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Clayhanger, by Arnold Bennett
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This book is one of several written by Bennett about life in the
Staffordshire Potteries in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
The hero is Edwin Clayhanger, and we see him through his childhood,
adolescence, early working life, when he was working for his martinet
old father, and to the point where he inherits the business, which is
printing.
Bennett comes from that area of industrial Britain, and the book rings
true on every page.
NH
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CLAYHANGER
BY ARNOLD BENNETT
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER ONE.
BOOK ONE--HIS VOCATION.
THE LAST OF A SCHOOLBOY.
Edwin Clayhanger stood on the steep-sloping, red-bricked canal bridge,
in the valley between Bursley and its suburb Hillport. In that
neighbourhood the Knype and Mersey canal formed the western boundary of
the industrialism of the Five Towns. To the east rose pitheads,
chimneys, and kilns, tier above tier, dim in their own mists. To the
west, Hillport Fields, grimed but possessing authentic hedgerows and
winding paths, mounted broadly up to the sharp ridge on which stood
Hillport Church, a landmark. Beyond the ridge, and partly protected by
it from the driving smoke of the Five Towns, lay the fine and ancient
Tory borough of Oldcastle, from whose historic Middle School Edwin
Clayhanger was now walking home. The fine and ancient Tory borough
provided education for the whole of the Five Towns, but the relentless
ignorance of its prejudices had blighted the district. A hundred years
earlier the canal had only been obtained after a vicious Parliamentary
fight between industry and the fine and ancient borough, which saw in
canals a menace to its importance as a centre of traffic. Fifty years
earlier the fine and ancient borough had succeeded in forcing the
greatest railway line in England to run through unpopulated country five
miles off instead of through the Five Towns, because it loathed the mere
conception of a railway. And now, people are inquiring why the Five
Towns, with a railway system special to itself, is characterised by a
perhaps excessive provincialism. These interesting details have
everything to do with the history of Edwin Clayhanger, as they have
everything to do with the history of each of the two hundred thousand
souls in the Five Towns. Oldcastle guessed not the vast influences of
its sublime stupidity.
It was a breezy Friday in July 1872. The canal, which ran north and
south, reflected a blue and white sky. Towards the bridge, from the
north came a long narrow canal-boat roofed with tarpaulins; and towards
the bridge, from the south came a similar craft, sluggishly creeping.
The towing-path was a morass of sticky brown mud, for, in the way of
rain, that year was breaking the records of a century and a half.
Thirty yards in front of each boat an unhappy skeleton of a horse
floundered its best in the quagmire. The honest endeavour of one of the
animals received a frequent tonic from a bare-legged girl of seven who
heartily curled a whip about its crooked large-jointed legs. The ragged
and filthy child danced in the rich mud round the horse's flanks with
the simple joy of one who had been rewarded for good behaviour by the
unrestricted use of a whip for the first time.
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TWO.
Edwin, with his elbows on the stone parapet of the bridge, stared
uninterested at the spectacle of the child, the whip, and the skeleton.
He was not insensible to the piquancy of the pageant of life, but his
mind was preoccupied with grave and heavy matters. He had left school
that day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a
willing beast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the
advance guard of its problems bearing down on him. Slim, gawky, untidy,
fair, with his worn black-braided clothes, and slung over his shoulders
in a bursting satchel the last load of his schoolbooks, and on his
bright, rough hair a shapeless cap whose lining protruded behind, he had
the extraordinary wistful look of innocence and simplicity which marks
most boys of sixteen. It seemed rather a shame, it seemed even tragic,
that this naive, simple creature, with his straightforward and friendly
eyes so eager to believe appearances, this creature immaculate of
worldly experience, must soon be transformed into a man, wary,
incredulous, detracting. Older eyes might have wept at the simplicity
of those eyes.
This picture of Edwin as a wistful innocent would have made Edwin laugh.
He had been seven years at school, and considered himself a hardened
sort of brute, free of illusions. And he sometimes thought that he
could judge the world better than most neighbouring mortals.
"Hello! The Sunday!" he murmured, without turning his eyes.
Another boy, a little younger and shorter, and clothed in a superior
untidiness, had somehow got on to the bridge, and was leaning with his
back against the parapet which supported Edwin's elbows. His eyes were
franker and simpler even than the eyes of Edwin, and his lips seemed to
be permanently parted in a good-humoured smile. His name was Charlie
Orgreave, but at school he was invariably called "the Sunday"--not
"Sunday," but "the Sunday"--and nobody could authoritatively explain how
he had come by the nickname. Its origin was lost in the prehistoric
ages of his childhood. He and Edwin had been chums for several years.
They had not sworn fearful oaths of loyalty; they did not constitute a
secret society; they had not even pricked forearms and written certain
words in blood; for these rites are only performed at Harrow, and
possibly at the Oldcastle High School, which imitates Harrow. Their
fellowship meant chiefly that they spent a great deal of time together,
instinctively and unconsciously enjoying each other's mere presence, and
that in public arguments they always reinforced each other, whatever the
degree of intellectual dishonesty thereby necessitated.
"I'll bet you mine gets to the bridge first," said the Sunday. With an
ingenious movement of the shoulders he arranged himself so that the
parapet should bear the weight of his satchel.
Edwin Clayhanger slowly turned round, and perceived that the object
which the Sunday had appropriated as "his" was the other canal-boat,
advancing from the south.
"Horse or boat?" asked Edwin.
"Boat's nose, of course," said the Sunday.
"Well," said Edwin, having surveyed the unconscious competitors, and
counting on the aid of the whipping child, "I don't mind laying you
five."
"That be damned for a tale!" protested the Sunday. "We said we'd never
bet less than ten--you know that."
"Yes, but--" Edwin hesitatingly drawled.
"But what?"
"All right. Ten," Edwin agreed. "But it's not fair. You've got a rare
start on me."
"Rats!" said the Sunday, with finality. In the pronunciation of this
word the difference between his accent and Edwin's came out clear. The
Sunday's accent was less local; there was a hint of a short "e" sound in
the "a," and a briskness about the consonants, that Edwin could never
have compassed. The Sunday's accent was as carelessly superior as his
clothes. Evidently the Sunday had some one at home who had not learnt
the art of speech in the Five Towns.
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THREE.
He began to outline a scheme, in which perpendicular expectoration
figured, for accurately deciding the winner, and a complicated argument
might have ensued about this, had it not soon become apparent that
Edwin's boat was going to be handsomely beaten, despite the joyous
efforts of the little child. The horse that would die but would not
give up, was only saved from total subsidence at every step by his
indomitable if aged spirit. Edwin handed over the ten marbles even
before the other boat had arrived at the bridge.
"Here," he said. "And you may as well have these, too," adding five
more to the ten, all he possessed. They were not the paltry marble of
to-day, plaything of infants, but the majestic "rinker," black with
white spots, the king of marbles in an era when whole populations
practised the game. Edwin looked at them half regretfully as they lay
in the Sunday's hands. They seemed prodigious wealth in those hands,
and he felt somewhat as a condemned man might feel who bequeaths his
jewels on the scaffold. Then there was a rattle, and a tumour grew out
larger on the Sunday's thigh.
The winning boat, long preceded by its horse, crawled under the bridge
and passed northwards to the sea, laden with crates of earthenware. And
then the loser, with the little girl's father and mother and her
brothers and sisters, and her kitchen, drawing-room, and bedroom, and
her smoking chimney and her memories and all that was hers, in the stern
of it, slid beneath the boys' down-turned faces while the whip cracked
away beyond the bridge. They could see, between the whitened
tarpaulins, that the deep belly of the craft was filled with clay.
"Where does that there clay come from?" asked Edwin. For not merely was
he honestly struck by a sudden new curiosity, but it was meet for him to
behave like a man now, and to ask manly questions.
"Runcorn," said the Sunday scornfully. "Can't you see it painted all
over the boat?"
"Why do they bring clay all the way from Runcorn?"
"They don't bring it from Runcorn. They bring it from Cornwall. It
comes round by sea--see?" He laughed.
"Who told you?" Edwin roughly demanded.
"Anybody knows that!" said the Sunday grandly, but always maintaining
his gay smile.
"Seems devilish funny to me," Edwin murmured, after reflection, "that
they should bring clay all that roundabout way just to make crocks of it
here. Why should they choose just this place to make crocks in? I
always understood--"
"Oh! Come on!" the Sunday cut him short. "It's blessed well one
o'clock and after!"
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FOUR.
They climbed the long bank from the canal up to the Manor Farm, at which
high point their roads diverged, one path leading direct to Bleakridge
where Orgreave lived, and the other zigzagging down through neglected
pasturage into Bursley proper. Usually they parted here without a word,
taking pride in such Spartan taciturnity, and they would doubtless have
done the same this morning also, though it were fifty-fold their last
walk together as two schoolboys. But an incident intervened.
"Hold on!" cried the Sunday.
To the south of them, a mile and a half off, in the wreathing mist of
the Cauldon Bar Ironworks, there was a yellow gleam that even the
capricious sunlight could not kill, and then two rivers of fire sprang
from the gleam and ran in a thousand delicate and lovely hues down the
side of a mountain of refuse. They were emptying a few tons of molten
slag at the Cauldon Bar Ironworks. The two rivers hung slowly dying in
the mists of smoke. They reddened and faded, and you thought they had
vanished, and you could see them yet, and then they escaped the baffled
eye, unless a cloud aided them for a moment against the sun; and their
ephemeral but enchanting beauty had expired for ever.
"Now!" said Edwin sharply.
"One minute ten seconds," said the Sunday, who had snatched out his
watch, an inestimable contrivance with a centre-seconds hand. "By Jove!
That was a good 'un."
A moment later two smaller boys, both laden with satchels, appeared over
the brow from the canal.
"Let's wait a jiff," said the Sunday to Edwin, and as the smaller boys
showed no hurry he bawled out to them across the intervening
cinder-waste: "Run!" They ran. They were his younger brothers, Johnnie
and Jimmie. "Take this and hook it!" he commanded, passing the strap of
his satchel over his head as they came up. In fatalistic silence they
obeyed the smiling tyrant.
"What are you going to do?" Edwin asked.
"I'm coming down your way a bit."
"But I thought you said you were peckish."
"I shall eat three slices of beef instead of my usual brace," said the
Sunday carelessly.
Edwin was touched. And the Sunday was touched, because he knew he had
touched Edwin. After all, this was a solemn occasion. But neither
would overtly admit that its solemnity had affected him. Hence, first
one and then the other began to skim stones with vicious force over the
surface of the largest of the three ponds that gave interest to the
Manor Farm. When they had thus proved to themselves that the day
differed in no manner from any other breaking-up day, they went forward.
On their left were two pitheads whose double wheels revolved rapidly in
smooth silence, and the puffing engine-house and all the trucks and gear
of a large ironstone mine. On their right was the astonishing farm,
with barns and ricks and cornfields complete, seemingly quite unaware of
its forlorn oddness in that foul arena of manufacture. In front, on a
little hill in the vast valley, was spread out the Indian-red
architecture of Bursley--tall chimneys and rounded ovens, schools, the
new scarlet market, the grey tower of the old church, the high spire of
the evangelical church, the low spire of the church of genuflexions, and
the crimson chapels, and rows of little red houses with amber
chimney-pots, and the gold angel of the blackened Town Hall topping the
whole. The sedate reddish browns and reds of the composition, all
netted in flowing scarves of smoke, harmonised exquisitely with the
chill blues of the chequered sky. Beauty was achieved, and none saw it.
The boys descended without a word through the brick-strewn pastures,
where a horse or two cropped the short grass. At the railway bridge,
which carried a branch mineral line over the path, they exchanged a
brief volley of words with the working-lads who always played
pitch-and-toss there in the dinner-hour; and the Sunday added to the
collection of shawds and stones lodged on the under ledges of the low
iron girders. A strange boy, he had sworn to put ten thousand stones on
those ledges before he died, or perish in the attempt. Hence Edwin
sometimes called him "Old Perish-in-the-attempt." A little farther on
the open gates of a manufactory disclosed six men playing the noble game
of rinkers on a smooth patch of ground near the weighing machine. These
six men were Messieurs Ford, Carter, and Udall, the three partners
owning the works, and three of their employees. They were celebrated
marble-players, and the boys stayed to watch them as, bending with one
knee almost touching the earth, they shot the rinkers from their stubby
thumbs with a canon-like force and precision that no boy could ever hope
to equal. "By gum!" mumbled Edwin involuntarily, when an impossible
shot was accomplished; and the bearded shooter, pleased by this tribute
from youth, twisted his white apron into a still narrower ring round his
waist. Yet Edwin was not thinking about the game. He was thinking
about a battle that lay before him, and how he would be weakened in the
fight by the fact that in the last school examination, Charlie Orgreave,
younger than himself by a year, had ousted him from the second place in
the school. The report in his pocket said: "Position in class next
term: third;" whereas he had been second since the beginning of the
year. There would of course be no "next term" for him, but the report
remained. A youth who has come to grips with that powerful enemy, his
father, cannot afford to be handicapped by even such a trifle as a
report entirely irrelevant to the struggle.
Suddenly Charlie Orgreave gave a curt nod, and departed, in nonchalant
good-humour, doubtless considering that to accompany his chum any
farther would be to be guilty of girlish sentimentality. And Edwin
nodded with equal curtness and made off slowly into the maze of Bursley.
The thought in his heart was: "I'm on my own, now. I've got to face it
now, by myself." And he felt that not merely his father, but the
leagued universe, was against him.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER TWO.
THE FLAME.
The various agencies which society has placed at the disposal of a
parent had been at work on Edwin in one way or another for at least a
decade, in order to equip him for just this very day when he should step
into the world. The moment must therefore be regarded as dramatic, the
first crucial moment of an experiment long and elaborately prepared.
Knowledge was admittedly the armour and the weapon of one about to try
conclusions with the world, and many people for many years had been
engaged in providing Edwin with knowledge. He had received, in fact, "a
good education"--or even, as some said, "a thoroughly sound education;"
assuredly as complete an equipment of knowledge as could be obtained in
the county, for the curriculum of the Oldcastle High School was less in
accord with common sense than that of the Middle School.
He knew, however, nothing of natural history, and in particular of
himself, of the mechanism of the body and mind, through which his soul
had to express and fulfil itself. Not one word of information about
either physiology or psychology had ever been breathed to him, nor had
it ever occurred to any one around him that such information was
needful. And as no one had tried to explain to him the mysteries which
he carried about with him inside that fair skin of his, so no one had
tried to explain to him the mysteries by which he was hemmed in, either
mystically through religion, or rationally through philosophy. Never in
chapel or at Sunday school had a difficulty been genuinely faced. And
as for philosophy, he had not the slightest conception of what it meant.
He imagined that a philosopher was one who made the best of a bad job,
and he had never heard the word used in any other sense. He had great
potential intellectual curiosity, but nobody had thought to stimulate it
by even casually telling him that the finest minds of humanity had been
trying to systematise the mysteries for quite twenty-five centuries. Of
physical science he had been taught nothing, save a grotesque perversion
to the effect that gravity was a force which drew things towards the
centre of the earth. In the matter of chemistry it had been practically
demonstrated to him scores of times, so that he should never forget this
grand basic truth, that sodium and potassium may be relied upon to fizz
flamingly about on a surface of water. Of geology he was perfectly
ignorant, though he lived in a district whose whole livelihood depended
on the scientific use of geological knowledge, and though the existence
of Oldcastle itself was due to a freak of the earth's crust which
geologists call a "fault."
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TWO.
Geography had been one of his strong points. He was aware of the rivers
of Asia in their order, and of the principal products of Uruguay; and he
could name the capitals of nearly all the United States. But he had
never been instructed for five minutes in the geography of his native
county, of which he knew neither the boundaries nor the rivers nor the
terrene characteristics. He could have drawn a map of the Orinoco, but
he could not have found the Trent in a day's march; he did not even know
where his drinking-water came from. That geographical considerations
are the cause of all history had never been hinted to him, nor that
history bears immediately upon modern life and bore on his own life.
For him history hung unsupported and unsupporting in the air. In the
course of his school career he had several times approached the
nineteenth century, but it seemed to him that for administrative reasons
he was always being dragged back again to the Middle Ages. Once his
form had "got" as far as the infancy of his own father, and concerning
this period he had learnt that "great dissatisfaction prevailed among
the labouring classes, who were led to believe by mischievous
demagogues," etcetera. But the next term he was recoiling round Henry
the Eighth, who "was a skilful warrior and politician," but "unfortunate
in his domestic relations;" and so to Elizabeth, than whom "few
sovereigns have been so much belied, but her character comes out
unscathed after the closest examination." History indeed resolved
itself into a series of more or less sanguinary events arbitrarily
grouped under the names of persons who had to be identified with the
assistance of numbers. Neither of the development of national life, nor
of the clash of nations, did he really know anything that was not
inessential and anecdotic. He could not remember the clauses of Magna
Charta, but he knew eternally that it was signed at a place amusingly
called Runnymede. And the one fact engraved on his memory about the
battle of Waterloo was that it was fought on a Sunday.
And as he had acquired absolutely nothing about political economy or
about logic, and was therefore at the mercy of the first agreeable
sophistry that might take his fancy by storm, his unfitness to commence
the business of being a citizen almost reached perfection.
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THREE.
For his personal enjoyment of the earth and air and sun and stars, and
of society and solitude, no preparation had been made, or dreamt of.
The sentiment of nature had never been encouraged in him, or even
mentioned. He knew not how to look at a landscape nor at a sky. Of
plants and trees he was as exquisitely ignorant as of astronomy. It had
not occurred to him to wonder why the days are longer in summer, and he
vaguely supposed that the cold of winter was due to an increased
distance of the earth from the sun. Still, he had learnt that Saturn
had a ring, and sometimes he unconsciously looked for it in the
firmament, as for a tea-tray.
Of art, and the arts, he had been taught nothing. He had never seen a
great picture or statue, nor heard great orchestral or solo music; and
he had no idea that architecture was an art and emotional, though it
moved him in a very peculiar fashion. Of the art of English literature,
or of any other literature, he had likewise been taught nothing. But he
knew the meaning of a few obsolete words in a few plays of Shakespeare.
He had not learnt how to express himself orally in any language, but
through hard drilling he was so genuinely erudite in accidence and
syntax that he could parse and analyse with superb assurance the most
magnificent sentences of Milton, Virgil, and Racine. This skill,
together with an equal skill in utilising the elementary properties of
numbers and geometrical figures, was the most brilliant achievement of
his long apprenticeship.
And now his education was finished. It had cost his father twenty-eight
shillings a term, or four guineas a year, and no trouble. In younger
days his father had spent more money and far more personal attention on
the upbringing of a dog. His father had enjoyed success with dogs
through treating them as individuals. But it had not happened to him,
nor to anybody in authority, to treat Edwin as an individual.
Nevertheless it must not be assumed that Edwin's father was a callous
and conscienceless brute, and Edwin a martyr of neglect. Old Clayhanger
was, on the contrary, an average upright and respectable parent who had
given his son a thoroughly sound education, and Edwin had had the good
fortune to receive that thoroughly sound education, as a preliminary to
entering the world.
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FOUR.
He was very far from realising the imperfections of his equipment for
the grand entry; but still he was not without uneasiness. In particular
the conversation incident to the canal-boat wager was disturbing him.
It amazed him, as he reflected, that he should have remained, to such an
advanced age, in a state of ignorance concerning the origin of the clay
from which the crocks of his native district were manufactured. That
the Sunday should have been able to inform him did not cause him any
shame, for he guessed from the peculiar eager tone of voice in which the
facts had been delivered, that the Sunday was merely retailing some
knowledge recently acquired by chance. He knew all the Sunday's tones
of voice; and he also was well aware that the Sunday's brain was not on
the whole better stored than his own. Further, the Sunday was satisfied
with his bit of accidental knowledge. Edwin was not. Edwin wanted to
know why, if the clay for making earthenware was not got in the Five
Towns, the Five Towns had become the great seat of the manufacture. Why
were not pots made in the South, where the clay came from? He could not
think of any answer to this enigma, nor of any means of arriving by
himself at an answer. The feeling was that he ought to have been able
to arrive at the answer as at the answer to an equation.
He did not definitely blame his education; he did not think clearly
about the thing at all. But, as a woman with a vague discomfort dimly
fears cancer, so he dimly feared that there might be something
fundamentally unsound in this sound education of his. And he had
remorse for all the shirking that he had been guilty of during all his
years at school. He shook his head solemnly at the immense and nearly
universal shirking that continually went on. He could only acquit three
or four boys, among the hundreds he had known, of the shameful sin. And
all that he could say in favour of himself was that there were many
worse than Edwin Clayhanger. Not merely the boys, but the masters, were
sinners. Only two masters could he unreservedly respect as having acted
conscientiously up to their pretensions, and one of these was an
unpleasant brute. All the cleverness, the ingenuities, the fakes, the
insincerities, the incapacitaties, the vanities, and the dishonesties of
the rest stood revealed to him, and he judged them by the mere essential
force of character alone. A schoolmaster might as well attempt to
deceive God as a boy who is watching him every day with the inhuman eye
of youth.
"All this must end now!" he said to himself, meaning all that could be
included in the word "shirk."
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FIVE.
He was splendidly serious. He was as splendidly serious as a reformer.
By a single urgent act of thought he would have made himself a man, and
changed imperfection into perfection. He desired--and there was real
passion in his desire--to do his best, to exhaust himself in doing his
best, in living according to his conscience. He did not know of what he
was capable, nor what he could achieve. Achievement was not the matter
of his desire; but endeavour, honest and terrific endeavour. He
admitted to himself his shortcomings, and he did not under-estimate the
difficulties that lay before him; but he said, thinking of his father:
"Surely he'll see I mean business! Surely he's bound to give in when he
sees how much in earnest I am!" He was convinced, almost, that
passionate faith could move mountainous fathers.
"I'll show 'em!" he muttered.
And he meant that he would show the world... He was honouring the
world; he was paying the finest homage to it. In that head of his a
flame burnt that was like an altar-fire, a miraculous and beautiful
phenomenon, than which nothing is more miraculous nor more beautiful
over the whole earth. Whence had it suddenly sprung, that flame? After
years of muddy inefficiency, of contentedness with the second-rate and
the dishonest, that flame astoundingly bursts forth, from a hidden,
unheeded spark that none had ever thought to blow upon. It bursts forth
out of a damp jungle of careless habits and negligence that could not
possibly have fed it. There is little to encourage it. The very
architecture of the streets shows that environment has done naught for
it: ragged brickwork, walls finished anyhow with saggars and slag;
narrow uneven alleys leading to higgledy-piggledy workshops and kilns;
cottages transformed into factories and factories into cottages,
clumsily, hastily, because nothing matters so long as "it will do;"
everywhere something forced to fulfil, badly, the function of something
else; in brief, the reign of the slovenly makeshift, shameless, filthy,
and picturesque. Edwin himself seemed no tabernacle for that singular
flame. He was not merely untidy and dirty--at his age such defects
might have excited in a sane observer uneasiness by their absence; but
his gestures and his gait were untidy. He did not mind how he walked.
All his sprawling limbs were saying: "What does it matter, so long as we
get there?" The angle of the slatternly bag across his shoulders was an
insult to the flame. And yet the flame burned with serene and terrible
pureness.
It was surprising that no one saw it passing along the mean, black,
smoke-palled streets that huddle about Saint Luke's Church. Sundry
experienced and fat old women were standing or sitting at their cottage
doors, one or two smoking cutties. But even they, who in child-bed and
at gravesides had been at the very core of life for long years, they,
who saw more than most, could only see a fresh lad passing along, with
fair hair and a clear complexion, and gawky knees and elbows, a fierce,
rapt expression on his straightforward, good-natured face. Some knew
that it was "Clayhanger's lad," a nice-behaved young gentleman, and the
spitten image of his poor mother. They all knew what a lad is--the feel
of his young skin under his "duds," the capricious freedom of his
movements, his sudden madnesses and shoutings and tendernesses, and the
exceeding power of his unconscious wistful charm. They could divine all
that in a glance. But they could not see the mysterious and holy flame
of the desire for self-perfection blazing within that tousled head. And
if Edwin had suspected that anybody could indeed perceive it, he would
have whipped it out for shame, though the repudiation had meant
everlasting death. Such is youth in the Five Towns, if not elsewhere.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER THREE.
ENTRY INTO THE WORLD.
Edwin came steeply out of the cinder-strewn back streets by Woodisun
Bank [hill] into Duck Square, nearly at the junction of Trafalgar Road
and Wedgwood Street. A few yards down Woodisun Bank, cocks and hens
were scurrying, with necks horizontal, from all quarters, and were even
flying, to the call of a little old woman who threw grain from the top
step of her porch. On the level of the narrow pavement stood an immense
constable, clad in white trousers, with a gun under his arm for the
killing of mad dogs; he was talking to the woman, and their two heads
were exactly at the same height. On a pair of small double gates near
the old woman's cottage were painted the words, "Steam Printing Works.
No admittance except on business." And from as far as Duck Square could
be heard the puff-puff which proved the use of steam in this works to
which idlers and mere pleasure-seekers were forbidden access.
Duck Square was one of the oldest, if the least imposing, of all the
public places in Bursley. It had no traffic across it, being only a
sloping rectangle, like a vacant lot, with Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood
Street for its exterior sides, and no outlet on its inner sides. The
buildings on those inner sides were low and humble and, as it were,
withdrawn from the world, the chief of them being the ancient Duck Inn,
where the hand-bell ringers used to meet. But Duck Square looked out
upon the very birth of Trafalgar Road, that wide, straight thoroughfare,
whose name dates it, which had been invented, in the lifetime of a few
then living, to unite Bursley with Hanbridge. It also looked out upon
the birth of several old pack-horse roads which Trafalgar Road had
supplanted. One of these was Woodisun Bank, that wound slowly up hill
and down dale, apparently always choosing the longest and hardest route,
to Hanbridge; and another was Aboukir Street, formerly known as Warm
Lane, that reached Hanbridge in a manner equally difficult and
unhurried. At the junction of Trafalgar Road and Aboukir Street stood
the Dragon Hotel, once the great posting-house of the town, from which
all roads started. Duck Square had watched coaches and waggons stop at
and start from the Dragon Hotel for hundreds of years. It had seen the
Dragon rebuilt in brick and stone, with fine bay windows on each storey,
in early Georgian times, and it had seen even the new structure become
old and assume the dignity of age. Duck Square could remember strings
of pack-mules driven by women, `trapesing' in zigzags down Woodisun Bank
and Warm Lane, and occasionally falling, with awful smashes of the
crockery they carried, in the deep, slippery, scarce passable mire of
the first slants into the valley. Duck Square had witnessed the slow
declension of these roads into mere streets, and slum streets at that,
and the death of all mules, and the disappearance of all coaches and all
neighing and prancing and whipcracking romance; while Trafalgar Road,
simply because it was straight and broad and easily graded, flourished
with toll-bars and a couple of pair-horsed trams that ran on lines. And
many people were proud of those cushioned trams; but perhaps they had
never known that coach-drivers used to tell each other about the state
of the turn at the bottom of Warm Lane (since absurdly renamed in honour
of an Egyptian battle), and that Woodisun Bank (now unnoticed save by
doubtful characters, policemen, and schoolboys) was once regularly
`taken' by four horses at a canter. The history of human manners is
crunched and embedded in the very macadam of that part of the borough,
and the burgesses unheedingly tread it down every day and talk gloomily
about the ugly smoky prose of industrial manufacture. And yet the
Dragon Hotel, safely surviving all revolutions by the mighty virtue and
attraction of ale, stands before them to remind them of the
interestingness of existence.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
At the southern corner of Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood Street, with Duck
Square facing it, the Dragon Hotel and Warm Lane to its right, and
Woodisun Bank creeping inconspicuously down to its left, stood a
three-storey building consisting of house and shop, the frontage being
in Wedgwood Street. Over the double-windowed shop was a discreet
signboard in gilt letters, "D. Clayhanger, Printer and Stationer," but
above the first floor was a later and much larger sign, with the single
word, "Steam-printing." All the brickwork of the facade was painted
yellow, and had obviously been painted yellow many times; the woodwork
of the plate-glass windows was a very dark green approaching black. The
upper windows were stumpy, almost square, some dirty and some clean and
curtained, with prominent sills and architraves. The line of the
projecting spouting at the base of the roof was slightly curved through
subsidence; at either end of the roof-ridge rose twin chimneys each with
three salmon-coloured chimney-pots. The gigantic word `Steam-printing'
could be seen from the windows of the Dragon, from the porch of the big
Wesleyan chapel higher up the slope, from the Conservative Club and the
playground at the top of the slope; and as for Duck Square itself, it
could see little else. The left-hand shop window was alluringly set out
with the lighter apparatus of writing and reading, and showed
incidentally several rosy pictures of ideal English maidens; that to the
right was grim and heavy with ledgers, inks, and variegated specimens of
steam-printing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
In the wedge-shaped doorway between the windows stood two men, one
middle-aged and one old, one bareheaded and the other with a beaver hat,
engaged in conversation. They were talking easily, pleasantly, with
free gestures, the younger looking down in deferential smiles at the
elder, and the elder looking up benignantly at the younger. You could
see that, having begun with a business matter, they had quitted it for a
topic of the hour. But business none the less went forward, the shop
functioned, the presses behind the shop were being driven by steam as
advertised; a customer emerged, and was curtly nodded at by the
proprietor as he squeezed past; a girl with a small flannel apron over a
large cotton apron went timidly into the shop. The trickling, calm
commerce of a provincial town was proceeding, bit being added to bit and
item to item, until at the week's end a series of apparent nothings had
swollen into the livelihood of near half a score of people. And nobody
perceived how interesting it was, this interchange of activities, this
ebb and flow of money, this sluggish rise and fall of reputations and
fortunes, stretching out of one century into another and towards a
third! Printing had been done at that corner, though not by steam,
since the time of the French Revolution. Bibles and illustrated herbals
had been laboriously produced by hand at that corner, and hawked on the
backs of asses all over the county; and nobody heard romance in the
puffing of the hidden steam-engine multiplying catalogues and billheads
on the self-same spot at the rate of hundreds an hour.
The younger and bigger of the two men chatting in the doorway was Darius
Clayhanger, Edwin's father, and the first printer to introduce steam
into Bursley. His age was then under forty-five, but he looked more.
He was dressed in black, with an ample shirt-front and a narrow black
cravat tied in an angular bow; the wristbands were almost tight on the
wrists, and, owing to the shortness of the alpaca coat-sleeves, they
were very visible even as Darius Clayhanger stood, with his two hands
deep in the horizontal pockets of his `full-fall' trousers. They were
not precisely dirty, these wristbands, nor was the shirt-front, nor the
turned-down pointed collar, but all the linen looked as though it would
scarcely be wearable the next day. Clayhanger's linen invariably looked
like that, not dirty and not clean; and further, he appeared to wear
eternally the same suit, ever on the point of being done for and never
being done for. The trousers always had marked transverse creases; the
waistcoat always showed shiningly the outline of every article in the
pockets thereof, and it always had a few stains down the front (and
never more than a few), and the lowest button insecure. The coat,
faintly discoloured round the collar and fretted at the cuffs, fitted
him easily and loosely like the character of an old crony; it was as if
it had grown up with him, and had expanded with his girth. His head was
a little bald on the top, but there was still a great deal of mixed
brown and greyish hair at the back and the sides, and the moustache,
hanging straight down with an effect recalling the mouth of a seal, was
plenteous and defiant--a moustache of character, contradicting the full
placidity of the badly shaved chin. Darius Clayhanger had a habit, when
reflective or fierce, of biting with his upper teeth as far down as he
could on the lower lip; this trick added emphasis to the moustache. He
stood, his feet in their clumsy boots planted firmly about sixteen
inches apart, his elbows sticking out, and his head bent sideways,
listening to and answering his companion with mien now eager, now
roguish, now distinctly respectful.
The older man, Mr Shushions, was apparently very old. He was one of
those men of whom one says in conclusion that they are very old. He
seemed to be so fully occupied all the time in conducting those physical
operations which we perform without thinking of them, that each in his
case became a feat. He balanced himself on his legs with conscious
craft; he directed carefully his shaking and gnarled hand to his beard
in order to stroke it. When he collected his thoughts into a sentence
and uttered it in his weak, quavering voice, he did something wonderful;
he listened closely, as though to an imperfectly acquired foreign
language; and when he was not otherwise employed, he gave attention to
the serious business of breathing. He wore a black silk stock, in a
style even more antique than his remarkable headgear, and his trousers
were very tight. He had survived into another and a more fortunate age
than his own.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
Edwin, his heavy bag on his shoulders, found the doorway blocked by
these two. He hesitated with a diffident charming smile, feeling, as he
often did in front of his father, that he ought to apologise for his
existence, and yet fiercely calling himself an ass for such a sentiment.
Darius Clayhanger nodded at him carelessly, but not without a
surprising benevolence, over his shoulder.
"This is him," said Darius briefly.
Edwin was startled to catch a note of pride in his father's voice.
Little Mr Shushions turned slowly and looked up at Edwin's face (for he
was shorter even than the boy), and gradually acquainted himself with
the fact that Edwin was the son of his father.
"Is this thy son, Darius?" he asked; and his ancient eyes were shining.
Edwin had scarcely ever heard any one address his father by his
Christian name.
Darius nodded; and then, seeing the old man's hand creeping out towards
him, Edwin pulled off his cap and took the hand, and was struck by the
hot smooth brittleness of the skin and the earnest tremulous weakness of
the caressing grasp. Edwin had never seen Mr Shushions before.
"Nay, nay, my boy," trembled the old man, "don't bare thy head to me ...
not to me! I'm one o' th' ould sort. Eh, I'm rare glad to see thee!"
He kept Edwin's hand, and stared long at him, with his withered face
transfigured by solemn emotion. Slowly he turned towards Darius, and
pulled himself together. "Thou'st begotten a fine lad, Darius! ... a
fine, honest lad!"
"So-so!" said Darius gruffly, whom Edwin was amazed to see in a state of
agitation similar to that of Mr Shushions.
The men gazed at each other; Edwin looked at the ground and other
unresponsive objects.
"Edwin," his father said abruptly, "run and ask Big James for th' proof
of that Primitive Methodist hymn-paper; there's a good lad."
And Edwin hastened through the shadowy shop as if loosed from a
captivity, and in passing threw his satchel down on a bale of goods.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
He comprehended nothing of the encounter; neither as to the origin of
the old man's status in his father's esteem, nor as to the cause of his
father's strange emotion. He regarded the old man impatiently as an
aged simpleton, probably over pious, certainly connected with the
Primitive Methodists. His father had said `There's a good lad' almost
cajolingly. And this was odd; for, though nobody could be more
persuasively agreeable than his father when he chose, the occasions when
he cared to exert his charm, especially over his children, were
infrequent, and getting more so. Edwin also saw something symbolically
ominous in his being sent direct to the printing office. It was no
affair of his to go to the printing office. He particularly did not
want to go to the printing office.
However, he met Big James, with flowing beard and flowing apron,
crossing the yard. Big James was brushing crumbs from the beard.
"Father wants the proof of some hymn-paper--I don't know what," he said.
"I was just coming--"
"So was I, Mister Edwin," replied Big James in his magnificent voice,
and with his curious humorous smile. And he held up a sheet of paper in
his immense hand, and strode majestically on towards the shop.
Here was another detail that struck the boy. Always Big James had
addressed him as `Master Edwin' or `Master Clayhanger.' Now it was
`Mister.' He had left school. Big James was, of course, aware of that,
and Big James had enough finesse and enough gentle malice to change
instantly the `master' to `mister.' Edwin was scarcely sure if Big
James was not laughing at him. He could not help thinking that Big
James had begun so promptly to call him `mister' because the foreman
compositor expected that the son of the house would at once begin to
take a share in the business. He could not help thinking that his
father must have so informed Big James. And all this vaguely disturbed
Edwin, and reminded him of his impending battle and of the complex
forces marshalled against him. And his hand, wandering in his pockets,
touched that unfortunate report which stated that he had lost one place
during the term.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SIX.
He lingered in the blue-paved yard, across which cloud-shadows swept
continually, and then Big James came back and spectacularly ascended the
flight of wooden steps to the printing office, and disappeared. Edwin
knew that he must return to the shop to remove his bag, for his father
would assuredly reprimand him if he found it where it had been untidily
left. He sidled, just like an animal, to the doorway, and then slipped
up to the counter, behind the great mahogany case of `artists'
materials.' His father and the old man were within the shop now, and
Edwin overheard that they were discussing a topic that had lately been
rife in religious circles, namely, Sir Henry Thompson's ingenious device
for scientifically testing the efficacy of prayer, known as the `Prayer
Gauge.' The scheme was to take certain hospitals and to pray for the
patients in particular wards, leaving other wards unprayed for, and then
to tabulate and issue the results.
Mr Shushions profoundly resented the employment of such a dodge; the
mere idea of it shocked him, as being blasphemous; and Darius Clayhanger
deferentially and feelingly agreed with him, though Edwin had at least
once heard his father refer to the topic with the amused and
non-committal impartiality of a man who only went to chapel when he
specially felt like going.
"I've preached in the pulpits o' our Connexion," said Mr Shushions with
solemn, quavering emotion, "for over fifty year, as you know. But I'd
ne'er gi' out another text if Primitives had ought to do wi' such a
flouting o' th' Almighty. Nay, I'd go down to my grave dumb afore God!"
He had already been upset by news of a movement that was on foot for
deferring Anniversary Sermons from August to September, so that people
should be more free to go away for a holiday, and collections be more
fruitful. What! Put off God's ordinance, to enable chapel-members to
go `a-wakesing'! Monstrous! Yet September was tried, in spite of Mr
Shushions, and when even September would not work satisfactorily, God's
ordinance was shifted boldly to May, in order to catch people, and their
pockets well before the demoralisation incident to holidays.
Edwin thought that his father and the mysterious old man would talk for
ever, and timorously he exposed himself to obtain possession of his
satchel, hoping to escape unseen. But Mr Shushions saw him, and called
him, and took his hand again.
"Eh, my boy," he said, feebly shaking the hand, "I do pray as you'll
grow up to be worthy o' your father. That's all as I pray for."
Edwin had never considered his father as an exemplar. He was a just and
unmerciful judge of his father, against whom he had a thousand
grievances. And in his heart he resentfully despised Mr Shushions, and
decided again that he was a simpleton, and not a very tactful one. But
then he saw a round yellow tear slowly form in the red rim of the old
man's eye and run crookedly down that wrinkled cheek. And his impatient
scorn expired. The mere sight of him, Edwin, had brought the old man to
weeping! And the tear was so genuine, so convincing, so majestic that
it induced in Edwin a blank humility. He was astounded, mystified; but
he was also humbled. He himself was never told, and he never learnt,
the explanation of that epic tear.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FOUR.
THE CHILD-MAN.
The origin of the tear on the aged cheek of Mr Shushions went back
about forty years, and was embedded in the infancy of Darius Clayhanger.
The earliest memory of Darius Clayhanger had to do with the capital
letters Q W and S. Even as the first steam-printer in Bursley, even as
the father of a son who had received a thoroughly sound middle-class
education, he never noticed a capital Q W or S without recalling the
Widow Susan's school, where he had wonderingly learnt the significance
of those complicated characters. The school consisted of the entire
ground floor of her cottage, namely, one room, of which the far corner
was occupied by a tiny winding staircase that led to the ancient widow's
bedchamber. The furniture comprised a few low forms for scholars, a
table, and a chair; and there were some brilliant coloured prints on the
whitewashed walls. At this school Darius acquired a knowledge of the
alphabet, and from the alphabet passed to Reading-Made-Easy, and then to
the Bible. He made such progress that the widow soon singled him out
for honour. He was allowed the high and envied privilege of raking the
ashes from under the fire-place and carrying them to the ash-pit, which
ash-pit was vast and lofty, being the joint production of many cottages.
To reach the summit of the ash-pit, and thence to fling backwards down
its steep sides all assailants who challenged your supremacy, was a
precious joy. The battles of the ash-pit, however, were not battles of
giants, as no children had leisure for ash-carrying after the age of
seven. A still greater honour accorded to Darius was permission to sit,
during lessons, on the topmost visible step of the winding stair. The
widow Susan, having taught Darius to read brilliantly, taught him to
knit, and he would knit stockings for his father, mother, and sister.
At the age of seven, his education being complete, he was summoned into
the world. It is true that he could neither write nor deal with the
multiplication table; but there were always night-schools which studious
adults of seven and upwards might attend if business permitted.
Further, there was the Sunday school, which Darius had joyously
frequented since the age of three, and which he had no intention of
leaving. As he grew older the Sunday school became more and more
enchanting to him. Sunday morning was the morning which he lived for
during six days; it was the morning when his hair was brushed and
combed, and perfumed with a delightful oil, whose particular fragrance
he remembered throughout his life. At Sunday school he was petted and
caressed. His success at Sunday school was shining. He passed over the
heads of bigger boys, and at the age of six he was in a Bible class.
Upon hearing that Darius was going out into the world, the
superintendent of the Sunday school, a grave whiskered young man of
perhaps thirty, led him one morning out of the body of the Primitive
Methodist Chapel which served as schoolroom before and after chapel
service, up into the deserted gallery of the chapel, and there seated
him on a stair, and knelt on the stair below him, and caressed his head,
and called him a good boy, and presented him with an old battered Bible.
This volume was the most valuable thing that Darius had ever possessed.
He ran all the way home with it, half suffocated by his triumph.
Sunday school prizes had not then been invented. The young
superintendent of the Sunday school was Mr Shushions.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
The man Darius was first taken to work by his mother. It was the winter
of 1835, January. They passed through the marketplace of the town of
Turnhill where they lived. Turnhill lies a couple of miles north of
Bursley. One side of the market-place was barricaded with stacks of
coal, and the other with loaves of a species of rye and straw bread.
This coal and these loaves were being served out by meticulous and
haughty officials, all invisibly, braided with red-tape, to a crowd of
shivering, moaning, and weeping wretches, men, women and children--the
basis of the population of Turnhill. Although they, were all
endeavouring to make a noise they, made scarcely any noise, from mere
lack of strength. Nothing could be heard, under the implacable bright
sky, but faint ghosts of sound, as though people were sighing and crying
from within the vacuum of a huge glass bell.
The next morning, at half-past five, Darius began his career in earnest.
He was `mould-runner' to a `muffin-maker,' a muffin being not a
comestible but a small plate, fashioned by its maker on a mould. The
business of Darius was to run as hard as he could with the mould, and a
newly, created plate adhering thereto, into the drying-stove. This
`stove' was a room lined with shelves, and having a red-hot stove and
stove-pipe in the middle. As no man of seven could reach the upper
shelves, a pair of steps was provided for Darius, and up these he had to
scamper. Each mould with its plate had to be leaned carefully against
the wall and if the soft clay of a new-born plate was damaged, Darius
was knocked down. The atmosphere outside the stove was chill, but owing
to the heat of the stove, Darius was obliged to work half naked. His
sweat ran down his cheeks, and down his chest, and down his back, making
white channels, and lastly it soaked his hair.
When there were no moulds to be sprinted into the drying-stove, and no
moulds to be carried less rapidly out, Darius was engaged in
clay-wedging. That is to say, he took a piece of raw clay weighing more
than himself, cut it in two with a wire, raised one half above his head
and crashed it down with all his force upon the other half, and he
repeated the process until the clay was thoroughly soft and even in
texture. At a later period it was discovered that hydraulic machinery
could perform this operation more easily and more effectually than the
brawny arms of a man of seven. At eight o'clock in the evening Darius
was told that he had done enough for that day, and that he must arrive
at five sharp the next morning to light the fire, before his master the
muffin-maker began to work. When he inquired how he was to light the
fire his master kicked him jovially on the thigh and suggested that he
should ask another mould-runner. His master was not a bad man at heart,
it was said, but on Tuesdays, after Sunday, and Saint Monday, masters
were apt to be capricious.
Darius reached home at a quarter to nine, having eaten nothing but bread
all day. Somehow he had lapsed into the child again. His mother took
him on her knee, and wrapped her sacking apron round his ragged clothes,
and cried over him and cried into his supper of porridge, and undressed
him and put him to bed. But he could not sleep easily because he was
afraid of being late the next morning.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
And the next morning wandering about the yards of the manufactory in a
storm of icy sleet a little before five o'clock, he learnt from a more
experienced companion that nobody would provide him with kindling for
his fire, that on the contrary everybody who happened to be on the place
at that hour would unite to prevent him from getting kindling, and that
he must steal it or expect to be thrashed before six o'clock. Near them
a vast kiln of ware in process of firing showed a white flaming glow at
each of its mouths in the black winter darkness. Darius's mentor crept
up to the archway of the great hovel which protected the kiln, and
pointed like a conspirator to the figure of the guardian fireman dozing
near his monster. The boy had the handle-less remains of an old spade,
and with it he crept into the hovel, dangerously abstracted fire from
one of the scorching mouths, and fled therewith, and the fireman never
stirred. Then Darius, to whom the mentor kindly lent his spade,
attempted to do the same, but being inexpert woke the fireman, who held
him spellbound by his roaring voice and then flung him like a sack of
potatoes bodily into the slush of the yard, and the spade after him.
Happily the mentor, whose stove was now alight, lent fire to Darius, so
that Darius's stove too was cheerfully burning when his master came.
And Darius was too excited to feel fatigue.
