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

wait for him, she said gaily that they had better be obedient and begin, though it would have been more agreeable to wait for father. And she said how beautiful the tea was, and how beautiful the toast, and how beautiful the strawberry-jam, and how beautiful the pikelets. She would herself pour some hot water into the slop basin, and put a pikelet on a plate thereon, covered, to keep warm for father. She would not hear a word about the toast being a little hard, and when Maggie in her curious quiet way `stuck her out' that the toast was in fact hard, she said that that precise degree of hardness was the degree which she, for herself, preferred. Then she talked of jams, and mentioned gooseberry-jam, whereupon Clara privately put her tongue out, with the quickness of a snake, to signal to Maggie.

"Ours isn't good this year," said Maggie.

"I told auntie we weren't so set up with it, a fortnight ago," said Clara simply, like a little angel.

"Did you, dear?" Mrs Hamps exclaimed, with great surprise, almost with shocked surprise. "I'm sure it's beautiful. I was quite looking forward to tasting it; quite! I know what your gooseberry-jam is."

"Would you like to try it now?" Maggie suggested. "But we've warned you."

"Oh, I don't want to trouble you now. We're all so cosy here. Any time--"

"No trouble, auntie," said Clara, with her most captivating and innocent smile.

"Well, if you talk about `warning' me, of course I must insist on having some," said Auntie Clara.

Clara jumped up, passed behind Mrs Hamps, making a contemptuous face at those curls as she did so, and ran gracefully down to the kitchen.

"Here," she said crossly to Mrs Nixon. "A pot of that gooseberry, please. A small one will do. She knows it's short of sugar, and so she's determined to try it, just out of spite; and nothing will stop her."

Clara returned smiling to the tea-table, and Maggie neatly unsealed the jam; and Auntie Clara, with a face beaming with pleasurable anticipation, helped herself circumspectly to a spoonful.

"Beautiful!" she murmured.

"Don't you think it's a bit tart?" Maggie asked.

"Oh no!" protestingly.

"Don't you?" asked Clara, with an air of delighted deferential astonishment.

"Oh no!" Mrs Hamps repeated. "It's beautiful!" She did not smack her lips over it, because she would have considered it unladylike to smack her lips, but by less offensive gestures she sought to convey her unbounded pleasure in the jam. "How much sugar did you put in?" she inquired after a while. "Half and half?"

"Yes," said Maggie.

"They do say gooseberries were a tiny bit sour this year, owing to the weather," said Mrs Hamps reflectively.

Clara kicked Edwin under the table, as it were viciously, but her delightful innocent smile, directed vaguely upon Mrs Hamps, did not relax. Such duplicity passed Edwin's comprehension; it seemed to him purposeless. Yet he could not quite deny that there might be a certain sting, a certain insinuation, in his auntie's last remark.

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THREE.

Then Mr Clayhanger entered, blowing forth a long breath as if trying to repulse the oppressive heat of the July afternoon. He came straight to the table, with a slightly preoccupied air, quickly, his arms motionless at his sides, and slanting a little outwards. Mr Clayhanger always walked like this, with motionless arms so that in spite of a rather clumsy and heavy step, the upper part of him appeared to glide along. He shook hands genially with Auntie Clara, greeting her almost as grandiosely as she greeted him, putting on for a moment the grand manner, not without dignity. Each admired the other. Each often said that the other was `wonderful.' Each undoubtedly flattered the other, made a fuss of the other. Mr Clayhanger's admiration was the greater. The bitterest thing that Edwin had ever heard Maggie say was: "It's something to be thankful for that she's his deceased wife's sister!" And she had said the bitter thing with such quiet bitterness! Edwin had not instantly perceived the point of it.

Darius Clayhanger then sat down, with a thud, snatched at the cup of tea which Maggie had placed before him, and drank half of it with a considerable in-drawing noise. No one asked where or why he had been detained; it was not etiquette to do so. If father had been `called away,' or had `had to go away,' or was `kept somewhere,' the details were out of deference allowed to remain in mystery, respected by curiosity ... `Father-business.' ... All business was sacred. He himself had inculcated this attitude.

In a short silence the sound of the bell that the carman rang before the tram started for Hanbridge floated in through the open window.

"There's the tram!" observed Auntie Clara, apparently with warm and special interest in the phenomena of the tram. Then another little silence.

"Auntie," said Clara, writhing about youthfully on her chair.

"Can't ye sit still a bit?" the father asked, interrupting her roughly, but with good humour. "Ye'll be falling off th' chair in a minute."

Clara blushed swiftly, and stopped.

"Yes, love?" Auntie Clara encouraged her. It was as if Auntie Clara had said: "Your dear father is of course quite right, more than right, to insist on your sitting properly at table. However, do not take the correction too much to heart. I sympathise with all your difficulties."

