When he had got a fair bunch, they returned to the house. He listened for a moment to his mother’s quiet movement upstairs, then he said:
“Come here, and let me pin them in for you.” He arranged them two or three at a time in the bosom of her dress, stepping back now and then to see the effect. “You know,” he said, taking the pin out of his mouth, “a woman ought always to arrange her flowers before her glass.”
Miriam laughed. She thought flowers ought to be pinned in one’s dress without any care. That Paul should take pains to fix her flowers for her was his whim.
He was rather offended at her laughter.
“Some women do—those who look decent,” he said.
Miriam laughed again, but mirthlessly, to hear him thus mix her up with women in a general way. From most men she would have ignored it. But from him it hurt her.
He had nearly finished arranging the flowers when he heard his mother’s footstep on the stairs. Hurriedly he pushed in the last pin and turned away.
“Don’t let mater know,” he said.
Miriam picked up her books and stood in the doorway looking with chagrin at the beautiful sunset. She would call for Paul no more, she said.
“Good-evening, Mrs. Morel,” she said, in a deferential way. She sounded as if she felt she had no right to be there.
“Oh, is it you, Miriam?” replied Mrs. Morel coolly.
But Paul insisted on everybody’s accepting his friendship with the girl, and Mrs. Morel was too wise to have any open rupture.
It was not till he was twenty years old that the family could ever afford to go away for a holiday. Mrs. Morel had never been away for a holiday, except to see her sister, since she had been married. Now at last Paul had saved enough money, and they were all going. There was to be a party: some of Annie’s friends, one friend of Paul’s, a young man in the same office where William had previously been, and Miriam.
It was great excitement writing for rooms. Paul and his mother debated it endlessly between them. They wanted a furnished cottage for two weeks. She thought one week would be enough, but he insisted on two.
At last they got an answer from Mablethorpe, a cottage such as they wished for thirty shillings a week. There was immense jubilation. Paul was wild with joy for his mother’s sake. She would have a real holiday now. He and she sat at evening picturing what it would be like. Annie came in, and Leonard, and Alice, and Kitty. There was wild rejoicing and anticipation. Paul told Miriam. She seemed to brood with joy over it. But the Morel’s house rang with excitement.
They were to go on Saturday morning by the seven train. Paul suggested that Miriam should sleep at his house, because it was so far for her to walk. She came down for supper. Everybody was so excited that even Miriam was accepted with warmth. But almost as soon as she entered the feeling in the family became close and tight. He had discovered a poem by Jean Ingelow which mentioned Mablethorpe, and so he must read it to Miriam.23 He would never have got so far in the direction of sentimentality as to read poetry to his own family. But now they condescended to listen. Miriam sat on the sofa absorbed in him. She always seemed absorbed in him, and by him, when he was present. Mrs. Morel sat jealously in her own chair. She was going to hear also. And even Annie and the father attended, Morel with his head cocked on one side, like somebody listening to a sermon and feeling conscious of the fact. Paul ducked his head over the book. He had got now all the audience he cared for. And Mrs. Morel and Annie almost contested with Miriam who should listen best and win his favour. He was in very high feather.
“But,” interrupted Mrs. Morel, “what is the ‘Bride of Enderby’ that the bells are supposed to ring?”
“It’s an old tune they used to play on the bells for a warning against water. I suppose the Bride of Enderby was drowned in a flood,” he replied. He had not the faintest knowledge what it really was, but he would never have sunk so low as to confess that to his womenfolk. They listened and believed him. He believed himself “And the people knew what that tune meant?” said his mother.
“Yes—just like the Scotch when they heard ‘The Flowers o’ the Forest’—and when they used to ring the bells backward for alarm.”24
“How?” said Annie. “A bell sounds the same whether it’s rung backwards or forwards.”
“But,” he said, “if you start with the deep bell and ring up to the high one—der—der—der—der—der—der—der—der!”
He ran up the scale. Everybody thought it clever. He thought so too. Then, waiting a minute, he continued the poem.
“Hm!” said Mrs. Morel curiously, when he finished. “But I wish everything that’s written weren’t so sad.”
“I canna see what they want drownin’ theirselves for,” said Morel.
There was a pause. Annie got up to clear the table.
Miriam rose to help with the pots.
“Let me help to wash up,” she said.
“Certainly not,” cried Annie. “You sit down again. There aren’t many.”
And Miriam, who could not be familiar and insist, sat down again to look at the book with Paul.
He was master of the party; his father was no good. And great tortures he suffered lest the tin box should be put out at Firsby instead of at Mablethorpe. And he wasn’t equal to getting a carriage. His bold little mother did that.
“Here!” she cried to a man. “Here!”
Paul and Annie got behind the rest, convulsed with shamed laughter.
“How much will it be to drive to Brook Cottage?” said Mrs. Morel.
“Two shillings.”
“Why, how far is it?”
“A good way.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
But she scrambled in. There were eight crowded in one old seaside carriage.
