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

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The old man paused, half intimidated. With his pimpled face and glaring eyes, his gleaming gold teeth, his frowziness of a difficult invalid, his grimaces and gestures which were the result of a lifetime devoted to gain, he made a loathsome object. Edwin hated him, and there was a bitter contempt in his hatred.

"I'm going to have that spawn, and I'm going to have some change! Give me some money!" Darius positively hissed.

Edwin grew nearly capable of homicide. All the wrongs that he had suffered leaped up and yelled.

"You'll have no money!" he said, with brutal roughness. "And you'll grow no mushrooms! And let that be understood once for all! You've got to behave in this house."

Darius flickered up.

"Do you hear?" Edwin stamped on the conflagration.

It was extinguished. Darius, cowed, slowly and clumsily directed himself towards the door. Once Edwin had looked forward to a moment when he might have his father at his mercy, when he might revenge himself for the insults and the bullying that had been his. Once he had clenched his fist and his teeth, and had said, "When you're old, and I've got you, and you can't help yourself!" That moment had come, and it had even enabled and forced him to refuse money to his father--refuse money to his father! As he looked at the poor figure fumbling towards the door, he knew the humiliating paltriness of revenge. As his anger fell, his shame grew.

Maggie lifted her eyebrows when Darius banged the door.

"He can't help it," she said.

"Of course he can't help it," said Edwin, defending himself, less to Maggie than to himself. "But there must be a limit. He's got to be kept in order, you know, even if he is an invalid." His heart was perceptibly beating.

"Yes, of course."

"And evidently there's only one way of doing it. How long's he been on this mushroom tack?"

"Oh, not long."

"Well, you ought to have told me," said Edwin, with the air of a master of the house who is displeased. Maggie accepted the reproof.

"He'd break his neck in the cellar before he knew where he was," Edwin resumed.

"Yes, he would," said Maggie, and left the room.

Upon her placid features there was not the slightest trace of the onslaught of profanity. The faint flush had paled away.

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THREE.

The next morning, Sunday, Edwin came downstairs late, to the sound of singing. In his soft carpet-slippers he stopped at the foot of the stairs and tapped the weather-glass, after the manner of his father; and listened. It was a duet for female voices that was being sung, composed by Balfe to the words of the good Longfellow's "Excelsior." A pretty thing, charming in its thin sentimentality; one of the few pieces that Darius in former days really understood and liked. Maggie and Clara had not sung it for years. For years they had not sung it at all.

Edwin went to the doorway of the drawing-room and stood there. Clara, in Sunday bonnet, was seated at the ancient piano; it had always been she who had played the accompaniments. Maggie, nursing one of the babies, sat on another chair, and leaned towards the page in order to make out the words. She had half-forgotten the words, and Clara was no longer at ease in the piano part, and their voices were shaky and unruly, and the piano itself was exceedingly bad. A very indifferent performance of indifferent music! And yet it touched Edwin. He could not deny that by its beauty and by the sentiment of old times it touched him. He moved a little forward in the doorway. Clara glanced at him, and winked. Now he could see his father. Darius was standing at some distance behind his daughters and his grandchild, and staring at them. And the tears rained down from his red eyes, and then his emotion overcame him and he blubbered, just as the duet finished.

"Now, father," Clara protested cheerfully, "this won't do. You know you asked for it. Give me the infant, Maggie."

Edwin walked away.


VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER THIRTEEN.


THE JOURNEY UPSTAIRS.

Late on another Saturday afternoon in the following March, when Darius had been ill nearly two years, he and Edwin and Albert were sitting round the remains of high tea together in the dining-room. Clara had not been able to accompany her husband on what was now the customary Saturday visit, owing to the illness of her fourth child. Mrs Hamps was fighting chronic rheumatism at home. And Maggie had left the table to cosset Mrs Nixon, who of late received more help than she gave.

Darius sat in dull silence. The younger men were talking about the Bursley Society for the Prosecution of Felons, of which Albert had just been made a member. Whatever it might have been in the past, the Society for the Prosecution of Felons was now a dining-club and little else. Its annual dinner, admitted to be the chief oratorical event of the year, was regarded as strictly exclusive, because no member, except the president, had the right to bring a guest to it. Only `Felons,' as they humorously named themselves, and the reporters of the "Signal," might listen to the eloquence of Felons. Albert Benbow, who for years had been hearing about the brilliant funniness of the American Consul at these dinners, was so flattered by his Felonry that he would have been ready to put the letters S P F after his name.

