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

I dressing or undressing?" And he would be capable of so involving himself in a shirt, if Edwin were not there to direct, that much patience was needed for his extrication. His misapprehensions and mistakes frequently reached the grotesque. As habit threw them more and more intimately together, the trusting dependence of Darius on Edwin increased. At morning and evening the expression of that intensely mournful visage seemed to be saying as its gaze met Edwin's, "Here is the one clear-sighted, powerful being who can guide me through this complex and frightful problem of my clothes." A suit, for Darius, had become as intricate as a quadratic equation. And, in Edwin, compassion and irritation fought an interminable guerilla. Now one obtained the advantage, now the other. His nerves demanded relief from the friction, but he could offer them no holiday, not one single day's holiday. Twice every day he had to manoeuvre and persuade that ponderous, irrational body in his father's bedroom. Maggie helped the body to feed itself at table. But Maggie apparently had no nerves.

"I shall never go down them stairs again," said Darius, as if in fatigued disgust, on the ottoman.

"Oh, nonsense!" Edwin exclaimed.

Darius shook his head solemnly, and looked at vacancy.

"Well, we'll talk about that to-morrow," said Edwin, and with the skill of regular practice drew out the ends of the bow of his father's necktie. He had gradually evolved a complete code of rules covering the entire process of the toilette, and he insisted on their observance. Every article had its order in the ceremony and its place in the room. Never had the room been so tidy, nor the rites so expeditious, as in the final months of Darius's malady.

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THREE.

The cumbrous body lay in bed. The bed was in an architecturally contrived recess, sheltered from both the large window and the door. Over its head was the gas-bracket and the bell-knob. At one side was a night-table, and at the other a chair. In front of the night-table were Darius's slippers. On the chair were certain clothes. From a hook near the night-table, and almost over the slippers, hung his dressing-gown. Seen from the bed, the dressing-table, at the window, appeared to be a long way off, and the wardrobe was a long way off in another direction. The gas was turned low. It threw a pale illumination on the bed, and gleamed on a curve of mahogany here and there in the distances.

Edwin looked at his father, to be sure that all was in order, that nothing had been forgotten. The body seemed monstrous and shapeless beneath the thickly piled clothes; and from the edge of the eider-down, making a valley in the pillow, the bearded face projected, in a manner grotesque and ridiculous. A clock struck seven in another part of the house.

"What time's that?" Darius murmured.

"Seven," said Edwin, standing close to him.

Darius raised himself slowly and clumsily on one elbow.

"Here! But look here!" Edwin protested. "I've just fixed you up--"

The old man ignored him, and one of those unnaturally white hands stretched forth to the night-table, which was on the side of the bed opposite to Edwin. Darius's gold watch and chain lay on the night-table.

"I've wound it up! I've wound it up!" said Edwin, a little crossly. "What are you worrying at?"

But Darius, silent, continued to manoeuvre his flannelled arm so as to possess the watch. At length he seized the chain, and, shifting his weight to the other elbow, held out the watch and chain to Edwin, with a most piteous expression. Edwin could see in the twilight that his father was ready to weep.

"I want ye--" the old man began, and then burst into violent sobs; and the watch dangled dangerously.

"Come now!" Edwin tried to soothe him, forcing himself to be kindly. "What is it? I tell you I've wound it up all right. And it's correct time to a tick." He consulted his own silver watch.

With a tremendous effort, Darius mastered his sobs, and began once more, "I want ye--"

He tried several times, but his emotion overcame him each time before he could force the message out. It was always too quick for him. Silent, he could control it, but he could not simultaneously control it and speak.

"Never mind," said Edwin. "We'll see about that tomorrow." And he wondered what bizarre project affecting the watch had entered his father's mind. Perhaps he wanted it set a quarter of an hour fast.

Darius dropped the watch on the eider-down, and sighed in despair, and fell back on the pillow and shut his eyes. Edwin restored the watch to the night-table.

Later, he crept into the dim room. Darius was snoring under the twilight of the gas. Like an unhappy child, he had found refuge in sleep from the enormous, infantile problems of his existence. And it was so pathetic, so distressing, that Edwin, as he gazed at that beard and those gold teeth, could have sobbed too.


VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER FOURTEEN.


THE WATCH.

When Edwin the next morning, rather earlier than usual on Sundays, came forth from his bedroom to go into the bathroom, he was startled by a voice from his father's bedroom calling him. It was Maggie's. She had heard him open his door, and she joined him on the landing.

