Sons and Lovers
a big tenderness, as after a strong emotion they had known together;
but it was not she who could keep his soul steady. He had wanted her to
be something she could not be.
And she was mad with desire of him. She could not see him without
touching him. In the factory, as he talked to her about Spiral hose,
she ran her hand secretly along his side. She followed him out into the
basement for a quick kiss; her eyes, always mute and yearning, full of
unrestrained passion, she kept fixed on his. He was afraid of her, lest
she should too flagrantly give herself away before the other girls. She
invariably waited for him at dinnertime for him to embrace her before
she went. He felt as if she were helpless, almost a burden to him, and
it irritated him.
“But what do you always want to be kissing and embracing for?” he said.
“Surely there’s a time for everything.”
She looked up at him, and the hate came into her eyes.
“_Do_ I always want to be kissing you?” she said.
“Always, even if I come to ask you about the work. I don’t want
anything to do with love when I’m at work. Work’s work—”
“And what is love?” she asked. “Has it to have special hours?”
“Yes; out of work hours.”
“And you’ll regulate it according to Mr. Jordan’s closing time?”
“Yes; and according to the freedom from business of any sort.”
“It is only to exist in spare time?”
“That’s all, and not always then—not the kissing sort of love.”
“And that’s all you think of it?”
“It’s quite enough.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
And she was cold to him for some time—she hated him; and while she was
cold and contemptuous, he was uneasy till she had forgiven him again.
But when they started afresh they were not any nearer. He kept her
because he never satisfied her.
In the spring they went together to the seaside. They had rooms at a
little cottage near Theddlethorpe, and lived as man and wife. Mrs.
Radford sometimes went with them.
It was known in Nottingham that Paul Morel and Mrs. Dawes were going
together, but as nothing was very obvious, and Clara always a solitary
person, and he seemed so simple and innocent, it did not make much
difference.
He loved the Lincolnshire coast, and she loved the sea. In the early
morning they often went out together to bathe. The grey of the dawn,
the far, desolate reaches of the fenland smitten with winter, the
sea-meadows rank with herbage, were stark enough to rejoice his soul.
As they stepped on to the highroad from their plank bridge, and looked
round at the endless monotony of levels, the land a little darker than
the sky, the sea sounding small beyond the sandhills, his heart filled
strong with the sweeping relentlessness of life. She loved him then. He
was solitary and strong, and his eyes had a beautiful light.
They shuddered with cold; then he raced her down the road to the green
turf bridge. She could run well. Her colour soon came, her throat was
bare, her eyes shone. He loved her for being so luxuriously heavy, and
yet so quick. Himself was light; she went with a beautiful rush. They
grew warm, and walked hand in hand.
A flush came into the sky, the wan moon, half-way down the west, sank
into insignificance. On the shadowy land things began to take life,
plants with great leaves became distinct. They came through a pass in
the big, cold sandhills on to the beach. The long waste of foreshore
lay moaning under the dawn and the sea; the ocean was a flat dark strip
with a white edge. Over the gloomy sea the sky grew red. Quickly the
fire spread among the clouds and scattered them. Crimson burned to
orange, orange to dull gold, and in a golden glitter the sun came up,
dribbling fierily over the waves in little splashes, as if someone had
gone along and the light had spilled from her pail as she walked.
The breakers ran down the shore in long, hoarse strokes. Tiny seagulls,
like specks of spray, wheeled above the line of surf. Their crying
seemed larger than they. Far away the coast reached out, and melted
into the morning, the tussocky sandhills seemed to sink to a level with
the beach. Mablethorpe was tiny on their right. They had alone the
space of all this level shore, the sea, and the upcoming sun, the faint
noise of the waters, the sharp crying of the gulls.
They had a warm hollow in the sandhills where the wind did not come. He
stood looking out to sea.
“It’s very fine,” he said.
“Now don’t get sentimental,” she said.
It irritated her to see him standing gazing at the sea, like a solitary
and poetic person. He laughed. She quickly undressed.
“There are some fine waves this morning,” she said triumphantly.
She was a better swimmer than he; he stood idly watching her.
“Aren’t you coming?” she said.
“In a minute,” he answered.
She was white and velvet skinned, with heavy shoulders. A little wind,
coming from the sea, blew across her body and ruffled her hair.
The morning was of a lovely limpid gold colour. Veils of shadow seemed
to be drifting away on the north and the south. Clara stood shrinking
slightly from the touch of the wind, twisting her hair. The sea-grass
rose behind the white stripped woman. She glanced at the sea, then
looked at him. He was watching her with dark eyes which she loved and
could not understand. She hugged her breasts between her arms,
cringing, laughing:
“Oo, it will be so cold!” she said.
He bent forward and kissed her, held her suddenly close, and kissed her
again. She stood waiting. He looked into her eyes, then away at the
pale sands.
“Go, then!” he said quietly.
She flung her arms round his neck, drew him against her, kissed him
passionately, and went, saying:
“But you’ll come in?”
“In a minute.”
She went plodding heavily over the sand that was soft as velvet. He, on
the sandhills, watched the great pale coast envelop her. She grew
smaller, lost proportion, seemed only like a large white bird toiling
forward.
