Clayhanger

  Then they returned to the case of Darius. The doctor was more communicative, and they were both cheerfully matter-of-fact concerning it. There it was, to be made the best of! And that Darius could never handle business again, and that in about two years his doom would be accomplished – these were basic facts, axiomatic. The doctor had seen his patient in the garden, and he suggested that if Darius could be persuaded to interest himself in gardening …! They discussed his medicine, his meals, his digestion, and the great, impossible dream of ‘taking him away,’ ‘out of it all.’ And every now and then Dr Heve dropped some little hint as to the management of Darius.

  The ticking parcel drew the discreet attention of the doctor. The machine was one guaranteed to go in any position, and was much more difficult to stop than to start.

  ‘It’s only an alarm,’ said Edwin, not without self-consciousness.

  The doctor went, tripping neatly and optimistically, off towards his own breakfast. He got up earlier than his horse.

  II

  Darius was still in the garden when Edwin went to him. He had put on his daily suit, and was leisurely digging in an uncultivated patch of ground. He stuck the spade into the earth perpendicularly and deep, and when he tried to prise it up and it would not yield because of a concealed half-brick, he put his tongue between his teeth and then bit his lower lip, controlling himself, determined to get the better of the spade and the brick by persuasively humouring them. He took no notice whatever of Edwin.

  ‘I see you aren’t losing any time,’ said Edwin, who felt as though he were engaging in small-talk with a stranger.

  ‘Are you?’ Darius replied, without turning his head.

  ‘I’ve just come up for a bit of breakfast. Everything’s all right,’ he said. He would have liked to add: ‘I was in the shop before seven-thirty,’ but he was too proud.

  After a pause, he ventured, essaying the casual –

  ‘I say, father, I shall want the keys of the desk, and all that.’

  ‘Keys o’ th’ desk!’ Darius muttered, leaning on the spade, as though demanding in stupefaction, ‘What on earth can you want the keys for?’

  ‘Well—’ Edwin stammered.

  But the proposition was too obvious to be denied. Darius left the spade to stand up by itself, and stared.

  ‘Got ’em in your pocket?’ Edwin inquired.

  Slowly Darius drew forth a heavy, glittering bunch of keys, one of the chief insignia of his dominion, and began to fumble at it.

  ‘You needn’t take any of them off. I expect I know which is which,’ said Edwin, holding out his hand.

  Darius hesitated, and then yielded up the bunch.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Edwin lightly.

  But the old man’s reluctance to perform this simple and absolutely necessary act of surrender, the old man’s air of having done something tremendous – these signs frightened Edwin and shook his courage for the demand compared to which the demand for the keys was naught. Still, the affair had to be carried through.

  ‘And I say,’ he proceeded, jingling the keys, ‘about signing and endorsing cheques. They tell me at the Bank that if you sign a general authority to me to do it for you, that will be enough.’

  He could not avoid looking guilty. He almost felt guilty, almost felt as if he were plotting against his father’s welfare. And as he spoke his words seemed unreal and his suggestion fantastic. At the Bank the plan had been simple, easy, and perfectly natural. But there could be no doubt, that as he had walked up Trafalgar Road, receding from the Bank and approaching his father, the plan had gradually lost those attractive qualities. And now in the garden it was merely monstrous.

  Silent, Darius resumed the spade.

  ‘Well,’ said Edwin desperately. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Do you think’ – Darius glowered upon him with heavy desolating scorn – ‘do you think as I’m going to let you sign my cheques for me? You’re taking too much on yourself, my lad.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I tell ye you’re taking too much on yourself!’ he began to shout menacingly. ‘Get about your business and don’t act the fool! You needn’t think you’re going to be God A’mighty because you’ve got up a bit earlier for once in a way and been down to th’ shop before breakfast.’

  III

  In all his demeanour there was not the least indication of weakness. He might never have sat down on the stairs and cried! He might never have submitted feebly and perhaps gladly to the caresses of Clara and the soothings of Auntie Hamps! Impossible to convince him that he was cut off from the world! Impossible even to believe it! Was this the man that Edwin and the Bank manager and the doctor and all the others had been disposing of as though he were an automaton accurately responsive to external suggestion?

