Sons and Lovers, D.H.

Lawrence (excerpts)

1.
He was not strong enough for heavy manual work, his mother said. He did not care for making
things with his hands, preferred racing about, or making excursions into the country, or reading,
or painting.%
“What do you want to be?” his mother asked.
“Anything.”
“That is no answer,” said Mrs. Morel.
But it was quite truthfully the only answer he could give. His ambition, as far as this world’s gear
went, was quietly to earn his thirty or thirty-five shillings a week somewhere near home, and
then, when his father died, have a cottage with his mother, paint and go out as he liked, and
live happy ever after. That was his programme as far as doing things went. But he was proud
within himself, measuring people against himself, and placing them, inexorably. And he thought
that perhaps he might also make a painter, the real thing. But that he left alone.

2.
“I’m the man in the house now,” he used to say to his mother with joy. They learned how
perfectly peaceful the home could be. And they almost regretted—though none of them would
have owned to such callousness—that their father was soon coming back.

3.
Mrs. Morel clung now to Paul. He was quiet and not brilliant. But still he stuck to his painting,
and still he stuck to his mother. Everything he did was for her. She waited for his coming home
in the evening, and then she unburdened herself of all she had pondered, or of all that had
occurred to her during the day. He sat and listened with his earnestness. The two shared lives.

4.
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 (Miriam’s family). They kindled him and
made him glow to his work, whereas his mother’s influence was to make him quietly
determined, patient, dogged, unwearied.
(…)
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
(…)
“No, mother—I really don’t love her. I talk to her, but I want to come home to you.”
He had taken off his collar and tie, and rose, bare-throated, to go to bed. As he stooped to kiss his
mother, she threw her arms round his neck, hid her face on his shoulder, and cried, in a
whimpering voice, so unlike her own that he writhed in agony:
“I can’t bear it. I could let another woman—but not her. She’d leave me no room, not a bit of
room—”
And immediately he hated Miriam bitterly.
“And I’ve never—you know, Paul—I’ve never had a husband—not really—”
He stroked his mother’s hair, and his mouth was on her throat.
“And she exults so in taking you from me—she’s not like ordinary girls.”
“Well, I don’t love her, mother,” he murmured, bowing his head and hiding his eyes on her
shoulder in misery. His mother kissed him a long, fervent kiss.
“My boy!” she said, in a voice trembling with passionate love.
(…)
Miriam went on her knees before one cluster, took a wild-looking daffodil between her hands,
turned up its face of gold to her, and bowed down, caressing it with her mouth and cheeks and
brow. He stood aside, with his hands in his pockets, watching her. One after another she turned
up to him the faces of the yellow, bursten flowers appealingly, fondling them lavishly all the
while.%
“Aren’t they magnificent?” she murmured.
“Magnificent! It’s a bit thick—they’re pretty!”
She bowed again to her flowers at his censure of her praise. He watched her crouching, sipping
the flowers with fervid kisses.
“Why must you always be fondling things?” he said irritably.
“But I love to touch them,” she replied, hurt.
“Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted to pull the heart out of them?
Why don’t you have a bit more restraint, or reserve, or something?”

5.
The warmth was Clara’s breathing heaving. He lifted his head, and looked into her eyes. They
were dark and shining and strange, life wild at the source staring into his life, stranger to him, yet
meeting him; and he put his face down on her throat, afraid. What was she? A strong, strange,
wild life, that breathed with his in the darkness through this hour. It was all so much bigger than
themselves that he was hushed. (…)
It seemed natural they were there; the night contained them. And after such an evening they both
were very still, having known the immensity of passion. They felt small, half-afraid, childish and
wondering, like Adam and Eve when they lost their innocence and realised the magnificence of
the power which drove them out of Paradise and across the great night and the great day of
humanity. It was for each of them an initiation and a satisfaction. To know their own
nothingness, to know the tremendous living flood which carried them always, gave them
rest within themselves. (…)
In the morning he had considerable peace, and was happy in himself. It seemed almost as if he
had known the baptism of fire in passion, and it left him at rest. But it was not Clara. It was
something that happened because of her, but it was not her. They were scarcely any nearer each
other. It was as if they had been blind agents of a great force.

6.
“There are different ways of dying. My father’s people are frightened, and have to be hauled out
of life into death like cattle into a slaughter-house, pulled by the neck; but my mother’s people
are pushed from behind, inch by inch. They are stubborn people, and won’t die.”
“Yes,” said Clara.
“And she won’t die. She can’t. Mr. Renshaw, the parson, was in the other day. ‘Think!’ he said
to her; ‘you will have your mother and father, and your sisters, and your son, in the Other Land.’
And she said: ‘I have done without them for a long time, and can do without them now. It is the
living I want, not the dead.’ She wants to live even now.”
“Oh, how horrible!” said Clara, too frightened to speak.
“And she looks at me, and she wants to stay with me,” he went on monotonously. “She’s got
such a will, it seems as if she would never go—never!”

7.
Then, quite mechanically and more distinctly, the conversation began again inside him.
“She’s dead. What was it all for—her struggle?”
That was his despair wanting to go after her.
“You’re alive.”
“She’s not.”
“She is—in you.”
Suddenly he felt tired with the burden of it.
“You’ve got to keep alive for her sake,” said his will in him.
Something felt sulky, as if it would not rouse.
“You’ve got to carry forward her living, and what she had done, go on with it.”
But he did not want to. He wanted to give up.
“But you can go on with your painting,” said the will in him. “Or else you can beget children.
They both carry on her effort.”
“Painting is not living.”
“Then live.”
(…)
“Mother!” he whispered—”mother!”
She was the only thing that held him up, himself, amid all this. And she was gone, intermingled
herself. He wanted her to touch him, have him alongside with her.
But no, he would not give in. Turning sharply, he walked towards the city’s gold
phosphorescence. His fists were shut, his mouth set fast. He would not take that direction, to the
darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.