Clayhanger

by Arnold Bennett

  III

  And at the same time he was extremely sad, only less sad than his father. When he allowed his thoughts to rest for an instant on his father he was so moved that he could almost have burst into a sob – just one terrific sob. And he would say in his mind, ‘What a damned shame! What a damned shame!’ Meaning that destiny had behaved ignobly to his father, after all. Destiny had no right to deal with a man so faithlessly. Destiny should do either one thing or the other. It seemed to him that he was leading his father by a string to his humiliation. And he was ashamed: ashamed of his own dominance and of his father’s craven submissiveness. Twice they were stopped by hearty and curious burgesses, and each encounter Edwin, far more than Darius, was anxious to pretend that the harsh hand of Darius still firmly held the sceptre.

  When they entered the shining mahogany interior of the richest Bank in the Five Towns, hushed save for a discreet shovelling of coins, Edwin waited for his father to speak, and Darius said not a word, but stood glumly quiescent, like a victim in a halter. The little wiry dancing cashier looked; every clerk in the place looked; from behind the third counter, in the far recesses of the Bank, clerks looked over their ledgers; and they all looked in the same annoying way, as at a victim in a halter; in their glance was all the pitiful gloating baseness of human nature, mingled with a little of its compassion.

  Everybody of course knew that ‘something had happened’ to the successful steam-printer.

  ‘Can we see Mr Lovatt?’ Edwin demanded curtly. He was abashed and he was resentful.

  The cashier jumped on all his springs into a sudden activity of deference.

  Presently the manager emerged from the glazed door of his room, pulling his long whiskers.

  ‘Oh, Mr Lovatt,’ Edwin began nervously. ‘Father’s just come along—’

  They were swallowed up into the manager’s parlour. It might have been a court of justice, or a dentist’s surgery, or the cabinet of an insurance doctor, or the room at Fontainebleau where Napoleon signed his abdication – anything but the thing it was. Happily Mr Lovatt had a manner which never varied; he had only one manner for all men and all occasions. So that Edwin was not distressed either by the deficiencies of amateur acting or by the exhibition of another’s self-conscious awkwardness. Nevertheless, when his father took the pen to write, he was obliged to look studiously at the window and inaudibly hum an air. Had he not done so, that threatening sob might have burst its way out of him.

  IV

  ‘I’m going this road,’ said Darius, when they were safely out of the Bank, pointing towards the Sytch.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’m going this road,’ he repeated, gloomily obstinate.

  ‘All right,’ said Edwin cheerfully. ‘I’ll trot round with you.’

  He did not know whether he could safely leave his father. The old man’s eyes resented his assiduity and accepted it.

  They passed the Old Sytch Pottery, the smoke of whose kilns now no longer darkened the sky. The senior partner of the firm which leased it had died, and his sons had immediately taken advantage of his absence to build a new and efficient works down by the canal-side at Shawport – a marvel of everything save architectural dignity. Times changed. Edwin remarked on the desolation of the place and received no reply. Then the idea occurred to him that his father was bound for the Liberal Club. It was so. They both entered. In the large room two young men were amusing themselves at the billiard-table which formed the chief attraction of the naked interior, and on the ledges of the table were two glasses. The steward in an apron watched them.

  ‘Aye!’ grumbled Darius, eyeing the group. ‘That’s Rad, that is! That’s Rad! Not twelve o’clock yet!’

  If Edwin with his father had surprised two young men drinking and playing billiards before noon in the Conservative Club, he would have been grimly pleased. He would have taken it for a further proof of the hollowness of the opposition to the great Home Rule Bill; but the spectacle of a couple of wastrels in the Liberal Club annoyed and shamed him. His vague notion was that at such a moment of high crisis the two wastrels ought to have had the decency to refrain from wasting.

  ‘Well, Mr Clayhanger,’ said the steward, in his absurd boniface way, ‘you’re quite a stranger.’

  ‘I want my name taken off this Club,’ said Darius shortly. ‘Ye understand me! And I reckon I’m not the only one, these days.’

  The steward did in fact understand. He protested in a low, amiable voice, while the billiard-players affected not to hear; but he perfectly understood. The epidemic of resignations had already set in, and there had been talk of a Liberal-Unionist Club. The steward saw that the grand folly of a senile statesman was threatening his own future prospects. He smiled. But at Edwin, as they were leaving, he smiled in a quite peculiar way, and that smile clearly meant: ‘Your father goes dotty, and the first thing he does is to change his politics.’ This was the steward’s justifiable revenge.

  ‘You aren’t leaving us?’ the steward questioned Edwin in a half-whisper.

  Edwin shook his head. But he could have killed the steward for that nauseating suggestive smile. The outer door swung to, cutting off the delicate click of billiard balls.

  At the top of Duck Bank, Darius silently and without warning mounted the steps of the Conservative Club. Doubtless he knew how to lay his hand instantly on a proposer and seconder. Edwin did not follow him.