By six o'clock on Saturday night Darius had earned a shilling for his
week's work. But he could only possess himself of the shilling by going
to a magnificent public-house with his master the muffin-maker. This
was the first time that he had ever been inside a public-house. The
place was crowded with men, women, and children eating the most lovely,
hot rolls and drinking beer, in an atmosphere exquisitely warm. And
behind a high counter a stout jolly man was counting piles and piles and
piles of silver. Darius's master, in company, with other boys' masters,
gave this stout man four sovereigns to change, and it was an hour before
he changed them. Meanwhile Darius was instructed that he must eat a
roll like the rest, together with cheese. Never had he tasted anything
so luscious. He had a match with his mentor, as to which of them could
spin out his roll the longer, honestly chewing all the time; and he won.
Some one gave him half a glass of beer. At half-past seven he received
his shilling which consisted of a sixpenny-piece and four pennies; and
leaving the gay, public-house, pushed his way through a crowd of tearful
women with babies in their arms at the doors, and went home. And such
was the attraction of the Sunday school that he was there the next
morning, with scented hair, two minutes before the opening.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
In about a year Darius's increasing knowledge of the world enabled him
to rise in it. He became a handle-maker in another manufactory, and
also he went about with the pride of one who could form the letters of
the alphabet with a pen. In his new work he had to put a bit of clay
between two moulds, and then force the top mould on to the bottom one by
means of his stomach which it was necessary to press downwards and at
the same time to wriggle with a peculiar movement. The workman to whom
he was assigned, his new `master,' attached these handles, with strange
rapid skill, to beer-mugs. For Darius the labour was much lighter than
that of mould-running and clay-wedging, and the pay was somewhat higher.
But there were minor disadvantages. He descended by twenty steps to
his toil, and worked in a long cellar which never received any air
except by way of the steps and a passage, and never any daylight at all.
Its sole illumination was a stove used for drying. The `throwers'' and
the `turners'' rooms were also subterranean dungeons. When in full
activity all these stinking cellars were full of men, boys, and young
women, working close together in a hot twilight. Certain boys were
trained contrabandists of beer, and beer came as steadily into the
dungeons as though it had been laid on by a main pipe. It was not
honourable even on the part of a young woman, to refuse beer,
particularly when the beer happened to arrive in the late afternoon. On
such occasions young men and women would often entirely omit to go home
of a night, and seasoned men of the world aged eight, on descending into
the dungeons early the next morning, would have a full view of
pandemonium, and they would witness during the day salutary scenes of
remorse, and proofs of the existence of a profound belief in the
homeopathic properties of beer.
But perhaps the worst drawback of Darius's new position was the long and
irregular hours, due partly to the influences of Saint Monday and of the
scenes above indicated but not described, and partly to the fact that
the employes were on piece-work and entirely unhampered by grandmotherly
legislation. The result was that six days' work was generally done in
four. And as the younger the workman the earlier he had to start in the
morning, Darius saw scarcely enough of his bed. It was not of course to
be expected that a self-supporting man of the world should rigorously
confine himself to an eight-hour day or even a twelve-hour day, but
Darius's day would sometimes stretch to eighteen and nineteen hours:
which on hygienic grounds could not be unreservedly defended.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
One Tuesday evening his master, after three days of debauch, ordered him
to be at work at three o'clock the next morning. He quickly and even
eagerly agreed, for he was already intimate with his master's rope-lash.
He reached home at ten o'clock on an autumn night, and went to bed and
to sleep. He woke up with a start, in the dark. There was no watch or
clock in the house, from which nearly all the furniture had gradually
vanished, but he knew it must be already after three o'clock; and he
sprang up and rushed out. Of course he had not undressed; his life was
too strenuous for mere formalities. The stars shone above him as he ran
along, wondering whether after all, though late, he could by
unprecedented effort make the ordained number of handles before his
master tumbled into the cellar at five o'clock.
When he had run a mile he met some sewage men on their rounds, who in
reply, to his question told him that the hour was half after midnight.
He dared not risk a return to home and bed, for within two and a half
hours he must be at work. He wandered aimlessly over the surface of the
earth until he came to a tile-works, more or less unenclosed, whose
primitive ovens showed a glare. He ventured within, and in spite of
himself sat down on the ground near one of those heavenly ovens. And
then he wanted to get up again, for he could feel the strong breath of
his enemy, sleep. But he could not get up. In a state of terror he
yielded himself to his enemy. Shameful cowardice on the part of a man
now aged nine! God, however, is merciful, and sent to him an angel in
the guise of a night-watchman, who kicked him into wakefulness and off
the place. He ran on limping, beneath the stellar systems, and reached
his work at half-past four o'clock.
Although he had never felt so exhausted in his long life, he set to work
with fury. Useless! When his master arrived he had scarcely got
through the preliminaries. He dully faced his master in the narrow
stifling cellar, lit by candles impaled on nails and already peopled by
the dim figures of boys, girls, and a few men. His master was of
taciturn habit and merely told him to kneel down. He knelt. Two bigger
boys turned hastily from their work to snatch a glimpse of the affair.
The master moved to the back of the cellar and took from a box a piece
of rope an inch thick and clogged with clay. At the same moment a
companion offered him, in silence, a tin with a slim neck, out of which
he drank deep; it contained a pint of porter owing on loan from the
previous day. When the master came in due course with the rope to do
justice upon the sluggard he found the lad fallen forward and breathing
heavily and regularly. Darius had gone to sleep. He was awakened with
some violence, but the public opinion of the dungeon saved him from a
torn shirt and a bloody back.
This was Darius's last day on a pot-bank. The next morning he and his
went in procession to the Bastille, as the place was called. His
father, having been too prominent and too independent in a strike, had
been black-listed by every manufacturer in the district; and Darius,
though nine, could not keep the family.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FIVE.
MR. SHUSHIONS'S TEAR EXPLAINED.
The Bastille was on the top of a hill about a couple of miles long, and
the journey thither was much lengthened by the desire of the family to
avoid the main road. They were all intensely ashamed; Darius was
ashamed to tears, and did not know why; even his little sister wept and
had to be carried, not because she was shoeless and had had nothing to
eat, but because she was going to the Ba-ba-bastille; she had no notion
what the place was. It proved to be the largest building that Darius
had ever seen; and indeed it was the largest in the district; they stood
against its steep sides like flies against a kennel. Then there was
rattling of key-bunches, and the rasping voices of sour officials, who
did not inquire if they would like a meal after their stroll. And they
were put into a cellar and stripped and washed and dressed in other
people's clothes, and then separated, amid tears. And Darius was
pitched into a large crowd of other boys, all clothed like himself. He
now understood the reason for shame; it was because he could have no
distinctive clothes of his own, because he had somehow lost his identity
All the boys had a sullen, furtive glance, and when they spoke it was in
whispers.
In the low room where the boys were assembled there fell a silence, and
Darius heard some one whisper that the celebrated boy who had run away
and been caught would be flogged before supper. Down the long room ran
a long table. Some one brought in three candles in tin candlesticks and
set them near the end of this table. Then somebody else brought in a
pickled birch-rod, dripping with the salt water from which it had been
taken, and also a small square table. Then came some officials, and a
clergyman, and then, surpassing the rest in majesty, the governor of the
Bastille, a terrible man. The governor made a speech about the crime of
running away from the Bastille, and when he had spoken for a fair time,
the clergyman talked in the same sense; and then a captured tiger,
dressed like a boy, with darting fierce eyes, was dragged in by two men,
and laid face down on the square table, and four boys were commanded to
step forward and hold tightly the four members of this tiger. And, his
clothes having previously been removed as far as his waist, his breeches
were next pulled down his legs. Then the rod was raised and it
descended swishing, and blood began to flow; but far more startling than
the blood were the shrill screams of the tiger; they were so loud and
deafening that the spectators could safely converse under their shelter.
The boys in charge of the victim had to cling hard and grind their
teeth in the effort to keep him prone. As the blows succeeded each
other, Darius became more and more ashamed. The physical spectacle did
not sicken nor horrify him, for he was a man of wide experience; but he
had never before seen flogging by lawful authority. Flogging in the
workshop was different, a private if sanguinary affair between free
human beings. This ritualistic and cold-blooded torture was infinitely
more appalling in its humiliation. The screaming grew feebler, then
ceased; then the blows ceased, and the unconscious infant (cured of
being a tiger) was carried away leaving a trail of red drops along the
floor.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
After this, supper was prepared on the long table, and the clergyman
called down upon it the blessing of God, and enjoined the boys to be
thankful, and departed in company with the governor. Darius, who had
not tasted all day, could not eat. The flogging had not nauseated him,
but the bread and the skilly revolted his pampered tastes. Never had
he, with all his experience, seen nor smelt anything so foully
disgusting. When supper was completed, a minor official interceded with
the Almighty in various ways for ten minutes, and at last the boys were
marched upstairs to bed. They all slept in one room. The night also
could be set down in words, but must not be, lest the setting-down
should be disastrous...
Darius knew that he was ruined; he knew that he was a workhouse boy for
evermore, and that the bright freedom of sixteen hours a day in a cellar
was lost to him for evermore. He was now a prisoner, branded, hopeless.
He would never be able to withstand the influences that had closed
around him and upon him. He supposed that he should become desperate,
become a tiger, and then...
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
But the following afternoon he was forcibly reclothed in his own
beautiful and beloved rags, and was pushed out of the Bastille, and
there he saw his pale father and his mother, and his little sister, and
another man. And his mother was on her knees in the cold autumn
sunshine, and hysterically clasping the knees of the man, and weeping;
and the man was trying to raise her, and the man was weeping too.
Darius wept. The man was Mr Shushions. Somehow, in a way that Darius
comprehended not, Mr Shushions had saved them. Mr Shushions, in a
beaver tall-hat and with an apron rolled round his waist under his coat,
escorted them back to their house, into which some fresh furniture had
been brought. And Darius knew that a situation was waiting for his
father. And further, Mr Shushions, by his immense mysterious power,
found a superb situation for Darius himself as a printer's devil. All
this because Mr Shushions, as superintendent of a Sunday school, was
emotionally interested in the queer, harsh boy who had there picked up
the art of writing so quickly.
Such was the origin of the tear that ran down Mr Shushions's cheek when
he beheld Edwin, well-nourished, well-dressed and intelligent, the son
of Darius the successful steam-printer. Mr Shushions's tear was the
tear of the creator looking upon his creation and marvelling at it. Mr
Shushions loved Darius as only the benefactor can love the benefited.
He had been out of the district for over thirty years, and, having
returned there to die, the wonder of what he had accomplished by merely
saving a lad from the certain perdition of a prolonged stay in the
workhouse, struck him blindingly in the face and dazzled him.
Darius had never spoken to a soul of his night in the Bastille. All his
infancy was his own fearful secret. His life, seen whole, had been a
miracle. But none knew that except himself and Mr Shushions.
Assuredly Edwin never even faintly suspected it. To Edwin Mr Shushions
was nothing but a feeble and tedious old man.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SIX.
IN THE HOUSE.
To return to Edwin. On that Friday afternoon of the breaking-up he was,
in the local phrase, at a loose end. That is, he had no task, no
programme, and no definite desires. Not knowing, when he started out in
the morning, whether school would formally end before or after the
dinner-hour, he had taken his dinner with him, as usual, and had eaten
it at Oldcastle. Thus, though the family dinner had not begun when he
reached home, he had no share in it, partly because he was not hungry,
and partly because he was shy about having left school. The fact that
he had left school affected him as he was affected by the wearing of a
new suit for the first time, or by the cutting of his hair after a
prolonged neglect of the barber. It inspired him with a wish to avoid
his kind, and especially his sisters, Maggie and Clara. Clara might
make some facetious remark. Edwin could never forget the Red Indian
glee with which Clara had danced round him when for the first time--and
quite unprepared for the exquisite shock--she had seen him in long
trousers. There was also his father. He wanted to have a plain talk
with his father--he knew that he would not be at peace until he had had
that talk--and yet in spite of himself he had carefully kept out of his
father's way during all the afternoon, save for a moment when, strolling
with affected nonchalance up to Darius's private desk in the shop, he
had dropped thereon his school report, and strolled off again.
Towards six o'clock he was in his bedroom, an attic with a floor very
much more spacious than its ceiling, and a window that commanded the
slope of Trafalgar Road towards Bleakridge. It had been his room, his
castle, his sanctuary, for at least ten years, since before his mother's
death of cancer. He did not know that he loved it, with all its
inconveniences and makeshifts; but he did love it, and he was jealous
for it; no one should lay a hand on it to rearrange what he had once
arranged. His sisters knew this; the middle-aged servant knew it; even
his father, with a curt laugh, would humorously acquiesce in the theory
of the sacredness of Edwin's bedroom. As for Edwin, he saw nothing
extraordinary in his attitude concerning his bedroom; and he could not
understand, and he somewhat resented, that the household should perceive
anything comic in it. He never went near his sisters' bedroom, never
wished to go near it, never thought about it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
Now he sat idly on the patchwork counterpane of his bed and gazed at the
sky. He was feeling a little happier, a little less unsettled, for his
stomach was empty and his mind had begun to fix itself with pleasure on
the images of hot toast and jam. He `wanted his tea:' the manner in
which he glanced at his old silver watch proved that. He wished only
that before six o'clock struck he could settle upon the necessary
changes in his bedroom. A beautiful schooner, which for over a year,
with all sails spread, had awaited the breeze in a low dark corner to
the right of the window, would assuredly have to be dismissed to the
small, empty attic. Once that schooner had thrilled him; the slight
rake of its masts and the knotted reality of its rigging had thrilled
him; and to navigate it had promised the most delicious sensations
conceivable. Now, one moment it was a toy as silly as a doll, and the
next moment it thrilled him once more, and he could believe again its
promises of bliss--and then he knew that it was for ever a vain toy, and
he was sad, and his sadness was pleasure. He had already stacked most
of his school-books in the other attic. He would need a table and a
lamp; he knew not for what precise purpose; but a table and a lamp were
necessary to the continuance of his self-respect. The only question
was, Should he remodel his bedroom, or should he demand the other attic,
and plant his flag in it and rule over it in addition to his bedroom?
Had he the initiative and the energy to carry out such an enterprise?
He was not able to make up his mind. And, moreover, he could not decide
anything until after that plain talk with his father.
His sister Clara's high voice sounded outside, on the landing, or
half-way up the attic stairs.
"Ed-win! Ed-win!"
"What's up?" he called in answer, rising with a nervous start. The door
of the room was unlatched.
"You're mighty mysterious in your bedroom," said Clara's voice behind
the door.
"Come in! Come in! Why don't you come in?" he replied, with
good-natured impatience. But somehow he could not speak in a natural
tone. The mere fact that he had left school that day and that the world
awaited him, and that everybody in the house knew this, rendered him
self-conscious.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
Clara entered, with a curious sidelong movement, half-winning and
half-serpentine. She was aged fourteen, a very fair and very slight
girl, with a thin face and thin lips, and extraordinarily slender hands;
in general appearance fragile. She wore a semi-circular comb on the
crown of her head, and her abundant hair hung over her shoulders in two
tight pigtails. Edwin considered that Clara was harsh and capricious;
he had much fault to find with her; but nevertheless the sight of her
usually affected him pleasurably (of course without his knowing it), and
he never for long sat definitely in adverse judgement upon her. Her
gestures had a charm for him which he felt but did not realise. And
this charm was similar to his own charm. But nothing would have so
surprised him as to learn that he himself had any charm at all. He
would have laughed, and been ashamed--to hear that his gestures and the
play of his features had an ingratiating, awkward, and wistful grace; he
would have tried to cure that.
"Father wants you," said Clara, her hand on the handle of the thin
attic-door hung with odd garments.
Edwin's heart fell instantly, and all the agreeable images of tea
vanished from his mind. His father must have read the school report and
perceived that Edwin had been beaten by Charlie Orgreave, a boy younger
than himself!
"Did he send you up for me?" Edwin asked.
"No," said Clara, frowning. "But I heard him calling out for you all
over. So Maggie told me to run up. Not that I expect any thanks." She
put her head forward a little.
The episode, and Clara's tone, showed clearly the nature and force of
the paternal authority in the house. It was an authority with the gift
of getting its commands anticipated.
"All right! I'm coming," said Edwin superiorly.
"I know what you want," Clara said teasingly as she turned towards the
passage.
"What do I want?"
"You want the empty attic all to yourself, and a fine state it would be
in in a month, my word!"
"How do you know I want the empty attic?" Edwin repelled the onslaught;
but he was considerably taken aback. It was a mystery to him how those
girls, and Clara in particular, got wind of his ideas before he had even
formulated them definitely to himself. It was also a mystery to him how
they could be so tremendously interested in matters which did not
concern them.
"You never mind!" Clara gibed, with a smile that was malicious, but
charmingly malicious. "I know!"
She had merely seen him staring into the empty attic, and from that
brief spectacle she had by divination constructed all his plans.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
The Clayhanger sitting-room, which served as both dining-room and
drawing-room, according to the more primitive practices of those days,
was over one half of the shop, and looked on Duck Square. Owing to its
northern aspect it scarcely ever saw the sun. The furniture followed
the universal fashion of horse-hair, mahogany, and wool embroidery.
There was a piano, with a high back-fretted wood over silk pleated in
rays from the centre; a bookcase whose lower part was a cupboard; a
sofa; and a large leather easy-chair which did not match the rest of the
room. This easy-chair had its back to the window and its front legs a
little towards the fireplace, so that Mr Clayhanger could read his
newspaper with facility in daytime. At night the light fell a little
awkwardly from the central chandelier, and Mr Clayhanger, if he
happened to be reading, would continually shift his chair an inch or two
to left or right, backwards or forwards, and would also continually
glance up at the chandelier, as if accusing it of not doing its best. A
common sight in the sitting-room was Mr Clayhanger balanced on a chair,
the table having been pushed away, screwing the newest burner into the
chandelier. When he was seated in his easy-chair the piano could not be
played, because there was not sufficient space for the stool between the
piano and his chair; nor could the fire be made up without disturbing
him, because the japanned coal-box was on the same side of the
hearth-rug as the chair. Thus, when the fire languished and Mr
Clayhanger neglected it, the children had either to ask permission to
step over his legs, or suggest that he should attend to the fire
himself. Occasionally, when he was in one of his gay moods, he would
humorously impede the efforts of the fire-maker with his feet, and if
the fire-maker was Clara or Edwin, the child would tickle him, which
brought him to his senses and forced him to shout: "None o' that! None
o' that!"
The position of Mr Clayhanger's easy-chair--a detail apparently
trifling--was in reality a strongly influencing factor in the family
life, for it meant that the father's presence obsessed the room. And it
could not be altered, for it depended on the window; the window was too
small to be quite efficient. When the children reflected upon the
history of their childhood they saw one important aspect of it as a long
series of detached hours spent in the sitting-room, in a state of desire
to do something that could not be done without disturbing father, and in
a state of indecision whether or not to disturb him. If by chance, as
sometimes occurred, he chose to sit on the sofa, which was unobtrusive
in the corner away from the window, between the fireplace and the door,
the room was instantly changed into something larger, freer, and less
inconvenient.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
As the hour was approaching six, Edwin, on the way downstairs, looked in
at the sitting-room for his father; but Darius was not there.
"Where's father?" he demanded.
"I don't know, I'm sure," said Maggie, at the sewing-machine. Maggie
was aged twenty; dark, rather stout, with an expression at once
benevolent and worried. She rarely seemed to belong to the same
generation as her brother and sister. She consorted on equal terms with
married women, and talked seriously of the same things as they did. Mr
Clayhanger treated her somewhat differently from the other two. Yet,
though he would often bid them accept her authority, he would now and
then impair that authority by roughly `dressing her down' at the
meal-table. She was a capable girl; she had much less firmness, and
much more good-nature, than she seemed to have. She could not assert
herself adequately. She `managed' very well; indeed she had `done
wonders' in filling the place of the mother who had died when Clara was
four and Edwin six, and she herself only ten. Responsibility,
apprehension, and strained effort had printed their marks on her
features. But the majority of acquaintances were more impressed by her
good intention than by her capacity; they would call her `a nice thing.'
The discerning minority, while saying with admiring conviction that she
was `a very fine girl,' would regret that somehow she had not the
faculty of `making the best of herself,' of `putting her best foot
foremost.' And would they not heartily stand up for her with the
superficial majority!
A thin, grey-haired, dreamy-eyed woman hurried into the room, bearing a
noisy tray and followed by Clara with a white cloth. This was Mrs
Nixon, the domestic staff of the Clayhanger household for years. Clara
and Mrs Nixon swept Maggie's sewing materials from the corner of the
table on to a chair, put Maggie's flower-glasses on to the ledge of the
bookcase, folded up the green cloth, and began rapidly to lay the tea.
Simultaneously Maggie, glancing at the clock, closed up her
sewing-machine, and deposited her work in a basket. Clara, leaving the
table, stooped to pick up the bits of cotton and white stuff that
littered the carpet. The clock struck six.
"Now, sharpy!" she exclaimed curtly to Edwin, who stood hesitatingly
with his hands in his pockets. "Can't you help Maggie to push that
sewing-machine into the corner?"
"What on earth's up?" he inquired vaguely, but starting forward to help
Maggie.
"She'll be here in a minute," said Maggie, almost under her breath, as
she fitted on the cover of the sewing-machine.
"Who?" asked Edwin. "Oh! Auntie! I'd forgotten it was her night."
"As if anyone could forget!" murmured Clara, with sarcastic unbelief.
By this time the table was completely set.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SIX.
Edwin wondered mildly, as he often wondered, at the extremely bitter
tone in which Clara always referred to their Aunt Clara Hamps,--when
Mrs Hamps was not there. Even Maggie's private attitude to Auntie
Clara was scarcely more Christian. Mrs Hamps was the widowed younger
sister of their mother, and she had taken a certain share in the
supervision of Darius Clayhanger's domestic affairs after the death of
Mrs Clayhanger. This latter fact might account, partially but not
wholly, for the intense and steady dislike in which she was held by
Maggie, Clara, and Mrs Nixon. Clara hated her own name because she had
been `called after' her auntie. Mr Clayhanger `got on' excellently
with his sister-in-law. He `thought highly' of her, and was indeed
proud to have her for a relative. In their father's presence the girls
never showed their dislike of Mrs Hamps; it was a secret pleasure
shared between them and Mrs Nixon, and only disclosed to Edwin because
the girls were indifferent to what Edwin might think. They casually
despised him for somehow liking his auntie, for not seeing through her
wiles; but they could count on his loyalty to themselves.
"Are you ready for tea, or aren't you?" Clara asked him. She
frequently spoke to him as if she was the elder instead of the younger.
"Yes," he said. "But I must find father."
He went off, but he did not find his father in the shop, and after a few
futile minutes he returned upstairs. Mrs Nixon preceded him, carrying
the tea-urn, and she told him that his father had sent word into the
kitchen that they were not to `wait tea' for him.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SEVEN.
AUNTIE HAMPS.
Mrs Hamps had splendidly arrived. The atmosphere of the sitting-room
was changed. Maggie, smiling, wore her second-best black silk apron.
Clara, smiling and laughing, wore a clean long white pinafore. Mrs
Nixon, with her dreamy eyes less vacant than usual, greeted Mrs Ramps
effusively, and effusively gave humble thanks for kind inquiries after
her health. A stranger might have thought that these women were
strongly attached to one another by ties of affection and respect.
Edwin never understood how his sisters, especially Maggie, could
practise such vast and eternal hypocrisy with his aunt. As for him, his
aunt acted on him now, as generally, like a tonic. Some effluence from
her quickened him. He put away the worry in connection with his father,
and gave himself up to the physical pleasures of tea.
Aunt Clara was a handsome woman. She had been called--but not by men
whose manners and code she would have approved--`a damned fine woman.'
Her age was about forty, which at that period, in a woman's habit of
mind, was the equivalent of about fifty to-day. Her latest photograph
was considered to be very successful. It showed her standing behind a
velvet chair and leaning her large but still shapely bust slightly over
the chair. Her forearms, ruffled and braceleted, lay along the fringed
back of the chair, and from one negligent hand depended a rose. A heavy
curtain came downwards out of nothing into the picture, and the end of
it lay coiled and draped on the seat of the chair. The great dress was
of slate-coloured silk, with sleeves tight to the elbow, and thence,
from a ribbon-bow, broadening to a wide, triangular climax that revealed
quantities of lace at the wrists. The pointed ends of the sleeves were
picked out with squares of velvet. A short and highly ornamental
fringed and looped flounce waved grandly out behind from the waist to
the level of the knees; and the stomacher recalled the ornamentation of
the flounce; and both the stomacher and flounce gave contrasting value
to the severe plainness of the skirt, designed to emphasise the quality
of the silk. Round the neck was a lace collarette to match the
furniture of the wrists, and the broad ends of the collarette were
crossed on the bosom and held by a large jet brooch. Above that you saw
a fine regular face, with a firm hard mouth and a very straight nose and
dark eyebrows; small ears weighted with heavy jet ear-rings.
The photograph could not render the clear perfection of Aunt Clara's
rosy skin; she had the colour and the flashing eye of a girl. But it
did justice to her really magnificent black hair. This hair was all her
own, and the coiffure seemed as ample as a judge's wig. From the low
forehead the hair was parted exactly in the middle for about two inches;
then plaited bands crossed and recrossed the scalp in profusion, forming
behind a pattern exceedingly complicated, and down either side of the
head, now behind the ear, now hiding it, now resting on the shoulders,
now hanging clear of them, fell long multitudinous glossy curls. These
curls--one of them in the photograph reached as far as the stomacher--
could not have been surpassed in Bursley.
She was a woman of terrific vitality. Her dead sister had been nothing
in comparison with her. She had a glorious digestion, and was the envy
of her brother-in-law--who suffered much from biliousness--because she
could eat with perfect impunity hot buttered toast and raw celery in
large quantities. Further, she had independent means, and no children
to cause anxieties. Yet she was always, as the phrase went, `bearing
up,' or, as another phrase went, `leaning hard.' Frances Ridley
Havergal was her favourite author, and Frances Ridley Havergal's little
book Lean Hard, was kept on her dressing-table. (The girls, however,
averred that she never opened it.) Aunt Clara's spiritual life must be
imagined as a continual, almost physical leaning on Christ.
Nevertheless she never complained, and she was seldom depressed. Her
desire, and her achievement, was to be bright, to take everything
cheerfully, to look obstinately on the best side of things, and to
instil this religion into others.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
Thus, when it was announced that father had been called out
unexpectedly, leaving an order that they were not to wait for him, she
said gaily that they had better be obedient and begin, though it would
have been more agreeable to wait for father. And she said how beautiful
the tea was, and how beautiful the toast, and how beautiful the
strawberry-jam, and how beautiful the pikelets. She would herself pour
some hot water into the slop basin, and put a pikelet on a plate
thereon, covered, to keep warm for father. She would not hear a word
about the toast being a little hard, and when Maggie in her curious
quiet way `stuck her out' that the toast was in fact hard, she said that
that precise degree of hardness was the degree which she, for herself,
preferred. Then she talked of jams, and mentioned gooseberry-jam,
whereupon Clara privately put her tongue out, with the quickness of a
snake, to signal to Maggie.
"Ours isn't good this year," said Maggie.
"I told auntie we weren't so set up with it, a fortnight ago," said
Clara simply, like a little angel.
"Did you, dear?" Mrs Hamps exclaimed, with great surprise, almost with
shocked surprise. "I'm sure it's beautiful. I was quite looking
forward to tasting it; quite! I know what your gooseberry-jam is."
"Would you like to try it now?" Maggie suggested. "But we've warned
you."
"Oh, I don't want to trouble you now. We're all so cosy here. Any
time--"
"No trouble, auntie," said Clara, with her most captivating and innocent
smile.
"Well, if you talk about `warning' me, of course I must insist on having
some," said Auntie Clara.
Clara jumped up, passed behind Mrs Hamps, making a contemptuous face at
those curls as she did so, and ran gracefully down to the kitchen.
"Here," she said crossly to Mrs Nixon. "A pot of that gooseberry,
please. A small one will do. She knows it's short of sugar, and so
she's determined to try it, just out of spite; and nothing will stop
her."
Clara returned smiling to the tea-table, and Maggie neatly unsealed the
jam; and Auntie Clara, with a face beaming with pleasurable
anticipation, helped herself circumspectly to a spoonful.
"Beautiful!" she murmured.
"Don't you think it's a bit tart?" Maggie asked.
"Oh no!" protestingly.
"Don't you?" asked Clara, with an air of delighted deferential
astonishment.
"Oh no!" Mrs Hamps repeated. "It's beautiful!" She did not smack her
lips over it, because she would have considered it unladylike to smack
her lips, but by less offensive gestures she sought to convey her
unbounded pleasure in the jam. "How much sugar did you put in?" she
inquired after a while. "Half and half?"
"Yes," said Maggie.
"They do say gooseberries were a tiny bit sour this year, owing to the
weather," said Mrs Hamps reflectively.
Clara kicked Edwin under the table, as it were viciously, but her
delightful innocent smile, directed vaguely upon Mrs Hamps, did not
relax. Such duplicity passed Edwin's comprehension; it seemed to him
purposeless. Yet he could not quite deny that there might be a certain
sting, a certain insinuation, in his auntie's last remark.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
Then Mr Clayhanger entered, blowing forth a long breath as if trying to
repulse the oppressive heat of the July afternoon. He came straight to
the table, with a slightly preoccupied air, quickly, his arms motionless
at his sides, and slanting a little outwards. Mr Clayhanger always
walked like this, with motionless arms so that in spite of a rather
clumsy and heavy step, the upper part of him appeared to glide along.
He shook hands genially with Auntie Clara, greeting her almost as
grandiosely as she greeted him, putting on for a moment the grand
manner, not without dignity. Each admired the other. Each often said
that the other was `wonderful.' Each undoubtedly flattered the other,
made a fuss of the other. Mr Clayhanger's admiration was the greater.
The bitterest thing that Edwin had ever heard Maggie say was: "It's
something to be thankful for that she's his deceased wife's sister!"
And she had said the bitter thing with such quiet bitterness! Edwin had
not instantly perceived the point of it.
Darius Clayhanger then sat down, with a thud, snatched at the cup of tea
which Maggie had placed before him, and drank half of it with a
considerable in-drawing noise. No one asked where or why he had been
detained; it was not etiquette to do so. If father had been `called
away,' or had `had to go away,' or was `kept somewhere,' the details
were out of deference allowed to remain in mystery, respected by
curiosity ... `Father-business.' ... All business was sacred. He
himself had inculcated this attitude.
In a short silence the sound of the bell that the carman rang before the
tram started for Hanbridge floated in through the open window.
"There's the tram!" observed Auntie Clara, apparently with warm and
special interest in the phenomena of the tram. Then another little
silence.
"Auntie," said Clara, writhing about youthfully on her chair.
"Can't ye sit still a bit?" the father asked, interrupting her roughly,
but with good humour. "Ye'll be falling off th' chair in a minute."
Clara blushed swiftly, and stopped.
"Yes, love?" Auntie Clara encouraged her. It was as if Auntie Clara
had said: "Your dear father is of course quite right, more than right,
to insist on your sitting properly at table. However, do not take the
correction too much to heart. I sympathise with all your difficulties."
"I was only going to ask you," Clara went on, in a weaker, stammering
voice, "if you knew that Edwin's left school to-day." Her archness had
deserted her.
"Mischievous little thing!" thought Edwin. "Why must she deliberately
go and draw attention to that?" And he too blushed, feeling as if he
owed an apology to the company for having left school.
"Oh yes!" said Auntie Clara with eager benevolence. "I've got something
to say about that to my nephew."
Mr Clayhanger searched in a pocket of his alpaca, and drew forth an
open envelope.
"Here's the lad's report, auntie," said he. "Happen ye'd like to look
at it."
"I should indeed!" she replied fervently. "I'm sure it's a very good
one."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
She took the paper, and assumed her spectacles.
"Conduct--Excellent," she read, poring with enthusiasm over the
document. And she read again: "Conduct--Excellent." Then she went down
the list of subjects, declaiming the number of marks for each; and at
the end she read: "Position in class next term: Third. Splendid, Eddy!"
she exclaimed.
"I thought you were second," said Clara, in her sharp manner.
Edwin blushed again, and hesitated.
"Eh? What's that? What's that?" his father demanded. "I didn't notice
that. Third?"
"Charlie Orgreave beat me in the examination," Edwin muttered.
"Well, that's a pretty how d'ye do!" said his father. "Going down one!
Ye ought to ha' been first instead o' third. And would ha' been,
happen, if ye'd pegged at it."
"Now I won't have that! I won't have it!" Auntie Clara protested,
laughingly showing her fine teeth and gazing first at Darius, and then
at Edwin, from under her spectacles, her head being thrown back and the
curls hanging far behind. "No one shall say that Edwin doesn't work,
not even his father, while his auntie's about! Because I know he does
work! And besides, he hasn't gone down. It says, `position next
term'--not this term. You were still second to-day, weren't you, my
boy?"
"I suppose so. Yes," Edwin answered, pulling himself together.
"Well! There you are!" Auntie Clara's voice rang triumphantly. She
was opening her purse. "And there you are!" she repeated, popping half
a sovereign down in front of him. "That's a little present from your
auntie on your leaving school."
"Oh, auntie!" he cried feebly.
"Oh!" cried Clara, genuinely startled.
Mrs Hamps was sometimes thus astoundingly munificent. It was she who
had given the schooner to Edwin. And her presents of elaborately
enveloped and costly toilet soap on the birthdays of the children, and
at Christmas, were massive. Yet Clara always maintained that she was
the meanest old thing imaginable. And Maggie had once said that she
knew that Auntie Clara made her servant eat dripping instead of butter.
To give inferior food to a servant was to Maggie the unforgivable in
parsimony.
"Well," Mr Clayhanger warningly inquired, "what do you say to your
aunt?"
"Thank you, auntie," Edwin sheepishly responded, fingering the coin.
It was a princely sum. And she had stuck up for him famously in the
matter of the report. Strange that his father should not have read the
report with sufficient attention to remark the fall to third place!
Anyway, that aspect of the affair was now safely over, and it seemed to
him that he had not lost much prestige by it. He would still be able to
argue with his father on terms not too unequal, he hoped.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
As the tea drew to an end, and the plates of toast, bread and butter,
and tea-cake grew emptier, and the slop-basin filled, and only Maggie's
flowers remained fresh and immaculate amid the untidy debris of the
meal; and as Edwin and Clara became gradually indifferent to jam, and
then inimical to it; and as the sounds of the street took on the softer
quality of summer evening, and the first filmy shades of twilight
gathered imperceptibly in the corners of the room, and Mr Clayhanger
performed the eructations which signified that he had had enough; so
Mrs Hamps prepared herself for one of her classic outbursts of feeling.
"Well!" she said at last, putting her spoon to the left of her cup as a
final indication that seriously she would drink no more. And she gave a
great sigh. "School over! And the only son going out into the world!
How time flies!" And she gave another great sigh, implying an immense
melancholy due to this vision of the reality of things. Then she
remembered her courage, and the device of leaning hard, and all her
philosophy.
"But it's all for the best!" she broke forth in a new brave tone.
"Everything is ordered for the best. We must never forget that! And
I'm quite sure that Edwin will be a very great credit to us all, with
help from above."
She proceeded powerfully in this strain. She brought in God, Christ,
and even the Holy Spirit. She mentioned the dangers of the world, and
the disguises of the devil, and the unspeakable advantages of a good
home, and the special goodness of Mr Clayhanger and of Maggie, yes, and
of her little Clara; and the pride which they all had in Edwin, and the
unique opportunities which he had of doing good, by example, and also,
soon, by precept, for others younger than himself would begin to look up
to him; and again her personal pride in him, and her sure faith in him;
and what a solemn hour it was...
Nothing could stop her. The girls loathed these exhibitions. Maggie
always looked at the table during their progress, and she felt as though
she had done something wrong and was ashamed of it. Clara not merely
felt like a criminal--she felt like an unrepentant criminal; she
blushed, she glanced nervously about the room, and all the time she
repeated steadily in her heart a highly obscene word which she had heard
at school. This unspoken word, hurled soundlessly but savagely at her
aunt in that innocent heart, afforded much comfort to Clara in the
affliction. Even Edwin, who was more lenient in all ways than his
sisters, profoundly deplored these moralisings of his aunt. They filled
him with a desire to run fast and far, to be alone at sea, or to be deep
somewhere in the bosom of the earth. He could not understand this side
of his auntie's individuality. But there was no delivery from Mrs
Hamps. The only person who could possibly have delivered them seemed to
enjoy the sinister thraldom. Mr Clayhanger listened with appreciative
and admiring nods; he appeared to be quite sincere. And Edwin could not
understand his father either. "How simple father must be!" he thought
vaguely. Whereas Clara fatalistically dismissed her father's attitude
as only one more of the preposterously unreasonable phenomena which she
was constantly meeting in life; and she persevered grimly with her
obscene word.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SIX.
"Eh!" said Mrs Hamps enthusiastically, after a trifling pause. "It
does me good when I think what a help you'll be to your father in the
business, with that clever head of yours."
She gazed at him fondly.
Now this was Edwin's chance. He did not wish to be any help at all to
his father in the business. He had other plans for himself He had never
mentioned them before, because his father had never talked to him about
his future career, apparently assuming that he would go into the
business. He had been waiting for his father to begin. "Surely," he
had said to himself "father's bound to speak to me sometime about what
I'm going to do, and when he does I shall just tell him." But his
father never had begun; and by timidity, negligence, and perhaps
ill-luck, Edwin had thus arrived at his last day at school with the
supreme question not merely unsolved but unattacked. Oh he blamed
himself! Any ordinary boy (he thought) would have discussed such a
question naturally long ago. After all it was not a crime it was no
cause for shame, to wish not to be a printer. Yet he was ashamed!
Absurd! He blamed himself. But he also blamed his father. Now,
however, in responding to his auntie's remark, he could remedy all the
past by simply and boldly stating that he did not want to follow his
father. It would be unpleasant, of course, but the worst shock would be
over in a moment, like the drawing of a tooth. He had merely to utter
certain words. He must utter them. They were perfectly easy to say,
and they were also of the greatest urgency. "I don't want to be a
printer." He mumbled them over in his mind. "I don't want to be a
printer." What could it matter to his father whether he was a printer
or not? Seconds, minutes, seemed to pass. He knew that if he was so
inconceivably craven as to remain silent, his self-respect would never
recover from the blow. Then, in response to Mrs Hamps's prediction
about his usefulness to his father in the business, he said, with a
false-jaunty, unconvinced, unconvincing air--
"Well, that remains to be seen."
This was all he could accomplish. It seemed as if he had looked death
itself in the face, and drawn away.
"Remains to be seen?" Auntie Clara repeated, with a hint of startled
pain, due to this levity.
He was mute. No one suspected, as he sat there, so boyish, wistful, and
uneasily squirming, that he was agonised to the very centre of his
being. All the time, in his sweating soul, he kept trying to persuade
himself: "I've given them a hint, anyhow! I've given them a hint,
anyhow!"
"Them" included everybody at the table.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SEVEN.
Mr Clayhanger, completely ignoring Edwin's reply to his aunt and her
somewhat shocked repetition of it, turned suddenly towards his son and
said, in a manner friendly but serious, a manner that assumed
everything, a manner that begged the question, unconscious even that
there was a question--
"I shall be out the better part o' to-morrow. I want ye to be sure to
be in the shop all afternoon--I'll tell you what for downstairs." It
was characteristic of him thus to make a mystery of business in front of
the women.
Edwin felt the net closing about him. Then he thought of one of those
`posers' which often present themselves to youths of his age.
"But to-morrow's Saturday," he said, perhaps perkily. "What about the
Bible class?"
Six months previously a young minister of the Wesleyan Circuit, to whom
Heaven had denied both a sense of humour and a sense of honour, had
committed the infamy of starting a Bible class for big boys on Saturday
afternoons. This outrage had appalled and disgusted the boyhood of
Wesleyanism in Bursley. Their afternoon for games, their only fair
afternoon in the desert of the week, to be filched from them and used
against them for such an odious purpose as a Bible class! Not only
Sunday school on Sunday afternoon, but a Bible class on Saturday
afternoon! It was incredible. It was unbearable. It was gross
tyranny, and nothing else. Nevertheless the young minister had his way,
by dint of meanly calling upon parents and invoking their help. The
scurvy worm actually got together a class of twelve to fifteen boys, to
the end of securing their eternal welfare. And they had to attend the
class, though they swore they never would, and they had to sing hymns,
and they had to kneel and listen to prayers, and they had to listen to
the most intolerable tedium, and to take notes of it. All this, while
the sun was shining, or the rain was raining, on fields and streets and
open spaces and ponds!
Edwin had been trapped in the snare. His father, after only three words
from the young minister, had yielded up his son like a burnt sacrifice--
and with a casual nonchalance that utterly confounded Edwin. In vain
Edwin had pointed out to his elders that a Saturday afternoon of
confinement must be bad for his health. His attention had been directed
to his eternal health. In vain he had pointed out that on wet Saturday
afternoons he frequently worked at his home-lessons, which therefore
might suffer under the regime of a Bible class. His attention had been
directed to the peace which passeth understanding. So he had been
beaten, and was secretly twitted by Clara as an abject victim. Hence it
was with a keen and peculiar feeling of triumph, of hopelessly cornering
the inscrutable generation which a few months ago had cornered him, that
he demanded, perhaps perkily: "What about the Bible class?"
"There'll be no more Bible classing," said his father, with a mild but
slightly sardonic smile, as who should say: "I'm ready to make all
allowances for youth; but I must get you to understand, as gently as I
can, that you can't keep on going to Bible classes for ever and ever."
Mrs Hamps said--
"It won't be as if you were at school. But I do hope you won't neglect
to study your Bible. Eh, but I do hope you'll always find time for
that, to your dying day!"
"Oh--but I say--" Edwin began, and stopped.
He was beaten by the mere effrontery of the replies. His father and his
aunt (the latter of whom at any rate was a firm and confessed
religionist, who had been responsible for converting Mr Clayhanger from
Primitive Methodism to Wesleyan Methodism) did not trouble to defend
their new position by argument. They made no effort to reconcile it
with their position of a few months back, when the importance of
heavenly welfare far exceeded the importance of any conceivable earthly
welfare. The fact was that they had no argument. If God took
precedence of knowledge and of health, he took precedence of a peddling
shop! That was unanswerable.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
EIGHT.
Edwin was dashed. His faith in humanity was dashed. These elders were
not sincere. And as Mrs Hamps continued to embroider the original
theme of her exhortation about the Bible, Edwin looked at her
stealthily, and the doubt crossed his mind whether that majestic and
vital woman was ever sincere about anything, even to herself--whether
the whole of her daily existence, from her getting-up to her down-lying,
was not a grandiose pretence.
Not that he had the least desire to cling to the Bible class, even as an
alternative to the shop! No! He was much relieved to be rid of the
Bible class. What overset him was the crude illogicality of the new
decree, and the shameless tacit admission of previous insincerity.
Two hours later, as he stood idly at the window of his bedroom, watching
the gas lamps of Trafalgar Road wax brighter in the last glooms of
twilight, he was still occupied with the sham and the unreason and the
lack of scruple suddenly revealed in the life of the elder generation.
Unconsciously imitating a trick of his father's when annoyed but calm,
he nodded his head several times, and with his tongue against his teeth
made the noise which in writing is represented by `tut-tut.' Yet
somehow he had always known that it would be so. At bottom, he was only
pretending to himself to be shocked and outraged.
His plans were no further advanced; indeed they were put back, for this
Saturday afternoon vigil in the shop would be in some sort a symbolic
temporary defeat for him. Why had he not spoken out clearly? Why was
he always like a baby in presence of his father? The future was all
askew for him. He had forgotten his tremendous serious resolves. The
touch of the half-sovereign in his pocket, however, was comforting in a
universe of discomfort.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER EIGHT.
IN THE SHOP.
"Here, lad!" said his father to Edwin, as soon as he had scraped up the
last crumbs of cheese from his plate at the end of dinner on the
following day.
Edwin rose obediently and followed him out of the room. Having waited
at the top of the stairs until his father had reached the foot, he
leaned forward as far as he could with one hand on the rail and the
other pressing against the wall, swooped down to the mat at the bottom,
without touching a single step on the way, and made a rocket-like noise
with his mouth, He had no other manner of descending the staircase,
unless he happened to be in disgrace. His father went straight to the
desk in the corner behind the account-book window, assumed his
spectacles, and lifted the lid of the desk.
"Here!" he said, in a low voice. "Mr Enoch Peake is stepping in this
afternoon to look at this here." He displayed the proof--an unusually
elaborate wedding card, which announced the marriage of Mr Enoch Peake
with Mrs Louisa Loggerheads. "Ye know him as I mean?"
"Yes," said Edwin, "The stout man. The Cocknage Gardens man."
"That's him. Well ye'll tell him I've been called away. Tell him who
ye are. Not but what he'll know. Tell him I think it might be
better"--Darius's thick finger ran along a line of print--"if we
put--`widow of the late Simon Loggerheads Esquire,' instead of--`Esq.'
See? Otherwise it's all right. Tell him I say as otherwise it's all
right. And ask him if he'll have it printed in silver, and how many he
wants, and show him this sample envelope. Now, d'ye understand?"
"Yes," said Edwin, in a tone to convey, not disrespectfully, that there
was nothing to understand. Curious, how his father had the air of
bracing all his intellect as if to a problem!
"Then ye'll take it to Big James, and he can start Chawner on it. Th'
job's promised for Monday forenoon."
"Will Big James be working?" asked Edwin, for it was Saturday afternoon,
when, though the shop remained open, the printing office was closed.
"They're all on overtime," said Mr Clayhanger; and then he added, in a
voice still lower, and with a surreptitious glance at Miss Ingamells,
the shop-woman, who was stolidly enfolding newspapers in wrappers at the
opposite counter, "See to it yourself, now. He won't want to talk to
her about a thing like that. Tell him I told you specially. Just let
me see how well ye can do it."
