Sons and Lovers | Excerpt

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CHAPTER VII: LAD-AND-GIRL-LOVE

[…]And Miriam also refused to be approached. She was afraid of being set at nought, as by her own brothers. The girl was romantic in her soul. Everywhere was a Walter Scott heroine being loved by men with helments or with plumes in their caps. She herself was something of a princess turned into a swine-girl in her own imagination. […] might consider her simply as the swine-girl, unable to perceive the princess beneath; so she held aloof.

[…]She madly wanted her little brother of four to let her swathe him and stifle him in her love; she went to church reverently, with bowed head, and quivered in anguish from the vulgarity of the other choir-girls and from the common-sounding voice of the curate; she fought with her brothers, whom she considered brutal louts; and she held not her father in too high esteem because he did not carry any mystical ideals cherished in his heart, but only wanted to have as easy a time as he could, and his meals when he was ready for them.

[…]Yet she tried hard to scorn him, because he would not see in her the princess but only the swine-girl. And he scarely observed her.

[…]The over-gentleness and apologetic tone of the mother brought out all the brutality of manners in the sons. Edgar tasted the potatoes, moved his mouth quickly like a rabbit, looked indignantly at his mother,[…]

[…]And she was cut off from ordinary life by her religious intensity which made the world for her either a nunnery garden or a paradise, where sin and knowledge were not, or else an ugly, cruel thing.

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.

She seemd 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.

Always when he went with Miriam, and it grew rather late, he knew his monther was fretting and getting angry about him — why, he could not understand. As he went into the house, flighing down his cap, his mother looked up at the clock. She had been sitting thinking, because a chill 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. 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.

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. The both were lat in coming to maturity, and psychical ripeness was much behind even the physical. Miriam was exceedingly sensitive, as her mother and 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 intercouse. 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.

[…]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.[…]

[…]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.

[…]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.

They continued to mount the winding staircase. A high wind, blowing through the loopholes, went rushing up the shaft, and filled the girl’s skirts like a balloon, so that she was ashamed, until he took the hem of her dress and held it down for her. He did it perfectly simply, as he would have picked up her glove. She remembered this always.

The two sisters did not talk much to each other. Agatha, who was fair and small and determined, had rebelled against the home atmosphere, against the doctrine of “the other cheek”. She was out in the world now, in a fair way to be independent. And she insisted on worldly values, on appearance, on manners, on position, which Miriam would fain have ignored.

[…]Prayer was almost essential to her. Then she fell into that rapture of self-sacrifice, identifying herself with a God who was sacrificed, which gives to so many human souls their deepest bliss.

[…]Miriam glanced at two, and avoided their levity. She went into the parlour to be alone.

[…]And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.

Then, if she put her arm in his, it caused him almost torture. His consciousness seemed to split. The place where she was touching him ran hot with friction. He was one internecine battle, and he became cruel to her because of it.

[…]When she bent and breathed a flower, it was as if she and the flower were loving each other. Paul hated her for it. There seemed a sort of exposure about the action, something too intimate.

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.

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 arches 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. Himself, he said, was Norman, Miriam was Gothic. She bowd in consent even to that.

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 sush 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 kill, and then he was too shrinking and sensitive to give it.

And Paul hated her because, somehow, she spoilt his ease and naturalness. And he writhed himself with a feeling of humiliation.

CHAPTER VIII: STRIFE IN LOVE

[…]She was walking with a rather striking woman, blonde, with a sullen expression, and a defiant carriage.

[…]She had scornful grey eyes, a skin like white honey, and a full mouth, with a slightly lifted upper lip that did not know whether it was raised in scorn of all men or out of eagerness to be kissed, but which believed the former.

[…]There was a peculiar similarity between himself and his wife. He had the same white skin, with a clear, golden tinge. His hair was of soft brown, his moustache was golden. And he had a similar defiance in his bearing and manner. But then came the difference. His eyes, dark brown and quick-shifting, were dissolute. They protruded very slightly, and his eyelids hung over them in a way that was half hate. his mouth, too, was sensual. His whole manner was of cowed defiance, as if he were ready to knock anybody down who disapproved of him — perhaps because he really disapproved of himself.

From the first day he had hated Paul. Finding the lad’s impersonal, deliberate gaze of an artist on his face, he got into a fury.

She was a handsome, insolent bussy, who mocked at the youth, and yet flushed if he walked along to the station with her as she went home.

The glow was warm on her handsome, pensive face as she kneeled there like a devotee.

He wondered why Miriam crouched there brooding in that strange way. It irritated him.

Eh, I don’t know — perhaps you like her because she’s got a grudge against men.

You make me so spiritual! And I don’t want to be spiritual.

If he could have kissed her in abstract purity he would have done so. But he could not kiss her thus — and she seemed to leave no other way. And she yearned to him.

Miriam came with the bowl of water and stood close to him, watching. She loved to see his hands doing things. He was slim and vigorous, with a kind of easiness even in his most hasty movements. And busy at his work he seemed to forget her. She love him absorbedly. She wanted to run her hands down his sides. She always wanted to embrace him, so long as he did not want her.

He laughed, hating her voice, but his blood roused to a wave of flame by her hands. She did not seem to realise him in all this. He might have been an object. She never realised the male he was.

Recklessness is almost a man’s revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued, so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.

He helped his mother to get the tea ready. Miriam would have gladly proffered, but was afraid. He was rather proud of his home. There was about it now, he thought, a certain distinction. The chairs were only wooden, and the sofa was old. But the hearthrug and cushions were cosy; the pictures were prints in good taste; there was a simplicity in everything, and plenty of books. He was never ashamed in the least of his home, nor was Miriam of hers, because both were what they should be, and warm. And then he was proud of the table; the china was pretty, the knives ivory-handled; everything look nice. Mrs. Morel had managed wonderfully while her children were growing up, so that nothing was out of place.

Miriam talked books a little. That was her unfailing topic. But Mrs. Morel was not cordial, and turned soon to Edgar.

It was wonderfully sweet and soothing to sit there for an hour and a half, next to Miriam, and near to his mother, uniting his two loves under the spell of the place of worship. Then he felt warm and happly and religious at once.

