Sons and Lovers

  So it was in this atmosphere of subtle intimacy, this meeting in their common feeling for something in Nature, that their love started.

  Personally, he was a long time before he realized her. For ten months he had to stay home after his illness. For a while he went to Skegness with his mother, and was perfectly happy. But even from the seaside he wrote long letters to Mrs. Leivers about the shore and the sea. And he brought back his beloved sketches of the flat Lincoln coast, anxious for them to see. Almost they would interest the Leivers more than they interested his mother. It was not his art Mrs. Morel cared about; it was himself and his achievement. But Mrs. Leivers and her children were almost his disciples. They kindled him and made him glow to his work, whereas his mother’s influence was to make him quietly determined, patient, dogged, unwearied.

  He soon was friends with the boys, whose rudeness was only superficial. They had all, when they could thrust themselves, a strange gentleness and lovableness.

  “Will you come with me on to the fallow?”cy asked Edgar, rather hesitatingly.

  Paul went joyfully, and spent the afternoon helping to hoe or to single turnips with his friend. He used to lie with the three brothers in the hay piled up in the barn and tell them about Nottingham and about Jordan’s. In return, they taught him to milk, and let him do little jobs—chopping hay or pulping turnips—just as much as he liked. At midsummer he worked all through hay-harvest with them, and then he loved them. The family was so cut off from the world actually. They seemed, somehow, like “les derniers fils d’une race epuisee. ”cz Though the lads were strong and healthy, yet they had all that over-sensitiveness and hanging-back which made them so lonely, yet also such close, delicate friends once their intimacy was won. Paul loved them dearly, and they him.

  Miriam came later. But he had come into her life before she made any mark on his. One dull afternoon, when the men were on the land and the rest at school, only Miriam and her mother at home, the girl said to him, after having hesitated for some time:

  “Have you seen the swing?”

  “No,” he answered. “Where?”

  “In the cowshed,” she replied.

  She always hesitated to offer or to show him anything. Men have such different standards of worth from women, and her dear things—the valuable things to her—her brothers had so often mocked or flouted.

  “Come on, then,” he replied, jumping up.

  There were two cowsheds, one on either side of the barn. In the lower, darker shed there was standing for four cows. Hens flew scolding over the manger-wall as the youth and girl went forward for the great thick rope which hung from the beam in the darkness overhead, and was pushed back over a peg in the wall.

  “It’s something like a rope!” he exclaimed appreciatively; and he sat down on it, anxious to try it. Then immediately he rose.

  “Come on, then, and have first go,” he said to the girl.

  “See,” she answered, going into the barn, “we put some bags on the seat”; and she made the swing comfortable for him. That gave her pleasure. He held the rope.

  “Come on, then,” he said to her.

  “No, I won’t go first,” she answered.

  She stood aside in her still, aloof fashion.

  “Why?”

  “You go,” she pleaded.

  Almost for the first time in her life she had the pleasure of giving up to a man, of spoiling him. Paul looked at her.

  “All right,” he said, sitting down. “Mind out!”

  He set off with a spring, and in a moment was flying through the air, almost out of the door of the shed, the upper half of which was open, showing outside the drizzling rain, the filthy yard, the cattle standing disconsolate against the black cart-shed, and at the back of all the grey-green wall of the wood. She stood below in her crimson tam-o’-shanter and watched.7 He looked down at her, and she saw his blue eyes sparkling.

  “It’s a treat of a swing,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He was swinging through the air, every bit of him swinging, like a bird that swoops for joy of movement. And he looked down at her. Her crimson cap hung over her dark curls, her beautiful warm face, so still in a kind of brooding, was lifted towards him. It was dark and rather cold in the shed. Suddenly a swallow came down from the high roof and darted out of the door.

  “I didn’t know a bird was watching,” he called.

  He swung negligently. She could feel him falling and lifting through the air, as if he were lying on some force.