"Right!" said Edwin; and to himself, superciliously: "It might be life
and death."
"We ought to be doing a lot o' business wi' Enoch Peake, later on," Mr
Clayhanger finished, in a whisper.
"I see," said Edwin, impressed, perceiving that he had perhaps been
supercilious too soon.
Mr Clayhanger returned his spectacles to their case, and taking his hat
from its customary hook behind him, over the job-files, consulted his
watch and passed round the counter to go. Then he stopped.
"I'm going to Manchester," he murmured confidentially. "To see if I can
pick up a machine as I've heard of."
Edwin was flattered. At the dinner-table Mr Clayhanger had only
vouchsafed that he had a train to catch, and would probably not be in
till late at night.
The next moment he glimpsed Darius through the window, his arms
motionless by his sides and sticking slightly out; hurrying in the
sunshine along Wedgwood Street in the direction of Shawport station.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
So this was business! It was not the business he desired and meant to
have; and he was uneasy at the extent to which he was already entangled
in it; but it was rather amusing, and his father had really been very
friendly. He felt a sense of importance.
Soon afterwards Clara ran into the shop to speak to Miss Ingamells. The
two chatted and giggled together.
"Father's gone to Manchester," he found opportunity to say to Clara as
she was leaving.
"Why aren't you doing those prizes he told you to do?" retorted Clara,
and vanished, She wanted none of Edwin's superior airs.
During dinner Mr Clayhanger had instructed his son to go through the
Sunday school prize stock and make an inventory of it.
This injunction from the child Clara, which Miss Ingamells had certainly
overheard, prevented him, as an independent man, from beginning his work
for at least ten minutes. He whistled, opened his father's desk and
stared vacantly into it, examined the pen-nib case in detail, and tore
off two leaves from the date calendar so that it should be ready for
Monday. He had a great scorn for Miss Ingamells, who was a personable
if somewhat heavy creature of twenty-eight, because she kept company
with a young man. He had caught them arm-in-arm and practically hugging
each other, one Sunday afternoon in the street. He could see naught but
silliness in that kind of thing.
The entrance of a customer caused him to turn abruptly to the high
shelves where the books were kept. He was glad that the customer was
not Mr Enoch Peake, the expectation of whose arrival made him curiously
nervous. He placed the step-ladder against the shelves, climbed up, and
began to finger volumes and parcels of volumes. The dust was
incredible. The disorder filled him with contempt. It was astounding
that his father could tolerate such disorder; no doubt the whole shop
was in the same condition. "Thirteen Archie's Old Desk," he read on a
parcel, but when he opened the parcel he found seven "From Jest to
Earnest." Hence he had to undo every parcel. However, the work was
easy. He first wrote the inventory in pencil, then he copied it in ink;
then he folded it, and wrote very carefully on the back, because his
father had a mania for endorsing documents in the legal manner:
"Inventory of Sunday school prize stock." And after an instant's
hesitation he added his own initials. Then he began to tie up and
restore the parcels and the single volumes. None of all this literature
had any charm for him. He possessed five or six such books, all gilt
and chromatic, which had been awarded to him at Sunday school, `suitably
inscribed,' for doing nothing in particular; and he regarded them
without exception as frauds upon boyhood. However, Clara had always
enjoyed reading them. But lying flat on one of the top shelves he
discovered, nearly at the end of his task, an oblong tome which did
interest him: "Cazenove's Architectural Views of European Capitals, with
descriptive letterpress." It had an old-fashioned look, and was
probably some relic of his father's predecessor in the establishment.
Another example of the lack of order which prevailed!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
He took the volume to the retreat of the desk, and there turned over its
pages of coloured illustrations. At first his interest in them, and in
the letterpress, was less instinctive than deliberate. He said to
himself: "Now, if there is anything in me, I ought really to be
interested in this, and I must be interested in it." And he was. He
glanced carelessly at the clock, which was hung above the shelves of
exercise-books and notebooks, exactly opposite the door. A quarter past
four. The afternoon was quietly passing, and he had not found it too
tedious. In the background of the task which (he considered) he had
accomplished with extraordinary efficiency, his senses noted faintly the
continual trickle of customers, all of whom were infallibly drawn to
Miss Ingamells's counter by her mere watchful and receptive appearance.
He had heard phrases and ends of phrases, such as: "No, we haven't
anything smaller," "A camel-hair brush," "Gum but not glue," "Very
sorry, sir. I'll speak firmly to the paper boy," and the sound of coins
dragged along the counter, the sound of the testing of half a sovereign,
the opening and shutting of the till-drawer; and occasionally Miss
Ingamells exclaiming to herself upon the stupidity of customers after a
customer had gone; and once Miss Ingamells crossing angrily to fix the
door ajar which some heedless customer had closed: "Did they suppose
that people didn't want air like other people?" And now it was a
quarter past four. Undoubtedly he had a peculiar, and pleasant, feeling
of importance. In another half-minute he glanced at the clock again,
and it was a quarter to five.
What hypnotism attracted him towards the artists' materials cabinet
which stood magnificent, complicated, and complete in the middle of the
shop, like a monument? His father, after one infantile disastrous raid,
had absolutely forbidden any visitation of that cabinet, with its glass
case of assorted paints, crayons, brushes and pencils, and its
innumerable long drawers full of paper and cards and wondrous perfectly
equipped boxes, and T-squares and set-squares, with a hundred other
contrivances. But of course the order had now ceased to have force.
Edwin had left school; and, if he was not a man, he was certainly not a
boy. He began to open the drawers, at first gingerly, then boldly;
after all it was no business of Miss Ingamells's! And, to be just, Miss
Ingamells made no sort of pretence that it was any business of hers.
She proceeded with her own business. Edwin opened a rather large wooden
water-colour box. It was marked five and sixpence. It seemed to
comprise everything needed for the production of the most entrancing and
majestic architectural views, and as Edwin took out its upper case and
discovered still further marvellous devices and apparatus in its
basement beneath, he dimly but passionately saw, in his heart, bright
masterpieces that ought to be the fruit of that box. There was a key to
it. He must have it. He would have given all that he possessed for it,
if necessary.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
"Miss Ingamells," he said: and, as she did not look up immediately, "I
say, Miss Ingamells! How much does father take off in the shilling to
auntie when she buys anything?"
"Don't ask me, Master Edwin," said Miss Ingamells; "I don't know, How
should I know?"
"Well, then," he muttered, "I shall pay full price for it--that's all."
He could not wait, and he wanted to be on the safe side.
Miss Ingamells gave him change for his half-sovereign in a strictly
impartial manner, to indicate that she accepted no responsibility. And
the squaring of Edwin's shoulders conveyed to Miss Ingamells that he
advised her to keep carefully within her own sphere, and not to make
impertinent inquiries about the origin of the half-sovereign, which he
could see intrigued her acutely. He now owned the box; it was not a box
of colours, but a box of enchantment. He had had colour-boxes before,
but nothing to compare with this, nothing that could have seemed magical
to anybody wiser than a very small boy. Then he bought some
cartridge-paper; he considered that cartridge-paper would be good enough
for preliminary experiments.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
It was while he was paying for the cartridge-paper--he being, as was
indeed proper, on the customers' side of the counter--that a heavy
loutish boy in an apron entered the shop, blushing. Edwin turned away.
This was Miss Ingamells's affair.
"If ye please, Mester Peake's sent me. He canna come in this
afternoon--he's got a bit o' ratting on--and will Mester Clayhanger step
across to th' Dragon to-night after eight, with that there peeper
[paper] as he knows on?"
At the name of Peake, Edwin started. He had utterly forgotten the
matter.
"Master Edwin," said Miss Ingamells drily. "You know all about that,
don't you?" Clearly she resented that he knew all about that while she
didn't.
"Oh! Yes," Edwin stammered. "What did you say?" It was his first
piece of real business.
"If you please, Mester Peake sent me." The messenger blundered through
his message again word for word.
"Very well. I'll attend to it," said Edwin, as nonchalantly as he
could.
Nevertheless he was at a loss what to do, simple though the situation
might have seemed to a person with an experience of business longer than
Edwin's. Just as three hours previously his father had appeared to be
bracing all his intellect to a problem that struck Edwin as entirely
simple, so now Edwin seemed to be bracing all his intellect to another
aspect of the same problem. Time, revenging his father! ... What! Go
across to the Dragon and in cold blood demand Mr Enoch Peake, and then
parley with Mr Enoch Peake as one man with another! He had never been
inside the Dragon. He had been brought up in the belief that the Dragon
was a place of sin. The Dragon was included in the generic
term--`gin-palace,' and quite probably in the Siamese-twin
term--`gaming-saloon.' Moreover, to discuss business with Mr Enoch
Peake... Mr Enoch Peake was as mysterious to Edwin as, say, a Chinese
mandarin! Still, business was business, and something would have to be
done. He did not know what. Ought he to go to the Dragon? His father
had not foreseen the possibility of this development. He instantly
decided one fundamental: he would not consult Miss Ingamells; no, nor
even Maggie! There remained only Big James. He went across to see Big
James, who was calmly smoking a pipe on the little landing at the top of
the steps leading to the printing office.
Big James showed no astonishment.
"You come along o' me to the Dragon to-night, young sir, at eight
o'clock, or as soon after as makes no matter, and I'll see as you see
Mr Enoch Peake. I shall be coming up Woodisun Bank at eight o'clock,
or as soon after as makes no matter. You be waiting for me at the back
gates there, and I'll see as you see Mr Enoch Peake."
"Are you going to the Dragon?"
"Am I going to the Dragon, young sir!" exclaimed Big James, in his
majestic voice.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER NINE.
THE TOWN.
James Yarlett was worthy of his nickname. He stood six feet four and a
half inches in height, and his girth was proportionate; he had enormous
hands and feet, large features, and a magnificent long dark brown beard;
owing to this beard his necktie was never seen. But the most
magnificent thing about him was his bass voice, acknowledged to be the
finest bass in the town, and one of the finest even in Hanbridge, where,
in his earlier prime, James had lived as a `news comp' on the
"Staffordshire Signal." He was now a `jobbing comp' in Bursley, because
Bursley was his native town and because he preferred jobbing. He made
the fourth and heaviest member of the celebrated Bursley Male Glee
Party, the other three being Arthur Smallrice, an old man with a
striking falsetto voice, Abraham Harracles, and Jos Rawnpike (pronounced
Rampick). These men were accustomed to fame, and Big James was the king
of them, though the mildest. They sang at dinners, free-and-easies,
concerts, and Martinmas tea-meetings. They sang for the glory, and when
there was no demand for their services, they sang to themselves, for the
sake of singing. Each of them was a star in some church or chapel
choir. And except Arthur Smallrice, they all shared a certain
elasticity of religious opinion. Big James, for example, had varied in
ten years from Wesleyan, through Old Church, to Roman Catholic up at
Bleakridge. It all depended on niceties in the treatment accorded to
him, and on the choice of anthems. Moreover, he liked a change.
He was what his superiors called `a very superior man.' Owing to the
more careful enunciation required in singing, he had lost a great deal
of the Five Towns accent, and one cannot be a compositor for a quarter
of a century without insensibly acquiring an education and a store of
knowledge far excelling the ordinary. His manner was gentle, and
perhaps somewhat pompous, as is common with very big men; but you could
never be sure whether an extremely subdued humour did not underlie his
pomposity. He was a bachelor, aged forty-five, and lived quietly with a
married sister at the bottom of Woodisun Bank, near the National
Schools. The wonder was that, with all his advantages, he had not more
deeply impressed himself upon Bursley as an individuality, and not
merely as a voice. But he seemed never to seek to do so. He was
without ambition; and, though curiously careful sometimes about
preserving his own dignity, and beyond question sensitive by
temperament, he showed marked respect, and even humility, to the
worldly-successful. Despite his bigness and simplicity there was
something small about him which came out in odd trifling details. Thus
it was characteristic of Big James to ask Edwin to be waiting for him at
the back gates in Woodisun Bank when he might just as easily have met
him at the side door by the closed shop in Wedgwood Street.
Edwin, who from mere pride had said nothing to his sisters about the
impending visit to the Dragon, was a little surprised and dashed to see
Big James in broadcloth and a high hat; for he had not dreamed of
changing his own everyday suit, nor had it occurred to him that the
Dragon was a temple of ceremoniousness. Big James looked enormous. The
wide lapel of his shining frock-coat was buttoned high up under his
beard and curved downwards for a distance of considerably more than a
yard to his knees: it was a heroic frock-coat. The sleeves were wide,
but narrowing at the wrists, and the white wristbands were very tight.
The trousers fell in ample folds on the uppers of the gigantic boots.
Big James had a way of sticking out his chest and throwing his head back
which would have projected the tip of his beard ten inches forth from
his body, had the beard been stiff; but the soft silkiness of the beard
frustrated this spectacular phenomenon which would have been very
interesting to witness.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
The pair stepped across Trafalgar Road together, Edwin, though he tried
to be sedate, nothing but a frisking morsel by the side of the vast
monument. Compared with the architectural grandeur of Mr Varlett, his
thin, supple, free-moving limbs had an almost pathetic appearance of
ephemeral fragility.
Big James directed himself to the archway leading to the Dragon stables,
and there he saw an ostler or oddman. Edwin, feeling the imminence of
an ordeal, surreptitiously explored a pocket to be sure that the proof
of the wedding-card was safely there.
The ostler raised his reddish eyebrows to Big James. Big James jerked
his head to one side, indicating apparently the entire Dragon, and
simultaneously conveying a query. The ostler paused immobile an instant
and then shook his insignificant turnip-pate. Big James turned away.
No word had been spoken; nevertheless, the men had exchanged a dialogue
which might be thus put into words--
"I wasn't thinking to see ye so soon," from the ostler.
"Then nobody of any importance has yet gone into the assembly room?"
from Big James.
"Nobody worth speaking of, and won't, for a while," from the other.
"Then I'll take a turn," from Big James.
The latter now looked down at Edwin, and addressed him in words--
"Seemingly we're too soon, Mr Edwin. What do you say to a turn round
the town--playground way? I doubted we should be too soon."
Edwin showed alacrity. As a schoolboy it had been definitely forbidden
to him to go out at night; and unless sent on a special and hurried
errand, he had scarcely seen the physiognomy of the streets after eight
o'clock. He had never seen the playground in the evening. And this
evening the town did not seem like the same town; it had become a new
and mysterious town of adventure. And yet Edwin was not fifty yards
away from his own bedroom.
They ascended Duck Bank together, Edwin proud to be with a celebrity of
the calibre of Big James, and Big James calmly satisfied to show himself
thus formally with his master's son. It appeared almost incredible that
those two immortals, so diverse, had issued from the womb practically
alike; that a few brief years on the earth had given Big James such a
tremendous physical advantage. Several hours' daily submission to the
exact regularities of lines of type and to the unvarying demands of
minutely adjusted machines in motion had stamped Big James's body and
mind with the delicate and quasi-finicking preciseness which
characterises all compositors and printers; and the continual monotonous
performance of similar tasks that employed his faculties while never
absorbing or straining them, had soothed and dulled the fever of life in
him to a beneficent calm, a calm refined and beautified by the
pleasurable exercise of song. Big James had seldom known a violent
emotion. He had craved nothing, sought for nothing, and lost nothing.
Edwin, like Big James in progress from everlasting to everlasting, was
all inchoate, unformed, undisciplined, and burning with capricious
fires; all expectant, eager, reluctant, tingling, timid, innocently and
wistfully audacious. By taking the boy's hand, Big James might have
poetically symbolised their relation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
"Are you going to sing to-night at the Dragon, Mr Yarlett?" asked
Edwin. He lengthened his step to Big James's, controlled his ardent
body, and tried to remember that he was a man with a man.
"I am, young sir," said Big James. "There is a party of us."
"Is it the Male Glee Party?" Edwin pursued.
"Yes, Mr Edwin."
"Then Mr Smallrice will be there?"
"He will, Mr Edwin."
"Why can Mr Smallrice sing such high notes?"
Big James slowly shook his head, as Edwin looked up at him. "I tell you
what it is, young sir. It's a gift, that's what it is, same as I can
sing low."
"But Mr Smallrice is very old, isn't he?"
"There's a parrot in a cage over at the Duck, there, as is eighty-five
years old, and that's proved by record kept, young sir."
"No!" protested Edwin's incredulity politely.
"By record kept," said Big James.
"Do you often sing at the Dragon, Mr Yarlett?"
"Time was," said Big James, "when some of us used to sing there every
night, Sundays excepted, and concerts and whatnot excepted. Aye! For
hours and hours every night. And still do sometimes."
"After your work?"
"After our work. Aye! And often till dawn in summer. One o'clock, two
o'clock, half-past two o'clock, every night. But now they say that this
new Licensing Act will close every public-house in this town at eleven
o'clock, and a straight-up eleven at that!"
"But what do you do it for?"
"What do we do it for? We do it to pass the time and the glass, young
sir. Not as I should like you to think as I ever drank, Mr Edwin. One
quart of ale I take every night, and have ever done; no more, no less."
"But"--Edwin's rapid, breaking voice interrupted eagerly the deep
majestic tones--"aren't you tired the next day? I should be!"
"Never," said Big James. "I get up from my bed as fresh as a daisy at
six sharp. And I've known the nights when my bed ne'er saw me."
"You must be strong, Mr Yarlett, my word!" Edwin exclaimed. These
revelations of the habits and prowess of Big James astounded him. He
had never suspected that such things went on in the town.
"Aye! Middling!"
"I suppose it's a free-and-easy at the Dragon, to-night, Mr Yarlett?"
"In a manner of speaking," said Big James.
"I wish I could stay for it."
"And why not?" Big James suggested, and looked down at Edwin with
half-humorous incertitude.
Edwin shrugged his shoulders superiorly, indicating by instinct, in
spite of himself, that possibly Big James was trespassing over the
social line that divided them. And yet Big James's father would have
condescended to Edwin's grandfather. Only, Edwin now belonged to the
employing class, whilst Big James belonged to the employed. Already
Edwin, whose father had been thrashed by workmen whom a compositor would
hesitate to call skilled--already Edwin had the mien natural to a ruler,
and Big James, with dignified deference, would submit unresentingly to
his attitude. It was the subtlest thing. It was not that Edwin
obscurely objected to the suggestion of his being present at the
free-and-easy; it was that he objected (but nicely, and with good
nature) to any assumption of Big James's right to influence him towards
an act that his father would not approve. Instead of saying, "Why not?"
Big James ought to have said: "Nobody but you can decide that, as your
father's away." James ought to have been strictly impartial.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
"Well," said Big James, when they arrived at the playground, which lay
north of the covered Meat Market or Shambles, "it looks as if they
hadn't been able to make a start yet at the Blood Tub." His tone was
marked by a calm, grand disdain, as of one entertainer talking about
another.
The Blood Tub, otherwise known as Snaggs's, was the centre of nocturnal
pleasure in Bursley. It stood almost on the very spot where the jawbone
of a whale had once lain, as a supreme natural curiosity. It
represented the softened manners which had developed out of the old
medievalism of the century. It had supplanted the bear-pit and the
cock-pit. It corresponded somewhat with the ideals symbolised by the
new Town Hall. In the tiny odorous beer-houses of all the undulating,
twisting, reddish streets that surrounded the contiguous open spaces of
Duck Bank, the playground, the market-place, and Saint Luke's Square,
the folk no longer discussed eagerly what chance on Sunday morning the
municipal bear would have against five dogs. They had progressed as far
as a free library, boxing-gloves, rabbit-coursing, and the Blood Tub.
This last was a theatre with wooden sides and a canvas roof, and it
would hold quite a crowd of people. In front of it was a platform, and
an orchestra, lighted by oil flares that, as Big James and Edwin
approached, were gaining strength in the twilight. Leaning against the
platform was a blackboard on which was chalked the announcement of two
plays: "The Forty Thieves" (author unstated) and Cruikshank's "The
Bottle." The orchestra, after terrific concussions, fell silent, and
then a troupe of players in costume, cramped on the narrow trestle
boards, performed a sample scene from "The Forty Thieves," just to give
the crowd in front an idea of the wonders of this powerful work. And
four thieves passed and repassed behind the screen hiding the doors, and
reappeared nine times as four fresh thieves until the tale of forty was
complete. And then old Hammerad, the beloved clown who played the drum
(and whose wife kept a barber's shop in Buck Row and shaved for a
penny), left his drum and did two minutes' stiff clowning, and then the
orchestra burst forth again, and the brazen voice of old Snaggs (in his
moleskin waistcoat) easily rode the storm, adjuring the folk to walk up
and walk up: which some of the folk did do. And lastly the band played
"God Save the Queen," and the players, followed by old Snaggs,
processionally entered the booth.
"I lay they come out again," said Big James, with grim blandness.
"Why?" asked Edwin. He was absolutely new to the scene.
"I lay they haven't got twenty couple inside," said Big James.
And in less than a minute the troupe did indeed emerge, and old Snaggs
expostulated with a dilatory public, respectfully but firmly. It had
been a queer year for Mr Snaggs. Rain had ruined the Wakes; rain had
ruined everything; rain had nearly ruined him. July was obviously not a
month in which a self-respecting theatre ought to be open, but Mr
Snaggs had got to the point of catching at straws. He stated that in
order to prove his absolute bona fides the troupe would now give a scene
from that world-renowned and unique drama, "The Bottle," after which the
performance really would commence, since he could not as a gentleman
keep his kind patrons within waiting any longer. His habit, which
emphasised itself as he grew older, was to treat the staring crowd in
front of his booth like a family of nephews and nieces. The device was
quite useless, for the public's stolidity was impregnable. It touched
the heroic. No more granitic and crass stolidity could have been
discovered in England. The crowd stood; it exercised no other function
of existence. It just stood, and there it would stand until convinced
that the gratis part of the spectacle was positively at an end.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
With a ceremonious gesture signifying that he assumed the young sir's
consent, Big James turned away. He had displayed to Edwin the poverty
and the futility of the Blood Tub. Edwin would perhaps have liked to
stay. The scenes enacted on the outer platform were certainly tinged
with the ridiculous, but they were the first histrionics that he had
ever witnessed; and he could not help thinking, hoping, in spite of his
common sense, that within the booth all was different, miraculously
transformed into the grand and the impressive. Left to himself, he
would surely have preferred an evening at the Blood Tub to a business
interview with Mr Enoch Peake at the Dragon. But naturally he had to
scorn the Blood Tub with a scorn equal to the massive and silent scorn
of Big James. And on the whole he considered that he was behaving as a
man with another man rather well. He sought by depreciatory remarks to
keep the conversation at its proper adult level.
Big James led him through the market-place, where a few vegetable,
tripe, and gingerbread stalls--relics of the day's market--were still
attracting customers in the twilight. These slatternly and picturesque
groups, beneath their flickering yellow flares, were encamped at the
gigantic foot of the Town Hall porch as at the foot of a precipice. The
monstrous black walls of the Town Hall rose and were merged in gloom;
and the spire of the Town Hall, on whose summit stood a gold angel
holding a gold crown, rose right into the heavens and was there lost.
It was marvellous that this town, by adding stone to stone, had upreared
this monument which, in expressing the secret nobility of its ideals,
dwarfed the town. On every side of it the beer-houses, full of a
dulled, savage ecstasy of life, gleamed brighter than the shops. Big
James led Edwin down through the mysteries of the Cock Yard and up along
Bugg's Gutter, and so back to the Dragon.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER TEN.
FREE AND EASY.
When Edwin, shyly, followed Big James into the assembly room of the
Dragon, it already held a fair sprinkling of men, and newcomers
continued to drop in. They were soberly and respectably clothed, though
a few had knotted handkerchiefs round their necks instead of collars and
ties. The occasion was a jollity of the Bursley Mutual Burial Club.
This Club, a singular example of that dogged private co-operative
enterprise which so sharply distinguishes English corporate life from
the corporate life of other European countries, had lustily survived
from a period when men were far less sure of a decent burial than they
were then, in the very prosperous early seventies. It had helped to
maintain the barbaric fashion of ostentatiously expensive funerals, out
of which undertakers and beer-sellers made vast sums; but it had also
provided a basis of common endeavour and of fellowship. And its
respectability was intense, and at the same time broad-minded. To be an
established subscriber to the Burial Club was evidence of good character
and of social spirit. The periodic jollities of this company of men
whose professed aim was to bury each other, had a high reputation for
excellence. Up till a year previously they had always been held at the
Duck, in Duck Square, opposite; but Mr Enoch Peake, Chairman of the
Club, had by persistent and relentless chicane, triumphing over immense
influences, changed their venue to the Dragon, whose landlady, Mrs
Louisa Loggerheads, he was then courting. (It must be stated that Mrs
Louisa's name contained no slur of cantankerousness; it is merely the
local word for a harmless plant, the knapweed.) He had now won Mrs
Loggerheads, after being a widower thrice, and with her the second best
`house' in the town.
There were long benches down the room, with forms on either side of
them. Big James, not without pomp, escorted a blushing Edwin to the end
of one of these tables, near a small raised platform that occupied the
extremity of the room. Over this platform was printed a legend: "As a
bird is known by its note--"; and over the legend was a full-rigged ship
in a glass case, and a pair of antlers. The walls of the room were dark
brown, the ceiling grey with soot of various sorts, and the floor tiled
red-and-black and sanded. Smoke rose in spirals from about a score of
churchwarden pipes and as many cutties, which were charged from tin
pouches, and lighted by spills of newspaper from the three double
gas-jets that hung down over the benches. Two middle-aged women, one in
black and the other checked, served beer, porter, and stout in mugs, and
gin in glasses, passing in and out through a side door. The company
talked little, and it had not yet begun seriously to drink; but,
sprawled about in attitudes of restful abeyance, it was smoking
religiously, and the flat noise of solemn expectorations punctuated the
minutes. Edwin was easily the youngest person present--the average age
appeared to be about fifty--but nobody's curiosity seemed to be much
stirred by his odd arrival, and he ceased gradually to blush. When,
however, one of the women paused before him in silent question, and he
had to explain that he required no drink because he had only called for
a moment about a matter of business, he blushed again vigorously.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
Then Mr Enoch Peake appeared. He was a short, stout old man, with fat
hands, a red, minutely wrinkled face, and very small eyes. Greeted with
the respect due to the owner of Cocknage Gardens, a sporting resort
where all the best foot-racing and rabbit-coursing took place, he
accepted it in somnolent indifference, and immediately took off his coat
and sat down in cotton shirt-sleeves. Then he pulled out a red
handkerchief and his tobacco-box, and set them on the table. Big James
motioned to Edwin.
"Evening, Mr Peake," said Big James, crossing the floor, "and here's a
young gent wishful for two words with you."
Mr Peake stared vacantly.
"Young Mr Clayhanger," explained Big James.
"It's about this card," Edwin began, in a whisper, drawing the
wedding-card sheepishly from his pocket. "Father had to go to
Manchester," he added, when he had finished.
Mr Enoch Peake seized the card in both hands, and examined it; and
Edwin could hear his heavy breathing.
Mrs Louisa Loggerheads, a comfortable, smiling administrative woman of
fifty, showed herself at the service-door, and nodded with dignity to a
few of the habitues.
"Missis is at door," said Big James to Mr Peake.
"Is her?" muttered Mr Peake, not interrupting his examination of the
card.
One of the serving-women, having removed Mr Peake's coat, brought a new
church warden, filled it, and carefully directed the tip towards his
tight little mouth: the lips closed on it. Then she lighted a spill and
applied it to the distant bowl, and the mouth puffed; and then the woman
deposited the bowl cautiously on the bench. Lastly, she came with a
small glass of sloe gin. Mr Peake did not move.
At length Mr Peake withdrew the pipe from his mouth, and after an
interval said--
"Aye!"
He continued to stare at the card, now held in one hand.
"And is it to be printed in silver?" Edwin asked.
Mr Peake took a few more puffs.
"Aye!"
When he had stared further for a long time at the card, his hand moved
slowly with it towards Edwin, and Edwin resumed possession of it.
Mrs Louisa Loggerheads had now vanished.
"Missis has gone," said Big James.
"Has her?" muttered Mr Peake.
Edwin rose to leave, though unwillingly; but Big James asked him in
polite reproach whether he should not stay for the first song. He
nodded, encouraged; and sat down. He did not know that the uppermost
idea in Big James's mind for an hour past had been that Edwin would hear
him sing.
Mr Peake lifted his glass, held it from him, approached his lips
towards it, and emptied it at a draught. He then glanced round and said
thickly--
"Gentlemen all, Mester Smallrice, Mester Harracles, Mester Rampick, and
Mester Yarlett will now oblige with one o' th' ould favourites."
There was some applause, a few coats were removed, and Mr Peake fixed
himself in a contemplative attitude.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
Messrs. Arthur Smallrice, Abraham Harracles, Jos Rawnpike, and James
Yarlett rose, stepped heavily on to the little platform, and stood in a
line with their hands in their pockets. "As a bird is known by its
note--" was hidden by the rampart of their shoulders. They had no
music. They knew the music; they had sung it a thousand times. They
knew precisely the effects which they wished to produce, and the means
of production. They worked together like an inspired machine. Mr
Arthur Smallrice gave a rapid glance into a corner, and from that corner
a concertina spoke--one short note. Then began, with no hesitating
shuffling preliminaries nor mute consultations, the singing of that
classic quartet, justly celebrated from Hull to Wigan and from
Northallerton to Lichfield, "Loud Ocean's Roar." The thing was
performed with absolute assurance and perfection. Mr Arthur Smallrice
did the yapping of the short waves on the foam-veiled rocks, and Big
James in fullest grandeur did the long and mighty rolling of the deep.
It was majestic, terrific, and overwhelming. Many bars before the close
Edwin was thrilled, as by an exquisite and vast revelation. He tingled
from head to foot. He had never heard any singing like it, or any
singing in any way comparable to it. He had never guessed that song
held such possibilities of emotion. The pure and fine essential
qualities of the voices, the dizzying harmonies, the fugal calls and
responses, the strange relief of the unisons, and above all the free,
natural mien of the singers, proudly aware that they were producing
something beautiful that could not be produced more beautifully,
conscious of unchallenged supremacy,--all this enfevered him to an
unprecedented and self-astonished enthusiasm.
He murmured under his breath, as "Loud Ocean's Roar" died away and the
little voices of the street supervened: "By Gad! By Gad!"
The applause was generous. Edwin stamped and clapped with childlike
violence and fury. Mr Peake slowly and regularly thumped one fist on
the bench, puffing the while. Glasses and mugs could be seen, but not
heard, dancing. Mr Arthur Smallrice, Mr Abraham Harracles, Mr Jos
Rawnpike, and Mr James Yarlett, entirely inattentive to the
acclamations, stepped heavily from the platform and sat down. When
Edwin caught Big James's eye he clapped again, reanimating the general
approval, and Big James gazed at him with bland satisfaction. Mr Enoch
Peake was now, save for the rise and fall of his great chest, as
immobile and brooding as an Indian god.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
Edwin did not depart. He reflected that, even if his father should come
home earlier than the last train and prove curious, it would be
impossible for him to know the exact moment at which his son had been
able to have speech with Mr Enoch Peake on the important matter of
business. For aught his father could ever guess he might have been
prevented from obtaining the attention of the chairman of the
proceedings until, say, eleven o'clock. Also, he meant to present his
conduct to his father in the light of an enterprising and fearless
action showing a marked aptitude for affairs. Mr Enoch Peake, whom his
father was anxious to flatter, had desired his father's company at the
Dragon, and, to save the situation, Edwin had courageously gone instead:
that was it.
Besides, he would have stayed in any case. His mind was elevated above
the fear of consequences.
There was some concertina-playing, with a realistic imitation of church
bells borne on the wind from a distance; and then the Bursley Prize
Handbell Ringers (or Campanologists) produced a whole family of real
bells from under a form, and the ostler and the two women arranged a
special table, and the campanologists fixed their bells on it and
themselves round it, and performed a selection of Scotch and Irish airs,
without once deceiving themselves as to the precise note which a chosen
bell would emit when duly shaken.
Singular as was this feat, it was far less so than a young man's
performance of the ophicleide, a serpentine instrument that coiled round
and about its player, and when breathed into persuasively gave forth
prodigious brassy sounds that resembled the night-noises of beasts of
prey. This item roused the Indian god from his umbilical
contemplations, and as the young ophicleide player, somewhat breathless,
passed down the room with his brazen creature in his arms, Mr Enoch
Peake pulled him by the jacket-tail.
"Eh!" said Mr Enoch Peake. "Is that the ophicleide as thy father used
to play at th' owd church?"
"Yes, Mr Peake," said the young man, with bright respect.
Mr Peake dropped his eyes again, and when the young man had gone, he
murmured, to his stomach--
"I well knowed it were th' ophicleide as his father used to play at th'
owd church!" And suddenly starting up, he continued hoarsely,
"Gentlemen all, Mr James Yarlett will now kindly oblige with `The
Miller of the Dee.'" And one of the women relighted his pipe and served
him with beer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
Big James's rendering of "The Miller of the Dee" had been renowned in
the Five Towns since 1852. It was classical, hallowed. It was the only
possible rendering of "The Miller of the Dee." If the greatest bass in
the world had come incognito to Bursley and sung "The Miller of the
Dee," people would have said, "Ah! But ye should hear Big James sing
it!" It suited Big James. The sentiments of the song were his
sentiments; he expressed them with natural simplicity; but at the same
time they underwent a certain refinement at his hands; for even when he
sang at his loudest Big James was refined, natty, and restrained. His
instinctive gentlemanliness was invincible and all-pervading. And the
real beauty and enormous power of his magnificent voice saved him by its
mere distinction from the charge of being finicking. The simple sound
of the voice gave pleasure. And the simple production of that sound was
Big James's deepest joy. Amid all the expected loud applause the giant
looked naively for Edwin's boyish mad enthusiasm, and felt it; and was
thrilled, and very glad that he had brought Edwin. As for Edwin, Edwin
was humbled that he should have been so blind to what Big James was. He
had always regarded Big James as a dull, decent, somewhat peculiar
fellow in a dirty apron, who was his father's foreman. He had actually
talked once to Big James of the wonderful way in which Maggie and Clara
sang, and Big James had been properly respectful. But the singing of
Maggie and Clara was less than nothing, the crudest amateurism, compared
to these public performances of Big James's. Even the accompanying
concertina was far more cleverly handled than the Clayhanger piano had
ever been handled. Yes, Edwin was humbled. And he had a great wish to
be able to do something brilliantly himself--he knew not what. The
intoxication of the desire for glory was upon him as he sat amid those
shirt-sleeved men, near the brooding Indian god, under a crawling bluish
canopy of smoke, gazing absently at the legend: "As a bird is known by
its note--"
After an interval, during which Mr Enoch Peake was roused more than
once, a man with a Lancashire accent recited a poem entitled "The Patent
Hairbrushing Machine," the rotary hairbrush being at that time an
exceedingly piquant novelty that had only been heard of in the barbers'
shops of the Five Towns, though travellers to Manchester could boast
that they had sat under it. As the principle of the new machine was
easily grasped, and the sensations induced by it easily imagined, the
recitation had a success which was indicated by slappings of thighs and
great blowings-off of mirth. But Mr Enoch Peake preserved his
tranquillity throughout it, and immediately it was over he announced
with haste--
"Gentlemen all, Miss Florence Simcox--or shall us say Mrs Offlow, wife
of the gentleman who has just obliged--the champion female clog-dancer
of the Midlands, will now oblige."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SIX.
These words put every man whom they surprised into a state of unusual
animation; and they surprised most of the company. It may be doubted
whether a female clog-dancer had ever footed it in Bursley. Several
public-houses possessed local champions--of a street, of a village--but
these were emphatically not women. Enoch Peake had arranged this daring
item in the course of his afternoon's business at Cocknage Gardens, Mr
Offlow being an expert in ratting terriers, and Mrs Offlow happening to
be on a tour with her husband through the realms of her championship, a
tour which mingled the varying advantages derivable from terriers,
recitations, and clogs. The affair was therefore respectable beyond
cavil.
Nevertheless when Florence shone suddenly at the service-door, the
shortness of her red-and-black velvet skirts, and the undeniable
complete visibility of her rounded calves produced an uneasy and
agreeable impression that Enoch Peake, for a chairman of the Mutual
Burial Club, had gone rather far, superbly far, and that his moral
ascendancy over Louisa Loggerheads must indeed be truly astonishing.
Louisa now stood gravely behind the dancer, in the shadow of the
doorway, and the contrast between her and Florence was in every way
striking enough to prove what a wonderful and mysterious man Enoch Peake
was. Florence was accustomed to audiences. She was a pretty, doll-like
woman, if inclined to amplitude; but the smile between those shaking
golden ringlets had neither the modesty nor the false modesty nor the
docility that Bursley was accustomed to think proper to the face of
woman. It could have stared down any man in the place, except perhaps
Mr Peake.
The gestures of Mr Offlow, and her gestures, as he arranged and
prepared the surface of the little square dancing-board that was her
throne, showed that he was the husband of Florence Simcox rather than
she the wife of Offlow the reciter and dog-fancier. Further, it was his
role to play the concertina to her: he had had to learn the concertina--
possibly a secret humiliation for one whose judgement in terriers was
not excelled in many public-houses.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SEVEN.
She danced; and the service-doorway showed a vista of open-mouthed
scullions. There was no sound in the room, save the concertina and the
champion clogs. Every eye was fixed on those clogs; even the little
eyes of Mr Peake quitted the button of his waistcoat and burned like
diamond points on those clogs. Florence herself chiefly gazed on those
clogs, but occasionally her nonchalant petulant gaze would wander up and
down her bare arms and across her bosom. At intervals, with her ringed
fingers she would lift the short skirt--a nothing, an imperceptibility,
half an inch, with glance downcast; and the effect was profound,
recondite, inexplicable. Her style was not that of a male dog-dancer,
but it was indubitably clog-dancing, full of marvels to the connoisseur,
and to the profane naught but a highly complicated series of wooden
noises. Florence's face began to perspire. Then the concertina ceased
playing, so that an undistracted attention might be given to the
supremely difficult final figures of the dance.
And thus was rendered back to the people in the charming form of beauty
that which the instinct of the artist had taken from the sordid ugliness
of the people. The clog, the very emblem of the servitude and the
squalor of brutalised populations, was changed, on the light feet of
this favourite, into the medium of grace. Few of these men but at some
time of their lives had worn the clog, had clattered in it through
winter's slush, and through the freezing darkness before dawn, to the
manufactory and the mill and the mine, whence after a day of labour
under discipline more than military, they had clattered back to their
little candle-lighted homes. One of the slatterns behind the doorway
actually stood in clogs to watch the dancer. The clog meant everything
that was harsh, foul, and desolating; it summoned images of misery and
disgust. Yet on those feet that had never worn it seriously, it became
the magic instrument of pleasure, waking dulled wits and forgotten
aspirations, putting upon everybody an enchantment... And then,
suddenly, the dancer threw up one foot as high as her head and brought
two clogs down together like a double mallet on the board, and stood
still. It was over.
Mrs Louisa Loggerheads turned nervously away, pushing her servants in
front of her. And when the society of mutual buriers had recovered from
the startling shameless insolence of that last high kick, it gave the
rein to its panting excitement, and roared and stamped. Edwin was
staggered. The blood swept into his face, a hot tide. He was ravished,
but he was also staggered. He did not know what to think of Florence,
the champion female clog-dancer. He felt that she was wondrous; he felt
that he could have gazed at her all night; but he felt that she had put
him under the necessity of reconsidering some of his fundamental
opinions. For example, he was obliged to admit within himself a
lessening of scorn for the attitude toward each other of Miss Ingamells
and her young man. He saw those things in a new light. And he
reflected, dazzled by the unforeseen chances of existence: "Yesterday I
was at school--and to-day I see this!" He was so preoccupied by his own
intimate sensations that the idea of applauding never occurred to him,
until he perceived his conspicuousness in not applauding, whereupon he
clapped self-consciously.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
EIGHT.
Miss Florence Simcox, somewhat breathless, tripped away, with simulated
coyness and many curtseys. She had done her task, and as a woman she
had to go: this was a gathering of members of the Mutual Burial Club, a
masculine company, and not meet for females. The men pulled themselves
together, remembering that their proudest quality was a stoic
callousness that nothing could overthrow. They refilled pipes, ordered
more beer, and resumed the mask of invulnerable solemnity.
"Aye!" muttered Mr Enoch Peake.
Edwin, with a great effort, rose and walked out. He would have liked to
say good night to Big James; he did not deny that he ought to have done
so; but he dared not complicate his exit. On the pavement outside, in
the warm damp night, a few loitering listeners stood doggedly before an
open window, hearkening, their hands deep in their pockets, motionless.
And Edwin could hear Mr Enoch Peake: "Gentlemen all, Mester Arthur
Smallrice, Mester Abraham Harracles, Mester Jos Rampick, and Mester
James Yarlett--"
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER ELEVEN.
SON AND FATHER.
Later that evening, Edwin sat at a small deal table in the embrasure of
the dormer window of the empty attic next to his bedroom. During the
interval between tea and the rendezvous with Big James he had formally
planted his flag in that room. He had swept it out with a long-brush,
while Clara stood at the door giggling at the spectacle and telling him
that he had no right thus to annex territory in the absence of the
overlord. He had mounted a pair of steps, and put a lot of lumber
through a trap at the head of the stairs into the loft. And he had got
a table, a lamp, and a chair. That was all that he needed for the
moment. He had gone out to meet Big James with his head quite half-full
of this vague attic-project, but the night sights of Bursley, and
especially the music at the Dragon, and still more especially the
dancing at the Dragon, had almost expelled the attic-project from his
head. When he returned unobtrusively into the house and learnt from a
disturbed Mrs Nixon, who was sewing in the kitchen, that he was
understood to be in his new attic, and that his sisters had gone to bed,
the enchantment of the attic had instantly resumed much of its power
over him, and he had hurried upstairs fortified with a slice of bread
and half a cold sausage. He had eaten the food absently in gulps while
staring at the cover of "Cazenove's Architectural Views of European
Capitals," abstracted from the shop without payment. Then he had pinned
part of a sheet of cartridge-paper on an old drawing-board which he
possessed, and had sat down. For his purpose the paper ought to have
been soaked and stretched on the board with paste, but that would have
meant a delay of seven or eight hours, and he was not willing to wait.
Though he could not concentrate his mind to begin, his mind could not be
reconciled to waiting. So he had decided to draw his picture in pencil
outline, and then stretch the paper early on Sunday morning; it would
dry during chapel. His new box of paints, a cracked T-square, and some
india-rubber also lay on the table.
He had chosen "View of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame Paris, from the Pont
des Arts." It pleased him by the coloration of the old houses in front
of Notre-Dame, and the reflections in the water of the Seine, and the
elusive blueness of the twin towers amid the pale grey clouds of a
Parisian sky. A romantic scene! He wanted to copy it exactly, to
recreate it from beginning to end, to feel the thrill of producing each
wonderful effect himself. Yet he sat inactive. He sat and vaguely
gazed at the slope of Trafalgar Road with its double row of yellow
jewels, beautifully ascending in fire to the ridge of the horizon and
there losing itself in the deep and solemn purple of the summer night;
and he thought how ugly and commonplace all that was, and how different
from all that were the noble capitals of Europe. Scarcely a sound came
through the open window; song doubtless still gushed forth at the
Dragon, and revellers would not for hours awake the street on their way
to the exacerbating atmosphere of home.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
He had no resolution to take up the pencil. Yet after the Male Glee
Party had sung "Loud Ocean's Roar," he remembered that he had had a most
clear and distinct impulse to begin drawing architecture at once, and to
do something grand and fine, as grand and fine as the singing, something
that would thrill people as the singing thrilled. If he had not rushed
home instantly it was solely because he had been held back by the
stronger desire to hear more music and by the hope of further novel and
exciting sensations. But Florence the clog-dancer had easily diverted
the seeming-powerful current of his mind. He wanted as much as ever to
do wondrous things, and to do them soon, but it appeared to him that he
must think out first the enigmatic subject of Florence, Never had he
seen any female creature as he saw her, and ephemeral images of her were
continually forming and dissolving before him. He could come to no
conclusion at all about the subject of Florence. Only his boyish pride
was gradually being beaten back by an oncoming idea that up to that very
evening he had been a sort of rather silly kid with no eyes in his head.
It was in order to ignore for a time this unsettling and humiliating
idea that, finally, he began to copy the outlines of the Parisian scene
on his cartridge-paper. He was in no way a skilled draughtsman, but he
had dabbled in pencils and colours, and he had lately picked up from a
handbook the hint that in blocking out a drawing the first thing to do
was to observe what points were vertically under what points, and what
points horizontal with what points. He seemed to see the whole secret
of draughtsmanship in this priceless counsel, which, indeed, with an
elementary knowledge of geometry acquired at school, and the familiarity
of his fingers with a pencil, constituted the whole of his technical
equipment. All the rest was mere desire. Happily the architectural
nature of the subject made it more amenable than, say, a rural landscape
to the use of a T-square and common sense. And Edwin considered that he
was doing rather well until, quitting measurements and rulings, he
arrived at the stage of drawing the detail of the towers. Then at once
the dream of perfect accomplishment began to fade at the edges, and the
crust of faith to yield ominously. Each stroke was a falling-away from
the ideal, a blow to hope.
