Paul Morel

“ Morel danced a little nearer, crouching, drawing back his fist to strike. William put his fists ready. A light came into his blue eyes, almost like a laugh. He watched his father. Another word, and the men would have begun to fight. Paul hoped they would. The three children sat pale on the sofa.
"Stop it, both of you," cried Mrs. Morel in a hard voice. "We've had enough for one night. And you," she said, turning on to her husband, "look at your children!"
Morel glanced at the sofa.
"Look at the children, you nasty little bitch!" ”

“ Morel cried in her heart when Paul had gone. "She's not like an ordinary woman, who can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him. She wants to draw him out and absorb him till there is nothing left of him, even for himself. He will never be a man on his own feet—she will suck him up." So the mother sat, and battled and brooded bitterly.
And he, coming home from his walks with Miriam, was wild with torture. He walked biting his lips and with clenched fists, going at a great rate. ”

“ Paul saw drops of sweat fall from his father's brow. Six men were in the room—six coatless men, with yielding, struggling limbs, filling the room and knocking against the furniture. The coffin veered, and was gently lowered on to the chairs. The sweat fell from Morel's face on its boards.
"My word, he's a weight!" said a man, and the five miners sighed, bowed, and, trembling with the struggle, descended the steps again, closing the door behind them.
The family was alone in the parlour with the great polished box. William, when laid out, was six feet four inches long. ”

“ Morel saw the wrist and the white hand of the other man gripping the stem of the pipe and knocking out the ash, as if he had given up.
"How old are you?" Paul asked.
"Thirty-nine," replied Dawes, glancing at him.
Those brown eyes, full of the consciousness of failure, [472] almost pleading for reassurance, for someone to re-establish the man in himself, to warn him, to set him up firm again, troubled Paul.
"You'll just be in your prime," said Morel. "You don't look as if much life had gone out of you." ”

“ He would never have got so far in the direction of sentimentality as to read poetry to his own family. But now they condescended to listen. Miriam sat on the sofa absorbed in him. She always seemed absorbed in him, and by him, when he was present. Mrs. Morel sat jealously in her own chair. She was going to hear also. And even Annie and the father attended, Morel with his head cocked on one side, like somebody listening to a sermon and feeling conscious of the fact. Paul ducked his head over the book. ”

“ Dawes kept his fingers on the draught-piece.
“I never knew you were there till the very second when you passed,” said Morel.
“It was that as did me,” he said, very low.
Paul took another sweet.
“I never laughed,” he said, “except as I’m always laughing.”
They finished the game.
That night Morel walked home from Nottingham, in order to have something to do. The furnaces flared in a red blotch over Bulwell; the black clouds were like a low ceiling. As he went along the ten miles of highroad, he felt as if he were walking out of life, between the black levels of the sky and the earth. ”

“ Morel fetched a sheaf of long sound wheat-straws from the attic. These he cleaned with his hand, till each one gleamed like a stalk of gold, after which he cut the straws into lengths of about six inches, leaving, if he could, a notch at the bottom of each piece. He always had a beautifully sharp knife that could cut a straw clean without hurting it. Then he set in the middle of the table a heap of gunpowder, a little pile of black grains upon the white-scrubbed board. He made and trimmed the straws while Paul and Annie rifled and plugged them. ”

“ Mrs. Morel got gradually worse. At first they used to carry her downstairs, sometimes even into the garden. She sat propped in her chair, smiling, and so pretty. The gold wedding-ring shone on her white hand; her hair was carefully brushed. And she watched the tangled sunflowers dying, the chrysanthemums coming out, and the dahlias.
Paul and she were afraid of each other. He knew, and she knew, that she was dying. But they kept up a pretence of cheerfulness. Every morning, when he got up, he went into her room in his pyjamas. ”

“ Morel gave each of them a sovereign till there were no more sovereigns; each half a crown till there were no more half-crowns; each a shilling till there were no more shillings. If there was anything at the end that wouldn’t split, Morel took it and stood drinks.
Then the three men rose and went. Morel scuttled out of the house before his wife came down. She heard the door close, and descended. She looked hastily at the bread in the oven. Then, glancing on the table, she saw her money lying. Paul had been working all the time. ”

