Sons and Lovers

She went indoors, wondering if things were never going to alter. She was beginning by now to realize that they would not. She seemed so far away from her girlhood, she wondered if it were the same person walking heavily up the back garden at the Bottoms as had run so lightly on the breakwater at Sheerness ten years before.

“What have I to do with it?” she said to herself. “What have I to do with all this? Even the child I am going to have! It doesn’t seem as if I were taken into account.”

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

“I wait,” Mrs. Morel said to herself—“I wait, and what I wait for can never come.”

Then she straightened the kitchen, lit the lamp, mended the fire, looked out the washing for the next day, and put it to soak. After which she sat down to her sewing. Through the long hours her needle flashed regularly through the stuff. Occasionally she sighed, moving to relieve herself. And all the time she was thinking how to make the most of what she had, for the children’s sakes.

At half-past eleven her husband came. His cheeks were very red and very shiny above his black moustache. His head nodded slightly. He was pleased with himself.

“Oh! Oh! waitin’ for me, lass? I’ve bin ‘elpin’ Anthony, an’ what’s think he’s gen me? Nowt b’r a lousy hae’f-crown, an’ that’s ivry penny—”

“He thinks you’ve made the rest up in beer,” she said shortly.

“An’ I ‘aven’t—that I ‘aven’t. You b’lieve me, I’ve ‘ad very little this day, I have an’ all.” His voice went tender. “Here, an’ I browt thee a bit o’ brandysnap, an’ a coconut for th’ children.” He laid the gingerbread and the coconut, a hairy object, on the table. “Nay, tha niver said thankyer for nowt i’ thy life, did ter?”

As a compromise, she picked up the coconut and shook it, to see if it had any milk.

“It’s a good ‘un, you may back yer life o’ that. I got it fra’ Bill Hodgkisson. ‘Bill,’ I says, ‘tha non wants them three nuts, does ter? Arena ter for gi’ein’ me one for my bit of a lad an’ wench?’ ‘I ham, Walter, my lad,’ ‘e says; ‘ta’e which on ‘em ter’s a mind.’ An’ so I took one, an’ thanked ‘im. I didn’t like ter shake it afore ‘is eyes, but ‘e says, ‘Tha’d better ma’e sure it’s a good un, Walt.’ An’ so, yer see, I knowed it was. He’s a nice chap, is Bill Hodgkisson, ‘e’s a nice chap!”

“A man will part with anything so long as he’s drunk, and you’re drunk along with him,” said Mrs. Morel.

“Eh, tha mucky little ‘ussy, who’s drunk, I sh’d like ter know?” said Morel. He was extraordinarily pleased with himself, because of his day’s helping to wait in the Moon and Stars. He chattered on.

Mrs. Morel, very tired, and sick of his babble, went to bed as quickly as possible, while he raked the fire.

Mrs. Morel came of a good old burgher family, famous independents who had fought with Colonel Hutchinson, and who remained stout Congregationalists. Her grandfather had gone bankrupt in the lace-market at a time when so many lace-manufacturers were ruined in Nottingham. Her father, George Coppard, was an engineer—a large, handsome, haughty man, proud of his fair skin and blue eyes, but more proud still of his integrity. Gertrude resem-bled her mother in her small build. But her temper, proud and unyielding, she had from the Coppards.

George Coppard was bitterly galled by his own poverty. He became foreman of the engineers in the dockyard at Sheerness. Mrs. Morel—Gertrude—was the second daughter. She favoured her mother, loved her mother best of all; but she had the Coppard’s clear, defiant blue eyes and their broad brow. She remembered to have hated her father’s overbearing manner towards her gentle, humorous, kindly-souled mother. She remembered running over the breakwater at Sheerness and finding the boat. She remembered to have been petted and flattered by all the men when she had gone to the dockyard, for she was a delicate, rather proud child. She remembered the funny old mistress, whose assistant she had become, whom she had loved to help in the private school. And she still had the Bible that John Field had given her. She used to walk home from chapel with John Field when she was nineteen. He was the son of a well-to-do tradesman, had been to college in London, and was to devote himself to business.

She could always recall in detail a September Sunday afternoon, when they sat under the vine at the back of her father’s house. The sun came through the chinks in the vine-leaves and made beautiful patterns, like a lace scarf, falling on her and on him. Some of the leaves were clean yellow, like yellow flat flowers.

“Now sit still,” he had cried. “Now your hair, I don’t know what it is like! It’s as bright as copper and gold, as red as burnt copper, and it has gold threads where the sun shines on it. Fancy their saying it’s brown. Your mother calls it mouse-colour.”

She had met his brilliant eyes, but her clear face scarcely showed the elation which rose within her.

“But you say you don’t like business,” she pursued.

“I don’t. I hate it!” he cried hotly.

