Volume Four--Chapter Seven.The Wall.One morning—towards the end of November—Edwin, attended by Maggie, was rearranging books in the drawing-room after breakfast, when there came a startling loud tap at the large central pane of the window. Both of them jumped.“Who’s throwing?” Edwin exclaimed.“I expect it’s that boy,” said Maggie, almost angrily.“Not Georgie?”“Yes. I wish you’d go and stop him. You’ve no idea what a tiresome little thing he is. And so rough too!”This attitude of Maggie towards the mysterious nephew was a surprise for Edwin. She had never grumbled about him before. In fact they had seen little of him. For a fortnight he had not been abroad, and the rumour ran that he was unwell, that he was ‘not so strong as he ought to be.’ And now Maggie suddenly charged him with a whole series of misdoings! But it was Maggie’s way to keep unpleasant things from Edwin for a time, in order to save her important brother from being worried, and then in a moment of tension to fling them full in his face, like a wet clout.“What’s he been up to?” Edwin inquired for details.“Oh! I don’t know,” answered Maggie vaguely. At the same instant came another startling blow on the window. “There!” Maggie cried, in triumph, as if saying: “That’s what he’s been up to!” After all, the windows were Maggie’s own windows.Edwin left on the sofa a whole pile of books that he was sorting, and went out into the garden. On the top of the wall separating him from the Orgreaves a row of damaged earthenware objects—jugs and jars chiefly—at once caught his eye. He witnessed the smashing of one of them, and then he ran to the wall, and taking a spring, rested on it with his arms, his toes pushed into crevices. Young George, with hand outstretched to throw, in the garden of the Orgreaves, seemed rather diverted by this apparition.“Hello!” said Edwin. “What are you up to?”“I’m practising breaking crocks,” said the child. That he had acquired the local word gave Edwin pleasure.“Yes, but do you know you’re practising breaking my windows too? When you aim too high you simply can’t miss one of my windows.”George’s face was troubled, as he examined the facts, which had hitherto escaped his attention, that there was a whole world of consequences on the other side of the wall, and that a missile which did not prove its existence against either the wall or a crock had not necessarily ceased to exist. Edwin watched the face with a new joy, as though looking at some wonder of nature under a microscope. It seemed to him that he now saw vividly why children were interesting.“I can’t see any windows from here,” said George, in defence.“If you climb up here you’ll see them all right.”“Yes, but I can’t climb up. I’ve tried to, a lot of times. Even when I stood on my toes on this stump I could only just reach to put the crocks on the top.”“What did you want to get on the wall for?”“I wanted to see that swing of yours.”“Well,” said Edwin, laughing, “if you could remember the swing why couldn’t you remember the windows?”George shook his head at Edwin’s stupidity, and looked at the ground. “A swing isn’t windows,” he said. Then he glanced up with a diffident smile: “I’ve often been wanting to come and see you.”Edwin was tremendously flattered. If he had made a conquest, the child by this frank admission had made a greater.“Then why didn’t you come?”“I couldn’t, by myself. Besides, my back hasn’t been well. Did they tell you?”George was so naturally serious that Edwin decided to be serious too.“I did hear something about it,” he replied, with the grave confidential tone that he would have used to a man of his own age. This treatment was evidently appreciated by George, and always afterwards Edwin conversed with him as with an equal, forbearing from facetiousness.Damp though it was, Edwin twisted himself round and sat on the wall next to the crocks, and bent over the boy beneath, who gazed with upturned face.“Why didn’t you ask Auntie Janet to bring you?”“I don’t generally ask for things that I really want,” said the boy, with a peculiar glance.“I see,” said Edwin, with an air of comprehension. He did not, however, comprehend. He only felt that the boy was wonderful. Imagine the boy saying that! He bent lower. “Come on up,” he said. “I’ll give you a hand. Stick your feet into that nick there.”Two.In an instant George was standing on the wall, light as fluff. Edwin held him by the legs, and his hand was on Edwin’s cap. The feel of the boy was delightful; he was so lithe and so yielding, and yet firm; and his glance was so trustful and admiring. “Rough!” thought Edwin, remembering Maggie’s adjective. “He isn’t a bit rough! Unruly? Well, I dare say he can be unruly if he cares to be. It all depends how you handle him.” Thus Edwin reflected in the pride of conquest, holding close to the boy, and savouring intimately his charm. Even the boy’s slightness attracted him. Difficult to believe that he was nine years old! His body was indeed backward. So too, it appeared, was his education. And yet was there not the wisdom of centuries in, “I don’t generally ask for things that I really want?”Suddenly the boy wriggled, and gave a sound of joy that was almost a yell. “Look!” he cried.The covered top of the steam-car could just be seen gliding along above the high wall that separated Edwin’s garden from the street.“Yes,” Edwin agreed. “Funny, isn’t it?” But he considered that such glee at such a trifle was really more characteristic of six or seven than of nine years. George’s face was transformed by ecstasy.“It’s when things move like that—horizontal!” George explained, pronouncing the word carefully.Edwin felt that there was no end to the surpassing strangeness of this boy. One moment he was aged six, and the next he was talking about horizontality.“Why? What do you mean?”“I don’t know!” George sighed. “But somehow—” Then, with fresh vivacity: “I tell you—when Auntie Janet comes to wake me up in the morning the cat comes in too, with its tail up in the air—you know!” Edwin nodded. “Well, when I’m lying in bed I can’t see the cat, but I can see the top of its tail sailing along the edge of the bed. But if I sit up I can see all the cat, and that spoils it, so I don’t sit up at first.”The child was eager for Edwin to understand his pleasure in horizontal motion that had no apparent cause, like the tip of a cat’s tail on the horizon of a bed, or the roof of a tram-car on the horizon of the wall. And Edwin was eager to understand, and almost persuaded himself that he did understand; but he could not be sure. A marvellous child—disconcerting! He had a feeling of inferiority to the child, because the child had seen beauty where he had not dreamed of seeing it.“Want a swing,” he suggested, “before I have to go off to business?”Three.When it occurred to him that he had had as much violent physical exercise as was good for his years, and that he had left his books in disarray, and that his business demanded him, Edwin apologetically announced that he must depart, and the child admitted that Aunt Janet was probably waiting to give him his lessons.“Are you going back the way you came? You’d better. It’s always best,” said Edwin.“Is it?”“Yes.”He lifted and pushed the writhing form on to the wall, dislodging a jar, which crashed dully on the ground.“Auntie Janet told me I could have them to do what I liked with. So I break them,” said George, “when they don’t break themselves!”“I bet she never told you to put them on this wall,” said Edwin.“No, she didn’t. But it was the best place for aiming. And she told me it didn’t matter how many crocks I broke, because they make crocks here. Do they, really?”“Yes.”“Why?”“Because there’s clay here,” said Edwin glibly.“Where?”“Oh! Round about.”“White, like that?” exclaimed George eagerly, handling a teapot without a spout. He looked at Edwin: “Will you take me to see it? I should like to see white ground.”“Well,” said Edwin, more cautiously, “the clay they get about here isn’t exactly white.”“Then do they make it white?”“As a matter of fact the white clay comes from a long way off—Cornwall, for instance.”“Then why do they make the things here?” George persisted; with the annoying obstinacy of his years. He had turned the teapot upside down. “This was made here. It’s got ‘Bursley’ on it. Auntie Janet showed me.”Edwin was caught. He saw himself punished for that intellectual sloth which leads adults to fob children off with any kind of a slipshod, dishonestly simplified explanation of phenomena whose adequate explanation presents difficulty. He remembered how nearly twenty years earlier he had puzzled over the same question and for a long time had not found the answer.“I’ll tell you how it is,” he said, determined to be conscientious. “It’s like this—” He had to pause. Queer, how hard it was to state the thing coherently! “It’s like this. In the old days they used to make crocks anyhow, very rough, out of any old clay. And crocks were first made here because the people found common yellow clay, and the coal to burn it with, lying close together in the ground. You see how handy it was for them.”“Then the old crocks were yellow?”“More or less. Then people got more particular, you see, and when white clay was found somewhere else they had it brought here, because everybody was used to making crocks here, and they had all the works and the tools they wanted, and the coal too. Very important, the coal! Much easier to bring the clay to the people and the works, than cart off all the people—and their families, don’t forget—and so on, to the clay, and build fresh works into the bargain... That’s why. Now are you sure you see?”George ignored the question. “I suppose they used up all the yellow clay there was here, long ago?”“Not much!” said Edwin. “And they never will! You don’t know what a sagger is, I reckon?”“What is a sagger?”“Well, I can’t stop to tell you all that now. But I will some time. They make saggers out of the yellow clay.”“Will you show me the yellow clay?”“Yes, and some saggers too.”“When?”“I don’t know. As soon as I can.”“Will you to-morrow?”To-morrow happened to be Thursday. It was not Edwin’s free afternoon, but it was an afternoon to which a sort of licence attached. He yielded to the ruthless egotism of the child.“All right!” he said.“You won’t forget?”“You can rely on me. Ask your auntie if you may go, and if she says you may, be ready for me to pull you up over the wall here, about three o’clock.”“Auntie will have to let me go,” said George, in a savage tone, as Edwin helped him to slip down into the garden of the Orgreaves. Edwin went off to business with a singular consciousness of virtue, and with pride in his successful manner of taming wayward children, and with a very strong new interest in the immediate future.
One morning—towards the end of November—Edwin, attended by Maggie, was rearranging books in the drawing-room after breakfast, when there came a startling loud tap at the large central pane of the window. Both of them jumped.
“Who’s throwing?” Edwin exclaimed.
“I expect it’s that boy,” said Maggie, almost angrily.
“Not Georgie?”
“Yes. I wish you’d go and stop him. You’ve no idea what a tiresome little thing he is. And so rough too!”
This attitude of Maggie towards the mysterious nephew was a surprise for Edwin. She had never grumbled about him before. In fact they had seen little of him. For a fortnight he had not been abroad, and the rumour ran that he was unwell, that he was ‘not so strong as he ought to be.’ And now Maggie suddenly charged him with a whole series of misdoings! But it was Maggie’s way to keep unpleasant things from Edwin for a time, in order to save her important brother from being worried, and then in a moment of tension to fling them full in his face, like a wet clout.
