prompt:
Chapter: LAD-AND-GIRL LOVE

PAUL had been many times up to Willey Farm during the autumn. He
was friends with the two youngest boys. Edgar the eldest, would not
condescend at first. And Miriam also refused to be approached. She was
afraid of being set at nought, as by her own brothers. The girl was
romantic in her soul. Everywhere was a Walter Scott heroine being
loved by men with helmets or with plumes in their caps. She herself was
something of a princess turned into a swine-girl in her own imagination.
And she was afraid lest this boy, who, nevertheless, looked something
like a Walter Scott hero, who could paint and speak French, and knew
what algebra meant, and who went by train to Nottingham every day, might
consider her simply as the swine-girl, unable to perceive the princess
beneath; so she held aloof.

Her great companion was her mother. They were both brown-eyed, and
inclined to be mystical, such women as treasure religion inside them,
breathe it in their nostrils, and see the whole of life in a mist
thereof. So to Miriam, Christ and God made one great figure, which she
loved tremblingly and passionately when a tremendous sunset burned
out the western sky, and Ediths, and Lucys, and Rowenas, Brian de Bois
Guilberts, Rob Roys, and Guy Mannerings, rustled the sunny leaves in the
morning, or sat in her bedroom aloft, alone, when it snowed. That was
life to her. For the rest, she drudged in the house, which work she
would not have minded had not her clean red floor been mucked up
immediately by the trampling farm-boots of her brothers. She madly
wanted her little brother of four to let her swathe him and stifle
him in her love; she went to church reverently, with bowed head, and
quivered in anguish from the vulgarity of the other choir-girls and from
the common-sounding voice of the curate; she fought with her brothers,
whom she considered brutal louts; and she held not her father in too
high esteem because he did not carry any mystical ideals cherished in
his heart, but only wanted to have as easy a time as he could, and his
meals when he was ready for them.

She hated her position as swine-girl. She wanted to be considered. She
wanted to learn, thinking that if she could read, as Paul said he could
read, "Colomba", or the "Voyage autour de ma Chambre", the world would
have a different face for her and a deepened respect. She could not be
princess by wealth or standing. So she was mad to have learning whereon
to pride herself. For she was different from other folk, and must not
be scooped up among the common fry. Learning was the only distinction to
which she thought to aspire.

Her beauty--that of a shy, wild, quiveringly sensitive thing--seemed
nothing to her. Even her soul, so strong for rhapsody, was not enough.
She must have something to reinforce her pride, because she felt
different from other people. Paul she eyed rather wistfully. On the
whole, she scorned the male sex. But here was a new specimen, quick,
light, graceful, who could be gentle and who could be sad, and who was
clever, and who knew a lot, and who had a death in the family. The boy's
poor morsel of learning exalted him almost sky-high in her esteem.
Yet she tried hard to scorn him, because he would not see in her the
princess but only the swine-girl. And he scarcely observed her.

Then he was so ill, and she felt he would be weak. Then she would be
stronger than he. Then she could love him. If she could be mistress of
him in his weakness, take care of him, if he could depend on her, if she
could, as it were, have him in her arms, how she would love him!

As soon as the skies brightened and plum-blossom was out, Paul drove off
in the milkman's heavy float up to Willey Farm. Mr. Leivers shouted in a
kindly fashion at the boy, then clicked to the horse as they climbed the
hill slowly, in the freshness of the morning. White clouds went on
their way, crowding to the back of the hills that were rousing in the
springtime. The water of Nethermere lay below, very blue against the
seared meadows and the thorn-trees.

It was four and a half miles' drive. Tiny buds on the hedges, vivid
as copper-green, were opening into rosettes; and thrushes called, and
blackbirds shrieked and scolded. It was a new, glamorous world.

Miriam, peeping through the kitchen window, saw the horse walk through
the big white gate into the farmyard that was backed by the oak-wood,
still bare. Then a youth in a heavy overcoat climbed down. He put up
his hands for the whip and the rug that the good-looking, ruddy farmer
handed down to him.

Miriam appeared in the doorway. She was nearly sixteen, very beautiful,
with her warm colouring, her gravity, her eyes dilating suddenly like an
ecstasy.

"I say," said Paul, turning shyly aside, "your daffodils are nearly out.
Isn't it early? But don't they look cold?"

"Cold!" said Miriam, in her musical, caressing voice.

"The green on their buds--" and he faltered into silence timidly.

"Let me take the rug," said Miriam over-gently.

"I can carry it," he answered, rather injured. But he yielded it to her.

Then Mrs. Leivers appeared.

"I'm sure you're tired and cold," she said. "Let me take your coat. It
IS heavy. You mustn't walk far in it."

She helped him off with his coat. He was quite unused to such attention.
She was almost smothered under its weight.

"Why, mother," laughed the farmer as he passed through the kitchen,
swinging the great milk-churns, "you've got almost more than you can
manage there."

She beat up the sofa cushions for the youth.

The kitchen was very small and irregular. The farm had been originally
a labourer's cottage. And the furniture was old and battered. But Paul
loved it--loved the sack-bag that formed the hearthrug, and the funny
little corner under the stairs, and the small window deep in the corner,
through which, bending a little, he could see the plum trees in the back
garden and the lovely round hills beyond.

"Won't you lie down?" said Mrs. Leivers.

"Oh no; I'm not tired," he said. "Isn't it lovely coming out, don't you
think? I saw a sloe-bush in blossom and a lot of celandines. I'm glad
it's sunny."

"Can I give you anything to eat or to drink?"

"No, thank you."

"How's your mother?"

"I think she's tired now. I think she's had too much to do. Perhaps in a
little while she'll go to Skegness with me. Then she'll be able to rest.
I s'll be glad if she can."

"Yes," replied Mrs. Leivers. "It's a wonder she isn't ill herself."

Miriam was moving about preparing dinner. Paul watched everything that
happened. His face was pale and thin, but his eyes were quick and bright
with life as ever. He watched the strange, almost rhapsodic way in which
the girl moved about, carrying a great stew-jar to the oven, or looking
in the saucepan. The atmosphere was different from that of his own home,
where everything seemed so ordinary. When Mr. Leivers called loudly
outside to the horse, that was reaching over to feed on the rose-bushes
in the garden, the girl started, looked round with dark eyes, as if
something had come breaking in on her world. There was a sense of
silence inside the house and out. Miriam seemed as in some dreamy tale,
a maiden in bondage, her spirit dreaming in a land far away and magical.
And her discoloured, old blue frock and her broken boots seemed only
like the romantic rags of King Cophetua's beggar-maid.

She suddenly became aware of his keen blue eyes upon her, taking her all
in. Instantly her broken boots and her frayed old frock hurt her. She
resented his seeing everything. Even he knew that her stocking was not
pulled up. She went into the scullery, blushing deeply. And afterwards
her hands trembled slightly at her work. She nearly dropped all she
handled. When her inside dream was shaken, her body quivered with
trepidation. She resented that he saw so much.

Mrs. Leivers sat for some time talking to the boy, although she was
needed at her work. She was too polite to leave him. Presently she
excused herself and rose. After a while she looked into the tin
saucepan.

"Oh DEAR, Miriam," she cried, "these potatoes have boiled dry!"

Miriam started as if she had been stung.

"HAVE they, mother?" she cried.

"I shouldn't care, Miriam," said the mother, "if I hadn't trusted them
to you." She peered into the pan.

The girl stiffened as if from a blow. Her dark eyes dilated; she
remained standing in the same spot.

"Well," she answered, gripped tight in self-conscious shame, "I'm sure I
looked at them five minutes since."

"Yes," said the mother, "I know it's easily done."

"They're not much burned," said Paul. "It doesn't matter, does it?"

Mrs. Leivers looked at the youth with her brown, hurt eyes.

"It wouldn't matter but for the boys," she said to him. "Only Miriam
knows what a trouble they make if the potatoes are 'caught'."

"Then," thought Paul to himself, "you shouldn't let them make a
trouble."

After a while Edgar came in. He wore leggings, and his boots were
covered with earth. He was rather small, rather formal, for a farmer. He
glanced at Paul, nodded to him distantly, and said:

"Dinner ready?"

"Nearly, Edgar," replied the mother apologetically.

"I'm ready for mine," said the young man, taking up the newspaper and
reading. Presently the rest of the family trooped in. Dinner was served.
The meal went rather brutally. The over-gentleness and apologetic tone
of the mother brought out all the brutality of manners in the sons.
Edgar tasted the potatoes, moved his mouth quickly like a rabbit, looked
indignantly at his mother, and said:

"These potatoes are burnt, mother."

