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

child was on the other--just opposite Howson's. My belief is she'd lost all control over the little jockey. Oh! A regular little jockey! You could see that at once. `Now, George, come along,' she called to him. And then he shouted, `I want you to come on this side, auntie.' Of course I couldn't stop to see it out. She was so busy with him she only just moved to me."

"George? George?" Maggie consulted her memory. "How old was he, about?"

"Seven or eight, I should say."

"Well, it couldn't be one of Tom's children. Nor Alicia's."

"No," said Auntie Hamps. "And I always understood that the eldest daughter's--what's her name?"

"Marian."

"Marian's were all girls."

"I believe they are. Aren't they, Edwin?"

"How can I tell?" said Edwin. It was a marvel to him how his auntie collected her information. Neither she nor Clara had ever been in the slightest degree familiar with the Orgreaves, and Maggie, so far as he knew, was not a gossiper. He thought he perceived, however, the explanation of Mrs Hamps's visit. She had encountered in the street a phenomenon which would not harmonise with facts of her own knowledge, and the discrepancy had disturbed her to such an extent that she had been obliged to call in search of relief. There was that, and there was also her natural inclination to show herself off on her triumphant sixtieth birthday.

"Charles Orgreave isn't married, is he?" she inquired.

"No," said Maggie.

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SEVEN.

Silence fell upon this enigma of Janet's entirely unaccountable nephew.

"Charlie may be married," said Edwin humorously, at length. "You never know! It's a funny world! I suppose you've seen," he looked particularly at his auntie, "that your friend Parnell's dead?"

She affected to be outraged.

"I've seen that Parnell is dead," she rebuked him, with solemn quietness. "I saw it on a poster as I came up. I don't want to be uncharitable, but it was the best thing he could do. I do hope we've heard the last of all this Home Rule now!"

Like many people Mrs Hamps was apparently convinced that the explanation of Parnell's scandalous fall and of his early death was to be found in the inherent viciousness of the Home Rule cause, and also that the circumstances of his end were a proof that Home Rule was cursed of God. She reasoned with equal power forwards and backwards. And she was so earnest and so dignified that Edwin was sneaped into silence. Once more he could not keep from his face a look that seemed to apologise for his opinions. And all the heroic and passionate grandeur of Parnell's furious career shrivelled up to mere sordidness before the inability of one narrow-minded and ignorant but vigorous woman to appreciate its quality. Not only did Edwin feel apologetic for himself, but also for Parnell. He wished he had not tried to be funny about Parnell; he wished he had not mentioned him. The brightness of the birthday was for an instant clouded.

"I don't know what's coming over things!" Auntie Hamps murmured sadly, staring out of the window at the street gay with October sun shine. "What with that! And what with those terrible baccarat scandals. And now there's this free education, that we ratepayers have to pay for. They'll be giving the children of the working classes free meals next!" she added, with remarkably intelligent anticipation.

"Oh well! Never mind!" Edwin soothed her.

She gazed at him in loving reproach. And he felt guilty because he only went to chapel about once in two months, and even then from sheer moral cowardice.

"Can you give me those measurements, Maggie?" Mrs Hamps asked suddenly. "I'm on my way to Brunt's."

The women left the room together. Edwin walked idly to the window. After all, he had been perhaps wrong concerning the motive of her visit. The next moment he caught sight of Janet and the unaccountable nephew, breasting the hill from Bursley, hand in hand.


VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER TWO.


JANET'S NEPHEW.

Edwin was a fairly conspicuous object at the dining-room window. As Janet and the child drew level with the corner her eye accidentally caught Edwin's. He nodded, smiling, and took the cigarette out of his mouth and waved it. They were old friends. He was surprised to notice that Janet blushed and became self-conscious. She returned his smile awkwardly, and then, giving a gesture to signify her intention, she came in at the gate. Which action surprised Edwin still more. With all her little freedoms of manner, Janet was essentially a woman stately and correct, and time had emphasised these qualities in her. It was not in the least like her to pay informal, capricious calls at a quarter to ten in the morning.

He went to the front door and opened it. She was persuading the child up the tiled steps. The breeze dashed gaily into the house.

"Good morning. You're out early."

"Good morning. Yes. We've just been down to the post-office to send off a telegram, haven't we, George?"

She entered the hall, the boy following, and shook hands, meeting Edwin's gaze fairly. Her esteem for him, her confidence in him, shone in her troubled, candid eyes. She held herself proudly, mastering her curious constraint. "Now just see that!" she said, pointing to a fleck of black mud on the virgin elegance of her pale brown costume. Edwin thought anew, as he had often thought, that she was a distinguished and delightful piece of goods. He never ceased to be flattered by her regard. But with harsh masculine impartiality he would not minimise to himself the increasing cleft under her chin, nor the deterioration of her once brilliant complexion.

