Page 278 - sons-and-lovers

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