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

lower part was a cupboard; a sofa; and a large leather easy-chair which did not match the rest of the room. This easy-chair had its back to the window and its front legs a little towards the fireplace, so that Mr Clayhanger could read his newspaper with facility in daytime. At night the light fell a little awkwardly from the central chandelier, and Mr Clayhanger, if he happened to be reading, would continually shift his chair an inch or two to left or right, backwards or forwards, and would also continually glance up at the chandelier, as if accusing it of not doing its best. A common sight in the sitting-room was Mr Clayhanger balanced on a chair, the table having been pushed away, screwing the newest burner into the chandelier. When he was seated in his easy-chair the piano could not be played, because there was not sufficient space for the stool between the piano and his chair; nor could the fire be made up without disturbing him, because the japanned coal-box was on the same side of the hearth-rug as the chair. Thus, when the fire languished and Mr Clayhanger neglected it, the children had either to ask permission to step over his legs, or suggest that he should attend to the fire himself. Occasionally, when he was in one of his gay moods, he would humorously impede the efforts of the fire-maker with his feet, and if the fire-maker was Clara or Edwin, the child would tickle him, which brought him to his senses and forced him to shout: "None o' that! None o' that!"

The position of Mr Clayhanger's easy-chair--a detail apparently trifling--was in reality a strongly influencing factor in the family life, for it meant that the father's presence obsessed the room. And it could not be altered, for it depended on the window; the window was too small to be quite efficient. When the children reflected upon the history of their childhood they saw one important aspect of it as a long series of detached hours spent in the sitting-room, in a state of desire to do something that could not be done without disturbing father, and in a state of indecision whether or not to disturb him. If by chance, as sometimes occurred, he chose to sit on the sofa, which was unobtrusive in the corner away from the window, between the fireplace and the door, the room was instantly changed into something larger, freer, and less inconvenient.

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FIVE.

As the hour was approaching six, Edwin, on the way downstairs, looked in at the sitting-room for his father; but Darius was not there.

"Where's father?" he demanded.

"I don't know, I'm sure," said Maggie, at the sewing-machine. Maggie was aged twenty; dark, rather stout, with an expression at once benevolent and worried. She rarely seemed to belong to the same generation as her brother and sister. She consorted on equal terms with married women, and talked seriously of the same things as they did. Mr Clayhanger treated her somewhat differently from the other two. Yet, though he would often bid them accept her authority, he would now and then impair that authority by roughly `dressing her down' at the meal-table. She was a capable girl; she had much less firmness, and much more good-nature, than she seemed to have. She could not assert herself adequately. She `managed' very well; indeed she had `done wonders' in filling the place of the mother who had died when Clara was four and Edwin six, and she herself only ten. Responsibility, apprehension, and strained effort had printed their marks on her features. But the majority of acquaintances were more impressed by her good intention than by her capacity; they would call her `a nice thing.' The discerning minority, while saying with admiring conviction that she was `a very fine girl,' would regret that somehow she had not the faculty of `making the best of herself,' of `putting her best foot foremost.' And would they not heartily stand up for her with the superficial majority!

A thin, grey-haired, dreamy-eyed woman hurried into the room, bearing a noisy tray and followed by Clara with a white cloth. This was Mrs Nixon, the domestic staff of the Clayhanger household for years. Clara and Mrs Nixon swept Maggie's sewing materials from the corner of the table on to a chair, put Maggie's flower-glasses on to the ledge of the bookcase, folded up the green cloth, and began rapidly to lay the tea. Simultaneously Maggie, glancing at the clock, closed up her sewing-machine, and deposited her work in a basket. Clara, leaving the table, stooped to pick up the bits of cotton and white stuff that littered the carpet. The clock struck six.

"Now, sharpy!" she exclaimed curtly to Edwin, who stood hesitatingly with his hands in his pockets. "Can't you help Maggie to push that sewing-machine into the corner?"

"What on earth's up?" he inquired vaguely, but starting forward to help Maggie.

"She'll be here in a minute," said Maggie, almost under her breath, as she fitted on the cover of the sewing-machine.

"Who?" asked Edwin. "Oh! Auntie! I'd forgotten it was her night."

"As if anyone could forget!" murmured Clara, with sarcastic unbelief.

By this time the table was completely set.

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SIX.

