Sons and Lovers
his fingers wandered over her face pitifully. Now again she loved him
deeply. He was tender and beautiful.
“The rain!” he said.
“Yes—is it coming on you?”
She put her hands over him, on his hair, on his shoulders, to feel if
the raindrops fell on him. She loved him dearly. He, as he lay with his
face on the dead pine-leaves, felt extraordinarily quiet. He did not
mind if the raindrops came on him: he would have lain and got wet
through: he felt as if nothing mattered, as if his living were smeared
away into the beyond, near and quite lovable. This strange, gentle
reaching-out to death was new to him.
“We must go,” said Miriam.
“Yes,” he answered, but did not move.
To him now, life seemed a shadow, day a white shadow; night, and death,
and stillness, and inaction, this seemed like _being_. To be alive, to
be urgent and insistent—that was _not-to-be_. The highest of all was to
melt out into the darkness and sway there, identified with the great
Being.
“The rain is coming in on us,” said Miriam.
He rose, and assisted her.
“It is a pity,” he said.
“What?”
“To have to go. I feel so still.”
“Still!” she repeated.
“Stiller than I have ever been in my life.”
He was walking with his hand in hers. She pressed his fingers, feeling
a slight fear. Now he seemed beyond her; she had a fear lest she should
lose him.
“The fir-trees are like presences on the darkness: each one only a
presence.”
She was afraid, and said nothing.
“A sort of hush: the whole night wondering and asleep: I suppose that’s
what we do in death—sleep in wonder.”
She had been afraid before of the brute in him: now of the mystic. She
trod beside him in silence. The rain fell with a heavy “Hush!” on the
trees. At last they gained the cartshed.
“Let us stay here awhile,” he said.
There was a sound of rain everywhere, smothering everything.
“I feel so strange and still,” he said; “along with everything.”
“Ay,” she answered patiently.
He seemed again unaware of her, though he held her hand close.
“To be rid of our individuality, which is our will, which is our
effort—to live effortless, a kind of curious sleep—that is very
beautiful, I think; that is our after-life—our immortality.”
“Yes?”
“Yes—and very beautiful to have.”
“You don’t usually say that.”
“No.”
In a while they went indoors. Everybody looked at them curiously. He
still kept the quiet, heavy look in his eyes, the stillness in his
voice. Instinctively, they all left him alone.
About this time Miriam’s grandmother, who lived in a tiny cottage in
Woodlinton, fell ill, and the girl was sent to keep house. It was a
beautiful little place. The cottage had a big garden in front, with red
brick walls, against which the plum trees were nailed. At the back
another garden was separated from the fields by a tall old hedge. It
was very pretty. Miriam had not much to do, so she found time for her
beloved reading, and for writing little introspective pieces which
interested her.
At the holiday-time her grandmother, being better, was driven to Derby
to stay with her daughter for a day or two. She was a crotchety old
lady, and might return the second day or the third; so Miriam stayed
alone in the cottage, which also pleased her.
Paul used often to cycle over, and they had as a rule peaceful and
happy times. He did not embarrass her much; but then on the Monday of
the holiday he was to spend a whole day with her.
It was perfect weather. He left his mother, telling her where he was
going. She would be alone all the day. It cast a shadow over him; but
he had three days that were all his own, when he was going to do as he
liked. It was sweet to rush through the morning lanes on his bicycle.
He got to the cottage at about eleven o’clock. Miriam was busy
preparing dinner. She looked so perfectly in keeping with the little
kitchen, ruddy and busy. He kissed her and sat down to watch. The room
was small and cosy. The sofa was covered all over with a sort of linen
in squares of red and pale blue, old, much washed, but pretty. There
was a stuffed owl in a case over a corner cupboard. The sunlight came
through the leaves of the scented geraniums in the window. She was
cooking a chicken in his honour. It was their cottage for the day, and
they were man and wife. He beat the eggs for her and peeled the
potatoes. He thought she gave a feeling of home almost like his mother;
and no one could look more beautiful, with her tumbled curls, when she
was flushed from the fire.
The dinner was a great success. Like a young husband, he carved. They
talked all the time with unflagging zest. Then he wiped the dishes she
had washed, and they went out down the fields. There was a bright
little brook that ran into a bog at the foot of a very steep bank. Here
they wandered, picking still a few marsh-marigolds and many big blue
forget-me-nots. Then she sat on the bank with her hands full of
flowers, mostly golden water-blobs. As she put her face down into the
marigolds, it was all overcast with a yellow shine.
“Your face is bright,” he said, “like a transfiguration.”
She looked at him, questioning. He laughed pleadingly to her, laying
his hands on hers. Then he kissed her fingers, then her face.
The world was all steeped in sunshine, and quite still, yet not asleep,
but quivering with a kind of expectancy.
“I have never seen anything more beautiful than this,” he said. He held
her hand fast all the time.
“And the water singing to itself as it runs—do you love it?” She looked
at him full of love. His eyes were very dark, very bright.
“Don’t you think it’s a great day?” he asked.
She murmured her assent. She _was_ happy, and he saw it.
“And our day—just between us,” he said.
