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

business and don't act the fool! You needn't think you're going to be God A'mighty because you've got up a bit earlier for once in a way and been down to th' shop before breakfast."

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THREE.

In all his demeanour there was not the least indication of weakness. He might never have sat down on the stairs and cried! He might never have submitted feebly and perhaps gladly to the caresses of Clara and the soothings of Auntie Hamps! Impossible to convince him that he was cut off from the world! Impossible even to believe it! Was this the man that Edwin and the Bank manager and the doctor and all the others had been disposing of as though he were an automaton accurately responsive to external suggestion?

"Look here," Edwin knew that he ought to say. "Let it be clearly understood once for all--I'm the boss now! I have the authority in my pocket and you must sign it, and quick too! I shall do my best for you, but I don't mean to be bullied while I'm doing it!"

But he could not say it. Nor could his heart emotionally feel it.

He turned away sheepishly, and then he faced his father again, with a distressed, apologetic smile.

"Well then," he asked, "who is going to sign cheques?"

"I am," said Darius.

"But you know what the doctor said! You know what you promised him!"

"What did the doctor say?"

"He said you weren't to do anything at all. And you said you wouldn't. What's more, you said you didn't want to."

Darius sneered.

"I reckon I can sign cheques," he said. "And I reckon I can endorse cheques... So it's got to that! I can't sign my own name now. I shall show some of you whether I can't sign my own name!"

"You know it isn't simply signing them. You know if I bring cheques up for you to sign you'll begin worrying about them at once, and--and there'll be no end to it. You'd much better--"

"Shut up!" It was like a clap of thunder.

Edwin hesitated an instant and then went towards the house. He could hear his father muttering "Whipper-snapper!"

"And I'll tell you another thing," Darius bawled across the garden-- assuredly his voice would reach the street. "It was like your impudence to go to the Bank like that without asking me first! `They tell you at the Bank!' `They tell you at the Bank!' Anything else they told you at the Bank?" Then a snort.

Edwin was humiliated and baffled. He knew not what he could do. The situation became impossible immediately it was faced. He felt also very resentful, and resentment was capturing him, when suddenly an idea seemed to pull him by the sleeve: "All this is part of his disease. It's part of his disease that he can't see the point of a thing." And the idea was insistent, and under its insistence Edwin's resentment changed to melancholy. He said to himself that he must think of his father as a child. He blamed himself, in a sort of pleasurable luxury of remorse, for all the anger which during all his life he had felt against his father. His father's unreasonableness had not been a fault, but a misfortune. His father had been not a tyrant, but a victim. His brain must always have been wrong! And now he was doomed, and the worst part of his doom was that he was unaware of it. And in the thought of Darius ignorantly blustering within the walled garden, in the spring sunshine, condemned, cut off, helpless at the last, pitiable at the last, there was something inexpressibly poignant. And the sunshine seemed a shame; and Edwin's youth and mental vigour seemed a shame.

Nevertheless Edwin knew not what to do.

"Master Edwin," said Mrs Nixon, who was rubbing the balustrade of the stairs, "you munna' cross him like that." She jerked her head in the direction of the garden. The garden door stood open.

If he had not felt solemn and superior, he could have snapped off that head of hers.

"Is my breakfast ready?" he asked. He hung up his hat, and absently took the little parcel which he had left on the marble ledge of the umbrella-stand.


VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER SEVEN.


LAID ASIDE.

The safe, since the abandonment of the business premises by the family, had stood in a corner of a small nondescript room, sometimes vaguely called the safe-room, between the shop and what had once been the kitchen. It was a considerable safe, and it had the room practically to itself. As Edwin unlocked it, and the prodigious door swung with silent smoothness to his pull, he was aware of a very romantic feeling of exploration. He had seen the inside of the safe before; he had even opened the safe, and taken something from it, under his father's orders. But he had never had leisure, nor licence, to inspect its interior. From his boyhood had survived the notion that it must contain many marvels. In spite of himself his attitude was one of awe.

The first thing that met his eye was his father's large, black-bound private cash-book, which constituted the most sacred and mysterious document in the accountancy of the business. Edwin handled, and kept, all the books save that. At the beginning of the previous week he and Stifford had achieved the task of sending out the quarterly accounts, and of one sort or another there were some seven hundred quarterly accounts. Edwin was familiar with every detail of the printer's work-book, the daybook, the combined book colloquially called `invoice and ledger,' the `bought' ledger, and the shop cash-book. But he could form no sure idea of the total dimensions and results of the business, because his father always kept the ultimate castings to himself, and never displayed his private cash-book under any circumstances. By ingenuity and perseverance Edwin might have triumphed over Darius's mania for secrecy; but he did not care to do so; perhaps pride even more than honour caused him to refrain.