And suddenly a yawn surprised him, and recalled him to the existence of
his body. He thought: "I can't really be tired. It would be absurd to
go to bed." For his theory had long been that the notions of parents
about bedtime were indeed absurd, and that he would be just as
thoroughly reposed after three hours sleep as after ten. And now that
he was a man he meant to practise his theory so far as circumstances
allowed. He looked at his watch. It was turned half-past eleven. A
delicious wave of joy and of satisfaction animated him. He had never
been up so late, within his recollection, save on a few occasions when
even infants were allowed to be up late. He was alone, secreted, master
of his time and his activity, his mind charged with novel impressions,
and a congenial work in progress. Alone? ... It was as if he was
spiritually alone in the vast solitude of the night. It was as if he
could behold the unconscious forms of all humanity, sleeping. This
feeling that only he had preserved consciousness and energy, that he was
the sole active possessor of the mysterious night, affected him in the
most exquisite manner. He had not been so nobly happy in his life. And
at the same time he was proud, in a childlike way, of being up so late.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
He heard the door being pushed open, and he gave a jump and turned his
head. His father stood in the entrance to the attic.
"Hello, father!" he said weakly, ingratiatingly.
"What art doing at this time o' night, lad?" Darius Clayhanger
demanded.
Strange to say, the autocrat was not angered by the remarkable sight in
front of him. Edwin knew that his father would probably come home from
Manchester on the mail train, which would stop to set down a passenger
at Shawport by suitable arrangement. And he had expected that his
father would go to bed, as usual on such evenings, after having eaten
the supper left for him in the sitting-room. His father's bedroom was
next door to the sitting-room. Save for Mrs Nixon in a distant nook,
Edwin had the attic floor to himself. He ought to have been as safe
from intrusion there as in the farthest capital of Europe. His father
did not climb the attic stairs once in six months. So that he had
regarded himself as secure. Still, he must have positively forgotten
the very existence of his father; he must have been `lost,' otherwise he
could not but have heard the footsteps on the stairs.
"I was just drawing," said Edwin, with a little more confidence.
He looked at his father and saw an old man, a man who for him had always
been old, generally harsh, often truculent, and seldom indulgent. He
saw an ugly, undistinguished, and somewhat vulgar man (far less
dignified, for instance, than Big James); a man who had his way by force
and scarcely ever by argument; a man whose arguments for or against a
given course were simply pitiable, if not despicable. He sometimes
indeed thought that there must be a peculiar twist in his father's brain
which prevented him from appreciating an adverse point in a debate; he
had ceased to expect that his father would listen to reason. Latterly
he was always surprised when, as to-night, he caught a glance of mild
benevolence on that face; yet he would never fail to respond to such a
mood eagerly, without resentment. It might be said that he regarded his
father as he regarded the weather, fatalistically. No more than against
the weather would he have dreamed of bearing malice against his father,
even had such a plan not been unwise and dangerous. He was convinced
that his father's interest in him was about the same as the sun's
interest in him. His father was nearly always wrapped in business
affairs, and seemed to come to the trifling affairs of Edwin with
difficulty, as out of an absorbing engrossment.
Assuredly he would have been amazed to know that his father had been
thinking of him all the afternoon and evening. But it was so. Darius
Clayhanger had been nervous as to the manner in which the boy would
acquit himself in the bit of business which had been confided to him.
It was the boy's first bit of business. Straightforward as it was, the
boy might muddle it, might omit a portion of it, might say the wrong
thing, might forget. Darius hoped for the best, but he was afraid. He
saw in his son an amiable irresponsible fool. He compared Edwin at
sixteen with himself at the same age. Edwin had never had a care, never
suffered a privation, never been forced to think for himself. (Darius
might more justly have put it--never been allowed to think for himself.)
Edwin had lived in cotton-wool, and knew less of the world than his
father had known at half his years; much less. Darius was sure that
Edwin had never even come near suspecting the miracles which his father
had accomplished: this was true, and not merely was Edwin stupendously
ignorant, and even pettily scornful, of realities, but he was ignorant
of his own ignorance. Education! ... Darius snorted. To Darius it
seemed that Edwin's education was like lying down in an orchard in
lovely summer and having ripe fruit dropped into your mouth... A cocky
infant! A girl! And yet there was something about Edwin that his
father admired, even respected and envied ... an occasional gesture, an
attitude in walking, an intonation, a smile. Edwin, his own son, had a
personal distinction that he himself could never compass. Edwin talked
more correctly than his father. He thought differently from his father.
He had an original grace. In the essence of his being he was superior
to both his father and his sisters. Sometimes when his father saw him
walking along the street, or coming into a room, or uttering some simple
phrase, or shrugging his shoulders, Darius was aware of a faint thrill.
Pride? Perhaps; but he would never have admitted it. An agreeable
perplexity rather--a state of being puzzled how he, so common, had
begotten a creature so subtly aristocratic ... aristocratic was the
word. And Edwin seemed so young, fragile, innocent, and defenceless!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
Darius advanced into the attic.
"What about that matter of Enoch Peake's?" he asked, hoping and fearing,
really anxious for his son. He defended himself against probable
disappointment by preparing to lapse into savage paternal pessimism and
disgust at the futility of an offspring nursed in luxury.
"Oh! It's all right," said Edwin eagerly. "Mr Peake sent word he
couldn't come, and he wanted you to go across to the Dragon this
evening. So I went instead." It sounded dashingly capable.
He finished the recital, and added that of course Big James had not been
able to proceed with the job.
"And where's the proof?" demanded Darius. His relief expressed itself
in a superficial surliness; but Edwin was not deceived. As his father
gazed mechanically at the proof that Edwin produced hurriedly from his
pocket, he added with a negligent air--
"There was a free-and-easy on at the Dragon, father."
"Was there?" muttered Darius.
Edwin saw that whatever danger had existed was now over.
"And I suppose," said Darius, with assumed grimness, "if I hadn't
happened to ha' seen a light from th' bottom o' th' attic stairs I
should never have known aught about all this here?" He indicated the
cleansed attic, the table, the lamp, and the apparatus of art.
"Oh yes, you would, father!" Edwin reassured him.
Darius came nearer. They were close together, Edwin twisted on the
cane-chair, and his father almost over him. The lamp smelt, and gave
off a stuffy warmth; the open window, through which came a wandering
air, was a black oblong; the triangular side walls of the dormer shut
them intimately in; the house slept.
"What art up to?"
The tone was benignant. Edwin had not been ordered abruptly off to bed,
with a reprimand for late hours and silly proceedings generally. He
sought the reason in vain. One reason was that Darius Clayhanger had
made a grand bargain at Manchester in the purchase of a second-hand
printing machine.
"I'm copying this," he replied slowly, and then all the details tumbled
rashly out of his mouth, one after the other. "Oh, father! I found
this book in the shop, packed away on a top shelf, and I want to borrow
it. I only want to borrow it. And I've bought this paint-box, out of
auntie's half-sovereign. I paid Miss Ingamells the full price... I
thought I'd have a go at some of these architecture things."
Darius glared at the copy.
"Humph!"
"It's only just started, you know."
"Them prize books--have ye done all that?"
"Yes, father."
"And put all the prices down, as I told ye?"
"Yes, father."
Then a pause. Edwin's heart was beating hard.
"I want to do some of these architecture things," he repeated. No
remark from his father. Then he said, fastening his gaze intensely on
the table: "You know, father, what I should really like to be--I should
like to be an architect."
It was out. He had said it.
"Should ye?" said his father, who attached no importance of any kind to
this avowal of a preference. "Well, what you want is a bit o' business
training for a start, I'm thinking."
"Oh, of course!" Edwin concurred, with pathetic eagerness, and added a
piece of information for his father: "I'm only sixteen, aren't I?"
"Sixteen ought to ha' been in bed this two hours and more. Off with
ye!"
Edwin retired in an extraordinary state of relief and happiness.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER TWELVE.
MACHINERY.
Rather more than a week later, Edwin had so far entered into the life of
his father's business that he could fully share the excitement caused by
an impending solemnity in the printing office. He was somewhat pleased
with himself, and especially with his seriousness. The memory of school
was slipping away from him in the most extraordinary manner. His only
school-friend, Charlie Orgreave, had departed, with all the
multitudinous Orgreaves, for a month in Wales. He might have written to
the Sunday; the Sunday might have written to him: but the idea of
writing did not occur to either of them; they were both still
sufficiently childlike to accept with fatalism all the consequences of
parental caprice. Orgreave senior had taken his family to Wales; the
boys were thus separated, and there was an end of it. Edwin regretted
this, because Orgreave senior happened to be a very successful
architect, and hence there were possibilities of getting into an
architectural atmosphere. He had never been inside the home of the
Sunday, nor the Sunday in his--a schoolboy friendship can flourish in
perfect independence of home--but he nervously hoped that on the return
of the Orgreave regiment from Wales, something favourable to his
ambitions--he knew not what--would come to pass. In the meantime he was
conscientiously doing his best to acquire a business training, as his
father had suggested. He gave himself with an enthusiasm almost
religious to the study of business methods. All the force of his
resolve to perfect himself went for the moment into this immediate
enterprise, and he was sorry that business methods were not more
complex, mysterious, and original than they seemed to be: he was also
sorry that his father did not show a greater interest in his industry
and progress.
He no longer wanted to `play' now. He despised play. His unique wish
was to work. It struck him as curious and delightful that he really
enjoyed work. Work had indeed become play. He could not do enough work
to satisfy his appetite. And after the work of the day, scorning all
silly notions about exercise and relaxation, he would spend the evening
in his beautiful new attic, copying designs, which he would sometimes
rise early to finish. He thought he had conquered the gross body, and
that it was of no account. Even the desolating failures which his
copies invariably proved did not much discourage him; besides, one of
them had impressed both Maggie and Clara. He copied with laborious
ardour undiminished. And further, he masterfully appropriated Maggie's
ticket for the Free Library, pending the preliminaries to the possession
of a ticket of his own, to procure a volume on architecture. From
timidity, from a singular false shame, he kept this volume in the attic,
like a crime; nobody knew what the volume was. Evidence of a strange
trait in his character; a trait perhaps not defensible! He argued with
himself that having told his father plainly that he wanted to be an
architect, he need do nothing else aggressive for the present. He had
agreed to the suggestion about business training, and he must be loyal
to his agreement. He pointed out to himself how right his father was.
At sixteen one could scarcely begin to be an architect; it was too soon;
and a good business training would not be out of place in any career or
profession.
He was so wrapped up in his days and his nights that he forgot to
inquire why earthenware was made in just the Five Towns. He had grown
too serious for trifles--and all in about a week! True, he was feeling
the temporary excitement of the printing office, which was perhaps
expressed boyishly by the printing staff; but he reckoned that his share
of it was quite adult, frowningly superior, and in a strictly business
sense justifiable and even proper.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
Darius Clayhanger's printing office was a fine example of the policy of
makeshift which governed and still governs the commercial activity of
the Five Towns. It consisted of the first floor of a nondescript
building which stood at the bottom of the irregularly shaped yard behind
the house and shop, and which formed the southern boundary of the
Clayhanger premises. The antique building had once been part of an
old-fashioned pot-works, but that must have been in the eighteenth
century. Kilns and chimneys of all ages, sizes, and tints rose behind
it to prove that this part of the town was one of the old manufacturing
quarters. The ground-floor of the building, entirely inaccessible from
Clayhanger's yard, had a separate entrance of its own in an alley that
branched off from Woodisun Bank, ran parallel to Wedgwood Street, and
stopped abruptly at the back gate of a saddler's workshop. In the
narrow entry you were like a creeping animal amid the undergrowth of a
forest of chimneys, ovens, and high blank walls. This ground-floor had
been a stable for many years; it was now, however, a baker's storeroom.
Once there had been an interior staircase leading from the ground-floor
to the first-floor, but it had been suppressed in order to save floor
space, and an exterior staircase constructed with its foot in
Clayhanger's yard. To meet the requirement of the staircase, one of the
first-floor windows had been transformed into a door. Further, as the
staircase came against one of the ground-floor windows, and as
Clayhanger's predecessor had objected to those alien windows overlooking
his yard, and as numerous windows were anyhow unnecessary to a stable,
all the ground-floor windows had been closed up with oddments of brick
and tile, giving to the wall a very variegated and chequered appearance.
Thus the ground-floor and the first-floor were absolutely divorced, the
former having its entrance and light from the public alley, the latter
from the private yard.
The first-floor had been a printing office for over seventy years. All
the machinery in it had had to be manoeuvred up the rickety stairs, or
put through one of the windows on either side of the window that had
been turned into a door. When Darius Clayhanger, in his audacity,
decided to print by steam, many people imagined that he would at last be
compelled to rent the ground-floor or to take other premises. But no!
The elasticity of the makeshift policy was not yet fully stretched.
Darius, in consultation with a jobbing builder, came happily to the
conclusion that he could `manage,' that he could `make things do,' by
adding to the top of his stairs a little landing for an engine-shed.
This was done, and the engine and boiler perched in the air; the shaft
of the engine went through the wall; the chimney-pipe of the boiler ran
up straight to the level of the roof-ridge, and was stayed with pieces
of wire. A new chimney had also been pierced in the middle of the roof,
for the uses of a heating stove. The original chimneys had been allowed
to fall into decay. Finally, a new large skylight added interest to the
roof. In a general way, the building resembled a suit of clothes that
had been worn, during four of the seven ages of man, by an untidy
husband with a tidy and economical wife, and then given by the wife to a
poor relation of a somewhat different figure to finish. All that could
be said of it was that it survived and served.
But these considerations occurred to nobody.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
Edwin, quite unaware that he was an instrument in the hands of his
Auntie Clara's Providence, left the shop without due excuse and passed
down the long blue-paved yard towards the printing office. He imagined
that he was being drawn thither simply by his own curiosity--a
curiosity, however, which he considered to be justifiable, and even
laudable. The yard showed signs that the unusual had lately been
happening there. Its brick pavement, in the narrow branch of it that
led to the double gates in Woodisun Bank (those gates which said to the
casual visitor, `No Admittance except on Business'), was muddy,
littered, and damaged, as though a Juggernaut had passed that way.
Ladders reclined against the walls. Moreover, one of the windows of the
office had been taken out of its frame, leaving naught but an oblong
aperture. Through this aperture Edwin could see the busy, eager forms
of his father, Big James, and Chawner. Through this aperture had been
lifted, in parts and by the employment of every possible combination of
lever and pulley, the printing machine which Darius Clayhanger had so
successfully purchased in Manchester on the day of the free-and-easy at
the Dragon.
At the top of the flight of steps two apprentices, one nearly `out of
his time,' were ministering to the engine, which that morning did not
happen to be running. The engine, giving glory to the entire
establishment by virtue of the imposing word `steam', was a crotchety
and capricious thing, constant only in its tendency to break down. No
more reliance could be placed on it than on a pampered donkey.
Sometimes it would run, and sometimes it would not run, but nobody could
safely prophesy its moods. Of the several machines it drove but one,
the grand cylinder, the last triumph of the ingenuity of man, and even
that had to be started by hand before the engine would consent to work
it. The staff hated the engine, except during those rare hours when one
of its willing moods coincided with a pressure of business. Then, when
the steam was sputtering and the smoke smoking and the piston throbbing,
and the leathern belt travelling round and round and the complete
building a-tremble and a-clatter, and an attendant with clean hands was
feeding the sheets at one end of the machine and another attendant with
clean hands taking them off at the other, all at the rate of twenty
copies per sixty seconds--then the staff loved the engine and meditated
upon the wonders of their modern civilisation. The engine had been
known to do its five thousand in an afternoon, and its horse-power was
only one.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
Edwin could not keep out of the printing office. He went
inconspicuously and, as it were, by accident up the stone steps, and
disappeared into the interior. When you entered the office you were
first of all impressed by the multiplicity of odours competing for your
attention, the chief among them being those of ink, oil, and paraffin.
Despite the fact that the door was open and one window gone, the smell
and heat in the office on that warm morning were notable. Old sheets of
the "Manchester Examiner" had been pinned over the skylight to keep out
the sun, but, as these were torn and rent, the sun was not kept out.
Nobody, however, seemed to suffer inconvenience. After the odours, the
remarkable feature of the place was the quantity of machinery on its
uneven floor. Timid employes had occasionally suggested to Darius that
the floor might yield one day and add themselves and all the machinery
to the baker's stores below; but Darius knew that floors never did
yield.
In the middle of the floor was a huge and heavy heating stove, whose
pipe ran straight upwards to the visible roof. The mighty cylinder
machine stood to the left hand. Behind was a small rough-and-ready
binding department with a guillotine cutting machine, a
cardboard-cutting machine, and a perforating machine, trifles by the
side of the cylinder, but still each of them formidable masses of metal
heavy enough to crush a horse; the cutting machines might have served to
illustrate the French Revolution, and the perforating machine the Holy
Inquisition.
Then there was what was called in the office the `old machine,' a relic
of Clayhanger's predecessor, and at least eighty years old. It was one
of those machines whose worn physiognomies, full of character, show at
once that they have a history. In construction it carried solidity to
an absurd degree. Its pillars were like the piles of a pier. Once, in
a historic rat-catching, a rat had got up one of them, and a piece of
smouldering brown paper had done what a terrier could not do. The
machine at one period of its career had been enlarged, and the neat
seaming of the metal was an ecstasy to the eye of a good workman. Long
ago, it was known, this machine had printed a Reform newspaper at
Stockport. Now, after thus participating in the violent politics of an
age heroic and unhappy, it had been put to printing small posters of
auctions and tea-meetings. Its movement was double: first that of a
handle to bring the bed under the platen, and second, a lever pulled
over to make contact between the type and the paper. It still worked
perfectly. It was so solid, and it had been so honestly made, that it
could never get out of order nor wear away. And, indeed, the
conscientiousness and skill of artificers in the eighteenth century are
still, through that resistless machine, producing their effect in the
twentieth. But it needed a strong hand to bestir its smooth
plum-coloured limbs of metal, and a speed of a hundred an hour meant
gentle perspiration. The machine was loved like an animal.
Near this honourable and lumbering survival stood pertly an Empire
treadle-machine for printing envelopes and similar trifles. It was new,
and full of natty little devices. It worked with the lightness of
something unsubstantial. A child could actuate it, and it would print
delicately a thousand envelopes an hour. This machine, with the latest
purchase, which was away at the other end of the room near the large
double-pointed case-rack, completed the tale of machines. That
case-rack alone held fifty different founts of type, and there were
other caseracks. The lead-rack was nearly as large, and beneath the
lead-rack was a rack containing all those "furnitures" which help to
hold a forme of type together without betraying themselves to the reader
of the printed sheet. And under the furniture rack was the `random,'
full of galleys. Then there was a table with a top of solid stone, upon
which the formes were bolted up. And there was the ink-slab, another
solidity, upon which the ink-rollers were inked. Rollers of various
weightiness lay about, and large heavy cans, and many bottles, and metal
galleys, and nameless fragments of metal. Everything contributed to the
impression of immense ponderosity exceeding the imagination. The fancy
of being pinned down by even the lightest of these constructions was
excruciating. You moved about in narrow alleys among upstanding,
unyielding metallic enormities, and you felt fragile and perilously
soft.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
The only unintimidating phenomena in the crowded place were the
lye-brushes, the dusty job-files that hung from the great transverse
beams, and the proof-sheets that were scattered about. These printed
things showed to what extent Darius Clayhanger's establishment was a
channel through which the life of the town had somehow to pass.
Auctions, meetings, concerts, sermons, improving lectures, miscellaneous
entertainments, programmes, catalogues, deaths, births, marriages,
specifications, municipal notices, summonses, demands, receipts,
subscription-lists, accounts, rate-forms, lists of voters, jury-lists,
inaugurations, closures, bill-heads, handbills, addresses,
visiting-cards, society rules, bargain-sales, lost and found notices:
traces of all these matters, and more, were to be found in that office;
it was impregnated with the human interest; it was dusty with the human
interest; its hot smell seemed to you to come off life itself, if the
real sentiment and love of life were sufficiently in you. A grand,
stuffy, living, seething place, with all its metallic immobility!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SIX.
Edwin sidled towards the centre of interest, the new machine, which,
however, was not a new machine. Darius Clayhanger did not buy more new
things than he could help. His delight was to `pick up' articles that
were supposed to be `as good as new'; occasionally he would even assert
that an object bought second-hand was `better than new,' because it had
been `broken in,' as if it were a horse. Nevertheless, the latest
machine was, for a printing machine, nearly new: its age was four years
only. It was a Demy Columbian Press, similar in conception and movement
to the historic `old machine' that had been through the Reform
agitation; but how much lighter, how much handier, how much more
ingenious and precise in the detail of its working! A beautiful
edifice, as it stood there, gazed on admiringly by the expert eyes of
Darius, in his shirt-sleeves, Big James, in his royally flowing apron,
and Chawner, the journeyman compositor, who, with the two apprentices
outside, completed the staff! Aided by no mechanic more skilled than a
day-labourer, those men had got the machine piecemeal into the office,
and had duly erected it. At that day a foreman had to be equal to
anything.
The machine appeared so majestic there, so solid and immovable, that it
might ever have existed where it then was. Who could credit that, less
than a fortnight earlier, it had stood equally majestic, solid, and
immovable in Manchester? There remained nothing to show how the miracle
had been accomplished, except a bandage of ropes round the lower pillars
and some pulley-tackle hanging from one of the transverse beams exactly
overhead. The situation of the machine in the workshop had been fixed
partly by that beam above and partly by the run of the beams that
supported the floor. The stout roof-beam enabled the artificers to
handle the great masses by means of the tackle; and as for the
floor-beams, Darius had so far listened to warnings as to take them into
account.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SEVEN.
"Take another impress, James," said Darius. And when he saw Edwin,
instead of asking the youth what he was wasting his time there for, he
good-humouredly added: "Just watch this, my lad." Darius was pleased
with himself, his men, and his acquisition. He was in one of his moods
when he could charm; he was jolly, and he held up his chin. Two days
before, so interested had he been in the Demy Columbian, he had actually
gone through a bilious attack while scarcely noticing it! And now the
whole complex operation had been brought to a triumphant conclusion.
Big James inserted the sheet of paper, with gentle and fine movements.
The journeyman turned the handle, and the bed of the machine slid
horizontally forward in frictionless, stately silence. And then Big
James seized the lever with his hairy arm bared to the elbow, and pulled
it over. The delicate process was done with minute and level
exactitude; adjusted to the thirty-second of an inch, the great masses
of metal had brought the paper and the type together and separated them
again. In another moment Big James drew out the sheet, and the three
men inspected it, each leaning over it. A perfect impression!
"Well," said Darius, glowing, "we've had a bit o' luck in getting that
up! Never had less trouble! Shows we can do better without those
Foundry chaps than with 'em! James, ye can have a quart brought in, if
ye'n a mind, but I won't have them apprentices drinking! No, I won't!
Mrs Nixon'll give 'em some nettle-beer if they fancy it."
He was benignant. The inauguration of a new machine deserved solemn
recognition, especially on a hot day. It was an event.
"An infant in arms could turn this here," murmured the journeyman,
toying with the handle that moved the bed. It was an exaggeration, but
an excusable, poetical exaggeration.
Big James wiped his wrists on his apron.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
EIGHT.
Then there was a queer sound of cracking somewhere, vague, faint, and
yet formidable. Darius was standing between the machines and the
dismantled window, his back to the latter. Big James and the journeyman
rushed instinctively from the centre of the floor towards him. In a
second the journeyman was on the window sill.
"What art doing?" Darius demanded roughly; but there was no sincerity
in his voice.
"Th' floor!" the journeyman excitedly exclaimed.
Big James stood close to the wall.
"And what about th' floor?" Darius challenged him obstinately.
"One o' them beams is a-going," stammered the journeyman.
"Rubbish!" shouted Darius. But simultaneously he motioned to Edwin to
move from the middle of the room, and Edwin obeyed. All four listened,
with nerves stretched to the tightest. Darius was biting his lower lip
with his upper teeth. His humour had swiftly changed to the savage.
Every warning that had been uttered for years past concerning that floor
was remembered with startling distinctness. Every impatient reassurance
offered by Darius for years past suddenly seemed fatuous and perverse.
How could any man in his senses expect the old floor to withstand such a
terrific strain as that to which Darius had at last dared to subject it?
The floor ought by rights to have given way years ago! His men ought
to have declined to obey instructions that were obviously insane. These
and similar thoughts visited the minds of Big James and the journeyman.
As for Edwin, his excitement was, on balance, pleasurable. In truth, he
could not kill in his mind the hope that the floor would yield. The
greatness of the resulting catastrophe fascinated him. He knew that he
should be disappointed if the catastrophe did not occur. That it would
mean ruinous damage to the extent of hundreds of pounds, and enormous
worry, did not influence him. His reason did not influence him, nor his
personal danger. He saw a large hook in the wall to which he could
cling when the exquisite crash came, and pictured a welter of broken
machinery and timber ten feet below him, and the immense pother that the
affair would create in the town.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NINE.
Darius would not loose his belief in his floor. He hugged it in mute
fury. He would not climb on to the window sill, nor tell Big James to
do so, nor even Edwin. On the subject of the floor he was religious; he
was above the appeal of the intelligence. He had always held
passionately that the floor was immovable, and he always would. He had
finally convinced himself of its omnipotent strength by the long process
of assertion and reassertion. When a voice within him murmured that his
belief in the floor had no scientific basis, he strangled the voice. So
he remained, motionless, between the window and the machine.
No sound! No slightest sound! No tremor of the machine! But Darius's
breathing could be heard after a moment.
He guffawed sneeringly.
"And what next?" he defiantly asked, scowling. "What's amiss wi' ye
all?" He put his hands in his pockets. "Dun ye mean to tell me as--"
The younger apprentice entered from the engine-shed.
"Get back there!" rolled and thundered the voice of Big James. It was
the first word he had spoken, and he did not speak it in frantic,
hysteric command, but with a terrible and convincing mildness. The
phrase fell on the apprentice like a sandbag, and he vanished.
Darius said nothing. There was another cracking sound, louder, and
unmistakably beneath the bed of the machine. And at the same instant a
flake of grimy plaster detached itself from the opposite wall and
dropped into pale dust on the floor. And still Darius religiously did
not move, and Big James would not move. They might have been under a
spell. The journeyman jumped down incautiously into the yard.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TEN.
And then Edwin, hardly knowing what he did, and certainly not knowing
why he did it, walked quickly out on to the floor, seized the huge hook
attached to the lower pulley of the tackle that hung from the roof-beam,
pulled up the slack of the rope-bandage on the hind part of the machine,
and stuck the hook into it, then walked quickly back. The hauling-rope
of the tackle had been carried to the iron ring of a trap-door in the
corner near Big James; this trap-door, once the outlet of the interior
staircase from the ground floor, had been nailed down many years
previously. Big James dropped to his knees and tightened and knotted
the rope. Another and much louder noise of cracking followed, the floor
visibly yielded, and the hindpart of the machine visibly sank about a
quarter of an inch. But no more. The tackle held. The strain was
distributed between the beam above and the beam below, and equilibrium
established.
"Out! Lad! Out!" cried Darius feebly, in the wreck, not of his
workshop, but of his religion. And Edwin fled down the steps, pushing
the mystified apprentices before him, and followed by the men. In the
yard the journeyman, entirely self-centred, was hopping about on one leg
and cursing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ELEVEN.
Darius, Big James, and Edwin stared in the morning sunshine at the
aperture of the window and listened.
"Nay!" said Big James, after an eternity. "He's saved it! He's saved
th' old shop! But by gum--by gum--"
Darius turned to Edwin, and tried to say something; and then Edwin saw
his father's face working into monstrous angular shapes, and saw the
tears spurt out of his eyes, and was clutched convulsively in his
father's shirt-sleeved arms. He was very proud, very pleased, but he
did not like this embrace; it made him feel ashamed. He thought how
Clara would have sniggered about it and caricatured it afterwards, had
she witnessed it. And although he had incontestably done something
which was very wonderful and very heroic, and which proved in him the
most extraordinary presence of mind, he could not honestly glorify
himself in his own heart, because it appeared to him that he had acted
exactly like an automaton. He blankly marvelled, and thought the
situation agreeably thrilling, if somewhat awkward. His father let him
go. Then all Edwin's feelings gave place to an immense stupefaction at
his father's truly remarkable behaviour. What! His father emotional!
He had to begin to revise again his settled views.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
ONE RESULT OF COURAGE.
By the next morning a certain tranquillity was restored.
It was only in this relative calm that the Clayhanger family and its
dependants began to realise the intensity of the experience through
which they had passed, and, in particular, the strain of waiting for
events after the printing office had been abandoned by its denizens, The
rumour of what had happened, and of what might have happened, had spread
about the premises in an instant, and in another instant all the women
had collected in the yard; even Miss Ingamells had betrayed the sacred
charge of the shop. Ten people were in the yard, staring at the window
aperture on the first-floor and listening for ruin. Some time had
elapsed before Darius would allow anybody even to mount the steps. Then
the baker, the tenant of the ground-floor, had had to be fetched. A
pleasant, bland man, he had consented in advance to every suggestion; he
had practically made Darius a present of the ground-floor, if Darius
possessed the courage to go into it, or to send others into it, The seat
of deliberation had then been transferred to the alley behind. And the
jobbing builder and carpenters had been fetched, and there was a palaver
of tremendous length and solemnity. For hours nothing definite seemed
to happen; no one ate or drank, and the current of life at the corner of
Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood Street ceased to flow. Boys and men who had
heard of the affair, and who had the divine gift of curiosity, gazed in
rapture at the `No Admittance' notice on the ramshackle double gates in
Woodisun Bank, It seemed that they might never be rewarded, but their
great faith was justified when a hand-cart, bearing several beams three
yards long, halted at the gates and was, after a pause, laboriously
pushed past them and round the corner into the alley and up the alley.
The alley had been crammed to witness the taking of the beams into the
baker's storeroom. If the floor above had decided to yield, the noble,
negligent carpenters would have been crushed beneath tons of machinery.
At length a forest of pillars stood planted on the ground-floor amid the
baker's lumber; every beam was duly supported, and the experts
pronounced that calamity was now inconceivable. Lastly, the tackle on
the Demy Columbian had been loosed, and the machine, slightly askew,
permitted gently to sink to full rest on the floor: and the result
justified the experts.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
By this time people had started to eat, but informally, as it were
apologetically--Passover meals. Evening was at hand. The Clayhangers,
later, had met at table. A strange repast! A strange father! The
children had difficulty in speaking naturally. And then Mrs Hamps had
come, ebulliently thanking God, and conveying the fact that the town was
thrilled and standing utterly amazed in admiration before her heroical
nephew. And yet she had said ardently that she was in no way amazed at
her nephew's coolness; she would have been surprised if he had shown
himself even one degree less cool. From a long study of his character
she had foreknown infallibly that in such a crisis as had supervened he
would behave precisely as he had behaved. This attitude of Auntie
Hamps, however, though it reduced the miraculous to the
ordinary-expected, did not diminish Clara's ingenuous awe of Edwin.
From a mocker, the child had been temporarily transformed into an
unwilling hero-worshipper. Mrs Hamps having departed, all the family,
including Darius, had retired earlier than usual.
And now, on meeting his father and Big James and Miss Ingamells in the
queer peace of the morning, in the relaxation after tension, and in the
complete realisation of the occurrence, Edwin perceived from the
demeanour of all that, by an instinctive action extending over perhaps
five seconds of time, he had procured for himself a wondrous and
apparently permanent respect. Miss Ingamells, when he went vaguely into
the freshly watered shop before breakfast, greeted him in a new tone,
and with startling deference asked him what he thought she had better do
in regard to the addressing of a certain parcel. Edwin considered this
odd; he considered it illogical; and one consequence of Miss Ingamells's
quite sincere attitude was that he despised Miss Ingamells for a moral
weakling. He knew that he himself was a moral weakling, but he was sure
that he could never bend, never crouch, to such a posture as Miss
Ingamells's; that she was obviously sincere only increased his secret
scorn.
But his father resembled Miss Ingamells. Edwin had not dreamt that
mankind, and especially his father, was characterised by such
simplicity. And yet, on reflection, had he not always found in his
father a peculiar ingenuousness, which he could not but look down upon?
His father, whom he met crossing the yard, spoke to him almost as he
might have spoken to a junior partner. It was more than odd; it was
against nature, as Edwin had conceived nature.
He was so superior and lofty, yet without intending it, that he made no
attempt to put himself in his father's place. He, in the exciting
moments between the first cracking sound and the second, had had a
vision of wrecked machinery and timber in an abyss at his feet. His
father had had a vision far more realistic and terrifying. His father
had seen the whole course of his printing business brought to a
standstill, and all his savings dragged out of him to pay for
reconstruction and for new machinery. His father had seen loss of life
which might be accounted to his negligence. His father had seen, with
that pessimism which may overtake anybody in a crisis, the ruin of a
career, the final frustration of his lifelong daring and obstinacy, and
the end of everything. And then he had seen his son suddenly walk forth
and save the frightful situation. He had always looked down upon that
son as helpless, coddled, incapable of initiative or of boldness. He
believed himself to be a highly remarkable man, and existence had taught
him that remarkable men seldom or never have remarkable sons. Again and
again had he noted the tendency of remarkable men to beget gaping and
idle fools. Nevertheless, he had intensely desired to be able to be
proud of his son. He had intensely desired to be able, when
acquaintances should be sincerely enthusiastic about the merits of his
son, to pretend, insincerely and with pride only half concealed, that
his son was quite an ordinary youth.
Now his desire had been fulfilled; it had been more than fulfilled. The
town would chatter about Edwin's presence of mind for a week. Edwin's
act would become historic; it already was historic. And not only was
the act in itself wonderful and admirable and epoch-making; but it
proved that Edwin, despite his blondness, his finickingness, his
hesitations, had grit. That was the point: the lad had grit; there was
material in the lad of which much could be made. Add to this, the
father's mere instinctive gratitude--a gratitude of such unguessed depth
that it had prevented him even from being ashamed of having publicly and
impulsively embraced his son on the previous morning.
Edwin, in his unconscious egoism, ignored all that.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
"I've just seen Barlow," said Darius confidentially to Edwin. Barlow
was the baker. "He's been here afore his rounds. He's willing to
sublet me his storeroom--so that'll be all right! Eh?"
"Yes," said Edwin, seeing that his approval was being sought for.
"We must fix that machine plumb again."
"I suppose the floor's as firm as rocks now?" Edwin suggested.
"Eh! Bless ye! Yes!" said his father, with a trace of kindly
impatience.
The policy of makeshift was to continue. The floor having been stayed
with oak, the easiest thing and the least immediately expensive thing
was to leave matters as they were. When the baker's stores were cleared
from his warehouse, Darius could use the spaces between the pillars for
lumber of his own; and he could either knock an entrance-way through the
wall in the yard, or he could open the nailed-down trap door and patch
the ancient stairway within; or he could do nothing--it would only mean
walking out into Woodisun Bank and up the alley each time he wanted
access to his lumber!
And yet, after the second cracking sound on the previous day, he had
been ready to vow to rent an entirely new and common-sense printing
office somewhere else--if only he should be saved from disaster that
once! But he had not quite vowed. And, in any case, a vow to oneself
is not a vow to the Virgin. He had escaped from a danger, and the
recurrence of the particular danger was impossible. Why then commit
follies of prudence, when the existing arrangement of things `would do'?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
That afternoon Darius Clayhanger, with his most mysterious air of
business, told Edwin to follow him into the shop. Several hours of
miscellaneous consultative pottering had passed between Darius and his
compositors round and about the new printing machine, which was once
more plumb and ready for action. For considerably over a week Edwin had
been on his father's general staff without any definite task or
occupation having been assigned to him. His father had been too
excitedly preoccupied with the arrival and erection of the machine to
bestow due thought upon the activities proper to Edwin in the complex
dailiness of the business. Now he meant at any rate to begin to put the
boy into a suitable niche. The boy had deserved at least that.
At the desk he opened before him the daily and weekly newspaper-book,
and explained its system.
"Let's take the `British Mechanic,'" he said.
And he turned to the page where the title `British Mechanic' was written
in red ink. Underneath that title were written the names and addresses
of fifteen subscribers to the paper. To the right of the names were
thirteen columns, representing a quarter of the year. With his
customary laboriousness, Darius described the entire process of
distribution. The parcel of papers arrived and was counted, and the
name of a subscriber scribbled in an abbreviated form on each copy.
Some copies had to be delivered by the errand boy; these were handed to
the errand boy, and a tick made against each subscriber in the column
for the week: other copies were called for by the subscriber, and as
each of these was taken away, similarly a tick had to be made against
the name of its subscriber. Some copies were paid for in cash in the
shop, some were paid in cash to the office boy, some were paid for
monthly, some were paid for quarterly, and some, as Darius said grimly,
were never paid for at all. No matter what the method of paying, when a
copy was paid for, or thirteen copies were paid for, a crossing tick had
to be made in the book for each copy. Thus, for a single quarter of
"British Mechanic" nearly two hundred ticks and nearly two hundred
crossing ticks had to be made in the book, if the work was properly
done. However, it was never properly done--Miss Ingamells being short
of leisure and the errand boy utterly unreliable--and Darius wanted it
properly done. The total gross profit on a quarter of "British
Mechanics" was less than five shillings, and no customers were more
exigent and cantankerous than those who bought one pennyworth of goods
per week, and had them delivered free, and received three months'
credit. Still, that could not be helped. A printer and stationer was
compelled by usage to supply papers; and besides, paper subscribers
served a purpose as a nucleus of general business.
As with the "British Mechanics," so with seventeen other weeklies. The
daily papers were fewer, but the accountancy they caused was even more
elaborate. For monthly magazines there was a separate book with a
separate system; here the sums involved were vaster, ranging as high as
half a crown.
Darius led Edwin with patient minuteness through the whole labyrinth.
"Now," he said, "you're going to have sole charge of all this."
And he said it benevolently, in the conviction that he was awarding a
deserved recompense, with the mien of one who was giving dominion to a
faithful steward over ten cities.
"Just look into it carefully yerself, lad," he said at last, and left
Edwin with a mixed parcel of journals upon which to practise.
Before Edwin's eyes flickered hundreds of names, thousands of figures,
and tens of thousands of ticks. His heart protested; it protested with
loathing. The prospect stretching far in front of him made him feel
sick. But something weak and good-natured in him forced him to smile,
and to simulate a subdued ecstasy at receiving this overwhelming proof
of his father's confidence in him. As for Darius, Darius was delighted
with himself and with his son, and he felt that he was behaving as a
benignant father should. Edwin had proved his grit, proved that he had
that uncommunicable quality, `character,' and had well deserved
encouragement.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
The next morning, in the printing office, Edwin came upon Big James
giving a lesson in composing to the younger apprentice, who in theory
had `learned his cases.' Big James held the composing stick in his
great left hand, like a match-box, and with his great right thumb and
index picked letter after letter from the case, very slowly in order to
display the movement, and dropped them into the stick. In his mild,
resonant tones he explained that each letter must be picked up
unfalteringly in a particular way, so that it would drop face upward
into the stick without any intermediate manipulation. And he explained
also that the left hand must be held so that the right hand would have
to travel to and fro as little as possible. He was revealing the basic
mysteries of his craft, and was happy, making the while the broad series
of stock pleasantries which have probably been current in composing
rooms since printing was invented. Then he was silent, working more and
more quickly, till his right hand could scarcely be followed in its
twinklings, and the face of the apprentice duly spread in marvel, When
the line was finished he drew out the rule, clapped it down on the top
of the last row of letters, and gave the composing stick to the
apprentice to essay.
The apprentice began to compose with his feet, his shoulders, his mouth,
his eyebrows--with all his body except his hands, which nevertheless
travelled spaciously far and wide.
"It's not in seven year, nor in seventy, as you'll learn, young son of a
gun!" said Big James.
And, having unsettled the youth to his foundations with a bland thwack
across the head, he resumed the composing stick and began again the
exposition of the unique smooth movement which is the root of rapid
type-setting.
"Here!" said Big James, when the apprentice had behaved worse than ever.
"Us'll ask Mr Edwin to have a go. Us'll see what he'll do."
And Edwin, sheepish, had to comply. He was in pride bound to surpass
the apprentice, and did so.
"There!" said Big James. "What did I tell ye?" He seemed to imply a
prophecy that, because Edwin had saved the printing office from
destruction two days previously, he would necessarily prove to be a born
compositor.
The apprentice deferentially sniggered, and Edwin smiled modestly and
awkwardly and departed without having accomplished what he had come to
do.
By his own act of cool, nonchalant, unconsidered courage in a crisis, he
had, it seemed, definitely proved himself to possess a special aptitude
in all branches of the business of printer and stationer. Everybody
assumed it. Everybody was pleased. Everybody saw that Providence had
been kind to Darius and to his son. The fathers of the town, and the
mothers, who liked Edwin's complexion and fair hair, told each other
that not every parent was so fortunate as Mr Clayhanger, and what a
blessing it was that the old breed was not after all dying out in those
newfangled days. Edwin could not escape from the universal assumption.
He felt it round him as a net which somehow he had to cut.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
THE ARCHITECT.
One morning Edwin was busy in the shop with his own private minion, the
paper boy, who went in awe of him. But this was not the same Edwin,
though people who could only judge by features, and by the length of
trousers and sleeves on legs and arms, might have thought that it was
the same Edwin enlarged and corrected. Half a year had passed. The
month was February, cold. Mr Enoch Peake had not merely married Mrs
Louisa Loggerheads, but had died of an apoplexy, leaving behind him
Cocknage Gardens, a widow, and his name painted in large letters over
the word `Loggerheads' on the lintel of the Dragon. The steam-printer
had done the funeral cards, and had gone to the burial of his hopes of
business in that quarter. Many funeral cards had come out of the same
printing office during the winter, including that of Mr Udall, the
great marble-player. It seemed uncanny to Edwin that a marble-player
whom he had actually seen playing marbles should do anything so solemn
as expire. However, Edwin had perfectly lost all interest in marbles;
only once in six months had he thought of them, and that once through a
funeral card. Also he was growing used to funeral cards. He would
enter an order for funeral cards as nonchalantly as an order for
butterscotch labels. But it was not deaths and the spectacle of life as
seen from the shop that had made another Edwin of him.
What had changed him was the slow daily influence of a large number of
trifling habitual duties none of which fully strained his faculties, and
the monotony of them, and the constant watchful conventionality of his
deportment with customers. He was still a youth, very youthful, but you
had to keep an eye open for his youthfulness if you wished to find it
beneath the little man that he had been transformed into. He now took
his watch out of his pocket with an absent gesture and look exactly like
his father's; and his tones would be a reflection of those of the last
important full-sized man with whom he had happened to have been in
contact. And though he had not developed into a dandy (finance
forbidding), he kept his hair unnaturally straight, and amiably grumbled
to Maggie about his collars every fortnight or so. Yes, another Edwin!
Yet it must not be assumed that he was growing in discontent, either
chronic or acute. On the contrary, the malady of discontent troubled
him less and less.
To the paper boy he was a real man. The paper boy accepted him with
unreserved fatalism, as Edwin accepted his father. Thus the boy stood
passive while Edwin brought business to a standstill by privately
perusing the "Manchester Examiner." It was Saturday morning, the
morning on which the "Examiner" published its renowned Literary
Supplement. All the children read eagerly the Literary Supplement; but
Edwin, in virtue of his office, got it first. On the first and second
pages was the serial story, by George MacDonald, W. Clark Russell, or
Mrs Lynn Linton; then followed readable extracts from new books, and on
the fourth page were selected jokes from "Punch." Edwin somehow always
began with the jokes, and in so doing was rather ashamed of his levity.
He would skim the jokes, glance at the titles of the new books, and look
at the dialogue parts of the serial, while business and the boy waited.
There was no hurry then, even though the year had reached 1873 and
people were saying that they would soon be at the middle of the
seventies; even though the Licensing Act had come into force and
publicans were predicting the end of the world. Morning papers were not
delivered till ten, eleven, or twelve o'clock in Bursley, and on
Saturdays, owing to Edwin's laudable interest in the best periodical
literature, they were apt to be delivered later than usual.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
On this particular morning Edwin was disturbed in his studies by a
greater than the paper boy, a greater even than his father. Mr Osmond
Orgreave came stamping his cold feet into the shop, the floor of which
was still a little damp from the watering that preceded its sweeping.
Mr Orgreave, though as far as Edwin knew he had never been in the shop
before, went straight to the coke-stove, bent his knees, and began to
warm his hands. In this position he opened an interview with Edwin, who
dropped the Literary Supplement. Miss Ingamells was momentarily absent.
"Father in?"
"No, sir."
Edwin did not say where his father was, because he had received general
instructions never to `volunteer information' on that point.
"Where is he?"
"He's out, sir."
"Oh! Well! Has he left any instructions about those specifications for
the Shawport Board School?"
"No, sir. I'm afraid he hasn't. But I can ask in the printing office."
Mr Orgreave approached the counter, smiling. His face was angular,
rather stout, and harsh, with a grey moustache and a short grey beard,
and yet his demeanour and his voice had a jocular, youthful quality.
And this was not the only contradiction about him. His clothes were
extremely elegant and nice in detail--the whiteness of his linen would
have struck the most casual observer--but he seemed to be perfectly
oblivious of his clothes, indeed, to show carelessness concerning them.
His finger-nails were marvellously tended. But he scribbled in pencil
on his cuff, and apparently was not offended by a grey mark on his hand
due to touching the top of the stove. The idea in Edwin's head was that
Mr Orgreave must put on a new suit of clothes once a week, and new
linen every day, and take a bath about once an hour. The man had no
ceremoniousness. Thus, though he had never previously spoken to Edwin,
he made no preliminary pretence of not being sure who Edwin was; he
chatted with him as though they were old friends and had parted only the
day before; he also chatted with him as though they were equals in age,
eminence, and wealth. A strange man!