"Yes, Edgar. I forgot them for a minute. Perhaps you'll have bread if
you can't eat them."

Edgar looked in anger across at Miriam.

"What was Miriam doing that she couldn't attend to them?" he said.

Miriam looked up. Her mouth opened, her dark eyes blazed and winced, but
she said nothing. She swallowed her anger and her shame, bowing her dark
head.

"I'm sure she was trying hard," said the mother.

"She hasn't got sense even to boil the potatoes," said Edgar. "What is
she kept at home for?"

"On'y for eating everything that's left in th' pantry," said Maurice.

"They don't forget that potato-pie against our Miriam," laughed the
father.

She was utterly humiliated. The mother sat in silence, suffering, like
some saint out of place at the brutal board.

It puzzled Paul. He wondered vaguely why all this intense feeling
went running because of a few burnt potatoes. The mother exalted
everything--even a bit of housework--to the plane of a religious trust.
The sons resented this; they felt themselves cut away underneath, and
they answered with brutality and also with a sneering superciliousness.

Paul was just opening out from childhood into manhood. This atmosphere,
where everything took a religious value, came with a subtle fascination
to him. There was something in the air. His own mother was logical. Here
there was something different, something he loved, something that at
times he hated.

Miriam quarrelled with her brothers fiercely. Later in the afternoon,
when they had gone away again, her mother said:

"You disappointed me at dinner-time, Miriam."

The girl dropped her head.

"They are such BRUTES!" she suddenly cried, looking up with flashing
eyes.

"But hadn't you promised not to answer them?" said the mother. "And I
believed in you. I CAN'T stand it when you wrangle."

"But they're so hateful!" cried Miriam, "and--and LOW."

"Yes, dear. But how often have I asked you not to answer Edgar back?
Can't you let him say what he likes?"

"But why should he say what he likes?"

"Aren't you strong enough to bear it, Miriam, if even for my sake? Are
you so weak that you must wrangle with them?"

Mrs. Leivers stuck unflinchingly to this doctrine of "the other cheek".
She could not instil it at all into the boys. With the girls she
succeeded better, and Miriam was the child of her heart. The boys
loathed the other cheek when it was presented to them. Miriam was often
sufficiently lofty to turn it. Then they spat on her and hated her. But
she walked in her proud humility, living within herself.

There was always this feeling of jangle and discord in the Leivers
family. Although the boys resented so bitterly this eternal appeal to
their deeper feelings of resignation and proud humility, yet it had
its effect on them. They could not establish between themselves and an
outsider just the ordinary human feeling and unexaggerated friendship;
they were always restless for the something deeper. Ordinary folk
seemed shallow to them, trivial and inconsiderable. And so they were
unaccustomed, painfully uncouth in the simplest social intercourse,
suffering, and yet insolent in their superiority. Then beneath was the
yearning for the soul-intimacy to which they could not attain because
they were too dumb, and every approach to close connection was blocked
by their clumsy contempt of other people. They wanted genuine intimacy,
but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they
scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms
common human intercourse.

Paul fell under Mrs. Leivers's spell. Everything had a religious
and intensified meaning when he was with her. His soul, hurt, highly
developed, sought her as if for nourishment. Together they seemed to
sift the vital fact from an experience.

Miriam was her mother's daughter. In the sunshine of the afternoon
mother and daughter went down the fields with him. They looked for
nests. There was a jenny wren's in the hedge by the orchard.

"I DO want you to see this," said Mrs. Leivers.

He crouched down and carefully put his finger through the thorns into
the round door of the nest.

"It's almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of the bird,"
he said, "it's so warm. They say a bird makes its nest round like a cup
with pressing its breast on it. Then how did it make the ceiling round,
I wonder?"

The nest seemed to start into life for the two women. After that, Miriam
came to see it every day. It seemed so close to her. Again, going
down the hedgeside with the girl, he noticed the celandines, scalloped
splashes of gold, on the side of the ditch.

"I like them," he said, "when their petals go flat back with the
sunshine. They seemed to be pressing themselves at the sun."

And then the celandines ever after drew her with a little spell.
Anthropomorphic as she was, she stimulated him into appreciating things
thus, and then they lived for her. She seemed to need things kindling in
her imagination or in her soul before she felt she had them. And she
was cut off from ordinary life by her religious intensity which made
the world for her either a nunnery garden or a paradise, where sin and
knowledge were not, or else an ugly, cruel thing.

So it was in this atmosphere of subtle intimacy, this meeting in their
common feeling for something in Nature, that their love started.

Personally, he was a long time before he realized her. For ten months he
had to stay at home after his illness. For a while he went to Skegness
with his mother, and was perfectly happy. But even from the seaside he
wrote long letters to Mrs. Leivers about the shore and the sea. And he
brought back his beloved sketches of the flat Lincoln coast, anxious
for them to see. Almost they would interest the Leivers more than they
interested his mother. It was not his art Mrs. Morel cared about; it
was himself and his achievement. But Mrs. Leivers and her children were
almost his disciples. They kindled him and made him glow to his work,
whereas his mother's influence was to make him quietly determined,
patient, dogged, unwearied.

He soon was friends with the boys, whose rudeness was only superficial.
They had all, when they could trust themselves, a strange gentleness and
lovableness.

"Will you come with me on to the fallow?" asked Edgar, rather
hesitatingly.

Paul went joyfully, and spent the afternoon helping to hoe or to single
turnips with his friend. He used to lie with the three brothers in
the hay piled up in the barn and tell them about Nottingham and about
Jordan's. In return, they taught him to milk, and let him do little
jobs--chopping hay or pulping turnips--just as much as he liked. At
midsummer he worked all through hay-harvest with them, and then he loved
them. The family was so cut off from the world actually. They seemed,
somehow, like "_les derniers fils d'une race epuisee_". Though the lads
were strong and healthy, yet they had all that over-sensitiveness and
hanging-back which made them so lonely, yet also such close, delicate
friends once their intimacy was won. Paul loved them dearly, and they
him.

Miriam came later. But he had come into her life before she made any
mark on his. One dull afternoon, when the men were on the land and the
rest at school, only Miriam and her mother at home, the girl said to
him, after having hesitated for some time:

"Have you seen the swing?"

"No," he answered. "Where?"

"In the cowshed," she replied.

She always hesitated to offer or to show him anything. Men have such
different standards of worth from women, and her dear things--the
valuable things to her--her brothers had so often mocked or flouted.

"Come on, then," he replied, jumping up.

There were two cowsheds, one on either side of the barn. In the lower,
darker shed there was standing for four cows. Hens flew scolding over
the manger-wall as the youth and girl went forward for the great thick
rope which hung from the beam in the darkness overhead, and was pushed
back over a peg in the wall.

"It's something like a rope!" he exclaimed appreciatively; and he sat
down on it, anxious to try it. Then immediately he rose.

"Come on, then, and have first go," he said to the girl.

"See," she answered, going into the barn, "we put some bags on the
seat"; and she made the swing comfortable for him. That gave her
pleasure. He held the rope.

"Come on, then," he said to her.

"No, I won't go first," she answered.

She stood aside in her still, aloof fashion.

"Why?"

"You go," she pleaded.

Almost for the first time in her life she had the pleasure of giving up
to a man, of spoiling him. Paul looked at her.

"All right," he said, sitting down. "Mind out!"

He set off with a spring, and in a moment was flying through the air,
almost out of the door of the shed, the upper half of which was open,
showing outside the drizzling rain, the filthy yard, the cattle standing
disconsolate against the black cartshed, and at the back of all
the grey-green wall of the wood. She stood below in her crimson
tam-o'-shanter and watched. He looked down at her, and she saw his blue
eyes sparkling.

"It's a treat of a swing," he said.

"Yes."

He was swinging through the air, every bit of him swinging, like a bird
that swoops for joy of movement. And he looked down at her. Her crimson
cap hung over her dark curls, her beautiful warm face, so still in a
kind of brooding, was lifted towards him. It was dark and rather cold in
the shed. Suddenly a swallow came down from the high roof and darted out
of the door.

"I didn't know a bird was watching," he called.

He swung negligently. She could feel him falling and lifting through the
air, as if he were lying on some force.

"Now I'll die," he said, in a detached, dreamy voice, as though he were
the dying motion of the swing. She watched him, fascinated. Suddenly he
put on the brake and jumped out.

"I've had a long turn," he said. "But it's a treat of a swing--it's a
real treat of a swing!"

Miriam was amused that he took a swing so seriously and felt so warmly
over it.

"No; you go on," she said.

"Why, don't you want one?" he asked, astonished.

"Well, not much. I'll have just a little."

She sat down, whilst he kept the bags in place for her.

