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

/> "You know about the Vicar of Saint Peter's?"

"No."

"Died at four o'clock."

"Oh dear me! Dear me!" murmured Mrs Orgreave, agonised.

Most evidently George's case was aggravated by the Vicar's death--and not only in the eyes of Mrs Orgreave and her falsely stoic husband, but in Edwin's eyes too! Useless for him to argue with himself about idiotic superstitiousness! The death of the Vicar had undoubtedly influenced his attitude towards George.

They halted on the landing, outside a door that was ajar. Near them burned a gas jet, and beneath the bracket was a large framed photograph of the bridal party at Alicia's wedding. Farther along the landing were other similar records of the weddings of Marion, Tom, and Jimmie.

Mr Orgreave pushed the door half open.

"Janet," said Mr Orgreave conspiratorially.

"Well?" from within the bedroom.

"Here's Edwin."

Janet appeared in the doorway, pale. She was wearing an apron with a bib.

"I--I thought I'd just look in and inquire," Edwin said awkwardly, fiddling with his hat and a pocket of his overcoat. "What's he like now?"

Janet gave details. The sick-room lay hidden behind the face of the door, mysterious and sacred.

"Mr Edwin thinks you ought to telegraph," said Mrs Orgreave timidly.

"Do you?" demanded Janet. Her eyes seemed to pierce him. Why did she gaze at him with such particularity, as though he possessed a special interest in Hilda?

"Well--" he muttered. "You might just wire how things are, and leave it to her to come as she thinks fit."

"Just so," said Mr Orgreave quickly, as if Edwin had expressed his own thought.

"But the telegram couldn't be delivered to-night," Janet objected. "It's nearly half-past seven now."

It was true. Yet Edwin was more than ever conscious of a keen desire to telegraph at once.

"But it would be delivered first thing in the morning," he said. "So that she'd have more time to make arrangements if she wanted to."

"Well, if you think like that," Janet acquiesced.

The visage of Mrs Orgreave lightened.

"I'll run down and telegraph myself, if you like," said Edwin. "Of course you've written to her. She knows--"

"Oh yes!"

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FIVE.

In a minute he was walking rapidly, with his ungainly, slouching stride, down Trafalgar Road, his overcoat flying loose. Another crisis was approaching, he thought. As he came to Duck Square, he met a newspaper boy shouting shrilly and wearing the contents bill of a special edition of the "Signal" as an apron: "Duke of Clarence. More serious bulletin." The scourge and fear of influenza was upon the town, upon the community, tangible, oppressive, tragic.

In the evening calm of the shabby, gloomy post-office, holding a stubby pencil that was chained by a cable to the wall, he stood over a blank telegraph-form, hesitating how to word the message. Behind the counter an instrument was ticking unheeded, and far within could be discerned the vague bodies of men dealing with parcels. He wrote, "Cannon, 59 Preston Street, Brighton. George's temperature 104." Then he paused, and added, "Edwin." It was sentimental. He ought to have signed Janet's name. And, if he was determined to make the telegram personal, he might at least have put his surname. He knew it was sentimental, and he loathed sentimentality. But that evening he wanted to be sentimental.

He crossed to the counter, and pushed the form under the wire-netting.

A sleepy girl accepted it, and glanced mechanically at the clock, and then wrote the hour 7:42.

"It won't be delivered to-night," she said, looking up, as she counted the words.

"No, I know," said Edwin.

"Sixpence, please."

As he paid the sixpence he felt as though he had accomplished some great, critical, agitating deed. And his heart asserted itself again, thunderously beating.


VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER ELEVEN.


BEGINNING OF THE NIGHT.

The next day was full of strange suspense; it was coloured throughout with that quality of strangeness which puts a new light on all quotidian occupations and exposes their fundamental unimportance. Edwin arose to the fact that a thick grey fog was wrapping the town. When he returned home to breakfast at nine the fog was certainly more opaque than it had been an hour earlier. The steam-cars passed like phantoms, with a continuous clanging of bells. He breakfasted under gas--and alone. Maggie was invisible, or only to be seen momentarily, flying across the domestic horizon. She gave out that she was very busy in the attics, cleaning those shockingly neglected rooms. "Please, sir," said the servant, "Miss Clayhanger says she's been across to Mr Orgreave's, and Master George is about the same." Maggie would not come and tell him herself. On the previous evening he had not seen her after the reception of the news about the Vicar. She had gone upstairs when he came back from the post office. Beyond doubt, she was too disturbed, emotionally, to be able to face him with her customary tranquillity. She was getting over the shock with brush and duster up in the attics. He was glad that she had not attempted to be as usual. The ordeal of attempting to be as usual would have tried him perhaps as severely as her.

