LITMIR.BIZ

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did I? Wasn't I clear?”

      “I couldn't say,” laughed Edgar.

      None of them could say.

      “But you touched,” said Paul. “You're beaten.”

      “I did NOT touch!” she cried.

      “As plain as anything,” said Paul.

      “Box his ears for me!” she cried to Edgar.

      “Nay,” Edgar laughed. “I daren't. You must do it yourself.”

      “And nothing can alter the fact that you touched,” laughed Paul.

      She was furious with him. Her little triumph before these lads and men was gone. She had forgotten herself in the game. Now he was to humble her.

      “I think you are despicable!” she said.

      And again he laughed, in a way that tortured Miriam.

      “And I KNEW you couldn't jump that heap,” he teased.

      She turned her back on him. Yet everybody could see that the only person she listened to, or was conscious of, was he, and he of her. It pleased the men to see this battle between them. But Miriam was tortured.

      Paul could choose the lesser in place of the higher, she saw. He could be unfaithful to himself, unfaithful to the real, deep Paul Morel. There was a danger of his becoming frivolous, of his running after his satisfaction like any Arthur, or like his father. It made Miriam bitter to think that he should throw away his soul for this flippant traffic of triviality with Clara. She walked in bitterness and silence, while the other two rallied each other, and Paul sported.

      And afterwards, he would not own it, but he was rather ashamed of himself, and prostrated himself before Miriam. Then again he rebelled.

      “It's not religious to be religious,” he said. “I reckon a crow is religious when it sails across the sky. But it only does it because it feels itself carried to where it's going, not because it thinks it is being eternal.”

      But Miriam knew that one should be religious in everything, have God, whatever God might be, present in everything.

      “I don't believe God knows such a lot about Himself,” he cried. “God doesn't KNOW things, He IS things. And I'm sure He's not soulful.”

      And then it seemed to her that Paul was arguing God on to his own side, because he wanted his own way and his own pleasure. There was a long battle between him and her. He was utterly unfaithful to her even in her own presence; then he was ashamed, then repentant; then he hated her, and went off again. Those were the ever-recurring conditions.

      She fretted him to the bottom of his soul. There she remained—sad, pensive, a worshipper. And he caused her sorrow. Half the time he grieved for her, half the time he hated her. She was his conscience; and he felt, somehow, he had got a conscience that was too much for him. He could not leave her, because in one way she did hold the best of him. He could not stay with her because she did not take the rest of him, which was three-quarters. So he chafed himself into rawness over her.

      When she was twenty-one he wrote her a letter which could only have been written to her.

      “May I speak of our old, worn love, this last time. It, too, is changing, is it not? Say, has not the body of that love died, and left you its invulnerable soul? You see, I can give you a spirit love, I have given it you this long, long time; but not embodied passion. See, you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun—as a mystic monk to a mystic nun. Surely you esteem it best. Yet you regret—no, have regretted—the other. In all our relations no body enters. I do not talk to you through the senses—rather through the spirit. That is why we cannot love in the common sense. Ours is not an everyday affection. As yet we are mortal, and to live side by side with one another would be dreadful, for somehow with you I cannot long be trivial, and, you know, to be always beyond this mortal state would be to lose it. If people marry, they must live together as affectionate humans, who may be commonplace with each other without feeling awkward—not as two souls. So I feel it.

      “Ought I to send this letter?—I doubt it. But there—it is best to understand. Au revoir.”

      Miriam read this letter twice, after which she sealed it up. A year later she broke the seal to show her mother the letter.

      “You are a nun—you are a nun.” The words went into her heart again and again. Nothing he ever had said had gone into her so deeply, fixedly, like a mortal wound.

      She answered him two days after the party.

      “'Our intimacy would have been all-beautiful but for one little mistake,'” she quoted. “Was the mistake mine?”

      Almost immediately he replied to her from Nottingham, sending her at the same time a little “Omar Khayyam.”

      “I am glad you answered; you are so calm and natural you put me to shame. What a ranter I am! We are often out of sympathy. But in fundamentals we may always be together I think.

      “I must thank you for your sympathy with my painting and drawing. Many a sketch is dedicated to you. I do look forward to your criticisms, which, to my shame and glory, are always grand appreciations. It is a lovely joke, that. Au revoir.”

      This was the end of the first phase of Paul's love affair. He was now about twenty-three years old, and, though still virgin, the sex instinct that Miriam had over-refined for so long now grew particularly strong. Often, as he talked to Clara Dawes, came that thickening and quickening of his blood, that peculiar concentration in the breast, as if something were alive there, a new self or a new centre of consciousness, warning him that sooner or later he would have to ask one woman or another. But he belonged to Miriam. Of that she was so fixedly sure that he allowed her right.

      Chapter X

       Clara

       Table of Contents

      When he was twenty-three years old, Paul sent in a landscape to the winter exhibition at Nottingham Castle. Miss Jordan had taken a good deal of interest in him, and invited him to her house, where he met other artists. He was beginning to grow ambitious.

      One morning the postman came just as he was washing in the scullery. Suddenly he heard a wild noise from his mother. Rushing into the kitchen, he found her standing on the hearthrug wildly waving a letter and crying “Hurrah!” as if she had gone mad. He was shocked and frightened.

      “Why, mother!” he exclaimed.

      She flew to him, flung her arms round him for a moment, then waved the letter, crying:

      “Hurrah, my boy! I knew we should do it!”

      He was afraid of her—the small, severe woman with graying hair suddenly bursting out in such frenzy. The postman came running back, afraid something had happened. They saw his tipped cap over the short curtains. Mrs. Morel rushed to the door.

      “His picture's got first prize, Fred,” she cried, “and is sold for twenty guineas.”

      “My word, that's something like!” said the young postman, whom they had known all his life.

      “And Major Moreton has bought it!” she cried.

      “It looks like meanin' something, that does, Mrs. Morel,” said the postman, his blue eyes bright. He was glad to have brought such a lucky letter. Mrs. Morel went indoors and sat down, trembling. Paul was afraid lest she might have misread the letter, and might be disappointed after all. He scrutinised it once, twice. Yes, he became convinced it was true. Then he sat down, his heart beating with joy.

      “Mother!” he exclaimed.

      “Didn't I SAY we should do it!” she said, pretending she was not crying.

      He took the kettle off the fire and mashed the tea.

      “You

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