“What’s he been up to?” Edwin inquired for details.
“Oh! I don’t know,” answered Maggie vaguely. At the same instant came another startling blow on the window. “There!” Maggie cried, in triumph, as if saying: “That’s what he’s been up to!” After all, the windows were Maggie’s own windows.
Edwin left on the sofa a whole pile of books that he was sorting, and went out into the garden. On the top of the wall separating him from the Orgreaves a row of damaged earthenware objects—jugs and jars chiefly—at once caught his eye. He witnessed the smashing of one of them, and then he ran to the wall, and taking a spring, rested on it with his arms, his toes pushed into crevices. Young George, with hand outstretched to throw, in the garden of the Orgreaves, seemed rather diverted by this apparition.
“Hello!” said Edwin. “What are you up to?”
“I’m practising breaking crocks,” said the child. That he had acquired the local word gave Edwin pleasure.
“Yes, but do you know you’re practising breaking my windows too? When you aim too high you simply can’t miss one of my windows.”
George’s face was troubled, as he examined the facts, which had hitherto escaped his attention, that there was a whole world of consequences on the other side of the wall, and that a missile which did not prove its existence against either the wall or a crock had not necessarily ceased to exist. Edwin watched the face with a new joy, as though looking at some wonder of nature under a microscope. It seemed to him that he now saw vividly why children were interesting.
“I can’t see any windows from here,” said George, in defence.
“If you climb up here you’ll see them all right.”
“Yes, but I can’t climb up. I’ve tried to, a lot of times. Even when I stood on my toes on this stump I could only just reach to put the crocks on the top.”
“What did you want to get on the wall for?”
“I wanted to see that swing of yours.”
“Well,” said Edwin, laughing, “if you could remember the swing why couldn’t you remember the windows?”
George shook his head at Edwin’s stupidity, and looked at the ground. “A swing isn’t windows,” he said. Then he glanced up with a diffident smile: “I’ve often been wanting to come and see you.”
Edwin was tremendously flattered. If he had made a conquest, the child by this frank admission had made a greater.
“Then why didn’t you come?”
“I couldn’t, by myself. Besides, my back hasn’t been well. Did they tell you?”
George was so naturally serious that Edwin decided to be serious too.
“I did hear something about it,” he replied, with the grave confidential tone that he would have used to a man of his own age. This treatment was evidently appreciated by George, and always afterwards Edwin conversed with him as with an equal, forbearing from facetiousness.
Damp though it was, Edwin twisted himself round and sat on the wall next to the crocks, and bent over the boy beneath, who gazed with upturned face.
“Why didn’t you ask Auntie Janet to bring you?”
“I don’t generally ask for things that I really want,” said the boy, with a peculiar glance.
“I see,” said Edwin, with an air of comprehension. He did not, however, comprehend. He only felt that the boy was wonderful. Imagine the boy saying that! He bent lower. “Come on up,” he said. “I’ll give you a hand. Stick your feet into that nick there.”
In an instant George was standing on the wall, light as fluff. Edwin held him by the legs, and his hand was on Edwin’s cap. The feel of the boy was delightful; he was so lithe and so yielding, and yet firm; and his glance was so trustful and admiring. “Rough!” thought Edwin, remembering Maggie’s adjective. “He isn’t a bit rough! Unruly? Well, I dare say he can be unruly if he cares to be. It all depends how you handle him.” Thus Edwin reflected in the pride of conquest, holding close to the boy, and savouring intimately his charm. Even the boy’s slightness attracted him. Difficult to believe that he was nine years old! His body was indeed backward. So too, it appeared, was his education. And yet was there not the wisdom of centuries in, “I don’t generally ask for things that I really want?”
Suddenly the boy wriggled, and gave a sound of joy that was almost a yell. “Look!” he cried.
The covered top of the steam-car could just be seen gliding along above the high wall that separated Edwin’s garden from the street.
“Yes,” Edwin agreed. “Funny, isn’t it?” But he considered that such glee at such a trifle was really more characteristic of six or seven than of nine years. George’s face was transformed by ecstasy.
“It’s when things move like that—horizontal!” George explained, pronouncing the word carefully.
Edwin felt that there was no end to the surpassing strangeness of this boy. One moment he was aged six, and the next he was talking about horizontality.
“Why? What do you mean?”
“I don’t know!” George sighed. “But somehow—” Then, with fresh vivacity: “I tell you—when Auntie Janet comes to wake me up in the morning the cat comes in too, with its tail up in the air—you know!” Edwin nodded. “Well, when I’m lying in bed I can’t see the cat, but I can see the top of its tail sailing along the edge of the bed. But if I sit up I can see all the cat, and that spoils it, so I don’t sit up at first.”
The child was eager for Edwin to understand his pleasure in horizontal motion that had no apparent cause, like the tip of a cat’s tail on the horizon of a bed, or the roof of a tram-car on the horizon of the wall. And Edwin was eager to understand, and almost persuaded himself that he did understand; but he could not be sure. A marvellous child—disconcerting! He had a feeling of inferiority to the child, because the child had seen beauty where he had not dreamed of seeing it.
“Want a swing,” he suggested, “before I have to go off to business?”
When it occurred to him that he had had as much violent physical exercise as was good for his years, and that he had left his books in disarray, and that his business demanded him, Edwin apologetically announced that he must depart, and the child admitted that Aunt Janet was probably waiting to give him his lessons.
“Are you going back the way you came? You’d better. It’s always best,” said Edwin.
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
He lifted and pushed the writhing form on to the wall, dislodging a jar, which crashed dully on the ground.
“Auntie Janet told me I could have them to do what I liked with. So I break them,” said George, “when they don’t break themselves!”
“I bet she never told you to put them on this wall,” said Edwin.
“No, she didn’t. But it was the best place for aiming. And she told me it didn’t matter how many crocks I broke, because they make crocks here. Do they, really?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s clay here,” said Edwin glibly.
“Where?”
“Oh! Round about.”
“White, like that?” exclaimed George eagerly, handling a teapot without a spout. He looked at Edwin: “Will you take me to see it? I should like to see white ground.”
“Well,” said Edwin, more cautiously, “the clay they get about here isn’t exactly white.”
“Then do they make it white?”
“As a matter of fact the white clay comes from a long way off—Cornwall, for instance.”
“Then why do they make the things here?” George persisted; with the annoying obstinacy of his years. He had turned the teapot upside down. “This was made here. It’s got ‘Bursley’ on it. Auntie Janet showed me.”
Edwin was caught. He saw himself punished for that intellectual sloth which leads adults to fob children off with any kind of a slipshod, dishonestly simplified explanation of phenomena whose adequate explanation presents difficulty. He remembered how nearly twenty years earlier he had puzzled over the same question and for a long time had not found the answer.
“I’ll tell you how it is,” he said, determined to be conscientious. “It’s like this—” He had to pause. Queer, how hard it was to state the thing coherently! “It’s like this. In the old days they used to make crocks anyhow, very rough, out of any old clay. And crocks were first made here because the people found common yellow clay, and the coal to burn it with, lying close together in the ground. You see how handy it was for them.”
“Then the old crocks were yellow?”
“More or less. Then people got more particular, you see, and when white clay was found somewhere else they had it brought here, because everybody was used to making crocks here, and they had all the works and the tools they wanted, and the coal too. Very important, the coal! Much easier to bring the clay to the people and the works, than cart off all the people—and their families, don’t forget—and so on, to the clay, and build fresh works into the bargain... That’s why. Now are you sure you see?”
George ignored the question. “I suppose they used up all the yellow clay there was here, long ago?”
“Not much!” said Edwin. “And they never will! You don’t know what a sagger is, I reckon?”
“What is a sagger?”
“Well, I can’t stop to tell you all that now. But I will some time. They make saggers out of the yellow clay.”
“Will you show me the yellow clay?”
“Yes, and some saggers too.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. As soon as I can.”
“Will you to-morrow?”
To-morrow happened to be Thursday. It was not Edwin’s free afternoon, but it was an afternoon to which a sort of licence attached. He yielded to the ruthless egotism of the child.
“All right!” he said.
“You won’t forget?”
“You can rely on me. Ask your auntie if you may go, and if she says you may, be ready for me to pull you up over the wall here, about three o’clock.”
“Auntie will have to let me go,” said George, in a savage tone, as Edwin helped him to slip down into the garden of the Orgreaves. Edwin went off to business with a singular consciousness of virtue, and with pride in his successful manner of taming wayward children, and with a very strong new interest in the immediate future.
