Sons and Lovers · Part I · Chapter 10 (2/4)

Clara, ashamed and chagrined, brought him a bottle of stout and a glass. He poured out some of the black stuff.

“Well,” he said, lifting the glass, “here’s health!”

“And thank you,” said Mrs. Radford.

He took a drink of stout.

“And light yourself a cigarette, so long as you don’t set the house on fire,” said Mrs. Radford.

“Thank you,” he replied.

“Nay, you needn’t thank me,” she answered. “I s’ll be glad to smell a bit of smoke in th’ ’ouse again. A house o’ women is as dead as a house wi’ no fire, to my thinkin’. I’m not a spider as likes a corner to myself. I like a man about, if he’s only something to snap at.”

Clara began to work. Her jenny spun with a subdued buzz; the white lace hopped from between her fingers on to the card. It was filled; she snipped off the length, and pinned the end down to the banded lace. Then she put a new card in her jenny. Paul watched her. She sat square and magnificent. Her throat and arms were bare. The blood still mantled below her ears; she bent her head in shame of her humility. Her face was set on her work. Her arms were creamy and full of life beside the white lace; her large, well-kept hands worked with a balanced movement, as if nothing would hurry them. He, not knowing, watched her all the time. He saw the arch of her neck from the shoulder, as she bent her head; he saw the coil of dun hair; he watched her moving, gleaming arms.

“I’ve heard a bit about you from Clara,” continued the mother. “You’re in Jordan’s, aren’t you?” She drew her lace unceasing.

“Yes.”

“Ay, well, and I can remember when Thomas Jordan used to ask me for one of my toffies.”

“Did he?” laughed Paul. “And did he get it?”

“Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t⁠—which was latterly. For he’s the sort that takes all and gives naught, he is⁠—or used to be.”

“I think he’s very decent,” said Paul.

“Yes; well, I’m glad to hear it.”

Mrs. Radford looked across at him steadily. There was something determined about her that he liked. Her face was falling loose, but her eyes were calm, and there was something strong in her that made it seem she was not old; merely her wrinkles and loose cheeks were an anachronism. She had the strength and sangfroid of a woman in the prime of life. She continued drawing the lace with slow, dignified movements. The big web came up inevitably over her apron; the length of lace fell away at her side. Her arms were finely shapen, but glossy and yellow as old ivory. They had not the peculiar dull gleam that made Clara’s so fascinating to him.

“And you’ve been going with Miriam Leivers?” the mother asked him.

“Well⁠—” he answered.

“Yes, she’s a nice girl,” she continued. “She’s very nice, but she’s a bit too much above this world to suit my fancy.”

“She is a bit like that,” he agreed.

“She’ll never be satisfied till she’s got wings and can fly over everybody’s head, she won’t,” she said.

Clara broke in, and he told her his message. She spoke humbly to him. He had surprised her in her drudgery. To have her humble made him feel as if he were lifting his head in expectation.

“Do you like jennying?” he asked.

“What can a woman do!” she replied bitterly.

“Is it sweated?”

“More or less. Isn’t all woman’s work? That’s another trick the men have played, since we force ourselves into the labour market.”

“Now then, you shut up about the men,” said her mother. “If the women wasn’t fools, the men wouldn’t be bad uns, that’s what I say. No man was ever that bad wi’ me but what he got it back again. Not but what they’re a lousy lot, there’s no denying it.”

“But they’re all right really, aren’t they?” he asked.

“Well, they’re a bit different from women,” she answered.

“Would you care to be back at Jordan’s?” he asked Clara.

“I don’t think so,” she replied.

“Yes, she would!” cried her mother; “thank her stars if she could get back. Don’t you listen to her. She’s forever on that ’igh horse of hers, an’ it’s back’s that thin an’ starved it’ll cut her in two one of these days.”

Clara suffered badly from her mother. Paul felt as if his eyes were coming very wide open. Wasn’t he to take Clara’s fulminations so seriously, after all? She spun steadily at her work. He experienced a thrill of joy, thinking she might need his help. She seemed denied and deprived of so much. And her arm moved mechanically, that should never have been subdued to a mechanism, and her head was bowed to the lace, that never should have been bowed. She seemed to be stranded there among the refuse that life has thrown away, doing her jennying. It was a bitter thing to her to be put aside by life, as if it had no use for her. No wonder she protested.

She came with him to the door. He stood below in the mean street, looking up at her. So fine she was in her stature and her bearing, she reminded him of Juno dethroned. As she stood in the doorway, she winced from the street, from her surroundings.

“And you will go with Mrs. Hodgkisson to Hucknall?”

He was talking quite meaninglessly, only watching her. Her grey eyes at last met his. They looked dumb with humiliation, pleading with a kind of captive misery. He was shaken and at a loss. He had thought her high and mighty.

