Sons and Lovers quotes

“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.”

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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

But she knew, and Morel knew, that that act had caused something momentous to take place in her soul. She remembered the scene all her life, as one in which she had suffered the most intensely.

This act of masculine clumsiness was the spear through the side of her love for Morel.

Before, while she had striven against him bitterly, she had fretted after him, as if he had gone astray from her. Now she ceased to fret for his love: he was an outsider to her. This made life much more bearable.

The pity was, she was too much his opposite. She could not be content with the little he might be; she would have him the much that he ought to be.

So, in seeking to make him nobler than he could be, she destroyed him.

She injured and hurt and scarred herself, but she lost none of her worth. She also had the children.

The pity was, she was too much his opposite.

She could not be content with the little he might be; she would have him the much that he ought to be.

So, in seeking to make him nobler than he could be, she destroyed him. She injured and hurt and scarred herself, but she lost none of her worth. She also had the children.

“Why, where should you have gone? You daren’t even get your parcel through the yard-end,” she said.

He looked such a fool she was not even angry with him.

He continued to take his boots off and prepare for bed.

Now he was going away. She felt almost as if he were going as well out of her heart. He did not seem to leave her inhabited with himself. That was the grief and the pain to her.

He took nearly all himself away.

A few days before his departure—he was just twenty—he burned his love-letters. They had hung on a file at the top of the kitchen cupboard. From some of them he had read extracts to his mother.

“Well, they can’t go on scratching forever,” he replied. “And when they’ve done, I trot away.”

“But one day you’ll find a string round your neck that you can’t pull off,” she answered.

“Not me! I’m equal to any of ’em, mater, they needn’t flatter themselves.”

He was shut out from all family affairs. No one told him anything. The children, alone with their mother, told her all about the day’s happenings, everything.

Nothing had really taken place in them until it was told to their mother.

But as soon as the father came in, everything stopped. He was like the scotch in the smooth, happy machinery of the home. And he was always aware of this fall of silence on his entry, the shutting off of life, the unwelcome.

No one told him anything. The children, alone with their mother, told her all about the day’s happenings, everything. Nothing had really taken place in them until it was told to their mother. But as soon as the father came in, everything stopped.

He was like the scotch in the smooth, happy machinery of the home.

And he was always aware of this fall of silence on his entry, the shutting off of life, the unwelcome. But now it was gone too far to alter.

Paul loved to sleep with his mother.

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved.

The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing. Paul lay against her and slept, and got better;

The boy walked all day, went miles and miles, rather than own himself beaten and come home to her empty-handed. She never realised this, whilst he was young.

She was a woman who waited for her children to grow up.

And William occupied her chiefly.

Everybody was mad with happiness in the family.

Home was home, and they loved it with a passion of love, whatever the suffering had been.

There were parties, there were rejoicings. People came in to see William, to see what difference London had made to him. And they all found him “such a gentleman, and such a fine fellow, my word!”

Usually he looked as if he saw things, was full of life, and warm; then his smile, like his mother’s, came suddenly and was very lovable; and then, when there was any clog in his soul’s quick running, his face went stupid and ugly.

He was the sort of boy that becomes a clown and a lout as soon as he is not understood, or feels himself held cheap; and, again, is adorable at the first touch of warmth.

He suffered very much from the first contact with anything. When he was seven, the starting school had been a nightmare and a torture to him. But afterwards he liked it.

Paul wished he were stupid.

“I wish,” he thought to himself, “I was fat like him, and like a dog in the sun. I wish I was a pig and a brewer’s wagoner.”

Then, the room being at last empty, he would hastily copy an advertisement on a scrap of paper, then another, and slip out in immense relief. His mother would scan over his copies.

There were several doors, and two flights of steps. Straight in front, on a dirty glass door at the top of a staircase, loomed the ominous words “Thomas Jordan and Son—Surgical Appliances.” Mrs. Morel went first, her son followed her.

Charles I mounted his scaffold with a lighter heart than had Paul Morel as he followed his mother up the dirty steps to the dirty door.

She pushed open the door, and stood in pleased surprise. In front of her was a big warehouse, with creamy paper parcels everywhere, and clerks, with their shirtsleeves rolled back, were going about in an at-home sort of way.

The little man looked at him.

He did not know whether “doigts” meant “fingers”; he knew that for all his purposes it meant “toes.”

“Fingers to stockings!” he snapped.

“She should, but she hasn’t. I asked him. And I know he doesn’t buy her a gold bangle for nothing.

I wonder whoever bought me a gold bangle.

”

Presently the new photograph came, with a little silly note from the girl. This time the young lady was seen in a black satin evening bodice, cut square, with little puff sleeves, and black lace hanging down her beautiful arms.

