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

of a man's head and shoulders emerging from an oblong flickering firelight.

Hilda paused. "All right," she called to the man, who at once disappeared, shutting the door and leaving darkness where he had been. The large shadows cast by Hilda's lamp now had the gaunt hall to themselves again.

"Don't be alarmed," she laughed harshly. "It's only the broker's man."

Edwin was tongue-tied. If Hilda were joking, what answer could be made to such a pleasantry in such a situation? And if she were speaking the truth, if the bailiffs really were in possession...! His life seemed to him once again astoundingly romantic. He had loved this woman, conquered her. And now she was a mere acquaintance, and he was following her stiffly into the recesses of a strange and sinister abode peopled by mysterious men. Was this a Brighton boarding-house? It resembled nothing reputable in his experience. All was incomprehensible.

The room into which she led him was evidently the dining-room. Not spacious, perhaps not quite so large as his own dining-room, it was nearly filled by one long bare table. Eight or ten monotonous chairs were ranged round the grey walls. In the embrasure of the window was a wicker stand with a withered plant on its summit, and at the other end of the room a walnut sideboard in the most horrible taste. The mantelpiece was draped with dark knotted and rosetted cloth; within the fender stood a small paper screen. The walls were hung with ancient and with fairly modern engravings, some big, others little, some coloured, others in black-and-white, but all distressing in their fatuous ugliness. The ceiling seemed black. The whole room fulfilled pretty accurately the scornful scrupulous housewife's notion of a lodging-house interior. It was suspect. And in Edwin there was a good deal of the housewife. He was appalled. Obviously the house was small--he had known that from the outside--and the entire enterprise insignificant. This establishment was not in the King's Road, nor on the Marine Parade, nor at Hove; no doubt hundreds of such little places existed precariously in a vast town like Brighton. Widows, of course, were often in straits. And Janet had told him... Nevertheless he was appalled, and completely at a loss to reconcile Hilda with her environment. And then--"the broker's man!"

At her bidding he sat down, in his overcoat, with his hat insecure on his knee, and observed, under the lamp, the dust on the surface of the long table. Hilda seated herself opposite, so that the lamp was between them, hiding him from her by its circle of light. He wondered what Maggie would have thought, and what Clara would have said, could they have seen him in that obscurity.

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THREE.

"So you've seen my boy?" she began, with no softening of tone.

"Yes, Janet Orgreave brought him in one morning--the other day. He didn't seem to me to be so ill as all that."

"Ill!" she exclaimed. "He certainly wasn't ill when he left here. But he had been. And the doctor said that this air didn't suit him--it never had suited him. It doesn't suit some folks, you know--people can say what they like."

"Anyhow, he's a lively piece--no mistake about that!"

"When he's well, he's very well," said George's mother. "But he's up and down in a minute. And on the whole he's been on the poorly side."

He noticed that, though there was no relapse from the correctness of her accent, she was using just such phrases as she might have used had she never quitted her native Turnhill. He looked round the lamp at her furtively, and seemed to see in her shadowed face a particular local quality of sincerity and downrightness that appealed strongly to his admiration. (Yet ten years earlier he had considered her markedly foreign to the Five Towns.) That this quality should have survived in her was a proof to him that she was a woman unique. Unique she had been, and unique she still remained. He did not know that he had long ago lost for ever the power of seeing her with a normal vision. He imagined in his simplicity, which disguised itself as chill critical impartiality, that he was adding her up with clear-sighted shrewdness... And then she was a mother! That meant a mysterious, a mystic perfecting! For him, it was as if among all women she alone had been a mother--so special was his view of the influence of motherhood upon her. He drew together all the beauty of an experience almost universal, transcendentalised it, and centred it on one being. And he was disturbed, baffled, agitated by the effect of the secret workings of his own unsuspected emotion. He was made sad, and sadder. He wanted to right wrongs, to efface from hearts the memory of grief, to create bliss; and he knew that this could never be done. He now saw Hilda exclusively as a victim, whose misfortunes were innumerable. Imagine this creature, with her passion for Victor Hugo, obliged by circumstances to polish a brass door-plate surreptitiously at night! Imagine her solitary in the awful house--with the broker's man! Imagine her forced to separate herself from her child! Imagine the succession of disasters that had soured her and transformed seriousness into harshness and acridity! ... And within that envelope, what a soul must be burning!

"And when he begins to grow--he's scarcely begun to grow yet," Hilda continued about her offspring, "then he will reed all his strength!"