  ‘Look here,’ Edwin knew that he ought to say. ‘Let it be clearly understood once for all – I’m the boss now! I have the authority in my pocket and you must sign it, and quick too! I shall do my best for you, but I don’t mean to be bullied while I’m doing it!’

  But he could not say it. Nor could his heart emotionally feel it.

  He turned away sheepishly, and then he faced his father again, with a distressed, apologetic smile.

  ‘Well then,’ he asked, ‘who is going to sign cheques?’

  ‘I am,’ said Darius.

  ‘But you know what the doctor said! You know what you promised him!’

  ‘What did the doctor say?’

  ‘He said you weren’t to do anything at all. And you said you wouldn’t. What’s more, you said you didn’t want to.’

  Darius sneered.

  ‘I reckon I can sign cheques,’ he said. ‘And I reckon I can endorse cheques … So it’s got to that! I can’t sign my own name now. I shall show some of you whether I can’t sign my own name!’

  ‘You know it isn’t simply signing them. You know if I bring cheques up for you to sign you’ll begin worrying about them at once, and – and there’ll be no end to it. You’d much better—’

  ‘Shut up!’ It was like a clap of thunder.

  Edwin hesitated an instant and then went towards the house. He could hear his father muttering ‘Whippersnapper!’

  ‘And I’ll tell you another thing,’ Darius bawled across the garden – assuredly his voice would reach the street. ‘It was like your impudence to go to the Bank like that without asking me first! “They tell you at the Bank”! “They tell you at the Bank”! Anything else they told you at the Bank?’ Then a snort.

  Edwin was humiliated and baffled. He knew not what he could do. The situation became impossible immediately it was faced. He felt also very resentful, and resentment was capturing him, when suddenly an idea seemed to pull him by the sleeve: ‘All this is part of his disease. It’s part of his disease that he can’t see the point of a thing.’ And the idea was insistent, and under its insistence Edwin’s resentment changed to melancholy. He said to himself that he must think of his father as a child. He blamed himself, in a sort of pleasurable luxury of remorse, for all the anger which during all his life he had felt against his father. His father’s unreasonableness had not been a fault, but a misfortune. His father had been not a tyrant, but a victim. His brain must always have been wrong! And now he was doomed, and the worst part of his doom was that he was unaware of it. And in the thought of Darius ignorantly blustering within the walled garden, in the spring sunshine, condemned, cut off, helpless at the last, pitiable at the last, there was something inexpressibly poignant. And the sunshine seemed a shame; and Edwin’s youth and mental vigour seemed a shame.

  Nevertheless Edwin knew not what to do.

  ‘Master Edwin,’ said Mrs Nixon, who was rubbing the balustrade of the stairs, ‘you munna’ cross him like that.’ She jerked her head in the direction of the garden. The garden door stood open.

  If he had not felt solemn and superior, he could have snapped off that head of hers.

  ‘Is my breakfast ready?’ he asked. He hung up his hat, and absently took the littl
e parcel which he had left on the marble ledge of the umbrella-stand.

  7

  Laid Aside

  I

  THE SAFE, SINCE the abandonment of the business premises by the family, had stood in a corner of a small nondescript room, sometimes vaguely called the safe-room, between the shop and what had once been the kitchen. It was a considerable safe, and it had the room practically to itself. As Edwin unlocked it, and the prodigious door swung with silent smoothness to his pull, he was aware of a very romantic feeling of exploration. He had seen the inside of the safe before; he had even opened the safe, and taken something from it, under his father’s orders. But he had never had leisure, nor licence, to inspect its interior. From his boyhood had survived the notion that it must contain many marvels. In spite of himself his attitude was one of awe.

  The first thing that met his eye was his father’s large, black-bound private cash-book, which constituted the most sacred and mysterious document in the accountancy of the business. Edwin handled, and kept, all the books save that. At the beginning of the previous week he and Stifford had achieved the task of sending out the quarterly accounts, and of one sort or another there were some seven hundred quarterly accounts. Edwin was familiar with every detail of the printer’s work-book, the daybook, the combined book colloquially called ‘invoice and ledger,’ the ‘bought’ ledger, and the shop cash-book. But he could form no sure idea of the total dimensions and results of the business, because his father always kept the ultimate castings to himself, and never displayed his private cash-book under any circumstances. By ingenuity and perseverance Edwin might have triumphed over Darius’s mania for secrecy; but he did not care to do so; perhaps pride even more than honour caused him to refrain.

