‘No wine, no beer, nor spirit-uous liquors have I tasted for sixty-one years come Martinmas,’ whimpered the old man. And he gave another lurch against the policeman. ‘My name’s Shushions!’ And he repeated in a frantic treble, ‘My name’s Shushions!’
‘Go and bury thysen, owd gaffer!’ a Herculean young collier advised him.
‘Why,’ murmured Hilda, with a sharp frown, ‘that must be poor old Mr Shushions from Turnhill, and they’re guying him! You must stop it. Something must be done at once.’
She jumped down feverishly, and Edwin had to do likewise. He wondered how he should conduct himself so as to emerge creditably from the situation. He felt himself, and had always felt himself, to be the last man in the world capable of figuring with authority in a public altercation. He loathed public altercations. The name of Shushions meant nothing to him; he had forgotten it, if indeed he had ever wittingly heard it. And he did not at first recognize the old man. Descended from the barrel, he was merely an item in the loose-packed crowd. As, in the wake of Hilda, he pushed with false eagerness between stubborn shoulders, he heard the bands striking up again.
II
Approaching, he saw that the old man was very old. And then memory stirred. He began to surmise that he had met the wizened face before, that he knew something about it. And the face brought up a picture of the shop door and of his father standing beside it, a long time ago. He recalled his last day at school. Yes, of course! This was the old man named Shushions, some sort of an acquaintance of his father’s. This was the old man who had wept a surprising tear at sight of him, Edwin. The incident was so far off that it might have been recorded in history books. He had never seen Mr Shushions since. And the old man was changed, nearly out of recognition. The old man had lived too long; he had survived his dignity; he was now nothing but a bundle of capricious and obstinate instincts set in motion by ancient souvenirs remembered at hazard. The front of his face seemed to have given way in general collapse. The lips were in a hollow; the cheeks were concave; the eyes had receded; and there were pits in the forehead. The pale silvery straggling hairs might have been counted. The wrinkled skin was of a curious brown yellow, and the veins, instead of being blue, were outlined in Indian red. The impression given was that the flesh would be unpleasant and uncanny to the touch. The body was bent, and the neck eternally cricked backward in the effort of the eyes to look up. Moreover, the old man was in a state of neglect. His beard alone proved that. His clothes were dirty and had the air of concealing dirt. And he was dressed with striking oddness. He wore boots that were not a pair. His collar was only fastened by one button, behind; the ends oscillated like wings; he had forgotten to fasten them in front; he had forgotten to put on a neck-tie; he had forgotten the use of buttons on all his garments. He had grown down into a child again, but Providence had not provided him with a nurse.
Worse than these merely material phenomena was the mumbling toothless gibber of his shrill protesting; the glassy look of idiocy from his fatigued eyes; and the inane smile and impotent frown that alternated on his features. He was a horrible and offensive old man. He was Time’s obscene victim. Edwin was revolted by the spectacle of the younger men baiting him. He was astonished that they were so shortsighted as not to be able to see the image of themselves in the old man, so imprudent as not to think of their own future, so utterly brutalized. He wanted, by the simple force of desire, to seclude and shelter the old man, to protect the old man not only from the insults of stupid and crass bullies, but from the old man himself, from his own fatuous senility. He wanted to restore to him, by a benevolent system of pretences, the dignity and the self-respect which he had innocently lost, and so to keep him decent to the eye, if not to the ear, until death came to repair its omission. And it was for his own sake, for the sake of his own image, as much as for the sake of the old man, that he wanted to do this.
III
All that flashed through his mind and heart in a second.
‘I know this old gentleman, at least I know him by sight,’ Hilda was saying to the policeman. ‘He’s very well known in Turnhill as an old Sunday-school teacher, and I’m sure he ought to be on that platform.’
Before her eye, and her precise and haughty voice, which had no trace of the local accent, the young policeman was secretly abashed, and the louts fell back sheepishly.
‘Yes, he’s a friend of my father’s – Mr Clayhanger, printer,’ said Edwin, behind her.
The old man stood blinking in the glare.