“I wonder if she ever wears anything except evening clothes,” said Mrs. Morel sarcastically. “I’m sure I ought to be impressed.”

“You are disagreeable, mother,” said Paul. “I think the first one with bare shoulders is lovely.”

“Let’s see, what’s your name?” asked Mr. Pappleworth of the boy.

It is curious that children suffer so much at having to pronounce their own names.

“Paul Morel, is it? All right, you Paul-Morel through them things there, and then—”

Mr. Jordan only made one more excursion to watch Paul, and then the only fault he found was seeing the boy lay his pen on the counter.

“Put your pen in your ear, if you’re going to be a clerk. Pen in your ear!”

And one day he said to the lad: “Why don’t you hold your shoulders straighter? Come down here,” when he took him into the glass office and fitted him with special braces for keeping the shoulders square.

Paul always enjoyed it when the work got faster, towards post-time, and all the men united in labour. He liked to watch his fellow-clerks at work. The man was the work and the work was the man, one thing, for the time being.

It was different with the girls. The real woman never seemed to be there at the task, but as if left out, waiting.

From the train going home at night he used to watch the lights of the town, sprinkled thick on the hills, fusing together in a blaze in the valleys. He felt rich in life and happy.

Then he told her the budget of the day.

His life-story, like an Arabian Nights, was told night after night to his mother. It was almost as if it were her own life.

“You know, mother, when I’m away from her I don’t care for her a bit. I shouldn’t care if I never saw her again. But, then, when I’m with her in the evenings I am awfully fond of her.”

“It’s a queer sort of love to marry on,” said Mrs. Morel, “if she holds you no more than that!”

“It is funny!” he exclaimed. It worried and perplexed him. “But yet—there’s so much between us now I couldn’t give her up.”

She did so. He washed the pots, straightened, and then took her boots. They were quite clean.

Mrs. Morel was one of those naturally exquisite people who can walk in mud without dirtying their shoes.

But Paul had to clean them for her. They were kid boots at eight shillings a pair. He, however, thought them the most dainty boots in the world, and he cleaned them with as much reverence as if they had been flowers.

“You sit a minute, mother,” he said, and she took a seat on a bank, whilst he sketched rapidly. She was silent whilst he worked, looking round at the afternoon, the red cottages shining among their greenness.

“The world is a wonderful place,” she said, “and wonderfully beautiful.”

“And so’s the pit,” he said. “Look how it heaps together, like something alive almost—a big creature that you don’t know.”

“It’s because—it’s because there is scarcely any shadow in it; it’s more shimmery, as if I’d painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living.

The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.

”

“I am not—oh, not a bit!” she cried.

“But even your joy is like a flame coming off of sadness,” he persisted.

“You’re never jolly, or even just all right.”

And this fearful, naked contact of her on small occasions shocked him. He was used to his mother’s reserve. And on such occasions he was thankful in his heart and soul that he had his mother, so sane and wholesome.

All the life of Miriam’s body was in her eyes, which were usually dark as a dark church, but could flame with light like a conflagration.

Her face scarcely ever altered from its look of brooding. She might have been one of the women who went with Mary when Jesus was dead. Her body was not flexible and living. She walked with a swing, rather heavily, her head bowed forward, pondering.

“I’m going to teach Miriam algebra,” he said.

“Well,” replied Mrs. Morel, “I hope she’ll get fat on it.”

When he went up to the farm on the Monday evening, it was drawing twilight. Miriam was just sweeping up the kitchen, and was kneeling at the hearth when he entered. Everyone was out but her.

“All right,” he answered, throwing the book on the table and lighting a cigarette. Then, after a while, he went back to her repentant. So the lessons went. He was always either in a rage or very gentle.

“What do you tremble your soul before it for?” he cried. “You don’t learn algebra with your blessed soul. Can’t you look at it with your clear simple wits?”

Often, when he went again into the kitchen, Mrs. Leivers would look at him reproachfully, saying:

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.

As they walked along the dark fen-meadow he watched the moon and did not speak. She plodded beside him.

He hated her, for she seemed in some way to make him despise himself.

Looking ahead—he saw the one light in the darkness, the window of their lamp-lit cottage.

“Why don’t you praise me up to the skies?”

“I should have the trouble of dragging you down again,” she said.

But she was full of joy, nevertheless. William had brought her his sporting trophies. She kept them still, and she did not forgive his death. Arthur was handsome—at least, a good specimen—and warm and generous, and probably would do well in the end.

“I’m sure I don’t want to,” she said.

“I’m so damned spiritual with you always!” he cried.

She remained silent, thinking, “Then why don’t you be otherwise.” But he saw her crouching, brooding figure, and it seemed to tear him in two.

