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

of a tram-car on the horizon of the wall. And Edwin was eager to understand, and almost persuaded himself that he did understand; but he could not be sure. A marvellous child-- disconcerting! He had a feeling of inferiority to the child, because the child had seen beauty where he had not dreamed of seeing it.

"Want a swing," he suggested, "before I have to go off to business?"

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THREE.

When it occurred to him that he had had as much violent physical exercise as was good for his years, and that he had left his books in disarray, and that his business demanded him, Edwin apologetically announced that he must depart, and the child admitted that Aunt Janet was probably waiting to give him his lessons.

"Are you going back the way you came? You'd better. It's always best," said Edwin.

"Is it?"

"Yes."

He lifted and pushed the writhing form on to the wall, dislodging a jar, which crashed dully on the ground.

"Auntie Janet told me I could have them to do what I liked with. So I break them," said George, "when they don't break themselves!"

"I bet she never told you to put them on this wall," said Edwin.

"No, she didn't. But it was the best place for aiming. And she told me it didn't matter how many crocks I broke, because they make crocks here. Do they, really?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because there's clay here," said Edwin glibly.

"Where?"

"Oh! Round about."

"White, like that?" exclaimed George eagerly, handling a teapot without a spout. He looked at Edwin: "Will you take me to see it? I should like to see white ground."

"Well," said Edwin, more cautiously, "the clay they get about here isn't exactly white."

"Then do they make it white?"

"As a matter of fact the white clay comes from a long way off--Cornwall, for instance."

"Then why do they make the things here?" George persisted; with the annoying obstinacy of his years. He had turned the teapot upside down. "This was made here. It's got `Bursley' on it. Auntie Janet showed me."

Edwin was caught. He saw himself punished for that intellectual sloth which leads adults to fob children off with any kind of a slipshod, dishonestly simplified explanation of phenomena whose adequate explanation presents difficulty. He remembered how nearly twenty years earlier he had puzzled over the same question and for a long time had not found the answer.

"I'll tell you how it is," he said, determined to be conscientious. "It's like this--" He had to pause. Queer, how hard it was to state the thing coherently! "It's like this. In the old days they used to make crocks anyhow, very rough, out of any old clay. And crocks were first made here because the people found common yellow clay, and the coal to burn it with, lying close together in the ground. You see how handy it was for them."

"Then the old crocks were yellow?"

"More or less. Then people got more particular, you see, and when white clay was found somewhere else they had it brought here, because everybody was used to making crocks here, and they had all the works and the tools they wanted, and the coal too. Very important, the coal! Much easier to bring the clay to the people and the works, than cart off all the people--and their families, don't forget--and so on, to the clay, and build fresh works into the bargain... That's why. Now are you sure you see?"

George ignored the question. "I suppose they used up all the yellow clay there was here, long ago?"

"Not much!" said Edwin. "And they never will! You don't know what a sagger is, I reckon?"

"What is a sagger?"

"Well, I can't stop to tell you all that now. But I will some time. They make saggers out of the yellow clay."

"Will you show me the yellow clay?"

"Yes, and some saggers too."

"When?"

"I don't know. As soon as I can."

"Will you to-morrow?"

To-morrow happened to be Thursday. It was not Edwin's free afternoon, but it was an afternoon to which a sort of licence attached. He yielded to the ruthless egotism of the child.

"All right!" he said.

"You won't forget?"

"You can rely on me. Ask your auntie if you may go, and if she says you may, be ready for me to pull you up over the wall here, about three o'clock."

"Auntie will have to let me go," said George, in a savage tone, as Edwin helped him to slip down into the garden of the Orgreaves. Edwin went off to business with a singular consciousness of virtue, and with pride in his successful manner of taming wayward children, and with a very strong new interest in the immediate future.


VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER EIGHT.


THE FRIENDSHIP.

The next afternoon George's invincible energy took both himself and the great bearded man, Edwin, to a certain spot on the hollow confines of the town towards Turnhill, where there were several pits of marl and clay. They stared in silence at a vast ochre's-coloured glistening cavity in the ground, on the high edges of which grew tufts of grass amid shards and broken bottles. In the bottom of the pit were laid planks, and along the planks men with pieces of string tied tight round their legs beneath the knees drew large barrows full or empty, sometimes insecurely over pools of yellow water into which the plank sagged under their weight, and sometimes over little hillocks and through little defiles formed in the basin of the mine. They seemed to have no aim. The whole cavity had a sticky look which at first amused George, but on the whole he was not interested, and Edwin gathered that the clay-pit in some mysterious way fell short of expectations. A mineral line of railway which, near by, ambled at random like a pioneer over rough country, was much more successful than the pit in winning his approval.