  “Now I’ll die,” he said, in a detached, dreamy voice, as though he were the dying motion of the swing. She watched him, fascinated. Suddenly he put on the brake and jumped out.

  “I’ve had a long turn,” he said. “But it’s a treat of a swing—it’s a real treat of a swing!”

  Miriam was amused that he took a swing so seriously and felt so warmly over it.

  “No; you go on,” she said.

  “Why, don’t you want one?” he asked, astonished.

  “Well, not much. I’ll have just a little.”

  She sat down, whilst he kept the bags in place for her.

  “It’s so ripping!” he said, setting her in motion. “Keep your heels up, or they’ll bang the manger wall.”

  She felt the accuracy with which he caught her, exactly at the right moment, and the exactly proportionate strength of his thrust, and she was afraid. Down to her bowels went the hot wave of fear. She was in his hands. Again, firm and inevitable came the thrust at the right moment. She gripped the rope, almost swooning.

  “Ha!” she laughed in fear. “No higher!”

  “But you’re not a bit high,” he remonstrated.

  “But no higher.”

  He heard the fear in her voice, and desisted. Her heart melted in hot pain when the moment came for him to thrust her forward again. But he left her alone. She began to breathe.

  “Won’t you really go any farther?” he asked. “Should I keep you there?”

  “No; let me go by myself,” she answered.

  He moved aside and watched her.

  “Why, you’re scarcely moving,” he said.

  She laughed slightly with shame, and in a moment got down.

  “They say if you can swing you won’t be sea-sick,” he said, as he mounted again. “I don’t believe I should ever be sea-sick.”

  Away he went. There was something fascinating to her in him. For the moment he was nothing but a piece of swinging stuff; not a particle of him that did not swing. She could never lose herself so, nor could her brothers. It roused a warmth in her. It were almost as if he were a flame that had lit a warmth in her whilst he swung in the middle air.

  And gradually the intimacy with the family concentrated for Paul on three persons—the mother, Edgar, and Miriam. To the mother he went for that sympathy and that appeal which seemed to draw him out. Edgar was his very close friend. And to Miriam he more or less condescended, because she seemed so humble.

  But the girl gradually sought him out. If he brought up his sketch-book, it was she who pondered longest over the last picture. Then she would look up at him. Suddenly, her dark eyes alight like water that shakes with a stream of gold in the dark, she would ask:

  “Why do I like this so?”

  Always something in his breast shrank from these close, intimate, dazzled looks of hers.

  “Why do you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It seems so true.”

  “It’s because—it’s because there is scarcely any shadow in it; it’s more shimmery, as if I’d painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.”8

  And she, with her little finger in her mouth, would ponder these sayings.9 They gave her a feeling of life again, and vivified things which had meant nothing to her. She managed to find some meaning in his struggling, abstract speeches. And they were the m
edium through which she came distinctly at her beloved objects.

  Another day she sat at sunset whilst he was painting some pine-trees which caught the red glare from the west. He had been quiet.

  “There you are!” he said suddenly. “I wanted that. Now, look at them and tell me, are they pine trunks or are they red coals, standing-up pieces of fire in that darkness? There’s God’s burning bush for you, that burned not away.”

  Miriam looked, and was frightened. But the pine trunks were wonderful to her, and distinct. He packed his box and rose. Suddenly he looked at her.

  “Why are you always sad?” he asked her.

  “Sad!” she exclaimed, looking up at him with startled, wonderful brown eyes.

  “Yes,” he replied. “You are always sad.”

  “I am not—oh, not a bit!” she cried.

  “But even your joy is like a flame coming off of sadness,” he persisted. “You’re never jolly, or even just all right.”

  “No,” she pondered. “I wonder—why?”

  “Because you’re not; because you’re different inside, like a pine-tree, and then you flare up; but you’re not just like an ordinary tree, with fidgety leaves and jolly—”

  He got tangled up in his own speech; but she brooded on it, and he had a strange, roused sensation, as if his feelings were new. She got so near him. It was a strange stimulant.

