In the afternoon he came down. There was a certain weight on his heart which he wanted to remove. He thought to do it by offering her chocolates.
“Have one?” he said. “I bought a handful to sweeten me up.”
To his great relief, she accepted. He sat on the work-bench beside her machine, twisting a piece of silk round his finger. She loved him for his quick, unexpected movements, like a young animal. His feet swung as he pondered. The sweets lay strewn on the bench. She bent over her machine, grinding rhythmically, then stooping to see the stocking that hung beneath, pulled down by the weight. He watched the handsome crouching of her back, and the apron-strings curling on the floor.
“There is always about you,” he said, “a sort of waiting. Whatever I see you doing, you’re not really there: you are waiting—like Penelope when she did her weaving.”5 He could not help a spurt of wickedness. “I’ll call you Penelope,” he said.
“Would it make any difference?” she said, carefully removing one of her needles.
“That doesn’t matter, so long as it pleases me. Here, I say, you seem to forget I’m your boss. It just occurs to me.”
“And what does that mean?” she asked coolly.
“It means I’ve got a right to boss you.”
“Is there anything you want to complain about?”
“Oh, I say, you needn’t be nasty,” he said angrily.
“I don’t know what you want,” she said, continuing her task.
“I want you to treat me nicely and respectfully.”
“Call you ‘sir,’ perhaps?” she asked quietly.
“Yes, call me ‘sir.’ I should love it.”
“Then I wish you would go upstairs, sir.”
His mouth closed, and a frown came on his face. He jumped suddenly down.
“You’re too blessed superior for anything,” he said.
And he went away to the other girls. He felt he was being angrier than he had any need to be. In fact, he doubted slightly that he was showing off But if he were, then he would. Clara heard him laughing, in a way she hated, with the girls down the next room.
When at evening he went through the department after the girls had gone, he saw his chocolates lying untouched in front of Clara’s machine. He left them. In the morning they were still there, and Clara was at work. Later on Minnie, a little brunette they called Pussy, called to him:
“Hey, haven’t you got a chocolate for anybody?”
“Sorry, Pussy,” he replied. “I meant to have offered them; then I went and forgot ’em.”
“I think you did,” she answered.
“I’ll bring you some this afternoon. You don’t want them after they’ve been lying about, do you?”
“Oh, I’m not particular,” smiled Pussy.
“Oh no,” he said. “They’ll be dusty.”
He went up to Clara’s bench.
“Sorry I left these things littering about,” he said.
She flushed scarlet. He gathered them together in his fist.
“They’ll be dirty now,” he said. “You should have taken them. I wonder why you didn’t. I meant to have told you I wanted you to.”
He flung them out of the window into the yard below. He just glanced at her. She winced from his eyes.
In the afternoon he brought another packet.
“Will you take some?” he said, offering them first to Clara. “These are fresh.”
She accepted one, and put it onto the bench.
“Oh, take several—for luck,” he said.
She took a couple more, and put them on the bench also. Then she turned in confusion to her work. He went on up the room.
“Here you are, Pussy,” he said. “Don’t be greedy!”
“Are they all for her?” cried the others, rushing up.
“Of course they’re not,” he said.
The girls clamoured round. Pussy drew back from her mates.
“Come out!” she cried. “I can have first pick, can’t I, Paul?”
“Be nice with ’em,” he said, and went away.
“You are a dear,” the girls cried.
“Tenpence,” he answered.
He went past Clara without speaking. She felt the three chocolate creams would burn her if she touched them. It needed all her courage to slip them into the pocket of her apron.
The girls loved him and were afraid of him. He was so nice while he was nice, but if he were offended, so distant, treating them as if they scarcely existed, or not more than the bobbins of thread. And then, if they were impudent, he said quietly: “Do you mind going on with your work,” and stood and watched.
When he celebrated his twenty-third birthday, the house was in trouble. Arthur was just going to be married. His mother was not well. His father, getting an old man, and lame from his accidents, was given a paltry, poor job. Miriam was an eternal reproach. He felt he owed himself to her, yet could not give himself. The house, moreover, needed his support. He was pulled in all directions. He was not glad it was his birthday. It made him bitter.
He got to work at eight o’clock. Most of the clerks had not turned up. The girls were not due till 8.30. As he was changing his coat, he heard a voice behind him say:
“Paul, Paul, I want you.”
It was Fanny, the hunchback, standing at the top of her stairs, her face radiant with a secret. Paul looked at her in astonishment.
“I want you,” she said.
He stood, at a loss.
“Come on,” she coaxed. “Come before you begin on the letters.”
He went down the half-dozen steps into her dry, narrow, “finishing-off” room. Fanny walked before him: her black bodice was short—the waist was under her armpits—and her green-black cashmere skirt seemed very long, as she strode with big strides before the young man, himself so graceful. She went to her seat at the narrow end of the room, where the window opened on to chimney-pots. Paul watched her thin hands and her flat red wrists as she excitedly twitched her white apron, which was spread on the bench in front of her. She hesitated.
