Sons and Lovers

the flood-waters, a firmament below. Everywhere the vastness and terror of the immense night which is roused and stirred for a brief while by the day, but which returns, and will remain at last eternal, holding everything in its silence and its living gloom. There was no Time, only Space. Who could say his mother had lived and did not live? She had been in one place, and was in another; that was all. And his soul could not leave her, wherever she was. Now she was gone abroad into the night, and he was with her still. They were together. But yet there was his body, his chest, that leaned against the stile, his hands on the wooden bar. They seemed something. Where was he?⁠—one tiny upright speck of flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing.

“Mother!” he whispered⁠—“mother!”

She was the only thing that held him up, himself, amid all this. And she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to touch him, have him alongside with her.

But no, he would not give in. Turning sharply, he walked towards the city’s gold phosphorescence. His fists were shut, his mouth set fast. He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.

Part II

Endnotes

1. “Sorry” is a common form of address. It is, perhaps, a corruption of “sirrah.” ↩

List of Illustrations

1. A heart containing the initials L. L. W. and W. M.

Colophon

Sons and Lovers
was published in 1913 by
D. H. Lawrence.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Alex Cabal,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2006 by
Alan Charles Veeck and David Widger
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at
Google Books.

The cover page is adapted from
Madame Manet at Bellevue,
a painting completed in 1880 by
Édouard Manet.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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The League of Moveable Type.

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Uncopyright

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