Sons and Lovers
“It looked as if he respected you!” he said.
“He did! And I _made_ him horrid—I know I did! You’ve taught me that.
And he loved me a thousand times better than ever you do.”
“All right,” said Paul.
He only wanted to be left alone now. He had his own trouble, which was
almost too much to bear. Clara only tormented him and made him tired.
He was not sorry when he left her.
She went on the first opportunity to Sheffield to see her husband. The
meeting was not a success. But she left him roses and fruit and money.
She wanted to make restitution. It was not that she loved him. As she
looked at him lying there her heart did not warm with love. Only she
wanted to humble herself to him, to kneel before him. She wanted now to
be self-sacrificial. After all, she had failed to make Morel really
love her. She was morally frightened. She wanted to do penance. So she
kneeled to Dawes, and it gave him a subtle pleasure. But the distance
between them was still very great—too great. It frightened the man. It
almost pleased the woman. She liked to feel she was serving him across
an insuperable distance. She was proud now.
Morel went to see Dawes once or twice. There was a sort of friendship
between the two men, who were all the while deadly rivals. But they
never mentioned the woman who was between them.
Mrs. Morel got gradually worse. At first they used to carry her
downstairs, sometimes even into the garden. She sat propped in her
chair, smiling, and so pretty. The gold wedding-ring shone on her white
hand; her hair was carefully brushed. And she watched the tangled
sunflowers dying, the chrysanthemums coming out, and the dahlias.
Paul and she were afraid of each other. He knew, and she knew, that she
was dying. But they kept up a pretence of cheerfulness. Every morning,
when he got up, he went into her room in his pyjamas.
“Did you sleep, my dear?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Not very well?”
“Well, yes!”
Then he knew she had lain awake. He saw her hand under the bedclothes,
pressing the place on her side where the pain was.
“Has it been bad?” he asked.
“No. It hurt a bit, but nothing to mention.”
And she sniffed in her old scornful way. As she lay she looked like a
girl. And all the while her blue eyes watched him. But there were the
dark pain-circles beneath that made him ache again.
“It’s a sunny day,” he said.
“It’s a beautiful day.”
“Do you think you’ll be carried down?”
“I shall see.”
Then he went away to get her breakfast. All day long he was conscious
of nothing but her. It was a long ache that made him feverish. Then,
when he got home in the early evening, he glanced through the kitchen
window. She was not there; she had not got up.
He ran straight upstairs and kissed her. He was almost afraid to ask:
“Didn’t you get up, pigeon?”
“No,” she said, “it was that morphia; it made me tired.”
“I think he gives you too much,” he said.
“I think he does,” she answered.
He sat down by the bed, miserably. She had a way of curling and lying
on her side, like a child. The grey and brown hair was loose over her
ear.
“Doesn’t it tickle you?” he said, gently putting it back.
“It does,” she replied.
His face was near hers. Her blue eyes smiled straight into his, like a
girl’s—warm, laughing with tender love. It made him pant with terror,
agony, and love.
“You want your hair doing in a plait,” he said. “Lie still.”
And going behind her, he carefully loosened her hair, brushed it out.
It was like fine long silk of brown and grey. Her head was snuggled
between her shoulders. As he lightly brushed and plaited her hair, he
bit his lip and felt dazed. It all seemed unreal, he could not
understand it.
At night he often worked in her room, looking up from time to time. And
so often he found her blue eyes fixed on him. And when their eyes met,
she smiled. He worked away again mechanically, producing good stuff
without knowing what he was doing.
Sometimes he came in, very pale and still, with watchful, sudden eyes,
like a man who is drunk almost to death. They were both afraid of the
veils that were ripping between them.
Then she pretended to be better, chattered to him gaily, made a great
fuss over some scraps of news. For they had both come to the condition
when they had to make much of the trifles, lest they should give in to
the big thing, and their human independence would go smash. They were
afraid, so they made light of things and were gay.
Sometimes as she lay he knew she was thinking of the past. Her mouth
gradually shut hard in a line. She was holding herself rigid, so that
she might die without ever uttering the great cry that was tearing from
her. He never forgot that hard, utterly lonely and stubborn clenching
of her mouth, which persisted for weeks. Sometimes, when it was
lighter, she talked about her husband. Now she hated him. She did not
forgive him. She could not bear him to be in the room. And a few
things, the things that had been most bitter to her, came up again so
strongly that they broke from her, and she told her son.
He felt as if his life were being destroyed, piece by piece, within
him. Often the tears came suddenly. He ran to the station, the
tear-drops falling on the pavement. Often he could not go on with his
work. The pen stopped writing. He sat staring, quite unconscious. And
when he came round again he felt sick, and trembled in his limbs. He
never questioned what it was. His mind did not try to analyse or
understand. He merely submitted, and kept his eyes shut; let the thing
go over him.
His mother did the same. She thought of the pain, of the morphia, of
the next day; hardly ever of the death. That was coming, she knew. She
had to submit to it. But she would never entreat it or make friends
with it. Blind, with her face shut hard and blind, she was pushed
towards the door. The days passed, the weeks, the months.
Sometimes, in the sunny afternoons, she seemed almost happy.
