Clayhanger

by Arnold Bennett

  III

  ‘Auntie!’ cried the boy. ‘Can’t I go into this garden? There’s a swing there.’

  ‘Oh no!’ said Janet. ‘This isn’t our garden. We must go home. We only just called in. And big boys who won’t shake hands—’

  ‘Yes, yes!’Edwin dreamily stopped her. ‘Let him go into the garden for a minute if he wants to. You can’t run off like that! Come along, my lord.’

  He saw an opportunity of speaking to her out of the child’s hearing. Janet consented, perhaps divining his wish. The child turned and stared deliberately at Edwin, and then plunged forward, too eager to await guidance, towards the conquest of the garden.

  Standing silent and awkward in the garden porch, they watched him violently agitating the swing, a contrivance erected by a good-natured Uncle Edwin for the diversion of Clara’s offspring.

  ‘How old is he?’ Edwin demanded, for the sake of saying something.

  ‘About nine,’ said Janet.

  ‘He doesn’t look it.’

  ‘No, but he talks it – sometimes.’

  George did not in fact look his age. He was slight and small, and he seemed to have no bones – nothing but articulations that functioned with equal ease in all possible directions. His skin was pale and unhealthy. His eyes had an expression of fatigue, or he might have been ophthalmic. He spoke loudly, his gestures were brusque, and his life was apparently made up of a series of intense, absolute absorptions. The general effect of his personality upon Edwin was not quite agreeable, and Edwin’s conclusion was that George, in addition to being spoiled, was a profound and rather irritating egoist by nature.

  ‘By the way,’ he murmured, ‘what’s Mr Cannon?’

  ‘Oh!’ said Janet, hesitating, with emotion, ‘she’s a widow.’

  He felt sick. Janet might have been a doctor who had informed him that he was suffering from an unexpected disease, and that an operation severe and perilous lay in front of him. The impartial observer in him asked somewhat disdainfully why he should allow himself to be deranged in this physical manner, and he could only reply feebly and very meekly that he did not know. He felt sick.

  Suddenly he said to himself, making a discovery –

  ‘Of course she won’t come to Bursley. She’d be ashamed to meet me.’

  ‘How long?’ he demanded of Janet.

  ‘It was last year, I think,’ said Janet, with emotion increased, her voice heavy with the load of its sympathy. When he first knew Janet an extraordinary quick generous concern for others had been one of her chief characteristics. But of late years, though her deep universal kindness had not changed, she seemed to have hardened somewhat on the surface. Now he found again the earlier Janet.

  ‘You never told me.’

  ‘The truth is, we didn’t know,’ Janet said, and without giving Edwin time to put another question, she continued: ‘The poor thing’s had a great deal of trouble, a very great deal. George’s health, now! The sea air doesn’t suit him. And Hilda couldn’t possibly leave Brighton.’

  ‘Oh! She’s still at Brighton?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let me see – she used to be at – what was it? – Preston Street?’

  Janet glanced at him with interest: ‘What a memory you’ve got! Why, it’s ten years since she was here!’

  ‘Nearly!’ said Edwin. ‘It just happened to stick in my mind. You remember she came down to the shop to ask me about trains and things the day she left.’

  ‘Did she?’ Janet exclaimed, raising her eyebrows.

  Edwin had been suspecting that possibly Hilda had given some hint to Janet as to the nature of her relations with him. He now ceased to suspect that. He grew easier. He gathered up the reins again, though in a rather limp hand.

  ‘Why is she so bound to stay in Brighton?’ he inquired with affected boldness.

  ‘She’s got a boarding-house.’

  ‘I see. Well, it’s a good thing she has a private income of her own.’

  ‘That’s just the point,’ said Janet sadly. ‘We very much doubt if she has any private income any longer.’

  Edwin waited for further details, but Janet seemed to speak unwilling. She would follow him, but she would not lead.

  IV

  Behind them he could hear the stir of Mrs Hamps’s departure. She and Maggie were coming down the stairs. Guessing not the dramatic arrival of Janet Orgreave and the mysterious nephew, Mrs Hamps, having peeped into the empty dining-room, said: ‘I suppose the dear boy has gone,’ and forthwith went herself. Edwin smiled cruelly at the thought of what her joy would have been actually to inspect the mysterious nephew at close quarters, and to learn the strange suspicious truth that he was not a nephew after all.