They lingered a little while. Then they stood up upon the sweet thyme,
and he looked down at her simply.
“Will you come?” he asked.
They went back to the house, hand in hand, in silence. The chickens
came scampering down the path to her. He locked the door, and they had
the little house to themselves.
He never forgot seeing her as she lay on the bed, when he was
unfastening his collar. First he saw only her beauty, and was blind
with it. She had the most beautiful body he had ever imagined. He stood
unable to move or speak, looking at her, his face half-smiling with
wonder. And then he wanted her, but as he went forward to her, her
hands lifted in a little pleading movement, and he looked at her face,
and stopped. Her big brown eyes were watching him, still and resigned
and loving; she lay as if she had given herself up to sacrifice: there
was her body for him; but the look at the back of her eyes, like a
creature awaiting immolation, arrested him, and all his blood fell
back.
“You are sure you want me?” he asked, as if a cold shadow had come over
him.
“Yes, quite sure.”
She was very quiet, very calm. She only realised that she was doing
something for him. He could hardly bear it. She lay to be sacrificed
for him because she loved him so much. And he had to sacrifice her. For
a second, he wished he were sexless or dead. Then he shut his eyes
again to her, and his blood beat back again.
And afterwards he loved her—loved her to the last fibre of his being.
He loved her. But he wanted, somehow, to cry. There was something he
could not bear for her sake. He stayed with her till quite late at
night. As he rode home he felt that he was finally initiated. He was a
youth no longer. But why had he the dull pain in his soul? Why did the
thought of death, the after-life, seem so sweet and consoling?
He spent the week with Miriam, and wore her out with his passion before
it was gone. He had always, almost wilfully, to put her out of count,
and act from the brute strength of his own feelings. And he could not
do it often, and there remained afterwards always the sense of failure
and of death. If he were really with her, he had to put aside himself
and his desire. If he would have her, he had to put her aside.
“When I come to you,” he asked her, his eyes dark with pain and shame,
“you don’t really want me, do you?”
“Ah, yes!” she replied quickly.
He looked at her.
“Nay,” he said.
She began to tremble.
“You see,” she said, taking his face and shutting it out against her
shoulder—“you see—as we are—how can I get used to you? It would come
all right if we were married.”
He lifted her head, and looked at her.
“You mean, now, it is always too much shock?”
“Yes—and—”
“You are always clenched against me.”
She was trembling with agitation.
“You see,” she said, “I’m not used to the thought—”
“You are lately,” he said.
“But all my life. Mother said to me: ‘There is one thing in marriage
that is always dreadful, but you have to bear it.’ And I believed it.”
“And still believe it,” he said.
“No!” she cried hastily. “I believe, as you do, that loving, even in
_that_ way, is the high-water mark of living.”
“That doesn’t alter the fact that you never _want_ it.”
“No,” she said, taking his head in her arms and rocking in despair.
“Don’t say so! You don’t understand.” She rocked with pain. “Don’t I
want your children?”
“But not me.”
“How can you say so? But we must be married to have children—”
“Shall we be married, then? _I_ want you to have my children.”
He kissed her hand reverently. She pondered sadly, watching him.
“We are too young,” she said at length.
“Twenty-four and twenty-three—”
“Not yet,” she pleaded, as she rocked herself in distress.
“When you will,” he said.
She bowed her head gravely. The tone of hopelessness in which he said
these things grieved her deeply. It had always been a failure between
them. Tacitly, she acquiesced in what he felt.
And after a week of love he said to his mother suddenly one Sunday
night, just as they were going to bed:
“I shan’t go so much to Miriam’s, mother.”
She was surprised, but she would not ask him anything.
“You please yourself,” she said.
So he went to bed. But there was a new quietness about him which she
had wondered at. She almost guessed. She would leave him alone,
however. Precipitation might spoil things. She watched him in his
loneliness, wondering where he would end. He was sick, and much too
quiet for him. There was a perpetual little knitting of his brows, such
as she had seen when he was a small baby, and which had been gone for
many years. Now it was the same again. And she could do nothing for
him. He had to go on alone, make his own way.
He continued faithful to Miriam. For one day he had loved her utterly.
But it never came again. The sense of failure grew stronger. At first
it was only a sadness. Then he began to feel he could not go on. He
wanted to run, to go abroad, anything. Gradually he ceased to ask her
to have him. Instead of drawing them together, it put them apart. And
then he realised, consciously, that it was no good. It was useless
trying: it would never be a success between them.
For some months he had seen very little of Clara. They had occasionally
walked out for half an hour at dinner-time. But he always reserved
himself for Miriam. With Clara, however, his brow cleared, and he was
gay again. She treated him indulgently, as if he were a child. He
thought he did not mind. But deep below the surface it piqued him.
Sometimes Miriam said:
“What about Clara? I hear nothing of her lately.”
“I walked with her about twenty minutes yesterday,” he replied.
“And what did she talk about?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I did all the jawing—I usually do. I think I
was telling her about the strike, and how the women took it.”
“Yes.”
So he gave the account of himself.
But insidiously, without his knowing it, the warmth he felt for Clara
drew him away from Miriam, for whom he felt responsible, and to whom he