Now he held the book, and saw that only a portion of it was in the nature of a cash-book; the rest comprised summaries and general statements. The statement for the year 1885, so far as he could hastily decipher its meaning, showed a profit of 821 pounds. He was not surprised, and yet the sight of the figures in his father's heavy, scratchy hand was curiously impressive.

His father could keep nothing from him now. The interior of the safe was like a city that had capitulated; no law ran in it but his law, and he was absolute; he could commit infamies in the city and none might criticise. He turned over piles of dusty cheque-counterfoils, and old pass-books and other old books of account. He saw a linen bag crammed with four-shilling pieces (whenever Darius obtained a double florin he put it aside), and one or two old watches of no value. Also the title-deeds of the house at Bleakridge, their latest parchment still white with pounce; the mortgage, then, had been repaid, a fact which Darius had managed on principle to conceal from his son. Then he came to the four drawers, and in some of these he discovered a number of miscellaneous share-certificates with their big seals. He knew that his father had investments--it was impossible to inhabit the shop-cubicle with his father and not know that--but he had no conception of their extent or their value. Always he had regarded all those matters as foreign to himself, refusing to allow curiosity in regard to them to awake. Now he was differently minded, owing to the mere physical weight in his pocket of a bunch of keys! In a hasty examination he gathered that the stock was chiefly in railways and shipping, and that it amounted to large sums--anyhow quite a number of thousands. He was frankly astonished. How had his father's clumsy, slow intellect been able to cope with the dangerous intricacies of the Stock Exchange? It seemed incredible; and yet he had known quite well that his father was an investor!

"Of course he isn't keen on giving it all up!" Edwin exclaimed aloud suddenly. "I wonder he even forked out the keys as easily as he did!"

The view of the safe enabled him to perform a feat which very few children ever achieve; he put himself in his father's place. And it was with benevolence, not with exasperation, that he puzzled his head to invent some device for defeating the old man's obstinacy about cheque-signing.

One drawer was evidently not in regular use. Often, in a series of drawers, one of them falls into the idle habit of being overlooked, slipping gradually by custom into desuetude, though other drawers may overflow. This drawer held merely a few scraps of sample paper, and a map, all dusty. He drew forth the map. It was coloured, and in shaky Roman characters underneath it ran the legend, "The County of Staffordshire." He seemed to recognise the map. On the back he read, in his father's handwriting: "Drawn and coloured without help by my son Edwin, aged nine."

He had utterly forgotten it. He could in no detail recall the circumstances in which he had produced the wonderful map. A childish, rude effort! ... Still, rather remarkable that at the age of nine (perhaps even before he had begun to attend the Oldcastle Middle School) he should have chosen to do a county map instead of a map of that country beloved by all juvenile map-drawers, Ireland! He must have copied it from the map in Lewis's Gazetteer of England and Wales... Twenty-one years ago, nearly! He might, from the peculiar effect on him, have just discovered the mummy of the boy that once had been Edwin... And his father had kept the map for over twenty years. The old cock must have been deuced proud of it once! Not that he ever said so--Edwin was sure of that!

"Now you needn't get sentimental!" he told himself. Like Maggie he had a fearful, an almost morbid, horror of sentimentality. But he could not arrest the softening of his heart, as he smiled at the naivete of the map and at his father's parental simplicity.

As he was closing the safe, Stifford, agitated, hurried into the room.

"Please, sir, Mr Clayhanger's in the Square. I thought I'd better tell you."

"What? Father?"

"Yes, sir. He's standing opposite the chapel and he keeps looking this way. I thought you'd like--"

Edwin turned the key, and ran forth, stumbling, as he entered the shop, against the step-ladder which, with the paper-boy at the summit of it, overtopped the doorway. He wondered why he should run, and why Stifford's face was so obviously apprehensive.

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TWO.

Darius Clayhanger was standing at the north-east corner of the little Square, half-way up Duck Bank, at the edge of the pavement. And his gaze, hesitant and feeble, seemed to be upon the shop. He merely stood there, moveless, and yet the sight of