Volume Three--Chapter Ten.

Volume Three--Chapter Ten.Mrs Hamps as a Young Man.On the Saturday afternoon of the week following the Jubilee, Edwin and Mrs Hamps were sunning themselves in the garden, when Janet’s face and shoulders appeared suddenly at the other side of the wall. At the sight of Mrs Hamps she seemed startled and intimidated, and she bowed somewhat more ceremoniously than usual.“Good afternoon!”Then Mrs Hamps returned the bow with superb extravagance, like an Oriental monarch who is determined to outvie magnificently the gifts of another. Mrs Hamps became conscious of the whole of her body and of every article of her summer apparel, and nothing of it all was allowed to escape from contributing to the completeness of the bow. She bridled. She tossed proudly as it were against the bit. And the rich ruins of her handsomeness adopted new and softer lines in the overpowering sickly blandishment of a smile. Thus she always greeted any merely formal acquaintance whom she considered to be above herself in status—provided, of course, that the acquaintance had done nothing to offend her.“Good afternoon, Miss Orgreave!”Reluctantly she permitted her features to relax from the full effort of the smile; but they might not abandon it entirely.“I thought Maggie was there,” said Janet.“She was, a minute ago,” Edwin answered. “She’s just gone in to father. She’ll be out directly. Do you want her?”“I only wanted to tell her something,” said Janet, and then paused.She was obviously very excited. She had the little quick movements of a girl. In her cream-tinted frock she looked like a mere girl. And she was beautiful in her maturity; a challenge to the world of males. As she stood there, rising from behind the wall, flushed, quivering, abandoned to an emotion and yet unconsciously dignified by that peculiar stateliness that never left her—as she stood there it seemed as if she really was offering a challenge.“I’ll fetch Mag, if you like,” said Edwin.“Well,” said Janet, lifting her chin proudly, “it isn’t a secret. Alicia’s engaged.” And pride was in every detail of her bearing.“Well, I never!” Edwin exclaimed.Mrs Hamps’s features resumed the full smile.“Can you imagine it? I can’t! It seems only last week that she left school!”And indeed it seemed only last week that Alicia was nothing but legs, gawkiness, blushes, and screwed-up shoulders. And now she was a destined bride. She had caught and enchanted a youth by her mysterious attractiveness. She had been caught and enchanted by the mysterious attractiveness of the male. She had known the dreadful anxiety that precedes the triumph, and the ecstasy of surrender. She had kissed as Janet had never kissed, and gazed as Janet had never gazed. She knew infinitely more than Janet. She had always been a child to Janet, but now Janet was the child. No wonder that Janet was excited.“Might one ask who is the fortunate young gentleman?” Mrs Hamps dulcetly inquired.“It’s Harry Hesketh, from Oldcastle... You’ve met him here,” she added, glancing at Edwin.Mrs Hamps nodded, satisfied, and the approving nod indicated that she was aware of all the excellences of the Hesketh family.“The tennis man!” Edwin murmured.“Yes, of course! You aren’t surprised, are you?”The fact was that Edwin had not given a thought to the possible relations between Alicia and any particular young man. But Janet’s thrilled air so patently assumed his interest that he felt obliged to make a certain pretence.“I’m not what you’d call staggered,” he said roguishly. “I’m keeping my nerve.” And he gave her an intimate smile.“Father-in-law and son-in-law have just been talking it over,” said Janet archly, “in the breakfast-room! Alicia thoughtfully went out for a walk. I’m dying for her to come back.” Janet laughed from simple joyous expectation. “When Harry came out of the breakfast-room he just put his arms round me and kissed me. Yes! That was how I was told about it. He’s a dear! Don’t you think so? I mean really! I felt I must come and tell some one.”Edwin had never seen her so moved. Her emotion was touching, it was beautiful. She need not have said that she had come because she must. The fact was in her rapt eyes. She was under a spell.“Well, I must go!” she said, with a curious brusqueness. Perhaps she had a dim perception that she was behaving in a manner unusual with her. “You’ll tell your sister.”Her departing bow to Mrs Hamps had the formality of courts, and was equalled by Mrs Hamps’s bow. Just as Mrs Hamps, having re-created her elaborate smile, was allowing it finally to expire, she had to bring it into existence once more, and very suddenly, for Janet returned to the wall.“You won’t forget tennis after tea,” said Janet shortly.Edwin said that he should not.Two.“Well, well!” Mrs Hamps commented, and sat down in the wicker-chair of Darius.“I wonder she doesn’t get married herself,” said Edwin idly, having nothing in particular to remark.“You’re a nice one to say such a thing!” Mrs Hamps exclaimed.“Why?”“Well, you really are!” She raised the structure of her bonnet and curls, and shook it slowly at him. And her gaze had an extraordinary quality of fleshly naughtiness that half pleased and half annoyed him.“Why?” he repeated.“Well,” she said again, “you aren’t a ninny, and you aren’t a simpleton. At least I hope not. You must know as well as anybody the name of the young gentleman thatshe’swaiting for.”In spite of himself, Edwin blushed: he blushed more and more. Then he scowled.“What nonsense!” he muttered viciously. He was entirely sincere. The notion that Janet was waiting for him had never once crossed his mind. It seemed to him fantastic, one of those silly ideas that a woman such as Auntie Hamps would be likely to have, or more accurately would be likely to pretend to have. Still, it did just happen that on this occasion his auntie’s expression was more convincing than usual. She seemed more human than usual, to have abandoned, at any rate partially, the baffling garment of effusive insincerity in which she hid her soul. The Eve in her seemed to show herself, and, looking forth from her eyes, to admit that the youthful dalliance of the sexes was alone interesting in this life of strict piety. The revelation was uncanny.“You needn’t talk like that,” she retorted calmly, “unless you want to go down in my good opinion. You don’t mean to tell me honestly that you don’t know what’s been the talk of the town for years and years!”“It’s ridiculous,” said Edwin. “Why—what do you know of her—you don’t know the Orgreaves at all!”“I knowthat, anyway,” said Auntie Hamps.“Oh! Stuff!” He grew impatient.And yet, in his extreme astonishment, he was flattered and delighted.“Of course,” said Auntie Hamps, “you’re so difficult to talk to—”“Difficult to talk to!—Me?”“Otherwise your auntie might have given you a hint long ago. I believe you are a simpleton after all! I cannot understand what’s come over the young men in these days. Letting a girl like that wait and wait!” She implied, with a faint scornful smile, that if she were a young man she would be capable of playing the devil with the maidenhood of the town. Edwin was rather hurt. And though he felt that he ought not to be ashamed, yet he was ashamed. He divined that she was asking him how he had the face to stand there before her, at his age, with his youth unspilled. After all, she was an astounding woman. He remained silent.“Why—look how splendid it would be!” she murmured. “The very thing! Everybody would be delighted!”He still remained silent.“But you can’t keep on philandering for ever!” she said sharply. “She’ll never see thirty again! ... Why does she ask you to go and play at tennis? Can you tell me that? ... perhaps I’m saying too much, but this Iwillsay—”She stopped.Darius and Maggie appeared at the garden door. Maggie offered her hand to aid her father, but he repulsed it. Calmly she left him, and came up the garden, out of the deep shadow into the sunshine. She had learnt the news of the engagement, and had fully expressed her feelings about it before Darius arrived at his destination and Mrs Hamps vacated the wicker-chair.“I’ll get some chairs,” said Edwin gruffly. He could look nobody in the eyes. As he turned away he heard Mrs Hamps say—“Great news, father! Alicia Orgreave is engaged!”The old man made no reply. His mere physical present deprived the betrothal of all its charm. The news fell utterly flat and lay unregarded and insignificant.Edwin did not get the chairs. He sent the servant out with them.

On the Saturday afternoon of the week following the Jubilee, Edwin and Mrs Hamps were sunning themselves in the garden, when Janet’s face and shoulders appeared suddenly at the other side of the wall. At the sight of Mrs Hamps she seemed startled and intimidated, and she bowed somewhat more ceremoniously than usual.

“Good afternoon!”

Then Mrs Hamps returned the bow with superb extravagance, like an Oriental monarch who is determined to outvie magnificently the gifts of another. Mrs Hamps became conscious of the whole of her body and of every article of her summer apparel, and nothing of it all was allowed to escape from contributing to the completeness of the bow. She bridled. She tossed proudly as it were against the bit. And the rich ruins of her handsomeness adopted new and softer lines in the overpowering sickly blandishment of a smile. Thus she always greeted any merely formal acquaintance whom she considered to be above herself in status—provided, of course, that the acquaintance had done nothing to offend her.

“Good afternoon, Miss Orgreave!”

Reluctantly she permitted her features to relax from the full effort of the smile; but they might not abandon it entirely.

“I thought Maggie was there,” said Janet.

“She was, a minute ago,” Edwin answered. “She’s just gone in to father. She’ll be out directly. Do you want her?”

“I only wanted to tell her something,” said Janet, and then paused.

She was obviously very excited. She had the little quick movements of a girl. In her cream-tinted frock she looked like a mere girl. And she was beautiful in her maturity; a challenge to the world of males. As she stood there, rising from behind the wall, flushed, quivering, abandoned to an emotion and yet unconsciously dignified by that peculiar stateliness that never left her—as she stood there it seemed as if she really was offering a challenge.

“I’ll fetch Mag, if you like,” said Edwin.

“Well,” said Janet, lifting her chin proudly, “it isn’t a secret. Alicia’s engaged.” And pride was in every detail of her bearing.

“Well, I never!” Edwin exclaimed.

Mrs Hamps’s features resumed the full smile.

“Can you imagine it? I can’t! It seems only last week that she left school!”

And indeed it seemed only last week that Alicia was nothing but legs, gawkiness, blushes, and screwed-up shoulders. And now she was a destined bride. She had caught and enchanted a youth by her mysterious attractiveness. She had been caught and enchanted by the mysterious attractiveness of the male. She had known the dreadful anxiety that precedes the triumph, and the ecstasy of surrender. She had kissed as Janet had never kissed, and gazed as Janet had never gazed. She knew infinitely more than Janet. She had always been a child to Janet, but now Janet was the child. No wonder that Janet was excited.

“Might one ask who is the fortunate young gentleman?” Mrs Hamps dulcetly inquired.

“It’s Harry Hesketh, from Oldcastle... You’ve met him here,” she added, glancing at Edwin.

Mrs Hamps nodded, satisfied, and the approving nod indicated that she was aware of all the excellences of the Hesketh family.