"Now look here!" he said, as the conversation proceeded, "those
specifications are at the Sytch Chapel. If you could come along with me
now--I mean now--I could give them to you and point out one or two
things to you, and perhaps Big James could make a start on them this
morning. You see it's urgent."
So he was familiar with Big James.
"Certainly," said Edwin, excited.
And when he had curtly told the paper boy to do portions of the
newspaper job which he had always held the paper boy was absolutely
incapable of doing, he sent the boy to find Miss Ingamells, informed her
where he was going, and followed Mr Orgreave out of the shop.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
"Of course you know Charlie's at school in France," said Mr Orgreave,
as they passed along Wedgwood Street in the direction of Saint Luke's
Square. He was really very companionable.
"Er--yes!" Edwin replied, nervously explosive, and buttoning up his
tight overcoat with an important business air.
"At least it isn't a school--it's a university. Besancon, you know.
They take university students much younger there. Oh! He has a rare
time--a rare time. Never writes to you, I suppose?"
"No." Edwin gave a short laugh.
Mr Orgreave laughed aloud. "And he wouldn't to us either, if his
mother didn't make a fuss about it. But when he does write, we gather
there's no place like Besancon."
"It must be splendid," Edwin said thoughtfully.
"You and he were great chums, weren't you? I know we used to hear about
you every day. His mother used to say that we had Clayhanger with every
meal." Mr Orgreave again laughed heartily.
Edwin blushed. He was quite startled, and immensely flattered. What on
earth could the Sunday have found to tell them every day about him? He,
Edwin Clayhanger, a subject of conversation in the household of the
Orgreaves, that mysterious household which he had never entered but
which he had always pictured to himself as being so finely superior!
Less than a year ago Charlie Orgreave had been `the Sunday,' had been
`old Perish-in-the-attempt,' and now he was a student in Besancon
University, unapproachable, extraordinarily romantic; and he, Edwin,
remained in his father's shop! He had been aware that Charlie had gone
to Besancon University, but he had not realised it effectively till this
moment. The realisation blew discontent into a flame, which fed on the
further perception that evidently the Orgreave family were a gay, jolly
crowd of cronies together, not in the least like parents and children;
their home life must be something fundamentally different from his.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
When they had crossed the windy space of Saint Luke's Square and reached
the top of the Sytch Bank, Mr Orgreave stopped an instant in front of
the Sytch Pottery, and pointed to a large window at the south end that
was in process of being boarded up.
"At last!" he murmured with disgust. Then he said: "That's the most
beautiful window in Bursley, and perhaps in the Five Towns; and you see
what's happening to it."
Edwin had never heard the word `beautiful' uttered in quite that tone,
except by women, such as Auntie Hamps, about a baby or a valentine or a
sermon. But Mr Orgreave was not a woman; he was a man of the world, he
was almost the man of the world; and the subject of his adjective was a
window!
"Why are they boarding it up, Mr Orgreave?" Edwin asked.
"Oh! Ancient lights! Ancient lights!"
Edwin began to snigger. He thought for an instant that Mr Orgreave was
being jocular over his head, for he could only connect the phrase
`ancient lights' with the meaner organs of a dead animal, exposed, for
example, in tripe shops. However, he saw his ineptitude almost
simultaneously with the commission of it, and smothered the snigger in
becoming gravity. It was clear that he had something to learn in the
phraseology employed by architects.
"I should think," said Mr Orgreave, "I should think they've been at law
about that window for thirty years, if not more. Well, it's over now,
seemingly." He gazed at the disappearing window. "What a shame!"
"It is," said Edwin politely.
Mr Orgreave crossed the road and then stood still to gaze at the facade
of the Sytch Pottery. It was a long two-storey building, purest
Georgian, of red brick with very elaborate stone facings which
contrasted admirably with the austere simplicity of the walls. The
porch was lofty, with a majestic flight of steps narrowing to the doors.
The ironwork of the basement railings was unusually rich and
impressive.
"Ever seen another pot-works like that?" demanded Mr Orgreave,
enthusiastically musing.
"No," said Edwin. Now that the question was put to him, he never had
seen another pot-works like that.
"There are one or two pretty fine works in the Five Towns," said Mr
Orgreave. "But there's nothing elsewhere to touch this. I nearly
always stop and look at it if I'm passing. Just look at the pointing!
The pointing alone--"
Edwin had to readjust his ideas. It had never occurred to him to search
for anything fine in Bursley. The fact was, he had never opened his
eyes at Bursley. Dozens of times he must have passed the Sytch Pottery,
and yet not noticed, not suspected, that it differed from any other
pot-works: he who dreamed of being an architect!
"You don't think much of it?" said Mr Orgreave, moving on. "People
don't."
"Oh yes! I do!" Edwin protested, and with such an air of eager
sincerity that Mr Orgreave turned to glance at him. And in truth he
did think that the Sytch Pottery was beautiful. He never would have
thought so but for the accident of the walk with Mr Orgreave; he might
have spent his whole life in the town, and never troubled himself a
moment about the Sytch Pottery. Nevertheless he now, by an act of sheer
faith, suddenly, miraculously and genuinely regarded it as an
exquisitely beautiful edifice, on a plane with the edifices of the
capitals of Europe, and as a feast for discerning eyes. "I like
architecture very much," he added. And this too was said with such
feverish conviction that Mr Orgreave was quite moved.
"I must show you my new Sytch Chapel," said Mr Orgreave gaily.
"Oh! I should like you to show it me," said Edwin.
But he was exceedingly perturbed by misgivings. Here was he wanting to
be an architect, and he had never observed the Sytch Pottery! Surely
that was an absolute proof that he had no vocation for architecture!
And yet now he did most passionately admire the Sytch Pottery. And he
was proud to be sharing the admiration of the fine, joyous, superior,
luxurious, companionable man, Mr Orgreave.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
They went down the Sytch Bank to the new chapel of which Mr Orgreave,
though a churchman, was the architect, in that vague quarter of the
world between Bursley and Turnhill. The roof was not on; the
scaffolding was extraordinarily interesting and confusing; they bent
their heads to pass under low portals; Edwin had the delicious smell of
new mortar; they stumbled through sand, mud, cinders and little pools;
they climbed a ladder and stepped over a large block of dressed stone,
and Mr Orgreave said--
"This is the gallery we're in, here. You see the scheme of the place
now... That hole--only a flue. Now you see what that arch carries--
they didn't like it in the plans because they thought it might be
mistaken for a church--"
Edwin was receptive.
"Of course it's a very small affair, but it'll cost less per sitting
than any other chapel in your circuit, and I fancy it'll look less like
a box of bricks." Mr Orgreave subtly smiled, and Edwin tried to equal
his subtlety. "I must show you the elevation some other time--a bit
later. What I've been after in it, is to keep it in character with the
street... Hi! Dan, there!" Now, Mr Orgreave was calling across the
hollow of the chapel to a fat man in corduroys. "Have you remembered
about those blue bricks?"
Perhaps the most captivating phenomenon of all was a little lean-to shed
with a real door evidently taken from somewhere else, and a little
stove, and a table and a chair. Here Mr Orgreave had a confabulation
with the corduroyed man, who was the builder, and they pored over
immense sheets of coloured plans that lay on the table, and Mr Orgreave
made marks and even sketches on the plans, and the fat man objected to
his instructions, and Mr Orgreave insisted, "Yes, yes!" And it seemed
to Edwin as though the building of the chapel stood still while Mr
Orgreave cogitated and explained; it seemed to Edwin that he was in the
creating-chamber. The atmosphere of the shed was inexpressibly romantic
to him. After the fat man had gone Mr Orgreave took a clothes-brush
off a plank that had been roughly nailed on two brackets to the wall,
and brushed Edwin's clothes, and Edwin brushed Mr Orgreave, and then
Mr Orgreave, having run his hand through the brush, lightly brushed his
hair with it. All this was part of Edwin's joy.
"Yes," he said, "I think the idea of that arch is splendid."
"You do?" said Mr Orgreave quite simply and ingenuously pleased and
interested. "You see--with the lie of the ground as it is--"
That was another point that Edwin ought to have thought of by himself--
the lie of the ground--but he had not thought of it. Mr Orgreave went
on talking. In the shop he had conveyed the idea that he was
tremendously pressed for time; now he had apparently forgotten time.
"I'm afraid I shall have to be off," said Edwin timidly. And he made a
preliminary movement as if to depart.
"And what about those specifications, young man?" asked Mr Orgreave,
drily twinkling. He unlocked a drawer in the rickety table. Edwin had
forgotten the specifications as successfully as Mr Orgreave had
forgotten time. Throughout the remainder of the day he smelt imaginary
mortar.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
A DECISION.
The next day being the day of rest, Mrs Nixon arose from her nook at
5:30 a.m. and woke Edwin. She did this from good-nature, and because
she could refuse him nothing, and not under any sort of compulsion.
Edwin got up at the first call, though he was in no way remarkable for
his triumphs over the pillow. Twenty-five minutes later he was crossing
Trafalgar Road and entering the school-yard of the Wesleyan Chapel. And
from various quarters of the town, other young men, of ages varying from
sixteen to fifty, were converging upon the same point. Black night
still reigned above the lamplights that flickered in the wind which
precedes the dawn, and the mud was frozen. Not merely had these young
men to be afoot and abroad, but they had to be ceremoniously dressed.
They could not issue forth in flannels and sweater, with a towel round
the neck, as for a morning plunge in the river. The day was Sunday,
though Sunday had not dawned, and the plunge was into the river of
intellectual life. Moreover, they were bound by conscience to be
prompt. To have arrived late, even five minutes late, would have spoilt
the whole effect. It had to be six o'clock or nothing.
The Young Men's Debating Society was a newly formed branch of the
multifarous activity of the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel. It met on Sunday
because Sunday was the only day that would suit everybody; and at six in
the morning for two reasons. The obvious reason was that at any other
hour its meetings would clash either with other activities or with the
solemnity of Sabbath meals. This obvious reason could not have stood by
itself; it was secretly supported by the recondite reason that the
preposterous hour of 6 a.m. appealed powerfully to something youthful,
perverse, silly, fanatical, and fine in the youths. They discovered the
ascetic's joy in robbing themselves of sleep and in catching chills, and
in disturbing households and chapel-keepers. They thought it was a
great thing to be discussing intellectual topics at an hour when a town
that ignorantly scorned intellectuality was snoring in all its heavy
brutishness. And it was a great thing. They considered themselves the
salt of the earth, or of that part of the earth. And I have an idea
that they were.
Edwin had joined this Society partly because he did not possess the art
of refusing, partly because the notion of it appealed spectacularly to
the martyr in him, and partly because it gave him an excuse for ceasing
to attend the afternoon Sunday school, which he loathed. Without such
an excuse he could never have told his father that he meant to give up
Sunday school. He could never have dared to do so. His father had what
Edwin deemed to be a superstitious and hypocritical regard for the
Sunday school. Darius never went near the Sunday school, and assuredly
in business and in home life he did not practise the precepts inculcated
at the Sunday school, and yet he always spoke of the Sunday school with
what was to Edwin a ridiculous reverence. Another of those problems in
his father's character which Edwin gave up in disgust!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
The Society met in a small classroom. The secretary, arch ascetic,
arrived at 5:45 and lit the fire which the chapel-keeper (a man with no
enthusiasm whatever for flagellation, the hairshirt, or intellectuality)
had laid but would not get up to light. The chairman of the Society, a
little Welshman named Llewelyn Roberts, aged fifty, but a youth because
a bachelor, sat on a chair at one side of the incipient fire, and some
dozen members sat round the room on forms. A single gas jet flamed from
the ceiling. Everybody wore his overcoat, and within the collars of
overcoats could be seen glimpses of rich neckties; the hats, some
glossy, dotted the hat-rack which ran along two walls. A hymn was sung,
and then all knelt, some spreading handkerchiefs on the dusty floor to
protect fine trousers, and the chairman invoked the blessing of God on
their discussions. The proper mental and emotional atmosphere was now
established. The secretary read the minutes of the last meeting, while
the chairman surreptitiously poked the fire with a piece of wood from
the lower works of a chair, and then the chairman, as he signed the
minutes with a pen dipped in an excise ink-bottle that stood on the
narrow mantelpiece, said in his dry voice--
"I call upon our young friend, Mr Edwin Clayhanger, to open the debate,
`Is Bishop Colenso, considered as a Biblical commentator, a force for
good?'"
"I'm a damned fool!" said Edwin to himself savagely, as he stood on his
feet. But to look at his wistful and nervously smiling face, no one
would have guessed that he was thus blasphemously swearing in the
privacy of his own brain.
He had been entrapped into the situation in which he found himself. It
was not until after he had joined the Society that he had learnt of a
rule which made it compulsory for every member to speak at every meeting
attended, and for every member to open a debate at least once in a year.
And this was not all; the use of notes while the orator was `up' was
absolutely forbidden. A drastic Society! It had commended itself to
elders by claiming to be a nursery for ready speakers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
Edwin had chosen the subject of Bishop Colenso--the ultimate wording of
the resolution was not his--because he had been reading about the
intellectually adventurous Bishop in the "Manchester Examiner." And,
although eleven years had passed since the publication of the first part
of "The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined," the
Colenso question was only just filtering down to the thinking classes of
the Five Towns; it was an actuality in the Five Towns, if in abeyance in
London. Even Hugh Miller's "The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an
Old Field," then over thirty years old, was still being looked upon as
dangerously original in the Five Towns in 1873. However, the effect of
its disturbing geological evidence that the earth could scarcely have
been begun and finished in a little under a week, was happily nullified
by the suicide of its author; that pistol-shot had been a striking proof
of the literal inspiration of the Bible.
Bishop Colenso had, in Edwin, an ingenuous admirer. Edwin stammeringly
and hesitatingly gave a preliminary sketch of his life; how he had been
censured by Convocation and deposed from his See by his Metropolitan;
how the Privy Council had decided that the deposition was null and void;
how the ecclesiastical authorities had then circumvented the Privy
Council by refusing to pay his salary to the Bishop (which Edwin
considered mean); how the Bishop had circumvented the ecclesiastical
authorities by appealing to the Master of the Rolls, who ordered the
ecclesiastical authorities to pay him his arrears of income with
interest thereon, unless they were ready to bring him to trial for
heresy; how the said authorities would not bring him to trial for heresy
(which Edwin considered to be miserable cowardice on their part); how
the Bishop had then been publicly excommunicated, without authority; and
how his friends, among whom were some very respectable and powerful
people, had made him a present of over three thousand pounds. After
this graphic historical survey, Edwin proceeded to the Pentateuchal
puzzles, and, without pronouncing an opinion thereon, argued that any
commentator who was both learned and sincere must be a force for good,
as the Bible had nothing to fear from honest inquiry, etcetera,
etcetera. Five-sixths of his speech was coloured by phrases and modes
of thought which he had picked up in the Wesleyan community, and the
other sixth belonged to himself. The speech was moderately bad, but not
inferior to many other speeches. It was received in absolute silence.
This rather surprised Edwin, because the tone in which the leading
members of the Society usually spoke to him indicated that (for reasons
which he knew not) they regarded him as a very superior intellect
indeed; and Edwin was not entirely ashamed of the quality of his speech;
in fact, he had feared worse from himself, especially as, since his walk
with Mr Orgreave, he had been quite unable to concentrate his thoughts
on Bishop Colenso at all, and had been exceedingly unhappy and
apprehensive concerning an affair that bore no kind of relation to the
Pentateuch.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
The chairman began to speak at once. His function was to call upon the
speakers in the order arranged, and to sum up before putting the
resolution to the vote. But now he produced surprisingly a speech of
his own. He reminded the meeting that in 1860 Bishop Colenso had
memorialised the Archbishop of Canterbury against compelling natives who
had already more than one wife to renounce polygamy as a condition to
baptism in the Christian religion; he stated that, though there were
young men present who were almost infants in arms at that period, he for
his part could well remember all the episode, and in particular Bishop
Colenso's amazing allegation that he could find no disapproval of
polygamy either in the Bible or in the writings of the Ancient Church.
He also pointed out that in 1861 Bishop Colenso had argued against the
doctrine of Eternal Punishment. He warned the meeting to beware of
youthful indiscretions. Every one there assembled of course meant well,
and believed what it was a duty to believe, but at the same time...
"I shall write father a letter!" said Edwin to himself. The idea came
to him in a flash like a divine succour; and it seemed to solve all his
difficulties--difficulties unconnected with the subject of debate.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
The chairman went on crossing t's and dotting i's. And soon even Edwin
perceived that the chairman was diplomatically and tactfully, yet very
firmly, bent upon saving the meeting from any possibility of
scandalising itself and the Wesleyan community. Bishop Colenso must not
be approved beneath those roofs. Evidently Edwin had been more
persuasive than he dreamt of; and daring beyond precedent. He had meant
to carry his resolution if he could, whereas, it appeared, he ought to
have meant to be defeated, in the true interests of revealed religion.
The chairman kept referring to his young friend the proposer's brilliant
brains, and to the grave danger that lurked in brilliant brains, and the
inability of brilliant brains to atone for lack of experience. The
meeting had its cue. Young man after young man arose to snub Bishop
Colenso, to hope charitably that Bishop Colenso was sincere, and to
insist that no Bishop Colenso should lead him to the awful abyss of
polygamy, and that no Bishop Colenso should deprive him of that unique
incentive to righteousness--the doctrine of an everlasting burning hell.
Moses was put on his legs again as a serious historian, and the subject
of the resolution utterly lost to view. The Chairman then remarked that
his impartial role forbade him to support either side, and the voting
showed fourteen against one. They all sang the Doxology, and the
Chairman pronounced a benediction. The fourteen forgave the one, as one
who knew not what he did; but their demeanour rather too patently showed
that they were forgiving under difficulty; and that it would be as well
that this kind of youthful temerariousness was not practised too often.
Edwin, in the language of the district, was `sneaped.' Wondering what
on earth he after all had said to raise such an alarm, he nevertheless
did not feel resentful, only very depressed--about the debate and about
other things. He knew in his heart that for him attendance at the
meetings of the Young Men's Debating Society was ridiculous.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SIX.
He allowed all the rest to precede him from the room. When he was alone
he smiled sheepishly, and also disdainfully; he knew that the chasm
between himself and the others was a real chasm, and not a figment of
his childish diffidence, as he had sometimes suspected it to be. Then
he turned the gas out. A beautiful faint silver surged through the
window. While the debate was in progress, the sun had been going about
its business of the dawn, unperceived.
"I shall write a letter!" he kept saying to himself. "He'll never let
me explain myself properly if I start talking. I shall write a letter.
I can write a very good letter, and he'll be bound to take notice of it.
He'll never be able to get over my letter."
In the school-yard daylight reigned. The debaters had already
disappeared. Trafalgar Road and Duck Bank were empty and silent under
rosy clouds. Instead of going straight home Edwin went past the Town
Hall and through the Market Place to the Sytch Pottery. Astounding that
he had never noticed for himself how beautiful the building was! It was
a simply lovely building!
"Yes," he said, "I shall write him a letter, and this very day, too!
May I be hung, drawn, and quartered if he doesn't have to read my letter
to-morrow morning!"
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
THE LETTER.
Then there was roast goose for dinner, and Clara amused herself by
making silly facetious faces, furtively, dangerously, under her father's
very eyes. The children feared goose for their father, whose digestion
was usually unequal to this particular bird. Like many fathers of
families in the Five Towns, he had the habit of going forth on Saturday
mornings to the butcher's or the poulterer's and buying Sunday's dinner.
He was a fairly good judge of a joint, but Maggie considered herself to
be his superior in this respect. However, Darius was not prepared to
learn from Maggie, and his purchases had to be accepted without
criticism. At a given meal Darius would never admit that anything
chosen and bought by him was not perfect; but a week afterwards, if the
fact was so, he would of his own accord recall imperfections in that
which he had asserted to be perfect; and he would do this without any
shame, without any apparent sense of inconsistency or weakness. Edwin
noticed a similar trait in other grown-up persons, and it astonished
him. It astonished him especially in his father, who, despite the
faults and vulgarities which his fastidious son could find in him,
always impressed Edwin as a strong man, a man with the heroic quality of
not caring too much what other people thought.
When Edwin saw his father take a second plateful of goose, with the
deadly stuffing thereof--Darius simply could not resist it, like most
dyspeptics he was somewhat greedy--he foresaw an indisposed and perilous
father for the morrow. Which prevision was supported by Clara's
pantomimic antics, and even by Maggie's grave and restrained sigh.
Still, he had sworn to write and send the letter, and he should do so.
A career, a lifetime, was not to be at the mercy of a bilious attack,
surely! Such a notion offended logic and proportion, and he scorned it
away.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
The meal proceeded in silence. Darius, as in duty bound, mentioned the
sermon, but neither Clara nor Edwin would have anything to do with the
sermon, and Maggie had not been to chapel. Clara and Edwin felt
themselves free of piety till six o'clock at least, and they doggedly
would not respond. And Darius from prudence did not insist, for he had
arrived at chapel unthinkably late--during the second chant--and Clara
was capable of audacious remarks upon occasions. The silence grew
stolid.
And Edwin wondered what the dinner-table of the Orgreaves was like. And
he could smell fresh mortar. And he dreamed of a romantic life--he knew
not what kind of life, but something different fundamentally from his
own. He suddenly understood, understood with sympathy, the impulse
which had made boys run away to sea. He could feel the open sea; he
could feel the breath of freedom on his cheek.
He said to himself--
"Why shouldn't I break this ghastly silence by telling father out loud
here that he mustn't forget what I told him that night in the attic?
I'm going to be an architect. I'm not going to be any blooming printer.
I'm going to be an architect. Why haven't I mentioned it before? Why
haven't I talked about it all the time? Because I am an ass! Because
there is no word for what I am! Damn it! I suppose I'm the person to
choose what I'm going to be! I suppose it's my business more than his.
Besides, he can't possibly refuse me. If I say flatly that I won't be a
printer--he's done. This idea of writing a letter is just like me!
Coward! Coward! What's my tongue for? Can't I talk? Isn't he bound
to listen? All I have to do is to open my mouth. He's sitting there.
I'm sitting here. He can't eat me. I'm in my rights. Now suppose I
start on it as soon as Mrs Nixon has brought the pudding and pie in?"
And he waited anxiously to see whether he indeed would be able to make a
start after the departure of Mrs Nixon.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
Hopeless! He could not bring himself to do it. It was strange! It was
disgusting! ... No, he would be compelled to write the letter.
Besides, the letter would be more effective. His father could not
interrupt a letter by some loud illogical remark. Thus he salved his
self-conceit. He also sought relief in reflecting savagely upon the
speeches that had been made against him in the debate. He went through
them all in his mind. There was the slimy idiot from Baines's (it was
in such terms that his thoughts ran) who gloried in never having read a
word of Colenso, and called the assembled company to witness that
nothing should ever induce him to read such a godless author, going
about in the mask of a so-called Bishop. But had any of them read
Colenso, except possibly Llewellyn Roberts, who in his Welsh way would
pretend ignorance and then come out with a quotation and refer you to
the exact page? Edwin himself had read very little of Colenso--and that
little only because a customer had ordered the second part of the
"Pentateuch" and he had stolen it for a night. Colenso was not in the
Free Library... What a world! What a debate! Still, he could not help
dwelling with pleasure on Mr Roberts's insistence on the brilliant
quality of his brains. Astute as Mr Roberts was, the man was clearly
in awe of Edwin's brains! Why? To be honest, Edwin had never been
deeply struck by his own brain power. And yet there must be something
in it!
"Of course," he reflected sardonically, "father doesn't show the
faintest interest in the debate. Yet he knew all about it, and that I
had to open it." But he was glad that his father showed no interest in
the debate. Clara had mentioned it in the presence of Maggie, with her
usual ironic intent, and Edwin had quickly shut her up.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
In the afternoon, the sitting-room being made uninhabitable by his
father's goose-ridden dozes, he went out for a walk; the weather was
cold and fine. When he returned his father also had gone out; the two
girls were lolling in the sitting-room. An immense fire, built up by
Darius, was just ripe for the beginning of decay, and the room very
warm. Clara was at the window, Maggie in Darius's chair reading a novel
of Charlotte M Yonge's. On the table, open, was a bound volume of "The
Family Treasury of Sunday Reading," in which Clara had been perusing
"The Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family" with feverish interest.
Edwin had laughed at her ingenuous absorption in the adventures of the
Schonberg-Cotta family, but the fact was that he had found them rather
interesting, in spite of himself, while pretending the contrary. There
was an atmosphere of high obstinate effort and heroical foreign-ness
about the story which stimulated something secret in him that seldom
responded to the provocation of a book; more easily would this secret
something respond to a calm evening or a distant prospect, or the
silence of early morning when by chance he looked out of his window.
The volume of "The Family Treasury," though five years old, was a recent
acquisition. It had come into the house through the total disappearance
of a customer who had left the loose numbers to be bound in 1869. Edwin
dropped sideways on to a chair at the table, spread out his feet to the
right, pitched his left elbow a long distance to the left, and, his head
resting on his left hand, turned over the pages with his right hand
idly. His eye caught titles such as: "The Door was Shut," "My Mother's
Voice," "The Heather Mother," "The Only Treasure," "Religion and
Business," "Hope to the End," "The Child of our Sunday School," "Satan's
Devices," and "Studies of Christian Life and Character, Hannah More."
Then he saw an article about some architecture in Rome, and he read: "In
the Sistine picture there is the struggle of a great mind to reduce
within the possibilities of art a subject that transcends it. That mind
would have shown itself to be greater, truer, at least, in its judgement
of the capabilities of art, and more reverent to have let it alone."
The seriousness of the whole magazine intimidated him into accepting
this pronouncement for a moment, though his brief studies in various
encyclopaedias had led him to believe that the Sistine Chapel (shown in
an illustration in Cazenove) was high beyond any human criticism. His
elbow slid on the surface of the table, and in recovering himself he
sent "The Family Treasury" on the floor, wrong side up, with a great
noise. Maggie did not move. Clara turned and protested sharply against
this sacrilege, and Edwin, out of mere caprice, informed her that her
precious magazine was the most stinking silly `pi' [pious] thing that
ever was. With haughty and shocked gestures she gathered up the volume
and took it out of the room.
"I say, Mag," Edwin muttered, still leaning his head on his hand, and
staring blankly at the wall.
The fire dropped a little in the grate.
"What is it?" asked Maggie, without stirring or looking up.
"Has father said anything to you about me wanting to be an architect?"
He spoke with an affectation of dreaminess.
"About you wanting to be an architect?" repeated Maggie in surprise.
"Yes," said Edwin. He knew perfectly well that his father would never
have spoken to Maggie on such a subject. But he wanted to open a
conversation.
"No fear!" said Maggie. And added in her kindest, most encouraging,
elder-sisterly tone: "Why?"
"Oh!" He hesitated, drawling, and then he told her a great deal of what
was in his mind. And she carefully put the wool-marker in her book and
shut it, and listened to him. And the fire dropped and dropped,
comfortably. She did not understand him; obviously she thought his
desire to be an architect exceedingly odd; but she sympathised. Her
attitude was soothing and fortifying. After all (he reflected) Maggie's
all right--there's some sense in Maggie. He could `get on' with Maggie.
For a few moments he was happy and hopeful.
"I thought I'd write him a letter," he said. "You know how he is to
talk to."
There was a pause.
"What d'ye think?" he questioned.
"I should," said Maggie.
"Then I shall!" he exclaimed. "How d'ye think he'll take it?"
"Well," said Maggie, "I don't see how he can do aught but take it all
right... Depends how you put it, of course."
"Oh, you leave that to me!" said Edwin, with eager confidence. "I shall
put it all right. You trust me for that!"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
Clara danced into the room, flowing over with infantile joy. She had
been listening to part of the conversation behind the door.
"So he wants to be an architect! Arch-i-tect! Arch-i-tect!" She
half-sang the word in a frenzy of ridicule. She really did dance, and
waved her arms. Her eyes glittered, as if in rapture. These singular
manifestations of her temperament were caused solely by the strangeness
of the idea of Edwin wanting to be an architect. The strange sight of
him with his hair cut short or in a new neck-tie affected her in a
similar manner.
"Clara, go and put your pinafore on this instant!" said Maggie. "You
know you oughtn't to leave it off."
"You needn't be so hoity-toity, miss," Clara retorted. But she moved to
obey. When she reached the door she turned again and gleefully taunted
Edwin. "And it's all because he went for a walk yesterday with Mr
Orgreave! I know! I know! You needn't think I didn't see you, because
I did! Arch-i-tect! Arch-i-tect!"
She vanished, on all her springs, spitefully graceful.
"You might almost think that infernal kid was right bang off her head,"
Edwin muttered crossly. (Still, it was extraordinary how that infernal
kid hit on the truth.)
Maggie began to mend the fire.
"Oh, well!" murmured Maggie, conveying to Edwin that no importance must
be attached to the chit's chittishness.
He went up to the next flight of stairs to his attic. Dust on the table
of his work-attic! Shameful dust! He had not used that attic since
Christmas, on the miserable plea that winter was cold and there was no
fireplace! He blamed himself for his effeminacy. Where had flown his
seriousness, his elaborate plans, his high purposes? A touch of winter
had frightened them away. Yes, he blamed himself mercilessly. True it
was--as that infernal kid had chanted--a casual half-hour with Mr
Orgreave was alone responsible for his awakening--at any rate, for his
awakening at this particular moment. Still, he was awake--that was the
great fact. He was tremendously awake. He had not been asleep; he had
only been half-asleep. His intention of becoming an architect had never
left him. But, through weakness before his father, through a cowardly
desire to avoid disturbance and postpone a crisis, he had let the weeks
slide by. Now he was in a groove, in a canyon. He had to get out, and
the sooner the better.
A piece of paper, soiled, was pinned on his drawing-board; one or two
sketches lay about. He turned the drawing-board over, so that he might
use it for a desk on which to write the letter. But he had no habit of
writing letters. In the attic was to be found neither ink, pen, paper,
nor envelope. He remembered a broken quire of sermon paper in his
bedroom; he had used a few sheets of it for notes on Bishop Colenso.
These notes had been written in the privacy and warmth of bed, in
pencil. But the letter must be done in ink; the letter was too
important for pencil; assuredly his father would take exception to
pencil. He descended to his sister's room and borrowed Maggie's ink and
a pen, and took an envelope, tripping like a thief. Then he sat down to
the composition of the letter; but he was obliged to stop almost
immediately in order to light the lamp.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SIX.
This is what he wrote:
"Dear Father,--I dare say you will think it queer me writing you a
letter like this, but it is the best thing I can do, and I hope you will
excuse me. I dare say you will remember I told you that night when you
came home late from Manchester here in the attic that I wanted to be an
architect. You replied that what I wanted was business experience. If
you say that I have not had enough business experience yet, I agree to
that, but I want it to be understood that later on, when it is the
proper time, I am to be an architect. You know I am very fond of
architecture, and I feel that I must be an architect. I feel I shall
not be happy in the printing business because I want to be an architect.
I am now nearly seventeen. Perhaps it is too soon yet for me to be
apprenticed to an architect, and so I can go on learning business
habits. But I just want it to be understood. I am quite sure you wish
me to be happy in life, and I shan't be happy if I am always regretting
that I have not gone in for being an architect. I know I shall like
architecture.--Your affectionate son, Edwin Clayhanger."
Then, as an afterthought, he put the date and his address at the top.
He meditated a postscript asking for a reply, but decided that this was
unnecessary. As he was addressing the envelope Mrs Nixon called out to
him from below to come to tea. He was surprised to find that he had
spent over an hour on the letter. He shivered and sneezed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SEVEN.
During tea he felt himself absurdly self-conscious, but nobody seemed to
notice his condition. The whole family went to chapel. The letter lay
in his pocket, and he might easily have slipped away to the post-office
with it, but he had had no opportunity to possess himself of a stamp.
There was no need to send the letter through the post. He might get up
early and put it among the morning's letters. He had decided, however,
that it must arrive formally by the postman, and he would not alter his
decision. Hence, after chapel, he took a match, and, creeping into the
shop, procured a crimson stamp from his father's desk. Then he went
forth, by the back way, alone into the streets. The adventure was not
so hazardous as it seemed and as it felt. Darius was incurious by
nature, though he had brief fevers of curiosity. Thus the life of the
children was a demoralising mixture of rigid discipline and freedom.
They were permitted nothing, but, as the years passed, they might take
nearly anything. There was small chance of Darius discovering his son's
excursion.
In crossing the road from chapel Edwin had opined to his father that the
frost was breaking. He was now sure of it. The mud, no longer brittle,
yielded to pressure, and there was a trace of dampness in the
interstices of the pavement bricks. A thin raw mist was visible in huge
spheres round the street lamps. The sky was dark. The few people whom
he encountered seemed to be out upon mysterious errands, seemed to
emerge strangely from one gloom and strangely to vanish into another.
In the blind, black facades of the streets the public-houses blazed
invitingly with gas; they alone were alive in the weekly death of the
town; and they gleamed everywhere, at every corner; the town appeared to
consist chiefly of public-houses. He dropped the letter into the box in
the market-place; he heard it fall. His heart beat. The deed was now
irrevocable. He wondered what Monday held for him. The quiescent
melancholy of the town invaded his spirit, and mingled with his own
remorseful sorrow for the unstrenuous past, and his apprehensive
solicitude about the future. It was not unpleasant, this brooding
sadness, half-despondency and half-hope. A man and a woman, arm-in-arm,
went by him as he stood unconscious of his conspicuousness under the
gas-lamp that lit the post-office. They laughed the smothered laugh of
intimacy to see a tall boy standing alone there, with no overcoat,
gazing at naught. Edwin turned to go home. It occurred to him that
nearly all the people he met were couples, arm-in-arm. And he suddenly
thought of Florence, the clog-dancer. He had scarcely thought of her
for months. The complexity of the interests of life, and the
interweaving of its moods, fatigued his mind into an agreeably grave
vacuity.
VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.
END OF A STRUGGLE.
It was not one of his official bilious attacks that Darius had on the
following day; he only yielded himself up in the complete grand manner
when nature absolutely compelled. The goose had not formally beaten
him, but neither had he formally beaten the goose. The battle was
drawn, and this meant that Darius had a slight headache, a feeling of
heavy disgust with the entire polity of the universe, and a
disinclination for food. The first and third symptoms he hid as far as
possible, from pride: at breakfast he toyed with bacon, from pride,
hating bacon. The children knew from his eyes and his guilty gestures
that he was not well, but they dared not refer to his condition; they
were bound to pretend that the health of their father flourished in the
highest perfection. And they were glad that things were no worse.
On the other hand Edwin had a sneezing cold which he could not conceal,
and Darius inimically inquired what foolishness he had committed to have
brought this on himself. Edwin replied that he knew of no cause for it.
A deliberate lie! He knew that he had contracted a chill while writing
a letter to his father in an unwarmed attic, and had intensified the
chill by going forth to post the letter without his overcoat in a raw
evening mist. Obviously, however, he could not have stated the truth.
He was uncomfortable at the breakfast-table, but, after the first few
moments, less so than during the disturbed night he had feared to be.
His father had neither eaten him, nor jumped down his throat, nor
performed any of those unpleasant miraculous feats which fathers usually
do perform when infuriated by filial foolishness. The letter therefore
had not been utterly disastrous; sometimes a letter would ruin a
breakfast, for Mr Clayhanger, with no consideration for the success of
meals, always opened his post before bite or sup. He had had the
letter, and still he was ready to talk to his son in the ordinary grim
tone of a goose-morrow. Which was to the good. Edwin was now convinced
that he had done well to write the letter.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
But as the day passed, Edwin began to ask himself: "Has he had the
letter?" There was no sign of the letter in his father's demeanour,
which, while not such as to make it credible that he ever had moods of
positive gay roguishness, was almost tolerable, considering his headache
and his nausea. Letters occasionally were lost in the post, or delayed.
Edwin thought it would be just his usual bad luck if that particular
letter, that letter of all letters, should be lost. And the strange
thing is that he could not prevent himself from hoping that it indeed
was lost. He would prefer it to be lost rather than delayed. He felt
that if the postman brought it by the afternoon delivery while he and
his father were in the shop together, he should drop down dead. The day
continued to pass, and did pass. And the shop was closed. "He'll speak
to me after supper," said Edwin. But Darius did not speak to him after
supper. Darius put on his hat and overcoat and went out, saying no word
except to advise the children to be getting to bed, all of them.
As soon as he was gone Edwin took a candle and returned to the shop. He
was convinced now that the letter had not been delivered, but he wished
to make conviction sure. He opened the desk. His letter was nearly the
first document he saw. It looked affrighting, awful. He dared not read
it, to see whether its wording was fortunate or unfortunate. He
departed, mystified. Upstairs in his bedroom he had a new copy of an
English translation of Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame," which had been
ordered by Lawyer Lawton, but would not be called for till the following
week, because Lawyer Lawton only called once a fortnight. He had meant
to read that book, with due precautions, in bed. But he could not fix
attention on it. Impossible for him to follow a single paragraph. He
extinguished the candle. Then he heard his father come home. He
thought that he scarcely slept all night.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
The next morning, Tuesday, the girls, between whom and their whispering
friend Miss Ingamells something feminine was evidently afoot, left the
breakfast-table sooner than usual, not without stifled giggles: upon
occasion Maggie would surprisingly meet Clara and Miss Ingamells on
their own plane; since Sunday afternoon she had shown no further
interest in Edwin's important crisis; she seemed, so far as he could
judge, to have fallen back into her customary state of busy apathy.
The man and the young man were alone together. Darius, in his
satisfaction at having been delivered so easily from the goose, had
taken an extra slice of bacon. Edwin's cold was now fully developed;
and Maggie had told him to feed it.
"I suppose you got that letter I wrote you, father, about me going in
for architecture," said Edwin. Then he blew his nose to hide his
confusion. He was rather startled to hear himself saying those bold
words. He thought that he was quite calm and in control of his
impulses; but it was not so; his nerves were stretched to the utmost.
Darius said nothing. But Edwin could see his face darkening, and his
lower lip heavily falling. He glowered, though not at Edwin. With eyes
fixed on the window he glowered into vacancy. The pride went out of
Edwin's heart.
"So ye'd leave the printing?" muttered Darius, when he had finished
masticating. He spoke in a menacing voice thick with ferocious emotion.
"Well--" said Edwin, quaking.
He thought he had never seen his father so ominously intimidating. He
was terrorised as he looked at that ugly and dark countenance. He could
not say any more. His voice left him. Thus his fear was physical as
well as moral. He reflected: "Well, I expected a row, but I didn't
expect it would be as bad as this!" And once more he was completely
puzzled and baffled by the enigma of his father.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
He did not hold the key, and even had he held it he was too young, too
inexperienced, to have used it. As with gathering passion the eyes of
Darius assaulted the window-pane, Darius had a painful intense vision of
that miracle, his own career. Edwin's grand misfortune was that he was
blind to the miracle. Edwin had never seen the little boy in the
Bastille. But Darius saw him always, the infant who had begun life at a
rope's-end. Every hour of Darius's present existence was really an
astounding marvel to Darius. He could not read the newspaper without
thinking how wonderful it was that he should be able to read the
newspaper. And it was wonderful! It was wonderful that he had three
different suits of clothes, none of them with a single hole. It was
wonderful that he had three children, all with complete outfits of good
clothes. It was wonderful that he never had to think twice about buying
coal, and that he could have more food than he needed. It was wonderful
that he was not living in a two-roomed cottage. He never came into his
house by the side entrance without feeling proud that the door gave on
to a preliminary passage and not direct into a living-room; he would
never lose the idea that a lobby, however narrow, was the great
distinguishing mark of wealth. It was wonderful that he had a piano,
and that his girls could play it and could sing. It was wonderful that
he had paid twenty-eight shillings a term for his son's schooling, in
addition to book-money. Twenty-eight shillings a term! And once a
penny a week was considered enough, and twopence generous! Through
sheer splendid wilful pride he had kept his son at school till the lad
was sixteen, going on seventeen! Seventeen, not seven! He had had the
sort of pride in his son that a man may have in an idle, elegant, and
absurdly expensive woman. It even tickled him to hear his son called
`Master Edwin,' and then `Mister Edwin'; just as the fine ceremonious
manners of his sister-in-law Mrs Hamps tickled him. His marriage!
With all its inevitable disillusions it had been wonderful, incredible.
He looked back on it as a miracle. For he had married far above him,
and had proved equal to the enormously difficult situation. Never had
he made a fool of himself. He often took keen pleasure in speculating
upon the demeanour of his father, his mother, his little sister, could
they have seen him in his purple and in his grandeur. They were all
dead. And those days were fading, fading, gone, with their unutterable,
intolerable shame and sadness, intolerable even in memory. And his wife
dead too! All that remained was Mr Shushions.
And then his business? Darius's pride in the achievement of his
business was simply indescribable. If he had not built up that
particular connexion he had built up another one whose sale had enabled
him to buy it. And he was waxing yearly. His supremacy as a printer
could not be challenged in Bursley. Steam! A double-windowed shop! A
foreman to whom alone he paid thirty shillings a week! Four other
employees! (Not to mention a domestic servant.) ... How had he done
it? He did not know. Certainly he did not credit himself with
brilliant faculties. He knew he was not brilliant; he knew that once or
twice he had had luck. But he had the greatest confidence in his
rough-hewing common sense. The large curves of his career were
correctly drawn. His common sense, his slow shrewdness, had been richly
justified by events. They had been pitted against foes--and look now at
the little boy from the Bastille!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
To Darius there was no business quite like his own. He admitted that
there were businesses much bigger, but they lacked the miraculous
quality that his own had. They were not sacred. His was, genuinely.
Once, in his triumphant and vain early manhood he had had a fancy for
bulldogs; he had bred bulldogs; and one day he had sacrificed even that
great delight at the call of his business; and now no one could guess
that he knew the difference between a setter and a mastiff!
It was this sacred business (perpetually adored at the secret altar in
Darius's heart), this miraculous business, and not another, that Edwin
wanted to abandon, with scarcely a word; just casually!
True, Edwin had told him one night that he would like to be an
architect. But Darius had attached no importance to the boyish remark.
Darius had never even dreamed that Edwin would not go into the business.
It would not have occurred to him to conceive such a possibility. And
the boy had shown great aptitude. The boy had saved the printing office
from disaster. And Darius had proved his satisfaction therein, not by
words certainly, but beyond mistaking in his general demeanour towards
Edwin. And after all that, a letter--mind you, a letter!--proposing
with the most damnable insolent audacity that he should be an architect,
because he would not be `happy' in the printing business! ... An
architect! Why an architect, specially? What in the name of God was
there to attract in bricks and mortar? He thought the boy had gone off
his head for a space. He could not think of any other explanation. He
had not allowed the letter to upset him. By his armour of thick
callousness, he had protected the tender places in his soul from being
wounded. He had not decided how to phrase his answer to Edwin. He had
not even decided whether he would say anything at all, whether it would
not be more dignified and impressive to make no remark whatever to
Edwin, to let him slowly perceive, by silence, what a lamentable error
he had committed.
And here was the boy lightly, cheekily, talking at breakfast about
`going in for architecture'! The armour of callousness was pierced.
Darius felt the full force of the letter; and as he suffered, so he
became terrible and tyrannic in his suffering. He meant to save his
business, to put his business before anything. And he would have his
own way. He would impose his will. And he would have treated argument
as a final insult. All the heavy, obstinate, relentless force of his
individuality was now channelled in one tremendous instinct.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SIX.
"Well, what?" he growled savagely, as Edwin halted.
In spite of his advanced age Edwin began to cry. Yes, the tears came
out of his eyes.
"And now you begin blubbing!" said his father.
"You say naught for six months--and then you start writing letters!"
said his father.
"And what's made ye settle on architecting, I'd like to be knowing?"
Darius went on.
Edwin was not able to answer this question. He had never put it to
himself. Assuredly he could not, at the pistol's point, explain why he
wanted to be an architect. He did not know. He announced this truth
ingenuously--
"I don't know--I--"
"I sh'd think not!" said his father. "D'ye think architecting'll be any
better than this?" `This' meant printing.
"I don't know--"
"Ye don't know! Ye don't know!" Darius repeated testily. His
testiness was only like foam on the great wave of his resentment.
"Mr Orgreave--" Edwin began. It was unfortunate, because Darius had
had a difficulty with Mr Orgreave, who was notoriously somewhat
exacting in the matter of prices.
"Don't talk to me about Mester Orgreave!" Darius almost shouted.
Edwin didn't. He said to himself: "I am lost."
"What's this business o' mine for, if it isna' for you?" asked his
father. "Architecting! There's neither sense nor reason in it!
Neither sense nor reason!"
He rose and walked out. Edwin was now sobbing. In a moment his father
returned, and stood in the doorway.
"Ye've been doing well, I'll say that, and I've shown it! I was
beginning to have hopes of ye!" It was a great deal to say.
He departed.
"Perhaps if I hadn't stopped his damned old machine from going through
the floor, he'd have let me off!" Edwin muttered bitterly. "I've been
too good, that's what's the matter with me!"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SEVEN.
He saw how fantastic was the whole structure of his hopes. He wondered
that he had ever conceived it even wildly possible that his father would
consent to architecture as a career! To ask it was to ask absurdly too
much of fate. He demolished, with a violent and resentful impulse, the
structure of his hopes; stamped on it angrily. He was beaten. What
could he do? He could do nothing against his father. He could no more
change his father than the course of a river. He was beaten. He saw
his case in its true light.
