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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, be 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 1, 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
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