“The tennis man!” Edwin murmured.

“Yes, of course! You aren’t surprised, are you?”

The fact was that Edwin had not given a thought to the possible relations between Alicia and any particular young man. But Janet’s thrilled air so patently assumed his interest that he felt obliged to make a certain pretence.

“I’m not what you’d call staggered,” he said roguishly. “I’m keeping my nerve.” And he gave her an intimate smile.

“Father-in-law and son-in-law have just been talking it over,” said Janet archly, “in the breakfast-room! Alicia thoughtfully went out for a walk. I’m dying for her to come back.” Janet laughed from simple joyous expectation. “When Harry came out of the breakfast-room he just put his arms round me and kissed me. Yes! That was how I was told about it. He’s a dear! Don’t you think so? I mean really! I felt I must come and tell some one.”

Edwin had never seen her so moved. Her emotion was touching, it was beautiful. She need not have said that she had come because she must. The fact was in her rapt eyes. She was under a spell.

“Well, I must go!” she said, with a curious brusqueness. Perhaps she had a dim perception that she was behaving in a manner unusual with her. “You’ll tell your sister.”

Her departing bow to Mrs Hamps had the formality of courts, and was equalled by Mrs Hamps’s bow. Just as Mrs Hamps, having re-created her elaborate smile, was allowing it finally to expire, she had to bring it into existence once more, and very suddenly, for Janet returned to the wall.

“You won’t forget tennis after tea,” said Janet shortly.

Edwin said that he should not.

“Well, well!” Mrs Hamps commented, and sat down in the wicker-chair of Darius.

“I wonder she doesn’t get married herself,” said Edwin idly, having nothing in particular to remark.

“You’re a nice one to say such a thing!” Mrs Hamps exclaimed.

“Why?”

“Well, you really are!” She raised the structure of her bonnet and curls, and shook it slowly at him. And her gaze had an extraordinary quality of fleshly naughtiness that half pleased and half annoyed him.

“Why?” he repeated.

“Well,” she said again, “you aren’t a ninny, and you aren’t a simpleton. At least I hope not. You must know as well as anybody the name of the young gentleman thatshe’swaiting for.”

In spite of himself, Edwin blushed: he blushed more and more. Then he scowled.

“What nonsense!” he muttered viciously. He was entirely sincere. The notion that Janet was waiting for him had never once crossed his mind. It seemed to him fantastic, one of those silly ideas that a woman such as Auntie Hamps would be likely to have, or more accurately would be likely to pretend to have. Still, it did just happen that on this occasion his auntie’s expression was more convincing than usual. She seemed more human than usual, to have abandoned, at any rate partially, the baffling garment of effusive insincerity in which she hid her soul. The Eve in her seemed to show herself, and, looking forth from her eyes, to admit that the youthful dalliance of the sexes was alone interesting in this life of strict piety. The revelation was uncanny.

“You needn’t talk like that,” she retorted calmly, “unless you want to go down in my good opinion. You don’t mean to tell me honestly that you don’t know what’s been the talk of the town for years and years!”

“It’s ridiculous,” said Edwin. “Why—what do you know of her—you don’t know the Orgreaves at all!”

“I knowthat, anyway,” said Auntie Hamps.

“Oh! Stuff!” He grew impatient.

And yet, in his extreme astonishment, he was flattered and delighted.

“Of course,” said Auntie Hamps, “you’re so difficult to talk to—”

“Difficult to talk to!—Me?”

“Otherwise your auntie might have given you a hint long ago. I believe you are a simpleton after all! I cannot understand what’s come over the young men in these days. Letting a girl like that wait and wait!” She implied, with a faint scornful smile, that if she were a young man she would be capable of playing the devil with the maidenhood of the town. Edwin was rather hurt. And though he felt that he ought not to be ashamed, yet he was ashamed. He divined that she was asking him how he had the face to stand there before her, at his age, with his youth unspilled. After all, she was an astounding woman. He remained silent.

“Why—look how splendid it would be!” she murmured. “The very thing! Everybody would be delighted!”

He still remained silent.

“But you can’t keep on philandering for ever!” she said sharply. “She’ll never see thirty again! ... Why does she ask you to go and play at tennis? Can you tell me that? ... perhaps I’m saying too much, but this Iwillsay—”

She stopped.

Darius and Maggie appeared at the garden door. Maggie offered her hand to aid her father, but he repulsed it. Calmly she left him, and came up the garden, out of the deep shadow into the sunshine. She had learnt the news of the engagement, and had fully expressed her feelings about it before Darius arrived at his destination and Mrs Hamps vacated the wicker-chair.

“I’ll get some chairs,” said Edwin gruffly. He could look nobody in the eyes. As he turned away he heard Mrs Hamps say—

“Great news, father! Alicia Orgreave is engaged!”

The old man made no reply. His mere physical present deprived the betrothal of all its charm. The news fell utterly flat and lay unregarded and insignificant.

Edwin did not get the chairs. He sent the servant out with them.

Volume Three--Chapter Eleven.An Hour.Janet called out—“Play—no, I think perhaps you’ll do better if you stand a little farther back. Now—play!”She brought down her lifted right arm, and smacked the ball into the net.“Double fault!” she cried, lamenting, when she had done this twice. “Oh dear! Now you go over to the other side of the court.”Edwin would not have kept the rendezvous could he have found an excuse satisfactory to himself for staying away. He was a beginner at tennis, and a very awkward one, having little aptitude for games, and being now inelastic in the muscles. He possessed no flannels, though for weeks he had been meaning to get at least a pair of white pants. He was wearing Jimmie Orgreave’s india-rubber pumps, which admirably fitted him. Moreover, he was aware that he looked better in his jacket than in his shirt-sleeves. But these reasons against the rendezvous were naught. The only genuine reason was that he had felt timid about meeting Janet. Could he meet her without revealing by his mere guilty glance that his aunt had half convinced him that he had only to ask nicely in order to receive? Could he meet her without giving her the impression that he was a conceited ass? He had met her. She was waiting for him in the garden, and by dint of starting the conversation in loud tones from a distance, and fumbling a few moments with the tennis balls before approaching her, he had come through the encounter without too much foolishness.And now he was glad that he had not been so silly as to stay away. She was alone; Mrs Orgreave was lying down, and all the others were out. Alicia and her Harry were off together somewhere. She was alone in the garden, and she was beautiful, and the shaded garden was beautiful, and the fading afternoon. The soft short grass was delicate to his feet, and round the oval of the lawn were glimpses of flowers, and behind her clear-tinted frock was the yellow house laced over with green. A column of thick smoke rose from a manufactory close behind the house, but the trees mitigated it. He played perfunctorily, uninterested in the game, dreaming.She was a wondrous girl! She was the perfect girl! Nobody had ever been able to find any fault with her. He liked her exceedingly. Had it been necessary, he would have sacrificed his just interests in the altercation with her father in order to avoid a coolness in which she might have been involved. She was immensely distinguished and superior. And she was over thirty and had never been engaged, despite the number and variety of her acquaintances, despite her challenging readiness to flirt, and her occasional coquetries. Ten years ago he had almost regarded her as a madonna on a throne, so high did she seem to be above him. His ideas had changed, but there could be no doubt that in an alliance between an Orgreave and a Clayhanger, it would be the Clayhanger who stood to gain the greater advantage. There she was! If she was not waiting for him, she was waiting—for some one! Why not for him as well as for another?He said to himself—“Why shouldn’t I be happy? That other thing is all over!”It was, in fact, years since the name of Hilda had ever been mentioned between them. Why should he not be happy? There was nothing to prevent her from being happy. His father’s illness could not endure for ever. One day soon he would be free in theory as well as in practice. With no tie and no duty (Maggie was negligible) he would have both money and position. What might his life not be with a woman like Janet, brilliant, beautiful, elegant, and faithful? He pictured that life, and even the vision of it dazzled him. Janet his! Janet always there, presiding over a home which was his home, wearing hats that he had paid for, appealing constantly to his judgement, and meaninghimwhen she said, ‘My husband.’ He saw her in the close and tender intimacy of marriage, acquiescent, exquisite, yielding, calmly accustomed to him, modest, but with a different modesty! It was a vision surpassing visions. And there she was on the other side of the net!With her he could be his finest self. He would not have to hide his finest self from ridicule, as often now, among his own family.She was a fine woman! He watched the free movement of her waist, and the curvings and flyings of her short tennis skirt. And there was something strangely feminine about the neck of her blouse, now that he examined it.“Your game!” she cried. “That’s four double faults I’ve served. I can’t play! I really don’t think I can. There’s something the matter with me! Or else it’s the net that’s too high. Those boys will keep screwing it up!”She had a pouting, capricious air, and it delighted him. Never had he seen her so enchantingly girlish as, by a curious hazard, he saw her now. Why should he not he happy? Why should he not wake up out of his nightmare and begin to live? In a momentary flash he seemed to see his past in a true perspective, as it really was, as some well-balanced person not himself would have seen it. Mere morbidity to say, as he had been saying privately for years, that marriage was not for him! Marriage emphatically was for him, if only because he had fine ideals of it. Most people who married were too stupid to get the value of their adventure. Celibacy was grotesque, cowardly, and pitiful—no matter how intellectual the celibate—and it was no use pretending the contrary.A masculine gesture, an advance, a bracing of the male in him ... probably nothing else was needed.“Well,” he said boldly, “if you don’t want to play, let’s sit down and rest.” And then he gave a nervous little laugh.Two.They sat down on the bench that was shaded by the old elderberry tree. Visually, the situation had all the characteristics of an idyllic courtship.“I suppose it’s Alicia’s engagement,” she said, smiling reflectively, “that’s put me off my game. They do upset you, those things do, and you don’t know why... It isn’t as if Alicia was the first—I mean of us girls. There was Marian; but then, of course, that was so long ago, and I was only a chit.”“Yes,” he murmured vaguely; and though she seemed to be waiting for him to say more, he merely repeated, “Yes.”Such was his sole contribution to this topic, so suitable to the situation, so promising, so easy of treatment. They were so friendly that he was under no social obligation to talk for the sake of talking.That was it: they were too friendly. She sat within a foot of him, reclining against the sloping back of the bench, and idly dangling one white-shod foot; her long hands lay on her knees. She was there in all her perfection. But by some sinister magic, as she had approached him and their paths had met at the bench, his vision had faded. Now, she was no longer a woman and he a man. Now, the curvings of her drapery from the elegant waistband were no longer a provocation. She was immediately beneath his eye, and he recognised her again for what she was—Janet! Precisely Janet—no less and no more! But her beauty, her charm, her faculty for affection—surely... No! His instinct was deaf to all ‘buts.’ His instinct did not argue; it cooled. Fancy had created a vision in an instant out of an idea, and in an instant the vision had died. He remembered Hilda with painful intensity. He remembered the feel of her frock under his hand in the cubicle, and the odour of her flesh that was like fruit. His cursed constancy! ... Could he not get Hilda out of his bones? Did she sleep in his bones like a malady that awakes whenever it is disrespectfully treated?He grew melancholy. Accustomed to savour the sadness of existence, he soon accepted the new mood without resentment.He resigned himself to the destruction of his dream. He was like a captive whose cell has been opened in mistake, and who is too gentle to rave when he sees it shut again. Only in secret he poured an indifferent, careless scorn upon Auntie Hamps.They played a whole interminable set, and then Edwin went home, possibly marvelling at the variety of experience that a single hour may contain.

