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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Clayhanger, by Arnold Bennett
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Clayhanger
+
+Author: Arnold Bennett
+
+Release Date: April 28, 2007 [EBook #21249]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CLAYHANGER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England
+
+
+
+
+
+Clayhanger, by Arnold Bennett
+_______________________________________________________________________
+This book is one of several written by Bennett about life in the
+Staffordshire Potteries in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
+The hero is Edwin Clayhanger, and we see him through his childhood,
+adolescence, early working life, when he was working for his martinet
+old father, and to the point where he inherits the business, which is
+printing.
+
+Bennett comes from that area of industrial Britain, and the book rings
+true on every page.
+NH
+_______________________________________________________________________
+
+CLAYHANGER
+
+BY ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER ONE.
+
+BOOK ONE--HIS VOCATION.
+
+THE LAST OF A SCHOOLBOY.
+
+Edwin Clayhanger stood on the steep-sloping, red-bricked canal bridge,
+in the valley between Bursley and its suburb Hillport.  In that
+neighbourhood the Knype and Mersey canal formed the western boundary of
+the industrialism of the Five Towns.  To the east rose pitheads,
+chimneys, and kilns, tier above tier, dim in their own mists.  To the
+west, Hillport Fields, grimed but possessing authentic hedgerows and
+winding paths, mounted broadly up to the sharp ridge on which stood
+Hillport Church, a landmark.  Beyond the ridge, and partly protected by
+it from the driving smoke of the Five Towns, lay the fine and ancient
+Tory borough of Oldcastle, from whose historic Middle School Edwin
+Clayhanger was now walking home.  The fine and ancient Tory borough
+provided education for the whole of the Five Towns, but the relentless
+ignorance of its prejudices had blighted the district.  A hundred years
+earlier the canal had only been obtained after a vicious Parliamentary
+fight between industry and the fine and ancient borough, which saw in
+canals a menace to its importance as a centre of traffic.  Fifty years
+earlier the fine and ancient borough had succeeded in forcing the
+greatest railway line in England to run through unpopulated country five
+miles off instead of through the Five Towns, because it loathed the mere
+conception of a railway.  And now, people are inquiring why the Five
+Towns, with a railway system special to itself, is characterised by a
+perhaps excessive provincialism.  These interesting details have
+everything to do with the history of Edwin Clayhanger, as they have
+everything to do with the history of each of the two hundred thousand
+souls in the Five Towns.  Oldcastle guessed not the vast influences of
+its sublime stupidity.
+
+It was a breezy Friday in July 1872.  The canal, which ran north and
+south, reflected a blue and white sky.  Towards the bridge, from the
+north came a long narrow canal-boat roofed with tarpaulins; and towards
+the bridge, from the south came a similar craft, sluggishly creeping.
+The towing-path was a morass of sticky brown mud, for, in the way of
+rain, that year was breaking the records of a century and a half.
+Thirty yards in front of each boat an unhappy skeleton of a horse
+floundered its best in the quagmire.  The honest endeavour of one of the
+animals received a frequent tonic from a bare-legged girl of seven who
+heartily curled a whip about its crooked large-jointed legs.  The ragged
+and filthy child danced in the rich mud round the horse's flanks with
+the simple joy of one who had been rewarded for good behaviour by the
+unrestricted use of a whip for the first time.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Edwin, with his elbows on the stone parapet of the bridge, stared
+uninterested at the spectacle of the child, the whip, and the skeleton.
+He was not insensible to the piquancy of the pageant of life, but his
+mind was preoccupied with grave and heavy matters.  He had left school
+that day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a
+willing beast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the
+advance guard of its problems bearing down on him.  Slim, gawky, untidy,
+fair, with his worn black-braided clothes, and slung over his shoulders
+in a bursting satchel the last load of his schoolbooks, and on his
+bright, rough hair a shapeless cap whose lining protruded behind, he had
+the extraordinary wistful look of innocence and simplicity which marks
+most boys of sixteen.  It seemed rather a shame, it seemed even tragic,
+that this naive, simple creature, with his straightforward and friendly
+eyes so eager to believe appearances, this creature immaculate of
+worldly experience, must soon be transformed into a man, wary,
+incredulous, detracting.  Older eyes might have wept at the simplicity
+of those eyes.
+
+This picture of Edwin as a wistful innocent would have made Edwin laugh.
+He had been seven years at school, and considered himself a hardened
+sort of brute, free of illusions.  And he sometimes thought that he
+could judge the world better than most neighbouring mortals.
+
+"Hello!  The Sunday!" he murmured, without turning his eyes.
+
+Another boy, a little younger and shorter, and clothed in a superior
+untidiness, had somehow got on to the bridge, and was leaning with his
+back against the parapet which supported Edwin's elbows.  His eyes were
+franker and simpler even than the eyes of Edwin, and his lips seemed to
+be permanently parted in a good-humoured smile.  His name was Charlie
+Orgreave, but at school he was invariably called "the Sunday"--not
+"Sunday," but "the Sunday"--and nobody could authoritatively explain how
+he had come by the nickname.  Its origin was lost in the prehistoric
+ages of his childhood.  He and Edwin had been chums for several years.
+They had not sworn fearful oaths of loyalty; they did not constitute a
+secret society; they had not even pricked forearms and written certain
+words in blood; for these rites are only performed at Harrow, and
+possibly at the Oldcastle High School, which imitates Harrow.  Their
+fellowship meant chiefly that they spent a great deal of time together,
+instinctively and unconsciously enjoying each other's mere presence, and
+that in public arguments they always reinforced each other, whatever the
+degree of intellectual dishonesty thereby necessitated.
+
+"I'll bet you mine gets to the bridge first," said the Sunday.  With an
+ingenious movement of the shoulders he arranged himself so that the
+parapet should bear the weight of his satchel.
+
+Edwin Clayhanger slowly turned round, and perceived that the object
+which the Sunday had appropriated as "his" was the other canal-boat,
+advancing from the south.
+
+"Horse or boat?" asked Edwin.
+
+"Boat's nose, of course," said the Sunday.
+
+"Well," said Edwin, having surveyed the unconscious competitors, and
+counting on the aid of the whipping child, "I don't mind laying you
+five."
+
+"That be damned for a tale!" protested the Sunday.  "We said we'd never
+bet less than ten--you know that."
+
+"Yes, but--" Edwin hesitatingly drawled.
+
+"But what?"
+
+"All right.  Ten," Edwin agreed.  "But it's not fair.  You've got a rare
+start on me."
+
+"Rats!" said the Sunday, with finality.  In the pronunciation of this
+word the difference between his accent and Edwin's came out clear.  The
+Sunday's accent was less local; there was a hint of a short "e" sound in
+the "a," and a briskness about the consonants, that Edwin could never
+have compassed.  The Sunday's accent was as carelessly superior as his
+clothes.  Evidently the Sunday had some one at home who had not learnt
+the art of speech in the Five Towns.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+He began to outline a scheme, in which perpendicular expectoration
+figured, for accurately deciding the winner, and a complicated argument
+might have ensued about this, had it not soon become apparent that
+Edwin's boat was going to be handsomely beaten, despite the joyous
+efforts of the little child.  The horse that would die but would not
+give up, was only saved from total subsidence at every step by his
+indomitable if aged spirit.  Edwin handed over the ten marbles even
+before the other boat had arrived at the bridge.
+
+"Here," he said.  "And you may as well have these, too," adding five
+more to the ten, all he possessed.  They were not the paltry marble of
+to-day, plaything of infants, but the majestic "rinker," black with
+white spots, the king of marbles in an era when whole populations
+practised the game.  Edwin looked at them half regretfully as they lay
+in the Sunday's hands.  They seemed prodigious wealth in those hands,
+and he felt somewhat as a condemned man might feel who bequeaths his
+jewels on the scaffold.  Then there was a rattle, and a tumour grew out
+larger on the Sunday's thigh.
+
+The winning boat, long preceded by its horse, crawled under the bridge
+and passed northwards to the sea, laden with crates of earthenware.  And
+then the loser, with the little girl's father and mother and her
+brothers and sisters, and her kitchen, drawing-room, and bedroom, and
+her smoking chimney and her memories and all that was hers, in the stern
+of it, slid beneath the boys' down-turned faces while the whip cracked
+away beyond the bridge.  They could see, between the whitened
+tarpaulins, that the deep belly of the craft was filled with clay.
+
+"Where does that there clay come from?" asked Edwin.  For not merely was
+he honestly struck by a sudden new curiosity, but it was meet for him to
+behave like a man now, and to ask manly questions.
+
+"Runcorn," said the Sunday scornfully.  "Can't you see it painted all
+over the boat?"
+
+"Why do they bring clay all the way from Runcorn?"
+
+"They don't bring it from Runcorn.  They bring it from Cornwall.  It
+comes round by sea--see?"  He laughed.
+
+"Who told you?"  Edwin roughly demanded.
+
+"Anybody knows that!" said the Sunday grandly, but always maintaining
+his gay smile.
+
+"Seems devilish funny to me," Edwin murmured, after reflection, "that
+they should bring clay all that roundabout way just to make crocks of it
+here.  Why should they choose just this place to make crocks in?  I
+always understood--"
+
+"Oh!  Come on!" the Sunday cut him short.  "It's blessed well one
+o'clock and after!"
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+They climbed the long bank from the canal up to the Manor Farm, at which
+high point their roads diverged, one path leading direct to Bleakridge
+where Orgreave lived, and the other zigzagging down through neglected
+pasturage into Bursley proper.  Usually they parted here without a word,
+taking pride in such Spartan taciturnity, and they would doubtless have
+done the same this morning also, though it were fifty-fold their last
+walk together as two schoolboys.  But an incident intervened.
+
+"Hold on!" cried the Sunday.
+
+To the south of them, a mile and a half off, in the wreathing mist of
+the Cauldon Bar Ironworks, there was a yellow gleam that even the
+capricious sunlight could not kill, and then two rivers of fire sprang
+from the gleam and ran in a thousand delicate and lovely hues down the
+side of a mountain of refuse.  They were emptying a few tons of molten
+slag at the Cauldon Bar Ironworks.  The two rivers hung slowly dying in
+the mists of smoke.  They reddened and faded, and you thought they had
+vanished, and you could see them yet, and then they escaped the baffled
+eye, unless a cloud aided them for a moment against the sun; and their
+ephemeral but enchanting beauty had expired for ever.
+
+"Now!" said Edwin sharply.
+
+"One minute ten seconds," said the Sunday, who had snatched out his
+watch, an inestimable contrivance with a centre-seconds hand.  "By Jove!
+That was a good 'un."
+
+A moment later two smaller boys, both laden with satchels, appeared over
+the brow from the canal.
+
+"Let's wait a jiff," said the Sunday to Edwin, and as the smaller boys
+showed no hurry he bawled out to them across the intervening
+cinder-waste: "Run!"  They ran.  They were his younger brothers, Johnnie
+and Jimmie.  "Take this and hook it!" he commanded, passing the strap of
+his satchel over his head as they came up.  In fatalistic silence they
+obeyed the smiling tyrant.
+
+"What are you going to do?"  Edwin asked.
+
+"I'm coming down your way a bit."
+
+"But I thought you said you were peckish."
+
+"I shall eat three slices of beef instead of my usual brace," said the
+Sunday carelessly.
+
+Edwin was touched.  And the Sunday was touched, because he knew he had
+touched Edwin.  After all, this was a solemn occasion.  But neither
+would overtly admit that its solemnity had affected him.  Hence, first
+one and then the other began to skim stones with vicious force over the
+surface of the largest of the three ponds that gave interest to the
+Manor Farm.  When they had thus proved to themselves that the day
+differed in no manner from any other breaking-up day, they went forward.
+
+On their left were two pitheads whose double wheels revolved rapidly in
+smooth silence, and the puffing engine-house and all the trucks and gear
+of a large ironstone mine.  On their right was the astonishing farm,
+with barns and ricks and cornfields complete, seemingly quite unaware of
+its forlorn oddness in that foul arena of manufacture.  In front, on a
+little hill in the vast valley, was spread out the Indian-red
+architecture of Bursley--tall chimneys and rounded ovens, schools, the
+new scarlet market, the grey tower of the old church, the high spire of
+the evangelical church, the low spire of the church of genuflexions, and
+the crimson chapels, and rows of little red houses with amber
+chimney-pots, and the gold angel of the blackened Town Hall topping the
+whole.  The sedate reddish browns and reds of the composition, all
+netted in flowing scarves of smoke, harmonised exquisitely with the
+chill blues of the chequered sky.  Beauty was achieved, and none saw it.
+
+The boys descended without a word through the brick-strewn pastures,
+where a horse or two cropped the short grass.  At the railway bridge,
+which carried a branch mineral line over the path, they exchanged a
+brief volley of words with the working-lads who always played
+pitch-and-toss there in the dinner-hour; and the Sunday added to the
+collection of shawds and stones lodged on the under ledges of the low
+iron girders.  A strange boy, he had sworn to put ten thousand stones on
+those ledges before he died, or perish in the attempt.  Hence Edwin
+sometimes called him "Old Perish-in-the-attempt."  A little farther on
+the open gates of a manufactory disclosed six men playing the noble game
+of rinkers on a smooth patch of ground near the weighing machine.  These
+six men were Messieurs Ford, Carter, and Udall, the three partners
+owning the works, and three of their employees.  They were celebrated
+marble-players, and the boys stayed to watch them as, bending with one
+knee almost touching the earth, they shot the rinkers from their stubby
+thumbs with a canon-like force and precision that no boy could ever hope
+to equal.  "By gum!" mumbled Edwin involuntarily, when an impossible
+shot was accomplished; and the bearded shooter, pleased by this tribute
+from youth, twisted his white apron into a still narrower ring round his
+waist.  Yet Edwin was not thinking about the game.  He was thinking
+about a battle that lay before him, and how he would be weakened in the
+fight by the fact that in the last school examination, Charlie Orgreave,
+younger than himself by a year, had ousted him from the second place in
+the school.  The report in his pocket said: "Position in class next
+term: third;" whereas he had been second since the beginning of the
+year.  There would of course be no "next term" for him, but the report
+remained.  A youth who has come to grips with that powerful enemy, his
+father, cannot afford to be handicapped by even such a trifle as a
+report entirely irrelevant to the struggle.
+
+Suddenly Charlie Orgreave gave a curt nod, and departed, in nonchalant
+good-humour, doubtless considering that to accompany his chum any
+farther would be to be guilty of girlish sentimentality.  And Edwin
+nodded with equal curtness and made off slowly into the maze of Bursley.
+The thought in his heart was: "I'm on my own, now.  I've got to face it
+now, by myself."  And he felt that not merely his father, but the
+leagued universe, was against him.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER TWO.
+
+THE FLAME.
+
+The various agencies which society has placed at the disposal of a
+parent had been at work on Edwin in one way or another for at least a
+decade, in order to equip him for just this very day when he should step
+into the world.  The moment must therefore be regarded as dramatic, the
+first crucial moment of an experiment long and elaborately prepared.
+Knowledge was admittedly the armour and the weapon of one about to try
+conclusions with the world, and many people for many years had been
+engaged in providing Edwin with knowledge.  He had received, in fact, "a
+good education"--or even, as some said, "a thoroughly sound education;"
+assuredly as complete an equipment of knowledge as could be obtained in
+the county, for the curriculum of the Oldcastle High School was less in
+accord with common sense than that of the Middle School.
+
+He knew, however, nothing of natural history, and in particular of
+himself, of the mechanism of the body and mind, through which his soul
+had to express and fulfil itself.  Not one word of information about
+either physiology or psychology had ever been breathed to him, nor had
+it ever occurred to any one around him that such information was
+needful.  And as no one had tried to explain to him the mysteries which
+he carried about with him inside that fair skin of his, so no one had
+tried to explain to him the mysteries by which he was hemmed in, either
+mystically through religion, or rationally through philosophy.  Never in
+chapel or at Sunday school had a difficulty been genuinely faced.  And
+as for philosophy, he had not the slightest conception of what it meant.
+He imagined that a philosopher was one who made the best of a bad job,
+and he had never heard the word used in any other sense.  He had great
+potential intellectual curiosity, but nobody had thought to stimulate it
+by even casually telling him that the finest minds of humanity had been
+trying to systematise the mysteries for quite twenty-five centuries.  Of
+physical science he had been taught nothing, save a grotesque perversion
+to the effect that gravity was a force which drew things towards the
+centre of the earth.  In the matter of chemistry it had been practically
+demonstrated to him scores of times, so that he should never forget this
+grand basic truth, that sodium and potassium may be relied upon to fizz
+flamingly about on a surface of water.  Of geology he was perfectly
+ignorant, though he lived in a district whose whole livelihood depended
+on the scientific use of geological knowledge, and though the existence
+of Oldcastle itself was due to a freak of the earth's crust which
+geologists call a "fault."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Geography had been one of his strong points.  He was aware of the rivers
+of Asia in their order, and of the principal products of Uruguay; and he
+could name the capitals of nearly all the United States.  But he had
+never been instructed for five minutes in the geography of his native
+county, of which he knew neither the boundaries nor the rivers nor the
+terrene characteristics.  He could have drawn a map of the Orinoco, but
+he could not have found the Trent in a day's march; he did not even know
+where his drinking-water came from.  That geographical considerations
+are the cause of all history had never been hinted to him, nor that
+history bears immediately upon modern life and bore on his own life.
+For him history hung unsupported and unsupporting in the air.  In the
+course of his school career he had several times approached the
+nineteenth century, but it seemed to him that for administrative reasons
+he was always being dragged back again to the Middle Ages.  Once his
+form had "got" as far as the infancy of his own father, and concerning
+this period he had learnt that "great dissatisfaction prevailed among
+the labouring classes, who were led to believe by mischievous
+demagogues," etcetera.  But the next term he was recoiling round Henry
+the Eighth, who "was a skilful warrior and politician," but "unfortunate
+in his domestic relations;" and so to Elizabeth, than whom "few
+sovereigns have been so much belied, but her character comes out
+unscathed after the closest examination."  History indeed resolved
+itself into a series of more or less sanguinary events arbitrarily
+grouped under the names of persons who had to be identified with the
+assistance of numbers.  Neither of the development of national life, nor
+of the clash of nations, did he really know anything that was not
+inessential and anecdotic.  He could not remember the clauses of Magna
+Charta, but he knew eternally that it was signed at a place amusingly
+called Runnymede.  And the one fact engraved on his memory about the
+battle of Waterloo was that it was fought on a Sunday.
+
+And as he had acquired absolutely nothing about political economy or
+about logic, and was therefore at the mercy of the first agreeable
+sophistry that might take his fancy by storm, his unfitness to commence
+the business of being a citizen almost reached perfection.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+For his personal enjoyment of the earth and air and sun and stars, and
+of society and solitude, no preparation had been made, or dreamt of.
+The sentiment of nature had never been encouraged in him, or even
+mentioned.  He knew not how to look at a landscape nor at a sky.  Of
+plants and trees he was as exquisitely ignorant as of astronomy.  It had
+not occurred to him to wonder why the days are longer in summer, and he
+vaguely supposed that the cold of winter was due to an increased
+distance of the earth from the sun.  Still, he had learnt that Saturn
+had a ring, and sometimes he unconsciously looked for it in the
+firmament, as for a tea-tray.
+
+Of art, and the arts, he had been taught nothing.  He had never seen a
+great picture or statue, nor heard great orchestral or solo music; and
+he had no idea that architecture was an art and emotional, though it
+moved him in a very peculiar fashion.  Of the art of English literature,
+or of any other literature, he had likewise been taught nothing.  But he
+knew the meaning of a few obsolete words in a few plays of Shakespeare.
+He had not learnt how to express himself orally in any language, but
+through hard drilling he was so genuinely erudite in accidence and
+syntax that he could parse and analyse with superb assurance the most
+magnificent sentences of Milton, Virgil, and Racine.  This skill,
+together with an equal skill in utilising the elementary properties of
+numbers and geometrical figures, was the most brilliant achievement of
+his long apprenticeship.
+
+And now his education was finished.  It had cost his father twenty-eight
+shillings a term, or four guineas a year, and no trouble.  In younger
+days his father had spent more money and far more personal attention on
+the upbringing of a dog.  His father had enjoyed success with dogs
+through treating them as individuals.  But it had not happened to him,
+nor to anybody in authority, to treat Edwin as an individual.
+Nevertheless it must not be assumed that Edwin's father was a callous
+and conscienceless brute, and Edwin a martyr of neglect.  Old Clayhanger
+was, on the contrary, an average upright and respectable parent who had
+given his son a thoroughly sound education, and Edwin had had the good
+fortune to receive that thoroughly sound education, as a preliminary to
+entering the world.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+He was very far from realising the imperfections of his equipment for
+the grand entry; but still he was not without uneasiness.  In particular
+the conversation incident to the canal-boat wager was disturbing him.
+It amazed him, as he reflected, that he should have remained, to such an
+advanced age, in a state of ignorance concerning the origin of the clay
+from which the crocks of his native district were manufactured.  That
+the Sunday should have been able to inform him did not cause him any
+shame, for he guessed from the peculiar eager tone of voice in which the
+facts had been delivered, that the Sunday was merely retailing some
+knowledge recently acquired by chance.  He knew all the Sunday's tones
+of voice; and he also was well aware that the Sunday's brain was not on
+the whole better stored than his own.  Further, the Sunday was satisfied
+with his bit of accidental knowledge.  Edwin was not.  Edwin wanted to
+know why, if the clay for making earthenware was not got in the Five
+Towns, the Five Towns had become the great seat of the manufacture.  Why
+were not pots made in the South, where the clay came from?  He could not
+think of any answer to this enigma, nor of any means of arriving by
+himself at an answer.  The feeling was that he ought to have been able
+to arrive at the answer as at the answer to an equation.
+
+He did not definitely blame his education; he did not think clearly
+about the thing at all.  But, as a woman with a vague discomfort dimly
+fears cancer, so he dimly feared that there might be something
+fundamentally unsound in this sound education of his.  And he had
+remorse for all the shirking that he had been guilty of during all his
+years at school.  He shook his head solemnly at the immense and nearly
+universal shirking that continually went on.  He could only acquit three
+or four boys, among the hundreds he had known, of the shameful sin.  And
+all that he could say in favour of himself was that there were many
+worse than Edwin Clayhanger.  Not merely the boys, but the masters, were
+sinners.  Only two masters could he unreservedly respect as having acted
+conscientiously up to their pretensions, and one of these was an
+unpleasant brute.  All the cleverness, the ingenuities, the fakes, the
+insincerities, the incapacitaties, the vanities, and the dishonesties of
+the rest stood revealed to him, and he judged them by the mere essential
+force of character alone.  A schoolmaster might as well attempt to
+deceive God as a boy who is watching him every day with the inhuman eye
+of youth.
+
+"All this must end now!" he said to himself, meaning all that could be
+included in the word "shirk."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+He was splendidly serious.  He was as splendidly serious as a reformer.
+By a single urgent act of thought he would have made himself a man, and
+changed imperfection into perfection.  He desired--and there was real
+passion in his desire--to do his best, to exhaust himself in doing his
+best, in living according to his conscience.  He did not know of what he
+was capable, nor what he could achieve.  Achievement was not the matter
+of his desire; but endeavour, honest and terrific endeavour.  He
+admitted to himself his shortcomings, and he did not under-estimate the
+difficulties that lay before him; but he said, thinking of his father:
+"Surely he'll see I mean business!  Surely he's bound to give in when he
+sees how much in earnest I am!"  He was convinced, almost, that
+passionate faith could move mountainous fathers.
+
+"I'll show 'em!" he muttered.
+
+And he meant that he would show the world...  He was honouring the
+world; he was paying the finest homage to it.  In that head of his a
+flame burnt that was like an altar-fire, a miraculous and beautiful
+phenomenon, than which nothing is more miraculous nor more beautiful
+over the whole earth.  Whence had it suddenly sprung, that flame?  After
+years of muddy inefficiency, of contentedness with the second-rate and
+the dishonest, that flame astoundingly bursts forth, from a hidden,
+unheeded spark that none had ever thought to blow upon.  It bursts forth
+out of a damp jungle of careless habits and negligence that could not
+possibly have fed it.  There is little to encourage it.  The very
+architecture of the streets shows that environment has done naught for
+it: ragged brickwork, walls finished anyhow with saggars and slag;
+narrow uneven alleys leading to higgledy-piggledy workshops and kilns;
+cottages transformed into factories and factories into cottages,
+clumsily, hastily, because nothing matters so long as "it will do;"
+everywhere something forced to fulfil, badly, the function of something
+else; in brief, the reign of the slovenly makeshift, shameless, filthy,
+and picturesque.  Edwin himself seemed no tabernacle for that singular
+flame.  He was not merely untidy and dirty--at his age such defects
+might have excited in a sane observer uneasiness by their absence; but
+his gestures and his gait were untidy.  He did not mind how he walked.
+All his sprawling limbs were saying: "What does it matter, so long as we
+get there?"  The angle of the slatternly bag across his shoulders was an
+insult to the flame.  And yet the flame burned with serene and terrible
+pureness.
+
+It was surprising that no one saw it passing along the mean, black,
+smoke-palled streets that huddle about Saint Luke's Church.  Sundry
+experienced and fat old women were standing or sitting at their cottage
+doors, one or two smoking cutties.  But even they, who in child-bed and
+at gravesides had been at the very core of life for long years, they,
+who saw more than most, could only see a fresh lad passing along, with
+fair hair and a clear complexion, and gawky knees and elbows, a fierce,
+rapt expression on his straightforward, good-natured face.  Some knew
+that it was "Clayhanger's lad," a nice-behaved young gentleman, and the
+spitten image of his poor mother.  They all knew what a lad is--the feel
+of his young skin under his "duds," the capricious freedom of his
+movements, his sudden madnesses and shoutings and tendernesses, and the
+exceeding power of his unconscious wistful charm.  They could divine all
+that in a glance.  But they could not see the mysterious and holy flame
+of the desire for self-perfection blazing within that tousled head.  And
+if Edwin had suspected that anybody could indeed perceive it, he would
+have whipped it out for shame, though the repudiation had meant
+everlasting death.  Such is youth in the Five Towns, if not elsewhere.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER THREE.
+
+ENTRY INTO THE WORLD.
+
+Edwin came steeply out of the cinder-strewn back streets by Woodisun
+Bank [hill] into Duck Square, nearly at the junction of Trafalgar Road
+and Wedgwood Street.  A few yards down Woodisun Bank, cocks and hens
+were scurrying, with necks horizontal, from all quarters, and were even
+flying, to the call of a little old woman who threw grain from the top
+step of her porch.  On the level of the narrow pavement stood an immense
+constable, clad in white trousers, with a gun under his arm for the
+killing of mad dogs; he was talking to the woman, and their two heads
+were exactly at the same height.  On a pair of small double gates near
+the old woman's cottage were painted the words, "Steam Printing Works.
+No admittance except on business."  And from as far as Duck Square could
+be heard the puff-puff which proved the use of steam in this works to
+which idlers and mere pleasure-seekers were forbidden access.
+
+Duck Square was one of the oldest, if the least imposing, of all the
+public places in Bursley.  It had no traffic across it, being only a
+sloping rectangle, like a vacant lot, with Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood
+Street for its exterior sides, and no outlet on its inner sides.  The
+buildings on those inner sides were low and humble and, as it were,
+withdrawn from the world, the chief of them being the ancient Duck Inn,
+where the hand-bell ringers used to meet.  But Duck Square looked out
+upon the very birth of Trafalgar Road, that wide, straight thoroughfare,
+whose name dates it, which had been invented, in the lifetime of a few
+then living, to unite Bursley with Hanbridge.  It also looked out upon
+the birth of several old pack-horse roads which Trafalgar Road had
+supplanted.  One of these was Woodisun Bank, that wound slowly up hill
+and down dale, apparently always choosing the longest and hardest route,
+to Hanbridge; and another was Aboukir Street, formerly known as Warm
+Lane, that reached Hanbridge in a manner equally difficult and
+unhurried.  At the junction of Trafalgar Road and Aboukir Street stood
+the Dragon Hotel, once the great posting-house of the town, from which
+all roads started.  Duck Square had watched coaches and waggons stop at
+and start from the Dragon Hotel for hundreds of years.  It had seen the
+Dragon rebuilt in brick and stone, with fine bay windows on each storey,
+in early Georgian times, and it had seen even the new structure become
+old and assume the dignity of age.  Duck Square could remember strings
+of pack-mules driven by women, `trapesing' in zigzags down Woodisun Bank
+and Warm Lane, and occasionally falling, with awful smashes of the
+crockery they carried, in the deep, slippery, scarce passable mire of
+the first slants into the valley.  Duck Square had witnessed the slow
+declension of these roads into mere streets, and slum streets at that,
+and the death of all mules, and the disappearance of all coaches and all
+neighing and prancing and whipcracking romance; while Trafalgar Road,
+simply because it was straight and broad and easily graded, flourished
+with toll-bars and a couple of pair-horsed trams that ran on lines.  And
+many people were proud of those cushioned trams; but perhaps they had
+never known that coach-drivers used to tell each other about the state
+of the turn at the bottom of Warm Lane (since absurdly renamed in honour
+of an Egyptian battle), and that Woodisun Bank (now unnoticed save by
+doubtful characters, policemen, and schoolboys) was once regularly
+`taken' by four horses at a canter.  The history of human manners is
+crunched and embedded in the very macadam of that part of the borough,
+and the burgesses unheedingly tread it down every day and talk gloomily
+about the ugly smoky prose of industrial manufacture.  And yet the
+Dragon Hotel, safely surviving all revolutions by the mighty virtue and
+attraction of ale, stands before them to remind them of the
+interestingness of existence.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+At the southern corner of Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood Street, with Duck
+Square facing it, the Dragon Hotel and Warm Lane to its right, and
+Woodisun Bank creeping inconspicuously down to its left, stood a
+three-storey building consisting of house and shop, the frontage being
+in Wedgwood Street.  Over the double-windowed shop was a discreet
+signboard in gilt letters, "D.  Clayhanger, Printer and Stationer," but
+above the first floor was a later and much larger sign, with the single
+word, "Steam-printing."  All the brickwork of the facade was painted
+yellow, and had obviously been painted yellow many times; the woodwork
+of the plate-glass windows was a very dark green approaching black.  The
+upper windows were stumpy, almost square, some dirty and some clean and
+curtained, with prominent sills and architraves.  The line of the
+projecting spouting at the base of the roof was slightly curved through
+subsidence; at either end of the roof-ridge rose twin chimneys each with
+three salmon-coloured chimney-pots.  The gigantic word `Steam-printing'
+could be seen from the windows of the Dragon, from the porch of the big
+Wesleyan chapel higher up the slope, from the Conservative Club and the
+playground at the top of the slope; and as for Duck Square itself, it
+could see little else.  The left-hand shop window was alluringly set out
+with the lighter apparatus of writing and reading, and showed
+incidentally several rosy pictures of ideal English maidens; that to the
+right was grim and heavy with ledgers, inks, and variegated specimens of
+steam-printing.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+In the wedge-shaped doorway between the windows stood two men, one
+middle-aged and one old, one bareheaded and the other with a beaver hat,
+engaged in conversation.  They were talking easily, pleasantly, with
+free gestures, the younger looking down in deferential smiles at the
+elder, and the elder looking up benignantly at the younger.  You could
+see that, having begun with a business matter, they had quitted it for a
+topic of the hour.  But business none the less went forward, the shop
+functioned, the presses behind the shop were being driven by steam as
+advertised; a customer emerged, and was curtly nodded at by the
+proprietor as he squeezed past; a girl with a small flannel apron over a
+large cotton apron went timidly into the shop.  The trickling, calm
+commerce of a provincial town was proceeding, bit being added to bit and
+item to item, until at the week's end a series of apparent nothings had
+swollen into the livelihood of near half a score of people.  And nobody
+perceived how interesting it was, this interchange of activities, this
+ebb and flow of money, this sluggish rise and fall of reputations and
+fortunes, stretching out of one century into another and towards a
+third!  Printing had been done at that corner, though not by steam,
+since the time of the French Revolution.  Bibles and illustrated herbals
+had been laboriously produced by hand at that corner, and hawked on the
+backs of asses all over the county; and nobody heard romance in the
+puffing of the hidden steam-engine multiplying catalogues and billheads
+on the self-same spot at the rate of hundreds an hour.
+
+The younger and bigger of the two men chatting in the doorway was Darius
+Clayhanger, Edwin's father, and the first printer to introduce steam
+into Bursley.  His age was then under forty-five, but he looked more.
+He was dressed in black, with an ample shirt-front and a narrow black
+cravat tied in an angular bow; the wristbands were almost tight on the
+wrists, and, owing to the shortness of the alpaca coat-sleeves, they
+were very visible even as Darius Clayhanger stood, with his two hands
+deep in the horizontal pockets of his `full-fall' trousers.  They were
+not precisely dirty, these wristbands, nor was the shirt-front, nor the
+turned-down pointed collar, but all the linen looked as though it would
+scarcely be wearable the next day.  Clayhanger's linen invariably looked
+like that, not dirty and not clean; and further, he appeared to wear
+eternally the same suit, ever on the point of being done for and never
+being done for.  The trousers always had marked transverse creases; the
+waistcoat always showed shiningly the outline of every article in the
+pockets thereof, and it always had a few stains down the front (and
+never more than a few), and the lowest button insecure.  The coat,
+faintly discoloured round the collar and fretted at the cuffs, fitted
+him easily and loosely like the character of an old crony; it was as if
+it had grown up with him, and had expanded with his girth.  His head was
+a little bald on the top, but there was still a great deal of mixed
+brown and greyish hair at the back and the sides, and the moustache,
+hanging straight down with an effect recalling the mouth of a seal, was
+plenteous and defiant--a moustache of character, contradicting the full
+placidity of the badly shaved chin.  Darius Clayhanger had a habit, when
+reflective or fierce, of biting with his upper teeth as far down as he
+could on the lower lip; this trick added emphasis to the moustache.  He
+stood, his feet in their clumsy boots planted firmly about sixteen
+inches apart, his elbows sticking out, and his head bent sideways,
+listening to and answering his companion with mien now eager, now
+roguish, now distinctly respectful.
+
+The older man, Mr Shushions, was apparently very old.  He was one of
+those men of whom one says in conclusion that they are very old.  He
+seemed to be so fully occupied all the time in conducting those physical
+operations which we perform without thinking of them, that each in his
+case became a feat.  He balanced himself on his legs with conscious
+craft; he directed carefully his shaking and gnarled hand to his beard
+in order to stroke it.  When he collected his thoughts into a sentence
+and uttered it in his weak, quavering voice, he did something wonderful;
+he listened closely, as though to an imperfectly acquired foreign
+language; and when he was not otherwise employed, he gave attention to
+the serious business of breathing.  He wore a black silk stock, in a
+style even more antique than his remarkable headgear, and his trousers
+were very tight.  He had survived into another and a more fortunate age
+than his own.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Edwin, his heavy bag on his shoulders, found the doorway blocked by
+these two.  He hesitated with a diffident charming smile, feeling, as he
+often did in front of his father, that he ought to apologise for his
+existence, and yet fiercely calling himself an ass for such a sentiment.
+Darius Clayhanger nodded at him carelessly, but not without a
+surprising benevolence, over his shoulder.
+
+"This is him," said Darius briefly.
+
+Edwin was startled to catch a note of pride in his father's voice.
+
+Little Mr Shushions turned slowly and looked up at Edwin's face (for he
+was shorter even than the boy), and gradually acquainted himself with
+the fact that Edwin was the son of his father.
+
+"Is this thy son, Darius?" he asked; and his ancient eyes were shining.
+
+Edwin had scarcely ever heard any one address his father by his
+Christian name.
+
+Darius nodded; and then, seeing the old man's hand creeping out towards
+him, Edwin pulled off his cap and took the hand, and was struck by the
+hot smooth brittleness of the skin and the earnest tremulous weakness of
+the caressing grasp.  Edwin had never seen Mr Shushions before.
+
+"Nay, nay, my boy," trembled the old man, "don't bare thy head to me ...
+not to me!  I'm one o' th' ould sort.  Eh, I'm rare glad to see thee!"
+He kept Edwin's hand, and stared long at him, with his withered face
+transfigured by solemn emotion.  Slowly he turned towards Darius, and
+pulled himself together.  "Thou'st begotten a fine lad, Darius! ... a
+fine, honest lad!"
+
+"So-so!" said Darius gruffly, whom Edwin was amazed to see in a state of
+agitation similar to that of Mr Shushions.
+
+The men gazed at each other; Edwin looked at the ground and other
+unresponsive objects.
+
+"Edwin," his father said abruptly, "run and ask Big James for th' proof
+of that Primitive Methodist hymn-paper; there's a good lad."
+
+And Edwin hastened through the shadowy shop as if loosed from a
+captivity, and in passing threw his satchel down on a bale of goods.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+He comprehended nothing of the encounter; neither as to the origin of
+the old man's status in his father's esteem, nor as to the cause of his
+father's strange emotion.  He regarded the old man impatiently as an
+aged simpleton, probably over pious, certainly connected with the
+Primitive Methodists.  His father had said `There's a good lad' almost
+cajolingly.  And this was odd; for, though nobody could be more
+persuasively agreeable than his father when he chose, the occasions when
+he cared to exert his charm, especially over his children, were
+infrequent, and getting more so.  Edwin also saw something symbolically
+ominous in his being sent direct to the printing office.  It was no
+affair of his to go to the printing office.  He particularly did not
+want to go to the printing office.
+
+However, he met Big James, with flowing beard and flowing apron,
+crossing the yard.  Big James was brushing crumbs from the beard.
+
+"Father wants the proof of some hymn-paper--I don't know what," he said.
+"I was just coming--"
+
+"So was I, Mister Edwin," replied Big James in his magnificent voice,
+and with his curious humorous smile.  And he held up a sheet of paper in
+his immense hand, and strode majestically on towards the shop.
+
+Here was another detail that struck the boy.  Always Big James had
+addressed him as `Master Edwin' or `Master Clayhanger.'  Now it was
+`Mister.'  He had left school.  Big James was, of course, aware of that,
+and Big James had enough finesse and enough gentle malice to change
+instantly the `master' to `mister.'  Edwin was scarcely sure if Big
+James was not laughing at him.  He could not help thinking that Big
+James had begun so promptly to call him `mister' because the foreman
+compositor expected that the son of the house would at once begin to
+take a share in the business.  He could not help thinking that his
+father must have so informed Big James.  And all this vaguely disturbed
+Edwin, and reminded him of his impending battle and of the complex
+forces marshalled against him.  And his hand, wandering in his pockets,
+touched that unfortunate report which stated that he had lost one place
+during the term.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+He lingered in the blue-paved yard, across which cloud-shadows swept
+continually, and then Big James came back and spectacularly ascended the
+flight of wooden steps to the printing office, and disappeared.  Edwin
+knew that he must return to the shop to remove his bag, for his father
+would assuredly reprimand him if he found it where it had been untidily
+left.  He sidled, just like an animal, to the doorway, and then slipped
+up to the counter, behind the great mahogany case of `artists'
+materials.'  His father and the old man were within the shop now, and
+Edwin overheard that they were discussing a topic that had lately been
+rife in religious circles, namely, Sir Henry Thompson's ingenious device
+for scientifically testing the efficacy of prayer, known as the `Prayer
+Gauge.'  The scheme was to take certain hospitals and to pray for the
+patients in particular wards, leaving other wards unprayed for, and then
+to tabulate and issue the results.
+
+Mr Shushions profoundly resented the employment of such a dodge; the
+mere idea of it shocked him, as being blasphemous; and Darius Clayhanger
+deferentially and feelingly agreed with him, though Edwin had at least
+once heard his father refer to the topic with the amused and
+non-committal impartiality of a man who only went to chapel when he
+specially felt like going.
+
+"I've preached in the pulpits o' our Connexion," said Mr Shushions with
+solemn, quavering emotion, "for over fifty year, as you know.  But I'd
+ne'er gi' out another text if Primitives had ought to do wi' such a
+flouting o' th' Almighty.  Nay, I'd go down to my grave dumb afore God!"
+
+He had already been upset by news of a movement that was on foot for
+deferring Anniversary Sermons from August to September, so that people
+should be more free to go away for a holiday, and collections be more
+fruitful.  What!  Put off God's ordinance, to enable chapel-members to
+go `a-wakesing'!  Monstrous!  Yet September was tried, in spite of Mr
+Shushions, and when even September would not work satisfactorily, God's
+ordinance was shifted boldly to May, in order to catch people, and their
+pockets well before the demoralisation incident to holidays.
+
+Edwin thought that his father and the mysterious old man would talk for
+ever, and timorously he exposed himself to obtain possession of his
+satchel, hoping to escape unseen.  But Mr Shushions saw him, and called
+him, and took his hand again.
+
+"Eh, my boy," he said, feebly shaking the hand, "I do pray as you'll
+grow up to be worthy o' your father.  That's all as I pray for."
+
+Edwin had never considered his father as an exemplar.  He was a just and
+unmerciful judge of his father, against whom he had a thousand
+grievances.  And in his heart he resentfully despised Mr Shushions, and
+decided again that he was a simpleton, and not a very tactful one.  But
+then he saw a round yellow tear slowly form in the red rim of the old
+man's eye and run crookedly down that wrinkled cheek.  And his impatient
+scorn expired.  The mere sight of him, Edwin, had brought the old man to
+weeping!  And the tear was so genuine, so convincing, so majestic that
+it induced in Edwin a blank humility.  He was astounded, mystified; but
+he was also humbled.  He himself was never told, and he never learnt,
+the explanation of that epic tear.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FOUR.
+
+THE CHILD-MAN.
+
+The origin of the tear on the aged cheek of Mr Shushions went back
+about forty years, and was embedded in the infancy of Darius Clayhanger.
+
+The earliest memory of Darius Clayhanger had to do with the capital
+letters Q W and S.  Even as the first steam-printer in Bursley, even as
+the father of a son who had received a thoroughly sound middle-class
+education, he never noticed a capital Q W or S without recalling the
+Widow Susan's school, where he had wonderingly learnt the significance
+of those complicated characters.  The school consisted of the entire
+ground floor of her cottage, namely, one room, of which the far corner
+was occupied by a tiny winding staircase that led to the ancient widow's
+bedchamber.  The furniture comprised a few low forms for scholars, a
+table, and a chair; and there were some brilliant coloured prints on the
+whitewashed walls.  At this school Darius acquired a knowledge of the
+alphabet, and from the alphabet passed to Reading-Made-Easy, and then to
+the Bible.  He made such progress that the widow soon singled him out
+for honour.  He was allowed the high and envied privilege of raking the
+ashes from under the fire-place and carrying them to the ash-pit, which
+ash-pit was vast and lofty, being the joint production of many cottages.
+To reach the summit of the ash-pit, and thence to fling backwards down
+its steep sides all assailants who challenged your supremacy, was a
+precious joy.  The battles of the ash-pit, however, were not battles of
+giants, as no children had leisure for ash-carrying after the age of
+seven.  A still greater honour accorded to Darius was permission to sit,
+during lessons, on the topmost visible step of the winding stair.  The
+widow Susan, having taught Darius to read brilliantly, taught him to
+knit, and he would knit stockings for his father, mother, and sister.
+
+At the age of seven, his education being complete, he was summoned into
+the world.  It is true that he could neither write nor deal with the
+multiplication table; but there were always night-schools which studious
+adults of seven and upwards might attend if business permitted.
+Further, there was the Sunday school, which Darius had joyously
+frequented since the age of three, and which he had no intention of
+leaving.  As he grew older the Sunday school became more and more
+enchanting to him.  Sunday morning was the morning which he lived for
+during six days; it was the morning when his hair was brushed and
+combed, and perfumed with a delightful oil, whose particular fragrance
+he remembered throughout his life.  At Sunday school he was petted and
+caressed.  His success at Sunday school was shining.  He passed over the
+heads of bigger boys, and at the age of six he was in a Bible class.
+
+Upon hearing that Darius was going out into the world, the
+superintendent of the Sunday school, a grave whiskered young man of
+perhaps thirty, led him one morning out of the body of the Primitive
+Methodist Chapel which served as schoolroom before and after chapel
+service, up into the deserted gallery of the chapel, and there seated
+him on a stair, and knelt on the stair below him, and caressed his head,
+and called him a good boy, and presented him with an old battered Bible.
+This volume was the most valuable thing that Darius had ever possessed.
+He ran all the way home with it, half suffocated by his triumph.
+Sunday school prizes had not then been invented.  The young
+superintendent of the Sunday school was Mr Shushions.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+The man Darius was first taken to work by his mother.  It was the winter
+of 1835, January.  They passed through the marketplace of the town of
+Turnhill where they lived.  Turnhill lies a couple of miles north of
+Bursley.  One side of the market-place was barricaded with stacks of
+coal, and the other with loaves of a species of rye and straw bread.
+This coal and these loaves were being served out by meticulous and
+haughty officials, all invisibly, braided with red-tape, to a crowd of
+shivering, moaning, and weeping wretches, men, women and children--the
+basis of the population of Turnhill.  Although they were all
+endeavouring to make a noise they made scarcely any noise, from mere
+lack of strength.  Nothing could be heard, under the implacable bright
+sky, but faint ghosts of sound, as though people were sighing and crying
+from within the vacuum of a huge glass bell.
+
+The next morning, at half-past five, Darius began his career in earnest.
+He was `mould-runner' to a `muffin-maker,' a muffin being not a
+comestible but a small plate, fashioned by its maker on a mould.  The
+business of Darius was to run as hard as he could with the mould, and a
+newly, created plate adhering thereto, into the drying-stove.  This
+`stove' was a room lined with shelves, and having a red-hot stove and
+stove-pipe in the middle.  As no man of seven could reach the upper
+shelves, a pair of steps was provided for Darius, and up these he had to
+scamper.  Each mould with its plate had to be leaned carefully against
+the wall and if the soft clay of a new-born plate was damaged, Darius
+was knocked down.  The atmosphere outside the stove was chill, but owing
+to the heat of the stove, Darius was obliged to work half naked.  His
+sweat ran down his cheeks, and down his chest, and down his back, making
+white channels, and lastly it soaked his hair.
+
+When there were no moulds to be sprinted into the drying-stove, and no
+moulds to be carried less rapidly out, Darius was engaged in
+clay-wedging.  That is to say, he took a piece of raw clay weighing more
+than himself, cut it in two with a wire, raised one half above his head
+and crashed it down with all his force upon the other half, and he
+repeated the process until the clay was thoroughly soft and even in
+texture.  At a later period it was discovered that hydraulic machinery
+could perform this operation more easily and more effectually than the
+brawny arms of a man of seven.  At eight o'clock in the evening Darius
+was told that he had done enough for that day, and that he must arrive
+at five sharp the next morning to light the fire, before his master the
+muffin-maker began to work.  When he inquired how he was to light the
+fire his master kicked him jovially on the thigh and suggested that he
+should ask another mould-runner.  His master was not a bad man at heart,
+it was said, but on Tuesdays, after Sunday, and Saint Monday, masters
+were apt to be capricious.
+
+Darius reached home at a quarter to nine, having eaten nothing but bread
+all day.  Somehow he had lapsed into the child again.  His mother took
+him on her knee, and wrapped her sacking apron round his ragged clothes,
+and cried over him and cried into his supper of porridge, and undressed
+him and put him to bed.  But he could not sleep easily because he was
+afraid of being late the next morning.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+And the next morning wandering about the yards of the manufactory in a
+storm of icy sleet a little before five o'clock, he learnt from a more
+experienced companion that nobody would provide him with kindling for
+his fire, that on the contrary everybody who happened to be on the place
+at that hour would unite to prevent him from getting kindling, and that
+he must steal it or expect to be thrashed before six o'clock.  Near them
+a vast kiln of ware in process of firing showed a white flaming glow at
+each of its mouths in the black winter darkness.  Darius's mentor crept
+up to the archway of the great hovel which protected the kiln, and
+pointed like a conspirator to the figure of the guardian fireman dozing
+near his monster.  The boy had the handle-less remains of an old spade,
+and with it he crept into the hovel, dangerously abstracted fire from
+one of the scorching mouths, and fled therewith, and the fireman never
+stirred.  Then Darius, to whom the mentor kindly lent his spade,
+attempted to do the same, but being inexpert woke the fireman, who held
+him spellbound by his roaring voice and then flung him like a sack of
+potatoes bodily into the slush of the yard, and the spade after him.
+Happily the mentor, whose stove was now alight, lent fire to Darius, so
+that Darius's stove too was cheerfully burning when his master came.
+And Darius was too excited to feel fatigue.
+
+By six o'clock on Saturday night Darius had earned a shilling for his
+week's work.  But he could only possess himself of the shilling by going
+to a magnificent public-house with his master the muffin-maker.  This
+was the first time that he had ever been inside a public-house.  The
+place was crowded with men, women, and children eating the most lovely,
+hot rolls and drinking beer, in an atmosphere exquisitely warm.  And
+behind a high counter a stout jolly man was counting piles and piles and
+piles of silver.  Darius's master, in company, with other boys' masters,
+gave this stout man four sovereigns to change, and it was an hour before
+he changed them.  Meanwhile Darius was instructed that he must eat a
+roll like the rest, together with cheese.  Never had he tasted anything
+so luscious.  He had a match with his mentor, as to which of them could
+spin out his roll the longer, honestly chewing all the time; and he won.
+Some one gave him half a glass of beer.  At half-past seven he received
+his shilling which consisted of a sixpenny-piece and four pennies; and
+leaving the gay, public-house, pushed his way through a crowd of tearful
+women with babies in their arms at the doors, and went home.  And such
+was the attraction of the Sunday school that he was there the next
+morning, with scented hair, two minutes before the opening.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+In about a year Darius's increasing knowledge of the world enabled him
+to rise in it.  He became a handle-maker in another manufactory, and
+also he went about with the pride of one who could form the letters of
+the alphabet with a pen.  In his new work he had to put a bit of clay
+between two moulds, and then force the top mould on to the bottom one by
+means of his stomach which it was necessary to press downwards and at
+the same time to wriggle with a peculiar movement.  The workman to whom
+he was assigned, his new `master,' attached these handles, with strange
+rapid skill, to beer-mugs.  For Darius the labour was much lighter than
+that of mould-running and clay-wedging, and the pay was somewhat higher.
+But there were minor disadvantages.  He descended by twenty steps to
+his toil, and worked in a long cellar which never received any air
+except by way of the steps and a passage, and never any daylight at all.
+Its sole illumination was a stove used for drying.  The `throwers'' and
+the `turners'' rooms were also subterranean dungeons.  When in full
+activity all these stinking cellars were full of men, boys, and young
+women, working close together in a hot twilight.  Certain boys were
+trained contrabandists of beer, and beer came as steadily into the
+dungeons as though it had been laid on by a main pipe.  It was not
+honourable even on the part of a young woman, to refuse beer,
+particularly when the beer happened to arrive in the late afternoon.  On
+such occasions young men and women would often entirely omit to go home
+of a night, and seasoned men of the world aged eight, on descending into
+the dungeons early the next morning, would have a full view of
+pandemonium, and they would witness during the day salutary scenes of
+remorse, and proofs of the existence of a profound belief in the
+homeopathic properties of beer.
+
+But perhaps the worst drawback of Darius's new position was the long and
+irregular hours, due partly to the influences of Saint Monday and of the
+scenes above indicated but not described, and partly to the fact that
+the employes were on piece-work and entirely unhampered by grandmotherly
+legislation.  The result was that six days' work was generally done in
+four.  And as the younger the workman the earlier he had to start in the
+morning, Darius saw scarcely enough of his bed.  It was not of course to
+be expected that a self-supporting man of the world should rigorously
+confine himself to an eight-hour day or even a twelve-hour day, but
+Darius's day would sometimes stretch to eighteen and nineteen hours:
+which on hygienic grounds could not be unreservedly defended.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+One Tuesday evening his master, after three days of debauch, ordered him
+to be at work at three o'clock the next morning.  He quickly and even
+eagerly agreed, for he was already intimate with his master's rope-lash.
+He reached home at ten o'clock on an autumn night, and went to bed and
+to sleep.  He woke up with a start, in the dark.  There was no watch or
+clock in the house, from which nearly all the furniture had gradually
+vanished, but he knew it must be already after three o'clock; and he
+sprang up and rushed out.  Of course he had not undressed; his life was
+too strenuous for mere formalities.  The stars shone above him as he ran
+along, wondering whether after all, though late, he could by
+unprecedented effort make the ordained number of handles before his
+master tumbled into the cellar at five o'clock.
+
+When he had run a mile he met some sewage men on their rounds, who in
+reply, to his question told him that the hour was half after midnight.
+He dared not risk a return to home and bed, for within two and a half
+hours he must be at work.  He wandered aimlessly over the surface of the
+earth until he came to a tile-works, more or less unenclosed, whose
+primitive ovens showed a glare.  He ventured within, and in spite of
+himself sat down on the ground near one of those heavenly ovens.  And
+then he wanted to get up again, for he could feel the strong breath of
+his enemy, sleep.  But he could not get up.  In a state of terror he
+yielded himself to his enemy.  Shameful cowardice on the part of a man
+now aged nine!  God, however, is merciful, and sent to him an angel in
+the guise of a night-watchman, who kicked him into wakefulness and off
+the place.  He ran on limping, beneath the stellar systems, and reached
+his work at half-past four o'clock.
+
+Although he had never felt so exhausted in his long life, he set to work
+with fury.  Useless!  When his master arrived he had scarcely got
+through the preliminaries.  He dully faced his master in the narrow
+stifling cellar, lit by candles impaled on nails and already peopled by
+the dim figures of boys, girls, and a few men.  His master was of
+taciturn habit and merely told him to kneel down.  He knelt.  Two bigger
+boys turned hastily from their work to snatch a glimpse of the affair.
+The master moved to the back of the cellar and took from a box a piece
+of rope an inch thick and clogged with clay.  At the same moment a
+companion offered him, in silence, a tin with a slim neck, out of which
+he drank deep; it contained a pint of porter owing on loan from the
+previous day.  When the master came in due course with the rope to do
+justice upon the sluggard he found the lad fallen forward and breathing
+heavily and regularly.  Darius had gone to sleep.  He was awakened with
+some violence, but the public opinion of the dungeon saved him from a
+torn shirt and a bloody back.
+
+This was Darius's last day on a pot-bank.  The next morning he and his
+went in procession to the Bastille, as the place was called.  His
+father, having been too prominent and too independent in a strike, had
+been black-listed by every manufacturer in the district; and Darius,
+though nine, could not keep the family.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FIVE.
+
+MR. SHUSHIONS'S TEAR EXPLAINED.
+
+The Bastille was on the top of a hill about a couple of miles long, and
+the journey thither was much lengthened by the desire of the family to
+avoid the main road.  They were all intensely ashamed; Darius was
+ashamed to tears, and did not know why; even his little sister wept and
+had to be carried, not because she was shoeless and had had nothing to
+eat, but because she was going to the Ba-ba-bastille; she had no notion
+what the place was.  It proved to be the largest building that Darius
+had ever seen; and indeed it was the largest in the district; they stood
+against its steep sides like flies against a kennel.  Then there was
+rattling of key-bunches, and the rasping voices of sour officials, who
+did not inquire if they would like a meal after their stroll.  And they
+were put into a cellar and stripped and washed and dressed in other
+people's clothes, and then separated, amid tears.  And Darius was
+pitched into a large crowd of other boys, all clothed like himself.  He
+now understood the reason for shame; it was because he could have no
+distinctive clothes of his own, because he had somehow lost his identity.
+All the boys had a sullen, furtive glance, and when they spoke it was in
+whispers.
+
+In the low room where the boys were assembled there fell a silence, and
+Darius heard some one whisper that the celebrated boy who had run away
+and been caught would be flogged before supper.  Down the long room ran
+a long table.  Some one brought in three candles in tin candlesticks and
+set them near the end of this table.  Then somebody else brought in a
+pickled birch-rod, dripping with the salt water from which it had been
+taken, and also a small square table.  Then came some officials, and a
+clergyman, and then, surpassing the rest in majesty, the governor of the
+Bastille, a terrible man.  The governor made a speech about the crime of
+running away from the Bastille, and when he had spoken for a fair time,
+the clergyman talked in the same sense; and then a captured tiger,
+dressed like a boy, with darting fierce eyes, was dragged in by two men,
+and laid face down on the square table, and four boys were commanded to
+step forward and hold tightly the four members of this tiger.  And, his
+clothes having previously been removed as far as his waist, his breeches
+were next pulled down his legs.  Then the rod was raised and it
+descended swishing, and blood began to flow; but far more startling than
+the blood were the shrill screams of the tiger; they were so loud and
+deafening that the spectators could safely converse under their shelter.
+The boys in charge of the victim had to cling hard and grind their
+teeth in the effort to keep him prone.  As the blows succeeded each
+other, Darius became more and more ashamed.  The physical spectacle did
+not sicken nor horrify him, for he was a man of wide experience; but he
+had never before seen flogging by lawful authority.  Flogging in the
+workshop was different, a private if sanguinary affair between free
+human beings.  This ritualistic and cold-blooded torture was infinitely
+more appalling in its humiliation.  The screaming grew feebler, then
+ceased; then the blows ceased, and the unconscious infant (cured of
+being a tiger) was carried away leaving a trail of red drops along the
+floor.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+After this, supper was prepared on the long table, and the clergyman
+called down upon it the blessing of God, and enjoined the boys to be
+thankful, and departed in company with the governor.  Darius, who had
+not tasted all day, could not eat.  The flogging had not nauseated him,
+but the bread and the skilly revolted his pampered tastes.  Never had
+he, with all his experience, seen nor smelt anything so foully
+disgusting.  When supper was completed, a minor official interceded with
+the Almighty in various ways for ten minutes, and at last the boys were
+marched upstairs to bed.  They all slept in one room.  The night also
+could be set down in words, but must not be, lest the setting-down
+should be disastrous...
+
+Darius knew that he was ruined; he knew that he was a workhouse boy for
+evermore, and that the bright freedom of sixteen hours a day in a cellar
+was lost to him for evermore.  He was now a prisoner, branded, hopeless.
+He would never be able to withstand the influences that had closed
+around him and upon him.  He supposed that he should become desperate,
+become a tiger, and then...
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+But the following afternoon he was forcibly reclothed in his own
+beautiful and beloved rags, and was pushed out of the Bastille, and
+there he saw his pale father and his mother, and his little sister, and
+another man.  And his mother was on her knees in the cold autumn
+sunshine, and hysterically clasping the knees of the man, and weeping;
+and the man was trying to raise her, and the man was weeping too.
+Darius wept.  The man was Mr Shushions.  Somehow, in a way that Darius
+comprehended not, Mr Shushions had saved them.  Mr Shushions, in a
+beaver tall-hat and with an apron rolled round his waist under his coat,
+escorted them back to their house, into which some fresh furniture had
+been brought.  And Darius knew that a situation was waiting for his
+father.  And further, Mr Shushions, by his immense mysterious power,
+found a superb situation for Darius himself as a printer's devil.  All
+this because Mr Shushions, as superintendent of a Sunday school, was
+emotionally interested in the queer, harsh boy who had there picked up
+the art of writing so quickly.
+
+Such was the origin of the tear that ran down Mr Shushions's cheek when
+he beheld Edwin, well-nourished, well-dressed and intelligent, the son
+of Darius the successful steam-printer.  Mr Shushions's tear was the
+tear of the creator looking upon his creation and marvelling at it.  Mr
+Shushions loved Darius as only the benefactor can love the benefited.
+He had been out of the district for over thirty years, and, having
+returned there to die, the wonder of what he had accomplished by merely
+saving a lad from the certain perdition of a prolonged stay in the
+workhouse, struck him blindingly in the face and dazzled him.
+
+Darius had never spoken to a soul of his night in the Bastille.  All his
+infancy was his own fearful secret.  His life, seen whole, had been a
+miracle.  But none knew that except himself and Mr Shushions.
+Assuredly Edwin never even faintly suspected it.  To Edwin Mr Shushions
+was nothing but a feeble and tedious old man.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SIX.
+
+IN THE HOUSE.
+
+To return to Edwin.  On that Friday afternoon of the breaking-up he was,
+in the local phrase, at a loose end.  That is, he had no task, no
+programme, and no definite desires.  Not knowing, when he started out in
+the morning, whether school would formally end before or after the
+dinner-hour, he had taken his dinner with him, as usual, and had eaten
+it at Oldcastle.  Thus, though the family dinner had not begun when he
+reached home, he had no share in it, partly because he was not hungry,
+and partly because he was shy about having left school.  The fact that
+he had left school affected him as he was affected by the wearing of a
+new suit for the first time, or by the cutting of his hair after a
+prolonged neglect of the barber.  It inspired him with a wish to avoid
+his kind, and especially his sisters, Maggie and Clara.  Clara might
+make some facetious remark.  Edwin could never forget the Red Indian
+glee with which Clara had danced round him when for the first time--and
+quite unprepared for the exquisite shock--she had seen him in long
+trousers.  There was also his father.  He wanted to have a plain talk
+with his father--he knew that he would not be at peace until he had had
+that talk--and yet in spite of himself he had carefully kept out of his
+father's way during all the afternoon, save for a moment when, strolling
+with affected nonchalance up to Darius's private desk in the shop, he
+had dropped thereon his school report, and strolled off again.
+
+Towards six o'clock he was in his bedroom, an attic with a floor very
+much more spacious than its ceiling, and a window that commanded the
+slope of Trafalgar Road towards Bleakridge.  It had been his room, his
+castle, his sanctuary, for at least ten years, since before his mother's
+death of cancer.  He did not know that he loved it, with all its
+inconveniences and makeshifts; but he did love it, and he was jealous
+for it; no one should lay a hand on it to rearrange what he had once
+arranged.  His sisters knew this; the middle-aged servant knew it; even
+his father, with a curt laugh, would humorously acquiesce in the theory
+of the sacredness of Edwin's bedroom.  As for Edwin, he saw nothing
+extraordinary in his attitude concerning his bedroom; and he could not
+understand, and he somewhat resented, that the household should perceive
+anything comic in it.  He never went near his sisters' bedroom, never
+wished to go near it, never thought about it.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Now he sat idly on the patchwork counterpane of his bed and gazed at the
+sky.  He was feeling a little happier, a little less unsettled, for his
+stomach was empty and his mind had begun to fix itself with pleasure on
+the images of hot toast and jam.  He `wanted his tea:' the manner in
+which he glanced at his old silver watch proved that.  He wished only
+that before six o'clock struck he could settle upon the necessary
+changes in his bedroom.  A beautiful schooner, which for over a year,
+with all sails spread, had awaited the breeze in a low dark corner to
+the right of the window, would assuredly have to be dismissed to the
+small, empty attic.  Once that schooner had thrilled him; the slight
+rake of its masts and the knotted reality of its rigging had thrilled
+him; and to navigate it had promised the most delicious sensations
+conceivable.  Now, one moment it was a toy as silly as a doll, and the
+next moment it thrilled him once more, and he could believe again its
+promises of bliss--and then he knew that it was for ever a vain toy, and
+he was sad, and his sadness was pleasure.  He had already stacked most
+of his school-books in the other attic.  He would need a table and a
+lamp; he knew not for what precise purpose; but a table and a lamp were
+necessary to the continuance of his self-respect.  The only question
+was, Should he remodel his bedroom, or should he demand the other attic,
+and plant his flag in it and rule over it in addition to his bedroom?
+Had he the initiative and the energy to carry out such an enterprise?
+He was not able to make up his mind.  And, moreover, he could not decide
+anything until after that plain talk with his father.
+
+His sister Clara's high voice sounded outside, on the landing, or
+half-way up the attic stairs.
+
+"Ed-_win_!  Ed-_win_!"
+
+"What's up?" he called in answer, rising with a nervous start.  The door
+of the room was unlatched.
+
+"You're mighty mysterious in your bedroom," said Clara's voice behind
+the door.
+
+"Come in!  Come in!  Why don't you come in?" he replied, with
+good-natured impatience.  But somehow he could not speak in a natural
+tone.  The mere fact that he had left school that day and that the world
+awaited him, and that everybody in the house knew this, rendered him
+self-conscious.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Clara entered, with a curious sidelong movement, half-winning and
+half-serpentine.  She was aged fourteen, a very fair and very slight
+girl, with a thin face and thin lips, and extraordinarily slender hands;
+in general appearance fragile.  She wore a semi-circular comb on the
+crown of her head, and her abundant hair hung over her shoulders in two
+tight pigtails.  Edwin considered that Clara was harsh and capricious;
+he had much fault to find with her; but nevertheless the sight of her
+usually affected him pleasurably (of course without his knowing it), and
+he never for long sat definitely in adverse judgement upon her.  Her
+gestures had a charm for him which he felt but did not realise.  And
+this charm was similar to his own charm.  But nothing would have so
+surprised him as to learn that he himself had any charm at all.  He
+would have laughed, and been ashamed--to hear that his gestures and the
+play of his features had an ingratiating, awkward, and wistful grace; he
+would have tried to cure that.
+
+"Father wants you," said Clara, her hand on the handle of the thin
+attic-door hung with odd garments.
+
+Edwin's heart fell instantly, and all the agreeable images of tea
+vanished from his mind.  His father must have read the school report and
+perceived that Edwin had been beaten by Charlie Orgreave, a boy younger
+than himself!
+
+"Did he send you up for me?"  Edwin asked.
+
+"No," said Clara, frowning.  "But I heard him calling out for you all
+over.  So Maggie told me to run up.  Not that I expect any _thanks_."  She
+put her head forward a little.
+
+The episode, and Clara's tone, showed clearly the nature and force of
+the paternal authority in the house.  It was an authority with the gift
+of getting its commands anticipated.
+
+"All right!  I'm coming," said Edwin superiorly.
+
+"I know what you want," Clara said teasingly as she turned towards the
+passage.
+
+"What do I want?"
+
+"You want the empty attic all to yourself, and a fine state it would be
+in in a month, my word!"
+
+"How do you know I want the empty attic?"  Edwin repelled the onslaught;
+but he was considerably taken aback.  It was a mystery to him how those
+girls, and Clara in particular, got wind of his ideas before he had even
+formulated them definitely to himself.  It was also a mystery to him how
+they could be so tremendously interested in matters which did not
+concern them.
+
+"You never mind!"  Clara gibed, with a smile that was malicious, but
+charmingly malicious.  "I know!"
+
+She had merely seen him staring into the empty attic, and from that
+brief spectacle she had by divination constructed all his plans.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+The Clayhanger sitting-room, which served as both dining-room and
+drawing-room, according to the more primitive practices of those days,
+was over one half of the shop, and looked on Duck Square.  Owing to its
+northern aspect it scarcely ever saw the sun.  The furniture followed
+the universal fashion of horse-hair, mahogany, and wool embroidery.
+There was a piano, with a high back-fretted wood over silk pleated in
+rays from the centre; a bookcase whose lower part was a cupboard; a
+sofa; and a large leather easy-chair which did not match the rest of the
+room.  This easy-chair had its back to the window and its front legs a
+little towards the fireplace, so that Mr Clayhanger could read his
+newspaper with facility in daytime.  At night the light fell a little
+awkwardly from the central chandelier, and Mr Clayhanger, if he
+happened to be reading, would continually shift his chair an inch or two
+to left or right, backwards or forwards, and would also continually
+glance up at the chandelier, as if accusing it of not doing its best.  A
+common sight in the sitting-room was Mr Clayhanger balanced on a chair,
+the table having been pushed away, screwing the newest burner into the
+chandelier.  When he was seated in his easy-chair the piano could not be
+played, because there was not sufficient space for the stool between the
+piano and his chair; nor could the fire be made up without disturbing
+him, because the japanned coal-box was on the same side of the
+hearth-rug as the chair.  Thus, when the fire languished and Mr
+Clayhanger neglected it, the children had either to ask permission to
+step over his legs, or suggest that he should attend to the fire
+himself.  Occasionally, when he was in one of his gay moods, he would
+humorously impede the efforts of the fire-maker with his feet, and if
+the fire-maker was Clara or Edwin, the child would tickle him, which
+brought him to his senses and forced him to shout: "None o' that!  None
+o' that!"
+
+The position of Mr Clayhanger's easy-chair--a detail apparently
+trifling--was in reality a strongly influencing factor in the family
+life, for it meant that the father's presence obsessed the room.  And it
+could not be altered, for it depended on the window; the window was too
+small to be quite efficient.  When the children reflected upon the
+history of their childhood they saw one important aspect of it as a long
+series of detached hours spent in the sitting-room, in a state of desire
+to do something that could not be done without disturbing father, and in
+a state of indecision whether or not to disturb him.  If by chance, as
+sometimes occurred, he chose to sit on the sofa, which was unobtrusive
+in the corner away from the window, between the fireplace and the door,
+the room was instantly changed into something larger, freer, and less
+inconvenient.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+As the hour was approaching six, Edwin, on the way downstairs, looked in
+at the sitting-room for his father; but Darius was not there.
+
+"Where's father?" he demanded.
+
+"I don't know, I'm sure," said Maggie, at the sewing-machine.  Maggie
+was aged twenty; dark, rather stout, with an expression at once
+benevolent and worried.  She rarely seemed to belong to the same
+generation as her brother and sister.  She consorted on equal terms with
+married women, and talked seriously of the same things as they did.  Mr
+Clayhanger treated her somewhat differently from the other two.  Yet,
+though he would often bid them accept her authority, he would now and
+then impair that authority by roughly `dressing her down' at the
+meal-table.  She was a capable girl; she had much less firmness, and
+much more good-nature, than she seemed to have.  She could not assert
+herself adequately.  She `managed' very well; indeed she had `done
+wonders' in filling the place of the mother who had died when Clara was
+four and Edwin six, and she herself only ten.  Responsibility,
+apprehension, and strained effort had printed their marks on her
+features.  But the majority of acquaintances were more impressed by her
+good intention than by her capacity; they would call her `a nice thing.'
+The discerning minority, while saying with admiring conviction that she
+was `a very fine girl,' would regret that somehow she had not the
+faculty of `making the best of herself,' of `putting her best foot
+foremost.'  And would they not heartily stand up for her with the
+superficial majority!
+
+A thin, grey-haired, dreamy-eyed woman hurried into the room, bearing a
+noisy tray and followed by Clara with a white cloth.  This was Mrs
+Nixon, the domestic staff of the Clayhanger household for years.  Clara
+and Mrs Nixon swept Maggie's sewing materials from the corner of the
+table on to a chair, put Maggie's flower-glasses on to the ledge of the
+bookcase, folded up the green cloth, and began rapidly to lay the tea.
+Simultaneously Maggie, glancing at the clock, closed up her
+sewing-machine, and deposited her work in a basket.  Clara, leaving the
+table, stooped to pick up the bits of cotton and white stuff that
+littered the carpet.  The clock struck six.
+
+"Now, sharpy!" she exclaimed curtly to Edwin, who stood hesitatingly
+with his hands in his pockets.  "Can't you help Maggie to push that
+sewing-machine into the corner?"
+
+"What on earth's up?" he inquired vaguely, but starting forward to help
+Maggie.
+
+"_She'll_ be here in a minute," said Maggie, almost under her breath, as
+she fitted on the cover of the sewing-machine.
+
+"Who?" asked Edwin.  "Oh!  Auntie!  I'd forgotten it was her night."
+
+"As if anyone could forget!" murmured Clara, with sarcastic unbelief.
+
+By this time the table was completely set.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+Edwin wondered mildly, as he often wondered, at the extremely bitter
+tone in which Clara always referred to their Aunt Clara Hamps,--when
+Mrs Hamps was not there.  Even Maggie's private attitude to Auntie
+Clara was scarcely more Christian.  Mrs Hamps was the widowed younger
+sister of their mother, and she had taken a certain share in the
+supervision of Darius Clayhanger's domestic affairs after the death of
+Mrs Clayhanger.  This latter fact might account, partially but not
+wholly, for the intense and steady dislike in which she was held by
+Maggie, Clara, and Mrs Nixon.  Clara hated her own name because she had
+been `called after' her auntie.  Mr Clayhanger `got on' excellently
+with his sister-in-law.  He `thought highly' of her, and was indeed
+proud to have her for a relative.  In their father's presence the girls
+never showed their dislike of Mrs Hamps; it was a secret pleasure
+shared between them and Mrs Nixon, and only disclosed to Edwin because
+the girls were indifferent to what Edwin might think.  They casually
+despised him for somehow liking his auntie, for not seeing through her
+wiles; but they could count on his loyalty to themselves.
+
+"Are you ready for tea, or aren't you?"  Clara asked him.  She
+frequently spoke to him as if she was the elder instead of the younger.
+
+"Yes," he said.  "But I must find father."
+
+He went off, but he did not find his father in the shop, and after a few
+futile minutes he returned upstairs.  Mrs Nixon preceded him, carrying
+the tea-urn, and she told him that his father had sent word into the
+kitchen that they were not to `wait tea' for him.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SEVEN.
+
+AUNTIE HAMPS.
+
+Mrs Hamps had splendidly arrived.  The atmosphere of the sitting-room
+was changed.  Maggie, smiling, wore her second-best black silk apron.
+Clara, smiling and laughing, wore a clean long white pinafore.  Mrs
+Nixon, with her dreamy eyes less vacant than usual, greeted Mrs Hamps
+effusively, and effusively gave humble thanks for kind inquiries after
+her health.  A stranger might have thought that these women were
+strongly attached to one another by ties of affection and respect.
+Edwin never understood how his sisters, especially Maggie, could
+practise such vast and eternal hypocrisy with his aunt.  As for him, his
+aunt acted on him now, as generally, like a tonic.  Some effluence from
+her quickened him.  He put away the worry in connection with his father,
+and gave himself up to the physical pleasures of tea.
+
+Aunt Clara was a handsome woman.  She had been called--but not by men
+whose manners and code she would have approved--`a damned fine woman.'
+Her age was about forty, which at that period, in a woman's habit of
+mind, was the equivalent of about fifty to-day.  Her latest photograph
+was considered to be very successful.  It showed her standing behind a
+velvet chair and leaning her large but still shapely bust slightly over
+the chair.  Her forearms, ruffled and braceleted, lay along the fringed
+back of the chair, and from one negligent hand depended a rose.  A heavy
+curtain came downwards out of nothing into the picture, and the end of
+it lay coiled and draped on the seat of the chair.  The great dress was
+of slate-coloured silk, with sleeves tight to the elbow, and thence,
+from a ribbon-bow, broadening to a wide, triangular climax that revealed
+quantities of lace at the wrists.  The pointed ends of the sleeves were
+picked out with squares of velvet.  A short and highly ornamental
+fringed and looped flounce waved grandly out behind from the waist to
+the level of the knees; and the stomacher recalled the ornamentation of
+the flounce; and both the stomacher and flounce gave contrasting value
+to the severe plainness of the skirt, designed to emphasise the quality
+of the silk.  Round the neck was a lace collarette to match the
+furniture of the wrists, and the broad ends of the collarette were
+crossed on the bosom and held by a large jet brooch.  Above that you saw
+a fine regular face, with a firm hard mouth and a very straight nose and
+dark eyebrows; small ears weighted with heavy jet ear-rings.
+
+The photograph could not render the clear perfection of Aunt Clara's
+rosy skin; she had the colour and the flashing eye of a girl.  But it
+did justice to her really magnificent black hair.  This hair was all her
+own, and the coiffure seemed as ample as a judge's wig.  From the low
+forehead the hair was parted exactly in the middle for about two inches;
+then plaited bands crossed and recrossed the scalp in profusion, forming
+behind a pattern exceedingly complicated, and down either side of the
+head, now behind the ear, now hiding it, now resting on the shoulders,
+now hanging clear of them, fell long multitudinous glossy curls.  These
+curls--one of them in the photograph reached as far as the stomacher--
+could not have been surpassed in Bursley.
+
+She was a woman of terrific vitality.  Her dead sister had been nothing
+in comparison with her.  She had a glorious digestion, and was the envy
+of her brother-in-law--who suffered much from biliousness--because she
+could eat with perfect impunity hot buttered toast and raw celery in
+large quantities.  Further, she had independent means, and no children
+to cause anxieties.  Yet she was always, as the phrase went, `bearing
+up,' or, as another phrase went, `leaning hard.'  Frances Ridley
+Havergal was her favourite author, and Frances Ridley Havergal's little
+book _Lean Hard_, was kept on her dressing-table.  (The girls, however,
+averred that she never opened it.)  Aunt Clara's spiritual life must be
+imagined as a continual, almost physical leaning on Christ.
+Nevertheless she never complained, and she was seldom depressed.  Her
+desire, and her achievement, was to be bright, to take everything
+cheerfully, to look obstinately on the best side of things, and to
+instil this religion into others.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Thus, when it was announced that father had been called out
+unexpectedly, leaving an order that they were not to wait for him, she
+said gaily that they had better be obedient and begin, though it would
+have been more agreeable to wait for father.  And she said how beautiful
+the tea was, and how beautiful the toast, and how beautiful the
+strawberry-jam, and how beautiful the pikelets.  She would herself pour
+some hot water into the slop basin, and put a pikelet on a plate
+thereon, covered, to keep warm for father.  She would not hear a word
+about the toast being a little hard, and when Maggie in her curious
+quiet way `stuck her out' that the toast was in fact hard, she said that
+that precise degree of hardness was the degree which she, for herself,
+preferred.  Then she talked of jams, and mentioned gooseberry-jam,
+whereupon Clara privately put her tongue out, with the quickness of a
+snake, to signal to Maggie.
+
+"Ours isn't good this year," said Maggie.
+
+"I told auntie we weren't so set up with it, a fortnight ago," said
+Clara simply, like a little angel.
+
+"Did you, dear?"  Mrs Hamps exclaimed, with great surprise, almost with
+shocked surprise.  "I'm sure it's beautiful.  I was quite looking
+forward to tasting it; quite!  I know what your gooseberry-jam is."
+
+"Would you like to try it now?"  Maggie suggested.  "But we've warned
+you."
+
+"Oh, I don't want to trouble you _now_.  We're all so cosy here.  Any
+time--"
+
+"No trouble, auntie," said Clara, with her most captivating and innocent
+smile.
+
+"Well, if you talk about `warning' me, of course I must insist on having
+some," said Auntie Clara.
+
+Clara jumped up, passed behind Mrs Hamps, making a contemptuous face at
+those curls as she did so, and ran gracefully down to the kitchen.
+
+"Here," she said crossly to Mrs Nixon.  "A pot of that gooseberry,
+please.  A small one will do.  She knows it's short of sugar, and so
+she's determined to try it, just out of spite; and nothing will stop
+her."
+
+Clara returned smiling to the tea-table, and Maggie neatly unsealed the
+jam; and Auntie Clara, with a face beaming with pleasurable
+anticipation, helped herself circumspectly to a spoonful.
+
+"Beautiful!" she murmured.
+
+"Don't you think it's a bit tart?"  Maggie asked.
+
+"Oh no!" protestingly.
+
+"_Don't_ you?" asked Clara, with an air of delighted deferential
+astonishment.
+
+"Oh _no_!"  Mrs Hamps repeated.  "It's beautiful!"  She did not smack her
+lips over it, because she would have considered it unladylike to smack
+her lips, but by less offensive gestures she sought to convey her
+unbounded pleasure in the jam.  "How much sugar did you put in?" she
+inquired after a while.  "Half and half?"
+
+"Yes," said Maggie.
+
+"They do say gooseberries were a tiny bit sour this year, owing to the
+weather," said Mrs Hamps reflectively.
+
+Clara kicked Edwin under the table, as it were viciously, but her
+delightful innocent smile, directed vaguely upon Mrs Hamps, did not
+relax.  Such duplicity passed Edwin's comprehension; it seemed to him
+purposeless.  Yet he could not quite deny that there might be a certain
+sting, a certain insinuation, in his auntie's last remark.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Then Mr Clayhanger entered, blowing forth a long breath as if trying to
+repulse the oppressive heat of the July afternoon.  He came straight to
+the table, with a slightly preoccupied air, quickly, his arms motionless
+at his sides, and slanting a little outwards.  Mr Clayhanger always
+walked like this, with motionless arms so that in spite of a rather
+clumsy and heavy step, the upper part of him appeared to glide along.
+He shook hands genially with Auntie Clara, greeting her almost as
+grandiosely as she greeted him, putting on for a moment the grand
+manner, not without dignity.  Each admired the other.  Each often said
+that the other was `wonderful.'  Each undoubtedly flattered the other,
+made a fuss of the other.  Mr Clayhanger's admiration was the greater.
+The bitterest thing that Edwin had ever heard Maggie say was: "It's
+something to be thankful for that she's his deceased wife's sister!"
+And she had said the bitter thing with such quiet bitterness!  Edwin had
+not instantly perceived the point of it.
+
+Darius Clayhanger then sat down, with a thud, snatched at the cup of tea
+which Maggie had placed before him, and drank half of it with a
+considerable in-drawing noise.  No one asked where or why he had been
+detained; it was not etiquette to do so.  If father had been `called
+away,' or had `had to go away,' or was `kept somewhere,' the details
+were out of deference allowed to remain in mystery, respected by
+curiosity ...  `Father-business.' ...  All business was sacred.  He
+himself had inculcated this attitude.
+
+In a short silence the sound of the bell that the carman rang before the
+tram started for Hanbridge floated in through the open window.
+
+"There's the tram!" observed Auntie Clara, apparently with warm and
+special interest in the phenomena of the tram.  Then another little
+silence.
+
+"Auntie," said Clara, writhing about youthfully on her chair.
+
+"Can't ye sit still a bit?" the father asked, interrupting her roughly,
+but with good humour.  "Ye'll be falling off th' chair in a minute."
+
+Clara blushed swiftly, and stopped.
+
+"Yes, love?"  Auntie Clara encouraged her.  It was as if Auntie Clara
+had said: "Your dear father is of course quite right, more than right,
+to insist on your sitting properly at table.  However, do not take the
+correction too much to heart.  I sympathise with all your difficulties."
+
+"I was only going to ask you," Clara went on, in a weaker, stammering
+voice, "if you knew that Edwin's left school to-day."  Her archness had
+deserted her.
+
+"Mischievous little thing!" thought Edwin.  "Why must she deliberately
+go and draw attention to that?"  And he too blushed, feeling as if he
+owed an apology to the company for having left school.
+
+"Oh yes!" said Auntie Clara with eager benevolence.  "I've got something
+to say about that to my nephew."
+
+Mr Clayhanger searched in a pocket of his alpaca, and drew forth an
+open envelope.
+
+"Here's the lad's report, auntie," said he.  "Happen ye'd like to look
+at it."
+
+"I should indeed!" she replied fervently.  "I'm sure it's a very good
+one."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+She took the paper, and assumed her spectacles.
+
+"Conduct--Excellent," she read, poring with enthusiasm over the
+document.  And she read again: "Conduct--Excellent."  Then she went down
+the list of subjects, declaiming the number of marks for each; and at
+the end she read: "Position in class next term: Third.  Splendid, Eddy!"
+she exclaimed.
+
+"I thought you were second," said Clara, in her sharp manner.
+
+Edwin blushed again, and hesitated.
+
+"Eh?  What's that?  What's that?" his father demanded.  "I didn't notice
+that.  Third?"
+
+"Charlie Orgreave beat me in the examination," Edwin muttered.
+
+"Well, that's a pretty how d'ye do!" said his father.  "Going down one!
+Ye ought to ha' been first instead o' third.  And would ha' been,
+happen, if ye'd pegged at it."
+
+"Now I won't have that!  I won't have it!"  Auntie Clara protested,
+laughingly showing her fine teeth and gazing first at Darius, and then
+at Edwin, from under her spectacles, her head being thrown back and the
+curls hanging far behind.  "No one shall say that Edwin doesn't work,
+not even his father, while his auntie's about!  Because I know he does
+work!  And besides, he hasn't gone down.  It says, `position _next
+term_'--not this term.  You were still second to-day, weren't you, my
+boy?"
+
+"I suppose so.  Yes," Edwin answered, pulling himself together.
+
+"Well!  There you are!"  Auntie Clara's voice rang triumphantly.  She
+was opening her purse.  "And _there_ you are!" she repeated, popping half
+a sovereign down in front of him.  "That's a little present from your
+auntie on your leaving school."
+
+"Oh, auntie!" he cried feebly.
+
+"Oh!" cried Clara, genuinely startled.
+
+Mrs Hamps was sometimes thus astoundingly munificent.  It was she who
+had given the schooner to Edwin.  And her presents of elaborately
+enveloped and costly toilet soap on the birthdays of the children, and
+at Christmas, were massive.  Yet Clara always maintained that she was
+the meanest old thing imaginable.  And Maggie had once said that she
+knew that Auntie Clara made her servant eat dripping instead of butter.
+To give inferior food to a servant was to Maggie the unforgivable in
+parsimony.
+
+"Well," Mr Clayhanger warningly inquired, "what do you say to your
+aunt?"
+
+"Thank you, auntie," Edwin sheepishly responded, fingering the coin.
+
+It was a princely sum.  And she had stuck up for him famously in the
+matter of the report.  Strange that his father should not have read the
+report with sufficient attention to remark the fall to third place!
+Anyway, that aspect of the affair was now safely over, and it seemed to
+him that he had not lost much prestige by it.  He would still be able to
+argue with his father on terms not too unequal, he hoped.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+As the tea drew to an end, and the plates of toast, bread and butter,
+and tea-cake grew emptier, and the slop-basin filled, and only Maggie's
+flowers remained fresh and immaculate amid the untidy debris of the
+meal; and as Edwin and Clara became gradually indifferent to jam, and
+then inimical to it; and as the sounds of the street took on the softer
+quality of summer evening, and the first filmy shades of twilight
+gathered imperceptibly in the corners of the room, and Mr Clayhanger
+performed the eructations which signified that he had had enough; so
+Mrs Hamps prepared herself for one of her classic outbursts of feeling.
+
+"Well!" she said at last, putting her spoon to the left of her cup as a
+final indication that seriously she would drink no more.  And she gave a
+great sigh.  "School over!  And the only son going out into the world!
+How time flies!"  And she gave another great sigh, implying an immense
+melancholy due to this vision of the reality of things.  Then she
+remembered her courage, and the device of leaning hard, and all her
+philosophy.
+
+"But it's all for the best!" she broke forth in a new brave tone.
+"Everything is ordered for the best.  We must never forget that!  And
+I'm quite sure that Edwin will be a very great credit to us all, with
+help from above."
+
+She proceeded powerfully in this strain.  She brought in God, Christ,
+and even the Holy Spirit.  She mentioned the dangers of the world, and
+the disguises of the devil, and the unspeakable advantages of a good
+home, and the special goodness of Mr Clayhanger and of Maggie, yes, and
+of her little Clara; and the pride which they all had in Edwin, and the
+unique opportunities which he had of doing good, by example, and also,
+soon, by precept, for others younger than himself would begin to look up
+to him; and again her personal pride in him, and her sure faith in him;
+and what a solemn hour it was...
+
+Nothing could stop her.  The girls loathed these exhibitions.  Maggie
+always looked at the table during their progress, and she felt as though
+she had done something wrong and was ashamed of it.  Clara not merely
+felt like a criminal--she felt like an unrepentant criminal; she
+blushed, she glanced nervously about the room, and all the time she
+repeated steadily in her heart a highly obscene word which she had heard
+at school.  This unspoken word, hurled soundlessly but savagely at her
+aunt in that innocent heart, afforded much comfort to Clara in the
+affliction.  Even Edwin, who was more lenient in all ways than his
+sisters, profoundly deplored these moralisings of his aunt.  They filled
+him with a desire to run fast and far, to be alone at sea, or to be deep
+somewhere in the bosom of the earth.  He could not understand this side
+of his auntie's individuality.  But there was no delivery from Mrs
+Hamps.  The only person who could possibly have delivered them seemed to
+enjoy the sinister thraldom.  Mr Clayhanger listened with appreciative
+and admiring nods; he appeared to be quite sincere.  And Edwin could not
+understand his father either.  "How simple father must be!" he thought
+vaguely.  Whereas Clara fatalistically dismissed her father's attitude
+as only one more of the preposterously unreasonable phenomena which she
+was constantly meeting in life; and she persevered grimly with her
+obscene word.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+"Eh!" said Mrs Hamps enthusiastically, after a trifling pause.  "It
+does me good when I think what a _help_ you'll be to your father in the
+business, with that clever head of yours."
+
+She gazed at him fondly.
+
+Now this was Edwin's chance.  He did not wish to be any help at all to
+his father in the business.  He had other plans for himself.  He had never
+mentioned them before, because his father had never talked to him about
+his future career, apparently assuming that he would go into the
+business.  He had been waiting for his father to begin.  "Surely," he
+had said to himself "father's bound to speak to me sometime about what
+I'm going to do, and when he does I shall just tell him."  But his
+father never had begun; and by timidity, negligence, and perhaps
+ill-luck, Edwin had thus arrived at his last day at school with the
+supreme question not merely unsolved but unattacked.  Oh he blamed
+himself!  Any ordinary boy (he thought) would have discussed such a
+question naturally long ago.  After all, it was not a crime, it was no
+cause for shame, to wish not to be a printer.  Yet he was ashamed!
+Absurd!  He blamed himself.  But he also blamed his father.  Now,
+however, in responding to his auntie's remark, he could remedy all the
+past by simply and boldly stating that he did not want to follow his
+father.  It would be unpleasant, of course, but the worst shock would be
+over in a moment, like the drawing of a tooth.  He had merely to utter
+certain words.  He must utter them.  They were perfectly easy to say,
+and they were also of the greatest urgency.  "I don't want to be a
+printer."  He mumbled them over in his mind.  "I don't want to be a
+printer."  What could it matter to his father whether he was a printer
+or not?  Seconds, minutes, seemed to pass.  He knew that if he was so
+inconceivably craven as to remain silent, his self-respect would never
+recover from the blow.  Then, in response to Mrs Hamps's prediction
+about his usefulness to his father in the business, he said, with a
+false-jaunty, unconvinced, unconvincing air--
+
+"Well, that remains to be seen."
+
+This was all he could accomplish.  It seemed as if he had looked death
+itself in the face, and drawn away.
+
+"Remains to be _seen_?"  Auntie Clara repeated, with a hint of startled
+pain, due to this levity.
+
+He was mute.  No one suspected, as he sat there, so boyish, wistful, and
+uneasily squirming, that he was agonised to the very centre of his
+being.  All the time, in his sweating soul, he kept trying to persuade
+himself: "I've given them a hint, anyhow!  I've given them a hint,
+anyhow!"
+
+"Them" included everybody at the table.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SEVEN.
+
+Mr Clayhanger, completely ignoring Edwin's reply to his aunt and her
+somewhat shocked repetition of it, turned suddenly towards his son and
+said, in a manner friendly but serious, a manner that assumed
+everything, a manner that begged the question, unconscious even that
+there was a question--
+
+"I shall be out the better part o' to-morrow.  I want ye to be sure to
+be in the shop all afternoon--I'll tell you what for downstairs."  It
+was characteristic of him thus to make a mystery of business in front of
+the women.
+
+Edwin felt the net closing about him.  Then he thought of one of those
+`posers' which often present themselves to youths of his age.
+
+"But to-morrow's Saturday," he said, perhaps perkily.  "What about the
+Bible class?"
+
+Six months previously a young minister of the Wesleyan Circuit, to whom
+Heaven had denied both a sense of humour and a sense of honour, had
+committed the infamy of starting a Bible class for big boys on Saturday
+afternoons.  This outrage had appalled and disgusted the boyhood of
+Wesleyanism in Bursley.  Their afternoon for games, their only fair
+afternoon in the desert of the week, to be filched from them and used
+against them for such an odious purpose as a Bible class!  Not only
+Sunday school on Sunday afternoon, but a Bible class on Saturday
+afternoon!  It was incredible.  It was unbearable.  It was gross
+tyranny, and nothing else.  Nevertheless the young minister had his way,
+by dint of meanly calling upon parents and invoking their help.  The
+scurvy worm actually got together a class of twelve to fifteen boys, to
+the end of securing their eternal welfare.  And they had to attend the
+class, though they swore they never would, and they had to sing hymns,
+and they had to kneel and listen to prayers, and they had to listen to
+the most intolerable tedium, and to take notes of it.  All this, while
+the sun was shining, or the rain was raining, on fields and streets and
+open spaces and ponds!
+
+Edwin had been trapped in the snare.  His father, after only three words
+from the young minister, had yielded up his son like a burnt sacrifice--
+and with a casual nonchalance that utterly confounded Edwin.  In vain
+Edwin had pointed out to his elders that a Saturday afternoon of
+confinement must be bad for his health.  His attention had been directed
+to his eternal health.  In vain he had pointed out that on wet Saturday
+afternoons he frequently worked at his home-lessons, which therefore
+might suffer under the regime of a Bible class.  His attention had been
+directed to the peace which passeth understanding.  So he had been
+beaten, and was secretly twitted by Clara as an abject victim.  Hence it
+was with a keen and peculiar feeling of triumph, of hopelessly cornering
+the inscrutable generation which a few months ago had cornered him, that
+he demanded, perhaps perkily: "What about the Bible class?"
+
+"There'll be no more Bible classing," said his father, with a mild but
+slightly sardonic smile, as who should say: "I'm ready to make all
+allowances for youth; but I must get you to understand, as gently as I
+can, that you can't keep on going to Bible classes for ever and ever."
+
+Mrs Hamps said--
+
+"It won't be as if you were at school.  But I do hope you won't neglect
+to study your Bible.  Eh, but I do hope you'll always find time for
+that, to your dying day!"
+
+"Oh--but I say--" Edwin began, and stopped.
+
+He was beaten by the mere effrontery of the replies.  His father and his
+aunt (the latter of whom at any rate was a firm and confessed
+religionist, who had been responsible for converting Mr Clayhanger from
+Primitive Methodism to Wesleyan Methodism) did not trouble to defend
+their new position by argument.  They made no effort to reconcile it
+with their position of a few months back, when the importance of
+heavenly welfare far exceeded the importance of any conceivable earthly
+welfare.  The fact was that they had no argument.  If God took
+precedence of knowledge and of health, he took precedence of a peddling
+shop!  That was unanswerable.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+EIGHT.
+
+Edwin was dashed.  His faith in humanity was dashed.  These elders were
+not sincere.  And as Mrs Hamps continued to embroider the original
+theme of her exhortation about the Bible, Edwin looked at her
+stealthily, and the doubt crossed his mind whether that majestic and
+vital woman was ever sincere about anything, even to herself--whether
+the whole of her daily existence, from her getting-up to her down-lying,
+was not a grandiose pretence.
+
+Not that he had the least desire to cling to the Bible class, even as an
+alternative to the shop!  No!  He was much relieved to be rid of the
+Bible class.  What overset him was the crude illogicality of the new
+decree, and the shameless tacit admission of previous insincerity.
+
+Two hours later, as he stood idly at the window of his bedroom, watching
+the gas lamps of Trafalgar Road wax brighter in the last glooms of
+twilight, he was still occupied with the sham and the unreason and the
+lack of scruple suddenly revealed in the life of the elder generation.
+Unconsciously imitating a trick of his father's when annoyed but calm,
+he nodded his head several times, and with his tongue against his teeth
+made the noise which in writing is represented by `tut-tut.'  Yet
+somehow he had always known that it would be so.  At bottom, he was only
+pretending to himself to be shocked and outraged.
+
+His plans were no further advanced; indeed they were put back, for this
+Saturday afternoon vigil in the shop would be in some sort a symbolic
+temporary defeat for him.  Why had he not spoken out clearly?  Why was
+he always like a baby in presence of his father?  The future was all
+askew for him.  He had forgotten his tremendous serious resolves.  The
+touch of the half-sovereign in his pocket, however, was comforting in a
+universe of discomfort.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER EIGHT.
+
+IN THE SHOP.
+
+"Here, lad!" said his father to Edwin, as soon as he had scraped up the
+last crumbs of cheese from his plate at the end of dinner on the
+following day.
+
+Edwin rose obediently and followed him out of the room.  Having waited
+at the top of the stairs until his father had reached the foot, he
+leaned forward as far as he could with one hand on the rail and the
+other pressing against the wall, swooped down to the mat at the bottom,
+without touching a single step on the way, and made a rocket-like noise
+with his mouth. He had no other manner of descending the staircase,
+unless he happened to be in disgrace.  His father went straight to the
+desk in the corner behind the account-book window, assumed his
+spectacles, and lifted the lid of the desk.
+
+"Here!" he said, in a low voice.  "Mr Enoch Peake is stepping in this
+afternoon to look at this here."  He displayed the proof--an unusually
+elaborate wedding card, which announced the marriage of Mr Enoch Peake
+with Mrs Louisa Loggerheads.  "Ye know him as I mean?"
+
+"Yes," said Edwin, "The stout man.  The Cocknage Gardens man."
+
+"That's him.  Well ye'll tell him I've been called away.  Tell him who
+ye are.  Not but what he'll know.  Tell him I think it might be
+better"--Darius's thick finger ran along a line of print--"if we
+put--`widow of the late Simon Loggerheads Esquire,' instead of--`Esq.'
+See?  Otherwise it's all right.  Tell him I say as otherwise it's all
+right.  And ask him if he'll have it printed in silver, and how many he
+wants, and show him this sample envelope.  Now, d'ye understand?"
+
+"Yes," said Edwin, in a tone to convey, not disrespectfully, that there
+was nothing to understand.  Curious, how his father had the air of
+bracing all his intellect as if to a problem!
+
+"Then ye'll take it to Big James, and he can start Chawner on it.  Th'
+job's promised for Monday forenoon."
+
+"Will Big James be working?" asked Edwin, for it was Saturday afternoon,
+when, though the shop remained open, the printing office was closed.
+
+"They're all on overtime," said Mr Clayhanger; and then he added, in a
+voice still lower, and with a surreptitious glance at Miss Ingamells,
+the shop-woman, who was stolidly enfolding newspapers in wrappers at the
+opposite counter, "See to it yourself, now.  He won't want to talk to
+_her_ about a thing like that.  Tell him I told you specially.  Just let
+me see how well ye can do it."
+
+"Right!" said Edwin; and to himself, superciliously: "It might be life
+and death."
+
+"We ought to be doing a lot o' business wi' Enoch Peake, later on," Mr
+Clayhanger finished, in a whisper.
+
+"I see," said Edwin, impressed, perceiving that he had perhaps been
+supercilious too soon.
+
+Mr Clayhanger returned his spectacles to their case, and taking his hat
+from its customary hook behind him, over the job-files, consulted his
+watch and passed round the counter to go.  Then he stopped.
+
+"I'm going to Manchester," he murmured confidentially.  "To see if I can
+pick up a machine as I've heard of."
+
+Edwin was flattered.  At the dinner-table Mr Clayhanger had only
+vouchsafed that he had a train to catch, and would probably not be in
+till late at night.
+
+The next moment he glimpsed Darius through the window, his arms
+motionless by his sides and sticking slightly out; hurrying in the
+sunshine along Wedgwood Street in the direction of Shawport station.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+So this was business!  It was not the business he desired and meant to
+have; and he was uneasy at the extent to which he was already entangled
+in it; but it was rather amusing, and his father had really been very
+friendly.  He felt a sense of importance.
+
+Soon afterwards Clara ran into the shop to speak to Miss Ingamells.  The
+two chatted and giggled together.
+
+"Father's gone to Manchester," he found opportunity to say to Clara as
+she was leaving.
+
+"Why aren't you doing those prizes he told you to do?" retorted Clara,
+and vanished, She wanted none of Edwin's superior airs.
+
+During dinner Mr Clayhanger had instructed his son to go through the
+Sunday school prize stock and make an in_ven_tory of it.
+
+This injunction from the child Clara, which Miss Ingamells had certainly
+overheard, prevented him, as an independent man, from beginning his work
+for at least ten minutes.  He whistled, opened his father's desk and
+stared vacantly into it, examined the pen-nib case in detail, and tore
+off two leaves from the date calendar so that it should be ready for
+Monday.  He had a great scorn for Miss Ingamells, who was a personable
+if somewhat heavy creature of twenty-eight, because she kept company
+with a young man.  He had caught them arm-in-arm and practically hugging
+each other, one Sunday afternoon in the street.  He could see naught but
+silliness in that kind of thing.
+
+The entrance of a customer caused him to turn abruptly to the high
+shelves where the books were kept.  He was glad that the customer was
+not Mr Enoch Peake, the expectation of whose arrival made him curiously
+nervous.  He placed the step-ladder against the shelves, climbed up, and
+began to finger volumes and parcels of volumes.  The dust was
+incredible.  The disorder filled him with contempt.  It was astounding
+that his father could tolerate such disorder; no doubt the whole shop
+was in the same condition.  "Thirteen Archie's Old Desk," he read on a
+parcel, but when he opened the parcel he found seven "From Jest to
+Earnest."  Hence he had to undo every parcel.  However, the work was
+easy.  He first wrote the inventory in pencil, then he copied it in ink;
+then he folded it, and wrote very carefully on the back, because his
+father had a mania for endorsing documents in the legal manner:
+"Inventory of Sunday school prize stock."  And after an instant's
+hesitation he added his own initials.  Then he began to tie up and
+restore the parcels and the single volumes.  None of all this literature
+had any charm for him.  He possessed five or six such books, all gilt
+and chromatic, which had been awarded to him at Sunday school, `suitably
+inscribed,' for doing nothing in particular; and he regarded them
+without exception as frauds upon boyhood.  However, Clara had always
+enjoyed reading them.  But lying flat on one of the top shelves he
+discovered, nearly at the end of his task, an oblong tome which did
+interest him: "Cazenove's Architectural Views of European Capitals, with
+descriptive letterpress."  It had an old-fashioned look, and was
+probably some relic of his father's predecessor in the establishment.
+Another example of the lack of order which prevailed!
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+He took the volume to the retreat of the desk, and there turned over its
+pages of coloured illustrations.  At first his interest in them, and in
+the letterpress, was less instinctive than deliberate.  He said to
+himself: "Now, if there is anything in me, I ought really to be
+interested in this, and I must be interested in it."  And he was.  He
+glanced carelessly at the clock, which was hung above the shelves of
+exercise-books and notebooks, exactly opposite the door.  A quarter past
+four.  The afternoon was quietly passing, and he had not found it too
+tedious.  In the background of the task which (he considered) he had
+accomplished with extraordinary efficiency, his senses noted faintly the
+continual trickle of customers, all of whom were infallibly drawn to
+Miss Ingamells's counter by her mere watchful and receptive appearance.
+He had heard phrases and ends of phrases, such as: "No, we haven't
+anything smaller," "A camel-hair brush," "Gum but not glue," "Very
+sorry, sir.  I'll speak firmly to the paper boy," and the sound of coins
+dragged along the counter, the sound of the testing of half a sovereign,
+the opening and shutting of the till-drawer; and occasionally Miss
+Ingamells exclaiming to herself upon the stupidity of customers after a
+customer had gone; and once Miss Ingamells crossing angrily to fix the
+door ajar which some heedless customer had closed: "Did they suppose
+that people didn't want air like other people?"  And now it was a
+quarter past four.  Undoubtedly he had a peculiar, and pleasant, feeling
+of importance.  In another half-minute he glanced at the clock again,
+and it was a quarter to five.
+
+What hypnotism attracted him towards the artists' materials cabinet
+which stood magnificent, complicated, and complete in the middle of the
+shop, like a monument?  His father, after one infantile disastrous raid,
+had absolutely forbidden any visitation of that cabinet, with its glass
+case of assorted paints, crayons, brushes and pencils, and its
+innumerable long drawers full of paper and cards and wondrous perfectly
+equipped boxes, and T-squares and set-squares, with a hundred other
+contrivances.  But of course the order had now ceased to have force.
+Edwin had left school; and, if he was not a man, he was certainly not a
+boy.  He began to open the drawers, at first gingerly, then boldly;
+after all it was no business of Miss Ingamells's!  And, to be just, Miss
+Ingamells made no sort of pretence that it was any business of hers.
+She proceeded with her own business.  Edwin opened a rather large wooden
+water-colour box.  It was marked five and sixpence.  It seemed to
+comprise everything needed for the production of the most entrancing and
+majestic architectural views, and as Edwin took out its upper case and
+discovered still further marvellous devices and apparatus in its
+basement beneath, he dimly but passionately saw, in his heart, bright
+masterpieces that ought to be the fruit of that box.  There was a key to
+it.  He must have it.  He would have given all that he possessed for it,
+if necessary.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+"Miss Ingamells," he said: and, as she did not look up immediately, "I
+say, Miss Ingamells!  How much does father take off in the shilling to
+auntie when she buys anything?"
+
+"Don't ask _me_, Master Edwin," said Miss Ingamells; "_I_ don't know.  How
+should I know?"
+
+"Well, then," he muttered, "I shall pay full price for it--that's all."
+He could not wait, and he wanted to be on the safe side.
+
+Miss Ingamells gave him change for his half-sovereign in a strictly
+impartial manner, to indicate that she accepted no responsibility.  And
+the squaring of Edwin's shoulders conveyed to Miss Ingamells that he
+advised her to keep carefully within her own sphere, and not to make
+impertinent inquiries about the origin of the half-sovereign, which he
+could see intrigued her acutely.  He now owned the box; it was not a box
+of colours, but a box of enchantment.  He had had colour-boxes before,
+but nothing to compare with this, nothing that could have seemed magical
+to anybody wiser than a very small boy.  Then he bought some
+cartridge-paper; he considered that cartridge-paper would be good enough
+for preliminary experiments.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+It was while he was paying for the cartridge-paper--he being, as was
+indeed proper, on the customers' side of the counter--that a heavy
+loutish boy in an apron entered the shop, blushing.  Edwin turned away.
