Clayhanger Part 20

"How d'you do, Mr Clayhanger?" said Janet.

They shook hands. Edwin wrung Janet's hand; another gawky habit.

"I was just going to order a book," said Janet.

"Oh yes! 'The Light of Asia,'" said Edwin.

"Have you read it?" Janet asked.

"Yes--that is, a lot of it."

"Have you?" exclaimed Janet. She was impressed, because really the perusal of verse was not customary in the town. And her delightful features showed generously the full extent to which she was impressed: an honest, ungrudging appreciation of Edwin's studiousness. She said to herself: "Oh! I must certainly get him to the house." And Edwin said to himself, "No mistake, there's something very genuine about this girl."

Edwin said aloud quickly, from an exaggerated apprehensiveness lest she should be rating him too high--

"It was quite an accident that I saw it. I never read that sort of thing--not as a rule." He laughed again.

"Is it worth buying?" Now she appealed to him as an authority. She could not help doing so, and in doing so she was quite honest, for her good-nature had momentarily persuaded her that he was an authority.

"I--I don't know," Edwin answered, moving his neck as though his collar was not comfortable; but it was comfortable, being at least a size too large. "It depends, you know. If you read a lot of poetry, it's worth buying. But if you don't, it isn't. It's not Tennyson, you know. See what I mean?"

"Yes, quite!" said Janet, smiling with continued and growing appreciation. The reply struck her as very sagacious. She suddenly saw in a new light her father's hints that there was something in this young man not visible to everybody. She had a tremendous respect for her father's opinion, and now she reproached herself in that she had not attached due importance to what he had said about Edwin. "How right father always is!" she thought. Her att.i.tude of respect for Edwin was now more securely based upon impartial intelligence than before; it owed less to her weakness for seeing the best in people. As for Edwin, he was saying to himself: "I wish to the devil I could talk to her without spluttering! Why can't I be natural? Why can't I be glib? Some chaps could." And Edwin could be, with some chaps.

FOUR.

They were standing close together in the shop, Janet and Edwin, near the cabinet of artists' materials. Janet, after her manner at once frank and rea.s.suring, examined Edwin; she had come on purpose to examine him.

She had never been able to decide whether or not he was good-looking, and she could not decide now. But she liked the appeal in his eyes.

She did not say to herself that there was an appeal in his eyes; she said that there was 'something in his eyes.' Also he was moderately tall and he was slim. She said to herself that he must be very well shaped. Beginning at the bottom, his boots were clumsy, his trousers were baggy and even shiny, and they had transverse creases, not to be seen in the trousers of her own menkind; his waistcoat showed plainly the forms of every article in the pockets thereof--watch, penknife, pencil, etcetera, it was obvious that he never emptied his pockets at night; his collar was bluish-white instead of white, and its size was monstrous; his jacket had 'worked up' at the back of his neck, completely hiding his collar there; the side-pockets of his jacket were weighted and bulged with mysterious goods; his fair hair was rough but not curly; he had a moustache so trifling that one could not be sure whether it was a moustache or whether he had been too busy to think of shaving. Janet received all these facts into her brain, and then carelessly let them all slip out again, in her preoccupation with his eyes. She said they were sad eyes. The mouth, too, was somewhat sad (she thought), but there was a drawing down of the corners of it that seemed to make gentle fun of its sadness. Janet, perhaps out of her good-nature, liked his restless, awkward movements and the gesture of his hands, of which the articulations were too prominent, and the finger-nails too short.

"Tom reads rather a lot of poetry," said Janet. "That's my eldest brother."

"That might justify you," said Edwin doubtfully.

They both laughed. And as with Janet, so with Edwin, when he laughed, all the kindest and honestest part of him seemed to rise into his face.

"But if you don't supply new books any more?"

"Oh!" Edwin stuttered, blushing slightly. "That's nothing. I shall be very pleased to get it for you specially, Miss Orgreave. It's father that decided--only last month--that the new book business was more trouble than it's worth. It was--in a way; but I'm sorry, myself, we've given it up, poor as it was. Of course there are no book-buyers in this town, especially now old Lawton's dead. But still, what with one thing or another, there was generally some book on order, and I used to see them. Of course there's no money in it. But still... Father says that people buy less books than they used to--but he's wrong there." Edwin spoke with calm certainty. "I've shown him he's wrong by our order-book, but he wouldn't see it." Edwin smiled, with a general mild indulgence for fathers.

"Well," said Janet, "I'll ask Tom first."

"No trouble whatever to us to order it for you, I a.s.sure you. I can get it down by return of post."

"It's very good of you," said Janet, genuinely persuading herself for the moment that Edwin was quite exceeding the usual bounds of complaisance.

She moved to depart.

"Father told me to tell you if I saw you that the glazing will be all finished this morning," said she.

"Up yonder?" Edwin jerked his head to indicate the south.

And Janet delicately confirmed his a.s.sumption with a slight declension of her waving hat.

"Oh! Good!" Edwin murmured.

Janet held out her hand, to be wrung again, and a.s.sured him of her grat.i.tude for his offer of taking trouble about the book; and he a.s.sured her that it would not be trouble but pleasure. He accompanied her to the doorway.

"I think I must come up and have a look at that glazing this afternoon,"

he said, as she stood on the pavement.

She nodded, smiling benevolence and appreciation, and departed round the corner in the soft sunshine.