Janet called out—“Play—no, I think perhaps you’ll do better if you stand a little farther back. Now—play!”

She brought down her lifted right arm, and smacked the ball into the net.

“Double fault!” she cried, lamenting, when she had done this twice. “Oh dear! Now you go over to the other side of the court.”

Edwin would not have kept the rendezvous could he have found an excuse satisfactory to himself for staying away. He was a beginner at tennis, and a very awkward one, having little aptitude for games, and being now inelastic in the muscles. He possessed no flannels, though for weeks he had been meaning to get at least a pair of white pants. He was wearing Jimmie Orgreave’s india-rubber pumps, which admirably fitted him. Moreover, he was aware that he looked better in his jacket than in his shirt-sleeves. But these reasons against the rendezvous were naught. The only genuine reason was that he had felt timid about meeting Janet. Could he meet her without revealing by his mere guilty glance that his aunt had half convinced him that he had only to ask nicely in order to receive? Could he meet her without giving her the impression that he was a conceited ass? He had met her. She was waiting for him in the garden, and by dint of starting the conversation in loud tones from a distance, and fumbling a few moments with the tennis balls before approaching her, he had come through the encounter without too much foolishness.

And now he was glad that he had not been so silly as to stay away. She was alone; Mrs Orgreave was lying down, and all the others were out. Alicia and her Harry were off together somewhere. She was alone in the garden, and she was beautiful, and the shaded garden was beautiful, and the fading afternoon. The soft short grass was delicate to his feet, and round the oval of the lawn were glimpses of flowers, and behind her clear-tinted frock was the yellow house laced over with green. A column of thick smoke rose from a manufactory close behind the house, but the trees mitigated it. He played perfunctorily, uninterested in the game, dreaming.

She was a wondrous girl! She was the perfect girl! Nobody had ever been able to find any fault with her. He liked her exceedingly. Had it been necessary, he would have sacrificed his just interests in the altercation with her father in order to avoid a coolness in which she might have been involved. She was immensely distinguished and superior. And she was over thirty and had never been engaged, despite the number and variety of her acquaintances, despite her challenging readiness to flirt, and her occasional coquetries. Ten years ago he had almost regarded her as a madonna on a throne, so high did she seem to be above him. His ideas had changed, but there could be no doubt that in an alliance between an Orgreave and a Clayhanger, it would be the Clayhanger who stood to gain the greater advantage. There she was! If she was not waiting for him, she was waiting—for some one! Why not for him as well as for another?

He said to himself—

“Why shouldn’t I be happy? That other thing is all over!”

It was, in fact, years since the name of Hilda had ever been mentioned between them. Why should he not be happy? There was nothing to prevent her from being happy. His father’s illness could not endure for ever. One day soon he would be free in theory as well as in practice. With no tie and no duty (Maggie was negligible) he would have both money and position. What might his life not be with a woman like Janet, brilliant, beautiful, elegant, and faithful? He pictured that life, and even the vision of it dazzled him. Janet his! Janet always there, presiding over a home which was his home, wearing hats that he had paid for, appealing constantly to his judgement, and meaninghimwhen she said, ‘My husband.’ He saw her in the close and tender intimacy of marriage, acquiescent, exquisite, yielding, calmly accustomed to him, modest, but with a different modesty! It was a vision surpassing visions. And there she was on the other side of the net!

With her he could be his finest self. He would not have to hide his finest self from ridicule, as often now, among his own family.

She was a fine woman! He watched the free movement of her waist, and the curvings and flyings of her short tennis skirt. And there was something strangely feminine about the neck of her blouse, now that he examined it.

“Your game!” she cried. “That’s four double faults I’ve served. I can’t play! I really don’t think I can. There’s something the matter with me! Or else it’s the net that’s too high. Those boys will keep screwing it up!”

She had a pouting, capricious air, and it delighted him. Never had he seen her so enchantingly girlish as, by a curious hazard, he saw her now. Why should he not he happy? Why should he not wake up out of his nightmare and begin to live? In a momentary flash he seemed to see his past in a true perspective, as it really was, as some well-balanced person not himself would have seen it. Mere morbidity to say, as he had been saying privately for years, that marriage was not for him! Marriage emphatically was for him, if only because he had fine ideals of it. Most people who married were too stupid to get the value of their adventure. Celibacy was grotesque, cowardly, and pitiful—no matter how intellectual the celibate—and it was no use pretending the contrary.

A masculine gesture, an advance, a bracing of the male in him ... probably nothing else was needed.

“Well,” he said boldly, “if you don’t want to play, let’s sit down and rest.” And then he gave a nervous little laugh.

They sat down on the bench that was shaded by the old elderberry tree. Visually, the situation had all the characteristics of an idyllic courtship.

“I suppose it’s Alicia’s engagement,” she said, smiling reflectively, “that’s put me off my game. They do upset you, those things do, and you don’t know why... It isn’t as if Alicia was the first—I mean of us girls. There was Marian; but then, of course, that was so long ago, and I was only a chit.”

“Yes,” he murmured vaguely; and though she seemed to be waiting for him to say more, he merely repeated, “Yes.”

Such was his sole contribution to this topic, so suitable to the situation, so promising, so easy of treatment. They were so friendly that he was under no social obligation to talk for the sake of talking.

That was it: they were too friendly. She sat within a foot of him, reclining against the sloping back of the bench, and idly dangling one white-shod foot; her long hands lay on her knees. She was there in all her perfection. But by some sinister magic, as she had approached him and their paths had met at the bench, his vision had faded. Now, she was no longer a woman and he a man. Now, the curvings of her drapery from the elegant waistband were no longer a provocation. She was immediately beneath his eye, and he recognised her again for what she was—Janet! Precisely Janet—no less and no more! But her beauty, her charm, her faculty for affection—surely... No! His instinct was deaf to all ‘buts.’ His instinct did not argue; it cooled. Fancy had created a vision in an instant out of an idea, and in an instant the vision had died. He remembered Hilda with painful intensity. He remembered the feel of her frock under his hand in the cubicle, and the odour of her flesh that was like fruit. His cursed constancy! ... Could he not get Hilda out of his bones? Did she sleep in his bones like a malady that awakes whenever it is disrespectfully treated?

He grew melancholy. Accustomed to savour the sadness of existence, he soon accepted the new mood without resentment.

He resigned himself to the destruction of his dream. He was like a captive whose cell has been opened in mistake, and who is too gentle to rave when he sees it shut again. Only in secret he poured an indifferent, careless scorn upon Auntie Hamps.

They played a whole interminable set, and then Edwin went home, possibly marvelling at the variety of experience that a single hour may contain.

