Sons and Lovers

“They say if you can swing you won’t be sea-sick,” he said, as he mounted again. “I don’t believe I should ever be sea-sick.”

Away he went. There was something fascinating to her in him. For the moment he was nothing but a piece of swinging stuff; not a particle of him that did not swing. She could never lose herself so, nor could her brothers. It roused a warmth in her. It were almost as if he were a flame that had lit a warmth in her whilst he swung in the middle air.

And gradually the intimacy with the family concentrated for Paul on three persons—the mother, Edgar, and Miriam. To the mother he went for that sympathy and that appeal which seemed to draw him out. Edgar was his very close friend. And to Miriam he more or less condescended, because she seemed so humble.

But the girl gradually sought him out. If he brought up his sketch-book, it was she who pondered longest over the last picture. Then she would look up at him. Suddenly, her dark eyes alight like water that shakes with a stream of gold in the dark, she would ask:

“Why do I like this so?”

Always something in his breast shrank from these close, intimate, dazzled looks of hers.

“Why do you?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It seems so true.”

“It’s because—it’s because there is scarcely any shadow in it; it’s more shimmery, as if I’d painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.”⁸

And she, with her little finger in her mouth, would ponder these sayings.⁹ They gave her a feeling of life again, and vivified things which had meant nothing to her. She managed to find some meaning in his struggling, abstract speeches. And they were the medium through which she came distinctly at her beloved objects.

Another day she sat at sunset whilst he was painting some pine-trees which caught the red glare from the west. He had been quiet.

“There you are!” he said suddenly. “I wanted that. Now, look at them and tell me, are they pine trunks or are they red coals, standing-up pieces of fire in that darkness? There’s God’s burning bush for you, that burned not away.”

Miriam looked, and was frightened. But the pine trunks were wonderful to her, and distinct. He packed his box and rose. Suddenly he looked at her.

“Why are you always sad?” he asked her.

“Sad!” she exclaimed, looking up at him with startled, wonderful brown eyes.

“Yes,” he replied. “You are always sad.”

“I am not—oh, not a bit!” she cried.

“But even your joy is like a flame coming off of sadness,” he persisted. “You’re never jolly, or even just all right.”

“No,” she pondered. “I wonder—why?”

“Because you’re not; because you’re different inside, like a pine-tree, and then you flare up; but you’re not just like an ordinary tree, with fidgety leaves and jolly—”

He got tangled up in his own speech; but she brooded on it, and he had a strange, roused sensation, as if his feelings were new. She got so near him. It was a strange stimulant.

Then sometimes he hated her. Her youngest brother was only five. He was a frail lad, with immense brown eyes in his quaint fragile face—one of Reynolds’s “Choir of Angels,” with a touch of elf.¹⁰ Often Miriam kneeled to the child and drew him to her.

“Eh, my Hubert!” she sang, in a voice heavy and surcharged with love. “Eh, my Hubert!”

And, folding him in her arms, she swayed slightly from side to side with love, her face half lifted, her eyes half closed, her voice drenched with love.

“Don‘t!” said the child, uneasy—“don’t, Miriam!”

“Yes; you love me, don’t you?” she murmured deep in her throat, almost as if she were in a trance, and swaying also as if she were swooned in an ecstasy of love.

“Don’t!” repeated the child, a frown on his clear brow.

“You love me, don’t you?” she murmured.

“What do you make such a fuss for?” cried Paul, all in suffering because of her extreme emotion. “Why can’t you be ordinary with him?”

She let the child go, and rose, and said nothing. Her intensity, which would leave no emotion on a normal plane, irritated the youth into a frenzy. And this fearful, naked contact of her on small occasions shocked him. He was used to his mother’s reserve. And on such occasions he was thankful in his heart and soul that he had his mother, so sane and wholesome.

All the life of Miriam’s body was in her eyes, which were usually dark as a dark church, but could flame with light like a conflagration. Her face scarcely ever altered from its look of brooding. She might have been one of the women who went with Mary when Jesus was dead.¹¹ Her body was not flexible and living. She walked with a swing, rather heavily, her head bowed forward, pondering. She was not clumsy, and yet none of her movements seemed quite the movement. Often, when wiping the dishes, she would stand in bewilderment and chagrin because she had pulled in two halves a cup or a tumbler. It was as if, in her fear of self-mistrust, she put too much strength into the effort. There was no looseness or abandon about her. Everything was gripped stiff with intensity, and her effort, overcharged, closed in on itself.

She rarely varied from her swinging, forward, intense walk. Occasionally she ran with Paul down the fields.