Sons and Lovers
“Are they the right sort?” she asked, rocking herself with delight.
“Jove! they’re the best in the catalogue.”
“But they’re the right sorts?” she cried.
“They’re off the little list I’d made to get when my ship came in.” He
bit his lip.
Fanny was overcome with emotion. She must turn the conversation.
“They was all on thorns to do it; they all paid their shares, all
except the Queen of Sheba.”
The Queen of Sheba was Clara.
“And wouldn’t she join?” Paul asked.
“She didn’t get the chance; we never told her; we wasn’t going to have
_her_ bossing _this_ show. We didn’t _want_ her to join.”
Paul laughed at the woman. He was much moved. At last he must go. She
was very close to him. Suddenly she flung her arms round his neck and
kissed him vehemently.
“I can give you a kiss to-day,” she said apologetically. “You’ve looked
so white, it’s made my heart ache.”
Paul kissed her, and left her. Her arms were so pitifully thin that his
heart ached also.
That day he met Clara as he ran downstairs to wash his hands at
dinner-time.
“You have stayed to dinner!” he exclaimed. It was unusual for her.
“Yes; and I seem to have dined on old surgical-appliance stock. I
_must_ go out now, or I shall feel stale india-rubber right through.”
She lingered. He instantly caught at her wish.
“You are going anywhere?” he asked.
They went together up to the Castle. Outdoors she dressed very plainly,
down to ugliness; indoors she always looked nice. She walked with
hesitating steps alongside Paul, bowing and turning away from him.
Dowdy in dress, and drooping, she showed to great disadvantage. He
could scarcely recognise her strong form, that seemed to slumber with
power. She appeared almost insignificant, drowning her stature in her
stoop, as she shrank from the public gaze.
The Castle grounds were very green and fresh. Climbing the precipitous
ascent, he laughed and chattered, but she was silent, seeming to brood
over something. There was scarcely time to go inside the squat, square
building that crowns the bluff of rock. They leaned upon the wall where
the cliff runs sheer down to the Park. Below them, in their holes in
the sandstone, pigeons preened themselves and cooed softly. Away down
upon the boulevard at the foot of the rock, tiny trees stood in their
own pools of shadow, and tiny people went scurrying about in almost
ludicrous importance.
“You feel as if you could scoop up the folk like tadpoles, and have a
handful of them,” he said.
She laughed, answering:
“Yes; it is not necessary to get far off in order to see us
proportionately. The trees are much more significant.”
“Bulk only,” he said.
She laughed cynically.
Away beyond the boulevard the thin stripes of the metals showed upon
the railway-track, whose margin was crowded with little stacks of
timber, beside which smoking toy engines fussed. Then the silver string
of the canal lay at random among the black heaps. Beyond, the
dwellings, very dense on the river flat, looked like black, poisonous
herbage, in thick rows and crowded beds, stretching right away, broken
now and then by taller plants, right to where the river glistened in a
hieroglyph across the country. The steep scarp cliffs across the river
looked puny. Great stretches of country darkened with trees and faintly
brightened with corn-land, spread towards the haze, where the hills
rose blue beyond grey.
“It is comforting,” said Mrs. Dawes, “to think the town goes no
farther. It is only a _little_ sore upon the country yet.”
“A little scab,” Paul said.
She shivered. She loathed the town. Looking drearily across at the
country which was forbidden her, her impassive face, pale and hostile,
she reminded Paul of one of the bitter, remorseful angels.
“But the town’s all right,” he said; “it’s only temporary. This is the
crude, clumsy make-shift we’ve practised on, till we find out what the
idea is. The town will come all right.”
The pigeons in the pockets of rock, among the perched bushes, cooed
comfortably. To the left the large church of St. Mary rose into space,
to keep close company with the Castle, above the heaped rubble of the
town. Mrs. Dawes smiled brightly as she looked across the country.
“I feel better,” she said.
“Thank you,” he replied. “Great compliment!”
“Oh, my brother!” she laughed.
“H’m! that’s snatching back with the left hand what you gave with the
right, and no mistake,” he said.
She laughed in amusement at him.
“But what was the matter with you?” he asked. “I know you were brooding
something special. I can see the stamp of it on your face yet.”
“I think I will not tell you,” she said.
“All right, hug it,” he answered.
She flushed and bit her lip.
“No,” she said, “it was the girls.”
“What about ’em?” Paul asked.
“They have been plotting something for a week now, and to-day they seem
particularly full of it. All alike; they insult me with their secrecy.”
“Do they?” he asked in concern.
“I should not mind,” she went on, in the metallic, angry tone, “if they
did not thrust it into my face—the fact that they have a secret.”
“Just like women,” said he.
“It is hateful, their mean gloating,” she said intensely.
Paul was silent. He knew what the girls gloated over. He was sorry to
be the cause of this new dissension.
“They can have all the secrets in the world,” she went on, brooding
bitterly; “but they might refrain from glorying in them, and making me
feel more out of it than ever. It is—it is almost unbearable.”
Paul thought for a few minutes. He was much perturbed.
“I will tell you what it’s all about,” he said, pale and nervous. “It’s
my birthday, and they’ve bought me a fine lot of paints, all the girls.