The policeman, ignoring Hilda, glanced at Edwin, and touched his cap.
‘His friends hadn’t ought to let him out like this, sir. Just look at him.’ He sneered, and added: ‘I’m on point duty. If you ask me, I should say his friends ought to take him home.’ He said this with a peculiar mysterious emphasis, and looked furtively at the louts for moral support in sarcasm. They encouraged him with grins.
‘He must be got on to the platform, somehow,’ said Hilda, and glanced at Edwin as if counting absolutely on Edwin. ‘That’s what he’s come for. I’m sure it means everything to him.’
‘Aye!’ the old man droned. ‘I was Super when we had to teach ’em their alphabet and give ’em a crust to start with. Many’s the man walking about in these towns i’ purple and fine raiment as I taught his letters to, and his spellings, aye, and his multiplication table – in them days!’
‘That’s all very well, miss,’ said the policeman, ‘but who’s going to get him to the platform? He’ll be dropping in a sunstroke afore ye can say knife.’
‘Can’t we?’ She gazed at Edwin appealingly.
‘Tak’ him into a pub!’ growled the collier, audacious.
At the same moment two rosettes bustled up authoritatively. One of them was the burly Albert Benbow. For the first time Edwin was conscious of genuine pleasure at the sight of his brother-in-law. Albert was a born rosette.
‘What’s all this? What’s this? What is it?’ he asked sharply. ‘Hello! What? Mr Shushions!’ He bent down and looked close at the old man. ‘Where you been, old gentleman?’ He spoke loud in his ear. ‘Everybody’s been asking for you. Service is wellnigh over, but ye must come up.’
The old man did not appear to grasp the significance of Albert’s patronage. Albert turned to Edwin and winked, not only for Edwin’s benefit but for that of the policeman, who smiled in a manner that infuriated Edwin.
‘Queer old stick!’ Albert murmured. ‘No doing anything with him. He’s quarrelled with everybody at Turnhill. That’s why he wanted to come to us. And of course we weren’t going to refuse the oldest Sunday-school teacher in th’ Five Towns. He’s a catch … Come along, old gentleman!’
Mr Shushions did not stir.
‘Now, Mr Shushions,’ Hilda persuaded him in a voice exquisitely mild, and with a lovely gesture she bent over him. ‘Let these gentlemen take you up to the platform. That’s what you’ve come for, you know.’
The transformation in her amazed Edwin, who could see the tears in her eyes. The tableau of the little, silly old man looking up, and Hilda looking down at him, with her lips parted in a heavenly invitation, and one gloved hand caressing his greenish-black shoulder and the other mechanically holding the parasol aloft – this tableau was imprinted for ever on Edwin’s mind. It was a vision blended in an instant and in an instant dissolved, but for Edwin it remained one of the epochal things of his experience.
Hilda gave Edwin her parasol and quickly fastened Mr Shushions’s collar, and the old man consented to be led off between the two rosettes. The bands were playing the Austrian hymn.
‘Like to come up with your young lady friend?’ Albert whispered to Edwin importantly as he went.
‘Oh no, thanks.’ Edwin hurriedly smiled.
‘Now, old gentleman,’ he could hear Albert adjuring Mr Shushions, and he could see him broadly winking to the other rosettes and embracing the yielding crowd in his wink.
Thus was the doddering old fool who had given his youth to Sunday schools wh
en Sunday schools were not patronized by princes, archbishops, and lord mayors, when Sunday schools were the scorn of the intelligent, and had sometimes to be held in public-houses for lack of better accommodation – thus was he taken off for a show and a museum curiosity by indulgent and shallow Samaritans who had not even the wit to guess that he had sown what they were reaping. And Darius Clayhanger stood oblivious at a high window of the sacred Bank. And Edwin, who, all unconscious, owed the very fact of his existence to the doting imbecile, regarded him chiefly as a figure in a tableau, as the chance instrument of a woman’s beautiful revelation. Mr Shushions’s sole crime against society was that he had forgotten to die.