Volume Three--Chapter Twelve.Revenge.Edwin re-entered his home with a feeling of dismayed resignation. There was then no escape, and never could be any escape, from the existence to which he was accustomed; even after his father’s death, his existence would still be essentially the same—incomplete and sterile. He accepted the destiny, but he was daunted by it.He quietly shut the front door, which had been ajar, and as he did so he heard voices in the drawing-room.“I tell ye I’m going to grow mushrooms,” Darius was saying. “Can’t I grow mushrooms in my own cellar?” Then a snort.“I don’t think it’ll be a good thing,” was Maggie’s calm reply.“Ye’ve said that afore. Why won’t it be a good thing? And what’s it got to do with you?” The voice of Darius, ordinarily weak and languid, was rising and becoming strong.“Well, you’d be falling up and down the cellar steps. You know how dark they are. Supposing you hurt yourself?”“Ye’d only be too glad if I killed mysen!” said Darius, with a touch of his ancient grimness.There was a pause.“And it seems they want a lot of attention, mushrooms do,” Maggie went on with unperturbed placidity. “You’d never be able to do it.”“Jane could help me,” said Darius, in the tone of one who is rather pleased with an ingenious suggestion.“Oh no, she couldn’t!” Maggie exclaimed, with a peculiar humorous dryness which she employed only on the rarest occasions. Jane was the desired Bathsheba.“And I say she could!” the old man shouted with surprising vigour. “Her does nothing! What does Mrs Nixon do? What do you do? Three great strapping women in the house and doing nought! I say she shall!” The voice dropped and snarled. “Who’s master here? Is it me, or is it the cat? D’ye think as I can’t turn ye all out of it neck and crop, if I’ve a mind? You and Edwin, and the lot of ye! And to-night too! Give me some money now, and quicker than that! I’ve got nought but sovereigns and notes. I’ll go down and get the spawn myself—ay! and order the earth too! I’ll make it my business to show my childer—But I mun have some change for my car fares.” He breathed heavily.“I’m sure Edwin won’t like it,” Maggie murmured.“Edwin! Hast told Edwin?” Darius also murmured, but it was a murmur of rage.“No, I haven’t. Edwin’s got quite enough on his hands as it is, without any other worries.”There was the noise of a sudden movement, and of a chair falling.“Bugger you all!” Darius burst out with a fury whose restraint showed that he had unsuspected reserves of strength. And then he began to swear. Edwin, like many timid men, often used forbidden words with much ferocity in private. Once he had had a long philosophic argument with Tom Orgreave on the subject of profanity. They had discussed all aspects of it, from its religious origin to its psychological results, and Edwin’s theory had been that it was only improper by a purely superstitious convention, and that no man of sense could possibly be offended, in himself, by the mere sound of words that had been deprived of meaning. He might be offended on behalf of an unreasoning fellow-listener, such as a woman, but not personally. Edwin now discovered that his theory did not hold. He was offended. He was almost horrified. He had never in his life till that moment heard Darius swear. He heard him now. He considered himself to be a fairly first-class authority on swearing; he thought that he was familiar with all the sacred words and with all the combinations of them. He was mistaken. His father’s profanity was a brilliant and appalling revelation. It comprised words which were strange to him, and strange perversions that renewed the vigour of decrepit words. For Edwin, it was a whole series of fresh formulae, brutal and shameless beyond his experience, full of images and similes of the most startling candour, and drawing its inspiration always from the sickening bases of life. Darius had remembered with ease the vocabulary to which he was hourly accustomed when he began life as a man of seven. For more than fifty years he had carried within himself these vestiges of a barbarism which his children had never even conceived, and now he threw them out in all their crudity at his daughter. And when she did not blench, he began to accuse her as men were used to accuse their daughters in the bright days of the Sailor King. He invented enormities which she had committed, and there would have been no obscene infamy of which Maggie was not guilty, if Edwin—more by instinct than by volition—had not pushed open the door and entered the drawing-room.Two.He was angry, and the sight of the flushed meekness of his sister, as she leaned quietly with her back against an easy-chair, made him angrier.“Enough of this!” he said gruffly and peremptorily.Darius, with scarcely a break, continued.“I say enough of this!” Edwin cried, with increased harshness.The old man paused, half intimidated. With his pimpled face and glaring eyes, his gleaming gold teeth, his frowziness of a difficult invalid, his grimaces and gestures which were the result of a lifetime devoted to gain, he made a loathsome object. Edwin hated him, and there was a bitter contempt in his hatred.“I’m going to have that spawn, and I’m going to have some change! Give me some money!” Darius positively hissed.Edwin grew nearly capable of homicide. All the wrongs that he had suffered leaped up and yelled.“You’ll have no money!” he said, with brutal roughness. “And you’ll grow no mushrooms! And let that be understood once for all! You’ve got to behave in this house.”Darius flickered up.“Do you hear?” Edwin stamped on the conflagration.It was extinguished. Darius, cowed, slowly and clumsily directed himself towards the door. Once Edwin had looked forward to a moment when he might have his father at his mercy, when he might revenge himself for the insults and the bullying that had been his. Once he had clenched his fist and his teeth, and had said, “When you’re old, and I’vegotyou, and you can’t help yourself!” That moment had come, and it had even enabled and forced him to refuse money to his father—refuse money to his father! As he looked at the poor figure fumbling towards the door, he knew the humiliating paltriness of revenge. As his anger fell, his shame grew.Maggie lifted her eyebrows when Darius banged the door.“He can’t help it,” she said.“Of course he can’t help it,” said Edwin, defending himself, less to Maggie than to himself. “But there must be a limit. He’s got to be kept in order, you know, even if he is an invalid.” His heart was perceptibly beating.“Yes, of course.”“And evidently there’s only one way of doing it. How long’s he been on this mushroom tack?”“Oh, not long.”“Well, you ought to have told me,” said Edwin, with the air of a master of the house who is displeased. Maggie accepted the reproof.“He’d break his neck in the cellar before he knew where he was,” Edwin resumed.“Yes, he would,” said Maggie, and left the room.Upon her placid features there was not the slightest trace of the onslaught of profanity. The faint flush had paled away.Three.The next morning, Sunday, Edwin came downstairs late, to the sound of singing. In his soft carpet-slippers he stopped at the foot of the stairs and tapped the weather-glass, after the manner of his father; and listened. It was a duet for female voices that was being sung, composed by Balfe to the words of the good Longfellow’s “Excelsior.” A pretty thing, charming in its thin sentimentality; one of the few pieces that Darius in former days really understood and liked. Maggie and Clara had not sung it for years. For years they had not sung it at all.Edwin went to the doorway of the drawing-room and stood there. Clara, in Sunday bonnet, was seated at the ancient piano; it had always been she who had played the accompaniments. Maggie, nursing one of the babies, sat on another chair, and leaned towards the page in order to make out the words. She had half-forgotten the words, and Clara was no longer at ease in the piano part, and their voices were shaky and unruly, and the piano itself was exceedingly bad. A very indifferent performance of indifferent music! And yet it touched Edwin. He could not deny that by its beauty and by the sentiment of old times it touched him. He moved a little forward in the doorway. Clara glanced at him, and winked. Now he could see his father. Darius was standing at some distance behind his daughters and his grandchild, and staring at them. And the tears rained down from his red eyes, and then his emotion overcame him and he blubbered, just as the duet finished.“Now, father,” Clara protested cheerfully, “this won’t do. You know you asked for it. Give me the infant, Maggie.”Edwin walked away.

Edwin re-entered his home with a feeling of dismayed resignation. There was then no escape, and never could be any escape, from the existence to which he was accustomed; even after his father’s death, his existence would still be essentially the same—incomplete and sterile. He accepted the destiny, but he was daunted by it.

He quietly shut the front door, which had been ajar, and as he did so he heard voices in the drawing-room.

“I tell ye I’m going to grow mushrooms,” Darius was saying. “Can’t I grow mushrooms in my own cellar?” Then a snort.

“I don’t think it’ll be a good thing,” was Maggie’s calm reply.

“Ye’ve said that afore. Why won’t it be a good thing? And what’s it got to do with you?” The voice of Darius, ordinarily weak and languid, was rising and becoming strong.

“Well, you’d be falling up and down the cellar steps. You know how dark they are. Supposing you hurt yourself?”

“Ye’d only be too glad if I killed mysen!” said Darius, with a touch of his ancient grimness.

There was a pause.

“And it seems they want a lot of attention, mushrooms do,” Maggie went on with unperturbed placidity. “You’d never be able to do it.”

“Jane could help me,” said Darius, in the tone of one who is rather pleased with an ingenious suggestion.

“Oh no, she couldn’t!” Maggie exclaimed, with a peculiar humorous dryness which she employed only on the rarest occasions. Jane was the desired Bathsheba.

“And I say she could!” the old man shouted with surprising vigour. “Her does nothing! What does Mrs Nixon do? What do you do? Three great strapping women in the house and doing nought! I say she shall!” The voice dropped and snarled. “Who’s master here? Is it me, or is it the cat? D’ye think as I can’t turn ye all out of it neck and crop, if I’ve a mind? You and Edwin, and the lot of ye! And to-night too! Give me some money now, and quicker than that! I’ve got nought but sovereigns and notes. I’ll go down and get the spawn myself—ay! and order the earth too! I’ll make it my business to show my childer—But I mun have some change for my car fares.” He breathed heavily.

“I’m sure Edwin won’t like it,” Maggie murmured.

“Edwin! Hast told Edwin?” Darius also murmured, but it was a murmur of rage.

“No, I haven’t. Edwin’s got quite enough on his hands as it is, without any other worries.”

There was the noise of a sudden movement, and of a chair falling.

“Bugger you all!” Darius burst out with a fury whose restraint showed that he had unsuspected reserves of strength. And then he began to swear. Edwin, like many timid men, often used forbidden words with much ferocity in private. Once he had had a long philosophic argument with Tom Orgreave on the subject of profanity. They had discussed all aspects of it, from its religious origin to its psychological results, and Edwin’s theory had been that it was only improper by a purely superstitious convention, and that no man of sense could possibly be offended, in himself, by the mere sound of words that had been deprived of meaning. He might be offended on behalf of an unreasoning fellow-listener, such as a woman, but not personally. Edwin now discovered that his theory did not hold. He was offended. He was almost horrified. He had never in his life till that moment heard Darius swear. He heard him now. He considered himself to be a fairly first-class authority on swearing; he thought that he was familiar with all the sacred words and with all the combinations of them. He was mistaken. His father’s profanity was a brilliant and appalling revelation. It comprised words which were strange to him, and strange perversions that renewed the vigour of decrepit words. For Edwin, it was a whole series of fresh formulae, brutal and shameless beyond his experience, full of images and similes of the most startling candour, and drawing its inspiration always from the sickening bases of life. Darius had remembered with ease the vocabulary to which he was hourly accustomed when he began life as a man of seven. For more than fifty years he had carried within himself these vestiges of a barbarism which his children had never even conceived, and now he threw them out in all their crudity at his daughter. And when she did not blench, he began to accuse her as men were used to accuse their daughters in the bright days of the Sailor King. He invented enormities which she had committed, and there would have been no obscene infamy of which Maggie was not guilty, if Edwin—more by instinct than by volition—had not pushed open the door and entered the drawing-room.

He was angry, and the sight of the flushed meekness of his sister, as she leaned quietly with her back against an easy-chair, made him angrier.

“Enough of this!” he said gruffly and peremptorily.

Darius, with scarcely a break, continued.

“I say enough of this!” Edwin cried, with increased harshness.

The old man paused, half intimidated. With his pimpled face and glaring eyes, his gleaming gold teeth, his frowziness of a difficult invalid, his grimaces and gestures which were the result of a lifetime devoted to gain, he made a loathsome object. Edwin hated him, and there was a bitter contempt in his hatred.

“I’m going to have that spawn, and I’m going to have some change! Give me some money!” Darius positively hissed.

Edwin grew nearly capable of homicide. All the wrongs that he had suffered leaped up and yelled.

“You’ll have no money!” he said, with brutal roughness. “And you’ll grow no mushrooms! And let that be understood once for all! You’ve got to behave in this house.”

Darius flickered up.

“Do you hear?” Edwin stamped on the conflagration.

It was extinguished. Darius, cowed, slowly and clumsily directed himself towards the door. Once Edwin had looked forward to a moment when he might have his father at his mercy, when he might revenge himself for the insults and the bullying that had been his. Once he had clenched his fist and his teeth, and had said, “When you’re old, and I’vegotyou, and you can’t help yourself!” That moment had come, and it had even enabled and forced him to refuse money to his father—refuse money to his father! As he looked at the poor figure fumbling towards the door, he knew the humiliating paltriness of revenge. As his anger fell, his shame grew.

Maggie lifted her eyebrows when Darius banged the door.

“He can’t help it,” she said.

“Of course he can’t help it,” said Edwin, defending himself, less to Maggie than to himself. “But there must be a limit. He’s got to be kept in order, you know, even if he is an invalid.” His heart was perceptibly beating.

“Yes, of course.”

“And evidently there’s only one way of doing it. How long’s he been on this mushroom tack?”

“Oh, not long.”

“Well, you ought to have told me,” said Edwin, with the air of a master of the house who is displeased. Maggie accepted the reproof.

“He’d break his neck in the cellar before he knew where he was,” Edwin resumed.