Then, often very late indeed, she came in, with her long stride, her head bowed, her face hidden under her hat of dark green velvet. Her face, as she sat opposite, was always in shadow. But it gave him a very keen feeling, as if all his soul stirred within him, to see her there. It was not the same glow, happiness, and pride, that he felt in having his mother in charge: something more wonderful, less human, and tinged to intensity by a pain, as if there were something he could not get to.

“She exults—she exults as she carries him off from me,” Mrs. Morel cried in her heart when Paul had gone. “She’s not like an ordinary woman, who can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him. She wants to draw him out and absorb him till there is nothing left of him, even for himself. He will never be a man on his own feet—she will suck him up.” So the mother sat, and battled and brooded bitterly.

Orion was for them chief in significance among the constellation. They had gazed at him in their strange, surcharged hours of feeling, until they seemed themselves to live in every on of his stars. This evening Paul had been moody and perverse. Orion had seemed just an ordinary constellation to him. He had fought against his glamour and fascination. Miriam was watching her lover’s mood carefully. But he said nothing that gave him away, till the moment came to part, when he stood frowning gloomily at the gathered clouds, behind which the great constellation must be striding still.

“And she exults so in taking you from me—she’s not like ordinary girls.”

The efforts of his fater to conciliate him next day were a great humiliation to him.

CHAPTER IX: DEFEAT OF MIRIAM

[…]Certainly she never saw herself living happily through a lifetime with him. She saw tragedy, sorrow, and sacrifice ahead. And in sacrifice she was proud, in renunciation she was strong, for she did not trust herself to support everyday life. She was prepared for the big things and the deep things, like tragedy. It was the sufficiency of the small day-life she could not trust.

[…]Grey-green rosettes of honeysuckle leaves hung before the window, some already, she fancied, showing bud. It was spring, which she loved and dreaded.

She thought his sarcasms were unnecessary. They went forward in silence. Round the wild, tussocky lawn at the back of the house was a thorn hedge, under which daffodils were craning forward from among their sheaves of grey-green blades. The cheeks of the flowers were greenish with cold. But still some had burst, and their gold ruffled and glowed. Miriam went on her knees before one cluster, took a wild-looking daffodil between her hands, turned up its face of gold to her, and bowed down, caressing it with her mouth and cheeks and brow. He stood aside, with his hand in his pockets, watching her. One after another she turned up to him the faces of the yellow, bursten flowers appealingly, fondling them lavishly all the while.

And he came back to her. And in his soul was a feeling of the satisfaction of self-sacrifice because he was faithful to her. She loved him first; he loved her first. And yet it was not enough. His new young life, so strong and imperious, was urged towards something else. It made him mad with restlessness. She saw this, and wished bitterly that Miriam had been a woman who could take this new life of his, and leave her the roots. He fought against his mother almost as he fought against Miriam.

[…]She gathered something was fretting him, that he found thing hard. He seemed to drift to her for comfort. And she was good to him. She did him that great kindness of treating him almost with reverence.

Miriam was indignant at anybody’s forcing the issues between them. She had been furious with her own father for suggesting to Paul, laughingly, that he know why he came so much.

Miriam bowed her head moodily. She was angry at having this struggle. People should leave him and her alone.

Now Miriam wanted to cry. And she was angry, too. He was always such a child for people to do as they liked with.

There was silence. After all, then, she would not lose much. For all their talk down at his home there would not be much difference. She wished they would mind their own business.

“Because,” he continued, “a man gets across his bicycle—and goes to work—and does all sorts of things. But a woman broods.”

Miriam sat in the rocking-chair, and did not speak. He hesitated, expecting her to rise and go with him to the barn as usual for his bicycle. She remained as she was. He was at a loss.

She rose and went to the doorway to wave good-bye to him as he passed through the gate. He rode slowly under the pine-trees, feeling a cur and a miserable wretch. His bicycle went tilting down the hills at random. He thought it would be a relief to break one’s neck.

[…]She was nearly always alone, walking, pondering in the wood, reading, studying, dreaming, waiting. And he wrote to her frequently.

[…]She alone was his threshing-floor. She alone helped him towards realisation. Almost impassive, she submitted to his argument and expounding. And somehow, because of her, he gradually realised where he was wrong. And what he realised, she realised. She felt he could not do without her.

They came to the silent house. He took the key out of the scullery window, and they entered. All the time he went on with his discussion. He lit the gas, mended the fire, and brought her some cakes from the pantry. She sat on the sofa, quietly, with a plate on her knee. She wore a large white hat with some pinkish flowers. It was a cheap hat, but he liked it. Her face beneath was sill and pensive, golden-brown and ruddy. Always her ears were hid in her short curls. She watched him.

She liked him on Sundays. Then he wore a dark suit that showed the lithe movement of his body. There was a clean, clear-cut look about him. He went on with his thinking to her. Suddenly he reached for a Bible. Miriam liked the way he reached up—so sharp, straight to the mark. He turned the pages quickly, and read her a chapter of St. John. As he sat in the armchair reading, intent, his voice only thinking, she felt as if he were using her unconsciously as a man used his tools at some work he is bent on. She loved it. And the wistfulness of his voice was like a reaching to something, and it was as if she were what he reached with. She sat back on the sofa away from him, and yet feeling herself the very instrument his hand grasped. It gave her great pleasure.

Then he began to falter and to get self-conscious. And when he came to the verse, “A woman, when he is in travail, hath sorrow because her hour is come”, he missed it out. Miriam had felt him growing uncomfortable. She shrank when the well-known words did not follow. He went on reading, but she did not hear. A grief and shame made her bend her head. Six months ago he would have read it simply. Now there was a scotch in his running with her. Now she felt there was really something hostile between them, something of which they were ashamed.

Miriam brooded over his split with her. There was something else he wanted. He could not be satified; he could give her no peace. There was between them now always a ground for strife. She wanted to prove him. She believed that his chief need in life was herself. If she could prove it, both to herself and to him, the rest might go; she could simply trust to the future.

So in May she asked him to come to Willey Farm and meet Mrs. Dawes. There was something he hankered after. She saw him, whenever they spoke of Clara Dawes, rouse and get slightly angry. He said he did not like her. Yet he was keen to know about her. Well he should put himself to the test. She believed that there were in him desires for highter things, and desires for lower, and that the desire for the higher would conquer. At any rate, he should try. She forgot that her “higher” and “lower” were arbitray.

