Clayhanger

by Arnold Bennett

  ‘I’m waiting,’ said his father.

  ‘I’ve drawn my Club money,’ said Edwin.

  For an instant the old man was at a loss; then he understood. He had entirely forgotten the maturing of the Club share, and assuredly he had not dreamed that Edwin would accept and secrete so vast a sum as fifty pounds without uttering a word. Darius had made a mistake, and a bad one; but in those days fathers were never wrong; above all they never apologized. In Edwin’s wicked act of concealment Darius could choose new and effective ground, and he did so.

  ‘And what dost mean by doing that and saying nowt? Sneaking—’

  ‘What do you mean by calling me a thief?’ Edwin and Darius were equally startled by this speech. Edwin knew not what had come over him, and Darius, never having been addressed in such a dangerous tone by his son, was at a loss.

  ‘I never called ye a thief.’

  ‘Yes, you did! Yes, you did!’ Edwin nearly shouted now. ‘You starve me for money, until I haven’t got sixpence to bless myself with. You couldn’t get a man to do what I do for twice what you pay me. And then you call me a thief. And then you jump down my throat because I spend a bit of money of my own.’ He snorted. He knew that he was quite mad, but there was a strange drunken pleasure in this madness.

  ‘Hold yer tongue, lad!’ said Darius, as stiffly as he could. But Darius, having been unprepared, was intimidated. Darius vaguely comprehended that a new and disturbing factor had come into his life. ‘Make a less row!’ he went on more strongly. ‘D’ye want all th’ street to hear ye?’

  ‘I won’t make a less row. You make as much noise as you want, and I’ll make as much noise as I want!’ Edwin cried louder and louder. And then in bitter scorn, ‘Thief, indeed!’

  ‘I never called ye a—’

  ‘Let me come out!’ Edwin shouted. They were very close together. Darius saw that his son’s face was all drawn. Edwin snatched his hat off its hook, pushed violently past his father and, sticking his hands deep in his pockets, strode into the street.

  III

  In four minutes he was hammering on the front door of the new house. Maggie opened, in alarm. Edwin did not see how alarmed she was by his appearance.

  ‘What—’

  ‘Father thinks I’ve been stealing his damned money!’ Edwin snapped, in a breaking voice. The statement was not quite accurate, but it suited his boiling anger to put it in the present tense instead of in the past. He hesitated an instant in the hall, throwing a look behind at Maggie, who stood entranced with her hand on the latch of the open door. Then he bounded upstairs, and shut himself in his room with a tremendous bang that shook the house. He wanted to cry, but he would not.

  Nobody disturbed him till about two o’clock, when Maggie knocked at the door, and opened it, without entering.

  ‘Edwin, I’ve kept your dinner hot.’

  ‘No, thanks.’ He was standing with his legs wide apart on the hearthrug.

  ‘Father’s had his dinner and gone.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  She closed the door again.

  16

  The Sequel

  I

  ‘I SAY, EDWIN,’ Maggie called through the door.

  ‘Well, come in, come in,’ he replied gruffly. And as he spoke he sped from the window, where he was drumming on the pane, to the hearthrug, so that he should have the air of not having moved since Maggie’s previous visit. He knew not why he made this manœuvre, unless it was that he thought vaguely that Maggie’s impression of the seriousness of the crisis might thereby be intensified.

  She stood in the doorway, evidently placatory and sympathetic, and behind her stood Mrs Nixon, in a condition of great mental turmoil.

  ‘I think you’d better come and have your tea,’ said Maggie firmly, and yet gently. She was soft and stout, and incapable of asserting herself with dignity; but she was his elder, and there were moments when an unusual, scarce-perceptible quality in her voice would demand from him a particular attention.

  He shook his head, and looked sternly at his watch, in the manner of one who could be adamant. He was astonished to see that the hour was a quarter-past six.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked.

  ‘Father? He’s had his tea and gone back to the shop. Come along.’

  ‘I must wash myself first,’ said Edwin gloomily. He did not wish to yield, but he was undeniably very hungry indeed.