They’re jealous of you”—he felt her stiffen coldly at the word
‘jealous’—“merely because I sometimes bring you a book,” he added
slowly. “But, you see, it’s only a trifle. Don’t bother about it, will
you—because”—he laughed quickly—“well, what would they say if they saw
us here now, in spite of their victory?”
She was angry with him for his clumsy reference to their present
intimacy. It was almost insolent of him. Yet he was so quiet, she
forgave him, although it cost her an effort.
Their two hands lay on the rough stone parapet of the Castle wall. He
had inherited from his mother a fineness of mould, so that his hands
were small and vigorous. Hers were large, to match her large limbs, but
white and powerful looking. As Paul looked at them he knew her. “She is
wanting somebody to take her hands—for all she is so contemptuous of
us,” he said to himself. And she saw nothing but his two hands, so warm
and alive, which seemed to live for her. He was brooding now, staring
out over the country from under sullen brows. The little, interesting
diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was
a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses
and the river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen
differently. And now that the forms seemed to have melted away, there
remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark
mass of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the
large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one
atmosphere—dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit.
“Is that two o’clock striking?” Mrs. Dawes said in surprise.
Paul started, and everything sprang into form, regained its
individuality, its forgetfulness, and its cheerfulness.
They hurried back to work.
When he was in the rush of preparing for the night’s post, examining
the work up from Fanny’s room, which smelt of ironing, the evening
postman came in.
“‘Mr. Paul Morel,’” he said, smiling, handing Paul a package. “A lady’s
handwriting! Don’t let the girls see it.”
The postman, himself a favourite, was pleased to make fun of the girls’
affection for Paul.
It was a volume of verse with a brief note: “You will allow me to send
you this, and so spare me my isolation. I also sympathise and wish you
well.—C.D.” Paul flushed hot.
“Good Lord! Mrs. Dawes. She can’t afford it. Good Lord, who ever’d have
thought it!”
He was suddenly intensely moved. He was filled with the warmth of her.
In the glow he could almost feel her as if she were present—her arms,
her shoulders, her bosom, see them, feel them, almost contain them.
This move on the part of Clara brought them into closer intimacy. The
other girls noticed that when Paul met Mrs. Dawes his eyes lifted and
gave that peculiar bright greeting which they could interpret. Knowing
he was unaware, Clara made no sign, save that occasionally she turned
aside her face from him when he came upon her.
They walked out together very often at dinner-time; it was quite open,
quite frank. Everybody seemed to feel that he was quite unaware of the
state of his own feeling, and that nothing was wrong. He talked to her
now with some of the old fervour with which he had talked to Miriam,
but he cared less about the talk; he did not bother about his
conclusions.
One day in October they went out to Lambley for tea. Suddenly they came
to a halt on top of the hill. He climbed and sat on a gate, she sat on
the stile. The afternoon was perfectly still, with a dim haze, and
yellow sheaves glowing through. They were quiet.
“How old were you when you married?” he asked quietly.
“Twenty-two.”
Her voice was subdued, almost submissive. She would tell him now.
“It is eight years ago?”
“Yes.”
“And when did you leave him?”
“Three years ago.”
“Five years! Did you love him when you married him?”
She was silent for some time; then she said slowly:
“I thought I did—more or less. I didn’t think much about it. And he
wanted me. I was very prudish then.”
“And you sort of walked into it without thinking?”
“Yes. I seemed to have been asleep nearly all my life.”
“_Somnambule?_ But—when did you wake up?”
“I don’t know that I ever did, or ever have—since I was a child.”
“You went to sleep as you grew to be a woman? How queer! And he didn’t
wake you?”
“No; he never got there,” she replied, in a monotone.
The brown birds dashed over the hedges where the rose-hips stood naked
and scarlet.
“Got where?” he asked.
“At me. He never really mattered to me.”
The afternoon was so gently warm and dim. Red roofs of the cottages
burned among the blue haze. He loved the day. He could feel, but he
could not understand, what Clara was saying.
“But why did you leave him? Was he horrid to you?”
She shuddered lightly.
“He—he sort of degraded me. He wanted to bully me because he hadn’t got
me. And then I felt as if I wanted to run, as if I was fastened and
bound up. And he seemed dirty.”
“I see.”
He did not at all see.
“And was he always dirty?” he asked.
“A bit,” she replied slowly. “And then he seemed as if he couldn’t get
_at_ me, really. And then he got brutal—he _was_ brutal!”
“And why did you leave him finally?”
“Because—because he was unfaithful to me—”
They were both silent for some time. Her hand lay on the gate-post as
she balanced. He put his own over it. His heart beat quickly.
“But did you—were you ever—did you ever give him a chance?”
“Chance? How?”
“To come near to you.”
“I married him—and I was willing—”
They both strove to keep their voices steady.
“I believe he loves you,” he said.
“It looks like it,” she replied.
He wanted to take his hand away, and could not. She saved him by
removing her own. After a silence, he began again:
“Did you leave him out of count all along?”
“He left me,” she said.
“And I suppose he couldn’t _make_ himself mean everything to you?”
“He tried to bully me into it.”
But the conversation had got them both out of their depth. Suddenly
Paul jumped down.