Mrs Nixon entered to clear the table. He turned away to hide his face,
and strode passionately off. Two hours elapsed before he appeared in
the shop. Nobody asked for him, but Mrs Nixon knew he was in the
attic. At noon, Maggie, with a peculiar look, told him that Auntie
Hamps had called and that he was to go and have dinner with her at one
o'clock, and that his father consented. Obviously, Maggie knew the
facts of the day. He was perturbed at the prospect of the visit. But
he was glad; he thought he could not have lived through a dinner at the
same table as Clara. He guessed that his auntie had been made aware of
the situation and wished to talk to him.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
EIGHT.
"Your father came to see me in such a state last night!" said Auntie
Hamps, after she had dealt with his frightful cold.
Edwin was astonished by the news. Then after all his father had been
afraid! ... After all perhaps he had yielded too soon! If he had held
out... If he had not been a baby! ... But it was too late. The
incident was now closed.
Mrs Hamps was kind, but unusually firm in her tone; which reached a
sort of benevolent severity.
"Your father had such high hopes of you. Has--I should say. He
couldn't imagine what on earth possessed you to write such a letter.
And I'm sure I can't. I hope you're sorry. If you'd seen your father
last night you would be, I'm sure."
"But look here, auntie," Edwin defended himself, sneezing and wiping his
nose; and he spoke of his desire. Surely he was entitled to ask, to
suggest! A son could not be expected to be exactly like his father.
And so on.
No! no! She brushed all that aside. She scarcely listened to it.
"But think of the business! And just think of your father's feelings!"
Edwin spoke no more. He saw that she was absolutely incapable of
putting herself in his place. He could not have explained her attitude
by saying that she had the vast unconscious cruelty which always goes
with a perfect lack of imagination; but this was the explanation. He
left her, saddened by the obvious conclusion that his auntie, whom he
had always supported against his sisters, was part author of his
undoing. She had undoubtedly much strengthened his father against him.
He had a gleam of suspicion that his sisters had been right, and he
wrong, about Mrs Hamps. Wonderful, the cruel ruthless insight of
girls--into some things!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NINE.
Not till Saturday did the atmosphere of the Clayhanger household resume
the normal. But earlier than that Edwin had already lost his
resentment. It disappeared with his cold. He could not continue to
bear ill-will. He accepted his destiny of immense disappointment. He
shouldered it. You may call him weak or you may call him strong.
Maggie said nothing to him of the great affair. What could she have
said? And the affair was so great that even Clara did not dare to
exercise upon it her peculiar faculties of ridicule. It abashed her by
its magnitude.
On Saturday Darius said to his son, good-humouredly--
"Canst be trusted to pay wages?"
Edwin smiled.
At one o'clock he went across the yard to the printing office with a
little bag of money. The younger apprentice was near the door scrubbing
type with potash to cleanse it. The backs of his hands were horribly
raw and bleeding with chaps, due to the frequent necessity of washing
them in order to serve the machines, and the impossibility of drying
them properly. Still, winter was ending now, and he only worked eleven
hours a day, in an airy room, instead of nineteen hours in a cellar,
like the little boy from the Bastille. He was a fortunate youth. The
journeyman stood idle; as often, on Saturdays, the length of the
journeyman's apron had been reduced by deliberate tearing during the
week from three feet to about a foot--so imperious and sudden was the
need for rags in the processes of printing. Big James was folding up
his apron. They all saw that Edwin had the bag, and their faces
relaxed.
"You're as good as the master now, Mr Edwin," said Big James with
ceremonious politeness and a fine gesture, when Edwin had finished
paying.
"Am I?" he rejoined simply.
Everybody knew of the great affair. Big James's words were his gentle
intimation to Edwin that every one knew the great affair was now
settled.
That night, for the first time, Edwin could read "Notre Dame" with
understanding and pleasure. He plunged with soft joy into the river of
the gigantic and formidable narrative. He reflected that after all the
sources of happiness were not exhausted.
VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER ONE.
BOOK TWO--HIS LOVE.
THE VISIT.
We now approach the more picturesque part of Edwin's career. Seven
years passed. Towards the end of April 1880, on a Saturday morning,
Janet Orgreave, second daughter of Osmond Orgreave, the architect,
entered the Clayhanger shop.
All night an April shower lasting ten hours had beaten with persistent
impetuosity against the window-panes of Bursley, and hence half the town
had slept ill. But at breakfast-time the clouds had been mysteriously
drawn away, the winds had expired, and those drenched streets began to
dry under the caressing peace of bright soft sunshine; the sky was pale
blue of a delicacy unknown to the intemperate climes of the south.
Janet Orgreave, entering the Clayhanger shop, brought into it with her
the new morning weather. She also brought into it Edwin's fate, or part
of it, but not precisely in the sense commonly understood when the word
`fate' is mentioned between a young man and a young woman.
A youth stood at the left-hand or `fancy' counter, very nervous. Miss
Ingamells (that was) was married and the mother of three children, and
had probably forgotten the difference between `demy' and `post' octavos;
and this youth had taken her place and the place of two unsatisfactory
maids in black who had succeeded her. None but males were now employed
in the Clayhanger business, and everybody breathed more freely; round,
sound oaths were heard where never oaths had been heard before. The
young man's name was Stifford, and he was addressed as `Stiff.' He was
a proof of the indiscretion of prophesying about human nature. He had
been the paper boy, the minion of Edwin, and universally regarded as
unreliable and almost worthless. But at sixteen a change had come over
him; he parted his hair in the middle instead of at the side, arrived in
the morning at 7:59 instead of at 8:05, and seemed to see the
earnestness of life. Every one was glad and relieved, but every one
took the change as a matter of course; the attitude of every one to the
youth was: "Well, it's not too soon!" No one saw a romantic miracle.
"I suppose you haven't got `The Light of Asia' in stock?" began Janet
Orgreave, after she had greeted the youth kindly.
"I'm afraid we haven't, miss," said Stifford. This was an
understatement. He knew beyond fear that "The Light of Asia" was not in
stock.
"Oh!" murmured Janet.
"I think you said `The Light of Asia'?"
"Yes. `The Light of Asia,' by Edwin Arnold." Janet had a persuasive
humane smile.
Stifford was anxious to have the air of obliging this smile, and he
turned round to examine a shelf of prize books behind him, well aware
that "The Light of Asia" was not among them. He knew "The Light of
Asia," and was proud of his knowledge; that is to say, he knew by
visible and tactual evidence that such a book existed, for it had been
ordered and supplied as a Christmas present four months previously, soon
after its dazzling apparition in the world.
"Yes, by Edwin Arnold--Edwin Arnold," he muttered learnedly, running his
finger along gilded backs.
"It's being talked about a great deal," said Janet as if to encourage
him.
"Yes, it is... No, I'm very sorry, we haven't it in stock." Stifford
faced her again, and leaned his hands wide apart on the counter.
"I should like you to order it for me," said Janet Orgreave in a low
voice.
She asked this exactly as though she were asking a personal favour from
Stifford the private individual. Such was Janet's way. She could not
help it. People often said that her desire to please, and her methods
of pleasing, were unconscious. These people were wrong. She was
perfectly conscious and even deliberate in her actions. She liked to
please. She could please easily and she could please keenly. Therefore
she strove always to please. Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror,
and saw that charming, good-natured face with its rich vermilion lips
eager to part in a nice, warm, sympathetic smile, she could accuse
herself of being too fond of the art of pleasing. For she was a
conscientious girl, and her age being twenty-five her soul was at its
prime, full, bursting with beautiful impulses towards perfection. Yes,
she would accuse herself of being too happy, too content, and would
wonder whether she ought not to seek heaven by some austerity of
scowling. Janet had everything: a kind disposition, some brains, some
beauty, considerable elegance and luxury for her station, fine shoulders
at a ball, universal love and esteem.
Stifford, as he gazed diffidently at this fashionable, superior, and yet
exquisitely beseeching woman on the other side of the counter, was in a
very unpleasant quandary. She had by her magic transformed him into a
private individual, and he acutely wanted to earn that smile which she
was giving him. But he could not. He was under the obligation to say
`No' to her innocent and delightful request; and yet could he say `No'?
Could he bring himself to desolate her by a refusal? (She had produced
in him the illusion that a refusal would indeed desolate her, though she
would of course bear it with sweet fortitude.) Business was a barbaric
thing at times.
"The fact is, miss," he said at length, in his best manner, "Mr
Clayhanger has decided to give up the new book business. I'm very
sorry."
Had it been another than Janet he would have assuredly said with pride:
"We have decided--"
"Really!" said Janet. "I see!"
Then Stifford directed his eyes upon a square glazed structure of
ebonised wood that had been insinuated and inserted into the opposite
corner of the shop, behind the ledger-window. And Janet's eyes followed
his.
"I don't know if--" he hesitated.
"Is Mr Clayhanger in?" she demanded, as if wishful to help him in the
formulation of his idea, and she added: "Or Mr Edwin?" Deliciously
persuasive!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
The wooden structure was a lair. It had been constructed to hold Darius
Clayhanger; but in practice it generally held Edwin, as his father's
schemes for the enlargement of the business carried him abroad more and
more. It was a device of Edwin's for privacy; Edwin had planned it and
seen the plan executed. The theory was that a person concealed in the
structure (called `the office') was not technically in the shop and must
not be disturbed by anyone in the shop. Only persons of authority--
Darius and Edwin--had the privilege of the office, and since its
occupant could hear every whisper in the shop, it was always for the
occupant to decide when events demanded that he should emerge.
On Janet's entrance, Edwin was writing in the daybook: "April 11th.
Turnhill Oddfellows. 400 Contrib. Cards--" He stopped writing. He held
himself still like a startled mouse. With satisfaction he observed that
the door of the fortress was closed. By putting his nose near the
crystal wall he could see, through the minute transparent portions of
the patterned glass, without being seen. He watched Janet's graceful
gestures, and examined with pleasure the beauties of her half-season
toilet; he discerned the modishness of her umbrella handle. His
sensations were agreeable and yet disagreeable, for he wished both to
remain where he was and to go forth and engage her in brilliant small
talk. He had no small talk, except that of the salesman and the
tradesman; his tongue knew not freedom; but his fancy dreamed of light,
intellectual conversations with fine girls. These dreams of fancy had
of late become almost habitual, for the sole reason that he had raised
his hat several times to Janet, and once had shaken hands with her and
said, "How d'you do, Miss Orgreave?" in response to her "How d'you do,
Mr Clayhanger?" Osmond Orgreave, in whom had originated their
encounter, had cut across the duologue at that point and spoilt it. But
Edwin's fancy had continued it, when he was alone late at night, in a
very diverting and witty manner. And now, he had her at his disposal;
he had only to emerge, and Stiff would deferentially recede, and he
could chat with her at ease, starting comfortably from "The Light of
Asia." And yet he dared not; his faint heart told him in loud beats
that he could only chat cleverly with a fine girl when absolutely alone
in his room, in the dark.
Still, he surveyed her; he added her up; he pronounced, with a touch of
conventional male patronage (caught possibly from the Liberal Club),
that Janet was indubitably a nice girl and a fine girl. He would not
admit that he was afraid of her, and that despite all theoretical
argufying, he deemed her above him in rank.
And if he had known the full truth, he might have regretted that he had
not caused the lair to be furnished with a trap-door by means of which
the timid could sink into the earth.
The truth was that Janet had called purposely to inspect Edwin at
leisure. "The Light of Asia" was a mere poetical pretext. "The Light
of Asia" might as easily have been ordered at Hanbridge, where her
father and brothers ordered all their books--in fact, more easily.
Janet, with all her niceness, with all the reality of her immense
good-nature, loved as well as anybody a bit of chicane where a man was
concerned. Janet's eyes could twinkle as mischievously as her quiet
mother's. Mr Orgreave having in the last eight months been in
professional relations with Darius and Edwin, the Orgreave household had
begun discussing Edwin again. Mr Orgreave spoke of him favourably.
Mrs Orgreave said that he looked the right sort of youth, but that he
had a peculiar manner. Janet said that she should not be surprised if
there was something in him. Janet said also that his sister Clara was
an impossible piece of goods, and that his sister Maggie was born an old
maid. One of her brothers then said that that was just what was the
matter with Edwin too! Mr Orgreave protested that he wasn't so sure of
that, and that occasionally Edwin would say things that were really
rather good. This stimulated Mrs Orgreave's curiosity, and she
suggested that her husband should invite the young man to their house.
Whereupon Mr Orgreave pessimistically admitted that he did not think
Edwin could be enticed. And Janet, piqued, said, "If that's all, I'll
have him here in a week." They were an adventurous family, always ready
for anything, always on the look-out for new sources of pleasure, full
of zest in life. They liked novelties, and hospitality was their chief
hobby. They made fun of nearly every body, but it was not mean fun.
Such, and not "The Light of Asia," was the cause of Janet's visit.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
Be it said to Edwin's shame that she would have got no further with the
family plot that morning, had it not been for the chivalry of Stifford.
Having allowed his eyes to rest on the lair, Stifford allowed his memory
to forget the rule of the shop, and left the counter for the door of the
lair, determined that Miss Orgreave should see the genuineness of his
anxiety to do his utmost for so sympathetic a woman. Edwin, perceiving
the intention from his lair, had to choose whether he would go out or be
fetched out. Of course he preferred to go out. But he would never have
gone out on his own initiative; he would have hesitated until Janet had
departed, and he would then have called himself a fool. He regretted,
and I too regret, that he was like that; but like that he was.
He emerged with nervous abruptness.
"Oh, how d'you do, Miss Orgreave?" he said; "I thought it was your
voice." After this he gave a little laugh, which meant nothing,
certainly not amusement; it was merely a gawky habit that he had
unconsciously adopted. Then he took his handkerchief out of his pocket
and put it back again. Stifford fell back and had to pretend that
nothing interested him less than the interview which he had
precipitated.
"How d'you do, Mr Clayhanger?" said Janet.
They shook hands. Edwin wrung Janet's hand; another gawky habit.
"I was just going to order a book," said Janet.
"Oh yes! `The Light of Asia,'" said Edwin.
"Have you read it?" Janet asked.
"Yes--that is, a lot of it."
"Have you?" exclaimed Janet. She was impressed, because really the
perusal of verse was not customary in the town. And her delightful
features showed generously the full extent to which she was impressed:
an honest, ungrudging appreciation of Edwin's studiousness. She said to
herself: "Oh! I must certainly get him to the house." And Edwin said
to himself, "No mistake, there's something very genuine about this
girl."
Edwin said aloud quickly, from an exaggerated apprehensiveness lest she
should be rating him too high--
"It was quite an accident that I saw it. I never read that sort of
thing--not as a rule." He laughed again.
"Is it worth buying?" Now she appealed to him as an authority. She
could not help doing so, and in doing so she was quite honest, for her
good-nature had momentarily persuaded her that he was an authority.
"I--I don't know," Edwin answered, moving his neck as though his collar
was not comfortable; but it was comfortable, being at least a size too
large. "It depends, you know. If you read a lot of poetry, it's worth
buying. But if you don't, it isn't. It's not Tennyson, you know. See
what I mean?"
"Yes, quite!" said Janet, smiling with continued and growing
appreciation. The reply struck her as very sagacious. She suddenly saw
in a new light her father's hints that there was something in this young
man not visible to everybody. She had a tremendous respect for her
father's opinion, and now she reproached herself in that she had not
attached due importance to what he had said about Edwin. "How right
father always is!" she thought. Her attitude of respect for Edwin was
now more securely based upon impartial intelligence than before; it owed
less to her weakness for seeing the best in people. As for Edwin, he
was saying to himself: "I wish to the devil I could talk to her without
spluttering! Why can't I be natural? Why can't I be glib? Some chaps
could." And Edwin could be, with some chaps.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
They were standing close together in the shop, Janet and Edwin, near the
cabinet of artists' materials. Janet, after her manner at once frank
and reassuring, examined Edwin; she had come on purpose to examine him.
She had never been able to decide whether or not he was good-looking,
and she could not decide now. But she liked the appeal in his eyes.
She did not say to herself that there was an appeal in his eyes; she
said that there was `something in his eyes.' Also he was moderately
tall and he was slim. She said to herself that he must be very well
shaped. Beginning at the bottom, his boots were clumsy, his trousers
were baggy and even shiny, and they had transverse creases, not to be
seen in the trousers of her own menkind; his waistcoat showed plainly
the forms of every article in the pockets thereof--watch, penknife,
pencil, etcetera, it was obvious that he never emptied his pockets at
night; his collar was bluish-white instead of white, and its size was
monstrous; his jacket had `worked up' at the back of his neck,
completely hiding his collar there; the side-pockets of his jacket were
weighted and bulged with mysterious goods; his fair hair was rough but
not curly; he had a moustache so trifling that one could not be sure
whether it was a moustache or whether he had been too busy to think of
shaving. Janet received all these facts into her brain, and then
carelessly let them all slip out again, in her preoccupation with his
eyes. She said they were sad eyes. The mouth, too, was somewhat sad
(she thought), but there was a drawing down of the corners of it that
seemed to make gentle fun of its sadness. Janet, perhaps out of her
good-nature, liked his restless, awkward movements and the gesture of
his hands, of which the articulations were too prominent, and the
finger-nails too short.
"Tom reads rather a lot of poetry," said Janet. "That's my eldest
brother."
"That might justify you," said Edwin doubtfully.
They both laughed. And as with Janet, so with Edwin, when he laughed,
all the kindest and honestest part of him seemed to rise into his face.
"But if you don't supply new books any more?"
"Oh!" Edwin stuttered, blushing slightly. "That's nothing. I shall be
very pleased to get it for you specially, Miss Orgreave. It's father
that decided--only last month--that the new book business was more
trouble than it's worth. It was--in a way; but I'm sorry, myself, we've
given it up, poor as it was. Of course there are no book-buyers in this
town, especially now old Lawton's dead. But still, what with one thing
or another, there was generally some book on order, and I used to see
them. Of course there's no money in it. But still... Father says that
people buy less books than they used to--but he's wrong there." Edwin
spoke with calm certainty. "I've shown him he's wrong by our
order-book, but he wouldn't see it." Edwin smiled, with a general mild
indulgence for fathers.
"Well," said Janet, "I'll ask Tom first."
"No trouble whatever to us to order it for you, I assure you. I can get
it down by return of post."
"It's very good of you," said Janet, genuinely persuading herself for
the moment that Edwin was quite exceeding the usual bounds of
complaisance.
She moved to depart.
"Father told me to tell you if I saw you that the glazing will be all
finished this morning," said she.
"Up yonder?" Edwin jerked his head to indicate the south.
And Janet delicately confirmed his assumption with a slight declension
of her waving hat.
"Oh! Good!" Edwin murmured.
Janet held out her hand, to be wrung again, and assured him of her
gratitude for his offer of taking trouble about the book; and he assured
her that it would not be trouble but pleasure. He accompanied her to
the doorway.
"I think I must come up and have a look at that glazing this afternoon,"
he said, as she stood on the pavement.
She nodded, smiling benevolence and appreciation, and departed round the
corner in the soft sunshine.
Edwin put on a stern, casual expression for the benefit of Stifford, as
who should say: "What a trial these frivolous girls are to a man
immersed in affairs!" But Stifford was not deceived. Safe within his
lair, Edwin was conscious of quite a disturbing glow. He smiled to
himself--a little self-consciously, though alone. Then he scribbled
down in pencil "Light of Asia. Miss J. Orgreave."
VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TWO.
FATHER AND SON AFTER SEVEN YEARS.
Darius came heavily, and breathing heavily, into the little office.
"Now as all this racketing's over," he said crossly--he meant by
`racketing' the general election which had just put the Liberal party
into power--"I'll thank ye to see as all that red and blue ink is
cleaned off the rollers and slabs, and the types cleaned too. I've told
'em ten times if I've told 'em once, but as far as I can make out,
they've done naught to it yet."
Edwin grunted without looking up.
His father was now a fattish man, and he had aged quite as much as
Edwin. Some of his scanty hair was white; the rest was grey. White
hair sprouted about his ears; gold gleamed in his mouth; and a pair of
spectacles hung insecurely balanced half-way down his nose; his
waistcoat seemed to be stretched tightly over a perfectly smooth
hemisphere. He had an air of somewhat gross and prosperous untidiness.
Except for the teeth, his bodily frame appeared to have fallen into
disrepair, as though he had ceased to be interested in it, as though he
had been using it for a long time as a mere makeshift lodging. And this
impression was more marked at table; he ate exactly as if throwing food
to a wild animal concealed somewhere within the hemisphere, an animal
which was never seen, but which rumbled threateningly from time to time
in its dark dungeon.
Of all this, Edwin had definitely noticed nothing save that his father
was `getting stouter.' To Edwin, Darius was exactly the same father,
and for Darius, Edwin was still aged sixteen. They both of them went on
living on the assumption that the world had stood still in those seven
years between 1873 and 1880. If they had been asked what had happened
during those seven years, they would have answered: "Oh, nothing
particular!"
But the world had been whizzing ceaselessly from one miracle into
another. Board schools had been opened in Bursley, wondrous affairs,
with ventilation; indeed ventilation had been discovered. A Jew had
been made Master of the Rolls: a spectacle at which England shivered,
and then, perceiving no sign of disaster, shrugged its shoulders. Irish
members had taught the House of Commons how to talk for twenty-four
hours without a pause. The wages of the agricultural labourer had
sprung into the air and leaped over the twelve shilling bar into regions
of opulence. Moody and Sankey had found and conquered England for
Christ. Landseer and Livingstone had died, and the provinces could not
decide whether "Dignity and Impudence" or the penetration of Africa was
the more interesting feat. Herbert Spencer had published his "Study of
Sociology"; Matthew Arnold his "Literature and Dogma"; and Frederic
Farrar his Life of his Lord; but here the provinces had no difficulty in
deciding, for they had only heard of the last. Every effort had been
made to explain by persuasion and by force to the working man that trade
unions were inimical to his true welfare, and none had succeeded, so
stupid was he. The British Army had been employed to put reason into
the noddle of a town called Northampton which was furious because an
atheist had not been elected to Parliament. Pullman cars, "The Pirates
of Penzance," Henry Irving's "Hamlet," spelling-bees, and Captain Webb's
channel swim had all proved that there were novelties under the sun.
Bishops, archbishops, and dissenting ministers had met at Lambeth to
inspect the progress of irreligious thought, with intent to arrest it.
Princes and dukes had conspired to inaugurate the most singular scheme
that ever was, the Kyrle Society,--for bringing beauty home to the
people by means of decorative art, gardening, and music. The Bulgarian
Atrocities had served to give new life to all penny gaffs and
blood-tubs. The "Eurydice" and the "Princess Alice" had foundered in
order to demonstrate the uncertainty of existence and the courage of the
island-race. The "Nineteenth Century" had been started, a little late
in the day, and the "Referee." Ireland had all but died of hunger, but
had happily been saved to enjoy the benefits of Coercion. The Young
Men's Christian Association had been born again in the splendour of
Exeter Hall. Bursley itself had entered on a new career as a chartered
borough, with Mayor, alderman, and councillors, all in chains of silver.
And among the latest miracles were Northampton's success in sending the
atheist to Parliament, the infidelity of the Tay Bridge three days after
Christmas, the catastrophe of Majuba Hill, and the discovery that
soldiers objected to being flogged into insensibility for a peccadillo.
But, in spite of numerous attempts, nobody had contrived to make England
see that her very existence would not be threatened if museums were
opened on Sunday, or that Nonconformists might be buried according to
their own rites without endangering the constitution.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
Darius was possibly a little uneasy in his mind about the world.
Possibly there had just now begun to form in his mind the conviction, in
which most men die, that all was not quite well with the world, and that
in particular his native country had contracted a fatal malady since he
was a boy.
He was a printer, and yet the General Election had not put sunshine in
his heart. And this was strange, for a general election is the brief
millennium of printers, especially of steam-printers who for dispatch
can beat all rivals. During a general election the question put by a
customer to a printer is not, "How much will it be?" but "How soon can I
have it?" There was no time for haggling about price; and indeed to
haggle about price would have been unworthy, seeing that every customer
(ordinary business being at a standstill), was engaged in the salvation
of England. Darius was a Liberal, but a quiet one, and he was
patronised by both political parties--blue and red. As a fact, neither
party could have done without him. His printing office had clattered
and thundered early and late, and more than once had joined the end of
one day's work to the beginning of another; and more than once had Big
James with his men and his boy (a regiment increased since 1873), stood
like plotters muttering in the yard at five minutes to twelve on Sunday
evening, waiting for midnight to sound, and Big James had unlocked the
door of the office on the new-born Monday, and work had instantly
commenced to continue till Monday was nearly dead of old age.
Once only had work been interrupted, and that was on a day when, a lot
of `blue jobs' being about, a squad of red fire-eaters had come up the
back alley with intent to answer arguments by thwackings and wreckings;
but the obstinacy of an oak door had fatigued them. The staff had
enjoyed that episode. Every member of it was well paid for overtime.
Darius could afford to pay conscientiously. In the printing trade,
prices were steadier then than they are now. But already the discovery
of competition was following upon the discovery of ventilation. Perhaps
Darius sniffed it from a distance, and was disturbed thereby.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
For though he was a Liberal in addition to being a printer, and he had
voted Liberal, and his party had won, yet the General Election had not
put sunshine in his heart. No! The tendencies of England worried him.
When he read in a paper about the heretical tendencies of Robertson
Smith's Biblical articles in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," he said to
himself that they were of a piece with the rest, and that such things
were to be expected in those modern days, and that matters must have
come to a pretty pass when even the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" was
infected. (Still, he had sold a copy of the new edition.) He was
exceedingly bitter against Ireland; and also, in secret, behind Big
James's back, against trade unions. When Edwin came home one night and
announced that he had joined the Bursley Liberal Club, Darius lost his
temper. Yet he was a member of the club himself. He gave no reason for
his fury, except that it was foolish for a tradesman to mix himself up
with politics. Edwin, however, had developed a sudden interest in
politics, and had made certain promises of clerical aid, which promises
he kept, saying nothing more to his father. Darius's hero was Sir
Robert Peel, simply because Sir Robert Peel had done away with the Corn
Laws. Darius had known England before and after the repeal of the Corn
Laws, and the difference between the two Englands was so strikingly
dramatic to him that he desired no further change. He had only one
date--1846. His cup had been filled then. Never would he forget the
scenes of anguishing joy that occurred at midnight of the day before the
new Act became operative. From that moment he had finished with
progress... If Edwin could only have seen those memories, shining in
layers deep in his father's heart, and hidden now by all sorts of
Pliocene deposits, he would have understood his father better. But
Edwin did not see into his father's heart at all, nor even into his
head. When he looked at his father he saw nothing but an ugly,
stertorous old man (old, that is, to Edwin), with a peculiar and
incalculable way of regarding things and a temper of growing
capriciousness.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
Darius was breathing and fidgeting all over him as he sat bent at the
desk. His presence overwhelmed every other physical phenomenon.
"What's this?" asked Darius, picking up the bit of paper on which Edwin
had written the memorandum about "The Light of Asia."
Edwin explained, self-consciously, lamely.
When the barometer of Darius's temper was falling rapidly, there was a
sign: a small spot midway on the bridge of his nose turned ivory-white.
Edwin glanced upwards now to see if the sign was there, and it was. He
flushed slightly and resumed his work.
Then Darius began.
"What did I tell ye?" he shouted. "What in the name of God's the use o'
me telling ye things? Have I told ye not to take any more orders for
books, or haven't I? Haven't I said over and over again that I want
this shop to be known for wholesale?" He raved.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
Stifford could hear. Any person who might chance to come into the shop
would hear. But Darius cared neither for his own dignity nor for that
of his son. He was in a passion. The real truth was that this celibate
man, who never took alcohol, enjoyed losing his temper; it was his one
outlet; he gave himself up almost luxuriously to a passion; he looked
forward to it as some men look forward to brandy. And Edwin had never
stopped him by some drastic step. At first, years before, Edwin had
said to himself, trembling with resentment in his bedroom, "The next
time, the very next time, he humiliates me like that in front of other
people, I'll walk out of his damned house and shop, and I swear I won't
come back until he's apologised. I'll bring him to his senses. He
can't do without me. Once for all I'll stop it. What! He forces me
into his business, and then insults me!"
But Edwin had never done it. Always, it was `the very next time'!
Edwin was not capable of doing it. His father had a sort of moral
brute-force, against which he could not stand firm. He soon recognised
this, with his intellectual candour. Then he had tried to argue with
Darius, to `make him see'! Worse than futile! Argument simply put
Darius beside himself. So that in the end Edwin employed silence and
secret scorn, as a weapon and as a defence. And somehow without a word
he conveyed to Stifford and to Big James precisely what his attitude in
these crises was, so that he retained their respect and avoided their
pity. The outbursts still wounded him, but he was wonderfully inured.
As he sat writing under the onslaught, he said to himself, "By God! If
ever I get the chance, I'll pay you out for this some day!" And he
meant it. A peep into his mind, then, would have startled Janet
Orgreave, Mrs Nixon, and other persons who had a cult for the
wistfulness of his appealing eyes.
He steadily maintained silence, and the conflagration burnt itself out.
"Are you going to look after the printing shop, or aren't you?" Darius
growled at length.
Edwin rose and went. As he passed through the shop, Stifford, who had
in him the raw material of fine manners, glanced down, but not too
ostentatiously, at a drawer under the counter.
The printing office was more crowded than ever with men and matter.
Some of the composing was now done on the ground-floor. The whole
organism functioned, but under such difficulties as could not be allowed
to continue, even by Darius Clayhanger. Darius had finally recognised
that.
"Oh!" said Edwin, in a tone of confidential intimacy to Big James, "I
see they're getting on with the cleaning! Good. Father's beginning to
get impatient, you know. It's the bigger cases that had better be done
first."
"Right it is, Mr Edwin!" said Big James. The giant was unchanged. No
sign of grey in his hair; and his cheek was smooth, apparently his
philosophy put him beyond the touch of time.
"I say, Mr Edwin," he inquired in his majestic voice. "When are we
going to rearrange all this?" He gazed around.
Edwin laughed. "Soon," he said.
"Won't be too soon," said Big James.
VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER THREE.
THE NEW HOUSE.
A house stood on a hill. And that hill was Bleakridge, the summit of
the little billow of land between Bursley and Hanbridge. Trafalgar Road
passed over the crest of the billow. Bleakridge was certainly not more
than a hundred feet higher than Bursley; yet people were now talking a
lot about the advantages of living `up' at Bleakridge, `above' the
smoke, and `out' of the town, though it was not more than five minutes
from the Duck Bank. To hear them talking, one might have fancied that
Bleakridge was away in the mountains somewhere. The new steam-cars
would pull you up there in three minutes or so, every quarter of an
hour. It was really the new steam-cars that were to be the making of
Bleakridge as a residential suburb. It had also been predicted that
even Hanbridge men would come to live at Bleakridge now. Land was
changing owners at Bleakridge, and rising in price. Complete streets of
lobbied cottages grew at angles from the main road with the rapidity of
that plant which pushes out strangling branches more quickly than a man
can run. And these lobbied cottages were at once occupied.
Cottage-property in the centre of the town depreciated.
The land fronting the main road was destined not for cottages, but for
residences, semi-detached or detached. Osmond Orgreave had a good deal
of this land under his control. He did not own it, he hawked it. Like
all provincial, and most London, architects, he was a land-broker in
addition to being an architect. Before obtaining a commission to build
a house, he frequently had to create the commission himself by selling a
convenient plot, and then persuading the purchaser that if he wished to
retain the respect of the community he must put on the plot a house
worthy of the plot. The Orgreave family all had expensive tastes, and
it was Osmond Orgreave's task to find most of the money needed for the
satisfaction of those tastes. He always did find it, because the
necessity was upon him, but he did not always find it easily. Janet
would say sometimes, "We mustn't be so hard on father this month;
really, lately we've never seen him with his cheque-book out of his
hand." Undoubtedly the clothes on Janet's back were partly responsible
for the celerity with which building land at Bleakridge was `developed,'
just after the installation of steam-cars in Trafalgar Road.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
Mr Orgreave sold a corner plot to Darius. He had had his eye on Darius
for a long time before he actually shot him down; but difficulties
connected with the paring of estimates for printing had somewhat
estranged them. Orgreave had had to smooth out these difficulties,
offer to provide a portion of the purchase money on mortgage from
another client, produce a plan for a new house that surpassed all
records of cheapness, produce a plan for the transforming of Darius's
present residence into business premises, talk poetically about the
future of printing in the Five Towns, and lastly, demonstrate by digits
that Darius would actually save money by becoming a property-owner--he
had had to do all this, and more, before Darius would buy.
The two were regular cronies for about a couple of months--that is to
say, between the payment of the preliminary deposit and the signing of
the contract for building the house. But, the contract signed, their
relations were once more troubled. Orgreave had nothing to fear, then,
and besides, he was using his diplomacy elsewhere. The house went up to
an accompaniment of scenes in which only the proprietor was irate.
Osmond Orgreave could not be ruffled; he could not be deprived of his
air of having done a favour to Darius Clayhanger; his social and moral
superiority, his real aloofness, remained absolutely unimpaired. The
clear image of him as a fine gentleman was never dulled nor distorted
even in the mind of Darius. Nevertheless Darius `hated the sight' of
the house ere the house was roofed in. But this did not diminish his
pride in the house. He wished he had never `set eyes on' Osmond
Orgreave. Yes! But the little boy from the Bastille was immensely
content at the consequences of having set eyes on Osmond Orgreave. The
little boy from the Bastille was achieving the supreme peak of
greatness--he was about to live away from business. Soon he would be
`going down to business' of a morning. Soon he would be receiving two
separate demand-notes for rates. Soon he would be on a plane with the
vainest earthenware manufacturer of them all. Ages ago he had got as
far as a house with a lobby to it. Now, it would be a matter of two
establishments. Beneath all his discontents, moodiness, temper, and
biliousness, lay this profound satisfaction of the little boy from the
Bastille.
Moreover, in any case, he would have been obliged to do something
heroic, if only to find the room more and more imperiously demanded by
his printing business.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
On the Saturday afternoon of Janet Orgreave's visit to the shop, Edwin
went up to Bleakridge to inspect the house, and in particular the
coloured `lights' in the upper squares of the drawing-room and
dining-room windows. He had a key to the unpainted front door, and
having climbed over various obstacles and ascended an inclined bending
plank, he entered and stood in the square hall of the deserted, damp,
and inchoate structure.
The house was his father's only in name. In emotional fact it was
Edwin's house, because he alone was capable of possessing it by enjoying
it. To Darius, to Bursley in general, it was just a nice house, of red
brick with terra-cotta facings and red tiles, in the second-Victorian
Style, the style that had broken away from Georgian austerity and
first-Victorian stucco and smugness, and wandered off vaguely into
nothing in particular. To the plebeian in Darius it was of course
grandiose, and vast; to Edwin also, in a less degree. But to Edwin it
was not a house, it was a work of art, it was an epic poem, it was an
emanation of the soul. He did not realise this. He did not realise how
the house had informed his daily existence. All that he knew about
himself in relation to the house was that he could not keep away from
it. He went and had a look at it, nearly every morning before
breakfast, when the workmen were fresh and lyrical.
When the news came down to the younger generation that Darius had bought
land and meant to build on the land, Edwin had been profoundly moved
between apprehension and hope; his condition had been one of simple but
intense expectant excitement. He wondered what his own status would be
in the great enterprise of house-building. All depended on Mr
Orgreave. Would Mr Orgreave, of whom he had seen scarcely anything in
seven years, remember that he was intelligently interested in
architecture? Or would Mr Orgreave walk right over him and talk
exclusively to his father? He had feared, he had had a suspicion, that
Mr Orgreave was an inconstant man.
Mr Orgreave had remembered in the handsomest way. When the plans were
being discussed, Mr Orgreave with one word, a tone, a glance, had
raised Edwin to the consultative level of his father. He had let Darius
see that Edwin was in his opinion worthy to take part in discussions,
and quite privately he had let Edwin see that Darius must not be treated
too seriously. Darius, who really had no interest in ten thousand
exquisitely absorbing details, had sometimes even said, with impatience,
"Oh! Settle it how you like, with Edwin."
Edwin's own suggestions never seemed very brilliant, and Mr Orgreave
was always able to prove to him that they were inadvisable; but they
were never silly, like most of his father's. And he acquired leading
ideas that transformed his whole attitude towards architecture. For
example, he had always looked on a house as a front-wall diversified by
doors and windows, with rooms behind it. But when Mr Orgreave produced
his first notions for the new house Edwin was surprised to find that he
had not even sketched the front. He had said, "We shall be able to see
what the elevation looks like when we've decided the plan a bit." And
Edwin saw in a flash that the front of a house was merely the expression
of the inside of it, merely a result, almost accidental. And he was
astounded and disgusted that he, with his professed love of architecture
and his intermittent study of it, had not perceived this obvious truth
for himself. He never again looked at a house in the old irrational
way.
Then, when examining the preliminary sketch-plan, he had put his finger
on a square space and asked what room that was. "That isn't a room;
that's the hall," said Mr Orgreave. "But it's square!" Edwin
exclaimed. He thought that in houses (houses to be lived in) the hall
or lobby must necessarily be long and narrow. Now suddenly he saw no
reason why a hall should not be square. Mr Orgreave had made no
further remark about halls at the time, but another day, without any
preface, he re-opened the subject to Edwin, in a tone good-naturedly
informing, and when he had done Edwin could see that the shape of the
hall depended on the shape of the house, and that halls had only been
crushed and pulled into something long and narrow because the
disposition of houses absolutely demanded this ugly negation of the very
idea of a hall. Again, he had to begin to think afresh, to see afresh.
He conceived a real admiration for Osmond Orgreave; not more for his
original and yet common-sense manner of regarding things, than for his
aristocratic deportment, his equality to every situation, and his
extraordinary skill in keeping his dignity and his distance during
encounters with Darius. (At the same time, when Darius would grumble
savagely that Osmond Orgreave `was too clever by half,' Edwin could not
deny that.) Edwin's sisters got a good deal of Mr Orgreave, through
Edwin; he could never keep Mr Orgreave very long to himself. He gave
away a great deal of Mr Orgreave's wisdom without mentioning the origin
of the gift. Thus occasionally Clara would say cuttingly, "I know where
you've picked that up. You've picked that up from Mr Orgreave." The
young man Benbow to whom the infant Clara had been so queerly engaged,
also received from Edwin considerable quantities of Mr Orgreave. But
the fellow was only a decent, dull, pushing, successful ass, and quite
unable to assimilate Mr Orgreave; Edwin could never comprehend how
Clara, so extremely difficult to please, so carping and captious, could
mate herself to a fellow like Benbow. She had done so, however; they
were recently married. Edwin was glad that that was over; for it had
disturbed him in his attentions to the house.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
When the house began to `go up,' Edwin lived in an ecstasy of
contemplation. I say with deliberateness an `ecstasy.' He had seen
houses go up before; he knew that houses were constructed brick by
brick, beam by beam, lath by lath, tile by tile; he knew that they did
not build themselves. And yet, in the vagueness of his mind, he had
never imaginatively realised that a house was made with hands, and hands
that could err. With its exact perpendiculars and horizontals, its
geometric regularities, and its Chinese preciseness of fitting, a house
had always seemed to him--again in the vagueness of his mind--as
something superhuman. The commonest cornice, the most ordinary pillar
of a staircase-balustrade--could that have been accomplished in its
awful perfection of line and contour by a human being? How easy to
believe that it was `not made with hands'!
But now he saw. He had to see. He saw a hole in the ground, with water
at the bottom, and the next moment that hole was a cellar; not an
amateur cellar, a hole that would do at a pinch for a cellar, but a
professional cellar. He appreciated the brains necessary to put a brick
on another brick, with just the right quantity of mortar in between. He
thought the house would never get itself done--one brick at a time--and
each brick cost a farthing--slow, careful; yes, and even finicking. But
soon the bricklayers had to stand on plank-platforms in order to reach
the raw top of the wall that was ever rising above them. The
measurements, the rulings, the plumbings, the checkings! He was humbled
and he was enlightened. He understood that a miracle is only the result
of miraculous patience, miraculous nicety, miraculous honesty,
miraculous perseverance. He understood that there was no golden and
magic secret of building. It was just putting one brick on another and
against another--but to a hair's breadth. It was just like anything
else. For instance, printing! He saw even printing in a new light.
And when the first beams were bridged across two walls...
The funny thing was that the men's fingers were thicky and clumsy.
Never could such fingers pick up a pin! And still they would manoeuvre
a hundredweight of timber to a pin's point.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
He stood at the drawing-room bay-window (of which each large pane had
been marked with the mystic sign of a white circle by triumphant
glaziers), and looked across the enclosed fragment of clayey field that
ultimately would be the garden. The house was at the corner of
Trafalgar Road and a side-street that had lobbied cottages down its
slope. The garden was oblong, with its length parallel to Trafalgar
Road, and separated from the pavement only by a high wall. The upper
end of the garden was blocked by the first of three new houses which
Osmond Orgreave was building in a terrace. These houses had their main
fronts on the street; they were quite as commodious as the Clayhangers',
but much inferior in garden-space; their bits of flower-plots lay behind
them. And away behind their flower-plots, with double entrance-gates in
another side street, stretched the grounds of Osmond Orgreave, his house
in the sheltered middle thereof. He had got, cheaply, one of the older
residential properties of the district, Georgian, of a recognisable
style, relic of the days when manufacturers formed a class entirely
apart from their operatives; even as far back as 1880 any operative
might with luck become an employer. The south-east corner of the
Clayhanger garden touched the north-west corner of the domains of
Orgreave; for a few feet the two gardens were actually contiguous, with
naught but an old untidy thorn hedge between them; this hedge was to be
replaced by a wall that would match the topmost of the lobbied cottages
which bounded the view of the Clayhangers to the east.
From the bay-window Edwin could see over the hedge, and also through it,
on to the croquet lawn of the Orgreaves. Croquet was then in its first
avatar; nothing was more dashing than croquet. With rag-balls and
home-made mallets the Clayhanger children had imitated croquet in their
yard in the seventies. The Orgreaves played real croquet; one of them
had shone in a tournament at Buxton. Edwin noticed a figure on the
gravel between the lawn and the hedge. He knew it to be Janet, by the
crimson frock. But he had no notion that Janet had stationed herself in
that quarter with intent to waylay him. He could not have credited her
with such a purpose. Nor could his modesty have believed that he was
important enough to employ the talent of the Orgreaves for agreeable
chicane. The fact was that Janet had been espying him for a quarter of
an hour. When at length she waved her hand to him, it did not occur to
him to suppose that she was waving her hand to him; he merely wondered
what peculiar thing she was doing. Then he blushed as she waved again,
and he knew first from the blood in his face that Janet was making a
signal, and that it was to himself that the signal was directed: his
body had told his mind; this was very odd.
Of course he was obliged to go out; and he went, muttering to himself.
VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER FOUR.
THE TWO GARDENS.
In the full beauty of the afternoon they stood together, only the
scraggy hedge between them, he on grass-tufted clay, and she on orderly
gravel.
"Well," said Janet, earnestly looking at him, "how do you like the
effect of that window, now it's done?"
"Very nice!" he laughed nervously. "Very nice indeed!"
"Father said it was," she remarked. "I do hope Mr Clayhanger will like
it too!" And her voice really was charged with sympathetic hope. It
was as if she would be saddened and cast down if Darius did not approve
the window. It was as if she fervently wished that Darius should not be
disappointed with the window. The unskilled spectator might have
assumed that anxiety for the success of the window would endanger her
sleep at nights. She was perfectly sincere. Her power of emotional
sympathy was all-embracing and inexhaustible. If she heard that an
acquaintance of one of her acquaintances had lost a relative or broken a
limb, she would express genuine deep concern, with a tremor of her
honest and kindly voice. And if she heard the next moment that an
acquaintance of one of her acquaintances had come into five thousand
pounds or affianced himself to a sister-spirit, her eyes would sparkle
with heartfelt joy and her hands clasp each other in sheer delight.
"Oh!" said Edwin, touched. "It'll be all right for the dad. No fear!"
"I haven't seen it yet," she proceeded. "In fact I haven't been in your
house for such a long time. But I do think it's going to be very nice.
All father's houses are so nice, aren't they?"
"Yes," said Edwin, with that sideways shake of the head that in the
vocabulary of his gesture signified, not dissent, but emphatic assent.
"You ought to come and have a look at it." He could not say less.
"Do you think I could scramble through here?" she indicated the sparse
hedge.
"I-- I--"
"I know what I'll do. I'll get the steps." She walked off sedately,
and came back with a small pair of steps, which she opened out on the
narrow flower-bed under the hedge. Then she picked up her skirt and
delicately ascended the rocking ladder till her feet were on a level
with the top of the hedge. She smiled charmingly, savouring the
harmless escapade, and gazing at Edwin. She put out her free hand,
Edwin took it, and she jumped. The steps fell backwards, but she was
safe.
"What a good thing mother didn't see me!" she laughed. Her grave,
sympathetic, almost handsome face was now alive everywhere with a sort
of challenging merriment. She was only pretending that it was a good
thing her mother had not seen her: a delicious make-believe. Why, she
was as motherly as her mother! In an instant her feet were choosing
their way and carrying her with grace and stateliness across the mire of
the unformed garden. She was the woman of the world, and Edwin the raw
boy. The harmony and dignity of her movements charmed and intimidated
Edwin. Compare her to Maggie... That she was hatless added piquancy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
They went into the echoing bare house, crunching gravel and dry clay on
the dirty, new floors. They were alone together in the house. And all
the time Edwin was thinking: "I've never been through anything like this
before. Never been through anything like this!" And he recalled for a
second the figure of Florence Simcox, the clog-dancer.
And below these images and reflections in his mind was the thought: "I
haven't known what life is! I've been asleep. This is life!"
