Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett (best time to read books TXT) 📕

It's quite a secret yet. I haven't told father and mother. But she asked me to tell you if I saw you."

He thought her eyes were compassionate.

Mrs Orgreave came smiling into the room.

"Well, Mr Edwin, it seems we can only get you in here by main force."

"Are you quite better, Mrs Orgreave?" he rose to greet her.

He had by some means or other to get out.

"I must just run in home a second," he said, after a moment. "I'll be back in three minutes."

But he had no intention of coming back. He would have told any lie in order to be free.

In his bedroom, looking at himself in the glass, he could detect on his face no sign whatever of suffering or of agitation. It seemed just an ordinary mild, unmoved face.

And this, too, he had always felt and known would come to pass: that Hilda would not be his. All that romance was unreal; it was not true; it had never happened. Such a thing could not happen to such as he was... He could not reflect. When he tried to reflect, the top of his head seemed as though it would fly off... Cannon! She was with Cannon somewhere at that very instant... She had specially asked that he should be told. And indeed he had been told before even Mr and Mrs Orgreave... Cannon! She might at that very instant be in Cannon's arms.

It could be said of Edwin that he fully lived that night. Fate had at any rate roused him from the coma which most men called existence.

Simple Maggie was upset because, from Edwin's absence and her father's demeanour at supper, she knew that her menfolk had had another terrible discussion. And since her father offered no remark as to it, she guessed that this one must be even more serious that the last.

There was one thing that Edwin could not fit into any of his theories of the disaster which had overtaken him, and that was his memory of Hilda's divine gesture as she bent over Mr Shushions on the morning of the Centenary.



VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER ONE.

BOOK THREE--HIS FREEDOM.


AFTER A FUNERAL.

Four and a half years later, on a Tuesday night in April 1886, Edwin was reading in an easy-chair in his bedroom. He made a very image of solitary comfort. The easy-chair had been taken from the dining-room, silently, without permission, and Darius had apparently not noticed its removal. A deep chair designed by some one learned in the poses natural to the mortal body, it was firm where it ought to be firm, and where it ought to yield, there it yielded. By its own angles it threw the head slightly back, and the knees slightly up. Edwin's slippered feet rested on a hassock, and in front of the hassock was a red-glowing gas-stove. That stove, like the easy-chair, had been acquired by Edwin at his father's expense without his father's cognisance. It consumed gas whose price swelled the quarterly bill three times a year, and Darius observed nothing. He had not even entered his son's bedroom for several years. Each month seemed to limit further his interest in surrounding phenomena, and to centralise more completely all his faculties in his business. Over Edwin's head the gas jet flamed through one of Darius's special private burners, lighting the page of a little book, one of Cassell's "National Library," a new series of sixpenny reprints which had considerably excited the book-selling and the book-reading worlds, but which Darius had apparently quite ignored, though confronted in his house and in his shop by multitudinous examples of it. Sometimes Edwin would almost be persuaded to think that he might safely indulge any caprice whatever under his father's nose, and then the old man would notice some unusual trifle, of no conceivable importance, and go into a passion about it, and Maggie would say quietly, "I told you what would be happening one of these days," which would annoy Edwin. His annoyance was caused less by Maggie's `I told you so,' than by her lack of logic. If his father had ever overtaken him in some large and desperate caprice, such as the purchase of the gas-stove on the paternal account, he would have submitted in meekness to Maggie's triumphant reminder; but his father never did. It was always upon some perfectly innocent nothing, which the timidest son might have permitted himself, that the wrath of Darius overwhelmingly burst.

Maggie and Edwin understood each other on the whole very well. Only in minor points did their sympathy fail. And as Edwin would be exasperated because Maggie's attitude towards argument was that of a woman, so would Maggie resent a certain mulishness in him characteristic of the unfathomable stupid sex. Once a week, for example, when his room was `done out,' there was invariably a skirmish between them, because Edwin really did hate anybody to `meddle among his things.' The derangement of even a brush on the dressing-table would rankle in his mind. Also he was very `crotchety about his meals,' and on the subject of fresh air. Unless he was sitting in a perceptible draught, he thought he was being poisoned by nitrogen: but when he could see the curtain or blind trembling in the wind he was hygienically at ease. His existence was a series of catarrhal colds, which, however, as he would learnedly explain to Maggie, could not be connected, in the brain of a reasonable person, with currents of fresh air. Maggie mutely disdained his science. This, too, fretted him. Occasionally she would somewhat tartly assert that he was a regular old maid. The accusation made no impression on him at all. But when, more than ordinarily exacerbated, she sang out that he was `exactly like his father,' he felt wounded.