IV
Hilda Lessways would not return to the barrels. She was taciturn, and the only remark which she made bore upon the advisability of discovering Janet and Mr Orgreave. They threaded themselves out of the moving crowd and away from the hokey-pokey stall and the barrels into the tranquillity of the market-place, where the shadow of the gold angel at the top of the Town Hall spire was a mere squat shapeless stain on the irregular paving-stones. The sound of the Festival came diminished from the Square.
‘You’re very fond of poetry, aren’t you?’ Edwin asked her, thinking, among many other things, of her observation upon the verse of Isaac Watts.
‘Of course,’ she replied disagreeably. ‘I can’t imagine anybody wanting to read anything else.’ She seemed to be ashamed of her kindness to Mr Shushions, and to wish to efface any impression of amiability that she might have made on Edwin. But she could not have done so.
‘Well,’ he said to himself, ‘there’s no getting over it. You’re the biggest caution I’ve ever come across!’ His condition was one of various agitation.
Then, just as they were passing the upper end of the Cock Yard, which was an archway, Mr Orgreave and Janet appeared in the archway.
‘We’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
‘And so have we.’
‘What have you been doing?’
‘What have you been doing?’
Father and daughter were gay. They had not seen much, but they were gay. Hilda Lessways and Edwin were not gay, and Hilda would characteristically make no effort to seem that which she was not. Edwin, therefore, was driven by his own diffidence into a nervous light loquacity. He began the tale of Mr Shushions, and Hilda punctuated it with stabs of phrases.
Mr Orgreave laughed. Janet listened with eager sympathy.
‘Poor old thing! What a shame!’ said Janet.
But to Edwin, with the vision of Hilda’s mercifulness in his mind, even the sympathy of Janet for Mr Shushions had a quality of uncomprehending, facile condescension which slightly jarred on him.
The steam-car loitered into view, discharged two passengers, and began to manœuvre for the return journey.
‘Oh! Do let’s go home by car, father!’ cried Janet. ‘It’s too hot for anything!’
Edwin took leave of them at the car steps. Janet was the smiling incarnation of loving-kindness. Hilda shook hands grudgingly. Through the windows of the car he saw her sternly staring at the advertisements of the interior. He went down the Cock Yard into Wedgwood Street, whence he could hear the bands again and see the pennons. He thought, ‘This is a funny way of spending a morning!’ and wondered what he should do with himself till dinner-time. It was not yet a quarter-past twelve. Still, the hours had passed with extraordinary speed. He stood aimless at the corner of the pavement, and people who, having had their fill of the sun and the spectacle in the Square, were strolling slowly away, saw a fair young man, in a stylish suit, evidently belonging to the aloof classes, gazing at nothing whatever, with his hands elegantly in his pockets.
14
Money
I
THINGS SOMETIMES FALL out in a surprising way, and the removal of the Clayhanger household from the corner of Duck Square to the heights of Bleakridge was diversified by a circumstance which Edwin, the person whom alone it concerned, had not in the least anticipated.
It was the Monday morning after the Centenary. Foster’s largest furniture-van, painted all over with fine pictures of the van itself travelling by road, rail, and sea, stood loaded in front of the shop. One van had already departed, and this second one, in its crammed interior, on its crowded roof, on a swinging platform beneath its floor, and on a posterior ledge supported by rusty chains, contained all that was left of the furniture and domestic goods which Darius Clayhanger had collected in half a century of ownership. The moral effect of Foster’s activity was always salutary, in that Foster would prove to any man how small a space the acquisitions of a lifetime could be made to occupy when the object was not to display, but to pack them. Foster could put all your pride on to four wheels, and Foster’s driver would crack a whip and be off with the lot of it as though it were no more than a load of coal.
