Clayhanger

by Arnold Bennett

  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.

  III

  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 St 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.

  IV

  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 or 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 smil
ed 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 apologizing 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 ebonized 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 soliloquizing, 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 neck-tie 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 again.

  11

  The Bottom of the Square

  I

  ANOTHER PROCESSION – THAT of the Old Church Sunday school – came up, with standards floating and drums beating, out of the steepness of Woodisun Bank, and turned into Wedgwood Street, which thenceforward was loosely thronged by procession and sightseers. The importance of the festival was now quite manifest, for at the end of the street could be seen St Luke’s Square, massed with human beings in movement. Osmond Orgreave and his daughter were lost to view in the brave crowd; but after a little, Edwin distinctly saw Janet’s sunshade leave Wedgwood Street at the corner of the Wedgwood Institution and bob slowly into the Cock Yard, which was a narrow thoroughfare leading to the market-place and the Town Hall, and so to the top of St Luke’s Square. He said nothing, and kept straight on along Wedgwood Street past the Covered Market.

  ‘I hope you didn’t catch cold in the rain the other night,’ he remarked – grimly, as he thought.

  ‘I should have thought it would have been you who were more likely to catch cold,’ Hilda replied, in her curt manner. She looked in front of her. The words seemed to him to carry a double meaning. Suddenly she moved her head, glanced full at him for an instant, and glanced behind her. ‘Where are they?’ she inquired.

  ‘The others? Aren’t they in front? They must be somewhere about.’

  Unless she also had marked their deviation into the Cock Yard, why had she glanced behind her in asking where they were? She knew as well as he that they had started in front. He could only deduce that she had been as willing as himself to lose Mr Orgreave and Janet. Just then an acquaintance raised his hat to Edwin in acknowledgment of the lady’s presence, and he responded with pride. Whatever his private attitude to Hilda, he was undeniably proud to be seen in the streets with a disdainful, aloof girl unknown to the town. It was an experience entirely new to him, and it flattered him. He desired to look long at her face, to examine her expression, to make up his mind about her; but he could not, because they were walking side by side. The sole manifestation of her that he could judge was her voice. It was a remarkable voice, rather deep, with a sort of chiselled intonation. The cadences of it fell on the ear softly and yet ruthlessly, and when she had finished speaking you became aware of silence, as after a solemn utterance of destiny. What she happened to have been saying seemed to be immaterial to the effect, which was physical, vibratory.

  II

  At the border of St Luke’s Square, junction of eight streets, true centre of the town’s traffic, and the sole rectangular open space enclosed completely by shops, they found a line of constables which yielded only to processions and to the bearers of special ros
ettes. ‘The Square,’ as it was called by those who inhabited it, had been chosen for the historic scene of the day because of its pre-eminent claim and suitability; the least of its advantages – its slope, from the top of which it could be easily dominated by a speaker on a platform – would alone have secured for it the honours of the Centenary.

  As the police cordon closed on the procession from the Old Church, definitely dividing the spectators from the spectacle, it grew clear that the spectators were in the main a shabby lot; persons without any social standing: unkempt idlers, good-for-nothings, wastrels, clay-whitened pot-girls who had to work even on that day, and who had run out for a few moments in their flannel aprons to stare, and a few score ragamuffins, whose parents were too poor or too careless to make them superficially presentable enough to figure in a procession. Nearly the whole respectability of the town was either fussily marshalling processions or gazing down at them in comfort from the multitudinous open windows of the Square. The ‘leads’ over the projecting windows of Baines’s, the chief draper’s, were crowded with members of the ruling caste.

  And even within the Square, it could be seen, between the towering backs of constables, that the spectacle itself was chiefly made up of indigence bedecked. The thousands of perspiring children, penned like sheep, and driven to and fro like sheep by anxious and officious rosettes, nearly all had the air of poverty decently putting the best face on itself; they were nearly all, beneath their vague sense of importance, wistful with the resigned fatalism of the young and of the governed. They knew not precisely why they were there; but merely that they had been commanded to be there, and that they were hot and thirsty, and that for weeks they had been learning hymns by heart for this occasion, and that the occasion was glorious. Many of the rosettes themselves had a poor, driven look. None of these bought suits at Shillitoe’s, nor millinery at Baines’s. None of them gave orders for printing, nor had preferences in the form of ledgers, nor held views on Victor Hugo, nor drank wine, nor yearned for perfection in the art of social intercourse. To Edwin, who was just beginning to touch the planes of worldliness and of dilettantism in art, to Edwin, with the mysterious and haughty creature at his elbow, they seemed to have no more in common with himself and her than animals had. And he wondered by virtue of what decree he, in the Shillitoe suit, and the grand house waiting for him up at Bleakridge, had been lifted up to splendid ease above the squalid and pitiful human welter.