‘I say you must go your own road,’ said his father.
‘But at this rate I should never be able to marry!’
‘Do you reckon,’ asked Darius, with mild cold scorn, ‘as you getting married will make your services worth one penny more to my business?’ And he waited an answer with the august calm of one who is aware that he is unanswerable. But he might with equal propriety have tied his son’s hands behind him and then diverted himself by punching his head.
‘I do all I can,’ said Edwin meekly.
‘And what about getting orders?’ Darius questioned grimly. ‘Didn’t I offer you two and a half per cent. on all new customers you got yourself? And how many have you got? Not one. I give you a chance to make extra money and you don’t take it. Ye’d sooner go running about after girls.’
This was a particular grievance of the father against the son: that the son brought no grist to the mill in the shape of new orders.
‘But how can I get orders?’ Edwin protested.
‘How did I get ’em? How do I get ’em? Somebody has to get ’em.’ The old man’s lips were pressed together, and he waved ‘The Christian News’ slightly in his left hand.
IV
In a few minutes both their voices had risen. Darius, savage, stooped to replace with the shovel a large burning coal that had dropped on the tiles and was sending up a column of brown smoke.
‘I tell you what I shall do,’ he said, controlling himself bitterly. ‘It’s against my judgment, but I shall put you up to a pound a week at the New Year, if all goes well, of course. And it’s good money, let me add.’
He was entirely serious, and almost sincere. He loathed paying money over to his son. He was convinced that in an ideal world sons would toil gratis for their fathers who lodged and fed them and gifted them with the reversion of excellent businesses.
‘But what good’s a pound a week?’ Edwin demanded, with the querulousness of one who is losing hope.
‘What good’s a pound a week!’ Darius repeated, hurt and genuinely hurt. ‘Let me tell you that in my time young men married on a pound a week, and glad to! A pound a week!’ He finished with a sardonic exclamation.
‘I couldn’t marry Miss Lessways on a pound a week,’ Edwin murmured, in despair, his lower lip hanging. ‘I thought you might perhaps be offering me a partnership by this time!’ Possibly in some mad hour a thought so wild had indeed flitted through his brain.
‘Did you?’ rejoined Darius. And in the fearful grimness of the man’s accents was concealed all his intense and egoistic sense of possessing in absolute ownership the business which the little boy out of the Bastille had practically created. Edwin did not and could not understand the fierce strength of his father’s emotion concerning the business. Already in tacitly agreeing to leave Edwin the business after his own death, Darius imagined himself to be superbly benevolent.
‘And then there would be house-furnishing, and so on,’ Edwin continued.
‘What about that fifty pounds?’ Darius curtly inquired.
Edwin was startled. Never since the historic scene had Darius made the slightest reference to the proceeds of the Building Society share.
‘I haven’t spent all of it,’ Edwin muttered.
Do what he would with his brain, the project of marriage and house-tenancy and a separate existence obstinately presented itself to him as fantastic and preposterous. Who was he to ask so much from destiny? He could not feel that he was a man. In his father’s presence he never could feel that he was a man. He remained a boy, with no rights, moral or material.
‘And if as ye say she’s got money of her own—’ Darius remarked, and was considerably astonished when the boy walked straight out of the room and closed the door.
It was his last grain of common sense that took Edwin in silence out of the room.
Miserable, despicable baseness! Did the old devil suppose that he would be capable of asking his wife to find the resources which he himself could not bring? He was to say to his wife: ‘I can only supply a pound a week, but as you’ve got money it won’t matter.’ The mere notion outraged him so awfully that if he had stayed in the room there would have been an altercation and perhaps a permanent estrangement.
As he stood furious and impotent in the hall, he thought, with his imagination quickened by the memory of Mr Shushions: ‘When you’re old, and I’ve got you’ – he clenched his fists and his teeth – ‘when I’ve got you and you can’t help yourself, by God it’ll be my turn!’
And he meant it.
V
He seized his overcoat and hat, and putting them on anyhow, strode out. The kitchen clock struck half-past seven as he left. Chapel-goers would soon be returning in a thin procession of twos and threes up Trafalgar Road. To avoid meeting acquaintances he turned down the side-street, towards the old road which was a continuation of Aboukir Street. There he would be safe. Letting his overcoat fly open, he thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers. It was a cold night of mist. Humanity was separated from him by the semi-transparent blinds of the cottage windows, bright squares in the dark and enigmatic façades of the street. He was alone.
All along he had felt and known that this disgusting crisis would come to pass. He had hoped against it, but not with faith. And he had no remedy for it. What could he immediately and effectively do? He was convinced that his father would not yield. There were frequent occasions when his father was proof against reason, when his father seemed genuinely unable to admit the claim of justice, and this occasion was one of them. He could tell by certain peculiarities of tone and gesture. A pound a week! Assuming that he cut loose from his father, in a formal and confessed separation, he might not for a long time be in a position to earn more than a pound a week. A clerk was worth no more. And, except as responsible manager of a business, he could only go into the market as a clerk. In the Five Towns how many printing offices were there that might at some time or another be in need of a manager? Probably not one. They were all of modest importance, and directed personally by their proprietary heads. His father’s was one of the largest … No! His father had nurtured and trained, in him, a helpless slave.
