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

her greeting eagerly, and all his constraint was loosed away, and he felt at ease, and happy. Her face was very pale indeed against the glittering blackness of her eyes, and her sombre disordered hair and untidy dress; but it did not show fatigue nor extreme anxiety; it was a face of calm meekness. The sleeves of her dress were reversed, showing the forearms, which gave her an appearance of deshabille, homely, intimate, confiding. "So it was common property at one time," Edwin thought, recalling a phrase of Charlie's in the breakfast-room. Strange: he wanted her in all her disarray, with all her woes, anxieties, solicitudes; he wanted her, piteous, meek, beaten by destiny, weakly smiling; he wanted her because she stood so, after the immense, masterful effort of the day, watching in acquiescence by that bed!

"Has he gone?" she asked, in a voice ordinarily loud, but, for her, unusually tender.

"Yes," said Edwin. "He's gone. He told me I'd better come in here. So I came."

She nodded again. "Have that chair."

Without arguing, he took the chair. She remained standing.

The condition of George startled him. Evidently the boy was in a heavy stupor. His body was so feverish that it seemed to give off a perceptible heat. There was no need to touch the skin in order to know that it burned: one divined this. The hair was damp. About the pale lips an irregular rash had formed, purplish, patchy, and the rash seemed to be the mark and sign of some strange dreadful disease that nobody had ever named: a plague. Worse than all this was the profound, comprehensive discomfort of the whole organism, showing itself in the unnatural pose of the limbs, and in multitudinous faint instinctive ways of the inert but complaining body. And the child was so slight beneath the blanket, so young, so helpless, spiritually so alone. How could even Hilda communicate her sympathy to that spirit, withdrawn and inaccessible? During the illness of his father Edwin had thought that he was looking upon the extreme tragic limit of pathos, but this present spectacle tightened more painfully the heart. It was more shameful: a more excruciating accusation against the order of the universe. To think of George in his pride, strong, capricious, and dominant, while gazing at this victim of malady ... the contrast was intolerable!

George was very ill. And yet Hilda, despite the violence of her nature, could stand there calm, sweet, and controlled. What power! Edwin was humbled. "This is the sort of thing that women of her sort can do," he said to himself. "Why, Maggie and I are simply nothing to her!" Maggie and he could be self-possessed in a crisis; they could stand a strain; but the strain would show itself either in a tense harshness, or in some unnatural lightness, or even flippancy. Hilda was the very image of soft caressing sweetness. He felt that he must emulate her.

"Surely his temperature's gone up?" he said quietly.

"Yes," Hilda replied, fingering absently the clinical thermometer that with a lot of other gear lay on the table. "It's nearly 105. It can't last like this. It won't. I've been through it with him before, but not quite so bad."

"I didn't think anyone could have influenza twice, so soon," Edwin murmured.

"Neither did I," said she. "Still, he must have been sickening for it before he came down here." There was a pause. She wiped the boy's forehead. "This change has come on quite suddenly," she said, in a different voice. "Two hours ago--less than two hours ago--there was scarcely a sign of that rash."

"What is it?"

"Charlie says it's nothing particular."

"What's Charlie gone for?"

"I don't know." She shook her head; then smiled. "Isn't it a good thing I brought him?"

Indubitably it was. Her caprice, characterised as preposterous by males, had been justified. Thus chance often justifies women, setting at naught the high priests of reason.

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THREE.

Looking at the unconscious and yet tormented child, Edwin was aware of a melting protective pity for him, of an immense desire to watch over his rearing with all insight, sympathy, and help, so that in George's case none of the mistakes and cruelties and misapprehensions should occur which had occurred in his own. This feeling was intense to the point of being painful.

"I don't know whether you know or not," he said, "but we're great pals, the infant and I."

Hilda smiled, and in the very instant of seeing the smile its effect upon him was such that he humiliated himself before her in secret for ever having wildly suspected that she was jealous of the attachment. "Do you think I don't know all about that?" she murmured. "He wouldn't be here now if it hadn't been for that." After a silence she added: "You're the only person that he ever has really cared for, and I can tell you he likes you better than he likes me."

"How do you know that?"

"I know by the way he talks and looks."

"If he takes after his mother, that's no sign," Edwin retorted, without considering what he said.

"What do you mean--`if he takes after his mother'?" She seemed puzzled.

"Could anyone tell your real preferences from the way you talked and looked?" His audacious rashness astounded him. Nevertheless he stared her in the eyes, and her glance fell.

"No one but you could have said a thing like that," she observed mildly, yieldingly.

