Clayhanger, Arnold Bennett [best novels to read in english .txt] 📗

He knew for a fact that his father did not see Mr Shushions from one year's end to the next: hence they could not have been intimate friends, or even friends: hence his father's emotion was throughout exaggerated and sentimental. His acquaintance with history and with biography told him that tyrants often carried sentimentality to the absurd, and he was rather pleased with himself for being able thus to correlate the general past and the particular present. What he did not suspect was the existence of circumstances which made the death of Mr Shushions in the workhouse the most distressing tragedy that could by any possibility have happened to Darius Clayhanger.

"Shall I put the gas out, or will you?" he asked, with kindly secret superiority, unaware, with all his omniscience, that the being in front of him was not a successful steam-printer and tyrannical father, but a tiny ragged boy who could still taste the Bastille skilly and still see his mother weeping round the knees of a powerful god named Shushions.

"I--I don't know," said Darius, with another sigh.

The next instant he sat down heavily on the stairs and began openly to blubber. His hat fell off and rolled about undecidedly.

"By Jove!" said Edwin to himself, "I shall have to treat this man like a blooming child!" He was rather startled, and interested. He picked up the hat.

"Better not sit there," he advised. "Come into the dining-room a bit."

"What?" Darius asked feebly.

"Is he deaf?" Edwin thought, and half shouted: "Better not sit there. It's chilly. Come into the dining-room a bit. Come on."

Darius held out a hand, with a gesture inexpressibly sad; and Edwin, almost before he realised what he was doing, took it and assisted his father to his feet and helped him to the twilit dining-room, where Darius fell into a chair. Some bread and cheese had been laid for him on a napkin, and there was a gleam of red in the grate. Edwin turned up the gas, and Darius blinked. His coarse cheeks were all wet.

"Better have your overcoat off, hadn't you?"

Darius shook his head.

"Well, will you eat something?"

Darius shook his head again; then hid his face and violently sobbed.

Edwin was not equal to this situation. It alarmed him, and yet he did not see why it should alarm him. He left the room very quietly, went upstairs, and knocked at Maggie's door. He had to knock several times.

"Who's there?"

"I say, Mag!"

"What is it?"

"Open the door," he said.

"You can come in."

He opened the door, and within the darkness of the room he could vaguely distinguish a white bed.

"Father's come. He's in a funny state."

"How?"

"Well, he's crying all over the place, and he won't eat, or do anything!"

"All right," said Maggie--and a figure sat up in the bed. "Perhaps I'd better come down."

She descended immediately in an ulster and loose slippers. Edwin waited for her in the hall.

"Now, father," she said brusquely, entering the dining-room, "what's amiss?"

Darius gazed at her stupidly. "Nothing," he muttered.

"You're very late, I think. When did you have your last meal?"

He shook his head.

"Shall I make you some nice hot tea?"

He nodded.

"Very well," she said comfortingly.

Soon with her hair hanging about her face and hiding it, she was bending over the gleam of fire, and insinuating a small saucepan into the middle of it, and encouraging the gleam with a pair of bellows. Meanwhile Edwin uneasily ranged the room, and Darius sat motionless.

"Seen Gladstone's speech, I suppose?" Edwin said, daring a fearful topic in the extraordinary circumstances.

Darius paid no heed. Edwin and Maggie exchanged a glance. Maggie made the tea direct into a large cup, which she had previously warmed by putting it upside down on the saucepan lid. When it was infused and sweetened, she tasted it, as for a baby, and blew on it, and gave the cup to her father, who, by degrees, emptied it, though not exclusively into his mouth.

"Will you eat something now?" she suggested.

He would not.

"Very well, then, Edwin will help you upstairs."

From her manner Darius might have been a helpless and half-daft invalid for years.

The ascent to bed was processional; Maggie hovered behind. But at the dining-room door Darius, giving no explanation, insisted on turning back: apparently he tried to speak but could not. He had forgotten his "Signal." Snatching at it, he held it like a treasure. All three of them went into the father's bedroom. Maggie turned up the gas. Darius sat on the bed, looking dully at the carpet.

"Better see him into bed," Maggie murmured quickly to Edwin, and Edwin nodded--the nod of capability--as who should say, "Leave all that to me!" But in fact he was exceedingly diffident about seeing his father into bed.

Maggie departed.

"Now then," Edwin began the business. "Let's get that overcoat off, eh?" To his surprise Darius was most pliant. When the great clumsy figure, with its wet cheeks, stood in trousers, shirt, and socks, Edwin said, "You're all right now, aren't you?" And the figure nodded.

"Well, good-night."