“ Morel measured herself against the younger woman, and found herself easily stronger. Clara was deferential. She knew Paul’s surprising regard for his mother, and she had dreaded the meeting, expecting someone rather hard and cold. She was surprised to find this little interested woman chatting with such readiness; and then she felt, as she felt with Paul, that she would not care to stand in Mrs. Morel’s way. ”

“ After all, the life beyond offered very little to Mrs. Morel. She saw that our chance for doing is here, and doing counted with her. Paul was going to prove that she had been right; he was going to make a man whom nothing should shift off his feet; he was going to alter the face of the earth in some way which mattered. Wherever he went she felt her soul went with him. Whatever he did she felt her soul stood by him, ready, as it were, to hand him his tools. She could not bear it when he was with Miriam. William was dead. She would fight to keep Paul. ”

“ Is she so fascinating that you must follow her all that way?” Mrs. Morel was bitterly sarcastic. She sat still, with averted face, stroking with a rhythmic, jerked movement, the black sateen of her apron. It was a movement that hurt Paul to see.
“I do like her,” he said, “but—”
“Like her!” said Mrs. Morel, in the same biting tones. “It seems to me you like nothing and nobody else. There’s neither Annie, nor me, nor anyone now for you.” ”

“ Paul was studying design.
Morel was always in good spirits on Friday evening, unless the week’s earnings were small. He bustled immediately after his dinner, prepared to get washed. It was decorum for the women to absent themselves while the men reckoned. Women were not supposed to spy into such a masculine privacy as the butties’ reckoning, nor were they to know the exact amount of the week’s earnings. So, whilst her father was spluttering in the scullery, Annie went out to spend an hour with a neighbour. Mrs. Morel attended to her baking. ”

“ Morel's heart, and her treatment of Paul was different from that of the other children.
Suddenly one morning as she was looking down the alley of the Bottoms for the barm-man, she heard a voice calling her. It was the thin little Mrs. Anthony in brown velvet.
"Here, Mrs. Morel, I want to tell you about your Willie."
"Oh, do you?" replied Mrs. Morel. "Why, what's the matter?"
"A lad as gets 'old of another an' rips his clothes off'n 'is back," Mrs. Anthony said, "wants showing something."
"Your Alfred's as old as my William," said Mrs. Morel. ”

“ She sat and laughed.
"You've had a constitution like iron," she said; "and never a man had a better start, if it was body that counted. You should have seen him as a young man," she cried suddenly to Paul, drawing herself up to imitate her husband's once handsome bearing.
Morel watched her shyly. He saw again the passion she had had for him. It blazed upon her for a moment. He was shy, rather scared, and humble. Yet again he felt his old glow. ”

“ Mrs. Morel fretted after her son. She knew he would not like the army. He did not. The discipline was intolerable to him.
“But the doctor,” she said with some pride to Paul, “said he was perfectly proportioned—almost exactly; all his measurements were correct. He is good-looking, you know.”
“He’s awfully nice-looking. But he doesn’t fetch the girls like William, does he?”
“No; it’s a different character. He’s, a good deal like his father, irresponsible.”
To console his mother, Paul did not go much to Willey Farm at this time. ”

“ A few last colliers straggled up the dim field path. The lamplighter came along. No more colliers came. Darkness shut down over the valley; work was done. It was night.
Then Paul ran anxiously into the kitchen. The one candle still burned on the table, the big fire glowed red. Mrs. Morel sat alone. On the hob the saucepan steamed; the dinner-plate lay waiting on the table. All the room was full of the sense of waiting, waiting for the man who was sitting in his pit-dirt, dinnerless, some mile away from home, across the darkness, drinking himself drunk. Paul stood in the doorway. ”

“ There was scarcely any bond between father and son, save that each felt he must not let the other go in any actual want. As there was no one to keep on the home, and as they could neither of them bear the emptiness of the house, Paul took lodgings in Nottingham, and Morel went to live with a friendly family in Bestwood.
Everything seemed to have gone smash for the young man. He could not paint. The picture he finished on the day of his mother’s death—one that satisfied him was the last thing he did. At work there was no Clara. ”

