"But," he said, "if you start with the deep bell and ring upto the high one--der--der--der--der--der--der--der--der!"
He ran up the scale. Everybody thought it clever. He thoughtso too. Then, waiting a minute, he continued the poem.
"Hm!" said Mrs. Morel curiously, when he finished. "But Iwish everything that's written weren't so sad."
"I canna see what they want drownin' theirselves for,"said Morel.
There was a pause. Annie got up to clear the table.
Miriam rose to help with the pots.
"Let ME help to wash up," she said.
"Certainly not," cried Annie. "You sit down again. There aren't many."
And Miriam, who could not be familiar and insist, sat downagain to look at the book with Paul.
He was master of the party; his father was no good. And greattortures he suffered lest the tin box should be put out at Firsbyinstead of at Mablethorpe. And he wasn't equal to getting a carriage. His bold little mother did that.
"Here!" she cried to a man. "Here!"
Paul and Annie got behind the rest, convulsed with shamed laughter.
"How much will it be to drive to Brook Cottage?" said Mrs. Morel.
"Two shillings."
"Why, how far is it?"
"A good way."
"I don't believe it," she said.
But she scrambled in. There were eight crowded in one oldseaside carriage.
"You see," said Mrs. Morel, "it's only threepence each,and if it were a tramcar---"
They drove along. Each cottage they came to, Mrs. Morel cried:
"Is it this? Now, this is it!"
Everybody sat breathless. They drove past. There wasa universal sigh.
"I'm thankful it wasn't that brute," said Mrs. Morel. "I WAS frightened." They drove on and on.
At last they descended at a house that stood alone overthe dyke by the highroad. There was wild excitement because theyhad to cross a little bridge to get into the front garden. But they loved the house that lay so solitary, with a sea-meadowon one side, and immense expanse of land patched in white barley,yellow oats, red wheat, and green root-crops, flat and stretchinglevel to the sky.
Paul kept accounts. He and his mother ran the show. The total expenses--lodging, food, everything--was sixteen shillingsa week per person. He and Leonard went bathing in the mornings. Morel was wandering abroad quite early.
"You, Paul," his mother called from the bedroom, "eat a pieceof bread-and-butter."
"All right," he answered.
And when he got back he saw his mother presiding in state atthe breakfast-table. The woman of the house was young. Her husbandwas blind, and she did laundry work. So Mrs. Morel always washedthe pots in the kitchen and made the beds.
"But you said you'd have a real holiday," said Paul, "and nowyou work."
"Work!" she exclaimed. "What are you talking about!"
He loved to go with her across the fields to the villageand the sea. She was afraid of the plank bridge, and he abused herfor being a baby. On the whole he stuck to her as if he were HER man.
Miriam did not get much of him, except, perhaps, when all theothers went to the "Coons". Coons were insufferably stupid to Miriam,so he thought they were to himself also, and he preached priggishlyto Annie about the fatuity of listening to them. Yet he, too,knew all their songs, and sang them along the roads roisterously. And if he found himself listening, the stupidity pleased him very much. Yet to Annie he said:
"Such rot! there isn't a grain of intelligence in it. Nobody withmore gumption than a grasshopper could go and sit and listen." And to Miriam he said, with much scorn of Annie and the others: "I suppose they're at the 'Coons'."
It was queer to see Miriam singing coon songs. She had a straightchin that went in a perpendicular line from the lower lip to the turn. She always reminded Paul of some sad Botticelli angel when she sang,even when it was:
"Come down lover's lane For a walk with me, talk with me."
Only when he sketched, or at evening when the others were atthe "Coons", she had him to herself. He talked to her endlesslyabout his love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of skyand land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will,just as the bowed Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves,meant the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul,on and on, nobody knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicularlines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven andtouched the ecstasy and lost itself in the divine. Himself, he said,was Norman, Miriam was Gothic. She bowed in consent even to that.
