Sons and Lovers

“You don’t mind me, Miriam, do you?” he asked of the girl later.

  “No,” she reassured him in her beautiful deep tones—“no, I don’t mind.”

  “Don’t mind me; it’s my fault.”

  But, in spite of himself, his blood began to boil with her. It was strange that no one else made him in such fury. He flared against her. Once he threw the pencil in her face. There was a silence. She turned her face slightly aside.

  “I didn’t——” he began, but got no farther, feeling weak in all his bones. She never reproached him or was angry with him. He was often cruelly ashamed. But still again his anger burst like a bubble surcharged;da and still, when he saw her eager, silent, as it were, blind face, he felt he wanted to throw the pencil in it; and still, when he saw her hand trembling and her mouth parted with suffering, his heart was scalded with pain for her. And because of the intensity to which she roused him, he sought her.

  Then he often avoided her and went with Edgar. Miriam and her brother were naturally antagonistic. Edgar was a rationalist, who was curious, and had a sort of scientific interest in life. It was a great bitterness to Miriam to see herself deserted by Paul for Edgar, who seemed so much lower. But the youth was very happy with her elder brother. The two men spent afternoons together on the land or in the loft doing carpentry, when it rained. And they talked together, or Paul taught Edgar the songs he himself had learned from Annie at the piano. And often all the men, Mr. Leivers as well, had bitter debates on the nationalizing of the land and similar problems.12 Paul had already heard his mother’s views, and as these were as yet his own, he argued for her. Miriam attended and took part, but was all the time waiting until it should be over and a personal communication might begin.

  “After all,” she said within herself, “if the land were nationalized, Edgar and Paul and I would be just the same.” So she waited for the youth to come back to her.

  He was studying for his painting. He loved to sit at home, alone with his mother, at night, working and working. She sewed or read. Then, looking up from his task, he would rest his eyes for a moment on her face, that was bright with living warmth, and he returned gladly to his work.

  “I can do my best things when you sit there in your rocking-chair, mother,” he said.

  “I’m sure!” she exclaimed, sniffing with mock scepticism. But she felt it was so, and her heart quivered with brightness. For many hours she sat still, slightly conscious of him labouring away, whilst she worked or read her book. And he, with all his soul’s intensity directing his pencil, could feel her warmth inside him like strength. They were both very happy so, and both unconscious of it. These times, that meant so much, and which were real living, they almost ignored.

  He was conscious only when stimulated. A sketch finished, he always wanted to take it to Miriam. Then he was stimulated into knowledge of the work he had produced unconsciously. In contact with Miriam he gained insight; his vision went deeper. From his mother he drew the life-warmth, the strength to produce; Miriam urged this warmth into intensity like a white light.

  When he returned to the factory the conditions of work were better. He had Wednesday afternoon off to go to the Art School—Miss Jordan’s provision—returning in the evening. Then the factory closed at six instead of eight on Thursday and Friday evenings.

  One evening in the summer Miriam and he went over the fields by Herod’s Farm on their way from the library home. So it was only three miles to Willey Farm. There was a yellow glow over the mowing-grass, and the sorrel-heads burned crimson. Gradually, as they walked along the high land, the gold in the west sank down to red, the red to crimson, and then the chill blue crept up against the glow.

  They came out upon the high road to Alfreton, which ran white between the darkening fields. There Paul hesitated. It was two miles home for him, one mile forward for Miriam. They both looked up the road that ran in shadow right under the glow of the north-west sky. On the crest of the hill, Selby, with its stark houses and the up-pricked headstocks of the pit, stood in black silhouette small against the sky.

  He looked at his watch.

  “Nine o’clock!” he said.

  The pair stood, loth to part, hugging their books.

  “The wood is so lovely now,” she said. “I wanted you to see it.”

  He followed her slowly across the road to the white gate.

  “They grumble so if I’m late,” he said.

  “But you’re not doing anything wrong,” she answered impatiently.

  He followed her across the nibbled pasture in the dusk. There was a coolness in the wood, a scent of leaves, of honey-suckle, and a twilight. The two walked in silence. Night came wonderfully there, among the throng of dark tree-trunks. He looked round, expectant.

  She wanted to show him a certain wild-rose bush she had discovered. She knew it was wonderful. And yet, till he had seen it, she felt it had not come into her soul. Only he could make it her own, immortal. She was dissatisfied.

  Dew was already on the paths. In the old oak-wood a mist was rising, and he hesitated, wondering whether one whiteness were a strand of fog or only campion-flowers pallid in a cloud.

  By the time they came to the pine-trees Miriam was getting very eager and very tense. Her bush might be gone. She might not be able to find it; and she wanted it so much. Almost passionately she wanted to be with him when he stood before the flowers. They were going to have a communion together—something that thrilled her, something holy. He was walking beside her in silence. They were very near to each other. She trembled, and he listened, vaguely anxious.

  Coming to the edge of the wood, they saw the sky in front, like mother-of-pearl, and the earth growing dark. Somewhere on the outermost branches of the pine-wood the honeysuckle was streaming scent.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Down the middle path,” she murmured, quivering.

  When they turned the corner of the path she stood still. In the wide walk between the pines, gazing rather frightened, she could distinguish nothing for some moments; the greying light robbed things of their colour. Then she saw her bush.

  “Ah!” she cried, hastening forward.

  It was very still. The tree was tall and straggling. It had thrown its briers over a hawthorn-bush, and its long streamers trailed thick, right down to the grass, splashing the darkness everywhere with great spilt stars, pure white. In bosses of ivory and in large splashed stars the roses gleamed on the darkness of foliage and stems and grass. Paul and Miriam stood close together, silent, and watched. Point after point the steady roses shone out to them, seeming to kindle something in their souls. The dusk came like smoke around, and still did not put out the roses.

  Paul looked into Miriam’s eyes. She was pale and expectant with wonder, her lips were parted, and her dark eyes lay open to him. His look seemed to travel down into her. Her soul quivered. It was the communion she wanted. He turned aside, as if pained. He turned to the bush.

  “They seem as if they walk like butterflies, and shake themselves,” he said.

  She looked at her roses. They were white, some incurved and holy, others expanded in an ecstasy. The tree was dark as a shadow. She lifted her hand impulsively to the flowers; she went forward and touched them in worship.

  “Let us go,” he said.

  There was a cool scent of ivory roses—a white, virgin scent. Something made him feel anxious and imprisoned. The two walked in silence.

  “Till Sunday,” he said quietly, and left her; and she walked home slowly, feeling her soul satisfied with the holiness of the night. He stumbled down the path. And as soon as he was out of the wood, in the free open meadow, where he could breathe, he started to run as fast as he could. It was like a delicious delirium in his veins.

  Always when he went with Miriam, and it grew rather late, he knew his mother was fretting and getting angry about him—why, he could not understand. As he went into the house, flinging down his cap, his mother looked at the clock. She had been sitting thinking, because a chi
ll to her eyes prevented her reading. She could feel Paul being drawn away by this girl. And she did not care for Miriam. “She is one of those who will want to suck a man’s soul out till he has none of his own left,” she said to herself; “and he is just such a gaby as to let himself be absorbed.13 She will never let him become a man; she never will.” So, while he was away with Miriam, Mrs. Morel grew more and more worked up.

  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 spoondb 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.