There was still another silence. This peculiar sadness between them thrilled her soul. He seemed so beautiful with his eyes gone dark, and looking as if they were deep as the deepest well.

“You make me so spiritual!” he lamented. “And I don’t want to be spiritual.”

She took her finger from her mouth with a little pop, and looked up at him almost challenging. But still her soul was naked in her great dark eyes, and there was the same yearning appeal upon her.

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 loved 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.

“There!” he said, rising suddenly. “Now, could you have done it quicker?”

“Here goes!” he said. It was risky, because of the curve in the darkness at the bottom, and because of the brewers’ wagons with drunken wagoners asleep. His bicycle seemed to fall beneath him, and he loved it.

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.

The stars on the lake seemed to leap like grasshoppers, silver upon the blackness, as he spun past. Then there was the long climb home.

It might have been the body of a man of twenty-eight, except that there were, perhaps, too many blue scars, like tattoo-marks, where the coal-dust remained under the skin, and that his chest was too hairy. But he put his hand on his side ruefully.

It was his fixed belief that, because he did not get fat, he was as thin as a starved rat.

Paul looked at his father’s thick, brownish hands all scarred, with broken nails, rubbing the fine smoothness of his sides, and the incongruity struck him. It seemed strange they were the same flesh.

“You ought to have been a salamander,” she laughed, washing his back. It was very rarely she would do anything so personal for him. The children did those things.

“The next world won’t be half hot enough for you,” she added.

“No,” he said; “tha’lt see as it’s draughty for me.”

She saw the determined little collier buying in the week’s groceries and meat on the Friday nights, and she admired him.

“Barker’s little, but he’s ten times the man you are,” she said to her husband.

Just then Wesson entered. He was thin, rather frail-looking, with a boyish ingenuousness and a slightly foolish smile, despite his seven children. But his wife was a passionate woman.

Both colliers sat away back. They could not be induced to come on to the hearth.

The hearth is sacred to the family.

“Go thy ways i’ th’ armchair,” cried Morel cheerily.

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.

The Easter holidays began happily. Paul was his own frank self. Yet she felt it would go wrong.

“

Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted to pull the heart out of them? Why don’t you have a bit more restraint, or reserve, or something?

”

“You don’t want to love—your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren’t positive, you’re negative.

You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you’ve got a shortage somewhere.

”

And nobody else mattered. There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt into unreality: the place where his mother was. Everybody else could grow shadowy, almost nonexistent to him, but she could not.

It was as if the pivot and pole of his life, from which he could not escape, was his mother.

And in the same way she waited for him. In him was established her life now. After all, the life beyond offered very little to Mrs. Morel. She saw that our chance for doing is here, and doing counted with her.

He was more or less under her spell again. As usual, they were discussing the sermon. He was setting now full sail towards Agnosticism, but such a religious Agnosticism that Miriam did not suffer so badly. They were at the Renan Vie de Jesus stage.

Miriam was the threshing-floor on which he threshed out all his beliefs.

While he trampled his ideas upon her soul, the truth came out for him. She alone was his threshing-floor. She alone helped him towards realization. Almost impassive, she submitted to his argument and expounding.

“

Then the other people should have flaps to their ears,

” he replied.

“

You’ll find you’re always tumbling over the things you’ve put behind you,

” he said. Then he took his departure to the cowsheds. He felt he had been witty, and his manly pride was high. He whistled as he went down the brick track.

“I would.

When she fights for herself she seems like a dog before a looking-glass, gone into a mad fury with its own shadow.

”

“Well, I leave it to you to be good,” he retorted, laughing. “

Be good, sweet maid, and just let me be clever.

”

There the turf was smooth as velveteen, padded and holed by the rabbits. The field itself was coarse, and crowded with tall, big cowslips that had never been cut. Clusters of strong flowers rose everywhere above the coarse tussocks of bent.

It was like a roadstead crowded with tan, fairy shipping.

“Ah!” cried Miriam, and she looked at Paul, her dark eyes dilating. He smiled. Together they enjoyed the field of flowers. Clara, a little way off, was looking at the cowslips disconsolately. Paul and Miriam stayed close together, talking in subdued tones.

“It isn’t one to me.

A dead flower isn’t a corpse of a flower.

”

Clara laughed strangely, and rose, picking the cowslips from her hair. She took up her hat and pinned it on. One flower had remained tangled in her hair. He saw, but would not tell her. He gathered up the flowers he had sprinkled over her.

At the edge of the wood the bluebells had flowed over into the field and stood there like flood-water.

But they were fading now. Clara strayed up to them. He wandered after her. The bluebells pleased him.

“

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

”

“I don’t believe God knows such a lot about Himself,” he cried. “

God doesn’t know things, He is things. And I’m sure He’s not soulful.

”

“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.

”

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.