“You see,” said Mrs. Morel, “it’s only threepence each, and if it were a tram-car———”
They drove along. Each cottage they came to, Mrs. Morel cried:
“Is it this? Now, this is it!”
Everybody sat breathless. They drove past. There was a universal sigh.
“I’m thankful it wasn’t that brute,” said Mrs. Morel. “I was frightened.” They drove on and on.
At last they descended at a house that stood alone over the dyke by the highroad. There was wild excitement because they had to cross a little bridge to get into the front garden. But they loved the house that lay so solitary, with a sea-meadow on one side, and immense expanse of land patched in white barley, yellow oats, red wheat, and green root-crops, flat and stretching level to the sky.
Paul kept accounts. He and his mother ran the show. The total expenses—lodging, food, everything—was sixteen shillings a week per person. He and Leonard went bathing in the morning. Morel was wandering abroad quite early.
“You, Paul,” his mother called from the bedroom, “eat a piece of bread-and-butter.”
“All right,” he answered.
And when he got back he saw his mother presiding in state at the breakfast-table. The woman of the house was young. Her husband was blind, and she did laundry work. So Mrs. Morel always washed the pots in the kitchen and made the beds.
“But you said you’d have a real holiday,” said Paul, “and now you work.”
“Work!” she exclaimed. “What are you talking about!”
He loved to go with her across the fields to the village and the sea. She was afraid of the plank bridge, and he abused her for being a baby. On the whole he stuck to her as if he were her man.
Miriam did not get much of him, except, perhaps, when all the others went to the “Coons.”25 Coons were insufferably stupid to Miriam, so he thought they were to himself also, and he preached priggishly to Annie about the fatuity of listening to them. Yet he, too, knew all their songs, and sang them along the roads roisterously. And if he found himself listening, the stupidity pleased him very much. Yet to Annie he said:
“Such rot! there isn’t a grain of intelligence in it. Nobody with more gumption than a
grasshopper could go and sit and listen.” And to Miriam he said, with much scorn of Annie and the others: “I suppose they’re at the ‘Coons.’ ”
It was queer to see Miriam singing coon songs. She had a straight chin that went in a perpendicular line from the lower lip to the turn. She always reminded Paul of some sad Botticelli angel when she sang,26 even when it was:“Come down lover’s lane
For a walk with me, talk with me.” df
Only when he sketched, or at evening when the others were at the “Coons,” she had him to herself He talked to her endlessly about his love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed Norman arches27 of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstasy and lost itself in the divine.28 Himself, he said, was Norman, Miriam was Gothic. She bowed in consent even to that.
One evening he and she went up the great sweeping shore of sand towards Theddlethorpe. The long breakers plunged and ran in a hiss of foam along the coast. It was a warm evening. There was not a figure but themselves on the far reaches of sand, no noise but the sound of the sea. Paul loved to see it clanging at the land. He loved to feel himself between the noise of it and the silence of the sandy shore. Miriam was with him. Everything grew very intense. It was quite dark when they turned again. The way home was through a gap in the sandhills, and then along a raised grass road between two dykes. The country was black and still. From behind the sandhills came the whisper of the sea. Paul and Miriam walked in silence. Suddenly he started. The whole of his blood seemed to burst into flame, and he could scarcely breathe. An enormous orange moon was staring at them from the rim of the sandhills. He stood still, looking at it.
“Ah!” cried Miriam, when she saw it.
He remained perfectly still, staring at the immense and ruddy moon, the only thing in the far-reaching darkness of the level. His heart beat heavily, the muscles of his arms contracted.
“What is it?” murmured Miriam, waiting for him.
He turned and looked at her. She stood beside him, for ever in shadow. Her face, covered with the darkness of her hat, was watching him unseen. But she was brooding. She was slightly afraid—deeply moved and religious. That was her best state. He was impotent against it. His blood was concentrated like a flame in his chest. But he could not get across to her. There were flashes in his blood. But somehow she ignored them. She was expecting some religious state in him. Still yearning, she was half aware of his passion, and gazed at him, troubled.
“What is it?” she murmured again.
“It’s the moon,” he answered, frowning.
“Yes,” she assented. “Isn’t it wonderful?” She was curious about him. The crisis was past.
He did not know himself what was the matter. He was naturally so young, and their intimacy was so abstract, he did not know he wanted to crush her on to his breast to ease the ache there. He was afraid of her. The fact that he might want her as a man wants a woman had in him been suppressed into a shame. When she shrank in her convulsed, coiled torture from the thought of such a thing, he had winced to the depths of his soul. And now this “purity” prevented even their first love-kiss. It was as if she could scarcely stand the shock of physical love, even a passionate kiss, and then he was too shrinking and sensitive to give it.
As they walked along the dark fen-meadow he watched the moon and did not speak. She plodded beside him. He hated her, for she seemed in some way to make him despise himself: Looking ahead—he saw the one light in the darkness, the window of their lamp-lit cottage.
He loved to think of his mother, and the other jolly people.
“Well, everybody else has been in long ago!” said his mother as they entered.
