Volume Three--Chapter Six.Keys and Cheques.Coming up Trafalgar Road at twenty minutes past nine in the bright, astringent morning, Edwin carried by a string a little round parcel which for him contained the inspiring symbol of his new life. By mere accident he had wakened and had risen early, arriving at the shop before half-past seven. He had deliberately lifted on to his shoulders the whole burden of the shop and the printing business, and as soon as he felt its weight securely lodged he became extraordinarily animated and vigorous; even gay. He had worked with a most agreeable sense of energy until nearly nine o’clock; and then, having first called at the ironmonger’s, had stepped into the bank at the top of Saint Luke’s Square a moment after its doors opened, and had five minutes’ exciting conversation with the manager. After which, with righteous hunger in his belly and the symbol in his hand, he had come home to breakfast. The symbol was such as could be obtained at any ironmonger’s: an alarm clock. Mrs Nixon had grown less reliable than formerly as an alarm clock; machinery was now supplanting her.Dr Heve came out of the house, and Dr Heve too seemed gay with fine resolutions. The two met on the doorstep, each full of a justifiable self-satisfaction. The doctor explained that he had come thus early because Mr Clayhanger was one of those cases upon which he could look in casually at any time. In the sunshine they talked under the porch of early rising, as men who understood the value of that art. Edwin could see that Dr Heve’s life was a series of little habits which would never allow themselves to be interfered with by any large interest, and he despised the man’s womanish smile. Nevertheless his new respect for him did not weaken; he decided that he was a very decent fellow in his way, and he was more impressed than he would admit by the amount of work that the doctor had for years been doing in the morning before his intellectual superiors had sat up in bed. And he imagined that it might be even more agreeable to read in the fresh stillness of the morning than in the solitary night.Then they returned to the case of Darius. The doctor was more communicative, and they were both cheerfully matter-of-fact concerning it. There it was, to be made the best of! And that Darius could never handle business again, and that in about two years his doom would be accomplished—these were basic facts, axiomatic. The doctor had seen his patient in the garden, and he suggested that if Darius could be persuaded to interest himself in gardening... They discussed his medicine, his meals, his digestion, and the great, impossible dream of ‘taking him away,’ ‘out of it all.’ And every now and then Dr Heve dropped some little hint as to the management of Darius.The ticking parcel drew the discreet attention of the doctor. The machine was one guaranteed to go in any position, and was much more difficult to stop than to start.“It’s only an alarm,” said Edwin, not without self-consciousness.The doctor went, tripping neatly and optimistically, off towards his own breakfast. He got up earlier than his horse.Two.Darius was still in the garden when Edwin went to him. He had put on his daily suit, and was leisurely digging in an uncultivated patch of ground. He stuck the spade into the earth perpendicularly and deep, and when he tried to prise it up and it would not yield because of a concealed half-brick, he put his tongue between his teeth and then bit his lower lip, controlling himself, determined to get the better of the spade and the brick by persuasively humouring them. He took no notice whatever of Edwin.“I see you aren’t losing any time,” said Edwin, who felt as though he were engaging in small-talk with a stranger.“Areyou?” Darius replied, without turning his head.“I’ve just come up for a bit of breakfast. Everything’s all right,” he said. He would have liked to add: “I was in the shop before seven-thirty,” but he was too proud.After a pause, he ventured, essaying the casual—“I say, father, I shall want the keys of the desk, and all that.”“Keys o’ th’ desk!” Darius muttered, leaning on the spade, as though demanding in stupefaction, “What on earth can you want the keys for?”“Well—” Edwin stammered.But the proposition was too obvious to be denied. Darius left the spade to stand up by itself, and stared.“Got ’em in your pocket?” Edwin inquired.Slowly Darius drew forth a heavy, glittering bunch of keys, one of the chief insignia of his dominion, and began to fumble at it.“You needn’t take any of them off. I expect I know which is which,” said Edwin, holding out his hand.Darius hesitated, and then yielded up the bunch.“Thanks,” said Edwin lightly.But the old man’s reluctance to perform this simple and absolutely necessary act of surrender, the old man’s air of having done something tremendous—these signs frightened Edwin and shook his courage for the demand compared to which the demand for the keys was naught. Still, the affair had to be carried through.“And I say,” he proceeded, jingling the keys, “about signing and endorsing cheques. They tell me at the Bank that if you sign a general authority to me to do it for you, that will be enough.”He could not avoid looking guilty. He almost felt guilty, almost felt as if he were plotting against his father’s welfare. And as he spoke his words seemed unreal and his suggestion fantastic. At the Bank the plan had been simple, easy, and perfectly natural. But there could be no doubt, that as he had walked up Trafalgar Road, receding from the Bank and approaching his father, the plan had gradually lost those attractive qualities. And now in the garden it was merely monstrous.Silent, Darius resumed the spade.“Well,” said Edwin desperately. “What about it?”“Do you think”—Darius glowered upon him with heavy, desolating scorn—“do you think as I’m going to let you sign my cheques for me? You’re taking too much on yourself, my lad.”“But—”“I tell ye you’re taking too much on yourself!” he began to shout menacingly. “Get about your business and don’t act the fool! You needn’t think you’re going to be God A’mighty because you’ve got up a bit earlier for once in a way and been down to th’ shop before breakfast.”Three.In all his demeanour there was not the least indication of weakness. He might never have sat down on the stairs and cried! He might never have submitted feebly and perhaps gladly to the caresses of Clara and the soothings of Auntie Hamps! Impossible to convince him that he was cut off from the world! Impossible even to believe it! Was this the man that Edwin and the Bank manager and the doctor and all the others had been disposing of as though he were an automaton accurately responsive to external suggestion?“Look here,” Edwin knew that he ought to say. “Let it be clearly understood once for all—I’m the boss now! I have the authority in my pocket and you must sign it, and quick too! I shall do my best for you, but I don’t mean to be bullied while I’m doing it!”But he could not say it. Nor could his heart emotionally feel it.He turned away sheepishly, and then he faced his father again, with a distressed, apologetic smile.“Well then,” he asked, “whoisgoing to sign cheques?”“I am,” said Darius.“But you know what the doctor said! You know what you promised him!”“What did the doctor say?”“He said you weren’t to do anything at all. And you said you wouldn’t. What’s more, you said you didn’t want to.”Darius sneered.“I reckon I can sign cheques,” he said. “And I reckon I can endorse cheques... So it’s got to that! I can’t sign my own name now. I shall show some of you whether I can’t sign my own name!”“You know it isn’t simply signing them. You know if I bring cheques up for you to sign you’ll begin worrying about them at once, and—and there’ll be no end to it. You’d much better—”“Shut up!” It was like a clap of thunder.Edwin hesitated an instant and then went towards the house. He could hear his father muttering “Whipper-snapper!”“And I’ll tell you another thing,” Darius bawled across the garden—assuredly his voice would reach the street. “It was like your impudence to go to the Bank like that without asking me first! ‘They tell you at the Bank!’ ‘They tell you at the Bank!’ Anything else they told you at the Bank?” Then a snort.Edwin was humiliated and baffled. He knew not what he could do. The situation became impossible immediately it was faced. He felt also very resentful, and resentment was capturing him, when suddenly an idea seemed to pull him by the sleeve: “All this is part of his disease. It’s part of his disease that he can’t see the point of a thing.” And the idea was insistent, and under its insistence Edwin’s resentment changed to melancholy. He said to himself that he must think of his father as a child. He blamed himself, in a sort of pleasurable luxury of remorse, for all the anger which during all his life he had felt against his father. His father’s unreasonableness had not been a fault, but a misfortune. His father had been not a tyrant, but a victim. His brain must always have been wrong! And now he was doomed, and the worst part of his doom was that he was unaware of it. And in the thought of Darius ignorantly blustering within the walled garden, in the spring sunshine, condemned, cut off, helpless at the last, pitiable at the last, there was something inexpressibly poignant. And the sunshine seemed a shame; and Edwin’s youth and mental vigour seemed a shame.Nevertheless Edwin knew not what to do.“Master Edwin,” said Mrs Nixon, who was rubbing the balustrade of the stairs, “you munna’ cross him like that.” She jerked her head in the direction of the garden. The garden door stood open.If he had not felt solemn and superior, he could have snapped off that head of hers.“Is my breakfast ready?” he asked. He hung up his hat, and absently took the little parcel which he had left on the marble ledge of the umbrella-stand.
Coming up Trafalgar Road at twenty minutes past nine in the bright, astringent morning, Edwin carried by a string a little round parcel which for him contained the inspiring symbol of his new life. By mere accident he had wakened and had risen early, arriving at the shop before half-past seven. He had deliberately lifted on to his shoulders the whole burden of the shop and the printing business, and as soon as he felt its weight securely lodged he became extraordinarily animated and vigorous; even gay. He had worked with a most agreeable sense of energy until nearly nine o’clock; and then, having first called at the ironmonger’s, had stepped into the bank at the top of Saint Luke’s Square a moment after its doors opened, and had five minutes’ exciting conversation with the manager. After which, with righteous hunger in his belly and the symbol in his hand, he had come home to breakfast. The symbol was such as could be obtained at any ironmonger’s: an alarm clock. Mrs Nixon had grown less reliable than formerly as an alarm clock; machinery was now supplanting her.
Dr Heve came out of the house, and Dr Heve too seemed gay with fine resolutions. The two met on the doorstep, each full of a justifiable self-satisfaction. The doctor explained that he had come thus early because Mr Clayhanger was one of those cases upon which he could look in casually at any time. In the sunshine they talked under the porch of early rising, as men who understood the value of that art. Edwin could see that Dr Heve’s life was a series of little habits which would never allow themselves to be interfered with by any large interest, and he despised the man’s womanish smile. Nevertheless his new respect for him did not weaken; he decided that he was a very decent fellow in his way, and he was more impressed than he would admit by the amount of work that the doctor had for years been doing in the morning before his intellectual superiors had sat up in bed. And he imagined that it might be even more agreeable to read in the fresh stillness of the morning than in the solitary night.
Then they returned to the case of Darius. The doctor was more communicative, and they were both cheerfully matter-of-fact concerning it. There it was, to be made the best of! And that Darius could never handle business again, and that in about two years his doom would be accomplished—these were basic facts, axiomatic. The doctor had seen his patient in the garden, and he suggested that if Darius could be persuaded to interest himself in gardening... They discussed his medicine, his meals, his digestion, and the great, impossible dream of ‘taking him away,’ ‘out of it all.’ And every now and then Dr Heve dropped some little hint as to the management of Darius.
The ticking parcel drew the discreet attention of the doctor. The machine was one guaranteed to go in any position, and was much more difficult to stop than to start.
“It’s only an alarm,” said Edwin, not without self-consciousness.
The doctor went, tripping neatly and optimistically, off towards his own breakfast. He got up earlier than his horse.
Darius was still in the garden when Edwin went to him. He had put on his daily suit, and was leisurely digging in an uncultivated patch of ground. He stuck the spade into the earth perpendicularly and deep, and when he tried to prise it up and it would not yield because of a concealed half-brick, he put his tongue between his teeth and then bit his lower lip, controlling himself, determined to get the better of the spade and the brick by persuasively humouring them. He took no notice whatever of Edwin.
“I see you aren’t losing any time,” said Edwin, who felt as though he were engaging in small-talk with a stranger.
“Areyou?” Darius replied, without turning his head.
“I’ve just come up for a bit of breakfast. Everything’s all right,” he said. He would have liked to add: “I was in the shop before seven-thirty,” but he was too proud.
After a pause, he ventured, essaying the casual—
“I say, father, I shall want the keys of the desk, and all that.”
“Keys o’ th’ desk!” Darius muttered, leaning on the spade, as though demanding in stupefaction, “What on earth can you want the keys for?”
“Well—” Edwin stammered.
But the proposition was too obvious to be denied. Darius left the spade to stand up by itself, and stared.
“Got ’em in your pocket?” Edwin inquired.
Slowly Darius drew forth a heavy, glittering bunch of keys, one of the chief insignia of his dominion, and began to fumble at it.
