Sons and Lovers | Page 3

would not leave her. All the time he stuck close to her, bristling with a
small boy's pride of her. For no other woman looked such a lady as she
did, in her little black bonnet and her cloak. She smiled when she saw
women she knew. When she was tired she said to her son:

"Well, are you coming now, or later?"
"Are you goin' a'ready?" he cried, his face full of reproach.
"Already? It is past four, I know."
"What are you goin' a'ready for?" he lamented.
"You needn't come if you don't want," she said.
And she went slowly away with her little girl, whilst her son stood
watching her, cut to the heart to let her go, and yet unable to leave the
wakes. As she crossed the open ground in front of the Moon and Stars
she heard men shouting, and smelled the beer, and hurried a little,
thinking her husband was probably in the bar.
At about half-past six her son came home, tired now, rather pale, and
somewhat wretched. He was miserable, though he did not know it,
because he had let her go alone. Since she had gone, he had not enjoyed
his wakes.
"Has my dad been?" he asked.
"No," said the mother.
"He's helping to wait at the Moon and Stars. I seed him through that
black tin stuff wi' holes in, on the window, wi' his sleeves rolled up."
"Ha!" exclaimed the mother shortly. "He's got no money. An' he'll be
satisfied if he gets his 'lowance, whether they give him more or not."
When the light was fading, and Mrs. Morel could see no more to sew,
she rose and went to the door. Everywhere was the sound of excitement,
the restlessness of the holiday, that at last infected her. She went out
into the side garden. Women were coming home from the wakes, the
children hugging a white lamb with green legs, or a wooden horse.
Occasionally a man lurched past, almost as full as he could carry.
Sometimes a good husband came along with his family, peacefully. But
usually the women and children were alone. The stay-at-home mothers

stood gossiping at the corners of the alley, as the twilight sank, folding
their arms under their white aprons.
Mrs. Morel was alone, but she was used to it. Her son and her little girl
slept upstairs; so, it seemed, her home was there behind her, fixed and
stable. But she felt wretched with the coming child. The world seemed
a dreary place, where nothing else would happen for her--at least until
William grew up. But for herself, nothing but this dreary
endurance--till the children grew up. And the children! She could not
afford to have this third. She did not want it. The father was serving
beer in a public house, swilling himself drunk. She despised him, and
was tied to him. This coming child was too much for her. If it were not
for William and Annie, she was sick of it, the struggle with poverty and
ugliness and meanness.
She went into the front garden, feeling too heavy to take herself out, yet
unable to stay indoors. The heat suffocated her. And looking ahead, the
prospect of her life made her feel as if she were buried alive.
The front garden was a small square with a privet hedge. There she
stood, trying to soothe herself with the scent of flowers and the fading,
beautiful evening. Opposite her small gate was the stile that led uphill,
under the tall hedge between the burning glow of the cut pastures. The
sky overhead throbbed and pulsed with light. The glow sank quickly
off the field; the earth and the hedges smoked dusk. As it grew dark, a
ruddy glare came out on the hilltop, and out of the glare the diminished
commotion of the fair.
Sometimes, down the trough of darkness formed by the path under the
hedges, men came lurching home. One young man lapsed into a run
down the steep bit that ended the hill, and went with a crash into the
stile. Mrs. Morel shuddered. He picked himself up, swearing viciously,
rather pathetically, as if he thought the stile had wanted to hurt him.
She went indoors, wondering if things were never going to alter. She
was beginning by now to realise 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

up 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