And how could he discuss such a humiliating question with Hilda? Could he say to Hilda: ‘See here, my father won’t allow me more than a pound a week. What are we to do?’ In what terms should he telegraph to her tomorrow?
He heard the rapid firm footsteps of a wayfarer overtaking him. He had no apprehension of being disturbed in his bitter rage. But a hand was slapped on his shoulder, and a jolly voice said –
‘Now, Edwin, where’s this road leading you to on a Sunday night?’
It was Osmond Orgreave who, having been tramping for exercise in the high regions beyond the loop railway line, was just going home.
‘Oh! Nowhere particular,’ said Edwin feebly.
‘Working off Sunday dinner, eh?’
‘Yes.’ And Edwin added casually, to prove that there was nothing singular in his mood: ‘Nasty night!’
‘You must come in a bit,’ said Mr Orgreave.
‘Oh no!’ He shrank away.
‘Now, now!’ said Mr Orgreave masterfully. ‘You’ve got to come in, so you may as well give up first as last. Janet’s in. She’s like you and me, she’s a bad lot – hasn’t been to church.’ He took Edwin by the arm, and they turned into Oak Street at the lower end.
Edwin continued to object, but Mr Orgreave, unable to scrutinize his face in the darkness, and not dreaming of an indiscretion, rode over his weak negatives, horse and foot, and drew him by force into the garden; and in the hall took his hat away from him and slid his overcoat from his shoulders. Mr Orgreave, having accomplished a lot of forbidden labour on that Sabbath, was playful in his hospitality.
‘Prisoner! Take charge of him!’ exclaimed Mr Orgreave shortly, as he pushed Edwin into the breakfast-room and shut the door from the outside. Janet was there, exquisitely welcoming, unconsciously pouring balm from her eyes. But he thought she looked graver
than usual. Edwin had to enact the part of a man to whom nothing has happened. He had to behave as though his father was the kindest and most reasonable of fathers, as though Hilda wrote fully to him every day, as though he were not even engaged to Hilda. He must talk, and he scarcely knew what he was saying.
‘Heard lately from Miss Lessways?’ he asked lightly, or as lightly as he could. It was a splendid effort. Impossible to expect him to start upon the weather or the strike! He did the best he could.
Janet’s eyes became troubled. Speaking in a low voice she said, with a glance at the door –
‘I suppose you’ve not heard. She’s married.’
He did not move.
VI
‘Married?’
‘Yes. It is rather sudden, isn’t it?’ Janet tried to smile, but she was exceedingly self-conscious. ‘To a Mr Cannon. She’s known him for a very long time, I think.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday. I had a note this morning. It’s quite a secret yet. I haven’t told father and mother. But she asked me to tell you if I saw you.’
He thought her eyes were compassionate.
Mrs Orgreave came smiling into the room.
‘Well, Mr Edwin, it seems we can only get you in here by main force.’
‘Are you quite better, Mrs Orgreave?’ he rose to greet her.
He had by some means or other to get out.
‘I must just run in home a second,’ he said, after a moment. ‘I’ll be back in three minutes.’
But he had no intention of coming back. He would have told any lie in order to be free.
In his bedroom, looking at himself in the glass, he could detect on his face no sign whatever of suffering or of agitation. It seemed just an ordinary mild, unmoved face.
And this, too, he had always felt and known would come to pass: that Hilda would not be his. All that romance was unreal; it was not true; it had never happened. Such a thing could not happen to such as he was … He could not reflect. When he tried to reflect, the top of his head seemed as though it would fly off … Cannon! She was with Cannon somewhere at that very instant … She had specially asked that he should be told. And indeed he had been told before even Mr and Mrs Orgreave … Cannon! She might at that very instant be in Cannon’s arms.
It could be said of Edwin that he fully lived that night. Fate had at any rate roused him from the coma which most men called existence.
Simple Maggie was upset because, from Edwin’s absence and her father’s demeanour at supper, she knew that her menfolk had had another terrible discussion. And since her father offered no remark as to it, she guessed that this one must be even more serious than the last.
There was one thing that Edwin could not fit into any of his theories of the disaster which had overtaken him and that was his memory of Hilda’s divine gesture as she bent over Mr Shushions on the morning of the Centenary.
