Sons and Lovers
his head to her bosom, and rocked him softly. She was not to have him,
then! So she could comfort him. She put her fingers through his hair.
For her, the anguished sweetness of self-sacrifice. For him, the hate
and misery of another failure. He could not bear it—that breast which
was warm and which cradled him without taking the burden of him. So
much he wanted to rest on her that the feint of rest only tortured him.
He drew away.
“And without marriage we can do nothing?” he asked.
His mouth was lifted from his teeth with pain. She put her little
finger between her lips.
“No,” she said, low and like the toll of a bell. “No, I think not.”
It was the end then between them. She could not take him and relieve
him of the responsibility of himself. She could only sacrifice herself
to him—sacrifice herself every day, gladly. And that he did not want.
He wanted her to hold him and say, with joy and authority: “Stop all
this restlessness and beating against death. You are mine for a mate.”
She had not the strength. Or was it a mate she wanted? or did she want
a Christ in him?
He felt, in leaving her, he was defrauding her of life. But he knew
that, in staying, stilling the inner, desperate man, he was denying his
own life. And he did not hope to give life to her by denying his own.
She sat very quiet. He lit a cigarette. The smoke went up from it,
wavering. He was thinking of his mother, and had forgotten Miriam. She
suddenly looked at him. Her bitterness came surging up. Her sacrifice,
then, was useless. He lay there aloof, careless about her. Suddenly she
saw again his lack of religion, his restless instability. He would
destroy himself like a perverse child. Well, then, he would!
“I think I must go,” she said softly.
By her tone he knew she was despising him. He rose quietly.
“I’ll come along with you,” he answered.
She stood before the mirror pinning on her hat. How bitter, how
unutterably bitter, it made her that he rejected her sacrifice! Life
ahead looked dead, as if the glow were gone out. She bowed her face
over the flowers—the freesias so sweet and spring-like, the scarlet
anemones flaunting over the table. It was like him to have those
flowers.
He moved about the room with a certain sureness of touch, swift and
relentless and quiet. She knew she could not cope with him. He would
escape like a weasel out of her hands. Yet without him her life would
trail on lifeless. Brooding, she touched the flowers.
“Have them!” he said; and he took them out of the jar, dripping as they
were, and went quickly into the kitchen. She waited for him, took the
flowers, and they went out together, he talking, she feeling dead.
She was going from him now. In her misery she leaned against him as
they sat on the car. He was unresponsive. Where would he go? What would
be the end of him? She could not bear it, the vacant feeling where he
should be. He was so foolish, so wasteful, never at peace with himself.
And now where would he go? And what did he care that he wasted her? He
had no religion; it was all for the moment’s attraction that he cared,
nothing else, nothing deeper. Well, she would wait and see how it
turned out with him. When he had had enough he would give in and come
to her.
He shook hands and left her at the door of her cousin’s house. When he
turned away he felt the last hold for him had gone. The town, as he sat
upon the car, stretched away over the bay of railway, a level fume of
lights. Beyond the town the country, little smouldering spots for more
towns—the sea—the night—on and on! And he had no place in it! Whatever
spot he stood on, there he stood alone. From his breast, from his
mouth, sprang the endless space, and it was there behind him,
everywhere. The people hurrying along the streets offered no
obstruction to the void in which he found himself. They were small
shadows whose footsteps and voices could be heard, but in each of them
the same night, the same silence. He got off the car. In the country
all was dead still. Little stars shone high up; little stars spread far
away in the flood-waters, a firmament below. Everywhere the vastness
and terror of the immense night which is roused and stirred for a brief
while by the day, but which returns, and will remain at last eternal,
holding everything in its silence and its living gloom. There was no
Time, only Space. Who could say his mother had lived and did not live?
She had been in one place, and was in another; that was all. And his
soul could not leave her, wherever she was. Now she was gone abroad
into the night, and he was with her still. They were together. But yet
there was his body, his chest, that leaned against the stile, his hands
on the wooden bar. They seemed something. Where was he?—one tiny
upright speck of flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He
could not bear it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed
pressing him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost
nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost,
went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright
grains, went spinning round for terror, and holding each other in
embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them
tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a
nothingness, and yet not nothing.
“Mother!” he whimpered—“mother!”
She was the only thing that held him up, himself, amid all this. And
she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to touch him, have
him alongside with her.
But no, he would not give in. Turning sharply, he walked towards the
city’s gold phosphorescence. His fists were shut, his mouth set fast.
He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her. He
walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.
THE END