[…]Together they enjoyed the field of flowers. Clara, a little way off, was looking at the cowslips disconsolately. Paul and Miriam stayed close together, talk in subdued tones. He kneeled on one knee, quickly gathering the best blossoms, moving from tuft to tuft restlessly, talking softly all the time. Miriam plucked the flowers lovingly, lingering over them. He always seemed to her too quick and almost scientific.[…]

“Why can’t a man have a young mother? What is she old for?”

“You haven’t told me what you like her for.”
“Because I don’t know—a sort of defiant way she’s got—a sort of angry way.”

Miriam had one beautiful evening with him in the Hay. He had been on the horse-rake, and having finished, came to help her to put the hay in cocks. Then he talked to her of his hopes and despairs, and his whole soul seemed to lie bare before her. She felt as if she watched the very quivering stuff of life in him. The moon came out: they walked home together: he seemed to have come to her because he needed her so badly, and she listened to him, gave him all her love and her faith. It seemed to her he brought her the best of himself to keep, and that she would guard it all her life. Nay, the sky did not cherish the stars more surely and eternally than she would guard the good in the soul of Paul Morel. She went on home alone, feeling exalted, glad in her faith.

[…]Paul loved the determined way she rushed at the hay-cock and leaped, landed on the other side, her breasts shaken, her thick hair come undone.

And again he laughed, in a way that tortured Miriam.

Paul could choose the lesser in place of the higher, she saw. He could be unfaithful to himself, unfaithful to the real, deep Paul Morel. There was a danger of his becoming frivolous, of his running after his satisfaction like any Athur, or like his father. It made Miriam bitter to think that he should throw away his soul for this flippant traffic of triviality with Clara. She walked in bitterness and silence, while the other two rallied each other, and Paul sportd.

[…]He was now about twenty-three years old, and, though still virgin, the sex instinct that Miriam had over-refined for so long now grew particularly strong. Often, as he talked to Clara Dawes, came that thickening and quickening of his blood, that peculiar concentration in the breast, as if something were alive there, a new self or a new centre of consciousness, warning him that sooner or later he would have to ask one woman or another. But he belonged to Miriam. Of that she was so fixedly sure that he allowed her right.

CHAPTER X: CLARA

Paul and his mother now had long discussions about life. Religioin was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one’s God. Now life interestd him more.

“Because — the difference between people isn’t in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle class one gets ideas, and from the common people — life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves.”

“I don’t believe there’s a jot more life from Miriam than you could get from any educated girl — say Miss Moreton. It is you who are snobbish about class.”

[…]But he was stupid, and would refuse to love or even to admire a girl much, just because she was his social superior.

“You mean easy, mother,” he cried. “That’s a woman’s whole doctrine for life — ease of soul and physical comfort. And I do despise it.”

“Yes. I don’t care about its divinity. But damn your happiness! So long as life’s full, it doesn’t matter whether it’s happy or not. I’m afraid your happiness would bore me.”

“Never mind, Little,” he murmured. “So long as you don’t feel life’s paltry and miserable business, the rest doesn’t matter, happiness or unhappiness.”

Mis. Morel felt as if her heart would break for him. At this rate she knew he would not live. He had that poignant carelessness about himself, his own suffering, his own life, which is a form of slow suicide. It almost broke her heart. With all the passion of her strong nature she hated Miriam for having in this subtle way undermined his joy. It did not matter to her that Miriam could not help it. Miriam did it, and she hated her.

She wished so much he would fall in love with a girl equal to be his mate — educated and strong. But he would not look at anybody above him in station. He seemed to like Mrs. Daws. At any rate that feeling was wholesome. His mother prayed and prayed for him, that he might not be wasted. That was all her prayed — not for his soul or his righteousness, but that he might not be wasted. And while he slept, for hours and hours she thought and grayed for him.

He drifted away from Miriam imperceptibly, without knowing he was going. Arthur only left the army to be married. The baby was born six months after his wedding. Mrs. Morel got him a job under the firm again, at twenty-one shillings a week. She furnished for him, with the help of Beatrice’s mother, a little cottage of two room. He was caught now. It did not matter how he kicked and struggled, he was fast. For a time he chafed, was irritable with his young wife, who loved him; he went almost distracted when the baby, which was delicate, cried or gave trouble. He grumbled for hours to his mother. She only sid: “Well, my lad, you did it yourself, now you must make the best of it.” And then the grit came out in him. He buckled to work, undertook his responsibilities, acknowledged that he belonged to his wife and child, and did make a good best of it. He had never been very closely inbound into the family. Now he was gone altogether.

Mrs. Radford looked across at him steadily. There was something determined about her that he liked. Her face was falling loose, but her eyes were calm, and there was something strong in her that made it seem she was not old; merely her wrinkles and loose cheeks were an anachronism. She had the strength and sang-froid of a woman in the prime of life. She continued drawing the lace with slow, dignified movements. The big web came up inevitabley over her apron; the length of lace fell away at her side. Her arms were finely shapen, but glossy and yellow as old ivory. They had not the peculiar dull gleam that made Clara’s so fascinating to him.

Clara suffered badly from her mother. Paul felt as if his eyes were coming very wide open. Wasn’t he to take Clara’s fulminations so seriously, after all? She spun steadily at her work. He experienced a thrill of joy, thinking she might need his help. She seemed denied and depreived of so much. And her arm moved mechanically, that should never have been subdued to a mechanism, and her head was bowed. She seemed to be stranded there among the refuse that life has thrown away, doing her jennying. It was a bitter thing to her to be put aside by life, as if it had no use for her. No wonder she protested.

She came with him to the door. He stood below in the mean street, looking up at her. So fine she was in her stature and her bearing, she reminded him of Juno dethroned. As she stood in the doorway, she winced from the street, from her surroundings.

He was talking quite meaninglessly, only watching her. Her grey eyes at last met his. They looked dumb with humiliation, pleading with a kind of captive misery. He was shaken and at loss. He had thought her high and mighty.

For answer, she looked at him. There was about him a candour and gentleness which made the women trust him. He understood.

During the ten years that she had belonged to the women’s movement she had acquired a fair amount of education, and, having had some of Miriam’s passion to be instructed, had taught herself French, and could read in that language with a struggle. She considered herself as a woman apart, and particularly apart, from her class. The girls in the Spiral department were all of good homes. It was a small, special industry, and had a certain distinction. There was an air of refinement in both rooms. But Clara was aloof also from her fellow-worker.