+This was Miss Ingamells's affair.
+
+"If ye please, Mester Peake's sent me.  He canna come in this
+afternoon--he's got a bit o' ratting on--and will Mester Clayhanger step
+across to th' Dragon to-night after eight, with that there peeper
+[paper] as he knows on?"
+
+At the name of Peake, Edwin started.  He had utterly forgotten the
+matter.
+
+"Master Edwin," said Miss Ingamells drily.  "You know all about that,
+don't you?"  Clearly she resented that he knew all about that while she
+didn't.
+
+"Oh!  Yes," Edwin stammered.  "What did you say?"  It was his first
+piece of real business.
+
+"If you please, Mester Peake sent me."  The messenger blundered through
+his message again word for word.
+
+"Very well.  I'll attend to it," said Edwin, as nonchalantly as he
+could.
+
+Nevertheless he was at a loss what to do, simple though the situation
+might have seemed to a person with an experience of business longer than
+Edwin's.  Just as three hours previously his father had appeared to be
+bracing all his intellect to a problem that struck Edwin as entirely
+simple, so now Edwin seemed to be bracing all his intellect to another
+aspect of the same problem.  Time, revenging his father! ...  What!  Go
+across to the Dragon and in cold blood demand Mr Enoch Peake, and then
+parley with Mr Enoch Peake as one man with another!  He had never been
+inside the Dragon.  He had been brought up in the belief that the Dragon
+was a place of sin.  The Dragon was included in the generic
+term--`gin-palace,' and quite probably in the Siamese-twin
+term--`gaming-saloon.'  Moreover, to discuss business with Mr Enoch
+Peake...  Mr Enoch Peake was as mysterious to Edwin as, say, a Chinese
+mandarin!  Still, business was business, and something would have to be
+done.  He did not know what.  Ought he to go to the Dragon?  His father
+had not foreseen the possibility of this development.  He instantly
+decided one fundamental: he would not consult Miss Ingamells; no, nor
+even Maggie!  There remained only Big James.  He went across to see Big
+James, who was calmly smoking a pipe on the little landing at the top of
+the steps leading to the printing office.
+
+Big James showed no astonishment.
+
+"You come along o' me to the Dragon to-night, young sir, at eight
+o'clock, or as soon after as makes no matter, and I'll see as you see
+Mr Enoch Peake.  I shall be coming up Woodisun Bank at eight o'clock,
+or as soon after as makes no matter.  You be waiting for me at the back
+gates there, and I'll see as you see Mr Enoch Peake."
+
+"Are you going to the Dragon?"
+
+"Am I going to the Dragon, young sir!" exclaimed Big James, in his
+majestic voice.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER NINE.
+
+THE TOWN.
+
+James Yarlett was worthy of his nickname.  He stood six feet four and a
+half inches in height, and his girth was proportionate; he had enormous
+hands and feet, large features, and a magnificent long dark brown beard;
+owing to this beard his necktie was never seen.  But the most
+magnificent thing about him was his bass voice, acknowledged to be the
+finest bass in the town, and one of the finest even in Hanbridge, where,
+in his earlier prime, James had lived as a `news comp' on the
+"Staffordshire Signal."  He was now a `jobbing comp' in Bursley, because
+Bursley was his native town and because he preferred jobbing.  He made
+the fourth and heaviest member of the celebrated Bursley Male Glee
+Party, the other three being Arthur Smallrice, an old man with a
+striking falsetto voice, Abraham Harracles, and Jos Rawnpike (pronounced
+Rampick).  These men were accustomed to fame, and Big James was the king
+of them, though the mildest.  They sang at dinners, free-and-easies,
+concerts, and Martinmas tea-meetings.  They sang for the glory, and when
+there was no demand for their services, they sang to themselves, for the
+sake of singing.  Each of them was a star in some church or chapel
+choir.  And except Arthur Smallrice, they all shared a certain
+elasticity of religious opinion.  Big James, for example, had varied in
+ten years from Wesleyan, through Old Church, to Roman Catholic up at
+Bleakridge.  It all depended on niceties in the treatment accorded to
+him, and on the choice of anthems.  Moreover, he liked a change.
+
+He was what his superiors called `a very superior man.'  Owing to the
+more careful enunciation required in singing, he had lost a great deal
+of the Five Towns accent, and one cannot be a compositor for a quarter
+of a century without insensibly acquiring an education and a store of
+knowledge far excelling the ordinary.  His manner was gentle, and
+perhaps somewhat pompous, as is common with very big men; but you could
+never be sure whether an extremely subdued humour did not underlie his
+pomposity.  He was a bachelor, aged forty-five, and lived quietly with a
+married sister at the bottom of Woodisun Bank, near the National
+Schools.  The wonder was that, with all his advantages, he had not more
+deeply impressed himself upon Bursley as an individuality, and not
+merely as a voice.  But he seemed never to seek to do so.  He was
+without ambition; and, though curiously careful sometimes about
+preserving his own dignity, and beyond question sensitive by
+temperament, he showed marked respect, and even humility, to the
+worldly-successful.  Despite his bigness and simplicity there was
+something small about him which came out in odd trifling details.  Thus
+it was characteristic of Big James to ask Edwin to be waiting for him at
+the back gates in Woodisun Bank when he might just as easily have met
+him at the side door by the closed shop in Wedgwood Street.
+
+Edwin, who from mere pride had said nothing to his sisters about the
+impending visit to the Dragon, was a little surprised and dashed to see
+Big James in broadcloth and a high hat; for he had not dreamed of
+changing his own everyday suit, nor had it occurred to him that the
+Dragon was a temple of ceremoniousness.  Big James looked enormous.  The
+wide lapel of his shining frock-coat was buttoned high up under his
+beard and curved downwards for a distance of considerably more than a
+yard to his knees: it was a heroic frock-coat.  The sleeves were wide,
+but narrowing at the wrists, and the white wristbands were very tight.
+The trousers fell in ample folds on the uppers of the gigantic boots.
+Big James had a way of sticking out his chest and throwing his head back
+which would have projected the tip of his beard ten inches forth from
+his body, had the beard been stiff; but the soft silkiness of the beard
+frustrated this spectacular phenomenon, which would have been very
+interesting to witness.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+The pair stepped across Trafalgar Road together, Edwin, though he tried
+to be sedate, nothing but a frisking morsel by the side of the vast
+monument.  Compared with the architectural grandeur of Mr Varlett, his
+thin, supple, free-moving limbs had an almost pathetic appearance of
+ephemeral fragility.
+
+Big James directed himself to the archway leading to the Dragon stables,
+and there he saw an ostler or oddman.  Edwin, feeling the imminence of
+an ordeal, surreptitiously explored a pocket to be sure that the proof
+of the wedding-card was safely there.
+
+The ostler raised his reddish eyebrows to Big James.  Big James jerked
+his head to one side, indicating apparently the entire Dragon, and
+simultaneously conveying a query.  The ostler paused immobile an instant
+and then shook his insignificant turnip-pate.  Big James turned away.
+No word had been spoken; nevertheless, the men had exchanged a dialogue
+which might be thus put into words--
+
+"I wasn't thinking to see ye so soon," from the ostler.
+
+"Then nobody of any importance has yet gone into the assembly room?"
+from Big James.
+
+"Nobody worth speaking of, and won't, for a while," from the other.
+
+"Then I'll take a turn," from Big James.
+
+The latter now looked down at Edwin, and addressed him in words--
+
+"Seemingly we're too soon, Mr Edwin.  What do you say to a turn round
+the town--playground way?  I doubted we should be too soon."
+
+Edwin showed alacrity.  As a schoolboy it had been definitely forbidden
+to him to go out at night; and unless sent on a special and hurried
+errand, he had scarcely seen the physiognomy of the streets after eight
+o'clock.  He had never seen the playground in the evening.  And this
+evening the town did not seem like the same town; it had become a new
+and mysterious town of adventure.  And yet Edwin was not fifty yards
+away from his own bedroom.
+
+They ascended Duck Bank together, Edwin proud to be with a celebrity of
+the calibre of Big James, and Big James calmly satisfied to show himself
+thus formally with his master's son.  It appeared almost incredible that
+those two immortals, so diverse, had issued from the womb practically
+alike; that a few brief years on the earth had given Big James such a
+tremendous physical advantage.  Several hours' daily submission to the
+exact regularities of lines of type and to the unvarying demands of
+minutely adjusted machines in motion had stamped Big James's body and
+mind with the delicate and quasi-finicking preciseness which
+characterises all compositors and printers; and the continual monotonous
+performance of similar tasks that employed his faculties while never
+absorbing or straining them, had soothed and dulled the fever of life in
+him to a beneficent calm, a calm refined and beautified by the
+pleasurable exercise of song.  Big James had seldom known a violent
+emotion.  He had craved nothing, sought for nothing, and lost nothing.
+
+Edwin, like Big James in progress from everlasting to everlasting, was
+all inchoate, unformed, undisciplined, and burning with capricious
+fires; all expectant, eager, reluctant, tingling, timid, innocently and
+wistfully audacious.  By taking the boy's hand, Big James might have
+poetically symbolised their relation.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+"Are you going to sing to-night at the Dragon, Mr Yarlett?" asked
+Edwin.  He lengthened his step to Big James's, controlled his ardent
+body, and tried to remember that he was a man with a man.
+
+"I am, young sir," said Big James.  "There is a party of us."
+
+"Is it the Male Glee Party?"  Edwin pursued.
+
+"Yes, Mr Edwin."
+
+"Then Mr Smallrice will be there?"
+
+"He will, Mr Edwin."
+
+"Why can Mr Smallrice sing such high notes?"
+
+Big James slowly shook his head, as Edwin looked up at him.  "I tell you
+what it is, young sir.  It's a gift, that's what it is, same as I can
+sing low."
+
+"But Mr Smallrice is very old, isn't he?"
+
+"There's a parrot in a cage over at the Duck, there, as is eighty-five
+years old, and that's proved by record kept, young sir."
+
+"No!" protested Edwin's incredulity politely.
+
+"By record kept," said Big James.
+
+"Do you often sing at the Dragon, Mr Yarlett?"
+
+"Time was," said Big James, "when some of us used to sing there every
+night, Sundays excepted, and concerts and whatnot excepted.  Aye!  For
+hours and hours every night.  And still do sometimes."
+
+"After your work?"
+
+"After our work.  Aye!  And often till dawn in summer.  One o'clock, two
+o'clock, half-past two o'clock, every night.  But now they say that this
+new Licensing Act will close every public-house in this town at eleven
+o'clock, and a straight-up eleven at that!"
+
+"But what do you do it for?"
+
+"What do we do it for?  We do it to pass the time and the glass, young
+sir.  Not as I should like you to think as I ever drank, Mr Edwin.  One
+quart of ale I take every night, and have ever done; no more, no less."
+
+"But"--Edwin's rapid, breaking voice interrupted eagerly the deep
+majestic tones--"aren't you tired the next day?  _I_ should be!"
+
+"Never," said Big James.  "I get up from my bed as fresh as a daisy at
+six sharp.  And I've known the nights when my bed ne'er saw me."
+
+"You must be strong, Mr Yarlett, my word!"  Edwin exclaimed.  These
+revelations of the habits and prowess of Big James astounded him.  He
+had never suspected that such things went on in the town.
+
+"Aye!  Middling!"
+
+"I suppose it's a free-and-easy at the Dragon, to-night, Mr Yarlett?"
+
+"In a manner of speaking," said Big James.
+
+"I wish I could stay for it."
+
+"And why not?"  Big James suggested, and looked down at Edwin with
+half-humorous incertitude.
+
+Edwin shrugged his shoulders superiorly, indicating by instinct, in
+spite of himself, that possibly Big James was trespassing over the
+social line that divided them.  And yet Big James's father would have
+condescended to Edwin's grandfather.  Only, Edwin now belonged to the
+employing class, whilst Big James belonged to the employed.  Already
+Edwin, whose father had been thrashed by workmen whom a compositor would
+hesitate to call skilled--already Edwin had the mien natural to a ruler,
+and Big James, with dignified deference, would submit unresentingly to
+his attitude.  It was the subtlest thing.  It was not that Edwin
+obscurely objected to the suggestion of his being present at the
+free-and-easy; it was that he objected (but nicely, and with good
+nature) to any assumption of Big James's right to influence him towards
+an act that his father would not approve.  Instead of saying, "Why not?"
+Big James ought to have said: "Nobody but you can decide that, as your
+father's away."  James ought to have been strictly impartial.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+"Well," said Big James, when they arrived at the playground, which lay
+north of the covered Meat Market or Shambles, "it looks as if they
+hadn't been able to make a start yet at the Blood Tub."  His tone was
+marked by a calm, grand disdain, as of one entertainer talking about
+another.
+
+The Blood Tub, otherwise known as Snaggs's, was the centre of nocturnal
+pleasure in Bursley.  It stood almost on the very spot where the jawbone
+of a whale had once lain, as a supreme natural curiosity.  It
+represented the softened manners which had developed out of the old
+medievalism of the century.  It had supplanted the bear-pit and the
+cock-pit.  It corresponded somewhat with the ideals symbolised by the
+new Town Hall.  In the tiny odorous beer-houses of all the undulating,
+twisting, reddish streets that surrounded the contiguous open spaces of
+Duck Bank, the playground, the market-place, and Saint Luke's Square,
+the folk no longer discussed eagerly what chance on Sunday morning the
+municipal bear would have against five dogs.  They had progressed as far
+as a free library, boxing-gloves, rabbit-coursing, and the Blood Tub.
+
+This last was a theatre with wooden sides and a canvas roof, and it
+would hold quite a crowd of people.  In front of it was a platform, and
+an orchestra, lighted by oil flares that, as Big James and Edwin
+approached, were gaining strength in the twilight.  Leaning against the
+platform was a blackboard on which was chalked the announcement of two
+plays: "The Forty Thieves" (author unstated) and Cruikshank's "The
+Bottle."  The orchestra, after terrific concussions, fell silent, and
+then a troupe of players in costume, cramped on the narrow trestle
+boards, performed a sample scene from "The Forty Thieves," just to give
+the crowd in front an idea of the wonders of this powerful work.  And
+four thieves passed and repassed behind the screen hiding the doors, and
+reappeared nine times as four fresh thieves until the tale of forty was
+complete.  And then old Hammerad, the beloved clown who played the drum
+(and whose wife kept a barber's shop in Buck Row and shaved for a
+penny), left his drum and did two minutes' stiff clowning, and then the
+orchestra burst forth again, and the brazen voice of old Snaggs (in his
+moleskin waistcoat) easily rode the storm, adjuring the folk to walk up
+and walk up: which some of the folk did do.  And lastly the band played
+"God Save the Queen," and the players, followed by old Snaggs,
+processionally entered the booth.
+
+"I lay they come out again," said Big James, with grim blandness.
+
+"Why?" asked Edwin.  He was absolutely new to the scene.
+
+"I lay they haven't got twenty couple inside," said Big James.
+
+And in less than a minute the troupe did indeed emerge, and old Snaggs
+expostulated with a dilatory public, respectfully but firmly.  It had
+been a queer year for Mr Snaggs.  Rain had ruined the Wakes; rain had
+ruined everything; rain had nearly ruined him.  July was obviously not a
+month in which a self-respecting theatre ought to be open, but Mr
+Snaggs had got to the point of catching at straws.  He stated that in
+order to prove his absolute _bona fides_ the troupe would now give a scene
+from that world-renowned and unique drama, "The Bottle," after which the
+performance really would commence, since he could not as a gentleman
+keep his kind patrons within waiting any longer.  His habit, which
+emphasised itself as he grew older, was to treat the staring crowd in
+front of his booth like a family of nephews and nieces.  The device was
+quite useless, for the public's stolidity was impregnable.  It touched
+the heroic.  No more granitic and crass stolidity could have been
+discovered in England.  The crowd stood; it exercised no other function
+of existence.  It just stood, and there it would stand until convinced
+that the gratis part of the spectacle was positively at an end.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+With a ceremonious gesture signifying that he assumed the young sir's
+consent, Big James turned away.  He had displayed to Edwin the poverty
+and the futility of the Blood Tub.  Edwin would perhaps have liked to
+stay.  The scenes enacted on the outer platform were certainly tinged
+with the ridiculous, but they were the first histrionics that he had
+ever witnessed; and he could not help thinking, hoping, in spite of his
+common sense, that within the booth all was different, miraculously
+transformed into the grand and the impressive.  Left to himself, he
+would surely have preferred an evening at the Blood Tub to a business
+interview with Mr Enoch Peake at the Dragon.  But naturally he had to
+scorn the Blood Tub with a scorn equal to the massive and silent scorn
+of Big James.  And on the whole he considered that he was behaving as a
+man with another man rather well.  He sought by depreciatory remarks to
+keep the conversation at its proper adult level.
+
+Big James led him through the market-place, where a few vegetable,
+tripe, and gingerbread stalls--relics of the day's market--were still
+attracting customers in the twilight.  These slatternly and picturesque
+groups, beneath their flickering yellow flares, were encamped at the
+gigantic foot of the Town Hall porch as at the foot of a precipice.  The
+monstrous black walls of the Town Hall rose and were merged in gloom;
+and the spire of the Town Hall, on whose summit stood a gold angel
+holding a gold crown, rose right into the heavens and was there lost.
+It was marvellous that this town, by adding stone to stone, had upreared
+this monument which, in expressing the secret nobility of its ideals,
+dwarfed the town.  On every side of it the beer-houses, full of a
+dulled, savage ecstasy of life, gleamed brighter than the shops.  Big
+James led Edwin down through the mysteries of the Cock Yard and up along
+Bugg's Gutter, and so back to the Dragon.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER TEN.
+
+FREE AND EASY.
+
+When Edwin, shyly, followed Big James into the assembly room of the
+Dragon, it already held a fair sprinkling of men, and newcomers
+continued to drop in.  They were soberly and respectably clothed, though
+a few had knotted handkerchiefs round their necks instead of collars and
+ties.  The occasion was a jollity of the Bursley Mutual Burial Club.
+This Club, a singular example of that dogged private co-operative
+enterprise which so sharply distinguishes English corporate life from
+the corporate life of other European countries, had lustily survived
+from a period when men were far less sure of a decent burial than they
+were then, in the very prosperous early seventies.  It had helped to
+maintain the barbaric fashion of ostentatiously expensive funerals, out
+of which undertakers and beer-sellers made vast sums; but it had also
+provided a basis of common endeavour and of fellowship.  And its
+respectability was intense, and at the same time broad-minded.  To be an
+established subscriber to the Burial Club was evidence of good character
+and of social spirit.  The periodic jollities of this company of men
+whose professed aim was to bury each other, had a high reputation for
+excellence.  Up till a year previously they had always been held at the
+Duck, in Duck Square, opposite; but Mr Enoch Peake, Chairman of the
+Club, had by persistent and relentless chicane, triumphing over immense
+influences, changed their venue to the Dragon, whose landlady, Mrs
+Louisa Loggerheads, he was then courting.  (It must be stated that Mrs
+Louisa's name contained no slur of cantankerousness; it is merely the
+local word for a harmless plant, the knapweed.)  He had now won Mrs
+Loggerheads, after being a widower thrice, and with her the second best
+`house' in the town.
+
+There were long benches down the room, with forms on either side of
+them.  Big James, not without pomp, escorted a blushing Edwin to the end
+of one of these tables, near a small raised platform that occupied the
+extremity of the room.  Over this platform was printed a legend: "As a
+bird is known by its note--"; and over the legend was a full-rigged ship
+in a glass case, and a pair of antlers.  The walls of the room were dark
+brown, the ceiling grey with soot of various sorts, and the floor tiled
+red-and-black and sanded.  Smoke rose in spirals from about a score of
+churchwarden pipes and as many cutties, which were charged from tin
+pouches, and lighted by spills of newspaper from the three double
+gas-jets that hung down over the benches.  Two middle-aged women, one in
+black and the other checked, served beer, porter, and stout in mugs, and
+gin in glasses, passing in and out through a side door.  The company
+talked little, and it had not yet begun seriously to drink; but,
+sprawled about in attitudes of restful abeyance, it was smoking
+religiously, and the flat noise of solemn expectorations punctuated the
+minutes.  Edwin was easily the youngest person present--the average age
+appeared to be about fifty--but nobody's curiosity seemed to be much
+stirred by his odd arrival, and he ceased gradually to blush.  When,
+however, one of the women paused before him in silent question, and he
+had to explain that he required no drink because he had only called for
+a moment about a matter of business, he blushed again vigorously.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Then Mr Enoch Peake appeared.  He was a short, stout old man, with fat
+hands, a red, minutely wrinkled face, and very small eyes.  Greeted with
+the respect due to the owner of Cocknage Gardens, a sporting resort
+where all the best foot-racing and rabbit-coursing took place, he
+accepted it in somnolent indifference, and immediately took off his coat
+and sat down in cotton shirt-sleeves.  Then he pulled out a red
+handkerchief and his tobacco-box, and set them on the table.  Big James
+motioned to Edwin.
+
+"Evening, Mr Peake," said Big James, crossing the floor, "and here's a
+young gent wishful for two words with you."
+
+Mr Peake stared vacantly.
+
+"Young Mr Clayhanger," explained Big James.
+
+"It's about this card," Edwin began, in a whisper, drawing the
+wedding-card sheepishly from his pocket.  "Father had to go to
+Manchester," he added, when he had finished.
+
+Mr Enoch Peake seized the card in both hands, and examined it; and
+Edwin could hear his heavy breathing.
+
+Mrs Louisa Loggerheads, a comfortable, smiling administrative woman of
+fifty, showed herself at the service-door, and nodded with dignity to a
+few of the habitues.
+
+"Missis is at door," said Big James to Mr Peake.
+
+"Is her?" muttered Mr Peake, not interrupting his examination of the
+card.
+
+One of the serving-women, having removed Mr Peake's coat, brought a new
+church warden, filled it, and carefully directed the tip towards his
+tight little mouth: the lips closed on it.  Then she lighted a spill and
+applied it to the distant bowl, and the mouth puffed; and then the woman
+deposited the bowl cautiously on the bench.  Lastly, she came with a
+small glass of sloe gin.  Mr Peake did not move.
+
+At length Mr Peake withdrew the pipe from his mouth, and after an
+interval said--
+
+"Aye!"
+
+He continued to stare at the card, now held in one hand.
+
+"And is it to be printed in silver?"  Edwin asked.
+
+Mr Peake took a few more puffs.
+
+"Aye!"
+
+When he had stared further for a long time at the card, his hand moved
+slowly with it towards Edwin, and Edwin resumed possession of it.
+
+Mrs Louisa Loggerheads had now vanished.
+
+"Missis has gone," said Big James.
+
+"Has her?" muttered Mr Peake.
+
+Edwin rose to leave, though unwillingly; but Big James asked him in
+polite reproach whether he should not stay for the first song.  He
+nodded, encouraged; and sat down.  He did not know that the uppermost
+idea in Big James's mind for an hour past had been that Edwin would hear
+him sing.
+
+Mr Peake lifted his glass, held it from him, approached his lips
+towards it, and emptied it at a draught.  He then glanced round and said
+thickly--
+
+"Gentlemen all, Mester Smallrice, Mester Harracles, Mester Rampick, and
+Mester Yarlett will now oblige with one o' th' ould favourites."
+
+There was some applause, a few coats were removed, and Mr Peake fixed
+himself in a contemplative attitude.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Messrs. Arthur Smallrice, Abraham Harracles, Jos Rawnpike, and James
+Yarlett rose, stepped heavily on to the little platform, and stood in a
+line with their hands in their pockets.  "As a bird is known by its
+note--" was hidden by the rampart of their shoulders.  They had no
+music.  They knew the music; they had sung it a thousand times.  They
+knew precisely the effects which they wished to produce, and the means
+of production.  They worked together like an inspired machine.  Mr
+Arthur Smallrice gave a rapid glance into a corner, and from that corner
+a concertina spoke--one short note.  Then began, with no hesitating
+shuffling preliminaries nor mute consultations, the singing of that
+classic quartet, justly celebrated from Hull to Wigan and from
+Northallerton to Lichfield, "Loud Ocean's Roar."  The thing was
+performed with absolute assurance and perfection.  Mr Arthur Smallrice
+did the yapping of the short waves on the foam-veiled rocks, and Big
+James in fullest grandeur did the long and mighty rolling of the deep.
+It was majestic, terrific, and overwhelming.  Many bars before the close
+Edwin was thrilled, as by an exquisite and vast revelation.  He tingled
+from head to foot.  He had never heard any singing like it, or any
+singing in any way comparable to it.  He had never guessed that song
+held such possibilities of emotion.  The pure and fine essential
+qualities of the voices, the dizzying harmonies, the fugal calls and
+responses, the strange relief of the unisons, and above all the free,
+natural mien of the singers, proudly aware that they were producing
+something beautiful that could not be produced more beautifully,
+conscious of unchallenged supremacy,--all this enfevered him to an
+unprecedented and self-astonished enthusiasm.
+
+He murmured under his breath, as "Loud Ocean's Roar" died away and the
+little voices of the street supervened: "By Gad!  By Gad!"
+
+The applause was generous.  Edwin stamped and clapped with childlike
+violence and fury.  Mr Peake slowly and regularly thumped one fist on
+the bench, puffing the while.  Glasses and mugs could be seen, but not
+heard, dancing.  Mr Arthur Smallrice, Mr Abraham Harracles, Mr Jos
+Rawnpike, and Mr James Yarlett, entirely inattentive to the
+acclamations, stepped heavily from the platform and sat down.  When
+Edwin caught Big James's eye he clapped again, reanimating the general
+approval, and Big James gazed at him with bland satisfaction.  Mr Enoch
+Peake was now, save for the rise and fall of his great chest, as
+immobile and brooding as an Indian god.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Edwin did not depart.  He reflected that, even if his father should come
+home earlier than the last train and prove curious, it would be
+impossible for him to know the exact moment at which his son had been
+able to have speech with Mr Enoch Peake on the important matter of
+business.  For aught his father could ever guess he might have been
+prevented from obtaining the attention of the chairman of the
+proceedings until, say, eleven o'clock.  Also, he meant to present his
+conduct to his father in the light of an enterprising and fearless
+action showing a marked aptitude for affairs.  Mr Enoch Peake, whom his
+father was anxious to flatter, had desired his father's company at the
+Dragon, and, to save the situation, Edwin had courageously gone instead:
+that was it.
+
+Besides, he would have stayed in any case.  His mind was elevated above
+the fear of consequences.
+
+There was some concertina-playing, with a realistic imitation of church
+bells borne on the wind from a distance; and then the Bursley Prize
+Handbell Ringers (or Campanologists) produced a whole family of real
+bells from under a form, and the ostler and the two women arranged a
+special table, and the campanologists fixed their bells on it and
+themselves round it, and performed a selection of Scotch and Irish airs,
+without once deceiving themselves as to the precise note which a chosen
+bell would emit when duly shaken.
+
+Singular as was this feat, it was far less so than a young man's
+performance of the ophicleide, a serpentine instrument that coiled round
+and about its player, and when breathed into persuasively gave forth
+prodigious brassy sounds that resembled the night-noises of beasts of
+prey.  This item roused the Indian god from his umbilical
+contemplations, and as the young ophicleide player, somewhat breathless,
+passed down the room with his brazen creature in his arms, Mr Enoch
+Peake pulled him by the jacket-tail.
+
+"Eh!" said Mr Enoch Peake.  "Is that the ophicleide as thy father used
+to play at th' owd church?"
+
+"Yes, Mr Peake," said the young man, with bright respect.
+
+Mr Peake dropped his eyes again, and when the young man had gone, he
+murmured, to his stomach--
+
+"I well knowed it were th' ophicleide as his father used to play at th'
+owd church!"  And suddenly starting up, he continued hoarsely,
+"Gentlemen all, Mr James Yarlett will now kindly oblige with `The
+Miller of the Dee.'"  And one of the women relighted his pipe and served
+him with beer.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+Big James's rendering of "The Miller of the Dee" had been renowned in
+the Five Towns since 1852.  It was classical, hallowed.  It was the only
+possible rendering of "The Miller of the Dee."  If the greatest bass in
+the world had come incognito to Bursley and sung "The Miller of the
+Dee," people would have said, "Ah!  But ye should hear Big James sing
+it!"  It suited Big James.  The sentiments of the song were his
+sentiments; he expressed them with natural simplicity; but at the same
+time they underwent a certain refinement at his hands; for even when he
+sang at his loudest Big James was refined, natty, and restrained.  His
+instinctive gentlemanliness was invincible and all-pervading.  And the
+real beauty and enormous power of his magnificent voice saved him by its
+mere distinction from the charge of being finicking.  The simple sound
+of the voice gave pleasure.  And the simple production of that sound was
+Big James's deepest joy.  Amid all the expected loud applause the giant
+looked naively for Edwin's boyish mad enthusiasm, and felt it; and was
+thrilled, and very glad that he had brought Edwin.  As for Edwin, Edwin
+was humbled that he should have been so blind to what Big James was.  He
+had always regarded Big James as a dull, decent, somewhat peculiar
+fellow in a dirty apron, who was his father's foreman.  He had actually
+talked once to Big James of the wonderful way in which Maggie and Clara
+sang, and Big James had been properly respectful.  But the singing of
+Maggie and Clara was less than nothing, the crudest amateurism, compared
+to these public performances of Big James's.  Even the accompanying
+concertina was far more cleverly handled than the Clayhanger piano had
+ever been handled.  Yes, Edwin was humbled.  And he had a great wish to
+be able to do something brilliantly himself--he knew not what.  The
+intoxication of the desire for glory was upon him as he sat amid those
+shirt-sleeved men, near the brooding Indian god, under a crawling bluish
+canopy of smoke, gazing absently at the legend: "As a bird is known by
+its note--"
+
+After an interval, during which Mr Enoch Peake was roused more than
+once, a man with a Lancashire accent recited a poem entitled "The Patent
+Hairbrushing Machine," the rotary hairbrush being at that time an
+exceedingly piquant novelty that had only been heard of in the barbers'
+shops of the Five Towns, though travellers to Manchester could boast
+that they had sat under it.  As the principle of the new machine was
+easily grasped, and the sensations induced by it easily imagined, the
+recitation had a success which was indicated by slappings of thighs and
+great blowings-off of mirth.  But Mr Enoch Peake preserved his
+tranquillity throughout it, and immediately it was over he announced
+with haste--
+
+"Gentlemen all, Miss Florence Simcox--or shall us say Mrs Offlow, wife
+of the gentleman who has just obliged--the champion female clog-dancer
+of the Midlands, will now oblige."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+These words put every man whom they surprised into a state of unusual
+animation; and they surprised most of the company.  It may be doubted
+whether a female clog-dancer had ever footed it in Bursley.  Several
+public-houses possessed local champions--of a street, of a village--but
+these were emphatically not women.  Enoch Peake had arranged this daring
+item in the course of his afternoon's business at Cocknage Gardens, Mr
+Offlow being an expert in ratting terriers, and Mrs Offlow happening to
+be on a tour with her husband through the realms of her championship, a
+tour which mingled the varying advantages derivable from terriers,
+recitations, and clogs.  The affair was therefore respectable beyond
+cavil.
+
+Nevertheless when Florence shone suddenly at the service-door, the
+shortness of her red-and-black velvet skirts, and the undeniable
+complete visibility of her rounded calves produced an uneasy and
+agreeable impression that Enoch Peake, for a chairman of the Mutual
+Burial Club, had gone rather far, superbly far, and that his moral
+ascendancy over Louisa Loggerheads must indeed be truly astonishing.
+Louisa now stood gravely behind the dancer, in the shadow of the
+doorway, and the contrast between her and Florence was in every way
+striking enough to prove what a wonderful and mysterious man Enoch Peake
+was.  Florence was accustomed to audiences.  She was a pretty, doll-like
+woman, if inclined to amplitude; but the smile between those shaking
+golden ringlets had neither the modesty nor the false modesty nor the
+docility that Bursley was accustomed to think proper to the face of
+woman.  It could have stared down any man in the place, except perhaps
+Mr Peake.
+
+The gestures of Mr Offlow, and her gestures, as he arranged and
+prepared the surface of the little square dancing-board that was her
+throne, showed that he was the husband of Florence Simcox rather than
+she the wife of Offlow the reciter and dog-fancier.  Further, it was his
+role to play the concertina to her: he had had to learn the concertina--
+possibly a secret humiliation for one whose judgement in terriers was
+not excelled in many public-houses.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SEVEN.
+
+She danced; and the service-doorway showed a vista of open-mouthed
+scullions.  There was no sound in the room, save the concertina and the
+champion clogs.  Every eye was fixed on those clogs; even the little
+eyes of Mr Peake quitted the button of his waistcoat and burned like
+diamond points on those clogs.  Florence herself chiefly gazed on those
+clogs, but occasionally her nonchalant petulant gaze would wander up and
+down her bare arms and across her bosom.  At intervals, with her ringed
+fingers she would lift the short skirt--a nothing, an imperceptibility,
+half an inch, with glance downcast; and the effect was profound,
+recondite, inexplicable.  Her style was not that of a male clog-dancer,
+but it was indubitably clog-dancing, full of marvels to the connoisseur,
+and to the profane naught but a highly complicated series of wooden
+noises.  Florence's face began to perspire.  Then the concertina ceased
+playing, so that an undistracted attention might be given to the
+supremely difficult final figures of the dance.
+
+And thus was rendered back to the people in the charming form of beauty
+that which the instinct of the artist had taken from the sordid ugliness
+of the people.  The clog, the very emblem of the servitude and the
+squalor of brutalised populations, was changed, on the light feet of
+this favourite, into the medium of grace.  Few of these men but at some
+time of their lives had worn the clog, had clattered in it through
+winter's slush, and through the freezing darkness before dawn, to the
+manufactory and the mill and the mine, whence after a day of labour
+under discipline more than military, they had clattered back to their
+little candle-lighted homes.  One of the slatterns behind the doorway
+actually stood in clogs to watch the dancer.  The clog meant everything
+that was harsh, foul, and desolating; it summoned images of misery and
+disgust.  Yet on those feet that had never worn it seriously, it became
+the magic instrument of pleasure, waking dulled wits and forgotten
+aspirations, putting upon everybody an enchantment...  And then,
+suddenly, the dancer threw up one foot as high as her head and brought
+two clogs down together like a double mallet on the board, and stood
+still.  It was over.
+
+Mrs Louisa Loggerheads turned nervously away, pushing her servants in
+front of her.  And when the society of mutual buriers had recovered from
+the startling shameless insolence of that last high kick, it gave the
+rein to its panting excitement, and roared and stamped.  Edwin was
+staggered.  The blood swept into his face, a hot tide.  He was ravished,
+but he was also staggered.  He did not know what to think of Florence,
+the champion female clog-dancer.  He felt that she was wondrous; he felt
+that he could have gazed at her all night; but he felt that she had put
+him under the necessity of reconsidering some of his fundamental
+opinions.  For example, he was obliged to admit within himself a
+lessening of scorn for the attitude toward each other of Miss Ingamells
+and her young man.  He saw those things in a new light.  And he
+reflected, dazzled by the unforeseen chances of existence: "Yesterday I
+was at school--and to-day I see this!"  He was so preoccupied by his own
+intimate sensations that the idea of applauding never occurred to him,
+until he perceived his conspicuousness in not applauding, whereupon he
+clapped self-consciously.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+EIGHT.
+
+Miss Florence Simcox, somewhat breathless, tripped away, with simulated
+coyness and many curtseys.  She had done her task, and as a woman she
+had to go: this was a gathering of members of the Mutual Burial Club, a
+masculine company, and not meet for females.  The men pulled themselves
+together, remembering that their proudest quality was a stoic
+callousness that nothing could overthrow.  They refilled pipes, ordered
+more beer, and resumed the mask of invulnerable solemnity.
+
+"Aye!" muttered Mr Enoch Peake.
+
+Edwin, with a great effort, rose and walked out.  He would have liked to
+say good night to Big James; he did not deny that he ought to have done
+so; but he dared not complicate his exit.  On the pavement outside, in
+the warm damp night, a few loitering listeners stood doggedly before an
+open window, hearkening, their hands deep in their pockets, motionless.
+And Edwin could hear Mr Enoch Peake: "Gentlemen all, Mester Arthur
+Smallrice, Mester Abraham Harracles, Mester Jos Rampick, and Mester
+James Yarlett--"
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER ELEVEN.
+
+SON AND FATHER.
+
+Later that evening, Edwin sat at a small deal table in the embrasure of
+the dormer window of the empty attic next to his bedroom.  During the
+interval between tea and the rendezvous with Big James he had formally
+planted his flag in that room.  He had swept it out with a long-brush,
+while Clara stood at the door giggling at the spectacle and telling him
+that he had no right thus to annex territory in the absence of the
+overlord.  He had mounted a pair of steps, and put a lot of lumber
+through a trap at the head of the stairs into the loft.  And he had got
+a table, a lamp, and a chair.  That was all that he needed for the
+moment.  He had gone out to meet Big James with his head quite half-full
+of this vague attic-project, but the night sights of Bursley, and
+especially the music at the Dragon, and still more especially the
+dancing at the Dragon, had almost expelled the attic-project from his
+head.  When he returned unobtrusively into the house and learnt from a
+disturbed Mrs Nixon, who was sewing in the kitchen, that he was
+understood to be in his new attic, and that his sisters had gone to bed,
+the enchantment of the attic had instantly resumed much of its power
+over him, and he had hurried upstairs fortified with a slice of bread
+and half a cold sausage.  He had eaten the food absently in gulps while
+staring at the cover of "Cazenove's Architectural Views of European
+Capitals," abstracted from the shop without payment.  Then he had pinned
+part of a sheet of cartridge-paper on an old drawing-board which he
+possessed, and had sat down.  For his purpose the paper ought to have
+been soaked and stretched on the board with paste, but that would have
+meant a delay of seven or eight hours, and he was not willing to wait.
+Though he could not concentrate his mind to begin, his mind could not be
+reconciled to waiting.  So he had decided to draw his picture in pencil
+outline, and then stretch the paper early on Sunday morning; it would
+dry during chapel.  His new box of paints, a cracked T-square, and some
+india-rubber also lay on the table.
+
+He had chosen "View of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame Paris, from the Pont
+des Arts."  It pleased him by the coloration of the old houses in front
+of Notre-Dame, and the reflections in the water of the Seine, and the
+elusive blueness of the twin towers amid the pale grey clouds of a
+Parisian sky.  A romantic scene!  He wanted to copy it exactly, to
+recreate it from beginning to end, to feel the thrill of producing each
+wonderful effect himself.  Yet he sat inactive.  He sat and vaguely
+gazed at the slope of Trafalgar Road with its double row of yellow
+jewels, beautifully ascending in fire to the ridge of the horizon and
+there losing itself in the deep and solemn purple of the summer night;
+and he thought how ugly and commonplace all that was, and how different
+from all that were the noble capitals of Europe.  Scarcely a sound came
+through the open window; song doubtless still gushed forth at the
+Dragon, and revellers would not for hours awake the street on their way
+to the exacerbating atmosphere of home.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+He had no resolution to take up the pencil.  Yet after the Male Glee
+Party had sung "Loud Ocean's Roar," he remembered that he had had a most
+clear and distinct impulse to begin drawing architecture at once, and to
+do something grand and fine, as grand and fine as the singing, something
+that would thrill people as the singing thrilled.  If he had not rushed
+home instantly it was solely because he had been held back by the
+stronger desire to hear more music and by the hope of further novel and
+exciting sensations.  But Florence the clog-dancer had easily diverted
+the seeming-powerful current of his mind.  He wanted as much as ever to
+do wondrous things, and to do them soon, but it appeared to him that he
+must think out first the enigmatic subject of Florence.  Never had he
+seen any female creature as he saw her, and ephemeral images of her were
+continually forming and dissolving before him.  He could come to no
+conclusion at all about the subject of Florence.  Only his boyish pride
+was gradually being beaten back by an oncoming idea that up to that very
+evening he had been a sort of rather silly kid with no eyes in his head.
+
+It was in order to ignore for a time this unsettling and humiliating
+idea that, finally, he began to copy the outlines of the Parisian scene
+on his cartridge-paper.  He was in no way a skilled draughtsman, but he
+had dabbled in pencils and colours, and he had lately picked up from a
+handbook the hint that in blocking out a drawing the first thing to do
+was to observe what points were vertically under what points, and what
+points horizontal with what points.  He seemed to see the whole secret
+of draughtsmanship in this priceless counsel, which, indeed, with an
+elementary knowledge of geometry acquired at school, and the familiarity
+of his fingers with a pencil, constituted the whole of his technical
+equipment.  All the rest was mere desire.  Happily the architectural
+nature of the subject made it more amenable than, say, a rural landscape
+to the use of a T-square and common sense.  And Edwin considered that he
+was doing rather well until, quitting measurements and rulings, he
+arrived at the stage of drawing the detail of the towers.  Then at once
+the dream of perfect accomplishment began to fade at the edges, and the
+crust of faith to yield ominously.  Each stroke was a falling-away from
+the ideal, a blow to hope.
+
+And suddenly a yawn surprised him, and recalled him to the existence of
+his body.  He thought: "I can't really be tired.  It would be absurd to
+go to bed."  For his theory had long been that the notions of parents
+about bedtime were indeed absurd, and that he would be just as
+thoroughly reposed after three hours sleep as after ten.  And now that
+he was a man he meant to practise his theory so far as circumstances
+allowed.  He looked at his watch.  It was turned half-past eleven.  A
+delicious wave of joy and of satisfaction animated him.  He had never
+been up so late, within his recollection, save on a few occasions when
+even infants were allowed to be up late.  He was alone, secreted, master
+of his time and his activity, his mind charged with novel impressions,
+and a congenial work in progress.  Alone? ...  It was as if he was
+spiritually alone in the vast solitude of the night.  It was as if he
+could behold the unconscious forms of all humanity, sleeping.  This
+feeling that only he had preserved consciousness and energy, that he was
+the sole active possessor of the mysterious night, affected him in the
+most exquisite manner.  He had not been so nobly happy in his life.  And
+at the same time he was proud, in a childlike way, of being up so late.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+He heard the door being pushed open, and he gave a jump and turned his
+head.  His father stood in the entrance to the attic.
+
+"Hello, father!" he said weakly, ingratiatingly.
+
+"What art doing at this time o' night, lad?"  Darius Clayhanger
+demanded.
+
+Strange to say, the autocrat was not angered by the remarkable sight in
+front of him.  Edwin knew that his father would probably come home from
+Manchester on the mail train, which would stop to set down a passenger
+at Shawport by suitable arrangement.  And he had expected that his
+father would go to bed, as usual on such evenings, after having eaten
+the supper left for him in the sitting-room.  His father's bedroom was
+next door to the sitting-room.  Save for Mrs Nixon in a distant nook,
+Edwin had the attic floor to himself.  He ought to have been as safe
+from intrusion there as in the farthest capital of Europe.  His father
+did not climb the attic stairs once in six months.  So that he had
+regarded himself as secure.  Still, he must have positively forgotten
+the very existence of his father; he must have been `lost,' otherwise he
+could not but have heard the footsteps on the stairs.
+
+"I was just drawing," said Edwin, with a little more confidence.
+
+He looked at his father and saw an old man, a man who for him had always
+been old, generally harsh, often truculent, and seldom indulgent.  He
+saw an ugly, undistinguished, and somewhat vulgar man (far less
+dignified, for instance, than Big James); a man who had his way by force
+and scarcely ever by argument; a man whose arguments for or against a
+given course were simply pitiable, if not despicable.  He sometimes
+indeed thought that there must be a peculiar twist in his father's brain
+which prevented him from appreciating an adverse point in a debate; he
+had ceased to expect that his father would listen to reason.  Latterly
+he was always surprised when, as to-night, he caught a glance of mild
+benevolence on that face; yet he would never fail to respond to such a
+mood eagerly, without resentment.  It might be said that he regarded his
+father as he regarded the weather, fatalistically.  No more than against
+the weather would he have dreamed of bearing malice against his father,
+even had such a plan not been unwise and dangerous.  He was convinced
+that his father's interest in him was about the same as the sun's
+interest in him.  His father was nearly always wrapped in business
+affairs, and seemed to come to the trifling affairs of Edwin with
+difficulty, as out of an absorbing engrossment.
+
+Assuredly he would have been amazed to know that his father had been
+thinking of him all the afternoon and evening.  But it was so.  Darius
+Clayhanger had been nervous as to the manner in which the boy would
+acquit himself in the bit of business which had been confided to him.
+It was the boy's first bit of business.  Straightforward as it was, the
+boy might muddle it, might omit a portion of it, might say the wrong
+thing, might forget.  Darius hoped for the best, but he was afraid.  He
+saw in his son an amiable irresponsible fool.  He compared Edwin at
+sixteen with himself at the same age.  Edwin had never had a care, never
+suffered a privation, never been forced to think for himself.  (Darius
+might more justly have put it--never been allowed to think for himself.)
+Edwin had lived in cotton-wool, and knew less of the world than his
+father had known at half his years; much less.  Darius was sure that
+Edwin had never even come near suspecting the miracles which his father
+had accomplished: this was true, and not merely was Edwin stupendously
+ignorant, and even pettily scornful, of realities, but he was ignorant
+of his own ignorance.  Education! ...  Darius snorted.  To Darius it
+seemed that Edwin's education was like lying down in an orchard in
+lovely summer and having ripe fruit dropped into your mouth...  A cocky
+infant!  A girl!  And yet there was something about Edwin that his
+father admired, even respected and envied ... an occasional gesture, an
+attitude in walking, an intonation, a smile.  Edwin, his own son, had a
+personal distinction that he himself could never compass.  Edwin talked
+more correctly than his father.  He thought differently from his father.
+He had an original grace.  In the essence of his being he was superior
+to both his father and his sisters.  Sometimes when his father saw him
+walking along the street, or coming into a room, or uttering some simple
+phrase, or shrugging his shoulders, Darius was aware of a faint thrill.
+Pride?  Perhaps; but he would never have admitted it.  An agreeable
+perplexity rather--a state of being puzzled how he, so common, had
+begotten a creature so subtly aristocratic ... aristocratic was the
+word.  And Edwin seemed so young, fragile, innocent, and defenceless!
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Darius advanced into the attic.
+
+"What about that matter of Enoch Peake's?" he asked, hoping and fearing,
+really anxious for his son.  He defended himself against probable
+disappointment by preparing to lapse into savage paternal pessimism and
+disgust at the futility of an offspring nursed in luxury.
+
+"Oh!  It's all right," said Edwin eagerly.  "Mr Peake sent word he
+couldn't come, and he wanted you to go across to the Dragon this
+evening.  So I went instead."  It sounded dashingly capable.
+
+He finished the recital, and added that of course Big James had not been
+able to proceed with the job.
+
+"And where's the proof?" demanded Darius.  His relief expressed itself
+in a superficial surliness; but Edwin was not deceived.  As his father
+gazed mechanically at the proof that Edwin produced hurriedly from his
+pocket, he added with a negligent air--
+
+"There was a free-and-easy on at the Dragon, father."
+
+"Was there?" muttered Darius.
+
+Edwin saw that whatever danger had existed was now over.
+
+"And I suppose," said Darius, with assumed grimness, "if I hadn't
+happened to ha' seen a light from th' bottom o' th' attic stairs I
+should never have known aught about all this here?"  He indicated the
+cleansed attic, the table, the lamp, and the apparatus of art.
+
+"Oh yes, you would, father!"  Edwin reassured him.
+
+Darius came nearer.  They were close together, Edwin twisted on the
+cane-chair, and his father almost over him.  The lamp smelt, and gave
+off a stuffy warmth; the open window, through which came a wandering
+air, was a black oblong; the triangular side walls of the dormer shut
+them intimately in; the house slept.
+
+"What art up to?"
+
+The tone was benignant.  Edwin had not been ordered abruptly off to bed,
+with a reprimand for late hours and silly proceedings generally.  He
+sought the reason in vain.  One reason was that Darius Clayhanger had
+made a grand bargain at Manchester in the purchase of a second-hand
+printing machine.
+
+"I'm copying this," he replied slowly, and then all the details tumbled
+rashly out of his mouth, one after the other.  "Oh, father!  I found
+this book in the shop, packed away on a top shelf, and I want to borrow
+it.  I only want to borrow it.  And I've bought this paint-box, out of
+auntie's half-sovereign.  I paid Miss Ingamells the full price...  I
+thought I'd have a go at some of these architecture things."
+
+Darius glared at the copy.
+
+"Humph!"
+
+"It's only just started, you know."
+
+"Them prize books--have ye done all that?"
+
+"Yes, father."
+
+"And put all the prices down, as I told ye?"
+
+"Yes, father."
+
+Then a pause.  Edwin's heart was beating hard.
+
+"I want to do some of these architecture things," he repeated.  No
+remark from his father.  Then he said, fastening his gaze intensely on
+the table: "You know, father, what I should really like to be--I should
+like to be an architect."
+
+It was out.  He had said it.
+
+"Should ye?" said his father, who attached no importance of any kind to
+this avowal of a preference.  "Well, what you want is a bit o' business
+training for a start, I'm thinking."
+
+"Oh, of course!"  Edwin concurred, with pathetic eagerness, and added a
+piece of information for his father: "I'm only sixteen, aren't I?"
+
+"Sixteen ought to ha' been in bed this two hours and more.  Off with
+ye!"
+
+Edwin retired in an extraordinary state of relief and happiness.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER TWELVE.
+
+MACHINERY.
+
+Rather more than a week later, Edwin had so far entered into the life of
+his father's business that he could fully share the excitement caused by
+an impending solemnity in the printing office.  He was somewhat pleased
+with himself, and especially with his seriousness.  The memory of school
+was slipping away from him in the most extraordinary manner.  His only
+school-friend, Charlie Orgreave, had departed, with all the
+multitudinous Orgreaves, for a month in Wales.  He might have written to
+the Sunday; the Sunday might have written to him: but the idea of
+writing did not occur to either of them; they were both still
+sufficiently childlike to accept with fatalism all the consequences of
+parental caprice.  Orgreave senior had taken his family to Wales; the
+boys were thus separated, and there was an end of it.  Edwin regretted
+this, because Orgreave senior happened to be a very successful
+architect, and hence there were possibilities of getting into an
+architectural atmosphere.  He had never been inside the home of the
+Sunday, nor the Sunday in his--a schoolboy friendship can flourish in
+perfect independence of home--but he nervously hoped that on the return
+of the Orgreave regiment from Wales, something favourable to his
+ambitions--he knew not what--would come to pass.  In the meantime he was
+conscientiously doing his best to acquire a business training, as his
+father had suggested.  He gave himself with an enthusiasm almost
+religious to the study of business methods.  All the force of his
+resolve to perfect himself went for the moment into this immediate
+enterprise, and he was sorry that business methods were not more
+complex, mysterious, and original than they seemed to be: he was also
+sorry that his father did not show a greater interest in his industry
+and progress.
+
+He no longer wanted to `play' now.  He despised play.  His unique wish
+was to work.  It struck him as curious and delightful that he really
+enjoyed work.  Work had indeed become play.  He could not do enough work
+to satisfy his appetite.  And after the work of the day, scorning all
+silly notions about exercise and relaxation, he would spend the evening
+in his beautiful new attic, copying designs, which he would sometimes
+rise early to finish.  He thought he had conquered the gross body, and
+that it was of no account.  Even the desolating failures which his
+copies invariably proved did not much discourage him; besides, one of
+them had impressed both Maggie and Clara.  He copied with laborious
+ardour undiminished.  And further, he masterfully appropriated Maggie's
+ticket for the Free Library, pending the preliminaries to the possession
+of a ticket of his own, to procure a volume on architecture.  From
+timidity, from a singular false shame, he kept this volume in the attic,
+like a crime; nobody knew what the volume was.  Evidence of a strange
+trait in his character; a trait perhaps not defensible!  He argued with
+himself that having told his father plainly that he wanted to be an
+architect, he need do nothing else aggressive for the present.  He had
+agreed to the suggestion about business training, and he must be loyal
+to his agreement.  He pointed out to himself how right his father was.
+At sixteen one could scarcely begin to be an architect; it was too soon;
+and a good business training would not be out of place in any career or
+profession.
+
+He was so wrapped up in his days and his nights that he forgot to
+inquire why earthenware was made in just the Five Towns.  He had grown
+too serious for trifles--and all in about a week!  True, he was feeling
+the temporary excitement of the printing office, which was perhaps
+expressed boyishly by the printing staff; but he reckoned that his share
+of it was quite adult, frowningly superior, and in a strictly business
+sense justifiable and even proper.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Darius Clayhanger's printing office was a fine example of the policy of
+makeshift which governed and still governs the commercial activity of
+the Five Towns.  It consisted of the first floor of a nondescript
+building which stood at the bottom of the irregularly shaped yard behind
+the house and shop, and which formed the southern boundary of the
+Clayhanger premises.  The antique building had once been part of an
+old-fashioned pot-works, but that must have been in the eighteenth
+century.  Kilns and chimneys of all ages, sizes, and tints rose behind
+it to prove that this part of the town was one of the old manufacturing
+quarters.  The ground-floor of the building, entirely inaccessible from
+Clayhanger's yard, had a separate entrance of its own in an alley that
+branched off from Woodisun Bank, ran parallel to Wedgwood Street, and
+stopped abruptly at the back gate of a saddler's workshop.  In the
+narrow entry you were like a creeping animal amid the undergrowth of a
+forest of chimneys, ovens, and high blank walls.  This ground-floor had
+been a stable for many years; it was now, however, a baker's storeroom.
+Once there had been an interior staircase leading from the ground-floor
+to the first-floor, but it had been suppressed in order to save floor
+space, and an exterior staircase constructed with its foot in
+Clayhanger's yard.  To meet the requirement of the staircase, one of the
+first-floor windows had been transformed into a door.  Further, as the
+staircase came against one of the ground-floor windows, and as
+Clayhanger's predecessor had objected to those alien windows overlooking
+his yard, and as numerous windows were anyhow unnecessary to a stable,
+all the ground-floor windows had been closed up with oddments of brick
+and tile, giving to the wall a very variegated and chequered appearance.
+Thus the ground-floor and the first-floor were absolutely divorced, the
+former having its entrance and light from the public alley, the latter
+from the private yard.
+
+The first-floor had been a printing office for over seventy years.  All
+the machinery in it had had to be manoeuvred up the rickety stairs, or
+put through one of the windows on either side of the window that had
+been turned into a door.  When Darius Clayhanger, in his audacity,
+decided to print by steam, many people imagined that he would at last be
+compelled to rent the ground-floor or to take other premises.  But no!
+The elasticity of the makeshift policy was not yet fully stretched.
+Darius, in consultation with a jobbing builder, came happily to the
+conclusion that he could `manage,' that he could `make things do,' by
+adding to the top of his stairs a little landing for an engine-shed.
+This was done, and the engine and boiler perched in the air; the shaft
+of the engine went through the wall; the chimney-pipe of the boiler ran
+up straight to the level of the roof-ridge, and was stayed with pieces
+of wire.  A new chimney had also been pierced in the middle of the roof,
+for the uses of a heating stove.  The original chimneys had been allowed
+to fall into decay.  Finally, a new large skylight added interest to the
+roof.  In a general way, the building resembled a suit of clothes that
+had been worn, during four of the seven ages of man, by an untidy
+husband with a tidy and economical wife, and then given by the wife to a
+poor relation of a somewhat different figure to finish.  All that could
+be said of it was that it survived and served.
+
+But these considerations occurred to nobody.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Edwin, quite unaware that he was an instrument in the hands of his
+Auntie Clara's Providence, left the shop without due excuse and passed
+down the long blue-paved yard towards the printing office.  He imagined
+that he was being drawn thither simply by his own curiosity--a
+curiosity, however, which he considered to be justifiable, and even
+laudable.  The yard showed signs that the unusual had lately been
+happening there.  Its brick pavement, in the narrow branch of it that
+led to the double gates in Woodisun Bank (those gates which said to the
+casual visitor, `No Admittance except on Business'), was muddy,
+littered, and damaged, as though a Juggernaut had passed that way.
+Ladders reclined against the walls.  Moreover, one of the windows of the
+office had been taken out of its frame, leaving naught but an oblong
+aperture.  Through this aperture Edwin could see the busy, eager forms
+of his father, Big James, and Chawner.  Through this aperture had been
+lifted, in parts and by the employment of every possible combination of
+lever and pulley, the printing machine which Darius Clayhanger had so
+successfully purchased in Manchester on the day of the free-and-easy at
+the Dragon.
+
+At the top of the flight of steps two apprentices, one nearly `out of
+his time,' were ministering to the engine, which that morning did not
+happen to be running.  The engine, giving glory to the entire
+establishment by virtue of the imposing word `steam', was a crotchety
+and capricious thing, constant only in its tendency to break down.  No
+more reliance could be placed on it than on a pampered donkey.
+Sometimes it would run, and sometimes it would not run, but nobody could
+safely prophesy its moods.  Of the several machines it drove but one,
+the grand cylinder, the last triumph of the ingenuity of man, and even
+that had to be started by hand before the engine would consent to work
+it.  The staff hated the engine, except during those rare hours when one
+of its willing moods coincided with a pressure of business.  Then, when
+the steam was sputtering and the smoke smoking and the piston throbbing,
+and the leathern belt travelling round and round and the complete
+building a-tremble and a-clatter, and an attendant with clean hands was
+feeding the sheets at one end of the machine and another attendant with
+clean hands taking them off at the other, all at the rate of twenty
+copies per sixty seconds--then the staff loved the engine and meditated
+upon the wonders of their modern civilisation.  The engine had been
+known to do its five thousand in an afternoon, and its horse-power was
+only one.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Edwin could not keep out of the printing office.  He went
+inconspicuously and, as it were, by accident up the stone steps, and
+disappeared into the interior.  When you entered the office you were
+first of all impressed by the multiplicity of odours competing for your
+attention, the chief among them being those of ink, oil, and paraffin.
+Despite the fact that the door was open and one window gone, the smell
+and heat in the office on that warm morning were notable.  Old sheets of
+the "Manchester Examiner" had been pinned over the skylight to keep out
+the sun, but, as these were torn and rent, the sun was not kept out.
+Nobody, however, seemed to suffer inconvenience.  After the odours, the
+remarkable feature of the place was the quantity of machinery on its
+uneven floor.  Timid employes had occasionally suggested to Darius that
+the floor might yield one day and add themselves and all the machinery
+to the baker's stores below; but Darius knew that floors never did
+yield.
+
+In the middle of the floor was a huge and heavy heating stove, whose
+pipe ran straight upwards to the visible roof.  The mighty cylinder
+machine stood to the left hand.  Behind was a small rough-and-ready
+binding department with a guillotine cutting machine, a
+cardboard-cutting machine, and a perforating machine, trifles by the
+side of the cylinder, but still each of them formidable masses of metal
+heavy enough to crush a horse; the cutting machines might have served to
+illustrate the French Revolution, and the perforating machine the Holy
+Inquisition.
+
+Then there was what was called in the office the `old machine,' a relic
+of Clayhanger's predecessor, and at least eighty years old.  It was one
+of those machines whose worn physiognomies, full of character, show at
+once that they have a history.  In construction it carried solidity to
+an absurd degree.  Its pillars were like the piles of a pier.  Once, in
+a historic rat-catching, a rat had got up one of them, and a piece of
+smouldering brown paper had done what a terrier could not do.  The
+machine at one period of its career had been enlarged, and the neat
+seaming of the metal was an ecstasy to the eye of a good workman.  Long
+ago, it was known, this machine had printed a Reform newspaper at
+Stockport.  Now, after thus participating in the violent politics of an
+age heroic and unhappy, it had been put to printing small posters of
+auctions and tea-meetings.  Its movement was double: first that of a
+handle to bring the bed under the platen, and second, a lever pulled
+over to make contact between the type and the paper.  It still worked
+perfectly.  It was so solid, and it had been so honestly made, that it
+could never get out of order nor wear away.  And, indeed, the
+conscientiousness and skill of artificers in the eighteenth century are
+still, through that resistless machine, producing their effect in the
+twentieth.  But it needed a strong hand to bestir its smooth
+plum-coloured limbs of metal, and a speed of a hundred an hour meant
+gentle perspiration.  The machine was loved like an animal.
+
+Near this honourable and lumbering survival stood pertly an Empire
+treadle-machine for printing envelopes and similar trifles.  It was new,
+and full of natty little devices.  It worked with the lightness of
+something unsubstantial.  A child could actuate it, and it would print
+delicately a thousand envelopes an hour.  This machine, with the latest
+purchase, which was away at the other end of the room near the large
+double-pointed case-rack, completed the tale of machines.  That
+case-rack alone held fifty different founts of type, and there were
+other case-racks.  The lead-rack was nearly as large, and beneath the
+lead-rack was a rack containing all those "furnitures" which help to
+hold a forme of type together without betraying themselves to the reader
+of the printed sheet.  And under the furniture rack was the `random,'
+full of galleys.  Then there was a table with a top of solid stone, upon
+which the formes were bolted up.  And there was the ink-slab, another
+solidity, upon which the ink-rollers were inked.  Rollers of various
+weightiness lay about, and large heavy cans, and many bottles, and metal
+galleys, and nameless fragments of metal.  Everything contributed to the
+impression of immense ponderosity exceeding the imagination.  The fancy
+of being pinned down by even the lightest of these constructions was
+excruciating.  You moved about in narrow alleys among upstanding,
+unyielding metallic enormities, and you felt fragile and perilously
+soft.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+The only unintimidating phenomena in the crowded place were the
+lye-brushes, the dusty job-files that hung from the great transverse
+beams, and the proof-sheets that were scattered about.  These printed
+things showed to what extent Darius Clayhanger's establishment was a
+channel through which the life of the town had somehow to pass.
+Auctions, meetings, concerts, sermons, improving lectures, miscellaneous
+entertainments, programmes, catalogues, deaths, births, marriages,
+specifications, municipal notices, summonses, demands, receipts,
+subscription-lists, accounts, rate-forms, lists of voters, jury-lists,
+inaugurations, closures, bill-heads, handbills, addresses,
+visiting-cards, society rules, bargain-sales, lost and found notices:
+traces of all these matters, and more, were to be found in that office;
+it was impregnated with the human interest; it was dusty with the human
+interest; its hot smell seemed to you to come off life itself, if the
+real sentiment and love of life were sufficiently in you.  A grand,
+stuffy, living, seething place, with all its metallic immobility!
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+Edwin sidled towards the centre of interest, the new machine, which,
+however, was not a new machine.  Darius Clayhanger did not buy more new
+things than he could help.  His delight was to `pick up' articles that
+were supposed to be `as good as new'; occasionally he would even assert
+that an object bought second-hand was `better than new,' because it had
+been `broken in,' as if it were a horse.  Nevertheless, the latest
+machine was, for a printing machine, nearly new: its age was four years
+only.  It was a Demy Columbian Press, similar in conception and movement
+to the historic `old machine' that had been through the Reform
+agitation; but how much lighter, how much handier, how much more
+ingenious and precise in the detail of its working!  A beautiful
+edifice, as it stood there, gazed on admiringly by the expert eyes of
+Darius, in his shirt-sleeves, Big James, in his royally flowing apron,
+and Chawner, the journeyman compositor, who, with the two apprentices
+outside, completed the staff!  Aided by no mechanic more skilled than a
+day-labourer, those men had got the machine piecemeal into the office,
+and had duly erected it.  At that day a foreman had to be equal to
+anything.
+
+The machine appeared so majestic there, so solid and immovable, that it
+might ever have existed where it then was.  Who could credit that, less
+than a fortnight earlier, it had stood equally majestic, solid, and
+immovable in Manchester?  There remained nothing to show how the miracle
+had been accomplished, except a bandage of ropes round the lower pillars
+and some pulley-tackle hanging from one of the transverse beams exactly
+overhead.  The situation of the machine in the workshop had been fixed
+partly by that beam above and partly by the run of the beams that
+supported the floor.  The stout roof-beam enabled the artificers to
+handle the great masses by means of the tackle; and as for the
+floor-beams, Darius had so far listened to warnings as to take them into
+account.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SEVEN.
+
+"Take another impress, James," said Darius.  And when he saw Edwin,
+instead of asking the youth what he was wasting his time there for, he
+good-humouredly added: "Just watch this, my lad."  Darius was pleased
+with himself, his men, and his acquisition.  He was in one of his moods
+when he could charm; he was jolly, and he held up his chin.  Two days
+before, so interested had he been in the Demy Columbian, he had actually
+gone through a bilious attack while scarcely noticing it!  And now the
+whole complex operation had been brought to a triumphant conclusion.
+
+Big James inserted the sheet of paper, with gentle and fine movements.
+The journeyman turned the handle, and the bed of the machine slid
+horizontally forward in frictionless, stately silence.  And then Big
+James seized the lever with his hairy arm bared to the elbow, and pulled
+it over.  The delicate process was done with minute and level
+exactitude; adjusted to the thirty-second of an inch, the great masses
+of metal had brought the paper and the type together and separated them
+again.  In another moment Big James drew out the sheet, and the three
+men inspected it, each leaning over it.  A perfect impression!
+
+"Well," said Darius, glowing, "we've had a bit o' luck in getting that
+up!  Never had less trouble!  Shows we can do better without those
+Foundry chaps than with 'em!  James, ye can have a quart brought in, if
+ye'n a mind, but I won't have them apprentices drinking!  No, I won't!
+Mrs Nixon'll give 'em some nettle-beer if they fancy it."
+
+He was benignant.  The inauguration of a new machine deserved solemn
+recognition, especially on a hot day.  It was an event.
+
+"An infant in arms could turn this here," murmured the journeyman,
+toying with the handle that moved the bed.  It was an exaggeration, but
+an excusable, poetical exaggeration.
+
+Big James wiped his wrists on his apron.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+EIGHT.
+
+Then there was a queer sound of cracking somewhere, vague, faint, and
+yet formidable.  Darius was standing between the machines and the
+dismantled window, his back to the latter.  Big James and the journeyman
+rushed instinctively from the centre of the floor towards him.  In a
+second the journeyman was on the window sill.
+
+"What art doing?"  Darius demanded roughly; but there was no sincerity
+in his voice.
+
+"Th' floor!" the journeyman excitedly exclaimed.
+
+Big James stood close to the wall.
+
+"And what about th' floor?"  Darius challenged him obstinately.
+
+"One o' them beams is a-going," stammered the journeyman.
+
+"Rubbish!" shouted Darius.  But simultaneously he motioned to Edwin to
+move from the middle of the room, and Edwin obeyed.  All four listened,
+with nerves stretched to the tightest.  Darius was biting his lower lip
+with his upper teeth.  His humour had swiftly changed to the savage.
+Every warning that had been uttered for years past concerning that floor
+was remembered with startling distinctness.  Every impatient reassurance
+offered by Darius for years past suddenly seemed fatuous and perverse.
+How could any man in his senses expect the old floor to withstand such a
+terrific strain as that to which Darius had at last dared to subject it?
+The floor ought by rights to have given way years ago!  His men ought
+to have declined to obey instructions that were obviously insane.  These
+and similar thoughts visited the minds of Big James and the journeyman.
+
+As for Edwin, his excitement was, on balance, pleasurable.  In truth, he
+could not kill in his mind the hope that the floor would yield.  The
+greatness of the resulting catastrophe fascinated him.  He knew that he
+should be disappointed if the catastrophe did not occur.  That it would
+mean ruinous damage to the extent of hundreds of pounds, and enormous
+worry, did not influence him.  His reason did not influence him, nor his
+personal danger.  He saw a large hook in the wall to which he could
+cling when the exquisite crash came, and pictured a welter of broken
+machinery and timber ten feet below him, and the immense pother that the
+affair would create in the town.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+NINE.
+
+Darius would not loose his belief in his floor.  He hugged it in mute
+fury.  He would not climb on to the window sill, nor tell Big James to
+do so, nor even Edwin.  On the subject of the floor he was religious; he
+was above the appeal of the intelligence.  He had always held
+passionately that the floor was immovable, and he always would.  He had
+finally convinced himself of its omnipotent strength by the long process
+of assertion and reassertion.  When a voice within him murmured that his
+belief in the floor had no scientific basis, he strangled the voice.  So
+he remained, motionless, between the window and the machine.
+
+No sound!  No slightest sound!  No tremor of the machine!  But Darius's
+breathing could be heard after a moment.
+
+He guffawed sneeringly.
+
+"And what next?" he defiantly asked, scowling.  "What's amiss wi' ye
+all?"  He put his hands in his pockets.  "Dun ye mean to tell me as--"
+
+The younger apprentice entered from the engine-shed.
+
+"Get back there!" rolled and thundered the voice of Big James.  It was
+the first word he had spoken, and he did not speak it in frantic,
+hysteric command, but with a terrible and convincing mildness.  The
+phrase fell on the apprentice like a sandbag, and he vanished.
+
+Darius said nothing.  There was another cracking sound, louder, and
+unmistakably beneath the bed of the machine.  And at the same instant a
+flake of grimy plaster detached itself from the opposite wall and
+dropped into pale dust on the floor.  And still Darius religiously did
+not move, and Big James would not move.  They might have been under a
+spell.  The journeyman jumped down incautiously into the yard.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TEN.
+
+And then Edwin, hardly knowing what he did, and certainly not knowing
+why he did it, walked quickly out on to the floor, seized the huge hook
+attached to the lower pulley of the tackle that hung from the roof-beam,
+pulled up the slack of the rope-bandage on the hind part of the machine,
+and stuck the hook into it, then walked quickly back.  The hauling-rope
+of the tackle had been carried to the iron ring of a trap-door in the
+corner near Big James; this trap-door, once the outlet of the interior
+staircase from the ground floor, had been nailed down many years
+previously.  Big James dropped to his knees and tightened and knotted
+the rope.  Another and much louder noise of cracking followed, the floor
+visibly yielded, and the hindpart of the machine visibly sank about a
+quarter of an inch.  But no more.  The tackle held.  The strain was
+distributed between the beam above and the beam below, and equilibrium
+established.
+
+"Out!  Lad!  Out!" cried Darius feebly, in the wreck, not of his
+workshop, but of his religion.  And Edwin fled down the steps, pushing
+the mystified apprentices before him, and followed by the men.  In the
+yard the journeyman, entirely self-centred, was hopping about on one leg
+and cursing.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+ELEVEN.
+
+Darius, Big James, and Edwin stared in the morning sunshine at the
+aperture of the window and listened.
+
+"Nay!" said Big James, after an eternity.  "He's saved it!  He's saved
+th' old shop!  But by gum--by gum--"
+
+Darius turned to Edwin, and tried to say something; and then Edwin saw
+his father's face working into monstrous angular shapes, and saw the
+tears spurt out of his eyes, and was clutched convulsively in his
+father's shirt-sleeved arms.  He was very proud, very pleased, but he
+did not like this embrace; it made him feel ashamed.  He thought how
+Clara would have sniggered about it and caricatured it afterwards, had
+she witnessed it.  And although he had incontestably done something
+which was very wonderful and very heroic, and which proved in him the
+most extraordinary presence of mind, he could not honestly glorify
+himself in his own heart, because it appeared to him that he had acted
+exactly like an automaton.  He blankly marvelled, and thought the
+situation agreeably thrilling, if somewhat awkward.  His father let him
+go.  Then all Edwin's feelings gave place to an immense stupefaction at
+his father's truly remarkable behaviour.  What!  His father emotional!
+He had to begin to revise again his settled views.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
+
+ONE RESULT OF COURAGE.
+
+By the next morning a certain tranquillity was restored.
+
+It was only in this relative calm that the Clayhanger family and its
+dependants began to realise the intensity of the experience through
+which they had passed, and, in particular, the strain of waiting for
+events after the printing office had been abandoned by its denizens.  The
+rumour of what had happened, and of what might have happened, had spread
+about the premises in an instant, and in another instant all the women
+had collected in the yard; even Miss Ingamells had betrayed the sacred
+charge of the shop.  Ten people were in the yard, staring at the window
+aperture on the first-floor and listening for ruin.  Some time had
+elapsed before Darius would allow anybody even to mount the steps.  Then
+the baker, the tenant of the ground-floor, had had to be fetched.  A
+pleasant, bland man, he had consented in advance to every suggestion; he
+had practically made Darius a present of the ground-floor, if Darius
+possessed the courage to go into it, or to send others into it.  The seat
+of deliberation had then been transferred to the alley behind.  And the
+jobbing builder and carpenters had been fetched, and there was a palaver
+of tremendous length and solemnity.  For hours nothing definite seemed
+to happen; no one ate or drank, and the current of life at the corner of
+Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood Street ceased to flow.  Boys and men who had
+heard of the affair, and who had the divine gift of curiosity, gazed in
+rapture at the `No Admittance' notice on the ramshackle double gates in
+Woodisun Bank.  It seemed that they might never be rewarded, but their
+great faith was justified when a hand-cart, bearing several beams three
+yards long, halted at the gates and was, after a pause, laboriously
+pushed past them and round the corner into the alley and up the alley.
+The alley had been crammed to witness the taking of the beams into the
+baker's storeroom.  If the floor above had decided to yield, the noble,
+negligent carpenters would have been crushed beneath tons of machinery.
+At length a forest of pillars stood planted on the ground-floor amid the
+baker's lumber; every beam was duly supported, and the experts
+pronounced that calamity was now inconceivable.  Lastly, the tackle on
+the Demy Columbian had been loosed, and the machine, slightly askew,
+permitted gently to sink to full rest on the floor: and the result
+justified the experts.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+By this time people had started to eat, but informally, as it were
+apologetically--Passover meals.  Evening was at hand.  The Clayhangers,
+later, had met at table.  A strange repast!  A strange father!  The
+children had difficulty in speaking naturally.  And then Mrs Hamps had
+come, ebulliently thanking God, and conveying the fact that the town was
+thrilled and standing utterly amazed in admiration before her heroical
+nephew.  And yet she had said ardently that she was in no way amazed at
+her nephew's coolness; she would have been surprised if he had shown
+himself even one degree less cool.  From a long study of his character
+she had foreknown infallibly that in such a crisis as had supervened he
+would behave precisely as he had behaved.  This attitude of Auntie
+Hamps, however, though it reduced the miraculous to the
+ordinary-expected, did not diminish Clara's ingenuous awe of Edwin.
+From a mocker, the child had been temporarily transformed into an
+unwilling hero-worshipper.  Mrs Hamps having departed, all the family,
+including Darius, had retired earlier than usual.
+
+And now, on meeting his father and Big James and Miss Ingamells in the
+queer peace of the morning, in the relaxation after tension, and in the
+complete realisation of the occurrence, Edwin perceived from the
+demeanour of all that, by an instinctive action extending over perhaps
+five seconds of time, he had procured for himself a wondrous and
+apparently permanent respect.  Miss Ingamells, when he went vaguely into
+the freshly watered shop before breakfast, greeted him in a new tone,
+and with startling deference asked him what he thought she had better do
+in regard to the addressing of a certain parcel.  Edwin considered this
+odd; he considered it illogical; and one consequence of Miss Ingamells's
+quite sincere attitude was that he despised Miss Ingamells for a moral
+weakling.  He knew that he himself was a moral weakling, but he was sure
+that he could never bend, never crouch, to such a posture as Miss
+Ingamells's; that she was obviously sincere only increased his secret
+scorn.
+
+But his father resembled Miss Ingamells.  Edwin had not dreamt that
+mankind, and especially his father, was characterised by such
+simplicity.  And yet, on reflection, had he not always found in his
+father a peculiar ingenuousness, which he could not but look down upon?
+His father, whom he met crossing the yard, spoke to him almost as he
+might have spoken to a junior partner.  It was more than odd; it was
+against nature, as Edwin had conceived nature.
+
+He was so superior and lofty, yet without intending it, that he made no
+attempt to put himself in his father's place.  He, in the exciting
+moments between the first cracking sound and the second, had had a
+vision of wrecked machinery and timber in an abyss at his feet.  His
+father had had a vision far more realistic and terrifying.  His father
+had seen the whole course of his printing business brought to a
+standstill, and all his savings dragged out of him to pay for
+reconstruction and for new machinery.  His father had seen loss of life
+which might be accounted to his negligence.  His father had seen, with
+that pessimism which may overtake anybody in a crisis, the ruin of a
+career, the final frustration of his lifelong daring and obstinacy, and
+the end of everything.  And then he had seen his son suddenly walk forth
+and save the frightful situation.  He had always looked down upon that
+son as helpless, coddled, incapable of initiative or of boldness.  He
+believed himself to be a highly remarkable man, and existence had taught
+him that remarkable men seldom or never have remarkable sons.  Again and
+again had he noted the tendency of remarkable men to beget gaping and
+idle fools.  Nevertheless, he had intensely desired to be able to be
+proud of his son.  He had intensely desired to be able, when
+acquaintances should be sincerely enthusiastic about the merits of his
+son, to pretend, insincerely and with pride only half concealed, that
+his son was quite an ordinary youth.
+
+Now his desire had been fulfilled; it had been more than fulfilled.  The
+town would chatter about Edwin's presence of mind for a week.  Edwin's
+act would become historic; it already was historic.  And not only was
+the act in itself wonderful and admirable and epoch-making; but it
+proved that Edwin, despite his blondness, his finickingness, his
+hesitations, had grit.  That was the point: the lad had grit; there was
+material in the lad of which much could be made.  Add to this, the
+father's mere instinctive gratitude--a gratitude of such unguessed depth
+that it had prevented him even from being ashamed of having publicly and
+impulsively embraced his son on the previous morning.
+
+Edwin, in his unconscious egoism, ignored all that.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+"I've just seen Barlow," said Darius confidentially to Edwin.  Barlow
+was the baker.  "He's been here afore his rounds.  He's willing to
+sublet me his storeroom--so that'll be all right!  Eh?"
+
+"Yes," said Edwin, seeing that his approval was being sought for.
+
+"We must fix that machine plumb again."
+
+"I suppose the floor's as firm as rocks now?"  Edwin suggested.
+
+"Eh!  Bless ye!  Yes!" said his father, with a trace of kindly
+impatience.
+
+The policy of makeshift was to continue.  The floor having been stayed
+with oak, the easiest thing and the least immediately expensive thing
+was to leave matters as they were.  When the baker's stores were cleared
+from his warehouse, Darius could use the spaces between the pillars for
+lumber of his own; and he could either knock an entrance-way through the
+wall in the yard, or he could open the nailed-down trap door and patch
+the ancient stairway within; or he could do nothing--it would only mean
+walking out into Woodisun Bank and up the alley each time he wanted
+access to his lumber!
+
+And yet, after the second cracking sound on the previous day, he had
+been ready to vow to rent an entirely new and common-sense printing
+office somewhere else--if only he should be saved from disaster that
+once!  But he had not quite vowed.  And, in any case, a vow to oneself
+is not a vow to the Virgin.  He had escaped from a danger, and the
+recurrence of the particular danger was impossible.  Why then commit
+follies of prudence, when the existing arrangement of things `would do'?
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+That afternoon Darius Clayhanger, with his most mysterious air of
+business, told Edwin to follow him into the shop.  Several hours of
+miscellaneous consultative pottering had passed between Darius and his
+compositors round and about the new printing machine, which was once
+more plumb and ready for action.  For considerably over a week Edwin had
+been on his father's general staff without any definite task or
+occupation having been assigned to him.  His father had been too
+excitedly preoccupied with the arrival and erection of the machine to
+bestow due thought upon the activities proper to Edwin in the complex
+dailiness of the business.  Now he meant at any rate to begin to put the
+boy into a suitable niche.  The boy had deserved at least that.
+
+At the desk he opened before him the daily and weekly newspaper-book,
+and explained its system.
+
+"Let's take the `British Mechanic,'" he said.
+
+And he turned to the page where the title `British Mechanic' was written
+in red ink.  Underneath that title were written the names and addresses
+of fifteen subscribers to the paper.  To the right of the names were
+thirteen columns, representing a quarter of the year.  With his
+customary laboriousness, Darius described the entire process of
+distribution.  The parcel of papers arrived and was counted, and the
+name of a subscriber scribbled in an abbreviated form on each copy.
+Some copies had to be delivered by the errand boy; these were handed to
+the errand boy, and a tick made against each subscriber in the column
+for the week: other copies were called for by the subscriber, and as
+each of these was taken away, similarly a tick had to be made against
+the name of its subscriber.  Some copies were paid for in cash in the
+shop, some were paid in cash to the office boy, some were paid for
+monthly, some were paid for quarterly, and some, as Darius said grimly,
+were never paid for at all.  No matter what the method of paying, when a
+copy was paid for, or thirteen copies were paid for, a crossing tick had
+to be made in the book for each copy.  Thus, for a single quarter of
+"British Mechanic" nearly two hundred ticks and nearly two hundred
+crossing ticks had to be made in the book, if the work was properly
+done.  However, it was never properly done--Miss Ingamells being short
+of leisure and the errand boy utterly unreliable--and Darius wanted it
+properly done.  The total gross profit on a quarter of "British
+Mechanics" was less than five shillings, and no customers were more
+exigent and cantankerous than those who bought one pennyworth of goods
+per week, and had them delivered free, and received three months'
+credit.  Still, that could not be helped.  A printer and stationer was
+compelled by usage to supply papers; and besides, paper subscribers
+served a purpose as a nucleus of general business.
+
+As with the "British Mechanics," so with seventeen other weeklies.  The
+daily papers were fewer, but the accountancy they caused was even more
+elaborate.  For monthly magazines there was a separate book with a
+separate system; here the sums involved were vaster, ranging as high as
+half a crown.
+
+Darius led Edwin with patient minuteness through the whole labyrinth.
+
+"Now," he said, "you're going to have sole charge of all this."
+
+And he said it benevolently, in the conviction that he was awarding a
+deserved recompense, with the mien of one who was giving dominion to a
+faithful steward over ten cities.
+
+"Just look into it carefully yerself, lad," he said at last, and left
+Edwin with a mixed parcel of journals upon which to practise.
+
+Before Edwin's eyes flickered hundreds of names, thousands of figures,
+and tens of thousands of ticks.  His heart protested; it protested with
+loathing.  The prospect stretching far in front of him made him feel
+sick.  But something weak and good-natured in him forced him to smile,
+and to simulate a subdued ecstasy at receiving this overwhelming proof
+of his father's confidence in him.  As for Darius, Darius was delighted
+with himself and with his son, and he felt that he was behaving as a
+benignant father should.  Edwin had proved his grit, proved that he had
+that uncommunicable quality, `character,' and had well deserved
+encouragement.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+The next morning, in the printing office, Edwin came upon Big James
+giving a lesson in composing to the younger apprentice, who in theory
+had `learned his cases.'  Big James held the composing stick in his
+great left hand, like a match-box, and with his great right thumb and
+index picked letter after letter from the case, very slowly in order to
+display the movement, and dropped them into the stick.  In his mild,
+resonant tones he explained that each letter must be picked up
+unfalteringly in a particular way, so that it would drop face upward
+into the stick without any intermediate manipulation.  And he explained
+also that the left hand must be held so that the right hand would have
+to travel to and fro as little as possible.  He was revealing the basic
+mysteries of his craft, and was happy, making the while the broad series
+of stock pleasantries which have probably been current in composing
+rooms since printing was invented.  Then he was silent, working more and
+more quickly, till his right hand could scarcely be followed in its
+twinklings, and the face of the apprentice duly spread in marvel, When
+the line was finished he drew out the rule, clapped it down on the top
+of the last row of letters, and gave the composing stick to the
+apprentice to essay.
+
+The apprentice began to compose with his feet, his shoulders, his mouth,
+his eyebrows--with all his body except his hands, which nevertheless
+travelled spaciously far and wide.
+
+"It's not in seven year, nor in seventy, as you'll learn, young son of a
+gun!" said Big James.
+
+And, having unsettled the youth to his foundations with a bland thwack
+across the head, he resumed the composing stick and began again the
+exposition of the unique smooth movement which is the root of rapid
+type-setting.
+
+"Here!" said Big James, when the apprentice had behaved worse than ever.
+"Us'll ask Mr Edwin to have a go.  Us'll see what _he_'ll do."
+
+And Edwin, sheepish, had to comply.  He was in pride bound to surpass
+the apprentice, and did so.
+
+"There!" said Big James.  "What did I tell ye?"  He seemed to imply a
+prophecy that, because Edwin had saved the printing office from
+destruction two days previously, he would necessarily prove to be a born
+compositor.
+
+The apprentice deferentially sniggered, and Edwin smiled modestly and
+awkwardly and departed without having accomplished what he had come to
+do.
+
+By his own act of cool, nonchalant, unconsidered courage in a crisis, he
+had, it seemed, definitely proved himself to possess a special aptitude
+in all branches of the business of printer and stationer.  Everybody
+assumed it.  Everybody was pleased.  Everybody saw that Providence had
+been kind to Darius and to his son.  The fathers of the town, and the
+mothers, who liked Edwin's complexion and fair hair, told each other
+that not every parent was so fortunate as Mr Clayhanger, and what a
+blessing it was that the old breed was not after all dying out in those
+newfangled days.  Edwin could not escape from the universal assumption.
+He felt it round him as a net which somehow he had to cut.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
+
+THE ARCHITECT.
+
+One morning Edwin was busy in the shop with his own private minion, the
+paper boy, who went in awe of him.  But this was not the same Edwin,
+though people who could only judge by features, and by the length of
+trousers and sleeves on legs and arms, might have thought that it was
+the same Edwin enlarged and corrected.  Half a year had passed.  The
+month was February, cold.  Mr Enoch Peake had not merely married Mrs
+Louisa Loggerheads, but had died of an apoplexy, leaving behind him
+Cocknage Gardens, a widow, and his name painted in large letters over
+the word `Loggerheads' on the lintel of the Dragon.  The steam-printer
+had done the funeral cards, and had gone to the burial of his hopes of
+business in that quarter.  Many funeral cards had come out of the same
+printing office during the winter, including that of Mr Udall, the
+great marble-player.  It seemed uncanny to Edwin that a marble-player
+whom he had actually seen playing marbles should do anything so solemn
+as expire.  However, Edwin had perfectly lost all interest in marbles;
+only once in six months had he thought of them, and that once through a
+funeral card.  Also he was growing used to funeral cards.  He would
+enter an order for funeral cards as nonchalantly as an order for
+butterscotch labels.  But it was not deaths and the spectacle of life as
+seen from the shop that had made another Edwin of him.
+
+What had changed him was the slow daily influence of a large number of
+trifling habitual duties none of which fully strained his faculties, and
+the monotony of them, and the constant watchful conventionality of his
+deportment with customers.  He was still a youth, very youthful, but you
+had to keep an eye open for his youthfulness if you wished to find it
+beneath the little man that he had been transformed into.  He now took
+his watch out of his pocket with an absent gesture and look exactly like
+his father's; and his tones would be a reflection of those of the last
+important full-sized man with whom he had happened to have been in
+contact.  And though he had not developed into a dandy (finance
+forbidding), he kept his hair unnaturally straight, and amiably grumbled
+to Maggie about his collars every fortnight or so.  Yes, another Edwin!
+Yet it must not be assumed that he was growing in discontent, either
+chronic or acute.  On the contrary, the malady of discontent troubled
+him less and less.
+
+To the paper boy he was a real man.  The paper boy accepted him with
+unreserved fatalism, as Edwin accepted his father.  Thus the boy stood
+passive while Edwin brought business to a standstill by privately
+perusing the "Manchester Examiner."  It was Saturday morning, the
+morning on which the "Examiner" published its renowned Literary
+Supplement.  All the children read eagerly the Literary Supplement; but
+Edwin, in virtue of his office, got it first.  On the first and second
+pages was the serial story, by George MacDonald, W. Clark Russell, or
+Mrs Lynn Linton; then followed readable extracts from new books, and on
+the fourth page were selected jokes from "Punch."  Edwin somehow always
+began with the jokes, and in so doing was rather ashamed of his levity.
+He would skim the jokes, glance at the titles of the new books, and look
+at the dialogue parts of the serial, while business and the boy waited.
+There was no hurry then, even though the year had reached 1873 and
+people were saying that they would soon be at the middle of the
+seventies; even though the Licensing Act had come into force and
+publicans were predicting the end of the world.  Morning papers were not
+delivered till ten, eleven, or twelve o'clock in Bursley, and on
+Saturdays, owing to Edwin's laudable interest in the best periodical
+literature, they were apt to be delivered later than usual.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+On this particular morning Edwin was disturbed in his studies by a
+greater than the paper boy, a greater even than his father.  Mr Osmond
+Orgreave came stamping his cold feet into the shop, the floor of which
+was still a little damp from the watering that preceded its sweeping.
+Mr Orgreave, though as far as Edwin knew he had never been in the shop
+before, went straight to the coke-stove, bent his knees, and began to
+warm his hands.  In this position he opened an interview with Edwin, who
+dropped the Literary Supplement.  Miss Ingamells was momentarily absent.
+
+"Father in?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+Edwin did not say where his father was, because he had received general
+instructions never to `volunteer information' on that point.
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"He's out, sir."
+
+"Oh!  Well!  Has he left any instructions about those specifications for
+the Shawport Board School?"
+
+"No, sir.  I'm afraid he hasn't.  But I can ask in the printing office."
+
+Mr Orgreave approached the counter, smiling.  His face was angular,
+rather stout, and harsh, with a grey moustache and a short grey beard,
+and yet his demeanour and his voice had a jocular, youthful quality.
+And this was not the only contradiction about him.  His clothes were
+extremely elegant and nice in detail--the whiteness of his linen would
+have struck the most casual observer--but he seemed to be perfectly
+oblivious of his clothes, indeed, to show carelessness concerning them.
+His finger-nails were marvellously tended.  But he scribbled in pencil
+on his cuff, and apparently was not offended by a grey mark on his hand
+due to touching the top of the stove.  The idea in Edwin's head was that
+Mr Orgreave must put on a new suit of clothes once a week, and new
+linen every day, and take a bath about once an hour.  The man had no
+ceremoniousness.  Thus, though he had never previously spoken to Edwin,
+he made no preliminary pretence of not being sure who Edwin was; he
+chatted with him as though they were old friends and had parted only the
+day before; he also chatted with him as though they were equals in age,
+eminence, and wealth.  A strange man!
+
+"Now look here!" he said, as the conversation proceeded, "those
+specifications are at the Sytch Chapel.  If you could come along with me
+now--I mean _now_--I could give them to you and point out one or two
+things to you, and perhaps Big James could make a start on them this
+morning.  You see it's urgent."
+
+So he was familiar with Big James.
+
+"Certainly," said Edwin, excited.
+
+And when he had curtly told the paper boy to do portions of the
+newspaper job which he had always held the paper boy was absolutely
+incapable of doing, he sent the boy to find Miss Ingamells, informed her
+where he was going, and followed Mr Orgreave out of the shop.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+"Of course you know Charlie's at school in France," said Mr Orgreave,
+as they passed along Wedgwood Street in the direction of Saint Luke's
+Square.  He was really very companionable.
+
+"Er--yes!"  Edwin replied, nervously explosive, and buttoning up his
+tight overcoat with an important business air.
+
+"At least it isn't a school--it's a university.  Besancon, you know.
+They take university students much younger there.  Oh!  He has a rare
+time--a rare time.  Never writes to you, I suppose?"
+
+"No."  Edwin gave a short laugh.
+
+Mr Orgreave laughed aloud.  "And he wouldn't to us either, if his
+mother didn't make a fuss about it.  But when he does write, we gather
+there's no place like Besancon."
+
+"It must be splendid," Edwin said thoughtfully.
+
+"You and he were great chums, weren't you?  I know we used to hear about
+you every day.  His mother used to say that we had Clayhanger with every
+meal."  Mr Orgreave again laughed heartily.
+
+Edwin blushed.  He was quite startled, and immensely flattered.  What on
+earth could the Sunday have found to tell them every day about _him_?  He,
+Edwin Clayhanger, a subject of conversation in the household of the
+Orgreaves, that mysterious household which he had never entered but
+which he had always pictured to himself as being so finely superior!
+Less than a year ago Charlie Orgreave had been `the Sunday,' had been
+`old Perish-in-the-attempt,' and now he was a student in Besancon
+University, unapproachable, extraordinarily romantic; and he, Edwin,
+remained in his father's shop!  He had been aware that Charlie had gone
+to Besancon University, but he had not realised it effectively till this
+moment.  The realisation blew discontent into a flame, which fed on the
+further perception that evidently the Orgreave family were a gay, jolly
+crowd of cronies together, not in the least like parents and children;
+their home life must be something fundamentally different from his.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+When they had crossed the windy space of Saint Luke's Square and reached
+the top of the Sytch Bank, Mr Orgreave stopped an instant in front of
+the Sytch Pottery, and pointed to a large window at the south end that
+was in process of being boarded up.
+
+"At last!" he murmured with disgust.  Then he said: "That's the most
+beautiful window in Bursley, and perhaps in the Five Towns; and you see
+what's happening to it."
+
+Edwin had never heard the word `beautiful' uttered in quite that tone,
+except by women, such as Auntie Hamps, about a baby or a valentine or a
+sermon.  But Mr Orgreave was not a woman; he was a man of the world, he
+was almost _the_ man of the world; and the subject of his adjective was a
+window!
+
+"Why are they boarding it up, Mr Orgreave?"  Edwin asked.
+
+"Oh!  Ancient lights!  Ancient lights!"
+
+Edwin began to snigger.  He thought for an instant that Mr Orgreave was
+being jocular over his head, for he could only connect the phrase
+`ancient lights' with the meaner organs of a dead animal, exposed, for
+example, in tripe shops.  However, he saw his ineptitude almost
+simultaneously with the commission of it, and smothered the snigger in
+becoming gravity.  It was clear that he had something to learn in the
+phraseology employed by architects.
+
+"I should think," said Mr Orgreave, "I should think they've been at law
+about that window for thirty years, if not more.  Well, it's over now,
+seemingly."  He gazed at the disappearing window.  "What a shame!"
+
+"It is," said Edwin politely.
+
+Mr Orgreave crossed the road and then stood still to gaze at the facade
+of the Sytch Pottery.  It was a long two-storey building, purest
+Georgian, of red brick with very elaborate stone facings which
+contrasted admirably with the austere simplicity of the walls.  The
+porch was lofty, with a majestic flight of steps narrowing to the doors.
+The ironwork of the basement railings was unusually rich and
+impressive.
+
+"Ever seen another pot-works like that?" demanded Mr Orgreave,
+enthusiastically musing.
+
+"No," said Edwin.  Now that the question was put to him, he never _had_
+seen another pot-works like that.
+
+"There are one or two pretty fine works in the Five Towns," said Mr
+Orgreave.  "But there's nothing elsewhere to touch this.  I nearly
+always stop and look at it if I'm passing.  Just look at the pointing!
+The pointing alone--"
+
+Edwin had to readjust his ideas.  It had never occurred to him to search
+for anything fine in Bursley.  The fact was, he had never opened his
+eyes at Bursley.  Dozens of times he must have passed the Sytch Pottery,
+and yet not noticed, not suspected, that it differed from any other
+pot-works: he who dreamed of being an architect!
+
+"You don't think much of it?" said Mr Orgreave, moving on.  "People
+don't."
+
+"Oh yes!  I _do_!"  Edwin protested, and with such an air of eager
+sincerity that Mr Orgreave turned to glance at him.  And in truth he
+did think that the Sytch Pottery was beautiful.  He never would have
+thought so but for the accident of the walk with Mr Orgreave; he might
+have spent his whole life in the town, and never troubled himself a
+moment about the Sytch Pottery.  Nevertheless he now, by an act of sheer
+faith, suddenly, miraculously and genuinely regarded it as an
+exquisitely beautiful edifice, on a plane with the edifices of the
+capitals of Europe, and as a feast for discerning eyes.  "I like
+architecture very much," he added.  And this too was said with such
+feverish conviction that Mr Orgreave was quite moved.
+
+"I must show you my new Sytch Chapel," said Mr Orgreave gaily.
+
+"Oh!  I should like you to show it me," said Edwin.
+
+But he was exceedingly perturbed by misgivings.  Here was he wanting to
+be an architect, and he had never observed the Sytch Pottery!  Surely
+that was an absolute proof that he had no vocation for architecture!
+And yet now he did most passionately admire the Sytch Pottery.  And he
+was proud to be sharing the admiration of the fine, joyous, superior,
+luxurious, companionable man, Mr Orgreave.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+They went down the Sytch Bank to the new chapel of which Mr Orgreave,
+though a churchman, was the architect, in that vague quarter of the
+world between Bursley and Turnhill.  The roof was not on; the
+scaffolding was extraordinarily interesting and confusing; they bent
+their heads to pass under low portals; Edwin had the delicious smell of
+new mortar; they stumbled through sand, mud, cinders and little pools;
+they climbed a ladder and stepped over a large block of dressed stone,
+and Mr Orgreave said--
+
+"This is the gallery we're in, here.  You see the scheme of the place
+now...  That hole--only a flue.  Now you see what that arch carries--
+they didn't like it in the plans because they thought it might be
+mistaken for a church--"
+
+Edwin was receptive.
+
+"Of course it's a very small affair, but it'll cost less per sitting
+than any other chapel in your circuit, and I fancy it'll look less like
+a box of bricks."  Mr Orgreave subtly smiled, and Edwin tried to equal
+his subtlety.  "I must show you the elevation some other time--a bit
+later.  What I've been after in it, is to keep it in character with the
+street...  Hi!  Dan, there!"  Now, Mr Orgreave was calling across the
+hollow of the chapel to a fat man in corduroys.  "Have you remembered
+about those blue bricks?"
+
+Perhaps the most captivating phenomenon of all was a little lean-to shed
+with a real door evidently taken from somewhere else, and a little
+stove, and a table and a chair.  Here Mr Orgreave had a confabulation
+with the corduroyed man, who was the builder, and they pored over
+immense sheets of coloured plans that lay on the table, and Mr Orgreave
+made marks and even sketches on the plans, and the fat man objected to
+his instructions, and Mr Orgreave insisted, "Yes, _yes_!"  And it seemed
+to Edwin as though the building of the chapel stood still while Mr
+Orgreave cogitated and explained; it seemed to Edwin that he was in the
+creating-chamber.  The atmosphere of the shed was inexpressibly romantic
+to him.  After the fat man had gone Mr Orgreave took a clothes-brush
+off a plank that had been roughly nailed on two brackets to the wall,
+and brushed Edwin's clothes, and Edwin brushed Mr Orgreave, and then
+Mr Orgreave, having run his hand through the brush, lightly brushed his
+hair with it.  All this was part of Edwin's joy.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I think the idea of that arch is splendid."
+
+"You do?" said Mr Orgreave quite simply and ingenuously pleased and
+interested.  "You see--with the lie of the ground as it is--"
+
+That was another point that Edwin ought to have thought of by himself--
+the lie of the ground--but he had not thought of it.  Mr Orgreave went
+on talking.  In the shop he had conveyed the idea that he was
+tremendously pressed for time; now he had apparently forgotten time.
+
+"I'm afraid I shall have to be off," said Edwin timidly.  And he made a
+preliminary movement as if to depart.
+
+"And what about those specifications, young man?" asked Mr Orgreave,
+drily twinkling.  He unlocked a drawer in the rickety table.  Edwin had
+forgotten the specifications as successfully as Mr Orgreave had
+forgotten time.  Throughout the remainder of the day he smelt imaginary
+mortar.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
+
+A DECISION.
+
+The next day being the day of rest, Mrs Nixon arose from her nook at
+5:30 a.m. and woke Edwin.  She did this from good-nature, and because
+she could refuse him nothing, and not under any sort of compulsion.
+Edwin got up at the first call, though he was in no way remarkable for
+his triumphs over the pillow.  Twenty-five minutes later he was crossing
+Trafalgar Road and entering the school-yard of the Wesleyan Chapel.  And
+from various quarters of the town, other young men, of ages varying from
+sixteen to fifty, were converging upon the same point.  Black night
+still reigned above the lamplights that flickered in the wind which
+precedes the dawn, and the mud was frozen.  Not merely had these young
+men to be afoot and abroad, but they had to be ceremoniously dressed.
+They could not issue forth in flannels and sweater, with a towel round
+the neck, as for a morning plunge in the river.  The day was Sunday,
+though Sunday had not dawned, and the plunge was into the river of
+intellectual life.  Moreover, they were bound by conscience to be
+prompt.  To have arrived late, even five minutes late, would have spoilt
+the whole effect.  It had to be six o'clock or nothing.
+
+The Young Men's Debating Society was a newly formed branch of the
+multifarous activity of the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel.  It met on Sunday
+because Sunday was the only day that would suit everybody; and at six in
+the morning for two reasons.  The obvious reason was that at any other
+hour its meetings would clash either with other activities or with the
+solemnity of Sabbath meals.  This obvious reason could not have stood by
+itself; it was secretly supported by the recondite reason that the
+preposterous hour of 6 a.m. appealed powerfully to something youthful,
+perverse, silly, fanatical, and fine in the youths.  They discovered the
+ascetic's joy in robbing themselves of sleep and in catching chills, and
+in disturbing households and chapel-keepers.  They thought it was a
+great thing to be discussing intellectual topics at an hour when a town
+that ignorantly scorned intellectuality was snoring in all its heavy
+brutishness.  And it was a great thing.  They considered themselves the
+salt of the earth, or of that part of the earth.  And I have an idea
+that they were.
+
+Edwin had joined this Society partly because he did not possess the art
+of refusing, partly because the notion of it appealed spectacularly to
+the martyr in him, and partly because it gave him an excuse for ceasing
+to attend the afternoon Sunday school, which he loathed.  Without such
+an excuse he could never have told his father that he meant to give up
+Sunday school.  He could never have dared to do so.  His father had what
+Edwin deemed to be a superstitious and hypocritical regard for the
+Sunday school.  Darius never went near the Sunday school, and assuredly
+in business and in home life he did not practise the precepts inculcated
+at the Sunday school, and yet he always spoke of the Sunday school with
+what was to Edwin a ridiculous reverence.  Another of those problems in
+his father's character which Edwin gave up in disgust!
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+The Society met in a small classroom.  The secretary, arch ascetic,
+arrived at 5:45 and lit the fire which the chapel-keeper (a man with no
+enthusiasm whatever for flagellation, the hairshirt, or intellectuality)
+had laid but would not get up to light.  The chairman of the Society, a
+little Welshman named Llewelyn Roberts, aged fifty, but a youth because
+a bachelor, sat on a chair at one side of the incipient fire, and some
+dozen members sat round the room on forms.  A single gas jet flamed from
+the ceiling.  Everybody wore his overcoat, and within the collars of
+overcoats could be seen glimpses of rich neckties; the hats, some
+glossy, dotted the hat-rack which ran along two walls.  A hymn was sung,
+and then all knelt, some spreading handkerchiefs on the dusty floor to
+protect fine trousers, and the chairman invoked the blessing of God on
+their discussions.  The proper mental and emotional atmosphere was now
+established.  The secretary read the minutes of the last meeting, while
+the chairman surreptitiously poked the fire with a piece of wood from
+the lower works of a chair, and then the chairman, as he signed the
+minutes with a pen dipped in an excise ink-bottle that stood on the
+narrow mantelpiece, said in his dry voice--
+
+"I call upon our young friend, Mr Edwin Clayhanger, to open the debate,
+`Is Bishop Colenso, considered as a Biblical commentator, a force for
+good?'"
+
+"I'm a damned fool!" said Edwin to himself savagely, as he stood on his
+feet.  But to look at his wistful and nervously smiling face, no one
+would have guessed that he was thus blasphemously swearing in the
+privacy of his own brain.
+
+He had been entrapped into the situation in which he found himself.  It
+was not until after he had joined the Society that he had learnt of a
+rule which made it compulsory for every member to speak at every meeting
+attended, and for every member to open a debate at least once in a year.
+And this was not all; the use of notes while the orator was `up' was
+absolutely forbidden.  A drastic Society!  It had commended itself to
+elders by claiming to be a nursery for ready speakers.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Edwin had chosen the subject of Bishop Colenso--the ultimate wording of
+the resolution was not his--because he had been reading about the
+intellectually adventurous Bishop in the "Manchester Examiner."  And,
+although eleven years had passed since the publication of the first part
+of "The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined," the
+Colenso question was only just filtering down to the thinking classes of
+the Five Towns; it was an actuality in the Five Towns, if in abeyance in
+London.  Even Hugh Miller's "The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an
+Old Field," then over thirty years old, was still being looked upon as
+dangerously original in the Five Towns in 1873.  However, the effect of
+its disturbing geological evidence that the earth could scarcely have
+been begun and finished in a little under a week, was happily nullified
+by the suicide of its author; that pistol-shot had been a striking proof
+of the literal inspiration of the Bible.
+
+Bishop Colenso had, in Edwin, an ingenuous admirer.  Edwin stammeringly
+and hesitatingly gave a preliminary sketch of his life; how he had been
+censured by Convocation and deposed from his See by his Metropolitan;
+how the Privy Council had decided that the deposition was null and void;
+how the ecclesiastical authorities had then circumvented the Privy
+Council by refusing to pay his salary to the Bishop (which Edwin
+considered mean); how the Bishop had circumvented the ecclesiastical
+authorities by appealing to the Master of the Rolls, who ordered the
+ecclesiastical authorities to pay him his arrears of income with
+interest thereon, unless they were ready to bring him to trial for
+heresy; how the said authorities would not bring him to trial for heresy
+(which Edwin considered to be miserable cowardice on their part); how
+the Bishop had then been publicly excommunicated, without authority; and
+how his friends, among whom were some very respectable and powerful
+people, had made him a present of over three thousand pounds.  After
+this graphic historical survey, Edwin proceeded to the Pentateuchal
+puzzles, and, without pronouncing an opinion thereon, argued that any
+commentator who was both learned and sincere must be a force for good,
+as the Bible had nothing to fear from honest inquiry, etcetera,
+etcetera.  Five-sixths of his speech was coloured by phrases and modes
+of thought which he had picked up in the Wesleyan community, and the
+other sixth belonged to himself.  The speech was moderately bad, but not
+inferior to many other speeches.  It was received in absolute silence.