“Not much more than a big white pebble on the beach, not much more than
a clot of foam being blown and rolled over the sand,” he said to
himself.
She seemed to move very slowly across the vast sounding shore. As he
watched, he lost her. She was dazzled out of sight by the sunshine.
Again he saw her, the merest white speck moving against the white,
muttering sea-edge.
“Look how little she is!” he said to himself. “She’s lost like a grain
of sand in the beach—just a concentrated speck blown along, a tiny
white foam-bubble, almost nothing among the morning. Why does she
absorb me?”
The morning was altogether uninterrupted: she was gone in the water.
Far and wide the beach, the sandhills with their blue marrain, the
shining water, glowed together in immense, unbroken solitude.
“What is she, after all?” he said to himself. “Here’s the seacoast
morning, big and permanent and beautiful; there is she, fretting,
always unsatisfied, and temporary as a bubble of foam. What does she
mean to me, after all? She represents something, like a bubble of foam
represents the sea. But what is _she?_ It’s not her I care for.”
Then, startled by his own unconscious thoughts, that seemed to speak so
distinctly that all the morning could hear, he undressed and ran
quickly down the sands. She was watching for him. Her arm flashed up to
him, she heaved on a wave, subsided, her shoulders in a pool of liquid
silver. He jumped through the breakers, and in a moment her hand was on
his shoulder.
He was a poor swimmer, and could not stay long in the water. She played
round him in triumph, sporting with her superiority, which he begrudged
her. The sunshine stood deep and fine on the water. They laughed in the
sea for a minute or two, then raced each other back to the sandhills.
When they were drying themselves, panting heavily, he watched her
laughing, breathless face, her bright shoulders, her breasts that
swayed and made him frightened as she rubbed them, and he thought
again:
“But she is magnificent, and even bigger than the morning and the sea.
Is she—? Is she—?”
She, seeing his dark eyes fixed on her, broke off from her drying with
a laugh.
“What are you looking at?” she said.
“You,” he answered, laughing.
Her eyes met his, and in a moment he was kissing her white
“goose-fleshed” shoulder, and thinking:
“What is she? What is she?”
She loved him in the morning. There was something detached, hard, and
elemental about his kisses then, as if he were only conscious of his
own will, not in the least of her and her wanting him.
Later in the day he went out sketching.
“You,” he said to her, “go with your mother to Sutton. I am so dull.”
She stood and looked at him. He knew she wanted to come with him, but
he preferred to be alone. She made him feel imprisoned when she was
there, as if he could not get a free deep breath, as if there were
something on top of him. She felt his desire to be free of her.
In the evening he came back to her. They walked down the shore in the
darkness, then sat for a while in the shelter of the sandhills.
“It seems,” she said, as they stared over the darkness of the sea,
where no light was to be seen—“it seemed as if you only loved me at
night—as if you didn’t love me in the daytime.”
He ran the cold sand through his fingers, feeling guilty under the
accusation.
“The night is free to you,” he replied. “In the daytime I want to be by
myself.”
“But why?” she said. “Why, even now, when we are on this short
holiday?”
“I don’t know. Love-making stifles me in the daytime.”
“But it needn’t be always love-making,” she said.
“It always is,” he answered, “when you and I are together.”
She sat feeling very bitter.
“Do you ever want to marry me?” he asked curiously.
“Do you me?” she replied.
“Yes, yes; I should like us to have children,” he answered slowly.
She sat with her head bent, fingering the sand.
“But you don’t really want a divorce from Baxter, do you?” he said.
It was some minutes before she replied.
“No,” she said, very deliberately; “I don’t think I do.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you feel as if you belonged to him?”
“No; I don’t think so.”
“What, then?”
“I think he belongs to me,” she replied.
He was silent for some minutes, listening to the wind blowing over the
hoarse, dark sea.
“And you never really intended to belong to _me?_” he said.
“Yes, I do belong to you,” she answered.
“No,” he said; “because you don’t want to be divorced.”
It was a knot they could not untie, so they left it, took what they
could get, and what they could not attain they ignored.
“I consider you treated Baxter rottenly,” he said another time.
He half-expected Clara to answer him, as his mother would: “You
consider your own affairs, and don’t know so much about other
people’s.” But she took him seriously, almost to his own surprise.
“Why?” she said.
“I suppose you thought he was a lily of the valley, and so you put him
in an appropriate pot, and tended him according. You made up your mind
he was a lily of the valley and it was no good his being a cow-parsnip.
You wouldn’t have it.”
“I certainly never imagined him a lily of the valley.”
“You imagined him something he wasn’t. That’s just what a woman is. She
thinks she knows what’s good for a man, and she’s going to see he gets
it; and no matter if he’s starving, he may sit and whistle for what he
needs, while she’s got him, and is giving him what’s good for him.”
“And what are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m thinking what tune I shall whistle,” he laughed.
And instead of boxing his ears, she considered him in earnest.
“You think I want to give you what’s good for you?” she asked.
“I hope so; but love should give a sense of freedom, not of prison.
Miriam made me feel tied up like a donkey to a stake. I must feed on