"Yes, he will," Edwin concurred heartily.

He wanted to ask her, "Why did you call him Edwin for his second name? Was it his father's name, or your father's, or did you insist on it yourself, because?" But he could not ask. He could ask nothing. He could not even ask why she had jilted him without a word. He knew naught, and evidently she was determined to give no information. She might at any rate have explained how she had come to meet Janet, and under what circumstances Janet had taken possession of the child. All was a mystery. Her face, when he avoided the lamp, shone in the midst of a huge dark cloud of impenetrable mystery. She was too proud to reveal anything whatever. The grand pride in her forbade her even to excuse her conduct to himself. A terrific woman!

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FOUR.

Silence fell. His constraint was excruciating. She too was nervous, tapping the table and creaking her chair. He could not speak.

"Shall you be going back to Bursley soon?" she demanded. In her voice was desperation.

"Oh yes!" he said, thankfully eager to follow up any subject. "On Monday, I expect."

"I wonder if you'd mind giving Janet a little parcel from me--some things of George's? I meant to send it by post, but if you--"

"Of course! With pleasure!" He seemed to implore her.

"It's quite small," she said, rising and going to the sideboard, on which lay a little brown-paper parcel.

His eye followed her. She picked up the parcel, glanced at it, and offered it to him.

"I'll take it across on Monday night," he said fervently.

"Thanks."

She remained standing; he got up.

"No message or anything?" he suggested.

"Oh!" she said coldly, "I write, you know."

"Well--" He made the gesture of departing. There was no alternative.

"We're having very rough weather, aren't we?" she said, with careless conventionality, as she took the lamp.

In the hall, when she held out her hand, he wanted tremendously to squeeze it, to give her through his hand the message of sympathy which his tongue, intimidated by her manner, dared not give. But his hand also refused to obey him. The clasp was strictly ceremonious. As she was drawing the heavy latch of the door he forced himself to say, "I'm in Brighton sometimes, off and on. Now I know where you are, I must look you up."

She made no answer. She merely said good night as he passed out into the street and the wind. The door banged.

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FIVE.

Edwin took a long breath. He had seen her! Yes, but the interview had been worse than his worst expectations. He had surpassed himself in futility, in fatuous lack of enterprise. He had behaved liked a schoolboy. Now, as he plunged up the street with the wind, he could devise easily a dozen ways of animating and guiding and controlling the interview so that, even if sad, its sadness might have been agreeable. The interview had been hell, ineffable torture, a perfect crime of clumsiness. It had resulted in nothing. (Except, of course, that he had seen her--that fact was indisputable.) He blamed himself. He cursed himself with really extraordinary savageness.

"Why did I go near her?" he demanded. "Why couldn't I keep away? I've simply made myself look a blasted fool! Creeping and crawling round her! ... After all, she did throw me over! And now she asks me to take a parcel to her confounded kid! The whole thing's ridiculous! And what's going to happen to her in that hole? I don't suppose she's got the least notion of looking after herself. Impossible--the whole thing! If anybody had told me that I should--that she'd--" Half of which talk was simple bluster. The parcel was bobbing on its loop against his side.

When he reached the top of the street he discovered that he had been going up it instead of down it. "What am I thinking of?" he grumbled impatiently. However, he would not turn back. He adventured forward, climbing into latitudes whose geography was strange to him, and scarcely seeing a single fellow-wanderer beneath the gas-lamps. Presently, after a steep hill, he came to a churchyard, and then he redescended, and at last tumbled into a street alive with people who had emerged from a theatre, laughing, lighting cigarettes, linking arms. Their existence seemed shallow, purposeless, infantile, compared to his. He felt himself superior to them. What did they know about life? He would not change with any of them.

Recognising the label on an omnibus, he followed its direction, and arrived almost immediately in the vast square which contained his hotel, and which was illuminated by the brilliant facades of several hotels. The doors of the Royal Sussex were locked, because eleven o'clock had struck. He could not account for the period of nearly three hours which had passed since he left the hotel. The zealous porter, observing his shadow through the bars, had sprung to unfasten the door before he could ring.

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SIX.

Within the hotel reigned gaiety, wine, and the dance. Small tables had been placed in the hall, and at these sat bald-headed men, smoking cigars and sharing champagne with ladies of every age. A white carpet had been laid in the large smoking-room, and through the curtained archway that separated it from the hall, Edwin could see couples revolving in obedience to the music of a piano and a violin. One of the Royal