University of Virginia Library

Knowles

Knowles and L. Bristow finished the last twenty-four pages of the MS. Knowles's cast-off galleys 50 and 51 covered nearly all the second half of chapter XIV, and L. Bristow's cast-off galley 52 started on the last page of the chapter and continued to the end of chapter XV.

Knowles began in the middle of Mrs Morel's illness but the surviving specimen of his work begins after her death, with Walter Morel's words: "'No!' he said. 'Why—has she gone?'" (MS p. 523; E1 p. 401) and it ends

with the end of his taking and the start of L. Bristow's (MS p. 531; E1 p. 410), in the middle of the final scene between Paul, Clara and Baxter Dawes where, at Clara's decision not to go back to Nottingham with Paul, Baxter "jerked suddenly, as if he had been held on a strain. He looked out over the sea, but he saw nothing." This fragment is 406 lines of type, the smallest of the three specimens, and in it Knowles made the fewest punctuation changes, only 76, which is about one every five and a third lines, and he introduced only one new paragraph. His substantive errors were also fewer, being only two, but they were more serious than Moore's and neither of them was picked up by Lawrence or the proof-correctors.

In the first, Knowles omitted the word "now", which seems a trivial slip, but it may be significant that L. Bristow also omitted this word. Here (MS p. 524; E1 p. 402), Lawrence was describing Walter Morel's inability to look at his dead wife: ". . . he got out of the room again and left her. He never looked at her again. He had not seen her now for months, because he had not dared to look." Knowles's second error occurred during the initial awkward moments after Clara's arrival in the Skegness lodgings shared briefly by Paul and Baxter, when Paul, covering his unease by busily making arrangements, urged Clara to change out of her wet boots and offered her his slippers. Knowles set "felt" for "left" in the concluding sentence (MS p. 529; E1 p. 408): "He put the slippers near her feet. She left them there." The error was not corrected on the proofs, and "felt" continued to be printed until the 1960s.