+This rather surprised Edwin, because the tone in which the leading
+members of the Society usually spoke to him indicated that (for reasons
+which he knew not) they regarded him as a very superior intellect
+indeed; and Edwin was not entirely ashamed of the quality of his speech;
+in fact, he had feared worse from himself, especially as, since his walk
+with Mr Orgreave, he had been quite unable to concentrate his thoughts
+on Bishop Colenso at all, and had been exceedingly unhappy and
+apprehensive concerning an affair that bore no kind of relation to the
+Pentateuch.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+The chairman began to speak at once.  His function was to call upon the
+speakers in the order arranged, and to sum up before putting the
+resolution to the vote.  But now he produced surprisingly a speech of
+his own.  He reminded the meeting that in 1860 Bishop Colenso had
+memorialised the Archbishop of Canterbury against compelling natives who
+had already more than one wife to renounce polygamy as a condition to
+baptism in the Christian religion; he stated that, though there were
+young men present who were almost infants in arms at that period, he for
+his part could well remember all the episode, and in particular Bishop
+Colenso's amazing allegation that he could find no disapproval of
+polygamy either in the Bible or in the writings of the Ancient Church.
+He also pointed out that in 1861 Bishop Colenso had argued against the
+doctrine of Eternal Punishment.  He warned the meeting to beware of
+youthful indiscretions.  Every one there assembled of course meant well,
+and believed what it was a duty to believe, but at the same time...
+
+"I shall write father a letter!" said Edwin to himself.  The idea came
+to him in a flash like a divine succour; and it seemed to solve all his
+difficulties--difficulties unconnected with the subject of debate.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+The chairman went on crossing t's and dotting i's.  And soon even Edwin
+perceived that the chairman was diplomatically and tactfully, yet very
+firmly, bent upon saving the meeting from any possibility of
+scandalising itself and the Wesleyan community.  Bishop Colenso must not
+be approved beneath those roofs.  Evidently Edwin had been more
+persuasive than he dreamt of; and daring beyond precedent.  He had meant
+to carry his resolution if he could, whereas, it appeared, he ought to
+have meant to be defeated, in the true interests of revealed religion.
+The chairman kept referring to his young friend the proposer's brilliant
+brains, and to the grave danger that lurked in brilliant brains, and the
+inability of brilliant brains to atone for lack of experience.  The
+meeting had its cue.  Young man after young man arose to snub Bishop
+Colenso, to hope charitably that Bishop Colenso was sincere, and to
+insist that no Bishop Colenso should lead _him_ to the awful abyss of
+polygamy, and that no Bishop Colenso should deprive _him_ of that unique
+incentive to righteousness--the doctrine of an everlasting burning hell.
+Moses was put on his legs again as a serious historian, and the subject
+of the resolution utterly lost to view.  The Chairman then remarked that
+his impartial role forbade him to support either side, and the voting
+showed fourteen against one.  They all sang the Doxology, and the
+Chairman pronounced a benediction.  The fourteen forgave the one, as one
+who knew not what he did; but their demeanour rather too patently showed
+that they were forgiving under difficulty; and that it would be as well
+that this kind of youthful temerariousness was not practised too often.
+Edwin, in the language of the district, was `sneaped.'  Wondering what
+on earth he after all _had_ said to raise such an alarm, he nevertheless
+did not feel resentful, only very depressed--about the debate and about
+other things.  He knew in his heart that for him attendance at the
+meetings of the Young Men's Debating Society was ridiculous.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+He allowed all the rest to precede him from the room.  When he was alone
+he smiled sheepishly, and also disdainfully; he knew that the chasm
+between himself and the others was a real chasm, and not a figment of
+his childish diffidence, as he had sometimes suspected it to be.  Then
+he turned the gas out.  A beautiful faint silver surged through the
+window.  While the debate was in progress, the sun had been going about
+its business of the dawn, unperceived.
+
+"I shall write a letter!" he kept saying to himself.  "He'll never let
+me explain myself properly if I start talking.  I shall write a letter.
+I can write a very good letter, and he'll be bound to take notice of it.
+He'll never be able to get over my letter."
+
+In the school-yard daylight reigned.  The debaters had already
+disappeared.  Trafalgar Road and Duck Bank were empty and silent under
+rosy clouds.  Instead of going straight home Edwin went past the Town
+Hall and through the Market Place to the Sytch Pottery.  Astounding that
+he had never noticed for himself how beautiful the building was!  It was
+a simply lovely building!
+
+"Yes," he said, "I shall write him a letter, and this very day, too!
+May I be hung, drawn, and quartered if he doesn't have to read my letter
+to-morrow morning!"
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
+
+THE LETTER.
+
+Then there was roast goose for dinner, and Clara amused herself by
+making silly facetious faces, furtively, dangerously, under her father's
+very eyes.  The children feared goose for their father, whose digestion
+was usually unequal to this particular bird.  Like many fathers of
+families in the Five Towns, he had the habit of going forth on Saturday
+mornings to the butcher's or the poulterer's and buying Sunday's dinner.
+He was a fairly good judge of a joint, but Maggie considered herself to
+be his superior in this respect.  However, Darius was not prepared to
+learn from Maggie, and his purchases had to be accepted without
+criticism.  At a given meal Darius would never admit that anything
+chosen and bought by him was not perfect; but a week afterwards, if the
+fact was so, he would of his own accord recall imperfections in that
+which he had asserted to be perfect; and he would do this without any
+shame, without any apparent sense of inconsistency or weakness.  Edwin
+noticed a similar trait in other grown-up persons, and it astonished
+him.  It astonished him especially in his father, who, despite the
+faults and vulgarities which his fastidious son could find in him,
+always impressed Edwin as a strong man, a man with the heroic quality of
+not caring too much what other people thought.
+
+When Edwin saw his father take a second plateful of goose, with the
+deadly stuffing thereof--Darius simply could not resist it, like most
+dyspeptics he was somewhat greedy--he foresaw an indisposed and perilous
+father for the morrow.  Which prevision was supported by Clara's
+pantomimic antics, and even by Maggie's grave and restrained sigh.
+Still, he had sworn to write and send the letter, and he should do so.
+A career, a lifetime, was not to be at the mercy of a bilious attack,
+surely!  Such a notion offended logic and proportion, and he scorned it
+away.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+The meal proceeded in silence.  Darius, as in duty bound, mentioned the
+sermon, but neither Clara nor Edwin would have anything to do with the
+sermon, and Maggie had not been to chapel.  Clara and Edwin felt
+themselves free of piety till six o'clock at least, and they doggedly
+would not respond.  And Darius from prudence did not insist, for he had
+arrived at chapel unthinkably late--during the second chant--and Clara
+was capable of audacious remarks upon occasions.  The silence grew
+stolid.
+
+And Edwin wondered what the dinner-table of the Orgreaves was like.  And
+he could smell fresh mortar.  And he dreamed of a romantic life--he knew
+not what kind of life, but something different fundamentally from his
+own.  He suddenly understood, understood with sympathy, the impulse
+which had made boys run away to sea.  He could feel the open sea; he
+could feel the breath of freedom on his cheek.
+
+He said to himself--
+
+"Why shouldn't I break this ghastly silence by telling father out loud
+here that he mustn't forget what I told him that night in the attic?
+I'm going to be an architect.  I'm not going to be any blooming printer.
+I'm going to be an architect.  Why haven't I mentioned it before?  Why
+haven't I talked about it all the time?  Because I am an ass!  Because
+there is no word for what I am!  Damn it!  I suppose I'm the person to
+choose what I'm going to be!  I suppose it's my business more than his.
+Besides, he can't possibly refuse me.  If I say flatly that I won't be a
+printer--he's done.  This idea of writing a letter is just like me!
+Coward!  Coward!  What's my tongue for?  Can't I talk?  Isn't he bound
+to listen?  All I have to do is to open my mouth.  He's sitting there.
+I'm sitting here.  He can't eat me.  I'm in my rights.  Now suppose I
+start on it as soon as Mrs Nixon has brought the pudding and pie in?"
+
+And he waited anxiously to see whether he indeed would be able to make a
+start after the departure of Mrs Nixon.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Hopeless!  He could not bring himself to do it.  It was strange!  It was
+disgusting! ...  No, he would be compelled to write the letter.
+Besides, the letter would be more effective.  His father could not
+interrupt a letter by some loud illogical remark.  Thus he salved his
+self-conceit.  He also sought relief in reflecting savagely upon the
+speeches that had been made against him in the debate.  He went through
+them all in his mind.  There was the slimy idiot from Baines's (it was
+in such terms that his thoughts ran) who gloried in never having read a
+word of Colenso, and called the assembled company to witness that
+nothing should ever induce him to read such a godless author, going
+about in the mask of a so-called Bishop.  But had any of them read
+Colenso, except possibly Llewellyn Roberts, who in his Welsh way would
+pretend ignorance and then come out with a quotation and refer you to
+the exact page?  Edwin himself had read very little of Colenso--and that
+little only because a customer had ordered the second part of the
+"Pentateuch" and he had stolen it for a night.  Colenso was not in the
+Free Library...  What a world!  What a debate!  Still, he could not help
+dwelling with pleasure on Mr Roberts's insistence on the brilliant
+quality of his brains.  Astute as Mr Roberts was, the man was clearly
+in awe of Edwin's brains!  Why?  To be honest, Edwin had never been
+deeply struck by his own brain power.  And yet there must be something
+in it!
+
+"Of course," he reflected sardonically, "father doesn't show the
+faintest interest in the debate.  Yet he knew all about it, and that I
+had to open it."  But he was glad that his father showed no interest in
+the debate.  Clara had mentioned it in the presence of Maggie, with her
+usual ironic intent, and Edwin had quickly shut her up.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+In the afternoon, the sitting-room being made uninhabitable by his
+father's goose-ridden dozes, he went out for a walk; the weather was
+cold and fine.  When he returned his father also had gone out; the two
+girls were lolling in the sitting-room.  An immense fire, built up by
+Darius, was just ripe for the beginning of decay, and the room very
+warm.  Clara was at the window, Maggie in Darius's chair reading a novel
+of Charlotte M. Yonge's.  On the table, open, was a bound volume of "The
+Family Treasury of Sunday Reading," in which Clara had been perusing
+"The Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family" with feverish interest.
+Edwin had laughed at her ingenuous absorption in the adventures of the
+Schonberg-Cotta family, but the fact was that he had found them rather
+interesting, in spite of himself, while pretending the contrary.  There
+was an atmosphere of high obstinate effort and heroical foreign-ness
+about the story which stimulated something secret in him that seldom
+responded to the provocation of a book; more easily would this secret
+something respond to a calm evening or a distant prospect, or the
+silence of early morning when by chance he looked out of his window.
+
+The volume of "The Family Treasury," though five years old, was a recent
+acquisition.  It had come into the house through the total disappearance
+of a customer who had left the loose numbers to be bound in 1869.  Edwin
+dropped sideways on to a chair at the table, spread out his feet to the
+right, pitched his left elbow a long distance to the left, and, his head
+resting on his left hand, turned over the pages with his right hand
+idly.  His eye caught titles such as: "The Door was Shut," "My Mother's
+Voice," "The Heather Mother," "The Only Treasure," "Religion and
+Business," "Hope to the End," "The Child of our Sunday School," "Satan's
+Devices," and "Studies of Christian Life and Character, Hannah More."
+Then he saw an article about some architecture in Rome, and he read: "In
+the Sistine picture there is the struggle of a great mind to reduce
+within the possibilities of art a subject that transcends it.  That mind
+would have shown itself to be greater, truer, at least, in its judgement
+of the capabilities of art, and more reverent to have let it alone."
+The seriousness of the whole magazine intimidated him into accepting
+this pronouncement for a moment, though his brief studies in various
+encyclopaedias had led him to believe that the Sistine Chapel (shown in
+an illustration in Cazenove) was high beyond any human criticism.  His
+elbow slid on the surface of the table, and in recovering himself he
+sent "The Family Treasury" on the floor, wrong side up, with a great
+noise.  Maggie did not move.  Clara turned and protested sharply against
+this sacrilege, and Edwin, out of mere caprice, informed her that her
+precious magazine was the most stinking silly `pi' [pious] thing that
+ever was.  With haughty and shocked gestures she gathered up the volume
+and took it out of the room.
+
+"I say, Mag," Edwin muttered, still leaning his head on his hand, and
+staring blankly at the wall.
+
+The fire dropped a little in the grate.
+
+"What is it?" asked Maggie, without stirring or looking up.
+
+"Has father said anything to you about me wanting to be an architect?"
+He spoke with an affectation of dreaminess.
+
+"About you wanting to be an architect?" repeated Maggie in surprise.
+
+"Yes," said Edwin.  He knew perfectly well that his father would never
+have spoken to Maggie on such a subject.  But he wanted to open a
+conversation.
+
+"No fear!" said Maggie.  And added in her kindest, most encouraging,
+elder-sisterly tone: "Why?"
+
+"Oh!"  He hesitated, drawling, and then he told her a great deal of what
+was in his mind.  And she carefully put the wool-marker in her book and
+shut it, and listened to him.  And the fire dropped and dropped,
+comfortably.  She did not understand him; obviously she thought his
+desire to be an architect exceedingly odd; but she sympathised.  Her
+attitude was soothing and fortifying.  After all (he reflected) Maggie's
+all right--there's some sense in Maggie.  He could `get on' with Maggie.
+For a few moments he was happy and hopeful.
+
+"I thought I'd write him a letter," he said.  "You know how he is to
+talk to."
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"What d'ye think?" he questioned.
+
+"I should," said Maggie.
+
+"Then I shall!" he exclaimed.  "How d'ye think he'll take it?"
+
+"Well," said Maggie, "I don't see how he can do aught but take it all
+right...  Depends how you put it, of course."
+
+"Oh, you leave that to me!" said Edwin, with eager confidence.  "I shall
+put it all right.  You trust me for that!"
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+Clara danced into the room, flowing over with infantile joy.  She had
+been listening to part of the conversation behind the door.
+
+"So he wants to be an architect!  Arch-i-tect!  Arch-i-tect!"  She
+half-sang the word in a frenzy of ridicule.  She really did dance, and
+waved her arms.  Her eyes glittered, as if in rapture.  These singular
+manifestations of her temperament were caused solely by the strangeness
+of the idea of Edwin wanting to be an architect.  The strange sight of
+him with his hair cut short or in a new neck-tie affected her in a
+similar manner.
+
+"Clara, go and put your pinafore on this _instant_!" said Maggie.  "You
+know you oughtn't to leave it off."
+
+"You needn't be so hoity-toity, miss," Clara retorted.  But she moved to
+obey.  When she reached the door she turned again and gleefully taunted
+Edwin.  "And it's all because he went for a walk yesterday with Mr
+Orgreave!  I know!  I know!  You needn't think I didn't see you, because
+I did!  Arch-i-tect!  Arch-i-tect!"
+
+She vanished, on all her springs, spitefully graceful.
+
+"You might almost think that infernal kid was right bang off her head,"
+Edwin muttered crossly.  (Still, it was extraordinary how that infernal
+kid hit on the truth.)
+
+Maggie began to mend the fire.
+
+"Oh, well!" murmured Maggie, conveying to Edwin that no importance must
+be attached to the chit's chittishness.
+
+He went up to the next flight of stairs to his attic.  Dust on the table
+of his work-attic!  Shameful dust!  He had not used that attic since
+Christmas, on the miserable plea that winter was cold and there was no
+fireplace!  He blamed himself for his effeminacy.  Where had flown his
+seriousness, his elaborate plans, his high purposes?  A touch of winter
+had frightened them away.  Yes, he blamed himself mercilessly.  True it
+was--as that infernal kid had chanted--a casual half-hour with Mr
+Orgreave was alone responsible for his awakening--at any rate, for his
+awakening at this particular moment.  Still, he was awake--that was the
+great fact.  He was tremendously awake.  He had not been asleep; he had
+only been half-asleep.  His intention of becoming an architect had never
+left him.  But, through weakness before his father, through a cowardly
+desire to avoid disturbance and postpone a crisis, he had let the weeks
+slide by.  Now he was in a groove, in a canyon.  He had to get out, and
+the sooner the better.
+
+A piece of paper, soiled, was pinned on his drawing-board; one or two
+sketches lay about.  He turned the drawing-board over, so that he might
+use it for a desk on which to write the letter.  But he had no habit of
+writing letters.  In the attic was to be found neither ink, pen, paper,
+nor envelope.  He remembered a broken quire of sermon paper in his
+bedroom; he had used a few sheets of it for notes on Bishop Colenso.
+These notes had been written in the privacy and warmth of bed, in
+pencil.  But the letter must be done in ink; the letter was too
+important for pencil; assuredly his father would take exception to
+pencil.  He descended to his sister's room and borrowed Maggie's ink and
+a pen, and took an envelope, tripping like a thief.  Then he sat down to
+the composition of the letter; but he was obliged to stop almost
+immediately in order to light the lamp.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+This is what he wrote:
+
+"Dear Father,--I dare say you will think it queer me writing you a
+letter like this, but it is the best thing I can do, and I hope you will
+excuse me.  I dare say you will remember I told you that night when you
+came home late from Manchester here in the attic that I wanted to be an
+architect.  You replied that what I wanted was business experience.  If
+you say that I have not had enough business experience yet, I agree to
+that, but I want it to be understood that later on, when it is the
+proper time, I am to be an architect.  You know I am very fond of
+architecture, and I feel that I must be an architect.  I feel I shall
+not be happy in the printing business because I want to be an architect.
+I am now nearly seventeen.  Perhaps it is too soon yet for me to be
+apprenticed to an architect, and so I can go on learning business
+habits.  But I just want it to be understood.  I am quite sure you wish
+me to be happy in life, and I shan't be happy if I am always regretting
+that I have not gone in for being an architect.  I know I shall like
+architecture.--Your affectionate son, Edwin Clayhanger."
+
+Then, as an afterthought, he put the date and his address at the top.
+He meditated a postscript asking for a reply, but decided that this was
+unnecessary.  As he was addressing the envelope Mrs Nixon called out to
+him from below to come to tea.  He was surprised to find that he had
+spent over an hour on the letter.  He shivered and sneezed.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SEVEN.
+
+During tea he felt himself absurdly self-conscious, but nobody seemed to
+notice his condition.  The whole family went to chapel.  The letter lay
+in his pocket, and he might easily have slipped away to the post-office
+with it, but he had had no opportunity to possess himself of a stamp.
+There was no need to send the letter through the post.  He might get up
+early and put it among the morning's letters.  He had decided, however,
+that it must arrive formally by the postman, and he would not alter his
+decision.  Hence, after chapel, he took a match, and, creeping into the
+shop, procured a crimson stamp from his father's desk.  Then he went
+forth, by the back way, alone into the streets.  The adventure was not
+so hazardous as it seemed and as it felt.  Darius was incurious by
+nature, though he had brief fevers of curiosity.  Thus the life of the
+children was a demoralising mixture of rigid discipline and freedom.
+They were permitted nothing, but, as the years passed, they might take
+nearly anything.  There was small chance of Darius discovering his son's
+excursion.
+
+In crossing the road from chapel Edwin had opined to his father that the
+frost was breaking.  He was now sure of it.  The mud, no longer brittle,
+yielded to pressure, and there was a trace of dampness in the
+interstices of the pavement bricks.  A thin raw mist was visible in huge
+spheres round the street lamps.  The sky was dark.  The few people whom
+he encountered seemed to be out upon mysterious errands, seemed to
+emerge strangely from one gloom and strangely to vanish into another.
+In the blind, black facades of the streets the public-houses blazed
+invitingly with gas; they alone were alive in the weekly death of the
+town; and they gleamed everywhere, at every corner; the town appeared to
+consist chiefly of public-houses.  He dropped the letter into the box in
+the market-place; he heard it fall.  His heart beat.  The deed was now
+irrevocable.  He wondered what Monday held for him.  The quiescent
+melancholy of the town invaded his spirit, and mingled with his own
+remorseful sorrow for the unstrenuous past, and his apprehensive
+solicitude about the future.  It was not unpleasant, this brooding
+sadness, half-despondency and half-hope.  A man and a woman, arm-in-arm,
+went by him as he stood unconscious of his conspicuousness under the
+gas-lamp that lit the post-office.  They laughed the smothered laugh of
+intimacy to see a tall boy standing alone there, with no overcoat,
+gazing at naught.  Edwin turned to go home.  It occurred to him that
+nearly all the people he met were couples, arm-in-arm.  And he suddenly
+thought of Florence, the clog-dancer.  He had scarcely thought of her
+for months.  The complexity of the interests of life, and the
+interweaving of its moods, fatigued his mind into an agreeably grave
+vacuity.
+
+
+
+VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.
+
+END OF A STRUGGLE.
+
+It was not one of his official bilious attacks that Darius had on the
+following day; he only yielded himself up in the complete grand manner
+when nature absolutely compelled.  The goose had not formally beaten
+him, but neither had he formally beaten the goose.  The battle was
+drawn, and this meant that Darius had a slight headache, a feeling of
+heavy disgust with the entire polity of the universe, and a
+disinclination for food.  The first and third symptoms he hid as far as
+possible, from pride: at breakfast he toyed with bacon, from pride,
+hating bacon.  The children knew from his eyes and his guilty gestures
+that he was not well, but they dared not refer to his condition; they
+were bound to pretend that the health of their father flourished in the
+highest perfection.  And they were glad that things were no worse.
+
+On the other hand Edwin had a sneezing cold which he could not conceal,
+and Darius inimically inquired what foolishness he had committed to have
+brought this on himself.  Edwin replied that he knew of no cause for it.
+A deliberate lie!  He knew that he had contracted a chill while writing
+a letter to his father in an unwarmed attic, and had intensified the
+chill by going forth to post the letter without his overcoat in a raw
+evening mist.  Obviously, however, he could not have stated the truth.
+He was uncomfortable at the breakfast-table, but, after the first few
+moments, less so than during the disturbed night he had feared to be.
+His father had neither eaten him, nor jumped down his throat, nor
+performed any of those unpleasant miraculous feats which fathers usually
+do perform when infuriated by filial foolishness.  The letter therefore
+had not been utterly disastrous; sometimes a letter would ruin a
+breakfast, for Mr Clayhanger, with no consideration for the success of
+meals, always opened his post before bite or sup.  He had had the
+letter, and still he was ready to talk to his son in the ordinary grim
+tone of a goose-morrow.  Which was to the good.  Edwin was now convinced
+that he had done well to write the letter.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+But as the day passed, Edwin began to ask himself: "Has he had the
+letter?"  There was no sign of the letter in his father's demeanour,
+which, while not such as to make it credible that he ever had moods of
+positive gay roguishness, was almost tolerable, considering his headache
+and his nausea.  Letters occasionally were lost in the post, or delayed.
+Edwin thought it would be just his usual bad luck if that particular
+letter, that letter of all letters, should be lost.  And the strange
+thing is that he could not prevent himself from hoping that it indeed
+was lost.  He would prefer it to be lost rather than delayed.  He felt
+that if the postman brought it by the afternoon delivery while he and
+his father were in the shop together, he should drop down dead.  The day
+continued to pass, and did pass.  And the shop was closed.  "He'll speak
+to me after supper," said Edwin.  But Darius did not speak to him after
+supper.  Darius put on his hat and overcoat and went out, saying no word
+except to advise the children to be getting to bed, all of them.
+
+As soon as he was gone Edwin took a candle and returned to the shop.  He
+was convinced now that the letter had not been delivered, but he wished
+to make conviction sure.  He opened the desk.  His letter was nearly the
+first document he saw.  It looked affrighting, awful.  He dared not read
+it, to see whether its wording was fortunate or unfortunate.  He
+departed, mystified.  Upstairs in his bedroom he had a new copy of an
+English translation of Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame," which had been
+ordered by Lawyer Lawton, but would not be called for till the following
+week, because Lawyer Lawton only called once a fortnight.  He had meant
+to read that book, with due precautions, in bed.  But he could not fix
+attention on it.  Impossible for him to follow a single paragraph.  He
+extinguished the candle.  Then he heard his father come home.  He
+thought that he scarcely slept all night.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+The next morning, Tuesday, the girls, between whom and their whispering
+friend Miss Ingamells something feminine was evidently afoot, left the
+breakfast-table sooner than usual, not without stifled giggles: upon
+occasion Maggie would surprisingly meet Clara and Miss Ingamells on
+their own plane; since Sunday afternoon she had shown no further
+interest in Edwin's important crisis; she seemed, so far as he could
+judge, to have fallen back into her customary state of busy apathy.
+
+The man and the young man were alone together.  Darius, in his
+satisfaction at having been delivered so easily from the goose, had
+taken an extra slice of bacon.  Edwin's cold was now fully developed;
+and Maggie had told him to feed it.
+
+"I suppose you got that letter I wrote you, father, about me going in
+for architecture," said Edwin.  Then he blew his nose to hide his
+confusion.  He was rather startled to hear himself saying those bold
+words.  He thought that he was quite calm and in control of his
+impulses; but it was not so; his nerves were stretched to the utmost.
+
+Darius said nothing.  But Edwin could see his face darkening, and his
+lower lip heavily falling.  He glowered, though not at Edwin.  With eyes
+fixed on the window he glowered into vacancy.  The pride went out of
+Edwin's heart.
+
+"So ye'd leave the printing?" muttered Darius, when he had finished
+masticating.  He spoke in a menacing voice thick with ferocious emotion.
+
+"Well--" said Edwin, quaking.
+
+He thought he had never seen his father so ominously intimidating.  He
+was terrorised as he looked at that ugly and dark countenance.  He could
+not say any more.  His voice left him.  Thus his fear was physical as
+well as moral.  He reflected: "Well, I expected a row, but I didn't
+expect it would be as bad as this!"  And once more he was completely
+puzzled and baffled by the enigma of his father.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+He did not hold the key, and even had he held it he was too young, too
+inexperienced, to have used it.  As with gathering passion the eyes of
+Darius assaulted the window-pane, Darius had a painful intense vision of
+that miracle, his own career.  Edwin's grand misfortune was that he was
+blind to the miracle.  Edwin had never seen the little boy in the
+Bastille.  But Darius saw him always, the infant who had begun life at a
+rope's-end.  Every hour of Darius's present existence was really an
+astounding marvel to Darius.  He could not read the newspaper without
+thinking how wonderful it was that he should be able to read the
+newspaper.  And it was wonderful!  It was wonderful that he had three
+different suits of clothes, none of them with a single hole.  It was
+wonderful that he had three children, all with complete outfits of good
+clothes.  It was wonderful that he never had to think twice about buying
+coal, and that he could have more food than he needed.  It was wonderful
+that he was not living in a two-roomed cottage.  He never came into his
+house by the side entrance without feeling proud that the door gave on
+to a preliminary passage and not direct into a living-room; he would
+never lose the idea that a lobby, however narrow, was the great
+distinguishing mark of wealth.  It was wonderful that he had a piano,
+and that his girls could play it and could sing.  It was wonderful that
+he had paid twenty-eight shillings a term for his son's schooling, in
+addition to book-money.  Twenty-eight shillings a term!  And once a
+penny a week was considered enough, and twopence generous!  Through
+sheer splendid wilful pride he had kept his son at school till the lad
+was sixteen, going on seventeen!  Seventeen, not seven!  He had had the
+sort of pride in his son that a man may have in an idle, elegant, and
+absurdly expensive woman.  It even tickled him to hear his son called
+`Master Edwin,' and then `Mister Edwin'; just as the fine ceremonious
+manners of his sister-in-law Mrs Hamps tickled him.  His marriage!
+With all its inevitable disillusions it had been wonderful, incredible.
+He looked back on it as a miracle.  For he had married far above him,
+and had proved equal to the enormously difficult situation.  Never had
+he made a fool of himself.  He often took keen pleasure in speculating
+upon the demeanour of his father, his mother, his little sister, could
+they have seen him in his purple and in his grandeur.  They were all
+dead.  And those days were fading, fading, gone, with their unutterable,
+intolerable shame and sadness, intolerable even in memory.  And his wife
+dead too!  All that remained was Mr Shushions.
+
+And then his business?  Darius's pride in the achievement of his
+business was simply indescribable.  If he had not built up that
+particular connexion he had built up another one whose sale had enabled
+him to buy it.  And he was waxing yearly.  His supremacy as a printer
+could not be challenged in Bursley.  Steam!  A double-windowed shop!  A
+foreman to whom alone he paid thirty shillings a week!  Four other
+employees!  (Not to mention a domestic servant.) ...  How had he done
+it?  He did not know.  Certainly he did not credit himself with
+brilliant faculties.  He knew he was not brilliant; he knew that once or
+twice he had had luck.  But he had the greatest confidence in his
+rough-hewing common sense.  The large curves of his career were
+correctly drawn.  His common sense, his slow shrewdness, had been richly
+justified by events.  They had been pitted against foes--and look now at
+the little boy from the Bastille!
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+To Darius there was no business quite like his own.  He admitted that
+there were businesses much bigger, but they lacked the miraculous
+quality that his own had.  They were not sacred.  His was, genuinely.
+Once, in his triumphant and vain early manhood he had had a fancy for
+bulldogs; he had bred bulldogs; and one day he had sacrificed even that
+great delight at the call of his business; and now no one could guess
+that he knew the difference between a setter and a mastiff!
+
+It was this sacred business (perpetually adored at the secret altar in
+Darius's heart), this miraculous business, and not another, that Edwin
+wanted to abandon, with scarcely a word; just casually!
+
+True, Edwin had told him one night that he would like to be an
+architect.  But Darius had attached no importance to the boyish remark.
+Darius had never even dreamed that Edwin would not go into the business.
+It would not have occurred to him to conceive such a possibility.  And
+the boy had shown great aptitude.  The boy had saved the printing office
+from disaster.  And Darius had proved his satisfaction therein, not by
+words certainly, but beyond mistaking in his general demeanour towards
+Edwin.  And after all that, a letter--mind you, a letter!--proposing
+with the most damnable insolent audacity that he should be an architect,
+because he would not be `happy' in the printing business! ...  An
+architect!  Why an architect, specially?  What in the name of God was
+there to attract in bricks and mortar?  He thought the boy had gone off
+his head for a space.  He could not think of any other explanation.  He
+had not allowed the letter to upset him.  By his armour of thick
+callousness, he had protected the tender places in his soul from being
+wounded.  He had not decided how to phrase his answer to Edwin.  He had
+not even decided whether he would say anything at all, whether it would
+not be more dignified and impressive to make no remark whatever to
+Edwin, to let him slowly perceive, by silence, what a lamentable error
+he had committed.
+
+And here was the boy lightly, cheekily, talking at breakfast about
+`going in for architecture'!  The armour of callousness was pierced.
+Darius felt the full force of the letter; and as he suffered, so he
+became terrible and tyrannic in his suffering.  He meant to save his
+business, to put his business before anything.  And he would have his
+own way.  He would impose his will.  And he would have treated argument
+as a final insult.  All the heavy, obstinate, relentless force of his
+individuality was now channelled in one tremendous instinct.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+"Well, what?" he growled savagely, as Edwin halted.
+
+In spite of his advanced age Edwin began to cry.  Yes, the tears came
+out of his eyes.
+
+"And now you begin blubbing!" said his father.
+
+"You say naught for six months--and then you start writing letters!"
+said his father.
+
+"And what's made ye settle on architecting, I'd like to be knowing?"
+Darius went on.
+
+Edwin was not able to answer this question.  He had never put it to
+himself.  Assuredly he could not, at the pistol's point, explain _why_ he
+wanted to be an architect.  He did not know.  He announced this truth
+ingenuously--
+
+"I don't know--I--"
+
+"I sh'd think not!" said his father.  "D'ye think architecting'll be any
+better than this?"  `This' meant printing.
+
+"I don't know--"
+
+"Ye don't know!  Ye don't know!"  Darius repeated testily.  His
+testiness was only like foam on the great wave of his resentment.
+
+"Mr Orgreave--" Edwin began.  It was unfortunate, because Darius had
+had a difficulty with Mr Orgreave, who was notoriously somewhat
+exacting in the matter of prices.
+
+"Don't talk to me about Mester Orgreave!"  Darius almost shouted.
+
+Edwin didn't.  He said to himself: "I am lost."
+
+"What's this business o' mine for, if it isna' for you?" asked his
+father.  "Architecting!  There's neither sense nor reason in it!
+Neither sense nor reason!"
+
+He rose and walked out.  Edwin was now sobbing.  In a moment his father
+returned, and stood in the doorway.
+
+"Ye've been doing well, I'll say that, and I've shown it!  I was
+beginning to have hopes of ye!"  It was a great deal to say.
+
+He departed.
+
+"Perhaps if I hadn't stopped his damned old machine from going through
+the floor, he'd have let me off!"  Edwin muttered bitterly.  "I've been
+too good, that's what's the matter with me!"
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SEVEN.
+
+He saw how fantastic was the whole structure of his hopes.  He wondered
+that he had ever conceived it even wildly possible that his father would
+consent to architecture as a career!  To ask it was to ask absurdly too
+much of fate.  He demolished, with a violent and resentful impulse, the
+structure of his hopes; stamped on it angrily.  He was beaten.  What
+could he do?  He could do nothing against his father.  He could no more
+change his father than the course of a river.  He was beaten.  He saw
+his case in its true light.
+
+Mrs Nixon entered to clear the table.  He turned away to hide his face,
+and strode passionately off.  Two hours elapsed before he appeared in
+the shop.  Nobody asked for him, but Mrs Nixon knew he was in the
+attic.  At noon, Maggie, with a peculiar look, told him that Auntie
+Hamps had called and that he was to go and have dinner with her at one
+o'clock, and that his father consented.  Obviously, Maggie knew the
+facts of the day.  He was perturbed at the prospect of the visit.  But
+he was glad; he thought he could not have lived through a dinner at the
+same table as Clara.  He guessed that his auntie had been made aware of
+the situation and wished to talk to him.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+EIGHT.
+
+"Your father came to see me in such a state last night!" said Auntie
+Hamps, after she had dealt with his frightful cold.
+
+Edwin was astonished by the news.  Then after all his father had been
+afraid! ...  After all perhaps he had yielded too soon!  If he had held
+out...  If he had not been a baby! ...  But it was too late.  The
+incident was now closed.
+
+Mrs Hamps was kind, but unusually firm in her tone; which reached a
+sort of benevolent severity.
+
+"Your father had such high hopes of you.  _Has_--I should say.  He
+couldn't imagine what on earth possessed you to write such a letter.
+And I'm sure I can't.  I hope you're sorry.  If you'd seen your father
+last night you would be, I'm sure."
+
+"But look here, auntie," Edwin defended himself, sneezing and wiping his
+nose; and he spoke of his desire.  Surely he was entitled to ask, to
+suggest!  A son could not be expected to be exactly like his father.
+And so on.
+
+No! no!  She brushed all that aside.  She scarcely listened to it.
+
+"But think of the business!  And just think of your father's feelings!"
+
+Edwin spoke no more.  He saw that she was absolutely incapable of
+putting herself in his place.  He could not have explained her attitude
+by saying that she had the vast unconscious cruelty which always goes
+with a perfect lack of imagination; but this was the explanation.  He
+left her, saddened by the obvious conclusion that his auntie, whom he
+had always supported against his sisters, was part author of his
+undoing.  She had undoubtedly much strengthened his father against him.
+He had a gleam of suspicion that his sisters had been right, and he
+wrong, about Mrs Hamps.  Wonderful, the cruel ruthless insight of
+girls--into some things!
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+NINE.
+
+Not till Saturday did the atmosphere of the Clayhanger household resume
+the normal.  But earlier than that Edwin had already lost his
+resentment.  It disappeared with his cold.  He could not continue to
+bear ill-will.  He accepted his destiny of immense disappointment.  He
+shouldered it.  You may call him weak or you may call him strong.
+Maggie said nothing to him of the great affair.  What could she have
+said?  And the affair was so great that even Clara did not dare to
+exercise upon it her peculiar faculties of ridicule.  It abashed her by
+its magnitude.
+
+On Saturday Darius said to his son, good-humouredly--
+
+"Canst be trusted to pay wages?"
+
+Edwin smiled.
+
+At one o'clock he went across the yard to the printing office with a
+little bag of money.  The younger apprentice was near the door scrubbing
+type with potash to cleanse it.  The backs of his hands were horribly
+raw and bleeding with chaps, due to the frequent necessity of washing
+them in order to serve the machines, and the impossibility of drying
+them properly.  Still, winter was ending now, and he only worked eleven
+hours a day, in an airy room, instead of nineteen hours in a cellar,
+like the little boy from the Bastille.  He was a fortunate youth.  The
+journeyman stood idle; as often, on Saturdays, the length of the
+journeyman's apron had been reduced by deliberate tearing during the
+week from three feet to about a foot--so imperious and sudden was the
+need for rags in the processes of printing.  Big James was folding up
+his apron.  They all saw that Edwin had the bag, and their faces
+relaxed.
+
+"You're as good as the master now, Mr Edwin," said Big James with
+ceremonious politeness and a fine gesture, when Edwin had finished
+paying.
+
+"Am I?" he rejoined simply.
+
+Everybody knew of the great affair.  Big James's words were his gentle
+intimation to Edwin that every one knew the great affair was now
+settled.
+
+That night, for the first time, Edwin could read "Notre Dame" with
+understanding and pleasure.  He plunged with soft joy into the river of
+the gigantic and formidable narrative.  He reflected that after all the
+sources of happiness were not exhausted.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER ONE.
+
+BOOK TWO--HIS LOVE.
+
+THE VISIT.
+
+We now approach the more picturesque part of Edwin's career.  Seven
+years passed.  Towards the end of April 1880, on a Saturday morning,
+Janet Orgreave, second daughter of Osmond Orgreave, the architect,
+entered the Clayhanger shop.
+
+All night an April shower lasting ten hours had beaten with persistent
+impetuosity against the window-panes of Bursley, and hence half the town
+had slept ill.  But at breakfast-time the clouds had been mysteriously
+drawn away, the winds had expired, and those drenched streets began to
+dry under the caressing peace of bright soft sunshine; the sky was pale
+blue of a delicacy unknown to the intemperate climes of the south.
+Janet Orgreave, entering the Clayhanger shop, brought into it with her
+the new morning weather.  She also brought into it Edwin's fate, or part
+of it, but not precisely in the sense commonly understood when the word
+`fate' is mentioned between a young man and a young woman.
+
+A youth stood at the left-hand or `fancy' counter, very nervous.  Miss
+Ingamells (that was) was married and the mother of three children, and
+had probably forgotten the difference between `demy' and `post' octavos;
+and this youth had taken her place and the place of two unsatisfactory
+maids in black who had succeeded her.  None but males were now employed
+in the Clayhanger business, and everybody breathed more freely; round,
+sound oaths were heard where never oaths had been heard before.  The
+young man's name was Stifford, and he was addressed as `Stiff.'  He was
+a proof of the indiscretion of prophesying about human nature.  He had
+been the paper boy, the minion of Edwin, and universally regarded as
+unreliable and almost worthless.  But at sixteen a change had come over
+him; he parted his hair in the middle instead of at the side, arrived in
+the morning at 7:59 instead of at 8:05, and seemed to see the
+earnestness of life.  Every one was glad and relieved, but every one
+took the change as a matter of course; the attitude of every one to the
+youth was: "Well, it's not too soon!"  No one saw a romantic miracle.
+
+"I suppose you haven't got `The Light of Asia' in stock?" began Janet
+Orgreave, after she had greeted the youth kindly.
+
+"I'm afraid we haven't, miss," said Stifford.  This was an
+understatement.  He knew beyond fear that "The Light of Asia" was not in
+stock.
+
+"Oh!" murmured Janet.
+
+"I think you said `The Light of Asia'?"
+
+"Yes.  `The Light of Asia,' by Edwin Arnold."  Janet had a persuasive
+humane smile.
+
+Stifford was anxious to have the air of obliging this smile, and he
+turned round to examine a shelf of prize books behind him, well aware
+that "The Light of Asia" was not among them.  He knew "The Light of
+Asia," and was proud of his knowledge; that is to say, he knew by
+visible and tactual evidence that such a book existed, for it had been
+ordered and supplied as a Christmas present four months previously, soon
+after its dazzling apparition in the world.
+
+"Yes, by Edwin Arnold--Edwin Arnold," he muttered learnedly, running his
+finger along gilded backs.
+
+"It's being talked about a great deal," said Janet as if to encourage
+him.
+
+"Yes, it is...  No, I'm very sorry, we haven't it in stock."  Stifford
+faced her again, and leaned his hands wide apart on the counter.
+
+"I should like you to order it for me," said Janet Orgreave in a low
+voice.
+
+She asked this exactly as though she were asking a personal favour from
+Stifford the private individual.  Such was Janet's way.  She could not
+help it.  People often said that her desire to please, and her methods
+of pleasing, were unconscious.  These people were wrong.  She was
+perfectly conscious and even deliberate in her actions.  She liked to
+please.  She could please easily and she could please keenly.  Therefore
+she strove always to please.  Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror,
+and saw that charming, good-natured face with its rich vermilion lips
+eager to part in a nice, warm, sympathetic smile, she could accuse
+herself of being too fond of the art of pleasing.  For she was a
+conscientious girl, and her age being twenty-five her soul was at its
+prime, full, bursting with beautiful impulses towards perfection.  Yes,
+she would accuse herself of being too happy, too content, and would
+wonder whether she ought not to seek heaven by some austerity of
+scowling.  Janet had everything: a kind disposition, some brains, some
+beauty, considerable elegance and luxury for her station, fine shoulders
+at a ball, universal love and esteem.
+
+Stifford, as he gazed diffidently at this fashionable, superior, and yet
+exquisitely beseeching woman on the other side of the counter, was in a
+very unpleasant quandary.  She had by her magic transformed him into a
+private individual, and he acutely wanted to earn that smile which she
+was giving him.  But he could not.  He was under the obligation to say
+`No' to her innocent and delightful request; and yet could he say `No'?
+Could he bring himself to desolate her by a refusal?  (She had produced
+in him the illusion that a refusal would indeed desolate her, though she
+would of course bear it with sweet fortitude.)  Business was a barbaric
+thing at times.
+
+"The fact is, miss," he said at length, in his best manner, "Mr
+Clayhanger has decided to give up the new book business.  I'm very
+sorry."
+
+Had it been another than Janet he would have assuredly said with pride:
+"We have decided--"
+
+"Really!" said Janet.  "I see!"
+
+Then Stifford directed his eyes upon a square glazed structure of
+ebonised wood that had been insinuated and inserted into the opposite
+corner of the shop, behind the ledger-window.  And Janet's eyes followed
+his.
+
+"I don't know if--" he hesitated.
+
+"Is Mr Clayhanger in?" she demanded, as if wishful to help him in the
+formulation of his idea, and she added: "Or Mr Edwin?"  Deliciously
+persuasive!
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+The wooden structure was a lair.  It had been constructed to hold Darius
+Clayhanger; but in practice it generally held Edwin, as his father's
+schemes for the enlargement of the business carried him abroad more and
+more.  It was a device of Edwin's for privacy; Edwin had planned it and
+seen the plan executed.  The theory was that a person concealed in the
+structure (called `the office') was not technically in the shop and must
+not be disturbed by anyone in the shop.  Only persons of authority--
+Darius and Edwin--had the privilege of the office, and since its
+occupant could hear every whisper in the shop, it was always for the
+occupant to decide when events demanded that he should emerge.
+
+On Janet's entrance, Edwin was writing in the daybook: "April 11th.
+Turnhill Oddfellows. 400 Contrib.  Cards--" He stopped writing.  He held
+himself still like a startled mouse.  With satisfaction he observed that
+the door of the fortress was closed.  By putting his nose near the
+crystal wall he could see, through the minute transparent portions of
+the patterned glass, without being seen.  He watched Janet's graceful
+gestures, and examined with pleasure the beauties of her half-season
+toilet; he discerned the modishness of her umbrella handle.  His
+sensations were agreeable and yet disagreeable, for he wished both to
+remain where he was and to go forth and engage her in brilliant small
+talk.  He had no small talk, except that of the salesman and the
+tradesman; his tongue knew not freedom; but his fancy dreamed of light,
+intellectual conversations with fine girls.  These dreams of fancy had
+of late become almost habitual, for the sole reason that he had raised
+his hat several times to Janet, and once had shaken hands with her and
+said, "How d'you do, Miss Orgreave?" in response to her "How d'you do,
+Mr Clayhanger?"  Osmond Orgreave, in whom had originated their
+encounter, had cut across the duologue at that point and spoilt it.  But
+Edwin's fancy had continued it, when he was alone late at night, in a
+very diverting and witty manner.  And now, he had her at his disposal;
+he had only to emerge, and Stiff would deferentially recede, and he
+could chat with her at ease, starting comfortably from "The Light of
+Asia."  And yet he dared not; his faint heart told him in loud beats
+that he could only chat cleverly with a fine girl when absolutely alone
+in his room, in the dark.
+
+Still, he surveyed her; he added her up; he pronounced, with a touch of
+conventional male patronage (caught possibly from the Liberal Club),
+that Janet was indubitably a nice girl and a fine girl.  He would not
+admit that he was afraid of her, and that despite all theoretical
+argufying, he deemed her above him in rank.
+
+And if he had known the full truth, he might have regretted that he had
+not caused the lair to be furnished with a trap-door by means of which
+the timid could sink into the earth.
+
+The truth was that Janet had called purposely to inspect Edwin at
+leisure.  "The Light of Asia" was a mere poetical pretext.  "The Light
+of Asia" might as easily have been ordered at Hanbridge, where her
+father and brothers ordered all their books--in fact, more easily.
+Janet, with all her niceness, with all the reality of her immense
+good-nature, loved as well as anybody a bit of chicane where a man was
+concerned.  Janet's eyes could twinkle as mischievously as her quiet
+mother's.  Mr Orgreave having in the last eight months been in
+professional relations with Darius and Edwin, the Orgreave household had
+begun discussing Edwin again.  Mr Orgreave spoke of him favourably.
+Mrs Orgreave said that he looked the right sort of youth, but that he
+had a peculiar manner.  Janet said that she should not be surprised if
+there was something in him.  Janet said also that his sister Clara was
+an impossible piece of goods, and that his sister Maggie was born an old
+maid.  One of her brothers then said that that was just what was the
+matter with Edwin too!  Mr Orgreave protested that he wasn't so sure of
+that, and that occasionally Edwin would say things that were really
+rather good.  This stimulated Mrs Orgreave's curiosity, and she
+suggested that her husband should invite the young man to their house.
+Whereupon Mr Orgreave pessimistically admitted that he did not think
+Edwin could be enticed.  And Janet, piqued, said, "If that's all, I'll
+have him here in a week."  They were an adventurous family, always ready
+for anything, always on the look-out for new sources of pleasure, full
+of zest in life.  They liked novelties, and hospitality was their chief
+hobby.  They made fun of nearly every body, but it was not mean fun.
+
+Such, and not "The Light of Asia," was the cause of Janet's visit.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Be it said to Edwin's shame that she would have got no further with the
+family plot that morning, had it not been for the chivalry of Stifford.
+Having allowed his eyes to rest on the lair, Stifford allowed his memory
+to forget the rule of the shop, and left the counter for the door of the
+lair, determined that Miss Orgreave should see the genuineness of his
+anxiety to do his utmost for so sympathetic a woman.  Edwin, perceiving
+the intention from his lair, had to choose whether he would go out or be
+fetched out.  Of course he preferred to go out.  But he would never have
+gone out on his own initiative; he would have hesitated until Janet had
+departed, and he would then have called himself a fool.  He regretted,
+and I too regret, that he was like that; but like that he was.
+
+He emerged with nervous abruptness.
+
+"Oh, how d'you do, Miss Orgreave?" he said; "I thought it was your
+voice."  After this he gave a little laugh, which meant nothing,
+certainly not amusement; it was merely a gawky habit that he had
+unconsciously adopted.  Then he took his handkerchief out of his pocket
+and put it back again.  Stifford fell back and had to pretend that
+nothing interested him less than the interview which he had
+precipitated.
+
+"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 attitude 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 reassuring, 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 assure 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 assumption with a slight declension
+of her waving hat.
+
+"Oh!  Good!"  Edwin murmured.
+
+Janet held out her hand, to be wrung again, and assured him of her
+gratitude for his offer of taking trouble about the book; and he assured
+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 assumption 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 Association 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, nobody 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 constitution.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+Once only had work been interrupted, and that was on a day when, a lot
+of `blue jobs' being about, a squad of red fire-eaters had come up the
+back alley with intent to answer arguments by thwackings and wreckings;
+but the obstinacy of an oak door had fatigued them.  The staff had
+enjoyed that episode.  Every member of it was well paid for overtime.
+Darius could afford to pay conscientiously.  In the printing trade,
+prices were steadier then than they are now.  But already the discovery
+of competition was following upon the discovery of ventilation.  Perhaps
+Darius sniffed it from a distance, and was disturbed thereby.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+For though he was a Liberal in addition to being a printer, and he had
+voted Liberal, and his party had won, yet the General Election had not
+put sunshine in his heart.  No!  The tendencies of England worried him.
+When he read in a paper about the heretical tendencies of Robertson
+Smith's Biblical articles in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," he said to
+himself that they were of a piece with the rest, and that such things
+were to be expected in those modern days, and that matters must have
+come to a pretty pass when even the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" was
+infected.  (Still, he had sold a copy of the new edition.)  He was
+exceedingly bitter against Ireland; and also, in secret, behind Big
+James's back, against trade unions.  When Edwin came home one night and
+announced that he had joined the Bursley Liberal Club, Darius lost his
+temper.  Yet he was a member of the club himself.  He gave no reason for
+his fury, except that it was foolish for a tradesman to mix himself up
+with politics.  Edwin, however, had developed a sudden interest in
+politics, and had made certain promises of clerical aid, which promises
+he kept, saying nothing more to his father.  Darius's hero was Sir
+Robert Peel, simply because Sir Robert Peel had done away with the Corn
+Laws.  Darius had known England before and after the repeal of the Corn
+Laws, and the difference between the two Englands was so strikingly
+dramatic to him that he desired no further change.  He had only one
+date--1846.  His cup had been filled then.  Never would he forget the
+scenes of anguishing joy that occurred at midnight of the day before the
+new Act became operative.  From that moment he had finished with
+progress...  If Edwin could only have seen those memories, shining in
+layers deep in his father's heart, and hidden now by all sorts of
+Pliocene deposits, he would have understood his father better.  But
+Edwin did not see into his father's heart at all, nor even into his
+head.  When he looked at his father he saw nothing but an ugly,
+stertorous old man (old, that is, to Edwin), with a peculiar and
+incalculable way of regarding things and a temper of growing
+capriciousness.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Darius was breathing and fidgeting all over him as he sat bent at the
+desk.  His presence overwhelmed every other physical phenomenon.
+
+"What's this?" asked Darius, picking up the bit of paper on which Edwin
+had written the memorandum about "The Light of Asia."
+
+Edwin explained, self-consciously, lamely.
+
+When the barometer of Darius's temper was falling rapidly, there was a
+sign: a small spot midway on the bridge of his nose turned ivory-white.
+Edwin glanced upwards now to see if the sign was there, and it was.  He
+flushed slightly and resumed his work.
+
+Then Darius began.
+
+"What did I tell ye?" he shouted.  "What in the name of God's the use o'
+me telling ye things?  Have I told ye not to take any more orders for
+books, or haven't I?  Haven't I said over and over again that I want
+this shop to be known for wholesale?"  He raved.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+Stifford could hear.  Any person who might chance to come into the shop
+would hear.  But Darius cared neither for his own dignity nor for that
+of his son.  He was in a passion.  The real truth was that this celibate
+man, who never took alcohol, enjoyed losing his temper; it was his one
+outlet; he gave himself up almost luxuriously to a passion; he looked
+forward to it as some men look forward to brandy.  And Edwin had never
+stopped him by some drastic step.  At first, years before, Edwin had
+said to himself, trembling with resentment in his bedroom, "The next
+time, the very next time, he humiliates me like that in front of other
+people, I'll walk out of his damned house and shop, and I swear I won't
+come back until he's apologised.  I'll bring him to his senses.  He
+can't do without me.  Once for all I'll stop it.  What!  He forces me
+into his business, and then insults me!"
+
+But Edwin had never done it.  Always, it was `the very next time'!
+Edwin was not capable of doing it.  His father had a sort of moral
+brute-force, against which he could not stand firm.  He soon recognised
+this, with his intellectual candour.  Then he had tried to argue with
+Darius, to `make him see'!  Worse than futile!  Argument simply put
+Darius beside himself.  So that in the end Edwin employed silence and
+secret scorn, as a weapon and as a defence.  And somehow without a word
+he conveyed to Stifford and to Big James precisely what his attitude in
+these crises was, so that he retained their respect and avoided their
+pity.  The outbursts still wounded him, but he was wonderfully inured.
+
+As he sat writing under the onslaught, he said to himself, "By God!  If
+ever I get the chance, I'll pay you out for this some day!"  And he
+meant it.  A peep into his mind, then, would have startled Janet
+Orgreave, Mrs Nixon, and other persons who had a cult for the
+wistfulness of his appealing eyes.
+
+He steadily maintained silence, and the conflagration burnt itself out.
+
+"Are you going to look after the printing shop, or aren't you?"  Darius
+growled at length.
+
+Edwin rose and went.  As he passed through the shop, Stifford, who had
+in him the raw material of fine manners, glanced down, but not too
+ostentatiously, at a drawer under the counter.
+
+The printing office was more crowded than ever with men and matter.
+Some of the composing was now done on the ground-floor.  The whole
+organism functioned, but under such difficulties as could not be allowed
+to continue, even by Darius Clayhanger.  Darius had finally recognised
+that.
+
+"Oh!" said Edwin, in a tone of confidential intimacy to Big James, "I
+see they're getting on with the cleaning!  Good.  Father's beginning to
+get impatient, you know.  It's the bigger cases that had better be done
+first."
+
+"Right it is, Mr Edwin!" said Big James.  The giant was unchanged.  No
+sign of grey in his hair; and his cheek was smooth, apparently his
+philosophy put him beyond the touch of time.
+
+"I say, Mr Edwin," he inquired in his majestic voice.  "When are we
+going to rearrange all this?"  He gazed around.
+
+Edwin laughed.  "Soon," he said.
+
+"Won't be too soon," said Big James.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER THREE.
+
+THE NEW HOUSE.
+
+A house stood on a hill.  And that hill was Bleakridge, the summit of
+the little billow of land between Bursley and Hanbridge.  Trafalgar Road
+passed over the crest of the billow.  Bleakridge was certainly not more
+than a hundred feet higher than Bursley; yet people were now talking a
+lot about the advantages of living `up' at Bleakridge, `above' the
+smoke, and `out' of the town, though it was not more than five minutes
+from the Duck Bank.  To hear them talking, one might have fancied that
+Bleakridge was away in the mountains somewhere.  The new steam-cars
+would pull you up there in three minutes or so, every quarter of an
+hour.  It was really the new steam-cars that were to be the making of
+Bleakridge as a residential suburb.  It had also been predicted that
+even Hanbridge men would come to live at Bleakridge now.  Land was
+changing owners at Bleakridge, and rising in price.  Complete streets of
+lobbied cottages grew at angles from the main road with the rapidity of
+that plant which pushes out strangling branches more quickly than a man
+can run.  And these lobbied cottages were at once occupied.
+Cottage-property in the centre of the town depreciated.
+
+The land fronting the main road was destined not for cottages, but for
+residences, semi-detached or detached.  Osmond Orgreave had a good deal
+of this land under his control.  He did not own it, he hawked it.  Like
+all provincial, and most London, architects, he was a land-broker in
+addition to being an architect.  Before obtaining a commission to build
+a house, he frequently had to create the commission himself by selling a
+convenient plot, and then persuading the purchaser that if he wished to
+retain the respect of the community he must put on the plot a house
+worthy of the plot.  The Orgreave family all had expensive tastes, and
+it was Osmond Orgreave's task to find most of the money needed for the
+satisfaction of those tastes.  He always did find it, because the
+necessity was upon him, but he did not always find it easily.  Janet
+would say sometimes, "We mustn't be so hard on father this month;
+really, lately we've never seen him with his cheque-book out of his
+hand."  Undoubtedly the clothes on Janet's back were partly responsible
+for the celerity with which building land at Bleakridge was `developed,'
+just after the installation of steam-cars in Trafalgar Road.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Mr Orgreave sold a corner plot to Darius.  He had had his eye on Darius
+for a long time before he actually shot him down; but difficulties
+connected with the paring of estimates for printing had somewhat
+estranged them.  Orgreave had had to smooth out these difficulties,
+offer to provide a portion of the purchase money on mortgage from
+another client, produce a plan for a new house that surpassed all
+records of cheapness, produce a plan for the transforming of Darius's
+present residence into business premises, talk poetically about the
+future of printing in the Five Towns, and lastly, demonstrate by digits
+that Darius would actually save money by becoming a property-owner--he
+had had to do all this, and more, before Darius would buy.
+
+The two were regular cronies for about a couple of months--that is to
+say, between the payment of the preliminary deposit and the signing of
+the contract for building the house.  But, the contract signed, their
+relations were once more troubled.  Orgreave had nothing to fear, then,
+and besides, he was using his diplomacy elsewhere.  The house went up to
+an accompaniment of scenes in which only the proprietor was irate.
+Osmond Orgreave could not be ruffled; he could not be deprived of his
+air of having done a favour to Darius Clayhanger; his social and moral
+superiority, his real aloofness, remained absolutely unimpaired.  The
+clear image of him as a fine gentleman was never dulled nor distorted
+even in the mind of Darius.  Nevertheless Darius `hated the sight' of
+the house ere the house was roofed in.  But this did not diminish his
+pride in the house.  He wished he had never `set eyes on' Osmond
+Orgreave.  Yes!  But the little boy from the Bastille was immensely
+content at the consequences of having set eyes on Osmond Orgreave.  The
+little boy from the Bastille was achieving the supreme peak of
+greatness--he was about to live away from business.  Soon he would be
+`going down to business' of a morning.  Soon he would be receiving two
+separate demand-notes for rates.  Soon he would be on a plane with the
+vainest earthenware manufacturer of them all.  Ages ago he had got as
+far as a house with a lobby to it.  Now, it would be a matter of two
+establishments.  Beneath all his discontents, moodiness, temper, and
+biliousness, lay this profound satisfaction of the little boy from the
+Bastille.
+
+Moreover, in any case, he would have been obliged to do something
+heroic, if only to find the room more and more imperiously demanded by
+his printing business.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+On the Saturday afternoon of Janet Orgreave's visit to the shop, Edwin
+went up to Bleakridge to inspect the house, and in particular the
+coloured `lights' in the upper squares of the drawing-room and
+dining-room windows.  He had a key to the unpainted front door, and
+having climbed over various obstacles and ascended an inclined bending
+plank, he entered and stood in the square hall of the deserted, damp,
+and inchoate structure.
+
+The house was his father's only in name.  In emotional fact it was
+Edwin's house, because he alone was capable of possessing it by enjoying
+it.  To Darius, to Bursley in general, it was just a nice house, of red
+brick with terra-cotta facings and red tiles, in the second-Victorian
+Style, the style that had broken away from Georgian austerity and
+first-Victorian stucco and smugness, and wandered off vaguely into
+nothing in particular.  To the plebeian in Darius it was of course
+grandiose, and vast; to Edwin also, in a less degree.  But to Edwin it
+was not a house, it was a work of art, it was an epic poem, it was an
+emanation of the soul.  He did not realise this.  He did not realise how
+the house had informed his daily existence.  All that he knew about
+himself in relation to the house was that he could not keep away from
+it.  He went and had a look at it, nearly every morning before
+breakfast, when the workmen were fresh and lyrical.
+
+When the news came down to the younger generation that Darius had bought
+land and meant to build on the land, Edwin had been profoundly moved
+between apprehension and hope; his condition had been one of simple but
+intense expectant excitement.  He wondered what his own status would be
+in the great enterprise of house-building.  All depended on Mr
+Orgreave.  Would Mr Orgreave, of whom he had seen scarcely anything in
+seven years, remember that he was intelligently interested in
+architecture?  Or would Mr Orgreave walk right over him and talk
+exclusively to his father?  He had feared, he had had a suspicion, that
+Mr Orgreave was an inconstant man.
+
+Mr Orgreave had remembered in the handsomest way.  When the plans were
+being discussed, Mr Orgreave with one word, a tone, a glance, had
+raised Edwin to the consultative level of his father.  He had let Darius
+see that Edwin was in his opinion worthy to take part in discussions,
+and quite privately he had let Edwin see that Darius must not be treated
+too seriously.  Darius, who really had no interest in ten thousand
+exquisitely absorbing details, had sometimes even said, with impatience,
+"Oh!  Settle it how you like, with Edwin."
+
+Edwin's own suggestions never seemed very brilliant, and Mr Orgreave
+was always able to prove to him that they were inadvisable; but they
+were never silly, like most of his father's.  And he acquired leading
+ideas that transformed his whole attitude towards architecture.  For
+example, he had always looked on a house as a front-wall diversified by
+doors and windows, with rooms behind it.  But when Mr Orgreave produced
+his first notions for the new house Edwin was surprised to find that he
+had not even sketched the front.  He had said, "We shall be able to see
+what the elevation looks like when we've decided the plan a bit."  And
+Edwin saw in a flash that the front of a house was merely the expression
+of the inside of it, merely a result, almost accidental.  And he was
+astounded and disgusted that he, with his professed love of architecture
+and his intermittent study of it, had not perceived this obvious truth
+for himself.  He never again looked at a house in the old irrational
+way.
+
+Then, when examining the preliminary sketch-plan, he had put his finger
+on a square space and asked what room that was.  "That isn't a room;
+that's the hall," said Mr Orgreave.  "But it's square!"  Edwin
+exclaimed.  He thought that in houses (houses to be lived in) the hall
+or lobby must necessarily be long and narrow.  Now suddenly he saw no
+reason why a hall should not be square.  Mr Orgreave had made no
+further remark about halls at the time, but another day, without any
+preface, he re-opened the subject to Edwin, in a tone good-naturedly
+informing, and when he had done Edwin could see that the shape of the
+hall depended on the shape of the house, and that halls had only been
+crushed and pulled into something long and narrow because the
+disposition of houses absolutely demanded this ugly negation of the very
+idea of a hall.  Again, he had to begin to think afresh, to see afresh.
+He conceived a real admiration for Osmond Orgreave; not more for his
+original and yet common-sense manner of regarding things, than for his
+aristocratic deportment, his equality to every situation, and his
+extraordinary skill in keeping his dignity and his distance during
+encounters with Darius.  (At the same time, when Darius would grumble
+savagely that Osmond Orgreave `was too clever by half,' Edwin could not
+deny that.)  Edwin's sisters got a good deal of Mr Orgreave, through
+Edwin; he could never keep Mr Orgreave very long to himself.  He gave
+away a great deal of Mr Orgreave's wisdom without mentioning the origin
+of the gift.  Thus occasionally Clara would say cuttingly, "I know where
+you've picked that up.  You've picked that up from Mr Orgreave."  The
+young man Benbow to whom the infant Clara had been so queerly engaged,
+also received from Edwin considerable quantities of Mr Orgreave.  But
+the fellow was only a decent, dull, pushing, successful ass, and quite
+unable to assimilate Mr Orgreave; Edwin could never comprehend how
+Clara, so extremely difficult to please, so carping and captious, could
+mate herself to a fellow like Benbow.  She had done so, however; they
+were recently married.  Edwin was glad that that was over; for it had
+disturbed him in his attentions to the house.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+When the house began to `go up,' Edwin lived in an ecstasy of
+contemplation.  I say with deliberateness an `ecstasy.'  He had seen
+houses go up before; he knew that houses were constructed brick by
+brick, beam by beam, lath by lath, tile by tile; he knew that they did
+not build themselves.  And yet, in the vagueness of his mind, he had
+never imaginatively realised that a house was made with hands, and hands
+that could err.  With its exact perpendiculars and horizontals, its
+geometric regularities, and its Chinese preciseness of fitting, a house
+had always seemed to him--again in the vagueness of his mind--as
+something superhuman.  The commonest cornice, the most ordinary pillar
+of a staircase-balustrade--could that have been accomplished in its
+awful perfection of line and contour by a human being?  How easy to
+believe that it was `not made with hands'!
+
+But now he saw.  He had to see.  He saw a hole in the ground, with water
+at the bottom, and the next moment that hole was a cellar; not an
+amateur cellar, a hole that would do at a pinch for a cellar, but a
+professional cellar.  He appreciated the brains necessary to put a brick
+on another brick, with just the right quantity of mortar in between.  He
+thought the house would never get itself done--one brick at a time--and
+each brick cost a farthing--slow, careful; yes, and even finicking.  But
+soon the bricklayers had to stand on plank-platforms in order to reach
+the raw top of the wall that was ever rising above them.  The
+measurements, the rulings, the plumbings, the checkings!  He was humbled
+and he was enlightened.  He understood that a miracle is only the result
+of miraculous patience, miraculous nicety, miraculous honesty,
+miraculous perseverance.  He understood that there was no golden and
+magic secret of building.  It was just putting one brick on another and
+against another--but to a hair's breadth.  It was just like anything
+else.  For instance, printing!  He saw even printing in a new light.
+
+And when the first beams were bridged across two walls...
+
+The funny thing was that the men's fingers were thicky and clumsy.
+Never could such fingers pick up a pin!  And still they would manoeuvre
+a hundredweight of timber to a pin's point.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+He stood at the drawing-room bay-window (of which each large pane had
+been marked with the mystic sign of a white circle by triumphant
+glaziers), and looked across the enclosed fragment of clayey field that
+ultimately would be the garden.  The house was at the corner of
+Trafalgar Road and a side-street that had lobbied cottages down its
+slope.  The garden was oblong, with its length parallel to Trafalgar
+Road, and separated from the pavement only by a high wall.  The upper
+end of the garden was blocked by the first of three new houses which
+Osmond Orgreave was building in a terrace.  These houses had their main
+fronts on the street; they were quite as commodious as the Clayhangers',
+but much inferior in garden-space; their bits of flower-plots lay behind
+them.  And away behind their flower-plots, with double entrance-gates in
+another side street, stretched the grounds of Osmond Orgreave, his house
+in the sheltered middle thereof.  He had got, cheaply, one of the older
+residential properties of the district, Georgian, of a recognisable
+style, relic of the days when manufacturers formed a class entirely
+apart from their operatives; even as far back as 1880 any operative
+might with luck become an employer.  The south-east corner of the
+Clayhanger garden touched the north-west corner of the domains of
+Orgreave; for a few feet the two gardens were actually contiguous, with
+naught but an old untidy thorn hedge between them; this hedge was to be
+replaced by a wall that would match the topmost of the lobbied cottages
+which bounded the view of the Clayhangers to the east.
+
+From the bay-window Edwin could see over the hedge, and also through it,
+on to the croquet lawn of the Orgreaves.  Croquet was then in its first
+avatar; nothing was more dashing than croquet.  With rag-balls and
+home-made mallets the Clayhanger children had imitated croquet in their
+yard in the seventies.  The Orgreaves played real croquet; one of them
+had shone in a tournament at Buxton.  Edwin noticed a figure on the
+gravel between the lawn and the hedge.  He knew it to be Janet, by the
+crimson frock.  But he had no notion that Janet had stationed herself in
+that quarter with intent to waylay him.  He could not have credited her
+with such a purpose.  Nor could his modesty have believed that he was
+important enough to employ the talent of the Orgreaves for agreeable
+chicane.  The fact was that Janet had been espying him for a quarter of
+an hour.  When at length she waved her hand to him, it did not occur to
+him to suppose that she was waving her hand to him; he merely wondered
+what peculiar thing she was doing.  Then he blushed as she waved again,
+and he knew first from the blood in his face that Janet was making a
+signal, and that it was to himself that the signal was directed: his
+body had told his mind; this was very odd.
+
+Of course he was obliged to go out; and he went, muttering to himself.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER FOUR.
+
+THE TWO GARDENS.
+
+In the full beauty of the afternoon they stood together, only the
+scraggy hedge between them, he on grass-tufted clay, and she on orderly
+gravel.
+
+"Well," said Janet, earnestly looking at him, "how do you like the
+effect of that window, now it's done?"
+
+"Very nice!" he laughed nervously.  "Very nice indeed!"
+
+"Father said it was," she remarked.  "I do hope Mr Clayhanger will like
+it too!"  And her voice really was charged with sympathetic hope.  It
+was as if she would be saddened and cast down if Darius did not approve
+the window.  It was as if she fervently wished that Darius should not be
+disappointed with the window.  The unskilled spectator might have
+assumed that anxiety for the success of the window would endanger her
+sleep at nights.  She was perfectly sincere.  Her power of emotional
+sympathy was all-embracing and inexhaustible.  If she heard that an
+acquaintance of one of her acquaintances had lost a relative or broken a
+limb, she would express genuine deep concern, with a tremor of her
+honest and kindly voice.  And if she heard the next moment that an
+acquaintance of one of her acquaintances had come into five thousand
+pounds or affianced himself to a sister-spirit, her eyes would sparkle
+with heartfelt joy and her hands clasp each other in sheer delight.
+
+"Oh!" said Edwin, touched.  "It'll be all right for the dad.  No fear!"
+
+"I haven't seen it yet," she proceeded.  "In fact I haven't been in your
+house for such a long time.  But I do think it's going to be very nice.
+All father's houses are so nice, aren't they?"
+
+"Yes," said Edwin, with that sideways shake of the head that in the
+vocabulary of his gesture signified, not dissent, but emphatic assent.
+"You ought to come and have a look at it."  He could not say less.
+
+"Do you think I could scramble through here?" she indicated the sparse
+hedge.
+
+"I-- I--"
+
+"I know what I'll do.  I'll get the steps."  She walked off sedately,
+and came back with a small pair of steps, which she opened out on the
+narrow flower-bed under the hedge.  Then she picked up her skirt and
+delicately ascended the rocking ladder till her feet were on a level
+with the top of the hedge.  She smiled charmingly, savouring the
+harmless escapade, and gazing at Edwin.  She put out her free hand,
+Edwin took it, and she jumped.  The steps fell backwards, but she was
+safe.
+
+"What a good thing mother didn't see me!" she laughed.  Her grave,
+sympathetic, almost handsome face was now alive everywhere with a sort
+of challenging merriment.  She was only pretending that it was a good
+thing her mother had not seen her: a delicious make-believe.  Why, she
+was as motherly as her mother!  In an instant her feet were choosing
+their way and carrying her with grace and stateliness across the mire of
+the unformed garden.  She was the woman of the world, and Edwin the raw
+boy.  The harmony and dignity of her movements charmed and intimidated
+Edwin.  Compare her to Maggie...  That she was hatless added piquancy.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+They went into the echoing bare house, crunching gravel and dry clay on
+the dirty, new floors.  They were alone together in the house.  And all
+the time Edwin was thinking: "I've never been through anything like this
+before.  Never been through anything like this!"  And he recalled for a
+second the figure of Florence Simcox, the clog-dancer.
+
+And below these images and reflections in his mind was the thought: "I
+haven't known what life _is_!  I've been asleep.  This is life!"
+
+The upper squares of the drawing-room window were filled with small
+leaded diamond-shaped panes of many colours.  It was the latest fashion
+in domestic glazing.  The effect was at once rich and gorgeous.  She
+liked it.
+
+"It will be beautiful on this side in the late afternoon," she murmured.
+"What a nice room!"
+
+Their eyes met, and she transmitted to him her joy in his joy at the
+admirableness of the house.
+
+He nodded.  "By Jove!" he thought.  "She's a splendid girl.  There can't
+be many girls knocking about as fine as she is!"
+
+"And when the garden's full of flowers!" she breathed in rapture.  She
+was thinking, "Strange, nice boy!  He's so romantic.  All he wants is
+bringing out."
+
+They wandered to and fro.  They went upstairs.  They saw the bathroom.
+They stood on the landing, and the unseen spaces of the house were busy
+with their echoes.  They then entered the room that was to be Edwin's.
+
+"Mine!" he said self-consciously.
+
+"And I see you're having shelves fixed on both sides of the mantelpiece!
+You're very fond of books, aren't you?" she appealed to him.
+
+"Yes," he said judicially.
+
+"Aren't they wonderful things?"  Her glowing eyes seemed to be
+expressing gratitude to Shakespeare and all his successors in the
+dynasty of literature.
+
+"That shelving is between your father and me," said Edwin.  "The dad
+doesn't know.  It'll go in with the house-fittings.  I don't expect the
+dad will ever notice it."
+
+"Really!"  She laughed, eager to join the innocent conspiracy.  "Father
+invented an excellent dodge for shelving in the hall at our house," she
+added.  "I'm sure he'd like you to come and see it.  The dear thing's
+most absurdly proud of it."
+
+"I should like to," Edwin answered diffidently.
+
+"Would you come in some evening and see us?  Mother would be delighted.
+We all should."
+
+"Very kind of you."  In his diffidence he was now standing on one leg.
+
+"Could you come to-night? ...  Or to-morrow night?"
+
+"I'm afraid I couldn't come to-night, _or_ to-morrow night," he answered
+with firmness.  A statement entirely untrue!  He had no engagement; he
+never did have an engagement.  But he was frightened, and his spirit
+sprang away from the idea, like a fawn at a sudden noise in the brake,
+and stood still.
+
+He did not suspect that the unconscious gruffness of his tone had
+repulsed her.  She blamed herself for a too brusque advance.
+
+"Well, I hope some other time," she said, mild and benignant.
+
+"Thanks!  I'd like to," he replied more boldly, reassured now that he
+had heard again the same noise but indefinitely farther off.
+
+She departed, but by the front door, and hatless and dignified up
+Trafalgar Road in the delicate sunshine to the next turning.  She was
+less vivacious.
+
+He hoped he had not offended her, because he wanted very much--not to go
+in cold blood to the famed mansion of the Orgreaves--but by some magic
+to find himself within it one night, at his ease, sharing in brilliant
+conversation.  "Oh no!" he said to himself.  "She's not offended.  A
+fine girl like that isn't offended for nothing at all!"  He had been
+invited to visit the Orgreaves!  He wondered what his father would say,
+or think.  The unexpressed basic idea of the Clayhangers was that the
+Clayhangers were as good as other folks, be they _who_ they might.  Still,
+the Orgreaves were the Orgreaves...  In sheer absence of mind he
+remounted the muddy stairs.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+He regarded the shabbiness of his clothes; he had been preoccupied by
+their defects for about a quarter of an hour; now he examined them in
+detail, and said to himself disgusted, that really it was ridiculous for
+a man about to occupy a house like that to be wearing garments like
+those.  Could he call on the Orgreaves in garments like those?  His
+Sunday suit was not, he felt, in fact much better.  It was newer, less
+tumbled, but scarcely better.  His suits did not cost enough.  Finance
+was at the root of the crying scandal of his career as a dandy.  The
+financial question must be reopened and settled anew.  He should attack
+his father.  His father was extremely dependent on him now, and must be
+brought to see reason.  (His father who had never seen reason!)  But the
+attack must not be made with the weapon of clothes, for on that subject
+Darius was utterly unapproachable.  Whenever Darius found himself in a
+conversation about clothes, he gave forth the antique and well-tried
+witticism that as for him he didn't mind what he wore, because if he was
+at home everybody knew him and it didn't matter, and if he was away from
+home nobody knew him and it didn't matter.  And he always repeated the
+saying with gusto, as if it was brand-new and none could possibly have
+heard it before.
+
+No, Edwin decided that he would have to found his attack on the
+principle of abstract justice; he would never be able to persuade his
+father that he lacked any detail truly needful to his happiness.  To go
+into details would be to invite defeat.
+
+Of course it would be a bad season in which to raise the financial
+question.  His father would talk savagely in reply about the enormous
+expenses of house-building, house-furnishing, and removing,--and
+architects' and lawyers' fees; he would be sure to mention the rapacity
+of architects and lawyers.  Nevertheless Edwin felt that at just this
+season, and no other, must the attack be offered.
+
+Because the inauguration of the new house was to be for Edwin, in a very
+deep and spiritual sense, the beginning of the new life!  He had settled
+that.  The new house inspired him.  It was not paradise.  But it was a
+temple.
+
+You of the younger generation cannot understand that--without
+imagination.  I say that the hot-water system of the new house, simple
+and primitive as it was, affected and inspired Edwin like a poem.  There
+was a cistern-room, actually a room devoted to nothing but cisterns, and
+the main cistern was so big that the builders had had to install it
+before the roof was put on, for it would never have gone through a door.
+This cistern, by means of a ball-tap, filled itself from the main
+nearly as quickly as it was emptied.  Out of it grew pipes, creeping in
+secret downwards between inner walls of the house, penetrating
+everywhere.  One went down to a boiler behind the kitchen-range and
+filled it, and as the fire that was roasting the joint heated the
+boiler, the water mounted again magically to the cistern-room and filled
+another cistern, spherical and sealed, and thence descended, on a third
+journeying, to the bath and to the lavatory basin in the bathroom.  All
+this was marvellous to Edwin; it was romantic.  What!  A room solely for
+baths!  And a huge painted zinc bath!  Edwin had never seen such a
+thing.  And a vast porcelain basin, with tiles all round it, in which
+you could splash!  An endless supply of water on the first floor!
+
+At the shop-house, every drop of water on the first floor had to be
+carried upstairs in jugs and buckets; and every drop of it had to be
+carried down again.  No hot water could be obtained until it had been
+boiled in a vessel on the fire.  Hot water had the value of champagne.
+To take a warm hip-bath was an immense enterprise of heating, fetching,
+decanting, and general derangement of the entire house; and at best the
+bath was not hot; it always lost its virtue on the stairs and landing.
+And to splash--one of the most voluptuous pleasures in life--was
+forbidden by the code.  Mrs Nixon would actually weep at a splashing.
+Splashing was immoral.  It was as wicked as amorous dalliance in a
+monastery.  In the shop-house godliness was child's play compared to
+cleanliness.
+
+And the shop-house was so dark!  Edwin had never noticed how dark it was
+until the new house approached completion.  The new house was radiant
+with light.  It had always, for Edwin, the somewhat blinding brilliance
+which filled the sitting-room of the shop-house only when Duck Bank
+happened to be covered with fresh snow.  And there was a dining-room,
+solely for eating, and a drawing-room.  Both these names seemed `grand'
+to Edwin, who had never sat in any but a sitting-room.  Edwin had never
+dined; he had merely had dinner.  And, having dined, to walk
+ceremoniously into another room!  (Odd!  After all, his father was a man
+of tremendous initiative.)  Would he and Maggie be able to do the thing
+naturally?  Then there was the square hall--positively a room!  That
+alone impelled him to a new life.  When he thought of it all, the
+reception-rooms, the scientific kitchen, the vast scullery, the four
+large bedrooms, the bathroom, the three attics, the cistern-room
+murmurous with water, and the water tirelessly, inexhaustibly coursing
+up and down behind walls--he thrilled to fine impulses.
+
+He took courage.  He braced himself.  The seriousness which he had felt
+on the day of leaving school revisited him.  He looked back across the
+seven years of his life in the world, and condemned them unsparingly.
+He blamed no one but Edwin.  He had forgiven his father for having
+thwarted his supreme ambition; long ago he had forgiven his father;
+though, curiously, he had never quite forgiven Mrs Hamps for her share
+in the catastrophe.  He honestly thought he had recovered from the
+catastrophe undisfigured, even unmarked.  He knew not that he would
+never be the same man again, and that his lightest gesture and his
+lightest glance were touched with the wistfulness of resignation.  He
+had frankly accepted the fate of a printer.  And in business he was
+convinced, despite his father's capricious complaints, that he had
+acquitted himself well.  In all the details of the business he
+considered himself superior to his father.  And Big James would
+invariably act on his secret instructions given afterwards to counteract
+some misguided hasty order of the old man's.
+
+It was the emptiness of the record of his private life that he
+condemned.  What had he done for himself?  Nothing large!  Nothing
+heroic and imposing!  He had meant to pursue certain definite courses of
+study, to become the possessor of certain definite groups of books, to
+continue his drawing and painting, to practise this, that and the other,
+to map out all his spare time, to make rules and to keep them,--all to
+the great end of self-perfecting.  He had said: "What does it matter
+whether I am an architect or a printer, so long as I improve myself to
+the best of my powers?"  He hated young men who talked about improving
+themselves.  He spurned the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society
+(which had succeeded the Debating Society--defunct through
+over-indulgence in early rising).  Nevertheless in his heart he was far
+more enamoured of the idea of improvement than the worst prig of them
+all.  He could never for long escape from the dominance of the idea.  He
+might violently push it away, arguing that it could lead to nothing and
+was futile and tedious; back it would come!  It had always worried him.
+
+And yet he had accomplished nothing.  His systems of reading never
+worked for more than a month at a time.  And for several months at a
+time he simply squandered his spare hours, the hours that were his very
+own, in a sort of coma of crass stupidity, in which he seemed to be
+thinking of nothing whatever.  He had not made any friends whom he could
+esteem.  He had not won any sort of notice.  He was remarkable for
+nothing.  He was not happy.  He was not content.  He had the
+consciousness of being a spendthrift of time and of years...  A fair
+quantity of miscellaneous reading--that was all he had done.  He was not
+a student.  He knew nothing about anything.  He had stood still.
+
+Thus he upbraided himself.  And against this futility was his courage
+now braced by the inspiration of the new house, and tightened to a
+smarting tension by the brief interview with Janet Orgreave.  He was
+going to do several feats at once: tackle his father, develop into a
+right expert on _some_ subject, pursue his painting, and--for the moment
+this had the chief importance--`come out of his shell.'  He meant to be
+social, to impress himself on others, to move about, to form
+connections, to be Edwin Clayhanger, an individuality in the town,--to
+live.  Why had he refused Janet's invitation?  Mere silliness.  The old
+self nauseated the new.  But the next instant he sought excuses for the
+old self...  Wait a bit!  There was time yet.
+
+He was happy in the stress of one immense and complex resolve.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER FIVE.
+
+CLOTHES.
+
+He heard voices below.  And his soul seemed to shrink back, as if into
+the recesses of the shell from which it had been peeping.  His soul was
+tremendous, in solitude; but even the rumour of society intimidated it.
+His father and another were walking about the ground floor; the rough
+voice of his father echoed upwards in all its crudity.  He listened for
+the other voice; it was his Auntie Clara's.  Darius too had taken his
+Saturday afternoon for a leisurely visit to the house, and somehow he
+must have encountered Mrs Hamps, and brought her with him to view.
+
+Without giving himself time to dissipate his courage in reflection, he
+walked to the landing, and called down the stairs, "Hello, Auntie!"
+
+Why should his tone have been self-conscious, forced?  He was engaged in
+no crime.  He had told his father where he was going, and his father had
+not contradicted his remark that even if both of them happened to be out
+together, the shop would take no harm under the sole care of Stifford
+for an hour in the quiet of Saturday afternoon.
+
+Mrs Hamps replied, in her coaxing, sweet manner.
+
+"What did ye leave th' front door open for?" his father demanded curtly,
+and every room in the house heard the question.
+
+"Was it open?" he said lamely.
+
+"Was it open!  All Trafalgar Road could have walked in and made
+themselves at home."
+
+Edwin stood leaning with his arms on the rail of the landing.  Presently
+the visitors appeared at the foot of the stairs, and Darius climbed
+carefully, having first shaken the balustrade to make sure that it was
+genuine, stout, and well-founded.  Mrs Hamps followed, the fripperies
+of her elegant bonnet trembling, and her black gown rustling.  Edwin
+smiled at her, and she returned his smile with usurious interest.  There
+was now a mist of grey in her fine hair.
+
+"Oh, Edwin!" she began, breathing relief on the top stair.  "What a
+beautiful house!  Beautiful!  Quite perfect!  The latest of everything!
+Do you know what I've been thinking while your dear father has been
+showing me all this.  So that's the bathroom!  Bless us!  Hot!  Cold!
+Waste!  That cupboard under the lavatory is very handy, but what a snare
+for a careless servant!  Maggie will have to look at it every day, or
+it'll be used for anything and everything.  You tell her what her auntie
+says...  I was thinking--if but your mother could have seen it all!"
+
+Father and son said nothing.  Auntie Hamps sighed.  She was the only
+person who ever referred to the late Mrs Clayhanger.
+
+The procession moved on from room to room, Darius fingering and
+grunting, Mrs Hamps discovering in each detail the fine flower of utter
+perfection, and Edwin strolling loosely in the wake of her curls, her
+mantle, and her abundant black petticoats.  He could detect the odour of
+her kid gloves; it was a peculiar odour that never escaped him, and it
+reminded him inevitably of his mother's funeral.
+
+He was glad that they had not arrived during the visit of Janet
+Orgreave.
+
+In due course Edwin's bedroom was reached, and here Auntie Clara's
+ecstasy was redoubled.
+
+"I'm sure you're very grateful to your father, aren't you, Edwin?" she
+majestically assumed, when she had admired passionately the window, the
+door, the pattern of the hearth-tiles, and the spaciousness.
+
+Edwin could not speak.  Inquiries of this nature from Mrs Hamps
+paralysed the tongues of the children.  They left nothing to be said.  A
+sheepish grin, preceded by an inward mute curse, was all that Edwin
+could accomplish.  How in heaven's name could the woman talk in that
+strain?  His attitude towards his auntie was assuredly hardening with
+years.
+
+"What's all this?" questioned his father suddenly, pointing to upright
+boards that had been fastened to the walls on either side of the
+mantelpiece, to a height of about three feet.
+
+Then Edwin perceived the clumsiness of his tactics in remaining
+upstairs.  He ought to have gone downstairs to meet his father and
+auntie, and left them to go up alone.  His father was in an inquisitive
+mood.
+
+"It's for shelves," he said.
+
+"Shelves?"
+
+"For my books.  It's Mr Orgreave's idea.  He says it'll cost less."
+
+"Cost less!  Mr Orgreave's got too many ideas--that's what's the matter
+with him.  He'll idea me into the bankruptcy court if he keeps on."
+
+Edwin would have liked to protest against the savagery of the tone, to
+inquire firmly why, since shelves were necessary for books and he had
+books, there need be such a display of ill-temper about a few feet of
+deal plank.  The words were ready, the sentences framed in his mind.
+But he was silent.  The door was locked on these words, but it was not
+Edwin who had turned the key; it was some force within him, over which
+he had no control.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+"Now, now, father!" intervened Mrs Hamps.  "You know you've said over
+and over again how glad you are he's so fond of books, and never goes
+out.  There isn't a better boy in Bursley.  That I will say, and to his
+face."  She smiled like an angel at both of them.
+
+"_You_ say!  _You_ say!"  Darius remarked curtly, trying to control
+himself. A few years ago he would never have used such violent demeanour
+in her presence.
+
+"And how much easier these shelves will be to keep clean than a
+bookcase!  No polishing.  Just a rub, and a wipe with a damp cloth now
+and then.  And no dirt underneath.  They will do away with four corners,
+anyhow.  That's what I think of--eh, poor Maggie!  Keeping all this
+clean.  There'll be work for two women night and day, early and late,
+and even then--But it's a great blessing to have water on every floor,
+that it is!  And people aren't so particular nowadays as they used to
+be, I fancy.  I fancy that more and more."  Mrs Hamps sighed,
+cheerfully bearing up.
+
+Without a pause she stepped quickly across to Edwin.  He wondered what
+she was at.  She merely straightened down the collar of his coat, which,
+unknown to him, had treacherously allowed itself to remain turned up
+behind.  It had probably been thus misbehaving itself since before
+dinner, when he had washed.
+
+"Now, I do like my nephew to be tidy," said Mrs Hamps affectionately.
+"I'm very jealous for my nephew."  She caressed the shoulders of the
+coat, and Edwin had to stand still and submit.  "Let me see, it's your
+birthday next month, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, auntie."
+
+"Well, I know he hasn't got a lot of money.  And I know his father
+hasn't any money to spare just now--what with all these expenses--the
+house--"
+
+"Ye may well say it, sister!"  Darius growled.
+
+"I saw you the day before yesterday.  My nephew didn't see me, but his
+auntie saw him.  Oh, never mind where.  And I said to myself; `I should
+like my only nephew to have a suit a little better than that when he
+goes up and down on his father's business.  What a change it would be if
+his old auntie gave him a new suit for a birthday present this year!'"
+
+"Oh, auntie."
+
+She spoke in a lower voice.  "You come and see me to-morrow, and I shall
+have a little piece of paper in an envelope waiting for you.  And you
+must choose something really good.  You've got excellent taste, we all
+know that.  And this will be a new start for you.  A new year, and a new
+start, and we shall see how neat and spruce you'll keep yourself in
+future, eh?"
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+It was insufferable.  But it was fine.  Who could deny that Auntie Clara
+was not an extraordinary, an original, and a generous woman?  What a
+masterly reproof to both father and son!  Perhaps not delicately
+administered.  Yet Auntie Clara had lavished all the delicacy of her
+nature on the administering!
+
+To Edwin, it seemed like an act of God in his favour.  It seemed to set
+a divine seal on his resolutions.  It was the most astonishing and
+apposite piece of luck that had ever happened to him.  When he had
+lamely thanked the benefactor, he slipped away as soon as he could.
+Already he could feel the crinkling of the five-pound note in his hand.
+Five pounds!  He had never had a suit that cost more than fifty
+shillings.  He slipped away.  A great resolve was upon him.  Shillitoe
+closed at four o'clock on Saturday afternoons.  There was just time.  He
+hurried down Trafalgar Road in a dream.  And when he had climbed Duck
+Bank he turned to the left, and without stopping he burst into
+Shillitoe's.  Not from eagerness to enter Shillitoe's, but because if he
+had hesitated he might never have entered at all: he might have slunk
+away to the old undistinguished tailor in Saint Luke's Square.
+Shillitoe was the stylish tailor.  Shillitoe made no display of goods,
+scorning such paltry devices.  Shillitoe had wire blinds across the
+lower part of his window, and on the blinds, in gold, "Gentlemen's
+tailor and outfitter.  Breeches-maker."  Above the blind could be seen a
+few green cardboard boxes.  Shillitoe made breeches for men who hunted.
+Shillitoe's lowest price for a suit was notoriously four guineas.
+Shillitoe's was the resort of the fashionable youth of the town and
+district.  It was a terrific adventure for Edwin to enter Shillitoe's.
+His nervousness was painful.  He seemed to have a vague idea that
+Shillitoe might sneer at him.  However, he went in.  The shop was empty.
+He closed the door, as he might have closed the door of a dentist's.
+He said to himself; "Well, I'm here!"  He wondered what his father would
+say on hearing that he had been to Shillitoe's.  And what would Clara
+have said, had she been at home?  Then Shillitoe in person came forward
+from the cutting-out room and Shillitoe's tone and demeanour reassured
+him.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER SIX.
+
+JANET LOSES HER BET.
+
+Accident--that is to say, a chance somewhat more fortuitous than the
+common hazards which we group together and call existence--pushed Edwin
+into the next stage of his career.  As, on one afternoon in late June,
+he was turning the corner of Trafalgar Road to enter the shop, he
+surprisingly encountered Charlie Orgreave, whom he had not seen for
+several years.  And when he saw this figure, at once fashionably and
+carelessly dressed, his first thought was one of deep satisfaction that
+he was wearing his new Shillitoe suit of clothes.  He had scarcely worn
+the suit at all, but that afternoon his father had sent him over to
+Hanbridge about a large order from Bostocks, the recently established
+drapers there whose extravagant advertising had shocked and pained the
+commerce of the Five Towns.  Darius had told him to `titivate himself,'
+a most startling injunction from Darius, and thus the new costly suit
+had been, as it were, officially blessed and henceforth could not be
+condemned.
+
+"How do, Teddy?"  Charlie greeted him.  "I've just been in to see you at
+your shop."
+
+Edwin paused.
+
+"Hello!  The Sunday!" he said quietly.  And he kept thinking, as his
+eyes noted details of Charlie's raiment, "It's a bit of luck I've got
+these clothes on."  And he was in fact rather sorry that Charlie
+probably paid no real attention to clothes.  The new suit had caused
+Edwin to look at everybody's clothes, had caused him to walk
+differently, and to put his shoulders back, and to change the style of
+his collars; had made a different man of Edwin.
+
+"Come in, will you?"  Edwin suggested.
+
+They went into the shop together.  Stifford smiled at them both, as if
+to felicitate them on the chance which had brought them together.
+
+"Come in here," said Edwin, indicating the small office.
+
+"The lion's den, eh?" observed the Sunday.
+
+He, as much as Edwin, was a little tongue-tied and nervous.
+
+"Sit down, will you?" said Edwin, shutting the door.  "No, take the
+arm-chair.  I'll absquatulate on the desk.  I'd no idea you were down.
+When did you come?"
+
+"Last night, last train.  Just a freak, you know."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+They were within a foot of each other in the ebonised cubicle.  Edwin's
+legs were swinging a few inches away from the arm-chair.  His hat was at
+the back of his head, and Charlie's hat was at the back of Charlie's
+head.  This was their sole point of resemblance.  As Edwin
+surreptitiously examined the youth who had once been his intimate
+friend, he experienced the half-sneering awe of the provincial for the
+provincial who has become a Londoner.  Charlie was changed; even his
+accent was changed.  He and Edwin belonged to utterly different worlds
+now.  They seldom saw the same scenes or thought the same things.  But
+of course they were obliged by loyalty to the past to pretend that
+nothing was changed.
+
+"You've not altered much," said Edwin.
+
+And indeed, when Charlie smiled, he was almost precisely the old Sunday,
+despite his metropolitan mannerisms.  And there was nothing whatever in
+his figure or deportment to show that he had lived for several years in
+France and could chatter in a language whose verbs had four
+conjugations.  After all, he was less formidable than Edwin might have
+anticipated.
+
+"_You_ have, anyhow," said Charlie.
+
+Edwin grinned self-consciously.
+
+"I suppose you've got this place practically in your own hands now,"
+said Charlie.  "I wish _I_ was on my own, I can tell you that."
+
+An instinctive gesture from Edwin made Charlie lower his voice in the
+middle of a sentence.  The cubicle had the appearance, but not the
+reality, of being private.
+
+"Don't you make any mistake," Edwin murmured.  He, who depended on his
+aunt's generosity for clothes, the practical ruler of the place!  Still
+he was glad that Charlie supposed that he ruled, even though the
+supposition might be mere small-talk.  "You're in that hospital, aren't
+you?"
+
+"Bart's."
+
+"Bart's, is it?  Yes, I remember.  I expect you aren't thinking of
+settling down here?"
+
+Charlie was about to reply in accents of disdain: "Not me!"  But his
+natural politeness stayed his tongue.  "I hardly think so," he said.
+"Too much competition here.  So there is everywhere, for the matter of
+that."  The disillusions of the young doctor were already upon Charlie.
+And yet people may be found who will assert that in those days there was
+no competition, that competition has been invented during the past ten
+years.
+
+"_You_ needn't worry about competition," said Edwin.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Why not, man!  Nothing could ever stop you from getting patients--with
+that smile!  You'll simply walk straight into anything you want."
+
+"You think so?"  Charlie affected an ironic incredulity, but he was
+pleased.  He had met the same theory in London.
+
+"Well, you didn't suppose degrees and things had anything to do with it,
+did you?" said Edwin, smiling a little superiorly.  He felt, with
+pleasure, that he was still older than the Sunday; and it pleased him
+also to be able thus to utilise ideas which he had formed from
+observation but which by diffidence and lack of opportunity he had never
+expressed.  "All a patient wants is to be smiled at in the right way,"
+he continued, growing bolder.  "Just look at 'em!"
+
+"Look at who?"
+
+"The doctors here."  He dropped his voice further.  "Do you know why the
+dad's gone to Heve?"
+
+"Gone to Heve, has he?  Left old Who-is-it?"
+
+"Yes.  I don't say Heve isn't clever, but it's his look that does the
+trick for him."
+
+"You seem to go about noticing things.  Any charge?"
+
+Edwin blushed and laughed.  Their nervousness was dissipated.  Each was
+reassured of the old basis of `decency' in the other.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+"Look here," said Charlie.  "I can't stop now."
+
+"Hold on a bit."
+
+"I only called to tell you that you've simply _got_ to come up to-night."
+
+"Come up where?"
+
+"To our place.  You've simply _got_ to."
+
+The secret fact was that Edwin had once more been under discussion in
+the house of the Orgreaves.  And Osmond Orgreave had lent Janet a
+shilling so that she might bet Charlie a shilling that he would not
+succeed in bringing Edwin to the house.  The understanding was that if
+Janet won, her father was to take sixpence of the gain.  Janet herself
+had failed to lure Edwin into the house.  He was so easy to approach and
+so difficult to catch.  Janet was slightly piqued.
+
+As for Edwin, he was postponing the execution of all his good
+resolutions until he should be installed in the new house.  He could not
+achieve highly difficult tasks under conditions of expectancy and
+derangement.  The whole Clayhanger premises were in a suppressed state
+of being packed up.  In a week the removal would occur.  Until the
+removal was over and the new order was established Edwin felt that he
+could still conscientiously allow his timidity to govern him, and so he
+had remained in his shell.  The sole herald of the new order was the new
+suit.
+
+"Oh!  I can't come--not to-night."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"We're so busy."
+
+"Bosh to that!"
+
+"Some other night."
+
+"No.  I'm going back to-morrow.  Must.  Now look here, old man, come on.
+I shall be very disappointed if you don't."
+
+Edwin wondered why he could not accept and be done with it, instead of
+persisting in a sequence of insincere and even lying hesitations.  But
+he could not.
+
+"That's all right," said Charlie, as if clinching the affair.  Then he
+lowered his voice to a scarce audible confidential whisper.  "Fine girl
+staying up there just now!"  His eyes sparkled.
+
+"Oh!  At your place?"  Edwin adopted the same cautious tone.  Stifford,
+outside, strained his ears--in vain.  The magic word `girl' had in an
+instant thrown the shop into agitation.  The shop was no longer
+provincial; it became a part of the universal.
+
+"Yes.  Haven't you seen her about?"
+
+"No.  Who is she?"
+
+"Oh!  Friend of Janet's.  Hilda Lessways, her name is.  I don't know
+much of her myself."
+
+"Bit of all right, is she?"  Edwin tried in a whisper to be a man of
+vast experience and settled views.  He tried to whisper as though he
+whispered about women every day of his life.  He thought that these
+Londoners were terrific on the subject of women, and he did his best to
+reach their level.  He succeeded so well that Charlie, who, as a man,
+knew more of London than of the provinces, thought that after all London
+was nothing in comparison to the seeming-quiet provinces.  Charlie
+leaned back in his chair, drew down the corners of his mouth, nodded his
+head knowingly, and then quite spoiled the desired effect of doggishness
+by his delightfully candid smile.  Neither of them had the least
+intention of disrespect towards the fine girl who was on their lips.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Edwin said to himself: "Is it possible that he has come down specially
+to see this Hilda?"  He thought enviously of Charlie as a free bird of
+the air.
+
+"What's she like?"  Edwin inquired.
+
+"You come up and see," Charlie retorted.
+
+"Not to-night," said the fawn, in spite of Edwin.
+
+"You come to-night, or I perish in the attempt," said Charlie, in his
+natural voice.  This phrase from their school-days made them both laugh
+again.  They were now apparently as intimate as ever they had been.
+
+"All right," said Edwin.  "I'll come."
+
+"Sure?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Come for a sort of supper at eight."
+
+"Oh!"  Edwin drew back.  "Supper?  I didn't--Suppose I come after supper
+for a bit?"
+
+"Suppose you don't!"  Charlie snorted, sticking his chin out.  "I'm off
+now.  Must."
+
+They stood a moment together at the door of the shop, in the declining
+warmth of the summer afternoon, mutually satisfied.
+
+"So-long!"
+
+"So-long!"
+
+The Sunday elegantly departed.  Edwin had given his word, and he felt as
+he might have felt had surgeons just tied him to the operating-table.
+Nevertheless he was not ill-pleased with his own demeanour in front of
+Charlie.  And he liked Charlie as much as ever.  He should rely on
+Charlie as a support during this adventure into the worldly regions
+peopled by fine girls.  He pictured this Hilda as being more romantic
+and strange than Janet Orgreave; he pictured her as mysteriously
+superior.  And he was afraid of his own image of her.
+
+At tea in the dismantled sitting-room, though he was going out to
+supper, he ate quite as much tea as usual, from sheer poltroonery.  He
+said as casually as he could--
+
+"By the way, Charlie Orgreave called this afternoon."
+
+"Did he?" said Maggie.
+
+"He's off back to London to-morrow.  He would have me slip up there
+to-night to see him."
+
+"And shall you?"
+
+"I think so," said Edwin, with an appearance of indecision.  "I may as
+well."
+
+It was the first time that there had ever been question of him visiting
+a private house, except his aunt's, at night.  To him the moment marked
+an epoch, the inception of freedom; but the phlegmatic Maggie showed no
+sign of excitement--("Clara would have gone into a fit!" he reflected)--
+and his father only asked a casual question about Charlie.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER SEVEN.
+
+LANE END HOUSE.
+
+Here was another of those impressive square halls, on the other side of
+the suddenly opened door of Lane End House.  But Edwin was now getting
+accustomed to square halls.  Nevertheless he quaked as he stood on the
+threshold.  An absurd young man!  He wondered whether he would ever
+experience the sensation of feeling authentically grown-up.  Behind him
+in the summer twilight lay the large oval lawn, and the gates which once
+had doubtless marked the end of Manor Lane--now Oak Street.  And
+actually he had an impulse to rush back upon his steps, and bring on
+himself eternal shame.  The servant, however, primly held him with her
+eyes alone, and he submitted to her sway.
+
+"Mr Charles in?" he inquired glumly, affecting nonchalance.
+
+The servant bowed her head with a certain condescending deference, as
+who should say: "Do not let us pretend that they are not expecting you."
+
+A door to the right opened.  Janet was revealed, and, behind her,
+Charlie.  Both were laughing.  There was a sound of a piano.  As soon as
+Charlie caught sight of Edwin he exclaimed to Janet--
+
+"Where's my bob?"
+
+"Charlie!" she protested, checking her laughter.
+
+"Why!  What have I said?"  Charlie inquired, with mock innocence,
+perceiving that he had been indiscreet, and trying to remedy his rash
+mistake.  "Surely I can say `bob'!"
+
+Edwin understood nothing of this brief passage.  Janet, ignoring Charlie
+and dismissing the servant with an imperceptible sign, advanced to the
+visitor.  She was dressed in white, and Edwin considered her to be
+extraordinarily graceful, dignified, sweet, and welcoming.  There was a
+peculiar charm in the way in which her skirts half-reluctantly followed
+her along the carpet, causing beautiful curves of drapery from the
+waist.  And her smile was so warm and so sincere!  For the moment she
+really felt that Edwin's presence in the house satisfied the keenest of
+her desires, and of course her face generously expressed what she felt.
+
+"Well, Miss Orgreave," Edwin grinned.  "Here I am, you see!"
+
+"And we're delighted," said Janet simply, taking his hand.  She might
+have amiably teased him about the protracted difficulties of getting
+him.  She might have hinted an agreeable petulance against the fact that
+the brother had succeeded where the sister had failed.  Her sisterly
+manner to Charlie a little earlier had perhaps shown flashes of such
+thoughts in her mind.  But no.  In the presence of Edwin, Janet's
+extreme good-nature forgot everything save that he was there, a stranger
+to be received and cherished.
+
+"Here!  Give us that tile," said Charlie.
+
+"Beautiful evening," Edwin observed.
+
+"Oh!  Isn't it!" breathed Janet, in ecstasy, and gazed from the front
+door into the western sky.  "We were out on the lawn, but mother said it
+was damp.  It wasn't," she laughed.  "But if you think it's damp, it is
+damp, isn't it?  Will you come and see mother?  Charlie, you can leave
+the front door open."
+
+Edwin said to himself that she had all the attractiveness of a girl and
+of a woman.  She preceded him towards the door to the right.  Charlie
+hovered behind, on springs.  Edwin, nervously pulling out his
+handkerchief and putting it back, had a confused vision of the hall full
+of little pictures, plates, stools, rugs, and old sword-sheaths.  There
+seemed to him to be far more knick-knacks in that hall than in the whole
+of his father's house; Mr Orgreave's ingeniously contrived bookshelves
+were simply overlaid and smothered in knick-knacks.  Janet pushed at the
+door, and the sound of the piano suddenly increased in volume.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+There was no cessation of the music as the three entered.  As it were
+beneath the music, Mrs Orgreave, a stout and faded calm lady, greeted
+him kindly: "Mr Edwin!"  She was shorter than Janet, but Edwin could
+see Janet in her movements and in her full lips.  "Well, Edwin!" said
+Osmond Orgreave with lazy and distinguished good-nature, shaking hands.