“You needn’t take any of them off. I expect I know which is which,” said Edwin, holding out his hand.
Darius hesitated, and then yielded up the bunch.
“Thanks,” said Edwin lightly.
But the old man’s reluctance to perform this simple and absolutely necessary act of surrender, the old man’s air of having done something tremendous—these signs frightened Edwin and shook his courage for the demand compared to which the demand for the keys was naught. Still, the affair had to be carried through.
“And I say,” he proceeded, jingling the keys, “about signing and endorsing cheques. They tell me at the Bank that if you sign a general authority to me to do it for you, that will be enough.”
He could not avoid looking guilty. He almost felt guilty, almost felt as if he were plotting against his father’s welfare. And as he spoke his words seemed unreal and his suggestion fantastic. At the Bank the plan had been simple, easy, and perfectly natural. But there could be no doubt, that as he had walked up Trafalgar Road, receding from the Bank and approaching his father, the plan had gradually lost those attractive qualities. And now in the garden it was merely monstrous.
Silent, Darius resumed the spade.
“Well,” said Edwin desperately. “What about it?”
“Do you think”—Darius glowered upon him with heavy, desolating scorn—“do you think as I’m going to let you sign my cheques for me? You’re taking too much on yourself, my lad.”
“But—”
“I tell ye you’re taking too much on yourself!” he began to shout menacingly. “Get about your business and don’t act the fool! You needn’t think you’re going to be God A’mighty because you’ve got up a bit earlier for once in a way and been down to th’ shop before breakfast.”
In all his demeanour there was not the least indication of weakness. He might never have sat down on the stairs and cried! He might never have submitted feebly and perhaps gladly to the caresses of Clara and the soothings of Auntie Hamps! Impossible to convince him that he was cut off from the world! Impossible even to believe it! Was this the man that Edwin and the Bank manager and the doctor and all the others had been disposing of as though he were an automaton accurately responsive to external suggestion?
“Look here,” Edwin knew that he ought to say. “Let it be clearly understood once for all—I’m the boss now! I have the authority in my pocket and you must sign it, and quick too! I shall do my best for you, but I don’t mean to be bullied while I’m doing it!”
But he could not say it. Nor could his heart emotionally feel it.
He turned away sheepishly, and then he faced his father again, with a distressed, apologetic smile.
“Well then,” he asked, “whoisgoing to sign cheques?”
“I am,” said Darius.
“But you know what the doctor said! You know what you promised him!”
“What did the doctor say?”
“He said you weren’t to do anything at all. And you said you wouldn’t. What’s more, you said you didn’t want to.”
Darius sneered.
“I reckon I can sign cheques,” he said. “And I reckon I can endorse cheques... So it’s got to that! I can’t sign my own name now. I shall show some of you whether I can’t sign my own name!”
“You know it isn’t simply signing them. You know if I bring cheques up for you to sign you’ll begin worrying about them at once, and—and there’ll be no end to it. You’d much better—”
“Shut up!” It was like a clap of thunder.
Edwin hesitated an instant and then went towards the house. He could hear his father muttering “Whipper-snapper!”
“And I’ll tell you another thing,” Darius bawled across the garden—assuredly his voice would reach the street. “It was like your impudence to go to the Bank like that without asking me first! ‘They tell you at the Bank!’ ‘They tell you at the Bank!’ Anything else they told you at the Bank?” Then a snort.
Edwin was humiliated and baffled. He knew not what he could do. The situation became impossible immediately it was faced. He felt also very resentful, and resentment was capturing him, when suddenly an idea seemed to pull him by the sleeve: “All this is part of his disease. It’s part of his disease that he can’t see the point of a thing.” And the idea was insistent, and under its insistence Edwin’s resentment changed to melancholy. He said to himself that he must think of his father as a child. He blamed himself, in a sort of pleasurable luxury of remorse, for all the anger which during all his life he had felt against his father. His father’s unreasonableness had not been a fault, but a misfortune. His father had been not a tyrant, but a victim. His brain must always have been wrong! And now he was doomed, and the worst part of his doom was that he was unaware of it. And in the thought of Darius ignorantly blustering within the walled garden, in the spring sunshine, condemned, cut off, helpless at the last, pitiable at the last, there was something inexpressibly poignant. And the sunshine seemed a shame; and Edwin’s youth and mental vigour seemed a shame.
Nevertheless Edwin knew not what to do.
“Master Edwin,” said Mrs Nixon, who was rubbing the balustrade of the stairs, “you munna’ cross him like that.” She jerked her head in the direction of the garden. The garden door stood open.
If he had not felt solemn and superior, he could have snapped off that head of hers.
“Is my breakfast ready?” he asked. He hung up his hat, and absently took the little parcel which he had left on the marble ledge of the umbrella-stand.
Volume Three--Chapter Seven.Laid Aside.The safe, since the abandonment of the business premises by the family, had stood in a corner of a small nondescript room, sometimes vaguely called the safe-room, between the shop and what had once been the kitchen. It was a considerable safe, and it had the room practically to itself. As Edwin unlocked it, and the prodigious door swung with silent smoothness to his pull, he was aware of a very romantic feeling of exploration. He had seen the inside of the safe before; he had even opened the safe, and taken something from it, under his father’s orders. But he had never had leisure, nor licence, to inspect its interior. From his boyhood had survived the notion that it must contain many marvels. In spite of himself his attitude was one of awe.The first thing that met his eye was his father’s large, black-bound private cash-book, which constituted the most sacred and mysterious document in the accountancy of the business. Edwin handled, and kept, all the books save that. At the beginning of the previous week he and Stifford had achieved the task of sending out the quarterly accounts, and of one sort or another there were some seven hundred quarterly accounts. Edwin was familiar with every detail of the printer’s work-book, the daybook, the combined book colloquially called ‘invoice and ledger,’ the ‘bought’ ledger, and the shop cash-book. But he could form no sure idea of the total dimensions and results of the business, because his father always kept the ultimate castings to himself, and never displayed his private cash-book under any circumstances. By ingenuity and perseverance Edwin might have triumphed over Darius’s mania for secrecy; but he did not care to do so; perhaps pride even more than honour caused him to refrain.Now he held the book, and saw that only a portion of it was in the nature of a cash-book; the rest comprised summaries and general statements. The statement for the year 1885, so far as he could hastily decipher its meaning, showed a profit of 821 pounds. He was not surprised, and yet the sight of the figures in his father’s heavy, scratchy hand was curiously impressive.His father could keep nothing from him now. The interior of the safe was like a city that had capitulated; no law ran in it but his law, and he was absolute; he could commit infamies in the city and none might criticise. He turned over piles of dusty cheque-counterfoils, and old pass-books and other old books of account. He saw a linen bag crammed with four-shilling pieces (whenever Darius obtained a double florin he put it aside), and one or two old watches of no value. Also the title-deeds of the house at Bleakridge, their latest parchment still white with pounce; the mortgage, then, had been repaid, a fact which Darius had managed on principle to conceal from his son. Then he came to the four drawers, and in some of these he discovered a number of miscellaneous share-certificates with their big seals. He knew that his father had investments—it was impossible to inhabit the shop-cubicle with his father and not know that—but he had no conception of their extent or their value. Always he had regarded all those matters as foreign to himself, refusing to allow curiosity in regard to them to awake. Now he was differently minded, owing to the mere physical weight in his pocket of a bunch of keys! In a hasty examination he gathered that the stock was chiefly in railways and shipping, and that it amounted to large sums—anyhow quite a number of thousands. He was frankly astonished. How had his father’s clumsy, slow intellect been able to cope with the dangerous intricacies of the Stock Exchange? It seemed incredible; and yet he had known quite well that his father was an investor!“Of course he isn’t keen on giving it all up!” Edwin exclaimed aloud suddenly. “I wonder he even forked out the keys as easily as he did!”The view of the safe enabled him to perform a feat which very few children ever achieve; he put himself in his father’s place. And it was with benevolence, not with exasperation, that he puzzled his head to invent some device for defeating the old man’s obstinacy about cheque-signing.One drawer was evidently not in regular use. Often, in a series of drawers, one of them falls into the idle habit of being overlooked, slipping gradually by custom into desuetude, though other drawers may overflow. This drawer held merely a few scraps of sample paper, and a map, all dusty. He drew forth the map. It was coloured, and in shaky Roman characters underneath it ran the legend, “The County of Staffordshire.” He seemed to recognise the map. On the back he read, in his father’s handwriting: “Drawn and coloured without help by my son Edwin, aged nine.”He had utterly forgotten it. He could in no detail recall the circumstances in which he had produced the wonderful map. A childish, rude effort! ... Still, rather remarkable that at the age of nine (perhaps even before he had begun to attend the Oldcastle Middle School) he should have chosen to do a county map instead of a map of that country beloved by all juvenile map-drawers, Ireland! He must have copied it from the map in Lewis’s Gazetteer of England and Wales... Twenty-one years ago, nearly! He might, from the peculiar effect on him, have just discovered the mummy of the boy that once had been Edwin... And his father had kept the map for over twenty years. The old cock must have been deuced proud of it once! Not that he ever said so—Edwin was sure of that!“Now you needn’t get sentimental!” he told himself. Like Maggie he had a fearful, an almost morbid, horror of sentimentality. But he could not arrest the softening of his heart, as he smiled at thenaïvetéof the map and at his father’s parental simplicity.As he was closing the safe, Stifford, agitated, hurried into the room.“Please, sir, Mr Clayhanger’s in the Square. I thought I’d better tell you.”“What? Father?”“Yes, sir. He’s standing opposite the chapel and he keeps looking this way. I thought you’d like—”Edwin turned the key, and ran forth, stumbling, as he entered the shop, against the step-ladder which, with the paper-boy at the summit of it, overtopped the doorway. He wondered why he should run, and why Stifford’s face was so obviously apprehensive.Two.Darius Clayhanger was standing at the north-east corner of the little Square, half-way up Duck Bank, at the edge of the pavement. And his gaze, hesitant and feeble, seemed to be upon the shop. He merely stood there, moveless, and yet the sight of him was most strangely disconcerting. Edwin, who kept within the shelter of the doorway, comprehended now the look on Stifford’s face. His father had the air of ranging round about the shop in a reconnaissance, like an Indian or a wild animal, or like a domestic animal violently expelled. Edwin almost expected him to creep round by the Town Hall into Saint Luke’s Square, and then to reappear stealthily at the other end of Wedgwood Street, and from a western ambush stare again at his own premises.A man coming down Duck Bank paused an instant near Darius, and with a smile spoke to him, holding out his hand. Darius gave a slight nod. The man, snubbed and confused, walked on, the smile still on his face, but meaningless now, and foolish.At length Darius walked up the hill, his arms stiff and out-pointing, as of old. Edwin got his hat and ran after him. Instead of turning to the left along the market-place, Darius kept on farther up the hill, past the Shambles, towards the old playground and the vague cinder-wastes where the town ended in a few ancient cottages. It was at the playground that Edwin, going slowly and cautiously, overtook him.“Hello, father!” he began nervously. “Where are you off to?”Darius did not seem to be at all startled to see him at his side. Nevertheless he behaved in a queer fashion. Without saying a word he suddenly turned at right-angles and apparently aimed himself towards the market-place, by the back of the Town Hall. When he had walked a few paces, he stopped and looked round at Edwin, who could not decide what ought to be done.“If ye want to know,” said Darius, with overwhelming sadness and embittered disgust, “I’m going to th’ Bank to sign that authority about cheques.”“Oh!” Edwin responded. “Good! I’ll go with you if you like.”