"It's so ripping!" he said, setting her in motion. "Keep your heels up,
or they'll bang the manger wall."

She felt the accuracy with which he caught her, exactly at the right
moment, and the exactly proportionate strength of his thrust, and she
was afraid. Down to her bowels went the hot wave of fear. She was in his
hands. Again, firm and inevitable came the thrust at the right moment.
She gripped the rope, almost swooning.

"Ha!" she laughed in fear. "No higher!"

"But you're not a BIT high," he remonstrated.

"But no higher."

He heard the fear in her voice, and desisted. Her heart melted in hot
pain when the moment came for him to thrust her forward again. But he
left her alone. She began to breathe.

"Won't you really go any farther?" he asked. "Should I keep you there?"

"No; let me go by myself," she answered.

He moved aside and watched her.

"Why, you're scarcely moving," he said.

She laughed slightly with shame, and in a moment got down.

"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 was 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."

And she, with her little finger in her mouth, would ponder these
sayings. 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. 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. 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 and
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. Then her eyes blazed naked in a kind
of ecstasy that frightened him. But she was physically afraid. If
she were getting over a stile, she gripped his hands in a little hard
anguish, and began to lose her presence of mind. And he could not
persuade her to jump from even a small height. Her eyes dilated, became
exposed and palpitating.

"No!" she cried, half laughing in terror--"no!"

"You shall!" he cried once, and, jerking her forward, he brought her
falling from the fence. But her wild "Ah!" of pain, as if she were
losing consciousness, cut him. She landed on her feet safely, and
afterwards had courage in this respect.

She was very much dissatisfied with her lot.

"Don't you like being at home?" Paul asked her, surprised.

"Who would?" she answered, low and intense. "What is it? I'm all day
cleaning what the boys make just as bad in five minutes. I don't WANT to
be at home."

"What do you want, then?"

"I want to do something. I want a chance like anybody else. Why should
I, because I'm a girl, be kept at home and not allowed to be anything?
What chance HAVE I?"

"Chance of what?"

"Of knowing anything--of learning, of doing anything. It's not fair,
because I'm a woman."

She seemed very bitter. Paul wondered. In his own home Annie was almost
glad to be a girl. She had not so much responsibility; things were
lighter for her. She never wanted to be other than a girl. But Miriam
almost fiercely wished she were a man. And yet she hated men at the same
time.

"But it's as well to be a woman as a man," he said, frowning.

"Ha! Is it? Men have everything."

"I should think women ought to be as glad to be women as men are to be
men," he answered.

"No!"--she shook her head--"no! Everything the men have."

"But what do you want?" he asked.

"I want to learn. Why SHOULD it be that I know nothing?"

"What! such as mathematics and French?"

"Why SHOULDN'T I know mathematics? Yes!" she cried, her eye expanding in
a kind of defiance.

"Well, you can learn as much as I know," he said. "I'll teach you, if
you like."

Her eyes dilated. She mistrusted him as teacher.

"Would you?" he asked.

Her head had dropped, and she was sucking her finger broodingly.

"Yes," she said hesitatingly.

He used to tell his mother all these things.

"I'm going to teach Miriam algebra," he said.

"Well," replied Mrs. Morel, "I hope she'll get fat on it."

When he went up to the farm on the Monday evening, it was drawing
twilight. Miriam was just sweeping up the kitchen, and was kneeling at
the hearth when he entered. Everyone was out but her. She looked round
at him, flushed, her dark eyes shining, her fine hair falling about her
face.

"Hello!" she said, soft and musical. "I knew it was you."

"How?"

"I knew your step. Nobody treads so quick and firm."

He sat down, sighing.

"Ready to do some algebra?" he asked, drawing a little book from his
pocket.

"But--"

He could feel her backing away.

"You said you wanted," he insisted.

"To-night, though?" she faltered.

"But I came on purpose. And if you want to learn it, you must begin."

She took up her ashes in the dustpan and looked at him, half
tremulously, laughing.

"Yes, but to-night! You see, I haven't thought of it."

"Well, my goodness! Take the ashes and come."

He went and sat on the stone bench in the back-yard, where the big
milk-cans were standing, tipped up, to air. The men were in the
cowsheds. He could hear the little sing-song of the milk spurting into
the pails. Presently she came, bringing some big greenish apples.

"You know you like them," she said.

He took a bite.

"Sit down," he said, with his mouth full.

She was short-sighted, and peered over his shoulder. It irritated him.
He gave her the book quickly.

"Here," he said. "It's only letters for figures. You put down 'a'
instead of '2' or '6'."

They worked, he talking, she with her head down on the book. He was
quick and hasty. She never answered. Occasionally, when he demanded
of her, "Do you see?" she looked up at him, her eyes wide with the
half-laugh that comes of fear. "Don't you?" he cried.

He had been too fast. But she said nothing. He questioned her more, then
got hot. It made his blood rouse to see her there, as it were, at his
mercy, her mouth open, her eyes dilated with laughter that was afraid,
apologetic, ashamed. Then Edgar came along with two buckets of milk.

"Hello!" he said. "What are you doing?"

"Algebra," replied Paul.

"Algebra!" repeated Edgar curiously. Then he passed on with a laugh.
Paul took a bite at his forgotten apple, looked at the miserable
cabbages in the garden, pecked into lace by the fowls, and he wanted to
pull them up. Then he glanced at Miriam. She was poring over the book,
seemed absorbed in it, yet trembling lest she could not get at it. It
made him cross. She was ruddy and beautiful. Yet her soul seemed to be
intensely supplicating. The algebra-book she closed, shrinking, knowing
he was angered; and at the same instant he grew gentle, seeing her hurt
because she did not understand.

But things came slowly to her. And when she held herself in a grip,
seemed so utterly humble before the lesson, it made his blood rouse.
He stormed at her, got ashamed, continued the lesson, and grew furious
again, abusing her. She listened in silence. Occasionally, very rarely,
she defended herself. Her liquid dark eyes blazed at him.

"You don't give me time to learn it," she said.

"All right," he answered, throwing the book on the table and lighting
a cigarette. Then, after a while, he went back to her repentant. So the
lessons went. He was always either in a rage or very gentle.

"What do you tremble your SOUL before it for?" he cried. "You don't
learn algebra with your blessed soul. Can't you look at it with your
clear simple wits?"

Often, when he went again into the kitchen, Mrs. Leivers would look at
him reproachfully, saying:

"Paul, don't be so hard on Miriam. She may not be quick, but I'm sure
she tries."

"I can't help it," he said rather pitiably. "I go off like it."

"You don't mind me, Miriam, do you?" he asked of the girl later.

"No," she reassured him in her beautiful deep tones--"no, I don't mind."

"Don't mind me; it's my fault."

But, in spite of himself, his blood began to boil with her. It was
strange that no one else made him in such fury. He flared against her.
Once he threw the pencil in her face. There was a silence. She turned
her face slightly aside.

"I didn't--" he began, but got no farther, feeling weak in all his
bones. She never reproached him or was angry with him. He was often
cruelly ashamed. But still again his anger burst like a bubble
surcharged; and still, when he saw her eager, silent, as it were, blind
face, he felt he wanted to throw the pencil in it; and still, when he
saw her hand trembling and her mouth parted with suffering, his heart
was scalded with pain for her. And because of the intensity to which she
roused him, he sought her.

Then he often avoided her and went with Edgar. Miriam and her brother
were naturally antagonistic. Edgar was a rationalist, who was curious,
and had a sort of scientific interest in life. It was a great bitterness
to Miriam to see herself deserted by Paul for Edgar, who seemed so much
lower. But the youth was very happy with her elder brother. The two men
spent afternoons together on the land or in the loft doing carpentry,
when it rained. And they talked together, or Paul taught Edgar the songs
he himself had learned from Annie at the piano. And often all the men,
Mr. Leivers as well, had bitter debates on the nationalizing of the land
and similar problems. Paul had already heard his mother's views, and as
these were as yet his own, he argued for her. Miriam attended and
took part, but was all the time waiting until it should be over and a
personal communication might begin.

"After all," she said within herself, "if the land were nationalized,
Edgar and Paul and I would be just the same." So she waited for the
youth to come back to her.

He was studying for his painting. He loved to sit at home, alone with
his mother, at night, working and working. She sewed or read. Then,
looking up from his task, he would rest his eyes for a moment on her
face, that was bright with living warmth, and he returned gladly to his
work.

"I can do my best things when you sit there in your rocking-chair,
mother," he said.

