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

He frowned and coughed.

"Well," said Osmond Orgreave to his son, thrusting out his coat-tails with his hands towards the fire, and swaying slightly to and fro on his heels and toes, "so you've had your consultation, you eminent specialists! What's the result?"

He looked at his elegant son with an air half-quizzical and half-deferential.

"I've told you he's evidently a little better, dad," Charlie answered casually. His London deportment was more marked than ever. The bracingly correct atmosphere of Ealing had given him a rather obvious sense of importance. He had developed into a man with a stake in the country, and he twisted his moustache like such a man, and took out a cigarette like such a man.

"Yes, I know," said Osmond, with controlled impatience. "But what sort of influenza is it? I'm hoping to learn something now you've come. Stirling will talk about anything except influenza."

"What sort of influenza is it? What do you mean?" And Charlie's twinkling glance said condescendingly: "What's the old cock got hold of now? This is just like him."

"But is there any real danger?" Edwin murmured.

"Well," said Osmond, bringing up his regiments, "as I understand it, there are three types of influenza--the respiratory, the gastro-intestinal, and the nervous. Which one is it?"

Charlie laughed, and prodded his father with a forefinger in a soft region near the shoulder, disturbing his balance. "You've been reading the `BMJ,'" he said, "and so you needn't pretend you haven't!"

Osmond paused an instant to consider the meaning of these initials.

"What if I have?" he demanded, raising his eyebrows, "I say there are three types--"

"Thirty; you might be nearer the mark with thirty," Charlie interrupted him. "The fact is that this division into types is all very well in theory," he proceeded, with easy disdain. "But in practice it won't work out. Now for instance, what this kid has won't square with any of your three types. It's purely febrile, that's what it is. Rare, decidedly rare, but less rare in children than in adults--at any rate in my experience--in my experience. If his temperature wasn't so high, I should say the thing might last for days--weeks even. I've known it. The first question I put was--has he been in a stupor? He had. It may recur. That, and headache, and the absence of localised nervous symptoms--" He stopped, leaving the sentence in the air, grandiose and formidable, but of no purport.

Charlie shrugged his shoulders, allowing the beholder to choose his own interpretation of the gesture.

"You're a devilish wonderful fellow," said Osmond grimly to his son. And Charlie winked grimly at Edwin, who grimly smiled.

"You and your `British Medical Journal'!" Charlie exclaimed, with an irony from which filial affection was not absent, and again prodded his father in the same spot.

"Of course I know I'm an old man," said Osmond, condescendingly rejecting Charlie's condescension. He thought he did not mean what he said; nevertheless, it was the expression of the one idea which latterly beyond all other ideas had possessed him.

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THREE.

Janet came into the room, and was surprised to see Edwin. She was in a state of extreme fatigue--pale, with burning eyes, and hair that has lost the gracefulness of its curves.

"So you know?" she said.

Edwin nodded.

"It seems I've got to go to bed," she went on. "Father, you must go to bed too. Mother's gone. It's frightfully late. Come along now!"

She was insistent. She had been worried during the greater part of the day by her restless parents, and she was determined not to leave either of them at large.

"Charlie, you might run upstairs and see that everything's all right before I go. I shall get up again at four."

"I'll be off," said Edwin.

"Here! Hold on a bit," Charlie objected. "Wait till I come down. Let's have a yarn. You don't want to go to bed yet."

Edwin agreed to the suggestion, and was left alone in the breakfast-room. What struck him was that the new situation created by Hilda's strange caprice had instantly been accepted by everybody, and had indeed already begun to seem quite natural. He esteemed highly the demeanour of all the Orgreaves. Neither he himself nor Maggie could have surpassed them in their determination not to exaggerate the crisis, in their determination to bear themselves simply and easily, and to speak with lightness, even with occasional humour. There were few qualities that he admired more than this.

And what was her demeanour, up there in the bedroom?

Suddenly the strangeness of Hilda's caprice presented itself to him as even more strange. She had merely gone to Ealing and captured Charlie. Charlie was understood to have a considerable practice. At her whim all his patients had been abandoned. What an idea, to bring him down like this! What tremendous faith in him she must have! And Edwin remembered distinctly that the first person who had ever spoken to him of Hilda was Charlie! And in what terms of admiration! Was there a long and secret understanding between these two? They must assuredly be far more intimate than he had ever suspected. Edwin hated to think that Hilda would depend more upon Charlie than upon himself in a grave difficulty. The notion caused him acute discomfort. He was resentful against Charlie as against a thief who had robbed him of his own, but who could not be apprehended and put to shame.

