Sons and Lovers | Page 8

he felt just at the minute, that was all to him. He could not abide by
anything. There was nothing at the back of all his show.
There began a battle between the husband and wife--a fearful, bloody
battle that ended only with the death of one. She fought to make him
undertake his own responsibilities, to make him fulfill his obligations.
But he was too different from her. His nature was purely sensuous, and
she strove to make him moral, religious. She tried to force him to face
things. He could not endure it--it drove him out of his mind.
While the baby was still tiny, the father's temper had become so
irritable that it was not to be trusted. The child had only to give a little
trouble when the man began to bully. A little more, and the hard hands
of the collier hit the baby. Then Mrs. Morel loathed her husband,
loathed him for days; and he went out and drank; and she cared very
little what he did. Only, on his return, she scathed him with her satire.
The estrangement between them caused him, knowingly or
unknowingly, grossly to offend her where he would not have done.
William was only one year old, and his mother was proud of him, he
was so pretty. She was not well off now, but her sisters kept the boy in
clothes. Then, with his little white hat curled with an ostrich feather,
and his white coat, he was a joy to her, the twining wisps of hair
clustering round his head. Mrs. Morel lay listening, one Sunday
morning, to the chatter of the father and child downstairs. Then she
dozed off. When she came downstairs, a great fire glowed in the grate,
the room was hot, the breakfast was roughly laid, and seated in his
armchair, against the chimney-piece, sat Morel, rather timid; and
standing between his legs, the child--cropped like a sheep, with such an
odd round poll--looking wondering at her; and on a newspaper spread
out upon the hearthrug, a myriad of crescent-shaped curls, like the
petals of a marigold scattered in the reddening firelight.
Mrs. Morel stood still. It was her first baby. She went very white, and
was unable to speak.

"What dost think o' 'im?" Morel laughed uneasily.
She gripped her two fists, lifted them, and came forward. Morel shrank
back.
"I could kill you, I could!" she said. She choked with rage, her two fists
uplifted.
"Yer non want ter make a wench on 'im," Morel said, in a frightened
tone, bending his head to shield his eyes from hers. His attempt at
laughter had vanished.
The mother looked down at the jagged, close-clipped head of her child.
She put her hands on his hair, and stroked and fondled his head.
"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.
Morel sat with his elbows on his knees, his hands gripped together till
the knuckles were white. He gazed in the fire, feeling almost stunned,
as if he could not breathe.
Presently she came to an end, soothed the child and cleared away the
breakfast-table. She left the newspaper, littered with curls, spread upon
the hearthrug. At last her husband gathered it up and put it at the back
of the fire. She went about her work with closed mouth and very quiet.
Morel was subdued. He crept about wretchedly, and his meals were a
misery that day. She spoke to him civilly, and never alluded to what he
had done. But he felt something final had happened.
Afterwards she said she had been silly, that the boy's hair would have
had to be cut, sooner or later. In the end, she even brought herself to
say to her husband it was just as well he had played barber when he did.
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.
Nevertheless, she still continued to strive with him. She still had her
high moral sense, inherited from generations of Puritans. It was now a
religious instinct,