"I'm sure!" she exclaimed, sniffing with mock scepticism. But she felt
it was so, and her heart quivered with brightness. For many hours she
sat still, slightly conscious of him labouring away, whilst she worked
or read her book. And he, with all his soul's intensity directing his
pencil, could feel her warmth inside him like strength. They were both
very happy so, and both unconscious of it. These times, that meant so
much, and which were real living, they almost ignored.

He was conscious only when stimulated. A sketch finished, he always
wanted to take it to Miriam. Then he was stimulated into knowledge of
the work he had produced unconsciously. In contact with Miriam he
gained insight; his vision went deeper. From his mother he drew the
life-warmth, the strength to produce; Miriam urged this warmth into
intensity like a white light.

When he returned to the factory the conditions of work were better.
He had Wednesday afternoon off to go to the Art School--Miss Jordan's
provision--returning in the evening. Then the factory closed at six
instead of eight on Thursday and Friday evenings.

One evening in the summer Miriam and he went over the fields by Herod's
Farm on their way from the library home. So it was only three miles
to Willey Farm. There was a yellow glow over the mowing-grass, and the
sorrel-heads burned crimson. Gradually, as they walked along the high
land, the gold in the west sank down to red, the red to crimson, and
then the chill blue crept up against the glow.

They came out upon the high road to Alfreton, which ran white between
the darkening fields. There Paul hesitated. It was two miles home for
him, one mile forward for Miriam. They both looked up the road that ran
in shadow right under the glow of the north-west sky. On the crest of
the hill, Selby, with its stark houses and the up-pricked headstocks of
the pit, stood in black silhouette small against the sky.

He looked at his watch.

"Nine o'clock!" he said.

The pair stood, loth to part, hugging their books.

"The wood is so lovely now," she said. "I wanted you to see it."

He followed her slowly across the road to the white gate.

"They grumble so if I'm late," he said.

"But you're not doing anything wrong," she answered impatiently.

He followed her across the nibbled pasture in the dusk. There was a
coolness in the wood, a scent of leaves, of honeysuckle, and a twilight.
The two walked in silence. Night came wonderfully there, among the
throng of dark tree-trunks. He looked round, expectant.

She wanted to show him a certain wild-rose bush she had discovered. She
knew it was wonderful. And yet, till he had seen it, she felt it had
not come into her soul. Only he could make it her own, immortal. She was
dissatisfied.

Dew was already on the paths. In the old oak-wood a mist was rising, and
he hesitated, wondering whether one whiteness were a strand of fog or
only campion-flowers pallid in a cloud.

By the time they came to the pine-trees Miriam was getting very eager
and very tense. Her bush might be gone. She might not be able to find
it; and she wanted it so much. Almost passionately she wanted to be
with him when he stood before the flowers. They were going to have a
communion together--something that thrilled her, something holy. He was
walking beside her in silence. They were very near to each other. She
trembled, and he listened, vaguely anxious.

Coming to the edge of the wood, they saw the sky in front, like
mother-of-pearl, and the earth growing dark. Somewhere on the outermost
branches of the pine-wood the honeysuckle was streaming scent.

"Where?" he asked.

"Down the middle path," she murmured, quivering.

When they turned the corner of the path she stood still. In the wide
walk between the pines, gazing rather frightened, she could distinguish
nothing for some moments; the greying light robbed things of their
colour. Then she saw her bush.

"Ah!" she cried, hastening forward.

It was very still. The tree was tall and straggling. It had thrown its
briers over a hawthorn-bush, and its long streamers trailed thick, right
down to the grass, splashing the darkness everywhere with great spilt
stars, pure white. In bosses of ivory and in large splashed stars the
roses gleamed on the darkness of foliage and stems and grass. Paul and
Miriam stood close together, silent, and watched. Point after point the
steady roses shone out to them, seeming to kindle something in their
souls. The dusk came like smoke around, and still did not put out the
roses.

Paul looked into Miriam's eyes. She was pale and expectant with wonder,
her lips were parted, and her dark eyes lay open to him. His look seemed
to travel down into her. Her soul quivered. It was the communion she
wanted. He turned aside, as if pained. He turned to the bush.

"They seem as if they walk like butterflies, and shake themselves," he
said.

She looked at her roses. They were white, some incurved and holy, others
expanded in an ecstasy. The tree was dark as a shadow. She lifted her
hand impulsively to the flowers; she went forward and touched them in
worship.

"Let us go," he said.

There was a cool scent of ivory roses--a white, virgin scent. Something
made him feel anxious and imprisoned. The two walked in silence.

"Till Sunday," he said quietly, and left her; and she walked home
slowly, feeling her soul satisfied with the holiness of the night. He
stumbled down the path. And as soon as he was out of the wood, in the
free open meadow, where he could breathe, he started to run as fast as
he could. It was like a delicious delirium in his veins.

Always when he went with Miriam, and it grew rather late, he knew his
mother was fretting and getting angry about him--why, he could not
understand. As he went into the house, flinging down his cap, his mother
looked up at the clock. She had been sitting thinking, because a chill
to her eyes prevented her reading. She could feel Paul being drawn away
by this girl. And she did not care for Miriam. "She is one of those who
will want to suck a man's soul out till he has none of his own left,"
she said to herself; "and he is just such a gaby as to let himself be
absorbed. She will never let him become a man; she never will." So,
while he was away with Miriam, Mrs. Morel grew more and more worked up.

She glanced at the clock and said, coldly and rather tired:

"You have been far enough to-night."

His soul, warm and exposed from contact with the girl, shrank.

"You must have been right home with her," his mother continued.

He would not answer. Mrs. Morel, looking at him quickly, saw his hair
was damp on his forehead with haste, saw him frowning in his heavy
fashion, resentfully.

"She must be wonderfully fascinating, that you can't get away from her,
but must go trailing eight miles at this time of night."

He was hurt between the past glamour with Miriam and the knowledge
that his mother fretted. He had meant not to say anything, to refuse to
answer. But he could not harden his heart to ignore his mother.

"I DO like to talk to her," he answered irritably.

"Is there nobody else to talk to?"

"You wouldn't say anything if I went with Edgar."

"You know I should. You know, whoever you went with, I should say it
was too far for you to go trailing, late at night, when you've been
to Nottingham. Besides"--her voice suddenly flashed into anger and
contempt--"it is disgusting--bits of lads and girls courting."

"It is NOT courting," he cried.

"I don't know what else you call it."

"It's not! Do you think we SPOON and do? We only talk."

"Till goodness knows what time and distance," was the sarcastic
rejoinder.

Paul snapped at the laces of his boots angrily.

"What are you so mad about?" he asked. "Because you don't like her."

"I don't say I don't like her. But I don't hold with children keeping
company, and never did."

"But you don't mind our Annie going out with Jim Inger."

"They've more sense than you two."

"Why?"

"Our Annie's not one of the deep sort."

He failed to see the meaning of this remark. But his mother looked
tired. She was never so strong after William's death; and her eyes hurt
her.

"Well," he said, "it's so pretty in the country. Mr. Sleath asked about
you. He said he'd missed you. Are you a bit better?"

"I ought to have been in bed a long time ago," she replied.

"Why, mother, you know you wouldn't have gone before quarter-past ten."

"Oh, yes, I should!"

"Oh, little woman, you'd say anything now you're disagreeable with me,
wouldn't you?"

He kissed her forehead that he knew so well: the deep marks between the
brows, the rising of the fine hair, greying now, and the proud setting
of the temples. His hand lingered on her shoulder after his kiss. Then
he went slowly to bed. He had forgotten Miriam; he only saw how his
mother's hair was lifted back from her warm, broad brow. And somehow,
she was hurt.

Then the next time he saw Miriam he said to her:

"Don't let me be late to-night--not later than ten o'clock. My mother
gets so upset."

Miriam dropped her bead, brooding.

"Why does she get upset?" she asked.

"Because she says I oughtn't to be out late when I have to get up
early."

"Very well!" said Miriam, rather quietly, with just a touch of a sneer.

He resented that. And he was usually late again.

That there was any love growing between him and Miriam neither of
them would have acknowledged. He thought he was too sane for such
sentimentality, and she thought herself too lofty. They both were late
in coming to maturity, and psychical ripeness was much behind even the
physical. Miriam was exceedingly sensitive, as her mother had always
been. The slightest grossness made her recoil almost in anguish. Her
brothers were brutal, but never coarse in speech. The men did all
the discussing of farm matters outside. But, perhaps, because of the
continual business of birth and of begetting which goes on upon every
farm, Miriam was the more hypersensitive to the matter, and her blood
was chastened almost to disgust of the faintest suggestion of such
intercourse. Paul took his pitch from her, and their intimacy went on in
an utterly blanched and chaste fashion. It could never be mentioned that
the mare was in foal.

