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

did she seem to be above him. His ideas had changed, but there could be no doubt that in an alliance between an Orgreave and a Clayhanger, it would be the Clayhanger who stood to gain the greater advantage. There she was! If she was not waiting for him, she was waiting--for some one! Why not for him as well as for another?

He said to himself--

"Why shouldn't I be happy? That other thing is all over!"

It was, in fact, years since the name of Hilda had ever been mentioned between them. Why should he not be happy? There was nothing to prevent her from being happy. His father's illness could not endure for ever. One day soon he would be free in theory as well as in practice. With no tie and no duty (Maggie was negligible) he would have both money and position. What might his life not be with a woman like Janet, brilliant, beautiful, elegant, and faithful? He pictured that life, and even the vision of it dazzled him. Janet his! Janet always there, presiding over a home which was his home, wearing hats that he had paid for, appealing constantly to his judgement, and meaning him when she said, `My husband.' He saw her in the close and tender intimacy of marriage, acquiescent, exquisite, yielding, calmly accustomed to him, modest, but with a different modesty! It was a vision surpassing visions. And there she was on the other side of the net!

With her he could be his finest self. He would not have to hide his finest self from ridicule, as often now, among his own family.

She was a fine woman! He watched the free movement of her waist, and the curvings and flyings of her short tennis skirt. And there was something strangely feminine about the neck of her blouse, now that he examined it.

"Your game!" she cried. "That's four double faults I've served. I can't play! I really don't think I can. There's something the matter with me! Or else it's the net that's too high. Those boys will keep screwing it up!"

She had a pouting, capricious air, and it delighted him. Never had he seen her so enchantingly girlish as, by a curious hazard, he saw her now. Why should he not he happy? Why should he not wake up out of his nightmare and begin to live? In a momentary flash he seemed to see his past in a true perspective, as it really was, as some well-balanced person not himself would have seen it. Mere morbidity to say, as he had been saying privately for years, that marriage was not for him! Marriage emphatically was for him, if only because he had fine ideals of it. Most people who married were too stupid to get the value of their adventure. Celibacy was grotesque, cowardly, and pitiful--no matter how intellectual the celibate--and it was no use pretending the contrary.

A masculine gesture, an advance, a bracing of the male in him ... probably nothing else was needed.

"Well," he said boldly, "if you don't want to play, let's sit down and rest." And then he gave a nervous little laugh.

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TWO.

They sat down on the bench that was shaded by the old elderberry tree. Visually, the situation had all the characteristics of an idyllic courtship.

"I suppose it's Alicia's engagement," she said, smiling reflectively, "that's put me off my game. They do upset you, those things do, and you don't know why... It isn't as if Alicia was the first--I mean of us girls. There was Marian; but then, of course, that was so long ago, and I was only a chit."

"Yes," he murmured vaguely; and though she seemed to be waiting for him to say more, he merely repeated, "Yes."

Such was his sole contribution to this topic, so suitable to the situation, so promising, so easy of treatment. They were so friendly that he was under no social obligation to talk for the sake of talking.

That was it: they were too friendly. She sat within a foot of him, reclining against the sloping back of the bench, and idly dangling one white-shod foot; her long hands lay on her knees. She was there in all her perfection. But by some sinister magic, as she had approached him and their paths had met at the bench, his vision had faded. Now, she was no longer a woman and he a man. Now, the curvings of her drapery from the elegant waistband were no longer a provocation. She was immediately beneath his eye, and he recognised her again for what she was--Janet! Precisely Janet--no less and no more! But her beauty, her charm, her faculty for affection--surely... No! His instinct was deaf to all `buts.' His instinct did not argue; it cooled. Fancy had created a vision in an instant out of an idea, and in an instant the vision had died. He remembered Hilda with painful intensity. He remembered the feel of her frock under his hand in the cubicle, and the odour of her flesh that was like fruit. His cursed constancy! ... Could he not get Hilda out of his bones? Did she sleep in his bones like a malady that awakes whenever it is disrespectfully treated?

He grew melancholy. Accustomed to savour the sadness of existence, he soon accepted the new mood without resentment.

He resigned himself to the destruction of his dream. He was like a captive whose cell has been opened in mistake, and who is too gentle to rave when he sees it shut again. Only in secret he poured an indifferent, careless scorn upon Auntie Hamps.

