Sons and Lovers (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (29 page)

She glanced at the clock and said, coldly and rather tired:

“You have been far enough to-night.”

His soul, warm and exposed from contact with the girl, shrank.

“You must have been right home with her,” his mother continued.

He would not answer. Mrs. Morel, looking at him quickly, saw his hair was damp on his forehead with haste, saw him frowning in his heavy fashion, resentfully.

“She must be wonderfully fascinating, that you can’t get away from her, but must go trailing eight miles at this time of night.”

He was hurt between the past glamour with Miriam and the knowledge that his mother fretted. He had meant not to say anything, to refuse to answer. But he could not harden his heart to ignore his mother.

“I do like to talk to her,” he answered irritably.

“Is there nobody else to talk to?”

“You wouldn’t say anything if I went with Edgar.”

“You know I should. You know, whoever you went with, I should say it was too far for you to go trailing, late at night, when you’ve been to Nottingham. Besides”—her voice suddenly flashed into anger and contempt—“it is disgusting—bits of lads and girls courting.”

“It is
not
courting,” he cried.

“I don’t know what else you call it.”

“It’s not! Do you think we
spoon
^db
and do? We only talk.”

“Till goodness knows what time and distance,” was the sarcastic rejoinder.

Paul snapped at the laces of his boots angrily.

“What are you so mad about?” he asked. “Because you don’t like her.”

“I don’t say I don’t like her. But I don’t hold with children keeping company, and never did.”

“But you don’t mind our Annie going out with Jim Inger.”

“They’ve more sense than you two.”

“Why?”

“Our Annie’s not one of the deep sort.”

He failed to see the meaning of this remark. But his mother looked tired. She was never so strong after William’s death; and her eyes hurt her.

“Well,” he said, “it’s so pretty in the country. Mr. Sleath asked about you. He said he’d missed you. Are you a bit better?”

“I ought to have been in bed a long time ago,” she replied.

“Why, mother, you know you wouldn’t have gone before quarter-past ten.”

“Oh, yes, I should!”

“Oh, little woman, you’d say anything now you’re disagreeable with me, wouldn’t you?”

He kissed her forehead that he knew so well: the deep marks between the brows, the rising of the fine hair, greying now, and the proud setting of the temples. His hand lingered on her shoulder after his kiss. Then he went slowly to bed. He had forgotten Miriam; he only saw how his mother’s hair was lifted back from her warm, broad brow. And somehow, she was hurt.

Then the next time he saw Miriam he said to her:

“Don’t let me be late to-night-not later than ten o’clock. My mother gets so upset.”

Miriam dropped her head, brooding.

“Why does she get upset?” she asked.

“Because she says I oughtn’t to be out late when I have to get up early.”

“Very well!” said Miriam, rather quietly, with just a touch of a sneer.

He resented that. And he was usually late again.

That there was any love growing between him and Miriam neither of them would have acknowledged. He thought he was too sane for such sentimentality, and she thought herself too lofty. They both were late in coming to maturity, and psychical ripeness was much behind even the physical. Miriam was exceedingly sensitive, as her mother had always been. The slightest grossness made her recoil almost in anguish. Her brothers were brutal, but never coarse in speech. The men did all the discussing of farm matters outside. But, perhaps, because of the continual business of birth and of begetting which goes on upon every farm, Miriam was the more hypersensitive to the matter, and her blood was chastened almost to disgust of the faintest suggestion of such intercourse. Paul took his pitch from her, and their intimacy went on in an utterly blanched and chaste fashion. It could never be mentioned that the mare was in foal.

When he was nineteen, he was earning only twenty shillings a week, but he was happy. His painting went well, and life went well enough. On the Good Friday he organised a walk to the Hemlock Stone.
¹⁴
There were three lads of his own age, then Annie and Arthur, Miriam and Geoffrey. Arthur, apprenticed as an electrician in Nottingham, was home for the holiday. Morel, as usual, was up early, whistling and sawing in the yard. At seven o’clock the family heard him buy threepennyworth of hot-cross buns; he talked with gusto to the little girl who brought them, calling her “my darling.” He turned away several boys who came with more buns, telling them they had been “kested”
^dc
by a little lass. Then Mrs. Morel got up, and the family straggled down. It was an immense luxury to everybody, this lying in bed just beyond the ordinary time on a weekday. And Paul and Arthur read before breakfast, and had the meal unwashed, sitting in their shirt-sleeves. This was another holiday luxury. The room was warm. Everything felt free of care and anxiety. There was a sense of plenty in the house.