"I was only going to ask you," Clara went on, in a weaker, stammering voice, "if you knew that Edwin's left school to-day." Her archness had deserted her.

"Mischievous little thing!" thought Edwin. "Why must she deliberately go and draw attention to that?" And he too blushed, feeling as if he owed an apology to the company for having left school.

"Oh yes!" said Auntie Clara with eager benevolence. "I've got something to say about that to my nephew."

Mr Clayhanger searched in a pocket of his alpaca, and drew forth an open envelope.

"Here's the lad's report, auntie," said he. "Happen ye'd like to look at it."

"I should indeed!" she replied fervently. "I'm sure it's a very good one."

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FOUR.

She took the paper, and assumed her spectacles.

"Conduct--Excellent," she read, poring with enthusiasm over the document. And she read again: "Conduct--Excellent." Then she went down the list of subjects, declaiming the number of marks for each; and at the end she read: "Position in class next term: Third. Splendid, Eddy!" she exclaimed.

"I thought you were second," said Clara, in her sharp manner.

Edwin blushed again, and hesitated.

"Eh? What's that? What's that?" his father demanded. "I didn't notice that. Third?"

"Charlie Orgreave beat me in the examination," Edwin muttered.

"Well, that's a pretty how d'ye do!" said his father. "Going down one! Ye ought to ha' been first instead o' third. And would ha' been, happen, if ye'd pegged at it."

"Now I won't have that! I won't have it!" Auntie Clara protested, laughingly showing her fine teeth and gazing first at Darius, and then at Edwin, from under her spectacles, her head being thrown back and the curls hanging far behind. "No one shall say that Edwin doesn't work, not even his father, while his auntie's about! Because I know he does work! And besides, he hasn't gone down. It says, `position next term'--not this term. You were still second to-day, weren't you, my boy?"

"I suppose so. Yes," Edwin answered, pulling himself together.

"Well! There you are!" Auntie Clara's voice rang triumphantly. She was opening her purse. "And there you are!" she repeated, popping half a sovereign down in front of him. "That's a little present from your auntie on your leaving school."

"Oh, auntie!" he cried feebly.

"Oh!" cried Clara, genuinely startled.

Mrs Hamps was sometimes thus astoundingly munificent. It was she who had given the schooner to Edwin. And her presents of elaborately enveloped and costly toilet soap on the birthdays of the children, and at Christmas, were massive. Yet Clara always maintained that she was the meanest old thing imaginable. And Maggie had once said that she knew that Auntie Clara made her servant eat dripping instead of butter. To give inferior food to a servant was to Maggie the unforgivable in parsimony.

"Well," Mr Clayhanger warningly inquired, "what do you say to your aunt?"

"Thank you, auntie," Edwin sheepishly responded, fingering the coin.

It was a princely sum. And she had stuck up for him famously in the matter of the report. Strange that his father should not have read the report with sufficient attention to remark the fall to third place! Anyway, that aspect of the affair was now safely over, and it seemed to him that he had not lost much prestige by it. He would still be able to argue with his father on terms not too unequal, he hoped.

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FIVE.

As the tea drew to an end, and the plates of toast, bread and butter, and tea-cake grew emptier, and the slop-basin filled, and only Maggie's flowers remained fresh and immaculate amid the untidy debris of the meal; and as Edwin and Clara became gradually indifferent to jam, and then inimical to it; and as the sounds of the street took on the softer quality of summer evening, and the first filmy shades of twilight gathered imperceptibly in the corners of the room, and Mr Clayhanger performed the eructations which signified that he had had enough; so Mrs Hamps prepared herself for one of her classic outbursts of feeling.

"Well!" she said at last, putting her spoon to the left of her cup as a final indication that seriously she would drink no more. And she gave a great sigh. "School over! And the only son going out into the world! How time flies!" And she gave another great sigh, implying an immense melancholy due to this vision of the reality of things. Then she remembered her courage, and the device of leaning hard, and all her philosophy.

"But it's all for the best!" she broke forth in a new brave tone. "Everything is ordered for the best. We must never forget that! And I'm quite sure that Edwin will be a very great credit to us all, with help from above."

She proceeded powerfully in this strain. She brought in God, Christ, and even the Holy Spirit. She mentioned the dangers of the world, and the disguises of the devil, and the unspeakable advantages of a good home, and the special goodness of Mr Clayhanger and of Maggie, yes, and of her little Clara; and the pride which they all had in Edwin, and the unique opportunities which he had of doing good, by example, and also, soon, by precept, for others younger than himself would begin to look up to him; and again her personal pride in him, and her sure faith in him; and what a solemn hour it was...

Nothing could stop her. The girls loathed these exhibitions. Maggie always looked at the table during their progress, and she