The upper squares of the drawing-room window were filled with small
leaded diamond-shaped panes of many colours. It was the latest fashion
in domestic glazing. The effect was at once rich and gorgeous. She
liked it.
"It will be beautiful on this side in the late afternoon," she murmured.
"What a nice room!"
Their eyes met, and she transmitted to him her joy in his joy at the
admirableness of the house.
He nodded. "By Jove!" he thought. "She's a splendid girl. There can't
be many girls knocking about as fine as she is!"
"And when the garden's full of flowers!" she breathed in rapture. She
was thinking, "Strange, nice boy! He's so romantic. All he wants is
bringing out."
They wandered to and fro. They went upstairs. They saw the bathroom.
They stood on the landing, and the unseen spaces of the house were busy
with their echoes. They then entered the room that was to be Edwin's.
"Mine!" he said self-consciously.
"And I see you're having shelves fixed on both sides of the mantelpiece!
You're very fond of books, aren't you?" she appealed to him.
"Yes," he said judicially.
"Aren't they wonderful things?" Her glowing eyes seemed to be
expressing gratitude to Shakespeare and all his successors in the
dynasty of literature.
"That shelving is between your father and me," said Edwin. "The dad
doesn't know. It'll go in with the house-fittings. I don't expect the
dad will ever notice it."
"Really!" She laughed, eager to join the innocent conspiracy. "Father
invented an excellent dodge for shelving in the hall at our house," she
added. "I'm sure he'd like you to come and see it. The dear thing's
most absurdly proud of it."
"I should like to," Edwin answered diffidently.
"Would you come in some evening and see us? Mother would be delighted.
We all should."
"Very kind of you." In his diffidence he was now standing on one leg.
"Could you come to-night? ... Or to-morrow night?"
"I'm afraid I couldn't come to-night, or to-morrow night," he answered
with firmness. A statement entirely untrue! He had no engagement; he
never did have an engagement. But he was frightened, and his spirit
sprang away from the idea, like a fawn at a sudden noise in the brake,
and stood still.
He did not suspect that the unconscious gruffness of his tone had
repulsed her. She blamed herself for a too brusque advance.
"Well, I hope some other time," she said, mild and benignant.
"Thanks! I'd like to," he replied more boldly, reassured now that he
had heard again the same noise but indefinitely farther off.
She departed, but by the front door, and hatless and dignified up
Trafalgar Road in the delicate sunshine to the next turning. She was
less vivacious.
He hoped he had not offended her, because he wanted very much--not to go
in cold blood to the famed mansion of the Orgreaves--but by some magic
to find himself within it one night, at his ease, sharing in brilliant
conversation. "Oh no!" he said to himself. "She's not offended. A
fine girl like that isn't offended for nothing at all!" He had been
invited to visit the Orgreaves! He wondered what his father would say,
or think. The unexpressed basic idea of the Clayhangers was that the
Clayhangers were as good as other folks, be they who they might. Still,
the Orgreaves were the Orgreaves... In sheer absence of mind he
remounted the muddy stairs.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
He regarded the shabbiness of his clothes; he had been preoccupied by
their defects for about a quarter of an hour; now he examined them in
detail, and said to himself disgusted, that really it was ridiculous for
a man about to occupy a house like that to be wearing garments like
those. Could he call on the Orgreaves in garments like those? His
Sunday suit was not, he felt, in fact much better. It was newer, less
tumbled, but scarcely better. His suits did not cost enough. Finance
was at the root of the crying scandal of his career as a dandy. The
financial question must be reopened and settled anew. He should attack
his father. His father was extremely dependent on him now, and must be
brought to see reason. (His father who had never seen reason!) But the
attack must not be made with the weapon of clothes, for on that subject
Darius was utterly unapproachable. Whenever Darius found himself in a
conversation about clothes, he gave forth the antique and well-tried
witticism that as for him he didn't mind what he wore, because if he was
at home everybody knew him and it didn't matter, and if he was away from
home nobody knew him and it didn't matter. And he always repeated the
saying with gusto, as if it was brand-new and none could possibly have
heard it before.
No, Edwin decided that he would have to found his attack on the
principle of abstract justice; he would never be able to persuade his
father that he lacked any detail truly needful to his happiness. To go
into details would be to invite defeat.
Of course it would be a bad season in which to raise the financial
question. His father would talk savagely in reply about the enormous
expenses of house-building, house-furnishing, and removing,--and
architects' and lawyers' fees; he would be sure to mention the rapacity
of architects and lawyers. Nevertheless Edwin felt that at just this
season, and no other, must the attack be offered.
Because the inauguration of the new house was to be for Edwin, in a very
deep and spiritual sense, the beginning of the new life! He had settled
that. The new house inspired him. It was not paradise. But it was a
temple.
You of the younger generation cannot understand that--without
imagination. I say that the hot-water system of the new house, simple
and primitive as it was, affected and inspired Edwin like a poem. There
was a cistern-room, actually a room devoted to nothing but cisterns, and
the main cistern was so big that the builders had had to install it
before the roof was put on, for it would never have gone through a door.
This cistern, by means of a ball-tap, filled itself from the main
nearly as quickly as it was emptied. Out of it grew pipes, creeping in
secret downwards between inner walls of the house, penetrating
everywhere. One went down to a boiler behind the kitchen-range and
filled it, and as the fire that was roasting the joint heated the
boiler, the water mounted again magically to the cistern-room and filled
another cistern, spherical and sealed, and thence descended, on a third
journeying, to the bath and to the lavatory basin in the bathroom. All
this was marvellous to Edwin; it was romantic. What! A room solely for
baths! And a huge painted zinc bath! Edwin had never seen such a
thing. And a vast porcelain basin, with tiles all round it, in which
you could splash! An endless supply of water on the first floor!
At the shop-house, every drop of water on the first floor had to be
carried upstairs in jugs and buckets; and every drop of it had to be
carried down again. No hot water could be obtained until it had been
boiled in a vessel on the fire. Hot water had the value of champagne.
To take a warm hip-bath was an immense enterprise of heating, fetching,
decanting, and general derangement of the entire house; and at best the
bath was not hot; it always lost its virtue on the stairs and landing.
And to splash--one of the most voluptuous pleasures in life--was
forbidden by the code. Mrs Nixon would actually weep at a splashing.
Splashing was immoral. It was as wicked as amorous dalliance in a
monastery. In the shop-house godliness was child's play compared to
cleanliness.
And the shop-house was so dark! Edwin had never noticed how dark it was
until the new house approached completion. The new house was radiant
with light. It had always, for Edwin, the somewhat blinding brilliance
which filled the sitting-room of the shop-house only when Duck Bank
happened to be covered with fresh snow. And there was a dining-room,
solely for eating, and a drawing-room. Both these names seemed `grand'
to Edwin, who had never sat in any but a sitting-room. Edwin had never
dined; he had merely had dinner. And, having dined, to walk
ceremoniously into another room! (Odd! After all, his father was a man
of tremendous initiative.) Would he and Maggie be able to do the thing
naturally? Then there was the square hall--positively a room! That
alone impelled him to a new life. When he thought of it all, the
reception-rooms, the scientific kitchen, the vast scullery, the four
large bedrooms, the bathroom, the three attics, the cistern-room
murmurous with water, and the water tirelessly, inexhaustibly coursing
up and down behind walls--he thrilled to fine impulses.
He took courage. He braced himself. The seriousness which he had felt
on the day of leaving school revisited him. He looked back across the
seven years of his life in the world, and condemned them unsparingly.
He blamed no one but Edwin. He had forgiven his father for having
thwarted his supreme ambition; long ago he had forgiven his father;
though, curiously, he had never quite forgiven Mrs Hamps for her share
in the catastrophe. He honestly thought he had recovered from the
catastrophe undisfigured, even unmarked. He knew not that he would
never be the same man again, and that his lightest gesture and his
lightest glance were touched with the wistfulness of resignation. He
had frankly accepted the fate of a printer. And in business he was
convinced, despite his father's capricious complaints, that he had
acquitted himself well. In all the details of the business he
considered himself superior to his father. And Big James would
invariably act on his secret instructions given afterwards to counteract
some misguided hasty order of the old man's.
It was the emptiness of the record of his private life that he
condemned. What had he done for himself? Nothing large! Nothing
heroic and imposing! He had meant to pursue certain definite courses of
study, to become the possessor of certain definite groups of books, to
continue his drawing and painting, to practise this, that and the other,
to map out all his spare time, to make rules and to keep them,--all to
the great end of self-perfecting. He had said: "What does it matter
whether I am an architect or a printer, so long as I improve myself to
the best of my powers?" He hated young men who talked about improving
themselves. He spurned the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society
(which had succeeded the Debating Society--defunct through
over-indulgence in early rising). Nevertheless in his heart he was far
more enamoured of the idea of improvement than the worst prig of them
all. He could never for long escape from the dominance of the idea. He
might violently push it away, arguing that it could lead to nothing and
was futile and tedious; back it would come! It had always worried him.
And yet he had accomplished nothing. His systems of reading never
worked for more than a month at a time. And for several months at a
time he simply squandered his spare hours, the hours that were his very
own, in a sort of coma of crass stupidity, in which he seemed to be
thinking of nothing whatever. He had not made any friends whom he could
esteem. He had not won any sort of notice. He was remarkable for
nothing. He was not happy. He was not content. He had the
consciousness of being a spendthrift of time and of years... A fair
quantity of miscellaneous reading--that was all he had done. He was not
a student. He knew nothing about anything. He had stood still.
Thus he upbraided himself. And against this futility was his courage
now braced by the inspiration of the new house, and tightened to a
smarting tension by the brief interview with Janet Orgreave. He was
going to do several feats at once: tackle his father, develop into a
right expert on some subject, pursue his painting, and--for the moment
this had the chief importance--`come out of his shell.' He meant to be
social, to impress himself on others, to move about, to form
connections, to be Edwin Clayhanger, an individuality in the town,--to
live. Why had he refused Janet's invitation? Mere silliness. The old
self nauseated the new. But the next instant he sought excuses for the
old self... Wait a bit! There was time yet.
He was happy in the stress of one immense and complex resolve.
VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER FIVE.
CLOTHES.
He heard voices below. And his soul seemed to shrink back, as if into
the recesses of the shell from which it had been peeping. His soul was
tremendous, in solitude; but even the rumour of society intimidated it.
His father and another were walking about the ground floor; the rough
voice of his father echoed upwards in all its crudity. He listened for
the other voice; it was his Auntie Clara's. Darius too had taken his
Saturday afternoon for a leisurely visit to the house, and somehow he
must have encountered Mrs Hamps, and brought her with him to view.
Without giving himself time to dissipate his courage in reflection, he
walked to the landing, and called down the stairs, "Hello, Auntie!"
Why should his tone have been self-conscious, forced? He was engaged in
no crime. He had told his father where he was going, and his father had
not contradicted his remark that even if both of them happened to be out
together, the shop would take no harm under the sole care of Stifford
for an hour in the quiet of Saturday afternoon.
Mrs Hamps replied, in her coaxing, sweet manner.
"What did ye leave th' front door open for?" his father demanded curtly,
and every room in the house heard the question.
"Was it open?" he said lamely.
"Was it open! All Trafalgar Road could have walked in and made
themselves at home."
Edwin stood leaning with his arms on the rail of the landing. Presently
the visitors appeared at the foot of the stairs, and Darius climbed
carefully, having first shaken the balustrade to make sure that it was
genuine, stout, and well-founded. Mrs Hamps followed, the fripperies
of her elegant bonnet trembling, and her black gown rustling. Edwin
smiled at her, and she returned his smile with usurious interest. There
was now a mist of grey in her fine hair.
"Oh, Edwin!" she began, breathing relief on the top stair. "What a
beautiful house! Beautiful! Quite perfect! The latest of everything!
Do you know what I've been thinking while your dear father has been
showing me all this. So that's the bathroom! Bless us! Hot! Cold!
Waste! That cupboard under the lavatory is very handy, but what a snare
for a careless servant! Maggie will have to look at it every day, or
it'll be used for anything and everything. You tell her what her auntie
says... I was thinking--if but your mother could have seen it all!"
Father and son said nothing. Auntie Hamps sighed. She was the only
person who ever referred to the late Mrs Clayhanger.
The procession moved on from room to room, Darius fingering and
grunting, Mrs Hamps discovering in each detail the fine flower of utter
perfection, and Edwin strolling loosely in the wake of her curls, her
mantle, and her abundant black petticoats. He could detect the odour of
her kid gloves; it was a peculiar odour that never escaped him, and it
reminded him inevitably of his mother's funeral.
He was glad that they had not arrived during the visit of Janet
Orgreave.
In due course Edwin's bedroom was reached, and here Auntie Clara's
ecstasy was redoubled.
"I'm sure you're very grateful to your father, aren't you, Edwin?" she
majestically assumed, when she had admired passionately the window, the
door, the pattern of the hearth-tiles, and the spaciousness.
Edwin could not speak. Inquiries of this nature from Mrs Hamps
paralysed the tongues of the children. They left nothing to be said. A
sheepish grin, preceded by an inward mute curse, was all that Edwin
could accomplish. How in heaven's name could the woman talk in that
strain? His attitude towards his auntie was assuredly hardening with
years.
"What's all this?" questioned his father suddenly, pointing to upright
boards that had been fastened to the walls on either side of the
mantelpiece, to a height of about three feet.
Then Edwin perceived the clumsiness of his tactics in remaining
upstairs. He ought to have gone downstairs to meet his father and
auntie, and left them to go up alone. His father was in an inquisitive
mood.
"It's for shelves," he said.
"Shelves?"
"For my books. It's Mr Orgreave's idea. He says it'll cost less."
"Cost less! Mr Orgreave's got too many ideas--that's what's the matter
with him. He'll idea me into the bankruptcy court if he keeps on."
Edwin would have liked to protest against the savagery of the tone, to
inquire firmly why, since shelves were necessary for books and he had
books, there need be such a display of ill-temper about a few feet of
deal plank. The words were ready, the sentences framed in his mind.
But he was silent. The door was locked on these words, but it was not
Edwin who had turned the key; it was some force within him, over which
he had no control.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
"Now, now, father!" intervened Mrs Hamps. "You know you've said over
and over again how glad you are he's so fond of books, and never goes
out. There isn't a better boy in Bursley. That I will say, and to his
face." She smiled like an angel at both of them.
"You say! You say!" Darius remarked curtly, trying to control himself.
A few years ago he would never have used such violent demeanour in her
presence.
"And how much easier these shelves will be to keep clean than a
bookcase! No polishing. Just a rub, and a wipe with a damp cloth now
and then. And no dirt underneath. They will do away with four corners,
anyhow. That's what I think of--eh, poor Maggie! Keeping all this
clean. There'll be work for two women night and day, early and late,
and even then--But it's a great blessing to have water on every floor,
that it is! And people aren't so particular nowadays as they used to
be, I fancy. I fancy that more and more." Mrs Hamps sighed,
cheerfully bearing up.
Without a pause she stepped quickly across to Edwin. He wondered what
she was at. She merely straightened down the collar of his coat, which,
unknown to him, had treacherously allowed itself to remain turned up
behind. It had probably been thus misbehaving itself since before
dinner, when he had washed.
"Now, I do like my nephew to be tidy," said Mrs Hamps affectionately.
"I'm very jealous for my nephew." She caressed the shoulders of the
coat, and Edwin had to stand still and submit. "Let me see, it's your
birthday next month, isn't it?"
"Yes, auntie."
"Well, I know he hasn't got a lot of money. And I know his father
hasn't any money to spare just now--what with all these expenses--the
house--"
"Ye may well say it, sister!" Darius growled.
"I saw you the day before yesterday. My nephew didn't see me, but his
auntie saw him. Oh, never mind where. And I said to myself; `I should
like my only nephew to have a suit a little better than that when he
goes up and down on his father's business. What a change it would be if
his old auntie gave him a new suit for a birthday present this year!'"
"Oh, auntie."
She spoke in a lower voice. "You come and see me tomorrow, and I shall
have a little piece of paper in an envelope waiting for you. And you
must choose something really good. You've got excellent taste, we all
know that. And this will be a new start for you. A new year, and a new
start, and we shall see how neat and spruce you'll keep yourself in
future, eh?"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
It was insufferable. But it was fine. Who could deny that Auntie Clara
was not an extraordinary, an original, and a generous woman? What a
masterly reproof to both father and son! Perhaps not delicately
administered. Yet Auntie Clara had lavished all the delicacy of her
nature on the administering!
To Edwin, it seemed like an act of God in his favour. It seemed to set
a divine seal on his resolutions. It was the most astonishing and
apposite piece of luck that had ever happened to him. When he had
lamely thanked the benefactor, he slipped away as soon as he could.
Already he could feel the crinkling of the five-pound note in his hand.
Five pounds! He had never had a suit that cost more than fifty
shillings. He slipped away. A great resolve was upon him. Shillitoe
closed at four o'clock on Saturday afternoons. There was just time. He
hurried down Trafalgar Road in a dream. And when he had climbed Duck
Bank he turned to the left, and without stopping he burst into
Shillitoe's. Not from eagerness to enter Shillitoe's, but because if he
had hesitated he might never have entered at all: he might have slunk
away to the old undistinguished tailor in Saint Luke's Square.
Shillitoe was the stylish tailor. Shillitoe made no display of goods,
scorning such paltry devices. Shillitoe had wire blinds across the
lower part of his window, and on the blinds, in gold, "Gentlemen's
tailor and outfitter. Breeches-maker." Above the blind could be seen a
few green cardboard boxes. Shillitoe made breeches for men who hunted.
Shillitoe's lowest price for a suit was notoriously four guineas.
Shillitoe's was the resort of the fashionable youth of the town and
district. It was a terrific adventure for Edwin to enter Shillitoe's.
His nervousness was painful. He seemed to have a vague idea that
Shillitoe might sneer at him. However, he went in. The shop was empty.
He closed the door, as he might have closed the door of a dentist's.
He said to himself; "Well, I'm here!" He wondered what his father would
say on hearing that he had been to Shillitoe's. And what would Clara
have said, had she been at home? Then Shillitoe in person came forward
from the cutting-out room and Shillitoe's tone and demeanour reassured
him.
VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER SIX.
JANET LOSES HER BET.
Accident--that is to say, a chance somewhat more fortuitous than the
common hazards which we group together and call existence--pushed Edwin
into the next stage of his career. As, on one afternoon in late June,
he was turning the corner of Trafalgar Road to enter the shop, he
surprisingly encountered Charlie Orgreave, whom he had not seen for
several years. And when he saw this figure, at once fashionably and
carelessly dressed, his first thought was one of deep satisfaction that
he was wearing his new Shillitoe suit of clothes. He had scarcely worn
the suit at all, but that afternoon his father had sent him over to
Hanbridge about a large order from Bostocks, the recently established
drapers there whose extravagant advertising had shocked and pained the
commerce of the Five Towns. Darius had told him to `titivate himself,'
a most startling injunction from Darius, and thus the new costly suit
had been, as it were, officially blessed and henceforth could not be
condemned.
"How do, Teddy?" Charlie greeted him. "I've just been in to see you at
your shop."
Edwin paused.
"Hello! The Sunday!" he said quietly. And he kept thinking, as his
eyes noted details of Charlie's raiment, "It's a bit of luck I've got
these clothes on." And he was in fact rather sorry that Charlie
probably paid no real attention to clothes. The new suit had caused
Edwin to look at everybody's clothes, had caused him to walk
differently, and to put his shoulders back, and to change the style of
his collars; had made a different man of Edwin.
"Come in, will you?" Edwin suggested.
They went into the shop together. Stifford smiled at them both, as if
to felicitate them on the chance which had brought them together.
"Come in here," said Edwin, indicating the small office.
"The lion's den, eh?" observed the Sunday.
He, as much as Edwin, was a little tongue-tied and nervous.
"Sit down, will you?" said Edwin, shutting the door. "No, take the
arm-chair. I'll absquatulate on the desk. I'd no idea you were down.
When did you come?"
"Last night, last train. Just a freak, you know."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
They were within a foot of each other in the ebonised cubicle. Edwin's
legs were swinging a few inches away from the arm-chair. His hat was at
the back of his head, and Charlie's hat was at the back of Charlie's
head. This was their sole point of resemblance. As Edwin
surreptitiously examined the youth who had once been his intimate
friend, he experienced the half-sneering awe of the provincial for the
provincial who has become a Londoner. Charlie was changed; even his
accent was changed. He and Edwin belonged to utterly different worlds
now. They seldom saw the same scenes or thought the same things. But
of course they were obliged by loyalty to the past to pretend that
nothing was changed.
"You've not altered much," said Edwin.
And indeed, when Charlie smiled, he was almost precisely the old Sunday,
despite his metropolitan mannerisms. And there was nothing whatever in
his figure or deportment to show that he had lived for several years in
France and could chatter in a language whose verbs had four
conjugations. After all, he was less formidable than Edwin might have
anticipated.
"You have, anyhow," said Charlie.
Edwin grinned self-consciously.
"I suppose you've got this place practically in your own hands now,"
said Charlie. "I wish I was on my own, I can tell you that."
An instinctive gesture from Edwin made Charlie lower his voice in the
middle of a sentence. The cubicle had the appearance, but not the
reality, of being private.
"Don't you make any mistake," Edwin murmured. He, who depended on his
aunt's generosity for clothes, the practical ruler of the place! Still
he was glad that Charlie supposed that he ruled, even though the
supposition might be mere small-talk. "You're in that hospital, aren't
you?"
"Bart's."
"Bart's, is it? Yes, I remember. I expect you aren't thinking of
settling down here?"
Charlie was about to reply in accents of disdain: "Not me!" But his
natural politeness stayed his tongue. "I hardly think so," he said.
"Too much competition here. So there is everywhere, for the matter of
that." The disillusions of the young doctor were already upon Charlie.
And yet people may be found who will assert that in those days there was
no competition, that competition has been invented during the past ten
years.
"You needn't worry about competition," said Edwin.
"Why not?"
"Why not, man! Nothing could ever stop you from getting patients--with
that smile! You'll simply walk straight into anything you want."
"You think so?" Charlie affected an ironic incredulity, but he was
pleased. He had met the same theory in London.
"Well, you didn't suppose degrees and things had anything to do with it,
did you?" said Edwin, smiling a little superiorly. He felt, with
pleasure, that he was still older than the Sunday; and it pleased him
also to be able thus to utilise ideas which he had formed from
observation but which by diffidence and lack of opportunity he had never
expressed. "All a patient wants is to be smiled at in the right way,"
he continued, growing bolder. "Just look at 'em!"
"Look at who?"
"The doctors here." He dropped his voice further. "Do you know why the
dad's gone to Heve?"
"Gone to Heve, has he? Left old Who-is-it?"
"Yes. I don't say Heve isn't clever, but it's his look that does the
trick for him."
"You seem to go about noticing things. Any charge?"
Edwin blushed and laughed. Their nervousness was dissipated. Each was
reassured of the old basis of `decency' in the other.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
"Look here," said Charlie. "I can't stop now."
"Hold on a bit."
"I only called to tell you that you've simply got to come up to-night."
"Come up where?"
"To our place. You've simply got to."
The secret fact was that Edwin had once more been under discussion in
the house of the Orgreaves. And Osmond Orgreave had lent Janet a
shilling so that she might bet Charlie a shilling that he would not
succeed in bringing Edwin to the house. The understanding was that if
Janet won, her father was to take sixpence of the gain. Janet herself
had failed to lure Edwin into the house. He was so easy to approach and
so difficult to catch. Janet was slightly piqued.
As for Edwin, he was postponing the execution of all his good
resolutions until he should be installed in the new house. He could not
achieve highly difficult tasks under conditions of expectancy and
derangement. The whole Clayhanger premises were in a suppressed state
of being packed up. In a week the removal would occur. Until the
removal was over and the new order was established Edwin felt that he
could still conscientiously allow his timidity to govern him, and so he
had remained in his shell. The sole herald of the new order was the new
suit.
"Oh! I can't come--not to-night."
"Why not?"
"We're so busy."
"Bosh to that!"
"Some other night."
"No. I'm going back to-morrow. Must. Now look here, old man, come on.
I shall be very disappointed if you don't."
Edwin wondered why he could not accept and be done with it, instead of
persisting in a sequence of insincere and even lying hesitations. But
he could not.
"That's all right," said Charlie, as if clinching the affair. Then he
lowered his voice to a scarce audible confidential whisper. "Fine girl
staying up there just now!" His eyes sparkled.
"Oh! At your place?" Edwin adopted the same cautious tone. Stifford,
outside, strained his ears--in vain. The magic word `girl' had in an
instant thrown the shop into agitation. The shop was no longer
provincial; it became a part of the universal.
"Yes. Haven't you seen her about?"
"No. Who is she?"
"Oh! Friend of Janet's. Hilda Lessways, her name is. I don't know
much of her myself."
"Bit of all right, is she?" Edwin tried in a whisper to be a man of
vast experience and settled views. He tried to whisper as though he
whispered about women every day of his life. He thought that these
Londoners were terrific on the subject of women, and he did his best to
reach their level. He succeeded so well that Charlie, who, as a man,
knew more of London than of the provinces, thought that after all London
was nothing in comparison to the seeming-quiet provinces. Charlie
leaned back in his chair, drew down the corners of his mouth, nodded his
head knowingly, and then quite spoiled the desired effect of doggishness
by his delightfully candid smile. Neither of them had the least
intention of disrespect towards the fine girl who was on their lips.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
Edwin said to himself: "Is it possible that he has come down specially
to see this Hilda?" He thought enviously of Charlie as a free bird of
the air.
"What's she like?" Edwin inquired.
"You come up and see," Charlie retorted.
"Not to-night," said the fawn, in spite of Edwin.
"You come to-night, or I perish in the attempt," said Charlie, in his
natural voice. This phrase from their school-days made them both laugh
again. They were now apparently as intimate as ever they had been.
"All right," said Edwin. "I'll come."
"Sure?"
"Yes."
"Come for a sort of supper at eight."
"Oh!" Edwin drew back. "Supper? I didn't--Suppose I come after supper
for a bit?"
"Suppose you don't!" Charlie snorted, sticking his chin out. "I'm off
now. Must."
They stood a moment together at the door of the shop, in the declining
warmth of the summer afternoon, mutually satisfied.
"So-long!"
"So-long!"
The Sunday elegantly departed. Edwin had given his word, and he felt as
he might have felt had surgeons just tied him to the operating-table.
Nevertheless he was not ill-pleased with his own demeanour in front of
Charlie. And he liked Charlie as much as ever. He should rely on
Charlie as a support during this adventure into the worldly regions
peopled by fine girls. He pictured this Hilda as being more romantic
and strange than Janet Orgreave; he pictured her as mysteriously
superior. And he was afraid of his own image of her.
At tea in the dismantled sitting-room, though he was going out to
supper, he ate quite as much tea as usual, from sheer poltroonery. He
said as casually as he could--
"By the way, Charlie Orgreave called this afternoon."
"Did he?" said Maggie.
"He's off back to London to-morrow. He would have me slip up there
to-night to see him."
"And shall you?"
"I think so," said Edwin, with an appearance of indecision. "I may as
well."
It was the first time that there had ever been question of him visiting
a private house, except his aunt's, at night. To him the moment marked
an epoch, the inception of freedom; but the phlegmatic Maggie showed no
sign of excitement--("Clara would have gone into a fit!" he reflected)--
and his father only asked a casual question about Charlie.
VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER SEVEN.
LANE END HOUSE.
Here was another of those impressive square halls, on the other side of
the suddenly opened door of Lane End House. But Edwin was now getting
accustomed to square halls. Nevertheless he quaked as he stood on the
threshold. An absurd young man! He wondered whether he would ever
experience the sensation of feeling authentically grown-up. Behind him
in the summer twilight lay the large oval lawn, and the gates which once
had doubtless marked the end of Manor Lane--now Oak Street. And
actually he had an impulse to rush back upon his steps, and bring on
himself eternal shame. The servant, however, primly held him with her
eyes alone, and he submitted to her sway.
"Mr Charles in?" he inquired glumly, affecting nonchalance.
The servant bowed her head with a certain condescending deference, as
who should say: "Do not let us pretend that they are not expecting you."
A door to the right opened. Janet was revealed, and, behind her,
Charlie. Both were laughing. There was a sound of a piano. As soon as
Charlie caught sight of Edwin he exclaimed to Janet--
"Where's my bob?"
"Charlie!" she protested, checking her laughter.
"Why! What have I said?" Charlie inquired, with mock innocence,
perceiving that he had been indiscreet, and trying to remedy his rash
mistake. "Surely I can say `bob'!"
Edwin understood nothing of this brief passage. Janet, ignoring Charlie
and dismissing the servant with an imperceptible sign, advanced to the
visitor. She was dressed in white, and Edwin considered her to be
extraordinarily graceful, dignified, sweet, and welcoming. There was a
peculiar charm in the way in which her skirts half-reluctantly followed
her along the carpet, causing beautiful curves of drapery from the
waist. And her smile was so warm and so sincere! For the moment she
really felt that Edwin's presence in the house satisfied the keenest of
her desires, and of course her face generously expressed what she felt.
"Well, Miss Orgreave," Edwin grinned. "Here I am, you see!"
"And we're delighted," said Janet simply, taking his hand. She might
have amiably teased him about the protracted difficulties of getting
him. She might have hinted an agreeable petulance against the fact that
the brother had succeeded where the sister had failed. Her sisterly
manner to Charlie a little earlier had perhaps shown flashes of such
thoughts in her mind. But no. In the presence of Edwin, Janet's
extreme good-nature forgot everything save that he was there, a stranger
to be received and cherished.
"Here! Give us that tile," said Charlie.
"Beautiful evening," Edwin observed.
"Oh! Isn't it!" breathed Janet, in ecstasy, and gazed from the front
door into the western sky. "We were out on the lawn, but mother said it
was damp. It wasn't," she laughed. "But if you think it's damp, it is
damp, isn't it? Will you come and see mother? Charlie, you can leave
the front door open."
Edwin said to himself that she had all the attractiveness of a girl and
of a woman. She preceded him towards the door to the right. Charlie
hovered behind, on springs. Edwin, nervously pulling out his
handkerchief and putting it back, had a confused vision of the hall full
of little pictures, plates, stools, rugs, and old sword-sheaths. There
seemed to him to be far more knick-knacks in that hall than in the whole
of his father's house; Mr Orgreave's ingeniously contrived bookshelves
were simply overlaid and smothered in knick-knacks. Janet pushed at the
door, and the sound of the piano suddenly increased in volume.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
There was no cessation of the music as the three entered. As it were
beneath the music, Mrs Orgreave, a stout and faded calm lady, greeted
him kindly: "Mr Edwin!" She was shorter than Janet, but Edwin could
see Janet in her movements and in her full lips. "Well, Edwin!" said
Osmond Orgreave with lazy and distinguished good-nature, shaking hands.
Jimmie and Johnnie, now aged nineteen and eighteen respectively, were in
the room; Johnnie was reading; their blushing awkwardness in salutation
and comic efforts to be curtly benevolent in the manner of clubmen
somewhat eased the tension in Edwin. They addressed him as
`Clayhanger.' The eldest and the youngest child of the family sat at
the piano in the act of performing a duet. Tom, pale, slight,
near-sighted and wearing spectacles, had reached the age of thirty-two,
and was junior partner in a firm of solicitors at Hanbridge; Bursley
seldom saw him. Alicia had the delightful gawkiness of twelve years.
One only of the seven children was missing. Marian, aged thirty, and
married in London, with two little babies; Marian was adored by all her
brothers and sisters, and most by Janet, who, during visits of the
married sister, fell back with worshipping joy into her original
situation of second daughter.
Edwin, Charles, and Janet sat down on a sofa. It was not until after a
moment that Edwin noticed an ugly young woman who sat behind the players
and turned over the pages of music for them. "Surely that can't be his
wonderful Hilda!" Edwin thought. In the excitement of arrival he had
forgotten the advertised Hilda. Was that she? The girl could be no
other. Edwin made the reflection that all men make: "Well, it's
astonishing what other fellows like!" And, having put down Charlie
several points in his esteem, he forgot Hilda.
Evidently loud and sustained conversation was not expected nor desired
while the music lasted. And Edwin was glad of this. It enabled him to
get his breath and his bearings in what was to him really a tremendous
ordeal. And in fact he was much more agitated than even he imagined.
The room itself abashed him.
Everybody, including Mr Orgreave, had said that the Clayhanger
drawing-room with its bay-window was a fine apartment. But the Orgreave
drawing-room had a bay-window and another large window; it was twice as
big as the Clayhangers' and of an interesting irregular shape. Although
there were in it two unoccupied expanses of carpet, it nevertheless
contained what seemed to Edwin immense quantities of furniture of all
sorts. Easy-chairs were common, and everywhere. Several bookcases rose
to the low ceiling; dozens and dozens of pictures hid the walls; each
corner had its little society of objects; cushions and candlesticks
abounded; the piano was a grand, and Edwin was astounded to see another
piano, a small upright, in the farther distance; there were even two
fireplaces, with two mirrors, two clocks, two sets of ornaments, and two
embroidered screens. The general effect was of extraordinary lavish
profusion--of wilful, splendid, careless extravagance.
Yet the arm of the sofa on which Edwin leaned was threadbare in two
different places. The room was faded and worn, like its mistress. Like
its mistress it seemed to exhale a silent and calm authority, based on
historic tradition.
And the room was historic; it had been the theatre of history. For
twenty-five years--ever since Tom was seven--it had witnessed the
adventurous domestic career of the Orgreaves, so quiet superficially, so
exciting in reality. It was the drawing-room of a man who had
consistently used immense powers of industry for the satisfaction of his
prodigal instincts; it was the drawing-room of a woman whose placidity
no danger could disturb, and who cared for nothing if only her husband
was amused. Spend and gain! And, for a change, gain and spend! That
was the method. Work till sheer exhaustion beat you. Plan, scheme,
devise! Satisfy your curiosity and your other instincts! Experiment!
Accept risks! Buy first, order first, pledge yourself first; and then
split your head in order to pay and to redeem! When chance aids you to
accumulate, let the pile grow, out of mere perversity, and then scatter
it royally! Play heartily! Play with the same intentness as you work!
Live to the uttermost instant and to the last flicker of energy! Such
was the spirit of Osmond Orgreave, and the spirit which reigned in the
house generally, if not in every room of the house.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
For each child had its room--except Jimmie and Johnnie, who shared one.
And each room was the fortress of an egoism, the theatre of a separate
drama, mysterious, and sacred from the others. Jimmie could not
remember having been in Janet's room--it was forbidden by Alicia, who
was jealous of her sole right of entree--and nobody would have dreamed
of violating the chamber of Jimmie and Johnnie to discover the origin of
peculiar noises that puzzled the household at seven o'clock in the
morning. As for Tom's castle--it was a legend to the younger children;
it was supposed to be wondrous.
All the children had always cost money, and a great deal of money, until
Marian had left the family in deep gloom for her absence, and Tom, with
a final wrench of a vast sum from the willing but wincing father, had
settled into a remunerative profession. Tom was now keeping himself and
repaying the weakened parent. The rest cost more and more every year as
their minds and bodies budded and flowered. It was endless, it was
staggering, it would not bear thinking about. The long and varied
chronicle of it was somehow written on the drawing-room as well as on
the faces of the father and mother--on the drawing-room which had the
same dignified, childlike, indefatigable, invincible, jolly expression
as its owners. Threadbare in places? And why not? The very identical
Turkey carpet at which Edwin gazed in his self-consciousness--on that
carpet Janet the queenly and mature had sprawled as an infant while her
mother, a fresh previous Janet of less than thirty, had cooed and said
incomprehensible foolishness to her. Tom was patriarchal because he had
vague memories of an earlier drawing-room, misted in far antiquity.
Threadbare? By heaven, its mere survival was magnificent! I say that
it was a miraculous drawing-room. Its chairs were humanised. Its
little cottage piano that nobody ever opened now unless Tom had gone mad
on something for two pianos, because it was so impossibly tinny--the
cottage piano could humanly recall the touch of a perfect baby when
Marian the wife sat down to it. Marian was one of your silly
sentimental nice things; on account of its associations, she really
preferred the cottage piano to the grand. The two carpets were both
resigned, grim old humanities, used to dirty heels, and not caring, or
pretending not to care. What did the curtains know of history? Naught.
They were always new; they could not last. But even the newest
curtains would at once submit to the influence of the room, and take on
something of its physiognomy, and help to express its comfortableness.
You could not hang a week in front of one of those windows without being
subtly informed by the tradition of adventurous happiness that presided
over the room. It was that: a drawing-room in which a man and a woman,
and boys and girls, had been on the whole happy, if often apprehensive.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
The music began to engage Edwin's attention. It was music of a kind
quite novel to him. Most of it had no meaning for him, but at intervals
some fragment detached itself from the mass, and stood out beautiful.
It was as if he were gazing at a stage in gloom, but lighted momentarily
by fleeting rays that revealed a lovely detail and were bafflingly cut
off. Occasionally he thought he noticed a recurrence of the same
fragment. Murmurs came from behind the piano. He looked cautiously.
Alicia was making faces of alarm and annoyance. She whispered: "Oh
dear! ... It's no use! ... We're all wrong, I'm sure!" Tom kept his
eyes on the page in front of him, doggedly playing. Then Edwin was
conscious of dissonances. And then the music stopped.
"Now, Alicia," her father protested mildly, "you mustn't be nervous."
"Nervous!" exclaimed Alicia. "Tom's just as nervous as I am! So he
needn't talk." She was as red as a cock's crest.
Tom was not talking. He pointed several times violently to a place on
Alicia's half of the open book--she was playing the bass part. "There!
There!" The music recommenced.
"She's always nervous like that," Janet whispered kindly, "when any
one's here. But she doesn't like to be told."
"She plays splendidly," Edwin responded. "Do you play?"
Janet shook her head.
"Yes, she does," Charlie whispered.
"Keep on, darling. You're at the end now." Edwin heard a low, stern
voice. That must be the voice of Hilda. A second later, he looked
across, and surprised her glance, which was intensely fixed on himself.
She dropped her eyes quickly; he also.
Then he felt by the nature of the chords that the piece was closing.
The music ceased. Mr Orgreave clapped his hands. "Bravo! Bravo!"
"Why," cried Charlie to the performers, "you weren't within ten bars of
each other!" And Edwin wondered how Charlie could tell that. As for
him, he did not know enough of music to be able to turn over the pages
for others. He felt himself to be an ignoramus among a company of
brilliant experts.
"Well," said Mr Orgreave, "I suppose we may talk a bit now. It's more
than our place is worth to breathe aloud while these Rubinsteins are
doing Beethoven!" He looked at Edwin, who grinned.
"Oh! My word!" smiled Mrs Orgreave, supporting her hand.
"Beethoven, is it?" Edwin muttered. He was acquainted only with the
name, and had never heard it pronounced as Mr Orgreave pronounced it.
"One symphony a night!" Mr Orgreave said, with irony. "And we're only
at the second, it seems. Seven more to come; What do you think of that,
Edwin?"
"Very fine!"
"Let's have the `Lost Chord,' Janet," Mr Orgreave suggested.
There was a protesting chorus of "Oh, dad!"
"Very well! Very well!" the father murmured, acting humility. "I'm
snubbed!"
Tom had now strolled across the room, smiling to himself, and looking at
the carpet, in an effort to behave as one who had done nothing in
particular.
"How d'ye do, Clayhanger?" He greeted Edwin, and grasped his hand in a
feverish clutch. "You must excuse us. We aren't used to audiences.
That's the worst of being rotten amateurs."
Edwin rose. "Oh!" he deprecated. He had never spoken to Tom Orgreave
before, but Tom seemed ready to treat him at once as an established
acquaintance.
Then Alicia had to come forward and shake hands. She could not get a
word out.
"Now, baby!" Charlie teased her.
She tossed her mane, and found refuge by her mother's side. Mrs
Orgreave caressed the mane into order.
"This is Miss Lessways. Hilda--Mr Edwin Clayhanger." Janet drew the
dark girl towards her as the latter hovered uncertainly in the middle of
the room, her face forced into the look of elaborate negligence
conventionally assumed by every self-respecting person who waits to be
introduced. She took Edwin's hand limply, and failed to meet his
glance. Her features did not soften. Edwin was confirmed in the
impression of her obdurate ugliness. He just noticed her olive skin and
black eyes and hair. She was absolutely different in type from any of
the Clayhangers. The next instant she and Charlie were talking
together.
Edwin felt the surprised relief of one who has plunged into the sea and
discovers himself fairly buoyant on the threatening waves.
"Janet," asked Mrs Orgreave, "will supper be ready?"
In the obscurer corners of the room grey shadows gathered furtively,
waiting their time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
"Seen my latest, Charlie?" asked Tom, in his thin voice.
"No, what is it?" Charlie replied. The younger brother was flattered
by this proof of esteem from the elder, but he did his best by
casualness of tone to prevent the fact from transpiring.
All the youths were now standing in a group in the middle of the
drawing-room. Their faces showed pale and more distinct than their
bodies in the darkening twilight. Mrs Orgreave, her husband, and the
girls had gone into the dining-room.
Tom Orgreave, with the gestures of a precisian, drew a bunch of keys
from his pocket, and unlocked a rosewood bookcase that stood between the
two windows. Jimmie winked to Johnnie, and included Edwin in the
fellowship of the wink, which meant that Tom was more comic than Tom
thought, with his locked bookcases and his simple vanities of a
collector. Tom collected books. As Edwin gazed at the bookcase he
perceived that it was filled mainly with rich bindings. And suddenly
all his own book-buying seemed to him petty and pitiful. He saw books
in a new aspect. He had need of no instruction, of no explanation. The
amorous care with which Tom drew a volume from the bookcase was enough
in itself to enlighten Edwin completely. He saw that a book might be
more than reading matter, might be a bibelot, a curious jewel, to
satisfy the lust of the eye and of the hand. He instantly condemned his
own few books as being naught; he was ashamed of them. Each book in
that bookcase was a separate treasure.
"See this, my boy?" said Tom, handing to Charlie a calf-bound volume,
with a crest on the sides. "Six volumes. Picked them up at Stafford--
Assizes, you know. It's the Wilbraham crest. I never knew they'd been
selling their library."
Charlie accepted the book with respect. Its edges were gilt, and the
paper thin and soft. Edwin looked over his shoulder, and saw the
title-page of Victor Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris," in French. The
volume had a most romantic, foreign, even exotic air. Edwin desired it
fervently, or something that might rank equal with it.
"How much did they stick you for this lot?" asked Charlie.
Tom held up one finger.
"Quid?" Charlie wanted to be sure. Tom nodded.
"Cheap as dirt, of course!" said Tom. "Binding's worth more than that.
Look at the other volumes. Look at them!"
"Pity it's only a second edition," said Charlie.
"Well, damn it, man! One can't have everything."
Charlie passed the volume to Edwin, who fingered it with the strangest
delight. Was it possible that this exquisitely delicate and uncustomary
treasure, which seemed to exhale all the charm of France and the savour
of her history, had been found at Stafford? He had been to Stafford
himself. He had read "Notre-Dame" himself, but in English, out of a
common book like any common book--not out of a bibelot.
"You've read it, of course, Clayhanger?" Tom said.
"Oh!" Edwin answered humbly. "Only in a translation." Yet there was a
certain falseness in his humility, for he was proud of having read the
work. What sort of a duffer would he have appeared had he been obliged
to reply `No'?
"You ought to read French in French," said Tom, kindly authoritative.
"Can't," said Edwin.
"Bosh!" Charlie cried. "You were always spiffing in French. You could
simply knock spots off me."
"And do you read French in French, the Sunday?" Edwin asked.
"Well," said Charlie, "I must say it was Thomas put me up to it. You
simply begin to read, that's all. What you don't understand, you miss.
But you soon understand. You can always look at a dictionary if you
feel like it. I usually don't."
"I'm sure you could read French easily in a month," said Tom. "They
always gave a good grounding at Oldcastle. There's simply nothing in
it."
"Really!" Edwin murmured, relinquishing the book. "I must have a shot,
I never thought of it." And he never thought of reading French for
pleasure. He had construed Xavier de Maistre's "Voyage autour de ma
Chambre" for marks, assuredly not for pleasure. "Are there any books in
this style to be got on that bookstall in Hanbridge Market?" he inquired
of Tom.
"Sometimes," said Tom, wiping his spectacles. "Oh yes!"
It was astounding to Edwin how blind he had been to the romance of
existence in the Five Towns.
"It's all very well," observed Charlie reflectively, fingering one or
two of the other volumes--"it's all very well, and Victor Hugo is Victor
Hugo; but you can say what you like--there's a lot of this that'll bear
skipping, your worships."
"Not a line!" said a passionate, vibrating voice.
The voice so startled and thrilled Edwin that he almost jumped, as he
looked round. To Edwin it was dramatic; it was even dangerous and
threatening. He had never heard a quiet voice so charged with intense
emotion. Hilda Lessways had come back to the room, and she stood near
the door, her face gleaming in the dusk. She stood like an Amazonian
defender of the aged poet. Edwin asked himself, "Can any one be so
excited as that about a book?" The eyes, lips, and nostrils were a
revelation to him. He could feel his heart beating. But the girl
strongly repelled him. Nobody else appeared to be conscious that
anything singular had occurred. Jimmie and Johnnie sidled out of the
room.
"Oh! Indeed!" Charlie directed his candid and yet faintly ironic smile
upon Hilda Lessways. "Don't you think that some of it's dullish,
Teddy?"
Edwin blushed. "Well, ye-es," he answered, honestly judicial.
