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

was not seriously wrong, waited on his knees to be accepted and to do its office. Unlike the magazines of his youth, its aim was to soothe and flatter, not to disconcert and impeach. He looked at the refined illustrations of South American capitals and of picturesque corners in Provence, and at the smooth or the rugged portraits of great statesmen and great bridges; all just as true to reality as the brilliant letterpress; and he tried to slip into the rectified and softened world offered by the magazine. He did not criticise the presentment. He did nothing so subtle as to ask himself whether if he encountered the reality he would recognise it from the presentment. He wanted the illusions of "Harper's." He desired the comfort, the distraction, and the pleasant ideal longings which they aroused. But they were a medicine which he discovered he was not in a condition to absorb, a medicine therefore useless. There was no effective medicine for his trouble.

His trouble was that he objected to being disturbed. At first he had been pleasantly excited, but now he shrank away at the call to freedom, to action, to responsibility. All the slave in him protested against the knocking off of irons, and the imperative kick into the open air. He saw suddenly that in the calm of regular habit and of subjection, he had arrived at something that closely resembled happiness. He wished not to lose it, knowing that it was already gone. Actually, for his own sake, and quite apart from his father, he would have been ready, were it possible, to cancel the previous twenty-four hours. Everything was ominous, and he wandering about, lost, amid menaces... Why, even his cherished programmes of reading were smashed... Hallam! ... True, to-night was not a night appointed for reading, but to-morrow night was. And would he be able to read to-morrow night? No, a hundred new complications would have arisen to harass him and to dispossess him of his tranquillity!

Destiny was demanding from him a huge effort, unexpected and formidable, and the whole of his being weakly complained, asking to be exempted, but asking without any hope of success; for all his faculties and his desires knew that his conscience was ultimately their master.

Talk to his father about making a will, eh! Besides being disgusting, it was laughable. Those people did not know his father as he did. He foresaw that, even in conducting the routine of business, he would have difficulties with his father over the simplest details. In particular there was one indispensable preliminary to the old man's complete repose, and his first duty on the morrow would be to endeavour to arrange this preliminary with his father; but he scarcely hoped to succeed.

On the portion of the mantelpiece reserved for books in actual use lay the "Tale of a Tub," last night so enchanting. And now he had positively forgotten it. He yawned, and prepared for bed. If he could not read "Harper's," perhaps he could read Swift.

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FOUR.

He lay in bed. The gas was out, the stove was out, and according to his custom he was reading himself to sleep by the light of a candle in a sconce attached to the bed's head. His eyes ran along line after line and down page after page, and transmitted nothing coherent to his brain.

Then there were steps on the stair. His father was at last coming to bed. He was a little relieved, though he had been quite prepared to go to sleep and leave his father below. Why not? The steps died at the top of the stair, but an irregular creaking continued. After a pause the door was pushed open; and after another pause the figure of his father came into view, breathing loudly.

"Edwin, are you asleep?" Darius asked anxiously. Edwin wondered what could be the matter, but he answered with lightness, "Nearly."

"I've not put th' light out down yon! Happen you'd better put it out." There was in his father's voice a note of dependence upon him, of appeal to him.

"Funny!" he thought, and said aloud, "All right."

He jumped up. His father thudded off deliberately to his own room, apparently relieved of a fearful oppression, but still fixed in sadness.

On the previous night Edwin had extinguished the hall-gas and come last to bed; and again to-night. But to-night with what a different sentiment of genuine, permanent responsibility! The appealing feebleness of his father's attitude seemed to give him strength. Surely a man so weak and fallen from tyranny could not cause much trouble! Edwin now had some hope that the unavoidable preliminary to the invalid's retirement might be achieved without too much difficulty. He braced himself.


VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER SIX.


KEYS AND CHEQUES.

Coming up Trafalgar Road at twenty minutes past nine in the bright, astringent morning, Edwin carried by a string a little round parcel which for him contained the inspiring symbol of his new life. By mere accident he had wakened and had risen early, arriving at the shop before half-past seven. He had deliberately lifted on to his shoulders the whole burden of the shop and the printing business, and as soon as he felt its weight securely lodged he became extraordinarily animated and vigorous; even gay. He had worked with a most agreeable sense of energy until nearly nine o'clock; and then, having first called at the ironmonger's, had stepped into the bank at the top of Saint Luke's Square a moment after its doors opened, and had five minutes' exciting conversation with the manager. After which, with righteous hunger in his belly and the symbol in his hand, he had come home to breakfast. The symbol was such as could be obtained at any ironmonger's: an alarm clock. Mrs Nixon had grown less reliable than formerly as an alarm clock; machinery was now supplanting her.