One evening he and she went up the great sweeping shoreof sand towards Theddlethorpe. The long breakers plunged and ranin a hiss of foam along the coast. It was a warm evening. There was not a figure but themselves on the far reaches of sand,no noise but the sound of the sea. Paul loved to see it clangingat the land. He loved to feel himself between the noise of itand the silence of the sandy shore. Miriam was with him. Everything grew very intense. It was quite dark when theyturned again. The way home was through a gap in the sandhills,and then along a raised grass road between two dykes. The countrywas black and still. From behind the sandhills came the whisperof the sea. Paul and Miriam walked in silence. Suddenly he started. The whole of his blood seemed to burst into flame, and he couldscarcely breathe. An enormous orange moon was staring at themfrom the rim of the sandhills. He stood still, looking at it.
"Ah!" cried Miriam, when she saw it.
He remained perfectly still, staring at the immense and ruddymoon, the only thing in the far-reaching darkness of the level. His heart beat heavily, the muscles of his arms contracted.
"What is it?" murmured Miriam, waiting for him.
He turned and looked at her. She stood beside him, for everin shadow. Her face, covered with the darkness of her hat, was watchinghim unseen. But she was brooding. She was slightly afraid--deeplymoved and religious. That was her best state. He was impotentagainst it. His blood was concentrated like a flame in his chest. But he could not get across to her. There were flashes in his blood. But somehow she ignored them. She was expecting some religiousstate in him. Still yearning, she was half aware of his passion,and gazed at him, troubled.
"What is it?" she murmured again.
"It's the moon," he answered, frowning.
"Yes," she assented. "Isn't it wonderful?" She was curiousabout him. The crisis was past.
He did not know himself what was the matter. He was naturallyso young, and their intimacy was so abstract, he did not know hewanted to crush her on to his breast to ease the ache there. He was afraid of her. The fact that he might want her as a man wantsa woman had in him been suppressed into a shame. When she shrankin her convulsed, coiled torture from the thought of sucha thing, he had winced to the depths of his soul. And now this"purity" prevented even their first love-kiss. It was as if she couldscarcely stand the shock of physical love, even a passionate kiss,and then he was too shrinking and sensitive to give it.
As they walked along the dark fen-meadow he watched the moonand did not speak. She plodded beside him. He hated her, for sheseemed in some way to make him despise himself. Looking ahead--he sawthe one light in the darkness, the window of their lamp-lit cottage.
He loved to think of his mother, and the other jolly people.
"Well, everybody else has been in long ago!" said his motheras they entered.
"What does that matter!" he cried irritably. "I can go a walkif I like, can't I?"
"And I should have thought you could get in to supper withthe rest," said Mrs. Morel.
"I shall please myself," he retorted. "It's not LATE. I shall do as I like."
"Very well," said his mother cuttingly, "then DO as you like." And she took no further notice of him that evening. Which hepretended neither to notice nor to care about, but sat reading. Miriam read also, obliterating herself. Mrs. Morel hated herfor making her son like this. She watched Paul growing irritable,priggish, and melancholic. For this she put the blame on Miriam. Annie and all her friends joined against the girl. Miriam had nofriend of her own, only Paul. But she did not suffer so much,because she despised the triviality of these other people.
And Paul hated her because, somehow, she spoilt his easeand naturalness. And he writhed himself with a feeling of humiliation.
CHAPTER VIII
STRIFE IN LOVE （I）
ARTHUR finished his apprenticeship, and got a job on the electricalplant at Minton Pit. He earned very little, but had a good chanceof getting on. But he was wild and restless. He did not drinknor gamble. Yet he somehow contrived to get into endless scrapes,always through some hot-headed thoughtlessness. Either he wentrabbiting in the woods, like a poacher, or he stayed in Nottinghamall night instead of coming home, or he miscalculated his diveinto the canal at Bestwood, and scored his chest into one massof wounds on the raw stones and tins at the bottom.
He had not been at his work many months when again he didnot come home one night.
"Do you know where Arthur is?" asked Paul at breakfast.
"I do not," replied his mother.
