“But why not, my dear? I tell you it’s the best―”
“It isn’t. And one ought to be happy, one ought.”
By this time Mrs. Morel was trembling violently. Struggles of this kind often took place between her and her son, when she seemed to fight for his very life against his own will to die. He took her in his arms. She was ill and pitiful.
“Never mind, Little,” he murmured. “So long as you don’t feel life’s paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn’t matter, happiness or unhappiness.”
She pressed him to her.
“But I want you to be happy,” she said pathetically.
“Eh, my dear—say rather you want me to live.”
Mrs. 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. Dawes. At any rate that feeling was wholesome. His mother prayed and prayed for him, that he might not be wasted. That was all her prayer—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 prayed 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 rooms. 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 said: “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.
The months went slowly along. Paul had more or less got into connection with the Socialist, Suffragette, Unitarian people in Nottingham, owing to his acquaintance with Clara. One day a friend of his and of Clara’s, in Bestwood, asked him to take a message to Mrs. Dawes. He went in the evening across Sneinton Market to Bluebell Hill. He found the house in a mean little street paved with granite cobbles and having causeways of dark blue, grooved bricks. The front door went up a step from off this rough pavement, where the feet of the passers-by rasped and clattered. The brown paint on the door was so old that the naked wood showed between the rents. He stood on the street below and knocked. There came a heavy footstep; a large, stout woman of about sixty towered above him. He looked up at her from the pavement. She had a rather severe face.
She admitted him into the parlour, which opened on to the street. It was a small, stuffy, defunct room, of mahogany, and deathly enlargements of photographs of departed people done in carbon.fc Mrs. Radford left him. She was stately, almost martial. In a moment Clara appeared. She flushed deeply, and he was covered with confusion. It seemed as if she did not like being discovered in her home circumstances.
“I thought it couldn’t be your voice,” she said.
But she might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. She invited him out of the mausoleum of a parlour into the kitchen.
That was a little, darkish room too, but it was smothered in white lace. The mother had seated herself again by the cupboard, and was drawing thread from a vast web of lace. A clump of fluff and ravelled cotton was at her right hand, a heap of three-quarter-inch lace lay on her left, whilst in front of her was the mountain of lace web, piling the hearth-rug. Threads of curly cotton, pulled out from between the lengths of lace, strewed over the fender and the fireplace. Paul dared not go forward, for fear of treading on piles of white stuff.
On the table was a jennyfd for carding the lace. There was a pack of brown cardboard squares, a pack of cards of lace, a little box of pins, and on the sofa lay a heap of drawn lace.
The room was all lace, and it was so dark and warm that the white, snowy stuff seemed the more distinct.
“If you’re coming in you won’t have to mind the work,” said Mrs. Radford. “I know we’re about blocked up. But sit you down.”
Clara, much embarrassed, gave him a chair against the wall opposite the white heaps. Then she herself took her place on the sofa, shamedly.
“Will you drink a bottle of stout?” Mrs. Radford asked. “Clara, get him a bottle of stout.”
He protested, but Mrs. Radford insisted.
“You look as if you could do with it,” she said. “Haven’t you never any more colour than that?”
“It’s only a thick skin I’ve got that doesn’t show the blood through,” he answered.
Clara, ashamed and chagrined, brought him a bottle of stout and a glass. He poured out some of the black stuff.
“Well,” he said, lifting the glass, “here’s health!”
“And thank you,” said Mrs. Radford.
He took a drink of stout.
“And light yourself a cigarette, so long as you don’t set the house on fire,” said Mrs. Radford.
“Thank you,” he replied.
“Nay, you needn’t thank me,” she answered. “I s’ll be glad to smell a bit of smoke in th’ ‘ouse again. A house o’ women is as dead as a house wi’ no fire, to my thinkin’. I’m not a spider as likes a corner to myself. I like a man about, if he’s only something to snap at.”
