hill. He found the house in
a mean little street paved with granite cobbles and having causeways of
dark blue, grooved bricks. The front door went up a step from off this
rough pavement, where the feet of the passers-by rasped and clattered.
The brown paint on the door was so old that the naked wood showed
between the rents. He stood on the street below and knocked. There came
a heavy footstep; a large, stout woman of about sixty towered above
him. He looked up at her from the pavement. She had a rather severe
face.
She admitted him into the parlour, which opened on to the street. It
was a small, stuffy, defunct room, of mahogany, and deathly
enlargements of photographs of departed people done in carbon. Mrs.
Radford left him. She was stately, almost martial. In a moment Clara
appeared. She flushed deeply, and he was covered with confusion. It
seemed as if she did not like being discovered in her home
circumstances.
“I thought it couldn’t be your voice,” she said.
But she might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. She invited
him out of the mausoleum of a parlour into the kitchen.
That was a little, darkish room too, but it was smothered in white
lace. The mother had seated herself again by the cupboard, and was
drawing thread from a vast web of lace. A clump of fluff and ravelled
cotton was at her right hand, a heap of three-quarter-inch lace lay on
her left, whilst in front of her was the mountain of lace web, piling
the hearthrug. Threads of curly cotton, pulled out from between the
lengths of lace, strewed over the fender and the fireplace. Paul dared
not go forward, for fear of treading on piles of white stuff.
On the table was a jenny for carding the lace. There was a pack of
brown cardboard squares, a pack of cards of lace, a little box of pins,
and on the sofa lay a heap of drawn lace.
The room was all lace, and it was so dark and warm that the white,
snowy stuff seemed the more distinct.
“If you’re coming in you won’t have to mind the work,” said Mrs.
Radford. “I know we’re about blocked up. But sit you down.”
Clara, much embarrassed, gave him a chair against the wall opposite the
white heaps. Then she herself took her place on the sofa, shamedly.
“Will you drink a bottle of stout?” Mrs. Radford asked. “Clara, get him
a bottle of stout.”
He protested, but Mrs. Radford insisted.
“You look as if you could do with it,” she said. “Haven’t you never any
more colour than that?”
“It’s only a thick skin I’ve got that doesn’t show the blood through,”
he answered.
Clara, ashamed and chagrined, brought him a bottle of stout and a
glass. He poured out some of the black stuff.
“Well,” he said, lifting the glass, “here’s health!”
“And thank you,” said Mrs. Radford.
He took a drink of stout.
“And light yourself a cigarette, so long as you don’t set the house on
fire,” said Mrs. Radford.
“Thank you,” he replied.
“Nay, you needn’t thank me,” she answered. “I s’ll be glad to smell a
bit of smoke in th’ ’ouse again. A house o’ women is as dead as a house
wi’ no fire, to my thinkin’. I’m not a spider as likes a corner to
myself. I like a man about, if he’s only something to snap at.”
Clara began to work. Her jenny spun with a subdued buzz; the white lace
hopped from between her fingers on to the card. It was filled; she
snipped off the length, and pinned the end down to the banded lace.
Then she put a new card in her jenny. Paul watched her. She sat square
and magnificent. Her throat and arms were bare. The blood still mantled
below her ears; she bent her head in shame of her humility. Her face
was set on her work. Her arms were creamy and full of life beside the
white lace; her large, well-kept hands worked with a balanced movement,
as if nothing would hurry them. He, not knowing, watched her all the
time. He saw the arch of her neck from the shoulder, as she bent her
head; he saw the coil of dun hair; he watched her moving, gleaming
arms.
“I’ve heard a bit about you from Clara,” continued the mother. “You’re
in Jordan’s, aren’t you?” She drew her lace unceasing.
“Yes.”
“Ay, well, and I can remember when Thomas Jordan used to ask _me_ for
one of my toffies.”
“Did he?” laughed Paul. “And did he get it?”
“Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t—which was latterly. For he’s the
sort that takes all and gives naught, he is—or used to be.”
“I think he’s very decent,” said Paul.
“Yes; well, I’m glad to hear it.”
Mrs. Radford looked across at him steadily. There was something
determined about her that he liked. Her face was falling loose, but her
eyes were calm, and there was something strong in her that made it seem
she was not old; merely her wrinkles and loose cheeks were an
anachronism. She had the strength and sang-froid of a woman in the
prime of life. She continued drawing the lace with slow, dignified
movements. The big web came up inevitably over her apron; the length of
lace fell away at her side. Her arms were finely shapen, but glossy and
yellow as old ivory. They had not the peculiar dull gleam that made
Clara’s so fascinating to him.
“And you’ve been going with Miriam Leivers?” the mother asked him.
“Well—” he answered.
“Yes, she’s a nice girl,” she continued. “She’s very nice, but she’s a
bit too much above this world to suit my fancy.”
“She is a bit like that,” he agreed.
“She’ll never be satisfied till she’s got wings and can fly over
everybody’s head, she won’t,” she said.