“Happen it’ll be as well,” said Darius, resigning himself.They walked together in silence.The old man was beaten. The old man had surrendered, unconditionally. Edwin’s heart lightened as he perceived more and more clearly what this surprising victory meant. It meant that always in the future he would have the upper hand. He knew now, and Darius knew, that his father had no strength to fight, and that any semblance of fighting could be treated as bluster. Probably nobody realised as profoundly as Darius himself, his real and yet mysterious inability to assert his will against the will of another. The force of his individuality was gone. He, who had meant to govern tyrannically to his final hour, to die with a powerful and grim gesture of command, had to accept the ignominy of submission. Edwin had not even insisted, had used no kind of threat. He had merely announced his will, and when the first fury had waned Darius had found his son’s will working like a chemical agent in his defenceless mind, and had yielded. It was astounding. And always it would be thus, until the time when Edwin would say ‘Do this’ and Darius would do it, and ‘Do that’ and Darius would do it, meekly, unreasoningly, anxiously.Edwin’s relief was so great that it might have been mistaken for positive ecstatic happiness. His mind ranged exultingly over the future of the business. In a few years, if he chose, he could sell the business and spend the whole treasure of his time upon programmes. The entire world would be his, and he could gather the fruits of every art. He would utterly belong to himself. It was a formidable thought. The atmosphere of the marketplace contained too much oxygen to be quite grateful to his lungs... In the meantime there were things he would do. He would raise Stifford’s wages. Long ago they ought to have been raised. And he would see that Stifford had for his dinner a full hour; which in practice Stifford had never had. And he would completely give up the sale and delivery of newspapers and weeklies, and would train the paper-boy to the shop, and put Stifford in his own place and perhaps get another clerk. It struck him hopefully that Stifford might go forth for orders. Assuredly he himself had not one quality of a commercial traveller. And, most inviting prospect of all, he would stock new books. He cared not whether new books were unremunerative. It should be known throughout the Five Towns that at Clayhanger’s in Bursley a selection of new books could always be seen. And if people would not buy them people must leave them. But he would have them. And so his thoughts flew.Three.And at the same time he was extremely sad, only less sad than his father. When he allowed his thoughts to rest for an instant on his father he was so moved that he could almost have burst into a sob—just one terrific sob. And he would say in his mind, “What a damned shame! What a damned shame!” Meaning that destiny had behaved ignobly to his father, after all. Destiny had no right to deal with a man so faithlessly. Destiny should do either one thing or the other. It seemed to him that he was leading his father by a string to his humiliation. And he was ashamed: ashamed of his own dominance and of his father’s craven submissiveness. Twice they were stopped by hearty and curious burgesses, and at each encounter Edwin, far more than Darius, was anxious to pretend that the harsh hand of Darius still firmly held the sceptre.When they entered the shining mahogany interior of the richest Bank in the Five Towns, hushed save for a discreet shovelling of coins, Edwin waited for his father to speak, and Darius said not a word, but stood glumly quiescent, like a victim in a halter. The little wiry dancing cashier looked; every clerk in the place looked; from behind the third counter, in the far recesses of the Bank, clerks looked over their ledgers; and they all looked in the same annoying way, as at a victim in a halter; in their glance was all the pitiful gloating baseness of human nature, mingled with a little of its compassion.Everybody of course knew that ‘something had happened’ to the successful steam-printer.“Can we see Mr Lovatt?” Edwin demanded curtly. He was abashed and he was resentful.The cashier jumped on all his springs into a sudden activity of deference.Presently the manager emerged from the glazed door of his room, pulling his long whiskers.“Oh, Mr Lovatt,” Edwin began nervously. “Father’s just come along—”They were swallowed up into the manager’s parlour. It might have been a court of justice, or a dentist’s surgery, or the cabinet of an insurance doctor, or the room at Fontainebleau where Napoleon signed his abdication—anything but the thing it was. Happily Mr Lovatt had a manner which never varied; he had only one manner for all men and all occasions. So that Edwin was not distressed either by the deficiencies of amateur acting or by the exhibition of another’s self-conscious awkwardness. Nevertheless when his father took the pen to write he was obliged to look studiously at the window and inaudibly hum an air. Had he not done so, that threatening sob might have burst its way out of him.Four.“I’m going this road,” said Darius, when they were safely out of the Bank, pointing towards the Sytch.“What for?”“I’m going this road,” he repeated, gloomily obstinate.“All right,” said Edwin cheerfully. “I’ll trot round with you.”He did not know whether he could safely leave his father. The old man’s eyes resented his assiduity and accepted it.They passed the Old Sytch Pottery, the smoke of whose kilns now no longer darkened the sky. The senior partner of the firm which leased it had died, and his sons had immediately taken advantage of his absence to build a new and efficient works down by the canal-side at Shawport—a marvel of everything save architectural dignity. Times changed. Edwin remarked on the desolation of the place and received no reply. Then the idea occurred to him that his father was bound for the Liberal Club. It was so. They both entered. In the large room two young men were amusing themselves at the billiard-table which formed the chief attraction of the naked interior, and on the ledges of the table were two glasses. The steward in an apron watched them.“Aye!” grumbled Darius, eyeing the group. “That’s Rad, that is! That’s Rad! Not twelve o’clock yet!”If Edwin with his father had surprised two young men drinking and playing billiards before noon in the Conservative Club, he would have been grimly pleased. He would have taken it for a further proof of the hollowness of the opposition to the great Home Rule Bill; but the spectacle of a couple of wastrels in the Liberal Club annoyed and shamed him. His vague notion was that at such a moment of high crisis the two wastrels ought to have had the decency to refrain from wasting.“Well, Mr Clayhanger,” said the steward, in his absurd boniface way, “you’re quite a stranger.”“I want my name taken off this Club,” said Darius shortly. “Ye understand me! And I reckon I’m not the only one, these days.”The steward did in fact understand. He protested in a low, amiable voice, while the billiard-players affected not to hear; but he perfectly understood. The epidemic of resignations had already set in, and there had been talk of a Liberal-Unionist Club. The steward saw that the grand folly of a senile statesman was threatening his own future prospects. He smiled. But at Edwin, as they were leaving, he smiled in a quite peculiar way, and that smile clearly meant: “Your father goes dotty, and the first thing he does is to change his politics.” This was the steward’s justifiable revenge.“Youaren’t leaving us?” the steward questioned Edwin in a half-whisper.Edwin shook his head. But he could have killed the steward for that nauseating suggestive smile. The outer door swung to, cutting off the delicate click of billiard balls.At the top of Duck Bank, Darius silently and without warning mounted the steps of the Conservative Club. Doubtless he knew how to lay his hand instantly on a proposer and seconder. Edwin did not follow him.Five.That evening, conscious of responsibility and of virtue, Edwin walked up Trafalgar Road with a less gawky and more dignified mien than ever he had managed to assume before. He had not only dismissed programmes of culture, he had forgotten them. After twelve hours as head of a business, they had temporarily ceased to interest him. And when he passed, or was overtaken by, other men of affairs, he thought to himself naïvely in the dark, “I am the equal of these men.” And the image of Florence Simcox, the clog-dancer, floated through his mind.He found Darius alone in the drawing-room, in front of an uncustomary fire, garden-clay still on his boots, and “The Christian News” under his spectacles. The Sunday before the funeral of Mr Shushions had been so unusual and so distressing that Darius had fallen into arrear with his perusals. True, he had never been known to read “The Christian News” on any day but Sunday, but now every day was Sunday.Edwin nodded to him and approached the fire, rubbing his hands.“What’s this as I hear?” Darius began, with melancholy softness.“Eh?”“About Albert wanting to borrow a thousand pounds?” Darius gazed at him over his spectacles.“Albert wanting to borrow a thousand pounds!” Edwin repeated, astounded.“Aye! Have they said naught to you?”“No,” said Edwin. “What is it?”“Clara and your aunt have both been at me since tea. Some tale as Albert can amalgamate into partnership with Hope and Carters if he can put down a thousand. Then Albert’s said naught to ye?”“No, he hasn’t!” Edwin exclaimed, emphasising each word with a peculiar fierceness. It was as if he had said, “I should like to catch him saying anything to me about it!”He was extremely indignant. It seemed to him monstrous that those two women should thus try to snatch an advantage from his father’s weakness, pitifully mean and base. He could not understand how people could bring themselves to do such things, nor how, having done them, they could ever look their fellows in the face again. Had they no shame? They would not let a day pass; but they must settle on the old man instantly, like flies on a carcass! He could imagine the plottings, the hushed chatterings; the acting-for-the-best demeanour of that cursed woman Auntie Hamps (yes, he now cursed her), and the candid greed of his sister.“You wouldn’t do it, would ye?” Darius asked, in a tone that expected a negative answer; but also with a rather plaintive appeal, as though he were depending on Edwin for moral support against the formidable forces of attack.“I should not,” said Edwin stoutly, touched by the strange wistful note and by the glance. “Unless of course you really want to.”He did not care in the least whether the money would or would not be really useful and reasonably safe. He did not care whose enmity he was risking. His sense of fair play was outraged, and he would salve it at any cost. He knew that had his father not been struck down and defenceless, these despicable people would never have dared to demand money from him. That was the only point that mattered.The relief of Darius at Edwin’s attitude in the affair was painful. Hoping for sympathy from Edwin, he yet had feared in him another enemy. Now he was reassured, and he could hide his feelings no better than a child.“Seemingly they can’t wait till my will’s opened!” he murmured, with a scarcely successful affectation of grimness.“Made a will, have you?” Edwin remarked, with an elaborate casualness to imply that he had never till then given a thought to his father’s will, but that, having thought of the question, he was perhaps a very little surprised that his father had indeed made a will.Darius nodded, quite benevolently. He seemed to have forgotten his deep grievance against Edwin in the matter of cheque-signing.“Duncalf’s got it,” he murmured after a moment. Duncalf was the town clerk and a solicitor.So the will was made! And he had submissively signed away all control over all monetary transactions. What more could he do, except expire with the minimum of fuss? Truly Darius, in the local phrase, was now ‘laid aside’! And of all the symptoms of his decay the most striking and the most tragic, to Edwin, was that he showed no curiosity whatever about business. Not one single word of inquiry had he uttered.“You’ll want shaving,” said Edwin, in a friendly way.Darius passed a hand over his face. He had ceased years ago to shave himself, and had a subscription at Dick Jones’s in Aboukir Street, close by the shop.“Aye!”“Shall I send the barber up, or shall you let it grow?”“What do you think?”“Oh!” Edwin drawled, characteristically hesitating. Then he remembered that he was the responsible head of the family of Clayhanger. “I think you might let it grow,” he decided.And when he had issued the verdict, it seemed to him like a sentence of sequestration and death on his father... ‘Let it grow! What does it matter?’ Such was the innuendo.“You used to grow a full beard once, didn’t you?” he asked.“Yes,” said Darius.That made the situation less cruel.
The safe, since the abandonment of the business premises by the family, had stood in a corner of a small nondescript room, sometimes vaguely called the safe-room, between the shop and what had once been the kitchen. It was a considerable safe, and it had the room practically to itself. As Edwin unlocked it, and the prodigious door swung with silent smoothness to his pull, he was aware of a very romantic feeling of exploration. He had seen the inside of the safe before; he had even opened the safe, and taken something from it, under his father’s orders. But he had never had leisure, nor licence, to inspect its interior. From his boyhood had survived the notion that it must contain many marvels. In spite of himself his attitude was one of awe.
The first thing that met his eye was his father’s large, black-bound private cash-book, which constituted the most sacred and mysterious document in the accountancy of the business. Edwin handled, and kept, all the books save that. At the beginning of the previous week he and Stifford had achieved the task of sending out the quarterly accounts, and of one sort or another there were some seven hundred quarterly accounts. Edwin was familiar with every detail of the printer’s work-book, the daybook, the combined book colloquially called ‘invoice and ledger,’ the ‘bought’ ledger, and the shop cash-book. But he could form no sure idea of the total dimensions and results of the business, because his father always kept the ultimate castings to himself, and never displayed his private cash-book under any circumstances. By ingenuity and perseverance Edwin might have triumphed over Darius’s mania for secrecy; but he did not care to do so; perhaps pride even more than honour caused him to refrain.
Now he held the book, and saw that only a portion of it was in the nature of a cash-book; the rest comprised summaries and general statements. The statement for the year 1885, so far as he could hastily decipher its meaning, showed a profit of 821 pounds. He was not surprised, and yet the sight of the figures in his father’s heavy, scratchy hand was curiously impressive.