Volume Four--Chapter Eight.The Friendship.The next afternoon George’s invincible energy took both himself and the great bearded man, Edwin, to a certain spot on the hollow confines of the town towards Turnhill, where there were several pits of marl and clay. They stared in silence at a vast ochre’s-coloured glistening cavity in the ground, on the high edges of which grew tufts of grass amid shards and broken bottles. In the bottom of the pit were laid planks, and along the planks men with pieces of string tied tight round their legs beneath the knees drew large barrows full or empty, sometimes insecurely over pools of yellow water into which the plank sagged under their weight, and sometimes over little hillocks and through little defiles formed in the basin of the mine. They seemed to have no aim. The whole cavity had a sticky look which at first amused George, but on the whole he was not interested, and Edwin gathered that the clay-pit in some mysterious way fell short of expectations. A mineral line of railway which, near by, ambled at random like a pioneer over rough country, was much more successful than the pit in winning his approval.“Can we go and see the saggers now?” he suggested.Edwin might have taken him to the manufactory in which Albert Benbow was a partner, but he preferred not to display to the father of Clara’s offspring his avuncular patronage of George Cannon, and he chose the works of a customer down at Shawport for whom he was printing a somewhat ambitious catalogue. He would call at the works and talk about the catalogue, and then incidentally mention that his young friend desired to see saggers.“I suppose God put that clay there so that people could practise on it first, before they tried the white clay,” George observed, as the pair descended Oldcastle Street.Decidedly he had moments of talking like an infant, like a baby of three. Edwin recalled that Hilda used to torture herself about questions of belief when she was not three but twenty-three. The scene in the garden porch seemed to have happened after all not very long ago. Yet a new generation, unconceived on that exciting and unforgettable night, had since been born and had passed through infancy and was now trotting and arguing and dogmatising by his side. It was strange, but it was certainly a fact, that George regarded him as a being immeasurably old. He still felt a boy.How ought he to talk to the child concerning God? He was about to make a conventional response, when he stopped himself. “Confound it! Why should I?” he thought.“If I were you I shouldn’t worry about God,” he said, aloud, in a casual and perhaps slightly ironic tone.“Oh, I don’t!” George answered positively. “But now and then He comes into your head, doesn’t He? I was only just thinking.” The boy ceased, being attracted by the marvellous spectacle of a man perilously balanced on a crate-float driving a long-tailed pony full tilt down the steep slope of Oldcastle Street: it was equal to a circus.Two.The visit to the works was a particularly brilliant success. By good fortune an oven was just being ‘drawn,’ and the child had sight of the finest, the most barbaric picture that the manufacture of earthenware, from end to end picturesque, offers to the imaginative observer. Within the dark and sinister bowels of the kiln, illuminated by pale rays that came down through the upper orifice from the smoke-soiled sky, half-naked figures moved like ghosts, strenuous and damned, among the saggers of ware. At rapid intervals they emerged, their hairy torsos glistening with sweat, carrying the fired ware, which was still too hot for any but inured fingers to touch: an endless procession of plates and saucers and cups and mugs and jugs and basins, thousands and thousands! George stared in an enchanted silence of awe. And presently one of the Hercules’s picked him up, and held him for a moment within the portal of the torrid kiln, and he gazed at the high curved walls, like the walls of a gigantic tomb, and at the yellow saggers that held the ware. Now he knew what a sagger was.“I’m glad you took me,” he said afterwards, clearly impressed by the authority of Edwin, who could stroll out and see such terrific goings-on whenever he chose. During all the walk home he did not speak.On the Saturday, nominally in charge of his Auntie Janet, he called upon his chum with some water-colour drawings that he had done; they showed naked devils carrying cups and plates amid bright salmon-tinted flames: designs horrible, and horribly crude, interesting only because a child had done them. But somehow Edwin was obscurely impressed by them, and also he was touched by the coincidence that George painted in water-colours, and he, too, had once painted in water-colours. He was moreover expected to judge the drawings as an expert. On Monday he brought up the most complicated box of water-colours that his shop contained, and presented it to George, who, astounded, dazed, bore it away to his bedroom without a single word. Their friendship was sealed and published; it became a fact recognised by the two families.Three.About a week later, after a visit of a couple of days to Manchester, Edwin went out into the garden as usual when breakfast was finished, and discovered George standing on the wall. The boy had learned how to climb the wall from his own side of it without help.“I say!” George cried, in a loud, rough, angry voice, as soon as he saw Edwin at the garden door. “I’ve got to go off in a minute, you know.”“Go off? Where?”“Home. Didn’t they tell you in your house? Auntie Janet and I came to your house yesterday, after I’d waited on the wall for you I don’t know how long, and you never came. We came to tell you, but you weren’t in. So we asked Miss Clayhanger to tell you. Didn’t Miss Clayhanger tell you?”“No,” said Edwin. “She must have forgot.” It occurred to him that even the simple and placid Maggie had her personal prejudices, and that one of them might be against this child. For some reason she did not like the child. She positively could not have forgotten the child’s visit with Janet. She had merely not troubled to tell him: a touch of that malice which, though it be as rare as radium, nevertheless exists even in the most benignant natures. Edwin and George exchanged a silent, puzzled glance.“Well, that’s a nice thing!” said the boy. It was.“When are you going home?”“I’m goingnow! Mr Orgreave has to go to London to-day, and mamma wrote to Auntie Janet yesterday to say that I must go with him, if he’d let me, and she would meet me at London. She wants me back. So Auntie Janet is taking me to Knype to meet Mr Orgreave there—he’s gone to his office first. And the gardener has taken my luggage in the barrow up to Bleakridge Station. Auntie’s putting her hat on. Can’t you see I’ve got my other clothes on?”“Yes,” said Edwin, “I noticed that.”“And my other hat?”“Yes.”“I’ve promised auntie I’ll come and put my overcoat on as soon as she calls me. I say—you wouldn’t believe how jammed my trunk is with that paint box and everything! Auntie Janet had to sit on it like anything! I say—shall you be coming to Brighton soon?”Edwin shook his head.“I never go to Brighton.”“But when I asked you once if you’d been, you said you had.”“So I have, but that was an accident.”“Was it long since?”“Well,” said Edwin, “you ought to know. It was when I brought that parcel for you.”“Oh! Of course!”Edwin was saying to himself: “She’s sent for him on purpose. She’s heard that we’re great friends, and she’s sent for him! She means to stop it! That’s what it is!” He had no rational basis for this assumption. It was instinctive. And yet why should she desire to interfere with the course of the friendship? How could it react unpleasantly on her? There obviously did not exist between mother and son one of those passionate attachments which misfortune and sorrow sometimes engender. She had been able to let him go. And as for George, he seldom mentioned his mother. He seldom mentioned anybody who was not actually present, or necessary to the fulfilment of the idea that happened to be reigning in his heart. He lived a life of absorption, hypnotised by the idea of the moment. These ideas succeeded each other like a dynasty of kings, like a series of dynasties, marked by frequent dynastic quarrels, by depositions and sudden deaths; but George’s loyalty was the same to all of them; it was absolute.“Well, anyhow,” said he, “I shall come back here. Mother will have to let me.”And he jumped down from the wall into Edwin’s garden, carelessly, his hands in his pockets, with a familiar ease of gesture that implied practice. He had in fact often done it before. But just this time—perhaps he was troubled by the unaccustomed clothes—having lighted on his feet, he failed to maintain his balance and staggered back against the wall.“Now, clumsy!” Edwin commented.The boy turned pale, and bit his lip, and then Edwin could see the tears in his eyes. One of his peculiarities was that he had no shame whatever about crying. He could not, or he would not, suffer stoically. Now he put his hands to his back, and writhed.“Hurt yourself?” Edwin asked.George nodded. He was very white, and startled. At first he could not command himself sufficiently to be able to articulate. Then he spluttered, “My back!” He subsided gradually into a sitting posture.Edwin ran to him, and picked him up. But he screamed until he was set down. At the open drawing-room window, Maggie was arranging curtains. Edwin reluctantly left George for an instant and hurried to the window, “I say, Maggie, bring a chair or something out, will you? This dashed kid’s fallen and hurt himself.”“I’m not surprised,” said Maggie calmly. “What surprises me is that you should ever have given him permission to scramble over the wall and trample all about the flower-beds the way he does!”However, she moved at once to obey.He returned to George. Then Janet’s voice was heard from the other garden, calling him: “George! Georgie! Nearly time to go!”Edwin put his head over the wall.“He’s fallen and hurt his back,” he answered to Janet, without any prelude.“His back!” she repeated in a frightened tone.Everybody was afraid of that mysterious back. And George himself was most afraid of it.“I’ll get over the wall,” said Janet.Edwin quitted the wall. Maggie was coming out of the house with a large cane easy-chair and a large cushion. But George was now standing up, though still crying. His beautiful best sailor hat lay on the winter ground.“Now,” said Maggie to him, “you mustn’t be a baby!”He glared at her resentfully. She would have dropped down dead on the spot if his wet and angry glance could have killed her. She was a powerful woman. She seized him carefully and set him in the chair, and supported the famous spine with the cushion.“I don’t think he’s much hurt,” she decided. “He couldn’t make that noise if he was, and see how his colour’s coming back!”In another case Edwin would have agreed with her, for the tendency of both was to minimise an ill and to exaggerate the philosophical attitude in the first moments of any occurrence that looked serious. But now he honestly thought that her judgement was being influenced by her prejudice, and he felt savage against her. The worst was that it was all his fault. Maggie was odiously right. He ought never to have encouraged the child to be acrobatic on the wall. It was he who had even put the idea of the wall as a means of access into the child’s head.“Does it hurt?” he inquired, bending down, his hands on his knees.“Yes,” said George, ceasing to cry.“Much?” asked Maggie, dusting the sailor hat and sticking it on his head.“No, not much,” George unwillingly admitted. Maggie could not at any rate say that he did not speak the truth.Janet, having obtained steps, stood on the wall in her elaborate street-array.“Who’s going to help me down?” she demanded anxiously. She was not so young and sprightly as once she had been. Edwin obeyed the call.Then the three of them stood round the victim’s chair, and the victim, like a god, permitted himself to be contemplated. And Janet had to hear Edwin’s account of the accident, and also Maggie’s account of it, as seen from the window.“I don’t know what to do!” said Janet.“It is annoying, isn’t it?” said Maggie. “And just as you were going to the station too!”“I—I think I’m all right,” George announced.Janet passed a hand down his back, as though expecting to be able to judge the condition of his spine through the thickness of all his clothes.“Are you?” she questioned doubtfully.“It’s nothing,” said Maggie, with firmness.“He’d be all right in the train,” said Janet. “It’s the walking to the station that I’m afraid of... You never know.”“I can carry him,” said Edwin quickly.“Of course you can’t!” Maggie contradicted. “And even if you could you’d jog him far worse than if he walked himself.”“There’s no time to get a cab, now,” said Janet, looking at her watch. “If we aren’t at Knype, father will wonder what on earth’s happened, and I don’t know what his mother would say!”“Where’s that old pram?” Edwin demanded suddenly of Maggie.“What? Clara’s? It’s in the outhouse.”“I can run him up to the station in two jiffs in that.”“Oh yes! Do!” said George. “You must. And then lift me into the carriage!”The notion was accepted.“I hope it’s the best thing to do,” said Janet, apprehensive and doubtful, as she hurried off to the other house in order to get the boy’s overcoat and meet Edwin and the perambulator at the gates.“I’m certain it is,” said Maggie calmly. “There’s nothing really the matter with that child.”“Well, it’s very good of Edwin, I’m sure,” said Janet.Edwin had already rushed for the perambulator, an ancient vehicle which was sometimes used in the garden for infant Benbows.In a few moments Trafalgar Road had the spectacle of the bearded and eminent master-printer, Edwin Clayhanger, steaming up its muddy pavement behind a perambulator with a grown boy therein. And dozens of persons who had not till then distinguished the boy from other boys, inquired about his identity, and gossip was aroused. Maggie was displeased.In obedience to the command Edwin lifted George into the train; and the feel of his little slippery body, and the feel of Edwin’s mighty arms, seemed to make them more intimate than ever. Except for dirty tear-marks on his cheeks, George’s appearance was absolutely normal.Edwin expected to receive a letter from him, but none came, and this negligence wounded Edwin.
