Sons and Lovers
possess any of his faculties, he got out of the room again and left
her. He never looked at her again. He had not seen her for months,
because he had not dared to look. And she looked like his young wife
again.
“Have you seen her?” Annie asked of him sharply after breakfast.
“Yes,” he said.
“And don’t you think she looks nice?”
“Yes.”
He went out of the house soon after. And all the time he seemed to be
creeping aside to avoid it.
Paul went about from place to place, doing the business of the death.
He met Clara in Nottingham, and they had tea together in a café, when
they were quite jolly again. She was infinitely relieved to find he did
not take it tragically.
Later, when the relatives began to come for the funeral, the affair
became public, and the children became social beings. They put
themselves aside. They buried her in a furious storm of rain and wind.
The wet clay glistened, all the white flowers were soaked. Annie
gripped his arm and leaned forward. Down below she saw a dark corner of
William’s coffin. The oak box sank steadily. She was gone. The rain
poured in the grave. The procession of black, with its umbrellas
glistening, turned away. The cemetery was deserted under the drenching
cold rain.
Paul went home and busied himself supplying the guests with drinks. His
father sat in the kitchen with Mrs. Morel’s relatives, “superior”
people, and wept, and said what a good lass she’d been, and how he’d
tried to do everything he could for her—everything. He had striven all
his life to do what he could for her, and he’d nothing to reproach
himself with. She was gone, but he’d done his best for her. He wiped
his eyes with his white handkerchief. He’d nothing to reproach himself
for, he repeated. All his life he’d done his best for her.
And that was how he tried to dismiss her. He never thought of her
personally. Everything deep in him he denied. Paul hated his father for
sitting sentimentalising over her. He knew he would do it in the
public-houses. For the real tragedy went on in Morel in spite of
himself. Sometimes, later, he came down from his afternoon sleep, white
and cowering.
“I _have_ been dreaming of thy mother,” he said in a small voice.
“Have you, father? When I dream of her it’s always just as she was when
she was well. I dream of her often, but it seems quite nice and
natural, as if nothing had altered.”
But Morel crouched in front of the fire in terror.
The weeks passed half-real, not much pain, not much of anything,
perhaps a little relief, mostly a _nuit blanche_. Paul went restless
from place to place. For some months, since his mother had been worse,
he had not made love to Clara. She was, as it were, dumb to him, rather
distant. Dawes saw her very occasionally, but the two could not get an
inch across the great distance between them. The three of them were
drifting forward.
Dawes mended very slowly. He was in the convalescent home at Skegness
at Christmas, nearly well again. Paul went to the seaside for a few
days. His father was with Annie in Sheffield. Dawes came to Paul’s
lodgings. His time in the home was up. The two men, between whom was
such a big reserve, seemed faithful to each other. Dawes depended on
Morel now. He knew Paul and Clara had practically separated.
Two days after Christmas Paul was to go back to Nottingham. The evening
before he sat with Dawes smoking before the fire.
“You know Clara’s coming down for the day to-morrow?” he said.
The other man glanced at him.
“Yes, you told me,” he replied.
Paul drank the remainder of his glass of whisky.
“I told the landlady your wife was coming,” he said.
“Did you?” said Dawes, shrinking, but almost leaving himself in the
other’s hands. He got up rather stiffly, and reached for Morel’s glass.
“Let me fill you up,” he said.
Paul jumped up.
“You sit still,” he said.
But Dawes, with rather shaky hand, continued to mix the drink.
“Say when,” he said.
“Thanks!” replied the other. “But you’ve no business to get up.”
“It does me good, lad,” replied Dawes. “I begin to think I’m right
again, then.”
“You are about right, you know.”
“I am, certainly I am,” said Dawes, nodding to him.
“And Len says he can get you on in Sheffield.”
Dawes glanced at him again, with dark eyes that agreed with everything
the other would say, perhaps a trifle dominated by him.
“It’s funny,” said Paul, “starting again. I feel in a lot bigger mess
than you.”
“In what way, lad?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s as if I was in a tangled sort of
hole, rather dark and dreary, and no road anywhere.”
“I know—I understand it,” Dawes said, nodding. “But you’ll find it’ll
come all right.”
He spoke caressingly.
“I suppose so,” said Paul.
Dawes knocked his pipe in a hopeless fashion.
“You’ve not done for yourself like I have,” he said.
Morel saw the wrist and the white hand of the other man gripping the
stem of the pipe and knocking out the ash, as if he had given up.
“How old are you?” Paul asked.
“Thirty-nine,” replied Dawes, glancing at him.
Those brown eyes, full of the consciousness of failure, almost pleading
for reassurance, for someone to re-establish the man in himself, to
warm him, to set him up firm again, troubled Paul.
“You’ll just be in your prime,” said Morel. “You don’t look as if much
life had gone out of you.”
The brown eyes of the other flashed suddenly.
“It hasn’t,” he said. “The go is there.”
Paul looked up and laughed.
“We’ve both got plenty of life in us yet to make things fly,” he said.
The eyes of the two men met. They exchanged one look. Having recognised
the stress of passion each in the other, they both drank their whisky.
“Yes, begod!” said Dawes, breathless.
There was a pause.
“And I don’t see,” said Paul, “why you shouldn’t go on where you left
off.”
“What—” said Dawes, suggestively.
“Yes—fit your old home together again.”
Dawes hid his face and shook his head.