  ‘Auntie!’yelled the boy across the garden.

  ‘Come along, we must go now,’ Janet retorted.

  ‘No! I want you to swing me. Make me swing very high.’

  ‘George!’

  ‘Let him swing a bit,’ said Edwin. ‘I’ll go and swing him.’ And calling loud to the boy: ‘I’ll come and swing you.’

  ‘He’s dreadfully spoiled,’ Janet protested. ‘You’ll make him worse.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Edwin carelessly.

  He seemed to understand better than he had ever done with Clara’s litter, how and why parents came to spoil their children. It was not because they feared a struggle of wills; but because of the unreasoning instinctive pleasure to be derived from the conferring of pleasure, especially when the pleasure thus conferred might involve doubtful consequences. He had not cared for the boy, did not care for him. In theory he had the bachelor’s factitious horror of a spoiled child. Nevertheless he would now support the boy against Janet. His instinct said: ‘He wants something. I can give it him. Let him have it. Never mind consequences. He shall have it.’

  He crossed the damp grass, and felt the breeze and the sun. The sky was a moving medley of Chinese white and Prussian blue, that harmonized admirably with the Indian red architecture which framed it on all sides. The high trees in the garden of the Orgreaves were turning to rich yellows and browns, and dead leaves slanted slowly down from their summits, a few reaching even the Clayhanger garden, speckling its evergreen with ochre. On the other side of the west wall traps and carts rattled and rumbled and creaked along Trafalgar Road.

  The child had stopped swinging, and greeted him with a most heavenly persuasive grateful smile. A different child! A sudden angel, with delicate distinguished gestures! … A wondrous screwing-up of the eyes in the sun! Weak eyes, perhaps! The thick eyebrows recalled Hilda’s. Possibly he had Hilda’s look! Or was that fancy? Edwin was sure that he would never have guessed George’s parentage.

  ‘Now!’ he warned. ‘Hold tight.’ And, going behind the boy, he strongly clasped his slim little waist in its blue sailor-cloth, and sent the whole affair – swing-seat and boy and all – flying to the skies. And the boy shrieked in the violence of his ecstasy, and his cap fell on the grass. Edwin worked hard without relaxing.

  ‘Go on! Go on!’ the boy shriekingly commanded.

  And amid these violent efforts and brusque delicious physical contacts, Edwin was calmly penetrated and saturated by the mystic effluence that is disengaged from young children. He had seen his father dead, and had thought: ‘Here is the most majestic and impressive enigma that the earth can show!’ But the child George – aged nine and seeming more like seven – offered an enigma surpassing in solemnity that of death. This was Hilda’s. This was hers, who had left him a virgin. With a singular thrilled impassivity he imagined, not bitterly, the history of Hilda. She who was his by word and by kiss, had given her mortal frame to the unknown Cannon – yielded it. She had conceived. At some moment when he, Edwin, was alive and suffering, she had conceived. She had ceased to be a virgin. Quickly, with an astounding quickness – for was not George nine years old? – she had passed from virginity to motherhood. And he imagined all that too; all of it; clearly. And here, swinging and shrieking, exerting the powerful an
d unique charm of infancy, was the miraculous sequel! Another individuality; a new being; definitely formed, with character and volition of its own; unlike any other individuality in the universe! Something fresh! Something unimaginably created! A phenomenon absolutely original of the pride and the tragedy of life! George!

  Yesterday she was a virgin, and today there was this! And this might have been his, ought to have been his! Yes, he thrilled secretly amid all those pushings and joltings! The mystery obsessed him. He had no rancour against Hilda. He was incapable of rancour, except a kind of wilful, fostered rancour in trifles. Thus he never forgave the inventor of Saturday afternoon Bible-classes. But rancour against Hilda—! No! Her act had been above rancour; like an act of Heaven. And she existed yet. On a spot of the earth’s surface entitled Brighton, which he could locate upon a map, she existed: a widow, in difficulty, keeping a boarding-house. She ate, slept, struggled; she brushed her hair. He could see her brushing her hair. And she was thirty-four – was it? The wonder of the world amazed and shook him. And it appeared to him that his career was more romantic than ever.