Edwin put on a stern, casual expression for the benefit of Stifford, as who should say: "What a trial these frivolous girls are to a man immersed in affairs!" But Stifford was not deceived. Safe within his lair, Edwin was conscious of quite a disturbing glow. He smiled to himself--a little self-consciously, though alone. Then he scribbled down in pencil "Light of Asia. Miss J. Orgreave."

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TWO.

FATHER AND SON AFTER SEVEN YEARS.

Darius came heavily, and breathing heavily, into the little office.

"Now as all this racketing's over," he said crossly--he meant by 'racketing' the general election which had just put the Liberal party into power--"I'll thank ye to see as all that red and blue ink is cleaned off the rollers and slabs, and the types cleaned too. I've told 'em ten times if I've told 'em once, but as far as I can make out, they've done naught to it yet."

Edwin grunted without looking up.

His father was now a fattish man, and he had aged quite as much as Edwin. Some of his scanty hair was white; the rest was grey. White hair sprouted about his ears; gold gleamed in his mouth; and a pair of spectacles hung insecurely balanced half-way down his nose; his waistcoat seemed to be stretched tightly over a perfectly smooth hemisphere. He had an air of somewhat gross and prosperous untidiness.

Except for the teeth, his bodily frame appeared to have fallen into disrepair, as though he had ceased to be interested in it, as though he had been using it for a long time as a mere makeshift lodging. And this impression was more marked at table; he ate exactly as if throwing food to a wild animal concealed somewhere within the hemisphere, an animal which was never seen, but which rumbled threateningly from time to time in its dark dungeon.

Of all this, Edwin had definitely noticed nothing save that his father was 'getting stouter.' To Edwin, Darius was exactly the same father, and for Darius, Edwin was still aged sixteen. They both of them went on living on the a.s.sumption that the world had stood still in those seven years between 1873 and 1880. If they had been asked what had happened during those seven years, they would have answered: "Oh, nothing particular!"

But the world had been whizzing ceaselessly from one miracle into another. Board schools had been opened in Bursley, wondrous affairs, with ventilation; indeed ventilation had been discovered. A Jew had been made Master of the Rolls: a spectacle at which England shivered, and then, perceiving no sign of disaster, shrugged its shoulders. Irish members had taught the House of Commons how to talk for twenty-four hours without a pause. The wages of the agricultural labourer had sprung into the air and leaped over the twelve shilling bar into regions of opulence. Moody and Sankey had found and conquered England for Christ. Landseer and Livingstone had died, and the provinces could not decide whether "Dignity and Impudence" or the penetration of Africa was the more interesting feat. Herbert Spencer had published his "Study of Sociology"; Matthew Arnold his "Literature and Dogma"; and Frederic Farrar his Life of his Lord; but here the provinces had no difficulty in deciding, for they had only heard of the last. Every effort had been made to explain by persuasion and by force to the working man that trade unions were inimical to his true welfare, and none had succeeded, so stupid was he. The British Army had been employed to put reason into the noddle of a town called Northampton which was furious because an atheist had not been elected to Parliament. Pullman cars, "The Pirates of Penzance," Henry Irving's "Hamlet," spelling-bees, and Captain Webb's channel swim had all proved that there were novelties under the sun.

Bishops, archbishops, and dissenting ministers had met at Lambeth to inspect the progress of irreligious thought, with intent to arrest it.

Princes and dukes had conspired to inaugurate the most singular scheme that ever was, the Kyrle Society,--for bringing beauty home to the people by means of decorative art, gardening, and music. The Bulgarian Atrocities had served to give new life to all penny gaffs and blood-tubs. The "Eurydice" and the "Princess Alice" had foundered in order to demonstrate the uncertainty of existence and the courage of the island-race. The "Nineteenth Century" had been started, a little late in the day, and the "Referee." Ireland had all but died of hunger, but had happily been saved to enjoy the benefits of Coercion. The Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation had been born again in the splendour of Exeter Hall. Bursley itself had entered on a new career as a chartered borough, with Mayor, alderman, and councillors, all in chains of silver.

And among the latest miracles were Northampton's success in sending the atheist to Parliament, the infidelity of the Tay Bridge three days after Christmas, the catastrophe of Majuba Hill, and the discovery that soldiers objected to being flogged into insensibility for a peccadillo.

But, in spite of numerous attempts, n.o.body had contrived to make England see that her very existence would not be threatened if museums were opened on Sunday, or that Nonconformists might be buried according to their own rites without endangering the const.i.tution.

TWO.

Darius was possibly a little uneasy in his mind about the world.

Possibly there had just now begun to form in his mind the conviction, in which most men die, that all was not quite well with the world, and that in particular his native country had contracted a fatal malady since he was a boy.

He was a printer, and yet the General Election had not put sunshine in his heart. And this was strange, for a general election is the brief millennium of printers, especially of steam-printers who for dispatch can beat all rivals. During a general election the question put by a customer to a printer is not, "How much will it be?" but "How soon can I have it?" There was no time for haggling about price; and indeed to haggle about price would have been unworthy, seeing that every customer (ordinary business being at a standstill), was engaged in the salvation of England. Darius was a Liberal, but a quiet one, and he was patronised by both political parties--blue and red. As a fact, neither party could have done without him. His printing office had clattered and thundered early and late, and more than once had joined the end of one day's work to the beginning of another; and more than once had Big James with his men and his boy (a regiment increased since 1873), stood like plotters muttering in the yard at five minutes to twelve on Sunday evening, waiting for midnight to sound, and Big James had unlocked the door of the office on the new-born Monday, and work had instantly commenced to continue till Monday was nearly dead of old age.