None of these things, however, did she reveal to Paul. She was not the one to give herself away. There was a sense of mystery about her. She was so reserved, he felt she had much to reserve. Her history was open on the surface, but its inner meaning was hidden from everybody. It was exciting. And then sometimes he caught her looking at him from under her brows with an almost furtive, sullen scrutiny, which made him move quickly. Often she met his eyes. But then her own were, as it were, covered over, revealing nothing. She gave him a little, lenient smile. She was to him extraordinarily provocative, because of the knowledge she seemed to possess, and gathered fruit of experience he could not attain.

Paul’s eyes glittered at her insolent indifference to him.

“Pah!” he said, contemptuous on his side now. “You only say that because you’re too proud to own up what you want and can’t get.”

“I know you think you’re terrific great shakes, and that you live under the eternal insult of working in a factory.”

“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.” He could not help a spurt of wickedness. “I’ll call you Penelop,” he said.

“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”, hundrends of little crosses in black-lead.

“Oh, I know, you’re spoony,” 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 bussy,” 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?” her replied.
“But I’m as good as you, aren’t 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.

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’s 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.

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 aplogetically. “You’re looked so while, it’s made my heart ache.”
Paul kissed her, and left her. Her arms were so pitifully thin that his heart acked also.

She lingered. He instantly caught at her wish.

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.

CHAPTER XI: THE TEST ON MIRIAM

He looked round. A good many of the nicest men he knew were like himself, bound in by their own virginity, which they could not break out of. They were so sensitive to their women that they would go without them for ever rather than do them a hurt, an injustice. Being the sons of mothers whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they were themselves too diffident and shy. They could easier deny themselves than incur any reproach from a woman; for a woman was like their mother, and they were full of the sense of their mother. They prefered themselves to suffer the misery of celibacy, rather than risk the other person.

Why was there his blood battling with her? If only he could have been always gentle, tender with her, breathing with her the atmosphere of reverie and religious dreams, he would give his right hand. It was not fair to hurt her. There seemed and eternal maidenhood about her; and when he thought of her mother, he saw the great brown eyes of a maiden who was nearly scared and shocked out of her virgin maidenhood, but not quite, in spite of her seven children. They had been born almost leaving her out of count, not of her, but upon her. So she could never let them go, because she never had possessed them.

He courted her now like a lover. Often, when he grew hot, she put his face from her, held it between her hands, and looked in his eyes. Her could not meet her gaze. He dark eyes, full of love, earnest and searching, made him turn away. Not for an instant would she let him forget. Back again he had to torture himself into a sense of his responsibility and hers. Never any relaxing, never any leaving himself to the great hunger and impersonality of passion; he must be brought back to a deliberate, reflective creature. As if from a swoon of passion she caged him back to the littleness, the personal relationship, He could not bear it. “Leave me alone — leave me alone!” he wanted to cry; but she wanted him to look at her with eyes full of love. His eyes, full of the dark, impersonal fire of desire, did not belong to her.

He got to the cottage at about elevent o’click. Miriam was busy preparing dinner. She looked so perfectly in keeping with the little kitchen, ruddy and busy. He kissed her and sat down to watch. The room was small and cosy. The sofa was covered all over with a sort of linen in squares of red and pale blue, old, much washed, but pretty. There was a stuffed owl in a case over a corner cupboard. The sunlight came through the leaves of the scented geraniums in the window. She was cooking a chicken in his honour. It was their cottage for day, and they were man and wife. He beat the eggs for her and peeled the potatoes. He thought she gave a feeling of home almost like his mother; and no one could look more beautiful, with her tumbled curls, when she was flushed from the fire.

The dinner was a great success. Like a young husband, he carved. They talked all the time with unflagging zest. Then he wiped the dished she had washed, and they went out down the fields. There was a bright little brook that ran into a bog at the foot of a very steep bank. Here they wandered, picking still a few marsh-marigolds and many big blue forget-me-nots. Then she sat on the bank with her hands full of flowers, mostly golden water-blobs. As she put her face down into the marigolds, it was all overcast with a yellow shine.

There was silence for a moment or two, while he dug viciously at the earth. She bent her head, pondering. He was an unreasonable child. He was like an infant which, when it has drunk its fill, throws away and smashes the cup. She looked at him, feeling she could get hold of him and wring some consistency out of him. But she was helpless.[…]

She had finished, but she had done enough. He sat aghast. He had wanted to say: “It has been good, but it is at an end.” And she — she whose love he had believed in when he had despised himself — denied that their love had ever benn love. “He had always fought away from her?” Then it had been monstrous. There had never been anything really between them; all the time he had been imagining something where there was nothing. And she had known. She had known so much, and had told him so little. She had known all the time. All the time this was at the bottom of her!

He sat silent in bitterness. At last the whole affair appeared in a cynical aspect to him. She had really played with him, not he with her. She had hidden all her condemnation from him, had flattered him, and despised him. She despised him now. He grew intellectual and cruel.

He sat in silence. He was full of a feeling that she had deceived him. She had despised him when he thought she worshipped him. She had let him say wrong things, and had not contradicted him. She had let him fight alone. But it stuck in his throat that she had despised him whilst he thought she worshipped him. She should have told him when she found fault with him. She had not played fair. He hated her. All these years she had treated him as if he were a hero, and thought of him secretly as an infant, a foolish child. Then why had she left the foolish child to his folly? his heart was hard against her.

[…]Ah, he was not a man! He was a baby that cries for the newest toy. And all the attachment of his soul would not keep him. Very well, he would have to go. But he would come back when he had tired of his new sensation.

CHAPTER XII: PASSION

He kneeled at her feet, worked away with a stick and tufts of grass. She put her fingers in his hair, drew his head to her, and kissed it.
“What am I supposed to be doing,” he said, looking at her laughing; “cleaning shoes or dibbling with love?” Answer me that!”
“Just whichever I please,” she replied.
“I’m your boot-boy for the time being, and nothing else!” But they remained looking into each other’s eyes and laughing. Then they kissed with little nibbling kisses.
“T-t-t-t!” he went with his tongue, like his mother. “I tell you, nothing gets done when there’s a woman about.”
And he returned to his boot-cleaning, singing softly. She touched his thick hair, and he kissed her fingers. He worked away at her shoes. At last they were quite presentable.