Clara broke in, and he told her his message. She spoke humbly to him.
He had surprised her in her drudgery. To have her humble made him feel
as if he were lifting his head in expectation.
“Do you like jennying?” he asked.
“What can a woman do!” she replied bitterly.
“Is it sweated?”
“More or less. Isn’t _all_ woman’s work? That’s another trick the men
have played, since we force ourselves into the labour market.”
“Now then, you shut up about the men,” said her mother. “If the women
wasn’t fools, the men wouldn’t be bad uns, that’s what I say. No man
was ever that bad wi’ me but what he got it back again. Not but what
they’re a lousy lot, there’s no denying it.”
“But they’re all right really, aren’t they?” he asked.
“Well, they’re a bit different from women,” she answered.
“Would you care to be back at Jordan’s?” he asked Clara.
“I don’t think so,” she replied.
“Yes, she would!” cried her mother; “thank her stars if she could get
back. Don’t you listen to her. She’s for ever on that ’igh horse of
hers, an’ it’s back’s that thin an’ starved it’ll cut her in two one of
these days.”
Clara suffered badly from her mother. Paul felt as if his eyes were
coming very wide open. Wasn’t he to take Clara’s fulminations so
seriously, after all? She spun steadily at her work. He experienced a
thrill of joy, thinking she might need his help. She seemed denied and
deprived of so much. And her arm moved mechanically, that should never
have been subdued to a mechanism, and her head was bowed to the lace,
that never should have been bowed. She seemed to be stranded there
among the refuse that life has thrown away, doing her jennying. It was
a bitter thing to her to be put aside by life, as if it had no use for
her. No wonder she protested.
She came with him to the door. He stood below in the mean street,
looking up at her. So fine she was in her stature and her bearing, she
reminded him of Juno dethroned. As she stood in the doorway, she winced
from the street, from her surroundings.
“And you will go with Mrs. Hodgkisson to Hucknall?”
He was talking quite meaninglessly, only watching her. Her grey eyes at
last met his. They looked dumb with humiliation, pleading with a kind
of captive misery. He was shaken and at a loss. He had thought her high
and mighty.
When he left her, he wanted to run. He went to the station in a sort of
dream, and was at home without realising he had moved out of her
street.
He had an idea that Susan, the overseer of the Spiral girls, was about
to be married. He asked her the next day.
“I say, Susan, I heard a whisper of your getting married. What about
it?”
Susan flushed red.
“Who’s been talking to you?” she replied.
“Nobody. I merely heard a whisper that you _were_ thinking—”
“Well, I am, though you needn’t tell anybody. What’s more, I wish I
wasn’t!”
“Nay, Susan, you won’t make me believe that.”
“Shan’t I? You _can_ believe it, though. I’d rather stop here a
thousand times.”
Paul was perturbed.
“Why, Susan?”
The girl’s colour was high, and her eyes flashed.
“That’s why!”
“And must you?”
For answer, she looked at him. There was about him a candour and
gentleness which made the women trust him. He understood.
“Ah, I’m sorry,” he said.
Tears came to her eyes.
“But you’ll see it’ll turn out all right. You’ll make the best of it,”
he continued rather wistfully.
“There’s nothing else for it.”
“Yea, there’s making the worst of it. Try and make it all right.”
He soon made occasion to call again on Clara.
“Would you,” he said, “care to come back to Jordan’s?”
She put down her work, laid her beautiful arms on the table, and looked
at him for some moments without answering. Gradually the flush mounted
her cheek.
“Why?” she asked.
Paul felt rather awkward.
“Well, because Susan is thinking of leaving,” he said.
Clara went on with her jennying. The white lace leaped in little jumps
and bounds on to the card. He waited for her. Without raising her head,
she said at last, in a peculiar low voice:
“Have you said anything about it?”
“Except to you, not a word.”
There was again a long silence.
“I will apply when the advertisement is out,” she said.
“You will apply before that. I will let you know exactly when.”
She went on spinning her little machine, and did not contradict him.
Clara came to Jordan’s. Some of the older hands, Fanny among them,
remembered her earlier rule, and cordially disliked the memory. Clara
had always been “ikey”, reserved, and superior. She had never mixed
with the girls as one of themselves. If she had occasion to find fault,
she did it coolly and with perfect politeness, which the defaulter felt
to be a bigger insult than crassness. Towards Fanny, the poor,
overstrung hunchback, Clara was unfailingly compassionate and gentle,
as a result of which Fanny shed more bitter tears than ever the rough
tongues of the other overseers had caused her.
There was something in Clara that Paul disliked, and much that piqued
him. If she were about, he always watched her strong throat or her
neck, upon which the blonde hair grew low and fluffy. There was a fine
down, almost invisible, upon the skin of her face and arms, and when
once he had perceived it, he saw it always.
When he was at his work, painting in the afternoon, she would come and
stand near to him, perfectly motionless. Then he felt her, though she
neither spoke nor touched him. Although she stood a yard away he felt
as if he were in contact with her. Then he could paint no more. He