The Complete Novels - D. H. Lawrence

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“it’s some money that he doesn’t want us to know about.”

      “That’s about it!” said Meg, giving a small laugh at the child’s perspicuity.

      “So’s he can keep it for himself, that’s what it is,” continued the child, nodding her head in rebuke at him.

      “I’ve no right to any money, have I?” asked the father sarcastically.

      “No, you haven’t,” the child nodded her head at him dictatorially, “you haven’t, because you only put it in the fire.”

      “You’ve got it wrong,” he sneered. “You mean it’s like giving a child fire to play with.”

      “Um! — and it is, isn’t it, Mam?”— the small woman turned to her mother for corroboration. Meg had flushed at his sneer, when he quoted for the child its mother’s dictum.

      “And you’re very naughty!” preached Gertie, turning her back disdainfully on her father.

      “Is that what the parson’s been telling you?” he asked, a grain of amusement still in his bitterness.

      “No, it isn’t!” retorted the youngster. “If you want to know you should go and listen for yourself. Everybody that goes to church looks nice —” she glanced at her mother and at herself, pruning herself proudly, “— and God loves them,” she added. She assumed a sanctified expression, and continued after a little thought, “Because they look nice and are meek.”

      “What!” exclaimed Meg, laughing, glancing with secret pride at me.

      “Because they’re meek!” repeated Gertie, with a superior little smile of knowledge.

      “You’re off the mark this time,” said George.

      “No, I’m not, am I, Mam? Isn’t it right, Mam? ‘The meek shall inevit the erf’?”

      Meg was too much amused to answer.

      “The meek shall have herrings on earth,” mocked the father, also amused. His daughter looked dubiously at him. She smelled impropriety.

      “It’s not, Mam, is it?” she asked, turning to her mother. Meg laughed.

      “The meek shall have herrings on earth,” repeated George with soft banter.

      “No, it’s not, Mam, is it?” cried the child in real distress.

      “Tell your father he’s always teaching you something wrong,” answered Meg.

      Then I said I must go. They pressed me to stay.

      “Oh yes — do stop to dinner,” suddenly pleaded the child, smoothing her wild ravels of curls after having drawn off her hat. She asked me again and again, with much earnestness.

      “But why?” I asked.

      “So’s you can talk to us this afternoon — an’ so’s Dad won’t be so dis’greeable,” she replied plaintively, poking the black spots on her muff.

      Meg moved nearer to her daughter with a little gesture of compassion.

      “But,” said I, “I promised a lady I would be back for lunch, so I must. You have some more visitors, you know.”

      “Oh, well!” she complained. “They go in another room, and Dad doesn’t care about them.”

      “But come!” said I.

      “Well, he’s just as dis’greeable when Auntie Emily’s here — he is with her an’ all.”

      “You are having your character given away,” said Meg brutally, turning to him.

      I bade him good-bye. He did me the honour of coming with me to the door. We could neither of us find a word to say, though we were both moved. When at last I held his hand and was looking at him as I said “Good-bye”, he looked back at me for the first time during our meeting. His eyes were heavy, and as he lifted them to me, seemed to recoil in an agony of shame.

      Chapter 8

       A Prospect Among the Marshes of Lethe

       Table of Contents

      George steadily declined from this time. I went to see him two years later. He was not at home. Meg wept to me as she told me of him, how he let the business slip, how he drank, what a brute he was in drink, and how unbearable afterwards. He was ruining his constitution, he was ruining her life and the children’s. I felt very sorry for her as she sat, large and ruddy, brimming over with bitter tears. She asked me if I did not think I might influence him. He was, she said, at the Ram. When he had an extra bad bout on he went up there, and stayed sometimes for a week at a time, with Oswald, coming back to the Hollies when he had recovered —“though,” said Meg, “he’s sick every morning and almost after every meal.”

      All the time Meg was telling me this, sat curled up in a large chair their youngest boy, a pale, sensitive, rather spoiled lad of seven or eight years, with a petulant mouth and nervous dark eyes. He sat watching his mother as she told her tale, heaving his shoulders and settling himself in a new position when his feelings were nearly too much for him. He was full of wild, childish pity for his mother, and furious, childish hate of his father, the author of all their trouble. I called at the Ram and saw George. He was half drunk.

      I went up to Highclose with a heavy heart. Lettie’s last child had been born, much to the surprise of everybody, some few months before I came down. There was a space of seven years between her youngest girl and this baby. Lettie was much absorbed in motherhood.

      When I went up to talk to her about George, I found her in the bedroom nursing the baby, who was very good and quiet on her knee. She listened to me sadly, but her attention was caught away by each movement made by the child. As I was telling her of the attitude of George’s children towards their father and mother, she glanced from the baby to me, and exclaimed:

      “See how he watches the light flash across your spectacles when you turn suddenly — Look!”

      But I was weary of babies. My friends had all grown up and married and inflicted them on me. There were storms of babies. I longed for a place where they would be obsolete, and young, arrogant, impervious mothers might be a forgotten tradition. Lettie’s heart would quicken in answer to only one pulse, the easy, light ticking of the baby’s blood.

      I remembered, one day as I sat in the train hastening to Charing Cross on my way from France, that that was George’s birthday. I had the feeling of him upon me, heavily, and I could not rid myself of the depression. I put it down to travel fatigue, and tried to dismiss it. As I watched the evening sun glitter along the new corn-stubble in the fields we passed, trying to describe the effect to myself, I found myself asking, “But — what’s the matter? I’ve not had bad news, have I, to make my chest feel so weighted?”

      I was surprised when I reached my lodging in New Malden to find no letters for me, save one fat budget from Alice. I knew her squat, saturnine handwriting on the envelope, and I thought I knew what contents to expect from the letter.

      She had married an old acquaintance who had been her particular aversion. This young man had got himself into trouble, so that the condemnations of the righteous pursued him like clouds of gnats on a summer evening. Alice immediately rose to sting back his vulgar enemies, and having rendered him a service, felt she could only wipe out the score by marrying him. They were fairly comfortable. Occasionally, as she said, there were displays of small fireworks in the back yard. He worked in the offices of some iron foundries just over the Erewash in Derbyshire. Alice lived in a dirty little place in the valley a mile and a half from Eberwich, not far from his work. She had no children, and practically no friends; a few young matrons for acquaintances. As wife of a superior clerk, she had to preserve her dignity among the work-people. So all her little crackling fires were sodded down with the sods of British respectability. Occasionally she smouldered

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