He was madly in love with her; every movement she made, every crease in her garments, sent a hot flash through him and seemed adorable.

“Oh, but it feels so find, when she’s there! She’s such a queen in her way.”

[…]She goes with me — it becomes something. Then she must pay — we both must pay! Folk are so frightened of paying; they’d rather starve and die.”

Occasionally he still walked a little way from chapel with Miriam and Edgar. He did not go up to the farm. She, however, was very much the same with him, and he did not feel embarrassed in her presence. One evening she was alone when he accompanied her. They began by talking book: it was their unfailing topic. Mrs. Morel had said that his and Miriam’s affair was like a fire fed on books — if there were no more volumes it would die out. Miriam, for her part, boasted that she could read him like a book, could place her finger any minute on the chapter and the line. He easily taken in , believed that Miriam knew more about him than anyone else. So it pleased him to talk to her about himself, like the simplest egoist. Very soon the conversation drifted to his own doings. It flattered him immensely that he was of such supreme interest.

Miriam bowed her head and brooded. He was quite unconscious of concealing anything from her.

“Why, it’s impossible! You don’t understand what a woman forfeits —“

“I suppose to. I suppose she had to. It isn’t altogether a question of understanding; it’s a question of living. With him, she was only half-alive; the rest was dormant, deadened. And the dormant woman was the femme incomprise, and she had to be awakened.”

“Yes; but my mother, I believe, got real joy and satisfaction out of my father at first. I believe she had a passion for him; that’s why she stayed with him. After all, they were bound to each other.”

“And with my father, at first, I’m sure she had the real thing. She knows; she has been there. You can feel it about her, and about him, and about hundreds of people you meet every day; and, once it has happened to you, you can go on with anything and ripen.”
“What happened, exactly?” asked Miriam.
“It’s so hard to say, but the something big and intense that changes you when you really come together with somebody else. It almost seems to fertilise your soul and make it that you can go on and mature.”
“And you think your mother had it with your father?”
“Yes; and at the bottom she feels grateful to him for giving it her, even now, though they are miles apart.”
“And you think Clara never had it?”
“I’m sure.”

Miriam pondered this. She saw what he was seeking — a sort of baptism of fire in passion, it seemed to her. She realised that he would never be satisfied till he had it. Perhaps it was essential to him, as to some men, to sow wild oats; and afterwards, when he was satisfied, he would not rage with restlessness any more, but could settle down and give her his life into her hands. Well, then, if he must go, let him go and have his fill — something big and intense, he called it. At any rate, when he had got it, he would not want it — that he said himself; he would want the other thing that she could give him. He would want to be owned, so that he could work. It seemed to her a bitter thing that he must go, but she could let him go into an inn for a glass of whisky, so she could let him go to Clara, so long as it was something that would satisfy a need in him, and leave him free for herself to possess.

Paul, watching, felt his heart contract with pain. His mother looked so small, and sallow, and done-for beside the huxuriant Clara.

[…]Clara wore a blouse of fine silk chiffon, with narrow black-and-white stripes; her hair was done simply, coiled on top of her head. She looked rather stately and reserved.

They parted. He felt guilty towards her. She was bitter, and she scorned him. He still belonged to herself, she believed; yet he could have Clara, take her home, sit with her next his mother in chapel, give her the same hymn-book he had given herself years before. She heard him running quickly indoors.
But he did not go straight in. Halting on the plot of grass, he heard his mother’s voice, then Clara’s answer:
“What I hate is the bloodhound quality in Miriam.”
“Yes,” said his mother quickly, “yes; doesn’t it make you hate her, now!”
His heart went hot, and he was angry with them for talking about the girl. What right had they to say that? Something in the speech itself stung him into a flame of hate against Miriam. Then his own heart rebelled furiously at Clara’s taking the liberty of speaking so about Miriam. After all, the girl was the better woman of the two, he thought, if it came to goodness. He went indoors. His mother looked excited. She was beating with her hand rhythmically on the sofa-arm, as women do who are wearing out. He could never bear to see the movement. There was a silence; then he began to talk.

“If I was with her now, we should be jawing about the ‘Christian Mystery’, or some such tack. Thank God, I’m not!”

“And what seats are you going in?”
“Circle — there-and-six each!”
“Well, I’m sure!” exclaimed his mother sarcastically.

And he was to sit all the evening beside her beautiful naked arm, watching the strong throat rise from the strong chest, watching the breasts under the green stuff, the curve of her limbs in the tight dress. Something in him hated her again for submitting him to this torture of nearness. And he loved her as she balanced her head and stared straight in front of her, pouting, wistful, immobile, as if she yielded herself to her fate because it was too strong for her. She could not help herself; she was in the grip of something bigger than herself. A kind of eternal look about her, as if she were a wistful sphinx, made it necessary for him to kiss her. He dropped his programme, and crouched down on the floor to get it, so that he could kiss her hand and wrist. Her beauty was a torture to him. She sat immobile. Only, when the lights went down, she sank a little against him, and he caressed her hand and arm with his fingers. He could small her faint perfume. All the time his blood kept sweeping up in great white-hot waves that killed his consciousness momentarily.

[…]Then he felt himself small and helpless, her towering in her force above him.

The play went on. But he was obsessed by the desire to kiss the tiny blue vein that nestled in the bend of her arm. He could feel it. His whole face seemed suspended till he had put his lips there. It must be done. And the other people! At last he bent quickly forward and touched it with his lips. His moustache brushed the sensitive flesh. Clara shivered, drew away her arm.

“I love you! You look beautiful in that dress,” he murmured over her shoulder, among the throng of bustling people.

He in his dinner jacket, and Clara in her green dress and bare arms, were confused. They felt they must shelter each other in that little kitchen.

“No,” he said, fighting stoutly. “Folk ought to look as well as they can.”
“And do you call that looking nice!” cried the mother, pointing a scornful fork at Clara. “That — that looks as if it wasn’t properly dressed!”
“I believe you’re jealous that you can’t swank as well,” he said laughing.
“Me! I could have worn evening dress with anybody, if I’d wanted to!” came the scornful answer.
“And why didn’t you want to?” he asked pertinently. “Or did you wear it?”
There was a long pause. Mrs. Radford readjusted the bacon in the Dutch oven. His heart beat fast, for fear he had offended her.
“Me!” she exclaimed at last. “No, I didn’t And when I was in service, I knew as soon as one of the maids came out in bare shoulders what sort she was, going to her sixpenny hop!”
“Were you too good to go to a sixpenny hop?” he said.