+Jimmie and Johnnie, now aged nineteen and eighteen respectively, were in
+the room; Johnnie was reading; their blushing awkwardness in salutation
+and comic efforts to be curtly benevolent in the manner of clubmen
+somewhat eased the tension in Edwin.  They addressed him as
+`Clayhanger.'  The eldest and the youngest child of the family sat at
+the piano in the act of performing a duet.  Tom, pale, slight,
+near-sighted and wearing spectacles, had reached the age of thirty-two,
+and was junior partner in a firm of solicitors at Hanbridge; Bursley
+seldom saw him.  Alicia had the delightful gawkiness of twelve years.
+One only of the seven children was missing.  Marian, aged thirty, and
+married in London, with two little babies; Marian was adored by all her
+brothers and sisters, and most by Janet, who, during visits of the
+married sister, fell back with worshipping joy into her original
+situation of second daughter.
+
+Edwin, Charles, and Janet sat down on a sofa.  It was not until after a
+moment that Edwin noticed an ugly young woman who sat behind the players
+and turned over the pages of music for them.  "Surely that can't be his
+wonderful Hilda!"  Edwin thought.  In the excitement of arrival he had
+forgotten the advertised Hilda.  Was that she?  The girl could be no
+other.  Edwin made the reflection that all men make: "Well, it's
+astonishing what other fellows like!"  And, having put down Charlie
+several points in his esteem, he forgot Hilda.
+
+Evidently loud and sustained conversation was not expected nor desired
+while the music lasted.  And Edwin was glad of this.  It enabled him to
+get his breath and his bearings in what was to him really a tremendous
+ordeal.  And in fact he was much more agitated than even he imagined.
+The room itself abashed him.
+
+Everybody, including Mr Orgreave, had said that the Clayhanger
+drawing-room with its bay-window was a fine apartment.  But the Orgreave
+drawing-room had a bay-window and another large window; it was twice as
+big as the Clayhangers' and of an interesting irregular shape.  Although
+there were in it two unoccupied expanses of carpet, it nevertheless
+contained what seemed to Edwin immense quantities of furniture of all
+sorts.  Easy-chairs were common, and everywhere.  Several bookcases rose
+to the low ceiling; dozens and dozens of pictures hid the walls; each
+corner had its little society of objects; cushions and candlesticks
+abounded; the piano was a grand, and Edwin was astounded to see another
+piano, a small upright, in the farther distance; there were even two
+fireplaces, with two mirrors, two clocks, two sets of ornaments, and two
+embroidered screens.  The general effect was of extraordinary lavish
+profusion--of wilful, splendid, careless extravagance.
+
+Yet the arm of the sofa on which Edwin leaned was threadbare in two
+different places.  The room was faded and worn, like its mistress.  Like
+its mistress it seemed to exhale a silent and calm authority, based on
+historic tradition.
+
+And the room was historic; it had been the theatre of history.  For
+twenty-five years--ever since Tom was seven--it had witnessed the
+adventurous domestic career of the Orgreaves, so quiet superficially, so
+exciting in reality.  It was the drawing-room of a man who had
+consistently used immense powers of industry for the satisfaction of his
+prodigal instincts; it was the drawing-room of a woman whose placidity
+no danger could disturb, and who cared for nothing if only her husband
+was amused.  Spend and gain!  And, for a change, gain and spend!  That
+was the method.  Work till sheer exhaustion beat you.  Plan, scheme,
+devise!  Satisfy your curiosity and your other instincts!  Experiment!
+Accept risks!  Buy first, order first, pledge yourself first; and then
+split your head in order to pay and to redeem!  When chance aids you to
+accumulate, let the pile grow, out of mere perversity, and then scatter
+it royally!  Play heartily!  Play with the same intentness as you work!
+Live to the uttermost instant and to the last flicker of energy!  Such
+was the spirit of Osmond Orgreave, and the spirit which reigned in the
+house generally, if not in every room of the house.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+For each child had its room--except Jimmie and Johnnie, who shared one.
+And each room was the fortress of an egoism, the theatre of a separate
+drama, mysterious, and sacred from the others.  Jimmie could not
+remember having been in Janet's room--it was forbidden by Alicia, who
+was jealous of her sole right of entree--and nobody would have dreamed
+of violating the chamber of Jimmie and Johnnie to discover the origin of
+peculiar noises that puzzled the household at seven o'clock in the
+morning.  As for Tom's castle--it was a legend to the younger children;
+it was supposed to be wondrous.
+
+All the children had always cost money, and a great deal of money, until
+Marian had left the family in deep gloom for her absence, and Tom, with
+a final wrench of a vast sum from the willing but wincing father, had
+settled into a remunerative profession.  Tom was now keeping himself and
+repaying the weakened parent.  The rest cost more and more every year as
+their minds and bodies budded and flowered.  It was endless, it was
+staggering, it would not bear thinking about.  The long and varied
+chronicle of it was somehow written on the drawing-room as well as on
+the faces of the father and mother--on the drawing-room which had the
+same dignified, childlike, indefatigable, invincible, jolly expression
+as its owners.  Threadbare in places?  And why not?  The very identical
+Turkey carpet at which Edwin gazed in his self-consciousness--on that
+carpet Janet the queenly and mature had sprawled as an infant while her
+mother, a fresh previous Janet of less than thirty, had cooed and said
+incomprehensible foolishness to her.  Tom was patriarchal because he had
+vague memories of an earlier drawing-room, misted in far antiquity.
+Threadbare?  By heaven, its mere survival was magnificent!  I say that
+it was a miraculous drawing-room.  Its chairs were humanised.  Its
+little cottage piano that nobody ever opened now unless Tom had gone mad
+on something for two pianos, because it was so impossibly tinny--the
+cottage piano could humanly recall the touch of a perfect baby when
+Marian the wife sat down to it.  Marian was one of your silly
+sentimental nice things; on account of its associations, she really
+preferred the cottage piano to the grand.  The two carpets were both
+resigned, grim old humanities, used to dirty heels, and not caring, or
+pretending not to care.  What did the curtains know of history?  Naught.
+They were always new; they could not last.  But even the newest
+curtains would at once submit to the influence of the room, and take on
+something of its physiognomy, and help to express its comfortableness.
+You could not hang a week in front of one of those windows without being
+subtly informed by the tradition of adventurous happiness that presided
+over the room.  It was that: a drawing-room in which a man and a woman,
+and boys and girls, had been on the whole happy, if often apprehensive.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+The music began to engage Edwin's attention.  It was music of a kind
+quite novel to him.  Most of it had no meaning for him, but at intervals
+some fragment detached itself from the mass, and stood out beautiful.
+It was as if he were gazing at a stage in gloom, but lighted momentarily
+by fleeting rays that revealed a lovely detail and were bafflingly cut
+off.  Occasionally he thought he noticed a recurrence of the same
+fragment.  Murmurs came from behind the piano.  He looked cautiously.
+Alicia was making faces of alarm and annoyance.  She whispered: "Oh
+dear! ...  It's no use! ...  We're all wrong, I'm sure!"  Tom kept his
+eyes on the page in front of him, doggedly playing.  Then Edwin was
+conscious of dissonances.  And then the music stopped.
+
+"Now, Alicia," her father protested mildly, "you mustn't be nervous."
+
+"Nervous!" exclaimed Alicia.  "Tom's just as nervous as I am!  So _he_
+needn't talk."  She was as red as a cock's crest.
+
+Tom was not talking.  He pointed several times violently to a place on
+Alicia's half of the open book--she was playing the bass part.  "There!
+There!"  The music recommenced.
+
+"She's always nervous like that," Janet whispered kindly, "when any
+one's here.  But she doesn't like to be told."
+
+"She plays splendidly," Edwin responded.  "Do you play?"
+
+Janet shook her head.
+
+"Yes, she does," Charlie whispered.
+
+"Keep on, darling.  You're at the end now."  Edwin heard a low, stern
+voice.  That must be the voice of Hilda.  A second later, he looked
+across, and surprised her glance, which was intensely fixed on himself.
+She dropped her eyes quickly; he also.
+
+Then he felt by the nature of the chords that the piece was closing.
+The music ceased.  Mr Orgreave clapped his hands.  "Bravo!  Bravo!"
+
+"Why," cried Charlie to the performers, "you weren't within ten bars of
+each other!"  And Edwin wondered how Charlie could tell that.  As for
+him, he did not know enough of music to be able to turn over the pages
+for others.  He felt himself to be an ignoramus among a company of
+brilliant experts.
+
+"Well," said Mr Orgreave, "I suppose we may talk a bit now.  It's more
+than our place is worth to breathe aloud while these Rubinsteins are
+doing Beethoven!"  He looked at Edwin, who grinned.
+
+"Oh!  My word!" smiled Mrs Orgreave, supporting her hand.
+
+"Beethoven, is it?"  Edwin muttered.  He was acquainted only with the
+name, and had never heard it pronounced as Mr Orgreave pronounced it.
+
+"One symphony a night!"  Mr Orgreave said, with irony.  "And we're only
+at the second, it seems.  Seven more to come.  What do you think of that,
+Edwin?"
+
+"Very fine!"
+
+"Let's have the `Lost Chord,' Janet," Mr Orgreave suggested.
+
+There was a protesting chorus of "Oh, dad!"
+
+"Very well!  Very well!" the father murmured, acting humility.  "I'm
+snubbed!"
+
+Tom had now strolled across the room, smiling to himself, and looking at
+the carpet, in an effort to behave as one who had done nothing in
+particular.
+
+"How d'ye do, Clayhanger?"  He greeted Edwin, and grasped his hand in a
+feverish clutch.  "You must excuse us.  We aren't used to audiences.
+That's the worst of being rotten amateurs."
+
+Edwin rose.  "Oh!" he deprecated.  He had never spoken to Tom Orgreave
+before, but Tom seemed ready to treat him at once as an established
+acquaintance.
+
+Then Alicia had to come forward and shake hands.  She could not get a
+word out.
+
+"Now, baby!"  Charlie teased her.
+
+She tossed her mane, and found refuge by her mother's side.  Mrs
+Orgreave caressed the mane into order.
+
+"This is Miss Lessways.  Hilda--Mr Edwin Clayhanger."  Janet drew the
+dark girl towards her as the latter hovered uncertainly in the middle of
+the room, her face forced into the look of elaborate negligence
+conventionally assumed by every self-respecting person who waits to be
+introduced.  She took Edwin's hand limply, and failed to meet his
+glance.  Her features did not soften.  Edwin was confirmed in the
+impression of her obdurate ugliness.  He just noticed her olive skin and
+black eyes and hair.  She was absolutely different in type from any of
+the Clayhangers.  The next instant she and Charlie were talking
+together.
+
+Edwin felt the surprised relief of one who has plunged into the sea and
+discovers himself fairly buoyant on the threatening waves.
+
+"Janet," asked Mrs Orgreave, "will supper be ready?"
+
+In the obscurer corners of the room grey shadows gathered furtively,
+waiting their time.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+"Seen my latest, Charlie?" asked Tom, in his thin voice.
+
+"No, what is it?"  Charlie replied.  The younger brother was flattered
+by this proof of esteem from the elder, but he did his best by
+casualness of tone to prevent the fact from transpiring.
+
+All the youths were now standing in a group in the middle of the
+drawing-room.  Their faces showed pale and more distinct than their
+bodies in the darkening twilight.  Mrs Orgreave, her husband, and the
+girls had gone into the dining-room.
+
+Tom Orgreave, with the gestures of a precisian, drew a bunch of keys
+from his pocket, and unlocked a rosewood bookcase that stood between the
+two windows.  Jimmie winked to Johnnie, and included Edwin in the
+fellowship of the wink, which meant that Tom was more comic than Tom
+thought, with his locked bookcases and his simple vanities of a
+collector.  Tom collected books.  As Edwin gazed at the bookcase he
+perceived that it was filled mainly with rich bindings.  And suddenly
+all his own book-buying seemed to him petty and pitiful.  He saw books
+in a new aspect.  He had need of no instruction, of no explanation.  The
+amorous care with which Tom drew a volume from the bookcase was enough
+in itself to enlighten Edwin completely.  He saw that a book might be
+more than reading matter, might be a bibelot, a curious jewel, to
+satisfy the lust of the eye and of the hand.  He instantly condemned his
+own few books as being naught; he was ashamed of them.  Each book in
+that bookcase was a separate treasure.
+
+"See this, my boy?" said Tom, handing to Charlie a calf-bound volume,
+with a crest on the sides.  "Six volumes.  Picked them up at Stafford--
+Assizes, you know.  It's the Wilbraham crest.  I never knew they'd been
+selling their library."
+
+Charlie accepted the book with respect.  Its edges were gilt, and the
+paper thin and soft.  Edwin looked over his shoulder, and saw the
+title-page of Victor Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris," in French.  The
+volume had a most romantic, foreign, even exotic air.  Edwin desired it
+fervently, or something that might rank equal with it.
+
+"How much did they stick you for this lot?" asked Charlie.
+
+Tom held up one finger.
+
+"Quid?"  Charlie wanted to be sure.  Tom nodded.
+
+"Cheap as dirt, of course!" said Tom.  "Binding's worth more than that.
+Look at the other volumes.  Look at them!"
+
+"Pity it's only a second edition," said Charlie.
+
+"Well, damn it, man!  One can't have everything."
+
+Charlie passed the volume to Edwin, who fingered it with the strangest
+delight.  Was it possible that this exquisitely delicate and uncustomary
+treasure, which seemed to exhale all the charm of France and the savour
+of her history, had been found at Stafford?  He had been to Stafford
+himself.  He had read "Notre-Dame" himself, but in English, out of a
+common book like any common book--not out of a bibelot.
+
+"You've read it, of course, Clayhanger?"  Tom said.
+
+"Oh!"  Edwin answered humbly.  "Only in a translation."  Yet there was a
+certain falseness in his humility, for he was proud of having read the
+work.  What sort of a duffer would he have appeared had he been obliged
+to reply `No'?
+
+"You ought to read French _in_ French," said Tom, kindly authoritative.
+
+"Can't," said Edwin.
+
+"Bosh!"  Charlie cried.  "You were always spiffing in French.  You could
+simply knock spots off me."
+
+"And do you read French in French, the Sunday?"  Edwin asked.
+
+"Well," said Charlie, "I must say it was Thomas put me up to it.  You
+simply begin to read, that's all.  What you don't understand, you miss.
+But you soon understand.  You can always look at a dictionary if you
+feel like it.  I usually don't."
+
+"I'm sure _you_ could read French easily in a month," said Tom.  "They
+always gave a good grounding at Oldcastle.  There's simply nothing in
+it."
+
+"Really!"  Edwin murmured, relinquishing the book.  "I must have a shot,
+I never thought of it."  And he never thought of reading French for
+pleasure.  He had construed Xavier de Maistre's "Voyage autour de ma
+Chambre" for marks, assuredly not for pleasure.  "Are there any books in
+this style to be got on that bookstall in Hanbridge Market?" he inquired
+of Tom.
+
+"Sometimes," said Tom, wiping his spectacles.  "Oh yes!"
+
+It was astounding to Edwin how blind he had been to the romance of
+existence in the Five Towns.
+
+"It's all very well," observed Charlie reflectively, fingering one or
+two of the other volumes--"it's all very well, and Victor Hugo is Victor
+Hugo; but you can say what you like--there's a lot of this that'll bear
+skipping, your worships."
+
+"Not a line!" said a passionate, vibrating voice.
+
+The voice so startled and thrilled Edwin that he almost jumped, as he
+looked round.  To Edwin it was dramatic; it was even dangerous and
+threatening.  He had never heard a quiet voice so charged with intense
+emotion.  Hilda Lessways had come back to the room, and she stood near
+the door, her face gleaming in the dusk.  She stood like an Amazonian
+defender of the aged poet.  Edwin asked himself, "Can any one be so
+excited as that about a book?"  The eyes, lips, and nostrils were a
+revelation to him.  He could feel his heart beating.  But the girl
+strongly repelled him.  Nobody else appeared to be conscious that
+anything singular had occurred.  Jimmie and Johnnie sidled out of the
+room.
+
+"Oh!  Indeed!"  Charlie directed his candid and yet faintly ironic smile
+upon Hilda Lessways.  "Don't _you_ think that some of it's dullish,
+Teddy?"
+
+Edwin blushed.  "Well, ye-es," he answered, honestly judicial.
+
+"Mrs Orgreave wants to know when you're coming to supper," said Hilda,
+and left.
+
+Tom was relocking the bookcase.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER EIGHT.
+
+THE FAMILY SUPPER.
+
+"Now father, let's have a bottle of wine, eh?"  Charlie vociferously
+suggested.
+
+Mr Orgreave hesitated: "You'd better ask your mother."
+
+"Really, Charlie--" Mrs Orgreave began.
+
+"Oh yes!"  Charlie cut her short.  "Right you are, Martha!"
+
+The servant, who had stood waiting for a definite command during this
+brief conflict of wills, glanced interrogatively at Mrs Orgreave and,
+perceiving no clear prohibition in her face, departed with a smile to
+get the wine.  She was a servant of sound prestige, and had the
+inexpressible privilege of smiling on duty.  In her time she had fought
+lively battles of repartee with all the children from Charlie downwards.
+Janet humoured Martha, and Martha humoured Mrs Orgreave.
+
+The whole family (save absent Marian) was now gathered in the
+dining-room, another apartment on whose physiognomy were written in
+cipher the annals of the vivacious tribe.  Here the curtains were drawn,
+and all the interest of the room centred on the large white gleaming
+table, about which the members stood or sat under the downward radiance
+of a chandelier.  Beyond the circle illuminated by the shaded chandelier
+could be discerned dim forms of furniture and of pictures, with a glint
+of high light here and there burning on the corner of some gold frame.
+Mr and Mrs Orgreave sat at either end of the table.  Alicia stood by
+her father, with one arm half round his neck.  Tom sat near his mother.
+Janet and Hilda sat together, flanked by Jimmie and Johnnie, who stood,
+having pushed chairs away.  Charlie and Edwin stood opposite.  The table
+seemed to Edwin to be heaped with food: cold and yet rich remains of
+bird and beast; a large fruit pie, opened; another intact; some
+puddings; cheese; sandwiches; raw fruit; at Janet's elbow were cups and
+saucers and a pot of coffee; a large glass jug of lemonade shone near
+by; plates, glasses, and cutlery were strewn about irregularly.  The
+effect upon Edwin was one of immense and careless prodigality; it
+intoxicated him; it made him feel that a grand profuseness was the
+finest thing in life.  In his own home the supper consisted of cheese,
+bread, and water, save on Sundays, when cold sausages were generally
+added, to make a feast.  But the idea of the price of living as the
+Orgreaves lived seriously startled the prudence in him.  Imagine that
+expense always persisting, day after day, night after night!  There were
+certainly at least four in the family who bought clothes at Shillitoe's,
+and everybody looked elaborately costly, except Hilda Lessways, who did
+not flatter the eye.  But equally, they all seemed quite unconscious of
+their costliness.
+
+"Now, Charlie darling, you must look after Mr Edwin," said Mrs
+Orgreave.
+
+"She never calls _us_ darling," said Johnnie, affecting disgust.
+
+"She will, as soon as you've left home," said Janet, ironically
+soothing.
+
+"I _do_, I often do!"  Mrs Orgreave asserted.  "Much oftener than you
+deserve."
+
+"Sit down, Teddy," Charlie enjoined.
+
+"Oh!  I'm all right, thanks," said Edwin.
+
+"Sit _down_!"  Charlie insisted, using force.
+
+"Do you talk to your poor patients in that tone?"  Alicia inquired, from
+the shelter of her father.
+
+"Here I come down specially to see them," Charlie mused aloud, as he
+twisted the corkscrew into the cork of the bottle, unceremoniously
+handed to him by Martha, "and not only they don't offer to pay my fares,
+but they grudge me a drop of claret!  Plupp!"  He grimaced as the cork
+came out.  "And my last night, too!  Hilda, this is better than coffee,
+as Saint Paul remarked on a famous occasion.  Pass your glass."
+
+"Charlie!" his mother protested.  "I'll thank you to leave Saint Paul
+out."
+
+"Charlie!  Your mother will be boxing your ears if you don't mind," his
+father warned him.
+
+"I'll not have it!" said his mother, shaking her head in a fashion that
+she imagined to be harsh and forbidding.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Towards the close of the meal, Mr Orgreave said--
+
+"Well, Edwin, what does your father say about Bradlaugh?"
+
+"He doesn't say much," Edwin replied.
+
+"Let me see, does he call himself a Liberal?"
+
+"He calls himself a Liberal," said Edwin, shifting on his chair.  "Yes,
+he calls himself a Liberal.  But I'm afraid he's a regular old Tory."
+
+Edwin blushed, laughing, as half the family gave way to more or less
+violent mirth.
+
+"Father's a regular old Tory too," Charlie grinned.
+
+"Oh!  I'm sorry," said Edwin.
+
+"Yes, father's a regular old Tory," agreed Mr Orgreave.  "Don't
+apologise!  Don't apologise!  I'm used to these attacks.  I've been
+nearly kicked out of my own house once.  But some one has to keep the
+flag flying."
+
+It was plain that Mr Orgreave enjoyed the unloosing of the hurricane
+which he had brought about.  Mrs Orgreave used to say that he employed
+that particular tone from a naughty love of mischief.  In a moment all
+the boys were upon him, except Jimmie, who, out of sheer intellectual
+snobbery, as the rest averred, supported his father.  Atheistical
+Bradlaugh had been exciting the British public to disputation for a long
+time, and the Bradlaugh question happened then to be acute.  In that
+very week the Northampton member had been committed to custody for
+outraging Parliament, and released.  And it was known that Gladstone
+meant immediately to bring in a resolution for permitting members to
+affirm, instead of taking oath by appealing to a God.  Than this
+complication of theology and politics nothing could have been better
+devised to impassion an electorate which had but two genuine interests--
+theology and politics.  The rumour of the feverish affair had spread to
+the most isolated communities.  People talked theology, and people
+talked politics, who had till then only felt silently on these subjects.
+In loquacious families Bradlaugh caused dissension and division, more
+real perhaps than apparent, for not all Bradlaugh's supporters had the
+courage to avow themselves such.  It was not easy, at any rate it was
+not easy in the Five Towns, for a timid man in reply to the question,
+"Are you in favour of a professed Freethinker sitting in the House of
+Commons?" to reply, "Yes, I am."  There was something shameless in that
+word `professed.'  If the Freethinker had been ashamed of his
+freethinking, if he had sought to conceal it in phrases,--the
+implication was that the case might not have been so bad.  This was what
+astonished Edwin: the candour with which Bradlaugh's position was upheld
+in the dining-room of the Orgreaves.  It was as if he were witnessing
+deeds of wilful perilous daring.
+
+But the conversation was not confined to Bradlaugh, for Bradlaugh was
+not a perfect test for separating Liberals and Tories.  Nobody in the
+room, for example, was quite convinced that Mr Orgreave was
+anti-Bradlaugh.  To satisfy their instincts for father-baiting, the boys
+had to include other topics, such as Ireland and the proposal for Home
+Rule.  As for Mr Orgreave, he could and did always infuriate them by
+refusing to answer seriously.  The fact was that this was his device for
+maintaining his prestige among the turbulent mob.  Dignified and
+brilliantly clever as Osmond Orgreave had the reputation of being in the
+town, he was somehow outshone in cleverness at home, and he never put
+the bar of his dignity between himself and his children.  Thus he could
+only keep the upper hand by allowing hints to escape from him of the
+secret amusement roused in him by the comicality of the spectacle of his
+filial enemies.  He had one great phrase, which he would drawl out at
+them with the accents of a man who is trying politely to hide his
+contempt: "You'll learn better as you get older."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Edwin, who said little, thought the relationship between father and sons
+utterly delightful.  He had not conceived that parents and children ever
+were or could be on such terms.
+
+"Now what do you say, Edwin?"  Mr Orgreave asked.  "Are you a--Charlie,
+pass me that bottle."
+
+Charlie was helping himself to another glass of wine.  The father, the
+two elder sons, and Edwin alone had drunk of the wine.  Edwin had never
+tasted wine in his life, and the effect of half a glass on him was very
+agreeable and strange.
+
+"Oh, dad!  I just want a--" Charlie objected, holding the bottle in the
+air above his glass.
+
+"Charlie," said his mother, "do you hear your father?"
+
+"Pass me that bottle," Mr Orgreave repeated.
+
+Charlie obeyed, proclaiming himself a martyr.  Mr Orgreave filled his
+own glass, emptying the bottle, and began to sip.
+
+"This will do me more good than you, young man," he said.  Then turning
+again to Edwin: "Are you a Bradlaugh man?"
+
+And Edwin, uplifted, said: "All I say is--you can't help what you
+believe.  You can't make yourself believe anything.  And I don't see why
+you should, either.  There's no virtue in believing."
+
+"Hooray," cried the sedate Tom.
+
+"No virtue in believing!  Eh, Mr Edwin!  Mr Edwin!"
+
+This sad expostulation came from Mrs Orgreave.
+
+"Don't you see what I mean?" he persisted vivaciously, reddening.  But
+he could not express himself further.
+
+"Hooray!" repeated Tom.
+
+Mrs Orgreave shook her head, with grieved good-nature.
+
+"You mustn't take mother too seriously," said Janet, smiling.  "She only
+puts on that expression to keep worse things from being said.  She's
+only pretending to be upset.  Nothing could upset her, really.  She's
+past being upset--she's been through so much--haven't you, you poor
+dear?"
+
+In looking at Janet, Edwin caught the eyes of Hilda blazing on him
+fixedly.  Her head seemed to tremble, and he glanced away.  She had
+added nothing to the discussion.  And indeed Janet herself had taken no
+part in the politics, content merely to advise the combatants upon their
+demeanour.
+
+"So you're against me too, Edwin!"  Mr Orgreave sighed with mock
+melancholy.  "Well, this is no place for me."  He rose, lifted Alicia
+and put her into his arm-chair, and then went towards the door.
+
+"You aren't going to work, are you, Osmond?" his wife asked, turning her
+head.
+
+"I am," said he.
+
+He disappeared amid a wailing chorus of "Oh, dad!"
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER NINE.
+
+IN THE PORCH.
+
+When the front door of the Orgreaves interposed itself that night
+between Edwin and a little group of gas-lit faces, he turned away
+towards the warm gloom of the garden in a state of happy excitement.  He
+had left fairly early, despite protests, because he wished to give his
+father no excuse for a spectacular display of wrath; Edwin's desire for
+a tranquil existence was growing steadily.  But now that he was in the
+open air, he did not want to go home.  He wanted to be in full
+possession of himself, at leisure and in freedom, and to examine the
+treasure of his sensations.  "It's been rather quiet," the Orgreaves had
+said.  "We generally have people dropping in."  Quiet!  It was the least
+quiet evening he had ever spent.
+
+He was intoxicated; not with wine, though he had drunk wine.  A group of
+well-intentioned philanthropists, organised into a powerful society for
+combating the fearful evils of alcoholism, had seized Edwin at the age
+of twelve and made him bind himself with solemn childish signature and
+ceremonies never to taste alcohol save by doctor's orders.  He thought
+of this pledge in the garden of the Orgreaves.  "Damned rot!" he
+murmured, and dismissed the pledge from his mind as utterly unimportant,
+if not indeed fatuous.  No remorse!  The whole philosophy of asceticism
+inspired him, at that moment, with impatient scorn.  It was the hope of
+pleasure that intoxicated him, the vision which he had had of the
+possibilities of being really interested in life.  He saw new avenues
+toward joy, and the sight thereof made him tingle, less with the desire
+to be immediately at them than with the present ecstasy of contemplating
+them.  He was conscious of actual physical tremors and agreeable
+smartings in his head; electric disturbances.  But he did not reason; he
+felt.  He was passive, not active.  He would not even, just then,
+attempt to make new plans.  He was in a beatitude, his mouth unaware
+that it was smiling.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Behind him was the lighted house; in front the gloom of the lawn ending
+in shrubberies and gates, with a street-lamp beyond.  And there was
+silence, save for the vast furnace-breathings, coming over undulating
+miles, which the people of the Five Towns, hearing them always, never
+hear.  A great deal of diffused light filtered through the cloudy sky.
+The warm wandering airs were humid on the cheek.  He must return home.
+He could not stand dreaming all the night in the garden of the
+Orgreaves.  To his right uprose the great rectangular mass of his
+father's new house, entirely free of scaffolding, having all the aspect
+of a house inhabited.  It looked enormous.  He was proud of it.  In such
+an abode, and so close to the Orgreaves, what could he not do?
+
+Why go to gaze on it again?  There was no common sense in doing so.  And
+yet he felt: "I must have another glance at it before I go home."  From
+his attitude towards it, he might have been the creator of that house.
+That house was like one of his more successful drawings.  When he had
+done a drawing that he esteemed, he was always looking at it.  He would
+look at it before running down to breakfast; and after breakfast,
+instead of going straight to the shop, he would rush upstairs to have
+still another look at it.  The act of inspection gave him pleasure.  So
+with the house.  Strange, superficially; but the simple explanation was
+that for some things he had the eyes of love...  Yes, in his dancing and
+happy brain the impulse to revisit the house was not to be conquered.
+
+The few battered yards of hedge between his father's land and that of
+Mr Orgreave seemed more passable in the night.  He crunched along the
+gravel, stepped carefully with noiseless foot on the flower-bed, and
+then pushed himself right through the frail bushes, forgetting the
+respect due to his suit.  The beginning of summer had dried the sticky
+clay of the new garden; paths had already been traced on it, and
+trenches cut for the draining of the lawn that was to be.  Edwin in the
+night saw the new garden finished, mellow, blooming with such blossoms
+as were sold in Saint Luke's Market; he had scarcely ever seen flowers
+growing in the mass.  He saw himself reclining in the garden with a rare
+and beautiful book in his hand, while the sound of Beethoven's music
+came to him through the open window of the drawing-room.  In so far as
+he saw Maggie at all, he saw her somehow mysteriously elegant and
+vivacious. He did not see his father.  His fancy had little relation to
+reality.  But this did not mar his pleasure...  Then he saw himself
+talking over the hedge, wittily, to amiable and witty persons in the
+garden of the Orgreaves.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+He had not his key to the new house, but he knew a way of getting into
+it through the cellar.  No reason in doing so; nevertheless he must get
+into it, must localise his dream in it!  He crouched down under the
+blank east wall, and, feet foremost, disappeared slowly, as though the
+house were swallowing him.  He stood on the stillage of the cellar, and
+struck a match.  Immense and weird, the cellar; and the doorless
+doorway, leading to the cellar steps, seemed to lead to affrighting
+matters.  He was in the earth, in it, with the smells of damp mortar and
+of bricks and of the earth itself about him, and above him rose the
+house, a room over him, and a room over that and another over that, and
+then the chimney-cowl up in the sky.  He jumped from the stillage, and
+went quickly to the doorway and saw the cellar steps.  His heart was
+beating.  He trembled, he was afraid, exquisitely afraid, acutely
+conscious of himself amid the fundamental mysteries of the universe.  He
+reached the top of the steps as the match expired.  After a moment he
+could distinguish the forms of things in the hall, even the main
+features of the pattern of the tiles.  The small panes in the glazed
+front door, whose varied tints repeated those of the drawing-room window
+in daytime, now showed a uniform dull grey, lifeless.  The cellar was
+formidable below, and the stairs curved upwards into the formidable.
+But he climbed them.  The house seemed full of inexplicable noises.
+When he stopped to listen he could hear scores of different
+infinitesimal sounds.  His spine thrilled, as if a hand delicate and
+terrible had run down it in a caress.  All the unknown of the night and
+of the universe was pressing upon him, but it was he alone who had
+created the night and the universe.  He reached his room, the room in
+which he meant to inaugurate the new life and the endeavour towards
+perfection.  Already, after his manner, he had precisely settled where
+the bed was to be, and where the table, and all the other objects of his
+world.  There he would sit and read rare and beautiful books in the
+original French!  And there he would sit to draw!  And to the right of
+the hearth over bookshelves would be such and such a picture, and to the
+left of the hearth over bookshelves such and such another picture...
+Only, now, he could not dream in the room as he had meant to dream;
+because beyond the open door was the empty landing and the well of the
+stairs and all the terror of the house.  The terror came and mingled
+with the delicious sensations that had seized him in the solitude of the
+garden of the Orgreaves.  No!  Never had he been so intensely alive as
+then!
+
+He went cautiously to the window and looked forth.  Instantly the terror
+of the house was annihilated.  It fell away, was gone.  He was not alone
+in his fancy-created universe.  The reassuring illusion of reality came
+back like a clap of thunder.  He could see a girl insinuating herself
+through the gap in the hedge which he had made ten minutes earlier.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+"What the deuce is she after?" he muttered.  He wondered whether, if she
+happened to glance upwards, she would be able to see him.  He stood away
+a little from the window, but as in the safer position he could no
+longer distinguish her he came again close to the glass.  After all,
+there could be no risk of her seeing him.  And if she did see him,--the
+fright would be hers, not his.
+
+Having passed through the hedge, she stopped, bent down, leaning
+backward and to one side, and lifted the hem of her skirt to examine it;
+possibly it was torn; then she dropped it.  By that black, tight skirt
+and by something in her walk he knew she was Hilda; he could not
+decipher her features.  She moved towards the new house, very slowly, as
+if she had emerged for an aimless nocturnal stroll.  Strange and
+disquieting creature!  He peered as far as he could leftwards, to see
+the west wall of Lane End House.  In a window of the upper floor a light
+burned.  The family had doubtless gone to bed, or were going...  And she
+had wandered forth solitary and was trespassing in his garden.  "Cheek!"
+If ever he got an opportunity he should mysteriously tease her on the
+subject of illegal night excursions!  Yes, he should be very witty and
+ironic.  "Nothing but cheek!"  He was confirmed in his hostility to her.
+She had no charm, and yet the entire Orgreave family was apparently
+infatuated about her.  Her interruption on behalf of Victor Hugo seemed
+to be savage.  Girls ought not to use that ruthless tone.  And her eyes
+were hard, even cruel.  She was less feminine than masculine.  Her hair
+was not like a girl's hair.
+
+She still came on, until the projecting roof of the bay-window beneath
+him hid her from sight.  He would have opened his window and leaned out
+to glimpse her, could he have done so without noise.  Where was she?  In
+the garden porch?  She did not reappear.  She might be capable of
+getting into the house!  She might even then actually be getting into
+the house!  She was queer, incalculable.  Supposing that she was in the
+habit of surreptitiously visiting the house, and had found a key to fit
+one of the doors, or supposing that she could push up a window,--she
+would doubtless mount the stairs and trap him!  Absurd, these
+speculations; as absurd as a nightmare!  But they influenced his
+conduct.  He felt himself forced to provide against the wildest hazards.
+Abruptly he departed from the bedroom and descended the stairs,
+stamping, clumping, with all possible noise; in addition he whistled.
+This was to warn her to fly.  He stopped in the hall until she had had
+time to fly, and then he lit a match as a signal which surely no
+carelessness could miss.  He could have gone direct by the front door
+into the street, so leaving her to her odd self; but, instead, he drew
+back the slip-catch of the garden door and opened it, self-consciously
+humming a tune.
+
+She was within the porch.  She turned deliberately to look at him.  He
+could feel his heart-beats.  His cheeks burned, and yet he was chilled.
+
+"Who's there?" he asked.  But he did not succeed to his own satisfaction
+in acting alarmed surprise.
+
+"Me!" said Hilda, challengingly, rudely.
+
+"Oh!" he murmured, at a loss.  "Did you want me?  Did any one want me?"
+
+"Yes," she said.  "I just wanted to ask you something," she paused.  He
+could not see her scowling, but it seemed to him that she must be.  He
+remembered that she had rather thick eyebrows, and that when she brought
+them nearer together by a frown, they made almost one continuous line,
+the effect of which was not attractive.
+
+"Did you know I was in here?"
+
+"Yes.  That's my bedroom window over there--I've left the gas up--and I
+saw you get through the hedge.  So I came down.  They'd all gone off to
+bed except Tom, and I told him I was just going a walk in the garden for
+a bit.  They never worry me, you know.  They let me alone.  I knew you'd
+got into the house, by the light."
+
+"But I only struck a match a second ago," he protested.
+
+"Excuse me," she said coldly; "I saw a light quite five minutes ago."
+
+"Oh yes!" he apologised.  "I remember.  When I came up the cellar
+steps."
+
+"I dare say you think it's very queer of me," she continued.
+
+"Not at all," he said quickly.
+
+"Yes you do," she bitterly insisted.  "But I want to know.  Did you mean
+it when you said--you know, at supper--that there's no virtue in
+believing?"
+
+"Did I say there was no virtue in believing?" he stammeringly demanded.
+
+"Of course you did!" she remonstrated.  "Do you mean to say you can say
+a thing like that and then forget about it?  If it's true, it's one of
+the most wonderful things that were ever said.  And that's why I wanted
+to know if you meant it or whether you were only saying it because it
+sounded clever.  That's what they're always doing in that house, you
+know, being clever!"  Her tone was invariably harsh.
+
+"Yes," he said simply, "I meant it.  Why?"
+
+"You did?"  Her voice seemed to search for insincerity.  "Well, thank
+you.  That's all.  It may mean a new life to me.  I'm always trying to
+believe; always!  Aren't you?"
+
+"I don't know," he mumbled.  "How do you mean?"
+
+"Well--you know!" she said, as if impatiently smashing his pretence of
+not understanding her.  "But perhaps you do believe?"
+
+He thought he detected scorn for a facile believer.  "No," he said, "I
+don't."
+
+"And it doesn't worry you?  Honestly?  Don't be clever!  I hate that!"
+
+"No," he said.
+
+"Don't you ever think about it?"
+
+"No.  Not often."
+
+"Charlie does."
+
+"Has he told you?"  ("So she talks to the Sunday too!" he reflected.)
+
+"Yes; but of course I quite see why it doesn't worry you--if you
+honestly think there's no virtue in believing."
+
+"Well," said Edwin.  "_Is_ there?"  The more he looked at it through her
+eyes, the more wonderful profundities he discovered in that remark of
+his, which at the time of uttering it had appeared to him a simple
+platitude.  It went exceedingly deep in many directions.
+
+"I hope you are right," she replied.  Her voice shook.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+There was silence.  To ease the strain of his self-consciousness Edwin
+stepped down from the stone floor of the porch to the garden.  He felt
+rain.  And he noticed that the sky was very much darker.
+
+"By Jove!" he said.  "It's beginning to rain, I do believe."
+
+"I thought it would," she answered.
+
+A squall of wind suddenly surged rustling through the high trees in the
+garden of the Orgreaves, and the next instant threw a handful of wild
+raindrops on his cheek.
+
+"You'd better stand against the other wall," he suggested.  "You'll
+catch it there, if it keeps on."
+
+She obeyed.  He returned to the porch, but remained in the exposed
+portion of it.
+
+"Better come here," she said, indicating somehow her side.
+
+"Oh!  I'm all right."
+
+"You needn't be afraid of me," she snapped.
+
+He grinned awkwardly, but said nothing, for he could not express his
+secret resentment.  He considered the girl to be of exceedingly
+unpleasant manners.
+
+"Would you mind telling me the time?" she asked.
+
+He took out his watch, but peer as he might, he could not discern the
+position of the hands.
+
+"Half a second," he said, and struck a match.  The match was blown out
+before he could look at the dial, but by its momentary flash he saw
+Hilda, pressed against the wall.  Her lips were tight, her eyes blazing,
+her hands clenched.  She frowned; she was pale, and especially pale by
+contrast with the black of her plain austere dress.
+
+"If you'll come into the house," he said, "I can get a light there."
+The door was ajar.
+
+"No thanks," she declined.  "It doesn't really matter what time it is,
+does it?  Good night!"
+
+He divined that she was offering her hand.  He clasped it blindly in the
+dark.  He could not refuse to shake hands.  Her hand gave his a feverish
+and lingering squeeze, which was like a contradicting message in the
+dark night; as though she were sending through her hand a secret denial
+of her spoken accents and her frown.  He forgot to answer her `good
+night.'  A trap rattled furiously up the road.  (Yes; only six yards
+off, on the other side of the boundary wall, was the public road!  And
+he standing hidden there in the porch with this girl whom he had seen
+for the first time that evening!)  It was the mail-cart, rushing to
+Knype.
+
+She did not move.  She had said `good night' and shaken hands; and yet
+she remained.  They stood speechless.
+
+Then without warning, after perhaps a minute that seemed like ten
+minutes, she walked away, slowly, into the rain.  And as she did so,
+Edwin could just see her straightening her spine and throwing back her
+shoulders with a proud gesture.
+
+"I say, Miss Lessways!" he called in a low voice.  But he had no notion
+of what he wanted to say.  Only her departure had unlocked his throat.
+
+She made no sign.  Again he grinned awkwardly, a little ashamed of her
+and a little ashamed of himself, because neither had behaved as woman or
+man of the world.
+
+After a short interval he followed in her steps as far as the gap in the
+hedge, which he did not find easily.  There was no sign of her.  The gas
+burned serenely in her bedroom, and the window was open.  Then he saw
+the window close up a little, and an arm in front of the drawn blind.
+The rain had apparently ceased.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+"Well, that's an eye-opener, that is!" he murmured, and thereby
+expressed the situation.  "Of all the damned impudence!"  He somewhat
+overstated his feelings, because he was posing a little to himself: an
+accident that sooner or later happens to every man!  "And she'll go back
+and make out to Master Tom that she's just had a stroll in the garden!
+Garden, indeed!  And yet they're all so fearfully stuck on her."
+
+He nodded his head several times reflectively, as if saying, "Well,
+well!  What next?"  And he murmured aloud: "So that's how they carry on,
+is it!"  He meant, of course, women...  He was very genuinely astounded.
+
+But the chief of all his acute sensations in that moment was pride:
+sheer pride.  He thought, what ninety-nine men out of a hundred would
+have thought in such circumstances: "She's taken a fancy to me!"
+Useless to call him a conceited coxcomb, from disgust that he did not
+conform to a sentimentally idealistic standard!  He thought: "She's
+taken a fancy to me!"  And he was not a conceited coxcomb.  He exulted
+in the thought.  Nothing had ever before so startled and uplifted him.
+It constituted the supreme experience of his career as a human being.
+The delightful and stimulating experience of his evening in the house of
+the Orgreaves sank into unimportance by the side of it.  The new avenues
+towards joy which had been revealed to him appeared now to be quite
+unexciting paths; he took them for granted.  And he forgot the high and
+serious mood of complex emotion in which he had entered the new house.
+Music and the exotic flavours of a foreign language seemed a little
+thing, in comparison with the feverish hand-clasp of the girl whom he so
+peculiarly disliked.  The lifeless hand which he had taken in the
+drawing-room of the Orgreaves could not be the same hand as that which
+had closed intimately on his under the porch.  She must have two right
+hands!
+
+And, even more base than his coxcombry, he despised her because it was
+he, Edwin, to whom she had taken a fancy.  He had not sufficient
+self-confidence to justify her fancy in his own eyes.  His argument
+actually was that no girl worth having could have taken a fancy to him
+at sight.  Thus he condemned her for her faith in him.  As for his
+historic remark about belief,--well, there might or might not be
+something in that; perhaps there was something in it.  One instant he
+admired it, and the next he judged it glib and superficial.  Moreover,
+he had conceivably absorbed it from a book.  But even if it were an
+original epigrammatic pearl--was that an adequate reason for her
+following him to an empty house at dead of night?  Of course, an
+overwhelming passion _might_ justify such behaviour!  He could recall
+cases in literature...  Yes, he had got so far as to envisage the
+possibility of overwhelming passion...  Then all these speculations
+disconcertingly vanished, and Hilda presented herself to his mind as a
+girl intensely religious, who would shrink from no unconventionality in
+the pursuit of truth.  He did not much care for this theory of Hilda,
+nor did it convince him.
+
+"Imagine marrying a girl like that!" he said to himself disdainfully.
+And he made a catalogue of her defects of person and of character.  She
+was severe, satiric, merciless.  "And I suppose--if I were to put my
+finger up!"  Thus ran on his despicable ideas.  "Janet Orgreave, now!"
+Janet had every quality that he could desire, that he could even think
+of.  Janet was balm.
+
+"You needn't be afraid," that unpleasant girl had said.  And he had only
+been able to grin in reply!
+
+Still, pride!  Intense masculine pride!
+
+There was one thing he had liked about her: that straightening of the
+spine and setting back of the shoulders as she left him.  She had in her
+some tinge of the heroic.
+
+He quitted the garden, and as soon as he was in the street he remembered
+that he had not pulled-to the garden door of the house.  "Dash the
+confounded thing!" he exploded, returning.  But he was not really
+annoyed.  He would not have been really annoyed even if he had had to
+return from half-way down Trafalgar Road.  Everything was a trifle save
+that a girl had run after him under such romantic circumstances.  The
+circumstances were not strictly romantic, but they so seemed to him.
+
+Going home, he did not meet a soul; only in the middle distance of one
+of the lower side streets he espied a policeman.  Trafalgar Road was a
+solitude of bright and forlorn gas lamps and dark, excluding facades.
+
+Suddenly he came to the corner of Wedgwood Street.  He had started from
+Bleakridge; he had arrived at home: the interval between these two
+events was a perfect blank, save for the policeman.  He could not recall
+having walked all the way down the road.  And as he put the key into the
+door he was not in the least disturbed by the thought that his father
+might not have gone to bed.  He went upstairs with a certain swaggering
+clatter, as who should say to all sleepers and bullies: "You be damned!
+I don't care for any of you!  Something's happened to me."
+
+And he mused: "If anybody had told me this afternoon that before
+midnight I should--"
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TEN.
+
+THE CENTENARY.
+
+It was immediately after this that the "Centenary"--mispronounced in
+every manner conceivable--began to obsess the town.  Superior and aloof
+persons, like the Orgreaves, had for weeks heard a good deal of vague
+talk about the Centenary from people whom intellectually they despised,
+and had condescended to the Centenary as an amiable and excusable affair
+which lacked interest for them.  They were wrong.  Edwin had gone
+further, and had sniffed at the Centenary, to everybody except his
+father.  And Edwin was especially wrong.  On the antepenultimate day of
+June he first uneasily suspected that he had committed a fault of
+appraisement.  That was when his father brusquely announced that by
+request of the Mayor all places of business in the town would be closed
+in honour of the Centenary.  It was the Centenary of the establishment
+of Sunday schools.
+
+Edwin hated Sunday schools.  Nay, he venomously resented them, though
+they had long ceased to incommode him.  They were connected in his
+memory with atrocious tedium, pietistic insincerity, and humiliating
+contacts.  At the bottom of his mind he still regarded them as a
+malicious device of parents for wilfully harassing and persecuting
+inoffensive, helpless children.  And he had a particular grudge against
+them because he alone of his father's offspring had been chosen for the
+nauseating infliction.  Why should his sisters have been spared and he
+doomed?  He became really impatient when Sunday schools were under
+discussion, and from mere irrational annoyance he would not admit that
+Sunday schools had any good qualities whatever.  He knew nothing of
+their history, and wished to know nothing.
+
+Nevertheless, when the day of the Centenary dawned--and dawned in
+splendour--he was compelled, even within himself, to treat Sunday
+schools with more consideration.  And, in fact, for two or three days
+previously the gathering force of public opinion had been changing his
+attitude from stern hatred to a sort of half-hearted derision.  Now, the
+derision was mysteriously transformed into an inimical respect.  By
+what?  By he knew not what.  By something without a name in the air
+which the mind breathes.  He felt it at six o'clock, ere he arose.
+Lying in bed he felt it.  The day was to be a festival.  The shop would
+not open, nor the printing office.  The work of preparing for the
+removal would be suspended.  The way of daily life would be quite
+changed.  He was free--that was, nearly free.  He said to himself that
+of course his excited father would expect him to witness the
+celebrations and to wear his best clothes, and that was a bore.  But
+therein he was not quite honest.  For he secretly wanted to witness the
+celebrations and to wear his best clothes.  His curiosity was hungry.
+He admitted, what many had been asserting for weeks, that the Centenary
+was going to be a big thing; and his social instinct wished him to share
+in the pride of it.
+
+"It's a grand day!" exclaimed his father, cheerful and all glossy as he
+looked out upon Duck Square before breakfast.  "It'll be rare and hot!"
+And it was a grand day; one of the dazzling spectacular blue-and-gold
+days of early summer.  And Maggie was in finery.  And Edwin too!
+Useless for him to pretend that a big thing was not afoot--and his
+father in a white waistcoat!  Breakfast was positively talkative, though
+the conversation was naught but a repeating and repeating of what the
+arrangements were, and of what everybody had decided to do.  The three
+lingered over breakfast, because there was no reason to hurry.  And then
+even Maggie left the sitting-room without a care, for though Clara was
+coming for dinner Mrs Nixon could be trusted.  Mrs Nixon, if she had
+time, would snatch half an hour in the afternoon to see what remained to
+be seen of the show.  Families must eat.  And if Mrs Nixon was stopped
+by duty from assisting at this Centenary, she must hope to be more at
+liberty for the next.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+At nine o'clock, in a most delicious mood of idleness, Edwin strolled
+into the shop.  His father had taken down one shutter from the doorway,
+and slanted it carelessly against another on the pavement.  A blind man
+or a drunkard might have stumbled against it and knocked it over.  The
+letters had been hastily opened.  Edwin could see them lying in disorder
+on the desk in the little office.  The dust-sheets thought the day was
+Sunday.  He stood in the narrow aperture and looked forth.  Duck Square
+was a shimmer of sunshine.  The Dragon and the Duck and the other
+public-house at the top corner seemed as usual, stolidly confident in
+the thirst of populations.  But the Borough Dining Rooms, next door but
+one to the corner of Duck Square and Wedgwood Street, were not as usual.
+The cart of Doy, the butcher, had halted laden in front of the Borough
+Dining Rooms, and the anxious proprietor, attended by his two little
+daughters (aproned and sleeved for hard work in imitation of their
+stout, perspiring mother), was accepting unusual joints from it.
+Ticklish weather for meat--you could see that from the man's gestures.
+Even on ordinary days those low-ceiled dining-rooms, stretching far back
+from the street in a complicated vista of interiors, were apt to be
+crowded; for the quality of the eightpenny dinner could be relied upon.
+Edwin imagined what a stifling, deafening inferno of culinary odours and
+clatter they would be at one o'clock, at two o'clock.
+
+Three hokey-pokey ice-cream hand-carts, one after another, turned the
+corner of Trafalgar Road and passed in front of him along Wedgwood
+Street.  Three!  The men pushing them, one an Italian, seemed to wear
+nothing but shirt and trousers, with a straw hat above and vague
+slippers below.  The steam-car lumbered up out of the valley of the road
+and climbed Duck Bank, throwing its enormous shadow to the left.  It was
+half full of bright frocks and suits.  An irregular current of finery
+was setting in to the gates of the Wesleyan School yard at the top of
+the Bank.  And ceremoniously bedecked individuals of all ages hurried in
+this direction and in that, some with white handkerchiefs over flowered
+hats, a few beneath parasols.  All the town's store of Sunday clothes
+was in use.  The humblest was crudely gay.  Pawnbrokers had full tills
+and empty shops, for twenty-four hours.
+
+Then a procession appeared, out of Moorthorne Road, from behind the
+Wesleyan Chapel-keeper's house.  And as it appeared it burst into music.
+First a purple banner, upheld on crimson poles with gilded
+lance-points; then a brass band in full note; and then children,
+children, children--little, middling, and big.  As the procession curved
+down into Trafalgar Road, it grew in stature, until, towards the end of
+it, the children were as tall as the adults who walked fussily as hens,
+proudly as peacocks, on its flank.  And last came a railway lorry on
+which dozens of tiny infants had been penned; and the horses of the
+lorry were ribboned and their manes and tails tightly plaited; on that
+grand day they could not be allowed to protect themselves against flies;
+they were sacrificial animals.
+
+A power not himself drew Edwin to the edge of the pavement.  He could
+read on the immense banner: "Moorthorne Saint John's Sunday School."
+These, then, were church folk.  And indeed the next moment he descried a
+curate among the peacocks.  The procession made another curve into
+Wedgwood Street, on its way to the supreme rendezvous in Saint Luke's
+Square.  The band blared; the crimson cheeks of the trumpeters sucked in
+and out; the drummer leaned backwards to balance his burden, and
+banged.  Every soul of the variegated company, big and little, was in a
+perspiration.  The staggering bearers of the purple banner, who held the
+great poles in leathern sockets slung from the shoulders, and their
+acolytes before and behind who kept the banner upright by straining at
+crimson halyards, sweated most of all.  Every foot was grey with dust,
+and the dark trousers of boys and men showed dust.  The steamy whiff of
+humanity struck Edwin's nostrils.  Up hill and down dale the procession
+had already walked over two miles.  Yet it was alert, joyous, and
+expectant: a chattering procession.  From the lorry rose a continuous
+faint shriek of infantile voices.  Edwin was saddened as by pathos.  I
+believe that as he gazed at the procession waggling away along Wedgwood
+Street he saw Sunday schools in a new light.
+
+And that was the opening of the day.  There were to be dozens of such
+processions.  Some would start only in the town itself; but others were
+coming from the villages like Red Cow, five sultry miles off.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+A young woman under a sunshade came slowly along Wedgwood Street.  She
+was wearing a certain discreet amount of finery, but her clothes did not
+fit well, and a thin mantle was arranged so as to lessen as much as
+possible the obviousness of the fact that she was about to become a
+mother.  The expression of her face was discontented and captious.
+Edwin did not see her until she was close upon him, and then he
+immediately became self-conscious and awkward.
+
+"Hello, Clara!" he greeted her, with his instinctive warm, transient
+smile, holding out his hand sheepishly.  It was a most extraordinary and
+amazing thing that he could never regard the ceremony of shaking hands
+with a relative as other than an affectation of punctilio.  Happily he
+was not wearing his hat; had it been on his head he would never have
+taken it off, and yet would have cursed himself for not doing so.
+
+"We _are_ grand!" exclaimed Clara, limply taking his hand and dropping it
+as an article of no interest.  In her voice there was still some echo of
+former sprightliness.  The old Clara in her had not till that moment
+beheld the smart and novel curves of Edwin's Shillitoe suit, and the
+satiric cry came unbidden from her heart.
+
+Edwin gave an uneasy laugh, which was merely the outlet for his disgust.
+Not that he was specially disgusted with Clara, for indeed marriage had
+assuaged a little the tediousness of some of her mannerisms, even if it
+had taken away from her charm.  He was disgusted more comprehensively by
+the tradition, universal in his class and in most classes, according to
+which relatives could not be formally polite to one another.  He obeyed
+the tradition as slavishly as anyone, but often said to himself that he
+would violate the sacred rule if only he could count on a suitable
+response; he knew that he could not count on a suitable response; and he
+had no mind to be in the excruciating position of one who, having
+started "God save the Queen" at a meeting, finds himself alone in the
+song.  Why could not he and Clara behave together as, for instance, he
+and Janet Orgreave would behave together, with dignity, with
+worldliness, with mutual deference?  But no!  It was impossible, and
+would ever be so.  They had been too brutally intimate, and the result
+was irremediable.
+
+"_She's_ got no room to talk about personal appearance, anyway!" he
+thought sardonically.
+
+There was another extraordinary and amazing thing.  He was ashamed of
+her condition!  He could not help the feeling.  In vain he said to
+himself that her condition was natural and proper.  In vain he
+remembered the remark of the sage that a young woman in her condition
+was the most beautiful sight in the world.  He was ashamed of it.  And
+he did not think it beautiful; he thought it ugly.  It worried him.
+What,--his sister?  Other men's sisters, yes; but his!  He forgot that
+he himself had been born.  He could scarcely bear to look at Clara.  Her
+face was thin, and changed in colour; her eyes were unnaturally lustrous
+and large, bold and fatigued; she looked ill, really ill; and she was
+incredibly unornamental.  And this was she whom he could remember as a
+graceful child!  And it was all perfectly correct and even laudable!  So
+much so that young Clara undoubtedly looked down, now, as from a
+superior height, upon both himself and Maggie!
+
+"Where's father?" she asked.  "Just shut my sunshade."
+
+"Oh!  Somewhere about.  I expect he'll be along in a minute.  Albert
+coming?"  He followed her into the shop.
+
+"Albert!" she protested, shocked.  "Albert can't possibly come till one
+o'clock.  Didn't you know he's one of the principal stewards in Saint
+Luke's Square?  He says we aren't to wait dinner for him if he isn't
+prompt."
+
+"Oh!"  Edwin replied, and put the sunshade on the counter.
+
+Clara sat down heavily on a chair, and began to fan herself with a
+handkerchief.  In spite of the heat of exercise her face was of a pallid
+yellow.
+
+"I suppose you're going to stay here all morning?"  Edwin inquired.
+
+"Well," said Clara, "you don't see me walking up and down the streets
+all morning, do you?  Albert said I was to be sure and go upstairs at
+once and not move.  He said there'd be plenty to see for a long time yet
+from the sitting-room window, and then afterwards I could lie down."
+
+Albert said!  Albert said!  Clara's intonation of this frequent phrase
+always jarred on Edwin.  It implied that Albert was the supreme fount of
+wisdom and authority in Bursley.  Whereas to Edwin, Albert was in fact a
+mere tedious, self-important manufacturer in a small way, with whom he
+had no ideas in common.  "A decent fellow at bottom," the fastidious
+Edwin was bound to admit to himself by reason of slight glimpses which
+he had had of Albert's uncouth good-nature; but pietistic, overbearing,
+and without humour.
+
+"Where's Maggie?"  Clara demanded.
+
+"I think she's putting her things on," said Edwin.
+
+"But didn't she understand I was coming early?"  Clara's voice was
+querulous, and she frowned.
+
+"I don't know," said Edwin.
+
+He felt that if they remained together for hours, he and Clara would
+never rise above this plane of conversation--personal, factual,
+perfectly devoid of wide interest.  They would never reach an exchange
+of general ideas; they never had done.  He did not think that Clara had
+any general ideas.
+
+"I hear you're getting frightfully thick with the Orgreaves," Clara
+observed, with a malicious accent and smile, as if to imply that he was
+getting frightfully above himself, and--simultaneously--that the
+Orgreaves were after all no better than other people.
+
+"Who told you that?"  He walked towards the doorway uneasily.  The worst
+was that he could not successfully pretend that these sisterly attacks
+were lost on him.
+
+"Never mind who told me," said Clara.
+
+Her voice took on a sudden charming roguish quality, and he could hear
+again the girl of fourteen.  His heart at once softened to her.  The
+impartial and unmoved spectator that sat somewhere in Edwin, as in
+everybody who possesses artistic sensibility, watching his secret life
+as from a conning tower, thought how strange this was.  He stared out
+into the street.  And then a face appeared at the aperture left by the
+removed shutter.  It was Janet Orgreave's, and it hesitated.  Edwin gave
+a nervous start.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Janet was all in white again, and her sunshade was white, with regular
+circular holes in it to let through spots of sunlight which flecked her
+face.  Edwin had not recovered from the blow of her apparition just at
+that moment, when he saw Hilda Lessways beyond her.  Hilda was
+slate-coloured, and had a black sunshade.  His heart began to thump; it
+might have been a dramatic and dangerous crisis that had suddenly come
+about.  And to Edwin the situation did in fact present itself as
+critical: his sister behind, and these two so different girls in front.
+Yet there was nothing critical in it whatsoever.  He shook hands as in a
+dream, wondering what he should do, trying to summon out of himself the
+man of the world.
+
+"Do come in," he urged them, hoping they would refuse.
+
+"Oh no.  We mustn't come in," said Janet, smiling gratefully.  Hilda did
+not smile; she had not even smiled in shaking hands; and she had shaken
+hands without conviction.
+
+Edwin heard a hurried step in the shop, and then the voice of Maggie,
+maternal and protective, in a low exclamation of surprise: "You, dear!"
+And then the sound of a smacking kiss, and Clara's voice, thin, weak,
+and confiding: "Yes, I've come."  "Come upstairs, do!" said Maggie
+imploringly.  "Come and be comfortable."  Then steps, ceasing to be
+heard as the sisters left the shop at the back.  The solicitude of
+Maggie for Clara during the last few months had seemed wonderful to
+Edwin, as also Clara's occasional childlike acceptance of it.
+
+"But you must come in!" he said more boldly to the visitors, asking
+himself whether either Janet or Hilda had caught sight of his sisters in
+the gloom of the shop.
+
+They entered, Hilda stiffly.  Each with the same gesture closed her
+parasol before passing through the slit between the shutters into the
+deep shade.  But whereas Janet smiled with pleasant anticipation as
+though she was going into heaven, Hilda wrinkled her forehead when her
+parasol would not subside at the first touch.
+
+Janet talked of the Centenary; said they had decided only that morning
+to come down into the town and see whatever was to be seen; said with an
+angelic air of apologising to the Centenary that up at Lane End House
+they had certainly been under-estimating its importance and its interest
+as a spectacle; said that it was most astonishing to see all the shops
+closed.  And Edwin interjected vague replies, pulling the chair out of
+the little ebonised cubicle so that they could both sit down.  And Hilda
+remained silent.  And Edwin's thoughts were diving darkly beneath
+Janet's chatter as in a deep sea beneath light waves.  He heard and
+answered Janet with a minor part of his being that functioned
+automatically.
+
+"She's a caution!" reflected the main Edwin, obsessed in secret by Hilda
+Lessways.  Who could have guessed, by looking at her, that only three
+evenings before she had followed him in the night to question him, to
+squeeze his hand, and to be rude to him?  Did Janet know?  Did anyone?
+No!  He felt sure that he and she had the knowledge of that interview to
+themselves.  She sat down glum, almost glowering.  She was no more
+worldly than Maggie and Clara were worldly.  Than they, she had no more
+skill to be sociable.  And in appearance she was scarcely more stylish.
+But she was not as they, and it was useless vindictively to disparage
+her by pretending that she was.  She could be passionate concerning
+Victor Hugo.  She was capable of disturbing herself about the abstract
+question of belief.  He had not heard her utter a single word in the way
+of common girlish conversation.
+
+The doubt again entered his mind whether indeed her visit to the porch
+of the new house had been due to a genuine interest in abstract
+questions and not to a fancy for himself.  "Yes," he reflected, "that
+must have been it."
+
+In two days his pride in the affair had lost its first acuteness, though
+it had continued to brighten every moment of his life, and though he had
+not ceased to regret that he had no intimate friend to whom he could
+recount it in solemn and delicious intimacy.  Now, philosophically, he
+stamped on his pride as on a fire.  And he affected to be relieved at
+the decision that the girl had been moved by naught but a sort of
+fanaticism.  But he was not relieved by the decision.  The decision
+itself was not genuine.  He still clung to the notion that she had
+followed him for himself.  He preferred that she should have taken a
+fancy to him, even though he discovered no charm in her, no beauty, no
+solace, nothing but matter for repulsion.  He wanted her to think of
+him, in spite of his distaste for her; to think of him hopelessly.  "You
+are an ass!" murmured the impartial watcher in the conning tower.  And
+he was.  But he did not care.  It was agreeable thus to be an ass...
+His pride flared up again, and instead of stamping he blew on it.
+
+"By Jove!" he thought, eyeing her slyly, "I'll make you show your hand--
+you see if I don't!  You think you can play with me, but you can't!"  He
+was as violent against her as if she had done him an injury instead of
+having squeezed his hand in the dark.  Was it not injurious to have
+snapped at him, when he refused her invitation to stand by her against
+the wall in the porch, "You needn't be afraid"?  Janet would never have
+said such a thing.  If only she resembled Janet! ...
+
+During all this private soliloquising, Edwin's mien of mild nervousness
+never hardened to betray his ferocity, and he said nothing that might
+not have been said by an innocuous idiot.
+
+The paper boy, arrayed richly, slipped apologetically into the shop.  He
+had certain packets to take out for delivery, and he was late.  Edwin
+nodded to him distantly.  The conversation languished.
+
+Then the head of Mr Orgreave appeared in the aperture.  The architect
+seemed amused.  Edwin could not understand how he had ever stood in awe
+of Mr Orgreave, who, with all his distinction and expensiveness, was
+the most companionable person in the world.
+
+"Oh!  Father!" cried Janet.  "What a deceitful thing you are!  Do you
+know, Mr Edwin, he pooh-poohed us coming down: he said he was far too
+busy for such childish things as Centenaries!  And look at him!"
+
+Mr Orgreave, whose suit, hat, and necktie were a harmony of elegant
+greys, smiled with paternal ease, and swung his cane.  "Come along now!
+Don't let's miss anything.  Come along.  Now, Edwin, you're coming,
+aren't you?"
+
+"Did you ever see such a child?" murmured Janet, adoring him.
+
+Edwin turned to the paper boy.  "Just find my father before you go," he
+commanded.  "Tell him I've gone, and ask him if you are to put the
+shutter up."  The paper boy respectfully promised obedience.  And Edwin
+was glad that the forbidding Hilda was there to witness his authority.
+
+Janet went out first.  Hilda hesitated; and Edwin, having taken his hat
+from its hook in the cubicle, stood attending her at the aperture.  He
+was sorry that he could not run upstairs for a walking-stick.  At last
+she seemed to decide to leave, yet left with apparent reluctance.  Edwin
+followed, giving a final glance at the boy, who was tying a parcel
+hurriedly.  Mr Orgreave and his daughter were ten yards off,
+arm-in-arm.  Edwin fell into step with Hilda Lessways.  Janet looked
+round, and smiled and beckoned.  "I wonder," said Edwin to himself,
+"what the devil's going to happen now?  I'll take my oath she stayed
+behind on purpose!  Well--" This swaggering audacity was within.
+Without, even a skilled observer could have seen nothing but a faint,
+sheepish smile.  And his heart was thumping again.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER ELEVEN.
+
+THE BOTTOM OF THE SQUARE.
+
+Another procession--that of the Old Church Sunday school--came up, with
+standards floating and drums beating, out of the steepness of Woodisun
+Bank, and turned into Wedgwood Street, which thenceforward was loosely
+thronged by procession and sightseers.  The importance of the festival
+was now quite manifest, for at the end of the street could be seen Saint
+Luke's Square, massed with human beings in movement.  Osmond Orgreave
+and his daughter were lost to view in the brave crowd; but after a
+little, Edwin distinctly saw Janet's sunshade leave Wedgwood Street at
+the corner of the Wedgwood Institution and bob slowly into the Cock
+Yard, which was a narrow thoroughfare leading to the market-place and
+the Town Hall, and so to the top of Saint Luke's Square.  He said
+nothing, and kept straight on along Wedgwood Street past the Covered
+Market.
+
+"I hope you didn't catch cold in the rain the other night," he
+remarked--grimly, as he thought.
+
+"I should have thought it would have been you who were more likely to
+catch cold," Hilda replied, in her curt manner.  She looked in front of
+her.  The words seem to him to carry a double meaning.  Suddenly she
+moved her head, glanced full at him for an instant, and glanced behind
+her.  "Where are they?" she inquired.
+
+"The others?  Aren't they in front?  They must be some where about."
+
+Unless she also had marked their deviation into the Cock Yard, why had
+she glanced behind her in asking where they were?  She knew as well as
+he that they had started in front.  He could only deduce that she had
+been as willing as himself to lose Mr Orgreave and Janet.  Just then an
+acquaintance raised his hat to Edwin in acknowledgement of the lady's
+presence, and he responded with pride.  Whatever his private attitude to
+Hilda, he was undeniably proud to be seen in the streets with a
+disdainful, aloof girl unknown to the town.  It was an experience
+entirely new to him, and it flattered him.  He desired to look long at
+her face, to examine her expression, to make up his mind about her; but
+he could not, because they were walking side by side.  The sole
+manifestation of her that he could judge was her voice.  It was a
+remarkable voice, rather deep, with a sort of chiselled intonation.  The
+cadences of it fell on the ear softly and yet ruthlessly, and when she
+had finished speaking you became aware of silence, as after a solemn
+utterance of destiny.  What she happened to have been saying seemed to
+be immaterial to the effect, which was physical, vibratory.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+At the border of Saint Luke's Square, junction of eight streets, true
+centre of the town's traffic, and the sole rectangular open space
+enclosed completely by shops, they found a line of constables which
+yielded only to processions and to the bearers of special rosettes.
+`The Square,' as it was called by those who inhabited it, had been
+chosen for the historic scene of the day because of its pre-eminent
+claim and suitability; the least of its advantages--its slope, from the
+top of which it could be easily dominated by a speaker on a platform--
+would alone have secured for it the honours of the Centenary.
+
+As the police cordon closed on the procession from the Old Church,
+definitely dividing the spectators from the spectacle, it grew clear
+that the spectators were in the main a shabby lot; persons without any
+social standing: unkempt idlers, good-for-nothings, wastrels,
+clay-whitened pot-girls who had to work even on that day, and who had
+run out for a few moments in their flannel aprons to stare, and a few
+score ragamuffins, whose parents were too poor or too careless to make
+them superficially presentable enough to figure in a procession.  Nearly
+the whole respectability of the town was either fussily marshalling
+processions or gazing down at them in comfort from the multitudinous
+open windows of the Square.  The `leads' over the projecting windows of
+Baines's, the chief draper's, were crowded with members of the ruling
+caste.
+
+And even within the Square, it could be seen, between the towering backs
+of constables, that the spectacle itself was chiefly made up of
+indigence bedecked.  The thousands of perspiring children, penned like
+sheep, and driven to and fro like sheep by anxious and officious
+rosettes, nearly all had the air of poverty decently putting the best
+face on itself; they were nearly all, beneath their vague sense of
+importance, wistful with the resigned fatalism of the young and of the
+governed.  They knew not precisely why they were there; but merely that
+they had been commanded to be there, and that they were hot and thirsty,
+and that for weeks they had been learning hymns by heart for this
+occasion, and that the occasion was glorious.  Many of the rosettes
+themselves had a poor, driven look.  None of these bought suits at
+Shillitoe's, nor millinery at Baines's.  None of them gave orders for
+printing, nor had preferences in the form of ledgers, nor held views on
+Victor Hugo, nor drank wine, nor yearned for perfection in the art of
+social intercourse.  To Edwin, who was just beginning to touch the
+planes of worldliness and of dilettantism in art, to Edwin, with the
+mysterious and haughty creature at his elbow, they seemed to have no
+more in common with himself and her than animals had.  And he wondered
+by virtue of what decree he, in the Shillitoe suit, and the grand house
+waiting for him up at Bleakridge, had been lifted up to splendid ease
+above the squalid and pitiful human welter.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Such musings were scarcely more than subconscious in him.  He stood now
+a few inches behind Hilda, and, above these thoughts, and beneath the
+stir and strident glitter and noise of the crawling ant-heap, his mind
+was intensely occupied with Hilda's ear and her nostril.  He could watch
+her now at leisure, for the changeful interest of the scene made
+conversation unnecessary and even inept.  What a lobe!  What a nostril!
+Every curve of her features seemed to express a fine arrogant acrimony
+and harsh truculence.  At any rate she was not half alive; she was alive
+in every particle of herself.  She gave off antipathies as a liquid
+gives off vapour.  Moods passed across her intent face like a wind over
+a field.  Apparently she was so rapt as to be unaware that her sunshade
+was not screening her.  Sadness prevailed among her moods.
+
+The mild Edwin said secretly:
+
+"By Jove!  If I had you to myself, my lady, I'd soon teach you a thing
+or two!"  He was quite sincere, too.
+
+His glance, roving, discovered Mrs Hamps above him, ten feet over his
+head, at the corner of the Baines balcony.  He flushed, for he perceived
+that she must have been waiting to catch him.  She was at her most
+stately and most radiant, wonderful in lavender, and she poured out on
+him the full opulence of a proud recognition.
+
+Everybody should be made aware that Mrs Hamps was greeting her adored
+nephew, who was with a lady friend of the Orgreaves.
+
+She leaned slightly from her cane chair.
+
+"Isn't it a beautiful sight?" she cried.  Her voice sounded thin and
+weak against the complex din of the Square.
+
+He nodded, smiling.
+
+"Oh!  I think it's a beautiful sight!" she cried once more, ecstatic.
+People turned to see whom she was addressing.
+
+But though he nodded again he did not think it was a beautiful sight.
+He thought it was a disconcerting sight, a sight vexatious and
+troublesome.  And he was in no way tranquillised by the reflection that
+every town in England had the same sight to show at that hour.
+
+And moreover, anticipating their next interview, he could, in fancy,
+plainly hear his Aunt Clara saying, with hopeless, longing benignancy:
+"Oh, Edwin, how I _do_ wish I could have seen you in the Square, bearing
+your part!"
+
+Hilda seemed to be oblivious of Mrs Hamps's ejaculations, but
+immediately afterwards she straightened her back, with a gesture that
+Edwin knew, and staring into his eyes said, as it were resentfully--
+
+"Well, they evidently aren't here!"
+
+And looked with scorn among the sightseers.  It was clear that the crowd
+contained nobody of the rank and stamp of the Orgreaves.
+
+"They may have gone up the Cock Yard--if you know where that is," said
+Edwin.
+
+"Well, don't you think we'd better find them somehow?"
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TWELVE.
+
+THE TOP OF THE SQUARE.
+
+In making the detour through the Cock Yard to reach Saint Luke's Square
+again at the top of it, the only members of the Orgreave clan whom they
+encountered were Jimmie and Johnnie, who, on hearing of the
+disappearance of their father and Janet, merely pointed out that their
+father and Janet were notoriously always getting themselves lost, owing
+to gross carelessness about whatever they happened to be doing.  The
+youths then departed, saying that the Bursley show was nothing, and that
+they were going to Hanbridge; they conveyed the idea that Hanbridge was
+the only place in the world for self-respecting men of fashion.  But
+before leaving they informed Edwin that a fellow at the corner of the
+Square was letting out rather useful barrels on lease.  This fellow
+proved to be an odd-jobman who had been discharged from the Duke of
+Wellington Vaults in the market-place for consistently intemperate
+language, but whose tongue was such that he had persuaded the landlord
+on this occasion to let him borrow a dozen stout empty barrels, and the
+police to let him dispose them on the pavement.  Every barrel was
+occupied, and, perceiving this, Edwin at once became bold with the
+barrel-man.  He did not comfortably fancy himself perched prominent on a
+barrel with Hilda Lessways by his side, but he could enjoy talking about
+it, and he wished to show Hilda that he could be as dashing as those
+young sparks, Jimmie and Johnnie.
+
+"Now, mester!" shouted the barrel-man thickly, in response to Edwin's
+airy remark, "these 'ere two chaps'll shunt off for th' price of a
+quart!"  He indicated a couple of barrel-tenants of his own tribe, who
+instantly jumped down, touching their soiled caps.  They were part of
+the barrel-man's machinery for increasing profits.  Edwin could not
+withdraw.  His very cowardice forced him to be audacious.  By the time
+he had satisfied the clawing greed of three dirty hands, the two barrels
+had cost him a shilling.  Hilda's only observation was, as Edwin helped
+her to the plateau of the barrel: "I do wish they wouldn't spit on their
+money."  All barrels being now let to _bona fide_ tenants and paid for,
+the three men sidled hastily away in order to drink luck to Sunday
+schools in the Duke of Wellington's Entire.  And Edwin, mounting the
+barrel next to Hilda's, was thinking: "I've been done over that job.  I
+ought to have got them for sixpence."  He saw how expensive it was,
+going about with delicately nurtured women.  Never would he have offered
+a barrel to Maggie, and even had he done so Maggie would assuredly have
+said that she could make shift well enough without one.
+
+"It's simply perfect for seeing," exclaimed Hilda, as he achieved her
+altitude.  Her tone was almost cordial.  He felt surprisingly at ease.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+The whole Square was now suddenly revealed as a swarming mass of heads,
+out of which rose banners and pennons that were cruder in tint even than
+the frocks and hats of the little girls and the dresses and bonnets of
+their teachers; the men, too, by their neckties, scarves, and rosettes,
+added colour to colour.  All the windows were chromatic with the hues of
+bright costumes, and from many windows and from every roof that had a
+flagstaff flags waved heavily against the gorgeous sky.  At the bottom
+of the Square the lorries with infants had been arranged, and each
+looked like a bank of variegated flowers.  The principal bands--that is
+to say, all the bands that could be trusted--were collected round the
+red baize platform at the top of the Square, and the vast sun-reflecting
+euphoniums, trumpets, and comets made a glittering circle about the
+officials and ministers and their wives and women.  All denominations,
+for one day only, fraternised effusively together on that platform; for
+princes of the royal house, and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the
+Lord Mayor of London had urged that it should be so.  The Primitive
+Methodists' parson discovered himself next but one to Father Milton, who
+on any other day would have been a Popish priest, and whose wooden
+substitute for a wife was the queen on a chessboard.  And on all these
+the sun blazed torridly.
+
+And almost in the middle of the Square an immense purple banner bellied
+in the dusty breeze, saying in large gold letters, "The Blood of the
+Lamb," together with the name of some Sunday school, which Edwin from
+his barrel could not decipher.
+
+Then a hoary white-tied notability on the platform raised his might arm
+very high, and a bugle called, and a voice that had filled fields in
+exciting times of religious revival floated in thunder across the
+enclosed Square, easily dominating it--
+
+"Let us sing."
+
+And the conductor of the eager massed bands set them free with a
+gesture, and after they had played a stave, a small stentorian choir at
+the back of the platform broke forth, and in a moment the entire
+multitude, at first raggedly, but soon in good unison, was singing--
+
+  Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
+  Let me hide myself in Thee;
+  Let the water and the blood,
+  From Thy riven side which flowed,
+  Be of sin the double cure:
+  Cleanse from guilt and make me pure.
+
+The volume of sound was overwhelming.  Its crashing force was enough to
+sweep people from barrels.  Edwin could feel moisture in his eyes, and
+he dared not look at Hilda.  "Why the deuce do I want to cry?" he asked
+himself angrily, and was ashamed.  And at the beginning of the second
+verse, when the glittering instruments blared forth anew, and the
+innumerable voices, high and loud, infantile and aged, flooded swiftly
+over their brassy notes, subduing them, the effect on Edwin was the same
+again: a tightening of the throat, and a squeezing down of the eyelids.
+Why was it?  Through a mist he read the words "The Blood of the Lamb,"
+and he could picture the riven trunk of a man dying, and a torrent of
+blood flowing therefrom, and people like his Auntie Clara and his
+brother-in-law Albert plunging ecstatically into the liquid in order to
+be white.  The picture came again in the third verse,--the red fountains
+and the frantic bathers.
+
+Then the notability raised his arm once more, and took off his hat, and
+all the males on the platform took off their hats, and presently every
+boy and man in the Square had uncovered his head to the strong sunshine;
+and at last Edwin had to do the same, and only the policemen, by virtue
+of their high office, could dare to affront the majesty of God.  And the
+reverberating voice cried--
+
+"Oh, most merciful Lord!  Have pity upon us.  We are brands plucked from
+the burning."  And continued for several minutes to descant upon the
+theme of everlasting torture by incandescence and thirst.  Nominally
+addressing a deity, but in fact preaching to his audience, he announced
+that, even for the veriest infant on a lorry, there was no escape from
+the eternal fires save by complete immersion in the blood.  And he was
+so convinced and convincing that an imaginative nose could have detected
+the odour of burnt flesh.  And all the while the great purple banner
+waved insistently: "The Blood of the Lamb."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+When the prayer was finished for the benefit of the little ones, another
+old and favourite hymn had to be sung.  (None but the classical lyrics
+of British Christianity had found a place in the programme of the great
+day.)  Guided by the orchestra, the youth of Bursley and the maturity
+thereof chanted with gusto--
+
+  There is a fountain filled with blood
+  Drawn from Emmanuel's veins;
+  And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
+  Lose all their guilty stains.
+  ...
+  Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood--
+
+Edwin, like everybody, knew every line of the poem.  With the purple
+banner waving there a bloody motto, he foresaw each sanguinary detail of
+the verse ere it came to him from the shrill childish throats.  And a
+phrase from another hymn jumped from somewhere in his mind just as
+William Cowper's ended and a speech commenced.  The phrase was `India's
+coral strand.'  In thinking upon it he forgot to listen to the speech.
+He saw the flags, banners, and pennons floating in the sunshine and in
+the heavy breeze; he felt the reverberation of the tropic sun on his
+head; he saw the crowded humanity of the Square attired in its crude,
+primary colours; he saw the great brass serpentine instruments gleaming;
+he saw the red dais; he saw, bursting with infancy, the immense cams to
+which were attached the fantastically plaited horses; he saw the
+venerable zealots on the dais raving lest after all the institutions
+whose centenary they had met to honour should not save these children
+from hopeless and excruciating torture for ever and ever; he saw those
+majestic purple folds in the centre embroidered with the legend of the
+blood of the mystic Paschal Lamb; he saw the meek, stupid, and
+superstitious faces, all turned one way, all for the moment under the
+empire of one horrible idea, all convinced that the consequences of sins
+could be prevented by an act of belief, all gloating over inexhaustible
+tides of blood.  And it seemed to him that he was not in England any
+longer.  It seemed to him that in the dim cellars under the shambles
+behind the Town Hall, where he had once been, there dwelt, squatting, a
+strange and savage god who would blast all those who did not enter his
+presence dripping with gore, be they child or grandfather.  It seemed to
+him that the drums were tom-toms, and Baines's a bazaar.  He could fit
+every detail of the scene to harmonise with a vision of India's coral
+strand.
+
+There was no mist before his eyes now.  His sight was so clear that he
+could distinguish his father at a window of the Bank, at the other top
+corner of the Square.  Part of his mind was so idle that he could wonder
+how his father had contrived to get there, and whether Maggie was
+staying at home with Clara.  But the visualisation of India's coral
+strand in Saint Luke's Square persisted.  A phrase in the speech loosed
+some catch in him and he turned suddenly to Hilda, and in an intimate
+half-whisper murmured--
+
+"More blood!"
+
+"What?" she harshly questioned.  But he knew that she understood.
+
+"Well," he said audaciously, "look at it!  It only wants the Ganges at
+the bottom of the Square!"
+
+No one heard save she.  But she put her hand on his arm protestingly.
+"Even if we don't believe," said she--not harshly, but imploringly, "we
+needn't make fun."
+
+"_We_ don't believe!"  And that new tone of entreaty!  She had
+comprehended without explanation.  She was a weird woman.  Was there
+another creature, male or female, to whom he would have dared to say
+what he had said to her?  He had chosen to say it to her because he
+despised her, because he wished to trample on her feelings.  She roused
+the brute in him, and perhaps no one was more astonished than himself to
+witness the brute stirring.  Imagine saying to the gentle and sensitive
+Janet: "It only wants the Ganges at the bottom of the Square--" He could
+not.
+
+They stood silent, gazing and listening.  And the sun went higher in the
+sky and blazed down more cruelly.  And then the speech ended, and the
+speaker wiped his head with an enormous handkerchief.  And the
+multitude, led by the brazen instruments, which in a moment it
+overpowered, was singing to a solemn air--
+
+  When I survey the wondrous cross
+  On which the Prince of Glory died,
+  My richest gain I count but loss,
+  And pour contempt on all my pride.
+
+Hilda shook her head.
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked, leaning towards her from his barrel.
+
+"That's the most splendid religious verse ever written!" she said
+passionately.  "You can say what you like.  It's worth while believing
+anything, if you can sing words like that and mean them!"
+
+She had an air of restrained fury.
+
+But fancy exciting herself over a hymn!
+
+"Yes, it is fine, that is!" he agreed.
+
+"Do you know who wrote it?" she demanded menacingly.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't remember," he said.  The hymn was one of his
+earliest recollections, but it had never occurred to him to be curious
+as to its authorship.
+
+Her lips sneered.  "Dr Watts, of course!" she snapped.
+
+He could hear her, beneath the tremendous chanting from the Square,
+repeating the words to herself with her precise and impressive
+articulation.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
+
+THE OLDEST SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER.
+
+From the elevation of his barrel Edwin could survey, in the lordly and
+negligent manner of people on a height, all the detail of his immediate
+surroundings.  Presently, in common with Hilda and the other aristocrats
+of barrels, he became aware of the increased vivacity of a scene which
+was passing at a little distance, near a hokey-pokey barrow.  The chief
+actors in the affair appeared to be a young policeman, the owner of the
+hokey-pokey barrow, and an old man.  It speedily grew into one of those
+episodes which, occurring on the outskirts of some episode immensely
+greater, draw too much attention to themselves and thereby outrage the
+sense of proportion residing in most plain men, and especially in most
+policemen.
+
+"Give him a ha'porth o' hokey," said a derisive voice.  "He hasn't got a
+tooth in his head, but it wants no chewing, hokey does na'."  There was
+a general guffaw from the little rabble about the barrow.
+
+"Aye!  Give us some o' that!" said the piping, silly voice of the old
+man.  "But I mun' get to that there platform, I'm telling ye.  I'm
+telling all of ye."  He made a senile plunge against the body of the
+policeman, as against a moveless barricade, and then his hat was awry
+and it fell off, and somebody lifted it into the air with a neat kick so
+that it dropped on the barrow.  All laughed.  The old man laughed.
+
+"Now, old sodger," said the hot policeman curtly.  "None o' this!  None
+o' this!  I advise ye civilly to be quiet; that's what I advise ye.  You
+can't go on th' platform without a ticket."
+
+"Nay!" piped the old man.  "Don't I tell ye I lost it down th' Sytch!"
+
+"And where's yer rosette?"
+
+"Never had any rosette," the old man replied.  "I'm th' oldest
+Sunday-schoo' teacher i' th' Five Towns.  Aye!  Fifty years and more
+since I was Super at Turnhill Primitive Sunday schoo', and all Turnhill
+knows on it.  And I've got to get on that there platform.  I'm th'
+oldest Sunday schoo' teacher i' th' Five Towns.  And I was Super--"
+
+Two ribald youngsters intoned `Super, Super,' and another person
+unceremoniously jammed the felt hat on the old man's head.
+
+"It's nowt to me if ye was forty Supers," said the policeman, with
+menacing disdain.  "I've got my orders, and I'm not here to be knocked
+about.  Where did ye have yer last drink?"
+
+"No wine, no beer, nor spirituous liquors have I tasted for sixty-one
+years come Martinmas," whimpered the old man.  And he gave another lurch
+against the policeman.  "My name's Shushions!"  And he repeated in a
+frantic treble, "My name's Shushions!"
+
+"Go and bury thysen, owd gaffer!" a Herculean young collier advised him.
+
+"Why," murmured Hilda, with a sharp frown, "that must be poor old Mr
+Shushions from Turnhill, and they're guying him!  You must stop it.
+Something must be done at once."
+
+She jumped down feverishly, and Edwin had to do likewise.  He wondered
+how he should conduct himself so as to emerge creditably from the
+situation.  He felt himself, and had always felt himself, to be the last
+man in the world capable of figuring with authority in a public
+altercation.  He loathed public altercations.  The name of Shushions
+meant nothing to him; he had forgotten it, if indeed he had ever
+wittingly heard it.  And he did not at first recognise the old man.
+Descended from the barrel, he was merely an item in the loose-packed
+crowd.  As, in the wake of Hilda, he pushed with false eagerness between
+stubborn shoulders, he heard the bands striking up again.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Approaching, he saw that the old man was very old.  And then memory
+stirred.  He began to surmise that he had met the wizened face before,
+that he knew something about it.  And the face brought up a picture of
+the shop door and of his father standing beside it, a long time ago.  He
+recalled his last day at school.  Yes, of course!  This was the old man
+named Shushions, some sort of an acquaintance of his father's.  This was
+the old man who had wept a surprising tear at sight of him, Edwin.  The
+incident was so far off that it might have been recorded in history
+books.  He had never seen Mr Shushions since.  And the old man was
+changed, nearly out of recognition.  The old man had lived too long; he
+had survived his dignity; he was now nothing but a bundle of capricious
+and obstinate instincts set in motion by ancient souvenirs remembered at
+hazard.  The front of his face seemed to have given way in general
+collapse.  The lips were in a hollow; the cheeks were concave; the eyes
+had receded; and there were pits in the forehead.  The pale silvery
+straggling hairs might have been counted.  The wrinkled skin was of a
+curious brown yellow, and the veins, instead of being blue, were
+outlined in Indian red.  The impression given was that the flesh would
+be unpleasant and uncanny to the touch.  The body was bent, and the neck
+eternally cricked backward in the effort of the eyes to look up.
+Moreover the old man was in a state of neglect.  His beard alone proved
+that.  His clothes were dirty and had the air of concealing dirt.  And
+he was dressed with striking oddness.  He wore boots that were not a
+pair.  His collar was only fastened by one button, behind; the ends
+oscillated like wings; he had forgotten to fasten them in front; he had
+forgotten to put on a necktie; he had forgotten the use of buttons on
+all his garments.  He had grown down into a child again, but Providence
+had not provided him with a nurse.
+
+Worse than these merely material phenomena was the mumbling toothless
+gibber of his shrill protesting; the glassy look of idiocy from his
+fatigued eyes; and the inane smile and impotent frown that alternated on
+his features.  He was a horrible and offensive old man.  He was Time's
+obscene victim.  Edwin was revolted by the spectacle of the younger men
+baiting him.  He was astonished that they were so short-sighted as not
+to be able to see the image of themselves in the old man, so imprudent
+as not to think of their own future, so utterly brutalised.  He wanted,
+by the simple force of desire, to seclude and shelter the old man, to
+protect the old man not only from the insults of stupid and crass
+bullies, but from the old man himself, from his own fatuous senility.
+He wanted to restore to him, by a benevolent system of pretences, the
+dignity and the self-respect which he had innocently lost, and so to
+keep him decent to the eye, if not to the ear, until death came to
+repair its omission.  And it was for his own sake, for the sake of his
+own image, as much as for the sake of the old man, that he wanted to do
+this.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+All that flashed through his mind and heart in a second.
+
+"I know this old gentleman, at least I know him by sight," Hilda was
+saying to the policeman.  "He's very well known in Turnhill as an old
+Sunday school teacher, and I'm sure he ought to be on that platform."
+
+Before her eye, and her precise and haughty voice, which had no trace of
+the local accent, the young policeman was secretly abashed, and the
+louts fell back sheepishly.
+
+"Yes, he's a friend of my father's,--Mr Clayhanger, printer," said
+Edwin, behind her.
+
+The old man stood blinking in the glare.
+
+The policeman, ignoring Hilda, glanced at Edwin, and touched his cap.
+
+"His friends hadn't ought to let him out like this, sir.  Just look at
+him."  He sneered, and added: "I'm on point duty.  If you ask me, I
+should say his friends ought to take him home."  He said this with a
+peculiar mysterious emphasis, and looked furtively at the louts for
+moral support in sarcasm.  They encouraged him with grins.
+
+"He must be got on to the platform, somehow," said Hilda, and glanced at
+Edwin as if counting absolutely on Edwin.  "That's what he's come for.
+I'm sure it means everything to him."
+
+"Aye!" the old man droned.  "I was Super when we had to teach 'em their
+alphabet and give 'em a crust to start with.  Many's the man walking
+about in these towns i' purple and fine raiment as I taught his letters
+to, and his spellings, aye, and his multiplication table,--in them
+days!"
+
+"That's all very well, miss," said the policeman, "but who's going to
+get him to the platform?  He'll be dropping in a sunstroke afore ye can
+say knife."
+
+"Can't _we_?"  She gazed at Edwin appealingly.
+
+"Tak' him into a pub!" growled the collier, audacious.
+
+At the same moment two rosettes bustled up authoritatively.  One of them
+was the burly Albert Benbow.  For the first time Edwin was conscious of
+genuine pleasure at the sight of his brother-in-law.  Albert was a born
+rosette.
+
+"What's all this?  What's this?  What is it?" he asked sharply.  "Hello!
+What?  Mr Shushions!"  He bent down and looked close at the old man.
+"Where you been, old gentleman?"  He spoke loud in his ear.
+"Everybody's been asking for you.  Service is well-nigh over, but ye
+must come up."
+
+The old man did not appear to grasp the significance of Albert's
+patronage.  Albert turned to Edwin and winked, not only for Edwin's
+benefit but for that of the policeman, who smiled in a manner that
+infuriated Edwin.
+
+"Queer old stick!"  Albert murmured.  "No doing anything with him.  He's
+quarrelled with everybody at Turnhill.  That's why he wanted to come to
+us.  And of course we weren't going to refuse the oldest Sunday school
+teacher in th' Five Towns.  He's a catch...  Come along, old gentleman!"
+
+Mr Shushions did not stir.
+
+"Now, Mr Shushions," Hilda persuaded him in a voice exquisitely mild,
+and with a lovely gesture she bent over him.  "Let these gentlemen take
+you up to the platform.  That's what you've come for, you know."
+
+The transformation in her amazed Edwin, who could see the tears in her
+eyes.  The tableau of the little, silly old man looking up, and Hilda
+looking down at him, with her lips parted in a heavenly invitation, and
+one gloved hand caressing his greenish-black shoulder and the other
+mechanically holding the parasol aloft,--this tableau was imprinted for
+ever on Edwin's mind.  It was a vision blended in an instant and in an
+instant dissolved, but for Edwin it remained one of the epochal things
+of his experience.
+
+Hilda gave Edwin her parasol and quickly fastened Mr Shushions's
+collar, and the old man consented to be led off between the two
+rosettes.  The bands were playing the Austrian hymn.
+
+"Like to come up with your young lady friend?"  Albert whispered to
+Edwin importantly as he went.
+
+"Oh no, thanks."  Edwin hurriedly smiled.
+
+"Now, old gentleman," he could hear Albert adjuring Mr Shushions, and
+he could see him broadly winking to the other rosettes and embracing the
+yielding crowd in his wink.
+
+Thus was the doddering old fool who had given his youth to Sunday
+schools when Sunday schools were not patronised by princes, archbishops,
+and lord mayors, when Sunday schools were the scorn of the intelligent,
+and had sometimes to be held in public-houses for lack of better
+accommodation,--thus was he taken off for a show and a museum curiosity
+by indulgent and shallow Samaritans who had not even the wit to guess
+that he had sown what they were reaping.  And Darius Clayhanger stood
+oblivious at a high window of the sacred Bank.  And Edwin, who, all
+unconscious, owed the very fact of his existence to the doting imbecile,
+regarded him chiefly as a figure in a tableau, as the chance instrument
+of a woman's beautiful revelation.  Mr Shushions's sole crime against
+society was that he had forgotten to die.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Hilda Lessways would not return to the barrels.  She was taciturn, and
+the only remark which she made bore upon the advisability of discovering
+Janet and Mr Orgreave.  They threaded themselves out of the moving
+crowd and away from the hokey-pokey stall and the barrels into the
+tranquillity of the market-place, where the shadow of the gold angel at
+the top of the Town Hall spire was a mere squat shapeless stain on the
+irregular paving-stones.  The sound of the Festival came diminished from
+the Square.
+
+"You're very fond of poetry, aren't you?"  Edwin asked her, thinking,
+among many other things, of her observation upon the verse of Isaac
+Watts.
+
+"Of course," she replied disagreeably.  "I can't imagine anybody wanting
+to read anything else."  She seemed to be ashamed of her kindness to Mr
+Shushions, and to wish to efface any impression of amiability that she
+might have made on Edwin.  But she could not have done so.
+
+"Well," he said to himself, "there's no getting over it.  You're the
+biggest caution I've ever come across!"  His condition was one of
+various agitation.
+
+Then, just as they were passing the upper end of the Cock Yard, which
+was an archway, Mr Orgreave and Janet appeared in the archway.
+
+"We've been looking for you everywhere."
+
+"And so have we."
+
+"What have you been doing?"
+
+"What have _you_ been doing?"
+
+Father and daughter were gay.  They had not seen much, but they were
+gay.  Hilda Lessways and Edwin were not gay, and Hilda would
+characteristically make no effort to seem that which she was not.
+Edwin, therefore, was driven by his own diffidence into a nervous light
+loquacity.  He began the tale of Mr Shushions, and Hilda punctuated it
+with stabs of phrases.
+
+Mr Orgreave laughed.  Janet listened with eager sympathy.
+
+"Poor old thing!  What a shame!" said Janet.
+
+But to Edwin, with the vision of Hilda's mercifulness in his mind, even
+the sympathy of Janet for Mr Shushions had a quality of
+uncomprehending, facile condescension which slightly jarred on him.
+
+The steam-car loitered into view, discharged two passengers, and began
+to manoeuvre for the return journey.
+
+"Oh!  Do let's go home by car, father!" cried Janet.  "It's too hot for
+anything!"
+
+Edwin took leave of them at the car steps.  Janet was the smiling
+incarnation of loving-kindness.  Hilda shook hands grudgingly.  Through
+the windows of the car he saw her sternly staring at the advertisements
+of the interior.  He went down the Cock Yard into Wedgwood Street,
+whence he could hear the bands again and see the pennons.  He thought,
+"This is a funny way of spending a morning!" and wondered what he should
+do with himself till dinner-time.  It was not yet a quarter past twelve.
+Still, the hours had passed with extraordinary speed.  He stood aimless
+at the corner of the pavement, and people who, having had their fill of
+the sun and the spectacle in the Square, were strolling slowly away, saw
+a fair young man, in a stylish suit, evidently belonging to the aloof
+classes, gazing at nothing whatever, with his hands elegantly in his
+pockets.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
+
+MONEY.
+
+Things sometimes fall out in a surprising way, and the removal of the
+Clayhanger household from the corner of Duck Square to the heights of
+Bleakridge was diversified by a circumstance which Edwin, the person
+whom alone it concerned, had not in the least anticipated.
+
+It was the Monday morning after the Centenary.  Foster's largest
+furniture-van, painted all over with fine pictures of the van itself
+travelling by road, rail, and sea, stood loaded in front of the shop.
+One van had already departed, and this second one, in its crammed
+interior, on its crowded roof, on a swinging platform beneath its floor,
+and on a posterior ledge supported by rusty chains, contained all that
+was left of the furniture and domestic goods which Darius Clayhanger had
+collected in half a century of ownership.  The moral effect of Foster's
+activity was always salutary, in that Foster would prove to any man how
+small a space the acquisitions of a lifetime could be made to occupy
+when the object was not to display but to pack them.  Foster could put
+all your pride on to four wheels, and Foster's driver would crack a whip
+and be off with the lot of it as though it were no more than a load of
+coal.
+
+The pavement and the road were littered with straw, and the straw
+straggled into the shop, and heaped itself at the open side door.  One
+large brass saucepan lay lorn near the doorstep, a proof that Foster was
+human.  For everything except that saucepan a place had been found.
+That saucepan had witnessed sundry ineffectual efforts to lodge it, and
+had also suffered frequent forgetfulness.  A tin candlestick had taken
+refuge within it, and was trusting for safety to the might of the
+obstinate vessel.  In the sequel, the candlestick was pitched by Edwin
+on to the roof of the van, and Darius Clayhanger, coming fussily out of
+the shop, threw a question at Edwin and then picked up the saucepan and
+went off to Bleakridge with it, thus making sure that it would not be
+forgotten, and demonstrating to the town that he, Darius, was at last
+`flitting' into his grand new house.  Even weighted by the saucepan, in
+which Mrs Nixon had boiled hundredweights of jam, he still managed to
+keep his arms slanted outwards and motionless, retaining his appearance
+of a rigid body that swam smoothly along on mechanical legs.  Darius,
+though putting control upon himself, was in a state of high complex
+emotion, partly due to apprehensiveness about the violent changing of
+the habits of a quarter of a century, and partly due to nervous pride.
+
+Maggie and Mrs Nixon had gone to the new house half an hour earlier, to
+devise encampments therein for the night; for the Clayhangers would
+definitely sleep no more at the corner of Duck Square; the rooms in
+which they had eaten and slept and lain awake, and learnt what life and
+what death was, were to be transformed into workshops and stores for an
+increasing business.  The premises were not abandoned empty.  The shop
+had to function as usual on that formidable day, and the printing had to
+proceed.  This had complicated the affair of the removal; but it had
+helped everybody to pretend, in an adult and sedate manner, that nothing
+in the least unusual was afoot.
+
+Edwin loitered on the pavement, with his brain all tingling, and
+excitedly incapable of any consecutive thought whatever.  It was his
+duty to wait.  Two of Foster's men were across in the vaults of the
+Dragon; the rest were at Bleakridge with the first and smaller van.
+Only one of Foster's horses was in the dropped double-shafts, and even
+he had his nose towards the van, and in a nosebag; two others were to
+come down soon from Bleakridge to assist.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+A tall, thin, grey-bearded man crossed Trafalgar Road from Aboukir
+Street.  He was very tall and very thin, and the peculiarity of his walk
+was that the knees were never quite straightened, so that his height was
+really greater even than it seemed.  His dark suit and his boots and hat
+were extraordinarily neat.  You could be sure at once that he was a
+person of immutable habits.  He stopped when, out of the corner of his
+eye, whose gaze was always precisely parallel to the direction of his
+feet, he glimpsed Edwin.  Deflecting his course, he went close to Edwin,
+and, addressing the vacant air immediately over Edwin's pate, he said in
+a mysterious, confidential whisper--"when are you coming in for that
+money?"
+
+He spoke as though he was anxious to avoid, by a perfect air of
+nonchalance, arousing the suspicions of some concealed emissary of the
+Russian secret police.
+
+Edwin started.  "Oh!" he exclaimed.  "Is it ready?"
+
+"Yes.  Waiting."
+
+"Are you going to your office now?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Edwin hesitated.  "It won't take a minute, I suppose.  I'll slip along
+in two jiffs.  I'll be there almost as soon as you are."
+
+"Bring a receipt stamp," said the man, and resumed his way.
+
+He was the secretary of the Bursley and Turnhill Permanent 50 pounds
+Benefit Building Society, one of the most solid institutions of the
+district.  And he had been its secretary for decades.  No stories of the
+defalcation of other secretaries of societies, no rumours as to the
+perils of the system of the more famous Starr-Bowkett Building
+Societies, ever bred a doubt in Bursley or Turnhill of the eternal
+soundness of the Bursley and Turnhill Permanent 50 pounds Benefit
+Building Society.  You could acquire a share in it by an entrance fee of
+one shilling, and then you paid eighteen-pence per week for ten years,
+making something less than 40 pounds, and then, after an inactive period
+of three months, the Society gave you 50 pounds, and you began therewith
+to build a house, if you wanted a house, and, if you were prudent, you
+instantly took out another share.  You could have as many shares as you
+chose.  Though the Society was chiefly nourished by respectable artisans
+with stiff chins, nobody in the district would have considered
+membership to be beneath him.  The Society was an admirable device for
+strengthening an impulse towards thrift, because, once you had put
+yourself into its machinery, it would stand no nonsense.  Prosperous
+tradesmen would push their children into it, and even themselves.  This
+was what had happened to Edwin in the dark past, before he had left
+school.  Edwin had regarded the trick with indifference at first,
+because, except the opening half crown, his father had paid the
+subscriptions for him until he left school and became a wage-earner.
+Thereafter he had regarded it as simple parental madness.
+
+His whole life seemed to be nothing but a vista of Friday evenings on
+which he went to the Society's office, between seven and nine, to `pay
+the Club.'  The social origin of any family in Bursley might have been
+decided by the detail whether it referred to the Society as the
+`Building Society' or as `the Club.'  Artisans called it the Club,
+because it did resemble an old-fashioned benefit club.  Edwin had
+invariably heard it called `Club' at home, and he called it `Club,' and
+he did not know why.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+On ten thousand Friday evenings, as it seemed to him, he had gone into
+the gas-lit office with the wire-blinds, in the Cock Yard.  And the
+procedure never varied.  Behind a large table sat two gentlemen, the
+secretary and a subordinate, who was, however, older than the secretary.
+They had enormous ledgers in front of them, and at the lower corners of
+the immense pages was a transverse crease, like a mountain range on the
+left and like a valley on the right, caused by secretarial thumbs in
+turning over.  On the table were also large metal inkstands and wooden
+money-coffers.  The two officials both wore spectacles, and they both
+looked above their spectacles when they talked to members across the
+table.  They spoke in low tones; they smiled with the most scrupulous
+politeness; they never wasted words.  They counted money with prim and
+efficient gestures, ringing gold with the mien of judges inaccessible to
+human emotions.  They wrote in the ledgers, and on the membership-cards,
+in a hand astoundingly regular and discreetly flourished; the pages of
+the ledgers had the mystic charm of ancient manuscripts, and the
+finality of decrees of fate.  Apparently the scribes never made
+mistakes, but sometimes they would whisper in colloquy, and one, without
+leaning his body, would run a finger across the ledger of the other;
+their fingers knew intimately the geography of the ledgers, and moved as
+though they could have found a desired name, date, or number, in the
+dark.  The whole ceremony was impressive.  It really did impress Edwin,
+as he would wait his turn among the three or four proud and respectable
+members that the going and coming seemed always to leave in the room.
+The modest blue-yellow gas, the vast table and ledgers, and the two
+sober heads behind; the polite murmurings, the rustle of leaves, the
+chink of money, the smooth sound of elegant pens: all this made
+something not merely impressive, but beautiful; something that had a
+true if narrow dignity; something that ministered to an ideal if a low
+one.
+
+But Edwin had regarded the operation as a complete loss of the money
+whose payment it involved.  Ten years!  It was an eternity!  And even
+then his father would have some preposterous suggestion for rendering
+useless the unimaginable fifty pounds!  Meanwhile the weekly deduction
+of eighteenpence from his miserable income was an exasperating strain.
+And then one night the secretary had told him that he was entering on
+his last month.  If he had possessed any genuine interest in money, he
+would have known for himself; but he did not.  And then the payments had
+ceased.  He had said nothing to his father.