The next afternoon George’s invincible energy took both himself and the great bearded man, Edwin, to a certain spot on the hollow confines of the town towards Turnhill, where there were several pits of marl and clay. They stared in silence at a vast ochre’s-coloured glistening cavity in the ground, on the high edges of which grew tufts of grass amid shards and broken bottles. In the bottom of the pit were laid planks, and along the planks men with pieces of string tied tight round their legs beneath the knees drew large barrows full or empty, sometimes insecurely over pools of yellow water into which the plank sagged under their weight, and sometimes over little hillocks and through little defiles formed in the basin of the mine. They seemed to have no aim. The whole cavity had a sticky look which at first amused George, but on the whole he was not interested, and Edwin gathered that the clay-pit in some mysterious way fell short of expectations. A mineral line of railway which, near by, ambled at random like a pioneer over rough country, was much more successful than the pit in winning his approval.
“Can we go and see the saggers now?” he suggested.
Edwin might have taken him to the manufactory in which Albert Benbow was a partner, but he preferred not to display to the father of Clara’s offspring his avuncular patronage of George Cannon, and he chose the works of a customer down at Shawport for whom he was printing a somewhat ambitious catalogue. He would call at the works and talk about the catalogue, and then incidentally mention that his young friend desired to see saggers.
“I suppose God put that clay there so that people could practise on it first, before they tried the white clay,” George observed, as the pair descended Oldcastle Street.
Decidedly he had moments of talking like an infant, like a baby of three. Edwin recalled that Hilda used to torture herself about questions of belief when she was not three but twenty-three. The scene in the garden porch seemed to have happened after all not very long ago. Yet a new generation, unconceived on that exciting and unforgettable night, had since been born and had passed through infancy and was now trotting and arguing and dogmatising by his side. It was strange, but it was certainly a fact, that George regarded him as a being immeasurably old. He still felt a boy.
How ought he to talk to the child concerning God? He was about to make a conventional response, when he stopped himself. “Confound it! Why should I?” he thought.
“If I were you I shouldn’t worry about God,” he said, aloud, in a casual and perhaps slightly ironic tone.
“Oh, I don’t!” George answered positively. “But now and then He comes into your head, doesn’t He? I was only just thinking.” The boy ceased, being attracted by the marvellous spectacle of a man perilously balanced on a crate-float driving a long-tailed pony full tilt down the steep slope of Oldcastle Street: it was equal to a circus.
The visit to the works was a particularly brilliant success. By good fortune an oven was just being ‘drawn,’ and the child had sight of the finest, the most barbaric picture that the manufacture of earthenware, from end to end picturesque, offers to the imaginative observer. Within the dark and sinister bowels of the kiln, illuminated by pale rays that came down through the upper orifice from the smoke-soiled sky, half-naked figures moved like ghosts, strenuous and damned, among the saggers of ware. At rapid intervals they emerged, their hairy torsos glistening with sweat, carrying the fired ware, which was still too hot for any but inured fingers to touch: an endless procession of plates and saucers and cups and mugs and jugs and basins, thousands and thousands! George stared in an enchanted silence of awe. And presently one of the Hercules’s picked him up, and held him for a moment within the portal of the torrid kiln, and he gazed at the high curved walls, like the walls of a gigantic tomb, and at the yellow saggers that held the ware. Now he knew what a sagger was.
“I’m glad you took me,” he said afterwards, clearly impressed by the authority of Edwin, who could stroll out and see such terrific goings-on whenever he chose. During all the walk home he did not speak.
On the Saturday, nominally in charge of his Auntie Janet, he called upon his chum with some water-colour drawings that he had done; they showed naked devils carrying cups and plates amid bright salmon-tinted flames: designs horrible, and horribly crude, interesting only because a child had done them. But somehow Edwin was obscurely impressed by them, and also he was touched by the coincidence that George painted in water-colours, and he, too, had once painted in water-colours. He was moreover expected to judge the drawings as an expert. On Monday he brought up the most complicated box of water-colours that his shop contained, and presented it to George, who, astounded, dazed, bore it away to his bedroom without a single word. Their friendship was sealed and published; it became a fact recognised by the two families.
About a week later, after a visit of a couple of days to Manchester, Edwin went out into the garden as usual when breakfast was finished, and discovered George standing on the wall. The boy had learned how to climb the wall from his own side of it without help.
“I say!” George cried, in a loud, rough, angry voice, as soon as he saw Edwin at the garden door. “I’ve got to go off in a minute, you know.”
“Go off? Where?”
“Home. Didn’t they tell you in your house? Auntie Janet and I came to your house yesterday, after I’d waited on the wall for you I don’t know how long, and you never came. We came to tell you, but you weren’t in. So we asked Miss Clayhanger to tell you. Didn’t Miss Clayhanger tell you?”
“No,” said Edwin. “She must have forgot.” It occurred to him that even the simple and placid Maggie had her personal prejudices, and that one of them might be against this child. For some reason she did not like the child. She positively could not have forgotten the child’s visit with Janet. She had merely not troubled to tell him: a touch of that malice which, though it be as rare as radium, nevertheless exists even in the most benignant natures. Edwin and George exchanged a silent, puzzled glance.
“Well, that’s a nice thing!” said the boy. It was.
“When are you going home?”
“I’m goingnow! Mr Orgreave has to go to London to-day, and mamma wrote to Auntie Janet yesterday to say that I must go with him, if he’d let me, and she would meet me at London. She wants me back. So Auntie Janet is taking me to Knype to meet Mr Orgreave there—he’s gone to his office first. And the gardener has taken my luggage in the barrow up to Bleakridge Station. Auntie’s putting her hat on. Can’t you see I’ve got my other clothes on?”
“Yes,” said Edwin, “I noticed that.”
“And my other hat?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve promised auntie I’ll come and put my overcoat on as soon as she calls me. I say—you wouldn’t believe how jammed my trunk is with that paint box and everything! Auntie Janet had to sit on it like anything! I say—shall you be coming to Brighton soon?”
Edwin shook his head.
“I never go to Brighton.”
“But when I asked you once if you’d been, you said you had.”
“So I have, but that was an accident.”
“Was it long since?”
“Well,” said Edwin, “you ought to know. It was when I brought that parcel for you.”
“Oh! Of course!”
Edwin was saying to himself: “She’s sent for him on purpose. She’s heard that we’re great friends, and she’s sent for him! She means to stop it! That’s what it is!” He had no rational basis for this assumption. It was instinctive. And yet why should she desire to interfere with the course of the friendship? How could it react unpleasantly on her? There obviously did not exist between mother and son one of those passionate attachments which misfortune and sorrow sometimes engender. She had been able to let him go. And as for George, he seldom mentioned his mother. He seldom mentioned anybody who was not actually present, or necessary to the fulfilment of the idea that happened to be reigning in his heart. He lived a life of absorption, hypnotised by the idea of the moment. These ideas succeeded each other like a dynasty of kings, like a series of dynasties, marked by frequent dynastic quarrels, by depositions and sudden deaths; but George’s loyalty was the same to all of them; it was absolute.
“Well, anyhow,” said he, “I shall come back here. Mother will have to let me.”
And he jumped down from the wall into Edwin’s garden, carelessly, his hands in his pockets, with a familiar ease of gesture that implied practice. He had in fact often done it before. But just this time—perhaps he was troubled by the unaccustomed clothes—having lighted on his feet, he failed to maintain his balance and staggered back against the wall.
“Now, clumsy!” Edwin commented.
The boy turned pale, and bit his lip, and then Edwin could see the tears in his eyes. One of his peculiarities was that he had no shame whatever about crying. He could not, or he would not, suffer stoically. Now he put his hands to his back, and writhed.
“Hurt yourself?” Edwin asked.
George nodded. He was very white, and startled. At first he could not command himself sufficiently to be able to articulate. Then he spluttered, “My back!” He subsided gradually into a sitting posture.
Edwin ran to him, and picked him up. But he screamed until he was set down. At the open drawing-room window, Maggie was arranging curtains. Edwin reluctantly left George for an instant and hurried to the window, “I say, Maggie, bring a chair or something out, will you? This dashed kid’s fallen and hurt himself.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Maggie calmly. “What surprises me is that you should ever have given him permission to scramble over the wall and trample all about the flower-beds the way he does!”
However, she moved at once to obey.
He returned to George. Then Janet’s voice was heard from the other garden, calling him: “George! Georgie! Nearly time to go!”
Edwin put his head over the wall.
“He’s fallen and hurt his back,” he answered to Janet, without any prelude.
“His back!” she repeated in a frightened tone.
Everybody was afraid of that mysterious back. And George himself was most afraid of it.
“I’ll get over the wall,” said Janet.
Edwin quitted the wall. Maggie was coming out of the house with a large cane easy-chair and a large cushion. But George was now standing up, though still crying. His beautiful best sailor hat lay on the winter ground.
“Now,” said Maggie to him, “you mustn’t be a baby!”
He glared at her resentfully. She would have dropped down dead on the spot if his wet and angry glance could have killed her. She was a powerful woman. She seized him carefully and set him in the chair, and supported the famous spine with the cushion.
“I don’t think he’s much hurt,” she decided. “He couldn’t make that noise if he was, and see how his colour’s coming back!”