"He is a fool," said Paul. "And if he DID anything Ishouldn't mind. But no, he simply can't come away from a gameof whist, or else he must see a girl home from the skating-rink--quiteproprietously--and so can't get home. He's a fool."
"I don't know that it would make it any better if he didsomething to make us all ashamed," said Mrs. Morel.
"Well, I should respect him more," said Paul.
"I very much doubt it," said his mother coldly.
They went on with breakfast.
"Are you fearfully fond of him?" Paul asked his mother.
"What do you ask that for?"
"Because they say a woman always like the youngest best."
"She may do--but I don't. No, he wearies me."
"And you'd actually rather he was good?"
"I'd rather he showed some of a man's common sense."
Paul was raw and irritable. He also wearied his mother very often. She saw the sunshine going out of him, and she resented it.
As they were finishing breakfast came the postman with a letterfrom Derby. Mrs. Morel screwed up her eyes to look at the address.
"Give it here, blind eye!" exclaimed her son, snatching itaway from her.
She started, and almost boxed his ears.
"It's from your son, Arthur," he said.
"What now---!" cried Mrs. Morel.
"'My dearest Mother,'" Paul read, "'I don't know what mademe such a fool. I want you to come and fetch me back from here. I came with Jack Bredon yesterday, instead of going to work,and enlisted. He said he was sick of wearing the seat of a stool out,and, like the idiot you know I am, I came away with him.
"'I have taken the King's shilling, but perhaps if youcame for me they would let me go back with you. I was a foolwhen I did it. I don't want to be in the army. My dear mother,I am nothing but a trouble to you. But if you get me out of this,I promise I will have more sense and consideration. . . .'"
Mrs. Morel sat down in her rocking-chair.
"Well, NOW," she cried, "let him stop!"
"Yes," said Paul, "let him stop."
There was silence. The mother sat with her hands foldedin her apron, her face set, thinking.
"If I'm not SICK!" she cried suddenly. "Sick!"
"Now," said Paul, beginning to frown, "you're not goingto worry your soul out about this, do you hear."
"I suppose I'm to take it as a blessing," she flashed,turning on her son.
"You're not going to mount it up to a tragedy, so there,"he retorted.
"The FOOL!--the young fool!" she cried.
"He'll look well in uniform," said Paul irritatingly.
His mother turned on him like a fury.
"Oh, will he!" she cried. "Not in my eyes!"
"He should get in a cavalry regiment; he'll have the timeof his life, and will look an awful swell."
"Swell!--SWELL!--a mighty swell idea indeed!--a common soldier!"
"Well," said Paul, "what am I but a common clerk?"
"A good deal, my boy!" cried his mother, stung.
"What?"
"At any rate, a MAN, and not a thing in a red coat."
"I shouldn't mind being in a red coat--or dark blue, that wouldsuit me better--if they didn't boss me about too much."
But his mother had ceased to listen.
"Just as he was getting on, or might have been getting on,at his job--a young nuisance--here he goes and ruins himself for life. What good will he be, do you think, after THIS?"
"It may lick him into shape beautifully," said Paul.
"Lick him into shape!--lick what marrow there WAS out of his bones. A SOLDIER!--a common SOLDIER!--nothing but a body that makes movementswhen it hears a shout! It's a fine thing!"
"I can't understand why it upsets you," said Paul.
"No, perhaps you can't. But I understand"; and she sat backin her chair, her chin in one hand, holding her elbow with the other,brimmed up with wrath and chagrin.
"And shall you go to Derby?" asked Paul.
"Yes."
"It's no good."
"I'll see for myself."
"And why on earth don't you let him stop. It's just whathe wants."
"Of course," cried the mother, "YOU know what he wants!"
She got ready and went by the first train to Derby, where shesaw her son and the sergeant. It was, however, no good.
When Morel was having his dinner in the evening, she said suddenly:
"I've had to go to Derby to-day."
The miner turned up his eyes, showing the whites in his black face.
"Has ter, lass. What took thee there?"