  Then sometimes he hated her. Her youngest brother was only five. He was a frail lad, with immense brown eyes in his quaint fragile face—one of Reynolds’s “Choir of Angels,” with a touch of elf.10 Often Miriam kneeled to the child and drew him to her.

  “Eh, my Hubert!” she sang, in a voice heavy and surcharged with love. “Eh, my Hubert!”

  And, folding him in her arms, she swayed slightly from side to side with love, her face half lifted, her eyes half closed, her voice drenched with love.

  “Don‘t!” said the child, uneasy—“don’t, Miriam!”

  “Yes; you love me, don’t you?” she murmured deep in her throat, almost as if she were in a trance, and swaying also as if she were swooned in an ecstasy of love.

  “Don’t!” repeated the child, a frown on his clear brow.

  “You love me, don’t you?” she murmured.

  “What do you make such a fuss for?” cried Paul, all in suffering because of her extreme emotion. “Why can’t you be ordinary with him?”

  She let the child go, and rose, and said nothing. Her intensity, which would leave no emotion on a normal plane, irritated the youth into a frenzy. And this fearful, naked contact of her on small occasions shocked him. He was used to his mother’s reserve. And on such occasions he was thankful in his heart and soul that he had his mother, so sane and wholesome.

  All the life of Miriam’s body was in her eyes, which were usually dark as a dark church, but could flame with light like a conflagration. Her face scarcely ever altered from its look of brooding. She might have been one of the women who went with Mary when Jesus was dead.11 Her body was not flexible and living. She walked with a swing, rather heavily, her head bowed forward, pondering. She was not clumsy, and yet none of her movements seemed quite the movement. Often, when wiping the dishes, she would stand in bewilderment and chagrin because she had pulled in two halves a cup or a tumbler. It was as if, in her fear of self-mistrust, she put too much strength into the effort. There was no looseness or abandon about her. Everything was gripped stiff with intensity, and her effort, overcharged, closed in on itself.

  She rarely varied from her swinging, forward, intense walk. Occasionally she ran with Paul down the fields. Then her eyes blazed naked in a kind of ecstasy that frightened him. But she was physically afraid. If she were getting over a stile, she gripped his hands in a little hard anguish, and began to lose her presence of mind. And he could not persuade her to jump from even a small height. Her eyes dilated, became exposed and palpitating.

  “No!” she cried, half laughing in terror—“no!”

  “You shall!” he cried once, and, jerking her forward, he brought her falling from the fence. But her wild “Ah!” of pain, as if she were losing consciousness, cut him. She landed on her feet safely, and afterwards had courage in this respect.

  She was very much dissatisfied with her lot.

  “Don’t you like being at home?” Paul asked her, surprised.

  “Who would?” she answered, low and intense. “What is it? I’m all day cleaning what the boys make just as bad in five minutes. I don’t want to be at home.”

  “What do you want, then?”

  “I want to do something. I want a chance like anybody else. Why should I, because I’m a girl, be kept at home and not allowed to be anything? What chance have I?”

  “Chance of what?”

  “Of knowing anything—of learning, of doing anything. It’s not fair, because I’m a woman.”

  She seemed very bitter. Paul wondered. In his own home Annie was almost glad to be a girl. She had not so much responsibility; things were lighter for her. She never wanted to be other than a girl. But Miriam almost fiercely wished she were a man. And yet she hated men at the same time.

  “But it’s as well to be a woman as a man,” he said, frowning.

  “Ha! Is it? Men have everything.”

  “I should think women ought to be as glad to be women as men are to be men,” he answered.

  “No!”—she shook her head—“no! Everything the men have.”

  “But what do you want?” he asked.

  “I want to learn. Why should it be that I know nothing?”

  “What! such as mathematics and French?”

  “Why shouldn’t I know mathematics? Yes!” she cried, her eyes expanding in a kind of defiance.