“You didn’t think we’d forgot you?” she asked, reproachful.
“Why?” he asked. He had forgotten his birthday himself.
“‘Why,’ he says! ‘Why!’ Why look here!” She pointed to the calendar, and he saw, surrounding the big black number “21,” hundreds of little crosses in black-lead.
“Oh, kisses for my birthday,” he laughed. “How did you know?”
“Yes, you want to know, don’t you?” Fanny mocked, hugely delighted. “There’s one from everybody—except Lady Clara—and two from some. But I shan’t tell you how many I put.”
“Oh, I know, you’re spooney,” he said.
“There you are mistaken!” she cried, indignant. “I could never be so soft.” Her voice was strong and contralto.
“You always pretend to be such a hard-hearted hussy,” he laughed. “And you know you’re as sentimental―”
“I’d rather be called sentimental than frozen meat,” Fanny blurted. Paul knew she referred to Clara, and he smiled.
“Do you say such nasty things about me?” he laughed.
“No, my duck,” the hunchback woman answered, lavishly tender. She was thirty-nine. “No, my duck, because you don’t think yourself a fine figure in marble and us nothing but dirt. I’m as good as you, aren’t I, Paul?” and the question delighted her.
“Why, we’re not better than one another, are we?” he replied.
“But I’m as good as you, aren’t I, Paul?” she persisted daringly.
“Of course you are. If it comes to goodness, you’re better.”
She was rather afraid of the situation. She might get hysterical.
“I thought I’d get here before the others—won’t they say I’m deep! Now shut your eyes―” she said.
“And open your mouth, and see what God sends you,” he continued, suiting action to words, and expecting a piece of chocolate. He heard the rustle of the apron, and a faint clink of metal. “
I’m going to look,” he said.
He opened his eyes. Fanny, her long cheeks flushed, her blue eyes shining, was gazing at him. There was a little bundle of paint-tubes on the bench before him. He turned pale.
“No, Fanny,” he said quickly.
“From us all,” she answered hastily.
“No, but―”
“Are they the right sort?” she asked, rocking herself with delight.
“Jove! they’re the best in the catalogue.”
“But they’re the right sorts?” she cried.
“They’re off the little list I’d made to get when my ship came in.” He bit his lip.
Fanny was overcome with emotion. She must turn the conversation.
“They was all on thornsff to do it; they all paid their shares, all except the Queen of Sheba.”6
The Queen of Sheba was Clara.
“And wouldn’t she join?” Paul asked.
“She didn’t get the chance; we never told her; we wasn’t going to have her bossing this show. We didn’t want her to join.”
Paul laughed at the woman. He was much moved. At last he must go. She was very close to him. Suddenly she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him vehemently.
“I can give you a kiss to-day,” she said apologetically. “You’ve looked so white, it’s made my heart ache.”
Paul kissed her, and left her. Her arms were so pitifully thin that his heart ached also.
That day he met Clara as he ran downstairs to wash his hands at dinner-time.
“You have stayed to dinner!” he exclaimed. It was unusual for her.
“Yes; and I seem to have dined on old surgical-appliance stock. I must go out now, or I shall feel stale india-rubber right through.”
She lingered. He instantly caught at her wish.
“You are going anywhere?” he asked.
They went together up to the Castle. Outdoors she dressed very plainly, down to ugliness; indoors she always looked nice. She walked with hesitating steps alongside Paul, bowing and turning away from him. Dowdy in dress, and drooping, she showed to great disadvantage. He could scarcely recognise her strong form, that seemed to slumber with power. She appeared almost insignificant, drowning her stature in her stoop, as she shrank from the public gaze.
The Castle grounds were very green and fresh. Climbing the precipitous ascent, he laughed and chattered, but she was silent, seeming to brood over something. There was scarcely time to go inside the squat, square building that crowns the bluff of rock. They leaned upon the wall where the cliff runs sheer down to the Park. Below them, in their holes in the sandstone, pigeons preened themselves and cooed softly. Away down upon the boulevard at the foot of the rock, tiny trees stood in their own pools of shadow, and tiny people went scurrying about in almost ludicrous importance.
“You feel as if you could scoop up the folk like tadpoles, and have a handful of them,” he said.
She laughed, answering:
“Yes; it is not necessary to get far off in order to see us proportionately. The trees are much more significant.”
“Bulk only,” he said.7
She laughed cynically.
Away beyond the boulevard the thin stripes of the metals showed upon the railway-track, whose margin was crowded with little stacks of timber, beside which smoking toy engines fussed. Then the silver string of the canal lay at random among the black heaps. Beyond, the dwellings, very dense on the river flat, looked like black, poisonous herbage, in thick rows and crowded beds; stretching right away, broken now and then by taller plants, right to where the river glistened in a hieroglyph across the country. The steep scarp cliffs across the river looked puny. Great stretches of country darkened with trees and faintly brightened with corn-land, spread towards the haze, where the hills rose blue beyond grey.
“It is comforting,” said Mrs. Dawes, “to think the town goes no farther. It is only a little sore upon the country yet.”
