‘I wonder if you’d mind dropping me a line to Glasgow, sir, if anything happens. I can give you the address. If it isn’t—’
‘Certainly, if you like.’ He tried to be nonchalant. ‘When are you going?’
‘I did think of getting to Crewe before noon, sir. As soon as I’ve seen to this—’ He cocked his eye at the copy for the poster.
‘Oh, you needn’t bother about that,’ said Edwin carelessly. ‘Go now if you want to.’
‘I’ve got time, sir. Mr Curtenty’s coming for me at nine o’clock to drive me to th’ polling-booth.’
This was the first time that Edwin had ever heard Big James talk of his private politics. The fact was that Big James was no more anxious than Jos Curtenty and Osmond Orgreave to put himself under the iron heel of his fellow working-man.
‘And what’s your colour, James?’ His smile was half a sneer.
‘If you’ll pardon me saying so, sir, I’m for Her Most Gracious,’ Big James answered with grave dignity.
Three journeymen, pretending to be busy, were listening with all ears from the other side of a case.
‘Oh!’ exclaimed Edwin, dashed. ‘Well, that’s all right!’
He walked straight out, put on his hat, and went to the Bleakridge polling-station and voted Labour defiantly, as though with a personal grievance against the polling-clerk. He had a vote, not as lessee of the business premises, but as his father’s lodger. He despised Labour; he did not care what happened to Labour. In voting for Labour, he seemed to have the same satisfaction as if from pique he had voted against it because its stupidity had incensed him.
Then, instead of returning him to the shop, his legs took him home and upstairs, and he lay down in his own room.
III
He was awakened by the presence of some one at his bedside, and the whole of his body protested against the disturbance.
‘I couldn’t make you hear with knocking,’ said Dr Heve, ‘so I came into the room.’
‘Hello, doctor, is that you?’ Edwin sat up, dazed, and with a sensation of large waves passing in slow succession through his head. ‘I must have dropped asleep.’
‘I hear you had a pretty bad night with him,’ the doctor remarked.
‘Yes. It’s a mystery to me how he could keep it up.’
‘I was afraid you would. Well, he’s quieter now. In fact, he’s unconscious.’
‘Unconscious, is he?’
‘You’ll have no more trouble with the old gentleman,’ said the doctor. He was looking at the window, as though at some object of great interest to be seen thence. His tone was gentle and unaffected. For the twentieth time Edwin privately admitted that in spite of the weak, vacuous smile which seemed to delight everybody except himself, there was a sympathetic quality in this bland doctor. In common moments he was common, but in the rare moment when a man with such a smile ought to be at his worst, a certain soft dignity would curiously distinguish his bearing.
‘Um!’ Edwin muttered, also looking at the window. And then, after a pause, he asked: ‘Will it last long?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the doctor. ‘The fact is, this is the first case of Cheyne-Stokes breathing I’ve ever had. It may last for days.’
‘How’s the nurse?’ Edwin demanded.
They talked about the nurse, and then Dr Heve said that, his brother the Vicar and he having met in the street, they had come in together, as the Vicar was anxious to have news of his old acquaintance’s condition. It appeared that the Vicar was talking to Maggie and Janet in the drawing-room.
‘Well,’ said Edwin, ‘I shan’t come down. Tell him I’m only presentable enough for doctors.’
With a faint smile and a nod, the doctor departed. As soon as he had gone, Edwin jumped off the bed and looked at his watch, which showed two o’clock. No doubt dinner was over. No doubt Maggie had decided that it would be best to leave him alone to sleep. But that day neither he nor anybody in the household had the sense of time, the continuous consciousness of what the hour was. The whole systematized convention of existence was deranged, and all values transmuted. Edwin was aware of no feeling whatever except an intensity of curiosity to see again in tranquillity the being with whom he had passed the night. Pushing his hand through his hair, he hurried into the sick-room. It was all tidy and fresh, as though nothing had ever happened in it. Mrs Nixon, shrivelled and deaf, sat in the arm-chair, watching. No responsibility now attached to the vigil, and so it could be left to the aged and almost useless domestic. She gave a gesture which might have meant anything – despair, authority, pride, grief.