“They say Sarah Bernhardt’s fifty,” he said.
“Fifty! She’s turned sixty!” came the scornful answer.
“Well,” he said, “you’d never think it! She made me want to howl even now.”
“I should like to see myself howling at that bad old baggage!” said Mrs. Radford. “It’s time she began to think herself a grandmother, not a shrieking catamaran —“

Then followed a little discussion of the merits of pyjamas.
“My mother loves me in them,” he said. “She says I’m a pierrot.”

His eyes were dark, very deep, and very quiet. It was as if her beauty and his taking it hurt him, made him sorrowful. He looked at her with a little pain, and was afraid. He was so humble before her. She kissed him fervently on the eyes, first one, then the other, and folded herself to him, She gave herself. He held her fast. It was a moment intense almost to agony.
She stood letting him adore her and tremble with joy for her. It healed her hurt pride. It healed her; it made her glad. It made her feel erect and proud again. Her pride had been wounded inside her. She had been cheapened. Now she radiated with joy and pride again. It was her restoration and recognition.
Then he looked at her, his face radiant. They laughed to each other, and he strained her to his chest. The seconds ticked off, the minutes passed, and still the two stood clasped rigid together, mouth to mouth, like a statue in one block.

CHAPTER XIII: BAXTER DAWES

[…]But he felt he had to conceal something from her, and it irked him. There was a certain silence between them, and he felt he had, in that silence, to defend himself against her; he felt condemned by her. Then sometimes he hated her, and pulled at her her bondage. His life wanted to free itself of her. It was like a circle where life turned back on itself, and got no farther. She bore him, loved him, kept him, and his love turned back into her, so that he could not free to go forward with his own life, really love another woman. At this period, unknowingly, he resisted his mother’s influence. He did not tell her things; there was a distance between them.

Thomas Jordan was shaken and bruised, not otherwise hurt. He was, however, beside himself with rage. He dismissed Dawes from his employment, and summoned him from assault.

The case was dismissed after the magistrate had told Dawes he thought him a shunk.

“Yes,” he said. “You know, mother, I think there must be something the matter with me, that I can’t love. When she’s there, as a rule, I do love her. Sometimes, when I see her just as the woman, I love her, mother; but then, when she talks and criticises, I often don’t listen to her.”

The feeling that things were going in circle made him mad.

One evening they were walking down by the canal, and something was troubling him. She know she had not got him. All the time he whistled softly and persistently to himself. She listened, feeling she could learn more from his whistling than from his speech. It was a sad dissatisfied tune — a tune that made her feel he would not stay with her. She walked on in silence. When they came to the swing bridge he sat down on the great pole, looking at the stars in the water. He was a long way from her. She had been thinking.

“Don’t ask me anything about the future,” he said miserabley. “I don’t know anything. Be with me now, will you, no matter what it is?”

In the morning he had considerable peace, and was happy in himself. It seemed almost as if he had known the baptism of fire in passion, and it left him at rest. But it was not Clara. It was something that happened because of her, but it was not her. They were scarcely any nearer each other. It was as if they had been blind agents of a great force.

[…]In the factory, as he talked to her about Spiral hose, she ran her hand secretly along his side. She followed him out into the basement for a quick kiss; her eyes, always mute and yearning, full of unrestrained passion, she kept fixed on his. He was afraid of her, lest she should too flagrantly give herself away before the other girls. She invariably waited for him at dinnertime for him to embrace her before she went. He felt as if she were helpless, almost a burden to him, and it irritated him.

“Look how little she is!” he said to himself. “She’s lost like a grain of sand in the beach — just a concentrated speck blown along, a tiny white foam-bubble, almost nothing among the morning. Why does she absorb me?”

“What is she, after all?” he said to himself. “Here’s the seacoast morning, big and permanent and beautiful; there is she, fretting, always unsatified, and temporary as a bubble of foam. What does she mean to me, after all? She represents something, like a bubble of foam represents the sea. But what is she? It’s not her I care for.”

“But she is magnificent, and even bigger than the morning and the sea. Is she — ? Is she —“

[…]She made him feel imprisoned when she was there, as if he could not get a free deep breath, as if there were something on top of him. She felt his desire to be free of her.

“I hope so; but love should give a sense of freedom, not of prison. Miriam made me feel tied up like a donkey to a stake. I must feed on her patch, and nowhere else. It’s sickening!”
“And would you let a woman do as she likes?”
“Yes; I’ll see that she likes to love me. If she doesn’t — well, I don’t hold her.”
“If you were as wonderful as you say —,” replied Clara.
“I should be the marvel I am,” he laughed.
There was a silence in which they hated each other, though they laughed.
“Love’s a dog in a manager,” he said.
“And which of us is the dog?” she asked.
“Oh well, you, of course.”

“You talk,” she said. “about the cruelty of woman; I wish you knew the cruelty of men in their brute force. They simple don’t know that the woman exists.”

One evening, as they were coming home over the fields, she startled him by asking:
“Do you think it’s worth it — the — the sex part?”
“The act of loving, itself?”
“Yes; is it worth anything to you?”
“But how can you separate it?” he said. “It’s the culmination of everything. All our intimacy culminates then.”
“Not for me,” she said.
He was silent. A flash of hate for her came up. After all, she was dissatisfied with him, even there, where he thought they fulfilled each other. But he believed her too implicitly.
“I feel,” she continued slowly, “as if I hadn’t got you, as if all of you weren’t there, and as if it were’t me you were taking —“
“Who, then?”
“Something just for yourself. It has been fine, so that I daren’t think of it. But is it me you want, or is it It?”
He again felt guilty. Did he leave Clara out of count, and take simply women? But he thought that was splitting a hair.

“If I start to make love to you,” he said, “I just go like a leaf down the wind.”
“And leave me out of count,” she said.
“And then is it nothing to you?” he asked, almost rigid with chagrin.
“It’s something; and sometimes you have carried me away — right away — I know — and — I reverence you for it — but —“
“Don’t ‘but’ me,” he said, kissing her quickly, as a fire ran through him.