While the boys were reading, Mrs. Morel went into the garden. They were now in another house, an old one, near the Scargill Street home, which had been left soon after William had died. Directly came an excited cry from the garden:

“Paul! Paul! come and look!”

It was his mother’s voice. He threw down his book and went out. There was a long garden that ran to a field. It was a grey, cold day, with a sharp wind blowing out of Derbyshire. Two fields away Bestwood began, with a jumble of roofs and red house-ends, out of which rose the church tower and the spire of the Congregational Chapel. And beyond went woods and hills, right away to the pale grey heights of the Pennine Chain.

Paul looked down the garden for his mother. Her head appeared among the young currant-bushes.

“Come here!” she cried.

“What for?” he answered.

“Come and see.”

She had been looking at the buds on the currant trees. Paul went up.

“To think,” she said, “that here I might never have seen them!”

Her son went to her side. Under the fence, in a little bed, was a ravel of poor grassy leaves, such as come from very immature bulbs, and three scyllas in bloom. Mrs. Morel pointed to the deep blue flowers.

“Now, just see those!” she exclaimed. “I was looking at the currant bushes, when, thinks I to myself, ‘There’s something very blue; is it a bit of sugar-bag?’ and there, behold you! Sugar-bag! Three glories of the snow, and such beauties! But where on earth did they come from?”

“I don’t know,” said Paul.

“Well, that’s a marvel, now! I
thought
I knew every weed and blade in this garden. But
baven’t
they done well? You see, that gooseberry-bush just shelters them. Not nipped, not touched!”

He crouched down and turned up the bells of the little blue flowers.

“They’re a glorious colour!” he said.

“Aren’t they!” she cried. “I guess they come from Switzerland, where they say they have such lovely things. Fancy them against the snow! But where have they come from? They can’t have blown here, can they?”

Then he remembered having set here a lot of little trash of bulbs to mature.

“And you never told me,” she said.

“No! I thought I’d leave it till they might flower.”

“And now, you see! I might have missed them. And I’ve never had a glory of the snow in my garden in my life.”

She was full of excitement and elation. The garden was an endless joy to her. Paul was thankful for her sake at last to be in a house with a long garden that went down to a field. Every morning after breakfast she went out and was happy pottering about in it. And it was true, she knew every weed and blade.

Everybody turned up for the walk. Food was packed, and they set off, a merry, delighted party. They hung over the wall of the mill-race, dropped paper in the water on one side of the tunnel and watched it shoot out on the other. They stood on the footbridge over Boathouse Station and looked at the metals gleaming coldly.

“You should see the Flying Scotsman come through at half-past six!” said Leonard, whose father was a signalman. “Lad, but she doesn’t half buzz!” and the little party looked up the lines one way, to London, and the other way, to Scotland, and they felt the touch of these two magical places.

In Ilkeston the colliers were waiting in gangs for the publichouses to open. It was a town of idleness and lounging. At Stanton Gate the iron foundry blazed. Over everything there were great discussions. At Trowell they crossed again from Derbyshire into Nottinghamshire. They came to the Hemlock Stone at dinner-time. Its field was crowded with folk from Nottingham and Ilkeston.

They had expected a venerable and dignified monument. They found a little, gnarled, twisted stump of rock, something like a decayed mushroom, standing out pathetically on the side of a field. Leonard and Dick immediately proceeded to carve their initials, “L. W.” and “R. P,” in the old red sandstone; but Paul desisted, because he had read in the newspaper satirical remarks about initial-carvers, who could find no other road to immortality. Then all the lads climbed to the top of the rock to look round.

Everywhere in the field below, factory girls and lads were eating lunch or sporting about. Beyond was the garden of an old manor. It had yew-hedges and thick clumps and borders of yellow crocuses round the lawn.

“See,” said Paul to Miriam, “what a quiet garden!”