“And you would like to go into the ministry,” she half implored.

“I should. I should love it, if I thought I could make a first-rate preacher.”

“Then why don’t you—why don’t you?” Her voice rang with defiance. “If I were a man, nothing would stop me.”

She held her head erect. He was rather timid before her.

“But my father’s so stiff-necked. He means to put me into the business, and I know he’ll do it.”

“But if you’re a man?” she had cried.

“Being a man isn’t everything,” he replied, frowning with puzzled helplessness.

Now, as she moved about her work at the Bottoms, with some experience of what being a man meant, she knew that it was not everything.

At twenty, owing to her health, she had left Sheerness. Her father had retired home to Nottingham. John Field’s father had been ruined; the son had gone as a teacher in Norwood. She did not hear of him until, two years later, she made determined inquiry. He had married his landlady, a woman of forty, a widow with property.

And still Mrs. Morel preserved John Field’s Bible. She did not now believe him to be—. Well, she understood pretty well what he might or might not have been. So she preserved his Bible, and kept his memory intact in her heart, for her own sake. To her dying day, for thirty-five years, she did not speak of him.

When she was twenty-three years old, she met, at a Christmas party, a young man from the Erewash Valley. Morel was then twenty-seven years old. He was well set-up, erect, and very smart. He had wavy black hair that shone again, and a vigorous black beard that had never been shaved. His cheeks were ruddy, and his red, moist mouth was noticeable because he laughed so often and so heartily. He had that rare thing, a rich, ringing laugh. Gertrude Coppard had watched him, fascinated. He was so full of colour and animation, his voice ran so easily into comic grotesque, he was so ready and so pleasant with everybody. Her own father had a rich fund of humour, but it was satiric. This man’s was different: soft, non-intellectual, warm, a kind of gambolling.

She herself was opposite. She had a curious, receptive mind, which found much pleasure and amusement in listening to other folk. She was clever in leading folk on to talk. She loved ideas, and was considered very intellectual. What she liked most of all was an argument on religion or philosophy or politics with some educated man. This she did not often enjoy. So she always had people tell her about themselves, finding her pleasure so.

In her person she was rather small and delicate, with a large brow, and dropping bunches of brown silk curls. Her blue eyes were very straight, honest, and searching. She had the beautiful hands of the Coppards. Her dress was always subdued. She wore dark blue silk, with a peculiar silver chain of silver scallops. This, and a heavy brooch of twisted gold, was her only ornament. She was still perfectly intact, deeply religious, and full of beautiful candour.

Walter Morel seemed melted away before her. She was to the miner that thing of mystery and fascination, a lady. When she spoke to him, it was with a southern pronunciation and a purity of English which thrilled him to hear. She watched him. He danced well, as if it were natural and joyous in him to dance. His grandfather was a French refugee who had married an English barmaid—if it had been a marriage. Gertrude Coppard watched the young miner as he danced a certain subtle exultation like glamour in his movement, and his face the flower of his body, ruddy, with tumbled black hair, and laughing alike whatever partner he bowed above. She thought him rather wonderful, never having met anyone like him. Her father was to her the type of all men. And George Coppard, proud in his bearing, handsome, and rather bitter; who preferred theology in reading, and who drew near in sympathy only to one man, the Apostle Paul; who was harsh in government, and in familiarity ironic; who ignored all sensuous pleasure;—he was very different from the miner. Gertrude herself was rather contemptuous of dancing; she had not the slightest inclination towards that accomplishment, and had never learned even a Roger de Coverley. She was a puritan, like her father, high-minded, and really stern. Therefore the dusky, golden softness of this man’s sensuous flame of life, that flowed off his flesh like the flame from a candle, not baffled and gripped into incandescence by thought and spirit as her life was, seemed to her something wonderful, beyond her.

He came and bowed above her. A warmth radiated through her as if she had drunk wine.

“Now do come and have this one wi’ me,” he said caressively. “It’s easy, you know. I’m pining to see you dance.”

She had told him before she could not dance. She glanced at his humility and smiled. Her smile was very beautiful. It moved the man so that he forgot everything.

“No, I won’t dance,” she said softly. Her words came clean and ringing.

Not knowing what he was doing—he often did the right thing by instinct—he sat beside her, inclining reverentially.

“But you mustn’t miss your dance,” she reproved.

“Nay, I don’t want to dance that—it’s not one as I care about.”

“Yet you invited me to it.”

He laughed very heartily at this.

“I never thought o’ that. Tha’rt not long in taking the curl out of me.”

It was her turn to laugh quickly.

“You don’t look as if you’d come much uncurled,” she said.

“I’m like a pig’s tail, I curl because I canna help it,” he laughed, rather boisterously.

“And you are a miner!” she exclaimed in surprise.

“Yes. I went down when I was ten.”