Sons and Lovers

CHAPTER I. THE EARLY MARRIED LIFE OF THE MORELS-3

“ It makes me feel blind,” she frowned.

“ Like a moudiwarp!” he laughed. “Yi, an’ there’s some chaps as does go round like moudiwarps.” He thrust his face forward in the blind, snout-like way of a mole, seeming to sniff and peer for direction. “They dun though!” he protested naïvely. “Tha niver seed such a way they get in. But tha mun let me ta’e thee down some time, an’ tha can see for thysen.”

She looked at him, startled. This was a new tract of life suddenly opened before her. She realised the life of the miners, hundreds of them toiling below earth and coming up at evening. He seemed to her noble. He risked his life daily, and with gaiety. She looked at him, with a touch of appeal in her pure humility.

“ Shouldn’t ter like it?” he asked tenderly. “’Appen not, it ’ud dirty thee.”

She had never been “thee’d” and “thou’d” before.

The next Christmas they were married, and for three months she was perfectly happy: for six months she was very happy.

He had signed the pledge, and wore the blue ribbon of a tee-totaller: he was nothing if not showy. They lived, she thought, in his own house. It was small, but convenient enough, and quite nicely furnished, with solid, worthy stuff that suited her honest soul. The women, her neighbours, were rather foreign to her, and Morel’s mother and sisters were apt to sneer at her ladylike ways. But she could perfectly well live by herself, so long as she had her husband close.

Sometimes, when she herself wearied of love-talk, she tried to open her heart seriously to him. She saw him listen deferentially, but without understanding. This killed her efforts at a finer intimacy, and she had flashes of fear. Sometimes he was restless of an evening: it was not enough for him just to be near her, she realised. She was glad when he set himself to little jobs.

He was a remarkably handy man—could make or mend anything. So she would say:

“ I do like that coal-rake of your mother’s—it is small and natty.”

“ Does ter, my wench? Well, I made that, so I can make thee one!”

“ What! why, it’s a steel one!”

“ An’ what if it is! Tha s’lt ha’e one very similar, if not exactly same.”

She did not mind the mess, nor the hammering and noise. He was busy and happy.

But in the seventh month, when she was brushing his Sunday coat, she felt papers in the breast pocket, and, seized with a sudden curiosity, took them out to read. He very rarely wore the frock-coat he was married in: and it had not occurred to her before to feel curious concerning the papers. They were the bills of the household furniture, still unpaid.

“ Look here,” she said at night, after he was washed and had had his dinner. “I found these in the pocket of your wedding-coat. Haven’t you settled the bills yet?”

“ No. I haven’t had a chance.”

“ But you told me all was paid. I had better go into Nottingham on Saturday and settle them. I don’t like sitting on another man’s chairs and eating from an unpaid table.”

He did not answer.

“ I can have your bank-book, can’t I?”

“ Tha can ha’e it, for what good it’ll be to thee.”

“ I thought—” she began. He had told her he had a good bit of money left over. But she realised it was no use asking questions. She sat rigid with bitterness and indignation.

The next day she went down to see his mother.

“ Didn’t you buy the furniture for Walter?” she asked.

“ Yes, I did,” tartly retorted the elder woman.

“ And how much did he give you to pay for it?”

The elder woman was stung with fine indignation.

“ Eighty pound, if you’re so keen on knowin’,” she replied.

“ Eighty pounds! But there are forty-two pounds still owing!”

“ I can’t help that.”

“ But where has it all gone?”

“ You’ll find all the papers, I think, if you look—beside ten pound as he owed me, an’ six pound as the wedding cost down here.”

“ Six pounds!” echoed Gertrude Morel. It seemed to her monstrous that, after her own father had paid so heavily for her wedding, six pounds more should have been squandered in eating and drinking at Walter’s parents’ house, at his expense.

“ And how much has he sunk in his houses?” she asked.

“ His houses—which houses?”

Gertrude Morel went white to the lips. He had told her the house he lived in, and the next one, was his own.

“ I thought the house we live in—” she began.

“ They’re my houses, those two,” said the mother-in-law. “And not clear either. It’s as much as I can do to keep the mortgage interest paid.”

Gertrude sat white and silent. She was her father now.

“ Then we ought to be paying you rent,” she said coldly.

“ Walter is paying me rent,” replied the mother.

“ And what rent?” asked Gertrude.

“ Six and six a week,” retorted the mother.

It was more than the house was worth. Gertrude held her head erect, looked straight before her.

“ It is lucky to be you,” said the elder woman, bitingly, “to have a husband as takes all the worry of the money, and leaves you a free hand.”

The young wife was silent.

She said very little to her husband, but her manner had changed towards him. Something in her proud, honourable soul had crystallised out hard as rock.

When October came in, she thought only of Christmas. Two years ago, at Christmas, she had met him. Last Christmas she had married him. This Christmas she would bear him a child.