The acute discomfort was jealousy; but this word did not occur to him.

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FOUR.

"I say," Edwin began, in a new intimate tone, when after what seemed a very long interval Charlie Orgreave returned to the breakfast-room with the information that for the present all had been done that could be done.

"What's up?" said Charlie, responding quite eagerly to the appeal for intimacy in Edwin's voice. He had brought in a tray with whisky and its apparatus, and he set this handily on a stool in front of the fire, and poked the fire, and generally made the usual ritualistic preparations for a comfortable talkative night.

"Rather delicate, wasn't it, you coming down and taking Stirling's case off him?"

Edwin smiled idly as he lolled far back in an old easy chair. His two individualities had now merged again into one.

"My boy," Charlie answered, pausing impressively with his curly head held forward, before dropping into an arm-chair by the stool, "you may take it from me that `delicate' is not the word!"

Edwin nodded sympathetically, perceiving with satisfaction that beneath his Metropolitan mannerism, and his amusing pomposities, and his perfectly dandiacal clothes, Charlie still remained the Sunday, possibly more naive than ever. This naivete of Charlie's was particularly pleasing to him, for the reason that it gave him a feeling of superiority to the more brilliant being and persuaded him that the difference between London and the provinces was inessential and negligible. Charlie's hair still curled like a boy's, and he had not outgrown the naivete of boyhood. Against these facts the fact that Charlie was a partner in a fashionable and dashing practice at Ealing simply did not weigh. The deference which in thought Edwin had been slowly acquiring for this Charlie, as to whom impressive news reached Bursley from time to time, melted almost completely away. In fundamentals he was convinced that Charlie was an infant compared to himself.

"Have a drop?"

"Well, it's not often I do, but I will to-night. Steady on with the whisky, old chap."

Each took a charged glass and sipped. Edwin, by raising his arm, could just lodge his glass on the mantelpiece. Charlie then opened his large gun-metal cigarette case, and one match lighted two cigarettes.

"Yes, my boy," Charlie resumed, as he meditatively blew out the match and threw it on the fire, "you may well say `delicate.' The truth is that if I hadn't seen at once that Stirling was a very decent sort of chap, and very friendly here, I might have funked it. Yes, I might. He came in just after we'd arrived. So I saw him alone--here. I made a clean breast of it, and put myself in his hands. Of course he appreciated the situation at once; and considering he'd never seen her, it was rather clever of him... I suppose people rather like that Scotch accent of his, down here?"

"They say he makes over a thousand a year already," Edwin replied. He was thinking. "Is she likely to be coming downstairs? No."

"The deuce he does!" Charlie murmured, with ingenuous animation, foolishly betraying by an instant's lack of self-control the fact that Ealing was not Utopia. Envy was in his voice as he continued: "It's astonishing how some chaps can come along and walk straight into anything they want--whatever it happens to be!"

"What do you think of him as a doctor?" Edwin questioned.

"Seems all right," said Charlie, with a fine brief effort to be patronising.

"He's got a great reputation down here," Edwin said quietly.

"Yes, yes. I should say he's quite all right."

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FIVE.

"How came it that Mrs Cannon came and rummaged you out?" Edwin knew that he would blush, and so he reached up for his whisky, and drank, adding: "The old man still clings to his old brand of Scotch."

"My dear fellow, I know no more than you. I was perfectly staggered--I can tell you that. I hadn't seen her since before she was married. Only heard of her again just lately through Janet. I suppose it was Janet who told her I was at Ealing. It's an absolute fact that just at the first blush I didn't even recognise her."

"Didn't you?" Edwin wondered how this could be.

"I did not. She came into our surgery, as if she'd come out of the next room and I'd seen her only yesterday, and she just asked me to come away with her at once to Bursley. I thought she was off her nut, but she wasn't. She showed me your telegram."

"The dickens she did!" Edwin was really startled.

"Yes. I told her there was nothing absolutely fatal in a temperature of 104. It happened in thousands of cases. Then she explained to me exactly how he'd been ill before, seemingly in the same way, and I could judge from what she said that he wasn't a boy who would stand a high temperature for very long."

"By the way, what's his temperature to-night?" Edwin interrupted.

"102 point 7," said Charlie.

"Yes," he resumed, "she did convince me it might be serious. But what then? I told her I couldn't possibly leave. She asked me why not. She kept on asking me why not. I said, What about my patients here? She asked if any of them were dying. I said no, but I couldn't leave them all to my partner. I don't think she realised, before that, that I was in partnership. She stuck to it