Clayhanger

by Arnold Bennett

  ‘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 to 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 apologized. ‘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.

  V

  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.

  VI

  ‘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 façades.

  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—’

  10

  The Centenary

  I

  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.

  II

  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 a
nd 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 St 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 St Luke’s Square. The band blared; the crimson cheeks of the trumpeters sucked in and out; the drummer 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.