His father could keep nothing from him now. The interior of the safe was like a city that had capitulated; no law ran in it but his law, and he was absolute; he could commit infamies in the city and none might criticise. He turned over piles of dusty cheque-counterfoils, and old pass-books and other old books of account. He saw a linen bag crammed with four-shilling pieces (whenever Darius obtained a double florin he put it aside), and one or two old watches of no value. Also the title-deeds of the house at Bleakridge, their latest parchment still white with pounce; the mortgage, then, had been repaid, a fact which Darius had managed on principle to conceal from his son. Then he came to the four drawers, and in some of these he discovered a number of miscellaneous share-certificates with their big seals. He knew that his father had investments—it was impossible to inhabit the shop-cubicle with his father and not know that—but he had no conception of their extent or their value. Always he had regarded all those matters as foreign to himself, refusing to allow curiosity in regard to them to awake. Now he was differently minded, owing to the mere physical weight in his pocket of a bunch of keys! In a hasty examination he gathered that the stock was chiefly in railways and shipping, and that it amounted to large sums—anyhow quite a number of thousands. He was frankly astonished. How had his father’s clumsy, slow intellect been able to cope with the dangerous intricacies of the Stock Exchange? It seemed incredible; and yet he had known quite well that his father was an investor!
“Of course he isn’t keen on giving it all up!” Edwin exclaimed aloud suddenly. “I wonder he even forked out the keys as easily as he did!”
The view of the safe enabled him to perform a feat which very few children ever achieve; he put himself in his father’s place. And it was with benevolence, not with exasperation, that he puzzled his head to invent some device for defeating the old man’s obstinacy about cheque-signing.
One drawer was evidently not in regular use. Often, in a series of drawers, one of them falls into the idle habit of being overlooked, slipping gradually by custom into desuetude, though other drawers may overflow. This drawer held merely a few scraps of sample paper, and a map, all dusty. He drew forth the map. It was coloured, and in shaky Roman characters underneath it ran the legend, “The County of Staffordshire.” He seemed to recognise the map. On the back he read, in his father’s handwriting: “Drawn and coloured without help by my son Edwin, aged nine.”
He had utterly forgotten it. He could in no detail recall the circumstances in which he had produced the wonderful map. A childish, rude effort! ... Still, rather remarkable that at the age of nine (perhaps even before he had begun to attend the Oldcastle Middle School) he should have chosen to do a county map instead of a map of that country beloved by all juvenile map-drawers, Ireland! He must have copied it from the map in Lewis’s Gazetteer of England and Wales... Twenty-one years ago, nearly! He might, from the peculiar effect on him, have just discovered the mummy of the boy that once had been Edwin... And his father had kept the map for over twenty years. The old cock must have been deuced proud of it once! Not that he ever said so—Edwin was sure of that!
“Now you needn’t get sentimental!” he told himself. Like Maggie he had a fearful, an almost morbid, horror of sentimentality. But he could not arrest the softening of his heart, as he smiled at thenaïvetéof the map and at his father’s parental simplicity.
As he was closing the safe, Stifford, agitated, hurried into the room.
“Please, sir, Mr Clayhanger’s in the Square. I thought I’d better tell you.”
“What? Father?”
“Yes, sir. He’s standing opposite the chapel and he keeps looking this way. I thought you’d like—”
Edwin turned the key, and ran forth, stumbling, as he entered the shop, against the step-ladder which, with the paper-boy at the summit of it, overtopped the doorway. He wondered why he should run, and why Stifford’s face was so obviously apprehensive.
Darius Clayhanger was standing at the north-east corner of the little Square, half-way up Duck Bank, at the edge of the pavement. And his gaze, hesitant and feeble, seemed to be upon the shop. He merely stood there, moveless, and yet the sight of him was most strangely disconcerting. Edwin, who kept within the shelter of the doorway, comprehended now the look on Stifford’s face. His father had the air of ranging round about the shop in a reconnaissance, like an Indian or a wild animal, or like a domestic animal violently expelled. Edwin almost expected him to creep round by the Town Hall into Saint Luke’s Square, and then to reappear stealthily at the other end of Wedgwood Street, and from a western ambush stare again at his own premises.
A man coming down Duck Bank paused an instant near Darius, and with a smile spoke to him, holding out his hand. Darius gave a slight nod. The man, snubbed and confused, walked on, the smile still on his face, but meaningless now, and foolish.
At length Darius walked up the hill, his arms stiff and out-pointing, as of old. Edwin got his hat and ran after him. Instead of turning to the left along the market-place, Darius kept on farther up the hill, past the Shambles, towards the old playground and the vague cinder-wastes where the town ended in a few ancient cottages. It was at the playground that Edwin, going slowly and cautiously, overtook him.
“Hello, father!” he began nervously. “Where are you off to?”
Darius did not seem to be at all startled to see him at his side. Nevertheless he behaved in a queer fashion. Without saying a word he suddenly turned at right-angles and apparently aimed himself towards the market-place, by the back of the Town Hall. When he had walked a few paces, he stopped and looked round at Edwin, who could not decide what ought to be done.
“If ye want to know,” said Darius, with overwhelming sadness and embittered disgust, “I’m going to th’ Bank to sign that authority about cheques.”
“Oh!” Edwin responded. “Good! I’ll go with you if you like.”
“Happen it’ll be as well,” said Darius, resigning himself.
They walked together in silence.
The old man was beaten. The old man had surrendered, unconditionally. Edwin’s heart lightened as he perceived more and more clearly what this surprising victory meant. It meant that always in the future he would have the upper hand. He knew now, and Darius knew, that his father had no strength to fight, and that any semblance of fighting could be treated as bluster. Probably nobody realised as profoundly as Darius himself, his real and yet mysterious inability to assert his will against the will of another. The force of his individuality was gone. He, who had meant to govern tyrannically to his final hour, to die with a powerful and grim gesture of command, had to accept the ignominy of submission. Edwin had not even insisted, had used no kind of threat. He had merely announced his will, and when the first fury had waned Darius had found his son’s will working like a chemical agent in his defenceless mind, and had yielded. It was astounding. And always it would be thus, until the time when Edwin would say ‘Do this’ and Darius would do it, and ‘Do that’ and Darius would do it, meekly, unreasoningly, anxiously.
Edwin’s relief was so great that it might have been mistaken for positive ecstatic happiness. His mind ranged exultingly over the future of the business. In a few years, if he chose, he could sell the business and spend the whole treasure of his time upon programmes. The entire world would be his, and he could gather the fruits of every art. He would utterly belong to himself. It was a formidable thought. The atmosphere of the marketplace contained too much oxygen to be quite grateful to his lungs... In the meantime there were things he would do. He would raise Stifford’s wages. Long ago they ought to have been raised. And he would see that Stifford had for his dinner a full hour; which in practice Stifford had never had. And he would completely give up the sale and delivery of newspapers and weeklies, and would train the paper-boy to the shop, and put Stifford in his own place and perhaps get another clerk. It struck him hopefully that Stifford might go forth for orders. Assuredly he himself had not one quality of a commercial traveller. And, most inviting prospect of all, he would stock new books. He cared not whether new books were unremunerative. It should be known throughout the Five Towns that at Clayhanger’s in Bursley a selection of new books could always be seen. And if people would not buy them people must leave them. But he would have them. And so his thoughts flew.
And at the same time he was extremely sad, only less sad than his father. When he allowed his thoughts to rest for an instant on his father he was so moved that he could almost have burst into a sob—just one terrific sob. And he would say in his mind, “What a damned shame! What a damned shame!” Meaning that destiny had behaved ignobly to his father, after all. Destiny had no right to deal with a man so faithlessly. Destiny should do either one thing or the other. It seemed to him that he was leading his father by a string to his humiliation. And he was ashamed: ashamed of his own dominance and of his father’s craven submissiveness. Twice they were stopped by hearty and curious burgesses, and at each encounter Edwin, far more than Darius, was anxious to pretend that the harsh hand of Darius still firmly held the sceptre.
When they entered the shining mahogany interior of the richest Bank in the Five Towns, hushed save for a discreet shovelling of coins, Edwin waited for his father to speak, and Darius said not a word, but stood glumly quiescent, like a victim in a halter. The little wiry dancing cashier looked; every clerk in the place looked; from behind the third counter, in the far recesses of the Bank, clerks looked over their ledgers; and they all looked in the same annoying way, as at a victim in a halter; in their glance was all the pitiful gloating baseness of human nature, mingled with a little of its compassion.
Everybody of course knew that ‘something had happened’ to the successful steam-printer.
“Can we see Mr Lovatt?” Edwin demanded curtly. He was abashed and he was resentful.
The cashier jumped on all his springs into a sudden activity of deference.
Presently the manager emerged from the glazed door of his room, pulling his long whiskers.
“Oh, Mr Lovatt,” Edwin began nervously. “Father’s just come along—”
They were swallowed up into the manager’s parlour. It might have been a court of justice, or a dentist’s surgery, or the cabinet of an insurance doctor, or the room at Fontainebleau where Napoleon signed his abdication—anything but the thing it was. Happily Mr Lovatt had a manner which never varied; he had only one manner for all men and all occasions. So that Edwin was not distressed either by the deficiencies of amateur acting or by the exhibition of another’s self-conscious awkwardness. Nevertheless when his father took the pen to write he was obliged to look studiously at the window and inaudibly hum an air. Had he not done so, that threatening sob might have burst its way out of him.
“I’m going this road,” said Darius, when they were safely out of the Bank, pointing towards the Sytch.
“What for?”
“I’m going this road,” he repeated, gloomily obstinate.
“All right,” said Edwin cheerfully. “I’ll trot round with you.”
He did not know whether he could safely leave his father. The old man’s eyes resented his assiduity and accepted it.
They passed the Old Sytch Pottery, the smoke of whose kilns now no longer darkened the sky. The senior partner of the firm which leased it had died, and his sons had immediately taken advantage of his absence to build a new and efficient works down by the canal-side at Shawport—a marvel of everything save architectural dignity. Times changed. Edwin remarked on the desolation of the place and received no reply. Then the idea occurred to him that his father was bound for the Liberal Club. It was so. They both entered. In the large room two young men were amusing themselves at the billiard-table which formed the chief attraction of the naked interior, and on the ledges of the table were two glasses. The steward in an apron watched them.
“Aye!” grumbled Darius, eyeing the group. “That’s Rad, that is! That’s Rad! Not twelve o’clock yet!”
If Edwin with his father had surprised two young men drinking and playing billiards before noon in the Conservative Club, he would have been grimly pleased. He would have taken it for a further proof of the hollowness of the opposition to the great Home Rule Bill; but the spectacle of a couple of wastrels in the Liberal Club annoyed and shamed him. His vague notion was that at such a moment of high crisis the two wastrels ought to have had the decency to refrain from wasting.
“Well, Mr Clayhanger,” said the steward, in his absurd boniface way, “you’re quite a stranger.”
“I want my name taken off this Club,” said Darius shortly. “Ye understand me! And I reckon I’m not the only one, these days.”
The steward did in fact understand. He protested in a low, amiable voice, while the billiard-players affected not to hear; but he perfectly understood. The epidemic of resignations had already set in, and there had been talk of a Liberal-Unionist Club. The steward saw that the grand folly of a senile statesman was threatening his own future prospects. He smiled. But at Edwin, as they were leaving, he smiled in a quite peculiar way, and that smile clearly meant: “Your father goes dotty, and the first thing he does is to change his politics.” This was the steward’s justifiable revenge.
“Youaren’t leaving us?” the steward questioned Edwin in a half-whisper.
Edwin shook his head. But he could have killed the steward for that nauseating suggestive smile. The outer door swung to, cutting off the delicate click of billiard balls.
At the top of Duck Bank, Darius silently and without warning mounted the steps of the Conservative Club. Doubtless he knew how to lay his hand instantly on a proposer and seconder. Edwin did not follow him.