When he left her, he wanted to run. He went to the station in a sort of dream, and was at home without realising he had moved out of her street.

He had an idea that Susan, the overseer of the Spiral girls, was about to be married. He asked her the next day.

“I say, Susan, I heard a whisper of your getting married. What about it?”

Susan flushed red.

“Who’s been talking to you?” she replied.

“Nobody. I merely heard a whisper that you were thinking⁠—”

“Well, I am, though you needn’t tell anybody. What’s more, I wish I wasn’t!”

“Nay, Susan, you won’t make me believe that.”

“Shan’t I? You can believe it, though. I’d rather stop here a thousand times.”

Paul was perturbed.

“Why, Susan?”

The girl’s colour was high, and her eyes flashed.

“That’s why!”

“And must you?”

For answer, she looked at him. There was about him a candour and gentleness which made the women trust him. He understood.

“Ah, I’m sorry,” he said.

Tears came to her eyes.

“But you’ll see it’ll turn out all right. You’ll make the best of it,” he continued rather wistfully.

“There’s nothing else for it.”

“Yea, there’s making the worst of it. Try and make it all right.”

He soon made occasion to call again on Clara.

“Would you,” he said, “care to come back to Jordan’s?”

She put down her work, laid her beautiful arms on the table, and looked at him for some moments without answering. Gradually the flush mounted her cheek.

“Why?” she asked.

Paul felt rather awkward.

“Well, because Susan is thinking of leaving,” he said.

Clara went on with her jennying. The white lace leaped in little jumps and bounds on to the card. He waited for her. Without raising her head, she said at last, in a peculiar low voice:

“Have you said anything about it?”

“Except to you, not a word.”

There was again a long silence.

“I will apply when the advertisement is out,” she said.

“You will apply before that. I will let you know exactly when.”

She went on spinning her little machine, and did not contradict him.

Clara came to Jordan’s. Some of the older hands, Fanny among them, remembered her earlier rule, and cordially disliked the memory. Clara had always been “ikey,” reserved, and superior. She had never mixed with the girls as one of themselves. If she had occasion to find fault, she did it coolly and with perfect politeness, which the defaulter felt to be a bigger insult than crassness. Towards Fanny, the poor, overstrung hunchback, Clara was unfailingly compassionate and gentle, as a result of which Fanny shed more bitter tears than ever the rough tongues of the other overseers had caused her.

There was something in Clara that Paul disliked, and much that piqued him. If she were about, he always watched her strong throat or her neck, upon which the blonde hair grew low and fluffy. There was a fine down, almost invisible, upon the skin of her face and arms, and when once he had perceived it, he saw it always.

When he was at his work, painting in the afternoon, she would come and stand near to him, perfectly motionless. Then he felt her, though she neither spoke nor touched him. Although she stood a yard away he felt as if he were in contact with her. Then he could paint no more. He flung down the brushes, and turned to talk to her.

Sometimes she praised his work; sometimes she was critical and cold.

“You are affected in that piece,” she would say; and, as there was an element of truth in her condemnation, his blood boiled with anger.

Again: “What of this?” he would ask enthusiastically.

“H’m!” She made a small doubtful sound. “It doesn’t interest me much.”

“Because you don’t understand it,” he retorted.

“Then why ask me about it?”

“Because I thought you would understand.”

She would shrug her shoulders in scorn of his work. She maddened him. He was furious. Then he abused her, and went into passionate exposition of his stuff. This amused and stimulated her. But she never owned that she had been wrong.

During the ten years that she had belonged to the women’s movement she had acquired a fair amount of education, and, having had some of Miriam’s passion to be instructed, had taught herself French, and could read in that language with a struggle. She considered herself as a woman apart, and particularly apart, from her class. The girls in the Spiral department were all of good homes. It was a small, special industry, and had a certain distinction. There was an air of refinement in both rooms. But Clara was aloof also from her fellow-workers.

None of these things, however, did she reveal to Paul. She was not the one to give herself away. There was a sense of mystery about her. She was so reserved, he felt she had much to reserve. Her history was open on the surface, but its inner meaning was hidden from everybody. It was exciting. And then sometimes he caught her looking at him from under her brows with an almost furtive, sullen scrutiny, which made him move quickly. Often she met his eyes. But then her own were, as it were, covered over, revealing nothing. She gave him a little, lenient smile. She was to him extraordinarily provocative, because of the knowledge she seemed to possess, and gathered fruit of experience he could not attain.

One day he picked up a copy of Lettres de mon Moulin from her workbench.

“You read French, do you?” he cried.

Clara glanced round negligently. She was making an elastic stocking of heliotrope silk, turning the Spiral machine with slow, balanced regularity, occasionally bending down to see her work or to adjust the needles; then her magnificent neck, with its down and fine pencils of hair, shone white against the lavender, lustrous silk. She turned a few more rounds, and stopped.