  George with dangerous abruptness wriggled his legs downwards and slipped off the seat of the swing, not waiting for Edwin to stop it. He rolled on the grass and jumped up in haste. He had had enough.

  ‘Well, want any more?’ Edwin asked, breathing hard.

  The child made a shy, negative sigh, twisting his tousled head down into his right shoulder. After all he was not really impudent, brazen. He could show a delicious timidity. Edwin decided that he was an enchanting child. He wanted to talk to him, but he could not think of anything natural and reasonable to say by way of opening.

  ‘You haven’t told me your name, you know,’ he began at length. ‘How do I know what your name is? George, yes – but George what? George is nothing by itself, I know ten million Georges.’

  The child smiled.

  ‘George Edwin Cannon,’ he replied shyly.

  V

  ‘Now, George!’ came Janet’s voice, more firmly than before. After all, she meant in the end to be obeyed. She was learning her business as aunt to this new and difficult nephew; but learn it she would, and thoroughly!

  ‘Come on!’ Edwin counselled the boy.

  They went together to the house. Maggie had found Janet, and the two were conversing. Soon afterwards aunt and nephew departed.

  ‘How very odd!’ murmured Maggie, with an unusual intonation, in the hall, as Edwin was putting on his hat to return to the shop. But whether she was speaking to herself or to him, he knew not.

  ‘What?’ he asked gruffly.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘isn’t it!’

  She was more like Auntie Hamps, more like Clara, than herself in that moment. He resented the suspicious implications of her tone. He was about to give her one of his rude, curt rejoinders, but happily he remembered in time that scarce half an hour earlier he had turned over a new leaf; so he kept silence. He walked down to the shop in a deep dream.

  3

  Adventure

  I

  IT WAS WHEN Edwin fairly reached the platform at Victoria Station and saw the grandiose express waiting its own moment to start, that the strange irrational quality of his journey first fully impressed him and frightened him – so much that he was almost ready to walk out of the station again. To come gradually into London from the North, to pass from the Manchester train half-full of Midlanders through Bloomsbury into the preoccupied, struggling, and untidy Strand – this gave no shock, typified nothing definite. But, having spent a night in London, deliberately to leave it for the South, where he had never been, of which he was entirely ignorant – that was like an explicit self-committal, like turning the back on the last recognizable landmark in an ill-considered voyage of pure adventure.

  The very character of Victoria Station and of this express was different from that of any other station and express in his experience. It was unstrenuous, soft; it had none of the busy harshness of the Midlands; it spoke of pleasure, relaxation, of spending free from all worry and humiliation of getting. Everybody who came towards this train came with an assured air of wealth and of dominion. Everybody was well dressed; many if not most of the women were in furs; some had expensive and delicate dogs; some had pale, elegant footmen, being too august even to speak to porters. All the luggage was luxurious; handbags could be seen that were worth fifteen or twenty pounds apiece. There was no question of first, second, or third class; there was no class at all on this train. Edwin had the apologetic air of the provincial who is determined to be as good as anybody else. When he sat down in the vast interior of one of those gilded vehicles he could not dismiss from his face the consciousness that he was an intruder, that he did not belong to that world. He was ashamed of his hand-baggage, and his gesture in tipping the porter lacked carelessness. Of course he pretended a frowning, absorbed interest in a newspaper – but the very newspaper was strange; he guessed not that unless he glanced first at the penultimate column of page one thereof he convicted himself of not knowing his way about.

  He could not think consecutively, not even of his adventure. His brain was in a maze of anarchy. But at frequent intervals recurred the query: ‘What the devil am I up to?’ And he would uneasily smile to himself. When the train rolled with all its majesty out of the station and across the Thames, he said to himself, fearful, ‘Well, I’ve done it now!’