  Now he held the book, and saw that only a portion of it was in the nature of a cash-book; the rest comprised summaries and general statements. The statement for the year 1885, so far as he could hastily decipher its meaning, showed a profit of £821. He was not surprised, and yet the sight of the figures in his father’s heavy, scratchy hand was curiously impressive.

  His father could keep nothing from him now. The interior of the safe was like a city that had capitulated; no law ran in it but his law, and he was absolute; he could commit infamies in the city and none might criticize. He turned over piles of dusty cheque-counterfoils, and old pass-books and other old books of account. He saw a linen bag crammed with four-shilling pieces (whenever Darius obtained a double florin he put it aside), and one or two old watches of no value. Also the title-deeds of the house at Bleakridge, their latest parchment still white with pounce; the mortgage, then, had been repaid, a fact which Darius had managed on principle to conceal from his son. Then he came to the four drawers, and in some of these he discovered a number of miscellaneous share-certificates with their big seals. He knew that his father had investments – it was impossible to inhabit the shop-cubicle with his father and not know that – but he had no conception of their extent or their value. Always he had regarded all those matters as foreign to himself, refusing to allow curiosity in regard to them to awake. Now he was differently minded, owing to the mere physical weight in his pocket of a bunch of keys! In a hasty examination he gathered that the stock was chiefly in railways and shipping, and that it amounted to large sums – anyhow quite a number of thousands. He was frankly astonished. How had his father’s clumsy, slow intellect been able to cope with the dangerous intricacies of the Stock Exchange? It seemed incredible; and yet he had known quite well that his father was an investor!

  ‘Of course he isn’t keen on giving it all up!’ Edwin exclaimed aloud suddenly. ‘I wonder he even forked out the keys as easily as he did!’

  The view of the safe enabled him to perform a feat which very few children ever achieve; he put himself in his father’s place. And it was with benevolence, not with exasperation, that he puzzled his head to invent some device for defeating the old man’s obstinacy about cheque-signing.

  One drawer was evidently not in regular use. Often, in a series of drawers, one of them falls into the idle habit of being overlooked, slipping gradually by custom into desuetude, though other drawers may overflow. This drawer held merely a few scraps of sample paper, and a map, all dusty. He drew forth the map. It was coloured, and in shaky Roman characters underneath it ran the legend, ‘The County of Staffordshire.’ He seemed to recognize the map. On the back he read, in his father’s handwriting: ‘Drawn and coloured without help by my son Edwin, aged nine.’

  He had utterly forgotten it. He could in no detail recall the circumstances in which he had produced the wonderful map. A childish, rude effort! … Still, rather remarkable that at the age of nine (perhaps even before he had begun to attend the Oldcastle Middle School) he should have chosen to do a county map instead of a map of that country beloved by all juvenile map-drawers, Ireland! He must have copied it from the map in Lewis’s Gazetteer of England and Wales … Twenty-one years ago, nearly! He might, from the peculiar effect on him, have just discovered the mummy of the boy that once had been Edwin … And his father had kept the map for over twenty years. The old cock must have been deuced proud of it once! Not that he ever said so – Edwin was sure of that!

  ‘Now you needn’t get sentimental!’ he told himself. Like Maggie, he had a fearful, an almost morbid, horror of sentimentality. But he could not arrest the softening of his heart, as he smiled at the naïveté of the map and at his father’s parental simplicity.

  As he was closing the safe, Stifford, agitated, hurried into the room.

  ‘Please, sir, Mr Clayhanger’s in the Square. I thought I’d better tell you.’

  ‘What? Father?’