"Mrs Orgreave wants to know when you're coming to supper," said Hilda,
and left.
Tom was relocking the bookcase.
VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER EIGHT.
THE FAMILY SUPPER.
"Now father, let's have a bottle of wine, eh?" Charlie vociferously
suggested.
Mr Orgreave hesitated: "You'd better ask your mother."
"Really, Charlie--" Mrs Orgreave began.
"Oh yes!" Charlie cut her short. "Right you are, Martha!"
The servant, who had stood waiting for a definite command during this
brief conflict of wills, glanced interrogatively at Mrs Orgreave and,
perceiving no clear prohibition in her face, departed with a smile to
get the wine. She was a servant of sound prestige, and had the
inexpressible privilege of smiling on duty. In her time she had fought
lively battles of repartee with all the children from Charlie downwards.
Janet humoured Martha, and Martha humoured Mrs Orgreave.
The whole family (save absent Marian) was now gathered in the
dining-room, another apartment on whose physiognomy were written in
cipher the annals of the vivacious tribe. Here the curtains were drawn,
and all the interest of the room centred on the large white gleaming
table, about which the members stood or sat under the downward radiance
of a chandelier. Beyond the circle illuminated by the shaded chandelier
could be discerned dim forms of furniture and of pictures, with a glint
of high light here and there burning on the corner of some gold frame.
Mr and Mrs Orgreave sat at either end of the table. Alicia stood by
her father, with one arm half round his neck. Tom sat near his mother.
Janet and Hilda sat together, flanked by Jimmie and Johnnie, who stood,
having pushed chairs away. Charlie and Edwin stood opposite. The table
seemed to Edwin to be heaped with food: cold and yet rich remains of
bird and beast; a large fruit pie, opened; another intact; some
puddings; cheese; sandwiches; raw fruit; at Janet's elbow were cups and
saucers and a pot of coffee; a large glass jug of lemonade shone near
by; plates, glasses, and cutlery were strewn about irregularly. The
effect upon Edwin was one of immense and careless prodigality; it
intoxicated him; it made him feel that a grand profuseness was the
finest thing in life. In his own home the supper consisted of cheese,
bread, and water, save on Sundays, when cold sausages were generally
added, to make a feast. But the idea of the price of living as the
Orgreaves lived seriously startled the prudence in him. Imagine that
expense always persisting, day after day, night after night! There were
certainly at least four in the family who bought clothes at Shillitoe's,
and everybody looked elaborately costly, except Hilda Lessways, who did
not flatter the eye. But equally, they all seemed quite unconscious of
their costliness.
"Now, Charlie darling, you must look after Mr Edwin," said Mrs
Orgreave.
"She never calls us darling," said Johnnie, affecting disgust.
"She will, as soon as you've left home," said Janet, ironically
soothing.
"I do, I often do!" Mrs Orgreave asserted. "Much oftener than you
deserve."
"Sit down, Teddy," Charlie enjoined.
"Oh! I'm all right, thanks," said Edwin.
"Sit down!" Charlie insisted, using force.
"Do you talk to your poor patients in that tone?" Alicia inquired, from
the shelter of her father.
"Here I come down specially to see them," Charlie mused aloud, as he
twisted the corkscrew into the cork of the bottle, unceremoniously
handed to him by Martha, "and not only they don't offer to pay my fares,
but they grudge me a drop of claret! Plupp!" He grimaced as the cork
came out. "And my last night, too! Hilda, this is better than coffee,
as Saint Paul remarked on a famous occasion. Pass your glass."
"Charlie!" his mother protested. "I'll thank you to leave Saint Paul
out."
"Charlie! Your mother will be boxing your ears if you don't mind," his
father warned him.
"I'll not have it!" said his mother, shaking her head in a fashion that
she imagined to be harsh and forbidding.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
Towards the close of the meal, Mr Orgreave said--
"Well, Edwin, what does your father say about Bradlaugh?"
"He doesn't say much," Edwin replied.
"Let me see, does he call himself a Liberal?"
"He calls himself a Liberal," said Edwin, shifting on his chair. "Yes,
he calls himself a Liberal. But I'm afraid he's a regular old Tory."
Edwin blushed, laughing, as half the family gave way to more or less
violent mirth.
"Father's a regular old Tory too," Charlie grinned.
"Oh! I'm sorry," said Edwin.
"Yes, father's a regular old Tory," agreed Mr Orgreave. "Don't
apologise! Don't apologise! I'm used to these attacks. I've been
nearly kicked out of my own house once. But some one has to keep the
flag flying."
It was plain that Mr Orgreave enjoyed the unloosing of the hurricane
which he had brought about. Mrs Orgreave used to say that he employed
that particular tone from a naughty love of mischief. In a moment all
the boys were upon him, except Jimmie, who, out of sheer intellectual
snobbery, as the rest averred, supported his father. Atheistical
Bradlaugh had been exciting the British public to disputation for a long
time, and the Bradlaugh question happened then to be acute. In that
very week the Northampton member had been committed to custody for
outraging Parliament, and released. And it was known that Gladstone
meant immediately to bring in a resolution for permitting members to
affirm, instead of taking oath by appealing to a God. Than this
complication of theology and politics nothing could have been better
devised to impassion an electorate which had but two genuine interests--
theology and politics. The rumour of the feverish affair had spread to
the most isolated communities. People talked theology, and people
talked politics, who had till then only felt silently on these subjects.
In loquacious families Bradlaugh caused dissension and division, more
real perhaps than apparent, for not all Bradlaugh's supporters had the
courage to avow themselves such. It was not easy, at any rate it was
not easy in the Five Towns, for a timid man in reply to the question,
"Are you in favour of a professed Freethinker sitting in the House of
Commons?" to reply, "Yes, I am." There was something shameless in that
word `professed.' If the Freethinker had been ashamed of his
freethinking, if he had sought to conceal it in phrases,--the
implication was that the case might not have been so bad. This was what
astonished Edwin: the candour with which Bradlaugh's position was upheld
in the dining-room of the Orgreaves. It was as if he were witnessing
deeds of wilful perilous daring.
But the conversation was not confined to Bradlaugh, for Bradlaugh was
not a perfect test for separating Liberals and Tories. Nobody in the
room, for example, was quite convinced that Mr Orgreave was
anti-Bradlaugh. To satisfy their instincts for father-baiting, the boys
had to include other topics, such as Ireland and the proposal for Home
Rule. As for Mr Orgreave, he could and did always infuriate them by
refusing to answer seriously. The fact was that this was his device for
maintaining his prestige among the turbulent mob. Dignified and
brilliantly clever as Osmond Orgreave had the reputation of being in the
town, he was somehow outshone in cleverness at home, and he never put
the bar of his dignity between himself and his children. Thus he could
only keep the upper hand by allowing hints to escape from him of the
secret amusement roused in him by the comicality of the spectacle of his
filial enemies. He had one great phrase, which he would drawl out at
them with the accents of a man who is trying politely to hide his
contempt: "You'll learn better as you get older."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
Edwin, who said little, thought the relationship between father and sons
utterly delightful. He had not conceived that parents and children ever
were or could be on such terms.
"Now what do you say, Edwin?" Mr Orgreave asked. "Are you a--Charlie,
pass me that bottle."
Charlie was helping himself to another glass of wine. The father, the
two elder sons, and Edwin alone had drunk of the wine. Edwin had never
tasted wine in his life, and the effect of half a glass on him was very
agreeable and strange.
"Oh, dad! I just want a--" Charlie objected, holding the bottle in the
air above his glass.
"Charlie," said his mother, "do you hear your father?"
"Pass me that bottle," Mr Orgreave repeated.
Charlie obeyed, proclaiming himself a martyr. Mr Orgreave filled his
own glass, emptying the bottle, and began to sip.
"This will do me more good than you, young man," he said. Then turning
again to Edwin: "Are you a Bradlaugh man?"
And Edwin, uplifted, said: "All I say is--you can't help what you
believe. You can't make yourself believe anything. And I don't see why
you should, either. There's no virtue in believing."
"Hooray," cried the sedate Tom.
"No virtue in believing! Eh, Mr Edwin! Mr Edwin!"
This sad expostulation came from Mrs Orgreave.
"Don't you see what I mean?" he persisted vivaciously, reddening. But
he could not express himself further.
"Hooray!" repeated Tom.
Mrs Orgreave shook her head, with grieved good-nature.
"You mustn't take mother too seriously," said Janet, smiling. "She only
puts on that expression to keep worse things from being said. She's
only pretending to be upset. Nothing could upset her, really. She's
past being upset--she's been through so much--haven't you, you poor
dear?"
In looking at Janet, Edwin caught the eyes of Hilda blazing on him
fixedly. Her head seemed to tremble, and he glanced away. She had
added nothing to the discussion. And indeed Janet herself had taken no
part in the politics, content merely to advise the combatants upon their
demeanour.
"So you're against me too, Edwin!" Mr Orgreave sighed with mock
melancholy. "Well, this is no place for me." He rose, lifted Alicia
and put her into his arm-chair, and then went towards the door.
"You aren't going to work, are you, Osmond?" his wife asked, turning her
head.
"I am," said he.
He disappeared amid a wailing chorus of "Oh, dad!"
VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER NINE.
IN THE PORCH.
When the front door of the Orgreaves interposed itself that night
between Edwin and a little group of gas-lit faces, he turned away
towards the warm gloom of the garden in a state of happy excitement. He
had left fairly early, despite protests, because he wished to give his
father no excuse for a spectacular display of wrath; Edwin's desire for
a tranquil existence was growing steadily. But now that he was in the
open air, he did not want to go home. He wanted to be in full
possession of himself, at leisure and in freedom, and to examine the
treasure of his sensations. "It's been rather quiet," the Orgreaves had
said. "We generally have people dropping in." Quiet! It was the least
quiet evening he had ever spent.
He was intoxicated; not with wine, though he had drunk wine. A group of
well-intentioned philanthropists, organised into a powerful society for
combating the fearful evils of alcoholism, had seized Edwin at the age
of twelve and made him bind himself with solemn childish signature and
ceremonies never to taste alcohol save by doctor's orders. He thought
of this pledge in the garden of the Orgreaves. "Damned rot!" he
murmured, and dismissed the pledge from his mind as utterly unimportant,
if not indeed fatuous. No remorse! The whole philosophy of asceticism
inspired him, at that moment, with impatient scorn. It was the hope of
pleasure that intoxicated him, the vision which he had had of the
possibilities of being really interested in life. He saw new avenues
toward joy, and the sight thereof made him tingle, less with the desire
to be immediately at them than with the present ecstasy of contemplating
them. He was conscious of actual physical tremors and agreeable
smartings in his head; electric disturbances. But he did not reason; he
felt. He was passive, not active. He would not even, just then,
attempt to make new plans. He was in a beatitude, his mouth unaware
that it was smiling.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
Behind him was the lighted house; in front the gloom of the lawn ending
in shrubberies and gates, with a street-lamp beyond. And there was
silence, save for the vast furnace-breathings, coming over undulating
miles, which the people of the Five Towns, hearing them always, never
hear. A great deal of diffused light filtered through the cloudy sky.
The warm wandering airs were humid on the cheek. He must return home.
He could not stand dreaming all the night in the garden of the
Orgreaves. To his right uprose the great rectangular mass of his
father's new house, entirely free of scaffolding, having all the aspect
of a house inhabited. It looked enormous. He was proud of it. In such
an abode, and so close to the Orgreaves, what could he not do?
Why go to gaze on it again? There was no common sense in doing so. And
yet he felt: "I must have another glance at it before I go home." From
his attitude towards it, he might have been the creator of that house.
That house was like one of his more successful drawings. When he had
done a drawing that he esteemed, he was always looking at it. He would
look at it before running down to breakfast; and after breakfast,
instead of going straight to the shop, he would rush upstairs to have
still another look at it. The act of inspection gave him pleasure. So
with the house. Strange, superficially; but the simple explanation was
that for some things he had the eyes of love... Yes, in his dancing and
happy brain the impulse to revisit the house was not to be conquered.
The few battered yards of hedge between his father's land and that of
Mr Orgreave seemed more passable in the night. He crunched along the
gravel, stepped carefully with noiseless foot on the flower-bed, and
then pushed himself right through the frail bushes, forgetting the
respect due to his suit. The beginning of summer had dried the sticky
clay of the new garden; paths had already been traced on it, and
trenches cut for the draining of the lawn that was to be. Edwin in the
night saw the new garden finished, mellow, blooming with such blossoms
as were sold in Saint Luke's Market; he had scarcely ever seen flowers
growing in the mass. He saw himself reclining in the garden with a rare
and beautiful book in his hand, while the sound of Beethoven's music
came to him through the open window of the drawing-room. In so far as
he saw Maggie at all, he saw her somehow mysteriously elegant and
vivacious He did not see his father. His fancy had little relation to
reality. But this did not mar his pleasure... Then he saw himself
talking over the hedge, wittily, to amiable and witty persons in the
garden of the Orgreaves.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
He had not his key to the new house, but he knew a way of getting into
it through the cellar. No reason in doing so; nevertheless he must get
into it, must localise his dream in it! He crouched down under the
blank east wall, and, feet foremost, disappeared slowly, as though the
house were swallowing him. He stood on the stillage of the cellar, and
struck a match. Immense and weird, the cellar; and the doorless
doorway, leading to the cellar steps, seemed to lead to affrighting
matters. He was in the earth, in it, with the smells of damp mortar and
of bricks and of the earth itself about him, and above him rose the
house, a room over him, and a room over that and another over that, and
then the chimney-cowl up in the sky. He jumped from the stillage, and
went quickly to the doorway and saw the cellar steps. His heart was
beating. He trembled, he was afraid, exquisitely afraid, acutely
conscious of himself amid the fundamental mysteries of the universe. He
reached the top of the steps as the match expired. After a moment he
could distinguish the forms of things in the hall, even the main
features of the pattern of the tiles. The small panes in the glazed
front door, whose varied tints repeated those of the drawing-room window
in daytime, now showed a uniform dull grey, lifeless. The cellar was
formidable below, and the stairs curved upwards into the formidable.
But he climbed them. The house seemed full of inexplicable noises.
When he stopped to listen he could hear scores of different
infinitesimal sounds. His spine thrilled, as if a hand delicate and
terrible had run down it in a caress. All the unknown of the night and
of the universe was pressing upon him, but it was he alone who had
created the night and the universe. He reached his room, the room in
which he meant to inaugurate the new life and the endeavour towards
perfection. Already, after his manner, he had precisely settled where
the bed was to be, and where the table, and all the other objects of his
world. There he would sit and read rare and beautiful books in the
original French! And there he would sit to draw! And to the right of
the hearth over bookshelves would be such and such a picture, and to the
left of the hearth over bookshelves such and such another picture...
Only, now, he could not dream in the room as he had meant to dream;
because beyond the open door was the empty landing and the well of the
stairs and all the terror of the house. The terror came and mingled
with the delicious sensations that had seized him in the solitude of the
garden of the Orgreaves. No! Never had he been so intensely alive as
then!
He went cautiously to the window and looked forth. Instantly the terror
of the house was annihilated. It fell away, was gone. He was not alone
in his fancy-created universe. The reassuring illusion of reality came
back like a clap of thunder. He could see a girl insinuating herself
through the gap in the hedge which he had made ten minutes earlier.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
"What the deuce is she after?" he muttered. He wondered whether, if she
happened to glance upwards, she would be able to see him. He stood away
a little from the window, but as in the safer position he could no
longer distinguish her he came again close to the glass. After all,
there could be no risk of her seeing him. And if she did see him,--the
fright would be hers, not his.
Having passed through the hedge, she stopped, bent down, leaning
backward and to one side, and lifted the hem of her skirt to examine it;
possibly it was torn; then she dropped it. By that black, tight skirt
and by something in her walk he knew she was Hilda; he could not
decipher her features. She moved towards the new house, very slowly, as
if she had emerged for an aimless nocturnal stroll. Strange and
disquieting creature! He peered as far as he could leftwards, to see
the west wall of Lane End House. In a window of the upper floor a light
burned. The family had doubtless gone to bed, or were going... And she
had wandered forth solitary and was trespassing in his garden. "Cheek!"
If ever he got an opportunity he should mysteriously tease her on the
subject of illegal night excursions! Yes, he should be very witty and
ironic. "Nothing but cheek!" He was confirmed in his hostility to her.
She had no charm, and yet the entire Orgreave family was apparently
infatuated about her. Her interruption on behalf of Victor Hugo seemed
to be savage. Girls ought not to use that ruthless tone. And her eyes
were hard, even cruel. She was less feminine than masculine. Her hair
was not like a girl's hair.
She still came on, until the projecting roof of the bay-window beneath
him hid her from sight. He would have opened his window and leaned out
to glimpse her, could he have done so without noise. Where was she? In
the garden porch? She did not reappear. She might be capable of
getting into the house! She might even then actually be getting into
the house! She was queer, incalculable. Supposing that she was in the
habit of surreptitiously visiting the house, and had found a key to fit
one of the doors, or supposing that she could push up a window,--she
would doubtless mount the stairs and trap him! Absurd, these
speculations; as absurd as a nightmare! But they influenced his
conduct. He felt himself forced to provide against the wildest hazards.
Abruptly he departed from the bedroom and descended the stairs,
stamping, clumping, with all possible noise; in addition he whistled.
This was to warn her to fly. He stopped in the hall until she had had
time to fly, and then he lit a match as a signal which surely no
carelessness could miss. He could have gone direct by the front door
into the street, so leaving her to her odd self; but, instead, he drew
back the slip-catch of the garden door and opened it, self-consciously
humming a tune.
She was within the porch. She turned deliberately to look at him. He
could feel his heart-beats. His cheeks burned, and yet he was chilled.
"Who's there?" he asked. But he did not succeed to his own satisfaction
in acting alarmed surprise.
"Me!" said Hilda, challengingly, rudely.
"Oh!" he murmured, at a loss. "Did you want me? Did any one want me?"
"Yes," she said. "I just wanted to ask you something," she paused. He
could not see her scowling, but it seemed to him that she must be. He
remembered that she had rather thick eyebrows, and that when she brought
them nearer together by a frown, they made almost one continuous line,
the effect of which was not attractive.
"Did you know I was in here?"
"Yes. That's my bedroom window over there--I've left the gas up--and I
saw you get through the hedge. So I came down. They'd all gone off to
bed except Tom, and I told him I was just going a walk in the garden for
a bit. They never worry me, you know. They let me alone. I knew you'd
got into the house, by the light."
"But I only struck a match a second ago," he protested.
"Excuse me," she said coldly; "I saw a light quite five minutes ago."
"Oh yes!" he apologised. "I remember. When I came up the cellar
steps."
"I dare say you think it's very queer of me," she continued.
"Not at all," he said quickly.
"Yes you do," she bitterly insisted. "But I want to know. Did you mean
it when you said--you know, at supper--that there's no virtue in
believing?"
"Did I say there was no virtue in believing?" he stammeringly demanded.
"Of course you did!" she remonstrated. "Do you mean to say you can say
a thing like that and then forget about it? If it's true, it's one of
the most wonderful things that were ever said. And that's why I wanted
to know if you meant it or whether you were only saying it because it
sounded clever. That's what they're always doing in that house, you
know, being clever!" Her tone was invariably harsh.
"Yes," he said simply, "I meant it. Why?"
"You did?" Her voice seemed to search for insincerity. "Well, thank
you. That's all. It may mean a new life to me. I'm always trying to
believe; always! Aren't you?"
"I don't know," he mumbled. "How do you mean?"
"Well--you know!" she said, as if impatiently smashing his pretence of
not understanding her. "But perhaps you do believe?"
He thought he detected scorn for a facile believer. "No," he said, "I
don't."
"And it doesn't worry you? Honestly? Don't be clever! I hate that!"
"No," he said.
"Don't you ever think about it?"
"No. Not often."
"Charlie does."
"Has he told you?" ("So she talks to the Sunday too!" he reflected.)
"Yes; but of course I quite see why it doesn't worry you--if you
honestly think there's no virtue in believing."
"Well," said Edwin. "Is there?" The more he looked at it through her
eyes, the more wonderful profundities he discovered in that remark of
his, which at the time of uttering it had appeared to him a simple
platitude. It went exceedingly deep in many directions.
"I hope you are right," she replied. Her voice shook.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIVE.
There was silence. To ease the strain of his self-consciousness Edwin
stepped down from the stone floor of the porch to the garden. He felt
rain. And he noticed that the sky was very much darker.
"By Jove!" he said. "It's beginning to rain, I do believe."
"I thought it would," she answered.
A squall of wind suddenly surged rustling through the high trees in the
garden of the Orgreaves, and the next instant threw a handful of wild
raindrops on his cheek.
"You'd better stand against the other wall," he suggested. "You'll
catch it there, if it keeps on."
She obeyed. He returned to the porch, but remained in the exposed
portion of it.
"Better come here," she said, indicating somehow her side.
"Oh! I'm all right."
"You needn't be afraid of me," she snapped.
He grinned awkwardly, but said nothing, for he could not express his
secret resentment. He considered the girl to be of exceedingly
unpleasant manners.
"Would you mind telling me the time?" she asked.
He took out his watch, but peer as he might, he could not discern the
position of the hands.
"Half a second," he said, and struck a match. The match was blown out
before he could look at the dial, but by its momentary flash he saw
Hilda, pressed against the wall. Her lips were tight, her eyes blazing,
her hands clenched. She frowned; she was pale, and especially pale by
contrast with the black of her plain austere dress.
"If you'll come into the house," he said, "I can get a light there."
The door was ajar.
"No thanks," she declined. "It doesn't really matter what time it is,
does it? Good night!"
He divined that she was offering her hand. He clasped it blindly in the
dark. He could not refuse to shake hands. Her hand gave his a feverish
and lingering squeeze, which was like a contradicting message in the
dark night; as though she were sending through her hand a secret denial
of her spoken accents and her frown. He forgot to answer her `good
night.' A trap rattled furiously up the road. (Yes; only six yards
off, on the other side of the boundary wall, was the public road! And
he standing hidden there in the porch with this girl whom he had seen
for the first time that evening!) It was the mail-cart, rushing to
Knype.
She did not move. She had said `good night' and shaken hands; and yet
she remained. They stood speechless.
Then without warning, after perhaps a minute that seemed like ten
minutes, she walked away, slowly, into the rain. And as she did so,
Edwin could just see her straightening her spine and throwing back her
shoulders with a proud gesture.
"I say, Miss Lessways!" he called in a low voice. But he had no notion
of what he wanted to say. Only her departure had unlocked his throat.
She made no sign. Again he grinned awkwardly, a little ashamed of her
and a little ashamed of himself, because neither had behaved as woman or
man of the world.
After a short interval he followed in her steps as far as the gap in the
hedge, which he did not find easily. There was no sign of her. The gas
burned serenely in her bedroom, and the window was open. Then he saw
the window close up a little, and an arm in front of the drawn blind.
The rain had apparently ceased.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SIX.
"Well, that's an eye-opener, that is!" he murmured, and thereby
expressed the situation. "Of all the damned impudence!" He somewhat
overstated his feelings, because he was posing a little to himself: an
accident that sooner or later happens to every man! "And she'll go back
and make out to Master Tom that she's just had a stroll in the garden!
Garden, indeed! And yet they're all so fearfully stuck on her."
He nodded his head several times reflectively, as if saying, "Well,
well! What next?" And he murmured aloud: "So that's how they carry on,
is it!" He meant, of course, women... He was very genuinely astounded.
But the chief of all his acute sensations in that moment was pride:
sheer pride. He thought, what ninety-nine men out of a hundred would
have thought in such circumstances: "She's taken a fancy to me!"
Useless to call him a conceited coxcomb, from disgust that he did not
conform to a sentimentally idealistic standard! He thought: "She's
taken a fancy to me!" And he was not a conceited coxcomb. He exulted
in the thought. Nothing had ever before so startled and uplifted him.
It constituted the supreme experience of his career as a human being.
The delightful and stimulating experience of his evening in the house of
the Orgreaves sank into unimportance by the side of it. The new avenues
towards joy which had been revealed to him appeared now to be quite
unexciting paths; he took them for granted. And he forgot the high and
serious mood of complex emotion in which he had entered the new house.
Music and the exotic flavours of a foreign language seemed a little
thing, in comparison with the feverish hand-clasp of the girl whom he so
peculiarly disliked. The lifeless hand which he had taken in the
drawing-room of the Orgreaves could not be the same hand as that which
had closed intimately on his under the porch. She must have two right
hands!
And, even more base than his coxcombry, he despised her because it was
he, Edwin, to whom she had taken a fancy. He had not sufficient
self-confidence to justify her fancy in his own eyes. His argument
actually was that no girl worth having could have taken a fancy to him
at sight. Thus he condemned her for her faith in him. As for his
historic remark about belief,--well, there might or might not be
something in that; perhaps there was something in it. One instant he
admired it, and the next he judged it glib and superficial. Moreover,
he had conceivably absorbed it from a book. But even if it were an
original epigrammatic pearl--was that an adequate reason for her
following him to an empty house at dead of night? Of course, an
overwhelming passion might justify such behaviour! He could recall
cases in literature... Yes, he had got so far as to envisage the
possibility of overwhelming passion... Then all these speculations
disconcertingly vanished, and Hilda presented herself to his mind as a
girl intensely religious, who would shrink from no unconventionality in
the pursuit of truth. He did not much care for this theory of Hilda,
nor did it convince him.
"Imagine marrying a girl like that!" he said to himself disdainfully.
And he made a catalogue of her defects of person and of character. She
was severe, satiric, merciless. "And I suppose--if I were to put my
finger up!" Thus ran on his despicable ideas. "Janet Orgreave, now!"
Janet had every quality that he could desire, that he could even think
of. Janet was balm.
"You needn't be afraid," that unpleasant girl had said. And he had only
been able to grin in reply!
Still, pride! Intense masculine pride!
There was one thing he had liked about her: that straightening of the
spine and setting back of the shoulders as she left him. She had in her
some tinge of the heroic.
He quitted the garden, and as soon as he was in the street he remembered
that he had not pulled-to the garden door of the house. "Dash the
confounded thing!" he exploded, returning. But he was not really
annoyed. He would not have been really annoyed even if he had had to
return from half-way down Trafalgar Road. Everything was a trifle save
that a girl had run after him under such romantic circumstances. The
circumstances were not strictly romantic, but they so seemed to him.
Going home, he did not meet a soul; only in the middle distance of one
of the lower side streets he espied a policeman. Trafalgar Road was a
solitude of bright and forlorn gas lamps and dark, excluding facades.
Suddenly he came to the corner of Wedgwood Street. He had started from
Bleakridge; he had arrived at home: the interval between these two
events was a perfect blank, save for the policeman. He could not recall
having walked all the way down the road. And as he put the key into the
door he was not in the least disturbed by the thought that his father
might not have gone to bed. He went upstairs with a certain swaggering
clatter, as who should say to all sleepers and bullies: "You be damned!
I don't care for any of you! Something's happened to me."
And he mused: "If anybody had told me this afternoon that before
midnight I should--"
VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TEN.
THE CENTENARY.
It was immediately after this that the "Centenary"--mispronounced in
every manner conceivable--began to obsess the town. Superior and aloof
persons, like the Orgreaves, had for weeks heard a good deal of vague
talk about the Centenary from people whom intellectually they despised,
and had condescended to the Centenary as an amiable and excusable affair
which lacked interest for them. They were wrong. Edwin had gone
further, and had sniffed at the Centenary, to everybody except his
father. And Edwin was especially wrong. On the antepenultimate day of
June he first uneasily suspected that he had committed a fault of
appraisement. That was when his father brusquely announced that by
request of the Mayor all places of business in the town would be closed
in honour of the Centenary. It was the Centenary of the establishment
of Sunday schools.
Edwin hated Sunday schools. Nay, he venomously resented them, though
they had long ceased to incommode him. They were connected in his
memory with atrocious tedium, pietistic insincerity, and humiliating
contacts. At the bottom of his mind he still regarded them as a
malicious device of parents for wilfully harassing and persecuting
inoffensive, helpless children. And he had a particular grudge against
them because he alone of his father's offspring had been chosen for the
nauseating infliction. Why should his sisters have been spared and he
doomed? He became really impatient when Sunday schools were under
discussion, and from mere irrational annoyance he would not admit that
Sunday schools had any good qualities whatever. He knew nothing of
their history, and wished to know nothing.
Nevertheless, when the day of the Centenary dawned--and dawned in
splendour--he was compelled, even within himself, to treat Sunday
schools with more consideration. And, in fact, for two or three days
previously the gathering force of public opinion had been changing his
attitude from stern hatred to a sort of half-hearted derision. Now, the
derision was mysteriously transformed into an inimical respect. By
what? By he knew not what. By something without a name in the air
which the mind breathes. He felt it at six o'clock, ere he arose.
Lying in bed he felt it. The day was to be a festival. The shop would
not open, nor the printing office. The work of preparing for the
removal would be suspended. The way of daily life would be quite
changed. He was free--that was, nearly free. He said to himself that
of course his excited father would expect him to witness the
celebrations and to wear his best clothes, and that was a bore. But
therein he was not quite honest. For he secretly wanted to witness the
celebrations and to wear his best clothes. His curiosity was hungry.
He admitted, what many had been asserting for weeks, that the Centenary
was going to be a big thing; and his social instinct wished him to share
in the pride of it.
"It's a grand day!" exclaimed his father, cheerful and all glossy as he
looked out upon Duck Square before breakfast, "It'll be rare and hot!"
And it was a grand day; one of the dazzling spectacular blue-and-gold
days of early summer. And Maggie was in finery. And Edwin too!
Useless for him to pretend that a big thing was not afoot--and his
father in a white waistcoat! Breakfast was positively talkative, though
the conversation was naught but a repeating and repeating of what the
arrangements were, and of what everybody had decided to do. The three
lingered over breakfast, because there was no reason to hurry. And then
even Maggie left the sitting-room without a care, for though Clara was
coming for dinner Mrs Nixon could be trusted. Mrs Nixon, if she had
time, would snatch half an hour in the afternoon to see what remained to
be seen of the show. Families must eat. And if Mrs Nixon was stopped
by duty from assisting at this Centenary, she must hope to be more at
liberty for the next.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO.
At nine o'clock, in a most delicious mood of idleness, Edwin strolled
into the shop. His father had taken down one shutter from the doorway,
and slanted it carelessly against another on the pavement. A blind man
or a drunkard might have stumbled against it and knocked it over. The
letters had been hastily opened. Edwin could see them lying in disorder
on the desk in the little office. The dust-sheets thought the day was
Sunday. He stood in the narrow aperture and looked forth. Duck Square
was a shimmer of sunshine. The Dragon and the Duck and the other
public-house at the top corner seemed as usual, stolidly confident in
the thirst of populations. But the Borough Dining Rooms, next door but
one to the corner of Duck Square and Wedgwood Street, were not as usual.
The cart of Doy, the butcher, had halted laden in front of the Borough
Dining Rooms, and the anxious proprietor, attended by his two little
daughters (aproned and sleeved for hard work in imitation of their
stout, perspiring mother), was accepting unusual joints from it.
Ticklish weather for meat--you could see that from the man's gestures.
Even on ordinary days those low-ceiled dining-rooms, stretching far back
from the street in a complicated vista of interiors, were apt to be
crowded; for the quality of the eightpenny dinner could be relied upon.
Edwin imagined what a stifling, deafening inferno of culinary odours and
clatter they would be at one o'clock, at two o'clock.
Three hokey-pokey ice-cream hand-carts, one after another, turned the
corner of Trafalgar Road and passed in front of him along Wedgwood
Street. Three! The men pushing them, one an Italian, seemed to wear
nothing but shirt and trousers, with a straw hat above and vague
slippers below. The steam-car lumbered up out of the valley of the road
and climbed Duck Bank, throwing its enormous shadow to the left. It was
half full of bright frocks and suits. An irregular current of finery
was setting in to the gates of the Wesleyan School yard at the top of
the Bank. And ceremoniously bedecked individuals of all ages hurried in
this direction and in that, some with white handkerchiefs over flowered
hats, a few beneath parasols. All the town's store of Sunday clothes
was in use. The humblest was crudely gay. Pawnbrokers had full tills
and empty shops, for twenty-four hours.
Then a procession appeared, out of Moorthorne Road, from behind the
Wesleyan Chapel-keeper's house. And as it appeared it burst into music.
First a purple banner, upheld on crimson poles with gilded
lance-points; then a brass band in full note; and then children,
children, children--little, middling, and big. As the procession curved
down into Trafalgar Road, it grew in stature, until, towards the end of
it, the children were as tall as the adults who walked fussily as hens,
proudly as peacocks, on its flank. And last came a railway lorry on
which dozens of tiny infants had been penned; and the horses of the
lorry were ribboned and their manes and tails tightly plaited; on that
grand day they could not be allowed to protect themselves against flies;
they were sacrificial animals.
A power not himself drew Edwin to the edge of the pavement. He could
read on the immense banner: "Moorthorne Saint John's Sunday School."
These, then, were church folk. And indeed the next moment he descried a
curate among the peacocks. The procession made another curve into
Wedgwood Street, on its way to the supreme rendezvous in Saint Luke's
Square. The band blared; the crimson cheeks of the trumpeters sucked in
and out; the drum-men leaned backwards to balance his burden, and
banged. Every soul of the variegated company, big and little, was in a
perspiration. The staggering bearers of the purple banner, who held the
great poles in leathern sockets slung from the shoulders, and their
acolytes before and behind who kept the banner upright by straining at
crimson halyards, sweated most of all. Every foot was grey with dust,
and the dark trousers of boys and men showed dust. The steamy whiff of
humanity struck Edwin's nostrils. Up hill and down dale the procession
had already walked over two miles. Yet it was alert, joyous, and
expectant: a chattering procession. From the lorry rose a continuous
faint shriek of infantile voices. Edwin was saddened as by pathos. I
believe that as he gazed at the procession waggling away along Wedgwood
Street he saw Sunday schools in a new light.
And that was the opening of the day. There were to be dozens of such
processions. Some would start only in the town itself; but others were
coming from the villages like Red Cow, five sultry miles off.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THREE.
A young woman under a sunshade came slowly along Wedgwood Street. She
was wearing a certain discreet amount of finery, but her clothes did not
fit well, and a thin mantle was arranged so as to lessen as much as
possible the obviousness of the fact that she was about to become a
mother. The expression of her face was discontented and captious.
Edwin did not see her until she was close upon him, and then he
immediately became self-conscious and awkward.
"Hello, Clara!" he greeted her, with his instinctive warm, transient
smile, holding out his hand sheepishly. It was a most extraordinary and
amazing thing that he could never regard the ceremony of shaking hands
with a relative as other than an affectation of punctilio. Happily he
was not wearing his hat; had it been on his head he would never have
taken it off, and yet would have cursed himself for not doing so.
"We are grand!" exclaimed Clara, limply taking his hand and dropping it
as an article of no interest. In her voice there was still some echo of
former sprightliness. The old Clara in her had not till that moment
beheld the smart and novel curves of Edwin's Shillitoe suit, and the
satiric cry came unbidden from her heart.
Edwin gave an uneasy laugh, which was merely the outlet for his disgust.
Not that he was specially disgusted with Clara, for indeed marriage had
assuaged a little the tediousness of some of her mannerisms, even if it
had taken away from her charm. He was disgusted more comprehensively by
the tradition, universal in his class and in most classes, according to
which relatives could not be formally polite to one another. He obeyed
the tradition as slavishly as anyone, but often said to himself that he
would violate the sacred rule if only he could count on a suitable
response; he knew that he could not count on a suitable response; and he
had no mind to be in the excruciating position of one who, having
started "God save the Queen" at a meeting, finds himself alone in the
song. Why could not he and Clara behave together as, for instance, he
and Janet Orgreave would behave together, with dignity, with
worldliness, with mutual deference? But no! It was impossible, and
would ever be so. They had been too brutally intimate, and the result
was irremediable.
"She's got no room to talk about personal appearance, anyway!" he
thought sardonically.
There was another extraordinary and amazing thing. He was ashamed of
her condition! He could not help the feeling. In vain he said to
himself that her condition was natural and proper. In vain he
remembered the remark of the sage that a young woman in her condition
was the most beautiful sight in the world. He was ashamed of it. And
he did not think it beautiful; he thought it ugly. It worried him.
What,--his sister? Other men's sisters, yes; but his! He forgot that
he himself had been born. He could scarcely bear to look at Clara. Her
face was thin, and changed in colour; her eyes were unnaturally lustrous
and large, bold and fatigued; she looked ill, really ill; and she was
incredibly unornamental. And this was she whom he could remember as a
graceful child! And it was all perfectly correct and even laudable! So
much so that young Clara undoubtedly looked down, now, as from a
superior height, upon both himself and Maggie!
"Where's father?" she asked. "Just shut my sunshade."
"Oh! Somewhere about. I expect he'll be along in a minute. Albert
coming?" He followed her into the shop.
"Albert!" she protested, shocked. "Albert can't possibly come till one
o'clock. Didn't you know he's one of the principal stewards in Saint
Luke's Square? He says we aren't to wait dinner for him if he isn't
prompt."
"Oh!" Edwin replied, and put the sunshade on the counter.
Clara sat down heavily on a chair, and began to fan herself with a
handkerchief. In spite of the heat of exercise her face was of a pallid
yellow.
"I suppose you're going to stay here all morning?" Edwin inquired.
"Well," said Clara, "you don't see me walking up and down the streets
all morning, do you? Albert said I was to be sure and go upstairs at
once and not move. He said there'd be plenty to see for a long time yet
from the sitting-room window, and then afterwards I could lie down."
Albert said! Albert said! Clara's intonation of this frequent phrase
always jarred on Edwin. It implied that Albert was the supreme fount of
wisdom and authority in Bursley. Whereas to Edwin, Albert was in fact a
mere tedious, self-important manufacturer in a small way, with whom he
had no ideas in common. "A decent fellow at bottom," the fastidious
Edwin was bound to admit to himself by reason of slight glimpses which
he had had of Albert's uncouth good-nature; but pietistic, overbearing,
and without humour.
"Where's Maggie?" Clara demanded.
"I think she's putting her things on," said Edwin.
"But didn't she understand I was coming early?" Clara's voice was
querulous, and she frowned.
"I don't know," said Edwin.
He felt that if they remained together for hours, he and Clara would
never rise above this plane of conversation--personal, factual,
perfectly devoid of wide interest. They would never reach an exchange
of general ideas; they never had done. He did not think that Clara had
any general ideas.
"I hear you're getting frightfully thick with the Orgreaves," Clara
observed, with a malicious accent and smile, as if to imply that he was
getting frightfully above himself, and--simultaneously--that the
Orgreaves were after all no better than other people.
"Who told you that?" He walked towards the doorway uneasily. The worst
was that he could not successfully pretend that these sisterly attacks
were lost on him.
"Never mind who told me," said Clara.
Her voice took on a sudden charming roguish quality, and he could hear
again the girl of fourteen. His heart at once softened to her. The
impartial and unmoved spectator that sat somewhere in Edwin, as in
everybody who possesses artistic sensibility, watching his secret life
as from a conning tower, thought how strange this was. He stared out
into the street. And then a face appeared at the aperture left by the
removed shutter. It was Janet Orgreave's, and it hesitated. Edwin gave
a nervous start.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUR.
Janet was all in white again, and her sunshade was white, with regular
circular holes in it to let through spots of sunlight which flecked her
face. Edwin had not recovered from the blow of her apparition just at
that moment, when he saw Hilda Lessways beyond her. Hilda was
slate-coloured, and had a black sunshade. His heart began to thump; it
might have been a dramatic and dangerous crisis that had suddenly come
about. And to Edwin the situation did in fact present itself as
critical: his sister behind, and these two so different girls in front.
Yet there was nothing critical in it whatsoever. He shook hands as in a
dream, wondering what he should do, trying to summon out of himself the
man of the world.
"Do come in," he urged them, hoping they would refuse.
"Oh no. We mustn't come in," said Janet, smiling gratefully. Hilda did
not smile; she had not even smiled in shaking hands; and she had shaken
hands without conviction.
Edwin heard a hurried step in the shop, and then the voice of Maggie,
maternal and protective, in a low exclamation of surprise: "You, dear!"
And then the sound of a smacking kiss, and Clara's voice, thin, weak,
and confiding: "Yes, I've come." "Come upstairs, do!" said Maggie
imploringly. "Come and be comfortable." Then steps, ceasing to be
heard as the sisters left the shop at the back. The solicitude of
Maggie for Clara during the last few months had seemed wonderful to
Edwin, as also Clara's occasional childlike acceptance of it.
"But you must come in!" he said more boldly to the visitors, asking
himself whether either Janet on Hilda had caught sight of his sisters in
the gloom of the shop.
They entered, Hilda stiffly. Each with the same gesture closed her
parasol before passing through the slit between the shutters into the
deep shade. But whereas Janet smiled with pleasant anticipation as
though she was going into heaven, Hilda wrinkled her forehead when her
parasol would not subside at the first touch.
Janet talked of the Centenary; said they had decided only that morning
to come down into the town and see whatever was to be seen; said with an
angelic air of apologising to the Centenary that up at Lane End House
they had certainly been under-estimating its importance and its interest
as a spectacle; said that it was most astonishing to see all the shops
closed. And Edwin interjected vague replies, pulling the chair out of
the little ebonised cubicle so that they could both sit down. And Hilda
remained silent. And Edwin's thoughts were diving darkly beneath
Janet's chatter as in a deep sea beneath light waves. He heard and
answered Janet with a minor part of his being that functioned
automatically.
"She's a caution!" reflected the main Edwin, obsessed in secret by Hilda
Lessways. Who could have guessed, by looking at her, that only three
evenings before she had followed him in the night to question him, to
squeeze his hand, and to be rude to him? Did Janet know? Did anyone?
No! He felt sure that he and she had the knowledge of that interview to
themselves. She sat down glum, almost glowering. She was no more
worldly than Maggie and Clara were worldly. Than they, she had no more
skill to be sociable. And in appearance she was scarcely more stylish.
But she was not as they, and it was useless vindictively to disparage
her by pretending that she was. She could be passionate concerning
Victor Hugo. She was capable of disturbing herself about the abstract
question of belief. He had not heard her utter a single word in the way
of common girlish conversation.
The doubt again entered his mind whether indeed her visit to the porch
of the new house had been due to a genuine interest in abstract
questions and not to a fancy for himself. "Yes," he reflected, "that
must have been it."
In two days his pride in the affair had lost its first acuteness, though
it had continued to brighten every moment of his life, and though he had
not ceased to regret that he had no intimate friend to whom he could
recount it in solemn and delicious intimacy. Now, philosophically, he
stamped on his pride as on a fire. And he affected to be relieved at
the decision that the girl had been moved by naught but a sort of
fanaticism. But he was not relieved by the decision. The decision
itself was not genuine. He still clung to the notion that she had
followed him for himself. He preferred that she should have taken a
fancy to him, even though he discovered no charm in her, no beauty, no
solace, nothing but matter for repulsion. He wanted her to think of
him, in spite of his distaste for her; to think of him hopelessly. "You
are an ass!" murmured the impartial watcher in the conning tower. And
he was. But he did not care. It was agreeable thus to be an ass...
His pride flared up again, and instead of stamping he blew on it.
"By Jove!" he thought, eyeing her slyly, "I'll make you show your hand--
you see if I don't! You think you can play with me, but you can't!" He
was as violent against her as if she had done him an injury instead of
having squeezed his hand in the dark. Was it not injurious to have
snapped at him, when he refused her invitation to stand by her against
the wall in the porch, "You needn't be afraid"? Janet would never have
said such a thing. If only she resembled Janet! ...
During all this private soliloquising, Edwin's mien of mild nervousness
never hardened to betray his ferocity, and he said nothing that might
not have been said by an innocuous idiot.
The paper boy, arrayed richly, slipped apologetically into the shop. He
had certain packets to take out for delivery, and he was late. Edwin
nodded to him distantly. The conversation languished.
Then the head of Mr Orgreave appeared in the aperture. The architect
seemed amused. Edwin could not understand how he had ever stood in awe
of Mr Orgreave, who, with all his distinction and expensiveness, was
the most companionable person in the world.
"Oh! Father!" cried Janet. "What a deceitful thing you are! Do you
know, Mr Edwin, he pooh-poohed us coming down: he said he was far too
busy for such childish things as Centenaries! And look at him!"
Mr Orgreave, whose suit, hat, and necktie were a harmony of elegant
greys, smiled with paternal ease, and swung his cane. "Come along now!
Don't let's miss anything. Come along. Now, Edwin, you're coming,
aren't you?"
"Did you ever see such a child?" murmured Janet, adoring him.
Edwin turned to the paper boy. "Just find my father before you go," he
commanded. "Tell him I've gone, and ask him if you are to put the
shutter up." The paper boy respectfully promised obedience. And Edwin
was glad that the forbidding Hilda was there to witness his authority.
Janet went out first. Hilda hesitated; and Edwin, having taken his hat
from its hook in the cubicle, stood attending her at the aperture. He
was sorry that he could not run upstairs for a walking-stick. At last
she seemed to decide to leave, yet left with apparent reluctance. Edwin
followed, giving a final glance at the boy, who was tying a parcel
hurriedly. Mr Orgreave and his daughter were ten yards off,
arm-in-arm. Edwin fell into step with Hilda Lessways. Janet looked
round, and smiled and beckoned. "I wonder," said Edwin to himself,
"what the devil's going to happen now? I'll take my oath she stayed
behind on purpose! Well--" This swaggering audacity was within.
Without, even a skilled observer could have seen nothing but a faint,
sheepish smile. And his heart was thumping aga |