“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.”

“

She’ll never be satisfied till she’s got wings and can fly over everybody’s head, she won’t,

” she said.

“

You feel as if you could scoop up the folk like tadpoles, and have a handful of them,

” he said.

“No,” he said, “I don’t. I wish it could be normal, give and take—like me and you.

I want a woman to keep me, but not in her pocket.

”

“Yes; I should love her better then.

She sort of wants me so much that I can’t give myself.

”

she would suffer for him. She put her hand on his knee as he leaned forward in his chair. He took it and kissed it; but it hurt to do so. He felt he was putting himself aside.

He sat there sacrificed to her purity, which felt more like nullity.

How could he kiss her hand passionately, when it would drive her away, and leave nothing but pain? Yet slowly he drew her to him and kissed her.

She went to the fence and sat there, watching the gold clouds fall to pieces, and go in immense, rose-coloured ruin towards the darkness.

Gold flamed to scarlet, like pain in its intense brightness.

Then the scarlet sank to rose, and rose to crimson, and quickly the passion went out of the sky. All the world was dark grey. Paul scrambled quickly down with his basket, tearing his shirtsleeve as he did so.

“

The fir-trees are like presences on the darkness: each one only a presence.

”

“A sort of hush: the whole night wondering and asleep: I suppose that’s what we do in death—sleep in wonder.”

She had been afraid before of the brute in him: now of the mystic.

She trod beside him in silence. The rain fell with a heavy “Hush!” on the trees. At last they gained the cartshed.

But insidiously, without his knowing it, the warmth he felt for Clara drew him away from Miriam, for whom he felt responsible, and to whom he felt he belonged. He thought he was being quite faithful to her.

It was not easy to estimate exactly the strength and warmth of one’s feelings for a woman till they have run away with one.

He began to give more time to his men friends. There was Jessop, at the art school; Swain, who was chemistry demonstrator at the university; Newton, who was a teacher; besides Edgar and Miriam’s younger brothers. Pleading work, he sketched and studied with Jessop.

She took all and gave nothing, he said. At least, she gave no living warmth. She was never alive, and giving off life. Looking for her was like looking for something which did not exist.

She was only his conscience, not his mate.

He hated her violently, and was more cruel to her. They dragged on till the next summer. He saw more and more of Clara.

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. Then she cried:

There was in it some truth that, in spite of her bitterness, she could not help registering. She knew she felt in a sort of bondage to him, which she hated because she could not control it.

She hated her love for him from the moment it grew too strong for her.

And, deep down, she had hated him because she loved him and he dominated her. She had resisted his domination. She had fought to keep herself free of him in the last issue. And she was free of him, even more than he of her.

She would obey him in his trifling commands. But once he was obeyed, then she had him in her power, she knew, to lead him where she would. She was sure of herself. Only, this new influence!

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.

She hung her head, afraid of the people they met. He looked sideways at her as they walked. There was a wonderful close down on her face near the ear that he wanted to touch.

And a certain heaviness, the heaviness of a very full ear of corn that dips slightly in the wind, that there was about her, made his brain spin.

He seemed to be spinning down the street, everything going round.

“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.

“Not sinners, are we?” he said, with an uneasy little frown.

“You like your little bit of guiltiness, I believe,” he said. “I believe Eve enjoyed it, when she went cowering out of Paradise.”

But there was a certain glow and quietness about her that made him glad. When he was alone in the railway-carriage, he found himself tumultuously happy, and the people exceedingly nice, and the night lovely, and everything good.

so she’s already singled out from the sheep, and, as far as I can see, hasn’t much to lose. No; her life’s nothing to her, so what’s the worth of nothing? 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.

”

“No, I don’t.

But if a woman’s got nothing but her fair fame to feed on, why, it’s thin tack, and a donkey would die of it!

”

“I s’d think she boxes your ears,” said Mrs. Radford, good-humouredly.

“She’d like to, and she says she will, so I give her a little stool to stand on.”

“That’s the worst of my mother,” said Clara. “She never wants a stool for anything.”

he felt condemned by her. Then sometimes he hated her, and pulled at 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 be 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.

“You haven’t met the right woman.”

“And I never shall meet the right woman while you live,” he said.

She was very quiet. Now she began to feel again tired, as if she were done.

“No,” he said; “because you don’t want to be divorced.”

It was a knot they could not untie, so they left it, took what they could get, and what they could not attain they ignored.

“I consider you treated Baxter rottenly,” he said another time.

“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!”

He sat in the 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.

The next day he kissed her before going back to work. It was very early in the morning, and they were alone.

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.

“Have you had a bad time?” asked Paul.

“It was that as did me,” Dawes said, very low.

“I never laughed,” he said, “except as I’m always laughing.”

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.