  Mrs Nixon could not leave him alone at tea, worrying him with offers of specialities to tempt him. He wondered who had told the old thing about the affair. Then he reflected that she had probably heard his outburst when he entered the house. Possibly the pert, nice niece also had heard it. Maggie remained sewing at the bow-window of the dining-room while he ate a plenteous tea.

  ‘Father said I could tell you that you could pay yourself an extra half-crown a week wages from next Saturday,’ said Maggie suddenly, when she saw he had finished. It was always Edwin who paid wages in the Clayhanger establishment.

  He was extremely startled by this news, with all that it implied of surrender and of pacific intentions. But he endeavoured to hide what he felt, and only snorted.

  ‘He’s been talking, then? What did he say?’

  ‘Oh! Not much! He told me I could tell you if I liked.’

  ‘It would have looked better of him, if he’d told me himself,’ said Edwin, determined to be ruthless. Maggie offered no response.

  II

  After about a quarter of an hour he went into the garden, and kicked stones in front of him. He could not classify his thoughts. He considered himself to be perfectly tranquillized now, but he was mistaken. As he idled in the beautiful August twilight near the garden-front of the house, catching faintly the conversation of Mrs Nixon and her niece as it floated through the open window of the kitchen, round the corner, together with quiet soothing sounds of washing-up, he heard a sudden noise in the garden-porch, and turned swiftly. His father stood there. Both of them were off guard. Their eyes met.

  ‘Had your tea?’ Darius asked, in an unnatural tone.

  ‘Yes,’ said Edwin.

  Darius, having saved his face, hurried into the house, and Edwin moved down the garden, with heart sensibly beating. The encounter renewed his agitation.

  And at the corner of the garden, over the hedge, which had been repaired, Janet entrapped him. She seemed to have sprung out of the ground. He could not avoid greeting her, and in order to do so he had to dominate himself by force. She was in white. She appeared always to wear white on fine summer days. Her smile was exquisitely benignant.

  ‘So you’re installed?’ she began.

  They talked of the removal, she asking questions and commenting, and he giving brief replies.

  ‘I’m all alone tonight,’ she said, in a pause, ‘except for Alicia. Father and mother and the boys are gone to a fête at Longshaw.’

  ‘And Miss Lessways?’ he inquired self-consciously.

  ‘Oh! She’s gone,’ said Janet. ‘She’s gone back to London. Went yesterday.’

  ‘Rather sudden, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, she had to go.’

  ‘Does she live in London?’ Edwin asked, with an air of indifference.

  ‘She does just now.’

  ‘I only ask because I thought from something she said she came from Turnhill way.’

  ‘Her people do,’ said Janet. ‘Yes, you may say she’s a Turnhill girl.’

  ‘She seems very fond of poetry,’ said Edwin.

  ‘You’ve noticed it!’ Janet’s face illuminated the dark. ‘You should hear her recite!’

  ‘Recites, does she?’

  ‘You’d have heard her that night you were here. But when she knew you were coming, she made us all promise not to ask her.’

  ‘Really!’ said Edwin. ‘But why? She didn’t know me. She’d never seen me.’

  ‘Oh! She might have just seen you in the street. In fact I believe she had. But that wasn’t the reason,’ Janet laughed. ‘It was just that you were a
stranger. She’s very sensitive, you know.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ he admitted.

  III

  He took leave of Janet, somehow, and went for a walk up to Toft End, where the wind blows. His thoughts were more complex than ever in the darkness. So she had made them all promise not to ask her to recite while he was at the Orgreaves’! She had seen him, previous to that, in the street, and had obviously discussed him with Janet … And then, at nearly midnight, she had followed him to the new house! And on the day of the Centenary she had manœuvred to let Janet and Mr Orgreave go in front … He did not like her. She was too changeable, too dark, and too light … But it was exciting. It was flattering. He saw again and again her gesture as she bent to Mr Shushions; and the straightening of her spine as she left the garden-porch on the night of his visit to the Orgreaves … Yet he did not like her. Her sudden departure, however, was a disappointment; it was certainly too abrupt … Probably very characteristic of her … Strange day! He had been suspected of theft. He had stood up to his father. He had remained away from the shop. And his father’s only retort was to give him a rise of half a crown a week!

  ‘The old man must have had a bit of a shock!’ he said to himself, grimly vain. ‘I lay I don’t hear another word about that fifty pounds.’