"I was waiting for you to be getting up," she said in a quiet tone. "I don't think father's so well, and I was wondering whether I hadn't better send Jane down for the doctor. It's not certain he'll call to-day if he isn't specially fetched."

"Why?" said Edwin. "What's up?"

"Oh, nothing," Maggie answered. "Nothing particular, but you didn't hear him ringing in the night?"

"Ringing? No! What time?"

"About one o'clock. Jane heard the bell, and she woke me. So I got up to him. He said he couldn't do with being alone."

"What did you do?"

"I made him something hot and stayed with him."

"What? All night?"

"Yes," said Maggie.

"But why didn't you call me?"

"What was the good?"

"You ought to have called me," he said with curt displeasure, not really against Maggie, but against himself for having heard naught of all these happenings. Maggie had no appearance of having passed the night by her father's bedside.

"Oh," she said lightly, "I dozed a bit now and then. And as soon as the girl was up I got her to come and sit with him while I spruced myself."

"I'll have a look at him," said Edwin, in another tone.

"Yes, I wish you would." Now, as often, he was struck by Maggie's singular deference to him, her submission to his judgement. In the past her attitude had been different; she had exercised the moral rights of an elder sister; but latterly she had mysteriously transformed herself into a younger sister.

He went towards his father, drawing his dressing-gown more closely round him. The chamber had an aspect of freshness and tidiness that made it almost gay--until he looked at the object in the smoothed and rectified bed. He nodded to his father, who merely gazed at him. There was no definite, definable change in the old man's face, but his bearing, even as he lay, was appreciably more melancholy and impotent. The mere sight of a man so broken and so sad was humiliating to the humanity which Edwin shared with him.

"Well, father," he nodded familiarly. "Don't feel like getting up, eh?" And, remembering that he was the head of the house, the source of authority and of strength, he tried to be cheerful, casual, and invigorating, and was disgusted by the futile inefficiency of the attempt. He had not, like Auntie Hamps, devoted a lifetime to the study of the trick.

Darius feebly moved his hopeless head to signify a negative.

And Edwin thought, with a lancinating pain, of what the old man had mumbled on the previous evening: "I shall never go down them stairs again." Perhaps the old man never would go down those stairs again! He had paid no serious attention to the remark at the moment, but now it presented itself to him as a solemn and prophetic utterance, of such as are remembered with awe for years and continue to jut up clear in the mind when all minor souvenirs of the time have crumbled away. And he would have given much of his pride to be able to go back and help the old man upstairs once more, and do it with a more loving patience.

"I've sent Jane," said Maggie, returning to the bedroom. "You'd better go and finish dressing."

On coming out of the bathroom he discovered Albert on the landing, waiting.

"The missis would have me come up and see how he was," said Albert. "So I've run in between school and chapel. When I told her what a doing he gave us, getting him upstairs, she was quite in a way, and she would have me come up. The kid's better." He was exceedingly and quite genuinely fraternal, not having his wife's faculty for nourishing a feud.

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TWO.

The spectacular developments were rapid. In the afternoon Auntie Hamps, Clara, Maggie, and Edwin were grouped around the bed of Darius. A fire burned in the grate; flowers were on the dressing-table. An extra table had been placed at the foot of the bed. The room was a sick-room.

Dr Heve had called, and had said that the patient's desire not to be left alone was a symptom of gravity. He suggested a nurse, and when Maggie, startled, said that perhaps they could manage without a nurse, he inquired how. And as he talked he seemed to be more persuaded that a nurse was necessary, if only for night duty, and in the end he went himself to the new Telephone Exchange and ordered a nurse from the Pirehill Infirmary Nursing Home. And the dramatic thing was that within two hours and a half the nurse had arrived. And in ten minutes after that it had been arranged that she should have Maggie's bedroom and that she should take night duty, and in order that she might be fresh for the night she had gone straight off to bed.

Then Clara had arrived, in spite of the illness of her baby, and Auntie Hamps had forced herself up Trafalgar Road, in spite of her rheumatism. And a lengthy confabulation between the women had occurred in the dining-room, not about the invalid, but about what `she' had said, and about the etiquette of treating `her,' and about what `she' looked like and shaped like; `her' and `she' being the professional nurse. With a professional nurse in it, each woman sincerely felt that the house was no longer itself, that it had become the house of the enemy.

Darius lay supine before them, physically and spiritually abased, accepting, like a victim who is too weak even to be ashamed, the cooings and strokings and prayers and optimistic mendacities of Auntie