“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.
Chapter VIII
Strife in Love
Arthur finished his apprenticeship, and got a job on the electrical plant at Minton Pit. He earned very little, but had a good chance of getting on. But he was wild and restless. He did not drink nor gamble. Yet he somehow contrived to get into endless scrapes, always through some hot-headed thoughtlessness. Either he went rabbiting in the woods, like a poacher, or he stayed in Nottingham all night instead of coming home, or he miscalculated his dive into the canal at Bestwood, and scored his chest into one mass of wounds on the raw stones and tins at the bottom.
He had not been at his work many months when again he did not come home one night.
“Do you know where Arthur is?” asked Paul at breakfast.
“I do not,” replied his mother.
“He is a fool,” said Paul. “And if he DID anything I shouldn't mind. But no, he simply can't come away from a game of whist, or else he must see a girl home from the skating-rink—quite proprietously—and so can't get home. He's a fool.”
“I don't know that it would make it any better if he did something to make us all ashamed,” said Mrs. Morel.
“Well, I should respect him more,” said Paul.
“I very much doubt it,” said his mother coldly.
They went on with breakfast.
“Are you fearfully fond of him?” Paul asked his mother.
“What do you ask that for?”
“Because they say a woman always like the youngest best.”
“She may do—but I don't. No, he wearies me.”
“And you'd actually rather he was good?”
“I'd rather he showed some of a man's common sense.”
Paul was raw and irritable. He also wearied his mother very often. She saw the sunshine going out of him, and she resented it.
As they were finishing breakfast came the postman with a letter from Derby. Mrs. Morel screwed up her eyes to look at the address.
“Give it here, blind eye!” exclaimed her son, snatching it away from her.
She started, and almost boxed his ears.
“It's from your son, Arthur,” he said.
“What now—!” cried Mrs. Morel.
“'My dearest Mother,'” Paul read, “'I don't know what made me such a fool. I want you to come and fetch me back from here. I came with Jack Bredon yesterday, instead of going to work, and enlisted. He said he was sick of wearing the seat of a stool out, and, like the idiot you know I am, I came away with him.
“'I have taken the King's shilling, but perhaps if you came for me they would let me go back with you. I was a fool when I did it. I don't want to be in the army. My dear mother, I am nothing but a trouble to you. But if you get me out of this, I promise I will have more sense and consideration. . . .'”
Mrs. Morel sat down in her rocking-chair.
“Well, NOW,” she cried, “let him stop!”
“Yes,” said Paul, “let him stop.”
There was silence. The mother sat with her hands folded in her apron, her face set, thinking.
“If I'm not SICK!” she cried suddenly. “Sick!”
“Now,” said Paul, beginning to frown, “you're not going to worry your soul out about this, do you hear.”
“I suppose I'm to take it as a blessing,” she flashed, turning on her son.
“You're not going to mount it up to a tragedy, so there,” he retorted.
“The FOOL!—the young fool!” she cried.
“He'll look well in uniform,” said Paul irritatingly.
His mother turned on him like a fury.
“Oh, will he!” she cried. “Not in my eyes!”
“He should get in a cavalry regiment; he'll have the time of his life, and will look an awful swell.”
“Swell!—SWELL!—a mighty swell idea indeed!—a common soldier!”
“Well,” said Paul, “what am I but a common clerk?”
“A good deal, my boy!” cried his mother, stung.
“What?”
“At any rate, a MAN, and not a thing in a red coat.”
“I shouldn't mind being in a red coat—or dark blue, that would suit me better—if they didn't boss me about too much.”
But his mother had ceased to listen.
“Just as he was getting on, or might have been getting on, at his job—a young nuisance—here he goes and ruins himself for life. What good will he be, do you think, after THIS?”
“It may lick him into shape beautifully,” said Paul.
“Lick him into shape!—lick what marrow there WAS out of his bones. A SOLDIER!—a common SOLDIER!—nothing but a body that makes movements when it hears a shout! It's a fine thing!”
“I