“Yes, he would,” said Maggie, and left the room.

Upon her placid features there was not the slightest trace of the onslaught of profanity. The faint flush had paled away.

The next morning, Sunday, Edwin came downstairs late, to the sound of singing. In his soft carpet-slippers he stopped at the foot of the stairs and tapped the weather-glass, after the manner of his father; and listened. It was a duet for female voices that was being sung, composed by Balfe to the words of the good Longfellow’s “Excelsior.” A pretty thing, charming in its thin sentimentality; one of the few pieces that Darius in former days really understood and liked. Maggie and Clara had not sung it for years. For years they had not sung it at all.

Edwin went to the doorway of the drawing-room and stood there. Clara, in Sunday bonnet, was seated at the ancient piano; it had always been she who had played the accompaniments. Maggie, nursing one of the babies, sat on another chair, and leaned towards the page in order to make out the words. She had half-forgotten the words, and Clara was no longer at ease in the piano part, and their voices were shaky and unruly, and the piano itself was exceedingly bad. A very indifferent performance of indifferent music! And yet it touched Edwin. He could not deny that by its beauty and by the sentiment of old times it touched him. He moved a little forward in the doorway. Clara glanced at him, and winked. Now he could see his father. Darius was standing at some distance behind his daughters and his grandchild, and staring at them. And the tears rained down from his red eyes, and then his emotion overcame him and he blubbered, just as the duet finished.

“Now, father,” Clara protested cheerfully, “this won’t do. You know you asked for it. Give me the infant, Maggie.”

Edwin walked away.

Volume Three--Chapter Thirteen.The Journey Upstairs.Late on another Saturday afternoon in the following March, when Darius had been ill nearly two years, he and Edwin and Albert were sitting round the remains of high tea together in the dining-room. Clara had not been able to accompany her husband on what was now the customary Saturday visit, owing to the illness of her fourth child. Mrs Hamps was fighting chronic rheumatism at home. And Maggie had left the table to cosset Mrs Nixon, who of late received more help than she gave.Darius sat in dull silence. The younger men were talking about the Bursley Society for the Prosecution of Felons, of which Albert had just been made a member. Whatever it might have been in the past, the Society for the Prosecution of Felons was now a dining-club and little else. Its annual dinner, admitted to be the chief oratorical event of the year, was regarded as strictly exclusive, because no member, except the president, had the right to bring a guest to it. Only ‘Felons,’ as they humorously named themselves, and the reporters of the “Signal,” might listen to the eloquence of Felons. Albert Benbow, who for years had been hearing about the brilliant funniness of the American Consul at these dinners, was so flattered by his Felonry that he would have been ready to put the letters S P F after his name.“Oh, you’ll have to join!” said he to Edwin, kindly urgent, like a man who, recently married, goes about telling all bachelors that they positively must marry at once. “You ought to get it fixed up before the next feed.”Edwin shook his head. Though he, too, dreamed of the Felons’ Dinner as a repast really worth eating, though he wanted to be a Felon, and considered that he ought to be a Felon, and wondered why he was not already a Felon, he repeatedly assured Albert that Felonry was not for him.“You’re a Felon, aren’t you, dad?” Albert shouted at Darius.“Oh yes, father’s a Felon,” said Edwin. “Has been ever since I can remember.”“Did ye ever speak there?” asked Albert, with an air of good-humoured condescension.Darius’s elbow slipped violently off the tablecloth, and a knife fell to the floor and a plate after it. Darius went pale.“All right! All right! Don’t be alarmed, dad!” Albert reassured him, picking up the things. “I was asking ye, did ye ever speak there—make a speech?”“Yes,” said Darius heavily.“Did you now!” Albert murmured, staring at Darius. And it was exactly as if he had said, “Well, it’s extraordinary that a foolish physical and mental wreck such as you are now, should ever have had wit and courage enough to rise and address the glorious Felons!”Darius glanced up at the gas, with a gesture that was among Edwin’s earliest recollections, and then he fixed his eyes dully on the fire, with head bent and muscles lax.“Have a cigarette—that’ll cheer ye up,” said Albert.Darius made a negative sign.“He’s very tired, seemingly,” Albert remarked to Edwin, as if Darius had not been present.“Yes,” Edwin muttered, examining his father. Darius appeared ten years older than his age. His thin hair was white, though the straggling beard that had been allowed to grow was only grey. His face was sunken and pale, but even more striking was the extreme pallor of the hands with their long clean fingernails, those hands that had been red and rough, tools of all work. His clothes hung somewhat loosely on him, and a shawl round his shoulders was awry. The comatose melancholy in his eyes was acutely painful to see—so much so that Edwin could not bear to look long at them. “Father,” Edwin asked him suddenly, “wouldn’t you like to go to bed?”And to his surprise Darius said, “Yes.”“Well, come on then.”Darius did not move.“Come on,” Edwin urged. “I’m sure you’re overtired, and you’ll be better in bed.”He took his father by the arm, but there was no responsive movement. Often Edwin noticed this capricious, obstinate attitude; his father would express a wish to do a certain thing, and then would make no effort to do it. “Come!” said Edwin more firmly, pulling at the lifeless arm. Albert sprang up, and said that he would assist. One on either side, they got Darius to his feet, and slowly walked him out of the room. He was very exasperating. His weight and his inertia were terrible. The spectacle suggested that either Darius was pretending to be a carcass, or Edwin and Albert were pretending that a carcass was alive. On the stairs there was not room for the three abreast. One had to push, another to pull: Darius seemed wilfully to fall backwards if pressure were released. Edwin restrained his exasperation; but though he said nothing, his sharp half-vicious pull on that arm seemed to say, “Confound you! Come up—will you!” The last two steps of the stair had a peculiar effect on Darius. He appeared to shy at them, and then finally to jib. It was no longer a reasonable creature that they were getting upstairs, but an incalculable and mysterious beast. They lifted him on to the landing, and he stood on the landing as if in his sleep. Both Edwin and Albert were breathless. This was the man who since the beginning of his illness had often walked to Hillport and back! It was incredible that he had ever walked to Hillport and back. He passed more easily along the landing. And then he was in his bedroom.“Father going to bed?” Maggie called out from below.“Yes,” said Albert. “We’ve just been getting him upstairs.”“Oh! That’s right,” Maggie said cheerfully. “I thought he was looking very tired to-night.”“He gave us a doing,” said the breathless Albert in a low voice at the door of the bedroom, smiling, and glancing at his cigarette to see if it was still alight.“He does it on purpose, you know,” Edwin whispered casually. “I’ll just get him to bed, and then I’ll be down.”Albert went, with a ‘good night’ to Darius that received no answer.Two.In the bedroom, Darius had sunk on to the cushioned ottoman. Edwin shut the door.“Now then!” said Edwin encouragingly, yet commandingly. “I can tell you one thing—you aren’t losing weight.” He had recovered from his annoyance, but he was not disposed to submit to any trifling. For many months now he had helped Darius to dress, when he came up from the shop for breakfast, and to undress in the evening. It was not that his father lacked the strength, but he would somehow lose himself in the maze of his garments, and apparently he could never remember the proper order of doffing or donning them. Sometimes he would ask, “Am I dressing or undressing?” And he would be capable of so involving himself in a shirt, if Edwin were not there to direct, that much patience was needed for his extrication. His misapprehensions and mistakes frequently reached the grotesque. As habit threw them more and more intimately together, the trusting dependence of Darius on Edwin increased. At morning and evening the expression of that intensely mournful visage seemed to be saying as its gaze met Edwin’s, “Here is the one clear-sighted, powerful being who can guide me through this complex and frightful problem of my clothes.” A suit, for Darius, had become as intricate as a quadratic equation. And, in Edwin, compassion and irritation fought an interminable guerilla. Now one obtained the advantage, now the other. His nerves demanded relief from the friction, but he could offer them no holiday, not one single day’s holiday. Twice every day he had to manoeuvre and persuade that ponderous, irrational body in his father’s bedroom. Maggie helped the body to feed itself at table. But Maggie apparently had no nerves.“I shall never go down them stairs again,” said Darius, as if in fatigued disgust, on the ottoman.“Oh, nonsense!” Edwin exclaimed.Darius shook his head solemnly, and looked at vacancy.“Well, we’ll talk about that to-morrow,” said Edwin, and with the skill of regular practice drew out the ends of the bow of his father’s necktie. He had gradually evolved a complete code of rules covering the entire process of the toilette, and he insisted on their observance. Every article had its order in the ceremony and its place in the room. Never had the room been so tidy, nor the rites so expeditious, as in the final months of Darius’s malady.Three.The cumbrous body lay in bed. The bed was in an architecturally contrived recess, sheltered from both the large window and the door. Over its head was the gas-bracket and the bell-knob. At one side was a night-table, and at the other a chair. In front of the night-table were Darius’s slippers. On the chair were certain clothes. From a hook near the night-table, and almost over the slippers, hung his dressing-gown. Seen from the bed, the dressing-table, at the window, appeared to be a long way off, and the wardrobe was a long way off in another direction. The gas was turned low. It threw a pale illumination on the bed, and gleamed on a curve of mahogany here and there in the distances.Edwin looked at his father, to be sure that all was in order, that nothing had been forgotten. The body seemed monstrous and shapeless beneath the thickly piled clothes; and from the edge of the eider-down, making a valley in the pillow, the bearded face projected, in a manner grotesque and ridiculous. A clock struck seven in another part of the house.“What time’s that?” Darius murmured.“Seven,” said Edwin, standing close to him.Darius raised himself slowly and clumsily on one elbow.“Here! But look here!” Edwin protested. “I’ve just fixed you up—”The old man ignored him, and one of those unnaturally white hands stretched forth to the night-table, which was on the side of the bed opposite to Edwin. Darius’s gold watch and chain lay on the night-table.“I’ve wound it up! I’ve wound it up!” said Edwin, a little crossly. “What are you worrying at?”But Darius, silent, continued to manoeuvre his flannelled arm so as to possess the watch. At length he seized the chain, and, shifting his weight to the other elbow, held out the watch and chain to Edwin, with a most piteous expression. Edwin could see in the twilight that his father was ready to weep.“I want ye—” the old man began, and then burst into violent sobs; and the watch dangled dangerously.“Come now!” Edwin tried to soothe him, forcing himself to be kindly. “What is it? I tell you I’ve wound it up all right. And it’s correct time to a tick.” He consulted his own silver watch.With a tremendous effort, Darius mastered his sobs, and began once more, “I want ye—”He tried several times, but his emotion overcame him each time before he could force the message out. It was always too quick for him. Silent, he could control it, but he could not simultaneously control it and speak.“Never mind,” said Edwin. “We’ll see about that tomorrow.” And he wondered what bizarre project affecting the watch had entered his father’s mind. Perhaps he wanted it set a quarter of an hour fast.Darius dropped the watch on the eider-down, and sighed in despair, and fell back on the pillow and shut his eyes. Edwin restored the watch to the night-table.Later, he crept into the dim room. Darius was snoring under the twilight of the gas. Like an unhappy child, he had found refuge in sleep from the enormous, infantile problems of his existence. And it was so pathetic, so distressing, that Edwin, as he gazed at that beard and those gold teeth, could have sobbed too.