He went forth again into the fog in a high state of agitation, constricted with sympathetic distress on Maggie's account, apprehensive for the boy, and painfully expectant of the end of the day. The whole day slipped away so, hour after monotonous hour, while people talked about influenza and about distinguished patients, and doctors hurried from house to house, and the fog itself seemed to be the visible mantle of the disease. And the end of the day brought nothing to Edwin save an acuter expectancy. George varied; on the whole he was worse; not much worse, but worse. Dr Stirling saw him twice. No message arrived from Hilda, nor did she come in person. Maggie watched George for five hours in the late afternoon and evening, while Janet rested.

At eight o'clock, when there was no further hope of a telegram from Hilda, everybody pretended to concur in the view that Hilda, knowing her boy better than anybody else, and having already seen him through an attack of influenza, had not been unduly alarmed by the telegraphic news of his temperature, and was content to write. She might probably be arranging to come on the morrow. After all, George's temperature had reached 104 in the previous attack. Then there was the fog. The fog would account for anything.

Nevertheless, nobody was really satisfied by these explanations of Hilda's silence and absence. In every heart lay the secret and sinister thought of the queerness and the incalculableness of Hilda.

Edwin called several times on the Orgreaves. He finally left their house about ten o'clock, with some difficulty tracing his way home from gas lamp to gas lamp through the fog. Mr Orgreave himself had escorted him with a lantern round the wilderness of the lawn to the gates. "We shall have a letter in the morning," Mr Orgreave had said. "Bound to!" Edwin had replied. And they had both superiorly puffed away into the fog the absurd misgivings of women.

Knowing that he was in no condition to sleep, Edwin mended the drawing-room fire, and settled down on the sofa to read. But he could no more read than sleep. He seemed to lie on the sofa for hours while his thoughts jigged with fatiguing monotony in his head. He was extraordinarily wakeful and alive, every sense painfully sharpened. At last he decided to go to bed. In his bedroom he gazed idly out at the blank density of the fog. And then his heart leapt as his eye distinguished a moving glimmer below in the garden of the Orgreaves. He threw up the window in a tumult of anticipation. The air was absolutely still. Then he heard a voice say, "Good night." It was undoubtedly Dr Stirling's voice. The Scotch accent was unmistakable. Was the boy worse? Not necessarily, for the doctor had said that he might look in again `last thing,' if chance favoured. And the Scotch significance of `last thing' was notoriously comprehensive; it might include regions beyond midnight. Then Edwin heard another voice: "Thanks ever so much!" At first it puzzled him. He knew it, and yet! Could it be the Sunday's voice? Assuredly it was not the voice of Mr Orgreave, nor of any one living in the house. It reminded him of the Sunday's voice.

He went out of his bedroom, striking a match, and going downstairs lit the gas in the hall, which he had just extinguished. Then he put on a cap, found a candlestick in the kitchen, unbolted the garden door as quietly as he could, and passed into the garden. The flame of the candle stood upright in the fog. He blundered along to the dividing wall, placed the candle on the top of it, and managed to climb over. Leaving the candle on the wall to guide his return, he approached the house, which showed gleams at several windows, and rang the bell. And in fact it was Charlie Orgreave himself who opened the door. And a lantern, stuck carelessly on the edge of a chair, was still burning in the hall.

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TWO.

In a moment he had learnt the chief facts. Hilda had gone up to London, dragged Charlie out of Ealing, and brought him down with her to watch over her child. Once more she had done something which nobody could have foreseen. The train--not the London express, but the loop--was late. The pair had arrived about half-past ten, and a little later Dr Stirling had fulfilled his promise to look in if he could. The two doctors had conferred across the child's bed, and had found themselves substantially in agreement. Moreover, the child was if anything somewhat better. The Scotsman had gone. Charles and Hilda had eaten. Hilda meant to sit up, and had insisted that Janet should go to bed; it appeared that Janet had rested but not slept in the afternoon.

Charlie took Edwin into the small breakfast-room, where Osmond Orgreave was waiting, and the three men continued to discuss the situation. They were all of them too excited to sit down, though Osmond and--in a less degree--Charlie affected the tranquillity of high philosophers. At first Edwin knew scarcely what he did. His speech and gestures were not the result of conscious volition. He seemed suddenly to have two individualities, and the new one, which was the more intimate one, watched the other as in a dim-lighted dream... She was there in a room above! She had come in response to the telegram signed `Edwin!' Last night she was far away. Tonight she was in the very house with him. Miracle! He asked himself: "Why should I get myself into this state simply because she is here? It would have been mighty strange if she had not come. I must take myself in hand better than this. I mustn't behave like a blooming girl."