“I try to think of the nice times—when we went to Mablethorpe, and
Robin Hood’s Bay, and Shanklin,” she said. “After all, not everybody
has seen those beautiful places. And wasn’t it beautiful! I try to
think of that, not of the other things.”
Then, again, for a whole evening she spoke not a word; neither did he.
They were together, rigid, stubborn, silent. He went into his room at
last to go to bed, and leaned against the doorway as if paralysed,
unable to go any farther. His consciousness went. A furious storm, he
knew not what, seemed to ravage inside him. He stood leaning there,
submitting, never questioning.
In the morning they were both normal again, though her face was grey
with the morphia, and her body felt like ash. But they were bright
again, nevertheless. Often, especially if Annie or Arthur were at home,
he neglected her. He did not see much of Clara. Usually he was with
men. He was quick and active and lively; but when his friends saw him
go white to the gills, his eyes dark and glittering, they had a certain
mistrust of him. Sometimes he went to Clara, but she was almost cold to
him.
“Take me!” he said simply.
Occasionally she would. But she was afraid. When he had her then, there
was something in it that made her shrink away from him—something
unnatural. She grew to dread him. He was so quiet, yet so strange. She
was afraid of the man who was not there with her, whom she could feel
behind this make-belief lover; somebody sinister, that filled her with
horror. She began to have a kind of horror of him. It was almost as if
he were a criminal. He wanted her—he had her—and it made her feel as if
death itself had her in its grip. She lay in horror. There was no man
there loving her. She almost hated him. Then came little bouts of
tenderness. But she dared not pity him.
Dawes had come to Colonel Seely’s Home near Nottingham. There Paul
visited him sometimes, Clara very occasionally. Between the two men the
friendship developed peculiarly. Dawes, who mended very slowly and
seemed very feeble, seemed to leave himself in the hands of Morel.
In the beginning of November Clara reminded Paul that it was her
birthday.
“I’d nearly forgotten,” he said.
“I’d thought quite,” she replied.
“No. Shall we go to the seaside for the week-end?”
They went. It was cold and rather dismal. She waited for him to be warm
and tender with her, instead of which he seemed hardly aware of her. He
sat in the railway-carriage, looking out, and was startled when she
spoke to him. He was not definitely thinking. Things seemed as if they
did not exist. She went across to him.
“What is it dear?” she asked.
“Nothing!” he said. “Don’t those windmill sails look monotonous?”
He sat holding her hand. He could not talk nor think. It was a comfort,
however, to sit holding her hand. She was dissatisfied and miserable.
He was not with her; she was nothing.
And in the evening they sat among the sandhills, looking at the black,
heavy sea.
“She will never give in,” he said quietly.
Clara’s heart sank.
“No,” she replied.
“There are different ways of dying. My father’s people are frightened,
and have to be hauled out of life into death like cattle into a
slaughter-house, pulled by the neck; but my mother’s people are pushed
from behind, inch by inch. They are stubborn people, and won’t die.”
“Yes,” said Clara.
“And she won’t die. She can’t. Mr. Renshaw, the parson, was in the
other day. ‘Think!’ he said to her; ‘you will have your mother and
father, and your sisters, and your son, in the Other Land.’ And she
said: ‘I have done without them for a long time, and _can_ do without
them now. It is the living I want, not the dead.’ She wants to live
even now.”
“Oh, how horrible!” said Clara, too frightened to speak.
“And she looks at me, and she wants to stay with me,” he went on
monotonously. “She’s got such a will, it seems as if she would never
go—never!”
“Don’t think of it!” cried Clara.
“And she was religious—she is religious now—but it is no good. She
simply won’t give in. And do you know, I said to her on Thursday:
‘Mother, if I had to die, I’d die. I’d _will_ to die.’ And she said to
me, sharp: ‘Do you think I haven’t? Do you think you can die when you
like?’”
His voice ceased. He did not cry, only went on speaking monotonously.
Clara wanted to run. She looked round. There was the black, re-echoing
shore, the dark sky down on her. She got up terrified. She wanted to be
where there was light, where there were other people. She wanted to be
away from him. He sat with his head dropped, not moving a muscle.
“And I don’t want her to eat,” he said, “and she knows it. When I ask
her: ‘Shall you have anything’ she’s almost afraid to say ‘Yes.’ ‘I’ll
have a cup of Benger’s,’ she says. ‘It’ll only keep your strength up,’
I said to her. ‘Yes’—and she almost cried—‘but there’s such a gnawing
when I eat nothing, I can’t bear it.’ So I went and made her the food.
It’s the cancer that gnaws like that at her. I wish she’d die!”
“Come!” said Clara roughly. “I’m going.”
He followed her down the darkness of the sands. He did not come to her.
He seemed scarcely aware of her existence. And she was afraid of him,
and disliked him.
In the same acute daze they went back to Nottingham. He was always
busy, always doing something, always going from one to the other of his
friends.
On the Monday he went to see Baxter Dawes. Listless and pale, the man
rose to greet the other, clinging to his chair as he held out his hand.
“You shouldn’t get up,” said Paul.
Dawes sat down heavily, eyeing Morel with a sort of suspicion.
“Don’t you waste your time on me,” he said, “if you’ve owt better to
do.”
“I wanted to come,” said Paul. “Here! I brought you some sweets.”
The invalid put them aside.