Late on another Saturday afternoon in the following March, when Darius had been ill nearly two years, he and Edwin and Albert were sitting round the remains of high tea together in the dining-room. Clara had not been able to accompany her husband on what was now the customary Saturday visit, owing to the illness of her fourth child. Mrs Hamps was fighting chronic rheumatism at home. And Maggie had left the table to cosset Mrs Nixon, who of late received more help than she gave.

Darius sat in dull silence. The younger men were talking about the Bursley Society for the Prosecution of Felons, of which Albert had just been made a member. Whatever it might have been in the past, the Society for the Prosecution of Felons was now a dining-club and little else. Its annual dinner, admitted to be the chief oratorical event of the year, was regarded as strictly exclusive, because no member, except the president, had the right to bring a guest to it. Only ‘Felons,’ as they humorously named themselves, and the reporters of the “Signal,” might listen to the eloquence of Felons. Albert Benbow, who for years had been hearing about the brilliant funniness of the American Consul at these dinners, was so flattered by his Felonry that he would have been ready to put the letters S P F after his name.

“Oh, you’ll have to join!” said he to Edwin, kindly urgent, like a man who, recently married, goes about telling all bachelors that they positively must marry at once. “You ought to get it fixed up before the next feed.”

Edwin shook his head. Though he, too, dreamed of the Felons’ Dinner as a repast really worth eating, though he wanted to be a Felon, and considered that he ought to be a Felon, and wondered why he was not already a Felon, he repeatedly assured Albert that Felonry was not for him.

“You’re a Felon, aren’t you, dad?” Albert shouted at Darius.

“Oh yes, father’s a Felon,” said Edwin. “Has been ever since I can remember.”

“Did ye ever speak there?” asked Albert, with an air of good-humoured condescension.

Darius’s elbow slipped violently off the tablecloth, and a knife fell to the floor and a plate after it. Darius went pale.

“All right! All right! Don’t be alarmed, dad!” Albert reassured him, picking up the things. “I was asking ye, did ye ever speak there—make a speech?”

“Yes,” said Darius heavily.

“Did you now!” Albert murmured, staring at Darius. And it was exactly as if he had said, “Well, it’s extraordinary that a foolish physical and mental wreck such as you are now, should ever have had wit and courage enough to rise and address the glorious Felons!”

Darius glanced up at the gas, with a gesture that was among Edwin’s earliest recollections, and then he fixed his eyes dully on the fire, with head bent and muscles lax.

“Have a cigarette—that’ll cheer ye up,” said Albert.

Darius made a negative sign.

“He’s very tired, seemingly,” Albert remarked to Edwin, as if Darius had not been present.

“Yes,” Edwin muttered, examining his father. Darius appeared ten years older than his age. His thin hair was white, though the straggling beard that had been allowed to grow was only grey. His face was sunken and pale, but even more striking was the extreme pallor of the hands with their long clean fingernails, those hands that had been red and rough, tools of all work. His clothes hung somewhat loosely on him, and a shawl round his shoulders was awry. The comatose melancholy in his eyes was acutely painful to see—so much so that Edwin could not bear to look long at them. “Father,” Edwin asked him suddenly, “wouldn’t you like to go to bed?”

And to his surprise Darius said, “Yes.”

“Well, come on then.”

Darius did not move.

“Come on,” Edwin urged. “I’m sure you’re overtired, and you’ll be better in bed.”

He took his father by the arm, but there was no responsive movement. Often Edwin noticed this capricious, obstinate attitude; his father would express a wish to do a certain thing, and then would make no effort to do it. “Come!” said Edwin more firmly, pulling at the lifeless arm. Albert sprang up, and said that he would assist. One on either side, they got Darius to his feet, and slowly walked him out of the room. He was very exasperating. His weight and his inertia were terrible. The spectacle suggested that either Darius was pretending to be a carcass, or Edwin and Albert were pretending that a carcass was alive. On the stairs there was not room for the three abreast. One had to push, another to pull: Darius seemed wilfully to fall backwards if pressure were released. Edwin restrained his exasperation; but though he said nothing, his sharp half-vicious pull on that arm seemed to say, “Confound you! Come up—will you!” The last two steps of the stair had a peculiar effect on Darius. He appeared to shy at them, and then finally to jib. It was no longer a reasonable creature that they were getting upstairs, but an incalculable and mysterious beast. They lifted him on to the landing, and he stood on the landing as if in his sleep. Both Edwin and Albert were breathless. This was the man who since the beginning of his illness had often walked to Hillport and back! It was incredible that he had ever walked to Hillport and back. He passed more easily along the landing. And then he was in his bedroom.

“Father going to bed?” Maggie called out from below.

“Yes,” said Albert. “We’ve just been getting him upstairs.”

“Oh! That’s right,” Maggie said cheerfully. “I thought he was looking very tired to-night.”

“He gave us a doing,” said the breathless Albert in a low voice at the door of the bedroom, smiling, and glancing at his cigarette to see if it was still alight.

“He does it on purpose, you know,” Edwin whispered casually. “I’ll just get him to bed, and then I’ll be down.”

Albert went, with a ‘good night’ to Darius that received no answer.

In the bedroom, Darius had sunk on to the cushioned ottoman. Edwin shut the door.

“Now then!” said Edwin encouragingly, yet commandingly. “I can tell you one thing—you aren’t losing weight.” He had recovered from his annoyance, but he was not disposed to submit to any trifling. For many months now he had helped Darius to dress, when he came up from the shop for breakfast, and to undress in the evening. It was not that his father lacked the strength, but he would somehow lose himself in the maze of his garments, and apparently he could never remember the proper order of doffing or donning them. Sometimes he would ask, “Am I dressing or undressing?” And he would be capable of so involving himself in a shirt, if Edwin were not there to direct, that much patience was needed for his extrication. His misapprehensions and mistakes frequently reached the grotesque. As habit threw them more and more intimately together, the trusting dependence of Darius on Edwin increased. At morning and evening the expression of that intensely mournful visage seemed to be saying as its gaze met Edwin’s, “Here is the one clear-sighted, powerful being who can guide me through this complex and frightful problem of my clothes.” A suit, for Darius, had become as intricate as a quadratic equation. And, in Edwin, compassion and irritation fought an interminable guerilla. Now one obtained the advantage, now the other. His nerves demanded relief from the friction, but he could offer them no holiday, not one single day’s holiday. Twice every day he had to manoeuvre and persuade that ponderous, irrational body in his father’s bedroom. Maggie helped the body to feed itself at table. But Maggie apparently had no nerves.

“I shall never go down them stairs again,” said Darius, as if in fatigued disgust, on the ottoman.

“Oh, nonsense!” Edwin exclaimed.

Darius shook his head solemnly, and looked at vacancy.

“Well, we’ll talk about that to-morrow,” said Edwin, and with the skill of regular practice drew out the ends of the bow of his father’s necktie. He had gradually evolved a complete code of rules covering the entire process of the toilette, and he insisted on their observance. Every article had its order in the ceremony and its place in the room. Never had the room been so tidy, nor the rites so expeditious, as in the final months of Darius’s malady.

The cumbrous body lay in bed. The bed was in an architecturally contrived recess, sheltered from both the large window and the door. Over its head was the gas-bracket and the bell-knob. At one side was a night-table, and at the other a chair. In front of the night-table were Darius’s slippers. On the chair were certain clothes. From a hook near the night-table, and almost over the slippers, hung his dressing-gown. Seen from the bed, the dressing-table, at the window, appeared to be a long way off, and the wardrobe was a long way off in another direction. The gas was turned low. It threw a pale illumination on the bed, and gleamed on a curve of mahogany here and there in the distances.

Edwin looked at his father, to be sure that all was in order, that nothing had been forgotten. The body seemed monstrous and shapeless beneath the thickly piled clothes; and from the edge of the eider-down, making a valley in the pillow, the bearded face projected, in a manner grotesque and ridiculous. A clock struck seven in another part of the house.

“What time’s that?” Darius murmured.

“Seven,” said Edwin, standing close to him.

Darius raised himself slowly and clumsily on one elbow.

“Here! But look here!” Edwin protested. “I’ve just fixed you up—”

The old man ignored him, and one of those unnaturally white hands stretched forth to the night-table, which was on the side of the bed opposite to Edwin. Darius’s gold watch and chain lay on the night-table.

“I’ve wound it up! I’ve wound it up!” said Edwin, a little crossly. “What are you worrying at?”

But Darius, silent, continued to manoeuvre his flannelled arm so as to possess the watch. At length he seized the chain, and, shifting his weight to the other elbow, held out the watch and chain to Edwin, with a most piteous expression. Edwin could see in the twilight that his father was ready to weep.

“I want ye—” the old man began, and then burst into violent sobs; and the watch dangled dangerously.

“Come now!” Edwin tried to soothe him, forcing himself to be kindly. “What is it? I tell you I’ve wound it up all right. And it’s correct time to a tick.” He consulted his own silver watch.

With a tremendous effort, Darius mastered his sobs, and began once more, “I want ye—”

He tried several times, but his emotion overcame him each time before he could force the message out. It was always too quick for him. Silent, he could control it, but he could not simultaneously control it and speak.

“Never mind,” said Edwin. “We’ll see about that tomorrow.” And he wondered what bizarre project affecting the watch had entered his father’s mind. Perhaps he wanted it set a quarter of an hour fast.

Darius dropped the watch on the eider-down, and sighed in despair, and fell back on the pillow and shut his eyes. Edwin restored the watch to the night-table.

Later, he crept into the dim room. Darius was snoring under the twilight of the gas. Like an unhappy child, he had found refuge in sleep from the enormous, infantile problems of his existence. And it was so pathetic, so distressing, that Edwin, as he gazed at that beard and those gold teeth, could have sobbed too.