“Couldn’t be done,” he said, and looked up with an ironic smile.
“Why? Because you don’t want?”
“Perhaps.”
They smoked in silence. Dawes showed his teeth as he bit his pipe stem.
“You mean you don’t want her?” asked Paul.
Dawes stared up at the picture with a caustic expression on his face.
“I hardly know,” he said.
The smoke floated softly up.
“I believe she wants you,” said Paul.
“Do you?” replied the other, soft, satirical, abstract.
“Yes. She never really hitched on to me—you were always there in the
background. That’s why she wouldn’t get a divorce.”
Dawes continued to stare in a satirical fashion at the picture over the
mantelpiece.
“That’s how women are with me,” said Paul. “They want me like mad, but
they don’t want to belong to me. And she _belonged_ to you all the
time. I knew.”
The triumphant male came up in Dawes. He showed his teeth more
distinctly.
“Perhaps I was a fool,” he said.
“You were a big fool,” said Morel.
“But perhaps even _then_ you were a bigger fool,” said Dawes.
There was a touch of triumph and malice in it.
“Do you think so?” said Paul.
They were silent for some time.
“At any rate, I’m clearing out to-morrow,” said Morel.
“I see,” answered Dawes.
Then they did not talk any more. The instinct to murder each other had
returned. They almost avoided each other.
They shared the same bedroom. When they retired Dawes seemed abstract,
thinking of something. He sat on the side of the bed in his shirt,
looking at his legs.
“Aren’t you getting cold?” asked Morel.
“I was lookin’ at these legs,” replied the other.
“What’s up with ’em? They look all right,” replied Paul, from his bed.
“They look all right. But there’s some water in ’em yet.”
“And what about it?”
“Come and look.”
Paul reluctantly got out of bed and went to look at the rather handsome
legs of the other man that were covered with glistening, dark gold
hair.
“Look here,” said Dawes, pointing to his shin. “Look at the water under
here.”
“Where?” said Paul.
The man pressed in his finger-tips. They left little dents that filled
up slowly.
“It’s nothing,” said Paul.
“You feel,” said Dawes.
Paul tried with his fingers. It made little dents.
“H’m!” he said.
“Rotten, isn’t it?” said Dawes.
“Why? It’s nothing much.”
“You’re not much of a man with water in your legs.”
“I can’t see as it makes any difference,” said Morel. “I’ve got a weak
chest.”
He returned to his own bed.
“I suppose the rest of me’s all right,” said Dawes, and he put out the
light.
In the morning it was raining. Morel packed his bag. The sea was grey
and shaggy and dismal. He seemed to be cutting himself off from life
more and more. It gave him a wicked pleasure to do it.
The two men were at the station. Clara stepped out of the train, and
came along the platform, very erect and coldly composed. She wore a
long coat and a tweed hat. Both men hated her for her composure. Paul
shook hands with her at the barrier. Dawes was leaning against the
bookstall, watching. His black overcoat was buttoned up to the chin
because of the rain. He was pale, with almost a touch of nobility in
his quietness. He came forward, limping slightly.
“You ought to look better than this,” she said.
“Oh, I’m all right now.”
The three stood at a loss. She kept the two men hesitating near her.
“Shall we go to the lodging straight off,” said Paul, “or somewhere
else?”
“We may as well go home,” said Dawes.
Paul walked on the outside of the pavement, then Dawes, then Clara.
They made polite conversation. The sitting-room faced the sea, whose
tide, grey and shaggy, hissed not far off.
Morel swung up the big arm-chair.
“Sit down, Jack,” he said.
“I don’t want that chair,” said Dawes.
“Sit down!” Morel repeated.
Clara took off her things and laid them on the couch. She had a slight
air of resentment. Lifting her hair with her fingers, she sat down,
rather aloof and composed. Paul ran downstairs to speak to the
landlady.
“I should think you’re cold,” said Dawes to his wife. “Come nearer to
the fire.”
“Thank you, I’m quite warm,” she answered.
She looked out of the window at the rain and at the sea.
“When are you going back?” she asked.
“Well, the rooms are taken until to-morrow, so he wants me to stop.
He’s going back to-night.”
“And then you’re thinking of going to Sheffield?”
“Yes.”
“Are you fit to start work?”
“I’m going to start.”
“You’ve really got a place?”
“Yes—begin on Monday.”
“You don’t look fit.”
“Why don’t I?”
She looked again out of the window instead of answering.
“And have you got lodgings in Sheffield?”
“Yes.”
Again she looked away out of the window. The panes were blurred with
streaming rain.
“And can you manage all right?” she asked.
“I s’d think so. I s’ll have to!”
They were silent when Morel returned.
“I shall go by the four-twenty,” he said as he entered.
Nobody answered.
“I wish you’d take your boots off,” he said to Clara.
“There’s a pair of slippers of mine.”
“Thank you,” she said. “They aren’t wet.”
He put the slippers near her feet. She left them there.
Morel sat down. Both the men seemed helpless, and each of them had a
rather hunted look. But Dawes now carried himself quietly, seemed to
yield himself, while Paul seemed to screw himself up. Clara thought she
had never seen him look so small and mean. He was as if trying to get
himself into the smallest possible compass. And as he went about
arranging, and as he sat talking, there seemed something false about
him and out of tune. Watching him unknown, she said to herself there
was no stability about him. He was fine in his way, passionate, and
able to give her drinks of pure life when he was in one mood. And now