The pavement and the road were littered with straw, and the straw straggled into the shop, and heaped itself at the open side door. One large brass saucepan lay lorn near the doorstep, a proof that Foster was human. For everything except that saucepan a place had been found. That saucepan had witnessed sundry ineffectual efforts to lodge it, and had also suffered frequent forgetfulness. A tin candlestick had taken refuge within it, and was trusting for safety to the might of the obstinate vessel. In the sequel, the candlestick was pitched by Edwin on to the roof of the van, and Darius Clayhanger, coming fussily out of the shop, threw a question at Edwin and then picked up the saucepan and went off to Bleakridge with it, thus making sure that it would not be forgotten, and demonstrating to the town that he, Darius, was at last ‘flitting’ into his grand new house. Even weighted by the saucepan, in which Mrs Nixon had boiled hundredweights of jam, he still managed to keep his arms slanted outwards and motionless, retaining his appearance of a rigid body that swam smoothly along on mechanical legs. Darius, though putting control upon himself, was in a state of high complex emotion, partly due to apprehensiveness about the violent changing of the habits of a quarter of a century, and partly due to nervous pride.
Maggie and Mrs Nixon had gone to the new house half an hour earlier, to devise encampments therein for the night; for the Clayhangers would definitely sleep no more at the corner of Duck Square; the rooms in which they had eaten and slept and lain awake, and learnt what life and what death was, were to be transformed into workshops and stores for an increasing business. The premises were not abandoned empty. The shop had to function as usual on that formidable day, and the printing had to proceed. This had complicated the affair of the removal; but it had helped everybody to pretend, in an adult and sedate manner, that nothing in the least unusual was afoot.
Edwin loitered on the pavement, with his brain all tingling, and excitedly incapable of any consecutive thought whatever. It was his duty to wait. Two of Foster’s men were across in the vaults of the Dragon; the rest were at Bleakridge with the first and smaller van. Only one of Foster’s horses was in the dropped double-shafts, and even he had his nose towards the van, and in a nosebag; two others were to come down soon from Bleakridge to assist.
II
A tall, thin, grey-bearded man crossed Trafalgar Road from Aboukir Street. He was very tall and very thin, and the peculiarity of his walk was that the knees were never quite straightened, so that his height was really greater even than it seemed. His dark suit and his boots and hat were extraordinarily neat. You could be sure at once that he was a person of immutable habits. He stopped when, out of the corner of his eye, whose gaze was always precisely parallel to the direction of his feet, he glimpsed Edwin. Deflecting his course, he went close to Edwin, and, addressing the vacant air immediately over Edwin’s pate, he said in a mysterious, confidential whisper –
‘When are you coming in for that money?’
He spoke as though he was anxious to avoid, by a perfect air of nonchalance, arousing the suspicions of some concealed emissary of the Russian secret police.
Edwin started. ‘Oh!’ he exclaimed. ‘Is it ready?’
‘Yes. Waiting.’
‘Are you going to your office now?’
‘Yes.’
Edwin hesitated. ‘It won’t take a minute, I suppose. I’ll slip along in two jiffs. I’ll be there almost as soon as you are.’
‘Bring a receipt stamp,’ said the man, and resumed his way.
He was the secretary of the Bursley and Turnhill Permanent £50 Benefit Building Society, one of the most solid institutions of the district. And he had been its secretary for decades. No stories of the defalcation of other secretaries of societies, no rumours as to the perils of the system of the more famous Starr-Bowkett Building Societies, ever bred a doubt in Bursley or Turnhill of the eternal soundness of the Bursley and Turnhill Permanent £50 Benefit Building Society. You could acquire a share in it by an entrance fee of one shilling, and then you paid eighteenpence per week for ten years, making something less than £40, and then, after an inactive period of three months, the Society gave you £50, and you began therewith to build a house, if you wanted a house, and, if you were prudent, you instantly took out another share. You could have as many shares as you chose. Though the Society was chiefly nourished by respectable artisans with stiff chins, nobody in the district would have considered membership to be beneath him. The Society was an admirable device for strengthening an impulse towards thrift, because, once you had put yourself into its machinery, it would stand no nonsense. Prosperous tradesmen would push their children into it, and even themselves. This was what had happened to Edwin in the dark past, before he had left school. Edwin had regarded the trick with indifference at first, because, except the opening half-crown, his father had paid the subscriptions for him until he left school and became a wage-earner. Thereafter he had regarded it as simple parental madness.
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