She hated her position as swine-girl. She wanted to be considered. She wanted to learn, thinking that if she could read, as Paul saidhe could read, "Colomba", or the "Voyage autour de ma Chambre", theworld would have a different face for her and a deepened respect. She could not be princess by wealth or standing. So she was madto have learning whereon to pride herself. For she was differentfrom other folk, and must not be scooped up among the common fry. Learning was the only distinction to which she thought to aspire.
Her beauty--that of a shy, wild, quiveringly sensitivething--seemed nothing to her. Even her soul, so strong for rhapsody,was not enough. She must have something to reinforce her pride,because she felt different from other people. Paul she eyedrather wistfully. On the whole, she scorned the male sex. But here was a new specimen, quick, light, graceful, who couldbe gentle and who could be sad, and who was clever, and who knewa lot, and who had a death in the family. The boy's poormorsel of learning exalted him almost sky-high in her esteem. Yet she tried hard to scorn him, because he would not see in herthe princess but only the swine-girl. And he scarcely observed her.
Then he was so ill, and she felt he would be weak. Then shewould be stronger than he. Then she could love him. If she couldbe mistress of him in his weakness, take care of him, if he coulddepend on her, if she could, as it were, have him in her arms,how she would love him!
As soon as the skies brightened and plum-blossom was out,Paul drove off in the milkman's heavy float up to Willey Farm. Mr. Leivers shouted in a kindly fashion at the boy, then clickedto the horse as they climbed the hill slowly, in the freshnessof the morning. White clouds went on their way, crowding to theback of the hills that were rousing in the springtime. The waterof Nethermere lay below, very blue against the seared meadows andthe thorn-trees.
It was four and a half miles' drive. Tiny buds on the hedges,vivid as copper-green, were opening into rosettes; and thrushes called,and blackbirds shrieked and scolded. It was a new, glamorous world.
Miriam, peeping through the kitchen window, saw the horse walkthrough the big white gate into the farmyard that was backed by theoak-wood, still bare. Then a youth in a heavy overcoat climbed down. He put up his hands for the whip and the rug that the good-looking,ruddy farmer handed down to him.
Miriam appeared in the doorway. She was nearly sixteen,very beautiful, with her warm colouring, her gravity, her eyesdilating suddenly like an ecstasy.
"I say," said Paul, turning shyly aside, "your daffodilsare nearly out. Isn't it early? But don't they look cold?"
"Cold!" said Miriam, in her musical, caressing voice.
"The green on their buds---" and he faltered into silence timidly.
"Let me take the rug," said Miriam over-gently.
"I can carry it," he answered, rather injured. But he yieldedit to her.
Then Mrs. Leivers appeared.
"I'm sure you're tired and cold," she said. "Let me takeyour coat. It IS heavy. You mustn't walk far in it."
She helped him off with his coat. He was quite unusedto such attention. She was almost smothered under its weight.
"Why, mother," laughed the farmer as he passed through the kitchen,swinging the great milk-churns, "you've got almost more than youcan manage there."
She beat up the sofa cushions for the youth.
The kitchen was very small and irregular. The farm had beenoriginally a labourer's cottage. And the furniture was old and battered. But Paul loved it--loved the sack-bag that formed the hearthrug,and the funny little corner under the stairs, and the small windowdeep in the corner, through which, bending a little, be could seethe plum trees in the back garden and the lovely round hills beyond.
"Won't you lie down?" said Mrs. Leivers.
"Oh no; I'm not tired," he said. "Isn't it lovely coming out,don't you think? I saw a sloe-bush in blossom and a lot of celandines. I'm glad it's sunny."
"Can I give you anything to eat or to drink?"
"No, thank you."
"How's your mother?"
"I think she's tired now. I think she's had too much to do. Perhaps in a little while she'll go to Skegness with me. Then she'llbe able to rest. I s'll be glad if she can."
"Yes," replied Mrs. Leivers. "It's a wonder she isn'till herself."