“What does that matter!” he cried irritably. “I can go a walk if I like, can’t I?”
“And I should have thought you could get in to supper with the rest,” said Mrs. Morel.
“I shall please myself,” he retorted. “It’s not late. I shall do as I like.”
“Very well,” said his mother cuttingly, “then do as you like.” And she took no further notice of him that evening. Which he pretended neither to notice nor to care about, but sat reading. Miriam read also, obliterating herself. Mrs. Morel hated her for making her son like this. She watched Paul growing irritable, priggish, and melancholic. For this she put the blame on Miriam. Annie and all her friends joined against the girl. Miriam had no friend of her own, only Paul. But she did not suffer so much, because she despised the triviality of these other people.
And Paul hated her because, somehow, she spoilt his ease and naturalness. And he writhed himself with a feeling of humiliation.
8
Strife in Love
ARTHUR FINISHED his apprenticeship, and got a job on the electrical plant at Minton Pit. He earned very little, but had a good chance of getting on. But he was wild and restless. He did not drink nor gamble. Yet he somehow contrived to get into endless scrapes, always through some hot-headed thoughtlessness. Either he went rabbiting in the woods, like a poacher, or he stayed in Nottingham all night instead of coming home, or he miscalculated his dive into the canal at Bestwood, and scored his chest into one mass of wounds on the raw stones and tins at the bottom.
He had not been at his work many months when again he did not come home one night.
“Do you know where Arthur is?” asked Paul at breakfast.
“I do not,” replied his mother.
“He is a fool,” said Paul. “And if he did anything I shouldn’t mind. But no, he simply can’t come away from a game of whist,dg or else he must see a girl home from the skating-rink-quite proprietously—and so can’t get home. He’s a fool.”
“I don’t know that it would make it any better if he did something to make us all ashamed,” said Mrs. Morel.
“Well, I should respect him more,” said Paul.
“I very much doubt it,” said his mother coldly.
They went on with breakfast.
“Are you fearfully fond of him?” Paul asked his mother.
“What do you ask that for?”
“Because they say a woman always like the youngest best.”
“She may do—but I don’t. No, he wearies me.”
“And you’d actually rather he was good?”
“I’d rather he showed some of a man’s common sense.”
Paul was raw and irritable. He also wearied his mother very often. She saw the sunshine going out of him, and she resented it.
As they were finishing breakfast came the postman with a letter from Derby. Mrs. Morel screwed up her eyes to look at the address.
“Give it here, blind eye!” exclaimed her son, snatching it away from her.
She started, and almost boxed his ears.
“It’s from your son, Arthur,” he said.
“What now——!” cried Mrs. Morel.
“‘My dearest Mother,’” Paul read, “‘I don’t know what made me such a fool. I want you to come and fetch me back from here. I came with Jack Bredon yesterday, instead of going to work, and enlisted. He said he was sick of wearing the seat of a stool out,dh and, like the idiot you know I am, I came away with him.
“‘ I have taken the King’s shilling, but perhaps if you came for me they would let me go back with you.1 I was a fool when I did it. I don’t want to be in the army. My dear mother, I am nothing but a trouble to you. But if you get me out of this, I promise I will have more sense and consideration....’ ”
Mrs. Morel sat down in her rocking-chair.
“Well, now,” she cried, “let him stop!”
“Yes,” said Paul, “let him stop.”
There was silence. The mother sat with her hands folded in her apron, her face set, thinking.
“If I’m not sick!” she cried suddenly.
“Sick!”
“Now,” said Paul, beginning to frown, “you’re not going to worry your soul out about this, do you hear.”
“I suppose I’m to take it as a blessing,” she flashed, turning on her son.
“You’re not going to mount it up to a tragedy, so there,” he retorted.
“The fool!―the young fool!” she cried.
“He’ll look well in uniform,” said Paul irritatingly.
His mother turned on him like a fury.
“Oh, will he!” she cried. “Not in my eyes!”
“He should get in a cavalry regiment; he’ll have the time of his life, and will look an awful swell.”
“Swell!―swell!―a mighty swell idea indeed!—a common soldier!”
“Well,” said Paul, “what am I but a common clerk?”
“A good deal, my boy!” cried his mother, stung.
“What?”
“At any rate, a man, and not a thing in a red coat.”di
“I shouldn’t mind being in a red coat—or dark blue, that would suit me better—if they didn’t boss me about too much.”
But his mother had ceased to listen.
“Just as he was getting on, or might have been getting on, at his job—a young nuisance—here he goes and ruins himself for life. What good will he be, do you think, after this?”
“It may lick him into shape beautifully,” said Paul.
“Lick him into shape!—lick what marrow there was out of his bones. A soldier!—a common soldier!―nothing but a body that makes movements when it hears a shout! It’s a fine thing!”
“I can’t understand why it upsets you,” said Paul.
“No, perhaps you can’t. But I understand”; and she sat back in her chair, her chin in one hand, holding her elbow with the other, brimmed up with wrath and chagrin.