Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett (best romance novels of all time txt) 📖

fire, or at the gas. She had been in the house since before tea. Clara also had passed most of the day there, with a few intervals at her own home; but now Clara was gone, and Janet too had gone. Darius was tiring them all out, in his mild and senseless repose. He remained absolutely still, and the enigma which he so indifferently offered to them might apparently continue for ever; at any rate the doctor's statement that he might keep as he was for days and days, beyond help, hung over the entire household, discouraging and oppressive. The energy of even Auntie Hamps was baffled. Only Alicia, who had come in, as she said, to take Janet's place, insisted on being occupied. This was one of the nights dedicated by family arrangement to her betrothed, but Alicia had found pleasure in sacrificing herself, and him, to her very busy sense of duty.

Suddenly the drawing-room door was pushed open, without a sound, and Alicia, in all the bursting charm of her youthfulness and the delicious naivete of her self-importance, stood in the doorway. She made no gesture; she just looked at Edwin with a peculiar ominous and excited glance, and Edwin rose quickly and left the room. Auntie Hamps had noticed nothing.

"Maggie wants you upstairs," said Alicia to Edwin.

He made no answer. He did not ask where Maggie was. They went upstairs together. But at the door of the sick-room Alicia hung back, intimidated, and Edwin entered and shut the door on that beautiful image of proud, throbbing life.

Maggie, standing by the bed under the gas which blazed at full, turned to him as he approached.

"Just come and look at him," she said quietly.

Darius lay in exactly the same position; except that his mouth was open a little wider, he presented exactly the same appearance as in the afternoon. His weary features, pitiful and yet grim, had exactly the same expression. But there was no sign of breathing. Edwin bent and listened.

"Oh! He's dead!" he murmured.

Maggie nodded, her eyes glittering as though set with diamonds. "I think so," she said.

"When was it?"

"Scarcely a minute ago. I was sitting there, by the fire, and I thought I noticed something--"

"What did you notice?"

"I don't know... I must go and tell nurse."

She went, wiping her eyes.

Edwin, now alone, looked again at the residue of his father. The spirit, after hiding within so long, had departed and left no trace. It had done with that form and was away. The vast and forlorn adventure of the little boy from the Bastille was over. Edwin did not know that the little boy from the Bastille was dead. He only knew that his father was dead. It seemed intolerably tragic that the enfeebled wreck should have had to bear so much, and yet intolerably tragic also that death should have relieved him. But Edwin's distress was shot through and enlightened by his solemn satisfaction at the fact that destiny had allotted to him, Edwin, an experience of such profound and overwhelming grandeur. His father was, and lo! he was not. That was all, but it was ineffable.

Maggie returned to the room, followed by Nurse Shaw, whose head was enveloped in various bandages. Edwin began to anticipate all the tedious formalities, as to which he would have to inform himself, of registration and interment...

------------------------------------------------------------------------


FIVE.

Ten o'clock. The news was abroad in the house. Alicia had gone to spread it. Maggie had startled everybody by deciding to go down and tell Clara herself, though Albert was bound to call. The nurse had laid out the corpse. Auntie Hamps and Edwin were again in the drawing-room together; the ageing lady was making up her mind to go. Edwin, in search of an occupation, prepared to write letters to one or two distant relatives of his mother. Then he remembered his promise to Big James, and decided to write that letter first.

"What a mercy he passed away peacefully!" Auntie Hamps exclaimed, not for the first time.

Edwin, at a rickety fancy desk, began to write: "Dear James, my father passed peacefully away at--" Then, with an abrupt movement, he tore the sheet in two and threw it in the fire, and began again: "Dear James, my father died quietly at eight o'clock to-night."

Soon afterwards, when Mrs Hamps had departed with her genuine but too spectacular grief, Edwin heard an immense commotion coming down the road from Hanbridge: cheers, shouts, squeals, penny whistles, and trumpets. He opened the gate.

"Who's in?" he asked a stout, shabby man, who was gesticulating in glee with a little Tory flag on the edge of the crowd.

"Who do you think, mister?" replied the man drunkenly.

"What majority?"

"Four hundred and thirty-nine."

The integrity of the empire was assured, and the paid agitator had received a proper rebuff.

"Miserable idiots!" Edwin murmured, with the most extraordinary violence of scorn, as he re-entered the house, and the blare of triumph receded. He was very much surprised. He had firmly expected his own side to win, though he was reconciled to a considerable reduction of the old majority. His lips curled.

It was in his resentment, in the hard setting of his teeth as he confirmed himself in the rightness of his own opinions, that he first began to realise an individual freedom. "I don't care if we're beaten forty times," his thoughts ran. "I'll be a more out-and-out Radical than ever! I don't care, and I don't care!" And he felt sturdily that he was free. The chain was at last broken that had bound together those two beings so dissimilar, antagonistic, and ill-matched--Edwin Clayhanger and his father.



VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER ONE.

BOOK FOUR--HIS START IN LIFE.


THE BIRTHDAY VISIT.

It was Auntie Hamps's birthday.

"She must be quite fifty-nine," said Maggie.

"Oh, stuff!" Edwin contradicted her curtly. "She can't be anything like as much as that."

Having by this positive and sharp statement disposed of the question of Mrs Hamps's age, he bent again with eagerness to his newspaper. The "Manchester Examiner" no longer existing as a Radical organ, he read the "Manchester Guardian," of which that morning's issue contained a long and vivid obituary of Charles Stewart Parnell.

Brother and sister were at breakfast. Edwin had changed the character of this meal. He went fasting to business at eight o'clock, opened correspondence, and gave orders to the wonderful Stifford, a person now of real importance in the firm, and at nine o'clock flew by car back to the house to eat bacon and eggs and marmalade leisurely, like a gentleman. It was known that between nine and ten he could not be seen at the shop.

"Well," Maggie continued, with her mild persistence, "Aunt Spenser told me--"

"Who's Aunt Spenser, in God's name?"

"You know--mother's and auntie's cousin--the fat old thing!"

"Oh! Her!" He recalled one of the unfamiliar figures that had bent over his father's coffin.

"She told me auntie was either fifty-five or fifty-six, at father's funeral. And that's nearly three and a half years ago. So she must be--"

"Two and a half, you mean." Edwin interrupted with a sort of savageness.

"No, I don't. It's nearly three years since Mrs Nixon died."

Edwin was startled to realise the passage of time. But he said nothing. Partly he wanted to read in peace, and partly he did not want to admit his mistake. Bit by bit he was assuming the historic privileges of the English master of the house. He had the illusion that if only he could maintain a silence sufficiently august his error of fact and of manner would cease to be an error.

"Yes; she must be fifty-nine," Maggie resumed placidly.

"I don't care if she's a hundred and fifty-nine!" snapped Edwin. "Any more coffee? Hot, that is."

Without moving his gaze from the paper, he pushed his cup a little way across the table.

Maggie took it, her chin slightly lifting, and her cheeks showing a touch of red.

"I hope you didn't forget to order the inkstand, after all," she said stiffly. "It's not been sent up yet, and I want to take it down to auntie's myself this morning. You know what a lot she thinks of such things!"

It had been arranged that Auntie Hamps should receive that year a cut-glass double inkstand from her nephew and niece. The shop occasionally dealt in such articles. Edwin had not willingly assented to the choice. He considered that a cut-glass double inkstand was a vicious concession to Mrs Hamps's very vulgar taste in knick-knacks, and, moreover, he always now discouraged retail trade at the shop. But still, he had assented, out of indolence.

"Well, it won't come till to-morrow," he said.

"But, Edwin, how's that?"

"How's that? Well, if you want to know, I didn't order it till yesterday. I can't think of everything."

"It's very annoying!" said Maggie sincerely.

Edwin put on the martyr's crown. "Some people seem to think I've nothing else to do down at my shop but order birthday presents," he remarked with disagreeable sarcasm.

"I think you might be a little more polite," said Maggie.

"Do you!"

"Yes; I do!" Maggie insisted stoutly. "Sometimes you get positively unbearable. Everybody notices it."

"Who's everybody?"

"You never mind!"

------------------------------------------------------------------------


TWO.

Maggie tossed her head, and Edwin knew that when she tossed her head--a gesture rare with her--she was tossing the tears back from her eyes. He was more than startled, he was intimidated, by that feminine movement of the head. She was hurt. It was absurd of her to be so susceptible, but he had undoubtedly hurt her. He had been clumsy enough to hurt her. She was nearing forty, and he also was close behind her on the road to forty; she was a perfectly decent sort, and he reckoned that he, too, was a perfectly decent sort, and yet they lacked the skill not to bicker. They no longer had the somewhat noisy altercations of old days concerning real or fancied interferences with the order and privacy of Edwin's sacred chamber, but their general demeanour to one another had dully soured. It was as if they tolerated one another, from motives of self-interest. Why should this be so? They were, at bottom, affectionate and mutually respectful. In a crisis they could and would rely on one another utterly. Why should their demeanour be so false an index to their real feelings? He supposed it was just the fault of loose habit. He did not blame her. From mere pride he blamed himself. He knew himself to be cleverer, more perceptive, wilier, than she; and he ought to have been able to muster the diplomatic skill necessary for smooth and felicitous intercourse. Any friction, whether due to her stupidity or not, was a proof of his incompetence in the art of life...

"Everybody notices it!" The phrase pricked him. An