When he was nineteen, he was earning only twenty shillings a week, but
he was happy. His painting went well, and life went well enough. On the
Good Friday he organised a walk to the Hemlock Stone. There were three
lads of his own age, then Annie and Arthur, Miriam and Geoffrey. Arthur,
apprenticed as an electrician in Nottingham, was home for the holiday.
Morel, as usual, was up early, whistling and sawing in the yard. At
seven o'clock the family heard him buy threepennyworth of hot-cross
buns; he talked with gusto to the little girl who brought them, calling
her "my darling". He turned away several boys who came with more buns,
telling them they had been "kested" by a little lass. Then Mrs. Morel
got up, and the family straggled down. It was an immense luxury to
everybody, this lying in bed just beyond the ordinary time on a weekday.
And Paul and Arthur read before breakfast, and had the meal unwashed,
sitting in their shirt-sleeves. This was another holiday luxury. The
room was warm. Everything felt free of care and anxiety. There was a
sense of plenty in the house.

While the boys were reading, Mrs. Morel went into the garden. They were
now in another house, an old one, near the Scargill Street home, which
had been left soon after William had died. Directly came an excited cry
from the garden:

"Paul! Paul! come and look!"

It was his mother's voice. He threw down his book and went out. There
was a long garden that ran to a field. It was a grey, cold day, with a
sharp wind blowing out of Derbyshire. Two fields away Bestwood began,
with a jumble of roofs and red house-ends, out of which rose the church
tower and the spire of the Congregational Chapel. And beyond went woods
and hills, right away to the pale grey heights of the Pennine Chain.

Paul looked down the garden for his mother. Her head appeared among the
young currant-bushes.

"Come here!" she cried.

"What for?" he answered.

"Come and see."

She had been looking at the buds on the currant trees. Paul went up.

"To think," she said, "that here I might never have seen them!"

Her son went to her side. Under the fence, in a little bed, was a ravel
of poor grassy leaves, such as come from very immature bulbs, and three
scyllas in bloom. Mrs. Morel pointed to the deep blue flowers.

"Now, just see those!" she exclaimed. "I was looking at the currant
bushes, when, thinks I to myself, 'There's something very blue; is it
a bit of sugar-bag?' and there, behold you! Sugar-bag! Three glories of
the snow, and such beauties! But where on earth did they come from?"

"I don't know," said Paul.

"Well, that's a marvel, now! I THOUGHT I knew every weed and blade in
this garden. But HAVEN'T they done well? You see, that gooseberry-bush
just shelters them. Not nipped, not touched!"

He crouched down and turned up the bells of the little blue flowers.

"They're a glorious colour!" he said.

"Aren't they!" she cried. "I guess they come from Switzerland, where
they say they have such lovely things. Fancy them against the snow! But
where have they come from? They can't have BLOWN here, can they?"

Then he remembered having set here a lot of little trash of bulbs to
mature.

"And you never told me," she said.

"No! I thought I'd leave it till they might flower."

"And now, you see! I might have missed them. And I've never had a glory
of the snow in my garden in my life."

She was full of excitement and elation. The garden was an endless joy to
her. Paul was thankful for her sake at last to be in a house with a long
garden that went down to a field. Every morning after breakfast she went
out and was happy pottering about in it. And it was true, she knew every
weed and blade.

Everybody turned up for the walk. Food was packed, and they set off,
a merry, delighted party. They hung over the wall of the mill-race,
dropped paper in the water on one side of the tunnel and watched it
shoot out on the other. They stood on the foot-bridge over Boathouse
Station and looked at the metals gleaming coldly.

"You should see the Flying Scotsman come through at half-past six!" said
Leonard, whose father was a signalman. "Lad, but she doesn't half buzz!"
and the little party looked up the lines one way, to London, and the
other way, to Scotland, and they felt the touch of these two magical
places.

In Ilkeston the colliers were waiting in gangs for the public-houses to
open. It was a town of idleness and lounging. At Stanton Gate the iron
foundry blazed. Over everything there were great discussions. At Trowell
they crossed again from Derbyshire into Nottinghamshire. They came to
the Hemlock Stone at dinner-time. Its field was crowded with folk from
Nottingham and Ilkeston.

They had expected a venerable and dignified monument. They found
a little, gnarled, twisted stump of rock, something like a decayed
mushroom, standing out pathetically on the side of a field. Leonard and
Dick immediately proceeded to carve their initials, "L. W." and "R. P.",
in the old red sandstone; but Paul desisted, because he had read in the
newspaper satirical remarks about initial-carvers, who could find no
other road to immortality. Then all the lads climbed to the top of the
rock to look round.

Everywhere in the field below, factory girls and lads were eating
lunch or sporting about. Beyond was the garden of an old manor. It had
yew-hedges and thick clumps and borders of yellow crocuses round the
lawn.

"See," said Paul to Miriam, "what a quiet garden!"

She saw the dark yews and the golden crocuses, then she looked
gratefully. He had not seemed to belong to her among all these others;
he was different then--not her Paul, who understood the slightest quiver
of her innermost soul, but something else, speaking another language
than hers. How it hurt her, and deadened her very perceptions. Only when
he came right back to her, leaving his other, his lesser self, as she
thought, would she feel alive again. And now he asked her to look at
this garden, wanting the contact with her again. Impatient of the set
in the field, she turned to the quiet lawn, surrounded by sheaves of
shut-up crocuses. A feeling of stillness, almost of ecstasy, came over
her. It felt almost as if she were alone with him in this garden.

Then he left her again and joined the others. Soon they started home.
Miriam loitered behind, alone. She did not fit in with the others; she
could very rarely get into human relations with anyone: so her friend,
her companion, her lover, was Nature. She saw the sun declining wanly.
In the dusky, cold hedgerows were some red leaves. She lingered to
gather them, tenderly, passionately. The love in her finger-tips
caressed the leaves; the passion in her heart came to a glow upon the
leaves.

Suddenly she realised she was alone in a strange road, and she hurried
forward. Turning a corner in the lane, she came upon Paul, who stood
bent over something, his mind fixed on it, working away steadily,
patiently, a little hopelessly. She hesitated in her approach, to watch.

He remained concentrated in the middle of the road. Beyond, one rift of
rich gold in that colourless grey evening seemed to make him stand out
in dark relief. She saw him, slender and firm, as if the setting sun had
given him to her. A deep pain took hold of her, and she knew she
must love him. And she had discovered him, discovered in him a
rare potentiality, discovered his loneliness. Quivering as at some
"annunciation", she went slowly forward.

At last he looked up.

"Why," he exclaimed gratefully, "have you waited for me!"

She saw a deep shadow in his eyes.

"What is it?" she asked.

"The spring broken here;" and he showed her where his umbrella was
injured.

Instantly, with some shame, she knew he had not done the damage himself,
but that Geoffrey was responsible.

"It is only an old umbrella, isn't it?" she asked.

She wondered why he, who did not usually trouble over trifles, made such
a mountain of this molehill.

"But it was William's an' my mother can't help but know," he said
quietly, still patiently working at the umbrella.

The words went through Miriam like a blade. This, then, was the
confirmation of her vision of him! She looked at him. But there was
about him a certain reserve, and she dared not comfort him, not even
speak softly to him.

"Come on," he said. "I can't do it;" and they went in silence along the
road.

That same evening they were walking along under the trees by Nether
Green. He was talking to her fretfully, seemed to be struggling to
convince himself.

"You know," he said, with an effort, "if one person loves, the other
does."

"Ah!" she answered. "Like mother said to me when I was little, 'Love
begets love.'"

"Yes, something like that, I think it MUST be."

"I hope so, because, if it were not, love might be a very terrible
thing," she said.

"Yes, but it IS--at least with most people," he answered.

And Miriam, thinking he had assured himself, felt strong in herself. She
always regarded that sudden coming upon him in the lane as a revelation.
And this conversation remained graven in her mind as one of the letters
of the law.

Now she stood with him and for him. When, about this time, he outraged
the family feeling at Willey Farm by some overbearing insult, she stuck
to him, and believed he was right. And at this time she dreamed
dreams of him, vivid, unforgettable. These dreams came again later on,
developed to a more subtle psychological stage.