+
+And now the share had matured, and there was the unimaginable sum
+waiting for him!  He got his hat and a stamp, and hurried to the Cock
+Yard.  The secretary, in his private room now, gave him five notes as
+though the notes had been naught but tissue paper, and he accepted them
+in the same inhuman manner.  The secretary asked him if he meant to take
+out another share, and from sheer moral cowardice he said that he did
+mean to do so; and he did so, on the spot.  And in less than ten minutes
+he was back at the shop.  Nothing had happened there.  The other horses
+had not come down from Bleakridge, and the men had not come out of the
+Dragon.  But he had fifty pounds in his pocket, and it was lawfully his.
+A quarter of an hour earlier he positively could not have conceived the
+miracle.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Two days later, on the Wednesday evening, Edwin was in his new bedroom,
+overlooking his father's garden, with a glimpse of the garden of Lane
+End House.  His chamber, for him, was palatial, and it was at once the
+symbol and the scene of his new life.  A stranger entering would have
+beheld a fair-sized room, a narrow bed, two chairs, an old-fashioned
+table, a new wardrobe, an old dressing-table, a curious carpet and
+hearthrug, low bookshelves on either side of the fireplace, and a few
+prints and drawings, not all of them framed, on the distempered walls.
+A stranger might have said in its praise that it was light and airy.
+But a stranger could not have had the divine vision that Edwin had.
+Edwin looked at it and saw clearly, and with the surest conviction, that
+it was wonderful.  He stood on the hearthrug, with his back to the
+hearth, bending his body concavely and then convexly with the idle easy
+sinuousness of youth, and he saw that it was wonderful.  As an organic
+whole it was wonderful.  Its defects were qualities.  For instance, it
+had no convenience for washing; but with a bathroom a few yards off, who
+would encumber his study (it was a study) with washing apparatus?  He
+had actually presented his old ramshackle washstand to the attic which
+was to be occupied by Mrs Nixon's niece, a girl engaged to aid her aunt
+in the terrible work of keeping clean a vast mansion.
+
+And the bedroom could show one or two details that in a bedroom were
+luxurious.  Chief of these were the carpet, the hearthrug, and the
+table.  Edwin owed them to a marvellous piece of good fortune.  He had
+feared, and even Maggie had feared, that their father would impair the
+practical value and the charm of the new house by parsimony in the
+matter of furniture.  The furniture in the domestic portion of the old
+dwelling was quite inadequate for the new one, and scarcely fit for it
+either.  Happily Darius had heard of a houseful of furniture for sale at
+Oldcastle by private treaty, and in a wild, adventurous hour he had
+purchased it, exceedingly cheap.  Edwin had been amazed at his luck (he
+accepted the windfall as his own private luck) when he first saw the
+bought furniture in the new house, before the removal.  Out of it he had
+selected the table, the carpet, and the rug for his bedroom, and none
+had demurred.  He noticed that his father listened to him, in affairs of
+the new house, as to an individuality whose views demanded some trifle
+of respect.  Beyond question his father was proving himself to possess a
+mind equal to the grand situation.  What with the second servant and the
+furniture, Edwin felt that he would not have to blush for the house, no
+matter who might enter it to spy it out.  As for his own room, he would
+not object to the Sunday seeing it.  Indeed he would rather like the
+Sunday to see it, on his next visit.  Already it was in nearly complete
+order, for he had shown a singular, callous disregard for the progress
+of the rest of the house: against which surprising display of
+selfishness both Maggie and Mrs Nixon had glumly protested.  The truth
+was that he was entirely obsessed by his room; it had disabled his
+conscience.
+
+When he had oscillated on his heels and toes for a few moments with his
+gaze on the table, he faced about, and stared in a sort of vacant
+beatitude at the bookshelves to the left hand; those to the right hand
+were as yet empty.  Twilight was deepening.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+He heard his father's heavy and clumsy footstep on the landing.  The old
+man seemed to wander uncertainly a little, and then he pushed open
+Edwin's door with a brusque movement and entered the room.  The two
+exchanged a look.  They seldom addressed each other, save for an
+immediate practical purpose, and they did not address each other now.
+But Darius ejaculated "Um!" as he glanced around.  They had no intimacy.
+Darius never showed any interest in his son as an independent human
+being with a developing personality, though he might have felt such an
+interest; and Edwin was never conscious of a desire to share any of his
+ideas or ideals with his father, whom he was content to accept as a
+creature of inscrutable motives.  Now, he resented his father's
+incursion.  He considered his room as his castle, whereof his rightful
+exclusive dominion ran as far as the door-mat; and to placate his pride
+Darius should have indicated by some gesture or word that he admitted
+being a visitor on sufferance.  It was nothing to Edwin that Darius
+owned the room and nearly everything in it.  He was generally nervous in
+his father's presence, and his submissiveness only hid a spiritual
+independence that was not less fierce for being restrained.  He thought
+Darius a gross fleshly organism, as he indeed was, and he privately
+objected to many paternal mannerisms, of eating, drinking, breathing,
+eructation, speech, deportment, and garb.  Further, he had noted, and
+felt, the increasing moroseness of his father's demeanour.  He could
+remember a period when Darius had moods of grim gaiety, displaying rough
+humour; these moods had long ceased to occur.
+
+"So this is how ye've fixed yerself up!"  Darius observed.
+
+"Yes," Edwin smiled, not moving from the hearthrug, and not ceasing to
+oscillate on heels and toes.
+
+"Well, I'll say this.  Ye've got a goodish notion of looking after
+yerself.  When ye can spare a few minutes to do a bit downstairs--" This
+sentence was sarcastic and required no finishing.
+
+"I was just coming," said Edwin.  And to himself, "What on earth does he
+want here, making his noises?"
+
+With youthful lack of imagination and of sympathy, he quite failed to
+perceive the patent fact that his father had been drawn into the room by
+the very same instinct which had caused Edwin to stand on the hearthrug
+in an idle bliss of contemplation.  It did not cross his mind that his
+father too was during those days going through wondrous mental
+experiences, that his father too had begun a new life, that his father
+too was intensely proud of the house and found pleasure in merely
+looking at it, and looking at it again, and at every corner of it.
+
+A glint of gold attracted the eye of Darius to the second shelf of the
+left-hand bookcase, and he went towards it with the arrogance of an
+autocrat whose authority recognises no limit.  Fourteen fine calf-backed
+volumes stood on that shelf in a row; twelve of them were uniform, the
+other two odd.  These books were taller and more distinguished than any
+of their neighbours.  Their sole possible rivals were half a dozen
+garishly bound Middle School prizes, machine-tooled, and to be mistaken
+for treasures only at a distance of several yards.
+
+Edwin trembled, and loathed himself for trembling.  He walked to the
+window.
+
+"What be these?"  Darius inquired.
+
+"Oh!  Some books I've been picking up."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+That same morning Edwin had been to the Saint Luke's Covered Market to
+buy some apples for Maggie, who had not yet perfected the organisation
+necessary to a house-mistress who does not live within half a minute of
+a large central source of supplies.  And, to his astonishment, he had
+observed that one of the interior shops was occupied by a second-hand
+bookseller with an address at Hanbridge.  He had never noticed the shop
+before, or, if he had noticed it, he had despised it.  But the chat with
+Tom Orgreave had awakened in him the alertness of a hunter.  The shop
+was not formally open--Wednesday's market being only half a market.  The
+shopkeeper, however, was busy within.  Edwin loitered.  Behind the piles
+of negligible sermons, pietisms, keepsakes, schoolbooks, and
+`Aristotles' (tied up in red twine, these last), he could descry, in the
+farther gloom, actual folios and quartos.  It was like seeing the gleam
+of nuggets on the familiar slopes of Mow Cop, which is the Five Towns'
+mountain.  The proprietor, an extraordinarily grimy man, invited him to
+examine.  He could not refuse.  He found Byron's "Childe Harold" in one
+volume and "Don Juan" in another, both royal octavo editions, slightly
+stained, but bound in full calf.  He bought them.  He knew that to keep
+his resolutions he must read a lot of poetry.  Then he saw Voltaire's
+prose tales in four volumes, in French,--an enchanting Didot edition,
+with ink as black as Hades and paper as white as snow; also bound in
+full calf.  He bought them.  And then the proprietor showed him, in
+eight similar volumes, Voltaire's "Dictionnaire Philosophique."  He did
+not want it; but it matched the tales and it was impressive to the eye.
+And so he bought the other eight volumes.  The total cost was seventeen
+shillings.  He was intoxicated and he was frightened.  What a nucleus
+for a collection of real books, of treasures!  Those volumes would do no
+shame even to Tom Orgreave's bookcase.  And they had been lying in the
+Covered Market, of all places in the universe...  Blind!  How blind he
+had been to the possibilities of existence!  Laden with a bag of apples
+in one hand and a heavy parcel of books in the other, he had had to go
+up to dinner in the car.  It was no matter; he possessed riches.  The
+car stopped specially for him at the portals of the new house.  He had
+introduced the books into the new house surreptitiously, because he was
+in fear, despite his acute joy.  He had pushed the parcel under the bed.
+After tea, he had passed half an hour in gazing at the volumes, as at
+precious contraband.  Then he had ranged them on the shelf, and had
+gazed at them for perhaps another quarter of an hour.  And now his
+father, with the infallible nose of fathers for that which is no concern
+of theirs, had lighted upon them and was peering into them, and
+fingering them with his careless, brutal hands,--hands that could not
+differentiate between a ready reckoner and a treasure.  As the light
+failed, he brought one of them and then another to the window.
+
+"Um!" he muttered.  "Voltaire!"
+
+"Um!  Byron!"
+
+And: "How much did they ask ye for these?"
+
+"Fifteen shillings," said Edwin, in a low voice.
+
+"Here!  Take it!" said his father, relinquishing a volume to him.  He
+spoke in a queer, hard voice; and instantly left the room.  Edwin
+followed him shortly, and assisted Maggie to hang pictures in that
+wilderness, the drawing-room.  Supper was eaten in silence; and Maggie
+looked askance from her father to her brother, both of whom had a
+strained demeanour.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
+
+THE INSULT.
+
+The cold bath, the early excursion into the oblong of meadow that was
+beginning to be a garden, the brisk stimulating walk down Trafalgar Road
+to business,--all these novel experiences, which for a year Edwin had
+been anticipating with joyous eagerness as bliss final and sure, had
+lost their savour on the following morning.  He had been ingenuous
+enough to believe that he would be happy in the new house--that the new
+house somehow meant the rebirth of himself and his family.  Strange
+delusion!  The bath-splashings and the other things gave him no
+pleasure, because he was saying to himself all the time, "There's going
+to be a row this morning.  There's going to be a regular shindy this
+morning!"  Yet he was accustomed to his father's scenes...  Not a word
+at breakfast, for which indeed Darius was very late.  But a thick cloud
+over the breakfast-table!  Maggie showed that she felt the cloud.  So
+did even Mrs Nixon.  The niece alone, unskilled in the science of
+meteorology, did not notice it, and was pertly bright.  Edwin departed
+before his father, hurrying.  He knew that his father, starting from the
+luxurious books, would ask him brutally what he meant by daring to draw
+out his share from the Club without mentioning the affair, and
+particularly without confiding to his safe custody the whole sum
+withdrawn.  He knew that his father would persist in regarding the fifty
+pounds as sacred, as the ark of the covenant, and on the basis of the
+alleged outrage would build one of those cold furies that seemed to give
+him so perverse a delight.  On the other hand, despite his father's
+peculiar intonation of the names of Edwin's authors--Voltaire and
+Byron--he did not fear to be upbraided for possessing himself of loose
+and poisonous literature.  It was a point to his father's credit that he
+never attempted any kind of censorship.  Edwin never knew whether this
+attitude was the result of indifference or due to a grim sporting
+instinct.
+
+There was no sign of trouble in the shop until noon.  Darius was very
+busy superintending the transformation of the former living-rooms
+upstairs into supplementary workshops, and also the jobbing builder was
+at work according to the plans of Osmond Orgreave.  But at five minutes
+past twelve--just before Stifford went out to his dinner--Darius entered
+the ebonised cubicle, and said curtly to Edwin, who was writing there--
+
+"Show me your book."
+
+This demand surprised Edwin.  `His' book was the shop-sales book.  He
+was responsible for it, and for the petty cash-book, and for the shop
+till.  His father's private cash-book was utterly unknown to him, and he
+had no trustworthy idea of the financial totality of the business; but
+the management of the shop till gave him the air of being in his
+father's confidence accustomed him to the discipline of anxiety, and
+also somewhat flattered him.
+
+He produced the book.  The last complete page had not been added up.
+
+"Add this," said his father.
+
+Darius himself added up the few lines on the incomplete page.
+
+"Stiff;" he shouted, "bring me the sales-slip."
+
+The amounts of sales conducted by Stifford himself were written on a
+slip of paper from which Edwin transferred the items at frequent
+intervals to the book.
+
+"Go to yer dinner," said Darius to Stifford, when he appeared at the
+door of the cubicle with the slip.
+
+"It's not quite time yet, sir."
+
+"Go to yer dinner, I tell ye."
+
+Stifford had three-quarters of an hour for his dinner.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Darius combined the slip with the book and made a total.
+
+"Petty cash," he muttered shortly.
+
+Edwin produced the petty cash-book, a volume of very trifling
+importance.
+
+"Now bring me the till."
+
+Edwin went out of the cubicle and brought the till, which was a large
+and battered japanned cash-box with a lid in two independent parts, from
+its well-concealed drawer behind the fancy-counter.  Darius counted the
+coins in it and made calculations on blotting-paper, breathing
+stertorously all the time.
+
+"What on earth are you trying to get at?"  Edwin asked, with innocent
+familiarity.  He thought that the Club-share crisis had been postponed
+by one of his father's swift strange caprices.
+
+Darius turned on him glaring: "I'm trying to get at where ye got the
+brass from to buy them there books as I saw last night.  Where _did_ ye
+get it from?  There's nowt wrong here, unless ye're a mighty lot
+cleverer than I take ye for.  Where did ye get it from?  Ye don't mean
+to tell me as ye saved it up!"
+
+Edwin had had some shocks in his life.  This was the greatest.  He could
+feel his cheeks and his hands growing dully hot, and his eyes smarting;
+and he was suddenly animated by an almost murderous hatred and an
+inexpressible disgust for his father, who in the grossness of his
+perceptions and his notions had imagined his son to be a thief.
+"Loathsome beast!" he thought savagely.
+
+"I'm waiting," said his father.
+
+"I've drawn my Club money," said Edwin.
+
+For an instant the old man was at a loss; then he understood.  He had
+entirely forgotten the maturing of the Club share, and assuredly he had
+not dreamed that Edwin would accept and secrete so vast a sum as fifty
+pounds without uttering a word.  Darius had made a mistake, and a bad
+one; but in those days fathers were never wrong; above all they never
+apologised.  In Edwin's wicked act of concealment Darius could choose
+new and effective ground, and he did so.
+
+"And what dost mean by doing that and saying nowt?  Sneaking--"
+
+"What do you mean by calling me a thief?"  Edwin and Darius were equally
+startled by this speech.  Edwin knew not what had come over him, and
+Darius, never having been addressed in such a dangerous tone by his son,
+was at a loss.
+
+"I never called ye a thief."
+
+"Yes, you did!  Yes, you did!"  Edwin nearly shouted now.  "You starve
+me for money, until I haven't got sixpence to bless myself with.  You
+couldn't get a man to do what I do for twice what you pay me.  And then
+you call me a thief.  And then you jump down my throat because I spend a
+bit of money of my own."  He snorted.  He knew that he was quite mad,
+but there was a strange drunken pleasure in this madness.
+
+"Hold yer tongue, lad!" said Darius, as stiffly as he could.  But
+Darius, having been unprepared, was intimidated.  Darius vaguely
+comprehended that a new and disturbing factor had come into his life.
+"Make a less row!" he went on more strongly.  "D'ye want all th' street
+to hear ye?"
+
+"I won't make a less row.  You make as much noise as you want, and I'll
+make as much noise as I want!"  Edwin cried louder and louder.  And then
+in bitter scorn, "Thief, indeed!"
+
+"I never called ye a--"
+
+"Let me come out!"  Edwin shouted.  They were very close together.
+Darius saw that his son's face was all drawn.  Edwin snatched his hat
+off its hook, pushed violently past his father and, sticking his hands
+deep in his pockets, strode into the street.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+In four minutes he was hammering on the front door of the new house.
+Maggie opened, in alarm.  Edwin did not see how alarmed she was by his
+appearance.
+
+"What--"
+
+"Father thinks I've been stealing his damned money!"  Edwin snapped, in
+a breaking voice.  The statement was not quite accurate, but it suited
+his boiling anger to put it in the present tense instead of in the past.
+He hesitated an instant in the hall, throwing a look behind at Maggie,
+who stood entranced with her hand on the latch of the open door.  Then
+he bounded upstairs, and shut himself in his room with a tremendous bang
+that shook the house.  He wanted to cry, but he would not.
+
+Nobody disturbed him till about two o'clock, when Maggie knocked at the
+door, and opened it, without entering.
+
+"Edwin, I've kept your dinner hot."
+
+"No, thanks."  He was standing with his legs wide apart on the hearth
+rug.
+
+"Father's had his dinner and gone."
+
+"No, thanks."
+
+She closed the door again.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
+
+THE SEQUEL.
+
+"I say, Edwin," Maggie called through the door.
+
+"Well, come in, come in," he replied gruffly.  And as he spoke he sped
+from the window, where he was drumming on the pane, to the hearthrug, so
+that he should have the air of not having moved since Maggie's previous
+visit.  He knew not why he made this manoeuvre, unless it was that he
+thought vaguely that Maggie's impression of the seriousness of the
+crisis might thereby be intensified.
+
+She stood in the doorway, evidently placatory and sympathetic, and
+behind her stood Mrs Nixon, in a condition of great mental turmoil.
+
+"I think you'd better come and have your tea," said Maggie firmly, and
+yet gently.  She was soft and stout, and incapable of asserting herself
+with dignity; but she was his elder, and there were moments when an
+unusual, scarce-perceptible quality in her voice would demand from him a
+particular attention.
+
+He shook his head, and looked sternly at his watch, in the manner of one
+who could be adamant.  He was astonished to see that the hour was a
+quarter past six.
+
+"Where is he?" he asked.
+
+"Father?  He's had his tea and gone back to the shop.  Come along."
+
+"I must wash myself first," said Edwin gloomily.  He did not wish to
+yield, but he was undeniably very hungry indeed.
+
+Mrs Nixon could not leave him alone at tea, worrying him with offers of
+specialities to tempt him.  He wondered who had told the old thing about
+the affair.  Then he reflected that she had probably heard his outburst
+when he entered the house.  Possibly the pert, nice niece also had heard
+it.  Maggie remained sewing at the bow-window of the dining-room while
+he ate a plenteous tea.
+
+"Father said I could tell you that you could pay yourself an extra
+half-crown a week wages from next Saturday," said Maggie suddenly, when
+she saw he had finished.  It was always Edwin who paid wages in the
+Clayhanger establishment.
+
+He was extremely startled by this news, with all that it implied of
+surrender and of pacific intentions.  But he endeavoured to hide what he
+felt, and only snorted.
+
+"He's been talking, then?  What did he say?"
+
+"Oh!  Not much!  He told me I could tell you if I liked."
+
+"It would have looked better of him, if he'd told me himself," said
+Edwin, determined to be ruthless.  Maggie offered no response.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+After about a quarter of an hour he went into the garden, and kicked
+stones in front of him.  He could not classify his thoughts.  He
+considered himself to be perfectly tranquillised now, but he was
+mistaken.  As he idled in the beautiful August twilight near the
+garden-front of the house, catching faintly the conversation of Mrs
+Nixon and her niece as it floated through the open window of the
+kitchen, round the corner, together with quiet soothing sounds of
+washing-up, he heard a sudden noise in the garden-porch, and turned
+swiftly.  His father stood there.  Both of them were off guard.  Their
+eyes met.
+
+"Had your tea?"  Darius asked, in an unnatural tone.
+
+"Yes," said Edwin.
+
+Darius, having saved his face, hurried into the house, and Edwin moved
+down the garden, with heart sensibly beating.  The encounter renewed his
+agitation.
+
+And at the corner of the garden, over the hedge, which had been
+repaired, Janet entrapped him.  She seemed to have sprung out of the
+ground.  He could not avoid greeting her, and in order to do so he had
+to dominate himself by force.  She was in white.  She appeared always to
+wear white on fine summer days.  Her smile was exquisitely benignant.
+
+"So you're installed?" she began.
+
+They talked of the removal, she asking questions and commenting, and he
+giving brief replies.
+
+"I'm all alone to-night," she said, in a pause, "except for Alicia.
+Father and mother and the boys are gone to a fete at Longshaw."
+
+"And Miss Lessways?" he inquired self-consciously.
+
+"Oh!  She's gone," said Janet.  "She's gone back to London.  Went
+yesterday."
+
+"Rather sudden, isn't it?"
+
+"Well, she had to go."
+
+"Does she live in London?"  Edwin asked, with an air of indifference.
+
+"She does just now."
+
+"I only ask because I thought from something she said she came from
+Turnhill way."
+
+"Her people do," said Janet.  "Yes, you may say she's a Turnhill girl."
+
+"She seems very fond of poetry," said Edwin.
+
+"You've noticed it!"  Janet's face illuminated the dark.  "You should
+hear her recite!"
+
+"Recites, does she?"
+
+"You'd have heard her that night you were here.  But when she knew you
+were coming, she made us all promise not to ask her."
+
+"Really!" said Edwin.  "But why?  She didn't know me.  She'd never seen
+me."
+
+"Oh!  She might have just seen you in the street.  In fact I believe she
+had.  But that wasn't the reason," Janet laughed.  "It was just that you
+were a stranger.  She's very sensitive, you know."
+
+"Ye-es," he admitted.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+He took leave of Janet, somehow, and went for a walk up to Toft End,
+where the wind blows.  His thoughts were more complex than ever in the
+darkness.  So she had made them all promise not to ask her to recite
+while he was at the Orgreaves'!  She had seen him, previous to that, in
+the street, and had obviously discussed him with Janet...  And then, at
+nearly midnight, she had followed him to the new house!  And on the day
+of the Centenary she had manoeuvred to let Janet and Mr Orgreave go in
+front...  He did not like her.  She was too changeable, too dark, and
+too light...  But it was exciting.  It was flattering.  He saw again and
+again her gesture as she bent to Mr Shushions; and the straightening of
+her spine as she left the garden-porch on the night of his visit to the
+Orgreaves...  Yet he did not like her.  Her sudden departure, however,
+was a disappointment; it was certainly too abrupt...  Probably very
+characteristic of her...  Strange day!  He had been suspected of theft.
+He had stood up to his father.  He had remained away from the shop.  And
+his father's only retort was to give him a rise of half a crown a week!
+
+"The old man must have had a bit of a shock!" he said to himself, grimly
+vain.  "I lay I don't hear another word about that fifty pounds."
+
+Yes, amid his profound resentment, there was some ingenuous vanity at
+the turn which things had taken.  And he was particularly content about
+the rise of half a crown a week, because that relieved him from the most
+difficult of all the resolutions the carrying out of which was to mark
+the beginning of the new life.  It settled the financial question, for
+the present at any rate.  It was not enough, but it was a great deal--
+from his father.  He was ashamed that he could not keep his righteous
+resentment pure from this gross satisfaction at an increase of income.
+The fineness of his nature was thereby hurt.  But the gross satisfaction
+would well up in his mind.
+
+And in the night, with the breeze on his cheek, and the lamps of the
+Five Towns curving out below him, he was not unhappy, despite what he
+had suffered and was still suffering.  He had a tingling consciousness
+of being unusually alive.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Later, in his bedroom, shut in, and safe and independent, with the new
+blind drawn, and the gas fizzing in its opaline globe, he tried to read
+"Don Juan."  He could not.  He was incapable of fixity of mind.  He
+could not follow the sense of a single stanza.  Images of his father and
+of Hilda Lessways mingled with reveries of the insult he had received
+and the triumph he had won, and all the confused wonder of the day and
+evening engaged his thoughts.  He dwelt lovingly on the supreme
+disappointment of his career.  He fancied what he would have been doing,
+and where he would have been then, if his appalling father had not made
+it impossible for him to be an architect.  He pitied himself.  But he
+saw the material of happiness ahead, in the faithful execution of his
+resolves for self-perfecting.  And Hilda had flattered him.  Hilda had
+given him a new conception of himself...  A tiny idea arose in his brain
+that there was perhaps some slight excuse for his father's suspicion of
+him.  After all, he had been secretive.  He trampled on that idea, and
+it arose again.
+
+He slept very heavily, and woke with a headache.  A week elapsed before
+his agitation entirely disappeared, and hence before he could realise
+how extreme that agitation had been.  He was ashamed of having so madly
+and wildly abandoned himself to passion.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.
+
+CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE.
+
+Time passed, like a ship across a distant horizon, which moves but which
+does not seem to move.  One Monday evening Edwin said that he was going
+round to Lane End House.  He had been saying so for weeks, and
+hesitating.  He thoroughly enjoyed going to Lane End House; there was no
+reason why he should not go frequently and regularly, and there were
+several reasons why he should.  Yet his visitings were capricious
+because his nature was irresolute.  That night he went, sticking a hat
+carelessly on his head, and his hands deep into his pockets.  Down the
+slope of Trafalgar Road, in the biting November mist, between the two
+rows of gas-lamps that flickered feebly into the pale gloom, came a long
+straggling band of men who also, to compensate for the absence of
+overcoats, stuck hands deep into pockets, and strode quickly.  With
+reluctance they divided for the passage of the steam-car, and closed
+growling together again on its rear.  The potters were on strike, and a
+Bursley contingent was returning in embittered silence from a mass
+meeting at Hanbridge.  When the sound of the steam-car subsided, as the
+car dipped over the hill-top on its descent towards Hanbridge, nothing
+could be heard but the tramp-tramp of the procession on the road.
+
+Edwin hurried down the side street, and in a moment rang at the front
+door of the Orgreaves'.  He nodded familiarly to the servant who opened,
+stepped on to the mat, and began contorting his legs in order to wipe
+the edge of his boot-soles.
+
+"Quite a stranger, sir!" said Martha, bridling, and respectfully aware
+of her attractiveness for this friend of the house.
+
+"Yes," he laughed.  "Anybody in?"
+
+"Well, sir, I'm afraid Miss Janet and Miss Alicia are out."
+
+"And Mr Tom?"
+
+"Mr Tom's out, sir.  He pretty nearly always is now, sir."  The fact
+was that Tom was engaged to be married, and the servant indicated, by a
+scarcely perceptible motion of the chin, that fiances were and ever
+would be all the same.  "And Mr John and Mr James are out too, sir."
+They also were usually out.  They were both assisting their father in
+business, and sought relief from his gigantic conception of a day's work
+by evening diversions at Hanbridge.  These two former noisy Liberals had
+joined the Hanbridge Conservative Club because it was a club, and had a
+billiard-table that could only be equalled at the Five Towns Hotel at
+Knype.
+
+"And Mr Orgreave?"
+
+"He's working upstairs, sir.  Mrs Orgreave's got her asthma, and so
+he's working upstairs."
+
+"Well, tell them I've called."  Edwin turned to depart.
+
+"I'm sure Mr Orgreave would like to know you're here, sir," said the
+maid firmly.  "If you'll just step into the breakfast-room."  That maid
+did as she chose with visitors for whom she had a fancy.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+She conducted him to the so-called breakfast-room and shut the door on
+him.  It was a small chamber behind the drawing-room, and shabbier than
+the drawing-room.  In earlier days the children had used it for their
+lessons and hobbies.  And now it was used as a sitting-room when mere
+cosiness was demanded by a decimated family.  Edwin stooped down and
+mended the fire.  Then he went to the wall and examined a framed
+water-colour of the old Sytch Pottery, which was signed with his
+initials.  He had done it, aided by a photograph, and by Johnnie
+Orgreave in details of perspective, and by dint of preprandial
+frequentings of the Sytch, as a gift for Mrs Orgreave.  It always
+seemed to him to be rather good.
+
+Then he bent to examine bookshelves.  Like the hall, the drawing-room,
+and the dining-room, this apartment too was plenteously full of
+everything, and littered over with the apparatus of various
+personalities.  Only from habit did Edwin glance at the books.  He knew
+their backs by heart.  And books in quantity no longer intimidated him.
+Despite his grave defects as a keeper of resolves, despite his paltry
+trick of picking up a newspaper or periodical and reading it all
+through, out of sheer vacillation and mental sloth, before starting
+serious perusals, despite the human disinclination which he had to
+bracing himself, and keeping up the tension, in a manner necessary for
+the reading of long and difficult works, and despite sundry ignominious
+backslidings into original sluggishness--still he had accomplished
+certain literary adventures.  He could not enjoy "Don Juan."  Expecting
+from it a voluptuous and daring grandeur, he had found in it nothing
+whatever that even roughly fitted into his idea of what poetry was.  But
+he had had a passion for "Childe Harold," many stanzas of which thrilled
+him again and again, bringing back to his mind what Hilda Lessways had
+said about poetry.  And further, he had a passion for Voltaire.  In
+Voltaire, also, he had been deceived, as in Byron.  He had expected
+something violent, arid, closely argumentative; and he found gaiety,
+grace, and really the funniest jokes.  He could read "Candide" almost
+without a dictionary, and he had intense pride in doing so, and for some
+time afterwards "Candide" and "La Princesse de Babylone," and a few
+similar witty trifles, were the greatest stories in the world for him.
+Only a faint reserve in Tom Orgreave's responsive enthusiasm made him
+cautiously reflect.
+
+He could never be intimate with Tom, because Tom somehow never came out
+from behind his spectacles.  But he had learnt much from him, and in
+especial a familiarity with the less difficult of Bach's preludes and
+fugues, which Tom loved to play.  Edwin knew not even the notes of
+music, and he was not sure that Bach gave him pleasure.  Bach affected
+him strangely.  He would ask for Bach out of a continually renewed
+curiosity, so that he could examine once more and yet again the
+sensations which the music produced; and the habit grew.  As regards the
+fugues, there could be no doubt that, the fugue begun, a desire was
+thereby set up in him for the resolution of the confusing problem
+created in the first few bars, and that he waited, with a pleasant and
+yet a trying anxiety, for the indications of that resolution, and that
+the final reassuring and utterly tranquillising chords gave him deep
+joy.  When he innocently said that he was `glad when the end came of a
+fugue,' all the Orgreaves laughed heartily, but after laughing, Tom said
+that he knew what Edwin meant and quite agreed.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+It was while he was glancing along the untidy and crowded shelves with
+sophisticated eye that the door brusquely opened.  He looked up mildly,
+expecting a face familiar, and saw one that startled him, and heard a
+voice that aroused disconcerting vibrations in himself.  It was Hilda
+Lessways.  She had in her hand a copy of the "Signal."  Over fifteen
+months had gone since their last meeting, but not since he had last
+thought of her.  Her features seemed strange.  His memory of them had
+not been reliable. He had formed an image of her in his mind, and had
+often looked at it, and he now saw that it did not correspond with the
+reality.  The souvenir of their brief intimacy swept back upon him.
+Incredible that she should be there, in front of him; and yet there she
+was!  More than once, after reflecting on her, he had laughed, and said
+lightly to himself: "Well, the chances are I shall never see _her_ again!
+Funny girl!"  But the recollection of her gesture with Mr Shushions
+prevented him from dismissing her out of his head with quite that
+lightness...
+
+"I'm ordered to tell you that Mr Orgreave will be down in a few
+minutes," she said.
+
+"_Hello!_" he exclaimed.  "I'd no idea you were in Bursley!"
+
+"Came to-day!" she replied.
+
+"How odd," he thought, "that I should call like this on the very day she
+comes!"  But he pushed away that instinctive thought with the rational
+thought that such a coincidence could not be regarded as in any way
+significant.
+
+They shook hands in the middle of the room, and she pressed his hand,
+while looking downwards with a smile.  And his mind was suddenly filled
+with the idea that during all those months she had been existing
+somewhere, under the eye of some one, intimate with some one, and
+constantly conducting herself with a familiar freedom that doubtless she
+would not use to him.  And so she was invested, for him, with
+mysteriousness.  His interest in her was renewed in a moment, and in a
+form much more acute than its first form.  Moreover, she presented
+herself to his judgement in a different aspect.  He could scarcely
+comprehend how he had ever deemed her habitual expression to be
+forbidding.  In fact, he could persuade himself now that she was
+beautiful, and even nobly beautiful.  From one extreme he flew to the
+other.  She sat down on an old sofa; he remained standing.  And in the
+midst of a little conversation about Mrs Orgreave's indisposition, and
+the absence of the members of the family (she said she had refused an
+invitation to go with Janet and Alicia to Hillport), she broke the
+thread, and remarked--
+
+"You would have known I was coming if you'd been calling here recently."
+She pushed her feet near the fender, and gazed into the fire.
+
+"Ah!  But you see I haven't been calling recently."
+
+She raised her eyes to his.  "I suppose you've never thought about me
+once since I left!" she fired at him.  An audacious and discomposing
+girl!
+
+"Oh yes, I have," he said weakly.  What could you reply to such
+speeches?  Nevertheless he was flattered.
+
+"Really?  But you've never inquired about me."
+
+"Yes, I have."
+
+"Only once."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"I asked Janet."
+
+"Damn her!" he said to himself, but pleased with her.  And aloud, in a
+tone suddenly firm, "That's nothing to go by."
+
+"What isn't?"
+
+"The number of _times_ I've inquired."  He was blushing.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+In the smallness of the room, sitting as it were at his feet on the
+sofa, surrounded and encaged by a hundred domestic objects and by the
+glow of the fire and the radiance of the gas, she certainly did seem to
+Edwin to be an organism exceedingly mysterious.  He could follow with
+his eye every fold of her black dress, he could trace the waving of her
+hair, and watch the play of light in her eyes.  He might have physically
+hurt her, he might have killed her, she was beneath his hand--and yet
+she was most bafflingly withdrawn, and the essence of her could not be
+touched nor got at.  Why did she challenge him by her singular attitude?
+Why was she always saying such queer things to him?  No other girl (he
+thought, in the simplicity of his inexperience) would ever talk as she
+talked.  He wanted to test her by being rude to her.  "Damn her!" he
+said to himself again.  "Supposing I took hold of her and kissed her--I
+wonder what sort of a face she'd pull then!"  (And a moment ago he had
+been appraising her as nobly beautiful!  A moment ago he had been
+dwelling on the lovely compassion of her gesture with Mr Shushions!)
+This quality of daring and naughty enterprise had never before shown
+itself in Edwin, and he was surprised to discover in himself such
+impulses.  But then the girl was so provocative.  And somehow the sight
+of the girl delivered him from an excessive fear of consequences.  He
+said to himself, "I'll do something or I'll say something, before I
+leave her to-night, just to show her!"  He screwed up his resolution to
+the point of registering a private oath that he would indeed do or say
+something.  Without a solemn oath he could not rely upon his valour.  He
+knew that whatever he said or did in the nature of a bold advance would
+be accomplished clumsily.  He knew that it would be unpleasant.  He knew
+that inaction suited much better his instinct for tranquillity.  No
+matter!  All that was naught.  She had challenged, and he had to
+respond.  Besides, she allured...  And, after her scene with him in the
+porch of the new house, had he not the right? ...  A girl who had
+behaved as she did that night cannot effectively contradict herself!
+
+"I was just reading about this strike," she said, rustling the
+newspaper.
+
+"You've soon got into local politics."
+
+"Well," she said, "I saw a lot of the men as we were driving from the
+station.  I should think I saw two thousand of them.  So of course I was
+interested.  I made Mr Orgreave tell me all about it.  Will they win?"
+
+"It depends on the weather."  He smiled.
+
+She remained silent, and grave.  "I see!" she said, leaning her chin on
+her hand.  At her tone he ceased smiling.  She said "I see," and she
+actually had seen.
+
+"You see," he repeated.  "If it was June instead of November!  But then
+it isn't June.  Wages are settled every year in November.  So if there
+is to be a strike it can only begin in November."
+
+"But didn't the men ask for the time of year to be changed?"
+
+"Yes," he said.  "But you don't suppose the masters were going to agree
+to that, do you?"  He sneered masculinely.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because it gives them such a pull."
+
+"What a shame!"  Hilda exclaimed passionately.  "And what a shame it is
+that the masters want to make the wages depend on selling prices!  Can't
+they see that selling prices ought to depend on wages?"
+
+Edwin said nothing.  She had knocked suddenly out of his head all ideas
+of flirting, and he was trying to reassemble them.
+
+"I suppose you're like all the rest?" she questioned gloomily.
+
+"How like all the rest?"
+
+"Against the men.  Mr Orgreave is, and he says your father is very
+strongly against them."
+
+"Look here," said Edwin, with an air of resentment as to which he
+himself could not have decided whether it was assumed or genuine, "what
+earthly right have you to suppose that I'm like all the rest?"
+
+"I'm very sorry," she surrendered.  "I knew all the time you weren't."
+With her face still bent downwards, she looked up at him, smiling sadly,
+smiling roguishly.
+
+"Father's against them," he proceeded, somewhat deflated.  And he
+thought of all his father's violent invective, and of Maggie's bland
+acceptance of the assumption that workmen on strike were rascals--how
+different the excellent simple Maggie from this feverish creature on the
+sofa!  "Father's against them, and most people are, because they broke
+the last arbitration award.  But I'm not my father.  If you ask me, I'll
+tell you what I think--workmen on strike are always in the right; at
+bottom I mean.  You've only got to look at them in a crowd together.
+They don't starve themselves for fun."
+
+He was not sure if he was convinced of the truth of these statements;
+but she drew them out of him by her strange power.  And when he had
+uttered them, they appeared fine to him.
+
+"What does your father say to that?"
+
+"Oh!" said Edwin uneasily.  "Him--and me--we don't argue about these
+things."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Well, we don't."
+
+"You aren't ashamed of your own opinions, are you?" she demanded, with a
+hint in her voice that she was ready to be scornful.
+
+"You know all the time I'm not."  He repeated the phrase of her previous
+confession with a certain acrimonious emphasis.  "Don't you?" he added
+curtly.
+
+She remained silent.
+
+"Don't you?" he said more loudly.  And as she offered no reply, he went
+on, marvelling at what was coming out of his mouth.  "I'll tell you what
+I am ashamed of.  I'm ashamed of seeing my father lose his temper.  So
+you know!"
+
+She said--
+
+"I never met anybody like you before.  No, never!"
+
+At this he really was astounded, and most exquisitely flattered.
+
+"I might say the same of you," he replied, sticking his chin out.
+
+"Oh no!" she said.  "I'm nothing."
+
+The fact was that he could not foretell their conversation even ten
+seconds in advance.  It was full of the completely unexpected.  He
+thought to himself, "You never know what a girl like that will say
+next."  But what would _he_ say next?
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+They were interrupted by Osmond Orgreave, with his, "Well, Edwin,"
+jolly, welcoming, and yet slightly quizzical.  Edwin could not look him
+in the face without feeling self-conscious.  Nor dared he glance at
+Hilda to see what her demeanour was like under the good-natured scrutiny
+of her friend's father.
+
+"We thought you'd forgotten us," said Mr Orgreave.  "But that's always
+the way with neighbours."  He turned to Hilda.  "It's true," he
+continued, jerking his head at Edwin.  "He scarcely ever comes to see
+us, except when you're here."
+
+"Steady on!"  Edwin murmured.  "Steady on, Mr Orgreave!"  And hastily
+he asked a question about Mrs Orgreave's asthma; and from that the
+conversation passed to the doings of the various absent members of the
+family.
+
+"You've been working, as usual, I suppose," said Edwin.
+
+"Working!" laughed Mr Orgreave.  "I've done what I could, with Hilda
+there!  Instead of going up to Hillport with Janet, she would stop here
+and chatter about strikes."
+
+Hilda smiled at him benevolently as at one to whom she permitted
+everything.
+
+"Mr Clayhanger agrees with me," she said.
+
+"Oh!  You needn't tell me!" protested Mr Orgreave.  "I could see you
+were as thick as thieves over it."  He looked at Edwin.  "Has she told
+you she wants to go over a printing works?"
+
+"No," said Edwin.  "But I shall be very pleased to show her over ours,
+any time."
+
+She made no observation.
+
+"Look here," said Edwin suddenly, "I must be off.  I only slipped in for
+a minute, really."  He did not know why he said this, for his greatest
+wish was to probe more deeply into the tantalising psychology of Hilda
+Lessways.  His tongue, however, had said it, and his tongue reiterated
+it when Mr Orgreave urged that Janet and Alicia would be back soon and
+that food would then be partaken of.  He would not stay.  Desiring to
+stay, he would not.  He wished to be alone, to think.  Clearly Hilda had
+been talking about him to Mr Orgreave, and to Janet.  Did she discuss
+him and his affairs with everybody?
+
+Nor would he, in response to Mr Orgreave's suggestion, promise
+definitely to call again on the next evening.  He said he would try.
+Hilda took leave of him nonchalantly.  He departed.
+
+And as he made the half-circuit of the misty lawn, on his way to the
+gates, he muttered in his heart, where even he himself could scarcely
+hear: "I swore I'd do something, and I haven't.  Well, of course, when
+she talked seriously like that, what could I do?"  But he was disgusted
+with himself and ashamed of his namby-pambiness.
+
+He strolled thoughtfully up Oak Street, and down Trafalgar Road; and
+when he was near home, another wayfarer saw him face right about and go
+up Trafalgar Road and disappear at the corner of Oak Street.
+
+The Orgreave servant was surprised to see him at the front door again
+when she answered a discreet ring.
+
+"I wish you'd tell Miss Lessways I want to speak to her a moment, will
+you?"
+
+"Miss Lessways?"
+
+"Yes."  What an adventure!
+
+"Certainly, sir.  Will you come in?"  She shut the door.
+
+"Ask her to come here," he said, smiling with deliberate confidential
+persuasiveness.  She nodded, with a brighter smile.
+
+The servant vanished, and Hilda came.  She was as red as fire.  He began
+hurriedly.
+
+"When will you come to look over our works?  To-morrow?  I should like
+you to come."  He used a tone that said: "Now don't let's have any
+nonsense!  You know you want to come."
+
+She frowned frankly.  There they were in the hall, like a couple of
+conspirators, but she was frowning; she would not meet him half-way.  He
+wished he had not permitted himself this caprice.  What importance had a
+private oath?  He felt ridiculous.
+
+"What time?" she demanded, and in an instant transformed his disgust
+into delight.
+
+"Any time."  His heart was beating with expectation.
+
+"Oh no!  You must fix the time."
+
+"Well, after tea.  Say between half-past six and a quarter to seven.
+That do?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Good," he murmured.  "That's all!  Thanks.  Good-night!"
+
+He hastened away, with a delicate photograph of the palm of her hand
+printed in minute sensations on the palm of his.
+
+"I did it, anyhow!" he muttered loudly, in his heart.  At any rate he
+was not shamed.  At any rate he was a man.  The man's face was burning,
+and the damp noxious chill of the night only caressed him agreeably.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.
+
+CURIOSITY.
+
+He was afraid that, from some obscure motive of propriety or
+self-protection, she would bring Janet with her, or perhaps Alicia.  On
+the other hand, he was afraid that she would come alone.  That she
+should come alone seemed to him, in spite of his reason, too brazen.
+Moreover, if she came alone would he be equal to the situation?  Would
+he be able to carry the thing off in a manner adequate?  He lacked
+confidence.  He desired the moment of her arrival, and yet he feared it.
+His heart and his brain were all confused together in a turmoil of
+emotion which he could not analyse nor define.
+
+He was in love.  Love had caught him, and had affected his vision so
+that he no longer saw any phenomenon as it actually was; neither
+himself, nor Hilda, nor the circumstances which were uniting them.  He
+could not follow a train of thought.  He could not remain of one opinion
+nor in one mind.  Within himself he was perpetually discussing Hilda,
+and her attitude.  She was marvellous!  But was she?  She admired him!
+But did she?  She had shown cunning!  But was it not simplicity?  He did
+not even feel sure whether he liked her.  He tried to remember what she
+looked like, and he positively could not.  The one matter upon which he
+could be sure was that his curiosity was hotly engaged.  If he had had
+to state the case in words to another he would not have gone further
+than the word `curiosity.'  He had no notion that he was in love.  He
+did not know what love was; he had not had sufficient opportunity of
+learning.  Nevertheless the processes of love were at work within him.
+Silently and magically, by the force of desire and of pride, the
+refracting glass was being specially ground which would enable him,
+which would compel him, to see an ideal Hilda when he gazed at the real
+Hilda.  He would not see the real Hilda any more unless some cataclysm
+should shatter the glass.  And he might be likened to a prisoner on whom
+the gate of freedom is shut for ever, or to a stricken sufferer of whom
+it is known that he can never rise again and go forth into the fields.
+He was as somebody to whom the irrevocable had happened.  And he knew it
+not.  None knew.  None guessed.  All day he went his ways, striving to
+conceal the whirring preoccupation of his curiosity (a curiosity which
+he thought showed a fine masculine dash), and succeeded fairly well.
+The excellent, simple Maggie alone remarked in secret that he was
+slightly nervous and unnatural.  But even she, with all her excellent
+simplicity, did not divine his victimhood.
+
+At six o'clock he was back at the shop from his tea.  It was a wet,
+chill night.  On the previous evening he had caught cold, and he was
+beginning to sneeze.  He said to himself that Hilda could not be
+expected to come on such a night.  But he expected her.  When the shop
+clock showed half-past six, he glanced at his watch, which also showed
+half-past six.  Now at any instant she might arrive.  The shop door
+opened, and simultaneously his heart ceased to beat.  But the person who
+came in, puffing and snorting, was his father, who stood within the shop
+while shaking his soaked umbrella over the exterior porch.  The draught
+from the shiny dark street and square struck cold, and Edwin
+responsively sneezed; and Darius Clayhanger upbraided him for not having
+worn his overcoat, and he replied with foolish unconvincingness that he
+had got a cold, that it was nothing.  Darius grunted his way into the
+cubicle.  Edwin remained in busy idleness at the right-hand counter;
+Stifford was tidying the contents of drawers behind the fancy-counter.
+And the fizzing gas-burners, inevitable accompaniment of night at the
+period, kept watch above.  Under the heat of the stove, the damp marks
+of Darius Clayhanger's entrance disappeared more quickly than the
+minutes ran.  It grew almost impossible for Edwin to pass the time.  At
+moments when his father was not stirring in the cubicle, and Stifford
+happened to be in repose, he could hear the ticking of the clock, which
+he could not remember ever having heard before, except when he mounted
+the steps to wind it.
+
+At a quarter to seven he said to himself that he gave up hope, while
+pretending that he never had hoped, and that Hilda's presence was
+indifferent to him.  If she came not that day she would probably come
+some other day.  What could it matter?  He was very unhappy.  He said to
+himself that he should have a long night's reading, but the prospect of
+reading had no savour.  He said: "No, I shan't go in to see them
+to-night, I shall stay in and nurse my cold, and read."  This was mere
+futile bravado, for the impartial spectator in him, though far less
+clear-sighted and judicial now than formerly, foresaw with certainty
+that if Hilda did not come he would call at the Orgreaves'.  At five
+minutes to seven he was miserable: he had decided to hope until five
+minutes to seven.  He made it seven in despair.  Then there were signs
+of a figure behind the misty glass of the door.  The door opened.  It
+could not be she!  Impossible that it should be she!  But it was she;
+she had the air of being a miracle.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+His feelings were complex and contradictory, flitting about and crossing
+each other in his mind with astounding rapidity.  He wished she had not
+come, because his father was there, and the thought of his father would
+intensify his self-consciousness.  He wondered why he should care
+whether she came or not; after all she was only a young woman who wanted
+to see a printing works; at best she was not so agreeable as Janet, at
+worst she was appalling, and moreover he knew nothing about her.  He had
+a glimpse of her face as, with a little tightening of the lips, she shut
+her umbrella.  What was there in that face judged impartially?  Why
+should he be to so absurd a degree curious about her?  He thought how
+exquisitely delicious it would be to be walking with her by the shore of
+a lovely lake on a summer evening, pale hills in the distance.  He had
+this momentary vision by reason of a coloured print of the "Silver
+Strand" of a Scottish loch which was leaning in a gilt frame against the
+artists' materials cabinet and was marked twelve-and-six.  During the
+day he had imagined himself with her in all kinds of beautiful spots and
+situations.  But the chief of his sensations was one of exquisite
+relief...  She had come.  He could wreak his hungry curiosity upon her.
+
+Yes, she was alone.  No Janet!  No Alicia!  How had she managed it?
+What had she said to the Orgreaves?  That she should have come alone,
+and through the November rain, in the night, affected him deeply.  It
+gave her the quality of a heroine of high adventure.  It was as though
+she had set sail unaided, in a frail skiff, on a formidable ocean, to
+meet him.  It was inexpressibly romantic and touching.  She came towards
+him, her face sedately composed.  She wore a small hat, a veil, and a
+mackintosh, and black gloves that were splashed with wet.  Certainly she
+was a practical woman.  She had said she would come, and she had come,
+sensibly, but how charmingly, protected against the shocking conditions
+of the journey.  There is naught charming in a mackintosh.  And yet
+there was, in this mackintosh! ...  Something in the contrast between
+its harshness and her fragility...  The veil was supremely charming.
+She had half lifted it, exposing her mouth; the upper part of her
+flushed face was caged behind the bars of the veil; behind those bars
+her eyes mysteriously gleamed...  Spanish! ...  No exaggeration in all
+this!  He felt every bit of it honestly, as he stood at the counter in
+thrilled expectancy.  By virtue of his impassioned curiosity, the
+terraces of Granada and the mantillas of _senoritas_ were not more
+romantic than he had made his father's shop and her dripping mackintosh.
+He tried to see her afresh; he tried to see her as though he had never
+seen her before; he tried desperately once again to comprehend what it
+was in her that piqued him.  And he could not.  He fell back from the
+attempt.  Was she the most wondrous?  Or was she commonplace?  Was she
+deceiving him?  Or did he alone possess the true insight? ...  Useless!
+He was baffled.  Far from piercing her soul, he could scarcely even see
+her at all; that is, with intelligence.  And it was always so when he
+was with her: he was in a dream, a vapour; he had no helm, his faculties
+were not under control.  She robbed him of judgement.
+
+And then the clear tones of her voice fell on the listening shop: "Good
+evening, Mr Clayhanger.  What a night, isn't it?  I hope I'm not too
+late."
+
+Firm, business-like syllables...  And she straightened her shoulders.
+He suffered.  He was not happy.  Whatever his feelings, he was not happy
+in that instant.  He was not happy because he was wrung between hope and
+fear, alike divine.  But he would not have exchanged his sensations for
+the extremest felicity of any other person.
+
+They shook hands.  He suggested that she should remove her mackintosh.
+She consented.  He had no idea that the effect of the removal of the
+mackintosh would be so startling as it was.  She stood intimately
+revealed in her frock.  The mackintosh was formal and defensive; the
+frock was intimate and acquiescent.
+
+Darius blundered out of the cubicle and Edwin had a dreadful moment
+introducing her to Darius and explaining their purpose.  Why had he not
+prepared the ground in advance?  His pusillanimous cowardice again!
+However, the directing finger of God sent a customer into the shop, and
+Edwin escaped with his Hilda through the aperture in the counter.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+The rickety building at the back of the premises, which was still the
+main theatre of printing activities, was empty save for Big James, the
+hour of seven being past.  Big James was just beginning to roll his
+apron round his waist, in preparation for departure.  This happened to
+be one of the habits of his advancing age.  Up till a year or two
+previously he would have taken off his apron and left it in the
+workshop; but now he could not confide it to the workshop; he must carry
+it about him until he reached home and a place of safety for it.  When
+he saw Edwin and a young lady appear in the doorway, he let the apron
+fall over his knees again.  As the day was only the second of the
+industrial week, the apron was almost clean; and even the office towel,
+which hung on a roller somewhat conspicuously near the door, was not
+offensive.  A single gas jet burned.  The workshop was in the languor of
+repose after toil which had officially commenced at 8 a.m.
+
+The perfection of Big James's attitude, an attitude symbolised by the
+letting down of his apron, helped to put Edwin at ease in the original
+and difficult circumstances.  "Good evening, Mr Edwin.  Good evening,
+miss," was all that the man actually said with his tongue, but the
+formality of his majestic gestures indicated in the most dignified way
+his recognition of a sharp difference of class and his exact
+comprehension of his own role in the affair.  He stood waiting: he had
+been about to depart, but he was entirely at the disposal of the
+company.
+
+"This is Mr Yarlett, our foreman," said Edwin, and to Big James: "Miss
+Lessways has just come to look round."
+
+Hilda smiled.  Big James suavely nodded his head.
+
+"Here are some of the types," said Edwin, because a big case was the
+object nearest him, and he glanced at Big James.
+
+In a moment the foreman was explaining to Hilda, in his superb voice,
+the use of the composing-stick, and he accompanied the theory by a
+beautiful exposition of the practice; Edwin could stand aside and watch.
+Hilda listened and looked with an extraordinary air of sympathetic
+interest.  And she was so serious, so adult.  But it was the quality of
+sympathy, he thought, that was her finest, her most attractive.  It was
+either that or her proud independence, as of a person not accustomed to
+bend to the will of others or to go to others for advice.  He could not
+be sure...  No!  Her finest quality was her mystery.  Even now, as he
+gazed at her comfortably, she baffled him; all her exquisite little
+movements and intonations baffled him.  Of one thing, however, he was
+convinced: that she was fundamentally different from other women.  There
+was she, and there was the rest of the sex.
+
+For appearance's sake he threw in short phrases now and then, to which
+Big James, by his mere deportment, gave the importance of the words of a
+master.
+
+"I suppose you printers did something special among yourselves to
+celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the invention of printing?"
+said Hilda suddenly, glancing from Edwin to Big James.  And Big James
+and Edwin glanced at one another.  Neither had ever heard of the
+four-hundredth anniversary of the invention of printing.  In a couple of
+seconds Big James's downcast eye had made it clear that he regarded this
+portion of the episode as master's business.
+
+"When was that?--let me see," Edwin foolishly blurted out.
+
+"Oh!  Some years ago.  Two or three--perhaps four."
+
+"I'm afraid we didn't," said Edwin, smiling.
+
+"Oh!" said Hilda slowly.  "I think they made a great fuss of it in
+London."  She relented somewhat.  "I don't really know much about it.
+But the other day I happened to be reading the new history of printing,
+you know--Cranswick's, isn't it?"
+
+"Oh yes!"  Edwin concurred, though he had never heard of Cranswick's new
+history of printing either.
+
+He knew that he was not emerging creditably from this portion of the
+episode.  But he did not care.  The whole of his body went hot and then
+cold as his mind presented the simple question: "Why had she been
+reading the history of printing?"  Could the reason be any other than
+her interest in himself?  Or was she a prodigy among young women, who
+read histories of everything in addition to being passionate about
+verse?  He said that it was ridiculous to suppose that she would read a
+history of printing solely from interest in himself.  Nevertheless he
+was madly happy for a few moments, and as it were staggered with joy.
+He decided to read a history of printing at once.
+
+Big James came to the end of his expositions of the craft.  The stove
+was dying out, and the steam-boiler cold.  Big James regretted that the
+larger machines could not be seen in action, and that the place was
+getting chilly.  Edwin began to name various objects that were lying
+about, with their functions, but it was evident that the interest of the
+workshop was now nearly exhausted.  Big James suggested that if Miss
+could make it convenient to call, say, on the next afternoon, she could
+see the large new Columbia in motion.  Edwin seized the idea and
+beautified it.  And on this he wavered towards the door, and she
+followed, and Big James in dignity bowed them forth to the elevated
+porch, and began to rewind his flowing apron once more.  They pattered
+down the dark steps (now protected with felt roofing) and ran across six
+feet of exposed yard into what had once been Mrs Nixon's holy kitchen.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+After glancing at sundry minor workshops in delicious propinquity and
+solitude, they mounted to the first floor, where there was an
+account-book ruling and binding shop: the site of the old sitting-room
+and the girls' bedroom.  In each chamber Edwin had to light a gas, and
+the corridors and stairways were traversed by the ray of matches.  It
+was excitingly intricate.  Then they went to the attics, because Edwin
+was determined that she should see all.  There he found a forgotten
+candle.
+
+"I used to work here," he said, holding high the candle.  "There was no
+other place for me to work in."
+
+They were in his old work attic, now piled with stocks of paper wrapped
+up in posters.
+
+"Work?  What sort of work?"
+
+"Well--reading, drawing, you know...  At that very table."  To be sure,
+there the very table was, thick with dust!  It had been too rickety to
+deserve removal to the heights of Bleakridge.  He was touched by the
+sight of the table now, though he saw it at least once every week.  His
+existence at the corner of Duck Square seemed now to have been beautiful
+and sad, seemed to be far off and historic.  And the attic seemed
+unhappy in its present humiliation.
+
+"But there's no fireplace," murmured Hilda.
+
+"I know," said Edwin.
+
+"But how did you do in winter?"
+
+"I did without."
+
+He had in fact been less of a martyr than those three telling words
+would indicate.  Nevertheless it appeared to him that he really had been
+a martyr; and he was glad.  He could feel her sympathy and her quiet
+admiration vibrating through the air towards him.  Had she not said that
+she had never met anybody like him?  He turned and looked at her.  Her
+eyes glittered in the candle-light with tears too proud to fall.  Solemn
+and exquisite bliss!  Profound anxiety and apprehension!  He was an
+arena where all the sensations of which a human being is capable
+struggled in blind confusion.
+
+Afterwards, he could recall her visit only in fragments.  The next
+fragment that he recollected was the last.  She stood outside the door
+in her mackintosh.  The rain had ceased.  She was going.  Behind them he
+could feel his father in the cubicle, and Stifford arranging the
+toilette of the shop for the night.
+
+"Please don't come out here," she enjoined, half in entreaty, half in
+command.  Her solicitude thrilled him.  He was on the step, she was on
+the pavement: so that he looked down at her, with the sodden,
+light-reflecting slope of Duck Square for a background to her.
+
+"Oh!  I'm all right.  Well, you'll come to-morrow afternoon?"
+
+"No, you aren't all right.  You've got a cold and you'll make it worse,
+and this isn't the end of winter, it's the beginning; I think you're
+very liable to colds."
+
+"N-no!" he said, enchanted, beside himself in an ecstasy of pleasure.
+"I shall expect you to-morrow about three."
+
+"Thank you," she said simply.  "I'll come."
+
+They shook hands.
+
+"Now do go in!"
+
+She vanished round the corner.
+
+All the evening he neither read nor spoke.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER NINETEEN.
+
+A CATASTROPHE.
+
+At half-past two on the following afternoon he was waiting for the
+future in order to recommence living.  During this period, to a greater
+extent even than the average individual in average circumstances, he was
+incapable of living in the present.  Continually he looked either
+forward or back.  All that he had achieved, or that had been achieved
+for him--the new house with its brightness and its apparatus of luxury,
+his books, his learning, his friends, his experience: not long since
+regarded by him as the precious materials of happiness--all had become
+negligible trifles, nothings, devoid of import.  The sole condition
+precedent to a tolerable existence was now to have sight and speech of
+Hilda Lessways.  He was intensely unhappy in the long stretches of time
+which separated one contact with her from the next.  And in the brief
+moments of their companionship he was far too distraught, too
+apprehensive, too desirous, too puzzled, to be able to call himself
+happy.  Seeing her apparently did naught to assuage the pain of his
+curiosity about her--not his curiosity concerning the details of her
+life and of her person, for these scarcely interested him, but his
+curiosity concerning the very essence of her being.  At seven o'clock on
+the previous day, he had esteemed her visit as possessing a decisive
+importance which covered the whole field of his wishes.  The visit had
+occurred, and he was not a whit advanced; indeed he had retrograded, for
+he was less content and more confused, and more preoccupied.  The
+medicine had aggravated the disease.  Nevertheless, he awaited a second
+dose of it in the undestroyed illusion of its curative property.
+
+In the interval he had behaved like a very sensible man.  Without
+appetite, he had still forced himself to eat, lest his relatives should
+suspect.  Short of sleep, he had been careful to avoid yawning at
+breakfast, and had spoken in a casual tone of Hilda's visit.  He had
+even said to his father: "I suppose the big Columbia will be running off
+those overseer notices this afternoon?"  And on the old man asking why
+he was thus interested, he had answered: "Because that girl, Miss
+Lessways, thought of coming down to see it.  For some reason or other
+she's very keen on printing, and as she's such a friend of the
+Orgreaves--"
+
+Nobody, he considered, could have done that better than he had done it.
+
+And now that girl, Miss Lessways, was nearly due.  He stood behind the
+counter again, waiting, waiting.  He could not apply himself to
+anything; he could scarcely wait.  He was in a state that approached
+fever, if not agony.  To exist from half-past two to three o'clock
+equalled in anguish the dreadful inquietude that comes before a surgical
+operation.
+
+He said to himself: "If I keep on like this I shall be in love with her
+one of these days."  He would not and could not believe that he already
+was in love with her, though the possibility presented itself to him.
+"No," he said, "you don't fall in love in a couple of days.  You mustn't
+tell me--" in a wise, superior, slightly scornful manner.  "I dare say
+there's nothing in it at all," he said uncertainly, after having
+strongly denied throughout that there was anything in it.
+
+The recollection of his original antipathy to Hilda troubled him.  She
+was the same girl.  She was the same girl who had followed him at night
+into his father's garden and merited his disdain.  She was the same girl
+who had been so unpleasant, so sharp, so rudely disconcerting in her
+behaviour.  And he dared not say that she had altered.  And yet now he
+could not get her out of his head.  And although he would not admit that
+he constantly admired her, he did admit that there were moments when he
+admired her passionately and deemed her unique and above all women.
+Whence the change in himself?  How to justify it?  The problem was
+insoluble, for he was intellectually too honest to say lightly that
+originally he had been mistaken.
+
+He did not pretend to solve the problem.  He looked at it with
+perturbation, and left it.  The consoling thing was that the Orgreaves
+had always expressed high esteem for Hilda.  He leaned on the Orgreaves.
+
+He wondered how the affair would end?  It could not indefinitely
+continue on its present footing.  How indeed would it end?  Marriage...
+He apologised to himself for the thought...  But just for the sake of
+argument ... supposing... well, supposing the affair went so far that
+one day he told her ... men did such things, young men!  No! ...
+Besides, she wouldn't...  It was absurd...  No such idea really! ...
+And then the frightful worry there would be with his father about money,
+and so on...  And the telling of Clara, and of everybody.  No!  He
+simply could not imagine himself married, or about to be married.
+Marriage might happen to other young men, but not to him.  His case was
+special, somehow...  He shrank from such formidable enterprises.  The
+mere notion of them made him tremble.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+He brushed all that away impatiently, pettishly.  The intense and
+terrible longing for her arrival persisted.  It was now twenty-five to
+three.  His father would be down soon from his after-dinner nap.
+Suddenly the door opened, and he saw the Orgreaves' servant, with a
+cloak over her white apron, and hands red with cold.  And also he saw
+disaster like a ghostly figure following her.  His heart sickeningly
+sank.  Martha smiled and gave him a note, which he smilingly accepted.
+"Miss Lessways asked me to come down with this," she said
+confidentially.  She was a little breathless, and she had absolutely the
+manner of a singing chambermaid in light opera.  He opened the note,
+which said: "Dear Mr Clayhanger, so sorry I can't come to-day.--Yours,
+H.L."  Nothing else.  It was scrawled.  "It's all right, thanks," he
+said, with an even brighter smile to the messenger, who nodded and
+departed.
+
+It all occurred in an instant.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+A catastrophe!  He suffered then as he had never suffered.
+
+His was no state approaching agony; it was agony itself, black and
+awful.  She was not coming.  She had not troubled herself to give a
+reason, nor to offer an excuse.  She merely was not coming.  She had
+showed no consideration for his feelings.  It had not happened to her to
+reflect that she would be causing him disappointment.  Disappointment
+was too mild a word.  He had been building a marvellously beautiful
+castle, and with a thoughtless, careless stroke of the pen she had
+annihilated all his labour; she had almost annihilated him.  Surely she
+owed him some reason, some explanation!  Had she the right to play fast
+and loose with him like that?  "What a shame!" he sobbed violently in
+his heart, with an excessive and righteous resentment.  He was innocent;
+he was blameless; and she tortured him thus!  He supposed that all women
+were like her...  "What a shame!"  He pitied himself for a victim.  And
+there was no glint of hope anywhere.  In half an hour he would have been
+near her, with her, guiding her to the workshop, discussing the machine
+with her; and savouring her uniqueness; feasting on her delicious and
+adorable personality! ...  `So sorry I can't come to-day!'  "She doesn't
+understand.  She can't understand!" he said to himself.  "No woman,
+however cruel, would ever knowingly be so cruel as she has been.  It
+isn't possible!"  Then he sought excuse for her, and then he cast the
+excuse away angrily.  She was not coming.  There was no ground beneath
+his feet.  He was so exquisitely miserable that he could not face a
+future of even ten hours ahead.  He could not look at what his existence
+would be till bedtime.  The blow had deprived him of all force, all
+courage.  It was a wanton blow.  He wished savagely that he had never
+seen her...  No! no!  He could not call on the Orgreaves that night.  He
+could not do it.  She might be out.  And then...
+
+His father entered, and began to grumble.  Both Edwin and Maggie had
+known since the beginning of dinner that Darius was quaking on the
+precipice of a bad bilious attack.  Edwin listened to the rising storm
+of words.  He had to resume the thread of his daily life.  He knew what
+affliction was.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TWENTY.
+
+THE MAN.
+
+But he was young.  Indeed to men of fifty, men just twice his age, he
+seemed a mere boy and incapable of grief.  He was so slim, and his limbs
+were so loose, and his hair so fair, and his gestures often so naive,
+that few of the mature people who saw him daily striding up and down
+Trafalgar Road could have believed him to be acquainted with sorrow like
+their sorrows.  The next morning, as it were in justification of these
+maturer people, his youth arose and fought with the malady in him, and,
+if it did not conquer, it was not defeated.  On the previous night,
+after hours of hesitation, he had suddenly walked forth and gone down
+Oak Street, and pushed open the garden gates of the Orgreaves, and gazed
+at the facade of the house--not at her window, because that was at the
+side--and it was all dark.  The Orgreaves had gone to bed: he had
+expected it.  Even this perfectly futile reconnaissance had calmed him.
+While dressing in the bleak sunrise he had looked at the oval lawn of
+the Orgreaves' garden, and had seen Johnnie idly kicking a football on
+it.  Johnnie had probably spent the evening with her; and it was nothing
+to Johnnie!  She was there, somewhere between him and Johnnie, within
+fifty yards of both of them, mysterious and withdrawn as ever, busy at
+something or other.  And it was naught to Johnnie!  By the thought of
+all this the woe in him was strengthened and embittered.  Nevertheless
+his youth, aided by the astringent quality of the clear dawn, still
+struggled sturdily against it.  And he ate six times more breakfast than
+his suffering and insupportable father.
+
+At half-past one--it was Thursday, and the shop closed at two o'clock--
+he had put on courage like a garment, and decided that he would see her
+that afternoon or night, `or perish in the attempt.'  And as the
+remembered phrase of the Sunday passed through his mind, he inwardly
+smiled and thought of school; and felt old and sure.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+At five minutes to two, as he stood behind the eternal counter in his
+eternal dream, he had the inexpressible and delectable shock of seeing
+her.  He was shot by the vision of her as by a bullet.  She came in,
+hurried and preoccupied, apparently full of purpose.
+
+"Have you got a Bradshaw?" she inquired, after the briefest greeting,
+gazing at him across the counter through her veil, as though imploring
+him for Bradshaw.
+
+"I'm afraid we haven't one left," he said.  "You see it's getting on for
+the end of the month.  I could-- No, I suppose you want it at once?"
+
+"I want it now," she replied.  "I'm going to London by the six express,
+and what I want to know is whether I can get on to Brighton to-night.
+They actually haven't a Bradshaw up there," half in scorn and half in
+levity, "and they said you'd probably have one here.  So I ran down."
+
+"They'd be certain to have one at the Tiger," he murmured, reflecting.
+
+"The Tiger!"  Evidently she did not care for the idea of the Tiger.
+"What about the railway station?"
+
+"Yes, or the railway station.  I'll go up there with you now if you
+like, and find out for you.  I know the head porter.  We're just
+closing.  Father's at home.  He's not very well."
+
+She thanked him, relief in her voice.
+
+In a minute he had put his hat and coat on and given instructions to
+Stifford, and he was climbing Duck Bank with Hilda at his side.  He had
+forgiven her.  Nay, he had forgotten her crime.  The disaster, with all
+its despair, was sponged clean from his mind like writing off a slate,
+and as rapidly.  It was effaced.  He tried to collect his faculties and
+savour the new sensations.  But he could not.  Within him all was
+incoherent, wild, and distracting.  Five minutes earlier, and he could
+not have conceived the bliss of walking with her to the station.  Now he
+was walking with her to the station; and assuredly it was bliss, and yet
+he did not fully taste it.  Though he would not have loosed her for a
+million pounds, her presence gave an even crueller edge to his anxiety
+and apprehension.  London!  Brighton!  Would she be that night in
+Brighton?  He felt helpless, and desperate.  And beneath all this was
+the throbbing of a strange, bitter joy.  She asked about his cold and
+about his father's indisposition.  She said nothing of her failure to
+appear on the previous day, and he knew not how to introduce it neatly:
+he was not in control of his intelligence.
+
+They passed Snaggs' Theatre, and from its green, wooden walls came the
+obscure sound of humanity in emotion.  Before the mean and shabby
+portals stood a small crowd of ragged urchins.  Posters printed by
+Darius Clayhanger made white squares on the front.
+
+"It's a meeting of the men," said Edwin.
+
+"They're losing, aren't they?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.  "I expect they are."
+
+She asked what the building was, and he explained.
+
+"They used to call it the Blood Tub," he said.
+
+She shivered.  "The Blood Tub?"
+
+"Yes.  Melodrama and murder and gore--you know."
+
+"How horrible!" she exclaimed.  "Why are people like that in the Five
+Towns?"
+
+"It's our form of poetry, I suppose," he muttered, smiling at the
+pavement, which was surprisingly dry and clean in the feeble sunshine.
+
+"I suppose it _is!_" she agreed heartily, after a pause.
+
+"But you belong to the Five Towns, don't you?" he asked.
+
+"Oh yes!  I used to."
+
+At the station the name of Bradshaw appeared to be quite unknown.  But
+Hilda's urgency impelled them upwards from the head porter to the ticket
+clerk, and from the ticket clerk to the stationmaster; and at length
+they discovered, in a stuffy stove-heated room with a fine view of a
+shawd-ruck and a pithead, that on Thursday evenings there was a train
+from Victoria to Brighton at eleven-thirty.  Hilda seemed to sigh
+relief, and her demeanour changed.  But Edwin's uneasiness was only
+intensified.  Brighton, which he had never seen, was in another
+hemisphere for him.  It was mysterious, like her.  It was part of her
+mystery.  What could he do?  His curse was that he had no initiative.
+Without her relentless force, he would never have penetrated even as far
+as the stuffy room where the unique Bradshaw lay.  It was she who had
+taken him to the station, not he her.  How could he hold her back from
+Brighton?
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+When they came again to the Blood Tub, she said--
+
+"Couldn't we just go and look in?  I've got plenty of time, now I know
+exactly how I stand."
+
+She halted, and glanced across the road.  He could only agree to the
+proposition.  For himself, a peculiar sense of delicacy would have made
+it impossible for him to intrude his prosperity upon the deliberations
+of starving artisans on strike and stricken; and he wondered what the
+potters might think or say about the invasion by a woman.  But he had to
+traverse the street with her and enter, and he had to do so with an air
+of masculine protectiveness.  The urchins stood apart to let them in.
+
+Snaggs', dimly lit by a few glazed apertures in the roof, was nearly
+crammed by men who sat on the low benches and leaned standing against
+the sidewalls.  In the small and tawdry proscenium, behind a worn
+picture of the Bay of Naples, were silhouetted the figures of the men's
+leader and of several other officials.  The leader was speaking in a
+quiet, mild voice, the other officials were seated on Windsor chairs.
+The smell of the place was nauseating, and yet the atmosphere was
+bitingly cold.  The warm-wrapped visitors could see rows and rows of
+discoloured backs and elbows, and caps, and stringy kerchiefs.  They
+could almost feel the contraction of thousands of muscles in an
+involuntary effort to squeeze out the chill from all these bodies; not a
+score of overcoats could be discerned in the whole theatre, and many of
+the jackets were thin and ragged; but the officials had overcoats.  And
+the visitors could almost see, as it were in rays, the intense fixed
+glances darting from every part of the interior, and piercing the
+upright figure in the centre of the stage.
+
+"Some method of compromise," the leader was saying in his persuasive
+tones.
+
+A young man sprang up furiously from the middle benches.
+
+"To hell wi' compromise!" he shouted in a tigerish passion.  "Haven't us
+had forty pound from Ameriky?"
+
+"Order!  Order!" some protested fiercely.  But one voice cried: "Pitch
+the bastard awt, neck and crop!"
+
+Hands clawed at the interrupter and dragged him with extreme violence to
+the level of the bench, where he muttered like a dying volcano.  Angry
+growls shot up here and there, snappish, menacing, and bestial.
+
+"It is quite true," said the leader soothingly, "that our comrades at
+Trenton have collected forty pounds for us.  But forty pounds would
+scarcely pay for a loaf of bread for one man in every ten on strike."
+
+There was more interruption.  The dangerous growls continued in running
+explosions along the benches.  The leader, ignoring them, turned to
+consult with his neighbour, and then faced his audience and called out
+more loudly--
+
+"The business of the meeting is at an end."
+
+The entire multitude jumped up, and there was stretching of arms and
+stamping of feet.  The men nearest to the door now perceived Edwin and
+Hilda, who moved backwards as before a flood.  Edwin seized Hilda's arm
+to hasten her.
+
+"Lads," bawled an old man's voice from near the stage, "Let's sing `Rock
+of Ages.'"
+
+A frowning and hirsute fellow near the door, with the veins prominent on
+his red forehead, shouted hoarsely, "`Rock of Ages' be buggered!" and
+shifting his hands into his pockets he plunged for the street, head
+foremost and chin sticking out murderously.  Edwin and Hilda escaped at
+speed and recrossed the road.  The crowd came surging out of the narrow
+neck of the building and spread over the pavements like a sinister
+liquid.  But from within the building came the lusty song of "Rock of
+Ages."
+
+"It's terrible!"  Hilda murmured, after a silence.  "Just to see them is
+enough.  I shall never forget what you said."
+
+"What was that?" he inquired.  He knew what it was, but he wished to
+prolong the taste of her appreciation.
+
+"That you've only got to see the poor things to know they're in the
+right!  Oh!  I've lost my handkerchief, unless I've left it in your
+shop.  It must have dropped out of my muff."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+The shop was closed.  As with his latchkey he opened the private door
+and then stood on one side for her to precede him into the corridor that
+led to the back of the shop, he watched the stream of operatives
+scattering across Duck Bank and descending towards the Square.  It was
+as if he and Hilda, being pursued, were escaping.  And as Hilda,
+stopping an instant on the step, saw what he saw, her face took a
+troubled expression.  They both went in and he shut the door.
+
+"Turn to the left," he said, wondering whether the big Columbia machine
+would be running, for her to see if she chose.
+
+"Oh!  This takes you to the shop, does it?  How funny to be behind the
+counter!"
+
+He thought she spoke self-consciously, in the way of small talk: which
+was contrary to her habit.
+
+"Here's my handkerchief!" she cried, with pleasure.  It was on the
+counter, a little white wisp in the grey-sheeted gloom.  Stifford must
+have found it on the floor and picked it up.
+
+The idea flashed through Edwin's head: "Did she leave her handkerchief
+on purpose, so that we should have to come back here?"
+
+The only illumination of the shop was from three or four diamond-shaped
+holes in the upper part of as many shutters.  No object was at first
+quite distinct.  The corners were very dark.  All merchandise not in
+drawers or on shelves was hidden in pale dust cloths.  A chair wrong
+side up was on the fancy-counter, its back hanging over the front of the
+counter.  Hilda had wandered behind the other counter, and Edwin was in
+the middle of the shop.  Her face in the twilight had become more
+mysterious than ever.  He was in a state of emotion, but he did not know
+to what category the emotion belonged.  They were alone.  Stifford had
+gone for the half-holiday.  Darius, sickly, would certainly not come
+near.  The printers were working as usual in their place, and the
+clanking whirr of a treadle-machine overhead agitated the ceiling.  But
+nobody would enter the shop.  His excitement increased, but did not
+define itself.  There was a sudden roar in Duck Square, and then cries.
+
+"What can that be?"  Hilda asked, low.
+
+"Some of the strikers," he answered, and went through the doors to the
+letter-hole in the central shutter, lifted the flap, and looked through.
+
+A struggle was in progress at the entrance to the Duck Inn.  One man was
+apparently drunk; others were jeering on the skirts of the lean crowd.
+
+"It's some sort of a fight among them," said Edwin loudly, so that she
+could hear in the shop.  But at the same instant he felt the wind of the
+door swinging behind him, and Hilda was silently at his elbow.
+
+"Let me look," she said.
+
+Assuredly her voice was trembling.  He moved, as little as possible, and
+held the flap up for her.  She bent and gazed.  He could hear various
+noises in the Square, but she described nothing to him.  After a long
+while she withdrew from the hole.
+
+"A lot of them have gone into the public-house," she said.  "The others
+seem to be moving away.  There's a policeman.  What a shame," she burst
+out passionately, "that they have to drink to forget their trouble!"
+She made no remark upon the strangeness of starving workmen being able
+to pay for beer sufficient to intoxicate themselves.  Nor did she
+comment, as a woman, on the misery of the wives and children at home in
+the slums and the cheap cottage-rows.  She merely compassionated the men
+in that they were driven to brutishness.  Her features showed painful
+pity masking disgust.
+
+She stepped back into the shop.
+
+"Do you know," she began, in a new tone, "you've quite altered my notion
+of poetry--what you said as we were going up to the station."
+
+"Really!"  He smiled nervously.  He was very pleased.  He would have
+been astounded by this speech from her, a professed devotee of poetry,
+if in those instants the capacity for astonishment had remained to him.
+
+"Yes," she said, and continued, frowning and picking at her muff: "But
+you _do_ alter my notions, I don't know how it is...  So this is your
+little office!"
+
+The door of the cubicle was open.
+
+"Yes, go in and have a look at it."
+
+"Shall I?"  She went in.
+
+He followed her.
+
+And no sooner was she in than she muttered, "I must hurry off now."  Yet
+a moment before she seemed to have infinite leisure.
+
+"Shall you be at Brighton long?" he demanded, and scarcely recognised
+his own accents.
+
+"Oh!  I can't tell!  I've no idea.  It depends."
+
+"How soon shall you be down our way again?"
+
+She only shook her head.
+
+"I say--you know--" he protested.
+
+"Good-bye," she said, quavering.  "Thanks very much."  She held out her
+hand.
+
+"But--" He took her hand.
+
+His suffering was intolerable.  It was torture of the most exquisite
+kind.  Her hand pressed his.  Something snapped in him.  His left hand
+hovered shaking over her shoulder, and then touched her shoulder, and he
+could feel her left hand on his arm.  The embrace was clumsy in its
+instinctive and unskilled violence, but its clumsiness was redeemed by
+all his sincerity and all hers.  His eyes were within six inches of her
+eyes, full of delicious shame, anxiety, and surrender.  They kissed...
+He had amorously kissed a woman.  All his past life sank away, and he
+began a new life on the impetus of that supreme and final emotion.  It
+was an emotion that in its freshness, agitating and divine, could never
+be renewed.  He had felt the virgin answer of her lips on his.  She had
+told him everything, she had yielded up her mystery, in a second of
+time.  Her courage in responding to his caress ravished and amazed him.
+She was so unaffected, so simple, so heroic.  And the cool, delicate
+purity of those lips!  And the faint feminine odour of her flesh and
+even of her stuffs!  Dreams and visions were surpassed.  He said to
+himself, in the flood-tide of masculinity--
+
+"My God!  She's mine."
+
+And it seemed incredible.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+She was sitting in the office chair; he on the desk.  She said in a
+trembling voice--
+
+"I should never have come to the Five Towns again, if you hadn't--"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I couldn't have stood it.  I couldn't."  She spoke almost bitterly,
+with a peculiar smile on her twitching lips.
+
+To him it seemed that she had resumed her mystery, that he had only
+really known her for one instant, that he was bound to a woman
+entrancing, noble, but impenetrable.  And this, in spite of the fact
+that he was close to her, touching her, tingling to her in the confined,
+crepuscular intimacy of the cubicle.  He could trace every movement of
+her breast as she breathed, and yet she escaped the inward searching of
+his gaze.  But he was happy.  He was happy enough to repel all anxieties
+and inquietudes about the future.  He was steeped in the bliss of the
+miracle.  This was but the fourth day, and they were vowed.
+
+"It was only Monday," he began.
+
+"Monday!" she exclaimed.  "I have thought of you for over a year."  She
+leaned towards him.  "Didn't you know?  Of course you did! ...  You
+couldn't bear me at first."
+
+He denied this, blushing, but she insisted.
+
+"You don't know how awful it was for me yesterday when you didn't come!"
+he murmured.
+
+"Was it?" she said, under her breath.  "I had some very important
+letters to write."  She clasped his hand.
+
+There it was again!  She spoke just like a man of business, immersed in
+secret schemes.
+
+"It's awfully funny," he said.  "I scarcely know anything about you, and
+yet--"
+
+"I'm Janet's friend!" she answered.  Perhaps it was the delicatest
+reproof of imagined distrust.
+
+"And I don't want to," he went on.  "How old are you?"
+
+"Twenty-four," she answered sweetly, acknowledging his right to put such
+questions.
+
+"I thought you were."
+
+"I suppose you know I've got no relatives," she said, as if relenting
+from her attitude of reproof.  "Fortunately, father left just enough
+money for me to live on."
+
+"Must you go to Brighton?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Where can I write to?"
+
+"It will depend," she said.  "But I shall send you the address
+to-morrow.  I shall write you before I go to bed whether it's to-night
+or to-morrow morning."
+
+"I wonder what people will say!"
+
+"Please tell no one, yet," she pleaded.  "Really, I should prefer not!
+Later on, it won't seem so sudden; people are so silly."
+
+"But shan't you tell Janet?"
+
+She hesitated.  "No!  Let's keep it to ourselves till I come back."
+
+"When shall you come back?"
+
+"Oh!  Very soon.  I hope in a few days, now.  But I must go to this
+friend at Brighton.  She's relying on me."
+
+It was enough for him, and indeed he liked the idea of a secret.  "Yes,
+yes," he agreed eagerly.
+
+There was the sound of another uproar in Duck Square.  It appeared to
+roll to and fro thunderously.
+
+She shivered.  The fire was dead out in the stove, and the chill of
+night crept in from the street.
+
+"It's nearly dark," she said.  "I must go!  I have to pack...  Oh dear,
+dear--those poor men!  Somebody will be hurt!"
+
+"I'll walk up with you," he whispered, holding her, in owner ship.
+
+"No.  It will be better not.  Let me out."
+
+"Really?"
+
+"Really!"
+
+"But who'll take you to Knype Station?"
+
+"Janet will go with me."
+
+She rose reluctantly.  In the darkness they were now only dim forms to
+each other.  He struck a match, that blinded them and expired as they
+reached the passage...
+
+When she had gone, he stood hatless at the open side door.  Right at the
+top of Duck Bank, he could discern, under the big lamp there, a knot of
+gesticulating and shouting strikers, menacing two policemen; and farther
+off, in the direction of Moorthorne Road, other strikers were running.
+The yellow-lit blinds of the Duck Inn across the Square seemed to screen
+a house of impenetrable conspiracies and debaucheries.  And all that
+grim, perilous background only gave to his emotions a further intensity,
+troubling them to still stranger ecstasy.  He thought: "It has happened
+to me, too, now--this thing that is at the bottom of everybody's mind!
+I've kissed her!  I've got her!  She's marvellous, marvellous!  I
+couldn't have believed it.  But is it true?  Has it happened?"  It
+passed his credence...  "By Jove!  I absolutely forgot about the ring!
+That's a nice how d'ye do!" ...  He saw himself married.  He thought of
+Clara's grotesque antics with her tedious babe.  And he thought of his
+father and of vexations.  But that night he was a man.  She, Hilda, with
+her independence and her mystery, had inspired him with a full pride of
+manhood.  And he discovered that one of the chief attributes of a man is
+an immense tenderness.
+
+
+
+VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.
+
+THE MARRIAGE.
+
+He was more proud and agitated than happy.  The romance of the affair,
+and its secrecy, made him proud; the splendid qualities of Hilda made
+him proud.  It was her mysteriousness that agitated him, and her absence
+rendered him unhappy in his triumph.  During the whole of Friday he was
+thinking: "To-morrow is Saturday and I shall have her address and a
+letter from her."  He decided that there was no hope of a letter by the
+last post on Friday, but as the hour of the last post drew nigh he grew
+excited, and was quite appreciably disappointed when it brought nothing.
+The fear, which had always existed in little, then waxed into enormous
+dread, that Saturday's post also would bring nothing.  His manoeuvres in
+the early twilight of Saturday morning were complicated by the fact that
+it had not been arranged whether she should write to the shop or to the
+house.  However, he prepared for either event by having his breakfast at
+seven o'clock, on the plea of special work in the shop.  He had finished
+it at half-past seven, and was waiting for the postman, whose route he
+commanded from the dining-room window.  The postman arrived.  Edwin with
+false calm walked into the hall, saying to himself that if the letter
+was not in the box it would be at the shop.  But the letter was in the
+box.  He recognised her sprawling hand on the envelope through the
+wirework.  He snatched the letter and slipped upstairs with it like a
+fox with a chicken.  It had come, then!  The letter safely in his hands
+he admitted more frankly that he had been very doubtful of its
+promptitude.
+
+"59 Preston Street, Brighton, 1 a.m.
+
+"Dearest,--This is my address.  I love you.  Every bit of me is
+absolutely yours.  Write me.--H.L."
+
+That was all.  It was enough.  Its tone enchanted him.  Also it startled
+him.  But it reminded him of her lips.  He had begun a letter to her.
+He saw now that what he had written was too cold in the expression of
+his feelings.  Hilda's note suddenly and completely altered his views
+upon the composition of love-letters.  "Every bit of me is absolutely
+yours."  How fine, how untrammelled, how like Hilda!  What other girl
+could or would have written such a phrase?  More than ever was he
+convinced that she was unique.  The thrill divine quickened in him
+again, and he rose eagerly to her level of passion.  The romance, the
+secrecy, the mystery, the fever!  He walked down Trafalgar Road with the
+letter in his pocket, and once he pulled it out to read it in the
+street.  His discretion objected to this act, but Edwin was not his own
+master.  Stifford, hurrying in exactly at eight, was somewhat perturbed
+to find his employer's son already installed in the cubicle, writing by
+the light of gas, as the shutters were not removed.  Edwin had finished
+and stamped his first love-letter just as his father entered the
+cubicle.  Owing to dyspeptic accidents Darius had not set foot in the
+cubicle since it had been sanctified by Hilda.  Edwin, leaving it,
+glanced at the old man's back and thought disdainfully: "Ah!  You little
+know, you rhinoceros, that less than two days ago, she and I, on that
+very spot--"
+
+As soon as his father had gone to pay the morning visit to the printing
+shops, he ran out to post the letter himself.  He could not be contented
+until it was in the post.  Now, when he saw men of about his own class
+and age in the street, he would speculate upon their experiences in the
+romance of women.  And it did genuinely seem to him impossible that
+anybody else in a town like Bursley could have passed through an episode
+so exquisitely strange and beautiful as that through which he was
+passing.  Yet his reason told him that he must be wrong there.  His
+reason, however, left him tranquil in the assurance that no girl in
+Bursley had ever written to her affianced: "I love you.  Every bit of me
+is absolutely yours."
+
+Hilda's second letter did not arrive till the following Tuesday, by
+which time he had become distracted by fears and doubts.  Yes, doubts!
+No rational being could have been more loyal than Edwin, but these
+little doubts would keep shooting up and withering away.  He could not
+control them.  The second letter was nearly as short as the first.  It
+told him nothing save her love and that she was very worried by her
+friend's situation, and that his letters were a joy.  She had had a
+letter from him each day.  In his reply to her second he gently implied,
+between two lines, that her letters lacked quantity and frequency.  She
+answered: "I simply cannot write letters.  It isn't in me.  Can't you
+tell that from my handwriting?  Not even to you!  You must take me as I
+am."  She wrote each day for three days.  Edwin was one of those who
+learn quickly, by the acceptance of facts.  And he now learnt that
+profound lesson that an individual must be taken or left in entirety,
+and that you cannot change an object merely because you love it.  Indeed
+he saw in her phrase, "You must take me as I am," the accents of
+original and fundamental wisdom, springing from the very roots of life.
+And he submitted.  At intervals he would say resentfully: "But surely
+she could find five minutes each day to drop me a line!  What's five
+minutes?"  But he submitted.  Submission was made easier when he
+co-ordinated with Hilda's idiosyncrasy the fact that Maggie, his own
+unromantic sister, could never begin to write a letter with less than
+from twelve to twenty-four hours' bracing of herself to the task.
+Maggie would be saying and saying: "I really must write that letter...
+Dear me!  I haven't written that letter yet."
+
+His whole life seemed to be lived in the post, and postmen were the
+angels of the creative spirit.  His unhappiness increased with the
+deepening of the impression that the loved creature was treating him
+with cruelty.  Time dragged.  At length he had been engaged a fortnight.
+On Thursday a letter should have come.  It came not.  Nor on Friday nor
+Saturday.  On Sunday it must come.  But it did not come on Sunday.  He
+determined to telegraph to her on the Monday morning.  His loyalty,
+though valorous, needed aid against all those pricking battalions of
+ephemeral doubts.  On the Sunday evening he suddenly had the idea of
+strengthening himself by a process that resembled boat-burning.  He
+would speak to his father.  His father's mentality was the core of a
+difficulty that troubled him exceedingly, and he took it into his head
+to attack the difficulty at once, on the spot.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+For years past Darius Clayhanger had not gone to chapel on Sunday
+evening.  In the morning he still went fairly regularly, but in the
+evening he would now sit in the drawing-room, generally alone, to read.
+On weekdays he never used the drawing-room, where indeed there was
+seldom a fire.  He had been accustomed to only one living-room, and save
+on Sunday, when he cared to bend the major part of his mind to the
+matter, he scorned to complicate existence by utilising all the
+resources of the house which he had built.  His children might do so;
+but not he.  He was proud enough to see to it that his house had a
+drawing-room, and too proud to employ the drawing-room except on the
+ceremonious day.  After tea, at about a quarter to six, when
+chapel-goers were hurriedly pulling gloves on, he would begin to
+establish himself in a saddle-backed, ear-flapped easy-chair with "The
+Christian News" and an ivory paper-knife as long and nearly as deadly as
+a scimitar.  "The Christian News" was a religious weekly of a new type.
+It belonged to a Mr James Bott, and it gave to God and to the mysteries
+of religious experience a bright and breezy actuality.  Darius's
+children had damned it for ever on its first issue, in which Clara had
+found, in a report of a very important charitable meeting, the following
+words: "Among those present were the Prince of Wales and Mr James
+Bott."  Such is the hasty and unjudicial nature of children that this
+single sentence finished the career of "The Christian News" with the
+younger generation.  But Darius liked it, and continued to like it.  He
+enjoyed it.  He would spend an hour and a half in reading it.  And
+further, he enjoyed cutting open the morsel.  Once when Edwin, in hope
+of more laughter, had cut the pages on a Saturday afternoon, and his
+father had found himself unable to use the paper-knife on Sunday
+evening, there had been a formidable inquiry: "Who's been meddling with
+my paper?"  Darius saved the paper even from himself until Sunday
+evening; not till then would he touch it.  This habit had flourished for
+several years.  It appeared never to lose its charm.  And Edwin did not
+cease to marvel at his father's pleasure in a tedious monotony.
+
+It was the hallowed rite of reading "The Christian News" that Edwin
+disturbed in his sudden and capricious resolve.  Maggie and Mrs Nixon
+had gone to chapel, for Mrs Nixon, by reason of her years, bearing,
+mantle, and reputation, could walk down Trafalgar Road by the side of her
+mistress on a Sunday night without offence to the delicate instincts of
+the town.  The niece, engaged to be married at an age absurdly youthful,
+had been permitted by Mrs Nixon the joy of attending evensong at the
+Bleakridge Church on the arm of a male, but under promise to be back at
+a quarter to eight to set supper.  The house was perfectly still when
+Edwin came all on fire out of his bedroom and slid down the stairs.  The
+gas burnt economically low within its stained-glass cage in the hall.
+The drawing-room door was unlatched.  He hesitated a moment on the mat,
+and he could hear the calm ticking of the clock in the kitchen and see
+the red glint of the kitchen fire against the wall.  Then he entered,
+looking and feeling apologetic.
+
+His father was all curtained in; his slippered feet on the fender of the
+blazing hearth, his head cushioned to a nicety, the long paper-knife
+across his knees.  And the room was really hot and in a glow of light.
+Darius turned and, lowering his face, gazed at Edwin over the top of his
+new gold-rimmed spectacles.
+
+"Not gone to chapel?" he frowned.
+
+"No! ...  I say, father, I just wanted to speak to you."
+
+Darius made no reply, but shifted his glance from Edwin to the fire, and
+maintained his frown.  He was displeased at the interruption.  Edwin
+failed to shut the door at the first attempt, and then banged it in his
+nervousness.  In spite of himself he felt like a criminal.  Coming
+forward, he leaned his loose, slim frame against a corner of the old
+piano.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+"Well?"  Darius growled impatiently, even savagely.  They saw each
+other, not once a week, but at nearly every hour of every day, and they
+were surfeited of the companionship.
+
+"Supposing I wanted to get married?"  This sentence shot out of Edwin's
+mouth like a bolt.  And as it flew, he blushed very red.  In the privacy
+of his mind he was horribly swearing.
+
+"So that's it, is it?"  Darius growled again.  And he leaned forward and
+picked up the poker, not as a menace, but because he too was nervous.
+As an opposer of his son he had never had quite the same confidence in
+himself since Edwin's historic fury at being suspected of theft, though
+apparently their relations had resumed the old basis of bullying and
+submission.
+
+"Well--" Edwin hesitated.  He thought, "After all, people do get
+married.  It won't be a crime."
+
+"Who'st been running after?"  Darius demanded inimically.  Instead of
+being softened by this rumour of love, by this hint that his son had
+been passing through wondrous secret hours, he instinctively and without
+any reason hardened himself and transformed the news into an offence.
+He felt no sympathy, and it did not occur to him to recall that he too
+had once thought of marrying.  He was a man whom life had brutalised
+about half a century earlier.
+
+"I was only thinking," said Edwin clumsily--the fool had not sense
+enough even to sit down--"I was only thinking, suppose _I did_ want to get
+married."
+
+"Who'st been running after?"
+
+"Well, I can't rightly say there's anything--what you may call settled.
+In fact, nothing was to be said about it at all at present.  But it's
+Miss Lessways, father--Hilda Lessways, you know."
+
+"Her as came in the shop the other day?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How long's this been going on?"
+
+Edwin thought of what Hilda had said.  "Oh!  Over a year."  He could not
+possibly have said "four days."  "Mind you this is strictly q.t.!  Nobody
+knows a word about it, nobody!  But of course I thought I'd better tell
+you.  You'll say nothing."  He tried wistfully to appeal as one loyal
+man to another.  But he failed.  There was no ray of response on his
+father's gloomy features, and he slipped back insensibly into the boy
+whose right to an individual existence had never been formally admitted.
+
+Something base in him--something of that baseness which occasionally
+actuates the oppressed--made him add: "She's got an income of her own.
+Her father left money."  He conceived that this would placate Darius.
+
+"I know all about her father," Darius sneered, with a short laugh.  "And
+her father's father! ...  Well, lad, ye'll go your own road."  He
+appeared to have no further interest in the affair.  Edwin was not
+surprised, for Darius was seemingly never interested in anything except
+his business; but he thought how strange, how nigh to the incredible,
+the old man's demeanour was.
+
+"But about money, I was thinking," he said, uneasily shifting his pose.
+
+"What about money?"
+
+"Well," said Edwin, endeavouring, and failing, to find courage to put a
+little sharpness into his tone, "I couldn't marry on seventeen-and-six a
+week, could I?"
+
+At the age of twenty-five, at the end of nine years' experience in the
+management and the accountancy of a general printing and stationery
+business, Edwin was receiving seventeen shillings and sixpence for a
+sixty-five-hour week's work, the explanation being that on his father's
+death the whole enterprise would be his, and that all money saved was
+saved for him.  Out of this sum he had to pay ten shillings a week to
+Maggie towards the cost of board and lodging, so that three half-crowns
+remained for his person and his soul.  Thus he could expect no
+independence of any kind until his father's death, and he had a direct
+and powerful interest in his father's death.  Moreover, all his future,
+and all unpaid reward of his labours in the past, hung hazardous on his
+father's goodwill.  If he quarrelled with him, he might lose everything.
+Edwin was one of a few odd-minded persons who did not regard this
+arrangement as perfectly just, proper, and in accordance with sound
+precedent.  But he was helpless.  His father would tell him, and did
+tell him, that he had fought no struggles, suffered no hardship, had no
+responsibility, and that he was simply coddled from head to foot in
+cotton-wool.
+
+"I say you must go your own road," said his father.
+
+"But at this rate I should never be able to marry!"
+
+"Do you reckon," asked Darius, with mild cold scorn, "as you getting
+married will make your services worth one penny more to my business?"
+And he waited an answer with the august calm of one who is aware that he
+is unanswerable.  But he might with equal propriety have tied his son's
+hands behind him and then diverted himself by punching his head.
+
+"I do all I can," said Edwin meekly.
+
+"And what about getting orders?"  Darius questioned grimly.  "Didn't I
+offer you two and a half per cent on all new customers you got yourself?
+And how many have you got?  Not one.  I give you a chance to make extra
+money and you don't take it.  Ye'd sooner go running about after girls."
+
+This was a particular grievance of the father against the son: that the
+son brought no grist to the mill in the shape of new orders.
+
+"But how can I get orders?"  Edwin protested.
+
+"How did I get 'em?  How do I get 'em?  Somebody has to get 'em."  The
+old man's lips were pressed together, and he waved "The Christian News"
+slightly in his left hand.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+In a few minutes both their voices had risen.  Darius, savage, stooped
+to replace with the shovel a large burning coal that had dropped on the
+tiles and was sending up a column of brown smoke.
+
+"I tell you what I shall do," he said, controlling himself bitterly.
+"It's against my judgement, but I shall put you up to a pound a week at
+the New Year, if all goes well, of course.  And it's good money, let me
+add."
+
+He was entirely serious, and almost sincere.  He loathed paying money
+over to his son.  He was convinced that in an ideal world sons would
+toil gratis for their fathers who lodged and fed them and gifted them
+with the reversion of excellent businesses.
+
+"But what good's a pound a week?"  Edwin demanded, with the
+querulousness of one who is losing hope.
+
+"What good's a pound a week!"  Darius repeated, hurt and genuinely hurt.
+"Let me tell you that in my time young men married on a pound a week,
+and glad to!  A pound a week!"  He finished with a sardonic exclamation.
+
+"I couldn't marry Miss Lessways on a pound a week," Edwin murmured, in
+despair, his lower lip hanging.  "I thought you might perhaps be
+offering me a partnership by this time!"  Possibly in some mad hour a
+thought so wild had indeed flitted through his brain.
+
+"Did you?" rejoined Darius.  And in the fearful grimness of the man's
+accents was concealed all his intense and egoistic sense of possessing
+in absolute ownership the business which the little boy out of the
+Bastille had practically created.  Edwin did not and could not
+understand the fierce strength of his father's emotion concerning the
+business.  Already in tacitly agreeing to leave Edwin the business after
+his own death, Darius imagined himself to be superbly benevolent.
+
+"And then there would be house-furnishing, and so on," Edwin continued.
+
+"What about that fifty pounds?"  Darius curtly inquired.
+
+Edwin was startled.  Never since the historic scene had Darius made the
+slightest reference to the proceeds of the Building Society share.
+
+"I haven't spent all of it," Edwin muttered.
+
+Do what he would with his brain, the project of marriage and
+house-tenancy and a separate existence obstinately presented itself to
+him as fantastic and preposterous.  Who was he to ask so much from
+destiny?  He could not feel that he was a man.  In his father's presence
+he never could feel that he was a man.  He remained a boy, with no
+rights, moral or material.
+
+"And if as ye say she's got money of her own--" Darius remarked, and was
+considerably astonished when the boy walked straight out of the room and
+closed the door.
+
+It was his last grain of common sense that took Edwin in silence out of
+the room.
+
+Miserable, despicable baseness!  Did the old devil suppose that he would
+be capable of asking his wife to find the resources which he himself
+could not bring?  He was to say to his wife: "I can only supply a pound
+a week, but as you've got money it won't matter."  The mere notion
+outraged him so awfully that if he had stayed in the room there would
+have been an altercation and perhaps a permanent estrangement.
+
+As he stood furious and impotent in the hall, he thought, with his
+imagination quickened by the memory of Mr Shushions: "When you're old,
+and I've _got_ you"--he clenched his fists and his teeth--"when I've _got_
+you and you can't help yourself, by God it'll be my turn!"
+
+And he meant it.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+He seized his overcoat and hat, and putting them on anyhow, strode out.
+The kitchen clock struck half-past seven as he left.  Chapel-goers would
+soon be returning in a thin procession of twos and threes up Trafalgar
+Road.  To avoid meeting acquaintances he turned down the side street,
+towards the old road which was a continuation of Aboukir Street.  There
+he would be safe.  Letting his overcoat fly open, he thrust his hands
+into the pockets of his trousers.  It was a cold night of mist.
+Humanity was separated from him by the semi-transparent blinds of the
+cottage windows, bright squares in the dark and enigmatic facades of the
+street.  He was alone.
+
+All along he had felt and known that this disgusting crisis would come
+to pass.  He had hoped against it, but not with faith.  And he had no
+remedy for it.  What could he immediately and effectively do?  He was
+convinced that his father would not yield.  There were frequent
+occasions when his father was proof against reason, when his father
+seemed genuinely unable to admit the claim of justice, and this occasion
+was one of them.  He could tell by certain peculiarities of tone and
+gesture.  A pound a week!  Assuming that he cut loose from his father,
+in a formal and confessed separation, he might not for a long time be in
+a position to earn more than a pound a week.  A clerk was worth no more.
+And, except as responsible manager of a business, he could only go into
+the market as a clerk.  In the Five Towns how many printing offices were
+there that might at some time or another be in need of a manager?
+Probably not one.  They were all of modest importance, and directed
+personally by their proprietary heads.  His father's was one of the
+largest...  No!  His father had nurtured and trained, in him, a helpless
+slave.
+
+And how could he discuss such a humiliating question with Hilda?  Could
+he say to Hilda: "See here, my father won't allow me more than a pound a
+week.  What are we to do?"  In what terms should he telegraph to her
+to-morrow?
+
+He heard the rapid firm footsteps of a wayfarer overtaking him.  He had
+no apprehension of being disturbed in his bitter rage.  But a hand was
+slapped on his shoulder, and a jolly voice said--
+
+"Now, Edwin, where's this road leading you to on a Sunday night?"
+
+It was Osmond Orgreave who, having been tramping for exercise in the
+high regions beyond the Loop railway line, was just going home.
+
+"Oh!  Nowhere particular," said Edwin feebly.
+
+"Working off Sunday dinner, eh?"
+
+"Yes."  And Edwin added casually, to prove that there was nothing
+singular in his mood: "Nasty night!"
+
+"You must come in a bit," said Mr Orgreave.
+
+"Oh no!"  He shrank away.
+
+"Now, now!" said Mr Orgreave masterfully.  "You've got to come in, so
+you may as well give up first as last.  Janet's in.  She's like you and
+me, she's a bad lot,--hasn't been to church."  He took Edwin by the arm,
+and they turned into Oak Street at the lower end.
+
+Edwin continued to object, but Mr Orgreave, unable to scrutinise his
+face in the darkness, and not dreaming of an indiscretion, rode over his
+weak negatives, horse and foot, and drew him by force into the garden;
+and in the hall took his hat away from him and slid his overcoat from
+his shoulders.  Mr Orgreave, having accomplished a lot of forbidden
+labour on that Sabbath, was playful in his hospitality.
+
+"Prisoner!  Take charge of him!" exclaimed Mr Orgreave shortly, as he
+pushed Edwin into the breakfast-room and shut the door from the outside.
+Janet was there, exquisitely welcoming, unconsciously pouring balm from
+her eyes.  But he thought she looked graver than usual.  Edwin had to
+enact the part of a man to whom nothing has happened.  He had to behave
+as though his father was the kindest and most reasonable of fathers, as
+though Hilda wrote fully to him every day, as though he were not even
+engaged to Hilda.  He must talk, and he scarcely knew what he was
+saying.
+
+"Heard lately from Miss Lessways?" he asked lightly, or as lightly as he
+could.  It was a splendid effort.  Impossible to expect him to start
+upon the weather or the strike!  He did the best he could.
+
+Janet's eyes became troubled.  Speaking in a low voice she said, with a
+glance at the door--
+
+"I suppose you've not heard.  She's married."
+
+He did not move.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+"Married?"