That evening, conscious of responsibility and of virtue, Edwin walked up Trafalgar Road with a less gawky and more dignified mien than ever he had managed to assume before. He had not only dismissed programmes of culture, he had forgotten them. After twelve hours as head of a business, they had temporarily ceased to interest him. And when he passed, or was overtaken by, other men of affairs, he thought to himself naïvely in the dark, “I am the equal of these men.” And the image of Florence Simcox, the clog-dancer, floated through his mind.
He found Darius alone in the drawing-room, in front of an uncustomary fire, garden-clay still on his boots, and “The Christian News” under his spectacles. The Sunday before the funeral of Mr Shushions had been so unusual and so distressing that Darius had fallen into arrear with his perusals. True, he had never been known to read “The Christian News” on any day but Sunday, but now every day was Sunday.
Edwin nodded to him and approached the fire, rubbing his hands.
“What’s this as I hear?” Darius began, with melancholy softness.
“Eh?”
“About Albert wanting to borrow a thousand pounds?” Darius gazed at him over his spectacles.
“Albert wanting to borrow a thousand pounds!” Edwin repeated, astounded.
“Aye! Have they said naught to you?”
“No,” said Edwin. “What is it?”
“Clara and your aunt have both been at me since tea. Some tale as Albert can amalgamate into partnership with Hope and Carters if he can put down a thousand. Then Albert’s said naught to ye?”
“No, he hasn’t!” Edwin exclaimed, emphasising each word with a peculiar fierceness. It was as if he had said, “I should like to catch him saying anything to me about it!”
He was extremely indignant. It seemed to him monstrous that those two women should thus try to snatch an advantage from his father’s weakness, pitifully mean and base. He could not understand how people could bring themselves to do such things, nor how, having done them, they could ever look their fellows in the face again. Had they no shame? They would not let a day pass; but they must settle on the old man instantly, like flies on a carcass! He could imagine the plottings, the hushed chatterings; the acting-for-the-best demeanour of that cursed woman Auntie Hamps (yes, he now cursed her), and the candid greed of his sister.
“You wouldn’t do it, would ye?” Darius asked, in a tone that expected a negative answer; but also with a rather plaintive appeal, as though he were depending on Edwin for moral support against the formidable forces of attack.
“I should not,” said Edwin stoutly, touched by the strange wistful note and by the glance. “Unless of course you really want to.”
He did not care in the least whether the money would or would not be really useful and reasonably safe. He did not care whose enmity he was risking. His sense of fair play was outraged, and he would salve it at any cost. He knew that had his father not been struck down and defenceless, these despicable people would never have dared to demand money from him. That was the only point that mattered.
The relief of Darius at Edwin’s attitude in the affair was painful. Hoping for sympathy from Edwin, he yet had feared in him another enemy. Now he was reassured, and he could hide his feelings no better than a child.
“Seemingly they can’t wait till my will’s opened!” he murmured, with a scarcely successful affectation of grimness.
“Made a will, have you?” Edwin remarked, with an elaborate casualness to imply that he had never till then given a thought to his father’s will, but that, having thought of the question, he was perhaps a very little surprised that his father had indeed made a will.
Darius nodded, quite benevolently. He seemed to have forgotten his deep grievance against Edwin in the matter of cheque-signing.
“Duncalf’s got it,” he murmured after a moment. Duncalf was the town clerk and a solicitor.
So the will was made! And he had submissively signed away all control over all monetary transactions. What more could he do, except expire with the minimum of fuss? Truly Darius, in the local phrase, was now ‘laid aside’! And of all the symptoms of his decay the most striking and the most tragic, to Edwin, was that he showed no curiosity whatever about business. Not one single word of inquiry had he uttered.
“You’ll want shaving,” said Edwin, in a friendly way.
Darius passed a hand over his face. He had ceased years ago to shave himself, and had a subscription at Dick Jones’s in Aboukir Street, close by the shop.
“Aye!”
“Shall I send the barber up, or shall you let it grow?”
“What do you think?”
“Oh!” Edwin drawled, characteristically hesitating. Then he remembered that he was the responsible head of the family of Clayhanger. “I think you might let it grow,” he decided.
And when he had issued the verdict, it seemed to him like a sentence of sequestration and death on his father... ‘Let it grow! What does it matter?’ Such was the innuendo.
“You used to grow a full beard once, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Darius.
That made the situation less cruel.
Volume Three--Chapter Eight.A Change of Mind.One evening, a year later, in earliest summer of 1887, Edwin and Mr Osmond Orgreave were walking home together from Hanbridge. When they reached the corner of the street leading to Lane End House, Osmond Orgreave said, stopping—“Now you’ll come with us?” And he looked Edwin hard in the eyes, and there was a most flattering appeal in his voice. It was some time since their eyes had met frankly, for Edwin had recently been having experience of Mr Orgreave’s methods in financial controversy, and it had not been agreeable.After an instant Edwin said heartily—“Yes, I think I’ll come. Of course I should like to. But I’ll let you know.”“To-night?”“Yes, to-night.”“I shall tell my wife you’re coming.”Mr Orgreave waved a hand, and passed with a certain decorative gaiety down the street. His hair was now silvern, but it still curled in the old places, and his gestures had apparently not aged at all.Mr and Mrs Orgreave were going to London for the Jubilee celebrations. So far as their family was concerned, they were going alone, because Osmond had insisted humorously that he wanted a rest from his children. But he had urgently invited Edwin to accompany them. At first Edwin had instinctively replied that it was impossible. He could not leave home. He had never been to London; a journey to London presented itself to him as an immense enterprise, almost as a piece of culpable self-indulgence. And then, under the stimulus of Osmond’s energetic and adventurous temperament, he had said to himself, “Why not? Why shouldn’t I?”The arguments favoured his going. It was absurd and scandalous that he had never been to London: he ought for his self-respect to depart thither at once. The legend of the Jubilee, spectacular, processional, historic, touched his imagination. Whenever he thought of it, his fancy saw pennons and corselets and chargers winding through stupendous streets, and, somewhere in the midst, the majesty of England in the frail body of a little old lady, who had had many children and one supreme misfortune. Moreover, he could incidentally see Charlie. Moreover, he had been suffering from a series of his customary colds, and from overwork, and Heve had told him that he ‘would do with a change.’ Moreover, he had a project for buying paper in London: he had received, from London, overtures which seemed promising. He had never been able to buy paper quite as cheaply as Darius had bought paper, for the mere reason that he could not haggle over sixteenths of a penny with efficient ruthlessness; he simply could not do it, being somehow ashamed to do it. In Manchester, where Darius had bought paper for thirty years, they were imperceptibly too brutal for Edwin in the harsh realities of a bargain; they had no sense of shame. He thought that in letters from London he detected a softer spirit.And above all he desired, by accepting Mr Orgreave’s invitation, to show to the architect that the differences between them were really expunged from his mind. Among many confusions in his father’s flourishing but disorderly affairs, Edwin had been startled to find the Orgreave transactions. There were accounts and contra-accounts, and quantities of strangely contradictory documents. Never had a real settlement occurred between Darius and Osmond. And Osmond did not seem to want one. Edwin, however, with his old-maid’s passion for putting and keeping everything in its place, insisted on one. Mr Orgreave had to meet him on his strongest point, his love of order. The process of settlement had been painful to Edwin; it had seriously marred some of his illusions. Nearly the last of the entanglements in his father’s business, the Orgreave matter was straightened and closed now; and the projected escapade to London would bury it deep, might even restore agreeable illusions. And Edwin was incapable of nursing malice.The best argument of all was that he had a right to go to London. He had earned London, by honest and severe work, and by bearing firmly the huge weight of his responsibility. So far he had offered himself no reward whatever, not even an increase of salary, not even a week of freedom or the satisfaction of a single caprice.“I shall go, and charge it to the business,” he said to himself. He became excited about going.Two.As he approached his house, he saw the elder Heve, vicar of Saint Peter’s, coming away from it, a natty clerical figure in a straw hat of peculiar shape. Recently this man had called once or twice; not professionally, for Darius was neither a churchman nor a parishioner, but as a brother of Dr Heve’s, as a friendly human being, and Darius had been flattered. The Vicar would talk about Jesus with quiet half-humorous enthusiasm. For him at any rate Christianity was grand fun. He seemed never to be solemn over his religion, like the Wesleyans. He never, with a shamed, defiant air, said, “I am not ashamed of Christ,” like the Wesleyans. He might have known Christ slightly at Cambridge. But his relations with Christ did not make him conceited, nor condescending. And if he was concerned about the welfare of people who knew not Christ, he hid his concern in the politest manner. Edwin, after being momentarily impressed by him, was now convinced of his perfect mediocrity; the Vicar’s views on literature had damned him eternally in the esteem of Edwin, who was still naïve enough to be unable to comprehend how a man who had been to Cambridge could speak enthusiastically of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Moreover, Edwin despised him for his obvious pride in being a bachelor. The Vicar would not say that a priest should be celibate, but he would, with delicacy, imply as much. Then also, for Edwin’s taste, the parson was somewhat too childishly interested in the culture of cellar-mushrooms, which was his hobby. He would recount the tedious details of all his experiments to Darius, who, flattered by these attentions from the Established Church, took immense delight in the Vicar and in the sample mushrooms offered to him from time to time.Maggie stood in the porch, which commanded the descent into Bursley; she was watching the Vicar as he receded. When Edwin appeared at the gate, she gave a little jump, and he fancied that she also blushed.“Look here!” he exclaimed to himself, in a flash of suspicion. “Surely she’s not thinking of the Vicar! Surely Maggie isn’t after all!” He did not conceive it possible that the Vicar, who had been to Cambridge and had notions about celibacy, was thinking of Maggie. “Women are queer,” he said to himself. (For him, this generalisation from facts was quite original.) Fancy her staring after the Vicar! She must have been doing it quite unconsciously! He had supposed that her attitude towards the Vicar was precisely his own. He took it for granted that the Vicar’s attitude was the same to both of them, based on a polite and kindly but firm recognition that there could be no genuine sympathy between him and them.“The Vicar’s just been,” said Maggie.“Has he? ... Cheered the old man up at all?”“Not much.” Maggie shook her head gloomily.Edwin’s conscience seemed to be getting ready to hint that he ought not to go to London.“I say, Mag,” he said quietly, as he inserted his stick in the umbrella-stand. She stopped on her way upstairs, and then approached him.“Mr Orgreave wants me to go to London with him and Mrs Orgreave.” He explained the whole project to her.She said at once, eagerly and benevolently—“Of course you ought to go. It’ll do you all the good in the world. I shall be all right here. Clara and Albert will come for Jubilee Day, anyhow. But haven’t you driven it late? ... The day after to-morrow, isn’t it? Mr Heve was only saying just now that the hotels were all crammed.”“Well, you know what Orgreave is! I expect he’ll look after all that.”“You go!” Maggie enjoined him.“Won’t upset him?” Edwin nodded vaguely to wherever Darius might be.“Can’t be helped if it does,” she replied calmly.