Volume Three--Chapter Fourteen.The Watch.When Edwin the next morning, rather earlier than usual on Sundays, came forth from his bedroom to go into the bathroom, he was startled by a voice from his father’s bedroom calling him. It was Maggie’s. She had heard him open his door, and she joined him on the landing.“I was waiting for you to be getting up,” she said in a quiet tone. “I don’t think father’s so well, and I was wondering whether I hadn’t better send Jane down for the doctor. It’s not certain he’ll call to-day if he isn’t specially fetched.”“Why?” said Edwin. “What’s up?”“Oh, nothing,” Maggie answered. “Nothing particular, but you didn’t hear him ringing in the night?”“Ringing? No! What time?”“About one o’clock. Jane heard the bell, and she woke me. So I got up to him. He said he couldn’t do with being alone.”“What did you do?”“I made him something hot and stayed with him.”“What? All night?”“Yes,” said Maggie.“But why didn’t you call me?”“What was the good?”“You ought to have called me,” he said with curt displeasure, not really against Maggie, but against himself for having heard naught of all these happenings. Maggie had no appearance of having passed the night by her father’s bedside.“Oh,” she said lightly, “I dozed a bit now and then. And as soon as the girl was up I got her to come and sit with him while I spruced myself.”“I’ll have a look at him,” said Edwin, in another tone.“Yes, I wish you would.” Now, as often, he was struck by Maggie’s singular deference to him, her submission to his judgement. In the past her attitude had been different; she had exercised the moral rights of an elder sister; but latterly she had mysteriously transformed herself into a younger sister.He went towards his father, drawing his dressing-gown more closely round him. The chamber had an aspect of freshness and tidiness that made it almost gay—until he looked at the object in the smoothed and rectified bed. He nodded to his father, who merely gazed at him. There was no definite, definable change in the old man’s face, but his bearing, even as he lay, was appreciably more melancholy and impotent. The mere sight of a man so broken and so sad was humiliating to the humanity which Edwin shared with him.“Well, father,” he nodded familiarly. “Don’t feel like getting up, eh?” And, remembering that he was the head of the house, the source of authority and of strength, he tried to be cheerful, casual, and invigorating, and was disgusted by the futile inefficiency of the attempt. He had not, like Auntie Hamps, devoted a lifetime to the study of the trick.Darius feebly moved his hopeless head to signify a negative.And Edwin thought, with a lancinating pain, of what the old man had mumbled on the previous evening: “I shall never go down them stairs again.” Perhaps the old man never would go down those stairs again! He had paid no serious attention to the remark at the moment, but now it presented itself to him as a solemn and prophetic utterance, of such as are remembered with awe for years and continue to jut up clear in the mind when all minor souvenirs of the time have crumbled away. And he would have given much of his pride to be able to go back and help the old man upstairs once more, and do it with a more loving patience.“I’ve sent Jane,” said Maggie, returning to the bedroom. “You’d better go and finish dressing.”On coming out of the bathroom he discovered Albert on the landing, waiting.“The missis would have me come up and see how he was,” said Albert. “So I’ve run in between school and chapel. When I told her what a doing he gave us, getting him upstairs, she was quite in a way, and she would have me come up. The kid’s better.” He was exceedingly and quite genuinely fraternal, not having his wife’s faculty for nourishing a feud.Two.The spectacular developments were rapid. In the afternoon Auntie Hamps, Clara, Maggie, and Edwin were grouped around the bed of Darius. A fire burned in the grate; flowers were on the dressing-table. An extra table had been placed at the foot of the bed. The room was a sick-room.Dr Heve had called, and had said that the patient’s desire not to be left alone was a symptom of gravity. He suggested a nurse, and when Maggie, startled, said that perhaps they could manage without a nurse, he inquired how. And as he talked he seemed to be more persuaded that a nurse was necessary, if only for night duty, and in the end he went himself to the new Telephone Exchange and ordered a nurse from the Pirehill Infirmary Nursing Home. And the dramatic thing was that within two hours and a half the nurse had arrived. And in ten minutes after that it had been arranged that she should have Maggie’s bedroom and that she should take night duty, and in order that she might be fresh for the night she had gone straight off to bed.Then Clara had arrived, in spite of the illness of her baby, and Auntie Hamps had forced herself up Trafalgar Road, in spite of her rheumatism. And a lengthy confabulation between the women had occurred in the dining-room, not about the invalid, but about what ‘she’ had said, and about the etiquette of treating ‘her,’ and about what ‘she’ looked like and shaped like; ‘her’ and ‘she’ being the professional nurse. With a professional nurse in it, each woman sincerely felt that the house was no longer itself, that it had become the house of the enemy.Darius lay supine before them, physically and spiritually abased, accepting, like a victim who is too weak even to be ashamed, the cooings and strokings and prayers and optimistic mendacities of Auntie Hamps, and the tearful tendernesses of Clara.“I’ve made my will,” he whimpered.“Yes, yes,” said Auntie Hamps. “Of course you have!”“Did I tell you I’d made my will?” he feebly insisted.“Yes, father,” said Clara. “Don’t worry about your will.”“I’ve left th’ business to Edwin, and all th’ rest’s divided between you two wenches.” He was weeping gently.“Don’t worry about that, father,” Clara repeated. “Why are you thinking so much about your will?” She tried to speak in a tone that was easy and matter-of-fact. But she could not. This was the first authentic information that any of them had had as to the dispositions of the will, and it was exciting.Then Darius began to try to sit up, and there were protests against such an act. Though he sat up to take his food, the tone of these apprehensive remonstrances implied that to sit up at any other time was to endanger his life. Darius, however, with a weak scowl, continued to lift himself, whereupon Maggie aided him, and Auntie Hamps like lightning put a shawl round his shoulders. He sighed, and stretched out his hand to the night-table for his gold watch and chain, which he dangled towards Edwin.“I want ye—” He stopped, controlling the muscles of his face.“He wants you to wind it up,” said Clara, struck by her own insight.“No, he doesn’t,” said Edwin. “He knows it’s wound up.”“I want ye—” Darius recommenced. But he was defeated again by his insidious foe. He wept loudly and without restraint for a few moments, and then suddenly ceased, and endeavoured to speak, and wept anew, agitating the watch in the direction of Edwin.“Take it, Edwin,” said Mrs Hamps. “Perhaps he wants it put away,” she added, as Edwin obeyed.Darius shook his head furiously. “I want him—” Sobs choked him.“I know what he wants,” said Auntie Hamps. “He wants to give dear Edwin the watch, because Edwin’s been so kind to him, helping him to dress every day, and looking after him just like a professional nurse—don’t you, dear?”Edwin secretly cursed her in the most horrible fashion. But she was right.“Ye–hes,” Darius confirmed her, on a sob.“He wants to show his gratitude,” said Auntie Hamps.“Ye–hes,” Darius repeated, and wiped his eyes.Edwin stood foolishly holding the watch with its massive Albert chain. He was very genuinely astonished, and he was profoundly moved. His father’s emotion concerning him must have been gathering force for months and months, increasing a little and a little every day in those daily, intimate contacts, until at length gratitude had become, as it were, a spirit that possessed him, a monstrous demon whose wild eagerness to escape defeated itself. And Edwin had never guessed, for Darius had mastered the spirit till the moment when the spirit mastered him. It was out now, and Darius, delivered, breathed more freely. Edwin was proud, but his humiliation was greater than his pride. He suffered humiliation for his father. He would have preferred that Darius should never have felt gratitude, or, at any rate, that he should never have shown it. He would have preferred that Darius should have accepted his help nonchalantly, grimly, thanklessly, as a right. And if through disease, the old man could not cease to be a tyrant with dignity, could not become human without this appalling ceremonial abasement—better that he should have exercised harshness and oppression to the very end! There was probably no phenomenon of human nature that offended Edwin’s instincts more than an open conversion.Maggie turned nervously away and busied herself with the grate.“You must put it on,” said Auntie Hamps sweetly. “Mustn’t he, father?”Darius nodded.The outrage was complete. Edwin removed his own watch and dropped it into the pocket of his trousers, substituting for it the gold one.“There, father!” exclaimed Auntie Hamps proudly, surveying the curve of the Albert on her nephew’s waistcoat.“Ay!” Darius murmured, and sank back on the pillow with a sigh of relief.“Thanks, father,” Edwin muttered, reddening. “But there was no occasion.”“Now you see what it is to be a good son!” Auntie Hamps observed.Darius murmured indistinctly.“What is it?” she asked, bending down.“I must have his,” said Darius. “I must have a watch here.”“He wants your old one in exchange,” Clara explained eagerly.Edwin smiled, discovering a certain alleviation in this shrewd demand of his father’s, and he drew out the silver Geneva.Three.Shortly afterwards the nurse surprised them all by coming into the room. She carried a writing-case. Edwin introduced her to Auntie Hamps and Clara. Clara blushed and became mute. Auntie Hamps adopted a tone of excessive deference, of which the refrain was “Nurse will know best.” Nurse seemed disinclined to be professional. Explaining that as she was not able to sleep she thought she might as well get up, she took a seat near the fire and addressed herself to Maggie. She was a tall and radiant woman of about thirty. Her aristocratic southern accent proved that she did not belong to the Five Towns, and to Maggie, in excuse for certain questions as to the district, she said that she had only been at Pirehill a few weeks. Her demeanour was extraordinarily cheerful. Auntie Hamps remarked aside to Clara what a good thing it was that Nurse was so cheerful; but in reality she considered such cheerfulness exaggerated in a sick-room, and not quite nice. The nurse asked about the posts, and said she had a letter to write and would write it there if she could have pen and ink. Auntie Hamps, telling her eagerly about the posts, thought that these professional nurses certainly did make themselves at home in a house. The nurse’s accent intimidated all of them.“Well, nurse, I suppose we mustn’t tire our patient,” said Auntie Hamps at last, after Edwin had brought ink and paper.Edwin, conscious of the glory of a gold watch and chain, and conscious also of freedom from future personal service on his father, preceded Auntie Hamps and Clara to the landing, and Nurse herself sped them from the room, in her quality of mistress of the room. And when she and Maggie and Darius were alone together she went to the bedside and spoke softly to her patient. She was so neat and bright and white and striped, and so perfect in every detail, that she might have been a model taken straight from a shop-window. Her figure illuminated the dusk. An incredible luxury for the little boy from the Bastille! But she was one of the many wonderful things he had earned.