+
+"Yes.  It is rather sudden, isn't it?"  Janet tried to smile, but she
+was exceedingly self-conscious.  "To a Mr Cannon.  She's known him for
+a very long time, I think."
+
+"When?"
+
+"Yesterday.  I had a note this morning.  It's quite a secret yet.  I
+haven't told father and mother.  But she asked me to tell you if I saw
+you."
+
+He thought her eyes were compassionate.
+
+Mrs Orgreave came smiling into the room.
+
+"Well, Mr Edwin, it seems we can only get you in here by main force."
+
+"Are you quite better, Mrs Orgreave?" he rose to greet her.
+
+He had by some means or other to get out.
+
+"I must just run in home a second," he said, after a moment.  "I'll be
+back in three minutes."
+
+But he had no intention of coming back.  He would have told any lie in
+order to be free.
+
+In his bedroom, looking at himself in the glass, he could detect on his
+face no sign whatever of suffering or of agitation.  It seemed just an
+ordinary mild, unmoved face.
+
+And this, too, he had always felt and known would come to pass: that
+Hilda would not be his.  All that romance was unreal; it was not true;
+it had never happened.  Such a thing could not happen to such as he
+was...  He could not reflect.  When he tried to reflect, the top of his
+head seemed as though it would fly off...  Cannon!  She was with Cannon
+somewhere at that very instant...  She had specially asked that he
+should be told.  And indeed he had been told before even Mr and Mrs
+Orgreave...  Cannon!  She might at that very instant be in Cannon's
+arms.
+
+It could be said of Edwin that he fully lived that night.  Fate had at
+any rate roused him from the coma which most men called existence.
+
+Simple Maggie was upset because, from Edwin's absence and her father's
+demeanour at supper, she knew that her menfolk had had another terrible
+discussion.  And since her father offered no remark as to it, she
+guessed that this one must be even more serious that the last.
+
+There was one thing that Edwin could not fit into any of his theories of
+the disaster which had overtaken him, and that was his memory of Hilda's
+divine gesture as she bent over Mr Shushions on the morning of the
+Centenary.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER ONE.
+
+BOOK THREE--HIS FREEDOM.
+
+AFTER A FUNERAL.
+
+Four and a half years later, on a Tuesday night in April 1886, Edwin was
+reading in an easy-chair in his bedroom.  He made a very image of
+solitary comfort.  The easy-chair had been taken from the dining-room,
+silently, without permission, and Darius had apparently not noticed its
+removal.  A deep chair designed by some one learned in the poses natural
+to the mortal body, it was firm where it ought to be firm, and where it
+ought to yield, there it yielded.  By its own angles it threw the head
+slightly back, and the knees slightly up.  Edwin's slippered feet rested
+on a hassock, and in front of the hassock was a red-glowing gas-stove.
+That stove, like the easy-chair, had been acquired by Edwin at his
+father's expense without his father's cognisance.  It consumed gas whose
+price swelled the quarterly bill three times a year, and Darius observed
+nothing.  He had not even entered his son's bedroom for several years.
+Each month seemed to limit further his interest in surrounding
+phenomena, and to centralise more completely all his faculties in his
+business.  Over Edwin's head the gas jet flamed through one of Darius's
+special private burners, lighting the page of a little book, one of
+Cassell's "National Library," a new series of sixpenny reprints which
+had considerably excited the book-selling and the book-reading worlds,
+but which Darius had apparently quite ignored, though confronted in his
+house and in his shop by multitudinous examples of it.  Sometimes Edwin
+would almost be persuaded to think that he might safely indulge any
+caprice whatever under his father's nose, and then the old man would
+notice some unusual trifle, of no conceivable importance, and go into a
+passion about it, and Maggie would say quietly, "I told you what would
+be happening one of these days," which would annoy Edwin.  His annoyance
+was caused less by Maggie's `I told you so,' than by her lack of logic.
+If his father had ever overtaken him in some large and desperate
+caprice, such as the purchase of the gas-stove on the paternal account,
+he would have submitted in meekness to Maggie's triumphant reminder; but
+his father never did.  It was always upon some perfectly innocent
+nothing, which the timidest son might have permitted himself, that the
+wrath of Darius overwhelmingly burst.
+
+Maggie and Edwin understood each other on the whole very well.  Only in
+minor points did their sympathy fail.  And as Edwin would be exasperated
+because Maggie's attitude towards argument was that of a woman, so would
+Maggie resent a certain mulishness in him characteristic of the
+unfathomable stupid sex.  Once a week, for example, when his room was
+`done out,' there was invariably a skirmish between them, because Edwin
+really did hate anybody to `meddle among his things.'  The derangement
+of even a brush on the dressing-table would rankle in his mind.  Also he
+was very `crotchety about his meals,' and on the subject of fresh air.
+Unless he was sitting in a perceptible draught, he thought he was being
+poisoned by nitrogen: but when he could see the curtain or blind
+trembling in the wind he was hygienically at ease.  His existence was a
+series of catarrhal colds, which, however, as he would learnedly explain
+to Maggie, could not be connected, in the brain of a reasonable person,
+with currents of fresh air.  Maggie mutely disdained his science.  This,
+too, fretted him.  Occasionally she would somewhat tartly assert that he
+was a regular old maid.  The accusation made no impression on him at
+all.  But when, more than ordinarily exacerbated, she sang out that he
+was `exactly like his father,' he felt wounded.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+The appearance of his bedroom, and the fact that he enjoyed being in it
+alone, gave some ground for Maggie's first accusation.  A screen hid the
+bed, and this screen was half covered with written papers of memoranda;
+roughly, it divided the room into dormitory and study.  The whole
+chamber was occupied by Edwin's personal goods, great and small, ranged
+in the most careful order; it was full; in the occupation of a young man
+who was not precociously an old maid, it would have been littered.  It
+was a complex and yet practical apparatus for daily use, completely
+organised for the production of comfort.  Edwin would move about in it
+with the loving and assured gestures of a creator; and always he was
+improving its perfection.  His bedroom was his passion.
+
+Often, during the wilderness of the day, he would think of his bedroom
+as of a refuge, to which in the evening he should hasten.  Ascending the
+stairs after the meal, his heart would run on in advance of his legs,
+and be within the room before his hand had opened the door.  And then he
+would close the door, as upon the whole tedious world, and turn up the
+gas, and light the stove with an explosive _plop_, and settle himself.
+And in the first few minutes of reading he would with distinct,
+conscious pleasure, allow his attention to circle the room, dwelling
+upon piled and serried volumes, and delighting in orderliness and in
+convenience.  And he would reflect: "This is my life.  This is what I
+shall always live for.  This is the best.  And why not?"  It seemed to
+him when he was alone in his bedroom and in the night, that he had
+respectably well solved the problem offered to him by destiny.  He
+insisted to himself sharply that he was not made for marriage, that he
+had always known marriage to be impossible for him, that what had
+happened was bound to have happened.  For a few weeks he had lived in a
+fool's paradise: that was all...  Fantastic scheme, mad self-deception!
+In such wise he thought of his love-affair.  His profound satisfaction
+was that none except his father knew of it, and even his father did not
+know how far it had gone.  He felt that if the town had been aware of
+his jilting, he could not have borne the humiliation.  To himself he had
+been horribly humiliated; but he had recovered in his own esteem.
+
+It was only by very slow processes, by insensible degrees, that he had
+arrived at the stage of being able to say to his mirror, "I've got over
+that!"  And who could judge better than he?  He could trace no mark of
+the episode in his face.  Save for the detail of a moustache, it seemed
+to him that he had looked on precisely the same unchangeable face for a
+dozen years.  Strange, that suffering had left no sign!  Strange, that,
+in the months just after Hilda's marriage, no acquaintance had taken him
+on one side and said, "What is the tragedy I can read on your features?"
+
+And indeed the truth was that no one suspected.  The vision of his face
+would remain with people long after he had passed them in the street, or
+spoken to them in the shop.  The charm of his sadness persisted in their
+memory.  But they would easily explain it to themselves by saying that
+his face had a naturally melancholy cast--a sort of accident that had
+happened to him in the beginning!  He had a considerable reputation, of
+which he was imperfectly aware, for secretiveness, timidity, gentleness,
+and intellectual superiority.  Sundry young women thought of him
+wistfully when smiling upon quite other young men, and would even kiss
+him while kissing them, according to the notorious perversity of love.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+He was reading Swift's "Tale of a Tub" eagerly, tasting with a palate
+consciously fastidious and yet catholic, the fine savour of a
+masterpiece.  By his secret enthusiasm, which would escape from him at
+rare intervals in a word to a friend, he was continuing the reputation
+of the "Tale of a Tub" from one century towards the next.  A classic
+remains a classic only because a few hundred Edwins up and down England
+enjoy it so heartily that their pleasure becomes religious.  Edwin,
+according to his programme, had no right to be amusing himself with
+Swift at that hour.  The portly Hallam, whom he found tedious, ought to
+have been in his hands.  But Swift had caught him and would not let him
+go.  Herein was one of the consequences of the pocketableness of
+Cassell's new series.  Edwin had been obliged to agree with Tom Orgreave
+(now a married man) that the books were not volumes for a collector; but
+they were so cheap, and they came from the press so often--once a week,
+and they could be carried so comfortably over the heart, that he could
+not resist most of them.  His professed idea was that by their aid he
+could read smaller works in odd moments, at any time, thus surpassing
+his programme.  He had not foreseen that Swift would make a breach in
+his programme, which was already in a bad way.
+
+But he went on reading tranquilly, despite the damage to it; for in the
+immediate future shone the hope of the new life, when programmes would
+never be neglected.  In less than a month he would be thirty years of
+age.  At twenty, it had seemed a great age, an age of absolute maturity.
+Now, he felt as young and as boyish as ever, especially before his
+father, and he perceived that his vague early notion about the finality
+of such an age as thirty had been infantile.  Nevertheless, the entry
+into another decade presented itself to him as solemn, and he meant to
+signalise it by new and mightier resolutions to execute vaster
+programmes.  He was intermittently engaged, during these weeks, in the
+delicious, the enchanting business of constructing the ideal programme
+and scheming the spare hours to ensure its achievement.  He lived in a
+dream and illusion of ultimate perfection.
+
+Several times, despite the spell of Swift, he glanced at his watch.  The
+hand went from nine to ten minutes past ten.  And then he thought he
+heard the sound for which he had been listening.  He jumped up,
+abandoned the book with its marker, opened the window wide, and lifting
+the blind by its rod, put his head out.  Yes, he could hear the yelling
+afar off, over the hill, softened by distance into something gentle and
+attractive.
+
+"`Signal!'  `Signal!'  Special edition!  `Signal!'"  And then words
+incomprehensible.
+
+It came nearer in the night.
+
+He drew down the window, and left the room.  The mere distant sound of
+the newsboys' voices had roused him to a pleasing excitement.  He
+fumbled in his pockets.  He had neither a halfpenny nor a penny--it was
+just like him--and those newsboys with their valuable tidings would not
+care to halt and weigh out change with a balance.
+
+"Got a halfpenny?  Quick!" he cried, running into the kitchen, where
+Maggie and Mrs Nixon were engaged in some calm and endless domestic
+occupation amid linen that hung down whitely.
+
+"What for?"  Maggie mechanically asked, feeling the while under her
+apron.
+
+"Paper," he said.
+
+"At this time of night?  You'll never get one at this time of night!"
+she said, in her simplicity.
+
+"Come _on!_"
+
+He stamped his foot with impatience.  It was absolutely astonishing, the
+ignorance in which Maggie lived, and lived efficiently and in content.
+Edwin filled the house with newspapers, and she never looked at them,
+never had the idea of looking at them, unless occasionally at the
+`Signal' for an account of a wedding or a bazaar.  In which case she
+would glance at the world for an instant with mild _naivete_, shocked by
+the horrible things that were apparently going on there, and in five
+minutes would forget all about it again.  Here the whole of England,
+Ireland, and Scotland was at its front doors that night waiting for
+newsboys, and to her the night was like any other night!  Yet she read
+many books.
+
+"Here's a penny," she said.  "Don't forget to give it me back."
+
+He ran out bareheaded.  At the corner of the street somebody else was
+expectant.  He could distinguish all the words now--
+
+"`Signal!'  Special edition!  Mester Gladstone's Home Rule Bill.  Full
+report.  Gladstone's speech.  Special!"
+
+The dark running figures approached, stopping at frequent gates, and
+their hoarse voices split the night.  The next moment they had gone by,
+in a flying column, and Edwin and the other man found themselves with
+fluttering paper in their hands, they knew not how!  It was the most
+unceremonious snatch-and-thrust transaction that could be imagined.
+Bleakridge was silent again, and its gates closed, and the shouts were
+descending violently into Bursley.
+
+"Where's father?"  Maggie called out when she heard Edwin in the hall.
+
+"Hasn't he come in yet?"  Edwin replied negligently, as he mounted the
+stairs with his desire.
+
+In his room he settled himself once more under the gas, and opened the
+flimsy newspaper with joy.  Yes, there it was--columns, columns, in
+small type!  An hour or two previously Gladstone had been speaking in
+Parliament, and by magic the whole of his speech, with all the little
+convolutions of his intricate sentences, had got into Edwin's bedroom.
+Edwin began to read, as it were voluptuously.  Not that he had a
+peculiar interest in Irish politics!  What he had was a passion for
+great news, for news long expected.  He could thrill responsively to a
+fine event.  I say that his pleasure had the voluptuousness of an
+artistic sensation.
+
+Moreover, the attraction of politics in general was increasing for him.
+Politics occupied his mind, often obsessing it.  And this was so in
+spite of the fact that he had done almost nothing in the last election,
+and that the pillars of the Liberal Club were beginning to suspect him
+of being a weakling who might follow his father into the wilderness
+between two frontiers.
+
+As he read the speech, slowly disengaging its significance from the
+thicket of words, it seemed incredible.  A parliament in Dublin!  The
+Irish taxing themselves according to their own caprices!  The Irish
+controlling the Royal Irish Constabulary!  The Irish members withdrawn
+from Westminster!  A separate nation!  Surely Gladstone could not mean
+it!  The project had the same air of unreality as that of his marriage
+with Hilda.  It did not convince.  It was too good to be true.  It could
+not materialise itself.  And yet, as his glance, flitting from left to
+right and right to left, eagerly, reached the bottom of one column and
+jumped with a crinkling of paper to the top of the next, and then to the
+next after that, the sense of unreality did depart.  He agreed with the
+principles of the Bill, and with all its details.  Whatever Gladstone
+had proposed would have received his sympathy.  He was persuaded in
+advance; he concurred in advance.  All he lacked was faith.  And those
+sentences, helped by his image of the aged legislator dominating the
+House, and by the wondrous legend of the orator's divine power--those
+long stretching, majestic, misty sentences gave him faith.  Henceforward
+he was an ardent Home Ruler.  Reason might or might not have entered
+into the affair had the circumstances of it been other; but in fact
+reason did not.  Faith alone sufficed.  For ever afterwards argument
+about Home Rule was merely tedious to him, and he had difficulty in
+crediting that opponents of it were neither stupid nor insincere.  Home
+Rule was part of his religion, beyond and above argument.
+
+He wondered what they were saying at the Liberal Club, and smiled
+disdainfully at the thought of the unseemly language that would animate
+the luxurious heaviness of the Conservative Club, where prominent
+publicans gathered after eleven o'clock to uphold the State and arrange
+a few bets with sporting clients.  He admitted, as the supreme
+importance of the night leaped out at him from the printed page, that,
+if only for form's sake, he ought to have been at the Liberal Club that
+evening.  He had been requested to go, but had refused, because on
+Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, he always spent the evening in study
+or in the semblance of study.  He would not break that rule even in
+honour of the culmination of the dazzling career of his political idol.
+Perhaps another proof of the justice of Maggie's assertion that he was a
+regular old maid!
+
+He knew what his father would say.  His father would be furious.  His
+father in his uncontrolled fury would destroy Gladstone.  And such was
+his father's empire over him that he was almost ready on Gladstone's
+behalf to adopt an apologetic and slightly shamed attitude to his father
+concerning this madness of Home Rule--to admit by his self-conscious
+blushes that it was madness.  He well knew that at breakfast the next
+morning, in spite of any effort to the contrary, he would have a guilty
+air when his father began to storm.  The conception of a separate
+parliament in Dublin, and of separate taxation, could not stand before
+his father's anger...
+
+Beneath his window, in the garden, he suddenly heard a faint sound as of
+somebody in distress.
+
+"What the deuce--!" he exclaimed.  "If that isn't the old man I'm--"
+Startled, he looked at his watch.  It was after midnight.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+As he opened the garden door, he saw, in the porch where had passed his
+first secret interview with Hilda, the figure of his father as it were
+awkwardly rising from the step.  The gas had not been turned out in the
+hall, and it gave a feeble but sufficient illumination to the porch and
+the nearest parts of the garden.  Darius stood silent and apparently
+irresolute, with a mournful and even despairing face.  He wore his best
+black suit, and a new silk hat and new black gloves, and in one hand he
+carried a copy of "The Signal" that was very crumpled.  He ignored
+Edwin.
+
+"Hello, father!" said Edwin persuasively.  "Anything wrong?"
+
+The heavy figure moved itself into the house without a word, and Edwin
+shut and bolted the door.
+
+"Funeral go off all right?"  Edwin inquired with as much nonchalance as
+he could.  (The thought crossed his mind: "I suppose he hasn't been
+having a drop too much, for once in a way?  Why did he come round into
+the garden?")
+
+Darius loosed a really terrible sigh.  "Yes," he answered, expressing
+with a single word the most profound melancholy.
+
+Four days previously Edwin and Maggie had seen their father considerably
+agitated by an item of gossip, casually received, to which it seemed to
+them he attached an excessive importance.  Namely, that old Shushions,
+having been found straying and destitute by the authorities appointed to
+deal with such matters, had been taken to the workhouse and was dying
+there.  Darius had heard the news as though it had been a message
+brought on horseback in a melodrama.  "The Bastille!" he exclaimed, in a
+whisper, and had left the house on the instant.  Edwin, while the name
+of Shushions reminded him of moments when he had most intensely lived,
+was disposed to regard the case of Mr Shushions philosophically.  Of
+course it was a pity that Mr Shushions should be in the workhouse; but
+after all, from what Edwin remembered and could surmise, the workhouse
+would be very much the same as any other house to that senile mentality.
+Thus Edwin had sagely argued, and Maggie had agreed with him.  But to
+them the workhouse was absolutely nothing but a name.  They were no more
+afraid of the workhouse than of the Russian secret police; and of their
+father's early history they knew naught.
+
+Mr Shushions had died in the workhouse, and Darius had taken his body
+out of the workhouse, and had organised for it a funeral which was to be
+rendered impressive by a procession of Turnhill Sunday school teachers.
+Edwin's activity in connexion with the funeral had been limited to the
+funeral cards, in the preparation of which his father had shown an
+irritability more than usually offensive.  And now the funeral was over.
+Darius had devoted to it the whole of Home Rule Tuesday, and had
+returned to his house at a singular hour and in a singular condition.
+
+And Edwin, loathing sentimentality and full of the wisdom of nearly
+thirty years, sedately pitied his father for looking ridiculous and
+grotesque.  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.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+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 out
+crying, and half tumbled down the steps, and off he went!  I couldn't go
+after him, as I was.  I didn't know _what_ to do.  If anything happened to
+your father, I don't know _what_ I should do."
+
+"What time was that?"  Edwin asked, wondering what on earth she
+meant--"if anything happened to your father!"
+
+"Half-past ten or hardly.  What time did he come home?  Very, very late,
+wasn't it?"
+
+"A little after twelve," he said carelessly.  He was sorry that he had
+inquired as to the hour of the visit to his aunt.  Obviously she was
+ready to build vast and terrible conjectures upon the mysterious
+interval between half-past ten and midnight.
+
+"You've cut yourself, my dear," she said, indicating with her gloved
+hand Edwin's chin.  "And I'm not surprised.  How upsetting it is for
+you!  Of course Maggie's the eldest, and we think a great deal of her,
+but you're the son--the only son!"
+
+"I know," he said, meaning that he knew he had cut himself, and he
+pressed his handkerchief to his chin.  Within, he was blasphemously
+fuming.  The sentimental accent with which she had finally murmured `the
+only son' irritated him extremely.  What in the name of God was she
+driving at?  The fact was that, enjoying a domestic crisis with positive
+sensuality, she was trying to manufacture one!  That was it!  He knew
+her.  There were times when he could share all Maggie's hatred of Mrs
+Hamps, and this was one of those times.  The infernal woman, with her
+shaking plumes and her odour of black kid, was enjoying herself!  In the
+thousandth part of a second he invented horrible and grotesque
+punishments for her, as that all the clothes should suddenly fall off
+that prim, widowed, odious modesty.  Yet, amid the multitude of his
+sensations--the smarting of his chin, the tingling of all his body after
+the bath, the fresh vivacity of the morning, the increased consciousness
+of his own ego, due to insufficient sleep, the queerness of being in the
+drawing-room at such an hour in conspiratorial talk, the vague disquiet
+caused at midnight, and now intensified despite his angry efforts to
+avoid the contagion of Mrs Hamps's mood, and above all the thought of
+his father gloomily wandering in the garden--amid these confusing
+sensations, it was precisely an idea communicated to him by his annoying
+aunt, an obvious idea, an idea not worth uttering, that emerged clear
+and dramatic: he was the only son.
+
+"There's no need to worry," he said as firmly as he could "The funeral
+got on his nerves, that's all.  He certainly did seem a bit knocked
+about last night, and I shouldn't have been surprised if he'd stayed in
+bed to-day.  But you see he's up and about."  Both of them glanced at
+the window, which gave on the garden.
+
+"Yes," murmured Mrs Hamps, unconvinced.  "But what about his crying?
+Maggie tells me he was--"
+
+"Oh!"  Edwin interrupted her almost roughly.  "That's nothing.  I've
+known him cry before."
+
+"Have you?"  She seemed taken aback.
+
+"Yes.  Years ago.  That's nothing fresh."
+
+"It's true he's very sensitive," Mrs Hamps reflected.  "That's what we
+don't realise, maybe, sometimes.  Of course if you think he's all
+right--"
+
+She approached the window, and, leaning over the tripod which held a
+flower-pot enveloped in pink paper, she drew the white curtain aside,
+and gazed forth in silence.  Darius was still pacing up and down the
+short path at the extremity of the garden; his eyes were still on the
+ground, and his features expressive of mournful despair, and at the end
+of the path he still turned his body round with slow and tedious
+hesitations.  Edwin also could see him through the window.  They both
+watched him; it was as if they were spying on him.
+
+Maggie entered, and said, in an unusual flutter--
+
+"Here's Clara and Albert!"
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Clara and her husband came immediately into the drawing-room.  The wife,
+dressed with a certain haste and carelessness, was carrying in her arms
+her third child, yet unweaned, and she expected a fourth in the early
+autumn.  Clara had matured, she had grown stronger; and despite the
+asperity of her pretty, pale face there was a charm in the free gestures
+and the large body of the young and prolific mother.  Albert Benbow wore
+the rough, clay-dusted attire of the small earthenware manufacturer who
+is away from the works for half an hour.  Both of them were electrically
+charged with importance.
+
+Amid the general self-consciousness Maggie took the baby, and Clara and
+Mrs Hamps kissed each other tenderly, as though saying, "Affliction is
+upon us."  It was impossible, in the circumstances, to proceed to minute
+inquiry about the health of the children, but Mrs Hamps expressed all
+her solicitude in a look, a tone, a lingering of lip on lip.  The years
+were drawing together Mrs Hamps and her namesake.  Edwin was often
+astonished at the increasing resemblance of Clara to her aunt, with
+whom, thanks to the unconscious intermediacy of babies, she was even
+indeed quite intimate.  The two would discuss with indefatigable gusto
+all the most minute physical details of motherhood and infancy: and
+Auntie Clara's presents were worthy of her reputation.
+
+As soon as the kiss was accomplished--no other greeting of any kind
+occurred--Clara turned sharply to Edwin--
+
+"What's this about father?"
+
+"Oh!  He's had a bit of a shock.  He's pretty much all right to-day."
+
+"Because Albert's just heard--" She looked at Albert.
+
+Edwin was thunderstruck.  Was the tale of his father's indisposition
+spread all over the Five Towns?  He had thought that the arrival of
+Clara and her husband must be due to Auntie Hamps having called at their
+house on her way up to Bleakridge.  But now he could see, even from his
+auntie's affrighted demeanour alone, that the Benbows' visit was an
+independent affair.
+
+"Are you sure he's all right?"  Albert questioned, in his superiorly
+sagacious manner, which mingled honest bullying with a little
+good-nature.
+
+"Because Albert just heard--" Clara put in again.
+
+The company then heard what Albert had just heard.  At his works before
+breakfast an old hollow-ware-presser, who lived at Turnhill, had
+casually mentioned that his father-in-law, Mr Clayhanger, had been
+cutting a very peculiar figure on the previous evening at Turnhill.  The
+hollow-ware-presser had seen nothing personally; he had only been told.
+He could not or would not particularise.  Apparently he possessed in a
+high degree the local talent for rousing an apprehension by the offer of
+food, and then under ingenious pretexts refusing the food.  At any rate,
+Albert had been startled, and had communicated his alarm to Clara.
+Clara had meant to come up a little later in the morning, but she wanted
+Albert to come with her, and Albert, being exceedingly busy, had only
+the breakfast half-hour of liberty.  Hence they had set out instantly,
+although the baby required sustenance; Albert having suggested that
+Clara could feed the baby just as well at her father's as at home.
+
+Before the Benbow story was quite finished it became entangled with the
+story of Mrs Hamps, and then with Edwin's story.  They were all
+speaking at once, except Maggie, who was trying to soothe the baby.
+
+Holding forth her arms, Clara, without ceasing to talk rapidly and
+anxiously to Mrs Hamps, without even regarding what she did, took the
+infant from her sister, held it with one hand, and with the other loosed
+her tight bodice, and boldly exposed to the greedy mouth the magnificent
+source of life.  As the infant gurgled itself into silence, she glanced
+with a fleeting ecstatic smile at Maggie, who smiled back.  It was
+strange how Maggie, now midway between thirty and forty, a tall,
+large-boned, plump, mature woman, efficient, kindly, and full of common
+sense--it was strange how she always failed to assert herself.  She
+listened now, not seeking notice and assuredly not receiving it.
+
+Edwin felt again the implication, first rendered by his aunt, and now
+emphasised by Clara and Albert, that the responsibility of the situation
+was upon him, and that everybody would look to him to discharge it.  He
+was expected to act, somehow, on his own initiative, and to do
+something.
+
+"But what is there to do?" he exclaimed, in answer to a question.
+
+"Well, hadn't he better see a doctor?"  Clara asked, as if saying
+ironically, "Hasn't it occurred to you even yet that a doctor ought to
+be fetched?"
+
+Edwin protested with a movement of impatience--
+
+"What on earth for?  He's walking about all right."
+
+They had all been surreptitiously watching Darius from behind the
+curtains.
+
+"Doesn't seem to be much the matter with him now!  That I must say!"
+agreed Albert, turning from the window.
+
+Edwin perceived that his brother-in-law was ready to execute one of
+those changes of front which lent variety to his positiveness, and he
+addressed himself particularly to Albert, with the persuasive tone and
+gesture of a man to another man in a company of women--
+
+"Of course there doesn't!  No doubt he was upset last night.  But he's
+getting over it.  _You_ don't think there's anything in it, do you,
+Maggie?"
+
+"I don't," said Maggie calmly.
+
+These two words had a great effect.
+
+"Of course if we're going to listen to every tale that's flying about a
+potbank," said Edwin.
+
+"You're right there, Teddy!" the brother-in-law heartily concurred.
+"But Clary thought we'd better--"
+
+"Certainly," said Edwin pacifically, admitting the entire propriety of
+the visit.
+
+"Why's he wearing his best clothes?"  Clara demanded suddenly.  And Mrs
+Hamps showed a sympathetic appreciation of the importance of the
+question.
+
+"Ask me another!" said Edwin.  "But you can't send for a doctor because
+a man's wearing his best clothes."
+
+Maggie smiled, scarce perceptibly.  Albert gave a guffaw.  Clara was
+slightly irritated.
+
+"Poor little dear!" murmured Mrs Hamps, caressing the baby.  "Well, I
+must be going," she sighed.
+
+"We shall see how he goes on," said Edwin, in his role of responsible
+person.
+
+"Perhaps it will be as well if you say nothing about us calling,"
+whispered Mrs Hamps.  "We'll just go quietly away.  You can give a hint
+to Mrs Nixon.  Much better he shouldn't know."
+
+"Oh! much better!" said Clara.
+
+Edwin could not deny this.  Yet he hated the chicane.  He hated to
+observe on the face of the young woman and of the old their instinctive
+impulses towards chicane, and their pleasure in it.  The whole double
+visit was subtly offensive to him.  Why should they gather like this at
+the first hint that his father was not well?  A natural affectionate
+anxiety...  Yes, of course, that motive could not be denied.
+Nevertheless, he did not like the tones and the gestures and the
+whisperings and oblique glances of their gathering.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+In the middle of a final miscellaneous conversation, Albert said--
+
+"We'll better be off."
+
+"Wait a moment," said Clara, with a nod to indicate the still busy
+infant.
+
+Then the door opened, very slowly and cautiously, and as they all
+observed the movement of the door, they all fell into silence.  Darius
+himself appeared.  Unobserved, he had left the garden and come into the
+house.  He stood in the doorway, motionless, astounded, acutely
+apprehensive, and with an expression of the most poignant sadness on his
+harsh, coarse, pimpled face.  He still wore the ridiculous cap and held
+the newspaper.  The broadcloth suit was soiled.  His eye wandered among
+his family, and it said, terrorised, and yet feebly defiant, "What are
+they plotting against me?  Why are they all here like this?"
+
+Mrs Hamps spoke first--
+
+"Well, father, we just popped in to see how you were after all that
+dreadful business yesterday.  Of course I quite understand you didn't
+want to come in last night.  You weren't equal to it."  The guilty crude
+sweetness of her cajoling voice grated excruciatingly on both Edwin and
+Maggie.  It would not have deceived even a monarch.
+
+Darius screwed himself round, and silently went forth again.
+
+"Where are you going, father?" asked Clara.
+
+He stopped, but his features did not relax.
+
+"To the shop," he muttered.  His accents were of the most dreadful
+melancholy.
+
+Everybody was profoundly alarmed by his mere tone and look.  This was
+not the old Darius.  Edwin felt intensely the futility and the
+hollowness of all those reassurances which he had just been offering.
+
+"You haven't had your breakfast, father," said Maggie quietly.
+
+"Please, father!  Please don't go like that.  You aren't fit," Clara
+entreated, and rushed towards him, the baby in her arms, and with one
+hand took his sleeve.  Mrs Hamps followed, adding persuasions.  Albert
+said bluffly, "Now, dad!  Now, dad!"
+
+Edwin and Maggie were silent in the background.
+
+Darius gazed at Clara's face, and then his glance fell, and fixed itself
+on her breast and on the head of the powerfully sucking infant, and then
+it rose to the plumes of Mrs Hamps.  His expression of tragic sorrow
+did not alter in the slightest degree under the rain of sugared
+remonstrances and cajoleries that the two women directed upon him.  And
+then, without any warning, he burst into terrible tears, and,
+staggering, leaned against the wall.  He was half carried to the sofa,
+and sat there, ineffably humiliated.  One after another looked
+reproachfully at Edwin, who had made light of his father's condition.
+And Edwin was abashed and frightened.
+
+"You or I had better fetch th' doctor," Albert muttered.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER THREE.
+
+THE NAME.
+
+"He mustn't go near business," said Mr Alfred Heve, the doctor, coming
+to Edwin, who was waiting in the drawing-room, after a long examination
+of Darius.
+
+Mr Heve was not wearing that gentle and refined smile which was so
+important a factor in the treatment of his patients and their families,
+and which he seemed to have caught from his elder brother, the vicar of
+Saint Peter's.  He was a youngish man, only a few years older than Edwin
+himself, and Edwin's respect for his ability had limits.  There were two
+other doctors in the town whom Edwin would have preferred, but Mr Heve
+was his father's choice, notable in the successful soothing of querulous
+stomachs, and it was inevitably Mr Heve who had been summoned.  He had
+arrived with an apprehensive, anxious air.  There had been a most
+distinct nervousness in his voice when, in replying to Edwin's question,
+he had said, "Perhaps I'd better see him quite alone."  Edwin had
+somehow got it into his head that he would be present at the interview.
+In shutting the dining-room door upon Edwin, Mr Heve had nodded timidly
+in a curious way, highly self-conscious.  And that dining-room door had
+remained shut for half an hour.  And now Mr Heve had emerged with the
+same embarrassment.
+
+"Whether he wants to or not?"  Edwin suggested, with a faint smile.
+
+"On no account whatever!" said the doctor, not answering the smile,
+which died.
+
+They were standing together near the door.  Edwin had his fingers on the
+handle.  He wondered how he would prevent his father from going to
+business, if his father should decide to go.
+
+"But I don't think he'll be very keen on business," the doctor added.
+
+"You don't?"
+
+Mr Heve slowly shook his head.  One of Mr Heve's qualities that
+slightly annoyed Edwin was his extraordinary discretion.  But then Edwin
+had always regarded the discreetness of doctors as exaggerated.  Why
+could not Heve tell him at once fully and candidly what was in his mind?
+He had surely the right to be told! ...  Curious!  And yet far more
+curious than Mr Heve's unwillingness to tell, was Edwin's unwillingness
+to ask.  He could not bring himself to demand bluntly of Heve: "Well,
+what's the matter with him?"
+
+"I suppose it's shock," Edwin adventured.
+
+Mr Heve lifted his chin.  "Shock may have had a little to do with it,"
+he answered doubtfully.
+
+"And how long must he be kept off business?"
+
+"I'm afraid there's not much chance of him doing any more business,"
+said Mr Heve.
+
+"Really!"  Edwin murmured.  "Are you sure?"
+
+"Quite."
+
+Edwin did not feel the full impact of this prophecy at the moment.
+Indeed, it appeared to him that he had known since the previous midnight
+of his father's sudden doom; it appeared to him that the first glimpse
+of his father after the funeral had informed him of it positively.  What
+impressed him at the moment was the unusual dignity which characterised
+Mr Heve's embarrassment.  He was beginning to respect Mr Heve.
+
+"I wouldn't care to give him more than two years," said Mr Heve, gazing
+at the carpet, and then lifting his eyes to Edwin's.
+
+Edwin flushed.  And this time his `Really!' was startled.
+
+"Of course you may care to get other advice," the doctor went on.  "I
+shall be delighted to meet a specialist.  But I tell you at once my
+opinion."  This with a gesture of candour.
+
+"Oh!" said Edwin.  "If you're sure--"
+
+Strange that the doctor would not give a name to the disease!  Most
+strange that Edwin even now could not demand the name.
+
+"I suppose he's in his right _mind?_" said Edwin.
+
+"Yes," said the doctor.  "He's in his right _mind_."  But he gave the
+reply in a tone so peculiar that the affirmative was almost as
+disconcerting as a negative would have been.
+
+"Just rest he wants?" said Edwin.
+
+"Just rest.  And looking after.  I'll send up some medicine.  He'll like
+it."  Mr Heve glanced absently at his watch.  "I must be going."
+
+"Well--" Edwin opened the door.
+
+Then with a sudden movement Mr Heve put out his hand.
+
+"You'll come in again soon?"
+
+"Oh yes."
+
+In the hall they saw Maggie about to enter the dining-room with a
+steaming basin.
+
+"I'm going to give him this," she said simply in a low voice.  "It's so
+long to dinner-time."
+
+"By all means," said Mr Heve, with his little formal bow.
+
+"You've finished seeing him then, doctor?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"I'll be back soon," said Edwin to Maggie, taking his hat from the rack.
+"Tell father if he asks I've run down to the shop."
+
+She nodded and disappeared.
+
+"I'll walk down a bit of the way with you," said Mr Heve.
+
+His trap, which was waiting at the corner, followed them down the road.
+Edwin could not begin to talk.  And Mr Heve kept silence.  Behind him,
+Edwin could hear the jingling of metal on Mr Heve's sprightly horse.
+After a couple of hundred yards the doctor stopped at a house-door.
+
+"Well--" He shook hands again, and at last smiled with sad sweetness.
+
+"He'll be a bit difficult to manage, you know," said Edwin.
+
+"I don't think so," said the doctor.
+
+"I'll let you know about the specialist.  But if you're sure--"
+
+The doctor waved a deprecating hand.  It might have been the hand of his
+brother, the Vicar.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Edwin proceeded towards the town, absorbed in a vision of his father
+seated in the dining-room, inexpressibly melancholy, and Maggie with her
+white apron bending over him to offer some nice soup.  It was a
+desolating vision--and yet he wondered why it should be!  Whenever he
+reasoned he was always inimical to his father.  His reason asked harshly
+why he should be desolated, as he undoubtedly was.  The prospect of
+freedom, of release from a horrible and humiliating servitude--this
+prospect ought to have dazzled and uplifted him, in the safe, inviolable
+privacy of his own heart.  But it did not...  What a chump the doctor
+was, to be so uncommunicative!  And he himself! ...  By the way, he had
+not told Maggie.  It was like her to manifest no immediate curiosity, to
+be content to wait...  He supposed he must call at his aunt's, and even
+at Clara's.  But what should he say when they asked him why he had not
+asked the doctor for a name?
+
+Suddenly an approaching man whose face was vaguely familiar but with
+whom he had no acquaintance whatever, swerved across the footpath and
+stopped him.
+
+"What's amiss with th' old gentleman?"  It was astounding how news flew
+in the town!
+
+"He's not very well.  Doctor's ordered him a rest."
+
+"Not in bed, is he?"
+
+"Oh no!"  Edwin lightly scorned the suggestion.
+
+"Well, I do hope it's nothing serious.  Good morning."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Edwin was detained a long time in the shop by a sub-manager from
+Bostocks in Hanbridge who was waiting, and who had come about an
+estimate for a rather considerable order.  This man desired a decrease
+of the estimate and an increased speed in execution.  He was curt.  He
+was one business firm offering an ultimatum to another business firm.
+He asked Edwin whether Edwin could decide at once.  Edwin said
+`Certainly,' using a tone that he had never used before.  He decided.
+The man departed, and Edwin saw him spring on to the Hanbridge car as it
+swept down the hill.  The man would not have been interested in the news
+that Darius Clayhanger had been to business for the last time.  Edwin
+was glad of the incident because it had preserved him from embarrassed
+conversation with Stifford.  Two hours earlier he had called for a few
+moments at the shop, and even then, ere Edwin had spoken, Stifford's
+face showed that he knew something sinister had occurred.  With a few
+words of instruction to Stifford, he now went through towards the
+workshops to speak with Big James about the Bostock order.
+
+All the workmen and apprentices were self-conscious.  And Edwin could
+not speak naturally to Big James.  When he had come to an agreement with
+Big James as to the execution of the order, the latter said--
+
+"Would you step below a minute, Mr Edwin?"
+
+Edwin shuffled.  But Big James's majestic politeness gave to his
+expressed wish the force of a command.  Edwin preceded Big James down
+the rough wooden stair to the ground floor, which was still pillared
+with supporting beams.  Big James, with deliberate, careful movements,
+drew the trap-door horizontal as he descended.
+
+"Might I ask, sir, if Master's in a bad way?" he inquired, with solemn
+and delicate calm.  But he would have inquired about the weather in the
+same fashion.
+
+"I'm afraid he is," said Edwin, glancing nervously about at the litter,
+and the cobwebs, and the naked wood, and the naked earth.  The vibration
+of a treadle-machine above them put the place in a throb.
+
+Astounding!  Everybody knew or guessed everything!  How?
+
+Big James wagged his head and his grandiose beard, now more grey than
+black, and he fingered his apron.
+
+"I believe in herbs myself," said Big James.  "But this here softening
+of the brain--well--"
+
+That was it!  Softening of the brain!  What the doctor had not told him
+he had learned from Big James.  How it happened that Big James was in a
+position to tell him he could not comprehend.  But he was ready now to
+believe that the whole town had acquired by magic the information which
+fate or original stupidity had kept from him alone...  Softening of the
+brain!
+
+"Perhaps I'm making too bold, sir," Big James went on.  "Perhaps it's
+not so bad as that.  But I did hear--"
+
+Edwin nodded confirmingly.
+
+"You needn't talk about it," he murmured, indicating the first floor by
+an upward movement of the head.
+
+"That I shall not, sir," Big James smoothly replied, and proceeded in
+the same bland tone: "And what's more, never will I raise my voice in
+song again!  James Yarlett has sung his last song."
+
+There was silence.  Edwin, accustomed though he was to the mildness of
+Big James's deportment, did not on the instant grasp that the man was
+seriously announcing a solemn resolve made under deep emotion.  But as
+he understood, tears came into Edwin's eyes, and he thrilled at the
+swift and dramatic revelation of the compositor's feeling for his
+employer.  Its impressiveness was overwhelming and it was humbling.  Why
+this excess of devotion?
+
+"I don't say but what he had his faults like other folk," said Big
+James.  "And far be it from me to say that you, Mr Edwin, will not be a
+better master than your esteemed father.  But for over twenty years I've
+worked for him, and now he's gone, never will I lift my voice in song
+again!"
+
+Edwin could not reply.
+
+"I know what it is," said Big James, after a pause.
+
+"What what is?"
+
+"This ce-re-bral softening.  You'll have trouble, Mr Edwin."
+
+"The doctor says not."
+
+"You'll have trouble, if you'll excuse me saying so.  But it's a good
+thing he's got you.  It's a good thing for Miss Maggie as she isn't
+alone with him.  It's a providence, Mr Edwin, as you're not a married
+man."
+
+"I very nearly _was_ married once!"  Edwin cried, with a sudden
+uncontrollable outburst of feeling which staggered while it satisfied
+him.  Why should he make such a confidence to Big James?  Between his
+pleasure in the relief, and his extreme astonishment at the confession,
+he felt as it were lost and desperate, as if he did not care what might
+occur.
+
+"Were you now!"  Big James commented, with an ever intensified
+blandness.  "Well, sir, I thank you."
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER FOUR.
+
+THE VICTIM OF SYMPATHY.
+
+On the same evening, Edwin, Albert Benbow, and Darius were smoking
+Albert's cigarettes in the dining-room.  Edwin sat at the end of a
+disordered supper-table, Albert was standing, hat in hand, near the
+sideboard, and Darius leaned against the mantelpiece.  Nobody could have
+supposed from his appearance that a doctor had responsibly prophesied
+this man's death within two years.  Except for a shade of sadness upon
+his face, he looked the same as he had looked for a decade.  Though
+regarded by his children as an old man, he was not old, being in fact
+still under sixty.  His grey hair was sparse; his spectacles were set
+upon his nose with the negligence characteristic of age; but the
+down-pointing moustache, which, abetted by his irregular teeth, gave him
+that curious facial resemblance to a seal, showed great force, and the
+whole of his stiff and sturdy frame showed force.  His voice, if not his
+mouth, had largely recovered from the weakness of the morning.
+Moreover, the fashion in which he smoked a cigarette had somehow the
+effect of rejuvenating him.  It was Albert who had induced him to smoke
+cigarettes occasionally.  He was not an habitual smoker, consuming
+perhaps half an ounce a week of pipe-tobacco: and assuredly he would
+never of his own accord have tried a cigarette.  For Darius cigarettes
+were aristocratic and finicking; they were an affectation.  He smoked a
+cigarette with the self-consciousness which usually marks the
+consumption of champagne in certain strata of society.  His gestures, as
+he examined from time to time the end of the cigarette, or audibly blew
+forth spreading clouds, seemed to signify that in his opinion he was
+going the pace, cutting a dash, and seeing life.  This _naivete_ had its
+charm.
+
+The three men, left alone by their women, were discussing politics,
+which then meant nothing but the subject of Home Rule.  Darius agreed
+almost eagerly with everything that Albert Benbow said.  Albert was a
+calm and utterly sound Conservative.  He was one of those politicians
+whose conviction of rightness is so strong that they cannot help
+condescending towards an opponent.  Albert would say persuasively to
+Liberal acquaintances: "Now just _think_ a moment!" apparently sure that
+the only explanation of their misguided views was that they never had
+thought for a moment.  Or he would say: "Surely all patriotic
+Liberals--" But one day when Edwin had said to him with a peculiar
+accent: "Surely all patriotic Conservatives--" he had been politely
+offended for the rest of the evening, and Edwin and he had not mentioned
+politics to each other for a long time.  Albert had had much influence
+over his father-in-law.  And now Albert said, after Darius had concurred
+and concurred--
+
+"You're one of the right sort, after all, old gentleman."
+
+Throughout the evening he had spoken to Darius in an unusually loud
+voice, as though it was necessary to shout to a man who had only two
+years to live.
+
+"All I say is," said Darius, "country before party!"
+
+"Why, of course!"  Albert smiled, confident and superior.  "Haven't I
+been telling you for years you're one of us?"
+
+Edwin, too, smiled, as superiorly as he could, but unhappily not with
+sufficient superiority to wither Albert's smile.  He said nothing,
+partly from timid discretion, but partly because he was preoccupied with
+the thought of the malignant and subtle power working secretly in his
+father's brain.  How could the doctor tell?  What was the process of
+softening?  Did his father know, in that sick brain of his, that he was
+condemned; or did he hope to recover?  Now, as he leaned against the
+mantelpiece, protruding his body in an easy posture, he might have been
+any ordinary man, and not a victim; he might have been a man of business
+relaxing after a long day of hard and successful cerebral activity.
+
+It seemed strange to Edwin that Albert could talk as he did to one whom
+destiny had set apart, to one whose being was the theatre of a drama so
+mysterious and tragic.  Yet it was the proper thing for Albert to do,
+and Albert did it perfectly, better than anybody, except possibly
+Maggie.
+
+"Those women take a deuce of a time putting their bonnets on!"  Albert
+exclaimed.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+The women came downstairs at last.  At last, to Edwin's intense relief,
+every one was going.  Albert went into the hall to meet the women.
+Edwin rose and followed him.  And Darius came as far as the door of the
+dining-room.  Less than twenty-four hours had passed since Edwin had
+begun even to suspect any sort of disaster to his father.  But the
+previous night seemed an age away.  The day had been interminable, and
+the evening exasperating in the highest degree.  What an evening!  Why
+had Albert and Clara and Auntie Hamps all of them come up just at
+supper-time?  At first they would not be persuaded!  No!  They had just
+called--sheer accident!--nothing abnormal!  And yet the whole of the
+demeanour of Auntie Hamps and Clara was abnormal.  Maggie herself,
+catching the infection, had transformed the meal into a kind of abnormal
+horrible feast by serving cold beef and pickles--flesh-meat being
+unknown to the suppers of the Clayhangers save occasionally on Sundays.
+
+Edwin could not comprehend why the visitors had come.  That is to say,
+he understood the reason quite well, but hated to admit it.  They had
+come from a mere gluttony of curiosity.  They knew all that could be
+known--but still they must come and gaze and indulge their lamentable
+hearts, and repeat the same things again and again, ten million times!
+Auntie Hamps, indeed, probably knew more than Edwin did, for she had
+thought fit to summon Dr Heve that very afternoon for an ailment of her
+own, and Clara, with an infant or so, had by a remarkable coincidence
+called at Mrs Hamps's house just after the doctor left.  "Odious,"
+thought Edwin.
+
+These two had openly treated Darius as a martyr, speaking to him in soft
+and pitiful voices, urging him to eat, urging him to drink, caressing
+him, soothing him, humouring him; pretending to be brave and cheerful
+and optimistic, but with a pretence so poor, so wilfully poor, that it
+became an insult.  When they said fulsomely, "You'll be perfectly all
+right soon if only you'll take care and do as the doctor says," Edwin
+could have risen and killed them both with hearty pleasure.  They might
+just as well have said, "You're practically in your grave."  And
+assuredly they were not without influence on Maggie's deportment.  The
+curious thing was that it was impossible to decide whether Darius
+loathed, or whether he liked, to be so treated.  His face was an enigma.
+However, he was less gloomy.
+
+Then also the evening had necessarily been full of secret conferences.
+What would you?  Each had to relate privately the things that he or she
+knew or had heard or had imagined.  And there were questions of urgency
+to be discussed.  For example the question of the specialist.  They were
+all positively agreed, Edwin found, that a specialist was unnecessary.
+Darius was condemned beyond hope or argument.  There he sat, eating and
+talking, in the large, fine house that he had created out of naught,
+looking not at all like a corpse; but he was condemned.  The doctor had
+convinced them.  Besides, did not everybody know what softening of the
+brain was?  "Of course, if he thinks he would prefer to have a
+specialist, if he has the slightest wish--" This from Auntie Hamps.
+There was the question, further, of domestic service.  Mrs Nixon's
+niece had committed the folly of marriage, and for many months Maggie
+and the old servant had been `managing;' but with a crotchety invalid
+always in the house, more help would be indispensable.  And still
+further--should Darius be taken away for a period to the sea, or Buxton,
+or somewhere?  Maggie said that nothing would make him go, and Clara
+agreed with her.  All these matters, and others, had to be kept away
+from the central figure; they were all full of passionate interest, and
+they had to be debated, in tones hushed but excited, in the hall, in the
+kitchen, upstairs, or anywhere except in the dining-room.  The excuses
+invented by the conspiring women for quitting and entering the
+dining-room, their fatuous air of innocent simplicity, disgusted Edwin.
+And he became curter and curter, as he noticed the new deference which
+even Clara practised towards him.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+The adieux were distressing.  Clara, with her pale sharp face and
+troubled eyes, clasped Darius round the neck, and almost hung on it.
+And Edwin thought: "Why doesn't she tell him straight out he's done
+for?"  Then she retired and sought her husband's arm with the conscious
+pride of a wife fruitful up to the limits set by nature.  And then
+Auntie Hamps shook hands with the victim.  These two of course did not
+kiss.  Auntie Hamps bore herself bravely.  "Now _do_ do as the doctor
+advises!" she said, patting Darius on the shoulder.  "And _do_ be guided
+by these dear children!"
+
+Edwin caught Maggie's eye, and held it grimly.
+
+"And you, my pet," said Auntie Hamps, turning to Clara, who with Albert
+was now at the door.  "You must be getting back to your babies!  It's a
+wonder how you manage to get away!  But you're a wonderful arranger! ...
+Only don't overdo it.  Don't overdo it!"
+
+Clara gave a fatigued smile, as of one whom circumstances often forced
+to overdo it.
+
+They departed, Albert whistling to the night.  Edwin observed again, in
+their final glances, the queer, new, ingratiating deference for himself.
+He bolted the door savagely.
+
+Darius was still standing at the entrance to the dining-room.  And as he
+looked at him Edwin thought of Big James's vow never to lift his voice
+in song again.  Strange!  It was the idea of the secret strangeness of
+life that was uppermost in his mind: not grief, not expectancy.  In the
+afternoon he had been talking again to Big James, who, it appeared, had
+known intimately a case of softening of the brain.  He did not identify
+the case--it was characteristic of him to name no names--but clearly he
+was familiar with the course of the disease.
+
+He had begun revelations which disconcerted Edwin, and had then stopped.
+And now as Edwin furtively examined his father, he asked himself: "Will
+_that_ happen to him, and _that_, and those still worse things that Big
+James did not reveal?"  Incredible!  There he was, smoking a cigarette,
+and the clock striking ten in its daily, matter-of-fact way.
+
+Darius let fall the cigarette, which Edwin picked up from the mat, and
+offered to him.
+
+"Throw it away," said Darius, with a deep sigh.
+
+"Going to bed?"  Edwin asked.
+
+Darius shook his head, and Edwin debated what he should do.  A moment
+later, Maggie came from the kitchen and asked--
+
+"Going to bed, father?"
+
+Again Darius shook his head.  He then went slowly into the drawing-room
+and lit the gas there.
+
+"What shall you do?  Leave him?"  Maggie whispered to Edwin in the
+dining-room, as she helped Mrs Nixon to clear the table.
+
+"I don't know," said Edwin.  "I shall see."
+
+In ten minutes both Maggie and Mrs Nixon had gone to bed.  Edwin
+hesitated in the dining-room.  Then he extinguished the gas there, and
+went into the drawing-room.  Darius, not having lowered the blinds, was
+gazing out of the black window.
+
+"You needn't wait down here for me," said he, a little sharply.  And his
+tone was so sane, controlled, firm, and ordinary that Edwin could do
+nothing but submit to it.
+
+"I'm not going to," he answered quietly.
+
+Impossible to treat a man of such demeanour like a child.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER FIVE.
+
+THE SLAVE'S FEAR.
+
+Edwin closed the door of his bedroom with a sense of relief and of
+pleasure far greater than he would have admitted; or indeed could
+honestly have admitted, for it surpassed his consciousness.  The feeling
+recurred that he was separated from the previous evening by a tremendous
+expanse of time.  He had been flung out of his daily habits.  He had
+forgotten to worry over the execution of his private programmes.  He had
+forgotten even that the solemn thirtieth birthday was close upon him.
+It seemed to him as if his own egoism was lying about in scattered
+pieces, which he must collect in the calm of this cloister, and
+reconstruct.  He wanted to resume possession of himself, very slowly,
+without violent effort.  He wound up his watch; the hour was not yet
+half-past ten.  The whole exquisite night was his.
+
+He had brought with him from the shop, almost mechanically, a copy of
+"Harper's Magazine," not the copy which regularly once a month he kept
+from a customer during the space of twenty-four hours for his own uses,
+but a second copy which had been sent down by the wholesale agents in
+mistake, and which he could return when he chose.  He had already seen
+the number, but he could not miss the chance of carefully going through
+it at leisure.  Despite his genuine aspirations, despite his taste which
+was growing more and more fastidious, he found it exceedingly difficult
+to proceed with his regular plan of reading while there was an
+illustrated magazine unexplored.  Besides, the name of "Harper's" was
+august.  To read "Harper's" was to acquire merit; even the pictures in
+"Harper's" were too subtle for the uncultivated.
+
+He turned over the pages, and they all appeared to promise new and
+strange joys.  Such preliminary moments were the most ecstatic in his
+life, as in the lives of many readers.  He had not lost sight of the
+situation created by his father's illness, but he could only see it very
+dimly through the semi-transparent pages.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+The latch clicked and the door opened slightly.  He jumped, supposing
+that his father had crept upstairs.  And the first thought of the slave
+in him was that his father had never seen the gas-stove and would now
+infallibly notice it.  But Maggie's face showed.  She came in very
+quietly--she too had caught the conspiratorial manner.
+
+"I thought you wouldn't be ready for bed just yet," she said, in mild
+excuse of her entry.  "I didn't knock, for fear he might be wandering
+about and hear."
+
+"Oh!" muttered Edwin.  "What's up?"  Instinctively he resented the
+invasion, and was alarmed for the privacy of his sacred room, although
+he knew that Maggie, and Mrs Nixon also, had it at their mercy every
+day.  Nobody ever came into that room while he was in it.
+
+Maggie approached the hearth.
+
+"I think I ought to have a stove too," she said pleasantly.
+
+"Well, why don't you?" he replied.  "I can get it for you any time."  If
+Clara had envied his stove, she would have envied it with scoffing
+rancour, and he would have used sarcasm in response.
+
+"Oh no!" said Maggie quickly.  "I don't really want one."
+
+"What's up?" he repeated.  He could see she was hesitating.
+
+"Do you know what Clara and auntie are saying?"
+
+"No!  What now?  I should have thought they'd both said enough to last
+them for a few days at any rate."
+
+"Did Albert say anything to you?"
+
+"What about?"
+
+"Well--both Clara and auntie said I must tell you.  Albert says he ought
+to make his will--they all think so."
+
+Edwin's lips curled.
+
+"How do they know he hasn't made it?"
+
+"Has he made it?"
+
+"How do I know?  You don't suppose he ever talks to me about his
+affairs, do you?  Not much!"
+
+"Well--they meant he ought to be asked."
+
+"Well, let 'em ask him, then.  I shan't."
+
+"Of course what they say is--you're the--"
+
+"What do I care for that?" he interrupted her.  "So that's what you were
+yarning so long about in your room!"
+
+"I can tell you," said Maggie, "they're both of them very serious about
+it.  So's Albert, it seems."
+
+"They disgust me," he said briefly.  "Here the thing isn't a day old,
+and they begin worrying about his will!  They go slobbering all over him
+downstairs, and upstairs it's nothing but his will they think about...
+You can't rush at a man and talk to him about his will like that.  At
+least, I can't--it's altogether too thick!  I expect some people could.
+But I can't.  Damn it, you must have some sense of decency!"
+
+Maggie remained calm and benevolent.  After a pause she said--
+
+"You see--their point is that later on he mayn't be able to make a
+will."
+
+"Look here," he questioned amicably, meeting her eyes, "what do you
+think?  What do you think yourself?"
+
+"Oh!" she said, "I should never dream of bothering about it.  I'm only
+telling you what--"
+
+"Of course you wouldn't!" he exclaimed.  "No decent person would.  Later
+on, perhaps, if one could put in a word casually!  But not now! ...  If
+he doesn't make a will he doesn't make one--that's all."
+
+Maggie leaned against the mantelpiece.
+
+"Mind your skirt doesn't catch fire," he warned her, in a murmur.
+
+"I told them what you'd say," she answered his outburst, perfectly
+unmoved.  "I knew what you'd say.  But what they say is--it's all very
+well for _you_.  You're the son, and it seems that if there isn't a will,
+if it's left too late--"
+
+This aspect of the case had absolutely not presented itself to Edwin.
+
+"If they think," he muttered, with cold acrimony--"if they think I'm the
+sort of person to take the slightest advantage of being the son--well,
+they must think it--that's all!  Besides, they can always talk to him
+themselves--if they're so desperately anxious."
+
+"You have charge of everything."
+
+"Have I! ...  And I should like to know what it's got to do with
+auntie!"
+
+Maggie lifted her head.  "Oh, auntie and Clara, you know--you can't
+separate them...  Well, I've told you."
+
+She moved to leave.
+
+"I say," he stopped her, with a confidential appeal.  "Don't you agree
+with me?"
+
+"Yes," she replied simply.  "I think it ought to be left for a bit.
+Perhaps he's made it, after all.  Let's hope so.  I'm sure it will save
+a lot of trouble if he has."
+
+"Naturally it ought to be left for a bit!  Why--just look at him! ...
+He might be on his blooming dying bed, to hear the way some people talk!
+Let 'em mention it to me, and I'll tell 'em a thing or two!"
+
+Maggie raised her eyebrows.  She scarcely recognised Edwin.
+
+"I suppose he'll be all right, downstairs?"
+
+"Right?  Of course he'll be all right!"  Then he added, in a tone less
+pugnacious--for, after all, it was not Maggie who had outraged his
+delicacy, "Don't latch the door.  Pull it to.  I'll listen out."
+
+She went silently away.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Searching with his body for the most comfortable deeps of the
+easy-chair, he set himself to savour "Harper's."  This monthly
+reassurance that nearly all was well with the world, and that what was
+wrong was not seriously wrong, waited on his knees to be accepted and to
+do its office.  Unlike the magazines of his youth, its aim was to soothe
+and flatter, not to disconcert and impeach.  He looked at the refined
+illustrations of South American capitals and of picturesque corners in
+Provence, and at the smooth or the rugged portraits of great statesmen
+and great bridges; all just as true to reality as the brilliant
+letterpress; and he tried to slip into the rectified and softened world
+offered by the magazine.  He did not criticise the presentment.  He did
+nothing so subtle as to ask himself whether if he encountered the
+reality he would recognise it from the presentment.  He wanted the
+illusions of "Harper's."  He desired the comfort, the distraction, and
+the pleasant ideal longings which they aroused.  But they were a
+medicine which he discovered he was not in a condition to absorb, a
+medicine therefore useless.  There was no effective medicine for his
+trouble.
+
+His trouble was that he objected to being disturbed.  At first he had
+been pleasantly excited, but now he shrank away at the call to freedom,
+to action, to responsibility.  All the slave in him protested against
+the knocking off of irons, and the imperative kick into the open air.
+He saw suddenly that in the calm of regular habit and of subjection, he
+had arrived at something that closely resembled happiness.  He wished
+not to lose it, knowing that it was already gone.  Actually, for his own
+sake, and quite apart from his father, he would have been ready, were it
+possible, to cancel the previous twenty-four hours.  Everything was
+ominous, and he wandering about, lost, amid menaces...  Why, even his
+cherished programmes of reading were smashed...  Hallam! ...  True,
+to-night was not a night appointed for reading, but to-morrow night was.
+And would he be able to read to-morrow night?  No, a hundred new
+complications would have arisen to harass him and to dispossess him of
+his tranquillity!
+
+Destiny was demanding from him a huge effort, unexpected and formidable,
+and the whole of his being weakly complained, asking to be exempted, but
+asking without any hope of success; for all his faculties and his
+desires knew that his conscience was ultimately their master.
+
+Talk to his father about making a will, eh!  Besides being disgusting,
+it was laughable.  Those people did not know his father as he did.  He
+foresaw that, even in conducting the routine of business, he would have
+difficulties with his father over the simplest details.  In particular
+there was one indispensable preliminary to the old man's complete
+repose, and his first duty on the morrow would be to endeavour to
+arrange this preliminary with his father; but he scarcely hoped to
+succeed.
+
+On the portion of the mantelpiece reserved for books in actual use lay
+the "Tale of a Tub," last night so enchanting.  And now he had
+positively forgotten it.  He yawned, and prepared for bed.  If he could
+not read "Harper's," perhaps he could read Swift.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+He lay in bed.  The gas was out, the stove was out, and according to his
+custom he was reading himself to sleep by the light of a candle in a
+sconce attached to the bed's head.  His eyes ran along line after line
+and down page after page, and transmitted nothing coherent to his brain.
+
+Then there were steps on the stair.  His father was at last coming to
+bed.  He was a little relieved, though he had been quite prepared to go
+to sleep and leave his father below.  Why not?  The steps died at the
+top of the stair, but an irregular creaking continued.  After a pause
+the door was pushed open; and after another pause the figure of his
+father came into view, breathing loudly.
+
+"Edwin, are you asleep?"  Darius asked anxiously.  Edwin wondered what
+could be the matter, but he answered with lightness, "Nearly."
+
+"I've not put th' light out down yon!  Happen you'd better put it out."
+There was in his father's voice a note of dependence upon him, of appeal
+to him.
+
+"Funny!" he thought, and said aloud, "All right."
+
+He jumped up.  His father thudded off deliberately to his own room,
+apparently relieved of a fearful oppression, but still fixed in sadness.
+
+On the previous night Edwin had extinguished the hall-gas and come last
+to bed; and again to-night.  But to-night with what a different
+sentiment of genuine, permanent responsibility!  The appealing
+feebleness of his father's attitude seemed to give him strength.  Surely
+a man so weak and fallen from tyranny could not cause much trouble!
+Edwin now had some hope that the unavoidable preliminary to the
+invalid's retirement might be achieved without too much difficulty.  He
+braced himself.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER SIX.
+
+KEYS AND CHEQUES.
+
+Coming up Trafalgar Road at twenty minutes past nine in the bright,
+astringent morning, Edwin carried by a string a little round parcel
+which for him contained the inspiring symbol of his new life.  By mere
+accident he had wakened and had risen early, arriving at the shop before
+half-past seven.  He had deliberately lifted on to his shoulders the
+whole burden of the shop and the printing business, and as soon as he
+felt its weight securely lodged he became extraordinarily animated and
+vigorous; even gay.  He had worked with a most agreeable sense of energy
+until nearly nine o'clock; and then, having first called at the
+ironmonger's, had stepped into the bank at the top of Saint Luke's
+Square a moment after its doors opened, and had five minutes' exciting
+conversation with the manager.  After which, with righteous hunger in
+his belly and the symbol in his hand, he had come home to breakfast.
+The symbol was such as could be obtained at any ironmonger's: an alarm
+clock.  Mrs Nixon had grown less reliable than formerly as an alarm
+clock; machinery was now supplanting her.
+
+Dr Heve came out of the house, and Dr Heve too seemed gay with fine
+resolutions.  The two met on the doorstep, each full of a justifiable
+self-satisfaction.  The doctor explained that he had come thus early
+because Mr Clayhanger was one of those cases upon which he could look
+in casually at any time.  In the sunshine they talked under the porch of
+early rising, as men who understood the value of that art.  Edwin could
+see that Dr Heve's life was a series of little habits which would never
+allow themselves to be interfered with by any large interest, and he
+despised the man's womanish smile.  Nevertheless his new respect for him
+did not weaken; he decided that he was a very decent fellow in his way,
+and he was more impressed than he would admit by the amount of work that
+the doctor had for years been doing in the morning before his
+intellectual superiors had sat up in bed.  And he imagined that it might
+be even more agreeable to read in the fresh stillness of the morning
+than in the solitary night.
+
+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.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+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."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+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 "Whipper-snapper!"
+
+"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 little parcel which he had left on the marble ledge of the
+umbrella-stand.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER SEVEN.
+
+LAID ASIDE.
+
+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 pounds.  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
+criticise.  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 recognise 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 _naivete_ 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.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+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 Saint 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 out-pointing, 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 realised 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 marketplace 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.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+And at the same time he was extremely sad, only less sad than his
+father.  When he allowed his thoughts to rest for an instant on his
+father he was so moved that he could almost have burst into a sob--just
+one terrific sob.  And he would say in his mind, "What a damned shame!
+What a damned shame!"  Meaning that destiny had behaved ignobly to his
+father, after all.  Destiny had no right to deal with a man so
+faithlessly.  Destiny should do either one thing or the other.  It
+seemed to him that he was leading his father by a string to his
+humiliation.  And he was ashamed: ashamed of his own dominance and of
+his father's craven submissiveness.  Twice they were stopped by hearty
+and curious burgesses, and at each encounter Edwin, far more than
+Darius, was anxious to pretend that the harsh hand of Darius still
+firmly held the sceptre.
+
+When they entered the shining mahogany interior of the richest Bank in
+the Five Towns, hushed save for a discreet shovelling of coins, Edwin
+waited for his father to speak, and Darius said not a word, but stood
+glumly quiescent, like a victim in a halter.  The little wiry dancing
+cashier looked; every clerk in the place looked; from behind the third
+counter, in the far recesses of the Bank, clerks looked over their
+ledgers; and they all looked in the same annoying way, as at a victim in
+a halter; in their glance was all the pitiful gloating baseness of human
+nature, mingled with a little of its compassion.
+
+Everybody of course knew that `something had happened' to the successful
+steam-printer.
+
+"Can we see Mr Lovatt?"  Edwin demanded curtly.  He was abashed and he
+was resentful.
+
+The cashier jumped on all his springs into a sudden activity of
+deference.
+
+Presently the manager emerged from the glazed door of his room, pulling
+his long whiskers.
+
+"Oh, Mr Lovatt," Edwin began nervously.  "Father's just come along--"
+
+They were swallowed up into the manager's parlour.  It might have been a
+court of justice, or a dentist's surgery, or the cabinet of an insurance
+doctor, or the room at Fontainebleau where Napoleon signed his
+abdication--anything but the thing it was.  Happily Mr Lovatt had a
+manner which never varied; he had only one manner for all men and all
+occasions.  So that Edwin was not distressed either by the deficiencies
+of amateur acting or by the exhibition of another's self-conscious
+awkwardness.  Nevertheless when his father took the pen to write he was
+obliged to look studiously at the window and inaudibly hum an air.  Had
+he not done so, that threatening sob might have burst its way out of
+him.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+"I'm going this road," said Darius, when they were safely out of the
+Bank, pointing towards the Sytch.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"I'm going this road," he repeated, gloomily obstinate.
+
+"All right," said Edwin cheerfully.  "I'll trot round with you."
+
+He did not know whether he could safely leave his father.  The old man's
+eyes resented his assiduity and accepted it.
+
+They passed the Old Sytch Pottery, the smoke of whose kilns now no
+longer darkened the sky.  The senior partner of the firm which leased it
+had died, and his sons had immediately taken advantage of his absence to
+build a new and efficient works down by the canal-side at Shawport--a
+marvel of everything save architectural dignity.  Times changed.  Edwin
+remarked on the desolation of the place and received no reply.  Then the
+idea occurred to him that his father was bound for the Liberal Club.  It
+was so.  They both entered.  In the large room two young men were
+amusing themselves at the billiard-table which formed the chief
+attraction of the naked interior, and on the ledges of the table were
+two glasses.  The steward in an apron watched them.
+
+"Aye!" grumbled Darius, eyeing the group.  "That's Rad, that is!  That's
+Rad!  Not twelve o'clock yet!"
+
+If Edwin with his father had surprised two young men drinking and
+playing billiards before noon in the Conservative Club, he would have
+been grimly pleased.  He would have taken it for a further proof of the
+hollowness of the opposition to the great Home Rule Bill; but the
+spectacle of a couple of wastrels in the Liberal Club annoyed and shamed
+him.  His vague notion was that at such a moment of high crisis the two
+wastrels ought to have had the decency to refrain from wasting.
+
+"Well, Mr Clayhanger," said the steward, in his absurd boniface way,
+"you're quite a stranger."
+
+"I want my name taken off this Club," said Darius shortly.  "Ye
+understand me!  And I reckon I'm not the only one, these days."
+
+The steward did in fact understand.  He protested in a low, amiable
+voice, while the billiard-players affected not to hear; but he perfectly
+understood.  The epidemic of resignations had already set in, and there
+had been talk of a Liberal-Unionist Club.  The steward saw that the
+grand folly of a senile statesman was threatening his own future
+prospects.  He smiled.  But at Edwin, as they were leaving, he smiled in
+a quite peculiar way, and that smile clearly meant: "Your father goes
+dotty, and the first thing he does is to change his politics."  This was
+the steward's justifiable revenge.
+
+"_You_ aren't leaving us?" the steward questioned Edwin in a half-whisper.
+
+Edwin shook his head.  But he could have killed the steward for that
+nauseating suggestive smile.  The outer door swung to, cutting off the
+delicate click of billiard balls.
+
+At the top of Duck Bank, Darius silently and without warning mounted the
+steps of the Conservative Club.  Doubtless he knew how to lay his hand
+instantly on a proposer and seconder.  Edwin did not follow him.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+That evening, conscious of responsibility and of virtue, Edwin walked up
+Trafalgar Road with a less gawky and more dignified mien than ever he
+had managed to assume before.  He had not only dismissed programmes of
+culture, he had forgotten them.  After twelve hours as head of a
+business, they had temporarily ceased to interest him.  And when he
+passed, or was overtaken by, other men of affairs, he thought to himself
+naively in the dark, "I am the equal of these men."  And the image of
+Florence Simcox, the clog-dancer, floated through his mind.
+
+He found Darius alone in the drawing-room, in front of an uncustomary
+fire, garden-clay still on his boots, and "The Christian News" under his
+spectacles.  The Sunday before the funeral of Mr Shushions had been so
+unusual and so distressing that Darius had fallen into arrear with his
+perusals.  True, he had never been known to read "The Christian News" on
+any day but Sunday, but now every day was Sunday.
+
+Edwin nodded to him and approached the fire, rubbing his hands.
+
+"What's this as I hear?"  Darius began, with melancholy softness.
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"About Albert wanting to borrow a thousand pounds?"  Darius gazed at him
+over his spectacles.
+
+"Albert wanting to borrow a thousand pounds!"  Edwin repeated,
+astounded.
+
+"Aye!  Have they said naught to you?"
+
+"No," said Edwin.  "What is it?"
+
+"Clara and your aunt have both been at me since tea.  Some tale as
+Albert can amalgamate into partnership with Hope and Carters if he can
+put down a thousand.  Then Albert's said naught to ye?"
+
+"No, he hasn't!"  Edwin exclaimed, emphasising each word with a peculiar
+fierceness.  It was as if he had said, "I should like to catch him
+saying anything to me about it!"
+
+He was extremely indignant.  It seemed to him monstrous that those two
+women should thus try to snatch an advantage from his father's weakness,
+pitifully mean and base.  He could not understand how people could bring
+themselves to do such things, nor how, having done them, they could ever
+look their fellows in the face again.  Had they no shame?  They would
+not let a day pass; but they must settle on the old man instantly, like
+flies on a carcass!  He could imagine the plottings, the hushed
+chatterings; the acting-for-the-best demeanour of that cursed woman
+Auntie Hamps (yes, he now cursed her), and the candid greed of his
+sister.
+
+"You wouldn't do it, would ye?"  Darius asked, in a tone that expected a
+negative answer; but also with a rather plaintive appeal, as though he
+were depending on Edwin for moral support against the formidable forces
+of attack.
+
+"I should not," said Edwin stoutly, touched by the strange wistful note
+and by the glance.  "Unless of course you really want to."
+
+He did not care in the least whether the money would or would not be
+really useful and reasonably safe.  He did not care whose enmity he was
+risking.  His sense of fair play was outraged, and he would salve it at
+any cost.  He knew that had his father not been struck down and
+defenceless, these despicable people would never have dared to demand
+money from him.  That was the only point that mattered.
+
+The relief of Darius at Edwin's attitude in the affair was painful.
+Hoping for sympathy from Edwin, he yet had feared in him another enemy.
+Now he was reassured, and he could hide his feelings no better than a
+child.
+
+"Seemingly they can't wait till my will's opened!" he murmured, with a
+scarcely successful affectation of grimness.
+
+"Made a will, have you?"  Edwin remarked, with an elaborate casualness
+to imply that he had never till then given a thought to his father's
+will, but that, having thought of the question, he was perhaps a very
+little surprised that his father had indeed made a will.
+
+Darius nodded, quite benevolently.  He seemed to have forgotten his deep
+grievance against Edwin in the matter of cheque-signing.
+
+"Duncalf's got it," he murmured after a moment.  Duncalf was the town
+clerk and a solicitor.
+
+So the will was made!  And he had submissively signed away all control
+over all monetary transactions.  What more could he do, except expire
+with the minimum of fuss?  Truly Darius, in the local phrase, was now
+`laid aside'!  And of all the symptoms of his decay the most striking
+and the most tragic, to Edwin, was that he showed no curiosity whatever
+about business.  Not one single word of inquiry had he uttered.
+
+"You'll want shaving," said Edwin, in a friendly way.
+
+Darius passed a hand over his face.  He had ceased years ago to shave
+himself, and had a subscription at Dick Jones's in Aboukir Street, close
+by the shop.
+
+"Aye!"
+
+"Shall I send the barber up, or shall you let it grow?"
+
+"What do you think?"
+
+"Oh!"  Edwin drawled, characteristically hesitating.  Then he remembered
+that he was the responsible head of the family of Clayhanger.  "I think
+you might let it grow," he decided.
+
+And when he had issued the verdict, it seemed to him like a sentence of
+sequestration and death on his father...  `Let it grow!  What does it
+matter?'  Such was the innuendo.
+
+"You used to grow a full beard once, didn't you?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said Darius.
+
+That made the situation less cruel.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER EIGHT.
+
+A CHANGE OF MIND.
+
+One evening, a year later, in earliest summer of 1887, Edwin and Mr
+Osmond Orgreave were walking home together from Hanbridge.  When they
+reached the corner of the street leading to Lane End House, Osmond
+Orgreave said, stopping--
+
+"Now you'll come with us?"  And he looked Edwin hard in the eyes, and
+there was a most flattering appeal in his voice.  It was some time since
+their eyes had met frankly, for Edwin had recently been having
+experience of Mr Orgreave's methods in financial controversy, and it
+had not been agreeable.
+
+After an instant Edwin said heartily--
+
+"Yes, I think I'll come.  Of course I should like to.  But I'll let you
+know."
+
+"To-night?"
+
+"Yes, to-night."
+
+"I shall tell my wife you're coming."
+
+Mr Orgreave waved a hand, and passed with a certain decorative gaiety
+down the street.  His hair was now silvern, but it still curled in the
+old places, and his gestures had apparently not aged at all.
+
+Mr and Mrs Orgreave were going to London for the Jubilee celebrations.
+So far as their family was concerned, they were going alone, because
+Osmond had insisted humorously that he wanted a rest from his children.
+But he had urgently invited Edwin to accompany them.  At first Edwin had
+instinctively replied that it was impossible.  He could not leave home.
+He had never been to London; a journey to London presented itself to him
+as an immense enterprise, almost as a piece of culpable self-indulgence.
+And then, under the stimulus of Osmond's energetic and adventurous
+temperament, he had said to himself, "Why not?  Why shouldn't I?"
+
+The arguments favoured his going.  It was absurd and scandalous that he
+had never been to London: he ought for his self-respect to depart
+thither at once.  The legend of the Jubilee, spectacular, processional,
+historic, touched his imagination.  Whenever he thought of it, his fancy
+saw pennons and corselets and chargers winding through stupendous
+streets, and, somewhere in the midst, the majesty of England in the
+frail body of a little old lady, who had had many children and one
+supreme misfortune.  Moreover, he could incidentally see Charlie.
+Moreover, he had been suffering from a series of his customary colds,
+and from overwork, and Heve had told him that he `would do with a
+change.'  Moreover, he had a project for buying paper in London: he had
+received, from London, overtures which seemed promising.  He had never
+been able to buy paper quite as cheaply as Darius had bought paper, for
+the mere reason that he could not haggle over sixteenths of a penny with
+efficient ruthlessness; he simply could not do it, being somehow ashamed
+to do it.  In Manchester, where Darius had bought paper for thirty
+years, they were imperceptibly too brutal for Edwin in the harsh
+realities of a bargain; they had no sense of shame.  He thought that in
+letters from London he detected a softer spirit.
+
+And above all he desired, by accepting Mr Orgreave's invitation, to
+show to the architect that the differences between them were really
+expunged from his mind.  Among many confusions in his father's
+flourishing but disorderly affairs, Edwin had been startled to find the
+Orgreave transactions.  There were accounts and contra-accounts, and
+quantities of strangely contradictory documents.  Never had a real
+settlement occurred between Darius and Osmond.  And Osmond did not seem
+to want one.  Edwin, however, with his old-maid's passion for putting
+and keeping everything in its place, insisted on one.  Mr Orgreave had
+to meet him on his strongest point, his love of order.  The process of
+settlement had been painful to Edwin; it had seriously marred some of
+his illusions.  Nearly the last of the entanglements in his father's
+business, the Orgreave matter was straightened and closed now; and the
+projected escapade to London would bury it deep, might even restore
+agreeable illusions.  And Edwin was incapable of nursing malice.
+
+The best argument of all was that he had a right to go to London.  He
+had earned London, by honest and severe work, and by bearing firmly the
+huge weight of his responsibility.  So far he had offered himself no
+reward whatever, not even an increase of salary, not even a week of
+freedom or the satisfaction of a single caprice.
+
+"I shall go, and charge it to the business," he said to himself.  He
+became excited about going.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+As he approached his house, he saw the elder Heve, vicar of Saint
+Peter's, coming away from it, a natty clerical figure in a straw hat of
+peculiar shape.  Recently this man had called once or twice; not
+professionally, for Darius was neither a churchman nor a parishioner,
+but as a brother of Dr Heve's, as a friendly human being, and Darius
+had been flattered.  The Vicar would talk about Jesus with quiet
+half-humorous enthusiasm.  For him at any rate Christianity was grand
+fun.  He seemed never to be solemn over his religion, like the
+Wesleyans.  He never, with a shamed, defiant air, said, "I am not
+ashamed of Christ," like the Wesleyans.  He might have known Christ
+slightly at Cambridge.  But his relations with Christ did not make him
+conceited, nor condescending.  And if he was concerned about the welfare
+of people who knew not Christ, he hid his concern in the politest
+manner.  Edwin, after being momentarily impressed by him, was now
+convinced of his perfect mediocrity; the Vicar's views on literature had
+damned him eternally in the esteem of Edwin, who was still naive enough
+to be unable to comprehend how a man who had been to Cambridge could
+speak enthusiastically of "Uncle Tom's Cabin."  Moreover, Edwin despised
+him for his obvious pride in being a bachelor.  The Vicar would not say
+that a priest should be celibate, but he would, with delicacy, imply as
+much.  Then also, for Edwin's taste, the parson was somewhat too
+childishly interested in the culture of cellar-mushrooms, which was his
+hobby.  He would recount the tedious details of all his experiments to
+Darius, who, flattered by these attentions from the Established Church,
+took immense delight in the Vicar and in the sample mushrooms offered to
+him from time to time.
+
+Maggie stood in the porch, which commanded the descent into Bursley; she
+was watching the Vicar as he receded.  When Edwin appeared at the gate,
+she gave a little jump, and he fancied that she also blushed.
+
+"Look here!" he exclaimed to himself, in a flash of suspicion.  "Surely
+she's not thinking of the Vicar!  Surely Maggie isn't after all!"  He
+did not conceive it possible that the Vicar, who had been to Cambridge
+and had notions about celibacy, was thinking of Maggie.  "Women are
+queer," he said to himself.  (For him, this generalisation from facts
+was quite original.)  Fancy her staring after the Vicar!  She must have
+been doing it quite unconsciously!  He had supposed that her attitude
+towards the Vicar was precisely his own.  He took it for granted that
+the Vicar's attitude was the same to both of them, based on a polite and
+kindly but firm recognition that there could be no genuine sympathy
+between him and them.
+
+"The Vicar's just been," said Maggie.
+
+"Has he? ...  Cheered the old man up at all?"
+
+"Not much."  Maggie shook her head gloomily.
+
+Edwin's conscience seemed to be getting ready to hint that he ought not
+to go to London.
+
+"I say, Mag," he said quietly, as he inserted his stick in the
+umbrella-stand.  She stopped on her way upstairs, and then approached
+him.
+
+"Mr Orgreave wants me to go to London with him and Mrs Orgreave."  He
+explained the whole project to her.
+
+She said at once, eagerly and benevolently--
+
+"Of course you ought to go.  It'll do you all the good in the world.  I
+shall be all right here.  Clara and Albert will come for Jubilee Day,
+anyhow.  But haven't you driven it late? ...  The day after to-morrow,
+isn't it?  Mr Heve was only saying just now that the hotels were all
+crammed."
+
+"Well, you know what Orgreave is!  I expect he'll look after all that."
+
+"You go!"  Maggie enjoined him.
+
+"Won't upset him?"  Edwin nodded vaguely to wherever Darius might be.
+
+"Can't be helped if it does," she replied calmly.
+
+"Well then, I'm dashed if I don't go!  What about my collars?"
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Those three--Darius, Maggie, and Edwin--sat down to tea in silence.  The
+window was open, and the weather very warm and gay.  During the previous
+twelve months they had sat down to hundreds of such meals.  Save for a
+few brief periods of cheerfulness, Darius had steadily grown more
+taciturn, heavy and melancholy.  In the winter he had of course
+abandoned his attempts to divert himself by gardening--attempts at the
+best half-hearted and feeble--and he had not resumed them in the spring.
+Less than half a year previously he had often walked across the fields
+to Hillport and back, or up the gradual slopes to the height of Toft
+End--he never went townwards, had not once visited the Conservative
+Club.  But now he could not even be persuaded to leave the garden.  An
+old wicker arm-chair had been placed at the end of the garden, and he
+would set out for that arm-chair as upon a journey, and, having reached
+it, would sink into it with a huge sigh, and repose before bracing
+himself to the effort of return.
+
+And now it seemed marvellous that he had ever had the legs to get to
+Hillport and to Toft End.  He existed in a stupor of dull reflection,
+from pride pretending to read and not reading, or pretending to listen
+and not listening, and occasionally making a remark which was inapposite
+but which had to be humoured.  And as the weeks passed his children's
+manner of humouring him became increasingly perfunctory, and their
+movements in putting right the negligence of his attire increasingly
+brusque.  Vainly they tried to remember in time that he was a victim and
+not a criminal; they would remember after the careless remark and after
+the curt gesture, when it was too late.  His malady obsessed them: it
+was in the air of the house, omnipresent; it weighed upon them,
+corroding the nerve and exasperating the spirit.  Now and then, when
+Darius had vented a burst of irrational anger, they would say to each
+other with casual bitterness that really he was too annoying.  Once,
+when his demeanour towards the new servant had strongly suggested that
+he thought her name was Bathsheba, Mrs Nixon herself had `flown out' at
+him, and there had been a scene which the doctor had soothed by discreet
+professional explanations.  Maggie's difficulty was that he was always
+there, always on the spot.  To be free of him she must leave the house;
+and Maggie was not fond of leaving the house.
+
+Edwin meant to inform him briefly of his intention to go to London, but
+such was the power of habit that he hesitated; he could not bring
+himself to announce directly this audacious and unprecedented act of
+freedom, though he knew that his father was as helpless as a child in
+his hands.  Instead, he began to talk about the renewal of the lease of
+the premises in Duck Square, as to which it would be necessary to give
+notice to the landlord at the end of the month.
+
+"I've been thinking I'll have it made out in my own name," he said.
+"It'll save you signing, and so on."  This in itself was a proposal
+sufficiently startling, and he would not have been surprised at a
+violent instinctive protest from Darius; but Darius seemed not to heed.
+
+Then both Edwin and Maggie noticed that he was trying to hold a sausage
+firm on his plate with his knife, and to cut it with his fork.
+
+"No, no, father!" said Maggie gently.  "Not like that!"
+
+He looked up, puzzled, and then bent himself again to the plate.  The
+whole of his faculties seemed to be absorbed in a great effort to
+resolve the complicated problem of the plate, the sausage, the knife and
+the fork.
+
+"You've got your knife in the wrong hand," said Edwin impatiently, as to
+a wilful child.
+
+Darius stared at the knife and at the fork, and he then sighed, and his
+sigh meant, "This business is beyond me!"  Then he endeavoured to
+substitute the knife for the fork, but he could not.
+
+"See," said Edwin, leaning over.  "Like this!"  He took the knife, but
+Darius would not loose it.  "No, leave go!" he ordered.  "Leave go!  How
+can I show you if you don't leave go?"
+
+Darius dropped both knife and fork with a clatter.  Edwin put the knife
+into his right hand, and the fork into his left; but in a moment they
+were wrong again.  At first Edwin could not believe that his father was
+not indulging deliberately in naughtiness.
+
+"Shall I cut it up for you, father?"  Maggie asked, in a mild,
+persuasive tone.
+
+Darius pushed the plate towards her.
+
+When she had cut up the sausage, she said--
+
+"There you are!  I'll keep the knife.  Then you can't get mixed up."
+
+And Darius ate the sausage with the fork alone.  His intelligence had
+failed to master the original problem presented to it.  He ate steadily
+for a few moments, and then the tears began to roll down his cheek, and
+he ate no more.
+
+This incident, so simple, so unexpected, and so dramatic, caused the
+most acute distress.  And its effect was disconcerting in the highest
+degree.  It reminded everybody that what Darius suffered from was
+softening of the brain.  For long he had been a prisoner in the house
+and garden.  For long he had been almost mute.  And now, just after a
+visit which usually acted upon him as a tonic, he had begun to lose the
+skill to feed himself.  Little by little he was demonstrating, by his
+slow declension from it, the wonder of the standard of efficiency
+maintained by the normal human being.
+
+Edwin and Maggie avoided one another, even in their glances.  Each
+affected the philosophical, seeking to diminish the significance of the
+episode.  But neither succeeded.  Of the two years allotted to Darius,
+one had gone.  What would the second be?
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+In his bedroom, after tea, Edwin fought against the gloomy influence,
+but uselessly.  The inherent and appalling sadness of existence
+enveloped and chilled him.  He gazed at the rows of his books.  He had
+done no regular reading of late.  Why read?  He gazed at the screen in
+front of his bed, covered with neat memoranda.  How futile!  Why go to
+London?  He would only have to come back from London!  And then he said
+resistingly, "I _will_ go to London."  But as he said it aloud, he knew
+well that he would not go.  His conscience would not allow him to
+depart.  He could not leave Maggie alone with his father.  He yielded to
+his conscience unkindly, reluctantly, with no warm gust of
+unselfishness; he yielded because he could not outrage his abstract
+sense of justice.
+
+From the window he perceived Maggie and Janet Orgreave talking together
+over the low separating wall.  And he remembered a word of Janet's to
+the effect that she and Maggie were becoming quite friendly and that
+Maggie was splendid.  Suddenly he went downstairs into the garden.  They
+were talking in attitudes of intimacy; and both were grave and mature,
+and both had a little cleft under the chin.  Their pale frocks
+harmonised in the evening light.  As he approached, Maggie burst into a
+girlish laugh.  "Not really?" she murmured, with the vivacity of a young
+girl.  He knew not what they were discussing, nor did he care.  What
+interested him, what startled him, was the youthful gesture and tone of
+Maggie.  It pleased and touched him to discover another Maggie in the
+Maggie of the household.  Those two women had put on for a moment the
+charming, chattering silliness of schoolgirls.  He joined them.  On the
+lawn of the Orgreaves, Alicia was battling fiercely at tennis with an
+elegant young man whose name he did not know.  Croquet was deposed;
+tennis reigned.
+
+Even Alicia's occasional shrill cry had a mournful quality in the
+languishing beauty of the evening.
+
+"I wish you'd tell your father I shan't be able to go to-morrow," Edwin
+said to Janet.
+
+"But he's told all of us you _are_ going!"  Janet exclaimed.
+
+"Shan't you go?"  Maggie questioned, low.
+
+"No," he murmured.  Glancing at Janet, he added, "It won't do for me to
+go."
+
+"What a pity!"  Janet breathed.
+
+Maggie did not say, "Oh!  But you ought to!  There's no reason whatever
+why you shouldn't!"  By her silence she contradicted the philosophic
+nonchalance of her demeanour during the latter part of the meal.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER NINE.
+
+THE OX.
+
+Edwin walked idly down Trafalgar Road in the hot morning sunshine of
+Jubilee Day.  He had left his father tearfully sentimentalising about
+the Queen.  `She's a good 'un!'  Then a sob.  `Never was one like her!'
+Another sob.  `No, and never will be again!'  Then a gush of tears on
+the newspaper, which the old man laboriously scanned for details of the
+official programme in London.  He had not for months read the newspaper
+with such a determined effort to understand; indeed, since the beginning
+of his illness, no subject, except mushroom-culture, had interested him
+so much as the Jubilee.  Each time he looked at the sky from his shady
+seat in the garden he had thanked God that it was a fine day, as he
+might have thanked Him for deliverance from a grave personal disaster.
+
+Except for a few poor flags, there was no sign of gaiety in Trafalgar
+Road.  The street, the town, and the hearts of those who remained in it,
+were wrapped in that desolating sadness which envelops the provinces
+when a supreme spectacular national rejoicing is centralised in London.
+All those who possessed the freedom, the energy, and the money had gone
+to London to witness a sight that, as every one said to every one, would
+be unique, and would remain unique for ever--and yet perhaps less to
+witness it than to be able to recount to their grandchildren that they
+had witnessed it.  Many more were visiting nearer holiday resorts for a
+day or two days.  Those who remained, the poor, the spiritless, the
+afflicted, and the captive, felt with mournful keenness the shame of
+their utter provinciality, envying the crowds in London with a bitter
+envy, and picturing London as the paradise of fashion and splendour.
+
+It was from sheer aimless disgust that Edwin went down Trafalgar Road;
+he might as easily have gone up.  Having arrived in the town, a
+wilderness of shut shops, he gazed a moment at his own, and then entered
+it by the side door.  He had naught else to do.  Had he chosen he could
+have spent the whole day in reading, or he might have taken again to his
+long-neglected water-colours.  But it was not in him to put himself to
+the trouble of seeking contentment.  He preferred to wallow in utter
+desolation, thinking of all the unpleasant things that had ever happened
+to him, and occasionally conjecturing what he would have been doing at a
+given moment had he accompanied the jolly, the distinguished, and the
+enterprising Osmond Orgreave to London.
+
+He passed into the shop, sufficiently illuminated by the white rays that
+struck through the diamond holes in the shutters.  The morning's
+letters--a sparse company--lay forlorn on the floor.  He picked them up
+and pitched them down in the cubicle.  Then he went into the cubicle,
+and with the negligent gesture of long habit unlocked a part of the
+desk, the part which had once been his father's privacy, and of which he
+had demanded the key more than a year ago.  It was all now under his
+absolute dominion.  He could do exactly as he pleased with a commercial
+apparatus that brought in some eight hundred pounds a year net.  He was
+the unquestioned regent, and yet he told himself that he was no happier
+than when a slave.
+
+He drew forth his books of account, and began to piece figures together
+on backs of envelopes, using a shorthand of accounts such as a principal
+will use when he is impatient and not particular to a few pounds.  A
+little wasp of curiosity was teasing Edwin, and to quicken it a
+comparison was necessary between the result of the first six months of
+that year and the first six months of the previous year.  True, June had
+not quite expired, but most of the quarterly accounts were ready, and he
+could form a trustworthy estimate.  Was he, with his scorn of his
+father, his brains, his orderliness, doing better or worse than his
+father in the business?  At the election of 1886, there had been
+considerably fewer orders than was customary at elections; he had done
+nothing whatever for the Tories, but that was a point that affected
+neither period of six months.  Sundry customers had assuredly been lost;
+on the other hand, Stifford's travelling had seemed to be very
+satisfactory.  Nor could it be argued that money had been dropped on the
+new-book business, because he had not yet inaugurated the new-book
+business, preferring to wait; he was afraid that his father might after
+all astoundingly walk in one day, and see new books on the counter, and
+rage.  He had stopped the supplying of newspapers, and would deign to
+nothing lower than a sixpenny magazine; but the profit on newspapers was
+negligible.
+
+The totals ought surely to compare in a manner favourable to himself,
+for he had been extremely and unremittingly conscientious.  Nevertheless
+he was afraid.  He was afraid because he knew, vaguely and still deeply,
+that he could neither buy nor sell as well as his father.  It was not a
+question of brains; it was a question of individuality.  A sense of
+honour, of fairness, a temperamental generosity, a hatred of meanness,
+often prevented him from pushing a bargain to the limit.  He could not
+bring himself to haggle desperately.  And even when price was not the
+main difficulty, he could not talk to a customer, or to a person whose
+customer he was, with the same rough, gruff, cajoling, bullying skill as
+his father.  He could not, by taking thought, do what his father had
+done naturally, by the mere blind exercise of instinct.  His father,
+with all his clumsiness, and his unscientific methods, had a certain
+quality, unseizable, unanalysable, and Edwin had not that quality.
+
+He caught himself, in the rapid calculating, giving himself the benefit
+of every doubt; somehow he could not help it, childish as it was.  And
+even so, he could see, or he could feel, that the comparison was not
+going to be favourable to the regent.  It grew plainer that the volume
+of business had barely been maintained, and it was glaringly evident
+that the expenses, especially wages, had sensibly increased.  He
+abandoned the figures not quite finished, partly from weary disgust, and
+partly because Big James most astonishingly walked into the shop, from
+the back.  He was really quite glad to encounter Big James, a
+fellow-creature.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+"Seeing the door open, sir," said Big James cheerfully, through the
+narrow doorway of the cubicle, "I stepped in to see as it was no one
+unlawful."
+
+"Did I leave the side door open?"  Edwin murmured.  It was surprising
+even to himself, how forgetful he was at times, he with his mania for
+orderliness!
+
+Big James was in his best clothes, and seemed, with his indestructible
+blandness, to be perfectly happy.
+
+"I was just strolling up to have a look at the ox," he added.
+
+"Oh!" said Edwin.  "Are they cooking it?"
+
+"They should be, sir.  But my fear is it may turn, in this weather."
+
+"I'll come out with you," said Edwin, enlivened.
+
+He locked the desk, and hurriedly straightened a few things, and then
+they went out together, by Wedgwood Street and the Cock Yard up to the
+market-place.  No breeze moved, and the heat was tremendous.  And there
+at the foot of the Town Hall tower, and in its scanty shadow, a dead ox,
+slung by its legs from an iron construction, was frizzling over a great
+primitive fire.  The vast flanks of the animal, all rich yellows and
+browns, streamed with grease, some of which fell noisily on the almost
+invisible flames, while the rest was ingeniously caught in a system of
+runnels.  The spectacle was obscene, nauseating to the eye, the nose,
+and the ear, and it powerfully recalled to Edwin the legends of the
+Spanish Inquisition.  He speculated whether he would ever be able to
+touch beef again.  Above the tortured and insulted corpse the air
+quivered in large waves.  Mr Doy, the leading butcher of Bursley, and
+now chief executioner, regarded with anxiety the operation which had
+been entrusted to him, and occasionally gave instructions to a myrmidon.
+Round about stood a few privileged persons, whom pride helped to bear
+the double heat; and farther off on the pavements, a thin scattered
+crowd.  The sublime spectacle of an ox roasted whole had not sufficed to
+keep the townsmen in the town.  Even the sages who had conceived and
+commanded this peculiar solemnity for celebrating the Jubilee of a Queen
+and Empress had not stayed in the borough to see it enacted, though some
+of them were to return in time to watch the devouring of the animal by
+the aged poor at a ceremonial feast in the evening.
+
+"It's a grand sight!" said Big James, with simple enthusiasm.  "A grand
+sight!  Real old English!  And I wish her well!"  He meant the Queen and
+Empress.  Then suddenly, in a different tone, sniffing the air, "I doubt
+it's turned!  I'll step across and ask Mr Doy."
+
+He stepped across, and came back with the news that the greater portion
+of the ox, despite every precaution, had in fact very annoyingly
+`turned,' and that the remainder of the carcass was in serious danger.
+
+"What'll the old people say?" he demanded sadly.  "But it's a grand
+sight, turned or not!"
+
+Edwin stared and stared, in a sort of sinister fascination.  He thought
+that he might stare for ever.  At length, after ages of ennui, he loosed
+himself from the spell with an effort and glanced at Big James.
+
+"And what are you going to do with yourself to-day, James?"
+
+Big James smiled.  "I'm going to take my walks abroad, sir.  It's seldom
+as I get about in the town nowadays."
+
+"Well, I must be off!"
+
+"I'd like you to give my respects to the old gentleman, sir."
+
+Edwin nodded and departed, very slowly and idly, towards Trafalgar Road
+and Bleakridge.  He pulled his straw hat over his forehead to avoid the
+sun, and then he pushed it backwards to his neck to avoid the sun.  The
+odour of the shrivelling ox remained with him; it was in his nostrils
+for several days.  His heart grew blacker with intense gloom; and the
+contentment of Big James at the prospect of just strolling about the
+damnable dead town for the rest of the day surpassed his comprehension.
+He abandoned himself to misery voluptuously.  The afternoon and evening
+stretched before him, an arid and appalling Sahara.  The Benbows, and
+their babes, and Auntie Hamps were coming for dinner and tea, to cheer
+up grandfather.  He pictured the repasts with savage gloating
+detestation--burnt ox, and more burnt ox, and the false odious
+brightness of a family determined to be mutually helpful and inspiring.
+Since his refusal to abet the project of a loan to Albert, Clara had
+been secretly hostile under her superficial sisterliness, and Auntie
+Hamps had often assured him, in a manner extraordinarily exasperating,
+that she was convinced he had acted conscientiously for the best.
+Strange thought, that after eight hours of these people and of his
+father, he would be still alive!
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER TEN.
+
+MRS. HAMPS AS A YOUNG MAN.
+
+On the Saturday afternoon of the week following the Jubilee, Edwin and
+Mrs Hamps were sunning themselves in the garden, when Janet's face and
+shoulders appeared suddenly at the other side of the wall.  At the sight
+of Mrs Hamps she seemed startled and intimidated, and she bowed
+somewhat more ceremoniously than usual.
+
+"Good afternoon!"
+
+Then Mrs Hamps returned the bow with superb extravagance, like an
+Oriental monarch who is determined to outvie magnificently the gifts of
+another.  Mrs Hamps became conscious of the whole of her body and of
+every article of her summer apparel, and nothing of it all was allowed
+to escape from contributing to the completeness of the bow.  She
+bridled.  She tossed proudly as it were against the bit.  And the rich
+ruins of her handsomeness adopted new and softer lines in the
+overpowering sickly blandishment of a smile.  Thus she always greeted
+any merely formal acquaintance whom she considered to be above herself
+in status--provided, of course, that the acquaintance had done nothing
+to offend her.
+
+"Good after_noon_, Miss Orgreave!"
+
+Reluctantly she permitted her features to relax from the full effort of
+the smile; but they might not abandon it entirely.
+
+"I thought Maggie was there," said Janet.
+
+"She was, a minute ago," Edwin answered.  "She's just gone in to father.
+She'll be out directly.  Do you want her?"
+
+"I only wanted to tell her something," said Janet, and then paused.
+
+She was obviously very excited.  She had the little quick movements of a
+girl.  In her cream-tinted frock she looked like a mere girl.  And she
+was beautiful in her maturity; a challenge to the world of males.  As
+she stood there, rising from behind the wall, flushed, quivering,
+abandoned to an emotion and yet unconsciously dignified by that peculiar
+stateliness that never left her--as she stood there it seemed as if she
+really was offering a challenge.
+
+"I'll fetch Mag, if you like," said Edwin.
+
+"Well," said Janet, lifting her chin proudly, "it isn't a secret.
+Alicia's engaged."  And pride was in every detail of her bearing.
+
+"Well, I never!"  Edwin exclaimed.
+
+Mrs Hamps's features resumed the full smile.
+
+"Can you imagine it?  I can't!  It seems only last week that she left
+school!"
+
+And indeed it seemed only last week that Alicia was nothing but legs,
+gawkiness, blushes, and screwed-up shoulders.  And now she was a
+destined bride.  She had caught and enchanted a youth by her mysterious
+attractiveness.  She had been caught and enchanted by the mysterious
+attractiveness of the male.  She had known the dreadful anxiety that
+precedes the triumph, and the ecstasy of surrender.  She had kissed as
+Janet had never kissed, and gazed as Janet had never gazed.  She knew
+infinitely more than Janet.  She had always been a child to Janet, but
+now Janet was the child.  No wonder that Janet was excited.
+
+"Might one ask who is the fortunate young gentleman?"  Mrs Hamps
+dulcetly inquired.
+
+"It's Harry Hesketh, from Oldcastle...  You've met him here," she added,
+glancing at Edwin.
+
+Mrs Hamps nodded, satisfied, and the approving nod indicated that she
+was aware of all the excellences of the Hesketh family.
+
+"The tennis man!"  Edwin murmured.
+
+"Yes, of course!  You aren't surprised, are you?"
+
+The fact was that Edwin had not given a thought to the possible
+relations between Alicia and any particular young man.  But Janet's
+thrilled air so patently assumed his interest that he felt obliged to
+make a certain pretence.
+
+"I'm not what you'd call staggered," he said roguishly.  "I'm keeping my
+nerve."  And he gave her an intimate smile.
+
+"Father-in-law and son-in-law have just been talking it over," said
+Janet archly, "in the breakfast-room!  Alicia thoughtfully went out for
+a walk.  I'm dying for her to come back."  Janet laughed from simple
+joyous expectation.  "When Harry came out of the breakfast-room he just
+put his arms round me and kissed me.  Yes!  That was how I was told
+about it.  He's a dear!  Don't you think so?  I mean really!  I felt I
+must come and tell some one."
+
+Edwin had never seen her so moved.  Her emotion was touching, it was
+beautiful.  She need not have said that she had come because she must.
+The fact was in her rapt eyes.  She was under a spell.
+
+"Well, I must go!" she said, with a curious brusqueness.  Perhaps she
+had a dim perception that she was behaving in a manner unusual with her.
+"You'll tell your sister."
+
+Her departing bow to Mrs Hamps had the formality of courts, and was
+equalled by Mrs Hamps's bow.  Just as Mrs Hamps, having re-created her
+elaborate smile, was allowing it finally to expire, she had to bring it
+into existence once more, and very suddenly, for Janet returned to the
+wall.
+
+"You won't forget tennis after tea," said Janet shortly.
+
+Edwin said that he should not.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+"Well, well!"  Mrs Hamps commented, and sat down in the wicker-chair of
+Darius.
+
+"I wonder she doesn't get married herself," said Edwin idly, having
+nothing in particular to remark.
+
+"You're a nice one to say such a thing!"  Mrs Hamps exclaimed.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Well, you really are!"  She raised the structure of her bonnet and
+curls, and shook it slowly at him.  And her gaze had an extraordinary
+quality of fleshly naughtiness that half pleased and half annoyed him.
+
+"Why?" he repeated.
+
+"Well," she said again, "you aren't a ninny, and you aren't a simpleton.
+At least I hope not.  You must know as well as anybody the name of the
+young gentleman that _she's_ waiting for."
+
+In spite of himself, Edwin blushed: he blushed more and more.  Then he
+scowled.
+
+"What nonsense!" he muttered viciously.  He was entirely sincere.  The
+notion that Janet was waiting for him had never once crossed his mind.
+It seemed to him fantastic, one of those silly ideas that a woman such
+as Auntie Hamps would be likely to have, or more accurately would be
+likely to pretend to have.  Still, it did just happen that on this
+occasion his auntie's expression was more convincing than usual.  She
+seemed more human than usual, to have abandoned, at any rate partially,
+the baffling garment of effusive insincerity in which she hid her soul.
+The Eve in her seemed to show herself, and, looking forth from her eyes,
+to admit that the youthful dalliance of the sexes was alone interesting
+in this life of strict piety.  The revelation was uncanny.
+
+"You needn't talk like that," she retorted calmly, "unless you want to
+go down in my good opinion.  You don't mean to tell me honestly that you
+don't know what's been the talk of the town for years and years!"
+
+"It's ridiculous," said Edwin.  "Why--what do you know of her--you don't
+know the Orgreaves at all!"