“Well then, I’m dashed if I don’t go! What about my collars?”Three.Those three—Darius, Maggie, and Edwin—sat down to tea in silence. The window was open, and the weather very warm and gay. During the previous twelve months they had sat down to hundreds of such meals. Save for a few brief periods of cheerfulness, Darius had steadily grown more taciturn, heavy and melancholy. In the winter he had of course abandoned his attempts to divert himself by gardening—attempts at the best half-hearted and feeble—and he had not resumed them in the spring. Less than half a year previously he had often walked across the fields to Hillport and back, or up the gradual slopes to the height of Toft End—he never went townwards, had not once visited the Conservative Club. But now he could not even be persuaded to leave the garden. An old wicker arm-chair had been placed at the end of the garden, and he would set out for that arm-chair as upon a journey, and, having reached it, would sink into it with a huge sigh, and repose before bracing himself to the effort of return.And now it seemed marvellous that he had ever had the legs to get to Hillport and to Toft End. He existed in a stupor of dull reflection, from pride pretending to read and not reading, or pretending to listen and not listening, and occasionally making a remark which was inapposite but which had to be humoured. And as the weeks passed his children’s manner of humouring him became increasingly perfunctory, and their movements in putting right the negligence of his attire increasingly brusque. Vainly they tried to remember in time that he was a victim and not a criminal; they would remember after the careless remark and after the curt gesture, when it was too late. His malady obsessed them: it was in the air of the house, omnipresent; it weighed upon them, corroding the nerve and exasperating the spirit. Now and then, when Darius had vented a burst of irrational anger, they would say to each other with casual bitterness that really he was too annoying. Once, when his demeanour towards the new servant had strongly suggested that he thought her name was Bathsheba, Mrs Nixon herself had ‘flown out’ at him, and there had been a scene which the doctor had soothed by discreet professional explanations. Maggie’s difficulty was that he was always there, always on the spot. To be free of him she must leave the house; and Maggie was not fond of leaving the house.Edwin meant to inform him briefly of his intention to go to London, but such was the power of habit that he hesitated; he could not bring himself to announce directly this audacious and unprecedented act of freedom, though he knew that his father was as helpless as a child in his hands. Instead, he began to talk about the renewal of the lease of the premises in Duck Square, as to which it would be necessary to give notice to the landlord at the end of the month.“I’ve been thinking I’ll have it made out in my own name,” he said. “It’ll save you signing, and so on.” This in itself was a proposal sufficiently startling, and he would not have been surprised at a violent instinctive protest from Darius; but Darius seemed not to heed.Then both Edwin and Maggie noticed that he was trying to hold a sausage firm on his plate with his knife, and to cut it with his fork.“No, no, father!” said Maggie gently. “Not like that!”He looked up, puzzled, and then bent himself again to the plate. The whole of his faculties seemed to be absorbed in a great effort to resolve the complicated problem of the plate, the sausage, the knife and the fork.“You’ve got your knife in the wrong hand,” said Edwin impatiently, as to a wilful child.Darius stared at the knife and at the fork, and he then sighed, and his sigh meant, “This business is beyond me!” Then he endeavoured to substitute the knife for the fork, but he could not.“See,” said Edwin, leaning over. “Like this!” He took the knife, but Darius would not loose it. “No, leave go!” he ordered. “Leave go! How can I show you if you don’t leave go?”Darius dropped both knife and fork with a clatter. Edwin put the knife into his right hand, and the fork into his left; but in a moment they were wrong again. At first Edwin could not believe that his father was not indulging deliberately in naughtiness.“Shall I cut it up for you, father?” Maggie asked, in a mild, persuasive tone.Darius pushed the plate towards her.When she had cut up the sausage, she said—“There you are! I’ll keep the knife. Then you can’t get mixed up.”And Darius ate the sausage with the fork alone. His intelligence had failed to master the original problem presented to it. He ate steadily for a few moments, and then the tears began to roll down his cheek, and he ate no more.This incident, so simple, so unexpected, and so dramatic, caused the most acute distress. And its effect was disconcerting in the highest degree. It reminded everybody that what Darius suffered from was softening of the brain. For long he had been a prisoner in the house and garden. For long he had been almost mute. And now, just after a visit which usually acted upon him as a tonic, he had begun to lose the skill to feed himself. Little by little he was demonstrating, by his slow declension from it, the wonder of the standard of efficiency maintained by the normal human being.Edwin and Maggie avoided one another, even in their glances. Each affected the philosophical, seeking to diminish the significance of the episode. But neither succeeded. Of the two years allotted to Darius, one had gone. What would the second be?Four.In his bedroom, after tea, Edwin fought against the gloomy influence, but uselessly. The inherent and appalling sadness of existence enveloped and chilled him. He gazed at the rows of his books. He had done no regular reading of late. Why read? He gazed at the screen in front of his bed, covered with neat memoranda. How futile! Why go to London? He would only have to come back from London! And then he said resistingly, “Iwillgo to London.” But as he said it aloud, he knew well that he would not go. His conscience would not allow him to depart. He could not leave Maggie alone with his father. He yielded to his conscience unkindly, reluctantly, with no warm gust of unselfishness; he yielded because he could not outrage his abstract sense of justice.From the window he perceived Maggie and Janet Orgreave talking together over the low separating wall. And he remembered a word of Janet’s to the effect that she and Maggie were becoming quite friendly and that Maggie was splendid. Suddenly he went downstairs into the garden. They were talking in attitudes of intimacy; and both were grave and mature, and both had a little cleft under the chin. Their pale frocks harmonised in the evening light. As he approached, Maggie burst into a girlish laugh. “Not really?” she murmured, with the vivacity of a young girl. He knew not what they were discussing, nor did he care. What interested him, what startled him, was the youthful gesture and tone of Maggie. It pleased and touched him to discover another Maggie in the Maggie of the household. Those two women had put on for a moment the charming, chattering silliness of schoolgirls. He joined them. On the lawn of the Orgreaves, Alicia was battling fiercely at tennis with an elegant young man whose name he did not know. Croquet was deposed; tennis reigned.Even Alicia’s occasional shrill cry had a mournful quality in the languishing beauty of the evening.“I wish you’d tell your father I shan’t be able to go to-morrow,” Edwin said to Janet.“But he’s told all of us youaregoing!” Janet exclaimed.“Shan’t you go?” Maggie questioned, low.“No,” he murmured. Glancing at Janet, he added, “It won’t do for me to go.”“What a pity!” Janet breathed.Maggie did not say, “Oh! But you ought to! There’s no reason whatever why you shouldn’t!” By her silence she contradicted the philosophic nonchalance of her demeanour during the latter part of the meal.
One evening, a year later, in earliest summer of 1887, Edwin and Mr Osmond Orgreave were walking home together from Hanbridge. When they reached the corner of the street leading to Lane End House, Osmond Orgreave said, stopping—
“Now you’ll come with us?” And he looked Edwin hard in the eyes, and there was a most flattering appeal in his voice. It was some time since their eyes had met frankly, for Edwin had recently been having experience of Mr Orgreave’s methods in financial controversy, and it had not been agreeable.
After an instant Edwin said heartily—
“Yes, I think I’ll come. Of course I should like to. But I’ll let you know.”
“To-night?”
“Yes, to-night.”
“I shall tell my wife you’re coming.”
Mr Orgreave waved a hand, and passed with a certain decorative gaiety down the street. His hair was now silvern, but it still curled in the old places, and his gestures had apparently not aged at all.
Mr and Mrs Orgreave were going to London for the Jubilee celebrations. So far as their family was concerned, they were going alone, because Osmond had insisted humorously that he wanted a rest from his children. But he had urgently invited Edwin to accompany them. At first Edwin had instinctively replied that it was impossible. He could not leave home. He had never been to London; a journey to London presented itself to him as an immense enterprise, almost as a piece of culpable self-indulgence. And then, under the stimulus of Osmond’s energetic and adventurous temperament, he had said to himself, “Why not? Why shouldn’t I?”
The arguments favoured his going. It was absurd and scandalous that he had never been to London: he ought for his self-respect to depart thither at once. The legend of the Jubilee, spectacular, processional, historic, touched his imagination. Whenever he thought of it, his fancy saw pennons and corselets and chargers winding through stupendous streets, and, somewhere in the midst, the majesty of England in the frail body of a little old lady, who had had many children and one supreme misfortune. Moreover, he could incidentally see Charlie. Moreover, he had been suffering from a series of his customary colds, and from overwork, and Heve had told him that he ‘would do with a change.’ Moreover, he had a project for buying paper in London: he had received, from London, overtures which seemed promising. He had never been able to buy paper quite as cheaply as Darius had bought paper, for the mere reason that he could not haggle over sixteenths of a penny with efficient ruthlessness; he simply could not do it, being somehow ashamed to do it. In Manchester, where Darius had bought paper for thirty years, they were imperceptibly too brutal for Edwin in the harsh realities of a bargain; they had no sense of shame. He thought that in letters from London he detected a softer spirit.
And above all he desired, by accepting Mr Orgreave’s invitation, to show to the architect that the differences between them were really expunged from his mind. Among many confusions in his father’s flourishing but disorderly affairs, Edwin had been startled to find the Orgreave transactions. There were accounts and contra-accounts, and quantities of strangely contradictory documents. Never had a real settlement occurred between Darius and Osmond. And Osmond did not seem to want one. Edwin, however, with his old-maid’s passion for putting and keeping everything in its place, insisted on one. Mr Orgreave had to meet him on his strongest point, his love of order. The process of settlement had been painful to Edwin; it had seriously marred some of his illusions. Nearly the last of the entanglements in his father’s business, the Orgreave matter was straightened and closed now; and the projected escapade to London would bury it deep, might even restore agreeable illusions. And Edwin was incapable of nursing malice.
The best argument of all was that he had a right to go to London. He had earned London, by honest and severe work, and by bearing firmly the huge weight of his responsibility. So far he had offered himself no reward whatever, not even an increase of salary, not even a week of freedom or the satisfaction of a single caprice.
“I shall go, and charge it to the business,” he said to himself. He became excited about going.
As he approached his house, he saw the elder Heve, vicar of Saint Peter’s, coming away from it, a natty clerical figure in a straw hat of peculiar shape. Recently this man had called once or twice; not professionally, for Darius was neither a churchman nor a parishioner, but as a brother of Dr Heve’s, as a friendly human being, and Darius had been flattered. The Vicar would talk about Jesus with quiet half-humorous enthusiasm. For him at any rate Christianity was grand fun. He seemed never to be solemn over his religion, like the Wesleyans. He never, with a shamed, defiant air, said, “I am not ashamed of Christ,” like the Wesleyans. He might have known Christ slightly at Cambridge. But his relations with Christ did not make him conceited, nor condescending. And if he was concerned about the welfare of people who knew not Christ, he hid his concern in the politest manner. Edwin, after being momentarily impressed by him, was now convinced of his perfect mediocrity; the Vicar’s views on literature had damned him eternally in the esteem of Edwin, who was still naïve enough to be unable to comprehend how a man who had been to Cambridge could speak enthusiastically of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Moreover, Edwin despised him for his obvious pride in being a bachelor. The Vicar would not say that a priest should be celibate, but he would, with delicacy, imply as much. Then also, for Edwin’s taste, the parson was somewhat too childishly interested in the culture of cellar-mushrooms, which was his hobby. He would recount the tedious details of all his experiments to Darius, who, flattered by these attentions from the Established Church, took immense delight in the Vicar and in the sample mushrooms offered to him from time to time.
Maggie stood in the porch, which commanded the descent into Bursley; she was watching the Vicar as he receded. When Edwin appeared at the gate, she gave a little jump, and he fancied that she also blushed.
“Look here!” he exclaimed to himself, in a flash of suspicion. “Surely she’s not thinking of the Vicar! Surely Maggie isn’t after all!” He did not conceive it possible that the Vicar, who had been to Cambridge and had notions about celibacy, was thinking of Maggie. “Women are queer,” he said to himself. (For him, this generalisation from facts was quite original.) Fancy her staring after the Vicar! She must have been doing it quite unconsciously! He had supposed that her attitude towards the Vicar was precisely his own. He took it for granted that the Vicar’s attitude was the same to both of them, based on a polite and kindly but firm recognition that there could be no genuine sympathy between him and them.
“The Vicar’s just been,” said Maggie.
“Has he? ... Cheered the old man up at all?”
“Not much.” Maggie shook her head gloomily.
Edwin’s conscience seemed to be getting ready to hint that he ought not to go to London.
“I say, Mag,” he said quietly, as he inserted his stick in the umbrella-stand. She stopped on her way upstairs, and then approached him.
“Mr Orgreave wants me to go to London with him and Mrs Orgreave.” He explained the whole project to her.
She said at once, eagerly and benevolently—
“Of course you ought to go. It’ll do you all the good in the world. I shall be all right here. Clara and Albert will come for Jubilee Day, anyhow. But haven’t you driven it late? ... The day after to-morrow, isn’t it? Mr Heve was only saying just now that the hotels were all crammed.”
“Well, you know what Orgreave is! I expect he’ll look after all that.”
“You go!” Maggie enjoined him.
“Won’t upset him?” Edwin nodded vaguely to wherever Darius might be.
“Can’t be helped if it does,” she replied calmly.