Miriam was moving about preparing dinner. Paul watchedeverything that happened. His face was pale and thin, but his eyeswere quick and bright with life as ever. He watched the strange,almost rhapsodic way in which the girl moved about, carrying a greatstew-jar to the oven, or looking in the saucepan. The atmospherewas different from that of his own home, where everything seemedso ordinary. When Mr. Leivers called loudly outside to the horse,that was reaching over to feed on the rose-bushes in the garden,the girl started, looked round with dark eyes, as if something hadcome breaking in on her world. There was a sense of silence insidethe house and out. Miriam seemed as in some dreamy tale, a maidenin bondage, her spirit dreaming in a land far away and magical. And her discoloured, old blue frock and her broken boots seemedonly like the romantic rags of King Cophetua's beggar-maid.
She suddenly became aware of his keen blue eyes upon her,taking her all in. Instantly her broken boots and her frayed oldfrock hurt her. She resented his seeing everything. Even he knewthat her stocking was not pulled up. She went into the scullery,blushing deeply. And afterwards her hands trembled slightly ather work. She nearly dropped all she handled. When her insidedream was shaken, her body quivered with trepidation. She resentedthat he saw so much.
Mrs. Leivers sat for some time talking to the boy, although shewas needed at her work. She was too polite to leave him. Presently she excused herself and rose. After a while she lookedinto the tin saucepan.
"Oh DEAR, Miriam," she cried, "these potatoes have boiled dry!"
Miriam started as if she had been stung.
"HAVE they, mother?" she cried.
"I shouldn't care, Miriam," said the mother, "if I hadn'ttrusted them to you." She peered into the pan.
The girl stiffened as if from a blow. Her dark eyes dilated;she remained standing in the same spot.
"Well," she answered, gripped tight in self-conscious shame,"I'm sure I looked at them five minutes since."
"Yes," said the mother, "I know it's easily done."
"They're not much burned," said Paul. "It doesn't matter,does it?"
Mrs. Leivers looked at the youth with her brown, hurt eyes.
"It wouldn't matter but for the boys," she said to him. "Only Miriam knows what a trouble they make if the potatoes are'caught'."
"Then," thought Paul to himself, "you shouldn't let them makea trouble."
After a while Edgar came in. He wore leggings, and his bootswere covered with earth. He was rather small, rather formal,for a farmer. He glanced at Paul, nodded to him distantly,and said:
"Dinner ready?"
"Nearly, Edgar," replied the mother apologetically.
"I'm ready for mine," said the young man, taking up the newspaperand reading. Presently the rest of the family trooped in. Dinner was served. The meal went rather brutally. The over-gentlenessand apologetic tone of the mother brought out all the brutalityof manners in the sons. Edgar tasted the potatoes, moved his mouthquickly like a rabbit, looked indignantly at his mother, and said:
"These potatoes are burnt, mother."
"Yes, Edgar. I forgot them for a minute. Perhaps you'llhave bread if you can't eat them."
Edgar looked in anger across at Miriam.
"What was Miriam doing that she couldn't attend to them?"he said.
Miriam looked up. Her mouth opened, her dark eyes blazedand winced, but she said nothing. She swallowed her angerand her shame, bowing her dark head.
"I'm sure she was trying hard," said the mother.
"She hasn't got sense even to boil the potatoes," said Edgar. "What is she kept at home for?"
"On'y for eating everything that's left in th' pantry," said Maurice.
"They don't forget that potato-pie against our Miriam,"laughed the father.
She was utterly humiliated. The mother sat in silence,suffering, like some saint out of place at the brutal board.
It puzzled Paul. He wondered vaguely why all this intense feelingwent running because of a few burnt potatoes. The mother exaltedeverything--even a bit of housework--to the plane of a religious trust. The sons resented this; they felt themselves cut away underneath, andthey answered with brutality and also with a sneering superciliousness.
Paul was just opening out from childhood into manhood. This atmosphere, where everything took a religious value, came witha subtle fascination to him. There was something in the air. His own mother was logical. Here there was something different,something he loved, something that at times he hated.
Miriam quarrelled with her brothers fiercely. Later inthe afternoon, when they had gone away again, her mother said:
"You disappointed me at dinner-time, Miriam."
The girl dropped her head.
"They are such BRUTES!" she suddenly cried, looking upwith flashing eyes.
"But hadn't you promised not to answer them?" said the mother. "And I believed in you. I CAN'T stand it when you wrangle."
"But they're so hateful!" cried Miriam, "and--and LOW."