Edwin wondered mildly, as he often wondered, at the extremely bitter tone in which Clara always referred to their Aunt Clara Hamps,--when Mrs Hamps was not there. Even Maggie's private attitude to Auntie Clara was scarcely more Christian. Mrs Hamps was the widowed younger sister of their mother, and she had taken a certain share in the supervision of Darius Clayhanger's domestic affairs after the death of Mrs Clayhanger. This latter fact might account, partially but not wholly, for the intense and steady dislike in which she was held by Maggie, Clara, and Mrs Nixon. Clara hated her own name because she had been `called after' her auntie. Mr Clayhanger `got on' excellently with his sister-in-law. He `thought highly' of her, and was indeed proud to have her for a relative. In their father's presence the girls never showed their dislike of Mrs Hamps; it was a secret pleasure shared between them and Mrs Nixon, and only disclosed to Edwin because the girls were indifferent to what Edwin might think. They casually despised him for somehow liking his auntie, for not seeing through her wiles; but they could count on his loyalty to themselves.

"Are you ready for tea, or aren't you?" Clara asked him. She frequently spoke to him as if she was the elder instead of the younger.

"Yes," he said. "But I must find father."

He went off, but he did not find his father in the shop, and after a few futile minutes he returned upstairs. Mrs Nixon preceded him, carrying the tea-urn, and she told him that his father had sent word into the kitchen that they were not to `wait tea' for him.


VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SEVEN.


AUNTIE HAMPS.

Mrs Hamps had splendidly arrived. The atmosphere of the sitting-room was changed. Maggie, smiling, wore her second-best black silk apron. Clara, smiling and laughing, wore a clean long white pinafore. Mrs Nixon, with her dreamy eyes less vacant than usual, greeted Mrs Ramps effusively, and effusively gave humble thanks for kind inquiries after her health. A stranger might have thought that these women were strongly attached to one another by ties of affection and respect. Edwin never understood how his sisters, especially Maggie, could practise such vast and eternal hypocrisy with his aunt. As for him, his aunt acted on him now, as generally, like a tonic. Some effluence from her quickened him. He put away the worry in connection with his father, and gave himself up to the physical pleasures of tea.

Aunt Clara was a handsome woman. She had been called--but not by men whose manners and code she would have approved--`a damned fine woman.' Her age was about forty, which at that period, in a woman's habit of mind, was the equivalent of about fifty to-day. Her latest photograph was considered to be very successful. It showed her standing behind a velvet chair and leaning her large but still shapely bust slightly over the chair. Her forearms, ruffled and braceleted, lay along the fringed back of the chair, and from one negligent hand depended a rose. A heavy curtain came downwards out of nothing into the picture, and the end of it lay coiled and draped on the seat of the chair. The great dress was of slate-coloured silk, with sleeves tight to the elbow, and thence, from a ribbon-bow, broadening to a wide, triangular climax that revealed quantities of lace at the wrists. The pointed ends of the sleeves were picked out with squares of velvet. A short and highly ornamental fringed and looped flounce waved grandly out behind from the waist to the level of the knees; and the stomacher recalled the ornamentation of the flounce; and both the stomacher and flounce gave contrasting value to the severe plainness of the skirt, designed to emphasise the quality of the silk. Round the neck was a lace collarette to match the furniture of the wrists, and the broad ends of the collarette were crossed on the bosom and held by a large jet brooch. Above that you saw a fine regular face, with a firm hard mouth and a very straight nose and dark eyebrows; small ears weighted with heavy jet ear-rings.

The photograph could not render the clear perfection of Aunt Clara's rosy skin; she had the colour and the flashing eye of a girl. But it did justice to her really magnificent black hair. This hair was all her own, and the coiffure seemed as ample as a judge's wig. From the low forehead the hair was parted exactly in the middle for about two inches; then plaited bands crossed and recrossed the scalp in profusion, forming behind a pattern exceedingly complicated, and down either side of the head, now behind the ear, now hiding it, now resting on the shoulders, now hanging clear of them, fell long multitudinous glossy curls. These curls--one of them in the photograph reached as far as the stomacher-- could not have been surpassed in Bursley.

She was a woman of terrific vitality. Her dead sister had been nothing in comparison with her. She had a glorious digestion, and was the envy of her brother-in-law--who suffered much from biliousness--because she could eat with perfect impunity hot buttered toast and raw celery in large quantities. Further, she had independent means, and no children to cause anxieties. Yet she was always, as the phrase went, `bearing up,' or, as another phrase went, `leaning hard.' Frances Ridley Havergal was her favourite author, and Frances Ridley Havergal's little book Lean Hard, was kept on her dressing-table. (The girls, however, averred that she never opened it.) Aunt Clara's spiritual life must be imagined as a continual, almost physical leaning on Christ. Nevertheless she never complained, and she was seldom depressed. Her desire, and her achievement, was to be bright, to take everything cheerfully, to look obstinately on the best side of things, and to instil this religion into others.

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TWO.

Thus, when it was announced that father had been called out unexpectedly, leaving an order that they were not to