Sons and Lovers - Daimon Club

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.
"Then," said his mother, "you must look in the paper
for the advertisements."
He looked at her. It seemed to him a bitter humiliation
and an anguish to go through. But he said nothing. When he got up
in the morning, his whole being was knotted up over this one thought:
"I've got to go and look for advertisements for a job."
It stood in front of the morning, that thought, killing all
joy and even life, for him. His heart felt like a tight knot.
And then, at ten o'clock, he set off. He was supposed to be
a queer, quiet child. Going up the sunny street of the little town,
he felt as if all the folk he met said to themselves: "He's going
to the Co-op. reading-room to look in the papers for a place.
He can't get a job. I suppose he's living on his mother." Then he
crept up the stone stairs behind the drapery shop at the Co-op.,
and peeped in the reading-room. Usually one or two men were there,
either old, useless fellows, or colliers "on the club". So he entered,
full of shrinking and suffering when they looked up, seated himself at
the table, and pretended to scan the news. He knew they would think:
"What does a lad of thirteen want in a reading-room with a newspaper?"
and he suffered.
Then he looked wistfully out of the window. Already he was
a prisoner of industrialism. Large sunflowers stared over the
old red wall of the garden opposite, looking in their jolly way
down on the women who were hurrying with something for dinner.
The valley was full of corn, brightening in the sun. Two collieries,
among the fields, waved their small white plumes of steam. Far off
on the hills were the woods of Annesley, dark and fascinating.
Already his heart went down. He was being taken into bondage.
His freedom in the beloved home valley was going now.
The brewers' waggons came rolling up from Keston with enormous
barrels, four a side, like beans in a burst bean-pod. The waggoner,
throned aloft, rolling massively in his seat, was not so much
below Paul's eye. The man's hair, on his small, bullet head,
was bleached almost white by the sun, and on his thick red arms,
rocking idly on his sack apron, the white hairs glistened.
His red face shone and was almost asleep with sunshine. The horses,
handsome and brown, went on by themselves, looking by far the masters
of the show.
Paul wished he were stupid. "I wish," he thought to himself,
"I was fat like him, and like a dog in the sun. I wish I was a pig
and a brewer's waggoner."