In another case Edwin would have agreed with her, for the tendency of both was to minimise an ill and to exaggerate the philosophical attitude in the first moments of any occurrence that looked serious. But now he honestly thought that her judgement was being influenced by her prejudice, and he felt savage against her. The worst was that it was all his fault. Maggie was odiously right. He ought never to have encouraged the child to be acrobatic on the wall. It was he who had even put the idea of the wall as a means of access into the child’s head.
“Does it hurt?” he inquired, bending down, his hands on his knees.
“Yes,” said George, ceasing to cry.
“Much?” asked Maggie, dusting the sailor hat and sticking it on his head.
“No, not much,” George unwillingly admitted. Maggie could not at any rate say that he did not speak the truth.
Janet, having obtained steps, stood on the wall in her elaborate street-array.
“Who’s going to help me down?” she demanded anxiously. She was not so young and sprightly as once she had been. Edwin obeyed the call.
Then the three of them stood round the victim’s chair, and the victim, like a god, permitted himself to be contemplated. And Janet had to hear Edwin’s account of the accident, and also Maggie’s account of it, as seen from the window.
“I don’t know what to do!” said Janet.
“It is annoying, isn’t it?” said Maggie. “And just as you were going to the station too!”
“I—I think I’m all right,” George announced.
Janet passed a hand down his back, as though expecting to be able to judge the condition of his spine through the thickness of all his clothes.
“Are you?” she questioned doubtfully.
“It’s nothing,” said Maggie, with firmness.
“He’d be all right in the train,” said Janet. “It’s the walking to the station that I’m afraid of... You never know.”
“I can carry him,” said Edwin quickly.
“Of course you can’t!” Maggie contradicted. “And even if you could you’d jog him far worse than if he walked himself.”
“There’s no time to get a cab, now,” said Janet, looking at her watch. “If we aren’t at Knype, father will wonder what on earth’s happened, and I don’t know what his mother would say!”
“Where’s that old pram?” Edwin demanded suddenly of Maggie.
“What? Clara’s? It’s in the outhouse.”
“I can run him up to the station in two jiffs in that.”
“Oh yes! Do!” said George. “You must. And then lift me into the carriage!”
The notion was accepted.
“I hope it’s the best thing to do,” said Janet, apprehensive and doubtful, as she hurried off to the other house in order to get the boy’s overcoat and meet Edwin and the perambulator at the gates.
“I’m certain it is,” said Maggie calmly. “There’s nothing really the matter with that child.”
“Well, it’s very good of Edwin, I’m sure,” said Janet.
Edwin had already rushed for the perambulator, an ancient vehicle which was sometimes used in the garden for infant Benbows.
In a few moments Trafalgar Road had the spectacle of the bearded and eminent master-printer, Edwin Clayhanger, steaming up its muddy pavement behind a perambulator with a grown boy therein. And dozens of persons who had not till then distinguished the boy from other boys, inquired about his identity, and gossip was aroused. Maggie was displeased.
In obedience to the command Edwin lifted George into the train; and the feel of his little slippery body, and the feel of Edwin’s mighty arms, seemed to make them more intimate than ever. Except for dirty tear-marks on his cheeks, George’s appearance was absolutely normal.
Edwin expected to receive a letter from him, but none came, and this negligence wounded Edwin.
Volume Four--Chapter Nine.The Arrivals.On a Saturday in the early days of the following year, 1892, Edwin by special request had gone in to take afternoon tea with the Orgreaves. Osmond Orgreave was just convalescent after an attack of influenza, and in the opinion of Janet wanted cheering up. The task of enlivening him had been laid upon Edwin. The guest, and Janet and her father and mother sat together in a group round the fire in the drawing-room.The drawing-room alone had grown younger with years. Money had been spent on it rather freely. During the previous decade Osmond’s family, scattering, had become very much less costly to him, but his habits of industry had not changed, nor his faculty for collecting money. Hence the needs of the drawing-room, which had been pressing for quite twenty years, had at last been satisfied; indeed Osmond was saving, through mere lack of that energetic interest in things which is necessary to spending. Possibly even the drawing-room would have remained untouched—both Janet and her elder sister Marian sentimentally preferred it as it was—had not Mrs Orgreave been ‘positively ashamed’ of it when her married children, including Marian, came to see her. They were all married now, except Janet and Charlie and Johnnie; and Alicia at any rate had a finer drawing-room than her mother. So far as the parents were concerned Charlie might as well have been married, for he had acquired a partnership in a practice at Ealing and seldom visited home. Johnnie, too, might as well have been married. Since Jimmie’s wedding he had used the house strictly as a hotel, for sleeping and eating, and not always for sleeping. He could not be retained at home. His interests were mysterious, and lay outside it. Janet alone was faithful to the changed drawing-room, with its new carpets and wall-papers and upholstery.“I’ve got more grandchildren than children now,” said Mrs Orgreave to Edwin, “and I never thought to have!”“Have you really?” Edwin responded. “Let me see—”“I’ve got nine.”“Ten, mother,” Janet corrected. “She’s forgetting her own grandchildren now!”“Bless me!” exclaimed Mrs Orgreave, taking off her eyeglasses and wiping them, “I’d missed Tom’s youngest.”“You’d better not tell Emily that,” said Janet. (Emily was the mother of Tom’s children.) “Here, give me those eyeglasses, dear. You’ll never get them right with a linen handkerchief. Where’s your bit of chamois?”Mrs Orgreave absently and in somewhat stiff silence handed over the pince-nez! She was now quite an old woman, small, shapeless, and delightfully easy-going, whose sense of humour had not developed with age. She could never see a joke which turned upon her relations with her grandchildren, and in fact the jocular members of the family had almost ceased to employ this subject of humour. She was undoubtedly rather foolish about her grandchildren—‘fond,’ as they say down there. The parents of the grandchildren did not object to this foolishness—that is, they only pretended to object. The task of preventing a pardonable weakness from degenerating into a tedious and mischievous mania fell solely upon Janet. Janet was ready to admit that the health of the grandchildren was a matter which could fairly be left to their fathers and mothers, and she stood passive when Mrs Orgreave’s grandmotherly indulgences seemed inimical to their health; but Mrs Orgreave was apt to endanger her own health in her devotion to the profession of grandmother—for example by sitting up to unchristian hours with a needle. Then there would be a struggle of wills, in which of course Mrs Orgreave, being the weaker, was defeated; though her belief survived that she and she alone, by watchfulness, advice, sagacity, and energy, kept her children’s children out of the grave. On all other questions the harmony between Janet and her mother was complete, and Mrs Orgreave undoubtedly considered that no mother had ever had a daughter who combined so many virtues and charms.Two.Mr Orgreave, forgetful of the company, was deciphering the “British Medical Journal” in the twilight of the afternoon. His doctor had lent him this esoteric periodical because there was an article therein on influenza, and Mr Orgreave was very much interested in influenza.“You remember the influenza of ’89, Edwin?” he asked suddenly, looking over the top of the paper.“Do I?” said Edwin. “Yes, I fancy I do remember a sort of epidemic.”“I should think so indeed!” Janet murmured.“Well,” continued Mr Orgreave, “I’m like you. I thought it was an epidemic. But it seems it wasn’t. It was a pandemic. What’s a pandemic, now?”“Give it up,” said Edwin.“You might just look in the dictionary—Ogilvie there,” and while Edwin ferreted in the bookcase, Mr Orgreave proceeded, reading: “‘The pandemic of 1889 has been followed by epidemics, and by endemic prevalence in some areas!’ So you see how manydemicsthere are! I suppose they’d call it an epidemic we’ve got in the town now.”His voice had changed on the last sentence. He had meant to be a little facetious about the Greek words; but it was the slowly prepared and rather exasperating facetiousness of an ageing man, and he had dropped it listlessly, as though he himself had perceived this. Influenza had weakened and depressed him; he looked worn, and even outworn. But not influenza alone was responsible for his appearance. The incredible had happened: Osmond Orgreave was getting older. His bald head was not the worst sign of his declension, nor the thickened veins in his hands, nor the deliberation of his gestures, nor even the unsprightliness of his wit. The worst sign was that he was losing his terrific zest in life; his palate for the intense savour of it was dulled. In this last attack of influenza he had not fought against the onset of the disease. He had been wise; he had obeyed his doctor, and laid down his arms at once; and he showed no imprudent anxiety to resume them. Yes, a changed Osmond! He was still one of the most industrious professional men in Bursley; but he worked from habit, not from passion.When Edwin had found ‘pandemic’ in Ogilvie, Mr Orgreave wanted to see the dictionary for himself, and then he wanted the Greek dictionary, which could not be discovered, and then he began to quote further from the “British Medical Journal.”“‘It may be said that there are three well-marked types of the disease, attacking respectively the respiratory, the digestive, and the nervous system.’ Well, I should say I’d had ’em all three. ‘As a rule the attack—’”Thus he went on. Janet made amoueat Edwin, who returned the signal. These youngsters were united in good-natured forbearing condescension towards Mr Orgreave. The excellent old fellow was prone to be tedious; they would accept his tediousness, but they would not disguise from each other their perception of it.“I hear the Vicar of Saint Peter’s is very ill indeed,” said Mrs Orgreave, blandly interrupting her husband.“What? Heve? With influenza?”“Yes. I wouldn’t tell you before because I thought it might pull you down again.”Mr Orgreave, in silence, stared at the immense fire.“What about this tea, Janet?” he demanded.Janet rang the bell.“Oh! I’d have done that!” said Edwin, as soon as she had done it.Three.While Janet was pouring out the tea, Edwin restored Ogilvie to his place in the bookcase, feeling that he had had enough of Ogilvie.“Not so many books here now as there used to be!” he said, vacuously amiable, as he shut the glass door which had once protected the treasures of Tom Orgreave.For a man who had been specially summoned to the task of cheering up, it was not a felicitous remark. In the first place it recalled the days when the house, which was now a hushed retreat where settled and precise habits sheltered themselves from a changing world, had been an arena for the jolly, exciting combats of outspread individualities. And in the second place it recalled a slight difficulty between Tom and his father. Osmond Orgreave was a most reasonable father, but no father is perfect in reasonableness, and Osmond had quite inexcusably resented that Tom on his marriage should take away all Tom’s precious books. Osmond’s attitude had been that Tom might in decency have left, at any rate, some of the books. It was not that Osmond had a taste for book-collecting: it was merely that he did not care to see his house depleted and bookcases empty. But Tom had shown no compassion. He had removed not merely every scrap of a book belonging to himself, but also two bookcases which he happened to have paid for. The weight of public opinion was decidedly against Mr Orgreave, who had to yield and affect pleasantness. Nevertheless books had become a topic which was avoided between father and son.“Ah!” muttered Mr Orgreave, satirical, in response to Edwin’s clumsiness.