“A little scab,” Paul said.
She shivered. She loathed the town. Looking drearily across at the country which was forbidden her, her impassive face, pale and hostile, she reminded Paul of one of the bitter, remorseful angels.8
“But the town’s all right,” he said; “it’s only temporary. This is the crude, clumsy make-shift we’ve practised on, till we find out what the idea is. The town will come all right.”
The pigeons in the pockets of rock, among the perched bushes, cooed comfortably. To the left the large church of St. Mary rose into space, to keep close company with the Castle, above the heaped rubble of the town. Mrs. Dawes smiled brightly as she looked across the country.
“I feel better,” she said.
“Thank you,” he replied. “Great compliment!”
“Oh, my brother!” she laughed.
“H’m! that’s snatching back with the left hand what you gave with the right, and no mistake,” he said.9
She laughed in amusement at him.
“But what was the matter with you?” he asked. “I know you were brooding something special. I can see the stamp of it on your face yet.”
“I think I will not tell you,” she said.
“All right, hug it,” he answered.
She flushed and bit her lip.
“No,” she said, “it was the girls.”
“What about ’em?” Paul asked.
“They have been plotting something for a week now, and today they seem particularly full of it. All alike; they insult me with their secrecy.”
“Do they?” he asked in concern.
“I should not mind,” she went on, in the metallic, angry tone, “if they did not thrust it into my face—the fact that they have a secret.”
“Just like women,” said he.
“It is hateful, their mean gloating,” she said intensely.
Paul was silent. He knew what the girls gloated over. He was sorry to be the cause of this new dissension.
“They can have all the secrets in the world,” she went on, brooding bitterly; “but they might refrain from glorying in them, and making me feel more out of it than ever. It is—it is almost unbearable.”
Paul thought for a few minutes. He was much perturbed.
“I will tell you what it’s all about,” he said, pale and nervous. “It’s my birthday, and they’ve bought me a fine lot of paints, all the girls. They’re jealous of you”—he felt her stiffen coldly at the word ‘jealous’ —“merely because I sometimes bring you a book,” he added slowly. “But, you see, it’s only a trifle. Don’t bother about it, will you—because”—he laughed quickly—“well, what would they say if they saw us here now, in spite of their victory?”
She was angry with him for his clumsy reference to their present intimacy. It was almost insolent of him. Yet he was so quiet, she forgave him, although it cost her an effort.
Their two hands lay on the rough stone parapet of the Castle wall. He had inherited from his mother a fineness of mould, so that his hands were small and vigorous. Hers were large, to match her large limbs, but white and powerful looking. As Paul looked at them he knew her. “She is wanting somebody to take her hands—for all she is so contemptuous of us,” he said to himself. And she saw nothing but his two hands, so warm and alive, which seemed to live for her. He was brooding now, staring out over the country from under sullen brows. The little, interesting diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses and the river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen differently. And now that the forms seemed to have melted away, there, remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark mass of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one atmosphere—dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit.
“Is that two o’clock striking?” Mrs. Dawes said in surprise.
Paul started, and everything sprang into form, regained its individuality, its forget
fulness, and its cheerfulness.
They hurried back to work.
When he was in the rush of preparing for the night’s post, examining the work up from Fanny’s room, which smelt of ironing, the evening postman came in.
“‘Mr. Paul Morel,’ ” he said, smiling, handing Paul a package. “A lady’s handwriting! Don’t let the girls see it.”
The postman, himself a favourite, was pleased to make fun of the girls’ affection for Paul.
It was a volume of verse with a brief note: “You will allow me to send you this, and so spare me my isolation. I also sympathise and wish you well.—C.D.” Paul flushed hot.
“Good Lord! Mrs. Dawes. She can’t afford it. Good Lord, who ever’d have thought it!”
He was suddenly intensely moved. He was filled with the warmth of her. In the glow he could almost feel her as if she were present—her arms, her shoulders, her bosom, see them, feel them, almost contain them.
This move on the part of Clara brought them into closer intimacy. The other girls noticed that when Paul met Mrs. Dawes his eyes lifted and gave that peculiar bright greeting which they could interpret. Knowing he was unaware, Clara made no sign, save that occasionally she turned aside her face from him when he came upon her.
They walked out together very often at dinner-time; it was quite open, quite frank. Everybody seemed to feel that he was quite unaware of the state of his own feeling, and that nothing was wrong. He talked to her now with some of the old fervour with which he had talked to Miriam, but he cared less about the talk; he did not bother about his conclusions.
One day in October they went out to Lambley for tea. Suddenly they came to a halt on top of the hill. He climbed and sat on a gate, she sat on the stile. The afternoon was perfectly still, with a dim haze, and yellow sheaves glowing through. They were quiet.
“How old were you when you married?” he asked quietly.
“Twenty-two.”
Her voice was subdued, almost submissive. She would tell him now.
“It is eight years ago?”
“Yes.”
“And when did you leave him?”
“Three years ago.”
“Five years! Did you love him when you married him?”