Sons and Lovers - Daimon Club

Paul went to the counter.
"Seventeen pounds eleven and fivepence. Why don't you
shout up when you're called?" said Mr. Braithwaite. He banged
on to the invoice a five-pound bag of silver, then in a delicate
and pretty movement, picked up a little ten-pound column of gold,
and plumped it beside the silver. The gold slid in a bright stream
over the paper. The cashier finished counting off the money;
the boy dragged the whole down the counter to Mr. Winterbottom,
to whom the stoppages for rent and tools must be paid. Here he
suffered again.
"Sixteen an' six," said Mr. Winterbottom.
The lad was too much upset to count. He pushed forward some
loose silver and half a sovereign.
"How much do you think you've given me?" asked Mr. Winterbottom.
The boy looked at him, but said nothing. He had not the
faintest notion.
"Haven't you got a tongue in your head?"
Paul bit his lip, and pushed forward some more silver.
"Don't they teach you to count at the Board-school?" he asked.
"Nowt but algibbra an' French," said a collier.
"An' cheek an' impidence," said another.
Paul was keeping someone waiting. With trembling fingers 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 colliers 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. Wharmby's friend.