It was true as he said. As a rule, when he started love-making, the emotion was strong enough to carry with it everything — reason, soul, blood — in a great sweep, like the Trent carries bodily its back-swirls and intertwinings, noiselessly. Gradually the little criticisms, the little sensations, were lost, thought also went, everything borne along in one flood. He became, not a man with a mind, but a great instinct. His hands were like creatures, living; his limbs, his body, were all life and cousciousness, subject to no will of his, but living in themselves. Just as he was, so it seemed the vigorous, wintry stars were strong also with life. He and they struck with the same pulse of fire, and the same joy of strength which held the bracken-frond stiff near his eyes held his own body firm. It was as if he, and the stars, and the dark herbage, and Clara were licked up in an immense tongue of flame, which tore onwards and upwards. Everything rushed along in liveing beside him; everything was still, perfect in itself, along with him. This wonderful stillness in each thing in itself, while it was being borne along in a very ecstasy of living, seemed the hightest point of bliss.

Clara did not know what was the matter with him. She realised that he seemed unaware of her. Even when he came to her he seemed unaware of her; always he was somewhere else. She felt she was clutching for him, and he was somewhere else. It tortured her, and so she tortured him. For a month at a time she kept him at arm’s length. He almost hated her, and was driven to her in spite of himself. he went mostly into the company of men, was always at the George or the White Horse. His mother was ill, distant, quiet, shadowy. He was terrified of something; he dared not look at her. Her eyes seemed to grow darker, her face more waxen; still she dragged about at her work.

“The pain she had yesterday — I never saw anybody suffer like it!” she cried. “Leonard ran like a madman for Dr. Ansell, and when she’d got to bed she said to me: ‘Annie, look at this lump on my side. I wonder what it is?’ And there I looked, and I thought should have dropped. Paul, as true as I’m here, it’s a lump as big as my double fist. I said: ‘Good gracious, mother, whenever did that come?’ ‘Why, child,’ she said, ‘it’s been there a long time,’ I thought I should have died, our Paul, I did. She’s been having these pains for months at home, and nobody looking after her.”

His mother had been used to go to the public consultation on Saturday morning, when she could see the doctor for only nominal sum. Her son went on the same day. The waiting-room was full of poor women, who sat patiently on a bench around the wall. Paul thought of his mother, in her little back costume, sitting waiting likewise.[…]

The father was afraid of the mention of his wife. The two went indoors. Paul ate in silence; his father, with earthy hands, and sleeves rolled up, sat in the arm-chair opposite and looked at him.

Morel sighed deeply. The house seemed strangely empty, and Paul thought his father looked lost, forlorn, and old.

“I dunno wheer I s’ll find th’ money,” said Morel.
“And I’ll write to you what the doctor says,” said Paul.
“But tha writes i’ such a fashion, I canna ma’e it out,” said Morel.
“Well, I’ll write plain.”
It was no good asking Morel to answer, for he could scarcely do more than write his own name.

Paul put eight sovereigns and half a sovereign on the table. The doctor counted them, took a florin out of his purse, and put that down.

Then Paul carried his mother downstairs. She lay simple, like a child. But when he was on the stairs, she put her arms round his neck, clinging.

She pretended not to notice that Paul had gone out of the room. He sat in kitchen, smoking. Then he tried to brush some grey ash off his coat. He looked again. It was one of his mother’s grey hairs. It was so long! He held it up, and it drifted into the chimney. He let go. The long grey hair floated and was gone in the blackness of the chimney.

He kissed her again, and stroked the hair from her temples, gently, tenderly, as if she were a lover.

“How dun I find thee, lass?” he said, going forward and kissing her in a hasty, timid fashion.

She gave him a few instructions. He sat looking at her as if she were almost a stranger to him, before whom he was awkward and humble, and also as if he had lost his presence of mind, and wanted to run. This feeling that he wanted to run away, that he was on thorns to be gone from so trying a situation, and yet must linger because it looked better, made his presence so trying. He put up his eyebrows for misery, and clenched his fists on kis kness, feeling so awkward in presence of big trouble.

And Minnie, the little quaint maid, said:
“an’we glad t’ ‘ave yer.”

CHAPTER XIV: THE RELEASE

“That’s what I want to know. There he lies and sulks, day in, day out. Can’t get a word of information out of him.”

Presently she left the two men alone. Dawes was thinner, and handsome again, but life seemed low in him. As the doctor said, he was lying sulking, and would not move forward towards convalescence. He seemed to grudge every beat of his heart.

She went on the first opportunity to Sheffield to see her husband. The meeting was not a success. But she left him roses and fruit and money. She wanted to make restitution. It was not that she loved him. As she looked at him lying there her heart did not warm with love. Only she wanted to humble herself to him, to kneel before him. She wanted now to be self-sacrificial. After all, she had failed to make Morel really love her. She was morally frightened. She wanted to do penance. So she kneeled to Dawes, and it gave him a subtle pleasure. But the distance between them was still very great — too great. It frightened the man. It almost pleased the woman. She liked to feel she was serving him across an insuperable distance. She was proud now.

His face was near hers. Her blue eyes smiled straight into his, like a girl’s — warm, laughing with tender love. It made him pant with terror, agony, and love.

Somethimes as she lay he knew she was thinking of the past. Her mouth gradually shut hard in a line. She was holding herself rigid, so that she might die without ever uttering the great cry that was tearing from her. He never forgot that hard, utterly lonely and stubborn clenching of her mouth, which persisted for weeks. Sometimes, when it was lighter, she talked about her husband. Now she hated him. She did not forgive him. She could not bear him to be in the room. And a few things, the things that had been most bitter to her, came up again so strongly that they broke from her, and she told her son.

That night Morel walked home from Nottingham, in order to have something to do. The furnaces flared in a red blotch over Bulwell; the black clouds were like a low ceiling. As he went along the ten miles of highroad, he felt as if he were walking out of life, between the black levels of the sky and the earth. But at the end was only the sick-room. If he walked and walked for ever, there was only that place to come to.

[…]Morel, silent and frightened, obliterated himself. Somethimes he would go into the sick-room and look at her. Then he backed out, bewildered.

They turned the clothes back. Paul saw his mother like a girl curled up in her flannel nightdress. Quickly they made one half of the bed, moved her, made the other, straightened her nightgown over her small feet, and covered her up.

