LITMIR.BIZ

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the futility of the question.

      Then the boy dawdled about near his mother. They shared the same anxiety. Presently Mrs. Morel went out and strained the potatoes.

      “They’re ruined and black,” she said; “but what do I care?”

      Not many words were spoken. Paul almost hated his mother for suffering because his father did not come home from work.

      “What do you bother yourself for?” he said. “If he wants to stop and get drunk, why don’t you let him?”

      “Let him!” flashed Mrs. Morel. “You may well say ‘let him.’ ”

      She knew that the man who stops on the way home from work is on a quick way to ruining himself and his home. The children were yet young, and depended on the breadwinner. William gave her the sense of relief, providing her at last with someone to turn to if Morel failed. But the tense atmosphere of the room on these waiting evenings was the same.

      The minutes ticked away. At six o’clock still the cloth lay on the table, still the dinner stood waiting, still the same sense of anxiety and expectation in the room. The boy could not stand it any longer. He could not go out and play. So he ran in to Mrs. Inger, next door but one, for her to talk to him. She had no children. Her husband was good to her, but ​was in a shop, and came home late. So, when she saw the lad at the door, she called:

      “Come in, Paul.”

      The two sat talking for some time, when suddenly the boy rose, saying:

      “Well, I’ll be going and seeing if my mother wants an errand doing.”

      He pretended to be perfectly cheerful, and did not tell his friend what ailed him. Then he ran indoors.

      Morel at these times came in churlish and hateful.

      “This is a nice time to come home,” said Mrs. Morel.

      “Wha’s it matter to yo’ what time I come whoam?” he shouted.

      And everybody in the house was still, because he was dangerous. He ate his food in the most brutal manner possible, and, when he had done, pushed all the pots in a heap away from him, to lay his arms on the table. Then he went to sleep.

      Paul hated his father so. The collier’s small, mean head, with its black hair slightly soiled with grey, lay on the bare arms, and the fame, dirty and inflamed, with a fleshy nose and thin, paltry brows, was turned sideways, asleep with beer and weariness and nasty temper. If anyone entered suddenly, or a noise were made, the man looked up and shouted:

      “I’ll lay my fist about thy y’ead, I’m tellin’ thee, if tha doesna stop that clatter! Dost hear?”

      And the two last words, shouted in a bullying fashion, usually at Annie, made the family writhe with hate of the man.

      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. But now it was gone too far to alter.

      He would dearly have liked the children to talk to him, but they could not. Sometimes Mrs. Morel would say:

      “You ought to tell your father.”

      Paul won a prize in a competition in a child’s paper. Everybody was highly jubilant.

      “Now you’d better tell your father when he comes in,” said ​Mrs. Morel. “You know how he carries on and says he’s never told anything.”

      “All right,” said Paul. But he would almost rather have forfeited the prize than have to tell his father.

      “I’ve won a prize in a competition, dad,” he said.

      Morel turned round to him.

      “Have you, my boy? What sort of a competition?”

      “Oh, nothing—about famous women.”

      “And how much is the prize, then, as you’ve got?”

      “It’s a book.”

      “Oh, indeed!”

      “About birds.”

      “Hm—hm!”

      And that was all. Conversation was impossible between the father and any other member of the family. He was an outsider. He had denied the God in him.

      The only times when he entered again into the life of his own people was when he worked, and was happy at work. Sometimes, in the evening, he cobbled the boots or mended the kettle or his pit-bottle. Then he always wanted several attendants, and the children enjoyed it. They united with him in the work, in the actual doing of something, when he was his real self again.

      He was a good workman, dexterous, and one who, when he was in a good humour, always sang. He had whole periods, months, almost years, of friction and nasty temper. Then sometimes he was golly again. It was nice to see him run with a piece of red-hot iron into the scullery, crying:

      “Out of my road—out of my road!”

      Then he hammered the soft, red-glowing stuff on his iron goose, and made the shape he wanted. Or he sat absorbed for a moment, soldering. Then the children watched with joy as the metal sank suddenly molten, and was shoved about against the nose of the soldering-iron, while the room was full of a scent of burnt resin and hot tin, and Morel was silent and intent for a minute. He always sang when he mended boots because of the jolly sound of hammering. And he was rather happy when he sat putting great patches on his moleskin pit trousers, which he would often do, considering them too dirty, and the stuff too hard, for his wife to mend.

      But the best time for the young children was when he made fuses. Morel fetched a sheaf of long sound wheat-straws from the attic. These he cleaned with his hand, till each one gleamed like a stalk of gold, after which he cut the straws ​into lengths of about six inches, leaving, if he could, a notch at the bottom of each piece. He always had a beautifully sharp knife that could cut a straw clean without hurting it. Then he set in the middle of the table a heap of gunpowder, a little pile of black grains upon the white-scrubbed board. He made and trimmed the straws while Paul and Annie filled and plugged them. Paul loved to see the black grains trickle down a crack in his palm into the mouth of the straw, peppering jollily downwards till the straw was full. Then he bungled up the mouth with a bit of soap—which he got on his thumb nail from a pat in a saucer—and the straw was finished.

      “Look, dad!” he said.

      “That’s right, my beauty,” replied Morel, who was peculiarly lavish of endearments to his second son. Paul popped the fuse into the powder-tin, ready for the morning, when Morel would take it to the pit, and use it to fire a shot that would blast the coal down.

      Meantime Arthur, still fond of his father, would lean on the arm of Morel’s chair, and say:

      “Tell us about down pit, daddy.”

      This Morel loved to do.

      “Well, there’s one little ’oss—we call ’im Taffy,” he would begin. “An’ he’s a fawce un!”

      Morel had a warm way of telling a story. He made one feel Taffy’s cunning.

      “He’s a brown un,” he would answer, “an’ not very high. Well, he comes i’ th’ stall wi’ a rattle, an’ then yo’ ’ear ’im sneeze.

      “ ‘Ello, Taff,’ you say, ‘what art sneezin’ for? Bin ta’ein’ some snuff?’

      “An’ ’e sneezes again. Then he slives up an’ shoves ’is ’ead on yer, that cadin’.

      “ ‘What’s want,

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