  Yes, amid his profound resentment, there was some ingenuous vanity at the turn which things had taken. And he was particularly content about the rise of half a crown a week, because that relieved him from the most difficult of all the resolutions the carrying out of which was to mark the beginning of the new life. It settled the financial question, for the present at any rate. It was not enough, but it was a great deal – from his father. He was ashamed that he could not keep his righteous resentment pure from this gross satisfaction at an increase of income. The fineness of his nature was thereby hurt. But the gross satisfaction would well up in his mind.

  And in the night, with the breeze on his cheek, and the lamps of the Five Towns curving out below him, he was not unhappy, despite what he had suffered and was still suffering. He had a tingling consciousness of being unusually alive.

  IV

  Later, in his bedroom, shut in, and safe and independent, with the new blind drawn, and the gas fizzing in its opaline globe, he tried to read ‘Don Juan.’ He could not. He was incapable of fixity of mind. He could not follow the sense of a single stanza. Images of his father and of Hilda Lessways mingled with reveries of the insult he had received and the triumph he had won, and all the confused wonder of the day and evening engaged his thoughts. He dwelt lovingly on the supreme disappointment of his career. He fancied what he would have been doing, and where he would have been then, if his appalling father had not made it impossible for him to be an architect. He pitied himself. But he saw the material of happiness ahead, in the faithful execution of his resolves for self-perfecting. And Hilda had flattered him. Hilda had given him a new conception of himself … A tiny idea arose in his brain that there was perhaps some slight excuse for his father’s suspicion of him. After all, he had been secretive. He trampled on that idea, and it arose again.

  He slept very heavily, and woke with a headache. A week elapsed before his agitation entirely disappeared, and hence before he could realize how extreme that agitation had been. He was ashamed of having so madly and wildly abandoned himself to passion.

  17

  Challenge and Response

  I

  TIME PASSED, LIKE a ship across a distant horizon, which moves but which does not seem to move. One Monday evening Edwin said that he was going round to Lane End House. He had been saying so for weeks, and hesitating. He thoroughly enjoyed going to Lane End House; there was no reason why he should not go frequently and regularly, and there were several reasons why he should. Yet his visitings were capricious because his nature was irresolute. That night he went, sticking a hat carelessly on his head, and his hands deep into his pockets. Down the slope of Trafalgar Road, in the biting November mist, between the two rows of gas-lamps that flickered feebly into the pale gloom, came a long straggling band of men who also, to compensate for the absence of overcoats, stuck hands deep into pockets, and strode quickly. With reluctance they divided for the passage of the steam-car, and closed growling together again on its rear. The potters were on strike, and a Bursley contingent was returning in embittered silence from a mass meeting at Hanbridge. When the sound of the steam-car subsided, as the car dipped over the hill-top on its descent towards Hanbridge, nothing could be heard but the tramp-tramp of the procession on the road.

  Edwin hurried down the side-street, and in a moment rang at the front door of the Orgreaves’. He nodded familiarly to the servant who opened, stepped on to the mat, and began contorting his legs in order to wipe the edge of his boot-soles.

  ‘Quite a stranger, sir!’ said Martha, bridling, and respectfully aware of her attractiveness for this friend of the house.

  ‘Yes,’ he laughed. ‘Anybody in?’

  ‘Well, sir, I’m afraid Miss Janet and Miss Alicia are out.’

  ‘And Mr Tom?’

  ‘Mr Tom’s out, sir. He pretty nearly always is now, sir.’ The fact was that Tom was engaged to be married, and the servant indicated, by a scarcely perceptible motion of the chin, that fiancés were and ever would be all the same. ‘And Mr John and Mr James are out too, sir.’ They also were usually out. They were both assisting their father in business, and sought relief from his gigantic conception of a day’s work by evening diversions at Hanbridge. These two former noisy Liberals had joined the Hanbridge Conservative Club because it was a club, and had a billiard-table that could only be equalled at the Five Towns Hotel at Knype.

  ‘And Mr Orgreave?’

  ‘He’s working upstairs, sir. Mrs Orgreave’s got her asthma, and so he’s working upstairs.’

