Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI

DEATH IN THE FAMILY

ARTHUR MOREL was growing up. He was a quick, careless, impulsive boy,
a good deal like his father. He hated study, made a great moan if he
had to work, and escaped as soon as possible to his sport again.

In appearance he remained the flower of the family,
being well made, graceful, and full of life. His dark brown hair
and fresh colouring, and his exquisite dark blue eyes shaded with
long lashes, together with his generous manner and fiery temper,
made him a favourite. But as he grew older his temper became uncertain.
He flew into rages over nothing, seemed unbearably raw and irritable.

His mother, whom he loved, wearied of him sometimes.
He thought only of himself. When he wanted amusement, all that
stood in his way he hated, even if it were she.
When he was in trouble he moaned to her ceaselessly.

"Goodness, boy!" she said, when he groaned about a master who,
he said, hated him, "if you don't like it, alter it, and if you
can't alter it, put up with it."

And his father, whom he had loved and who had worshipped him,
he came to detest. As he grew older Morel fell into a slow ruin.
His body, which had been beautiful in movement and in being,
shrank, did not seem to ripen with the years, but to get mean
and rather despicable. There came over him a look of meanness
and of paltriness. And when the mean-looking elderly man bullied or
ordered the boy about, Arthur was furious. Moreover, Morel's manners
got worse and worse, his habits somewhat disgusting. When the
children were growing up and in the crucial stage of adolescence,
the father was like some ugly irritant to their souls. His manners
in the house were the same as he used among the colliers down pit.

"Dirty nuisance!" Arthur would cry, jumping up and going
straight out of the house when his father disgusted him.
And Morel persisted the more because his children hated it.
He seemed to take a kind of satisfaction in disgusting them,
and driving them nearly mad, while they were so irritably sensitive
at the age of fourteen or fifteen. So that Arthur, who was growing
up when his father was degenerate and elderly, hated him worst
of all.

Then, sometimes, the father would seem to feel the contemptuous
hatred of his children.

"There's not a man tries harder for his family!" he would shout.
"He does his best for them, and then gets treated like a dog.
But I'm not going to stand it, I tell you!"

But for the threat and the fact that he did not try so hard
as be imagined, they would have felt sorry. As it was, the battle
now went on nearly all between father and children, he persisting
in his dirty and disgusting ways, just to assert his independence.