Clara began to work. Her jenny spun with a subdued buzz; the white lace hopped from between her fingers on to the card. It was filled; she snipped off the length, and pinned the end down to the banded lace. Then she put a new card in her jenny. Paul watched her. She sat square and magnificent. Her throat and arms were bare. The blood still mantled below her ears; she bent her head in shame of her humility. Her face was set on her work. Her arms were creamy and full of life beside the white lace; her large, well-kept hands worked with a balanced movement, as if nothing would hurry them. He, not knowing, watched her all the time. He saw the arch of her neck from the shoulder, as she bent her head; he saw the coil of dun hair; he watched her moving, gleaming arms.
“I’ve heard a bit about you from Clara,” continued the mother. “You’re in Jordan’s, aren’t you?” She drew her lace unceasing.
“Yes.”
“Ay, well, and I can remember when Thomas Jordan used to ask me for one of my toffies.”
“Did he?” laughed Paul. “And did he get it?”
“Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t—which was latterly. For he’s the sort that takes all and gives naught, he is—or used to be.”
“I think he’s very decent,” said Paul.
“Yes; well, I’m glad to hear it.”
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-froidfe of a woman in the prime of life. She continued drawing the lace with slow, dignified movements. The big web came up inevitably 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.
“And you’ve been going with Miriam Leivers?” the mother asked him.
“Well―” he answered.
“Yes, she’s a nice girl,” she continued. “She’s very nice, but she’s a bi
t too much above this world to suit my fancy.”
“She is a bit like that,” he agreed.
“She’ll never be satisfied till she’s got wings and can fly over everybody’s head, she won’t,” she said.
Clara broke in, and he told her his message. She spoke humbly to him. He had surprised her in her drudgery. To have her humble made him feel as if he were lifting his head in expectation.
“Do you like jennying?” he asked.
“What can a woman do!” she replied bitterly.
“Is it sweated?”2
“More or less. Isn’t all woman’s work? That’s another trick the men have played, since we force ourselves into the labour market.”
“Now then, you shut up about the men,” said her mother. “If the women wasn’t fools, the men wouldn’t be bad uns, that’s what I say. No man was ever that bad wi’ me but what he got it back again. Not but what they’re a lousy lot, there’s no denying it.”
“But they’re all right really, aren’t they?” he asked.
“Well, they’re a bit different from women,” she answered.
“Would you care to be back at Jordan’s?” he asked Clara.
“I don’t think so,” she replied.
“Yes, she would!” cried her mother; “thank her stars if she could get back. Don’t you listen to her. She’s for ever on that ’igh horse of hers, an’ it’s back’s that thin an’ starved it’ll cut her i’ two one of these days.”
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 deprived of so much. And her arm moved mechanically, that should never have been subdued to a mechanism, and her head was bowed to the lace, that never should have been 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.3 As she stood in the doorway, she winced from the street, from her surroundings.
“And you will go with Mrs. Hodgkisson to Hucknall?”
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 a loss. He had thought her high and mighty.
When he left her, he wanted to run. He went to the station in a sort of dream, and was at home without realising he had moved out of her street.
He had an idea that Susan, the overseer of the Spiral girls, was about to be married. He asked her the next day.
“I say, Susan, I heard a whisper of your getting married. What about it?”
Susan flushed red.
“Who’s been talking to you?” she replied.
“Nobody. I merely heard a whisper that you were thinning―”
“Well, I am, though you needn’t tell anybody. What’s more, I wish I wasn’t!”
“Nay, Susan, you won’t make me believe that.”
“Shan’t I? You can believe it, though. I’d rather stop here a thousand times.”
Paul was perturbed.
“Why, Susan?”
The girl’s colour was high, and her eyes flashed.
“That’s why!”
“And must you?”
For answer, she looked at him. There was about him a candour and gentleness which made the women trust him. He understood.
“Ah, I’m sorry,” he said.
Tears came to her eyes.
“But you’ll see it’ll turn out all right. You’ll make the best of it,” he continued rather wistfully.
“There’s nothing else for it.”
“Yea, there’s making the worst of it. Try and make it all right.”
He soon made occasion to call again on Clara.