On the Easter Monday the same party took an excursion to Wingfield
Manor. It was great excitement to Miriam to catch a train at Sethley
Bridge, amid all the bustle of the Bank Holiday crowd. They left the
train at Alfreton. Paul was interested in the street and in the colliers
with their dogs. Here was a new race of miners. Miriam did not live till
they came to the church. They were all rather timid of entering, with
their bags of food, for fear of being turned out. Leonard, a comic, thin
fellow, went first; Paul, who would have died rather than be sent back,
went last. The place was decorated for Easter. In the font hundreds of
white narcissi seemed to be growing. The air was dim and coloured from
the windows and thrilled with a subtle scent of lilies and narcissi. In
that atmosphere Miriam's soul came into a glow. Paul was afraid of the
things he mustn't do; and he was sensitive to the feel of the place.
Miriam turned to him. He answered. They were together. He would not go
beyond the Communion-rail. She loved him for that. Her soul expanded
into prayer beside him. He felt the strange fascination of shadowy
religious places. All his latent mysticism quivered into life. She was
drawn to him. He was a prayer along with her.

Miriam very rarely talked to the other lads. They at once became awkward
in conversation with her. So usually she was silent.

It was past midday when they climbed the steep path to the manor.
All things shone softly in the sun, which was wonderfully warm and
enlivening. Celandines and violets were out. Everybody was tip-top full
with happiness. The glitter of the ivy, the soft, atmospheric grey
of the castle walls, the gentleness of everything near the ruin, was
perfect.

The manor is of hard, pale grey stone, and the other walls are blank and
calm. The young folk were in raptures. They went in trepidation, almost
afraid that the delight of exploring this ruin might be denied them. In
the first courtyard, within the high broken walls, were farm-carts, with
their shafts lying idle on the ground, the tyres of the wheels brilliant
with gold-red rust. It was very still.

All eagerly paid their sixpences, and went timidly through the fine
clean arch of the inner courtyard. They were shy. Here on the pavement,
where the hall had been, an old thorn tree was budding. All kinds of
strange openings and broken rooms were in the shadow around them.

After lunch they set off once more to explore the ruin. This time the
girls went with the boys, who could act as guides and expositors. There
was one tall tower in a corner, rather tottering, where they say Mary
Queen of Scots was imprisoned.

"Think of the Queen going up here!" said Miriam in a low voice, as she
climbed the hollow stairs.

"If she could get up," said Paul, "for she had rheumatism like anything.
I reckon they treated her rottenly."

"You don't think she deserved it?" asked Miriam.

"No, I don't. She was only lively."

They continued to mount the winding staircase. A high wind, blowing
through the loopholes, went rushing up the shaft, and filled the girl's
skirts like a balloon, so that she was ashamed, until he took the hem
of her dress and held it down for her. He did it perfectly simply, as he
would have picked up her glove. She remembered this always.

Round the broken top of the tower the ivy bushed out, old and handsome.
Also, there were a few chill gillivers, in pale cold bud. Miriam wanted
to lean over for some ivy, but he would not let her. Instead, she had to
wait behind him, and take from him each spray as he gathered it and held
it to her, each one separately, in the purest manner of chivalry. The
tower seemed to rock in the wind. They looked over miles and miles of
wooded country, and country with gleams of pasture.

The crypt underneath the manor was beautiful, and in perfect
preservation. Paul made a drawing: Miriam stayed with him. She was
thinking of Mary Queen of Scots looking with her strained, hopeless
eyes, that could not understand misery, over the hills whence no help
came, or sitting in this crypt, being told of a God as cold as the place
she sat in.

They set off again gaily, looking round on their beloved manor that
stood so clean and big on its hill.

"Supposing you could have THAT farm," said Paul to Miriam.

"Yes!"

"Wouldn't it be lovely to come and see you!"

They were now in the bare country of stone walls, which he loved, and
which, though only ten miles from home, seemed so foreign to Miriam. The
party was straggling. As they were crossing a large meadow that
sloped away from the sun, along a path embedded with innumerable tiny
glittering points, Paul, walking alongside, laced his fingers in the
strings of the bag Miriam was carrying, and instantly she felt Annie
behind, watchful and jealous. But the meadow was bathed in a glory of
sunshine, and the path was jewelled, and it was seldom that he gave her
any sign. She held her fingers very still among the strings of the bag,
his fingers touching; and the place was golden as a vision.

At last they came into the straggling grey village of Crich, that lies
high. Beyond the village was the famous Crich Stand that Paul could see
from the garden at home. The party pushed on. Great expanse of country
spread around and below. The lads were eager to get to the top of the
hill. It was capped by a round knoll, half of which was by now cut away,
and on the top of which stood an ancient monument, sturdy and squat, for
signalling in old days far down into the level lands of Nottinghamshire
and Leicestershire.

It was blowing so hard, high up there in the exposed place, that the
only way to be safe was to stand nailed by the wind to the wan of the
tower. At their feet fell the precipice where the limestone was quarried
away. Below was a jumble of hills and tiny villages--Mattock, Ambergate,
Stoney Middleton. The lads were eager to spy out the church of Bestwood,
far away among the rather crowded country on the left. They were
disgusted that it seemed to stand on a plain. They saw the hills of
Derbyshire fall into the monotony of the Midlands that swept away South.

Miriam was somewhat scared by the wind, but the lads enjoyed it. They
went on, miles and miles, to Whatstandwell. All the food was eaten,
everybody was hungry, and there was very little money to get home with.
But they managed to procure a loaf and a currant-loaf, which they hacked
to pieces with shut-knives, and ate sitting on the wall near the bridge,
watching the bright Derwent rushing by, and the brakes from Matlock
pulling up at the inn.

Paul was now pale with weariness. He had been responsible for the party
all day, and now he was done. Miriam understood, and kept close to him,
and he left himself in her hands.

They had an hour to wait at Ambergate Station. Trains came, crowded with
excursionists returning to Manchester, Birmingham, and London.

"We might be going there--folk easily might think we're going that far,"
said Paul.

They got back rather late. Miriam, walking home with Geoffrey, watched
the moon rise big and red and misty. She felt something was fulfilled in
her.

She had an elder sister, Agatha, who was a school-teacher. Between the
two girls was a feud. Miriam considered Agatha worldly. And she wanted
herself to be a school-teacher.

One Saturday afternoon Agatha and Miriam were upstairs dressing. Their
bedroom was over the stable. It was a low room, not very large, and
bare. Miriam had nailed on the wall a reproduction of Veronese's "St.
Catherine". She loved the woman who sat in the window, dreaming. Her
own windows were too small to sit in. But the front one was dripped over
with honeysuckle and virginia creeper, and looked upon the tree-tops of
the oak-wood across the yard, while the little back window, no bigger
than a handkerchief, was a loophole to the east, to the dawn beating up
against the beloved round hills.

The two sisters did not talk much to each other. Agatha, who was fair
and small and determined, had rebelled against the home atmosphere,
against the doctrine of "the other cheek". She was out in the world now,
in a fair way to be independent. And she insisted on worldly values,
on appearance, on manners, on position, which Miriam would fain have
ignored.

Both girls liked to be upstairs, out of the way, when Paul came. They
preferred to come running down, open the stair-foot door, and see him
watching, expectant of them. Miriam stood painfully pulling over her
head a rosary he had given her. It caught in the fine mesh of her hair.
But at last she had it on, and the red-brown wooden beads looked well
against her cool brown neck. She was a well-developed girl, and very
handsome. But in the little looking-glass nailed against the whitewashed
wall she could only see a fragment of herself at a time. Agatha had
bought a little mirror of her own, which she propped up to suit herself.
Miriam was near the window. Suddenly she heard the well-known click of
the chain, and she saw Paul fling open the gate, push his bicycle into
the yard. She saw him look at the house, and she shrank away. He walked
in a nonchalant fashion, and his bicycle went with him as if it were a
live thing.

"Paul's come!" she exclaimed.

"Aren't you glad?" said Agatha cuttingly.

Miriam stood still in amazement and bewilderment.

"Well, aren't you?" she asked.

"Yes, but I'm not going to let him see it, and think I wanted him."

Miriam was startled. She heard him putting his bicycle in the stable
underneath, and talking to Jimmy, who had been a pit-horse, and who was
seedy.

"Well, Jimmy my lad, how are ter? Nobbut sick an' sadly, like? Why,
then, it's a shame, my owd lad."

She heard the rope run through the hole as the horse lifted its head
from the lad's caress. How she loved to listen when he thought only
the horse could hear. But there was a serpent in her Eden. She searched
earnestly in herself to see if she wanted Paul Morel. She felt there
would be some disgrace in it. Full of twisted feeling, she was afraid
she did want him. She stood self-convicted. Then came an agony of new
shame. She shrank within herself in a coil of torture. Did she want Paul
Morel, and did he know she wanted him? What a subtle infamy upon her.
She felt as if her whole soul coiled into knots of shame.