Dr Heve came out of the house, and Dr Heve too seemed gay with fine resolutions. The two met on the doorstep, each full of a justifiable self-satisfaction. The doctor explained that he had come thus early because Mr Clayhanger was one of those cases upon which he could look in casually at any time. In the sunshine they talked under the porch of early rising, as men who understood the value of that art. Edwin could see that Dr Heve's life was a series of little habits which would never allow themselves to be interfered with by any large interest, and he despised the man's womanish smile. Nevertheless his new respect for him did not weaken; he decided that he was a very decent fellow in his way, and he was more impressed than he would admit by the amount of work that the doctor had for years been doing in the morning before his intellectual superiors had sat up in bed. And he imagined that it might be even more agreeable to read in the fresh stillness of the morning than in the solitary night.

Then they returned to the case of Darius. The doctor was more communicative, and they were both cheerfully matter-of-fact concerning it. There it was, to be made the best of! And that Darius could never handle business again, and that in about two years his doom would be accomplished--these were basic facts, axiomatic. The doctor had seen his patient in the garden, and he suggested that if Darius could be persuaded to interest himself in gardening... They discussed his medicine, his meals, his digestion, and the great, impossible dream of `taking him away,' `out of it all.' And every now and then Dr Heve dropped some little hint as to the management of Darius.

The ticking parcel drew the discreet attention of the doctor. The machine was one guaranteed to go in any position, and was much more difficult to stop than to start.

"It's only an alarm," said Edwin, not without self-consciousness.

The doctor went, tripping neatly and optimistically, off towards his own breakfast. He got up earlier than his horse.

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TWO.

Darius was still in the garden when Edwin went to him. He had put on his daily suit, and was leisurely digging in an uncultivated patch of ground. He stuck the spade into the earth perpendicularly and deep, and when he tried to prise it up and it would not yield because of a concealed half-brick, he put his tongue between his teeth and then bit his lower lip, controlling himself, determined to get the better of the spade and the brick by persuasively humouring them. He took no notice whatever of Edwin.

"I see you aren't losing any time," said Edwin, who felt as though he were engaging in small-talk with a stranger.

"Are you?" Darius replied, without turning his head.

"I've just come up for a bit of breakfast. Everything's all right," he said. He would have liked to add: "I was in the shop before seven-thirty," but he was too proud.

After a pause, he ventured, essaying the casual--

"I say, father, I shall want the keys of the desk, and all that."

"Keys o' th' desk!" Darius muttered, leaning on the spade, as though demanding in stupefaction, "What on earth can you want the keys for?"

"Well--" Edwin stammered.

But the proposition was too obvious to be denied. Darius left the spade to stand up by itself, and stared.

"Got 'em in your pocket?" Edwin inquired.

Slowly Darius drew forth a heavy, glittering bunch of keys, one of the chief insignia of his dominion, and began to fumble at it.

"You needn't take any of them off. I expect I know which is which," said Edwin, holding out his hand.

Darius hesitated, and then yielded up the bunch.

"Thanks," said Edwin lightly.

But the old man's reluctance to perform this simple and absolutely necessary act of surrender, the old man's air of having done something tremendous--these signs frightened Edwin and shook his courage for the demand compared to which the demand for the keys was naught. Still, the affair had to be carried through.

"And I say," he proceeded, jingling the keys, "about signing and endorsing cheques. They tell me at the Bank that if you sign a general authority to me to do it for you, that will be enough."

He could not avoid looking guilty. He almost felt guilty, almost felt as if he were plotting against his father's welfare. And as he spoke his words seemed unreal and his suggestion fantastic. At the Bank the plan had been simple, easy, and perfectly natural. But there could be no doubt, that as he had walked up Trafalgar Road, receding from the Bank and approaching his father, the plan had gradually lost those attractive qualities. And now in the garden it was merely monstrous.

Silent, Darius resumed the spade.

"Well," said Edwin desperately. "What about it?"

"Do you think"--Darius glowered upon him with heavy, desolating scorn--"do you think as I'm going to let you sign my cheques for me? You're taking too much on yourself, my lad."

"But--"

"I tell ye you're taking too much on yourself!" he began to shout menacingly. "Get about your