Clayhanger

by Arnold Bennett

  ‘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 tonight? … Or tomorrow night?’

  ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t come tonight, or tomorrow 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.

  III

  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.

  5

  Clothes

  I

  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.

  II

  ‘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 strai
ghtened 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?’

  III

  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 proof 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 St 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.