When Edwin the next morning, rather earlier than usual on Sundays, came forth from his bedroom to go into the bathroom, he was startled by a voice from his father’s bedroom calling him. It was Maggie’s. She had heard him open his door, and she joined him on the landing.

“I was waiting for you to be getting up,” she said in a quiet tone. “I don’t think father’s so well, and I was wondering whether I hadn’t better send Jane down for the doctor. It’s not certain he’ll call to-day if he isn’t specially fetched.”

“Why?” said Edwin. “What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing,” Maggie answered. “Nothing particular, but you didn’t hear him ringing in the night?”

“Ringing? No! What time?”

“About one o’clock. Jane heard the bell, and she woke me. So I got up to him. He said he couldn’t do with being alone.”

“What did you do?”

“I made him something hot and stayed with him.”

“What? All night?”

“Yes,” said Maggie.

“But why didn’t you call me?”

“What was the good?”

“You ought to have called me,” he said with curt displeasure, not really against Maggie, but against himself for having heard naught of all these happenings. Maggie had no appearance of having passed the night by her father’s bedside.

“Oh,” she said lightly, “I dozed a bit now and then. And as soon as the girl was up I got her to come and sit with him while I spruced myself.”

“I’ll have a look at him,” said Edwin, in another tone.

“Yes, I wish you would.” Now, as often, he was struck by Maggie’s singular deference to him, her submission to his judgement. In the past her attitude had been different; she had exercised the moral rights of an elder sister; but latterly she had mysteriously transformed herself into a younger sister.

He went towards his father, drawing his dressing-gown more closely round him. The chamber had an aspect of freshness and tidiness that made it almost gay—until he looked at the object in the smoothed and rectified bed. He nodded to his father, who merely gazed at him. There was no definite, definable change in the old man’s face, but his bearing, even as he lay, was appreciably more melancholy and impotent. The mere sight of a man so broken and so sad was humiliating to the humanity which Edwin shared with him.

“Well, father,” he nodded familiarly. “Don’t feel like getting up, eh?” And, remembering that he was the head of the house, the source of authority and of strength, he tried to be cheerful, casual, and invigorating, and was disgusted by the futile inefficiency of the attempt. He had not, like Auntie Hamps, devoted a lifetime to the study of the trick.

Darius feebly moved his hopeless head to signify a negative.

And Edwin thought, with a lancinating pain, of what the old man had mumbled on the previous evening: “I shall never go down them stairs again.” Perhaps the old man never would go down those stairs again! He had paid no serious attention to the remark at the moment, but now it presented itself to him as a solemn and prophetic utterance, of such as are remembered with awe for years and continue to jut up clear in the mind when all minor souvenirs of the time have crumbled away. And he would have given much of his pride to be able to go back and help the old man upstairs once more, and do it with a more loving patience.

“I’ve sent Jane,” said Maggie, returning to the bedroom. “You’d better go and finish dressing.”

On coming out of the bathroom he discovered Albert on the landing, waiting.

“The missis would have me come up and see how he was,” said Albert. “So I’ve run in between school and chapel. When I told her what a doing he gave us, getting him upstairs, she was quite in a way, and she would have me come up. The kid’s better.” He was exceedingly and quite genuinely fraternal, not having his wife’s faculty for nourishing a feud.

The spectacular developments were rapid. In the afternoon Auntie Hamps, Clara, Maggie, and Edwin were grouped around the bed of Darius. A fire burned in the grate; flowers were on the dressing-table. An extra table had been placed at the foot of the bed. The room was a sick-room.

Dr Heve had called, and had said that the patient’s desire not to be left alone was a symptom of gravity. He suggested a nurse, and when Maggie, startled, said that perhaps they could manage without a nurse, he inquired how. And as he talked he seemed to be more persuaded that a nurse was necessary, if only for night duty, and in the end he went himself to the new Telephone Exchange and ordered a nurse from the Pirehill Infirmary Nursing Home. And the dramatic thing was that within two hours and a half the nurse had arrived. And in ten minutes after that it had been arranged that she should have Maggie’s bedroom and that she should take night duty, and in order that she might be fresh for the night she had gone straight off to bed.

Then Clara had arrived, in spite of the illness of her baby, and Auntie Hamps had forced herself up Trafalgar Road, in spite of her rheumatism. And a lengthy confabulation between the women had occurred in the dining-room, not about the invalid, but about what ‘she’ had said, and about the etiquette of treating ‘her,’ and about what ‘she’ looked like and shaped like; ‘her’ and ‘she’ being the professional nurse. With a professional nurse in it, each woman sincerely felt that the house was no longer itself, that it had become the house of the enemy.

Darius lay supine before them, physically and spiritually abased, accepting, like a victim who is too weak even to be ashamed, the cooings and strokings and prayers and optimistic mendacities of Auntie Hamps, and the tearful tendernesses of Clara.

“I’ve made my will,” he whimpered.

“Yes, yes,” said Auntie Hamps. “Of course you have!”

“Did I tell you I’d made my will?” he feebly insisted.

“Yes, father,” said Clara. “Don’t worry about your will.”

“I’ve left th’ business to Edwin, and all th’ rest’s divided between you two wenches.” He was weeping gently.

“Don’t worry about that, father,” Clara repeated. “Why are you thinking so much about your will?” She tried to speak in a tone that was easy and matter-of-fact. But she could not. This was the first authentic information that any of them had had as to the dispositions of the will, and it was exciting.

Then Darius began to try to sit up, and there were protests against such an act. Though he sat up to take his food, the tone of these apprehensive remonstrances implied that to sit up at any other time was to endanger his life. Darius, however, with a weak scowl, continued to lift himself, whereupon Maggie aided him, and Auntie Hamps like lightning put a shawl round his shoulders. He sighed, and stretched out his hand to the night-table for his gold watch and chain, which he dangled towards Edwin.

“I want ye—” He stopped, controlling the muscles of his face.

“He wants you to wind it up,” said Clara, struck by her own insight.

“No, he doesn’t,” said Edwin. “He knows it’s wound up.”

“I want ye—” Darius recommenced. But he was defeated again by his insidious foe. He wept loudly and without restraint for a few moments, and then suddenly ceased, and endeavoured to speak, and wept anew, agitating the watch in the direction of Edwin.

“Take it, Edwin,” said Mrs Hamps. “Perhaps he wants it put away,” she added, as Edwin obeyed.

Darius shook his head furiously. “I want him—” Sobs choked him.

“I know what he wants,” said Auntie Hamps. “He wants to give dear Edwin the watch, because Edwin’s been so kind to him, helping him to dress every day, and looking after him just like a professional nurse—don’t you, dear?”

Edwin secretly cursed her in the most horrible fashion. But she was right.

“Ye–hes,” Darius confirmed her, on a sob.

“He wants to show his gratitude,” said Auntie Hamps.

“Ye–hes,” Darius repeated, and wiped his eyes.

Edwin stood foolishly holding the watch with its massive Albert chain. He was very genuinely astonished, and he was profoundly moved. His father’s emotion concerning him must have been gathering force for months and months, increasing a little and a little every day in those daily, intimate contacts, until at length gratitude had become, as it were, a spirit that possessed him, a monstrous demon whose wild eagerness to escape defeated itself. And Edwin had never guessed, for Darius had mastered the spirit till the moment when the spirit mastered him. It was out now, and Darius, delivered, breathed more freely. Edwin was proud, but his humiliation was greater than his pride. He suffered humiliation for his father. He would have preferred that Darius should never have felt gratitude, or, at any rate, that he should never have shown it. He would have preferred that Darius should have accepted his help nonchalantly, grimly, thanklessly, as a right. And if through disease, the old man could not cease to be a tyrant with dignity, could not become human without this appalling ceremonial abasement—better that he should have exercised harshness and oppression to the very end! There was probably no phenomenon of human nature that offended Edwin’s instincts more than an open conversion.

Maggie turned nervously away and busied herself with the grate.

“You must put it on,” said Auntie Hamps sweetly. “Mustn’t he, father?”

Darius nodded.

The outrage was complete. Edwin removed his own watch and dropped it into the pocket of his trousers, substituting for it the gold one.

“There, father!” exclaimed Auntie Hamps proudly, surveying the curve of the Albert on her nephew’s waistcoat.

“Ay!” Darius murmured, and sank back on the pillow with a sigh of relief.

“Thanks, father,” Edwin muttered, reddening. “But there was no occasion.”

“Now you see what it is to be a good son!” Auntie Hamps observed.

Darius murmured indistinctly.

“What is it?” she asked, bending down.

“I must have his,” said Darius. “I must have a watch here.”

“He wants your old one in exchange,” Clara explained eagerly.

Edwin smiled, discovering a certain alleviation in this shrewd demand of his father’s, and he drew out the silver Geneva.

Shortly afterwards the nurse surprised them all by coming into the room. She carried a writing-case. Edwin introduced her to Auntie Hamps and Clara. Clara blushed and became mute. Auntie Hamps adopted a tone of excessive deference, of which the refrain was “Nurse will know best.” Nurse seemed disinclined to be professional. Explaining that as she was not able to sleep she thought she might as well get up, she took a seat near the fire and addressed herself to Maggie. She was a tall and radiant woman of about thirty. Her aristocratic southern accent proved that she did not belong to the Five Towns, and to Maggie, in excuse for certain questions as to the district, she said that she had only been at Pirehill a few weeks. Her demeanour was extraordinarily cheerful. Auntie Hamps remarked aside to Clara what a good thing it was that Nurse was so cheerful; but in reality she considered such cheerfulness exaggerated in a sick-room, and not quite nice. The nurse asked about the posts, and said she had a letter to write and would write it there if she could have pen and ink. Auntie Hamps, telling her eagerly about the posts, thought that these professional nurses certainly did make themselves at home in a house. The nurse’s accent intimidated all of them.

“Well, nurse, I suppose we mustn’t tire our patient,” said Auntie Hamps at last, after Edwin had brought ink and paper.

Edwin, conscious of the glory of a gold watch and chain, and conscious also of freedom from future personal service on his father, preceded Auntie Hamps and Clara to the landing, and Nurse herself sped them from the room, in her quality of mistress of the room. And when she and Maggie and Darius were alone together she went to the bedside and spoke softly to her patient. She was so neat and bright and white and striped, and so perfect in every detail, that she might have been a model taken straight from a shop-window. Her figure illuminated the dusk. An incredible luxury for the little boy from the Bastille! But she was one of the many wonderful things he had earned.

Back to IndexNext