‘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 St Paul remarked on a famous occasion. Pass your glass.’
‘Charlie!’ his mother protested. ‘I’ll thank you to leave St 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.
II
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 apologize! Don’t apologize! 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.’
III
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!’
9
In the Porch
I
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 i
n 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, organized 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.
II
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 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 St 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.
III
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 localize 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 and 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.
IV
‘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 f
rom 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 anyone 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?’
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