"Can we go and see the saggers now?" he suggested.

Edwin might have taken him to the manufactory in which Albert Benbow was a partner, but he preferred not to display to the father of Clara's offspring his avuncular patronage of George Cannon, and he chose the works of a customer down at Shawport for whom he was printing a somewhat ambitious catalogue. He would call at the works and talk about the catalogue, and then incidentally mention that his young friend desired to see saggers.

"I suppose God put that clay there so that people could practise on it first, before they tried the white clay," George observed, as the pair descended Oldcastle Street.

Decidedly he had moments of talking like an infant, like a baby of three. Edwin recalled that Hilda used to torture herself about questions of belief when she was not three but twenty-three. The scene in the garden porch seemed to have happened after all not very long ago. Yet a new generation, unconceived on that exciting and unforgettable night, had since been born and had passed through infancy and was now trotting and arguing and dogmatising by his side. It was strange, but it was certainly a fact, that George regarded him as a being immeasurably old. He still felt a boy.

How ought he to talk to the child concerning God? He was about to make a conventional response, when he stopped himself. "Confound it! Why should I?" he thought.

"If I were you I shouldn't worry about God," he said, aloud, in a casual and perhaps slightly ironic tone.

"Oh, I don't!" George answered positively. "But now and then He comes into your head, doesn't He? I was only just thinking." The boy ceased, being attracted by the marvellous spectacle of a man perilously balanced on a crate-float driving a long-tailed pony full tilt down the steep slope of Oldcastle Street: it was equal to a circus.

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TWO.

The visit to the works was a particularly brilliant success. By good fortune an oven was just being `drawn,' and the child had sight of the finest, the most barbaric picture that the manufacture of earthenware, from end to end picturesque, offers to the imaginative observer. Within the dark and sinister bowels of the kiln, illuminated by pale rays that came down through the upper orifice from the smoke-soiled sky, half-naked figures moved like ghosts, strenuous and damned, among the saggers of ware. At rapid intervals they emerged, their hairy torsos glistening with sweat, carrying the fired ware, which was still too hot for any but inured fingers to touch: an endless procession of plates and saucers and cups and mugs and jugs and basins, thousands and thousands! George stared in an enchanted silence of awe. And presently one of the Hercules's picked him up, and held him for a moment within the portal of the torrid kiln, and he gazed at the high curved walls, like the walls of a gigantic tomb, and at the yellow saggers that held the ware. Now he knew what a sagger was.

"I'm glad you took me," he said afterwards, clearly impressed by the authority of Edwin, who could stroll out and see such terrific goings-on whenever he chose. During all the walk home he did not speak.

On the Saturday, nominally in charge of his Auntie Janet, he called upon his chum with some water-colour drawings that he had done; they showed naked devils carrying cups and plates amid bright salmon-tinted flames: designs horrible, and horribly crude, interesting only because a child had done them. But somehow Edwin was obscurely impressed by them, and also he was touched by the coincidence that George painted in water-colours, and he, too, had once painted in water-colours. He was moreover expected to judge the drawings as an expert. On Monday he brought up the most complicated box of water-colours that his shop contained, and presented it to George, who, astounded, dazed, bore it away to his bedroom without a single word. Their friendship was sealed and published; it became a fact recognised by the two families.

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THREE.

About a week later, after a visit of a couple of days to Manchester, Edwin went out into the garden as usual when breakfast was finished, and discovered George standing on the wall. The boy had learned how to climb the wall from his own side of it without help.

"I say!" George cried, in a loud, rough, angry voice, as soon as he saw Edwin at the garden door. "I've got to go off in a minute, you know."

"Go off? Where?"

"Home. Didn't they tell you in your house? Auntie Janet and I came to your house yesterday, after I'd waited on the wall for you I don't know how long, and you never came. We came to tell you, but you weren't in. So we asked Miss Clayhanger to tell you. Didn't Miss Clayhanger tell you?"

"No," said Edwin. "She must have forgot." It occurred to him that even the simple and placid Maggie had her personal prejudices, and that