+
+"I know _that_, anyway," said Auntie Hamps.
+
+"Oh!  Stuff!"  He grew impatient.
+
+And yet, in his extreme astonishment, he was flattered and delighted.
+
+"Of course," said Auntie Hamps, "you're so difficult to talk to--"
+
+"Difficult to talk to!--Me?"
+
+"Otherwise your auntie might have given you a hint long ago.  I believe
+you are a simpleton after all!  I cannot understand what's come over the
+young men in these days.  Letting a girl like that wait and wait!"  She
+implied, with a faint scornful smile, that if she were a young man she
+would be capable of playing the devil with the maidenhood of the town.
+Edwin was rather hurt.  And though he felt that he ought not to be
+ashamed, yet he was ashamed.  He divined that she was asking him how he
+had the face to stand there before her, at his age, with his youth
+unspilled.  After all, she was an astounding woman.  He remained silent.
+
+"Why--look how splendid it would be!" she murmured.  "The very thing!
+Everybody would be delighted!"
+
+He still remained silent.
+
+"But you can't keep on philandering for ever!" she said sharply.
+"She'll never see thirty again! ...  Why does she ask you to go and play
+at tennis?  Can you tell me that? ... perhaps I'm saying too much, but
+this I _will_ say--"
+
+She stopped.
+
+Darius and Maggie appeared at the garden door.  Maggie offered her hand
+to aid her father, but he repulsed it.  Calmly she left him, and came up
+the garden, out of the deep shadow into the sunshine.  She had learnt
+the news of the engagement, and had fully expressed her feelings about
+it before Darius arrived at his destination and Mrs Hamps vacated the
+wicker-chair.
+
+"I'll get some chairs," said Edwin gruffly.  He could look nobody in the
+eyes.  As he turned away he heard Mrs Hamps say--
+
+"Great news, father!  Alicia Orgreave is engaged!"
+
+The old man made no reply.  His mere physical present deprived the
+betrothal of all its charm.  The news fell utterly flat and lay
+unregarded and insignificant.
+
+Edwin did not get the chairs.  He sent the servant out with them.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER ELEVEN.
+
+AN HOUR.
+
+Janet called out--"Play--no, I think perhaps you'll do better if you
+stand a little farther back.  Now--play!"
+
+She brought down her lifted right arm, and smacked the ball into the
+net.
+
+"Double fault!" she cried, lamenting, when she had done this twice.  "Oh
+dear!  Now you go over to the other side of the court."
+
+Edwin would not have kept the rendezvous could he have found an excuse
+satisfactory to himself for staying away.  He was a beginner at tennis,
+and a very awkward one, having little aptitude for games, and being now
+inelastic in the muscles.  He possessed no flannels, though for weeks he
+had been meaning to get at least a pair of white pants.  He was wearing
+Jimmie Orgreave's india-rubber pumps, which admirably fitted him.
+Moreover, he was aware that he looked better in his jacket than in his
+shirt-sleeves.  But these reasons against the rendezvous were naught.
+The only genuine reason was that he had felt timid about meeting Janet.
+Could he meet her without revealing by his mere guilty glance that his
+aunt had half convinced him that he had only to ask nicely in order to
+receive?  Could he meet her without giving her the impression that he
+was a conceited ass?  He had met her.  She was waiting for him in the
+garden, and by dint of starting the conversation in loud tones from a
+distance, and fumbling a few moments with the tennis balls before
+approaching her, he had come through the encounter without too much
+foolishness.
+
+And now he was glad that he had not been so silly as to stay away.  She
+was alone; Mrs Orgreave was lying down, and all the others were out.
+Alicia and her Harry were off together somewhere.  She was alone in the
+garden, and she was beautiful, and the shaded garden was beautiful, and
+the fading afternoon.  The soft short grass was delicate to his feet,
+and round the oval of the lawn were glimpses of flowers, and behind her
+clear-tinted frock was the yellow house laced over with green.  A column
+of thick smoke rose from a manufactory close behind the house, but the
+trees mitigated it.  He played perfunctorily, uninterested in the game,
+dreaming.
+
+She was a wondrous girl!  She was the perfect girl!  Nobody had ever
+been able to find any fault with her.  He liked her exceedingly.  Had it
+been necessary, he would have sacrificed his just interests in the
+altercation with her father in order to avoid a coolness in which she
+might have been involved.  She was immensely distinguished and superior.
+And she was over thirty and had never been engaged, despite the number
+and variety of her acquaintances, despite her challenging readiness to
+flirt, and her occasional coquetries.  Ten years ago he had almost
+regarded her as a madonna on a throne, so high did she seem to be above
+him.  His ideas had changed, but there could be no doubt that in an
+alliance between an Orgreave and a Clayhanger, it would be the
+Clayhanger who stood to gain the greater advantage.  There she was!  If
+she was not waiting for him, she was waiting--for some one!  Why not for
+him as well as for another?
+
+He said to himself--
+
+"Why shouldn't I be happy?  That other thing is all over!"
+
+It was, in fact, years since the name of Hilda had ever been mentioned
+between them.  Why should he not be happy?  There was nothing to prevent
+her from being happy.  His father's illness could not endure for ever.
+One day soon he would be free in theory as well as in practice.  With no
+tie and no duty (Maggie was negligible) he would have both money and
+position.  What might his life not be with a woman like Janet,
+brilliant, beautiful, elegant, and faithful?  He pictured that life, and
+even the vision of it dazzled him.  Janet his!  Janet always there,
+presiding over a home which was his home, wearing hats that he had paid
+for, appealing constantly to his judgement, and meaning _him_ when she
+said, `My husband.'  He saw her in the close and tender intimacy of
+marriage, acquiescent, exquisite, yielding, calmly accustomed to him,
+modest, but with a different modesty!  It was a vision surpassing
+visions.  And there she was on the other side of the net!
+
+With her he could be his finest self.  He would not have to hide his
+finest self from ridicule, as often now, among his own family.
+
+She was a fine woman!  He watched the free movement of her waist, and
+the curvings and flyings of her short tennis skirt.  And there was
+something strangely feminine about the neck of her blouse, now that he
+examined it.
+
+"Your game!" she cried.  "That's four double faults I've served.  I
+can't play!  I really don't think I can.  There's something the matter
+with me!  Or else it's the net that's too high.  Those boys will keep
+screwing it up!"
+
+She had a pouting, capricious air, and it delighted him.  Never had he
+seen her so enchantingly girlish as, by a curious hazard, he saw her
+now.  Why should he not he happy?  Why should he not wake up out of his
+nightmare and begin to live?  In a momentary flash he seemed to see his
+past in a true perspective, as it really was, as some well-balanced
+person not himself would have seen it.  Mere morbidity to say, as he had
+been saying privately for years, that marriage was not for him!
+Marriage emphatically was for him, if only because he had fine ideals of
+it.  Most people who married were too stupid to get the value of their
+adventure.  Celibacy was grotesque, cowardly, and pitiful--no matter how
+intellectual the celibate--and it was no use pretending the contrary.
+
+A masculine gesture, an advance, a bracing of the male in him ...
+probably nothing else was needed.
+
+"Well," he said boldly, "if you don't want to play, let's sit down and
+rest."  And then he gave a nervous little laugh.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+They sat down on the bench that was shaded by the old elderberry tree.
+Visually, the situation had all the characteristics of an idyllic
+courtship.
+
+"I suppose it's Alicia's engagement," she said, smiling reflectively,
+"that's put me off my game.  They do upset you, those things do, and you
+don't know why...  It isn't as if Alicia was the first--I mean of us
+girls.  There was Marian; but then, of course, that was so long ago, and
+I was only a chit."
+
+"Yes," he murmured vaguely; and though she seemed to be waiting for him
+to say more, he merely repeated, "Yes."
+
+Such was his sole contribution to this topic, so suitable to the
+situation, so promising, so easy of treatment.  They were so friendly
+that he was under no social obligation to talk for the sake of talking.
+
+That was it: they were too friendly.  She sat within a foot of him,
+reclining against the sloping back of the bench, and idly dangling one
+white-shod foot; her long hands lay on her knees.  She was there in all
+her perfection.  But by some sinister magic, as she had approached him
+and their paths had met at the bench, his vision had faded.  Now, she
+was no longer a woman and he a man.  Now, the curvings of her drapery
+from the elegant waistband were no longer a provocation.  She was
+immediately beneath his eye, and he recognised her again for what she
+was--Janet!  Precisely Janet--no less and no more!  But her beauty, her
+charm, her faculty for affection--surely...  No!  His instinct was deaf
+to all `buts.'  His instinct did not argue; it cooled.  Fancy had
+created a vision in an instant out of an idea, and in an instant the
+vision had died.  He remembered Hilda with painful intensity.  He
+remembered the feel of her frock under his hand in the cubicle, and the
+odour of her flesh that was like fruit.  His cursed constancy! ...
+Could he not get Hilda out of his bones?  Did she sleep in his bones
+like a malady that awakes whenever it is disrespectfully treated?
+
+He grew melancholy.  Accustomed to savour the sadness of existence, he
+soon accepted the new mood without resentment.
+
+He resigned himself to the destruction of his dream.  He was like a
+captive whose cell has been opened in mistake, and who is too gentle to
+rave when he sees it shut again.  Only in secret he poured an
+indifferent, careless scorn upon Auntie Hamps.
+
+They played a whole interminable set, and then Edwin went home, possibly
+marvelling at the variety of experience that a single hour may contain.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER TWELVE.
+
+REVENGE.
+
+Edwin re-entered his home with a feeling of dismayed resignation.  There
+was then no escape, and never could be any escape, from the existence to
+which he was accustomed; even after his father's death, his existence
+would still be essentially the same--incomplete and sterile.  He
+accepted the destiny, but he was daunted by it.
+
+He quietly shut the front door, which had been ajar, and as he did so he
+heard voices in the drawing-room.
+
+"I tell ye I'm going to grow mushrooms," Darius was saying.  "Can't I
+grow mushrooms in my own cellar?"  Then a snort.
+
+"I don't think it'll be a good thing," was Maggie's calm reply.
+
+"Ye've said that afore.  Why won't it be a good thing?  And what's it
+got to do with you?"  The voice of Darius, ordinarily weak and languid,
+was rising and becoming strong.
+
+"Well, you'd be falling up and down the cellar steps.  You know how dark
+they are.  Supposing you hurt yourself?"
+
+"Ye'd only be too glad if I killed mysen!" said Darius, with a touch of
+his ancient grimness.
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"And it seems they want a lot of attention, mushrooms do," Maggie went
+on with unperturbed placidity.  "You'd never be able to do it."
+
+"Jane could help me," said Darius, in the tone of one who is rather
+pleased with an ingenious suggestion.
+
+"Oh no, she couldn't!"  Maggie exclaimed, with a peculiar humorous
+dryness which she employed only on the rarest occasions.  Jane was the
+desired Bathsheba.
+
+"And I say she could!" the old man shouted with surprising vigour.  "Her
+does nothing!  What does Mrs Nixon do?  What do you do?  Three great
+strapping women in the house and doing nought!  I say she shall!"  The
+voice dropped and snarled.  "Who's master here?  Is it me, or is it the
+cat?  D'ye think as I can't turn ye all out of it neck and crop, if I've
+a mind?  You and Edwin, and the lot of ye!  And to-night too!  Give me
+some money now, and quicker than that!  I've got nought but sovereigns
+and notes.  I'll go down and get the spawn myself--ay! and order the
+earth too!  I'll make it my business to show my childer--But I mun have
+some change for my car fares."  He breathed heavily.
+
+"I'm sure Edwin won't like it," Maggie murmured.
+
+"Edwin!  Hast told Edwin?"  Darius also murmured, but it was a murmur of
+rage.
+
+"No, I haven't.  Edwin's got quite enough on his hands as it is, without
+any other worries."
+
+There was the noise of a sudden movement, and of a chair falling.
+
+"Bugger you all!"  Darius burst out with a fury whose restraint showed
+that he had unsuspected reserves of strength.  And then he began to
+swear.  Edwin, like many timid men, often used forbidden words with much
+ferocity in private.  Once he had had a long philosophic argument with
+Tom Orgreave on the subject of profanity.  They had discussed all
+aspects of it, from its religious origin to its psychological results,
+and Edwin's theory had been that it was only improper by a purely
+superstitious convention, and that no man of sense could possibly be
+offended, in himself, by the mere sound of words that had been deprived
+of meaning.  He might be offended on behalf of an unreasoning
+fellow-listener, such as a woman, but not personally.  Edwin now
+discovered that his theory did not hold.  He was offended.  He was
+almost horrified.  He had never in his life till that moment heard
+Darius swear.  He heard him now.  He considered himself to be a fairly
+first-class authority on swearing; he thought that he was familiar with
+all the sacred words and with all the combinations of them.  He was
+mistaken.  His father's profanity was a brilliant and appalling
+revelation.  It comprised words which were strange to him, and strange
+perversions that renewed the vigour of decrepit words.  For Edwin, it
+was a whole series of fresh formulae, brutal and shameless beyond his
+experience, full of images and similes of the most startling candour,
+and drawing its inspiration always from the sickening bases of life.
+Darius had remembered with ease the vocabulary to which he was hourly
+accustomed when he began life as a man of seven.  For more than fifty
+years he had carried within himself these vestiges of a barbarism which
+his children had never even conceived, and now he threw them out in all
+their crudity at his daughter.  And when she did not blench, he began to
+accuse her as men were used to accuse their daughters in the bright days
+of the Sailor King.  He invented enormities which she had committed, and
+there would have been no obscene infamy of which Maggie was not guilty,
+if Edwin--more by instinct than by volition--had not pushed open the
+door and entered the drawing-room.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+He was angry, and the sight of the flushed meekness of his sister, as
+she leaned quietly with her back against an easy-chair, made him
+angrier.
+
+"Enough of this!" he said gruffly and peremptorily.
+
+Darius, with scarcely a break, continued.
+
+"I say enough of this!"  Edwin cried, with increased harshness.
+
+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.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+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.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+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 I
+dressing or undressing?"  And he would be capable of so involving
+himself in a shirt, if Edwin were not there to direct, that much
+patience was needed for his extrication.  His misapprehensions and
+mistakes frequently reached the grotesque.  As habit threw them more and
+more intimately together, the trusting dependence of Darius on Edwin
+increased.  At morning and evening the expression of that intensely
+mournful visage seemed to be saying as its gaze met Edwin's, "Here is
+the one clear-sighted, powerful being who can guide me through this
+complex and frightful problem of my clothes."  A suit, for Darius, had
+become as intricate as a quadratic equation.  And, in Edwin, compassion
+and irritation fought an interminable guerilla.  Now one obtained the
+advantage, now the other.  His nerves demanded relief from the friction,
+but he could offer them no holiday, not one single day's holiday.  Twice
+every day he had to manoeuvre and persuade that ponderous, irrational
+body in his father's bedroom.  Maggie helped the body to feed itself at
+table.  But Maggie apparently had no nerves.
+
+"I shall never go down them stairs again," said Darius, as if in
+fatigued disgust, on the ottoman.
+
+"Oh, nonsense!"  Edwin exclaimed.
+
+Darius shook his head solemnly, and looked at vacancy.
+
+"Well, we'll talk about that to-morrow," said Edwin, and with the skill
+of regular practice drew out the ends of the bow of his father's
+necktie.  He had gradually evolved a complete code of rules covering the
+entire process of the toilette, and he insisted on their observance.
+Every article had its order in the ceremony and its place in the room.
+Never had the room been so tidy, nor the rites so expeditious, as in the
+final months of Darius's malady.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+The cumbrous body lay in bed.  The bed was in an architecturally
+contrived recess, sheltered from both the large window and the door.
+Over its head was the gas-bracket and the bell-knob.  At one side was a
+night-table, and at the other a chair.  In front of the night-table were
+Darius's slippers.  On the chair were certain clothes.  From a hook near
+the night-table, and almost over the slippers, hung his dressing-gown.
+Seen from the bed, the dressing-table, at the window, appeared to be a
+long way off, and the wardrobe was a long way off in another direction.
+The gas was turned low.  It threw a pale illumination on the bed, and
+gleamed on a curve of mahogany here and there in the distances.
+
+Edwin looked at his father, to be sure that all was in order, that
+nothing had been forgotten.  The body seemed monstrous and shapeless
+beneath the thickly piled clothes; and from the edge of the eider-down,
+making a valley in the pillow, the bearded face projected, in a manner
+grotesque and ridiculous.  A clock struck seven in another part of the
+house.
+
+"What time's that?"  Darius murmured.
+
+"Seven," said Edwin, standing close to him.
+
+Darius raised himself slowly and clumsily on one elbow.
+
+"Here!  But look here!"  Edwin protested.  "I've just fixed you up--"
+
+The old man ignored him, and one of those unnaturally white hands
+stretched forth to the night-table, which was on the side of the bed
+opposite to Edwin.  Darius's gold watch and chain lay on the
+night-table.
+
+"I've wound it up!  I've wound it up!" said Edwin, a little crossly.
+"What are you worrying at?"
+
+But Darius, silent, continued to manoeuvre his flannelled arm so as to
+possess the watch.  At length he seized the chain, and, shifting his
+weight to the other elbow, held out the watch and chain to Edwin, with a
+most piteous expression.  Edwin could see in the twilight that his
+father was ready to weep.
+
+"I want ye--" the old man began, and then burst into violent sobs; and
+the watch dangled dangerously.
+
+"Come now!"  Edwin tried to soothe him, forcing himself to be kindly.
+"What is it?  I tell you I've wound it up all right.  And it's correct
+time to a tick."  He consulted his own silver watch.
+
+With a tremendous effort, Darius mastered his sobs, and began once more,
+"I want ye--"
+
+He tried several times, but his emotion overcame him each time before he
+could force the message out.  It was always too quick for him.  Silent,
+he could control it, but he could not simultaneously control it and
+speak.
+
+"Never mind," said Edwin.  "We'll see about that tomorrow."  And he
+wondered what bizarre project affecting the watch had entered his
+father's mind.  Perhaps he wanted it set a quarter of an hour fast.
+
+Darius dropped the watch on the eider-down, and sighed in despair, and
+fell back on the pillow and shut his eyes.  Edwin restored the watch to
+the night-table.
+
+Later, he crept into the dim room.  Darius was snoring under the
+twilight of the gas.  Like an unhappy child, he had found refuge in
+sleep from the enormous, infantile problems of his existence.  And it
+was so pathetic, so distressing, that Edwin, as he gazed at that beard
+and those gold teeth, could have sobbed too.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
+
+THE WATCH.
+
+When Edwin the next morning, rather earlier than usual on Sundays, came
+forth from his bedroom to go into the bathroom, he was startled by a
+voice from his father's bedroom calling him.  It was Maggie's.  She had
+heard him open his door, and she joined him on the landing.
+
+"I was waiting for you to be getting up," she said in a quiet tone.  "I
+don't think father's so well, and I was wondering whether I hadn't
+better send Jane down for the doctor.  It's not certain he'll call
+to-day if he isn't specially fetched."
+
+"Why?" said Edwin.  "What's up?"
+
+"Oh, nothing," Maggie answered.  "Nothing particular, but you didn't
+hear him ringing in the night?"
+
+"Ringing?  No!  What time?"
+
+"About one o'clock.  Jane heard the bell, and she woke me.  So I got up
+to him.  He said he couldn't do with being alone."
+
+"What did you do?"
+
+"I made him something hot and stayed with him."
+
+"What?  All night?"
+
+"Yes," said Maggie.
+
+"But why didn't you call me?"
+
+"What was the good?"
+
+"You ought to have called me," he said with curt displeasure, not really
+against Maggie, but against himself for having heard naught of all these
+happenings.  Maggie had no appearance of having passed the night by her
+father's bedside.
+
+"Oh," she said lightly, "I dozed a bit now and then.  And as soon as the
+girl was up I got her to come and sit with him while I spruced myself."
+
+"I'll have a look at him," said Edwin, in another tone.
+
+"Yes, I wish you would."  Now, as often, he was struck by Maggie's
+singular deference to him, her submission to his judgement.  In the past
+her attitude had been different; she had exercised the moral rights of
+an elder sister; but latterly she had mysteriously transformed herself
+into a younger sister.
+
+He went towards his father, drawing his dressing-gown more closely round
+him.  The chamber had an aspect of freshness and tidiness that made it
+almost gay--until he looked at the object in the smoothed and rectified
+bed.  He nodded to his father, who merely gazed at him.  There was no
+definite, definable change in the old man's face, but his bearing, even
+as he lay, was appreciably more melancholy and impotent.  The mere sight
+of a man so broken and so sad was humiliating to the humanity which
+Edwin shared with him.
+
+"Well, father," he nodded familiarly.  "Don't feel like getting up, eh?"
+And, remembering that he was the head of the house, the source of
+authority and of strength, he tried to be cheerful, casual, and
+invigorating, and was disgusted by the futile inefficiency of the
+attempt.  He had not, like Auntie Hamps, devoted a lifetime to the study
+of the trick.
+
+Darius feebly moved his hopeless head to signify a negative.
+
+And Edwin thought, with a lancinating pain, of what the old man had
+mumbled on the previous evening: "I shall never go down them stairs
+again."  Perhaps the old man never would go down those stairs again!  He
+had paid no serious attention to the remark at the moment, but now it
+presented itself to him as a solemn and prophetic utterance, of such as
+are remembered with awe for years and continue to jut up clear in the
+mind when all minor souvenirs of the time have crumbled away.  And he
+would have given much of his pride to be able to go back and help the
+old man upstairs once more, and do it with a more loving patience.
+
+"I've sent Jane," said Maggie, returning to the bedroom.  "You'd better
+go and finish dressing."
+
+On coming out of the bathroom he discovered Albert on the landing,
+waiting.
+
+"The missis would have me come up and see how he was," said Albert.  "So
+I've run in between school and chapel.  When I told her what a doing he
+gave us, getting him upstairs, she was quite in a way, and she would
+have me come up.  The kid's better."  He was exceedingly and quite
+genuinely fraternal, not having his wife's faculty for nourishing a
+feud.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+The spectacular developments were rapid.  In the afternoon Auntie Hamps,
+Clara, Maggie, and Edwin were grouped around the bed of Darius.  A fire
+burned in the grate; flowers were on the dressing-table.  An extra table
+had been placed at the foot of the bed.  The room was a sick-room.
+
+Dr Heve had called, and had said that the patient's desire not to be
+left alone was a symptom of gravity.  He suggested a nurse, and when
+Maggie, startled, said that perhaps they could manage without a nurse,
+he inquired how.  And as he talked he seemed to be more persuaded that a
+nurse was necessary, if only for night duty, and in the end he went
+himself to the new Telephone Exchange and ordered a nurse from the
+Pirehill Infirmary Nursing Home.  And the dramatic thing was that within
+two hours and a half the nurse had arrived.  And in ten minutes after
+that it had been arranged that she should have Maggie's bedroom and that
+she should take night duty, and in order that she might be fresh for the
+night she had gone straight off to bed.
+
+Then Clara had arrived, in spite of the illness of her baby, and Auntie
+Hamps had forced herself up Trafalgar Road, in spite of her rheumatism.
+And a lengthy confabulation between the women had occurred in the
+dining-room, not about the invalid, but about what `she' had said, and
+about the etiquette of treating `her,' and about what `she' looked like
+and shaped like; `her' and `she' being the professional nurse.  With a
+professional nurse in it, each woman sincerely felt that the house was
+no longer itself, that it had become the house of the enemy.
+
+Darius lay supine before them, physically and spiritually abased,
+accepting, like a victim who is too weak even to be ashamed, the cooings
+and strokings and prayers and optimistic mendacities of Auntie Hamps,
+and the tearful tendernesses of Clara.
+
+"I've made my will," he whimpered.
+
+"Yes, yes," said Auntie Hamps.  "Of course you have!"
+
+"Did I tell you I'd made my will?" he feebly insisted.
+
+"Yes, father," said Clara.  "Don't worry about your will."
+
+"I've left th' business to Edwin, and all th' rest's divided between you
+two wenches."  He was weeping gently.
+
+"Don't worry about that, father," Clara repeated.  "Why are you thinking
+so much about your will?"  She tried to speak in a tone that was easy
+and matter-of-fact.  But she could not.  This was the first authentic
+information that any of them had had as to the dispositions of the will,
+and it was exciting.
+
+Then Darius began to try to sit up, and there were protests against such
+an act.  Though he sat up to take his food, the tone of these
+apprehensive remonstrances implied that to sit up at any other time was
+to endanger his life.  Darius, however, with a weak scowl, continued to
+lift himself, whereupon Maggie aided him, and Auntie Hamps like
+lightning put a shawl round his shoulders.  He sighed, and stretched out
+his hand to the night-table for his gold watch and chain, which he
+dangled towards Edwin.
+
+"I want ye--" He stopped, controlling the muscles of his face.
+
+"He wants you to wind it up," said Clara, struck by her own insight.
+
+"No, he doesn't," said Edwin.  "He knows it's wound up."
+
+"I want ye--" Darius recommenced.  But he was defeated again by his
+insidious foe.  He wept loudly and without restraint for a few moments,
+and then suddenly ceased, and endeavoured to speak, and wept anew,
+agitating the watch in the direction of Edwin.
+
+"Take it, Edwin," said Mrs Hamps.  "Perhaps he wants it put away," she
+added, as Edwin obeyed.
+
+Darius shook his head furiously.  "I want him--" Sobs choked him.
+
+"I know what he wants," said Auntie Hamps.  "He wants to give dear Edwin
+the watch, because Edwin's been so kind to him, helping him to dress
+every day, and looking after him just like a professional nurse--don't
+you, dear?"
+
+Edwin secretly cursed her in the most horrible fashion.  But she was
+right.
+
+"Ye-hes," Darius confirmed her, on a sob.
+
+"He wants to show his gratitude," said Auntie Hamps.
+
+"Ye-hes," Darius repeated, and wiped his eyes.
+
+Edwin stood foolishly holding the watch with its massive Albert chain.
+He was very genuinely astonished, and he was profoundly moved.  His
+father's emotion concerning him must have been gathering force for
+months and months, increasing a little and a little every day in those
+daily, intimate contacts, until at length gratitude had become, as it
+were, a spirit that possessed him, a monstrous demon whose wild
+eagerness to escape defeated itself.  And Edwin had never guessed, for
+Darius had mastered the spirit till the moment when the spirit mastered
+him.  It was out now, and Darius, delivered, breathed more freely.
+Edwin was proud, but his humiliation was greater than his pride.  He
+suffered humiliation for his father.  He would have preferred that
+Darius should never have felt gratitude, or, at any rate, that he should
+never have shown it.  He would have preferred that Darius should have
+accepted his help nonchalantly, grimly, thanklessly, as a right.  And if
+through disease, the old man could not cease to be a tyrant with
+dignity, could not become human without this appalling ceremonial
+abasement--better that he should have exercised harshness and oppression
+to the very end!  There was probably no phenomenon of human nature that
+offended Edwin's instincts more than an open conversion.
+
+Maggie turned nervously away and busied herself with the grate.
+
+"You must put it on," said Auntie Hamps sweetly.  "Mustn't he, father?"
+
+Darius nodded.
+
+The outrage was complete.  Edwin removed his own watch and dropped it
+into the pocket of his trousers, substituting for it the gold one.
+
+"There, father!" exclaimed Auntie Hamps proudly, surveying the curve of
+the Albert on her nephew's waistcoat.
+
+"Ay!"  Darius murmured, and sank back on the pillow with a sigh of
+relief.
+
+"Thanks, father," Edwin muttered, reddening.  "But there was no
+occasion."
+
+"Now you see what it is to be a good son!"  Auntie Hamps observed.
+
+Darius murmured indistinctly.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, bending down.
+
+"I must have his," said Darius.  "I must have a watch here."
+
+"He wants your old one in exchange," Clara explained eagerly.
+
+Edwin smiled, discovering a certain alleviation in this shrewd demand of
+his father's, and he drew out the silver Geneva.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Shortly afterwards the nurse surprised them all by coming into the room.
+She carried a writing-case.  Edwin introduced her to Auntie Hamps and
+Clara.  Clara blushed and became mute.  Auntie Hamps adopted a tone of
+excessive deference, of which the refrain was "Nurse will know best."
+Nurse seemed disinclined to be professional.  Explaining that as she was
+not able to sleep she thought she might as well get up, she took a seat
+near the fire and addressed herself to Maggie.  She was a tall and
+radiant woman of about thirty.  Her aristocratic southern accent proved
+that she did not belong to the Five Towns, and to Maggie, in excuse for
+certain questions as to the district, she said that she had only been at
+Pirehill a few weeks.  Her demeanour was extraordinarily cheerful.
+Auntie Hamps remarked aside to Clara what a good thing it was that Nurse
+was so cheerful; but in reality she considered such cheerfulness
+exaggerated in a sick-room, and not quite nice.  The nurse asked about
+the posts, and said she had a letter to write and would write it there
+if she could have pen and ink.  Auntie Hamps, telling her eagerly about
+the posts, thought that these professional nurses certainly did make
+themselves at home in a house.  The nurse's accent intimidated all of
+them.
+
+"Well, nurse, I suppose we mustn't tire our patient," said Auntie Hamps
+at last, after Edwin had brought ink and paper.
+
+Edwin, conscious of the glory of a gold watch and chain, and conscious
+also of freedom from future personal service on his father, preceded
+Auntie Hamps and Clara to the landing, and Nurse herself sped them from
+the room, in her quality of mistress of the room.  And when she and
+Maggie and Darius were alone together she went to the bedside and spoke
+softly to her patient.  She was so neat and bright and white and
+striped, and so perfect in every detail, that she might have been a
+model taken straight from a shop-window.  Her figure illuminated the
+dusk.  An incredible luxury for the little boy from the Bastille!  But
+she was one of the many wonderful things he had earned.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
+
+THE BANQUET.
+
+It was with a conscience uneasy that Edwin shut the front door one night
+a month later, and issued out into Trafalgar Road.  Since the arrival of
+Nurse Shaw, Darius had not risen from his bed, and the household had
+come to accept him as bed-ridden and the nurse as a permanency.  The
+sick-room was the centre of the house, and Maggie and Edwin and the
+servants lived, as it were, in a camp round about it, their days
+uncomfortably passing in suspense, in expectation of developments which
+tarried.  "How is he this morning?"  "Much the same."  "How is he this
+evening?"  "Much the same."  These phrases had grown familiar and
+tedious.  But for three days Darius had been noticeably worse, and the
+demeanour of Nurse Shaw had altered, and she had taken less sleep and
+less exercise.  Osmond Orgreave had even called in person to inquire
+after the invalid, doubtless moved by Janet to accomplish this
+formality, for he could not have been without news.  Janet was
+constantly in the house, helping Maggie; and Alicia also sometimes.
+Since her engagement, Alicia had been striving to prove that she
+appreciated the gravity of existence.
+
+Still, despite the change in the patient's condition, everybody had
+insisted that Edwin should go to the annual dinner of the Society for
+the Prosecution of Felons, to which he had been duly elected with
+flattering dispatch.  Why should he not go?  Why should he not enjoy
+himself?  What could he do if he stayed at home?  Would not the change
+be good for him?  At most the absence would be for a few hours, and if
+he could absent himself during ten hours for business, surely for
+healthful distraction he might absent himself during five hours!  Maggie
+grew elder-sisterly at the last moment of decision, and told him he must
+go, and that if he didn't she should be angry.  When he asked her `What
+about _her_ health?  What about _her_ needing a change?' she said curtly
+that that had nothing to do with it.
+
+He went.  The persuaders were helped by his own desire.  And in spite of
+his conscience, when he was fairly in the street he drew a sigh of
+relief, and deliberately turned his heart towards gaiety.  It seemed
+inexpressibly pathetic that his father was lying behind those
+just-lighted blinds above, and would never again breathe the open air,
+never again glide along those pavements with his arms fixed and slightly
+outwards.  But Edwin was determined to listen to reason and not to be
+morbid.
+
+The streets were lively with the red and the blue colours of politics.
+The Liberal member for the Parliamentary borough of Hanbridge, which
+included Bursley, had died very suddenly, and the seat was being
+disputed by the previously defeated Conservative candidate and a new
+Labour candidate officially adopted by the Liberal party.  The Tories
+had sworn not to be beaten again in the defence of the integrity of the
+Empire.  And though they had the difficult and delicate task of
+persuading a large industrial constituency that an industrial
+representative would not further industrial interests, and that they
+alone were actuated by unselfish love for the people, yet they had made
+enormous progress in a very brief period, and publicans were jubilant
+and bars sloppy.
+
+The aspect of the affair that did not quite please the Society for the
+Prosecution of Felons was that the polling had been fixed for the day
+after its annual dinner instead of the day before.  Powerful efforts had
+been made `in the proper quarter' to get the date conveniently arranged,
+but without success; after all, the seat of authority was Hanbridge and
+not Bursley.  Hanbridge, sadly failing to appreciate the importance of
+Bursley's Felonry, had suggested that the feast might be moved a couple
+of days.  The Felonry refused.  If its dinner clashed with the supreme
+night of the campaign, so much the worse for the campaign!  Moreover,
+the excitement of the campaign would at any rate give zest to the
+dinner.
+
+Ere he reached Duck Bank, the vivacity of the town, loosed after the
+day's labour to an evening's orgy of oratory and horseplay and beer, had
+communicated itself to Edwin.  He was most distinctly aware of pleasure
+in the sight of the Tory candidate driving past, at a pace to overtake
+steam-cars, in a coach-and-four, with amateur postilions and an
+orchestra of horns.  The spectacle, and the speed of it, somehow
+thrilled him, and for an instant made him want to vote Tory.  A
+procession of illuminated carts, bearing white potters apparently
+engaged in the handicraft which the Labour candidate had practised in
+humbler days, also pleased him, but pleased him less.  As he passed up
+Duck Bank the Labour candidate himself was raising loud enthusiastic
+cheers from a railway lorry in Duck Square, and Edwin's spirits went
+even higher, and he elbowed through the laughing, joking throng with
+fraternal good-humour, feeling that an election was in itself a grand
+thing, apart from its result, and apart from the profit which it brought
+to steam-printers.
+
+In the porch of the Town Hall, a man turned from an eagerly-smiling
+group of hungry Felons and, straightening his face, asked with quiet
+concern, "How's your father?"  Edwin shook his head.  "Pretty bad," he
+answered.  "Is he?" murmured the other sadly.  And Edwin suddenly saw
+his father again behind the blind, irrevocably prone.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+But by the time the speeches were in progress he was uplifted high once
+more into the joy of life.  He had been welcomed by acquaintances and by
+strangers with a deferential warmth that positively startled him.  He
+realised, as never before, that the town esteemed him as a successful
+man.  His place was not many removes from the chair.  Osmond Orgreave
+was on his right, and Albert Benbow on his left.  He had introduced an
+impressed Albert to his friend Mr Orgreave, recently made a Justice of
+the Peace.
+
+And down the long littered tables stretched the authority and the wealth
+of the town-aldermen, councillors, members of the school board,
+guardians of the poor, magistrates, solid tradesmen, and solid
+manufacturers, together with higher officials of the borough and some
+members of the learned professions.  Here was the oligarchy which,
+behind the appearances of democratic government, effectively managed,
+directed, and controlled the town.  Here was the handful of people who
+settled between them whether rates should go up or down, and to whom it
+did not seriously matter whether rates went up or down, provided that
+the interests of the common people were not too sharply set in
+antagonism to their own interests.  Here were the privileged, who did
+what they liked on the condition of not offending each other.  Here the
+populace was honestly and cynically and openly regarded as a restless
+child, to be humoured and to be flattered, but also to be ruled firmly,
+to be kept in its place, to be ignored when advisable, and to be made to
+pay.
+
+For the feast, the court-room had been transformed into a banqueting
+hall, and the magistrates' bench, where habitual criminals were created
+and families ruined and order maintained, was hidden in flowers.  Osmond
+Orgreave was dryly facetious about that bench.  He exchanged comments
+with other magistrates, and they all agreed, with the same dry
+facetiousness, that most of the law was futile and some of it
+mischievous; and they all said, `But what can you do?' and by their tone
+indicated that you could do nothing.  According to Osmond Orgreave's
+wit, the only real use of a magistrate was to sign the necessary papers
+for persons who had lost pawn-tickets.  It appeared that such persons in
+distress came to Mr Orgreave every day for the august signature.  "I
+had an old woman come to me this morning at my office," he said.  "I
+asked her how it was they were always losing their pawn-tickets.  I told
+her I never lost mine."  Osmond Orgreave was encircled with laughter.
+Edwin laughed heartily.  It was a good joke.  And even mediocre jokes
+would convulse the room.
+
+Jos Curtenty, the renowned card, a jolly old gentleman of sixty, was in
+the chair, and therefore jollity was assured in advance.  Rising to
+inaugurate the oratorical section of the night, he took an enormous red
+flower from a bouquet behind him, and sticking it with a studiously
+absent air in his button-hole, said blandly, "Gentlemen, no politics,
+please!"  The uproarious effect was one of his very best.  He knew his
+audience.  He could have taught Edwin a thing or two.  For Edwin in his
+simplicity was astonished to find the audience almost all of one colour,
+frankly and joyously and optimistically Tory.  There were not ten
+Liberals in the place, and there was not one who was vocal.  The cream
+of the town, of its brains, its success, its respectability, was
+assembled together, and the Liberal party was practically unrepresented.
+It seemed as if there was no Liberal party.  It seemed impossible that
+a Labour candidate could achieve anything but complete disaster at the
+polls.  It seemed incredible that in the past a Liberal candidate had
+ever been returned.  Edwin began, even in the privacy of his own heart,
+to be apologetic for his Liberalism.  All these excellent fellows could
+not be wrong.  The moral force of numbers intimidated him.  He suspected
+that there was, after all, more to be said for Conservatism than he had
+hitherto allowed himself to suppose.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+And the Felons were so good-humoured and kindly and so free-handed, and,
+with it all, so boyish!  They burst into praise of one another on the
+slenderest excuse.  They ordered more champagne as carelessly as though
+champagne were ginger-beer (Edwin was glad that by an excess of
+precaution he had brought two pounds in his pocket--the scale of
+expenditure was staggering); and they nonchalantly smoked cigars that
+would have made Edwin sick.  They knew all about cigars and about
+drinks, and they implied by their demeanour, though they never said,
+that a first-class drink and a first-class smoke were the `good things'
+of life, the ultimate rewards; the references to women were sly...
+Edwin was like a demure cat among a company of splendid curly dogs.
+
+The toasts, every one of them, called forth enthusiasm.  Even in the
+early part of the evening much good-nature had bubbled out when, at
+intervals, a slim young bachelor of fifty, armed with a violent mallet,
+had rapped authoritatively on the table and cried: "Mr President wishes
+to take wine with Mr Vice," "Mr President wishes to take wine with the
+bachelors on the right," "Mr President wishes to take wine with the
+married Felons on the left," and so on till every sort and condition and
+geographical situation had been thus distinguished.  But the toasts
+proper aroused displays of the most affectionate loving-kindness.  Each
+reference to a Felon was greeted with warm cheers, and each reference
+touched the superlative of laudation.  Every stroke of humour was
+noisily approved, and every exhibition of tender feeling effusively
+endorsed.  And all the estates of the realm, and all the institutions of
+the realm and of the town, and all the services of war and peace, and
+all the official castes were handsomely and unreservedly praised, and
+their health and prosperity pledged with enthusiastic fervour.  The
+organism of the Empire was pronounced to be essentially perfect.  Nobody
+of importance, from the Queen's Majesty to the `ministers of the
+Established Church and other denominations,' was omitted from the
+certificate of supreme excellence and efficiency.  And even when an
+alderman, proposing the toast of the `town and trade of Bursley,'
+mentioned certain disturbing symptoms in the demeanour of the lower
+classes, he immediately added his earnest conviction that the `heart of
+the country beat true,' and was comforted with grave applause.
+
+Towards the end of the toast-list one of the humorous vocal quartets
+which were designed to relieve the seriousness of the programme, was
+interrupted by the formidable sound of the governed proletariat beyond
+the walls of the Town Hall.  And Edwin's memory, making him feel very
+old, leapt suddenly back into another generation of male glee-singers
+that did not disport humorously and that would not have permitted
+themselves to be interrupted by the shouting of populations; and he
+recalled `Loud Ocean's Roar,' and the figure of Florence Simcox flitted
+in front of him.  The proletariat was cheering somebody.  The cheers
+died down.  And in another moment the Conservative candidate burst into
+the room, and was followed by two of his friends (the latter in
+evening-dress), whom he presented to the President.  The ceremonious
+costume impressed the President himself, for at this period of ancient
+history Felons dined in frock-coats or cutaways; it proved that the
+wearers were so accustomed to wearing evening-dress of a night that they
+put it on by sheer habit and inadvertence even for electioneering.  The
+candidate only desired to shake hands with a few supporters and to
+assure the President that nothing but hard necessity had kept him away
+from the dinner.  Amid inspiriting bravos and hurrahs he fled, followed
+by his friends, and it became known that one of these was a baronet.
+
+After this the vote of thanks to the President scarcely escaped being an
+anticlimax.  And several men left, including Albert Benbow, who had once
+or twice glanced at his watch.  "She won't let you be out after
+half-past ten, eh, Benbow?" said jocularly a neighbour.  And Albert,
+laughing at the joke, nevertheless looked awkward.  And the neighbour
+perceived that he had been perhaps a trifle clumsy.  Edwin, since the
+mysterious influence in the background was his own sister, had to share
+Albert's confusion.  He too would have departed.  But Osmond Orgreave
+absolutely declined to let him go, and to prevent him from going used
+the force which good wine gives.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+The company divided itself into intimate groups, leaving empty white
+spaces at the disordered tables.  The attendants now served whisky, and
+more liqueurs and coffee.  Those guests who knew no qualm lighted fresh
+cigars; a few produced beloved pipes; the others were content with
+cigarettes.  Some one ordered a window to be opened, and then, when the
+fresh night air began to disturb the curtains and scatter the fumes of
+the banquet, some one else crept aside and furtively closed it again.
+
+Edwin found himself with Jos Curtenty and Osmond Orgreave and a few
+others.  He felt gay and enheartened; he felt that there was a great
+deal of pleasure to be had on earth with very little trouble.  Politics
+had been broached, and he made a mild joke about the Tory candidate.
+And amid the silence that followed it he mistily perceived that the
+remainder of the group, instead of becoming more jolly, had grown grave.
+For them the political situation was serious.  They did not trouble to
+argue against the Labour candidate.  All their reasoning was based on
+the assumption, which nobody denied or questioned, that at any cost the
+Labour candidate must be defeated.  The success of the Labour candidate
+was regarded as a calamity.  It would jeopardise the entire social
+order.  It would deliver into the destroying hands of an ignorant,
+capricious, and unscrupulous rabble all that was best in English life.
+It would even mean misery for the rabble itself.  The tones grew more
+solemn.  And Edwin, astonished, saw that beneath the egotism of their
+success, beneath their unconscious arrogance due to the habit of
+authority, there was a profound and genuine patriotism and sense of
+duty.  And he was abashed.  Nevertheless, he had definitely taken sides,
+and out of mere self-respect he had gently to remind them of the fact.
+Silence would have been cowardly.
+
+"Then what about `trusting to the people'?" he murmured, smiling.
+
+"If trusting to the people means being under the thumb of the British
+working man, my boy," said Osmond Orgreave, "you can scratch me out, for
+one."
+
+Edwin had never heard him speak so colloquially.
+
+"I've always found 'em pretty decent," said Edwin, but lamely.
+
+Jos Curtenty fixed him with a grim eye.
+
+"How many hands do you employ, Mr Clayhanger?"
+
+"Fourteen," said Edwin.
+
+"Do you?" exclaimed another voice, evidently surprised and impressed.
+
+Jos Curtenty pulled at his cigar.  "I wish I could make as much money as
+you make out of fourteen hands!" said he.  "Well, I've got two hundred
+of 'em at my place.  And I know 'em!  I've known 'em for forty years and
+more.  There's not ten of 'em as I'd trust to do an honest day's work,
+of their own accord...  And after the row in '80, when they'd agreed to
+arbitration--fifteen thousand of 'em--did they accept the award, or
+didn't they?  Tell me that, if it isn't troubling ye too much."
+
+Only in the last phase did the irrepressible humorous card in him assert
+itself.
+
+Edwin mumbled inarticulately.  His mind was less occupied by politics
+than by the fact that in the view of all these men he had already
+finally and definitely taken the place of his father.  But for the
+inquiries made at intervals during the evening, he might have supposed
+that Darius, lying in helpless obscurity up there at Bleak ridge, had
+been erased from the memory of the town.
+
+A crony who had not hitherto spoken began to give sarcastic and
+apparently damning details of the early record of the Labour candidate.
+Among other delinquencies the fellow had condoned the inexcusable
+rejection of the arbitrators' award long ago.  And then some one said:
+
+"Hello!  Here's Benbow back again!"
+
+Albert, in overcoat and cap, beckoned to Edwin, who sprang up, pricked
+into an exaggerated activity by his impatient conscience.
+
+"It's nothing particular," said Albert at the door.  "But the missus has
+been round to your father's to-night, and it seems the nurse has knocked
+up.  She thought I'd perhaps better come along and tell you, in case you
+hadn't gone."
+
+"Knocked up, has she?" said Edwin.  "Well, it's not to be wondered at.
+Nurse or no nurse, she's got no more notion of looking after herself
+than anybody else has.  I was just going.  It's only a little after
+eleven."
+
+The last thing he heard on quitting the precincts of the banqueting
+chamber was the violent sound of the mallet.  Its wielder seemed to have
+developed a slight affection for the senseless block of wood.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
+
+AFTER THE BANQUET.
+
+"Yes, yes," said Edwin, impatiently, in reply to some anxious remark of
+Maggie's, "I shall be all right with him.  Don't you worry till
+morning."
+
+They stood at the door of the sick-room, Edwin in an attitude almost
+suggesting that he was pushing her out.
+
+He had hurried home from the festival, and found the doctor just leaving
+and the house in a commotion.  Dr Heve said mildly that he was glad
+Edwin had come, and he hinted that some general calming influence was
+needed.  Nurse Shaw had developed one of the sudden abscesses in the ear
+which troubled her from time to time.  This radiant and apparently
+strong creature suffered from an affection of the ear.  Once her left
+ear had kept her in bed for six weeks, and she had arisen with the drum
+pierced.  Since which episode there had always been the danger, when the
+evil recurred, of the region of the brain being contaminated through the
+tiny orifice in the drum.  Hence, even if the acute pain which she
+endured had not forced her to abandon other people's maladies for the
+care of her own, the sense of her real peril would have done so.  This
+masterful, tireless woman, whom no sadness nor abomination of her
+habitual environment could depress or daunt, lived under a menace, and
+was sometimes laid low, like a child.  She rested now in Maggie's room,
+with a poultice for a pillow.  A few hours previously no one in the
+house had guessed that she had any weakness whatever.  Her collapse gave
+to Maggie an excellent opportunity, such as Maggie loved, to prove that
+she was equal to a situation.  Maggie would not permit Mrs Hamps to be
+sent for.  Nor would she permit Mrs Nixon to remain up.  She was
+excited and very fatigued, and she meant to manage the night with the
+sole aid of Jane.  It was even part of her plan that Edwin should go to
+bed as usual--poor Edwin, with all the anxieties of business upon his
+head!  But she had not allowed for Edwin's conscience, nor foreseen what
+the doctor would say to him privately.  Edwin had learnt from the
+doctor--a fact which the women had not revealed to him--that his father
+during the day had shown symptoms of `Cheyne-Stokes breathing,' the
+final and the worst phenomenon of his disease; a phenomenon, too,
+interestingly rare.  The doctor had done all that could be done by
+injections, and there was absolutely nothing else for anybody to do
+except watch.
+
+"I shall come in in the night," Maggie whispered.
+
+Behind them the patient vaguely stirred and groaned in his recess.
+
+"You'll do no such thing," said Edwin shortly.  "Get all the sleep you
+can."
+
+"But Nurse has to have a fresh poultice every two hours," Maggie
+protested.
+
+"Now, look here!"  Edwin was cross.  "Do show a little sense.  Get--
+all--the--sleep--you--can.  We shall be having you ill next, and then
+there'll be a nice kettle of fish.  I won't have you coming in here.  I
+shall be perfectly all right.  Now!"  He gave a gesture that she should
+go at once.
+
+"You won't be fit for the shop to-morrow."
+
+"Damn the shop!"
+
+"Well, you know where everything is."  She was resigned.  "If you want
+to make some tea--"
+
+"All right, all right!"  He forced himself to smile.
+
+She departed, and he shut the door.
+
+"Confounded nuisance women are!" he thought, half indulgently, as he
+turned towards the bed.  But it was his conscience that was a confounded
+nuisance.  He ought never to have allowed himself to be persuaded to go
+to the banquet.  When his conscience annoyed him, it was usually Maggie
+who felt the repercussion.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Darius was extremely ill.  Every part of his physical organism was
+deranged and wearied out.  His features combined the expression of
+intense fatigue with the sinister liveliness of an acute tragic
+apprehension.  His failing faculties were kept horribly alert by the
+fear of what was going to happen to him next.  So much that was
+appalling had already happened to him!  He wanted repose; he wanted
+surcease; he wanted nothingness.  He was too tired to move, but he was
+also too tired to lie still.  And thus he writhed faintly on the bed;
+his body seemed to have that vague appearance of general movement which
+a multitude of insects will give to a piece of decaying matter.  His
+skin was sick, and his hair, and his pale lips.  The bed could not be
+kept tidy for five minutes.
+
+"He's bad, no mistake!" thought Edwin, as he met his father's anxious
+and intimidated gaze.  He had never seen anyone so ill.  He knew now
+what disease could do.
+
+"Where's Nurse?" the old man murmured, with excessive feebleness, his
+voice captiously rising to a shrill complaint.
+
+"She's not well.  She's lying down.  I'm going to sit with you to-night.
+Have a drink?"  As Edwin said these words in his ordinary voice, it
+seemed to him that in comparison with his father he was a god of
+miraculous proud strength and domination.
+
+Darius nodded.
+
+"Her's a Tartar!"  Darius muttered.  "But her's just!  Her will have her
+own way!"  He often spoke thus of the nurse, giving people to understand
+that during the long nights, when he was left utterly helpless to the
+harsh mercy of the nurse, he had to accept many humiliations.  He seemed
+to fear and love her as a dog its master.  Edwin, using his imagination
+to realise the absoluteness of the power which the nurse had over Darius
+during ten hours in every twenty-four, was almost frightened by it.  "By
+Jove!" he thought, "I wouldn't be in his place with any woman on earth!"
+The old man's lips closed clumsily round the funnel of the invalid's
+cup that Edwin offered.  Then he sank back, and shut his eyes, and
+appeared calmer.
+
+Edwin smoothed the clothes, stared at him a long time, and finally sat
+down in the arm-chair by the fire.  He wound up his watch.  It was not
+yet midnight.  He took off his boots and put on the slippers which now
+Darius had not worn for over a week and would not wear again.  He yawned
+heavily.  The yawn surprised him.  He perceived that his head was
+throbbing and his mouth dry, and that the meats and liquors of the
+banquet, having ceased to stimulate, were incommoding him.  His mind and
+body were in reaction.  He reflected cynically upon the facile
+self-satisfactions of those successful men in whose company he had been.
+The whole dinner grew unreal.  Nothing was real except imprisonment on
+a bed night and day, day and night for weeks.  Every one could have
+change and rest save his father.  For his father there was no relief,
+not a moment's.  He was always there, in the same recess, prone, in
+subjection, helpless, hopeless, and suffering.  Politics!  What were
+they?
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+He closed his eyes, because it occurred to him that to do so would be
+agreeable.  And he was awakened from a doze by a formidable stir on the
+bed.  Darius's breathing was quick and shallow, and growing more so.  He
+lifted his head from the pillow in order to breathe, and leaned on one
+elbow.  Edwin sprang up and went to him.
+
+"Clara!  Clara!  Don't leave me!" the old man cried in tones of agonised
+apprehension.
+
+"It's all right; I'm here," said Edwin reassuringly.  And he took the
+sick man's hot, crackling hand and held it.
+
+Gradually the breathing went slower and deeper, and at length Darius
+sighed very deeply as at a danger past, and relaxed his limbs, and Edwin
+let go his hand.  But he had not been at ease more than a few seconds
+when the trouble recommenced, and he was fighting again, and with
+appreciably more difficulty, to get air down into his lungs.  It entered
+in quantities smaller and smaller, until it seemed scarcely to reach his
+throat before it was expelled again.  The respirations were as rapid as
+the ticking of a watch.  Despite his feebleness Darius wrenched his
+limbs into contortions, and gripped fiercely Edwin's hands.
+
+"Clara!  Clara!" he cried once more.
+
+"It's all right.  You're all right.  There's nothing to be afraid of,"
+said Edwin, soothing him.
+
+And that paroxysm also passed, and the old man moaned in the melancholy
+satisfaction of deep breaths.  But the mysterious disturbing force would
+not leave him in peace.  In another moment yet a fresh struggle was
+commencing.  And each was worse than the last.  And it was always Clara
+to whom he turned for succour.  Not Maggie, who had spent nearly forty
+years in his service, and never spoke ill-naturedly of him; but Clara,
+who was officious rather than helpful, who wept for him in his presence,
+and said harsh things behind his back, and who had never forgiven him
+since the refusal of the loan to Albert.
+
+After he had passed through a dozen crises of respiration Edwin said to
+himself that the next one could not be worse.  But it was worse.  Darius
+breathed like a blown dog that has fallen.  He snatched furiously at
+breath like a tiger snatching at meat.  He accomplished exertions that
+would have exhausted an athlete, and when he had saved his life in the
+very instant of its loss, calling on Clara as on God, he would look at
+Edwin for confirmation of his hope that he had escaped again.  The
+paroxysms continued, still growing more critical.  Edwin was aghast at
+his own helplessness.  He could do absolutely naught.  It was even
+useless to hold the hand or to speak sympathy and reassurance.  Darius
+at the keenest moment of battle was too occupied with his enemy to hear
+or feel the presence of a fellow-creature.  He was solitary with his
+unseen enemy, and if the room had been full of ministering angels he
+would still have been alone and unsuccoured.  He might have been sealed
+up in a cell with his enemy who, incredibly cruel, withheld from him his
+breath; and Edwin outside the cell trying foolishly to get in.  He asked
+for little; he would have been content with very little; but it was
+refused him until despair had reached the highest agony.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+"He's dying, I do believe," thought Edwin, and the wonder of this
+nocturnal adventure sent tremors down his spine.  He faced the
+probability that at the next bout his father would be worsted.  Should
+he fetch Maggie and then go for the doctor?  Heve had told him that it
+would be `pretty bad,' and that nothing on earth could be done.  No!  He
+would not fetch Maggie, and he would not go for the doctor.  What use?
+He would see the thing through.  In the solemnity of the night he was
+glad that an experience tremendous and supreme had been vouchsafed to
+him.  He knew now what the will to live was.  He saw life naked,
+stripped of everything unessential.  He saw life and death together.
+What caused his lip to curl when the thought of the Felons' dinner
+flashed through his mind was the damned complacency of the Felons.  Did
+any of them ever surmise that they had never come within ten miles of
+life itself, that they were attaching importance to the most futile
+trifles?  Let them see a human animal in a crisis of Cheyne-Stokes
+breathing, and they would know something about reality! ...  So this was
+Cheyne-Stokes breathing, that rare and awful affliction!  What was it?
+What caused it?  What controlled its frequency?  No answer!  Not only
+could he do naught, he knew naught!  He was equally useless and ignorant
+before the affrighting mystery.
+
+Darius no longer sat up and twisted himself in the agony of the
+struggles.  He lay flat, resigned but still obstinate, fighting with the
+only muscles that could fight now, those of his chest and throat.  The
+enemy had got him down, but he would not surrender.  Time after time he
+won a brief armistice in the ruthless altercation, and breathed deep and
+long, and sighed as if he would doze, and then his enemy was at him
+again, and Darius, aroused afresh to the same terror, summoned Clara in
+the extremity of his anguish.
+
+Edwin moved away, and surveyed the bed from afar.  The old man was
+perfectly oblivious of him.  He looked at his watch, and timed the
+crises.  They recurred fairly regularly about every hundred seconds.
+Thirty-six times an hour Darius, growing feebler, fought unaided and
+without hope of aid an enemy growing stronger, and would not yield.  He
+was dragged to his death thirty-six times every hour, and thirty-six
+times managed to scramble back from the edge of the chasm.  Occasionally
+his voice, demanding that Clara should not desert him, made a shriek
+which seemed loud enough to wake the street.  Edwin listened for any
+noise in the house, but heard nothing.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+A curious instinct drove him out of the room for a space on to the
+landing.  He shut the door on the human animal in its lonely struggle.
+The gas was burning on the landing and also in the hall, for this was
+not a night on which to extinguish lights.  The clock below ticked
+quietly, and then struck three.  He had passed more than three hours
+with his father.  The time had gone quickly.  He crept to Maggie's door.
+No sound!  Utter silence!  He crept upstairs to the second storey.  No
+sound there!  Coming down again to the first floor he noticed that the
+door of his own bedroom was open.  He crept in there, and started
+violently to see a dim form on the bed.  It was Maggie, dressed, but
+fast asleep under a rug.  He left her.  The whole world was asleep, and
+he was awake with his father.
+
+"What an awful shame!" he thought savagely.  "Why couldn't we have let
+him grow his mushrooms if he wanted to?  What harm would it have done
+us?  Supposing it _had_ been a nuisance, supposing he _had_ tried to kiss
+Jane, supposing he _had_ hurt himself, what then?  Why couldn't we let him
+do what he wanted?"
+
+And he passionately resented his own harshness and that of Maggie as he
+might have resented the cruelty of some national injustice.
+
+He listened.  Nothing but the ticking of the clock disturbed the calm of
+the night.  Could his father have expired in one of those frantic bouts
+with his enemy?  Brusquely, with false valiance, he re-entered the
+chamber, and saw again the white square of the blind and the expanse of
+carpet and the tables littered with nursing apparatus, and saw the bed
+and his father on it, panting in a new and unsurpassable despair, but
+still unbeaten, under the thin gas-flame.  The crisis eased as he went
+in.  He picked up the arm-chair and carried it to the bedside and sat
+down facing his father, and once more took his father's intolerably
+pathetic hand.
+
+"All right!" he murmured, and never before had he spoken with such
+tenderness.  "All right!  I'm here.  I'm not leaving you."
+
+The victim grew quieter.
+
+"Is it Edwin?" he whispered, scarcely articulate, out of a bottomless
+depth of weakness.
+
+"Yes," said Edwin cheerfully; "you're a bit better now, aren't you?"
+
+"Aye!" sighed Darius in hope.
+
+And almost immediately the rumour of struggle recommenced, and in a
+minute the crisis was at its fiercest.
+
+Edwin became hardened to the spectacle.  He reasoned with himself about
+suffering.  After all, what was its importance?  Up to a point it could
+be borne, and when it could not be borne it ceased to be suffering.  The
+characteristic grimness of those latitudes showed itself in him.  There
+was nothing to be done.  They who were destined to suffer had to suffer,
+must suffer; and no more could be said.  The fight must come to an end
+sooner or later.  Fortitude alone could meet the situation.
+Nevertheless, the night seemed eternal, and at intervals fortitude
+lacked.
+
+"By Jove!" he would mutter aloud, under the old man's constant appeals
+to Clara, "I shan't be sorry when this is over."
+
+Then he would interest himself in the periodicity of the attacks, timing
+them by his watch with care.  Then he would smooth the bed.  Once he
+looked at the fire.  It was out.  He had forgotten it.  He immediately
+began to feel chilly, and then he put on his father's patched
+dressing-gown and went to the window, and, drawing aside the blind,
+glanced forth.  All was black and utterly silent.  He thought with
+disdain of Maggie and the others unconscious in sleep.  He returned to
+the chair.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+He was startled, at a side glance, by something peculiar in the
+appearance of the window.  It was the first messenger of the dawn.  Yes,
+a faint greyness, very slowly working in secret against the power of the
+gaslight: timid, delicate, but brightening by imperceptible degrees into
+strength.
+
+"Some of them will be getting up soon, now," he said to himself.  The
+hour was between four and half-past.  He looked forward to release.
+Maggie was sure to come and release him shortly.  And even as he held
+the sick man's arm, comforting him, he yawned.
+
+But no one came.  Five o'clock, half-past five!  The first car rumbled
+down.  And still the victim, unbroken, went through his agony every two
+minutes or oftener, with the most frightful regularity.
+
+He extinguished the gas, and lo! there was enough daylight to see
+clearly.  He pulled up the blind.  The night had gone.  He had been
+through the night.  The entire surface of his head was tingling.  Now he
+would look at the martyrdom of the victim as at a natural curiosity,
+having no capacity left for feeling.  And now his sympathy would gush
+forth anew, and he would cover with attentions his father, who, fiercely
+preoccupied with the business of obtaining breath, gave no heed to them.
+And now he would stand impressed, staggered, by the magnificence of the
+struggle.
+
+The suspense from six to seven was the longest.  When would somebody
+come?  Had the entire household taken laudanum?  He would go and rouse
+Maggie.  No, he would not.  He was too proud.
+
+At a quarter-past seven the knob of the door clicked softly.  He could
+scarcely believe his ears.  Maggie entered.  Darius was easier between
+two crises.
+
+"Well," said she tranquilly, "how is he?"  She was tying her apron.
+
+"Pretty bad," Edwin answered, with affected nonchalance.
+
+"Nurse is a bit better.  I've given her three fresh poultices since
+midnight.  You'd better go now, hadn't you?"
+
+"All right.  I've let the fire out."
+
+"I'll tell Jane to light it.  She's just making some tea for you."
+
+He went.  He did not need twice telling.  As he went, carelessly
+throwing off the dressing-gown and picking up his boots, Darius began to
+pant afresh, to nerve himself instinctively afresh for another struggle.
+Edwin, strong and healthy, having done nothing but watch, was
+completely exhausted.  But Darius, weakened by disease, having fought a
+couple of hundred terrific and excruciating encounters, each a supreme
+battle, in the course of a single night, was still drawing upon the
+apparently inexhaustible reserves of his volition.
+
+"I couldn't have stood that much longer," said Edwin, out on the
+landing.
+
+
+
+VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.
+
+THE CHAIN BROKEN.
+
+Shortly after eight o'clock Edwin was walking down Trafalgar Road on his
+way to the shop.  He had bathed, and drunk some tea, and under the
+stimulation he felt the factitious vivacity of excessive fatigue.  Rain
+had fallen quietly and perseveringly during the night, and though the
+weather was now fine the streets were thick with black mire.
+Paintresses with their neat gloves and their dinner-baskets and their
+thin shoes were trudging to work, and young clerks and shop-assistants
+and the upper classes of labour generally.  Everybody was in a hurry.
+The humbler mass had gone long ago.  Miners had been in the earth for
+hours.  Later, and more leisurely, the magnates would pass by.
+
+There were carriages about.  An elegant wagonette, streaming with red
+favours, dashed down the road behind two horses.  Its cargo was a
+handful of clay-soiled artisans, gleeful in the naive pride of their
+situation, wearing red and shouting red, and hurrahing for the
+Conservative candidate.
+
+"Asses!" murmured Edwin, with acrid and savage disdain.  "Do you think
+he'd drive you anywhere to-morrow?"  He walked on a little, and broke
+forth again, all to himself: "Of course he's doing it solely in your
+interest, isn't he?  Why doesn't he pick some of these paintresses out
+of the mud and give them a drive?"
+
+He cultivated an unreasoning anger against the men who had so impressed
+him at the banquet.  He did not try to find answers to their arguments.
+He accused them stoutly of wilful blindness, of cowardice, of bullying,
+of Pharisaism, and of other sins.  He had no wish to hear their defence.
+He condemned them, and as it were ordered them to be taken away and
+executed.  He had a profound conviction that argument was futile, and
+that nothing would serve but a pitched battle, in which each fighting
+man should go to the poll and put a cross against a name in grim
+silence.  Argue with these gross self-satisfied fellows about the
+turpitude of the artisans!  Why, there was scarcely one of them whose
+grandfather had not been an artisan!  Curse their patriotism!  Then he
+would begin bits of argument to himself, and stop them, too impatient to
+continue...  The shilling cigars of those feasters disgusted him...  In
+such wise his mind ran.  And he was not much kinder to the artisan.  If
+scorn could have annihilated, there would have been no proletariat left
+in the division...  Men?  Sheep rather!  Letting themselves be driven up
+and down like that, and believing all the yarns that were spun to them!
+Gaping idiots, they would swallow any mortal thing!  There was simply
+naught that they were not stupid enough to swallow with a glass of beer.
+It would serve them right if--However, that could not happen.  Idiocy
+had limits.  At least he presumed it had.
+
+Early as it was, the number of carriages was already considerable.  But
+he did not see one with the blue of the Labour candidate.  Blue rosettes
+there were, but the red rosettes bore them down easily.  Even dogs had
+been adorned with red rosettes, and nice clean infants!  And on all the
+hoardings were enormous red posters exhorting the shrewd common-sense
+potter not to be misled by paid agitators, but to plump for his true
+friend, for the man who was anxious to devote his entire career and
+goods to the welfare of the potter and the integrity of the Empire.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+"If you can give me three days off, sir," said Big James, in the
+majestic humility of his apron, "I shall take it kindly."
+
+Edwin had gone into the composing room with the copy for a demy poster,
+consisting of four red words to inform the public that the true friend
+of the public was `romping in.'  A hundred posters were required within
+an hour.  He had nearly refused the order, in his feverish fatigue and
+his disgust, but some remnant of sagacity had asserted itself in him and
+saved him from this fatuity.
+
+"Why?" he asked roughly.  "What's up now, James?"
+
+"My old comrade Abraham Harracles is dead, sir, at Glasgow, and I'm
+wishful for to attend the interment, far as it is.  He was living with
+his daughter, and she's written to me.  If you could make it convenient
+to spare me--"
+
+"Of course, of course!"  Edwin interrupted him hastily.  In his present
+mood, it revolted him that a man of between fifty and sixty should be
+humbly asking as a favour to be allowed to fulfil a pious duty.
+
+"I'm very much obliged to you, sir," said Big James simply, quite
+unaware that captious Edwin found his gratitude excessive and servile.
+"I'm the last now, sir, of the old glee-party," he added.
+
+"Really!"
+
+Big James nodded, and said quietly, "And how's the old gentleman, sir?"
+
+Edwin shook his head.
+
+"I'm sorry, sir," said Big James.
+
+"I've been up with him all night," Edwin told him.
+
+"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.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+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 systematised 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 agonised 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.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+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
+_naivete_ 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...
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+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 to-night."
+
+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 realise 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.
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER ONE.
+
+BOOK FOUR--HIS START IN LIFE.
+
+THE BIRTHDAY VISIT.
+
+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 realise 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 to-morrow," 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!"
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+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 as 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.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+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.
+
+And withal he could uneasily ask himself, "Am I happy?"  Maggie did not
+guess that, as he bent unseeing over his precious "Manchester Guardian,"
+he was thinking: "I must hold an inquisition upon my whole way of
+existence.  I must see where I stand.  If ever I am to be alive, I ought
+to be alive now.  And I'm not at all sure whether I am."  Maggie never
+put such questions to herself.  She went on in placidness from hour to
+hour, ruffled occasionally.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+An unusual occurrence gave him the opportunity to turn over a new leaf
+immediately.  The sounds of the front-door bell and of voices in the
+hall were followed by the proud entrance of Auntie Hamps herself into
+the dining-room.
+
+"Now don't disturb yourselves, please," Mrs Hamps entreated.  She often
+began with this phrase.
+
+Maggie sprang up and kissed her, somewhat effusively for Maggie, and
+said in a quiet, restrained tone--
+
+"Many happy returns of the day, auntie."
+
+Then Edwin rose, scraping his arm-chair backwards along the floor, and
+shook hands with her, and said with a guilty grin--
+
+"A long life and a merry one, auntie!"
+
+"Eh!" she exclaimed, falling back with a sigh of satisfaction into a
+chair by the table.  "I'm sure everybody's very kind.  Will you believe
+me, those darling children of Clara's were round at my house before
+eight o'clock this morning!"
+
+"Is Amy's cough better?"  Maggie interjected, as she and Edwin sat down.
+
+"Bless ye!" cried Auntie Hamps, "I was in such a fluster I forgot to ask
+the little toddler.  But I didn't hear her cough.  I do hope it is.
+October's a bad time for coughs to begin.  I ought to have asked.  But
+I'm getting an old woman."
+
+"We were just arguing whether you were thirty-eight or thirty-nine,
+auntie," said Edwin.
+
+"What a tease he is--with his beard!" she archly retorted.  "Well, your
+old aunt is sixty this day."
+
+"Sixty!" the nephew and niece repeated together in astonishment.
+
+Auntie Hamps nodded.
+
+"You're the finest sixty I ever saw!" said Edwin, with unaffected
+admiration.
+
+And she was fine.  The pride in her eye as she made the avowal--probably
+the first frank avowal of her age that had passed those lips for thirty
+years--was richly justified.  With her clear, rosy complexion, her white
+regular teeth, her straight spine, her plump figure, her brilliant gaze,
+her rapid gestures, and that authentic hair of hers falling in Victorian
+curls, she offered to the world a figure that no one could regard
+without a physical pleasure and stimulation.  And she was so shiningly
+correct in her black silk and black velvet, and in the massive jet at
+her throat, and in the slenderness of her shoe!  It was useless to
+recall her duplicities, her mendacities, her hypocrisies, her
+meannesses.  At any rate she could be generous at moments, and the
+splendour of her vitality sometimes, as now, hid all her faults.  She
+would confess to aches and pains like other folk, bouts of rheumatism
+for example--but the high courage of her body would not deign to ratify
+such miserable statements; it haughtily repelled the touch of time; it
+kept at least the appearance of victory.  If you did not like Auntie
+Hamps willingly, in her hours of bodily triumph, you had to like her
+unwillingly.  Both Edwin and Maggie had innumerable grievances against
+her, but she held their allegiance, and even their warm instinctive
+affection, on the morning of her sixtieth birthday.  She had been a lone
+widow ever since Edwin could remember, and yet she had continued to
+bloom.  Nothing could desiccate nor wither her.  Even her sins did not
+find her out.  God and she remained always on the best terms, and she
+thrived on insincerity.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+"There's a little parcel for you, auntie," said Edwin, with a particular
+effort to make his voice soft and agreeable.  "But it's in Manchester.
+It won't be here till to-morrow.  My fault entirely!  You know how awful
+I am for putting off things."
+
+"We quite expected it would be here to-day," said the loyal Maggie, when
+most sisters--and Clara assuredly--would have said in an eager,
+sarcastic tone: "Yes, it's just like Edwin, and yet I reminded him I
+don't know how many times!"  (Edwin felt with satisfaction that the new
+leaf was already turned.  He was glad that he had said `My fault
+entirely.'  He now said to himself: "Maggie's all right, and so am I.  I
+must keep this up.  Perfect nonsense, people hinting that she and I
+can't get on together!")
+
+"Please, _please!_"  Auntie Hamps entreated.  "Don't talk about parcels!"
+And yet they knew that if they had not talked about a parcel the ageing
+lady would have been seriously wounded.  "All I want is your love.  You
+children are all I have now.  And if you knew how proud I am of you all,
+seeing you all so nice and good, and respected in the town, and Clara's
+little darlings beginning to run about, and such strong little things.
+If only your poor mother--!"
+
+Impossible not to be impressed by those accents!  Edwin and Maggie might
+writhe under Auntie Hamps's phraseology; they might remember the most
+horrible examples of her cant.  In vain!  They were impressed.  They had
+to say to themselves: "There's something very decent about her, after
+all."
+
+Auntie Hamps looked from one to the other, and at the quiet opulence of
+the breakfast-table, and the spacious solidities of the room.
+Admiration and respect were in that eye, always too masculine to weep
+under emotion.  Undoubtedly she was proud of her nephew and nieces.  And
+had she not the right to be?  The bearded Edwin, one of the chief
+tradesmen in the town, and so fond of books, such a reader, and so quiet
+in his habits!  And the two girls, with nice independent fortunes: Clara
+so fruitful and so winning, and Maggie so dependable, so kind!  Auntie
+Hamps had scarce anything else to wish for.  Her ideals were fulfilled.
+Undoubtedly since the death of Darius her attitude towards his children
+had acquired even a certain humility.
+
+"Shall you be in to-morrow morning, auntie?"  Maggie asked, in the
+constrained silence that followed Mrs Hamps's protestations.
+
+"Yes, I shall," said Mrs Hamps, with assurance.  "I shall be mending
+curtains."
+
+"Well, then, I shall call.  About eleven."  Maggie turned to Edwin
+benevolently.  "It won't be too soon if I pop in at the shop a little
+before eleven?"
+
+"No," said Edwin with equal benevolence.  "It's not often Sutton's
+delivery is after ten.  That'll be all right.  I'll have it unpacked."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+He lit a cigarette.
+
+"Have one?" he suggested to Mrs Hamps, holding out the case.
+
+"I shall give you a rap over the knuckles in a minute," smiled Mrs
+Hamps, who was now leaning an elbow on the table in easy intimacy.  And
+she went on in a peculiar tone, low, mysterious, and yet full of
+vivacity: "I can't quite make out who that little nephew is that Janet
+Orgreave is taking about."
+
+"Little nephew that Janet's taking about!" murmured Maggie, in surprise;
+and to Edwin, "Do you know?"
+
+Edwin shook his head.  "When?" he asked.
+
+"Well, this morning," said Mrs Hamps.  "I met them as I was coming up.
+She was on one side of the road, and the child was on the other--just
+opposite Howson's.  My belief is she'd lost all control over the little
+jockey.  Oh!  A regular little jockey!  You could see that at once.
+`Now, George, come along,' she called to him.  And then he shouted, `I
+want you to come on this side, auntie.'  Of course I couldn't stop to
+see it out.  She was so busy with him she only just moved to me."
+
+"George?  George?"  Maggie consulted her memory.  "How old was he,
+about?"
+
+"Seven or eight, I should say."
+
+"Well, it couldn't be one of Tom's children.  Nor Alicia's."
+
+"No," said Auntie Hamps.  "And I always understood that the eldest
+daughter's--what's her name?"
+
+"Marian."
+
+"Marian's were all girls."
+
+"I believe they are.  Aren't they, Edwin?"
+
+"How can I tell?" said Edwin.  It was a marvel to him how his auntie
+collected her information.  Neither she nor Clara had ever been in the
+slightest degree familiar with the Orgreaves, and Maggie, so far as he
+knew, was not a gossiper.  He thought he perceived, however, the
+explanation of Mrs Hamps's visit.  She had encountered in the street a
+phenomenon which would not harmonise with facts of her own knowledge,
+and the discrepancy had disturbed her to such an extent that she had
+been obliged to call in search of relief.  There was that, and there was
+also her natural inclination to show herself off on her triumphant
+sixtieth birthday.
+
+"Charles Orgreave isn't married, is he?" she inquired.
+
+"No," said Maggie.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SEVEN.
+
+Silence fell upon this enigma of Janet's entirely unaccountable nephew.
+
+"Charlie _may_ be married," said Edwin humorously, at length.  "You never
+know!  It's a funny world!  I suppose you've seen," he looked
+particularly at his auntie, "that your friend Parnell's dead?"
+
+She affected to be outraged.
+
+"I've seen that Parnell is dead," she rebuked him, with solemn
+quietness.  "I saw it on a poster as I came up.  I don't want to be
+uncharitable, but it was the best thing he could do.  I do hope we've
+heard the last of all this Home Rule now!"
+
+Like many people Mrs Hamps was apparently convinced that the
+explanation of Parnell's scandalous fall and of his early death was to
+be found in the inherent viciousness of the Home Rule cause, and also
+that the circumstances of his end were a proof that Home Rule was cursed
+of God.  She reasoned with equal power forwards and backwards.  And she
+was so earnest and so dignified that Edwin was sneaped into silence.
+Once more he could not keep from his face a look that seemed to
+apologise for his opinions.  And all the heroic and passionate grandeur
+of Parnell's furious career shrivelled up to mere sordidness before the
+inability of one narrow-minded and ignorant but vigorous woman to
+appreciate its quality.  Not only did Edwin feel apologetic for himself,
+but also for Parnell.  He wished he had not tried to be funny about
+Parnell; he wished he had not mentioned him.  The brightness of the
+birthday was for an instant clouded.
+
+"I don't know what's coming over things!"  Auntie Hamps murmured sadly,
+staring out of the window at the street gay with October sun shine.
+"What with that!  And what with those terrible baccarat scandals.  And
+now there's this free education, that we ratepayers have to pay for.
+They'll be giving the children of the working classes free meals next!"
+she added, with remarkably intelligent anticipation.
+
+"Oh well!  Never mind!"  Edwin soothed her.
+
+She gazed at him in loving reproach.  And he felt guilty because he only
+went to chapel about once in two months, and even then from sheer moral
+cowardice.
+
+"Can you give me those measurements, Maggie?"  Mrs Hamps asked
+suddenly.  "I'm on my way to Brunt's."
+
+The women left the room together.  Edwin walked idly to the window.
+After all, he had been perhaps wrong concerning the motive of her visit.
+The next moment he caught sight of Janet and the unaccountable nephew,
+breasting the hill from Bursley, hand in hand.
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER TWO.
+
+JANET'S NEPHEW.
+
+Edwin was a fairly conspicuous object at the dining-room window.  As
+Janet and the child drew level with the corner her eye accidentally
+caught Edwin's.  He nodded, smiling, and took the cigarette out of his
+mouth and waved it.  They were old friends.  He was surprised to notice
+that Janet blushed and became self-conscious.  She returned his smile
+awkwardly, and then, giving a gesture to signify her intention, she came
+in at the gate.  Which action surprised Edwin still more.  With all her
+little freedoms of manner, Janet was essentially a woman stately and
+correct, and time had emphasised these qualities in her.  It was not in
+the least like her to pay informal, capricious calls at a quarter to ten
+in the morning.
+
+He went to the front door and opened it.  She was persuading the child
+up the tiled steps.  The breeze dashed gaily into the house.
+
+"Good morning.  You're out early."
+
+"Good morning.  Yes.  We've just been down to the post-office to send
+off a telegram, haven't we, George?"
+
+She entered the hall, the boy following, and shook hands, meeting
+Edwin's gaze fairly.  Her esteem for him, her confidence in him, shone
+in her troubled, candid eyes.  She held herself proudly, mastering her
+curious constraint.  "Now just see that!" she said, pointing to a fleck
+of black mud on the virgin elegance of her pale brown costume.  Edwin
+thought anew, as he had often thought, that she was a distinguished and
+delightful piece of goods.  He never ceased to be flattered by her
+regard.  But with harsh masculine impartiality he would not minimise to
+himself the increasing cleft under her chin, nor the deterioration of
+her once brilliant complexion.
+
+"Well, young man!"  Edwin greeted the boy with that insolent familiarity
+which adults permit themselves to children who are perfect strangers.
+
+"I thought I'd just run in and introduce my latest nephew to you," said
+Janet quickly, adding, "and then that would be over."
+
+"Oh!"  Edwin murmured.  "Come into the drawing-room, will you?  Maggie's
+upstairs."
+
+They passed into the drawing-room, where a servant in striped print was
+languidly caressing the glass of a bookcase with a duster.  "You can
+leave this a bit," Edwin said curtly to the girl, who obsequiously
+acquiesced and fled, forgetting a brush on a chair.
+
+"Sit down, will you?"  Edwin urged awkwardly.  "And which particular
+nephew is this?  I may tell you he's already raised a great deal of
+curiosity in the town."
+
+Janet most unusually blushed again.
+
+"Has he?" she replied.  "Well, he isn't my nephew at all really, but we
+pretend he is, don't we, George?  It's cosier.  This is Master George
+Cannon."
+
+"Cannon?  You don't mean--"
+
+"You remember Mrs Cannon, don't you?  Hilda Lessways?  Now, Georgie,
+come and shake hands with Mr Clayhanger."
+
+But George would not.
+
+TWO.
+
+"Indeed!"  Edwin exclaimed, very feebly.  He knew not whether his voice
+was natural or unnatural.  He felt as if he had received a heavy blow
+with a sandbag over the heart: not a symbolic, but a real physical blow.
+He might, standing innocent in the street, have been staggeringly
+assailed by a complete stranger of mild and harmless appearance, who had
+then passed tranquilly on.  Dizzy astonishment held him, to the
+exclusion of any other sentiment.  He might have gasped, foolish and
+tottering: "Why--what's the meaning of this?  What's happened?"  He
+looked at the child uncomprehendingly, idiotically.  Little by little--
+it seemed an age, and was in fact a few seconds--he resumed his
+faculties, and remembered that in order to keep a conventional
+self-respect he must behave in such a manner as to cause Janet to
+believe that her revelation of the child's identity had in no way
+disturbed him.  To act a friendly indifference seemed to him, then, to
+be the most important duty in life.  And he knew not why.
+
+"I thought," he said in a low voice, and then he began again, "I thought
+you hadn't been seeing anything of her, of Mrs Cannon, for a long time
+now."
+
+The child was climbing on a chair at the window that gave on the garden,
+absorbed in exploration and discovery, quite ignoring the adults.
+Either Janet had forgotten him, or she had no hope of controlling him
+and was trusting to chance that the young wild stag would do nothing too
+dreadful.
+
+"Well," she admitted, "we haven't."  Her constraint recurred.  Very
+evidently she had to be careful about what she said.  There were reasons
+why even to Edwin she would not be frank.  "I only brought him down from
+London yesterday."
+
+Edwin trembled as he put the question--
+
+"Is she here too--Mrs Cannon?"
+
+Somehow he could only refer to Mrs Cannon as "her" and "she."
+
+"Oh no!" said Janet, in a tone to indicate that there was no possibility
+of Mrs Cannon being in Bursley.
+
+He was relieved.  Yes, he was glad.  He felt that he could not have
+endured the sensation of her nearness, of her actually being in the next
+house.  Her presence at the Orgreaves' would have made the
+neighbourhood, the whole town, dangerous.  It would have subjected him
+to the risk of meeting her suddenly at any corner.  Nay, he would have
+been forced to go in cold blood to encounter her.  And he knew that he
+could not have borne to look at her.  The constraint of such an
+interview would have been torture too acute.  Strange, that though he
+was absolutely innocent, though he had done nought but suffer, he should
+feel like a criminal, should have the criminal's shifting downcast
+glance!
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+"Auntie!" cried the boy.  "Can't I go into this garden?  There's a swing
+there."
+
+"Oh no!" said Janet.  "This isn't our garden.  We must go home.  We only
+just called in.  And big boys who won't shake hands--"
+
+"Yes, yes!"  Edwin dreamily stopped her.  "Let him go into the garden
+for a minute if he wants to.  You can't run off like that!  Come along,
+my lord."
+
+He saw an opportunity of speaking to her out of the child's hearing.
+Janet consented, perhaps divining his wish.  The child turned and stared
+deliberately at Edwin, and then plunged forward, too eager to await
+guidance, towards the conquest of the garden.
+
+Standing silent and awkward in the garden porch, they watched him
+violently agitating the swing, a contrivance erected by a good-natured
+Uncle Edwin for the diversion of Clara's offspring.
+
+"How old is he?"  Edwin demanded, for the sake of saying something.
+
+"About nine," said Janet.
+
+"He doesn't look it."
+
+"No, but he talks it--sometimes."
+
+George did not in fact look his age.  He was slight and small, and he
+seemed to have no bones--nothing but articulations that functioned with
+equal ease in all possible directions.  His skin was pale and unhealthy.
+His eyes had an expression of fatigue, or he might have been
+ophthalmic.  He spoke loudly, his gestures were brusque, and his life
+was apparently made up of a series of intense, absolute absorptions.
+The general effect of his personality upon Edwin was not quite
+agreeable, and Edwin's conclusion was that George, in addition to being
+spoiled, was a profound and rather irritating egoist by nature.
+
+"By the way," he murmured, "what's _Mr_ Cannon?"
+
+"Oh!" said Janet, hesitating, with emotion, "she's a widow."
+
+He felt sick.  Janet might have been a doctor who had informed him that
+he was suffering from an unexpected disease, and that an operation
+severe and perilous lay in front of him.  The impartial observer in him
+asked somewhat disdainfully why he should allow himself to be deranged
+in this physical manner, and he could only reply feebly and very meekly
+that he did not know.  He felt sick.
+
+Suddenly he said to himself making a discovery--
+
+"Of course she won't come to Bursley.  She'd be ashamed to meet me."
+
+"How long?" he demanded of Janet.
+
+"It was last year, I think," said Janet, with emotion increased, her
+voice heavy with the load of its sympathy.  When he first knew Janet an
+extraordinary quick generous concern for others had been one of her
+chief characteristics.  But of late years, though her deep universal
+kindness had not changed, she seemed to have hardened somewhat on the
+surface.  Now he found again the earlier Janet.
+
+"You never told me."
+
+"The truth is, we didn't know," Janet said, and without giving Edwin
+time to put another question, she continued: "The poor thing's had a
+great deal of trouble, a very great deal.  George's health, now!  The
+sea air doesn't suit him.  And Hilda couldn't possibly leave Brighton."
+
+"Oh!  She's still at Brighton?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Let me see--she used to be at--what was it?--Preston Street?"
+
+Janet glanced at him with interest: "What a memory you've got!  Why,
+it's ten years since she was here!"
+
+"Nearly!" said Edwin.  "It just happened to stick in my mind.  You
+remember she came down to the shop to ask me about trains and things the
+day she left."
+
+"Did she?"  Janet exclaimed, raising her eyebrows.
+
+Edwin had been suspecting that possibly Hilda had given some hint to
+Janet as to the nature of her relations with him.  He now ceased to
+suspect that.  He grew easier.  He gathered up the reins again, though
+in a rather limp hand.
+
+"Why is she so bound to stay in Brighton?" he inquired with affected
+boldness.
+
+"She's got a boarding-house."
+
+"I see.  Well, it's a good thing she has a private income of her own."
+
+"That's just the point," said Janet sadly.  "We very much doubt if she
+has any private income any longer."
+
+Edwin waited for further details, but Janet seemed to speak unwilling.
+She would follow him, but she would not lead.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Behind them he could hear the stir of Mrs Hamps's departure.  She and
+Maggie were coming down the stairs.  Guessing not the dramatic arrival
+of Janet Orgreave and the mysterious nephew, Mrs Hamps, having peeped
+into the empty dining-room, said: "I suppose the dear boy has gone," and
+forthwith went herself.  Edwin smiled cruelly at the thought of what her
+joy would have been actually to inspect the mysterious nephew at close
+quarters, and to learn the strange suspicious truth that he was not a
+nephew after all.
+
+"Auntie!" yelled the boy across the garden.
+
+"Come along, we must go now," Janet retorted.
+
+"No!  I want you to swing me.  Make me swing very high."
+
+"George!"
+
+"Let him swing a bit," said Edwin.  "I'll go and swing him."  And
+calling loud to the boy: "I'll come and swing you."
+
+"He's dreadfully spoiled," Janet protested.  "You'll make him worse."
+
+"I don't care," said Edwin carelessly.
+
+He seemed to understand, better than he had ever done with Clara's
+litter, how and why parents came to spoil their children.  It was not
+because they feared a struggle of wills; but because of the unreasoning
+instinctive pleasure to be derived from the conferring of pleasure,
+especially when the pleasure thus conferred might involve doubtful
+consequences.  He had not cared for the boy, did not care for him.  In
+theory he had the bachelor's factitious horror of a spoiled child.
+Nevertheless he would now support the boy against Janet.  His instinct
+said: "He wants something.  I can give it him.  Let him have it.  Never
+mind consequences.  He shall have it."
+
+He crossed the damp grass, and felt the breeze and the sun.  The sky was
+a moving medley of Chinese white and Prussian blue, that harmonised
+admirably with the Indian red architecture which framed it on all sides.
+The high trees in the garden of the Orgreaves were turning to rich
+yellows and browns, and dead leaves slanted slowly down from their
+summits a few reaching even the Clayhanger garden, speckling its
+evergreen with ochre.  On the other side of the west wall traps and
+carts rattled and rumbled and creaked along Trafalgar Road.
+
+The child had stopped swinging, and greeted him with a most heavenly
+persuasive grateful smile.  A different child!  A sudden angel, with
+delicate distinguished gestures! ...  A wondrous screwing-up of the eyes
+in the sun!  Weak eyes, perhaps!  The thick eyebrows recalled Hilda's.
+Possibly he had Hilda's look!  Or was that fancy?  Edwin was sure that
+he would never have guessed George's parentage.
+
+"Now!" he warned.  "Hold tight."  And, going behind the boy, he strongly
+clasped his slim little waist in its blue sailor-cloth, and sent the
+whole affair--swing-seat and boy and all--flying to the skies.  And the
+boy shrieked in the violence of his ecstasy, and his cap fell on the
+grass.  Edwin worked hard without relaxing.
+
+"Go on!  Go on!"  The boy shriekingly commanded.
+
+And amid these violent efforts and brusque delicious physical contacts,
+Edwin was calmly penetrated and saturated by the mystic effluence that
+is disengaged from young children.  He had seen his father dead, and had
+thought: "Here is the most majestic and impressive enigma that the earth
+can show!"  But the child George--aged nine and seeming more like
+seven--offered an enigma surpassing in solemnity that of death.  This
+was Hilda's.  This was hers, who had left him a virgin.  With a singular
+thrilled impassivity he imagined, not bitterly, the history of Hilda.
+She who was his by word and by kiss, had given her mortal frame to the
+unknown Cannon--yielded it.  She had conceived.  At some moment when he,
+Edwin, was alive and suffering, she had conceived.  She had ceased to be
+a virgin.  Quickly, with an astounding quickness--for was not George
+nine years old?--she had passed from virginity to motherhood.  And he
+imagined all that too; all of it; clearly.  And here, swinging and
+shrieking, exerting the powerful and unique charm of infancy, was the
+miraculous sequel!  Another individuality; a new being; definitely
+formed, with character and volition of its own; unlike any other
+individuality in the universe!  Something fresh!  Something unimaginably
+created!  A phenomenon absolutely original of the pride and the tragedy
+of life!  George!
+
+Yesterday she was a virgin, and to-day there was this!  And this might
+have been his, ought to have been his!  Yes, he thrilled secretly amid
+all those pushings and joltings!  The mystery obsessed him.  He had no
+rancour against Hilda.  He was incapable of rancour, except a kind of
+wilful, fostered rancour in trifles.  Thus he never forgave the inventor
+of Saturday afternoon Bible-classes.  But rancour against Hilda!  No!
+Her act had been above rancour, like an act of Heaven!  And she existed
+yet.  On a spot of the earth's surface entitled Brighton, which he could
+locate upon a map, she existed: a widow, in difficulty, keeping a
+boarding-house.  She ate, slept, struggled; she brushed her hair.  He
+could see her brushing her hair.  And she was thirty-four--was it?  The
+wonder of the world amazed and shook him.  And it appeared to him that
+his career was more romantic than ever.
+
+George with dangerous abruptness wriggled his legs downwards and slipped
+off the seat of the swing, not waiting for Edwin to stop it.  He rolled
+on the grass and jumped up in haste.  He had had enough.
+
+"Well, want any more?"  Edwin asked, breathing hard.
+
+The child made a shy, negative sigh, twisting his tousled head down into
+his right shoulder.  After all he was not really impudent, brazen.  He
+could show a delicious timidity.  Edwin decided that he was an
+enchanting child.  He wanted to talk to him, but he could not think of
+anything natural and reasonable to say by way of opening.
+
+"You haven't told me your name, you know," he began at length.  "How do
+I know what your name is?  George, yes--but George what?  George is
+nothing by itself, I know ten million Georges."
+
+The child smiled.
+
+"George Edwin Cannon," he replied shyly.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+"Now, George!" came Janet's voice, more firmly than before.  After all,
+she meant in the end to be obeyed.  She was learning her business as
+aunt to this new and difficult nephew; but learn it she would, and
+thoroughly!
+
+"Come on!"  Edwin counselled the boy.
+
+They went together to the house.  Maggie had found Janet, and the two
+were conversing.  Soon afterwards aunt and nephew departed.
+
+"How very odd!" murmured Maggie, with an unusual intonation, in the
+hall, as Edwin was putting on his hat to return to the shop.  But
+whether she was speaking to herself or to him, he knew not.
+
+"What?" he asked gruffly.
+
+"Well," she said, "isn't it?"
+
+She was more like Auntie Hamps, more like Clara, than herself in that
+moment.  He resented the suspicious implications of her tone.  He was
+about to give her one of his rude, curt rejoinders, but happily he
+remembered in time that scarce half an hour earlier he had turned over a
+new leaf; so he kept silence.  He walked down to the shop in a deep
+dream.
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER THREE.
+
+ADVENTURE.
+
+It was when Edwin fairly reached the platform at Victoria Station and
+saw the grandiose express waiting its own moment to start, that the
+strange irrational quality of his journey first fully impressed him and
+frightened him--so much that he was almost ready to walk out of the
+station again.  To come gradually into London from the North, to pass
+from the Manchester train half-full of Midlanders through Bloomsbury
+into the preoccupied, struggling, and untidy Strand--this gave no shock,
+typified nothing definite.  But, having spent a night in London,
+deliberately to leave it for the South, where he had never been, of
+which he was entirely ignorant,--that was like an explicit
+self-committal, like turning the back on the last recognisable landmark
+in an ill-considered voyage of pure adventure.
+
+The very character of Victoria Station and of this express was different
+from that of any other station and express in his experience.  It was
+unstrenuous, soft; it had none of the busy harshness of the Midlands; it
+spoke of pleasure, relaxation, of spending free from all worry and
+humiliation of getting.  Everybody who came towards this train came with
+an assured air of wealth and of dominion.  Everybody was well dressed;
+many if not most of the women were in furs; some had expensive and
+delicate dogs; some had pale, elegant footmen, being too august even to
+speak to porters.  All the luggage was luxurious; handbags could be seen
+that were worth fifteen or twenty pounds apiece.  There was no question
+of first, second, or third class; there was no class at all on this
+train.  Edwin had the apologetic air of the provincial who is determined
+to be as good as anybody else.  When he sat down in the vast interior of
+one of those gilded vehicles he could not dismiss from his face the
+consciousness that he was an intruder, that he did not belong to that
+world.  He was ashamed of his hand-baggage, and his gesture in tipping
+the porter lacked carelessness.  Of course he pretended a frowning,
+absorbed interest in a newspaper--but the very newspaper was strange; he
+guessed not that unless he glanced first at the penultimate column of
+page one thereof he convicted himself of not knowing his way about.
+
+He could not think consecutively, not even of his adventure.  His brain
+was in a maze of anarchy.  But at frequent intervals recurred the query:
+"What the devil am I up to?"  And he would uneasily smile to himself.
+When the train rolled with all its majesty out of the station and across
+the Thames, he said to himself, fearful, "Well, I've done it now!"
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+On the Thursday he had told Maggie, with affected casualness, that on
+the Friday he might have to go to London, about a new machine.  Sheer
+invention!  Fortunately Maggie had been well drilled by her father in
+the manner proper to women in accepting announcements connected with
+`business.'  And Edwin was just as laconic and mysterious as Darius had
+been about `business.'  It was a word that ended arguments, or prevented
+them.  On the Friday he had said that he should go in the afternoon.  On
+being asked whether he should return on the Saturday, he had replied
+that he did not know, but that he would telegraph.  Whereupon Maggie had
+said that if he stayed away for the week-end she should probably have
+all the children up for dinner and tea.  At the shop, "Stifford," he had
+said, "I suppose you don't happen to know a good hotel in Brighton?  I
+might run down there for the week-end if I don't come back to-morrow.
+But you needn't say anything."  "No, sir," Stifford had discreetly
+concurred in this suggestion.  "They say there's really only one hotel
+in Brighton, sir--the Royal Sussex.  But I've never been there."  Edwin
+had replied: "Not the Metropole, then?"  "Oh _no_, sir!"  Stifford had
+become a great and wonderful man, and Edwin's constant fear was that he
+might lose this indispensable prop to his business.  For Stifford,
+having done a little irregular commercial travelling in Staffordshire
+and the neighbouring counties, had been seised of the romance of
+travelling; he frequented the society of real commercial travellers, and
+was gradually becoming a marvellous encyclopaedia of information about
+hotels, routes, and topography.
+
+Edwin having been to the Bank himself, instead of sending Stifford, had
+departed with the minimum of ostentation.  He had in fact crept away.
+Since the visit of Janet and the child he had not seen either of them
+again, nor had he mentioned the child to anybody at all.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+When, in an astounding short space of time, he stood in the King's Road
+at Brighton, it seemed to him that he was in a dream; that he was not
+really at Brighton, that town which for so many years had been to him
+naught but a romantic name.  Had his adventurousness, his foolhardiness,
+indeed carried him so far?  As for Brighton, it corresponded with no
+dream.  It was vaster than any imagining of it.  Edwin had only seen the
+pleasure cities of the poor and of the middling, such as Blackpool and
+Llandudno.  He had not conceived what wealth would do when it organised
+itself for the purposes of distraction.  The train had prepared him to a
+certain extent, but not sufficiently.  He suddenly saw Brighton in its
+autumnal pride, Brighton beginning one of its fine week-ends, and he had
+to admit that the number of rich and idle people in the world surpassed
+his provincial notions.  For miles westwards and miles eastwards,
+against a formidable background of high, yellow and brown architecture,
+persons the luxuriousness of any one of whom would have drawn remarks in
+Bursley, walked or drove or rode in thronging multitudes.  Edwin could
+comprehend lolling by the sea in August, but in late October it seemed
+unnatural, fantastic.  The air was full of the trot of glossy horses and
+the rattle of bits and the roll of swift wheels, and the fall of elegant
+soles on endless clean pavements; it was full of the consciousness of
+being correct and successful.  Many of the faces were monstrously ugly,
+most were dissatisfied and querulous; but they were triumphant.  Even
+the pale beings in enlarged perambulators, pulled solemnly to and fro by
+their aged fellow-beings, were triumphant.  The scared, the maimed, yes,
+and the able-bodied blind trusting to the arms of friends, were
+triumphant.  And the enormous policemen, respectfully bland, confident
+in the system which had chosen them and fattened them, gave as it were
+to the scene an official benediction.
+
+The bricks and stucco which fronted the sea on the long embanked
+promenade never sank lower than a four-storey boarding-house, and were
+continually rising to the height of some gilt-lettered hotel, and at
+intervals rose sheer into the skies--six, eight, ten storeys--where a
+hotel, admittedly the grandest on any shore of ocean sent terra-cotta
+chimneys to lose themselves amid the pearly clouds.  Nearly every
+building was a lodgement waiting for the rich, and nearly every great
+bow-window, out of tens of thousands of bow-windows bulging forward in
+an effort to miss no least glimpse of the full prospect, exhibited the
+apparatus and the menials of gourmandise.  And the eye, following the
+interminable irregular horizontal lines of architecture, was foiled in
+the far distances, and, still farther off, after a break of
+indistinguishable brown, it would catch again the receding run of roofs,
+simplified by atmosphere into featureless rectangles of grey against
+sapphire or rose.  There were two piers that strode and sprawled into
+the sea, and these also were laden with correctness and with domination.
+And, between the two, men were walking miraculously on the sea to build
+a third, that should stride farther and deeper than the others.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Amid the crowd, stamping and tapping his way monotonously along with the
+assured obstinacy of a mendicant experienced and hardened, came a shabby
+man bearing on his breast a large label with these words: "Blind through
+boy throwing mortar.  Discharged from four hospitals.  Incurable."
+Edwin's heart seemed to be constricted.  He thought of the ragged
+snarling touts who had fawned to him at the station, and of the
+creatures locked in the cellars whence came beautiful odours of
+confectionery and soup through the pavement gratings, and of the
+slatternly women who kept thrusting flowers under his nose, and the
+half-clad infants who skimmed before the wind yelling the names of
+newspapers.  All was not triumph!  Where triumph was, there also must be
+the conquered.
+
+_She_ was there, she too!  Somewhere, close to him.  He recalled the exact
+tone of Janet's voice as she had said: "The poor thing's had a great
+deal of trouble."  A widow, trying to run a boarding-house and not
+succeeding!  Why, there were hundreds upon hundreds of boarding-houses,
+all large, all imposing, all busy at the end of October!  Where was hers
+hidden away, her pathetic little boarding-house?  Preston Street!  He
+knew not where Preston Street was, and he had purposely refrained from
+inquiring.  But he might encounter it at any moment.  He was afraid to
+look too closely at the street-signs as he passed them; afraid!
+
+"What am I doing here?" he asked himself curiously, and sometimes
+pettishly.  "What's my object?  Where's the sense of it?  I'm nothing
+but a damned fool.  I've got no plan.  I don't know what I'm going to
+do."  It was true.  He had no plan, and he did not know what he was
+going to do.  What he did most intimately know was that the idea of her
+nearness made him tremble.
+
+"I'd much better go back at once," he said.
+
+He walked miles, until he came to immense and silent squares of huge
+palatial houses, and wide transversal avenues running far up into the
+land and into the dusk.  In these vast avenues and across these vast
+squares infrequent carriages sped like mechanical toys guided by
+mannikins.  The sound of the sea waxed.  And then he saw the twinkle of
+lights, and then fire ran slowly along the promenade: until the whole
+map of it was drawn out in flame; and he perceived that though he had
+walked a very long way, the high rampart of houses continued still
+interminably beyond him.  He turned.  He was tired.  His face caught the
+full strength of the rising wind.  Foam gleamed on the rising tide.  In
+the profound violet sky to the east stars shone and were wiped out, in
+fields; but to the west, silver tarried.  He had not seen Preston
+Street, and it was too dark now to decipher the signs.  He was glad.  He
+went on and on, with rapidly increasing fatigue, disgust, impatience.
+The thronging multitudes had almost disappeared; but many illuminated
+vehicles were flitting to and fro, and the shops were brilliant.  He was
+so exhausted by the pavements that he could scarcely walk.  And Brighton
+became for him the most sorrowful city on earth.
+
+"What am I doing here?" he asked himself savagely.  However, by dint of
+sticking doggedly to it he did in the end reach the hotel.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+After dinner, and wine, both of which, by their surprising and indeed
+unique excellence, fostered the prestige of Stifford as an authority
+upon hotels, Edwin was conscious of new strength and cheerfulness.  He
+left the crowded and rose-lit dining-room early, because he was not at
+ease amid its ceremoniousness of attire and of service, and went into
+the turkey-carpeted hall, whose porter suddenly sprang into propitiatory
+life on seeing him.  He produced a cigarette, and with passionate haste
+the porter produced a match, and by his method of holding the flame to
+the cigarette, deferential and yet firm, proved that his young existence
+had not been wasted in idleness.  When the cigarette was alight, the
+porter surveyed his work with a pleased smile.
+
+"Another rare storm blowing up, sir," said the porter.
+
+"Yes," said Edwin.  "It's been giving the window of my room a fine
+shake."
+
+The porter glanced at the clock.  "High tide in half an hour, sir."
+
+"I think I'll go out and have a look at it," said Edwin.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"By the way," Edwin added, "I suppose you haven't got a map of
+Brighton?"
+
+"Certainly, sir," said the porter, and with a rebirth of passion began
+to search among the pile of time-tables and other documents on a table
+behind him.
+
+Edwin wished he had not asked for the map.  He had not meant to ask for
+it.  The words had said themselves.  He gazed unseeing at the map for a
+few instants.
+
+"What particular street did you want, sir?" the porter murmured.
+
+In deciding how to answer, it seemed to Edwin that he was deciding the
+hazard of his life.
+
+"Preston Street."
+
+"Oh!  Preston Street!" the porter repeated in a relieved tone, as if
+assuring Edwin that there was nothing very esoteric about Preston
+Street.  "It's just beyond the Metropole.  You know Regency Square.
+Well, it's the next street after that.  There's a club at the corner."
+
+In the afternoon, then, Edwin must have walked across the end of Preston
+Street twice.  This thought made him tremble as at the perception of a
+danger past but unperceived at the moment.
+
+The porter gave his whole soul to the putting of Edwin's overcoat on
+Edwin's back; he offered the hat with an obeisance, and having ushered
+Edwin into the night so that the illustrious guest might view the storm,
+he turned with a sudden new mysterious supply of zeal to other guests
+who were now emerging from the dining-room.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+The hotel fronted north on an old sheltered square where no storm raged,
+but simultaneously with Edwin's first glimpse of the sea the wind struck
+him a tremendous blow, and continued to strike.  He had the peculiar
+grim joy of the Midlander and Northerner in defying an element.  All the
+lamps of the promenade were insecurely flickering.  Grouped opposite a
+small jetty was a crowd of sightseers.  The dim extremity of the jetty
+was wreathed in spray, and the waves ran along its side, making curved
+lines on the masonry like curved lines of a rope shaken from one end.
+The wet floor of the jetty shone like a mirror.  Edwin approached the
+crowd, and, peeping over black shoulders, could see down into the hollow
+of the corner between the jetty and the sea-wall, where boys on the
+steps dared the spent waves, amid jeering laughter.  The crowd had the
+air of being a family intimately united.  Farther on was another similar
+crowd, near an irregular high fountain of spray that glittered in the
+dark.  On the beach below, at vague distances were curious rows of
+apparently tiny people silhouetted like the edge of a black saw against
+an excessive whiteness.  This whiteness was the sheet of foam that the
+sea made.  It stretched everywhere, until the eye lost it seawards.