“Well then, I’m dashed if I don’t go! What about my collars?”
Those three—Darius, Maggie, and Edwin—sat down to tea in silence. The window was open, and the weather very warm and gay. During the previous twelve months they had sat down to hundreds of such meals. Save for a few brief periods of cheerfulness, Darius had steadily grown more taciturn, heavy and melancholy. In the winter he had of course abandoned his attempts to divert himself by gardening—attempts at the best half-hearted and feeble—and he had not resumed them in the spring. Less than half a year previously he had often walked across the fields to Hillport and back, or up the gradual slopes to the height of Toft End—he never went townwards, had not once visited the Conservative Club. But now he could not even be persuaded to leave the garden. An old wicker arm-chair had been placed at the end of the garden, and he would set out for that arm-chair as upon a journey, and, having reached it, would sink into it with a huge sigh, and repose before bracing himself to the effort of return.
And now it seemed marvellous that he had ever had the legs to get to Hillport and to Toft End. He existed in a stupor of dull reflection, from pride pretending to read and not reading, or pretending to listen and not listening, and occasionally making a remark which was inapposite but which had to be humoured. And as the weeks passed his children’s manner of humouring him became increasingly perfunctory, and their movements in putting right the negligence of his attire increasingly brusque. Vainly they tried to remember in time that he was a victim and not a criminal; they would remember after the careless remark and after the curt gesture, when it was too late. His malady obsessed them: it was in the air of the house, omnipresent; it weighed upon them, corroding the nerve and exasperating the spirit. Now and then, when Darius had vented a burst of irrational anger, they would say to each other with casual bitterness that really he was too annoying. Once, when his demeanour towards the new servant had strongly suggested that he thought her name was Bathsheba, Mrs Nixon herself had ‘flown out’ at him, and there had been a scene which the doctor had soothed by discreet professional explanations. Maggie’s difficulty was that he was always there, always on the spot. To be free of him she must leave the house; and Maggie was not fond of leaving the house.
Edwin meant to inform him briefly of his intention to go to London, but such was the power of habit that he hesitated; he could not bring himself to announce directly this audacious and unprecedented act of freedom, though he knew that his father was as helpless as a child in his hands. Instead, he began to talk about the renewal of the lease of the premises in Duck Square, as to which it would be necessary to give notice to the landlord at the end of the month.
“I’ve been thinking I’ll have it made out in my own name,” he said. “It’ll save you signing, and so on.” This in itself was a proposal sufficiently startling, and he would not have been surprised at a violent instinctive protest from Darius; but Darius seemed not to heed.
Then both Edwin and Maggie noticed that he was trying to hold a sausage firm on his plate with his knife, and to cut it with his fork.
“No, no, father!” said Maggie gently. “Not like that!”
He looked up, puzzled, and then bent himself again to the plate. The whole of his faculties seemed to be absorbed in a great effort to resolve the complicated problem of the plate, the sausage, the knife and the fork.
“You’ve got your knife in the wrong hand,” said Edwin impatiently, as to a wilful child.
Darius stared at the knife and at the fork, and he then sighed, and his sigh meant, “This business is beyond me!” Then he endeavoured to substitute the knife for the fork, but he could not.
“See,” said Edwin, leaning over. “Like this!” He took the knife, but Darius would not loose it. “No, leave go!” he ordered. “Leave go! How can I show you if you don’t leave go?”
Darius dropped both knife and fork with a clatter. Edwin put the knife into his right hand, and the fork into his left; but in a moment they were wrong again. At first Edwin could not believe that his father was not indulging deliberately in naughtiness.
“Shall I cut it up for you, father?” Maggie asked, in a mild, persuasive tone.
Darius pushed the plate towards her.
When she had cut up the sausage, she said—
“There you are! I’ll keep the knife. Then you can’t get mixed up.”
And Darius ate the sausage with the fork alone. His intelligence had failed to master the original problem presented to it. He ate steadily for a few moments, and then the tears began to roll down his cheek, and he ate no more.
This incident, so simple, so unexpected, and so dramatic, caused the most acute distress. And its effect was disconcerting in the highest degree. It reminded everybody that what Darius suffered from was softening of the brain. For long he had been a prisoner in the house and garden. For long he had been almost mute. And now, just after a visit which usually acted upon him as a tonic, he had begun to lose the skill to feed himself. Little by little he was demonstrating, by his slow declension from it, the wonder of the standard of efficiency maintained by the normal human being.
Edwin and Maggie avoided one another, even in their glances. Each affected the philosophical, seeking to diminish the significance of the episode. But neither succeeded. Of the two years allotted to Darius, one had gone. What would the second be?
In his bedroom, after tea, Edwin fought against the gloomy influence, but uselessly. The inherent and appalling sadness of existence enveloped and chilled him. He gazed at the rows of his books. He had done no regular reading of late. Why read? He gazed at the screen in front of his bed, covered with neat memoranda. How futile! Why go to London? He would only have to come back from London! And then he said resistingly, “Iwillgo to London.” But as he said it aloud, he knew well that he would not go. His conscience would not allow him to depart. He could not leave Maggie alone with his father. He yielded to his conscience unkindly, reluctantly, with no warm gust of unselfishness; he yielded because he could not outrage his abstract sense of justice.
From the window he perceived Maggie and Janet Orgreave talking together over the low separating wall. And he remembered a word of Janet’s to the effect that she and Maggie were becoming quite friendly and that Maggie was splendid. Suddenly he went downstairs into the garden. They were talking in attitudes of intimacy; and both were grave and mature, and both had a little cleft under the chin. Their pale frocks harmonised in the evening light. As he approached, Maggie burst into a girlish laugh. “Not really?” she murmured, with the vivacity of a young girl. He knew not what they were discussing, nor did he care. What interested him, what startled him, was the youthful gesture and tone of Maggie. It pleased and touched him to discover another Maggie in the Maggie of the household. Those two women had put on for a moment the charming, chattering silliness of schoolgirls. He joined them. On the lawn of the Orgreaves, Alicia was battling fiercely at tennis with an elegant young man whose name he did not know. Croquet was deposed; tennis reigned.
Even Alicia’s occasional shrill cry had a mournful quality in the languishing beauty of the evening.
“I wish you’d tell your father I shan’t be able to go to-morrow,” Edwin said to Janet.
“But he’s told all of us youaregoing!” Janet exclaimed.
“Shan’t you go?” Maggie questioned, low.
“No,” he murmured. Glancing at Janet, he added, “It won’t do for me to go.”
“What a pity!” Janet breathed.
Maggie did not say, “Oh! But you ought to! There’s no reason whatever why you shouldn’t!” By her silence she contradicted the philosophic nonchalance of her demeanour during the latter part of the meal.
Volume Three--Chapter Nine.The Ox.Edwin walked idly down Trafalgar Road in the hot morning sunshine of Jubilee Day. He had left his father tearfully sentimentalising about the Queen. ‘She’s a good ’un!’ Then a sob. ‘Never was one like her!’ Another sob. ‘No, and never will be again!’ Then a gush of tears on the newspaper, which the old man laboriously scanned for details of the official programme in London. He had not for months read the newspaper with such a determined effort to understand; indeed, since the beginning of his illness, no subject, except mushroom-culture, had interested him so much as the Jubilee. Each time he looked at the sky from his shady seat in the garden he had thanked God that it was a fine day, as he might have thanked Him for deliverance from a grave personal disaster.Except for a few poor flags, there was no sign of gaiety in Trafalgar Road. The street, the town, and the hearts of those who remained in it, were wrapped in that desolating sadness which envelops the provinces when a supreme spectacular national rejoicing is centralised in London. All those who possessed the freedom, the energy, and the money had gone to London to witness a sight that, as every one said to every one, would be unique, and would remain unique for ever—and yet perhaps less to witness it than to be able to recount to their grandchildren that they had witnessed it. Many more were visiting nearer holiday resorts for a day or two days. Those who remained, the poor, the spiritless, the afflicted, and the captive, felt with mournful keenness the shame of their utter provinciality, envying the crowds in London with a bitter envy, and picturing London as the paradise of fashion and splendour.It was from sheer aimless disgust that Edwin went down Trafalgar Road; he might as easily have gone up. Having arrived in the town, a wilderness of shut shops, he gazed a moment at his own, and then entered it by the side door. He had naught else to do. Had he chosen he could have spent the whole day in reading, or he might have taken again to his long-neglected water-colours. But it was not in him to put himself to the trouble of seeking contentment. He preferred to wallow in utter desolation, thinking of all the unpleasant things that had ever happened to him, and occasionally conjecturing what he would have been doing at a given moment had he accompanied the jolly, the distinguished, and the enterprising Osmond Orgreave to London.He passed into the shop, sufficiently illuminated by the white rays that struck through the diamond holes in the shutters. The morning’s letters—a sparse company—lay forlorn on the floor. He picked them up and pitched them down in the cubicle. Then he went into the cubicle, and with the negligent gesture of long habit unlocked a part of the desk, the part which had once been his father’s privacy, and of which he had demanded the key more than a year ago. It was all now under his absolute dominion. He could do exactly as he pleased with a commercial apparatus that brought in some eight hundred pounds a year net. He was the unquestioned regent, and yet he told himself that he was no happier than when a slave.He drew forth his books of account, and began to piece figures together on backs of envelopes, using a shorthand of accounts such as a principal will use when he is impatient and not particular to a few pounds. A little wasp of curiosity was teasing Edwin, and to quicken it a comparison was necessary between the result of the first six months of that year and the first six months of the previous year. True, June had not quite expired, but most of the quarterly accounts were ready, and he could form a trustworthy estimate. Was he, with his scorn of his father, his brains, his orderliness, doing better or worse than his father in the business? At the election of 1886, there had been considerably fewer orders than was customary at elections; he had done nothing whatever for the Tories, but that was a point that affected neither period of six months. Sundry customers had assuredly been lost; on the other hand, Stifford’s travelling had seemed to be very satisfactory. Nor could it be argued that money had been dropped on the new-book business, because he had not yet inaugurated the new-book business, preferring to wait; he was afraid that his father might after all astoundingly walk in one day, and see new books on the counter, and rage. He had stopped the supplying of newspapers, and would deign to nothing lower than a sixpenny magazine; but the profit on newspapers was negligible.The totals ought surely to compare in a manner favourable to himself, for he had been extremely and unremittingly conscientious. Nevertheless he was afraid. He was afraid because he knew, vaguely and still deeply, that he could neither buy nor sell as well as his father. It was not a question of brains; it was a question of individuality. A sense of honour, of fairness, a temperamental generosity, a hatred of meanness, often prevented him from pushing a bargain to the limit. He could not bring himself to haggle desperately. And even when price was not the main difficulty, he could not talk to a customer, or to a person whose customer he was, with the same rough, gruff, cajoling, bullying skill as his father. He could not, by taking thought, do what his father had done naturally, by the mere blind exercise of instinct. His father, with all his clumsiness, and his unscientific methods, had a certain quality, unseizable, unanalysable, and Edwin had not that quality.He caught himself, in the rapid calculating, giving himself the benefit of every doubt; somehow he could not help it, childish as it was. And even so, he could see, or he could feel, that the comparison was not going to be favourable to the regent. It grew plainer that the volume of business had barely been maintained, and it was glaringly evident that the expenses, especially wages, had sensibly increased. He abandoned the figures not quite finished, partly from weary disgust, and partly because Big James most astonishingly walked into the shop, from the back. He was really quite glad to encounter Big James, a fellow-creature.Two.“Seeing the door open, sir,” said Big James cheerfully, through the narrow doorway of the cubicle, “I stepped in to see as it was no one unlawful.”“Did I leave the side door open?” Edwin murmured. It was surprising even to himself, how forgetful he was at times, he with his mania for orderliness!Big James was in his best clothes, and seemed, with his indestructible blandness, to be perfectly happy.“I was just strolling up to have a look at the ox,” he added.“Oh!” said Edwin. “Are they cooking it?”“They should be, sir. But my fear is it may turn, in this weather.”“I’ll come out with you,” said Edwin, enlivened.He locked the desk, and hurriedly straightened a few things, and then they went out together, by Wedgwood Street and the Cock Yard up to the market-place. No breeze moved, and the heat was tremendous. And there at the foot of the Town Hall tower, and in its scanty shadow, a dead ox, slung by its legs from an iron construction, was frizzling over a great primitive fire. The vast flanks of the animal, all rich yellows and browns, streamed with grease, some of which fell noisily on the almost invisible flames, while the rest was ingeniously caught in a system of runnels. The spectacle was obscene, nauseating to the eye, the nose, and the ear, and it powerfully recalled to Edwin the legends of the Spanish Inquisition. He speculated whether he would ever be able to touch beef again. Above the tortured and insulted corpse the air quivered in large waves. Mr Doy, the leading butcher of Bursley, and now chief executioner, regarded with anxiety the operation which had been entrusted to him, and occasionally gave instructions to a myrmidon. Round about stood a few privileged persons, whom pride helped to bear the double heat; and farther off on the pavements, a thin scattered crowd. The sublime spectacle of an ox roasted whole had not sufficed to keep the townsmen in the town. Even the sages who had conceived and commanded this peculiar solemnity for celebrating the Jubilee of a Queen and Empress had not stayed in the borough to see it enacted, though some of them were to return in time to watch the devouring of the animal by the aged poor at a ceremonial feast in the evening.“It’s a grand sight!” said Big James, with simple enthusiasm. “A grand sight! Real old English! And I wish her well!” He meant the Queen and Empress. Then suddenly, in a different tone, sniffing the air, “I doubt it’s turned! I’ll step across and ask Mr Doy.”He stepped across, and came back with the news that the greater portion of the ox, despite every precaution, had in fact very annoyingly ‘turned,’ and that the remainder of the carcass was in serious danger.“What’ll the old people say?” he demanded sadly. “But it’s a grand sight, turned or not!”Edwin stared and stared, in a sort of sinister fascination. He thought that he might stare for ever. At length, after ages of ennui, he loosed himself from the spell with an effort and glanced at Big James.“And what are you going to do with yourself to-day, James?”Big James smiled. “I’m going to take my walks abroad, sir. It’s seldom as I get about in the town nowadays.”“Well, I must be off!”“I’d like you to give my respects to the old gentleman, sir.”Edwin nodded and departed, very slowly and idly, towards Trafalgar Road and Bleakridge. He pulled his straw hat over his forehead to avoid the sun, and then he pushed it backwards to his neck to avoid the sun. The odour of the shrivelling ox remained with him; it was in his nostrils for several days. His heart grew blacker with intense gloom; and the contentment of Big James at the prospect of just strolling about the damnable dead town for the rest of the day surpassed his comprehension. He abandoned himself to misery voluptuously. The afternoon and evening stretched before him, an arid and appalling Sahara. The Benbows, and their babes, and Auntie Hamps were coming for dinner and tea, to cheer up grandfather. He pictured the repasts with savage gloating detestation—burnt ox, and more burnt ox, and the false odious brightness of a family determined to be mutually helpful and inspiring. Since his refusal to abet the project of a loan to Albert, Clara had been secretly hostile under her superficial sisterliness, and Auntie Hamps had often assured him, in a manner extraordinarily exasperating, that she was convinced he had acted conscientiously for the best. Strange thought, that after eight hours of these people and of his father, he would be still alive!
