Page 113 - sons-and-lovers

asked.
‘Nowt but algibbra an’ French,’ said a collier.
‘An’ cheek an’ impidence,’ said another.
Paul was keeping someone waiting. With trembling fin-
gers he got his money into the bag and slid out. He suffered
the tortures of the damned on these occasions.
His relief, when he got outside, and was walking along
the Mansfield Road, was infinite. On the park wall the
mosses were green. There were some gold and some white
fowls pecking under the apple trees of an orchard. The col-
liers were walking home in a stream. The boy went near the
wall, self-consciously. He knew many of the men, but could
not recognise them in their dirt. And this was a new torture
to him.
When he got down to the New Inn, at Bretty, his father
was not yet come. Mrs. Wharmby, the landlady, knew him.
His grandmother, Morel’s mother, had been Mrs. Wharm-
by’s friend.
‘Your father’s not come yet,’ said the landlady, in the pe-
culiar half-scornful, half-patronising voice of a woman who
talks chiefly to grown men. ‘Sit you down.’
Paul sat down on the edge of the bench in the bar. Some
colliers were ‘reckoning’—sharing out their money—in a
corner; others came in. They all glanced at the boy without
speaking. At last Morel came; brisk, and with something of
an air, even in his blackness.
‘Hello!’ he said rather tenderly to his son. ‘Have you best-
ed me? Shall you have a drink of something?’
Paul and all the children were bred up fierce anti-al-

11 Sons and Lovers