I first read this story as a teenager, and still remember how chilling and sad and overwhelmingly realistic I found it. Even now, it often comes to mind unexpectedly, when I’m thinking about something else.
It’s about the family of a Nottinghamshire miner, who spend the early part of the story waiting for him to come home from the pit. All of them, even his young children, suspect that he’s getting drunk on his wages instead of coming home. Resentment builds as they sit looking at the table, which is set for tea, and they eventually begin to eat without him. A kind of domestic contentment is built, despite Elizabeth, the mother’s, tightly repressed anger, which keeps breaking through the surface of their conversation. Earlier, she picked some chrysanthemums, but when her daughter notices and admires them, Elizabeth refutes the idea that they smell beautiful:
“’No,’ she said. ‘Not to me. It was chrysanthemums when I married him and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he had brown chrysanthemums in his buttonhole.’”
I admire the beauty of Lawrence’s prose and his deep understanding of human relationships and the silences that can exist beneath speech and between people. But I think that what I admire most about this story is the way he so closely follows Elizabeth’s emotions, which shift from an anger that’s so powerful she’s unable to hold herself back from telling the children, in brief explosive sentences, that their father is a drunk, to a restless anxiety, and finally to fear, grief, guilt and an overwhelming sense of isolation, without losing their intensity.
First published in The English Review, 1911, collected in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, by D.H. Lawrence, Duckworth, 1914 and in D.H. Lawrence’s Short Stories, Everyman, 1981. Read online here