“Suppose we have another gas lighted,” Janet suggested. The servant had already lighted several burners and drawn the blinds and curtains.Edwin comprehended that he had been a blundering fool, and that Janet’s object was to create a diversion. He lit the extra burner above her head. She sat there rather straight and rather prim between her parents, sticking to them, smoothing creases for them, bearing their weight, living for them. She was the kindliest, the most dignified, the most capable creature; but she was now an old maid. You saw it even in the way she poured tea and dropped pieces of sugar into the cups. Her youth was gone; her complexion was nearly gone. And though in one aspect she seemed indispensable, in another the chief characteristic of her existence seemed to be a tragic futility. Whenever she came seriously into Edwin’s thoughts she saddened him. Useless for him to attempt to be gay and frivolous in that house!Four.With the inevitable passionate egotism of his humanity he almost at once withdrew his aroused pity from her to himself. Look at himself! Was he not also to be sympathised with? What was the object or the use of his being alive? He worked, saved, improved his mind, voted right, practised philosophy, and was generally benevolent; but to what end? Was not his existence miserable and his career a respectable fiasco? He too had lost zest. He had diligently studied both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus; he was enthusiastic, to others, about the merit of these two expert daily philosophers; but what had they done for him? Assuredly they had not enabled him to keep the one treasure of this world-zest. The year was scarcely a week old, and he was still young enough to have begun the year with resolutions and fresh hopes and aspirations, but already the New Year sensation had left him, and the year might have been dying in his heart.And yet what could he have done that he had not done? With what could he reproach himself? Ought he to have continued to run after a married woman? Ought he to have set himself titanically against the conventions amid which he lived, and devoted himself either to secret intrigue or to the outraging of the susceptibilities which environed him? There was only one answer. He could not have acted otherwise than he had acted. His was not the temperament of a rebel, nor was he the slave of his desires. He could sympathise with rebels and with slaves, but he could not join them; he regarded himself as spiritually their superior.And then the disaster of Hilda’s career! He felt, more than ever, that he had failed in sympathy with her overwhelming misfortune. In the secrecy of his heart a full imaginative sympathy had been lacking. He had not realised, as he seemed to realise then, in front of the fire in the drawing-room of the Orgreaves, what it must be to be the wife of a convict. Janet, sitting there as innocent as a doe, knew that Hilda was the wife of a convict. But did her parents know? And was she aware that he knew? He wondered, drinking his tea.Five.Then the servant—not the Martha who had been privileged to smile on duty if she felt so inclined—came with a tawny gold telegram on a silver plate, and hesitated a moment as to where she should bestow it.“Give it to me, Selina,” said Janet.Selina impassively obeyed, imitating as well as she could the deportment of an automaton; and went away.“That’s my telegram,” said Mr Orgreave. “How is it addressed?”“Orgreave, Bleakridge, Bursley.”“Then it’s mine.”“Oh no, it isn’t!” Janet archly protested. “If you have your business telegrams sent here you must take the consequences. I always open all telegrams that come here, don’t I, mother?”Mrs Orgreave made no reply, but waited with candid and fretful impatience, thinking of her five absent children, and her ten grandchildren, for the telegram to be opened.Janet opened it.Her lips parted to speak, and remained so in silent astonishment. “Just read that!” she said to Edwin, passing the telegram to him; and she added to her father: “It was for me, after all.”Edwin read, aloud: “Am sending George down to-day. Please meet 6:30 train at Knype. Love. Hilda.”“Well, I never!” exclaimed Mrs Orgreave. “You don’t mean to tell me she’s letting that boy travel alone! What next?”“Where’s the telegram sent from?” asked Mr Orgreave.Edwin examined the official indications: “Victoria.”“Then she’s brought him up to London, and she’s putting him in a train at Euston. That’s it.”“Only there is no London train that gets to Knype at half-past six,” Edwin said. “It’s 7:12, or 7:14—I forget.”“Oh! That’s near enough for Hilda,” Janet smiled, looking at her watch.“She doesn’t mean any other train?” Mrs Orgreave fearfully suggested.“She can’t mean any other train. There is no other. Only probably she’s been looking at the wrong time-table,” Janet reassured her mother.“Because if the poor little thing found no one to meet him at Knype—”“Don’t worry, dear,” said Janet. “The poor little thing would soon be engaging somebody’s attention. Trust him!”“But has she been writing to you lately?” Mrs Orgreave questioned.“No.”“Then why—”“Don’t askme!” said Janet. “No doubt I shall get a letter to-morrow, after George has come and told us everything! Poor dear, I’m glad she’s doing so much better now.”“Is she?” Edwin murmured, surprised.“Oh yes!” said Janet. “She’s got a regular bustling partner, and they’re that busy they scarcely know what to do. But they only keep one little servant.”In the ordinary way Janet and Edwin never mentioned Hilda to one another. Each seemed to be held back by a kind of timid shame and by a cautious suspicion. Each seemed to be inquiring: “What doesheknow?” “What doessheknow?”“If I thought it wasn’t too cold, I’d go with you to Knype,” said Mr Orgreave.“Now, Osmond!” Mrs Orgreave sat up.“Shall I go?” said Edwin.“Well,” said Janet, with much kindliness, “I’m sure he’d be delighted to seeyou.”Mrs Orgreave rang the bell.“What do you want, mother?”“There’ll be the bed—”“Don’t you trouble with those things, dear,” said Janet, very calmly. “There’s heaps of time.”But Janet was just as excited as her parents. In two minutes the excitement had spread through the whole house, like a piquant and agreeable odour. The place was alive again.“I’ll just step across and ask Maggie to alter supper,” said Edwin, “and then I’ll call for you. I suppose we’ll go down by train.”“I’m thankful he’s had influenza,” observed Mrs Orgreave, implying that thus there would be less chance of George catching the disease under her infected roof.That George had been down with influenza before Christmas was the sole information about him that Edwin obtained. Nobody appeared to consider it worth while to discuss the possible reasons for his sudden arrival. Hilda’s caprices were accepted in that house like the visitations of heaven.Six.Edwin and Janet stood together on the windy and bleak down-platform of Knype Station, awaiting the express, which had been signalled. Edwin was undoubtedly very nervous and constrained, and it seemed to him that Janet’s demeanour lacked naturalness.“It’s just occurred to me how she made that mistake about the time of the train,” said Edwin, chiefly because he found the silence intolerably irksome. “It stops at Lichfield, and in running her eye across the page she must have mixed up the Lichfield figures with the Knype figures—you know how awkward it is in a time-table. As a matter of fact, the train doesstopat Lichfield about 6:30.”“I see,” said Janet reflectively.And Edwin was saying to himself—“It’s a marvel to me how I can talk to her at all. What made me offer to come with her? How much does she know about me and Hilda? Hilda may have told her everything. If she’s told her about her husband why shouldn’t she have told her about me? And here we are both pretending that there’s never been anything at all between me and Hilda!”Then the train appeared, obscure round the curve, and bore down formidable and dark upon them, growing at every instant in stature and in noise until it deafened and seemed to fill the station; and the platform was suddenly in an uproar.And almost opposite Janet and Edwin, leaning forth high above them from the door of a third-class carriage, the head and the shoulders of George Cannon were displayed in the gaslight. He seemed to dominate the train and the platform. At the windows on either side of him were adult faces, excited by his excitement, of the people who had doubtless been friendly to him during the journey. He distinguished Janet and Edwin almost at once, and shouted, and then waved.“Hello, young son of a gun!” Edwin greeted him, trying to turn the handle of the door. But the door was locked, and it was necessary to call a porter, who tarried.“Imademamma let me come!” George cried victoriously. “I told you I should!” He was far too agitated to think of shaking hands, and seemed to be in a state of fever. All his gestures were those of a proud, hysterical conqueror, and like a conqueror he gazed down at Edwin and Janet, who stood beneath him with upturned faces. He had absolutely forgotten the existence of his acquaintances in the carriage. “Did you know I’ve had the influenza? My temperature was up to 104 once—but it didn’t stay long,” he added regretfully.When the door was at length opened, he jumped headlong, and Edwin caught him. He shook hands with Edwin and allowed Janet to kiss him.“How hot you are!” Janet murmured.The people in the compartment passed down his luggage, and after one of them had shouted good-bye to him twice, he remembered them, as it were by an effort, and replied, “Good-bye, good-bye,” in a quick, impatient tone.It was not until his anxious and assiduous foster-parents had bestowed him and his goods in the tranquillity of an empty compartment of the Loop Line train that they began to appreciate the morbid unusualness of his condition. His eyes glittered with extraordinary brilliance. He talked incessantly, not listening to their answers. And his skin was burning hot.“Why, whatever’s the matter with you, my dear?” asked Janet, alarmed. “You’re like an oven!”“I’m thirsty,” said George. “If I don’t have something to drink soon, I don’t know what I shall do.”Janet looked at Edwin.“There won’t be time to get something at the refreshment room?”They both felt heavily responsible.“I might—” Edwin said irresolutely.But just then the guard whistled.“Never mind!” Janet comforted the child. “In twenty minutes we shall be in the house... No! you must keep your overcoat buttoned.”“How long have you been like that, George?” Edwin asked. “You weren’t like that when you started, surely?”“No,” said George judicially. “It came on in the train.”After this, he appeared to go to sleep.“He’s certainly not well,” Janet whispered.Edwin shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t you think he’s grown?” he observed.“Oh yes!” said Janet. “It’s astonishing, isn’t it, how children shoot up in a few weeks!”They might have been parents exchanging notes, instead of celibates playing at parenthood for a hobby.“Mamma says I’ve grown an inch.” George opened his eyes. “She says it’s about time I had! I dare say I shall be very tall. Are we nearly there?” His high, curt, febrile tones were really somewhat alarming.When the train threw them out into the sodden waste that surrounds Bleakridge Station, George could scarcely stand. At any rate he showed no wish to stand. His protectors took him strongly by either arm, and thus bore him to Lane End House, with irregular unwilling assistance from his own feet. A porter followed with the luggage. It was an extremely distressing passage. Each protector in secret was imagining for George some terrible fever, of swift onslaught and fatal effect. At length they entered the garden, thanking their gods.“He’s not well,” said Janet to her mother, who was fussily awaiting them in the hall. Her voice showed apprehension, and she was not at all convincing when she added: “But it’s nothing serious. I shall put him straight to bed and let him eat there.”Instantly George became the centre of the house. The women disappeared with him, and Edwin had to recount the whole history of the arrival to Osmond Orgreave in the drawing-room. This recital was interrupted by Mrs Orgreave.“Mr Edwin, Janet thinks if we sent for the doctor, just to be sure. As Johnnie isn’t in, would you mind—”“Stirling, I suppose?” said Edwin.Stirling was the young Scottish doctor who had recently come into the town and taken it by storm.When Edwin at last went home to a much-delayed meal, he was in a position to tell Maggie that young George Cannon had thought fit to catch influenza a second time in a couple of months. And Maggie, without a clear word, contrived to indicate that it was what she would have expected from a boy of George’s violent temperament.