And what he had said suddenly acquired a mysterious and wise significance and became oracular. She alone had the power of inspiring him to be profound. He had noticed that before, years ago, and first at their first meeting. Or was it that she saw in him an oracle, and caused him to see with her?

Slowly her face coloured, and she walked away to the fireplace, and cautiously tended it. Constraint had seized him again, and his heart was loud.

"Edwin," she summoned him, from the fireplace.

He rose, shaking with emotion, and crossed the undiscovered spaces of the room to where she was. He had the illusion that they were by themselves not in the room but in the universe. She was leaning with one hand on the mantelpiece.

"I must tell you something," she said, "that nobody at all knows except George's father, and probably nobody ever will know. His sister knew, but she's dead."

"Yes!" he muttered, in an exquisite rush of happiness. After all, it was not with Charlie, nor even with Janet, that she was most intimate; it was with himself!

"George's father was put in prison for bigamy. George is illegitimate." She spoke with her characteristic extreme clearness of enunciation, in a voice that showed no emotion.

"You don't mean it!" He gasped foolishly.

She nodded. "I'm not a married woman. I once thought I was, but I wasn't. That's all."

"But--"

"But what?"

"You--you said six or seven years, didn't you? Surely they don't give that long for bigamy?"

"Oh!" she replied mildly. "That was for something else. When he came out of prison the first time they arrested him again instantly--so I was told. It was in Scotland."

"I see."

There was a rattle as of hailstones on the window. They both started.

"That must be Charlie!" she exclaimed, suddenly loosing her excitement under this pretext. "He doesn't want to ring and wake the house."

Edwin ran out of the room, sliding and slipping down the deserted stairs that waited patiently through the night for human feet.

"Forgot to take a key," said Charlie, appearing, breathless, just as the door opened. "I meant to take the big key, and then I forgot." He had a little round box in his hand. He mounted the stairs two and three at a time.

Edwin slowly closed the door. He could not bring himself to follow Charlie and, after a moment's vacillation, he went back into the breakfast-room.

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FOUR.

Amazing, incalculable woman, wrapped within fold after fold of mystery! He understood better now, but even now there were things that he did not understand; and the greatest enigma of all remained unsolved, the original enigma of her treachery to himself... And she had chosen just that moment, just that crisis, to reveal to him that sinister secret which by some unguessed means she had been able to hide from her acquaintance. Naturally, if she wished to succeed with a boarding-house in Brighton she would be compelled to conceal somehow the fact that she was the victim of a bigamist and her child without a lawful name! The merest prudence would urge her to concealment so long as concealment was possible; yes, even from Janet! Her other friends deemed her a widow; Janet thought her the wife of a convict; he alone knew that she was neither wife nor widow. Through what scathing experience she must have passed! An unfamiliar and disconcerting mood gradually took complete possession of him. At first he did not correctly analyse it. It was sheer, exuberant, instinctive, unreasoning, careless joy.

Then, after a long period of beatific solitude in the breakfast-room, he heard stealthy noises in the hall, and his fancy jumped to the idea of burglary. Excited, unreflecting, he hurried into the hall. Johnnie Orgreave, who had let himself in with a latchkey, was shutting and bolting the front door. Johnnie's surprise was the greater. He started violently on seeing Edwin, and then at once assumed the sang-froid of a hero of romance. When Edwin informed him that Hilda had come, and Charlie with her, and that those two were watching by the boy, the rest of the household being in bed, Johnnie permitted himself a few verbal symptoms of astonishment.

"How is Georgie?" he asked with an effort, as if ashamed.

"He isn't much better," said Edwin evasively.

Johnnie made a deprecatory sound with his tongue against his lips, and frowned, determined to take his proper share in the general anxiety.

With careful, dignified movements, he removed his silk hat and his heavy ulster, revealing evening-dress, and a coloured scarf that overhung a crumpled shirt-front.

"Where've you been?" Edwin asked.

"Tennis dance. Didn't you know?"

"No," said Edwin.

"Really!" Johnnie murmured, with a falsely ingenuous air. After a pause he said: "They've left you all alone, then?"

"I was in the breakfast-room," said Edwin, when he had given further information.

They walked into the breakfast-room together. Charlie's cigarette-case lay on the tray.

"Those your cigarettes?" Johnnie inquired.

"No. They're Charlie's."

"Oh! Master Charlie's, are they? I wonder if they're any good." He took one fastidiously. Between two enormous outblowings of smoke he said: "Well, I'm dashed! So Charlie's come with her! I hope the kid'll soon be better... I should have been back long ago, only I took Mrs Chris Hamson home."

"Who's Mrs Chris Hamson?"

"Don't you know her? She's a ripping woman."

He stood there in all the