Edwin came out on to the landing, shut the door, and walked about a little in his own room. Then he went back to his father's room. Maggie's door was closed. Darius was already in bed, but the gas was blazing at full.

"You've forgotten the gas," he said lightly and pleasantly, and turned it down to a blue point.

"I say, lad," the old man stopped him, as he was finally leaving.

"Yes?"

"What about that Home Rule?"

The voice was weak, infantile. Edwin hesitated. The "Signal" made a patch of white on the ottoman.

"Oh!" he answered soothingly, and yet with condescension, "it's much about what everybody expected. Better leave that till to-morrow."

He shut the door. The landing received light through the open door of his bedroom and from the hall below. He went downstairs, bolted the front door, and extinguished the hall gas. Then he came softly up, and listened at his father's door. Not a sound! He entered his own room and began to undress, and then, half clothed, crept back to his father's door. Now he could hear a heavy, irregular snoring.

"Devilish odd, all this!" he reflected, as he got into bed. Assuredly he had disconcerting thoughts, not all unpleasant. His excitement had even an agreeable, zestful quality.


VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER TWO.


THE CONCLAVE.

The next morning Edwin overslept himself. He seldom rose easily from his bed, and his first passage down Trafalgar Road to business was notoriously hurried; the whole thoroughfare was acquainted with its special character. Often his father arrived at the shop before him, but Edwin's conscience would say that of course if Darius went down early for his own passion and pleasure, that was Darius's affair. Edwin's official time for beginning work was half-past eight. And at half-past eight, on this morning, he was barely out of the bath. His lateness, however, did not disturb him; there was an excuse for it. He hoped that his father would be in bed, and decided that he must go and see, and, if the old man was still sufficiently pliant, advise him to stay where he was until he had had some food.

But, looking out of the window over a half-buttoned collar, he saw his father dressed and in the garden. Darius had resumed the suit of broadcloth, for some strange reason, and was dragging his feet with painful, heavy slowness along the gravel at the south end of the garden. He carried in his left hand the "Signal," crumpled. A cloth cap, surmounting the ceremonious suit, gave to his head a ridiculous appearance. He was gazing at the earth with an expression of absorbed and acute melancholy. When he reached the end of the path, he looked round, at a loss, then turned, as if on an inefficient pivot, and set himself in motion again. Edwin was troubled by this singular episode. And yet his reason argued with his instinct to the effect that he ought not to be troubled. Evidently the sturdy Darius was not ill. Nothing serious could be the matter. He had been harrowed and fatigued by the funeral; no more. In another day, doubtless, he would be again the harsh employer astoundingly concentrated in affairs and impervious to the emotional appeal of aught else. Nevertheless he made a strange sight, parading his excessive sadness there in the garden.

A knock at Edwin's door! He was startled. "Hold on!" he cried, went to the door, and cautiously opened it. Maggie was on the mat.

"Here's Auntie Clara!" she said in a whisper, perturbed. "She's come about father. Shall you be long?"

"About father? What about father?"

"It seems she saw him last night. He called there. And she was anxious."

"Oh! I see!" Edwin affected to be relieved. Maggie nodded, also affecting, somewhat eagerly, to be relieved. But neither of them was relieved. Auntie Clara calling at half-past eight! Auntie Clara neglecting that which she never neglected--the unalterable and divinely appointed rites for the daily cleansing and ordering of her abode!

"I shall be down in ten secs," said he. "Father's in the garden," he added, almost kindly. "Seems all right."

"Yes," said Maggie, with cheerfulness, and went. He closed the door.

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TWO.

Mrs Hamps was in the drawing-room. She had gone into the drawing-room because it was more secret, better suited to conversation of an exquisite privacy than the dining-room--a public resort at that hour. Edwin perceived at once that she was savouring intensely the strangeness of the occasion, inflating its import and its importance to the largest possible.

"Good morning, dear," she greeted him in a low and significant tone. "I felt I must come up at once. I couldn't fancy any breakfast till I'd been up, so I put on my bonnet and mantle and just came. It's no use fighting against what you feel you must do."

"But--"

"Hasn't Maggie told you? Your father called to see me last night just after I'd gone upstairs. In fact I'd begun to get ready for bed. I heard the knocking and I came down and lit the gas in the lobby. `Who's there?' I said. There wasn't any answer, but I made sure I heard some one crying. And when I opened the door, there was your father. `Oh!' he said. `Happen you've gone to bed, Clara?' `No,' I said. `Come in, do!' But he wouldn't. And he looked so queer. I never saw him look like that before. He's such a strong self-controlled man. I knew he'd been to poor Mr Shushions's funeral. `I suppose you've been to the funeral, Darius,' I said. And as soon as I said that he burst