  “Well, you can learn as much as I know,” he said. “I’ll teach you, if you like.”

  Her eyes dilated. She mistrusted him as teacher.

  “Would you?” he asked.

  Her head had dropped, and she was sucking her finger broodingly.

  “Yes,” she said hesitatingly.

  He used to tell his mother all these things.

  “I’m going to teach Miriam algebra,” he said.

  “Well,” replied Mrs. Morel, “I hope she’ll get fat on it.”

  When he went up to the farm on the Monday evening, it was drawing twilight. Miriam was just sweeping up the kitchen, and was kneeling at the hearth when he entered. Everyone was out but her. She looked round at him, flushed, her dark eyes shining, her fine hair falling about her face.

  “Hello!” she said, soft and musical. “I knew it was you.”

  “How?”

  “I knew your step. Nobody treads so quick and firm.”

  He sat down, sighing.

  “Ready to do some algebra?” he asked, drawing a little book from his pocket.

  “But———”

  He could feel her backing away.

  “You said you wanted,” he insisted.

  “To-night, though?” she faltered.

  “But I came on purpose. And if you want to learn it, you must begin.”

  She took up her ashes in the dustpan and looked at him, half tremulously, laughing.

  “Yes, but to-night! You see, I haven’t thought of it.”

  “Well, my goodness! Take the ashes and come.”

  He went and sat on the stone bench in the back-yard, where the big milk-cans were standing, tipped up, to air. The men were in the cowsheds. He could hear the little sing-song of the milk spurting into the pails. Presently she came, bringing some big greenish apples.

  “You know you like them,” she said.

  He took a bite.

  “Sit down,” he said, with his mouth full.

  She was short-sighted, and peered over his shoulder. It irritated him. He gave her the book quickly.

  “Here,” he said. “It’s only letters for figures. You put down ‘a’ instead of ‘2’ or ‘6.’”

  They worked, he talking, she with her head down on the book. He was quick and hasty. Sh
e never answered. Occasionally, when he demanded of her, “Do you see?” she looked up at him, her eyes wide with the half-laugh that comes of fear. “Don’t you?” he cried.

  He had been too fast. But she said nothing. He questioned her more, then got hot. It made his blood rouse to see her there, as it were, at his mercy, her mouth open, her eyes dilated with laughter that was afraid, apologetic, ashamed. Then Edgar came along with two buckets of milk.

  “Hello!” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “Algebra,” replied Paul. are you doing?”

  “Algebra,” replied Paul.

  “Algebra!” repeated Edgar curiously. Then he passed on with a laugh. Paul took a bite at his forgotten apple, looked at the miserable cabbages in the garden, pecked into lace by the fowls, and he wanted to pull them up. Then he glanced at Miriam. She was poring over the book, seemed absorbed in it, yet trembling lest she could not get at it. It made him cross. She was ruddy and beautiful. Yet her soul seemed to be intensely supplicating. The algebra-book she closed, shrinking, knowing he was angered; and at the same instant he grew gentle, seeing her hurt because she did not understand.

  But things came slowly to her. And when she held herself in a grip, seemed so utterly humble before the lesson, it made his blood rouse. He stormed at her, got ashamed, continued the lesson, and grew furious again, abusing her. She listened in silence. Occasionally, very rarely, she defended herself Her liquid dark eyes blazed at him.

  “You don’t give me time to learn it,” she said.

  “All right,” he answered, throwing the book on the table and lighting a cigarette. Then, after a while, he went back to her repentant. So the lessons went. He was always either in a rage or very gentle.

  “What do you tremble your soul before it for?” he cried. “You don’t learn algebra with your blessed soul. Can’t you look at it with your clear simple wits?”

  Often, when he went again into the kitchen, Mrs. Leivers would look at him reproachfully, saying:

  “Paul, don’t be so hard on Miriam. She may not be quick, but I’m sure she tries.”

  “I can’t help it,” he said rather pitiably. “I go off like it.”