On a Saturday in the early days of the following year, 1892, Edwin by special request had gone in to take afternoon tea with the Orgreaves. Osmond Orgreave was just convalescent after an attack of influenza, and in the opinion of Janet wanted cheering up. The task of enlivening him had been laid upon Edwin. The guest, and Janet and her father and mother sat together in a group round the fire in the drawing-room.
The drawing-room alone had grown younger with years. Money had been spent on it rather freely. During the previous decade Osmond’s family, scattering, had become very much less costly to him, but his habits of industry had not changed, nor his faculty for collecting money. Hence the needs of the drawing-room, which had been pressing for quite twenty years, had at last been satisfied; indeed Osmond was saving, through mere lack of that energetic interest in things which is necessary to spending. Possibly even the drawing-room would have remained untouched—both Janet and her elder sister Marian sentimentally preferred it as it was—had not Mrs Orgreave been ‘positively ashamed’ of it when her married children, including Marian, came to see her. They were all married now, except Janet and Charlie and Johnnie; and Alicia at any rate had a finer drawing-room than her mother. So far as the parents were concerned Charlie might as well have been married, for he had acquired a partnership in a practice at Ealing and seldom visited home. Johnnie, too, might as well have been married. Since Jimmie’s wedding he had used the house strictly as a hotel, for sleeping and eating, and not always for sleeping. He could not be retained at home. His interests were mysterious, and lay outside it. Janet alone was faithful to the changed drawing-room, with its new carpets and wall-papers and upholstery.
“I’ve got more grandchildren than children now,” said Mrs Orgreave to Edwin, “and I never thought to have!”
“Have you really?” Edwin responded. “Let me see—”
“I’ve got nine.”
“Ten, mother,” Janet corrected. “She’s forgetting her own grandchildren now!”
“Bless me!” exclaimed Mrs Orgreave, taking off her eyeglasses and wiping them, “I’d missed Tom’s youngest.”
“You’d better not tell Emily that,” said Janet. (Emily was the mother of Tom’s children.) “Here, give me those eyeglasses, dear. You’ll never get them right with a linen handkerchief. Where’s your bit of chamois?”
Mrs Orgreave absently and in somewhat stiff silence handed over the pince-nez! She was now quite an old woman, small, shapeless, and delightfully easy-going, whose sense of humour had not developed with age. She could never see a joke which turned upon her relations with her grandchildren, and in fact the jocular members of the family had almost ceased to employ this subject of humour. She was undoubtedly rather foolish about her grandchildren—‘fond,’ as they say down there. The parents of the grandchildren did not object to this foolishness—that is, they only pretended to object. The task of preventing a pardonable weakness from degenerating into a tedious and mischievous mania fell solely upon Janet. Janet was ready to admit that the health of the grandchildren was a matter which could fairly be left to their fathers and mothers, and she stood passive when Mrs Orgreave’s grandmotherly indulgences seemed inimical to their health; but Mrs Orgreave was apt to endanger her own health in her devotion to the profession of grandmother—for example by sitting up to unchristian hours with a needle. Then there would be a struggle of wills, in which of course Mrs Orgreave, being the weaker, was defeated; though her belief survived that she and she alone, by watchfulness, advice, sagacity, and energy, kept her children’s children out of the grave. On all other questions the harmony between Janet and her mother was complete, and Mrs Orgreave undoubtedly considered that no mother had ever had a daughter who combined so many virtues and charms.
Mr Orgreave, forgetful of the company, was deciphering the “British Medical Journal” in the twilight of the afternoon. His doctor had lent him this esoteric periodical because there was an article therein on influenza, and Mr Orgreave was very much interested in influenza.
“You remember the influenza of ’89, Edwin?” he asked suddenly, looking over the top of the paper.
“Do I?” said Edwin. “Yes, I fancy I do remember a sort of epidemic.”
“I should think so indeed!” Janet murmured.
“Well,” continued Mr Orgreave, “I’m like you. I thought it was an epidemic. But it seems it wasn’t. It was a pandemic. What’s a pandemic, now?”
“Give it up,” said Edwin.
“You might just look in the dictionary—Ogilvie there,” and while Edwin ferreted in the bookcase, Mr Orgreave proceeded, reading: “‘The pandemic of 1889 has been followed by epidemics, and by endemic prevalence in some areas!’ So you see how manydemicsthere are! I suppose they’d call it an epidemic we’ve got in the town now.”
His voice had changed on the last sentence. He had meant to be a little facetious about the Greek words; but it was the slowly prepared and rather exasperating facetiousness of an ageing man, and he had dropped it listlessly, as though he himself had perceived this. Influenza had weakened and depressed him; he looked worn, and even outworn. But not influenza alone was responsible for his appearance. The incredible had happened: Osmond Orgreave was getting older. His bald head was not the worst sign of his declension, nor the thickened veins in his hands, nor the deliberation of his gestures, nor even the unsprightliness of his wit. The worst sign was that he was losing his terrific zest in life; his palate for the intense savour of it was dulled. In this last attack of influenza he had not fought against the onset of the disease. He had been wise; he had obeyed his doctor, and laid down his arms at once; and he showed no imprudent anxiety to resume them. Yes, a changed Osmond! He was still one of the most industrious professional men in Bursley; but he worked from habit, not from passion.
When Edwin had found ‘pandemic’ in Ogilvie, Mr Orgreave wanted to see the dictionary for himself, and then he wanted the Greek dictionary, which could not be discovered, and then he began to quote further from the “British Medical Journal.”
“‘It may be said that there are three well-marked types of the disease, attacking respectively the respiratory, the digestive, and the nervous system.’ Well, I should say I’d had ’em all three. ‘As a rule the attack—’”
Thus he went on. Janet made amoueat Edwin, who returned the signal. These youngsters were united in good-natured forbearing condescension towards Mr Orgreave. The excellent old fellow was prone to be tedious; they would accept his tediousness, but they would not disguise from each other their perception of it.
“I hear the Vicar of Saint Peter’s is very ill indeed,” said Mrs Orgreave, blandly interrupting her husband.
“What? Heve? With influenza?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t tell you before because I thought it might pull you down again.”
Mr Orgreave, in silence, stared at the immense fire.
“What about this tea, Janet?” he demanded.
Janet rang the bell.
“Oh! I’d have done that!” said Edwin, as soon as she had done it.
While Janet was pouring out the tea, Edwin restored Ogilvie to his place in the bookcase, feeling that he had had enough of Ogilvie.
“Not so many books here now as there used to be!” he said, vacuously amiable, as he shut the glass door which had once protected the treasures of Tom Orgreave.
For a man who had been specially summoned to the task of cheering up, it was not a felicitous remark. In the first place it recalled the days when the house, which was now a hushed retreat where settled and precise habits sheltered themselves from a changing world, had been an arena for the jolly, exciting combats of outspread individualities. And in the second place it recalled a slight difficulty between Tom and his father. Osmond Orgreave was a most reasonable father, but no father is perfect in reasonableness, and Osmond had quite inexcusably resented that Tom on his marriage should take away all Tom’s precious books. Osmond’s attitude had been that Tom might in decency have left, at any rate, some of the books. It was not that Osmond had a taste for book-collecting: it was merely that he did not care to see his house depleted and bookcases empty. But Tom had shown no compassion. He had removed not merely every scrap of a book belonging to himself, but also two bookcases which he happened to have paid for. The weight of public opinion was decidedly against Mr Orgreave, who had to yield and affect pleasantness. Nevertheless books had become a topic which was avoided between father and son.
“Ah!” muttered Mr Orgreave, satirical, in response to Edwin’s clumsiness.
“Suppose we have another gas lighted,” Janet suggested. The servant had already lighted several burners and drawn the blinds and curtains.
Edwin comprehended that he had been a blundering fool, and that Janet’s object was to create a diversion. He lit the extra burner above her head. She sat there rather straight and rather prim between her parents, sticking to them, smoothing creases for them, bearing their weight, living for them. She was the kindliest, the most dignified, the most capable creature; but she was now an old maid. You saw it even in the way she poured tea and dropped pieces of sugar into the cups. Her youth was gone; her complexion was nearly gone. And though in one aspect she seemed indispensable, in another the chief characteristic of her existence seemed to be a tragic futility. Whenever she came seriously into Edwin’s thoughts she saddened him. Useless for him to attempt to be gay and frivolous in that house!
With the inevitable passionate egotism of his humanity he almost at once withdrew his aroused pity from her to himself. Look at himself! Was he not also to be sympathised with? What was the object or the use of his being alive? He worked, saved, improved his mind, voted right, practised philosophy, and was generally benevolent; but to what end? Was not his existence miserable and his career a respectable fiasco? He too had lost zest. He had diligently studied both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus; he was enthusiastic, to others, about the merit of these two expert daily philosophers; but what had they done for him? Assuredly they had not enabled him to keep the one treasure of this world-zest. The year was scarcely a week old, and he was still young enough to have begun the year with resolutions and fresh hopes and aspirations, but already the New Year sensation had left him, and the year might have been dying in his heart.
