LITMIR.BIZ

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was queer to see Miriam singing coon songs. She had a straight chin 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 at the “Coons”, she had him to herself. He talked to her endlessly about his love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and 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 perpendicular lines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched 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 shore of sand towards Theddlethorpe. The long breakers plunged and ran in 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 clanging at the land. He loved to feel himself between the noise of it and the silence of the sandy shore. Miriam was with him. Everything grew very intense. It was quite dark when they turned again. The way home was through a gap in the sandhills, and then along a raised grass road between two dykes. The country was black and still. From behind the sandhills came the whisper of the sea. Paul and Miriam walked in silence. Suddenly he started. The whole of his blood seemed to burst into flame, and he could scarcely breathe. An enormous orange moon was staring at them from 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 ruddy moon, 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 ever in shadow. Her face, covered with the darkness of her hat, was watching him unseen. But she was brooding. She was slightly afraid—deeply moved and religious. That was her best state. He was impotent against 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 religious state 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 curious about him. The crisis was past.

      He did not know himself what was the matter. He was naturally so young, and their intimacy was so abstract, he did not know he wanted 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 wants a woman had in him been suppressed into a shame. When she shrank in her convulsed, coiled torture from the thought of such a 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 could scarcely 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 moon and did not speak. She plodded beside him. He hated her, for she seemed in some way to make him despise himself. Looking ahead—he saw the 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 mother as they entered.

      “What does that matter!” he cried irritably. “I can go a walk if I like, can't I?”

      “And I should have thought you could get in to supper with the 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 he pretended neither to notice nor to care about, but sat reading. Miriam read also, obliterating herself. Mrs. Morel hated her for 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 no friend 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 ease and naturalness. And he writhed himself with a feeling of humiliation.

      Chapter VIII

       Strife in Love

       Table of Contents

      Arthur finished his apprenticeship, and got a job on the electrical plant at Minton Pit. He earned very little, but had a good chance of getting on. But he was wild and restless. He did not drink nor gamble. Yet he somehow contrived to get into endless scrapes, always through some hot-headed thoughtlessness. Either he went rabbiting in the woods, like a poacher, or he stayed in Nottingham all night instead of coming home, or he miscalculated his dive into the canal at Bestwood, and scored his chest into one mass of wounds on the raw stones and tins at the bottom.

      He had not been at his work many months when again he did not 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 I shouldn't mind. But no, he simply can't come away from a game of whist, or else he must see a girl home from the skating-rink—quite proprietously—and so can't get home. He's a fool.”

      “I don't know that it would make it any better if he did something 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 letter from Derby. Mrs. Morel screwed up her eyes to look at the address.

      “Give it here, blind eye!” exclaimed her son, snatching it away 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 made me 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 you came for me they would let me go back with you. I was a fool when I did it. I don't want to be in the army. My dear mother, I am nothing but a

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