  II

  On the Thursday he had told Maggie, with affected casualness, that on the Friday he might have to go to London, about a new machine. Sheer invention! Fortunately Maggie had been well drilled by her father in the manner proper to women in accepting announcements connected with ‘business.’ And Edwin was just as laconic and mysterious as Darius had been about ‘business.’ It was a word that ended arguments, or prevented them. On the Friday he had said that he should go in the afternoon. On being asked whether he should return on the Saturday, he had replied that he did not know, but that he would telegraph. Whereupon Maggie had said that if he stayed away for the week-end she should probably have all the children up for dinner and tea. At the shop, ‘Stifford,’ he had said, ‘I suppose you don’t happen to know a good hotel in Brighton? I might run down there for the week-end if I don’t come back tomorrow. But you needn’t say anything.’ ‘No, sir,’ Stifford had discreetly concurred in this suggestion. ‘They say there’s really only one hotel in Brighton, sir – the Royal Sussex. But I’ve never been there.’ Edwin had replied: ‘Not the Metropole, then?’ ‘Oh no, sir!’ Stifford had become a great and wonderful man, and Edwin’s constant fear was that he might lose this indispensable prop to his business. For Stifford, having done a little irregular commercial travelling in Staffordshire and the neighbouring counties, had been seized of the romance of travelling; he frequented the society of real commercial travellers, and was gradually becoming a marvellous encyclopædia of information about hotels, routes, and topography.

  Edwin having been to the Bank himself, instead of sending Stifford, had departed with the minimum of ostentation. He had in fact crept away. Since the visit of Janet and the child he had not seen either of them again, nor had he mentioned the child to anybody at all.

  III

  When, in an astounding short space of time, he stood in the King’s Road at Brighton, it seemed to him that he was in a dream; that he was not really at Brighton, that town which for so many years had been to him naught but a romantic name. Had his adventurousness, his foolhardiness, indeed carried him so far? As for Brighton, it corresponded with no dream. It was vaster than any imagining of it. Edwin had only seen the pleasure cities of the poor and of the middling, such as Blackpool and Llandudno. He had not conceived what wealth would do when it organized itself for the purposes of distraction. The train had prepared him to a certain extent, but not sufficiently. He suddenly saw Brighton in its autumnal pride, Brighton beginning one of its fine weekends, and he had to admit that the number of rich and idle people in the world surpassed his provincial notions. For miles we
stwards and miles eastwards, against a formidable background of high, yellow and brown architecture, persons the luxuriousness of any one of whom would have drawn remarks in Bursley, walked or drove or rode in thronging multitudes. Edwin could comprehend lolling by the sea in August, but in late October it seemed unnatural, fantastic. The air was full of the trot of glossy horses and the rattle of bits and the roll of swift wheels, and the fall of elegant soles on endless clean pavements; it was full of the consciousness of being correct and successful. Many of the faces were monstrously ugly, most were dissatisfied and querulous; but they were triumphant. Even the pale beings in enlarged perambulators, pulled solemnly to and fro by their aged fellow-beings, were triumphant. The scared, the maimed, yes, and the able-bodied blind trusting to the arms of friends, were triumphant. And the enormous policemen, respectfully bland, confident in the system which had chosen them and fattened them, gave as it were to the scene an official benediction.

  The bricks and stucco which fronted the sea on the long embanked promenade never sank lower than a four-storey boarding-house, and were continually rising to the height of some gilt-lettered hotel, and at intervals rose sheer into the skies – six, eight, ten stories – where a hotel, admittedly the grandest on any shore of ocean sent terra-cotta chimneys to lose themselves amid the pearly clouds. Nearly every building was a lodgment waiting for the rich, and nearly every great bow-window, out of tens of thousands of bow-windows bulging forward in an effort to miss no least glimpse of the full prospect, exhibited the apparatus and the menials of gourmandize. And the eye, following the interminable irregular horizontal lines of architecture, was foiled in the far distances, and, still farther off, after a break of indistinguishable brown, it would catch again the receding run of roofs, simplified by atmosphere into featureless rectangles of grey against sapphire or rose. There were two piers that strode and sprawled into the sea, and these also were laden with correctness and with domination. And, between the two, men were walking miraculously on the sea to build a third, that should stride farther and deeper than the others.