Agatha was dressed first, and ran downstairs. Miriam heard her greet
the lad gaily, knew exactly how brilliant her grey eyes became with that
tone. She herself would have felt it bold to have greeted him in such
wise. Yet there she stood under the self-accusation of wanting him,
tied to that stake of torture. In bitter perplexity she kneeled down and
prayed:

"O Lord, let me not love Paul Morel. Keep me from loving him, if I ought
not to love him."

Something anomalous in the prayer arrested her. She lifted her head and
pondered. How could it be wrong to love him? Love was God's gift. And
yet it caused her shame. That was because of him, Paul Morel. But, then,
it was not his affair, it was her own, between herself and God. She was
to be a sacrifice. But it was God's sacrifice, not Paul Morel's or her
own. After a few minutes she hid her face in the pillow again, and said:

"But, Lord, if it is Thy will that I should love him, make me love
him--as Christ would, who died for the souls of men. Make me love him
splendidly, because he is Thy son."

She remained kneeling for some time, quite still, and deeply moved, her
black hair against the red squares and the lavender-sprigged squares of
the patchwork quilt. Prayer was almost essential to her. Then she fell
into that rapture of self-sacrifice, identifying herself with a God who
was sacrificed, which gives to so many human souls their deepest bliss.

When she went downstairs Paul was lying back in an armchair, holding
forth with much vehemence to Agatha, who was scorning a little painting
he had brought to show her. Miriam glanced at the two, and avoided their
levity. She went into the parlour to be alone.

It was tea-time before she was able to speak to Paul, and then her
manner was so distant he thought he had offended her.

Miriam discontinued her practice of going each Thursday evening to the
library in Bestwood. After calling for Paul regularly during the whole
spring, a number of trifling incidents and tiny insults from his family
awakened her to their attitude towards her, and she decided to go no
more. So she announced to Paul one evening she would not call at his
house again for him on Thursday nights.

"Why?" he asked, very short.

"Nothing. Only I'd rather not."

"Very well."

"But," she faltered, "if you'd care to meet me, we could still go
together."

"Meet you where?"

"Somewhere--where you like."

"I shan't meet you anywhere. I don't see why you shouldn't keep calling
for me. But if you won't, I don't want to meet you."

So the Thursday evenings which had been so precious to her, and to him,
were dropped. He worked instead. Mrs. Morel sniffed with satisfaction at
this arrangement.

He would not have it that they were lovers. The intimacy between them
had been kept so abstract, such a matter of the soul, all thought and
weary struggle into consciousness, that he saw it only as a platonic
friendship. He stoutly denied there was anything else between them.
Miriam was silent, or else she very quietly agreed. He was a fool who
did not know what was happening to himself. By tacit agreement they
ignored the remarks and insinuations of their acquaintances.

"We aren't lovers, we are friends," he said to her. "WE know it. Let
them talk. What does it matter what they say."

Sometimes, as they were walking together, she slipped her arm timidly
into his. But he always resented it, and she knew it. It caused a
violent conflict in him. With Miriam he was always on the high plane of
abstraction, when his natural fire of love was transmitted into the fine
stream of thought. She would have it so. If he were jolly and, as she
put it, flippant, she waited till he came back to her, till the change
had taken place in him again, and he was wrestling with his own soul,
frowning, passionate in his desire for understanding. And in this
passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to
herself. But he must be made abstract first.

Then, if she put her arm in his, it caused him almost torture. His
consciousness seemed to split. The place where she was touching him ran
hot with friction. He was one internecine battle, and he became cruel to
her because of it.

One evening in midsummer Miriam called at the house, warm from climbing.
Paul was alone in the kitchen; his mother could be heard moving about
upstairs.

"Come and look at the sweet-peas," he said to the girl.

They went into the garden. The sky behind the townlet and the church was
orange-red; the flower-garden was flooded with a strange warm light that
lifted every leaf into significance. Paul passed along a fine row of
sweet-peas, gathering a blossom here and there, all cream and pale blue.
Miriam followed, breathing the fragrance. To her, flowers appealed with
such strength she felt she must make them part of herself. When she bent
and breathed a flower, it was as if she and the flower were loving each
other. Paul hated her for it. There seemed a sort of exposure about the
action, something too intimate.

When he had got a fair bunch, they returned to the house. He listened
for a moment to his mother's quiet movement upstairs, then he said:

"Come here, and let me pin them in for you." He arranged them two or
three at a time in the bosom of her dress, stepping back now and then to
see the effect. "You know," he said, taking the pin out of his mouth, "a
woman ought always to arrange her flowers before her glass."

Miriam laughed. She thought flowers ought to be pinned in one's dress
without any care. That Paul should take pains to fix her flowers for her
was his whim.

He was rather offended at her laughter.

"Some women do--those who look decent," he said.

Miriam laughed again, but mirthlessly, to hear him thus mix her up with
women in a general way. From most men she would have ignored it. But
from him it hurt her.

He had nearly finished arranging the flowers when he heard his mother's
footstep on the stairs. Hurriedly he pushed in the last pin and turned
away.

"Don't let mater know," he said.

Miriam picked up her books and stood in the doorway looking with chagrin
at the beautiful sunset. She would call for Paul no more, she said.

"Good-evening, Mrs. Morel," she said, in a deferential way. She sounded
as if she felt she had no right to be there.

"Oh, is it you, Miriam?" replied Mrs. Morel coolly.

But Paul insisted on everybody's accepting his friendship with the girl,
and Mrs. Morel was too wise to have any open rupture.

It was not till he was twenty years old that the family could ever
afford to go away for a holiday. Mrs. Morel had never been away for a
holiday, except to see her sister, since she had been married. Now at
last Paul had saved enough money, and they were all going. There was to
be a party: some of Annie's friends, one friend of Paul's, a young man
in the same office where William had previously been, and Miriam.

It was great excitement writing for rooms. Paul and his mother debated
it endlessly between them. They wanted a furnished cottage for two
weeks. She thought one week would be enough, but he insisted on two.

At last they got an answer from Mablethorpe, a cottage such as they
wished for thirty shillings a week. There was immense jubilation. Paul
was wild with joy for his mother's sake. She would have a real holiday
now. He and she sat at evening picturing what it would be like. Annie
came in, and Leonard, and Alice, and Kitty. There was wild rejoicing and
anticipation. Paul told Miriam. She seemed to brood with joy over it.
But the Morel's house rang with excitement.

They were to go on Saturday morning by the seven train. Paul suggested
that Miriam should sleep at his house, because it was so far for her
to walk. She came down for supper. Everybody was so excited that even
Miriam was accepted with warmth. But almost as soon as she entered the
feeling in the family became close and tight. He had discovered a poem
by Jean Ingelow which mentioned Mablethorpe, and so he must read it
to Miriam. 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. He had got now all the
audience he cared for. And Mrs. Morel and Annie almost contested with
Miriam who should listen best and win his favour. He was in very high
feather.

"But," interrupted Mrs. Morel, "what IS the 'Bride of Enderby' that the
bells are supposed to ring?"

"It's an old tune they used to play on the bells for a warning against
water. I suppose the Bride of Enderby was drowned in a flood," he
replied. He had not the faintest knowledge what it really was, but he
would never have sunk so low as to confess that to his womenfolk. They
listened and believed him. He believed himself.

"And the people knew what that tune meant?" said his mother.

"Yes--just like the Scotch when they heard 'The Flowers o' the
Forest'--and when they used to ring the bells backward for alarm."

"How?" said Annie. "A bell sounds the same whether it's rung backwards
or forwards."

"But," he said, "if you start with the deep bell and ring up to the high
one--der--der--der--der--der--der--der--der!"

He ran up the scale. Everybody thought it clever. He thought so too.
Then, waiting a minute, he continued the poem.

"Hm!" said Mrs. Morel curiously, when he finished. "But I wish
everything that's written weren't so sad."

"I canna see what they want drownin' theirselves for," said Morel.

There was a pause. Annie got up to clear the table.

Miriam rose to help with the pots.

"Let ME help to wash up," she said.

"Certainly not," cried Annie. "You sit down again. There aren't many."

And Miriam, who could not be familiar and insist, sat down again to look
at the book with Paul.

He was master of the party; his father was no good. And great tortures
he suffered lest the tin box should be put out at Firsby instead of at
Mablethorpe. And he wasn't equal to getting a carriage. His bold little
mother did that.

"Here!" she cried to a man. "Here!"

Paul and Annie got behind the rest, convulsed with shamed laughter.

"How much will it be to drive to Brook Cottage?" said Mrs. Morel.

"Two shillings."

"Why, how far is it?"

"A good way."

"I don't believe it," she said.

But she scrambled in. There were eight crowded in one old seaside
carriage.