And yet what could he have done that he had not done? With what could he reproach himself? Ought he to have continued to run after a married woman? Ought he to have set himself titanically against the conventions amid which he lived, and devoted himself either to secret intrigue or to the outraging of the susceptibilities which environed him? There was only one answer. He could not have acted otherwise than he had acted. His was not the temperament of a rebel, nor was he the slave of his desires. He could sympathise with rebels and with slaves, but he could not join them; he regarded himself as spiritually their superior.
And then the disaster of Hilda’s career! He felt, more than ever, that he had failed in sympathy with her overwhelming misfortune. In the secrecy of his heart a full imaginative sympathy had been lacking. He had not realised, as he seemed to realise then, in front of the fire in the drawing-room of the Orgreaves, what it must be to be the wife of a convict. Janet, sitting there as innocent as a doe, knew that Hilda was the wife of a convict. But did her parents know? And was she aware that he knew? He wondered, drinking his tea.
Then the servant—not the Martha who had been privileged to smile on duty if she felt so inclined—came with a tawny gold telegram on a silver plate, and hesitated a moment as to where she should bestow it.
“Give it to me, Selina,” said Janet.
Selina impassively obeyed, imitating as well as she could the deportment of an automaton; and went away.
“That’s my telegram,” said Mr Orgreave. “How is it addressed?”
“Orgreave, Bleakridge, Bursley.”
“Then it’s mine.”
“Oh no, it isn’t!” Janet archly protested. “If you have your business telegrams sent here you must take the consequences. I always open all telegrams that come here, don’t I, mother?”
Mrs Orgreave made no reply, but waited with candid and fretful impatience, thinking of her five absent children, and her ten grandchildren, for the telegram to be opened.
Janet opened it.
Her lips parted to speak, and remained so in silent astonishment. “Just read that!” she said to Edwin, passing the telegram to him; and she added to her father: “It was for me, after all.”
Edwin read, aloud: “Am sending George down to-day. Please meet 6:30 train at Knype. Love. Hilda.”
“Well, I never!” exclaimed Mrs Orgreave. “You don’t mean to tell me she’s letting that boy travel alone! What next?”
“Where’s the telegram sent from?” asked Mr Orgreave.
Edwin examined the official indications: “Victoria.”
“Then she’s brought him up to London, and she’s putting him in a train at Euston. That’s it.”
“Only there is no London train that gets to Knype at half-past six,” Edwin said. “It’s 7:12, or 7:14—I forget.”
“Oh! That’s near enough for Hilda,” Janet smiled, looking at her watch.
“She doesn’t mean any other train?” Mrs Orgreave fearfully suggested.
“She can’t mean any other train. There is no other. Only probably she’s been looking at the wrong time-table,” Janet reassured her mother.
“Because if the poor little thing found no one to meet him at Knype—”
“Don’t worry, dear,” said Janet. “The poor little thing would soon be engaging somebody’s attention. Trust him!”
“But has she been writing to you lately?” Mrs Orgreave questioned.
“No.”
“Then why—”
“Don’t askme!” said Janet. “No doubt I shall get a letter to-morrow, after George has come and told us everything! Poor dear, I’m glad she’s doing so much better now.”
“Is she?” Edwin murmured, surprised.
“Oh yes!” said Janet. “She’s got a regular bustling partner, and they’re that busy they scarcely know what to do. But they only keep one little servant.”
In the ordinary way Janet and Edwin never mentioned Hilda to one another. Each seemed to be held back by a kind of timid shame and by a cautious suspicion. Each seemed to be inquiring: “What doesheknow?” “What doessheknow?”
“If I thought it wasn’t too cold, I’d go with you to Knype,” said Mr Orgreave.
“Now, Osmond!” Mrs Orgreave sat up.
“Shall I go?” said Edwin.
“Well,” said Janet, with much kindliness, “I’m sure he’d be delighted to seeyou.”
Mrs Orgreave rang the bell.
“What do you want, mother?”
“There’ll be the bed—”
“Don’t you trouble with those things, dear,” said Janet, very calmly. “There’s heaps of time.”
But Janet was just as excited as her parents. In two minutes the excitement had spread through the whole house, like a piquant and agreeable odour. The place was alive again.
“I’ll just step across and ask Maggie to alter supper,” said Edwin, “and then I’ll call for you. I suppose we’ll go down by train.”
“I’m thankful he’s had influenza,” observed Mrs Orgreave, implying that thus there would be less chance of George catching the disease under her infected roof.
That George had been down with influenza before Christmas was the sole information about him that Edwin obtained. Nobody appeared to consider it worth while to discuss the possible reasons for his sudden arrival. Hilda’s caprices were accepted in that house like the visitations of heaven.
Edwin and Janet stood together on the windy and bleak down-platform of Knype Station, awaiting the express, which had been signalled. Edwin was undoubtedly very nervous and constrained, and it seemed to him that Janet’s demeanour lacked naturalness.
“It’s just occurred to me how she made that mistake about the time of the train,” said Edwin, chiefly because he found the silence intolerably irksome. “It stops at Lichfield, and in running her eye across the page she must have mixed up the Lichfield figures with the Knype figures—you know how awkward it is in a time-table. As a matter of fact, the train doesstopat Lichfield about 6:30.”
“I see,” said Janet reflectively.
And Edwin was saying to himself—
“It’s a marvel to me how I can talk to her at all. What made me offer to come with her? How much does she know about me and Hilda? Hilda may have told her everything. If she’s told her about her husband why shouldn’t she have told her about me? And here we are both pretending that there’s never been anything at all between me and Hilda!”
Then the train appeared, obscure round the curve, and bore down formidable and dark upon them, growing at every instant in stature and in noise until it deafened and seemed to fill the station; and the platform was suddenly in an uproar.
And almost opposite Janet and Edwin, leaning forth high above them from the door of a third-class carriage, the head and the shoulders of George Cannon were displayed in the gaslight. He seemed to dominate the train and the platform. At the windows on either side of him were adult faces, excited by his excitement, of the people who had doubtless been friendly to him during the journey. He distinguished Janet and Edwin almost at once, and shouted, and then waved.
“Hello, young son of a gun!” Edwin greeted him, trying to turn the handle of the door. But the door was locked, and it was necessary to call a porter, who tarried.
“Imademamma let me come!” George cried victoriously. “I told you I should!” He was far too agitated to think of shaking hands, and seemed to be in a state of fever. All his gestures were those of a proud, hysterical conqueror, and like a conqueror he gazed down at Edwin and Janet, who stood beneath him with upturned faces. He had absolutely forgotten the existence of his acquaintances in the carriage. “Did you know I’ve had the influenza? My temperature was up to 104 once—but it didn’t stay long,” he added regretfully.
When the door was at length opened, he jumped headlong, and Edwin caught him. He shook hands with Edwin and allowed Janet to kiss him.
“How hot you are!” Janet murmured.
The people in the compartment passed down his luggage, and after one of them had shouted good-bye to him twice, he remembered them, as it were by an effort, and replied, “Good-bye, good-bye,” in a quick, impatient tone.
It was not until his anxious and assiduous foster-parents had bestowed him and his goods in the tranquillity of an empty compartment of the Loop Line train that they began to appreciate the morbid unusualness of his condition. His eyes glittered with extraordinary brilliance. He talked incessantly, not listening to their answers. And his skin was burning hot.
“Why, whatever’s the matter with you, my dear?” asked Janet, alarmed. “You’re like an oven!”
“I’m thirsty,” said George. “If I don’t have something to drink soon, I don’t know what I shall do.”
Janet looked at Edwin.
“There won’t be time to get something at the refreshment room?”
They both felt heavily responsible.
“I might—” Edwin said irresolutely.
But just then the guard whistled.
“Never mind!” Janet comforted the child. “In twenty minutes we shall be in the house... No! you must keep your overcoat buttoned.”
“How long have you been like that, George?” Edwin asked. “You weren’t like that when you started, surely?”
“No,” said George judicially. “It came on in the train.”
After this, he appeared to go to sleep.
“He’s certainly not well,” Janet whispered.
Edwin shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t you think he’s grown?” he observed.
“Oh yes!” said Janet. “It’s astonishing, isn’t it, how children shoot up in a few weeks!”
They might have been parents exchanging notes, instead of celibates playing at parenthood for a hobby.
“Mamma says I’ve grown an inch.” George opened his eyes. “She says it’s about time I had! I dare say I shall be very tall. Are we nearly there?” His high, curt, febrile tones were really somewhat alarming.
When the train threw them out into the sodden waste that surrounds Bleakridge Station, George could scarcely stand. At any rate he showed no wish to stand. His protectors took him strongly by either arm, and thus bore him to Lane End House, with irregular unwilling assistance from his own feet. A porter followed with the luggage. It was an extremely distressing passage. Each protector in secret was imagining for George some terrible fever, of swift onslaught and fatal effect. At length they entered the garden, thanking their gods.
“He’s not well,” said Janet to her mother, who was fussily awaiting them in the hall. Her voice showed apprehension, and she was not at all convincing when she added: “But it’s nothing serious. I shall put him straight to bed and let him eat there.”
Instantly George became the centre of the house. The women disappeared with him, and Edwin had to recount the whole history of the arrival to Osmond Orgreave in the drawing-room. This recital was interrupted by Mrs Orgreave.
“Mr Edwin, Janet thinks if we sent for the doctor, just to be sure. As Johnnie isn’t in, would you mind—”
“Stirling, I suppose?” said Edwin.
Stirling was the young Scottish doctor who had recently come into the town and taken it by storm.
When Edwin at last went home to a much-delayed meal, he was in a position to tell Maggie that young George Cannon had thought fit to catch influenza a second time in a couple of months. And Maggie, without a clear word, contrived to indicate that it was what she would have expected from a boy of George’s violent temperament.