They played a whole interminable set, and then Edwin went home, possibly marvelling at the variety of experience that a single hour may contain.


VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER TWELVE.


REVENGE.

Edwin re-entered his home with a feeling of dismayed resignation. There was then no escape, and never could be any escape, from the existence to which he was accustomed; even after his father's death, his existence would still be essentially the same--incomplete and sterile. He accepted the destiny, but he was daunted by it.

He quietly shut the front door, which had been ajar, and as he did so he heard voices in the drawing-room.

"I tell ye I'm going to grow mushrooms," Darius was saying. "Can't I grow mushrooms in my own cellar?" Then a snort.

"I don't think it'll be a good thing," was Maggie's calm reply.

"Ye've said that afore. Why won't it be a good thing? And what's it got to do with you?" The voice of Darius, ordinarily weak and languid, was rising and becoming strong.

"Well, you'd be falling up and down the cellar steps. You know how dark they are. Supposing you hurt yourself?"

"Ye'd only be too glad if I killed mysen!" said Darius, with a touch of his ancient grimness.

There was a pause.

"And it seems they want a lot of attention, mushrooms do," Maggie went on with unperturbed placidity. "You'd never be able to do it."

"Jane could help me," said Darius, in the tone of one who is rather pleased with an ingenious suggestion.

"Oh no, she couldn't!" Maggie exclaimed, with a peculiar humorous dryness which she employed only on the rarest occasions. Jane was the desired Bathsheba.

"And I say she could!" the old man shouted with surprising vigour. "Her does nothing! What does Mrs Nixon do? What do you do? Three great strapping women in the house and doing nought! I say she shall!" The voice dropped and snarled. "Who's master here? Is it me, or is it the cat? D'ye think as I can't turn ye all out of it neck and crop, if I've a mind? You and Edwin, and the lot of ye! And to-night too! Give me some money now, and quicker than that! I've got nought but sovereigns and notes. I'll go down and get the spawn myself--ay! and order the earth too! I'll make it my business to show my childer--But I mun have some change for my car fares." He breathed heavily.

"I'm sure Edwin won't like it," Maggie murmured.

"Edwin! Hast told Edwin?" Darius also murmured, but it was a murmur of rage.

"No, I haven't. Edwin's got quite enough on his hands as it is, without any other worries."

There was the noise of a sudden movement, and of a chair falling.

"Bugger you all!" Darius burst out with a fury whose restraint showed that he had unsuspected reserves of strength. And then he began to swear. Edwin, like many timid men, often used forbidden words with much ferocity in private. Once he had had a long philosophic argument with Tom Orgreave on the subject of profanity. They had discussed all aspects of it, from its religious origin to its psychological results, and Edwin's theory had been that it was only improper by a purely superstitious convention, and that no man of sense could possibly be offended, in himself, by the mere sound of words that had been deprived of meaning. He might be offended on behalf of an unreasoning fellow-listener, such as a woman, but not personally. Edwin now discovered that his theory did not hold. He was offended. He was almost horrified. He had never in his life till that moment heard Darius swear. He heard him now. He considered himself to be a fairly first-class authority on swearing; he thought that he was familiar with all the sacred words and with all the combinations of them. He was mistaken. His father's profanity was a brilliant and appalling revelation. It comprised words which were strange to him, and strange perversions that renewed the vigour of decrepit words. For Edwin, it was a whole series of fresh formulae, brutal and shameless beyond his experience, full of images and similes of the most startling candour, and drawing its inspiration always from the sickening bases of life. Darius had remembered with ease the vocabulary to which he was hourly accustomed when he began life as a man of seven. For more than fifty years he had carried within himself these vestiges of a barbarism which his children had never even conceived, and now he threw them out in all their crudity at his daughter. And when she did not blench, he began to accuse her as men were used to accuse their daughters in the bright days of the Sailor King. He invented enormities which she had committed, and there would have been no obscene infamy of which Maggie was not guilty, if Edwin--more by instinct than by volition--had not pushed open the door and entered the drawing-room.

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TWO.

He was angry, and the sight of the flushed meekness of his sister, as she leaned quietly with her back against an easy-chair, made him angrier.

"Enough of this!" he said gruffly and peremptorily.

Darius, with scarcely a break, continued.

"I say enough of this!" Edwin cried, with increased harshness.