"Oh, you'll have to join!" said he to Edwin, kindly urgent, like a man who, recently married, goes about telling all bachelors that they positively must marry at once. "You ought to get it fixed up before the next feed."

Edwin shook his head. Though he, too, dreamed of the Felons' Dinner as a repast really worth eating, though he wanted to be a Felon, and considered that he ought to be a Felon, and wondered why he was not already a Felon, he repeatedly assured Albert that Felonry was not for him.

"You're a Felon, aren't you, dad?" Albert shouted at Darius.

"Oh yes, father's a Felon," said Edwin. "Has been ever since I can remember."

"Did ye ever speak there?" asked Albert, with an air of good-humoured condescension.

Darius's elbow slipped violently off the tablecloth, and a knife fell to the floor and a plate after it. Darius went pale.

"All right! All right! Don't be alarmed, dad!" Albert reassured him, picking up the things. "I was asking ye, did ye ever speak there--make a speech?"

"Yes," said Darius heavily.

"Did you now!" Albert murmured, staring at Darius. And it was exactly as if he had said, "Well, it's extraordinary that a foolish physical and mental wreck such as you are now, should ever have had wit and courage enough to rise and address the glorious Felons!"

Darius glanced up at the gas, with a gesture that was among Edwin's earliest recollections, and then he fixed his eyes dully on the fire, with head bent and muscles lax.

"Have a cigarette--that'll cheer ye up," said Albert.

Darius made a negative sign.

"He's very tired, seemingly," Albert remarked to Edwin, as if Darius had not been present.

"Yes," Edwin muttered, examining his father. Darius appeared ten years older than his age. His thin hair was white, though the straggling beard that had been allowed to grow was only grey. His face was sunken and pale, but even more striking was the extreme pallor of the hands with their long clean fingernails, those hands that had been red and rough, tools of all work. His clothes hung somewhat loosely on him, and a shawl round his shoulders was awry. The comatose melancholy in his eyes was acutely painful to see--so much so that Edwin could not bear to look long at them. "Father," Edwin asked him suddenly, "wouldn't you like to go to bed?"

And to his surprise Darius said, "Yes."

"Well, come on then."

Darius did not move.

"Come on," Edwin urged. "I'm sure you're overtired, and you'll be better in bed."

He took his father by the arm, but there was no responsive movement. Often Edwin noticed this capricious, obstinate attitude; his father would express a wish to do a certain thing, and then would make no effort to do it. "Come!" said Edwin more firmly, pulling at the lifeless arm. Albert sprang up, and said that he would assist. One on either side, they got Darius to his feet, and slowly walked him out of the room. He was very exasperating. His weight and his inertia were terrible. The spectacle suggested that either Darius was pretending to be a carcass, or Edwin and Albert were pretending that a carcass was alive. On the stairs there was not room for the three abreast. One had to push, another to pull: Darius seemed wilfully to fall backwards if pressure were released. Edwin restrained his exasperation; but though he said nothing, his sharp half-vicious pull on that arm seemed to say, "Confound you! Come up--will you!" The last two steps of the stair had a peculiar effect on Darius. He appeared to shy at them, and then finally to jib. It was no longer a reasonable creature that they were getting upstairs, but an incalculable and mysterious beast. They lifted him on to the landing, and he stood on the landing as if in his sleep. Both Edwin and Albert were breathless. This was the man who since the beginning of his illness had often walked to Hillport and back! It was incredible that he had ever walked to Hillport and back. He passed more easily along the landing. And then he was in his bedroom.

"Father going to bed?" Maggie called out from below.

"Yes," said Albert. "We've just been getting him upstairs."

"Oh! That's right," Maggie said cheerfully. "I thought he was looking very tired to-night."

"He gave us a doing," said the breathless Albert in a low voice at the door of the bedroom, smiling, and glancing at his cigarette to see if it was still alight.

"He does it on purpose, you know," Edwin whispered casually. "I'll just get him to bed, and then I'll be down."

Albert went, with a `good night' to Darius that received no answer.

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TWO.

In the bedroom, Darius had sunk on to the cushioned ottoman. Edwin shut the door.

"Now then!" said Edwin encouragingly, yet commandingly. "I can tell you one thing--you aren't losing weight." He had recovered from his annoyance, but he was not disposed to submit to any trifling. For many months now he had helped Darius to dress, when he came up from the shop for breakfast, and to undress in the evening. It was not that his father lacked the strength, but he would somehow lose himself in the maze of his garments, and apparently he could never remember the proper order of doffing or donning them. Sometimes he would ask, "Am