“Would you,” he said, “care to come back to Jordan’s?”
She put down her work, laid her beautiful arms on the table, and looked at him for some moments without answering. Gradually the flush mounted her cheek.
“Why?” she asked.
Paul felt rather awkward.
“Well, because Susan is thinking of leaving,” he said.
Clara went on with her jennying. The white lace leaped in little jumps and bounds on to the card. He waited for her. Without raising her head, she said at last, in a peculiar low voice:
“Have you said anything about it?”
“Except to you, not a word.”
There was again a long silence.
“I will apply when the advertisement is out,” she said.
“You will apply before that. I will let you know exactly when.”
She went on spinning her little machine, and did not contradict him.
Clara came to Jordan’s. Some of the older hands, Fanny among them, remembered her earlier rule, and cordially disliked the memory. Clara had always been “ikey,” reserved, and superior. She had never mixed with the girls as one of themselves. If she had occasion to find fault, she did it coolly and with perfect politeness, which the defaulter felt to be a bigger insult than crossness. Towards Fanny, the poor, overstrung hunchback, Clara was unfailingly compassionate and gentle, as a result of which Fanny shed more bitter tears than ever the rough tongues of the other oversees had caused her.
There was something in Clara that Paul disliked, and much that piqued him. If she were about, he always watched her strong throat or her neck, upon which the blonde hair grew low and fluffy. There was a fine down, almost invisible, upon the skin of her face and arms, and when once he had perceived it, he saw it always.
When he was at his work, painting in the afternoon, she would come and stand near to him, perfectly motionless. Then he felt her, though she neither spoke nor touched him. Although she stood a yard away he felt as if he were in contact with her. Then he could paint no more. He flung down the brushes, and turned to talk to her.
Sometimes she praised his work; sometimes she was critical and cold.
“You are affected in that piece,” she would say; and, as there was an element of truth in her condemnation, his blood boiled with anger.
Again: “What of this?” he would ask enthusiastically.
“Hm!” She made a small doubtful sound. “It doesn’t interest me much.”
“Because you don’t understand it,” he retorted.
“Then why ask me about it?”
“Because I thought you would understand.”
She would shrug her shoulders in scorn of his work. She maddened him. He was furious. Then he abused her, and went into passionate exposition of his stuff. This amused and stimulated her. But she never owned that she had been wrong.
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-workers.
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.
One day he picked up a copy of Lettres de mon Moulin from her work-bench.4
“You read French, do you?” he cried.
Clara glanced round negligently. She was making an elastic stocking of heliotrope silk, turning the Spiral machine with slow, balanced regularity, occasionally bending down to see her work or to adjust the needles; then her magnificent neck, with its down and fine pencils of hair, shone white against the lavender, lustrous silk. She turned a few more rounds, and stopped.
“What did you say?” she asked, smiling sweetly.
Paul’s eyes glittered at her insolent indifference to him.
“I did not know you read French,” he said, very polite.
“Did you not?” she replied, with a faint, sarcastic smile.
“Rotten swank!” he said, but scarcely loud enough to be heard.
He shut his mouth angrily as he watched her. She seemed to scorn the work she mechanically produced; yet the hose she made were as nearly perfect as possible.
“You don’t like Spiral work,” he said.
“Oh, well, all work is work,” she answered, as if she knew all about it.
He marvelled at her coldness. He had to do everything hotly. She must be something special.
“What would you prefer to do?” he asked.
She laughed at him indulgently, as she said:
“There is so little likelihood of my ever being given a choice, that I haven’t wasted time considering.”
“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.”
“You know me very well,” she replied coldly.
“I know you think you’re terrific great shakes, and that you live under the eternal insult of working in a factory.”
He was very angry and very rude. She merely turned away from him in disdain. He walked whistling down the room, flirted and laughed with Hilda.
Later on he said to himself:
“What was I so impudent to Clara for?” He was rather annoyed with himself, at the same time glad. “Serve her right; she stinks with silent pride,” he said to himself angrily.
Sons and Lovers Page 34