  V

  That evening, conscious of responsibility and of virtue, Edwin walked up Trafalgar Road with a less gawky and more dignified mien than ever he had managed to assume before. He had not only dismissed programmes of culture, he had forgotten them. After twelve hours as head of a business, they had temporarily ceased to interest him. And when he passed, or was overtaken by, other men of affairs, he thought to himself naïvely in the dark, ‘I am the equal of these men.’ And the image of Florence Simcox the clog-dancer floated through his mind.

  He found Darius alone in the drawing-room, in front of an uncustomary fire, garden-clay still on his boots, and ‘The Christian News’ under his spectacles. The Sunday before the funeral of Mr Shushions had been so unusual and so distressing that Darius had fallen into arrear with his perusals. True, he had never been known to read ‘The Christian News’ on any day but Sunday, but now every day was Sunday.

  Edwin nodded to him and approached the fire, rubbing his hands.

  ‘What’s this as I hear?’ Darius began, with melancholy softness.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘About Albert wanting to borrow a thousand pounds?’ Darius gazed at him over his spectacles.

  ‘Albert wanting to borrow a thousand pounds!’ Edwin repeated, astounded.

  ‘Aye! Have they said naught to you?’

  ‘No,’ said Edwin. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Clara and your aunt have both been at me since tea. Some tale as Albert can amalgamate into partnership with Hope & Carters if he can put down a thousand. Then Albert’s said naught to ye?’

  ‘No, he hasn’t!’ Edwin exclaimed, emphasizing each word with a peculiar fierceness. It was as if he had said, ‘I should like to catch him saying anything to me about it!’

  He was extremely indignant. It seemed to him monstrous that those two women should thus try to snatch an advantage from his father’s weakness, pitifully mean and base. He could not understand how people could bring themselves to do such things, nor how, having done them, they could ever look their fellows in the face again. Had they no shame? They would not let a day pass; but they must settle on the old man instantly, like flies on a carcass! He could imagine the plottings, the hushed chatterings; the acting-for-the-best demeanour of that cursed woman Auntie Hamps (yes, he now cursed her), and the candid greed of his sister.

  ‘You wouldn’t do it, would ye?’ Darius asked, in a tone that expected a negative answer; but also with a rather plaintive appeal, as though he were depending on Edwin for moral support against the formidable forces of attack.

  ‘I should not,’ said Edwin s
toutly, touched by the strange wistful note and by the glance. ‘Unless of course you really want to.’

  He did not care in the least whether the money would or would not be really useful and reasonably safe. He did not care whose enmity he was risking. His sense of fair play was outraged, and he would salve it at any cost. He knew that had his father not been struck down and defenceless, these despicable people would never have dared to demand money from him. That was the only point that mattered.

  The relief of Darius at Edwin’s attitude in the affair was painful. Hoping for sympathy from Edwin, he yet had feared in him another enemy. Now he was reassured, and he could hide his feelings no better than a child.

  ‘Seemingly they can’t wait till my will’s opened!’ he murmured, with a scarcely successful affectation of grimness.

  ‘Made a will, have you?’ Edwin remarked, with an elaborate casualness to imply that he had never till then given a thought to his father’s will, but that, having thought of the question, he was perhaps a very little surprised that his father had indeed made a will.

  Darius nodded, quite benevolently. He seemed to have forgotten his deep grievance against Edwin in the matter of cheque-signing.

  ‘Duncalf’s got it,’ he murmured after a moment. Duncalf was the town clerk and a solicitor.

  So the will was made! And he had submissively signed away all control over all monetary transactions. What more could he do, except expire with the minimum of fuss? Truly Darius, in the local phrase, was now ‘laid aside’! And of all the symptoms of his decay the most striking and the most tragic, to Edwin, was that he showed no curiosity whatever about business. Not one single word of inquiry had he uttered.

  ‘You’ll want shaving,’ said Edwin, in a friendly way.

  Darius passed a hand over his face. He had ceased years ago to shave himself, and had a subscription at Dick Jones’s in Aboukir Street, close by the shop.

  ‘Aye!’

  ‘Shall I send the barber up, or shall you let it grow?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Oh!’ Edwin drawled, characteristically hesitating. Then he remembered that he was the responsible head of the family of Clayhanger. ‘I think you might let it grow,’ he decided.

  And when he had issued the verdict, it seemed to him like a sentence of sequestration and death on his father … ‘Let it grow! What does it matter?’ Such was the innuendo.

  ‘You used to grow a full beard once, didn’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Darius.

  That made the situation less cruel.

  8

  A Change of Mind

  I

  ONE EVENING, A year later, in earliest summer of 1887, Edwin and Mr Osmond Orgreave were walking home together from Hanbridge. When they reached the corner of the street leading to Lane End House, Osmond Orgreave said, stopping –

  ‘Now you’ll come with us?’ And he looked Edwin hard in the eyes, and there was a most flattering appeal in his voice. It was some time since their eyes had met frankly, for Edwin had recently been having experience of Mr Orgreave’s methods in financial controversy, and it had not been agreeable.

  After an instant Edwin said heartily –

  ‘Yes, I think I’ll come. Of course I should like to. But I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Yes, tonight.’

  ‘I shall tell my wife you’re coming.’

  Mr Orgreave waved a hand, and passed with a certain decorative gaiety down the street. His hair was now silvern, but it still curled in the old places, and his gestures had apparently not aged at all.