"You see," said Mrs. Morel, "it's only threepence each, and if it were a
tramcar--"

They drove along. Each cottage they came to, Mrs. Morel cried:

"Is it this? Now, this is it!"

Everybody sat breathless. They drove past. There was a universal sigh.

"I'm thankful it wasn't that brute," said Mrs. Morel. "I WAS
frightened." They drove on and on.

At last they descended at a house that stood alone over the dyke by the
highroad. There was wild excitement because they had to cross a little
bridge to get into the front garden. But they loved the house that lay
so solitary, with a sea-meadow on one side, and immense expanse of land
patched in white barley, yellow oats, red wheat, and green root-crops,
flat and stretching level to the sky.

Paul kept accounts. He and his mother ran the show. The total
expenses--lodging, food, everything--was sixteen shillings a week per
person. He and Leonard went bathing in the mornings. Morel was wandering
abroad quite early.

"You, Paul," his mother called from the bedroom, "eat a piece of
bread-and-butter."

"All right," he answered.

And when he got back he saw his mother presiding in state at the
breakfast-table. The woman of the house was young. Her husband was
blind, and she did laundry work. So Mrs. Morel always washed the pots in
the kitchen and made the beds.

"But you said you'd have a real holiday," said Paul, "and now you work."

"Work!" she exclaimed. "What are you talking about!"

He loved to go with her across the fields to the village and the sea.
She was afraid of the plank bridge, and he abused her for being a baby.
On the whole he stuck to her as if he were HER man.

Miriam did not get much of him, except, perhaps, when all the others
went to the "Coons". Coons were insufferably stupid to Miriam, so he
thought they were to himself also, and he preached priggishly to Annie
about the fatuity of listening to them. Yet he, too, knew all their
songs, and sang them along the roads roisterously. And if he found
himself listening, the stupidity pleased him very much. Yet to Annie he
said:

"Such rot! there isn't a grain of intelligence in it. Nobody with more
gumption than a grasshopper could go and sit and listen." And to Miriam
he said, with much scorn of Annie and the others: "I suppose they're at
the 'Coons'."

It was queer to see Miriam singing coon songs. She had a straight chin
that went in a perpendicular line from the lower lip to the turn. She
always reminded Paul of some sad Botticelli angel when she sang, even
when it was:

     "Come down lover's lane
     For a walk with me, talk with me."

Only when he sketched, or at evening when the others were at the
"Coons", she had him to herself. He talked to her endlessly about his
love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in
Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed
Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged
leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows
where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the Gothic
arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstasy and
lost itself in the divine. Himself, he said, was Norman, Miriam was
Gothic. She bowed in consent even to that.

One evening he and she went up the great sweeping shore of sand towards
Theddlethorpe. The long breakers plunged and ran in a hiss of foam along
the coast. It was a warm evening. There was not a figure but themselves
on the far reaches of sand, no noise but the sound of the sea. Paul
loved to see it clanging at the land. He loved to feel himself between
the noise of it and the silence of the sandy shore. Miriam was with him.
Everything grew very intense. It was quite dark when they turned again.
The way home was through a gap in the sandhills, and then along a raised
grass road between two dykes. The country was black and still. From
behind the sandhills came the whisper of the sea. Paul and Miriam walked
in silence. Suddenly he started. The whole of his blood seemed to burst
into flame, and he could scarcely breathe. An enormous orange moon was
staring at them from the rim of the sandhills. He stood still, looking
at it.

"Ah!" cried Miriam, when she saw it.

He remained perfectly still, staring at the immense and ruddy moon, the
only thing in the far-reaching darkness of the level. His heart beat
heavily, the muscles of his arms contracted.

"What is it?" murmured Miriam, waiting for him.

He turned and looked at her. She stood beside him, for ever in shadow.
Her face, covered with the darkness of her hat, was watching him
unseen. But she was brooding. She was slightly afraid--deeply moved
and religious. That was her best state. He was impotent against it. His
blood was concentrated like a flame in his chest. But he could not get
across to her. There were flashes in his blood. But somehow she ignored
them. She was expecting some religious state in him. Still yearning, she
was half aware of his passion, and gazed at him, troubled.

"What is it?" she murmured again.

"It's the moon," he answered, frowning.

"Yes," she assented. "Isn't it wonderful?" She was curious about him.
The crisis was past.

He did not know himself what was the matter. He was naturally so young,
and their intimacy was so abstract, he did not know he wanted to crush
her on to his breast to ease the ache there. He was afraid of her.
The fact that he might want her as a man wants a woman had in him
been suppressed into a shame. When she shrank in her convulsed, coiled
torture from the thought of such a thing, he had winced to the depths of
his soul. And now this "purity" prevented even their first love-kiss.
It was as if she could scarcely stand the shock of physical love, even a
passionate kiss, and then he was too shrinking and sensitive to give it.

As they walked along the dark fen-meadow he watched the moon and did not
speak. She plodded beside him. He hated her, for she seemed in some way
to make him despise himself. Looking ahead--he saw the one light in the
darkness, the window of their lamp-lit cottage.

He loved to think of his mother, and the other jolly people.

"Well, everybody else has been in long ago!" said his mother as they
entered.

"What does that matter!" he cried irritably. "I can go a walk if I like,
can't I?"

"And I should have thought you could get in to supper with the rest,"
said Mrs. Morel.

"I shall please myself," he retorted. "It's not LATE. I shall do as I
like."

"Very well," said his mother cuttingly, "then DO as you like." And she
took no further notice of him that evening. Which he pretended neither
to notice nor to care about, but sat reading. Miriam read also,
obliterating herself. Mrs. Morel hated her for making her son like this.
She watched Paul growing irritable, priggish, and melancholic. For this
she put the blame on Miriam. Annie and all her friends joined against
the girl. Miriam had no friend of her own, only Paul. But she did not
suffer so much, because she despised the triviality of these other
people.

And Paul hated her because, somehow, she spoilt his ease and
naturalness. And he writhed himself with a feeling of humiliation.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: This chapter describes the growing intimacy between Paul and Miriam. It begins from Miriam's perspective and describes the way that she aspires to learning, since she cannot have pride in her social status. She is interested in Paul, but scorns him because he only sees the swine-girl side of her and not the princess she believes she is inside. When he falls ill, she feels like he would be weaker than she and that is she could take care of him, she would love him deeply. Paul enjoys visiting the Leivers' farm because it is so different from his own home. Miriam and her mother both have very strong religious and spiritual convictions, and this strikes Paul as enormously different from his own mother's logical manner. One evening when he is there for dinner, the boys all become very upset with Miriam because the potatoes are burned. Her mother reprimands her for answering them instead of turning the other cheek, and Paul is puzzled why an insignificant matter like potatoes would cause such conflict. Miriam and Paul make their connection through nature, as they share the experience of looking at a birds' nest. The narrator tells us, though, that it is a long time before Paul really notices Miriam. He first becomes friends with the boys, most of all Edgar. Then one day Miriam shows him the swing they have in the cowshed, and they slowly grow closer. Paul is troubled by her "intensity, which would leave no emotion on a normal plane" . She tells him of her desire to learn, and he agrees to teach her algebra. They are both frustrated by the effort, and Paul finds her simultaneously infuriating and attractive. One evening when Paul and Miriam are walking home, she brings him into the woods to see a particular bush because she wants to share it with him. This excursion causes him to be late coming home, and his mother is unhappy with him, partly because she is not fond of Miriam. They argue about his relationship with the girl and he insists that they are not courting. Paul organizes a walk to the Hemlock Stone on Good Friday. During this walk, Miriam notices that Paul is different when she is alone with him. On the way back, she comes upon him alone in the road, trying to fix his umbrella so his mother will not be upset, and she realizes that she loves him. Miriam and Paul get along well during another excursion to Wingfield Manor on Easter Monday. However, after this she begins to feel tormented about whether she should be ashamed of loving him, and she decides she will no longer call at his house on Thursday nights. One evening she does call, and Paul picks some flowers to pin on her dress. Paul still refuses to define his and Miriam's relationship as that of lovers, and he forces his family to accept her as his friend. When Paul is twenty, he has saved enough money to take his family away for a holiday for two weeks at a cottage called Mablethorpe. The night before they leave, Miriam stays at the house so she doesn't have to walk in the morning. One evening, she and Paul are walking on the beach and see a beautiful view of the moon, and Paul is confused by his instincts: he feels powerful feelings toward Miriam, but does not know how to interpret them. So they return to the cottage, Mrs. Morel admonishes him once more for being late, and the chapter ends with Paul feeling irritated at Miriam because she has made him feel unnatural.