little pause. “Except that they are there, and that’s a nuisance,” she said. “There are my sons-in-law,” she went on, in a sort of monologue. “Now Laura’s got married, there’s another. And I really don’t know John from James yet. They come up to me and call me mother. I know what they will say—‘how are you, mother?’ I ought to say, ‘I am not your mother, in any sense.’ But what is the use? There they are. I have had children of my own. I suppose I know them from another woman’s children.” “One would suppose so,” he said. She looked at him, somewhat surprised, forgetting perhaps that she was talking to him. And she lost her thread. She looked round the room, vaguely. Birkin could not guess what she was looking for, nor what she was thinking. Evidently she noticed her sons. “Are my children all there?” she asked him abruptly. He laughed, startled, afraid perhaps. “I scarcely know them, except Gerald,” he replied. “Gerald!” she exclaimed. “He’s the most wanting of them all. You’d never think it, to look at him now, would you?” “No,” said Birkin. The mother looked across at her eldest son, stared at him heavily for some time. “Ay,” she said, in an incomprehensible monosyllable, that sounded profoundly cynical. Birkin felt afraid, as if he dared not realise. And Mrs Crich moved away, forgetting him. But she returned on her traces. “I should like him to have a friend,” she said. “He has never had a friend.” Birkin looked down into her eyes, which were blue, and watching heavily. He could not understand them. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he said to himself, almost flippantly. Then he remembered, with a slight shock, that that was Cain’s cry. And Gerald was Cain, if anybody. Not that he was Cain, either, although he had slain his brother. There was such a thing as pure accident, and the consequences did not attach to one, even though one had killed one’s brother in such wise. Gerald as a boy had accidentally killed his brother. What then? Why seek to draw a brand and a curse across the life that had
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