“ Morel doesn’t like it,” said the barmaid. “You’ll see, we shan’t have him in much more. I’m sorry; he’s good company. And Baxter Dawes wants locking up, that’s what he wants.”
Paul would have died rather than his mother should get to know of this affair. He suffered tortures of humiliation and self-consciousness. There was now a good deal of his life of which necessarily he could not speak to his mother. He had a life apart from her—his sexual life. The rest she still kept. ”

“ Morel, it wor that!’ he said. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘At ivry jolt I thought my ’eart would ha’ flown clean out o’ my mouth,’ he said. ‘An’ the scream ’e gives sometimes! Missis, not for a fortune would I go through wi’ it again.’ ‘I can quite understand it,’ I said. ‘It’s a nasty job, though,’ he said, ‘an’ one as’ll be a long while afore it’s right again.’ ‘I’m afraid it will,’ I said. I like Mr. Barker—I do like him. There’s something so manly about him.”
Paul resumed his task silently.
“And of course,” Mrs. Morel continued, “for a man like your father, the hospital is hard. ”

“ His look was full of fear, mistrust, hate, and misery. Morel met the swift, dark eyes, and hesitated. The two men were afraid of the naked selves they had been.
“Dr. Ansell told me you were here,” said Morel, holding out his hand.
Dawes mechanically shook hands.
“So I thought I’d come in,” continued Paul.
There was no answer. Dawes lay staring at the opposite wall.
“Say ‘Caw!’” mocked the nurse. “Say ‘Caw!’ Jim Crow.”
“He is getting on all right?” said Paul to her.
“Oh yes! He lies and imagines he’s going to die,” said the nurse, “and it frightens every word out of his mouth.” ”

“ He seemed to hate the doll so intensely, because he had broken it.
All the children, but particularly Paul, were peculiarly against their father, along with their mother. Morel continued to bully and to drink. He had periods, months at a time, when he made the whole life of the family a misery. Paul never forgot coming home from the Band of Hope one Monday evening and finding his mother with her eye swollen and discoloured, his father standing on the hearthrug, feet astride, his head down, and William, just home from work, glaring at his father. ”

“ PAUL LAUNCHES INTO LIFE
Morel was rather a heedless man, careless of danger. So he had endless accidents. Now, when Mrs. Morel heard the rattle of an empty coal-cart cease at her entry-end, she ran into the parlour to look, expecting almost to see her husband seated in the waggon, his face grey under his dirt, his body limp and sick with some hurt or other. If it were he, she would run out to help. ”

“ They were not badly off whilst Morel was in the hospital. There were fourteen shillings a week from the pit, ten shillings from the sick club, and five shillings from the Disability Fund; and then every week the butties had something for Mrs. Morel—five or seven shillings—so that she was quite well to do. And whilst Morel was progressing favourably in the hospital, the family was extraordinarily happy and peaceful. On Saturdays and Wednesdays Mrs. Morel went to Nottingham to see her husband. Then she always brought back some little thing: a small tube of paints for Paul, or some thick paper ”

“ Paul ate in silence; his father, with earthy hands, and sleeves rolled up, sat in the arm-chair opposite and looked at him.
“Well, an’ how is she?” asked the miner at length, in a little voice.
“She can sit up; she can be carried down for tea,” said Paul.
“That’s a blessin’!” exclaimed Morel. “I hope we s’ll soon be havin’ her whoam, then. An’ what’s that Nottingham doctor say?” ”

“ Then he went to bed and she settled down to enjoy herself alone, working, thinking, living.
Meanwhile another infant was coming, fruit of this little peace and tenderness between the separating parents. Paul was seventeen months old when the new baby was born. He was then a plump, pale child, quiet, with heavy blue eyes, and still the peculiar slight knitting of the brows. The last child was also a boy, fair and bonny. Mrs. Morel was sorry when she knew she was with child, both for economic reasons and because she did not love her husband; but not for the sake of the infant. ”