She saw the dark yews and the golden crocuses, then she looked gratefully. He had not seemed to belong to her among all these others ; he was different then—not her Paul, who understood the slightest quiver of her innermost soul, but something else, speaking another language than hers. How it hurt her, and deadened her very perceptions. Only when he came right back to her, leaving his other, his lesser self, as she thought, would she feel alive again. And now he asked her to look at this garden, wanting the contact with her again. Impatient of the set in the field, she turned to the quiet lawn, surrounded by sheaves of shut-up crocuses. A feeling of stillness, almost of ecstasy, came over her. It felt almost as if she were alone with him in this garden.

Then he left her again and joined the others. Soon they started home. Miriam loitered behind, alone. She did not fit in with the others; she could very rarely get into human relations with anyone: so her friend, her companion, her lover, was Nature. She saw the sun declining wanly. In the dusky, cold hedgerows were some red leaves. She lingered to gather them, tenderly, passionately. The love in her finger-tips caressed the leaves; the passion in her heart came to a glow upon the leaves.

Suddenly she realised she was alone in a strange road, and she hurried forward. Turning a corner in the lane, she came upon Paul, who stood bent over something, his mind fixed on it, working away steadily, patiently, a little hopelessly. She hesitated in her approach, to watch.

He remained concentrated in the middle of the road. Beyond, one rift of rich gold in that colourless grey evening seemed to make him stand out in dark relief. She saw him, slender and firm, as if the setting sun had given him to her. A deep pain took hold of her, and she knew she must love him. And she had discovered him, discovered in him a rare potentiality, discovered his loneliness. Quivering as at some “annunciation,” she went slowly forward.
¹⁵

At last he looked up.

“Why,” he exclaimed gratefully, “have you waited for me!”

She saw a deep shadow in his eyes.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The spring broken here”; and he showed her where his umbrella was injured.

Instantly, with some shame, she knew he had not done the damage himself, but that Geoffrey was responsible.

“It is only an old umbrella, isn’t it?” she asked.

She wondered why he, who did not usually trouble over trifles, made such a mountain of this molehill.

“But it was William’s an’ my mother can’t help but know,” he said quietly, still patiently working at the umbrella.

The words went through Miriam like a blade. This, then, was the confirmation of her vision of him! She looked at him. But there was about him a certain reserve, and she dared not comfort him, not even speak softly to him.

“Come on,” he said. “I can’t do it”; and they went in silence along the road.

That same evening they were walking along under the trees by Nether Green. He was talking to her fretfully, seemed to be struggling to convince himself

“You know,” he said, with an effort, “if one person loves, the other does.”

“Ah!” she answered. “Like mother said to me when I was little, ‘Love begets love.’ ”

“Yes, something like that, I think it
must
be.”

“I hope so, because, if it were not, love might be a very terrible thing,” she said.

“Yes, but it
is
—at least with most people,” he answered.

And Miriam, thinking he had assured himself, felt strong in herself. She always regarded that sudden coming upon him in the lane as a revelation. And this conversation remained graven in her mind as one of the letters of the law.
¹⁶

Now she stood with him and for him. When, about this time, he outraged the family feeling at Willey Farm by some overbearing insult, she stuck to him, and believed he was right. And at this time she dreamed dreams of him, vivid, unforgettable. These dreams came again later on, developed to a more subtle psychological stage.

On the Easter Monday the same party took an excursion to Wingfield Manor. It was great excitement to Miriam to catch a train at Sethley Bridge, amid all the bustle of the Bank Holiday crowd.
¹⁷
They left the train at Alfreton. Paul was interested in the street and in the colliers with their dogs. Here was a new race of miners. Miriam did not live till they came to the church. They were all rather timid of entering, with their bags of food, for fear of being turned out. Leonard, a comic, thin fellow, went first; Paul, who would have died rather than be sent back, went last. The place was decorated for Easter. In the font hundreds of white narcissi seemed to be growing. The air was dim and coloured from the windows and thrilled with a subtle scent of lilies and narcissi. In that atmosphere Miriam’s soul came into a glow. Paul was afraid of the things he mustn’t do; and he was sensitive to the feel of the place. Miriam turned to him. He answered. They were together. He would not go beyond the Communion-rail. She loved him for that. Her soul expanded into prayer beside him. He felt the strange fascination of shadowy religious places. All his latent mysticism quivered into life. She was drawn to him. He was a prayer along with her.