  Mr and Mrs Orgreave were going to London for the Jubilee celebrations. So far as their family was concerned, they were going alone, because Osmond had insisted humorously that he wanted a rest from his children. But he had urgently invited Edwin to accompany them. At first Edwin had instinctively replied that it was impossible. He could not leave home. He had never been to London; a journey to London presented itself to him as an immense enterprise, almost as a piece of culpable self-indulgence. And then, under the stimulus of Osmond’s energetic and adventurous temperament, he had said to himself, ‘Why not? Why shouldn’t I?’

  The arguments favoured his going. It was absurd and scandalous that he had never been to London: he ought for his self-respect to depart thither at once. The legend of the Jubilee, spectacular, processional, historic, touched his imagination. Whenever he thought of it, his fancy saw pennons and corslets and chargers winding through stupendous streets, and somewhere in the midst, the majesty of England in the frail body of a little old lady, who had had many children and one supreme misfortune. Moreover, he could incidentally see Charlie. Moreover, he had been suffering from a series of his customary colds, and from overwork, and Heve had told him that he ‘would do with a change.’ Moreover, he had a project for buying paper in London: he had received, from London, overtures which seemed promising. He had never been able to buy paper quite as cheaply as Darius had bought paper, for the mere reason that he could not haggle over sixteenths of a penny with efficient ruthlessness; he simply could not do it, being somehow ashamed to do it. In Manchester, where Darius had bought paper for thirty years, they were imperceptibly too brutal for Edwin in the harsh realities of a bargain; they had no sense of shame. He thought that in letters from London he detected a softer spirit.

  And above all he desired, by accepting Mr Orgreave’s invitation, to show to the architect that the differences between them were really expunged from his mind. Among many confusions in his father’s flourishing but disorderly affairs, Edwin had been startled to find the Orgreave transactions. There were accounts and contra-accounts, and quantities of strangely contradictory documents. Never had a real settlement occurred between Darius and Osmond. And Osmond did not seem to want one. Edwin, however, with his old-maid’s passion for putting and keeping everything in its place, insisted on one. Mr Orgreave had to meet him on his strongest point, his love of order. The process of settlement had been painful to Edwin; it had seriously marred some of his illusions. Nearly the last of the entanglements in his father’s business, the Orgreave matter was straightened and closed now; and the projected escapade to London would bury it deep, might even restore agreeable illusions. And Edwin was incapable of nursing malice.

  The best argument of all was that he had a right to go to London. He had earned London, by honest and severe work, and by bearing firmly the huge weight of his responsibility. So far he had offered himself no reward whatever, not even an increase of salary, not even a week of freedom, or the satisfaction of a single caprice.

  ‘I shall go, and charge it to the business,’ he said to himself. He became excited about going.

  II

  As he approached his house, he saw the elder Heve, vicar of St Peter’s, coming away from it, a natty clerical figure in a straw hat of peculiar shape. Recently this man had called once or twice; not professionally, for Darius was neither a churchman nor a parishioner, but as a brother of Dr Heve’s, as a friendly human being, and Darius had been flattered. The Vicar would talk about Jesus with quiet half-humorous enthusiasm. For him at any rate Christianity was grand fun. He seemed never to be solemn over his religion, like the Wesleyans. He never, with a shamed, defiant air, said, ‘I am not ashamed of Christ,’ like the Wesleyans. He might have known Christ slightly at Cambridge. But his relations with Christ did not make him conceited, nor condescending. And if he was concerned about the welfare of people who knew not Christ, he hid his concern in the politest manner. Edwin, after being momentarily impressed by him, was now convinced of his perfect mediocrity; the Vicar’s views on literature had damned him eternally in the esteem of Edwin, who was still naïve enough to be unable to comprehend how a man who had been to Cambridge could speak enthusiastically of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ Moreover, Edwin despised him for his obvious pride in being a bachelor. The Vicar would not say that a priest should be celibate, but he would, with delicacy, imply as much. Then also, for Edw
in’s taste, the parson was somewhat too childishly interested in the culture of cellar-mushrooms, which was his hobby. He would recount the tedious details of all his experiments to Darius, who, flattered by these attentions from the Established Church, took immense delight in the Vicar and in the sample mushrooms offered to him from time to time.

  Maggie stood in the porch, which commanded the descent into Bursley; she was watching the Vicar as he receded. When Edwin appeared at the gate, she gave a little jump, and he fancied that she also blushed.

  ‘Look here!’ he exclaimed to himself, in a flash of suspicion. ‘Surely she’s not thinking of the Vicar! Surely Maggie isn’t after all …!’ He did not conceive it possible that the Vicar, who had been to Cambridge and had notions about celibacy, was thinking of Maggie. ‘Women are queer,’ he said to himself. (For him, this generalization from facts was quite original.) Fancy her staring after the Vicar! She must have been doing it quite unconsciously! He had supposed that her attitude towards the Vicar was precisely his own. He took it for granted that the Vicar’s attitude was the same to both of them, based on a polite and kindly but firm recognition that there could be no genuine sympathy between him and them.