  ‘Yes, sir. He’s standing opposite the chapel and he keeps looking this way. I thought you’d like—’

  Edwin turned the key, and ran forth, stumbling, as he entered the shop, against the step-ladder which, with the paper-boy at the summit of it, overtopped the doorway. He wondered why he should run, and why Stifford’s face was so obviously apprehensive.

  II

  Darius Clayhanger was standing at the north-east corner of the little Square, half-way up Duck Bank, at the edge of the pavement. And his gaze, hesitant and feeble, seemed to be upon the shop. He merely stood there, moveless, and yet the sight of him was most strangely disconcerting. Edwin, who kept within the shelter of the doorway, comprehended now the look on Stifford’s face. His father had the air of ranging round about the shop in a reconnaissance, like an Indian or a wild animal, or like a domestic animal violently expelled. Edwin almost expected him to creep round by the Town Hall into St Luke’s Square, and then to reappear stealthily at the other end of Wedgwood Street, and from a western ambush stare again at his own premises.

  A man coming down Duck Bank paused an instant near Darius, and with a smile spoke to him, holding out his hand. Darius gave a slight nod. The man, snubbed and confused, walked on, the smile still on his face but meaningless now and foolish.

  At length Darius walked up the hill, his arms stiff and outpointing, as of old. Edwin got his hat and ran after him. Instead of turning to the left along the market-place, Darius kept on farther up the hill, past the Shambles, towards the old playground and the vague cinder-wastes where the town ended in a few ancient cottages. It was at the playground that Edwin, going slowly and cautiously, overtook him.

  ‘Hello, father!’ he began nervously. ‘Where are you off to?’

  Darius did not seem to be at all startled to see him at his side. Nevertheless he behaved in a queer fashion. Without saying a word he suddenly turned at right-angles and apparently aimed himself towards the market-place, by the back of the Town Hall. When he had walked a few paces, he stopped and looked round at Edwin, who could not decide what ought to be done.

  ‘If ye want to know,’ said Darius, with overwhelming sadness and embittered disgust, ‘I’m going to th’ Bank to sign that authority about cheques.’

  ‘Oh!’ Edwin responded. ‘Good! I’ll go with you if you like.’


  ‘Happen it’ll be as well,’ said Darius, resigning himself.

  They walked together in silence.

  The old man was beaten. The old man had surrendered, unconditionally. Edwin’s heart lightened as he perceived more and more clearly what this surprising victory meant. It meant that always in the future he would have the upper hand. He knew now, and Darius knew, that his father had no strength to fight, and that any semblance of fighting could be treated as bluster. Probably nobody realized as profoundly as Darius himself his real and yet mysterious inability to assert his will against the will of another. The force of his individuality was gone. He who had meant to govern tyrannically to his final hour, to die with a powerful and grim gesture of command, had to accept the ignominy of submission. Edwin had not even insisted, had used no kind of threat. He had merely announced his will, and when the first fury had waned Darius had found his son’s will working like a chemical agent in his defenceless mind, and had yielded. It was astounding. And always it would be thus, until the time when Edwin would say ‘Do this’ and Darius would do it, and ‘Do that’ and Darius would do it, meekly, unreasoningly, anxiously.

  Edwin’s relief was so great that it might have been mistaken for positive ecstatic happiness. His mind ranged exultingly over the future of the business. In a few years, if he chose, he could sell the business and spend the whole treasure of his time upon programmes. The entire world would be his, and he could gather the fruits of every art. He would utterly belong to himself. It was a formidable thought. The atmosphere of the market-place contained too much oxygen to be quite grateful to his lungs … In the meantime there were things he would do. He would raise Stifford’s wages. Long ago they ought to have been raised. And he would see that Stifford had for his dinner a full hour; which in practice Stifford had never had. And he would completely give up the sale and delivery of newspapers and weeklies, and would train the paper-boy to the shop, and put Stifford in his own place and perhaps get another clerk. It struck him hopefully that Stifford might go forth for orders. Assuredly he himself had not one quality of a commercial traveller. And, most inviting prospect of all, he would stock new books. He cared not whether new books were unremunerative. It should be known throughout the Five Towns that at Clayhanger’s in Bursley a selection of new books could always be seen. And if people would not buy them people must leave them. But he would have them. And so his thoughts flew.