The father came home from work at about four o’click. He dragged silently into the house and sat down. Minnie bustled to give him his dinner. Tired, he laid his black arms on the table. There were swede turnips for his dinner, which he liked. Paul wondered if he knew. It was some thime, and nobody had spoken. At last the son said:
“You noticed the blinds were down?”
Morel looked up.
“No,” he said. “Why — has she gone?”
“Yes.”
“When wor that?”
“About twelve this morning.”
“H’m!”
The miner sat still for a moment, then began his dinner. It was as if nothing had happend. He ate his turnips in silence. Afterwards he washed and went upstairs to dress. The door of her room was shut.

The room was cold, that had been warm for so long. Flowers, bottles, plates, all sick-room litter was taken away; everything was harsh and austere. She lay raised on the bed, the sweep of the sheet from the raised feet was like a clean curve of snow, so silent. She lay like a maiden asleep. With his candle in his hand, he bent over her. She lay like a girl asleep and dreaming of her love. The mouth was a little open as if wondering from the suffering, but her face was young, her brow clear and white as if life had never touched it. He looked again at the eyebrows, at the small, winsome nose a bit on one side. She was young again. Only the hair as it arched so beautifully from her temples was mixed with silver, and the two simple plaits that lay on her shoulders were filigree of silver and brown. She would wake up. She would lift her eyelids. She was with him still. He bent and kissed her passionately. But there was coldness against his mouth. He bit his lips with horror. Looking at her, he felt he could never, never let her go. No! He stroked the hair from her temples. That, too, was cold. He saw the mouth so dumb and wondering at the hurt. Then he crouched on the floor, whispering to her:

His father looked so forlorn. Morel had been a man without fear — simply nothing frightened him. Paul realised with a start that he had been afraid to go to bed, alone in the house with his dead. He was sorry.

In the morning Morel summoned his courage, hearing Annie downstairs and Paul coughing in the room across the landing. He opened her door, and went into the darkened room. He saw the white uplifted form in the twilight, but her he dared not see. Bewildered, too frightened to possess any of his faculties, he got out of the room again and left her. He never looked at her again. He had not seen her months, because he had not dared to look. And she looked like his young wife again.
“Have you seen her?” Annie asked of him sharply after breakfast.
“Yes,” he said.
“And don’t you think she looks nice?”
“Yes.”
He went out of the house soon after. And all the time he seemed to be creeping aside to avoid it.

Morel saw the wrist and the white hand of the other man gripping the stem of the pipe and knocking out the ash, as if he had given up.

She seemed to understand better now about men, and what they could or would do. She was less afraid of them, more sure of herself. That they were not the samll egoists she had imagined them made her more comfortable. She had hearned a good deal — almost as much as she wanted to learn. Her cup had been full. It was still as full as she could carry. On the whole, she would not be sorry when he was gone.

[…]He was a mean fellow, after all, to take what he wanted and then give her back. She did not remember that she herself had had what she wanted, and really, at the bottom of her heart, wished to be given back.

[…]He felt she wanted the man on top, not the real him that was in trouble. That would be too much trouble to her; he dared not give it her. She could not cope with him. It made him ashamed.[…]

They talked in a desultory fashion until it grew dark. The landlady brought in the tea. Dawes drew up his chair to the table without being invited, like a husband. Then he sat humbly waiting for his cup. She served him as she would, like a wife, not consulting his wish.

CHAPTER XV: DERELICT

The church clock struck two. Far away he could hear the sharp clinking of the trucks on the railway. No, it was not they that were far away. They were there in their places. But where was he himself?

“Marry whom?” came the sulky question.
“As best you can.”
“Miriam?”
But he did not trust that.

[…]Where could he go? There was nowhere to go, neither back into the inn, or forward anywhere. He felt stifled. There was nowhere for him. The stress grew inside him; he felt he should smash.

Then, happening to go into the Unitarian Church one Sunday evening, when they stood up to sing the second hymn he saw her before him. The light glistened on her lower lip as she sang. She looked as if she had got something, at any rate: some hope in heaven, if not in earth. Her comfort and her life seemed in the after-world. A warm, strong feeling for her came up. She seemed to yearn, as she sang, for the mystery and comfort. He put his hope in her. He longed for the sermon to be over, to speak to her.

Supper was laid. He swung the curtain over the window. There was a bowl of freesias and scarlet anemones on the table. She bent to them. Still touching them with her finger-tips, she looked up at him, saying:
“Aren’t they beautiful?”

“By the way,” he said, “didn’t I hear something about your earning your own living?”
“Yes,” she replied, bowing her dark head over her cup.
“And what of it?”
“I’m merely going to the farming college at Broughton for three months, and I shall probably be kept on as a teacher there.”
“I say — that sounds all right for you! You always wanted to be independent.”

She ate her food in the deliberate, constrained way, almost as if she recoiled a little from doing anything so publicly, that he knew so well.

“Oh, I don’t think it won’t be a great deal. Only you’ll find earning your own living isn’t everything.”
“No,” she said, swallowing with difficulty; “I don’t suppose it is.”
“I suppose work can be nearly everything to a man,” he said, “though it isn’t to me. But a woman only works with a part of herself. The real and vital part is coverted up.”
“But a man can give all himself to work?” she asked.
“Yes, practically.”
“And a woman only the unimportant part of herself?”
“That’s it.”
She looked up at him, and her eyes dilated with anger.
“Then,” she said, “if it’s true, it’s a great shame.”

[…]He could not bear it — that breast which was warm and which cradled him without taking the burden of him. So much he wanted to rest on her that the feint of rest only tortured him. He drew away.

He felt, in leaving her, he was defrauding her of life. But he knew that, in staying, stilling the inner, desperate man, he was denying his own life. And he did not hope to give life to her by denying his own.

[…]She suddenly looked at him. Her bitterness came surging up. Her sacrifice, then, was useless. He lay there aloof, careless about her. Suddenly she saw again his lack of religion, his restless instability. He would destroy himself like a perverse child. Well, then, he would!

She stood before the mirror pinning on her hat. How bitter, how unutterably bitter, it made her that he rejected her sacrifice! Life a head looked dead, as if the glow were gone out. She bowed her face over the flowers — the freesias so sweet and spring-like, the scarlet anemones flaunting over the table. It was like him to have those flowers.

[…]He had no religion; it was all for the moment’s attraction that he cared, nothing else, nothing deeper. Well, she would wait and see how it turned out with him. When he had had enough he would give in and come to her.