"Yes, dear. But how often have I asked you not to answerEdgar back? Can't you let him say what he likes?"
"But why should he say what he likes?"
"Aren't you strong enough to bear it, Miriam, if even for my sake? Are you so weak that you must wrangle with them?"
Mrs. Leivers stuck unflinchingly to this doctrine of "the othercheek". She could not instil it at all into the boys. With thegirls she succeeded better, and Miriam was the child of her heart. The boys loathed the other cheek when it was presented to them. Miriam was often sufficiently lofty to turn it. Then they spaton her and hated her. But she walked in her proud humility,living within herself.
There was always this feeling of jangle and discord in theLeivers family. Although the boys resented so bitterly this eternalappeal to their deeper feelings of resignation and proud humility,yet it had its effect on them. They could not establish between themselvesand an outsider just the ordinary human feeling and unexaggeratedfriendship; they were always restless for the something deeper. Ordinary folk seemed shallow to them, trivial and inconsiderable. And so they were unaccustomed, painfully uncouth in the simplestsocial intercourse, suffering, and yet insolent in their superiority. Then beneath was the yearning for the soul-intimacy to which they couldnot attain because they were too dumb, and every approach to closeconnection was blocked by their clumsy contempt of other people. They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normallynear to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps,they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.
Paul fell under Mrs. Leivers's spell. Everything hada religious and intensified meaning when he was with her. His soul, hurt, highly developed, sought her as if for nourishment. Together they seemed to sift the vital fact from an experience.
Miriam was her mother's daughter. In the sunshine of theafternoon mother and daughter went down the fields with him. They looked for nests. There was a jenny wren's in the hedgeby the orchard.
"I DO want you to see this," said Mrs. Leivers.
He crouched down and carefully put his finger through thethorns into the round door of the nest.
"It's almost as if you were feeling inside the live bodyof the bird," he said, "it's so warm. They say a bird makesits nest round like a cup with pressing its breast on it. Then how did it make the ceiling round, I wonder?"
The nest seemed to start into life for the two women. After that, Miriam came to see it every day. It seemed so closeto her. Again, going down the hedgeside with the girl, he noticedthe celandines, scalloped splashes of gold, on the side of the ditch.
"I like them," he said, "when their petals go flat back withthe sunshine. They seemed to be pressing themselves at the sun."
And then the celandines ever after drew her with a little spell. Anthropomorphic as she was, she stimulated him into appreciatingthings thus, and then they lived for her. She seemed to need thingskindling in her imagination or in her soul before she felt shehad them. And she was cut off from ordinary life by her religiousintensity which made the world for her either a nunnery gardenor a paradise, where sin and knowledge were not, or else an ugly,cruel thing.
So it was in this atmosphere of subtle intimacy, this meetingin their common feeling for something in Nature, that their love started.
Personally, he was a long time before he realized her. For ten months he had to stay at home after his illness. For awhile he went to Skegness with his mother, and was perfectly happy. But even from the seaside he wrote long letters to Mrs. Leiversabout the shore and the sea. And he brought back his belovedsketches of the flat Lincoln coast, anxious for them to see. Almost they would interest the Leivers more than they interestedhis mother. It was not his art Mrs. Morel cared about; it was himselfand his achievement. But Mrs. Leivers and her children were almosthis disciples. They kindled him and made him glow to his work,whereas his mother's influence was to make him quietly determined,patient, dogged, unwearied.
He soon was friends with the boys, whose rudeness wasonly superficial. They had all, when they could trust themselves,a strange gentleness and lovableness.
"Will you come with me on to the fallow?" asked Edgar,rather hesitatingly.
Paul went joyfully, and spent the afternoon helping to hoe or tosingle turnips with his friend. He used to lie with the three brothersin the hay piled up in the barn and tell them about Nottingham andabout Jordan's. In return, they taught him to milk, and let him dolittle jobs--chopping hay or pulping turnips--just as much as he liked. At midsummer he worked all through hay-harvest with them, and thenhe loved them. The family was so cut off from the world actually. They seemed, somehow, like "les derniers fils d'une race epuisee".Though the lads were strong and healthy, yet they had all thatover-sensitiveness and hanging-back which made them so lonely,yet also such close, delicate friends once their intimacy was won. Paul loved them dearly, and they him.