“ You don’t dance yourself, do you, missis?” asked her nearest neighbour, in October, when there was great talk of opening a dancing-class over the Brick and Tile Inn at Bestwood.

“ No—I never had the least inclination to,” Mrs. Morel replied.

“ Fancy! An’ how funny as you should ha’ married your Mester. You know he’s quite a famous one for dancing.”

“ I didn’t know he was famous,” laughed Mrs. Morel.

“ Yea, he is though! Why, he ran that dancing-class in the Miners’ Arms club-room for over five year.”

“ Did he?”

“ Yes, he did.” The other woman was defiant. “An’ it was thronged every Tuesday, and Thursday, an’ Sat’day—an’ there was carryin’s-on, accordin’ to all accounts.”

This kind of thing was gall and bitterness to Mrs. Morel, and she had a fair share of it. The women did not spare her, at first; for she was superior, though she could not help it.

He began to be rather late in coming home.

“ They’re working very late now, aren’t they?” she said to her washer-woman.

“ No later than they allers do, I don’t think. But they stop to have their pint at Ellen’s, an’ they get talkin’, an’ there you are! Dinner stone cold—an’ it serves ’em right.”

“ But Mr. Morel does not take any drink.”

The woman dropped the clothes, looked at Mrs. Morel, then went on with her work, saying nothing.

Gertrude Morel was very ill when the boy was born. Morel was good to her, as good as gold. But she felt very lonely, miles away from her own people. She felt lonely with him now, and his presence only made it more intense.

The boy was small and frail at first, but he came on quickly. He was a beautiful child, with dark gold ringlets, and dark-blue eyes which changed gradually to a clear grey. His mother loved him passionately. He came just when her own bitterness of disillusion was hardest to bear; when her faith in life was shaken, and her soul felt dreary and lonely. She made much of the child, and the father was jealous.

At last Mrs. Morel despised her husband. She turned to the child; she turned from the father. He had begun to neglect her; the novelty of his own home was gone. He had no grit, she said bitterly to herself. What he felt just at the minute, that was all to him. He could not abide by anything. There was nothing at the back of all his show.

There began a battle between the husband and wife—a fearful, b****y battle that ended only with the death of one. She fought to make him undertake his own responsibilities, to make him fulfill his obligations. But he was too different from her. His nature was purely sensuous, and she strove to make him moral, religious. She tried to force him to face things. He could not endure it—it drove him out of his mind.

While the baby was still tiny, the father’s temper had become so irritable that it was not to be trusted. The child had only to give a little trouble when the man began to bully. A little more, and the hard hands of the collier hit the baby. Then Mrs. Morel loathed her husband, loathed him for days; and he went out and drank; and she cared very little what he did. Only, on his return, she scathed him with her satire.

The estrangement between them caused him, knowingly or unknowingly, grossly to offend her where he would not have done.

William was only one year old, and his mother was proud of him, he was so pretty. She was not well off now, but her sisters kept the boy in clothes. Then, with his little white hat curled with an ostrich feather, and his white coat, he was a joy to her, the twining wisps of hair clustering round his head. Mrs. Morel lay listening, one Sunday morning, to the chatter of the father and child downstairs. Then she dozed off. When she came downstairs, a great fire glowed in the grate, the room was hot, the breakfast was roughly laid, and seated in his armchair, against the chimney-piece, sat Morel, rather timid; and standing between his legs, the child—cropped like a sheep, with such an odd round poll—looking wondering at her; and on a newspaper spread out upon the hearthrug, a myriad of crescent-shaped curls, like the petals of a marigold scattered in the reddening firelight.

Mrs. Morel stood still. It was her first baby. She went very white, and was unable to speak.

“ What dost think o’ ’im?” Morel laughed uneasily.

She gripped her two fists, lifted them, and came forward. Morel shrank back.

“ I could kill you, I could!” she said. She choked with rage, her two fists uplifted.

“ Yer non want ter make a wench on ’im,” Morel said, in a frightened tone, bending his head to shield his eyes from hers. His attempt at laughter had vanished.

The mother looked down at the jagged, close-clipped head of her child. She put her hands on his hair, and stroked and fondled his head.

“ Oh—my boy!” she faltered. Her lip trembled, her face broke, and, snatching up the child, she buried her face in his shoulder and cried painfully. She was one of those women who cannot cry; whom it hurts as it hurts a man. It was like ripping something out of her, her sobbing.

Morel sat with his elbows on his knees, his hands gripped together till the knuckles were white. He gazed in the fire, feeling almost stunned, as if he could not breathe.

Presently she came to an end, soothed the child and cleared away the breakfast-table. She left the newspaper, littered with curls, spread upon the hearthrug. At last her husband gathered it up and put it at the back of the fire. She went about her work with closed mouth and very quiet. Morel was subdued. He crept about wretchedly, and his meals were a misery that day. She spoke to him civilly, and never alluded to what he had done. But he felt something final had happened.