"Well, young man!" Edwin greeted the boy with that insolent familiarity which adults permit themselves to children who are perfect strangers.

"I thought I'd just run in and introduce my latest nephew to you," said Janet quickly, adding, "and then that would be over."

"Oh!" Edwin murmured. "Come into the drawing-room, will you? Maggie's upstairs."

They passed into the drawing-room, where a servant in striped print was languidly caressing the glass of a bookcase with a duster. "You can leave this a bit," Edwin said curtly to the girl, who obsequiously acquiesced and fled, forgetting a brush on a chair.

"Sit down, will you?" Edwin urged awkwardly. "And which particular nephew is this? I may tell you he's already raised a great deal of curiosity in the town."

Janet most unusually blushed again.

"Has he?" she replied. "Well, he isn't my nephew at all really, but we pretend he is, don't we, George? It's cosier. This is Master George Cannon."

"Cannon? You don't mean--"

"You remember Mrs Cannon, don't you? Hilda Lessways? Now, Georgie, come and shake hands with Mr Clayhanger."

But George would not.

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TWO.

"Indeed!" Edwin exclaimed, very feebly. He knew not whether his voice was natural or unnatural. He felt as if he had received a heavy blow with a sandbag over the heart: not a symbolic, but a real physical blow. He might, standing innocent in the street, have been staggeringly assailed by a complete stranger of mild and harmless appearance, who had then passed tranquilly on. Dizzy astonishment held him, to the exclusion of any other sentiment. He might have gasped, foolish and tottering: "Why--what's the meaning of this? What's happened?" He looked at the child uncomprehendingly, idiotically. Little by little-- it seemed an age, and was in fact a few seconds--he resumed his faculties, and remembered that in order to keep a conventional self-respect he must behave in such a manner as to cause Janet to believe that her revelation of the child's identity had in no way disturbed him. To act a friendly indifference seemed to him, then, to be the most important duty in life. And he knew not why.

"I thought," he said in a low voice, and then he began again, "I thought you hadn't been seeing anything of her, of Mrs Cannon, for a long time now."

The child was climbing on a chair at the window that gave on the garden, absorbed in exploration and discovery, quite ignoring the adults. Either Janet had forgotten him, or she had no hope of controlling him and was trusting to chance that the young wild stag would do nothing too dreadful.

"Well," she admitted, "we haven't." Her constraint recurred. Very evidently she had to be careful about what she said. There were reasons why even to Edwin she would not be frank. "I only brought him down from London yesterday."

Edwin trembled as he put the question--

"Is she here too--Mrs Cannon?"

Somehow he could only refer to Mrs Cannon as "her" and "she."

"Oh no!" said Janet, in a tone to indicate that there was no possibility of Mrs Cannon being in Bursley.

He was relieved. Yes, he was glad. He felt that he could not have endured the sensation of her nearness, of her actually being in the next house. Her presence at the Orgreaves' would have made the neighbourhood, the whole town, dangerous. It would have subjected him to the risk of meeting her suddenly at any corner. Nay, he would have been forced to go in cold blood to encounter her. And he knew that he could not have borne to look at her. The constraint of such an interview would have been torture too acute. Strange, that though he was absolutely innocent, though he had done nought but suffer, he should feel like a criminal, should have the criminal's shifting downcast glance!

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THREE.

"Auntie!" cried the boy. "Can't I go into this garden? There's a swing there."

"Oh no!" said Janet. "This isn't our garden. We must go home. We only just called in. And big boys who won't shake hands--"

"Yes, yes!" Edwin dreamily stopped her. "Let him go into the garden for a minute if he wants to. You can't run off like that! Come along, my lord."

He saw an opportunity of speaking to her out of the child's hearing. Janet consented, perhaps divining his wish. The child turned and stared deliberately at Edwin, and then plunged forward, too eager to await guidance, towards the conquest of the garden.

Standing silent and awkward in the garden porch, they watched him violently agitating the swing, a contrivance erected by a good-natured Uncle Edwin for the diversion of Clara's offspring.

"How old is he?" Edwin demanded, for the sake of saying something.

"About nine," said Janet.

"He doesn't look it."

"No, but he talks it--sometimes."

George did not in fact look his age. He was slight and small, and he seemed to have no bones--nothing but articulations that functioned with equal ease in all possible directions. His skin was pale and unhealthy. His eyes had an expression of fatigue, or he might have been ophthalmic. He spoke