LITMIR.BIZ

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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't trusted 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 make a trouble.”

      After a while Edgar came in. He wore leggings, and his boots were 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 newspaper and reading. Presently the rest of the family trooped in. Dinner was served. The meal went rather brutally. The over-gentleness and apologetic tone of the mother brought out all the brutality of manners in the sons. Edgar tasted the potatoes, moved his mouth quickly 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'll have 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 blazed and winced, but she said nothing. She swallowed her anger and 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 feeling went running because of a few burnt potatoes. The mother exalted everything—even a bit of housework—to the plane of a religious trust. The sons resented this; they felt themselves cut away underneath, and they 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 with a 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 in the 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 up with 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 answer Edgar 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 other cheek”. She could not instil it at all into the boys. With the girls 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 spat on her and hated her. But she walked in her proud humility, living within herself.

      There was always this feeling of jangle and discord in the Leivers family. Although the boys resented so bitterly this eternal appeal to their deeper feelings of resignation and proud humility, yet it had its effect on them. They could not establish between themselves and an outsider just the ordinary human feeling and unexaggerated friendship; 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 simplest social intercourse, suffering, and yet insolent in their superiority. Then beneath was the yearning for the soul-intimacy to which they could not attain because they were too dumb, and every approach to close connection was blocked by their clumsy contempt of other people. They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near 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 had a 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 the afternoon mother and daughter went down the fields with him. They looked for nests. There was a jenny wren's in the hedge by the orchard.

      “I DO want you to see this,” said Mrs. Leivers.

      He crouched down and carefully put his finger through the thorns into the round door of the nest.

      “It's almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of the bird,” he said, “it's so warm. They say a bird makes its 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 close to her. Again, going down the hedgeside with the girl, he noticed the celandines, scalloped splashes of gold, on the side of the ditch.

      “I like them,” he said, “when their petals go flat back with the 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 appreciating things thus, and then they lived for her. She seemed to need things kindling in her imagination or in her soul before she felt she had them. And she was cut off from ordinary life by her religious intensity which made the world for her either a nunnery garden or a paradise, where sin and knowledge were not, or else an ugly, cruel thing.

      So it was in this atmosphere of subtle intimacy, this meeting in 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 a while he went to Skegness with his mother, and was perfectly happy. But even from the seaside he wrote long letters to Mrs. Leivers about the shore and the sea. And he brought back his beloved sketches of the flat Lincoln coast, anxious for them to see. Almost they would interest the Leivers more than they interested his mother. It was not his art Mrs. Morel cared about; it was himself and his achievement. But Mrs. Leivers and her children were almost his disciples. They kindled him and made him glow

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