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TWO.

The appearance of his bedroom, and the fact that he enjoyed being in it alone, gave some ground for Maggie's first accusation. A screen hid the bed, and this screen was half covered with written papers of memoranda; roughly, it divided the room into dormitory and study. The whole chamber was occupied by Edwin's personal goods, great and small, ranged in the most careful order; it was full; in the occupation of a young man who was not precociously an old maid, it would have been littered. It was a complex and yet practical apparatus for daily use, completely organised for the production of comfort. Edwin would move about in it with the loving and assured gestures of a creator; and always he was improving its perfection. His bedroom was his passion.

Often, during the wilderness of the day, he would think of his bedroom as of a refuge, to which in the evening he should hasten. Ascending the stairs after the meal, his heart would run on in advance of his legs, and be within the room before his hand had opened the door. And then he would close the door, as upon the whole tedious world, and turn up the gas, and light the stove with an explosive plop, and settle himself. And in the first few minutes of reading he would with distinct, conscious pleasure, allow his attention to circle the room, dwelling upon piled and serried volumes, and delighting in orderliness and in convenience. And he would reflect: "This is my life. This is what I shall always live for. This is the best. And why not?" It seemed to him when he was alone in his bedroom and in the night, that he had respectably well solved the problem offered to him by destiny. He insisted to himself sharply that he was not made for marriage, that he had always known marriage to be impossible for him, that what had happened was bound to have happened. For a few weeks he had lived in a fool's paradise: that was all... Fantastic scheme, mad self-deception! In such wise he thought of his love-affair. His profound satisfaction was that none except his father knew of it, and even his father did not know how far it had gone. He felt that if the town had been aware of his jilting, he could not have borne the humiliation. To himself he had been horribly humiliated; but he had recovered in his own esteem.

It was only by very slow processes, by insensible degrees, that he had arrived at the stage of being able to say to his mirror, "I've got over that!" And who could judge better than he? He could trace no mark of the episode in his face. Save for the detail of a moustache, it seemed to him that he had looked on precisely the same unchangeable face for a dozen years. Strange, that suffering had left no sign! Strange, that, in the months just after Hilda's marriage, no acquaintance had taken him on one side and said, "What is the tragedy I can read on your features?"

And indeed the truth was that no one suspected. The vision of his face would remain with people long after he had passed them in the street, or spoken to them in the shop. The charm of his sadness persisted in their memory. But they would easily explain it to themselves by saying that his face had a naturally melancholy cast--a sort of accident that had happened to him in the beginning! He had a considerable reputation, of which he was imperfectly aware, for secretiveness, timidity, gentleness, and intellectual superiority. Sundry young women thought of him wistfully when smiling upon quite other young men, and would even kiss him while kissing them, according to the notorious perversity of love.

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THREE.

He was reading Swift's "Tale of a Tub" eagerly, tasting with a palate consciously fastidious and yet catholic, the fine savour of a masterpiece. By his secret enthusiasm, which would escape from him at rare intervals in a word to a friend, he was continuing the reputation of the "Tale of a Tub" from one century towards the next. A classic remains a classic only because a few hundred Edwins up and down England enjoy it so heartily that their pleasure becomes religious. Edwin, according to his programme, had no right to be amusing himself with Swift at that hour. The portly Hallam, whom he found tedious, ought to have been in his hands. But Swift had caught him and would not let him go. Herein was one of the consequences of the pocketableness of Cassell's new series. Edwin had been obliged to agree with Tom Orgreave (now a married man) that the books were not volumes for a collector; but they were so cheap, and they came from the press so often--once a week, and they could be carried so comfortably over the heart, that he could not resist most of them. His professed idea was that by their aid he could read smaller works in odd moments, at any time, thus surpassing his programme. He had not foreseen that Swift would make a breach in his programme, which was already in a bad way.

But he went on reading tranquilly, despite the damage to it; for in the immediate future shone the hope of the new life, when programmes