“What did you say?” she asked, smiling sweetly.

Paul’s eyes glittered at her insolent indifference to him.

“I did not know you read French,” he said, very polite.

“Did you not?” she replied, with a faint, sarcastic smile.

“Rotten swank!” he said, but scarcely loud enough to be heard.

He shut his mouth angrily as he watched her. She seemed to scorn the work she mechanically produced; yet the hose she made were as nearly perfect as possible.

“You don’t like Spiral work,” he said.

“Oh, well, all work is work,” she answered, as if she knew all about it.

He marvelled at her coldness. He had to do everything hotly. She must be something special.

“What would you prefer to do?” he asked.

She laughed at him indulgently, as she said:

“There is so little likelihood of my ever being given a choice, that I haven’t wasted time considering.”

“Pah!” he said, contemptuous on his side now. “You only say that because you’re too proud to own up what you want and can’t get.”

“You know me very well,” she replied coldly.

“I know you think you’re terrific great shakes, and that you live under the eternal insult of working in a factory.”

He was very angry and very rude. She merely turned away from him in disdain. He walked whistling down the room, flirted and laughed with Hilda.

Later on he said to himself:

“What was I so impudent to Clara for?” He was rather annoyed with himself, at the same time glad. “Serve her right; she stinks with silent pride,” he said to himself angrily.

In the afternoon he came down. There was a certain weight on his heart which he wanted to remove. He thought to do it by offering her chocolates.

“Have one?” he said. “I bought a handful to sweeten me up.”

To his great relief, she accepted. He sat on the workbench beside her machine, twisting a piece of silk round his finger. She loved him for his quick, unexpected movements, like a young animal. His feet swung as he pondered. The sweets lay strewn on the bench. She bent over her machine, grinding rhythmically, then stooping to see the stocking that hung beneath, pulled down by the weight. He watched the handsome crouching of her back, and the apron-strings curling on the floor.

“There is always about you,” he said, “a sort of waiting. Whatever I see you doing, you’re not really there: you are waiting⁠—like Penelope when she did her weaving.” He could not help a spurt of wickedness. “I’ll call you Penelope,” he said.

“Would it make any difference?” she said, carefully removing one of her needles.

“That doesn’t matter, so long as it pleases me. Here, I say, you seem to forget I’m your boss. It just occurs to me.”

“And what does that mean?” she asked coolly.

“It means I’ve got a right to boss you.”

“Is there anything you want to complain about?”

“Oh, I say, you needn’t be nasty,” he said angrily.

“I don’t know what you want,” she said, continuing her task.

“I want you to treat me nicely and respectfully.”

“Call you ‘sir,’ perhaps?” she asked quietly.

“Yes, call me ‘sir.’ I should love it.”

“Then I wish you would go upstairs, sir.”

His mouth closed, and a frown came on his face. He jumped suddenly down.

“You’re too blessed superior for anything,” he said.

And he went away to the other girls. He felt he was being angrier than he had any need to be. In fact, he doubted slightly that he was showing off. But if he were, then he would. Clara heard him laughing, in a way she hated, with the girls down the next room.

When at evening he went through the department after the girls had gone, he saw his chocolates lying untouched in front of Clara’s machine. He left them. In the morning they were still there, and Clara was at work. Later on Minnie, a little brunette they called Pussy, called to him:

“Hey, haven’t you got a chocolate for anybody?”

“Sorry, Pussy,” he replied. “I meant to have offered them; then I went and forgot ’em.”

“I think you did,” she answered.

“I’ll bring you some this afternoon. You don’t want them after they’ve been lying about, do you?”

“Oh, I’m not particular,” smiled Pussy.

“Oh no,” he said. “They’ll be dusty.”

He went up to Clara’s bench.

“Sorry I left these things littering about,” he said.

She flushed scarlet. He gathered them together in his fist.

“They’ll be dirty now,” he said. “You should have taken them. I wonder why you didn’t. I meant to have told you I wanted you to.”

He flung them out of the window into the yard below. He just glanced at her. She winced from his eyes.

In the afternoon he brought another packet.

“Will you take some?” he said, offering them first to Clara. “These are fresh.”

She accepted one, and put it on to the bench.

“Oh, take several⁠—for luck,” he said.

She took a couple more, and put them on the bench also. Then she turned in confusion to her work. He went on up the room.

“Here you are, Pussy,” he said. “Don’t be greedy!”

“Are they all for her?” cried the others, rushing up.

“Of course they’re not,” he said.

The girls clamoured round. Pussy drew back from her mates.

“Come out!” she cried. “I can have first pick, can’t I, Paul?”

“Be nice with ’em,” he said, and went away.