Edwin stood by the bedside and gazed. Darius lay on his back, with eyes half-open, motionless, unseeing, unhearing, and he breathed faintly, with the soft regularity of an infant. The struggle was finished, and he had emerged from it with the right to breathe. His hair had been brushed, and his beard combed. It was uncanny, this tidiness, this calm, this passivity. The memory of the night grew fantastic and remote. Surely the old man must spring up frantically in a moment, to beat off his enemy! Surely his agonized cry for Clara must be ringing through the room! But nothing of him stirred. Air came and went through those parted and relaxed lips with the perfect efficiency of a healthy natural function. And yet he was not asleep. His obstinate and tremendous spirit was now withdrawn somewhere, into some fastness more recondite than sleep; not far off, not detached, not dethroned; but undiscoverably hidden, and beyond any summons. Edwin gazed and gazed, until his heart could hold no more of the emotion which this mysteriously impressive spectacle, at once majestic and poignant, distilled into it. Then he silently left the old woman sitting dully by the spirit concealed in its ruined home.
IV
In the evening he was resting on the sofa in the drawing-room. Auntie Hamps was near him, at work on some embroidery. In order that her dear Edwin might doze a little if he could, she refrained from speech; from time to time she stopped her needle and looked reflectively at the morsel of 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 naïveté 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 …
V
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 tonight.’
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 realize 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.
BOOK IV
His Start in Life
1
The Birthday Visit
I
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 realize 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 tomorrow,’ 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!’
II
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 a
s 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 exaggeration, of course! Still, a phrase that would not be dismissed by a superior curl of the lips. Maggie was not Clara, and she did not invent allegations. His fault! Yes, his fault! Beyond doubt he was occasionally gruff, he was churlish, he was porcupinish. He did not mean to be so – indeed he most honestly meant not to be so – but he was. He must change. He must turn over a new leaf. He wished it had been his own birthday, or, better still, the New Year, instead of his auntie’s birthday, so that he might have turned over a new leaf at once with due solemnity. He actually remembered a pious saw uttered over twenty years earlier by that wretch in a white tie who had damnably devised the Saturday afternoon Bible-class, a saw which he furiously scorned – ‘Every day begins a New Year.’ Well, every day did begin a New Year! So did every minute. Why not begin a New Year then, in that minute? He had only to say in a cajoling, good-natured tone, ‘All right, all right! Keep your hair on, my child. I grovel!’ He had only to say some such words, and the excellent, simple, unresentful Maggie would at once be appeased. It would be a demonstration of his moral strength to say them.
But he could not say them.
III
Nevertheless he did seriously determine to turn over a new leaf at the very next occasion. His eyes were now following the obituary of Parnell mechanically, without transmitting any message that his preoccupied brain would seize. He had been astonished to find that Parnell was only forty-five. He thought: ‘Why, at my age Parnell was famous – a great man and a power!’ And there was he, Edwin, eating bacon and eggs opposite his sister in the humdrum dining-room at Bleakridge. But after all, what was the matter with the dining-room? It was not the dining-room that his father had left. He had altered and improved it to suit his own taste. He was free to do so, and he had done so. He was free in every way. The division of his father’s estate according to the will had proved unjust to himself; but he had not cared in the least. He had let Albert do as Albert and Clara pleased. In the settlement Maggie had taken the house (at a figure too high), and he paid her an adequate rent for it, while she in turn paid him for her board and lodging. They were all in clover, thanks to the terrible lifelong obstinacy of the little boy from the Bastille. And Edwin had had the business unburdened. It was not growing, but it brought in more than twice as much as he spent. Soon he would be as rich as either of the girls, and that without undue servitude. He bought books surpassing those books of Tom Orgreave which had once seemed so hopelessly beyond his reach. He went to the theatre. He went to concerts. He took holidays. He had been to London, and more than once. He had a few good friends. He was his own master. Nobody dreamed of saying him nay, and no bad habits held him in subjection. Everywhere he was treated with quite notable respect. Even, when partly from negligence, and partly to hide recurring pimples, he had allowed his beard to grow, Clara herself had not dared to titter. And although he suffered from certain disorders of the blood due to lack of exercise and to his condition, his health could not be called bad. The frequency of his colds had somewhat diminished. His career, which to others probably seemed dull and monotonous, presented itself to him as almost miraculously romantic in its development.