Edwin walked idly down Trafalgar Road in the hot morning sunshine of Jubilee Day. He had left his father tearfully sentimentalising about the Queen. ‘She’s a good ’un!’ Then a sob. ‘Never was one like her!’ Another sob. ‘No, and never will be again!’ Then a gush of tears on the newspaper, which the old man laboriously scanned for details of the official programme in London. He had not for months read the newspaper with such a determined effort to understand; indeed, since the beginning of his illness, no subject, except mushroom-culture, had interested him so much as the Jubilee. Each time he looked at the sky from his shady seat in the garden he had thanked God that it was a fine day, as he might have thanked Him for deliverance from a grave personal disaster.
Except for a few poor flags, there was no sign of gaiety in Trafalgar Road. The street, the town, and the hearts of those who remained in it, were wrapped in that desolating sadness which envelops the provinces when a supreme spectacular national rejoicing is centralised in London. All those who possessed the freedom, the energy, and the money had gone to London to witness a sight that, as every one said to every one, would be unique, and would remain unique for ever—and yet perhaps less to witness it than to be able to recount to their grandchildren that they had witnessed it. Many more were visiting nearer holiday resorts for a day or two days. Those who remained, the poor, the spiritless, the afflicted, and the captive, felt with mournful keenness the shame of their utter provinciality, envying the crowds in London with a bitter envy, and picturing London as the paradise of fashion and splendour.
It was from sheer aimless disgust that Edwin went down Trafalgar Road; he might as easily have gone up. Having arrived in the town, a wilderness of shut shops, he gazed a moment at his own, and then entered it by the side door. He had naught else to do. Had he chosen he could have spent the whole day in reading, or he might have taken again to his long-neglected water-colours. But it was not in him to put himself to the trouble of seeking contentment. He preferred to wallow in utter desolation, thinking of all the unpleasant things that had ever happened to him, and occasionally conjecturing what he would have been doing at a given moment had he accompanied the jolly, the distinguished, and the enterprising Osmond Orgreave to London.
He passed into the shop, sufficiently illuminated by the white rays that struck through the diamond holes in the shutters. The morning’s letters—a sparse company—lay forlorn on the floor. He picked them up and pitched them down in the cubicle. Then he went into the cubicle, and with the negligent gesture of long habit unlocked a part of the desk, the part which had once been his father’s privacy, and of which he had demanded the key more than a year ago. It was all now under his absolute dominion. He could do exactly as he pleased with a commercial apparatus that brought in some eight hundred pounds a year net. He was the unquestioned regent, and yet he told himself that he was no happier than when a slave.
He drew forth his books of account, and began to piece figures together on backs of envelopes, using a shorthand of accounts such as a principal will use when he is impatient and not particular to a few pounds. A little wasp of curiosity was teasing Edwin, and to quicken it a comparison was necessary between the result of the first six months of that year and the first six months of the previous year. True, June had not quite expired, but most of the quarterly accounts were ready, and he could form a trustworthy estimate. Was he, with his scorn of his father, his brains, his orderliness, doing better or worse than his father in the business? At the election of 1886, there had been considerably fewer orders than was customary at elections; he had done nothing whatever for the Tories, but that was a point that affected neither period of six months. Sundry customers had assuredly been lost; on the other hand, Stifford’s travelling had seemed to be very satisfactory. Nor could it be argued that money had been dropped on the new-book business, because he had not yet inaugurated the new-book business, preferring to wait; he was afraid that his father might after all astoundingly walk in one day, and see new books on the counter, and rage. He had stopped the supplying of newspapers, and would deign to nothing lower than a sixpenny magazine; but the profit on newspapers was negligible.
The totals ought surely to compare in a manner favourable to himself, for he had been extremely and unremittingly conscientious. Nevertheless he was afraid. He was afraid because he knew, vaguely and still deeply, that he could neither buy nor sell as well as his father. It was not a question of brains; it was a question of individuality. A sense of honour, of fairness, a temperamental generosity, a hatred of meanness, often prevented him from pushing a bargain to the limit. He could not bring himself to haggle desperately. And even when price was not the main difficulty, he could not talk to a customer, or to a person whose customer he was, with the same rough, gruff, cajoling, bullying skill as his father. He could not, by taking thought, do what his father had done naturally, by the mere blind exercise of instinct. His father, with all his clumsiness, and his unscientific methods, had a certain quality, unseizable, unanalysable, and Edwin had not that quality.
He caught himself, in the rapid calculating, giving himself the benefit of every doubt; somehow he could not help it, childish as it was. And even so, he could see, or he could feel, that the comparison was not going to be favourable to the regent. It grew plainer that the volume of business had barely been maintained, and it was glaringly evident that the expenses, especially wages, had sensibly increased. He abandoned the figures not quite finished, partly from weary disgust, and partly because Big James most astonishingly walked into the shop, from the back. He was really quite glad to encounter Big James, a fellow-creature.
“Seeing the door open, sir,” said Big James cheerfully, through the narrow doorway of the cubicle, “I stepped in to see as it was no one unlawful.”
“Did I leave the side door open?” Edwin murmured. It was surprising even to himself, how forgetful he was at times, he with his mania for orderliness!
Big James was in his best clothes, and seemed, with his indestructible blandness, to be perfectly happy.
“I was just strolling up to have a look at the ox,” he added.
“Oh!” said Edwin. “Are they cooking it?”
“They should be, sir. But my fear is it may turn, in this weather.”
“I’ll come out with you,” said Edwin, enlivened.
He locked the desk, and hurriedly straightened a few things, and then they went out together, by Wedgwood Street and the Cock Yard up to the market-place. No breeze moved, and the heat was tremendous. And there at the foot of the Town Hall tower, and in its scanty shadow, a dead ox, slung by its legs from an iron construction, was frizzling over a great primitive fire. The vast flanks of the animal, all rich yellows and browns, streamed with grease, some of which fell noisily on the almost invisible flames, while the rest was ingeniously caught in a system of runnels. The spectacle was obscene, nauseating to the eye, the nose, and the ear, and it powerfully recalled to Edwin the legends of the Spanish Inquisition. He speculated whether he would ever be able to touch beef again. Above the tortured and insulted corpse the air quivered in large waves. Mr Doy, the leading butcher of Bursley, and now chief executioner, regarded with anxiety the operation which had been entrusted to him, and occasionally gave instructions to a myrmidon. Round about stood a few privileged persons, whom pride helped to bear the double heat; and farther off on the pavements, a thin scattered crowd. The sublime spectacle of an ox roasted whole had not sufficed to keep the townsmen in the town. Even the sages who had conceived and commanded this peculiar solemnity for celebrating the Jubilee of a Queen and Empress had not stayed in the borough to see it enacted, though some of them were to return in time to watch the devouring of the animal by the aged poor at a ceremonial feast in the evening.
“It’s a grand sight!” said Big James, with simple enthusiasm. “A grand sight! Real old English! And I wish her well!” He meant the Queen and Empress. Then suddenly, in a different tone, sniffing the air, “I doubt it’s turned! I’ll step across and ask Mr Doy.”
He stepped across, and came back with the news that the greater portion of the ox, despite every precaution, had in fact very annoyingly ‘turned,’ and that the remainder of the carcass was in serious danger.
“What’ll the old people say?” he demanded sadly. “But it’s a grand sight, turned or not!”
Edwin stared and stared, in a sort of sinister fascination. He thought that he might stare for ever. At length, after ages of ennui, he loosed himself from the spell with an effort and glanced at Big James.
“And what are you going to do with yourself to-day, James?”
Big James smiled. “I’m going to take my walks abroad, sir. It’s seldom as I get about in the town nowadays.”
“Well, I must be off!”
“I’d like you to give my respects to the old gentleman, sir.”
Edwin nodded and departed, very slowly and idly, towards Trafalgar Road and Bleakridge. He pulled his straw hat over his forehead to avoid the sun, and then he pushed it backwards to his neck to avoid the sun. The odour of the shrivelling ox remained with him; it was in his nostrils for several days. His heart grew blacker with intense gloom; and the contentment of Big James at the prospect of just strolling about the damnable dead town for the rest of the day surpassed his comprehension. He abandoned himself to misery voluptuously. The afternoon and evening stretched before him, an arid and appalling Sahara. The Benbows, and their babes, and Auntie Hamps were coming for dinner and tea, to cheer up grandfather. He pictured the repasts with savage gloating detestation—burnt ox, and more burnt ox, and the false odious brightness of a family determined to be mutually helpful and inspiring. Since his refusal to abet the project of a loan to Albert, Clara had been secretly hostile under her superficial sisterliness, and Auntie Hamps had often assured him, in a manner extraordinarily exasperating, that she was convinced he had acted conscientiously for the best. Strange thought, that after eight hours of these people and of his father, he would be still alive!