BOOK III
His Freedom
1
After a Funeral
I
FOUR AND A half years later on a Tuesday night in April, 1886, Edwin was reading in an easy chair in his bedroom. He made a very image of solitary comfort. The easy chair had been taken from the dining-room, silently, without permission, and Darius had apparently not noticed its removal. A deep chair, designed by some one learned in the poses natural to the mortal body, it was firm where it ought to be firm, and where it ought to yield, there it yielded. By its own angles it threw the head slightly back, and the knees slightly up. Edwin’s slippered feet rested on a hassock, and in front of the hassock was a red-glowing gas-stove. That stove, like the easy chair, had been acquired by Edwin at his father’s expense without his father’s cognizance. It consumed gas whose price swelled the quarterly bill three times a year, and Darius observed nothing. He had not even entered his son’s bedroom for several years. Each month seemed to limit further his interest in surrounding phenomena, and to centralize more completely all his faculties in his business. Over Edwin’s head the gas-jet flamed through one of Darius’s special private burners, lighting the page of a little book, one of Cassell’s ‘National Library,’ a new series of sixpenny reprints which had considerably excited the book-selling and the book-reading worlds, but which Darius had apparently quite ignored, though confronted in his house and in his shop by multitudinous examples of it. Sometimes Edwin would almost be persuaded to think that he might safely indulge any caprice whatever under his father’s nose, and then the old man would notice some unusual trifle of no conceivable importance, and go into a passion about it, and Maggie would say quietly, ‘I told you what would be happening one of these days,’ which would annoy Edwin. His annoyance was caused less by Maggie’s ‘I told you so,’ than by her lack of logic. If his father had ever overtaken him in some large and desperate caprice, such as the purchase of the gas-stove on the paternal account, he would have submitted in meekness to Maggie’s triumphant reminder; but his father never did. It was always upon some perfectly innocent nothing, which the timidest son might have permitted himself, that the wrath of Darius overwhelmingly burst.
Maggie and Edwin understood each other on the whole very well. Only in minor points did their sympathy fail. And as Edwin would be exasperated because Maggie’s attitude towards argument was that of a woman, so would Maggie resent a certain mulishness in him characteristic of the unfathomable stupid sex. Once a week, for example, when his room was ‘done out,’ there was invariably a skirmish between them, because Edwin really did hate anybody to ‘meddle among his things.’ The derangement of even a brush on the dressing-table would rankle in his mind. Also he was very ‘crotchety about his meals,’ and on the subject of fresh air. Unless he was sitting in a perceptible draught, he thought he was being poisoned by nitrogen: but when he could see the curtain or blind trembling in the wind he was hygienically at ease. His existence was a series of catarrhal colds, which, however, as he would learnedly explain to Maggie, could not be connected, in the brain of a reasonable person, with currents of fresh air. Maggie mutely disdained his science. This, too, fretted him. Occasionally she would somewhat tartly assert that he was a regular old maid. The accusation made no impression on him at all. But when, more than ordinarily exacerbated, she sang out that he was ‘exactly like his father,’ he felt wounded.
II
The appearance of his bedroom, and the fact that he enjoyed being in it alone, gave some ground for Maggie’s first accusation. A screen hid the bed, and this screen was half covered with written papers of memoranda; roughly, it divided the room into dormitory and study. The whole chamber was occupied by Edwin’s personal goods, great and small, ranged in the most careful order; it was full; in the occupation of a young man who was not precociously an old maid, it would have been littered. It was a complex and yet practical apparatus for daily use, completely organized for the production of comfort. Edwin would move about in it with the loving and assured gestures of a creator; and always he was improving its perfection. His bedroom was his passion.
Often, during the wilderness of the day, he would think of his bedroom as of a refuge, to which in the evening he should hasten. Ascending the stairs after the meal, his heart would run on in advance of his legs, and be within the room before his hand had opened the door. And then he would close the door, as upon the whole tedious world, and turn up the gas, and light the stove with an explosive plop, and settle himself. And in the first few minutes of reading he would with distinct, conscious pleasure allow his attention to circle the room, dwelling upon piled and serried volumes, and delighting in orderliness and in convenience. And he would reflect: ‘This is my life. This is what I shall always live for. This is the best. And why not?’ It seemed to him when he was alone in his bedroom and in the night, that he had respectably well solved the problem offered to him by destiny. He insisted to himself sharply that he was not made for marriage, that he had always known marriage to be impossible for him, that what had happened was bound to have happened. For a few weeks he had lived
in a fool’s paradise: that was all … Fantastic scheme, mad self deception! In such wise he thought of his love-affair. His profound satisfaction was that none except his father knew of it, and even his father did not know how far it had gone. He felt that if the town had been aware of his jilting, he could not have borne the humiliation. To himself he had been horribly humiliated; but he had recovered in his own esteem.
It was only by very slow processes, by insensible degrees, that he had arrived at the stage of being able to say to his mirror, ‘I’ve got over that!’ And who could judge better than he? He could trace no mark of the episode in his face. Save for the detail of a moustache, it seemed to him that he had looked on precisely the same unchangeable face for a dozen years. Strange, that suffering had left no sign! Strange, that, in the months just after Hilda’s marriage, no acquaintance had taken him on one side and said, ‘What is the tragedy I can read on your features?’
And indeed the truth was that no one suspected. The vision of his face would remain with people long after he had passed them in the street, or spoken to them in the shop. The charm of his sadness persisted in their memory. But they would easily explain it to themselves by saying that his face had a naturally melancholy cast – a sort of accident that had happened to him in the beginning! He had a considerable reputation of which he was imperfectly aware, for secretiveness, timidity, gentleness, and intellectual superiority. Sundry young women thought of him wistfully when smiling upon quite other young men, and would even kiss him while kissing them, according to the notorious perversity of love.