  ‘Well, tell them I’ve called.’ Edwin turned to depart.

  ‘I’m sure Mr Orgreave would like to know you’re here, sir,’ said the maid firmly. ‘If you’ll just step into the breakfast-room.’ That maid did as she chose with visitors for whom she had a fancy.

  II

  She conducted him to the so-called breakfast-room and shut the door on him. It was a small chamber behind the drawing-room, and shabbier than the drawing-room. In earlier days the children had used it for their lessons and hobbies. And now it was used as a sitting-room when mere cosiness was demanded by a decimated family. Edwin stooped down and mended the fire. Then he went to the wall and examined a framed water-colour of the old Sytch Pottery, which was signed with his initials. He had done it, aided by a photograph, and by Johnnie Orgreave in details of perspective, and by dint of preprandial frequentings of the Sytch, as a gift for Mrs Orgreave. It always seemed to him to be rather good.

  Then he bent to examine bookshelves. Like the hall, the drawing-room, and the dining-room, this apartment, too, was plenteously full of everything, and littered over with the apparatus of various personalities. Only from habit did Edwin glance at the books. He knew their backs by heart. And books in quantity no longer intimidated him. Despite his grave defects as a keeper of resolves, despite his paltry trick of picking up a newspaper or periodical and reading it all through, out of sheer vacillation and mental sloth, before starting serious perusals, despite the human disinclination which he had to bracing himself, and keeping up the tension, in a manner necessary for the reading of long and difficult works, and despite sundry ignominious backslidings into original sluggishness – still he had accomplished certain literary adventures. He could not enjoy ‘Don Juan.’ Expecting from it a voluptuous and daring grandeur, he had found in it nothing whatever that even roughly fitted into his idea of what poetry was. But he had had a passion for ‘Childe Harold,’ many stanzas of which thrilled him again and again, bringing back to his mind what Hilda Lessways had said about poetry. And further, he had a passion for Voltaire. In Voltaire, also, he had been deceived, as in Byron. He had expected something violent, arid, closely argumentative; and he found gaiety, grace, and really th
e funniest jokes. He could read ‘Candide’ almost without a dictionary, and he had intense pride in doing so, and for some time afterwards ‘Candide’ and ‘La Princesse de Babylone,’ and a few similar witty trifles, were the greatest stories in the world for him. Only a faint reserve in Tom Orgreave’s responsive enthusiasm made him cautiously reflect.

  He could never be intimate with Tom, because Tom somehow never came out from behind his spectacles. But he had learnt much from him, and in especial a familiarity with the less difficult of Bach’s preludes and fugues, which Tom loved to play. Edwin knew not even the notes of music, and he was not sure that Bach gave him pleasure. Bach affected him strangely. He would ask for Bach out of a continually renewed curiosity, so that he could examine once more and yet again the sensations which the music produced; and the habit grew. As regards the fugues, there could be no doubt that, the fugue begun, a desire was thereby set up in him for the resolution of the confusing problem created in the first few bars, and that he waited, with a pleasant and yet a trying anxiety, for the indications of that resolution, and that the final reassuring and utterly tranquillizing chords gave him deep joy. When he innocently said that he was ‘glad when the end came of a fugue,’ all the Orgreaves laughed heartily, but after laughing, Tom said that he knew what Edwin meant and quite agreed.

  III

  It was while he was glancing along the untidy and crowded shelves with sophisticated eye that the door brusquely opened. He looked up mildly, expecting a face familiar, and saw one that startled him, and heard a voice that aroused disconcerting vibrations in himself. It was Hilda Lessways. She had in her hand a copy of the ‘Signal.’ Over fifteen months had gone since their last meeting, but not since he had last thought of her. Her features seemed strange. His memory of them had not been reliable. He had formed an image of her in his mind, and had often looked at it, and he now saw that it did not correspond with the reality. The souvenir of their brief intimacy swept back upon him. Incredible that she should be there, in front of him; and yet there she was! More than once, after reflecting on her, he had laughed, and said lightly to himself: ‘Well, the chances are I shall never see her again! Funny girl!’ But the recollection of her gesture with Mr Shushions prevented him from dismissing her out of his head with quite that lightness …