+Edwin descended to the beach, adding another tooth to the saw.  The tide
+ran up absolutely white in wide chords of a circle, and then, to the raw
+noise of disturbed shingle, the chord vanished; and in a moment was
+re-created.  This play went on endlessly, hypnotising the spectators
+who, beaten by the wind and deafened by sound, stared and stared, safe,
+at the mysterious and menacing world of spray and foam and darkness.
+Before, was the open malignant sea.  Close behind, on their eminence,
+the hotels rose in vast cubes of yellow light, moveless, secure,
+strangely confident that nothing sinister could happen to them.
+
+Edwin was aware of emotion.  The feel of his overcoat-collar upturned
+against the chin was friendly to him amid that onset of the pathos of
+the human world.  He climbed back to the promenade.  Always at the
+bottom of his mind, the foundation of all the shifting structures in his
+mind, was the consciousness of his exact geographical relation to
+Preston Street.  He walked westwards along the promenade.  "Why am I
+doing this?" he asked himself again and again.  "Why don't I go home?  I
+must be mad to be doing this."  Still his legs carried him on, past
+lamp-post after lamp-post of the wind-driven promenade, now almost
+deserted.  And presently the high lighted windows of the grandest hotels
+were to be seen, cut like square holes in the sky; and then the pier,
+which had flung a string of lanterns over the waves into the storm; and
+opposite the pier a dark empty space and a rectangle of gas-lamps:
+Regency Square.  He crossed over, and passed up the Square, and out of
+it by a tiny side street, at hazard, and lo! he was in Preston Street.
+He went hot and cold.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SEVEN.
+
+Well, and what then?  Preston Street was dark and lonely.  The wind
+charged furiously through it, panting towards the downs.  He was in
+Preston Street, but what could he do?  She was behind the black walls of
+one of those houses.  But what then?  Could he knock at the door in the
+night and say: "I've come.  I don't know why?"
+
+He said: "I shall walk up and down this street once, and then I shall go
+back to the hotel.  That's the only thing to do.  I've gone off my head,
+that's what's the matter with me!  I ought to have written to her.  Why
+in the name of God didn't I begin by writing to her? ...  Of course I
+might write to her from the hotel ... send the letter by messenger,
+to-night ... or early to-morrow.  Yes, that's what I'll do."
+
+He set himself to make the perambulation of the street.  Many of the
+numbers were painted on the fanlights over the doors and showed plain
+against illumination.  Suddenly he saw the large figures `59.'  He was
+profoundly stirred.  He had said that the matter with him was that he
+had gone off his head; but now, staring at that number on the opposite
+side of the street, he really did not know what was the matter with him.
+He might have been dying.  The front of the house was dark save for the
+fanlight. He crossed over and peered down into the area and at the black
+door.  A brass plate: "Cannon's Boarding-House," he could read.  He
+perspired.  It seemed to him that he could see her within the house,
+mysteriously moving at her feminine tasks.  Or did she lie in bed?  He
+had come from Bursley to London, from London to Brighton, and now he had
+found her portal; it existed.  The adventure seemed incredible in its
+result.  Enough for the present!  He could stand no more.  He walked
+away, meaning not to return.
+
+When he returned, five minutes later, the fanlight was dark.  Had _she_,
+in the meantime, come into the hall of the house and extinguished the
+gas?  Strange, that all lights should be out in a boarding establishment
+before ten o'clock!  He stood hesitant quite near the house, holding
+himself against the wind.  Then the door opened a little, as it were
+stealthily, and a hand and arm crept out and with a cloth polished the
+face of the brass plate.  He thought, in his excited fancy, that it was
+her hand and arm.  Within, he seemed to distinguish a dim figure.  He
+did not move; could not.  The door opened wider, and the figure stood
+revealed, a woman's.  Surely it was she!  She gazed at him suspiciously,
+duster in hand.
+
+"What are you standing there for?" she questioned inimically.  "We've
+had enough of loiterers in this street.  Please go away."
+
+She took him for a knave expectant of some chance to maraud.  She was
+not fearful, however.  It was she.  It was her voice.
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER FOUR.
+
+IN PRESTON STREET.
+
+He said, "I happened to be in Brighton, so I thought I'd just call,
+and--I thought I'd just call."
+
+She stared at him, frowning, in the dim diffused light of the street.
+
+"I've been seeing your little boy," he said.  "I thought perhaps as I
+was here you'd like to know how he was getting on."
+
+"Why," she exclaimed, with seeming bitterness, "you've grown a beard!"
+
+"Yes," he admitted foolishly, apologetically.
+
+"We can't stand here in this wind," she said, angry with the wind, which
+was indeed blowing her hair about, and her skirts and her duster.
+
+She did not in words invite him to enter, but she held the door more
+widely open and drew back for him to pass.  He went in.  She closed the
+door with a bang and rattle of large old-fashioned latches, locks, and
+chains, and the storm was excluded.  They were in the dark of the hall.
+"Wait till I put my hand on the matches," she said.  Then she struck a
+match, which revealed a common oil-lamp, with a reservoir of yellow
+glass and a paper shade.  She raised the chimney and lit the lamp, and
+regulated the wick.
+
+Edwin kept silence.  The terrible constraint which had half paralysed
+him when Janet first mentioned Hilda, seized him again.  He stood near
+the woman who without a word of explanation or regret had jilted,
+outraged, and ruined him ten years before; this was their first meeting
+after their kisses in his father's shop.  And yet she was not on her
+knees, nor in tears, nor stammering an appeal for forgiveness.  It was
+rather he who was apologetic, who sought excuses.  He felt somehow like
+a criminal, or at least like one who commits an enormous indiscretion.
+
+The harsh curves of her hair were the same.  Her thick eyebrows were the
+same.  Her blazing glance was the same.  Her intensely clear intonation
+was the same.  But she was a profoundly changed woman.  Even in his
+extreme perturbation he could be sure of that.  As, bending under the
+lamp-shade to arrange the wick, she exposed her features to the bright
+light, Edwin saw a face marred by anxiety and grief and time, the face
+of a mature woman, with no lingering pretension to girlishness.  She was
+thirty-four, and she looked older than Maggie, and much older than
+Janet.  She was embittered.  Her black dress was shabby and untidy, her
+finger-nails irregular, discoloured, and damaged.  The aspect of her
+pained Edwin acutely.  It seemed to him a poignant shame that time and
+sorrow and misfortune could not pass over a young girl's face and leave
+no mark.  When he recalled what she had been, comparing the woman with
+the delicious wistful freshness of the girl that lived unaltered in his
+memory, he was obliged to clear his throat.  The contrast was too
+pathetic to be dwelt on.  Only with the woman before him did he fully
+appreciate the exquisite innocent simplicity of the girl.  In the day of
+his passion Hilda had not seemed to him very young, very simple, very
+wistful.  On the contrary she had seemed to have much of the knowledge
+and the temper of a woman.
+
+Having at length subjugated the wick, she straightened her back, with a
+gesture that he knew, and for one instant she was a girl again.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+"Will you come this way?" she said coldly, holding the lamp in front of
+her, and opening a door.
+
+At the same moment another door opened at the far end of the hall; there
+was a heavy footstep; a great hand and arm showed, and then Edwin had a
+glimpse of a man's head and shoulders emerging from an oblong flickering
+firelight.
+
+Hilda paused.  "All right," she called to the man, who at once
+disappeared, shutting the door and leaving darkness where he had been.
+The large shadows cast by Hilda's lamp now had the gaunt hall to
+themselves again.
+
+"Don't be alarmed," she laughed harshly.  "It's only the broker's man."
+
+Edwin was tongue-tied.  If Hilda were joking, what answer could be made
+to such a pleasantry in such a situation?  And if she were speaking the
+truth, if the bailiffs really were in possession...!  His life seemed to
+him once again astoundingly romantic.  He had loved this woman,
+conquered her.  And now she was a mere acquaintance, and he was
+following her stiffly into the recesses of a strange and sinister abode
+peopled by mysterious men.  Was this a Brighton boarding-house?  It
+resembled nothing reputable in his experience.  All was
+incomprehensible.
+
+The room into which she led him was evidently the dining-room.  Not
+spacious, perhaps not quite so large as his own dining-room, it was
+nearly filled by one long bare table.  Eight or ten monotonous chairs
+were ranged round the grey walls.  In the embrasure of the window was a
+wicker stand with a withered plant on its summit, and at the other end
+of the room a walnut sideboard in the most horrible taste.  The
+mantelpiece was draped with dark knotted and rosetted cloth; within the
+fender stood a small paper screen.  The walls were hung with ancient and
+with fairly modern engravings, some big, others little, some coloured,
+others in black-and-white, but all distressing in their fatuous
+ugliness.  The ceiling seemed black.  The whole room fulfilled pretty
+accurately the scornful scrupulous housewife's notion of a lodging-house
+interior.  It was suspect.  And in Edwin there was a good deal of the
+housewife.  He was appalled.  Obviously the house was small--he had
+known that from the outside--and the entire enterprise insignificant.
+This establishment was not in the King's Road, nor on the Marine Parade,
+nor at Hove; no doubt hundreds of such little places existed
+precariously in a vast town like Brighton.  Widows, of course, were
+often in straits.  And Janet had told him...  Nevertheless he was
+appalled, and completely at a loss to reconcile Hilda with her
+environment.  And then--"the broker's man!"
+
+At her bidding he sat down, in his overcoat, with his hat insecure on
+his knee, and observed, under the lamp, the dust on the surface of the
+long table.  Hilda seated herself opposite, so that the lamp was between
+them, hiding him from her by its circle of light.  He wondered what
+Maggie would have thought, and what Clara would have said, could they
+have seen him in that obscurity.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+"So you've seen my boy?" she began, with no softening of tone.
+
+"Yes, Janet Orgreave brought him in one morning--the other day.  He
+didn't seem to me to be so ill as all that."
+
+"Ill!" she exclaimed.  "He certainly wasn't ill when he left here.  But
+he had been.  And the doctor said that this air didn't suit him--it
+never had suited him.  It doesn't suit some folks, you know--people can
+say what they like."
+
+"Anyhow, he's a lively piece--no mistake about that!"
+
+"When he's well, he's very well," said George's mother.  "But he's up
+and down in a minute.  And on the whole he's been on the poorly side."
+
+He noticed that, though there was no relapse from the correctness of her
+accent, she was using just such phrases as she might have used had she
+never quitted her native Turnhill.  He looked round the lamp at her
+furtively, and seemed to see in her shadowed face a particular local
+quality of sincerity and downrightness that appealed strongly to his
+admiration.  (Yet ten years earlier he had considered her markedly
+foreign to the Five Towns.)  That this quality should have survived in
+her was a proof to him that she was a woman unique.  Unique she had
+been, and unique she still remained.  He did not know that he had long
+ago lost for ever the power of seeing her with a normal vision.  He
+imagined in his simplicity, which disguised itself as chill critical
+impartiality, that he was adding her up with clear-sighted shrewdness...
+And then she was a mother!  That meant a mysterious, a mystic
+perfecting!  For him, it was as if among all women she alone had been a
+mother--so special was his view of the influence of motherhood upon her.
+He drew together all the beauty of an experience almost universal,
+transcendentalised it, and centred it on one being.  And he was
+disturbed, baffled, agitated by the effect of the secret workings of his
+own unsuspected emotion.  He was made sad, and sadder.  He wanted to
+right wrongs, to efface from hearts the memory of grief, to create
+bliss; and he knew that this could never be done.  He now saw Hilda
+exclusively as a victim, whose misfortunes were innumerable.  Imagine
+this creature, with her passion for Victor Hugo, obliged by
+circumstances to polish a brass door-plate surreptitiously at night!
+Imagine her solitary in the awful house--with the broker's man!  Imagine
+her forced to separate herself from her child!  Imagine the succession
+of disasters that had soured her and transformed seriousness into
+harshness and acridity! ...  And within that envelope, what a soul must
+be burning!
+
+"And when he begins to grow--he's scarcely _begun_ to grow yet," Hilda
+continued about her offspring, "then he will need all his strength!"
+
+"Yes, he will," Edwin concurred heartily.
+
+He wanted to ask her, "Why did you call him Edwin for his second name?
+Was it his father's name, or your father's, or did _you_ insist on it
+yourself, because--?"  But he could not ask.  He could ask nothing.  He
+could not even ask why she had jilted him without a word.  He knew
+naught, and evidently she was determined to give no information.  She
+might at any rate have explained how she had come to meet Janet, and
+under what circumstances Janet had taken possession of the child.  All
+was a mystery.  Her face, when he avoided the lamp, shone in the midst
+of a huge dark cloud of impenetrable mystery.  She was too proud to
+reveal anything whatever.  The grand pride in her forbade her even to
+excuse her conduct to himself.  A terrific woman!
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Silence fell.  His constraint was excruciating.  She too was nervous,
+tapping the table and creaking her chair.  He could not speak.
+
+"Shall you be going back to Bursley soon?" she demanded.  In her voice
+was desperation.
+
+"Oh yes!" he said, thankfully eager to follow up any subject.  "On
+Monday, I expect."
+
+"I wonder if you'd mind giving Janet a little parcel from me--some
+things of George's?  I meant to send it by post, but if you--"
+
+"Of course!  With pleasure!"  He seemed to implore her.
+
+"It's quite small," she said, rising and going to the sideboard, on
+which lay a little brown-paper parcel.
+
+His eye followed her.  She picked up the parcel, glanced at it, and
+offered it to him.
+
+"I'll take it across on Monday night," he said fervently.
+
+"Thanks."
+
+She remained standing; he got up.
+
+"No message or anything?" he suggested.
+
+"Oh!" she said coldly, "I write, you know."
+
+"Well--" He made the gesture of departing.  There was no alternative.
+
+"We're having very rough weather, aren't we?" she said, with careless
+conventionality, as she took the lamp.
+
+In the hall, when she held out her hand, he wanted tremendously to
+squeeze it, to give her through his hand the message of sympathy which
+his tongue, intimidated by her manner, dared not give.  But his hand
+also refused to obey him.  The clasp was strictly ceremonious.  As she
+was drawing the heavy latch of the door he forced himself to say, "I'm
+in Brighton sometimes, off and on.  Now I know where you are, I must
+look you up."
+
+She made no answer.  She merely said good night as he passed out into
+the street and the wind.  The door banged.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+Edwin took a long breath.  He had seen her!  Yes, but the interview had
+been worse than his worst expectations.  He had surpassed himself in
+futility, in fatuous lack of enterprise.  He had behaved liked a
+schoolboy.  Now, as he plunged up the street with the wind, he could
+devise easily a dozen ways of animating and guiding and controlling the
+interview so that, even if sad, its sadness might have been agreeable.
+The interview had been hell, ineffable torture, a perfect crime of
+clumsiness.  It had resulted in nothing.  (Except, of course, that he
+had seen her--that fact was indisputable.)  He blamed himself.  He
+cursed himself with really extraordinary savageness.
+
+"Why did I go near her?" he demanded.  "Why couldn't I keep away?  I've
+simply made myself look a blasted fool!  Creeping and crawling round
+her! ...  After all, she _did_ throw me over!  And now she asks me to take
+a parcel to her confounded kid!  The whole thing's ridiculous!  And
+what's going to happen to her in that hole?  I don't suppose she's got
+the least notion of looking after herself.  Impossible--the whole thing!
+If anybody had told me that I should--that she'd--" Half of which talk
+was simple bluster.  The parcel was bobbing on its loop against his
+side.
+
+When he reached the top of the street he discovered that he had been
+going up it instead of down it.  "What am I thinking of?" he grumbled
+impatiently.  However, he would not turn back.  He adventured forward,
+climbing into latitudes whose geography was strange to him, and scarcely
+seeing a single fellow-wanderer beneath the gas-lamps.  Presently, after
+a steep hill, he came to a churchyard, and then he redescended, and at
+last tumbled into a street alive with people who had emerged from a
+theatre, laughing, lighting cigarettes, linking arms.  Their existence
+seemed shallow, purposeless, infantile, compared to his.  He felt
+himself superior to them.  What did they know about life?  He would not
+change with any of them.
+
+Recognising the label on an omnibus, he followed its direction, and
+arrived almost immediately in the vast square which contained his hotel,
+and which was illuminated by the brilliant facades of several hotels.
+The doors of the Royal Sussex were locked, because eleven o'clock had
+struck.  He could not account for the period of nearly three hours which
+had passed since he left the hotel.  The zealous porter, observing his
+shadow through the bars, had sprung to unfasten the door before he could
+ring.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+Within the hotel reigned gaiety, wine, and the dance.  Small tables had
+been placed in the hall, and at these sat bald-headed men, smoking
+cigars and sharing champagne with ladies of every age.  A white carpet
+had been laid in the large smoking-room, and through the curtained
+archway that separated it from the hall, Edwin could see couples
+revolving in obedience to the music of a piano and a violin.  One of the
+Royal Sussex's Saturday Cinderellas was in progress.  The self-satisfied
+gestures of men inspecting their cigars or lifting glasses, of simpering
+women glancing on the sly at their jewels, and of youths pulling
+straight their white waistcoats as they strolled about with the air of
+Don Juans, invigorated his contempt for the average existence.  The
+tinkle of the music appeared exquisitely tedious in its superficiality.
+He could not remain in the hall because of the incorrectness of his
+attire, and the staircase was blocked, to a timid man, by elegant
+couples apparently engaged in the act of flirtation.  He turned, through
+a group of attendant waiters, into the passage leading to the small
+smoking-room which adjoined the discreetly situated bar.  This
+smoking-room, like a club, warm and bright, was empty, but in passing he
+had caught sight of two mutually affectionate dandies drinking at the
+splendid mahogany of the bar.  He lit a cigarette.  Seated in the
+smoking-room he could hear their conversation; he was forced to hear it.
+
+"I'm really a very quiet man, old chap, _very_ quiet," said one, with a
+wavering drawl, "but when they get at me-- I was at the Club at one
+o'clock.  I wasn't drunk, but I had a top on."
+
+"You were just gay and cheerful," the other flatteringly and soothingly
+suggested, in an exactly similar wavering drawl.
+
+"Yes.  I felt as if I wanted to go out somewhere and have another drink.
+So I went to Willis's Rooms.  I was in evening-dress.  You know you
+have to get a domino for those things.  Then, of course, you're a mark
+at once.  I also got a nose.  A girl snatched it off me.  I told her
+what I thought of _her_, and I got another nose.  Then five fellows tried
+to snatch my domino off me.  Then I _did_ get angry.  I landed out with my
+right at the nearest chap--right on his heart.  Not his face.  His
+heart.  I lowered him.  He asked me afterwards, `Was that your right?'
+`Yes,' I said, `and my left's worse!'  I couldn't use my left because
+they were holding it.  You see?  You _see_?"
+
+"Yes," said the other impatiently, and suddenly cantankerous.  "I see
+that all right!  Damned awful rot those Willis's Rooms affairs are
+getting, if you ask me!"
+
+"Asses!"  Edwin exploded within himself.  "Idiots!"  He could not
+tolerate their crassness.  He had a hot prejudice against them because
+they were not as near the core of life as he was himself.  It appeared
+to him that most people died without having lived.  Willis's Rooms!
+Girls!  Nose!  Heart! ...  Asses!
+
+He surged again out of the small room, desolating the bar with one
+scornful glance as he went by.  He braved the staircase, leaving those
+scenes of drivelling festivity.  In his bedroom, with the wind crashing
+against the window, he regarded meditatively the parcel.  After all, if
+she had meant to have nothing to do with him, she would not have charged
+him with the parcel.  The parcel was a solid fact.  The more he thought
+about it, the more significant a fact it seemed to him.  His ears sang
+with the vibrating intensity of his secret existence, but from the wild
+confusion of his heart he could disentangle no constant idea.
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER FIVE.
+
+THE BULLY.
+
+The next morning he was up early, preternaturally awake.  When he
+descended the waiters were waiting for him, and the zealous porter stood
+ready to offer him a Sunday paper, just as though in the night they had
+refreshed themselves magically, without going to bed.  No sign nor relic
+of the Cinderella remained.  He breakfasted in an absent mind, and then
+went idly into the lounge, a room with one immense circular window,
+giving on the Square.  Rain was falling heavily.  Already from the
+porter, and in the very mien of the waiters, he had learnt that the
+Brighton Sunday was ruined.  He left the window.  On a round table in
+the middle of the room were ranged, with religious regularity, all the
+most esoteric examples of periodical literature in our language, from
+"The Iron-Trades Review" to "The Animals' Guardian."  With one careless
+movement he destroyed the balanced perfection of a labour into which
+some menial had put his soul, and then dropped into a gigantic
+easy-chair near the fire, whose thin flames were just rising through the
+interstices of great black lumps of coal.
+
+The housekeeper, stiff with embroidered silk, swam majestically into the
+lounge, bowed with a certain frigid and deferential surprise to the
+early guest, and proceeded to an inquiry into dust.  In a moment she
+called, sharp and low--
+
+"Arthur!"
+
+And a page ran eagerly in, to whom, in the difficult corners of
+upholstery and of sculptured wood, she pointed out his sins of omission,
+lashing him with a restrained voice that Edwin could scarcely hear.
+Passing her hand carelessly along the beading of a door panel and then
+examining her fingers, she departed.  The page fetched a duster.
+
+"I see why this hotel has such a name," said Edwin to himself.  And
+suddenly the image of Hilda in that dark and frowzy tenement in Preston
+Street, on that wet Sunday morning, filled his heart with a revolt
+capricious and violent.  He sprang to his feet, unreflecting, wilful,
+and strode into the hall.
+
+"Can I have a cab?" he asked the porter.
+
+"Certainly, sir," said the porter, as if saying, "You ask me too little.
+Why will you not ask for a white elephant so that I may prove my
+devotion?"  And within five seconds the screech of a whistle sped
+through the air to the cab-stand at the corner.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+"Why am I doing this?" he once more asked himself, when he heard the
+bell ring, in answer to his pull, within the house in Preston Street.
+The desire for a tranquil life had always been one of his strongest
+instincts, and of late years the instinct had been satisfied, and so
+strengthened.  Now he seemed to be obstinately searching for tumult; and
+he did not know why.  He trembled at the sound of movement behind the
+door.  "In a moment," he thought, "I shall be right in the thick of it!"
+
+As he was expecting, she opened the door herself; but only a little,
+with the gesture habitual to women who live alone in apprehension, and
+she kept her hand on the latch.
+
+"Good morning," he said curtly.  "Can I speak to you?"
+
+His eye could not blaze like hers, but all his self-respect depended on
+his valour now, and with desperation he affronted her.  She opened the
+door wider, and he stepped in, and at once began to wipe his boots on
+the mat with nervous particularity.
+
+"Frightful morning!" he grinned.
+
+"Yes," she said.  "Is that your cab outside?"
+
+He admitted that it was.
+
+"Perhaps if we go upstairs," she suggested.
+
+Thanking her, he followed her upwards into the gloom at the head of the
+narrow stairs, and then along a narrow passage.  The house appeared
+quite as unfavourably by day as by night.  It was shabby.  All its tints
+had merged by use and by time into one tint, nondescript and unpleasant,
+in which yellow prospered.  The drawing-room was larger than the
+dining-room by the poor width of the hall.  It was a heaped, confused
+mass of chairs, sofas, small tables, draperies, embroideries, and
+valueless knick-knacks.  There was no peace in it for the eye, neither
+on the walls nor on the floor.  The gaze was driven from one ugliness to
+another without rest.
+
+The fireplace was draped; the door was draped; the back of the piano was
+draped; and none of the dark suspicious stuffs showed a clear pattern.
+The faded chairs were hidden by faded antimacassars; the little futile
+tables concealed their rickets under vague needlework, on which were
+displayed in straw or tinsel frames pale portraits of dowdy people who
+had stood like sheep before fifteenth-rate photographers.  The
+mantelpiece and the top of the piano were thickly strewn with fragments
+of coloured earthenware.  At the windows hung heavy dark curtains from
+great rings that gleamed gilt near the ceiling; and lest the light which
+they admitted should be too powerful it was further screened by greyish
+white curtains within them.  The carpet was covered in most places by
+small rugs or bits of other carpets, and in the deep shadows beneath
+sofas and chairs and behind the piano it seemed to slip altogether out
+of existence into black nothingness.  The room lacked ventilation, but
+had the appearance of having been recently dusted.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Hilda closed the draped door with a mysterious, bitter, cynical smile.
+
+"Sit down," she said coldly.
+
+"Last night," Edwin began, without sitting down, "when you mentioned the
+broker's man, were you joking, or did you mean it?"
+
+She was taken aback.
+
+"Did I say `broker's man'?"
+
+"Well," said Edwin, "you've not forgotten, I suppose."
+
+She sat down, with some precision of pose, on the principal sofa.
+
+"Yes," she said at length.  "As you're so curious.  The landlords are in
+possession."
+
+"The bailiffs still here?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But what are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm expecting them to take the furniture away to-morrow, or Tuesday at
+the latest," she replied.
+
+"And then what?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"But haven't you got any money?"
+
+She took a purse from her pocket, and opened it with a show of impartial
+curiosity.  "Two-and-seven," she said.
+
+"Any servant in the house?"
+
+"What do you think?" she replied.  "Didn't you see me cleaning the
+door-plate last night?  I _do_ like that to look nice at any rate!"
+
+"I don't see much use in that looking nice, when you've got the bailiffs
+in, and no servant and no money," Edwin said roughly, and added, still
+more roughly: "What should you do if anyone came inquiring for rooms?"
+He tried to guess her real mood, but her features would betray nothing.
+
+"I was expecting three old ladies--sisters--next week," she said.  "I'd
+been hoping I could hold out till they came.  They're horrid women,
+though they don't know it; but they've stayed a couple of months in this
+house every winter for I don't know how many years, and they're firmly
+convinced it's the best house in Brighton.  They're quite enough to keep
+it going by themselves when they're here.  But I shall have to write and
+tell them not to come this time."
+
+"Yes," said Edwin.  "But I keep asking you--what then?"
+
+"And I keep saying I don't know."
+
+"You must have some plans?"
+
+"I haven't."  She put her lips together, and dimpled her chin, and again
+cynically smiled.  At any rate she had not resented his inquisition.
+
+"I suppose you know you're behaving like a perfect fool?" he suggested
+angrily.  She did not wince.
+
+"And what if I am?  What's that got to do with you?" she asked, as if
+pleasantly puzzled.
+
+"You'll starve.  You can't live for ever on two-and-seven."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"And the boy?  Is he going to starve?"
+
+"Oh," said Hilda, "Janet will look after him till something turns up.
+The fact is, that's one reason why I allowed her to take him."
+
+"`Something turns up,' `something turns up!'"  Edwin repeated
+deliberately, letting himself go.  "You make me absolutely sick!  It's
+absolutely incredible how some people will let things slide!  What in
+the name of God Almighty do you think will turn up?"
+
+"I don't know," she said, with a certain weakness, still trying to be
+placidly bitter, and not now succeeding.
+
+"Where is the bailiff-johnny?"
+
+"He's in the kitchen with one of his friends, drinking."
+
+Edwin with bravado flopped his hat down forcefully on a table, pushed a
+chair aside, and strode towards the door.
+
+"Where are you going?" she asked in alarm, standing up.
+
+"Where do you suppose I'm going?  I'm going to find out from that chap
+how much will settle it.  If you can't show any common sense for
+yourself, other folks must show some for you--that's all.  The brokers
+in the house!  I never heard of such work!"
+
+And indeed, to a respected and successful tradesman, the entrance of the
+bailiffs into a house did really seem to be the very depth of disaster
+and shame for the people of that house.  Edwin could not remember that
+he had ever before seen a bailiff.  To him a bailiff was like a bug--
+something heard of, something known to exist, but something not likely
+to enter the field of vision of an honest and circumspect man.
+
+He would deal with the bailiff.  He would have a short way with the
+bailiff.  Secure in the confidence of his bankers, he was ready to bully
+the innocent bailiff.  He would not reflect, would not pause.  He had
+heated himself.  His steam was up, and he would not let the pressure be
+weakened by argumentative hesitations.  His emotion was not
+disagreeable.
+
+When he was in the passage he heard the sound of a sob.  Prudently, he
+had not banged the door after him.  He stopped, and listened.  Was it a
+sob?  Then he heard another sob.  He went back to the drawing-room.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Yes!  She stood in the middle of the room weeping.  Save Clara, and
+possibly once or twice Maggie, he had never seen a woman cry--that is,
+in circumstances of intimacy; he had seen women crying in the street,
+and the spectacle usually pained him.  On occasion he had very nearly
+made Maggie cry, and had felt exceedingly uncomfortable.  But now, as he
+looked at the wet eyes and the shaken bosom of Hilda Cannon, he was
+aware of acute joy.  Exquisite moment!  Damn her!  He could have taken
+her and beaten her in his sudden passion--a passion not of revenge, not
+of punishment!  He could have made her scream with the pain that his
+love would inflict.
+
+She tried to speak, and failed, in a storm of sobs.  He had left the
+door open.  Half blind with tears she dashed to the door and shut it,
+and then turned and fronted him, with her hands hovering near her face.
+
+"I can't let you do it!" she murmured imploringly, plaintively, and yet
+with that still obstinate bitterness in her broken voice.
+
+"Then who is to do it?" he demanded, less bitterly than she had spoken,
+nevertheless not softly.  "Who is to keep you if I don't?  Have you got
+any other friends who'll stand by you?"
+
+"I've got the Orgreaves," she answered.
+
+"And do you think it would be better for the Orgreaves to keep you, or
+for me?"  As she made no response, he continued: "Anybody else besides
+the Orgreaves?"
+
+"No," she muttered sulkily.  "I'm not the sort of woman that makes a lot
+of friends.  I expect people don't like me, as a rule."
+
+"You're the sort of woman that behaves like a blooming infant!" he said.
+"Supposing I don't help you?  What then, I keep asking you?  How shall
+you get money?  You can only borrow it--and there's nobody but Janet,
+and she'd have to ask her father for it.  Of course, if you'd sooner
+borrow from Osmond Orgreave than from me--"
+
+"I don't want to borrow from any one," she protested.
+
+"Then you want to starve!  And you want your boy to starve--or else to
+live on charity!  Why don't you look facts in the face?  You'll have to
+look them in the face sooner or later, and the sooner the better.  You
+think you're doing a fine thing by sitting tight and bearing it, and
+saying nothing, and keeping it all a secret, until you get pitched into
+the street!  Let me tell you you aren't."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+She dropped into a chair by the piano, and rested her elbows on the
+curved lid of the piano.
+
+"You're frightfully cruel!" she sobbed, hiding her face.
+
+He fidgeted away to the larger of the two windows, which was bayed, so
+that the room could boast a view of the sea.  On the floor he noticed an
+open book, pages downwards.  He picked it up.  It was the poems of
+Crashaw, an author he had never read but had always been intending to
+read.  Outside, the driver of his cab was bunching up his head and
+shoulders together under a large umbrella, upon which the rain
+spattered.  The flanks of the resigned horse glistened with rain.
+
+"You needn't talk about cruelty!" he remarked, staring hard at the
+signboard of an optician opposite.  He could hear the faint clanging of
+church bells.
+
+After a pause she said, as if apologetically--
+
+"Keeping a boarding-house isn't my line.  But what could I do?  My
+sister-in-law had it, and I was with her.  And when she died...
+Besides, I dare say I can keep a boarding-house as well as plenty of
+other people.  But--well, it's no use going into that!"
+
+Edwin abruptly sat down near her.
+
+"Come, now," he said less harshly, more persuasively.  "How much do you
+owe?"
+
+"Oh!" she cried, pouting, and shifting her feet.  "It's out of the
+question!  They've distrained for seventy-five pounds."
+
+"I don't care if they've distrained for seven hundred and seventy-five
+pounds!"  She seemed just like a girl to him again now, in spite of her
+face and her figure.  "If that was cleared off, you could carry on,
+couldn't you?  This is just the season.  Could you get a servant in, in
+time for these three sisters?"
+
+"I could get a charwoman, anyhow," she said unwillingly.
+
+"Well, do you owe anything else?"
+
+"There'll be the expenses."
+
+"Of the distraint?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's nothing.  I shall lend you a hundred pounds.  It just happens
+that I've got fifty pounds on me in notes.  That and a cheque'll settle
+the bailiff person, and the rest of the hundred I'll send you by post.
+It'll be a bit of working capital."
+
+She rose and threaded between chairs and tables to the sofa, several
+feet from Edwin.  With a vanquished and weary sigh, she threw herself on
+to the sofa.
+
+"I never knew there was anybody like you in the world," she breathed,
+flicking away some fluff from her breast.  She seemed to be regarding
+him, not as a benefactor, but as a natural curiosity.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+He looked at her like a conqueror.  He had taught her a thing or two.
+He had been a man.  He was proud of himself.  He was proud of all sorts
+of details in his conduct.  The fifty pounds in notes, for example, was
+not an accident.  Since the death of his father, he had formed the habit
+of never leaving his base of supplies without a provision far in excess
+of what he was likely to need.  He was extravagant in nothing, but the
+humiliations of his penurious youth and early manhood had implanted in
+him a morbid fear of being short of money.  He had fantastically
+surmised circumstances in which he might need a considerable sum at
+Brighton.  And lo! the sequel had transformed his morbidity into
+prudence.
+
+"This time yesterday," he reflected, in his triumph, "I hadn't even seen
+her, and didn't know where she was.  Last night I was a fool.  Half an
+hour ago she herself hadn't a notion that I was going to get the upper
+hand of her...  Why, it isn't two days yet since I left home! ...  And
+look where I am now!"
+
+With pity and with joy he watched her slowly wiping her eyes.
+Thirty-four, perhaps; yet a child--compared to him!  But if she did not
+give a natural ingenuous smile of relief, it was because she could not.
+If she acted foolishly it was because of her tremendous haughtiness.
+However, he had lowered that.  He had shown her her master.  He felt
+that she had been profoundly wronged by destiny, and that gentleness
+must be lavished upon her.
+
+In a casual tone he began to talk about the most rapid means of getting
+rid of the bailiff.  He could not tolerate the incubus of the bailiff a
+moment longer than was absolutely unavoidable.  At intervals a misgiving
+shot like a thin flying needle through the solid satisfaction of his
+sensations: "She is a strange and an incalculable woman--why am I doing
+this?"  Shot, and was gone, almost before perceived!
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER SIX.
+
+THE RENDEZVOUS.
+
+In the afternoon the weather cleared somewhat.  Edwin, vaguely blissful,
+but with nothing to occupy him save reflection, sat in the lounge
+drinking tea at a Moorish table.  An old Jew, who was likewise drinking
+tea at a Moorish table, had engaged him in conversation and was relating
+the history of a burglary in which he had lost from his flat in Bolton
+Street, Piccadilly, nineteen gold cigarette-cases and thirty-seven
+jewelled scarf-pins, tokens of esteem and regard offered to him by
+friends and colleagues at various crises of his life.  The lounge was
+crowded, but not with tea-drinkers.  Despite the horrid dismalness of
+the morning, hope had sent down from London trains full of people whose
+determination was to live and to see life in a grandiose manner.  And
+all about the lounge of the Royal Sussex were groups of elegant youngish
+men and flaxen, uneasily stylish women, inviting the assistance of
+flattered waiters to decide what liqueurs they should have next.  Edwin
+was humanly trying to publish in nonchalant gestures the scorn which he
+really felt for these nincompoops, but whose free expression was
+hindered by a layer of envy.
+
+The hall-porter appeared, and his eye ranged like a condor's over the
+field until it discovered Edwin, whom he approached with a mien of joy
+and handed to him a letter.
+
+Edwin took the letter with an air of custom, as if he was anxious to
+convince the company that his stay at the Royal Sussex was frequently
+punctuated by the arrival of special missives.
+
+"Who brought this?" he asked.
+
+"An oldish man, sir," said the porter, and bowed and departed.
+
+The handwriting was hers.  Probably the broker's man had offered to
+bring the letter.  In the short colloquy with him in the morning, Edwin
+had liked the slatternly, coarse fellow.  The bailiff could not,
+unauthorised, accept cheques, but his tone in suggesting an immediate
+visit to his employers had shown that he had bowels, that he sympathised
+with the difficulties of careless tenants in a harsh world of landlords.
+It was Hilda who, furnished with notes and cheque, had gone, in Edwin's
+cab, to placate the higher powers.  She had preferred to go herself, and
+to go alone.  Edwin had not insisted.  He had so mastered her that he
+could afford to yield to her in trifles.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+The letter said exactly this: "Everything is all right and settled.  I
+had no trouble at all.  But I should like to speak to you this
+afternoon.  Will you meet me on the West Pier at six?--H.C."  No form of
+greeting!  No thanks!  The bare words necessary to convey a wish!  On
+leaving her in the morning no arrangement had been made for a further
+interview.  She had said nothing, and he had been too proud to ask--the
+terrible pride of the benefactor!  It was only by chance that it had
+even occurred to him to say: "By the way, I am staying at the Royal
+Sussex."  She had shown no curiosity whatever about him, his doings, his
+movements.  She had not put to him a single question.  He had intended
+to call at Preston Street on the Monday morning.  And now a letter from
+her!  Her handwriting had scarcely changed.  He was to meet her on the
+pier.  At her own request he now had a rendezvous with her on the pier!
+Why not at her house?  Perhaps she was afraid of his power over her in
+the house.  (Curious, how she, and she almost alone, roused the
+masculine force in him!)  Perhaps she wanted to thank him in
+surroundings which would compel both of them to be calm.  That would be
+like her!  Essentially modest, restrained!  And did she not know how to
+be meek, she who was so headstrong and independent!
+
+He looked at the clock.  The hour was not yet five.  Nevertheless he
+felt obliged to go out, to bestir himself.  On the misty, crowded,
+darkening promenade he abandoned himself afresh to indulgence in the
+souvenance of the great critical scene of the morning.  Yes, he had done
+marvels; and fate was astoundingly kind to him also.  But there was one
+aspect of the affair that intrigued and puzzled him, and weakened his
+self-satisfaction.  She had been defeated, yet he was baffled by her.
+She was a mystery within folds of mysteries.  He was no nearer--he
+secretly felt--to the essential Her than he had been before the short
+struggle and his spectacular triumph.  He wanted to reconstruct in his
+fancy all her emotional existence; he wanted to get _at_ her,--to possess
+her intimate mind,--and lo! he could not even recall the expressions of
+her face from minute to minute during the battle.  She hid herself from
+him.  She eluded him...  Strange creature!  The polishing of the
+door-plate in the night!  That volume of Crashaw--on the floor!  Her
+cold, almost daemonic smile!  Her sobs!  Her sudden retreats!  What was
+at the back of it all?  He remembered her divine gesture over the fond
+Shushions.  He remembered the ecstatic quality of her surrender in the
+shop.  He remembered her first love-letter: "Every bit of me is
+absolutely yours."  And yet the ground seemed to be unsure beneath his
+feet, and he wondered whether he had ever in reality known her, ever
+grasped firmly the secret of her personality, even for an instant.
+
+He said to himself that he would be seeing her face to face in an hour,
+and that then he would, by the ardour of his gaze, get behind those
+enigmatic features to the arcana they concealed.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Before six o'clock it was quite dark.  He thought it a strange notion,
+to fix a rendezvous at such an hour, on a day in autumn, in the open
+air.  But perhaps she was very busy, doing servant's work in the
+preparation of her house for visitors.  When he reached the pier gates
+at five minutes to six, they were closed, and the obscure vista of the
+pier as deserted as some northern pier in mid-winter.  Naturally it was
+closed!  There was a notice prominently displayed that the pier would
+close that evening at dusk.  What did she mean?  The truth was, he
+decided, that she lived in the clouds, ordering her existence by means
+of sudden and capricious decisions in which facts were neglected,--and
+herein probably lay the explanation of her misfortunes.  He was very
+philosophical: rather amused than disturbed, because her house was
+scarcely a stone's-throw away: she could not escape him.
+
+He glanced up and down the lighted promenade, and across the broad muddy
+road towards the opening of Preston Street.  The crowds had disappeared;
+only scattered groups and couples, and now and then a solitary, passed
+quickly in the gloom.  The hotels were brilliant, and carriages with
+their flitting lamps were continually stopping in front of them; but the
+blackness of the shop-fronts produced the sensation of melancholy proper
+to the day even in Brighton, and the renewed sound of church bells
+intensified this arid melancholy.
+
+Suddenly he saw her, coming not across the road from Preston Street, but
+from the direction of Hove.  He saw her before she saw him.  Under the
+multiplicity of lamps her face was white and clear.  He had a chance to
+read in it.  But he could read nothing in it save her sadness, save that
+she had suffered.  She seemed querulous, preoccupied, worried, and
+afflicted.  She had the look of one who is never free from apprehension.
+Yet for him that look of hers had a quality unique, a quality that he
+had never found in another, but which he was completely unable to
+define.  He wanted acutely to explain to himself what it was, and he
+could not.
+
+"You are frightfully cruel," she had said.  And he admitted that he had
+been.  Yes, he had bullied her, her who, he was convinced, had always
+been the victim.  In spite of her vigorous individuality she was
+destined to be a victim.  He was sure that she had never deserved
+anything but sympathy and respect and affection.  He was sure that she
+was the very incarnation of honesty--possibly she was too honest for the
+actual world.  Did not the Orgreaves worship her?  And could he himself
+have been deceived in his estimate of her character?
+
+She recognised him only when she was close upon him.  A faint,
+transient, wistful smile lightened her brooding face, pale and stern.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+"Oh!  There you are!" she exclaimed, in her clear voice.  "Did I say
+six, or five, in my note?"
+
+"Six."
+
+"I was afraid I had done, when I came here at five and didn't find you.
+I'm so sorry."
+
+"No!" he said.  "I think _I_ ought to be sorry.  It's you who've had the
+waiting to do.  The pier's closed now."
+
+"It was just closing at five," she answered.  "I ought to have known.
+But I didn't.  The fact is, I scarcely ever go out.  I remembered once
+seeing the pier open at night, and I thought it was always open."  She
+shrugged her shoulders as if stopping a shiver.
+
+"I hope you haven't caught cold," he said.  "Suppose we walk along a
+bit."
+
+They walked westwards in silence.  He felt as though he were by the side
+of a stranger, so far was he from having pierced the secret of that
+face.
+
+As they approached one of the new glazed shelters, she said--
+
+"Can't we sit down a moment.  I--I can't talk standing up.  I must sit
+down."
+
+They sat down, in an enclosed seat designed to hold four.  And Edwin
+could feel the wind on his calves, which stretched beyond the screened
+side of the structure.  Odd people passed dimly to and fro in front of
+them, glanced at them with nonchalant curiosity, and glanced away.  On
+the previous evening he had observed couples in those shelters, and had
+wondered what could be the circumstances or the preferences which led
+them to accept such a situation.  Certainly he could not have dreamed
+that within twenty-four hours he would be sitting in one of them with
+her, by her appointment, at her request.  He thrilled with excitement--
+with delicious anxieties.
+
+"Janet told you I was a widow," Hilda began, gazing at the ferule of her
+umbrella, which gleamed on the ground.
+
+"Yes."  Again she was surprising him.
+
+"Well, we arranged she should tell every one that.  But I think you
+ought to know that I'm not."
+
+"No?" he murmured weakly.  And in one small unimportant region of his
+mind he reflected with astonishment upon the hesitating but convincing
+air with which Janet had lied to him.  Janet!
+
+"After what you've done"--she paused, and went on with unblurred
+clearness--"after what you've insisted on doing, I don't want there to
+be any misunderstanding.  I'm not a widow.  My husband's in prison.
+He'll be in prison for another six or seven years.  That's all I wanted
+to tell you."
+
+"I'm very sorry," he breathed.  "I'd no idea you'd had this trouble."
+What could he say?  What could anybody have said?
+
+"I ought to have told you at once," she said.  "I ought to have told you
+last night."  Another pause.  "Then perhaps you wouldn't have come again
+this morning."
+
+"Yes, I should!" he asserted eagerly.  "If you're in a hole, you're in a
+hole.  What difference could it possibly make whether you were a widow
+or not?"
+
+"Oh!" she said.  "The wife of a convict... you know!"  He felt that she
+was evading the point.
+
+She went on: "It's a good thing my three old ladies don't know,
+anyhow...!  I'd no chance to tell you this morning.  You were too much
+for me."
+
+"I don't care whose wife you are!" he muttered, as though to himself, as
+though resenting something said by some one who had gone away and left
+him.  "If you're in a hole, you're in a hole."
+
+She turned and looked at him.  His eyes fell before hers.
+
+"Well," she said.  "I've told you.  I must go.  I haven't a moment.
+Good night."  She held out her hand.  "You don't want me to thank you a
+lot, do you?"
+
+"That I don't!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Good night."
+
+"But--"
+
+"I really must go."
+
+He rose and gave his hand.  The next instant she was gone.
+
+There was a deafening roar in his head.  It was the complete destruction
+by earthquake of a city of dreams.  A calamity which left nothing--even
+to be desired!  A tremendous silence reigned after the event.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+On the following evening, when from the windows of the
+London-to-Manchester express he saw in the gloom the high-leaping flames
+of the blast-furnaces that seem to guard eternally the southern frontier
+of the Five Towns, he felt that he had returned into daily reality out
+of an impossible world.  Waiting for the loop-line train in the familiar
+tedium of Knype platform, staring at the bookstall, every item on which
+he knew by heart and despised, surrounded once more by local
+physiognomies, gestures, and accent, he thought to himself: "_This_ is my
+lot.  And if I get messing about, it only shows what a damned fool I
+am!"  He called himself a damned fool because Hilda had proved to have a
+husband; because of that he condemned the whole expedition to Brighton
+as a piece of idiocy.  His dejection was profound and bitter.  At first,
+after Hilda had quitted him on the Sunday night, he had tried to be
+cheerful, had persuaded himself indeed that he was cheerful; but
+gradually his spirit had sunk, beaten and miserable.  He had not called
+at Preston Street again.  Pride forbade, and the terror of being
+misunderstood.
+
+And when he sat at his own table, in his own dining-room, and watched
+the calm incurious Maggie dispensing to him his elaborate tea-supper
+with slightly more fuss and more devotion than usual, his thoughts, had
+they been somewhat less vague, might have been summed up thus: "The
+right sort of women don't get landed as the wives of convicts.  Can you
+imagine such a thing happening to Maggie, for instance?  Or Janet?"
+(And yet Janet was in the secret!  This disturbed the flow of his
+reflections.)  Hilda was too mysterious.  Now she had half disclosed yet
+another mystery.  But what?  "Why was her husband a convict?  Under what
+circumstances?  For what crime?  Where?  Since when?"  He knew the
+answer to none of these questions.  More deeply than ever was that woman
+embedded in enigmas.
+
+"What's this parcel on the sideboard?"  Maggie inquired.
+
+"Oh!  I want you to send it in to Janet.  It's from her particular
+friend, Mrs Cannon--something for the kid, I believe.  I ran across her
+in Brighton, and she asked me if I'd bring the parcel along."
+
+The innocence of his manner was perfectly acted.  He wondered that he
+could do it so well.  But really there was no danger.  Nobody in
+Bursley, or in the world, had the least suspicion of his past relations
+with Hilda.  The only conceivable danger would have been in hiding the
+fact that he had met her in Brighton.
+
+"Of course," said Maggie, mildly interested.  "I was forgetting she
+lived at Brighton.  Well?" and she put a few casual questions, to which
+Edwin casually replied.
+
+"You look tired," she said later.
+
+He astonished her by admitting that he was.  According to all precedent
+her statement ought to have drawn forth a quick contradiction.
+
+The sad image of Hilda would not be dismissed.  He had to carry it about
+with him everywhere, and it was heavy enough to fatigue a stronger than
+Edwin Clayhanger.  The pathos of her situation overwhelmed him, argue as
+he might about the immunity of `the right sort of women' from a certain
+sort of disaster.  On the Tuesday he sent her a post-office order for
+twenty pounds.  It rather more than made up the agreed sum of a hundred
+pounds.  She returned it, saying she did not need it.  "Little fool!" he
+said.  He was not surprised.  He was, however, very much surprised, a
+few weeks later, to receive from Hilda her own cheque for eighty pounds
+odd!  More mystery!  An absolutely incredible woman!  Whence had she
+obtained that eighty pounds?  Needless to say, she offered no
+explanation.  He abandoned all conjecture.  But he could not abandon the
+image.  And first Auntie Hamps said, and then Clara, and then even
+Maggie admitted, that Edwin was sticking too close to business and
+needed a change, needed rousing.  Auntie Hamps urged openly that a wife
+ought to be found for him.  But in a few days the great talkers of the
+family, Auntie Hamps and Clara, had grown accustomed to Edwin's state,
+and some new topic supervened.
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER SEVEN.
+
+THE WALL.
+
+One morning--towards the end of November--Edwin, attended by Maggie, was
+rearranging books in the drawing-room after breakfast, when there came a
+startling loud tap at the large central pane of the window.  Both of
+them jumped.
+
+"Who's throwing?"  Edwin exclaimed.
+
+"I expect it's that boy," said Maggie, almost angrily.
+
+"Not Georgie?"
+
+"Yes.  I wish you'd go and stop him.  You've no idea what a tiresome
+little thing he is.  And so rough too!"
+
+This attitude of Maggie towards the mysterious nephew was a surprise for
+Edwin.  She had never grumbled about him before.  In fact they had seen
+little of him.  For a fortnight he had not been abroad, and the rumour
+ran that he was unwell, that he was `not so strong as he ought to be.'
+And now Maggie suddenly charged him with a whole series of misdoings!
+But it was Maggie's way to keep unpleasant things from Edwin for a time,
+in order to save her important brother from being worried, and then in a
+moment of tension to fling them full in his face, like a wet clout.
+
+"What's he been up to?"  Edwin inquired for details.
+
+"Oh!  I don't know," answered Maggie vaguely.  At the same instant came
+another startling blow on the window.  "There!"  Maggie cried, in
+triumph, as if saying: "That's what he's been up to!"  After all, the
+windows were Maggie's own windows.
+
+Edwin left on the sofa a whole pile of books that he was sorting, and
+went out into the garden.  On the top of the wall separating him from
+the Orgreaves a row of damaged earthenware objects--jugs and jars
+chiefly--at once caught his eye.  He witnessed the smashing of one of
+them, and then he ran to the wall, and taking a spring, rested on it
+with his arms, his toes pushed into crevices.  Young George, with hand
+outstretched to throw, in the garden of the Orgreaves, seemed rather
+diverted by this apparition.
+
+"Hello!" said Edwin.  "What are you up to?"
+
+"I'm practising breaking crocks," said the child.  That he had acquired
+the local word gave Edwin pleasure.
+
+"Yes, but do you know you're practising breaking my windows too?  When
+you aim too high you simply can't miss one of my windows."
+
+George's face was troubled, as he examined the facts, which had hitherto
+escaped his attention, that there was a whole world of consequences on
+the other side of the wall, and that a missile which did not prove its
+existence against either the wall or a crock had not necessarily ceased
+to exist.  Edwin watched the face with a new joy, as though looking at
+some wonder of nature under a microscope.  It seemed to him that he now
+saw vividly why children were interesting.
+
+"I can't see any windows from here," said George, in defence.
+
+"If you climb up here you'll see them all right."
+
+"Yes, but I can't climb up.  I've tried to, a lot of times.  Even when I
+stood on my toes on this stump I could only just reach to put the crocks
+on the top."
+
+"What did you want to get on the wall for?"
+
+"I wanted to see that swing of yours."
+
+"Well," said Edwin, laughing, "if you could remember the swing why
+couldn't you remember the windows?"
+
+George shook his head at Edwin's stupidity, and looked at the ground.
+"A swing isn't windows," he said.  Then he glanced up with a diffident
+smile: "I've often been wanting to come and see you."
+
+Edwin was tremendously flattered.  If he had made a conquest, the child
+by this frank admission had made a greater.
+
+"Then why didn't you come?"
+
+"I couldn't, by myself.  Besides, my back hasn't been well.  Did they
+tell you?"
+
+George was so naturally serious that Edwin decided to be serious too.
+
+"I did hear something about it," he replied, with the grave confidential
+tone that he would have used to a man of his own age.  This treatment
+was evidently appreciated by George, and always afterwards Edwin
+conversed with him as with an equal, forbearing from facetiousness.
+
+Damp though it was, Edwin twisted himself round and sat on the wall next
+to the crocks, and bent over the boy beneath, who gazed with upturned
+face.
+
+"Why didn't you ask Auntie Janet to bring you?"
+
+"I don't generally ask for things that I really want," said the boy,
+with a peculiar glance.
+
+"I see," said Edwin, with an air of comprehension.  He did not, however,
+comprehend.  He only felt that the boy was wonderful.  Imagine the boy
+saying that!  He bent lower.  "Come on up," he said.  "I'll give you a
+hand.  Stick your feet into that nick there."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+In an instant George was standing on the wall, light as fluff.  Edwin
+held him by the legs, and his hand was on Edwin's cap.  The feel of the
+boy was delightful; he was so lithe and so yielding, and yet firm; and
+his glance was so trustful and admiring.  "Rough!" thought Edwin,
+remembering Maggie's adjective.  "He isn't a bit rough!  Unruly?  Well,
+I dare say he can be unruly if he cares to be.  It all depends how you
+handle him."  Thus Edwin reflected in the pride of conquest, holding
+close to the boy, and savouring intimately his charm.  Even the boy's
+slightness attracted him.  Difficult to believe that he was nine years
+old!  His body was indeed backward.  So too, it appeared, was his
+education.  And yet was there not the wisdom of centuries in, "I don't
+generally ask for things that I really want?"
+
+Suddenly the boy wriggled, and gave a sound of joy that was almost a
+yell.  "Look!" he cried.
+
+The covered top of the steam-car could just be seen gliding along above
+the high wall that separated Edwin's garden from the street.
+
+"Yes," Edwin agreed.  "Funny, isn't it?"  But he considered that such
+glee at such a trifle was really more characteristic of six or seven
+than of nine years.  George's face was transformed by ecstasy.
+
+"It's when things move like that--horizontal!"  George explained,
+pronouncing the word carefully.
+
+Edwin felt that there was no end to the surpassing strangeness of this
+boy.  One moment he was aged six, and the next he was talking about
+horizontality.
+
+"Why?  What do you mean?"
+
+"I don't know!"  George sighed.  "But somehow--" Then, with fresh
+vivacity: "I tell you--when Auntie Janet comes to wake me up in the
+morning the cat comes in too, with its tail up in the air--you know!"
+Edwin nodded.  "Well, when I'm lying in bed I can't see the cat, but I
+can see the top of its tail sailing along the edge of the bed.  But if I
+sit up I can see all the cat, and that spoils it, so I don't sit up at
+first."
+
+The child was eager for Edwin to understand his pleasure in horizontal
+motion that had no apparent cause, like the tip of a cat's tail on the
+horizon of a bed, or the roof of a tram-car on the horizon of the wall.
+And Edwin was eager to understand, and almost persuaded himself that he
+did understand; but he could not be sure.  A marvellous child--
+disconcerting!  He had a feeling of inferiority to the child, because
+the child had seen beauty where he had not dreamed of seeing it.
+
+"Want a swing," he suggested, "before I have to go off to business?"
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+When it occurred to him that he had had as much violent physical
+exercise as was good for his years, and that he had left his books in
+disarray, and that his business demanded him, Edwin apologetically
+announced that he must depart, and the child admitted that Aunt Janet
+was probably waiting to give him his lessons.
+
+"Are you going back the way you came?  You'd better.  It's always best,"
+said Edwin.
+
+"Is it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He lifted and pushed the writhing form on to the wall, dislodging a jar,
+which crashed dully on the ground.
+
+"Auntie Janet told me I could have them to do what I liked with.  So I
+break them," said George, "when they don't break themselves!"
+
+"I bet she never told you to put them on this wall," said Edwin.
+
+"No, she didn't.  But it was the best place for aiming.  And she told me
+it didn't matter how many crocks I broke, because they make crocks here.
+Do they, really?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because there's clay here," said Edwin glibly.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Oh!  Round about."
+
+"White, like that?" exclaimed George eagerly, handling a teapot without
+a spout.  He looked at Edwin: "Will you take me to see it?  I should
+like to see white ground."
+
+"Well," said Edwin, more cautiously, "the clay they get about here isn't
+exactly white."
+
+"Then do they make it white?"
+
+"As a matter of fact the white clay comes from a long way off--Cornwall,
+for instance."
+
+"Then why do they make the things here?"  George persisted; with the
+annoying obstinacy of his years.  He had turned the teapot upside down.
+"This was made here.  It's got `Bursley' on it.  Auntie Janet showed
+me."
+
+Edwin was caught.  He saw himself punished for that intellectual sloth
+which leads adults to fob children off with any kind of a slipshod,
+dishonestly simplified explanation of phenomena whose adequate
+explanation presents difficulty.  He remembered how nearly twenty years
+earlier he had puzzled over the same question and for a long time had
+not found the answer.
+
+"I'll tell you how it is," he said, determined to be conscientious.
+"It's like this--" He had to pause.  Queer, how hard it was to state the
+thing coherently!  "It's like this.  In the old days they used to make
+crocks anyhow, very rough, out of any old clay.  And crocks were first
+made here because the people found common yellow clay, and the coal to
+burn it with, lying close together in the ground.  You see how handy it
+was for them."
+
+"Then the old crocks were yellow?"
+
+"More or less.  Then people got more particular, you see, and when white
+clay was found somewhere else they had it brought here, because
+everybody was used to making crocks here, and they had all the works and
+the tools they wanted, and the coal too.  Very important, the coal!
+Much easier to bring the clay to the people and the works, than cart off
+all the people--and their families, don't forget--and so on, to the
+clay, and build fresh works into the bargain...  That's why.  Now are
+you sure you see?"
+
+George ignored the question.  "I suppose they used up all the yellow
+clay there was here, long ago?"
+
+"Not much!" said Edwin.  "And they never will!  You don't know what a
+sagger is, I reckon?"
+
+"What is a sagger?"
+
+"Well, I can't stop to tell you all that now.  But I will some time.
+They make saggers out of the yellow clay."
+
+"Will you show me the yellow clay?"
+
+"Yes, and some saggers too."
+
+"When?"
+
+"I don't know.  As soon as I can."
+
+"Will you to-morrow?"
+
+To-morrow happened to be Thursday.  It was not Edwin's free afternoon,
+but it was an afternoon to which a sort of licence attached.  He yielded
+to the ruthless egotism of the child.
+
+"All right!" he said.
+
+"You won't forget?"
+
+"You can rely on me.  Ask your auntie if you may go, and if she says you
+may, be ready for me to pull you up over the wall here, about three
+o'clock."
+
+"Auntie will have to let me go," said George, in a savage tone, as Edwin
+helped him to slip down into the garden of the Orgreaves.  Edwin went
+off to business with a singular consciousness of virtue, and with pride
+in his successful manner of taming wayward children, and with a very
+strong new interest in the immediate future.
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER EIGHT.
+
+THE FRIENDSHIP.
+
+The next afternoon George's invincible energy took both himself and the
+great bearded man, Edwin, to a certain spot on the hollow confines of
+the town towards Turnhill, where there were several pits of marl and
+clay.  They stared in silence at a vast ochre's-coloured glistening
+cavity in the ground, on the high edges of which grew tufts of grass
+amid shards and broken bottles.  In the bottom of the pit were laid
+planks, and along the planks men with pieces of string tied tight round
+their legs beneath the knees drew large barrows full or empty, sometimes
+insecurely over pools of yellow water into which the plank sagged under
+their weight, and sometimes over little hillocks and through little
+defiles formed in the basin of the mine.  They seemed to have no aim.
+The whole cavity had a sticky look which at first amused George, but on
+the whole he was not interested, and Edwin gathered that the clay-pit in
+some mysterious way fell short of expectations.  A mineral line of
+railway which, near by, ambled at random like a pioneer over rough
+country, was much more successful than the pit in winning his approval.
+
+"Can we go and see the saggers now?" he suggested.
+
+Edwin might have taken him to the manufactory in which Albert Benbow was
+a partner, but he preferred not to display to the father of Clara's
+offspring his avuncular patronage of George Cannon, and he chose the
+works of a customer down at Shawport for whom he was printing a somewhat
+ambitious catalogue.  He would call at the works and talk about the
+catalogue, and then incidentally mention that his young friend desired
+to see saggers.
+
+"I suppose God put that clay there so that people could practise on it
+first, before they tried the white clay," George observed, as the pair
+descended Oldcastle Street.
+
+Decidedly he had moments of talking like an infant, like a baby of
+three.  Edwin recalled that Hilda used to torture herself about
+questions of belief when she was not three but twenty-three.  The scene
+in the garden porch seemed to have happened after all not very long ago.
+Yet a new generation, unconceived on that exciting and unforgettable
+night, had since been born and had passed through infancy and was now
+trotting and arguing and dogmatising by his side.  It was strange, but
+it was certainly a fact, that George regarded him as a being
+immeasurably old.  He still felt a boy.
+
+How ought he to talk to the child concerning God?  He was about to make
+a conventional response, when he stopped himself.  "Confound it!  Why
+should I?" he thought.
+
+"If I were you I shouldn't worry about God," he said, aloud, in a casual
+and perhaps slightly ironic tone.
+
+"Oh, I don't!"  George answered positively.  "But now and then He comes
+into your head, doesn't He?  I was only just thinking."  The boy ceased,
+being attracted by the marvellous spectacle of a man perilously balanced
+on a crate-float driving a long-tailed pony full tilt down the steep
+slope of Oldcastle Street: it was equal to a circus.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+The visit to the works was a particularly brilliant success.  By good
+fortune an oven was just being `drawn,' and the child had sight of the
+finest, the most barbaric picture that the manufacture of earthenware,
+from end to end picturesque, offers to the imaginative observer.  Within
+the dark and sinister bowels of the kiln, illuminated by pale rays that
+came down through the upper orifice from the smoke-soiled sky,
+half-naked figures moved like ghosts, strenuous and damned, among the
+saggers of ware.  At rapid intervals they emerged, their hairy torsos
+glistening with sweat, carrying the fired ware, which was still too hot
+for any but inured fingers to touch: an endless procession of plates and
+saucers and cups and mugs and jugs and basins, thousands and thousands!
+George stared in an enchanted silence of awe.  And presently one of the
+Hercules's picked him up, and held him for a moment within the portal of
+the torrid kiln, and he gazed at the high curved walls, like the walls
+of a gigantic tomb, and at the yellow saggers that held the ware.  Now
+he knew what a sagger was.
+
+"I'm glad you took me," he said afterwards, clearly impressed by the
+authority of Edwin, who could stroll out and see such terrific goings-on
+whenever he chose.  During all the walk home he did not speak.
+
+On the Saturday, nominally in charge of his Auntie Janet, he called upon
+his chum with some water-colour drawings that he had done; they showed
+naked devils carrying cups and plates amid bright salmon-tinted flames:
+designs horrible, and horribly crude, interesting only because a child
+had done them.  But somehow Edwin was obscurely impressed by them, and
+also he was touched by the coincidence that George painted in
+water-colours, and he, too, had once painted in water-colours.  He was
+moreover expected to judge the drawings as an expert.  On Monday he
+brought up the most complicated box of water-colours that his shop
+contained, and presented it to George, who, astounded, dazed, bore it
+away to his bedroom without a single word.  Their friendship was sealed
+and published; it became a fact recognised by the two families.
+
+THREE.
+
+About a week later, after a visit of a couple of days to Manchester,
+Edwin went out into the garden as usual when breakfast was finished, and
+discovered George standing on the wall.  The boy had learned how to
+climb the wall from his own side of it without help.
+
+"I say!"  George cried, in a loud, rough, angry voice, as soon as he saw
+Edwin at the garden door.  "I've got to go off in a minute, you know."
+
+"Go off?  Where?"
+
+"Home.  Didn't they tell you in your house?  Auntie Janet and I came to
+your house yesterday, after I'd waited on the wall for you I don't know
+how long, and you never came.  We came to tell you, but you weren't in.
+So we asked Miss Clayhanger to tell you.  Didn't Miss Clayhanger tell
+you?"
+
+"No," said Edwin.  "She must have forgot."  It occurred to him that even
+the simple and placid Maggie had her personal prejudices, and that one
+of them might be against this child.  For some reason she did not like
+the child.  She positively could not have forgotten the child's visit
+with Janet.  She had merely not troubled to tell him: a touch of that
+malice which, though it be as rare as radium, nevertheless exists even
+in the most benignant natures.  Edwin and George exchanged a silent,
+puzzled glance.
+
+"Well, that's a nice thing!" said the boy.  It was.
+
+"When are you going home?"
+
+"I'm going _now_!  Mr Orgreave has to go to London to-day, and mamma
+wrote to Auntie Janet yesterday to say that I must go with him, if he'd
+let me, and she would meet me at London.  She wants me back.  So Auntie
+Janet is taking me to Knype to meet Mr Orgreave there--he's gone to his
+office first.  And the gardener has taken my luggage in the barrow up to
+Bleakridge Station.  Auntie's putting her hat on.  Can't you see I've
+got my other clothes on?"
+
+"Yes," said Edwin, "I noticed that."
+
+"And my other hat?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I've promised auntie I'll come and put my overcoat on as soon as she
+calls me.  I say--you wouldn't believe how jammed my trunk is with that
+paint box and everything!  Auntie Janet had to sit on it like anything!
+I say--shall you be coming to Brighton soon?"
+
+Edwin shook his head.
+
+"I never go to Brighton."
+
+"But when I asked you once if you'd been, you said you had."
+
+"So I have, but that was an accident."
+
+"Was it long since?"
+
+"Well," said Edwin, "you ought to know.  It was when I brought that
+parcel for you."
+
+"Oh!  Of course!"
+
+Edwin was saying to himself: "She's sent for him on purpose.  She's
+heard that we're great friends, and she's sent for him!  She means to
+stop it!  That's what it is!"  He had no rational basis for this
+assumption.  It was instinctive.  And yet why should she desire to
+interfere with the course of the friendship?  How could it react
+unpleasantly on her?  There obviously did not exist between mother and
+son one of those passionate attachments which misfortune and sorrow
+sometimes engender.  She had been able to let him go.  And as for
+George, he seldom mentioned his mother.  He seldom mentioned anybody who
+was not actually present, or necessary to the fulfilment of the idea
+that happened to be reigning in his heart.  He lived a life of
+absorption, hypnotised by the idea of the moment.  These ideas succeeded
+each other like a dynasty of kings, like a series of dynasties, marked
+by frequent dynastic quarrels, by depositions and sudden deaths; but
+George's loyalty was the same to all of them; it was absolute.
+
+"Well, anyhow," said he, "I shall come back here.  Mother will have to
+let me."
+
+And he jumped down from the wall into Edwin's garden, carelessly, his
+hands in his pockets, with a familiar ease of gesture that implied
+practice.  He had in fact often done it before.  But just this time--
+perhaps he was troubled by the unaccustomed clothes--having lighted on
+his feet, he failed to maintain his balance and staggered back against
+the wall.
+
+"Now, clumsy!"  Edwin commented.
+
+The boy turned pale, and bit his lip, and then Edwin could see the tears
+in his eyes.  One of his peculiarities was that he had no shame whatever
+about crying.  He could not, or he would not, suffer stoically.  Now he
+put his hands to his back, and writhed.
+
+"Hurt yourself?"  Edwin asked.
+
+George nodded.  He was very white, and startled.  At first he could not
+command himself sufficiently to be able to articulate.  Then he
+spluttered, "My back!"  He subsided gradually into a sitting posture.
+
+Edwin ran to him, and picked him up.  But he screamed until he was set
+down.  At the open drawing-room window, Maggie was arranging curtains.
+Edwin reluctantly left George for an instant and hurried to the window,
+"I say, Maggie, bring a chair or something out, will you?  This dashed
+kid's fallen and hurt himself."
+
+"I'm not surprised," said Maggie calmly.  "What surprises me is that you
+should ever have given him permission to scramble over the wall and
+trample all about the flower-beds the way he does!"
+
+However, she moved at once to obey.
+
+He returned to George.  Then Janet's voice was heard from the other
+garden, calling him: "George!  Georgie!  Nearly time to go!"
+
+Edwin put his head over the wall.
+
+"He's fallen and hurt his back," he answered to Janet, without any
+prelude.
+
+"His back!" she repeated in a frightened tone.
+
+Everybody was afraid of that mysterious back.  And George himself was
+most afraid of it.
+
+"I'll get over the wall," said Janet.
+
+Edwin quitted the wall.  Maggie was coming out of the house with a large
+cane easy-chair and a large cushion.  But George was now standing up,
+though still crying.  His beautiful best sailor hat lay on the winter
+ground.
+
+"Now," said Maggie to him, "you mustn't be a baby!"
+
+He glared at her resentfully.  She would have dropped down dead on the
+spot if his wet and angry glance could have killed her.  She was a
+powerful woman.  She seized him carefully and set him in the chair, and
+supported the famous spine with the cushion.
+
+"I don't think he's much hurt," she decided.  "He couldn't make that
+noise if he was, and see how his colour's coming back!"
+
+In another case Edwin would have agreed with her, for the tendency of
+both was to minimise an ill and to exaggerate the philosophical attitude
+in the first moments of any occurrence that looked serious.  But now he
+honestly thought that her judgement was being influenced by her
+prejudice, and he felt savage against her.  The worst was that it was
+all his fault.  Maggie was odiously right.  He ought never to have
+encouraged the child to be acrobatic on the wall.  It was he who had
+even put the idea of the wall as a means of access into the child's
+head.
+
+"Does it hurt?" he inquired, bending down, his hands on his knees.
+
+"Yes," said George, ceasing to cry.
+
+"Much?" asked Maggie, dusting the sailor hat and sticking it on his
+head.
+
+"No, not much," George unwillingly admitted.  Maggie could not at any
+rate say that he did not speak the truth.
+
+Janet, having obtained steps, stood on the wall in her elaborate
+street-array.
+
+"Who's going to help me down?" she demanded anxiously.  She was not so
+young and sprightly as once she had been.  Edwin obeyed the call.
+
+Then the three of them stood round the victim's chair, and the victim,
+like a god, permitted himself to be contemplated.  And Janet had to hear
+Edwin's account of the accident, and also Maggie's account of it, as
+seen from the window.
+
+"I don't know what to do!" said Janet.
+
+"It is annoying, isn't it?" said Maggie.  "And just as you were going to
+the station too!"
+
+"I--I think I'm all right," George announced.
+
+Janet passed a hand down his back, as though expecting to be able to
+judge the condition of his spine through the thickness of all his
+clothes.
+
+"Are you?" she questioned doubtfully.
+
+"It's nothing," said Maggie, with firmness.
+
+"He'd be all right in the train," said Janet.  "It's the walking to the
+station that I'm afraid of...  You never know."
+
+"I can carry him," said Edwin quickly.
+
+"Of course you can't!"  Maggie contradicted.  "And even if you could
+you'd jog him far worse than if he walked himself."
+
+"There's no time to get a cab, now," said Janet, looking at her watch.
+"If we aren't at Knype, father will wonder what on earth's happened, and
+I don't know what his mother would say!"
+
+"Where's that old pram?"  Edwin demanded suddenly of Maggie.
+
+"What?  Clara's?  It's in the outhouse."
+
+"I can run him up to the station in two jiffs in that."
+
+"Oh yes!  Do!" said George.  "You must.  And then lift me into the
+carriage!"
+
+The notion was accepted.
+
+"I hope it's the best thing to do," said Janet, apprehensive and
+doubtful, as she hurried off to the other house in order to get the
+boy's overcoat and meet Edwin and the perambulator at the gates.
+
+"I'm certain it is," said Maggie calmly.  "There's nothing really the
+matter with that child."
+
+"Well, it's very good of Edwin, I'm sure," said Janet.
+
+Edwin had already rushed for the perambulator, an ancient vehicle which
+was sometimes used in the garden for infant Benbows.
+
+In a few moments Trafalgar Road had the spectacle of the bearded and
+eminent master-printer, Edwin Clayhanger, steaming up its muddy pavement
+behind a perambulator with a grown boy therein.  And dozens of persons
+who had not till then distinguished the boy from other boys, inquired
+about his identity, and gossip was aroused.  Maggie was displeased.
+
+In obedience to the command Edwin lifted George into the train; and the
+feel of his little slippery body, and the feel of Edwin's mighty arms,
+seemed to make them more intimate than ever.  Except for dirty
+tear-marks on his cheeks, George's appearance was absolutely normal.
+
+Edwin expected to receive a letter from him, but none came, and this
+negligence wounded Edwin.
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER NINE.
+
+THE ARRIVALS.
+
+On a Saturday in the early days of the following year, 1892, Edwin by
+special request had gone in to take afternoon tea with the Orgreaves.
+Osmond Orgreave was just convalescent after an attack of influenza, and
+in the opinion of Janet wanted cheering up.  The task of enlivening him
+had been laid upon Edwin.  The guest, and Janet and her father and
+mother sat together in a group round the fire in the drawing-room.
+
+The drawing-room alone had grown younger with years.  Money had been
+spent on it rather freely.  During the previous decade Osmond's family,
+scattering, had become very much less costly to him, but his habits of
+industry had not changed, nor his faculty for collecting money.  Hence
+the needs of the drawing-room, which had been pressing for quite twenty
+years, had at last been satisfied; indeed Osmond was saving, through
+mere lack of that energetic interest in things which is necessary to
+spending.  Possibly even the drawing-room would have remained
+untouched--both Janet and her elder sister Marian sentimentally
+preferred it as it was--had not Mrs Orgreave been `positively ashamed'
+of it when her married children, including Marian, came to see her.
+They were all married now, except Janet and Charlie and Johnnie; and
+Alicia at any rate had a finer drawing-room than her mother.  So far as
+the parents were concerned Charlie might as well have been married, for
+he had acquired a partnership in a practice at Ealing and seldom visited
+home.  Johnnie, too, might as well have been married.  Since Jimmie's
+wedding he had used the house strictly as a hotel, for sleeping and
+eating, and not always for sleeping.  He could not be retained at home.
+His interests were mysterious, and lay outside it.  Janet alone was
+faithful to the changed drawing-room, with its new carpets and
+wall-papers and upholstery.
+
+"I've got more grandchildren than children now," said Mrs Orgreave to
+Edwin, "and I never thought to have!"
+
+"Have you really?"  Edwin responded.  "Let me see--"
+
+"I've got nine."
+
+"Ten, mother," Janet corrected.  "She's forgetting her own grandchildren
+now!"
+
+"Bless me!" exclaimed Mrs Orgreave, taking off her eyeglasses and
+wiping them, "I'd missed Tom's youngest."
+
+"You'd better not tell Emily that," said Janet.  (Emily was the mother
+of Tom's children.) "Here, give me those eyeglasses, dear.  You'll never
+get them right with a linen handkerchief.  Where's your bit of chamois?"
+
+Mrs Orgreave absently and in somewhat stiff silence handed over the
+pince-nez!  She was now quite an old woman, small, shapeless, and
+delightfully easy-going, whose sense of humour had not developed with
+age.  She could never see a joke which turned upon her relations with
+her grandchildren, and in fact the jocular members of the family had
+almost ceased to employ this subject of humour.  She was undoubtedly
+rather foolish about her grandchildren--`fond,' as they say down there.
+The parents of the grandchildren did not object to this foolishness--
+that is, they only pretended to object.  The task of preventing a
+pardonable weakness from degenerating into a tedious and mischievous
+mania fell solely upon Janet.  Janet was ready to admit that the health
+of the grandchildren was a matter which could fairly be left to their
+fathers and mothers, and she stood passive when Mrs Orgreave's
+grandmotherly indulgences seemed inimical to their health; but Mrs
+Orgreave was apt to endanger her own health in her devotion to the
+profession of grandmother--for example by sitting up to unchristian
+hours with a needle.  Then there would be a struggle of wills, in which
+of course Mrs Orgreave, being the weaker, was defeated; though her
+belief survived that she and she alone, by watchfulness, advice,
+sagacity, and energy, kept her children's children out of the grave.  On
+all other questions the harmony between Janet and her mother was
+complete, and Mrs Orgreave undoubtedly considered that no mother had
+ever had a daughter who combined so many virtues and charms.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+Mr Orgreave, forgetful of the company, was deciphering the "British
+Medical Journal" in the twilight of the afternoon.  His doctor had lent
+him this esoteric periodical because there was an article therein on
+influenza, and Mr Orgreave was very much interested in influenza.
+
+"You remember the influenza of '89, Edwin?" he asked suddenly, looking
+over the top of the paper.
+
+"Do I?" said Edwin.  "Yes, I fancy I do remember a sort of epidemic."
+
+"I should think so indeed!"  Janet murmured.
+
+"Well," continued Mr Orgreave, "I'm like you.  I thought it was an
+epidemic.  But it seems it wasn't.  It was a pandemic.  What's a
+pandemic, now?"
+
+"Give it up," said Edwin.
+
+"You might just look in the dictionary--Ogilvie there," and while Edwin
+ferreted in the bookcase, Mr Orgreave proceeded, reading: "`The
+pandemic of 1889 has been followed by epidemics, and by endemic
+prevalence in some areas!'  So you see how many _demics_ there are!  I
+suppose they'd call it an epidemic we've got in the town now."
+
+His voice had changed on the last sentence.  He had meant to be a little
+facetious about the Greek words; but it was the slowly prepared and
+rather exasperating facetiousness of an ageing man, and he had dropped
+it listlessly, as though he himself had perceived this.  Influenza had
+weakened and depressed him; he looked worn, and even outworn.  But not
+influenza alone was responsible for his appearance.  The incredible had
+happened: Osmond Orgreave was getting older.  His bald head was not the
+worst sign of his declension, nor the thickened veins in his hands, nor
+the deliberation of his gestures, nor even the unsprightliness of his
+wit.  The worst sign was that he was losing his terrific zest in life;
+his palate for the intense savour of it was dulled.  In this last attack
+of influenza he had not fought against the onset of the disease.  He had
+been wise; he had obeyed his doctor, and laid down his arms at once; and
+he showed no imprudent anxiety to resume them.  Yes, a changed Osmond!
+He was still one of the most industrious professional men in Bursley;
+but he worked from habit, not from passion.
+
+When Edwin had found `pandemic' in Ogilvie, Mr Orgreave wanted to see
+the dictionary for himself, and then he wanted the Greek dictionary,
+which could not be discovered, and then he began to quote further from
+the "British Medical Journal."
+
+"`It may be said that there are three well-marked types of the disease,
+attacking respectively the respiratory, the digestive, and the nervous
+system.'  Well, I should say I'd had 'em all three.  `As a rule the
+attack--'"
+
+Thus he went on.  Janet made a _moue_ at Edwin, who returned the signal.
+These youngsters were united in good-natured forbearing condescension
+towards Mr Orgreave.  The excellent old fellow was prone to be tedious;
+they would accept his tediousness, but they would not disguise from each
+other their perception of it.
+
+"I hear the Vicar of Saint Peter's is very ill indeed," said Mrs
+Orgreave, blandly interrupting her husband.
+
+"What?  Heve?  With influenza?"
+
+"Yes.  I wouldn't tell you before because I thought it might pull you
+down again."
+
+Mr Orgreave, in silence, stared at the immense fire.
+
+"What about this tea, Janet?" he demanded.
+
+Janet rang the bell.
+
+"Oh!  I'd have done that!" said Edwin, as soon as she had done it.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+While Janet was pouring out the tea, Edwin restored Ogilvie to his place
+in the bookcase, feeling that he had had enough of Ogilvie.
+
+"Not so many books here now as there used to be!" he said, vacuously
+amiable, as he shut the glass door which had once protected the
+treasures of Tom Orgreave.
+
+For a man who had been specially summoned to the task of cheering up, it
+was not a felicitous remark.  In the first place it recalled the days
+when the house, which was now a hushed retreat where settled and precise
+habits sheltered themselves from a changing world, had been an arena for
+the jolly, exciting combats of outspread individualities.  And in the
+second place it recalled a slight difficulty between Tom and his father.
+Osmond Orgreave was a most reasonable father, but no father is perfect
+in reasonableness, and Osmond had quite inexcusably resented that Tom on
+his marriage should take away all Tom's precious books.  Osmond's
+attitude had been that Tom might in decency have left, at any rate, some
+of the books.  It was not that Osmond had a taste for book-collecting:
+it was merely that he did not care to see his house depleted and
+bookcases empty.  But Tom had shown no compassion.  He had removed not
+merely every scrap of a book belonging to himself, but also two
+bookcases which he happened to have paid for.  The weight of public
+opinion was decidedly against Mr Orgreave, who had to yield and affect
+pleasantness.  Nevertheless books had become a topic which was avoided
+between father and son.
+
+"Ah!" muttered Mr Orgreave, satirical, in response to Edwin's
+clumsiness.
+
+"Suppose we have another gas lighted," Janet suggested.  The servant had
+already lighted several burners and drawn the blinds and curtains.
+
+Edwin comprehended that he had been a blundering fool, and that Janet's
+object was to create a diversion.  He lit the extra burner above her
+head.  She sat there rather straight and rather prim between her
+parents, sticking to them, smoothing creases for them, bearing their
+weight, living for them.  She was the kindliest, the most dignified, the
+most capable creature; but she was now an old maid.  You saw it even in
+the way she poured tea and dropped pieces of sugar into the cups.  Her
+youth was gone; her complexion was nearly gone.  And though in one
+aspect she seemed indispensable, in another the chief characteristic of
+her existence seemed to be a tragic futility.  Whenever she came
+seriously into Edwin's thoughts she saddened him.  Useless for him to
+attempt to be gay and frivolous in that house!
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+With the inevitable passionate egotism of his humanity he almost at once
+withdrew his aroused pity from her to himself.  Look at himself!  Was he
+not also to be sympathised with?  What was the object or the use of his
+being alive?  He worked, saved, improved his mind, voted right,
+practised philosophy, and was generally benevolent; but to what end?
+Was not his existence miserable and his career a respectable fiasco?  He
+too had lost zest.  He had diligently studied both Marcus Aurelius and
+Epictetus; he was enthusiastic, to others, about the merit of these two
+expert daily philosophers; but what had they done for him?  Assuredly
+they had not enabled him to keep the one treasure of this world-zest.
+The year was scarcely a week old, and he was still young enough to have
+begun the year with resolutions and fresh hopes and aspirations, but
+already the New Year sensation had left him, and the year might have
+been dying in his heart.
+
+And yet what could he have done that he had not done?  With what could
+he reproach himself?  Ought he to have continued to run after a married
+woman?  Ought he to have set himself titanically against the conventions
+amid which he lived, and devoted himself either to secret intrigue or to
+the outraging of the susceptibilities which environed him?  There was
+only one answer.  He could not have acted otherwise than he had acted.
+His was not the temperament of a rebel, nor was he the slave of his
+desires.  He could sympathise with rebels and with slaves, but he could
+not join them; he regarded himself as spiritually their superior.
+
+And then the disaster of Hilda's career!  He felt, more than ever, that
+he had failed in sympathy with her overwhelming misfortune.  In the
+secrecy of his heart a full imaginative sympathy had been lacking.  He
+had not realised, as he seemed to realise then, in front of the fire in
+the drawing-room of the Orgreaves, what it must be to be the wife of a
+convict.  Janet, sitting there as innocent as a doe, knew that Hilda was
+the wife of a convict.  But did her parents know?  And was she aware
+that he knew?  He wondered, drinking his tea.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+Then the servant--not the Martha who had been privileged to smile on
+duty if she felt so inclined--came with a tawny gold telegram on a
+silver plate, and hesitated a moment as to where she should bestow it.
+
+"Give it to me, Selina," said Janet.
+
+Selina impassively obeyed, imitating as well as she could the deportment
+of an automaton; and went away.
+
+"That's my telegram," said Mr Orgreave.  "How is it addressed?"
+
+"Orgreave, Bleakridge, Bursley."
+
+"Then it's mine."
+
+"Oh no, it isn't!"  Janet archly protested.  "If you have your business
+telegrams sent here you must take the consequences.  I always open all
+telegrams that come here, don't I, mother?"
+
+Mrs Orgreave made no reply, but waited with candid and fretful
+impatience, thinking of her five absent children, and her ten
+grandchildren, for the telegram to be opened.
+
+Janet opened it.
+
+Her lips parted to speak, and remained so in silent astonishment.  "Just
+read that!" she said to Edwin, passing the telegram to him; and she
+added to her father: "It was for me, after all."
+
+Edwin read, aloud: "Am sending George down to-day.  Please meet 6:30
+train at Knype.  Love.  Hilda."
+
+"Well, I never!" exclaimed Mrs Orgreave.  "You don't mean to tell me
+she's letting that boy travel alone!  What next?"
+
+"Where's the telegram sent from?" asked Mr Orgreave.
+
+Edwin examined the official indications: "Victoria."
+
+"Then she's brought him up to London, and she's putting him in a train
+at Euston.  That's it."
+
+"Only there is no London train that gets to Knype at half-past six,"
+Edwin said.  "It's 7:12, or 7:14--I forget."
+
+"Oh!  That's near enough for Hilda," Janet smiled, looking at her watch.
+
+"She doesn't mean any other train?"  Mrs Orgreave fearfully suggested.
+
+"She can't mean any other train.  There is no other.  Only probably
+she's been looking at the wrong time-table," Janet reassured her mother.
+
+"Because if the poor little thing found no one to meet him at Knype--"
+
+"Don't worry, dear," said Janet.  "The poor little thing would soon be
+engaging somebody's attention.  Trust him!"
+
+"But has she been writing to you lately?"  Mrs Orgreave questioned.
+
+"No."
+
+"Then why--"
+
+"Don't ask _me_!" said Janet.  "No doubt I shall get a letter to-morrow,
+after George has come and told us everything!  Poor dear, I'm glad she's
+doing so much better now."
+
+"Is she?"  Edwin murmured, surprised.
+
+"Oh yes!" said Janet.  "She's got a regular bustling partner, and
+they're that busy they scarcely know what to do.  But they only keep one
+little servant."
+
+In the ordinary way Janet and Edwin never mentioned Hilda to one
+another.  Each seemed to be held back by a kind of timid shame and by a
+cautious suspicion.  Each seemed to be inquiring: "What does _he_ know?"
+"What does _she_ know?"
+
+"If I thought it wasn't too cold, I'd go with you to Knype," said Mr
+Orgreave.
+
+"Now, Osmond!"  Mrs Orgreave sat up.
+
+"Shall I go?" said Edwin.
+
+"Well," said Janet, with much kindliness, "I'm sure he'd be delighted to
+see _you_."
+
+Mrs Orgreave rang the bell.
+
+"What do you want, mother?"
+
+"There'll be the bed--"
+
+"Don't you trouble with those things, dear," said Janet, very calmly.
+"There's heaps of time."
+
+But Janet was just as excited as her parents.  In two minutes the
+excitement had spread through the whole house, like a piquant and
+agreeable odour.  The place was alive again.
+
+"I'll just step across and ask Maggie to alter supper," said Edwin, "and
+then I'll call for you.  I suppose we'll go down by train."
+
+"I'm thankful he's had influenza," observed Mrs Orgreave, implying that
+thus there would be less chance of George catching the disease under her
+infected roof.
+
+That George had been down with influenza before Christmas was the sole
+information about him that Edwin obtained.  Nobody appeared to consider
+it worth while to discuss the possible reasons for his sudden arrival.
+Hilda's caprices were accepted in that house like the visitations of
+heaven.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+Edwin and Janet stood together on the windy and bleak down-platform of
+Knype Station, awaiting the express, which had been signalled.  Edwin
+was undoubtedly very nervous and constrained, and it seemed to him that
+Janet's demeanour lacked naturalness.
+
+"It's just occurred to me how she made that mistake about the time of
+the train," said Edwin, chiefly because he found the silence intolerably
+irksome.  "It stops at Lichfield, and in running her eye across the page
+she must have mixed up the Lichfield figures with the Knype figures--you
+know how awkward it is in a time-table.  As a matter of fact, the train
+_does_ stop at Lichfield about 6:30."
+
+"I see," said Janet reflectively.
+
+And Edwin was saying to himself--
+
+"It's a marvel to me how I can talk to her at all.  What made me offer
+to come with her?  How much does she know about me and Hilda?  Hilda may
+have told her everything.  If she's told her about her husband why
+shouldn't she have told her about me?  And here we are both pretending
+that there's never been anything at all between me and Hilda!"
+
+Then the train appeared, obscure round the curve, and bore down
+formidable and dark upon them, growing at every instant in stature and
+in noise until it deafened and seemed to fill the station; and the
+platform was suddenly in an uproar.
+
+And almost opposite Janet and Edwin, leaning forth high above them from
+the door of a third-class carriage, the head and the shoulders of George
+Cannon were displayed in the gaslight.  He seemed to dominate the train
+and the platform.  At the windows on either side of him were adult
+faces, excited by his excitement, of the people who had doubtless been
+friendly to him during the journey.  He distinguished Janet and Edwin
+almost at once, and shouted, and then waved.
+
+"Hello, young son of a gun!"  Edwin greeted him, trying to turn the
+handle of the door.  But the door was locked, and it was necessary to
+call a porter, who tarried.
+
+"I _made_ mamma let me come!"  George cried victoriously.  "I told you I
+should!"  He was far too agitated to think of shaking hands, and seemed
+to be in a state of fever.  All his gestures were those of a proud,
+hysterical conqueror, and like a conqueror he gazed down at Edwin and
+Janet, who stood beneath him with upturned faces.  He had absolutely
+forgotten the existence of his acquaintances in the carriage.  "Did you
+know I've had the influenza?  My temperature was up to 104 once--but it
+didn't stay long," he added regretfully.
+
+When the door was at length opened, he jumped headlong, and Edwin caught
+him.  He shook hands with Edwin and allowed Janet to kiss him.
+
+"How hot you are!"  Janet murmured.
+
+The people in the compartment passed down his luggage, and after one of
+them had shouted good-bye to him twice, he remembered them, as it were
+by an effort, and replied, "Good-bye, good-bye," in a quick, impatient
+tone.
+
+It was not until his anxious and assiduous foster-parents had bestowed
+him and his goods in the tranquillity of an empty compartment of the
+Loop Line train that they began to appreciate the morbid unusualness of
+his condition.  His eyes glittered with extraordinary brilliance.  He
+talked incessantly, not listening to their answers.  And his skin was
+burning hot.
+
+"Why, whatever's the matter with you, my dear?" asked Janet, alarmed.
+"You're like an oven!"
+
+"I'm thirsty," said George.  "If I don't have something to drink soon, I
+don't know what I shall do."
+
+Janet looked at Edwin.
+
+"There won't be time to get something at the refreshment room?"
+
+They both felt heavily responsible.
+
+"I might--" Edwin said irresolutely.
+
+But just then the guard whistled.
+
+"Never mind!"  Janet comforted the child.  "In twenty minutes we shall
+be in the house...  No! you must keep your overcoat buttoned."
+
+"How long have you been like that, George?"  Edwin asked.  "You weren't
+like that when you started, surely?"
+
+"No," said George judicially.  "It came on in the train."
+
+After this, he appeared to go to sleep.
+
+"He's certainly not well," Janet whispered.
+
+Edwin shrugged his shoulders.  "Don't you think he's grown?" he
+observed.
+
+"Oh yes!" said Janet.  "It's astonishing, isn't it, how children shoot
+up in a few weeks!"
+
+They might have been parents exchanging notes, instead of celibates
+playing at parenthood for a hobby.
+
+"Mamma says I've grown an inch."  George opened his eyes.  "She says
+it's about time I had!  I dare say I shall be very tall.  Are we nearly
+there?"  His high, curt, febrile tones were really somewhat alarming.
+
+When the train threw them out into the sodden waste that surrounds
+Bleakridge Station, George could scarcely stand.  At any rate he showed
+no wish to stand.  His protectors took him strongly by either arm, and
+thus bore him to Lane End House, with irregular unwilling assistance
+from his own feet.  A porter followed with the luggage.  It was an
+extremely distressing passage.  Each protector in secret was imagining
+for George some terrible fever, of swift onslaught and fatal effect.  At
+length they entered the garden, thanking their gods.
+
+"He's not well," said Janet to her mother, who was fussily awaiting them
+in the hall.  Her voice showed apprehension, and she was not at all
+convincing when she added: "But it's nothing serious.  I shall put him
+straight to bed and let him eat there."
+
+Instantly George became the centre of the house.  The women disappeared
+with him, and Edwin had to recount the whole history of the arrival to
+Osmond Orgreave in the drawing-room.  This recital was interrupted by
+Mrs Orgreave.
+
+"Mr Edwin, Janet thinks if we sent for the doctor, just to be sure.  As
+Johnnie isn't in, would you mind--"
+
+"Stirling, I suppose?" said Edwin.
+
+Stirling was the young Scottish doctor who had recently come into the
+town and taken it by storm.
+
+When Edwin at last went home to a much-delayed meal, he was in a
+position to tell Maggie that young George Cannon had thought fit to
+catch influenza a second time in a couple of months.  And Maggie,
+without a clear word, contrived to indicate that it was what she would
+have expected from a boy of George's violent temperament.
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER TEN.
+
+GEORGE AND THE VICAR.
+
+On the Tuesday evening Edwin came home from business at six o'clock, and
+found that he was to eat alone.  The servant anxiously explained that
+Miss Clayhanger had gone across to the Orgreaves' to assist Miss
+Orgreave.  It was evident that before going Miss Clayhanger had inspired
+the servant with a full sense of the importance of Mr Clayhanger's
+solitary meal, and of the terrible responsibility lying upon the person
+in charge of it.  The girl was thrillingly alive; she would have liked
+some friend or other of the house to be always seriously ill, so that
+Miss Clayhanger might often leave her to the voluptuous savouring of
+this responsibility whose formidableness surpassed words.  Edwin, as he
+went upstairs and as he came down again, was conscious of her excited
+presence somewhere near him, half-visible in the warm gas-lit house,
+spying upon him in order to divine the precise moment for the final
+service of the meal.
+
+And in the dining-room the table was laid differently, so that he might
+be well situated, with regard to the light, for reading.  And by the
+side of his plate were the newspaper, the magazines, and the book, among
+which Maggie had well guessed that he would make his choice for perusal.
+He was momentarily touched.  He warmed his hands at the splendid fire,
+and then he warmed his back, watching the servant as with little
+flouncings and perkings she served, and he was touched by the placid and
+perfect efficiency of Maggie as a housekeeper.  Maggie gave him
+something that no money could buy.
+
+The servant departed and shut the door.
+
+When he sat down he minutely changed the situation of nearly everything
+on the table, so that his magazine might be lodged at exactly the right
+distance and angle, and so that each necessary object might be quite
+handy.  He was in luxury, and he yielded himself to it absolutely.  The
+sense that unusual events were happening, that the course of social
+existence was disturbed while his comfort was not disturbed, that danger
+hung cloudy on the horizon--this sense somehow intensified the
+appreciation of the hour, and positively contributed to his pleasure.
+Moreover, he was agreeably excited by a dismaying anticipation affecting
+himself alone.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Two.
+
+The door opened again, and Auntie Hamps was shown in by the servant.
+Before he could move the old lady had with overwhelming sweet
+supplications insisted that he should not move--no, not even to shake
+hands!  He rose only to shake hands, and then fell back into his
+comfort.  Auntie Hamps fixed a chair for herself opposite him, and
+drummed her black-gloved hands on the white table-cloth.  She was
+steadily becoming stouter, and those chubby little hands seemed
+impossibly small against the vast mountain of fur which was crowned by
+her smirking crimson face and the supreme peak of her bonnet.
+
+"They keep very friendly--those two," she remarked, with a strangely
+significant air, when he told her where Maggie was.  She had shown no
+surprise at finding him alone, for the reason that she had already
+learnt everything from the servant in the hall.
+
+"Janet and Maggie?  They're friendly enough when they can be of use to
+each other."
+
+"How _kind_ Miss Janet was when your father was ill!  I'm sure Maggie
+feels she must do all she can to return her kindness," Mrs Hamps
+murmured, with emotion.  "I shall always be grateful for her
+helpfulness!  She's a grand girl, a grand girl!"
+
+"Yes," said Edwin awkwardly.
+
+"She's still waiting for you," said Mrs Hamps, not archly, but sadly.
+
+Edwin restively poohed.  At the first instant of her arrival he had been
+rather glad to see her, for unusual events create a desire to discuss
+them; but if she meant to proceed in that strain unuttered curses would
+soon begin to accumulate for her in his heart.
+
+"I expect the kid must be pretty bad," he said.
+
+"Yes," sighed Mrs Hamps.  "And probably poor Mrs Orgreave is more in
+the way than anything else.  And Mr Orgreave only just out of bed, as
+you may say! ...  That young lady must have her hands full!  My word!
+What a blessing it is she _has_ made such friends with Maggie!"
+
+Mrs Hamps had the peculiar gift, which developed into ever-increasing
+perfection as her hair grew whiter, of being able to express ideas by
+means of words which had no relation to them at all.  Within three
+minutes, by three different remarks whose occult message no stranger
+could have understood but which forced itself with unpleasant clearness
+upon Edwin, Mrs Hamps had conveyed, "Janet Orgreave only cultivates
+Maggie because Maggie is the sister of Edwin Clayhanger."
+
+"You're all very devoted to that child," she said, meaning, "There is
+something mysterious in that quarter which sooner or later is bound to
+come out."  And the meaning was so clear that Edwin was intimidated.
+What did she guess?  Did she know anything?  To-night Auntie Hamps was
+displaying her gift at its highest.
+
+"I don't know that Maggie's so desperately keen on the infant!" he said.
+
+"She's not like you about him, that's sure!"  Mrs Hamps admitted.  And
+she went on, in a tone that was only superficially casual, "I wonder the
+mother doesn't come down to him!"
+
+Not `his' mother--`the' mother.  Odd, the effect of that trifle!  Mrs
+Hamps was a great artist in phrasing.
+
+"Oh!" said Edwin.  "It's not serious enough for that."
+
+"Well, I'm not so sure," Auntie Hamps gravely replied.  "_The Vicar is
+dead._"
+
+The emphasis which she put on these words was tremendous.
+
+"Is he," Edwin stammered.  "But what's that got to do with it?"
+
+He tried to be condescending towards her absurdly superstitious
+assumption that the death of the Vicar of Saint Peter's could increase
+the seriousness of George's case.  And he feebly succeeded in being
+condescending.  Nevertheless he could not meet his auntie's gaze without
+self-consciousness.  For her emphasis had been double, and he knew it.
+It had implied, secondly, that the death of the Vicar was an event
+specially affecting Edwin's household.  The rough sketch of a romance
+between the Vicar and Maggie had never been completed into a picture,
+but on the other hand it had never been destroyed.  The Vicar and Maggie
+had been supposed to be still interested in each other, despite the
+Vicar's priestliness, which latterly had perhaps grown more marked, just
+as his church had grown more ritualistic.  It was a strange affair,
+thin, elusive; but an affair it was.  The Vicar and Maggie had seldom
+met of recent years, they had never--so far as anyone knew--met alone;
+and yet, upon the news of the Vicar's death, the first thought of nearly
+everybody was for Maggie Clayhanger.
+
+Mrs Hamps's eyes, swimming in the satisfaction of several simultaneous
+woes, said plainly, "What about poor Maggie?"
+
+"When did you hear?"  Edwin asked.  "It isn't in this afternoon's
+paper."
+
+"I've only just heard.  He died at four o'clock."
+
+She had come up immediately with the news as fresh as orchard fruit.
+
+"And the Duke of Clarence is no better," she said, in a luxurious
+sighing gloom.  "And I'm afraid it's all over with Cardinal Manning."
+She made a peculiar noise in her throat, not quite a sigh; rather a
+brave protest against the general fatality of things, stiffened by a
+determination to be strong though melancholy in misfortune.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Three.
+
+Maggie suddenly entered, hatted, with a jacket over her arm.
+
+"Hello, auntie, you here!"  They had already met that morning.
+
+"I just called," said Mrs Hamps guiltily.  Edwin felt as though Maggie
+had surprised them both in some criminal act.  They knew that Mr Heve
+was dead.  She did not know.  She had to be told.  He wished violently
+that Auntie Hamps had been elsewhere.
+
+"Everything all right?"  Maggie asked Edwin, surveying the table.  "I
+gave particular orders about the eggs."
+
+"As right as rain," said Edwin, putting into his voice a note of true
+appreciation.  He saw that her sense of duty towards him had brought her
+back to the house.  She had taken every precaution to ensure his
+well-being, but she could not be content without seeing for herself that
+the servant had not betrayed the trust.
+
+"How are things--across?" he inquired.
+
+"Well," said Maggie, frowning, "that's one reason why I came back sooner
+than I meant.  The doctor's just been.  His temperature is getting
+higher and higher.  I wish you'd go over as soon as you've finished.  If
+you ask me, I think they ought to telegraph to his mother.  But Janet
+doesn't seem to think so.  Of course it's enough when Mrs Orgreave
+begins worrying about telegraphing for Janet to say there's no need to
+telegraph.  She's rather trying, Mrs Orgreave is, I must admit.  All
+that _I_'ve been doing is to keep her out of the bedroom.  Janet has
+everything on her shoulders.  Mr Orgreave is just about as fidgety as
+Mrs. And of course the servants have their own work to do.  Naturally
+Johnnie isn't in!"  Her tone grew sarcastic and bitter.
+
+"What does Stirling say about telegraphing?"  Edwin demanded.  He had
+intended to say `telegraphing for Mrs Cannon,' but he could not utter
+the last words; he could not compel his vocal organs to utter them.  He
+became aware of the beating of his heart.  For twenty-four hours he had
+been contemplating the possibility of a summons to Hilda.  Now the
+possibility had developed into a probability.  Nay, a certainty!  Maggie
+was the very last person to be alarmist.
+
+Maggie replied: "He says it might be as well to wait till to-morrow.
+But then you know he is like that--a bit."
+
+"So they say," Auntie Hamps agreed.
+
+"Have you seen the kid?"  Edwin asked.
+
+"About two minutes," said Maggie.  "It's pitiable to watch him."
+
+"Why?  Is he in pain?"
+
+"Not what you'd call pain.  No!  But he's so upset.  Worried about
+himself.  He's got a terrific fever on him.  I'm certain he's delirious
+sometimes.  Poor little thing!"
+
+Tears gleamed in her eyes.  The plight of the boy had weakened her
+prejudices against him.  Assuredly he was not `rough' now.
+
+Astounded and frightened by those shimmering tears, Edwin exclaimed,
+"You don't mean to say there's actual danger?"
+
+"Well--" Maggie hesitated, and stopped.
+
+There was silence for a moment.  Edwin felt that the situation was now
+further intensified.
+
+"I expect you've heard about the poor Vicar," Mrs Hamps funereally
+insinuated.  Edwin mutely damned her.
+
+Maggie looked up sharply.  "No! ...  He's not--"
+
+Mrs Hamps nodded twice.
+
+The tears vanished from Maggie's eyes, forced backwards by all the
+secret pride that was in her.  It was obvious that not the news of the
+Vicar had originally caused those tears; but nevertheless there should
+be no shadow of misunderstanding.  The death of the Vicar must be
+associated with no more serious sign of distress in Maggie than in
+others.  She must be above suspicion.  For one acute moment, as he read
+her thoughts and as the profound sacrificial tragedy of her entire
+existence loomed less indistinctly than usual before him, Edwin ceased
+to think about himself and Hilda.
+
+She made a quick hysterical movement.
+
+"I wish you'd go across, Edwin," she said harshly.
+
+"I'll go now," he answered, with softness.  And he was glad to go.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Four.
+
+It was Osmond Orgreave who opened to him the front door of Lane End
+House.  Maggie had told the old gentleman that she should send Edwin
+over, and he was wandering vaguely about in nervous expectation.  In an
+instant they were discussing George's case, and the advisability of
+telegraphing to Hilda.  Mrs Orgreave immediately joined them in the
+hall.  Both father and mother clearly stood in awe of the gentle but
+powerful Janet.  And somehow the child was considered as her private
+affair, into which others might not thrust themselves save on
+sufferance.  Perceiving that Edwin was slightly inclined to the course
+of telegraphing, they drew him towards them as a reinforcement, but
+while Mrs Orgreave frankly displayed her dependence on him, Mr
+Orgreave affected to be strong, independent, and judicial.
+
+"I wish you'd go and speak to her," Mrs Orgreave entreated.
+
+"Upstairs?"
+
+"It won't do any harm, anyhow," said Osmond, finely indifferent.
+
+They went up the stairs in a procession.  Edwin did not wish to tell
+them about the Vicar.  He could see no sense in telling them about the
+Vicar.  And yet, before they reached the top of the stairs, he heard
+himself saying in a concerned whisper--
+
+"You know about the Vicar of Saint Peter's?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Died at four o'clock."
+
+"Oh dear me!  Dear me!" murmured Mrs Orgreave, agonised.
+
+Most evidently George's case was aggravated by the Vicar's death--and
+not only in the eyes of Mrs Orgreave and her falsely stoic husband, but
+in Edwin's eyes too!  Useless for him to argue with himself about
+idiotic superstitiousness!  The death of the Vicar had undoubtedly
+influenced his attitude towards George.
+
+They halted on the landing, outside a door that was ajar.  Near them
+burned a gas jet, and beneath the bracket was a large framed photograph
+of the bridal party at Alicia's wedding.  Farther along the landing were
+other similar records of the weddings of Marion, Tom, and Jimmie.
+
+Mr Orgreave pushed the door half open.
+
+"Janet," said Mr Orgreave conspiratorially.
+
+"Well?" from within the bedroom.
+
+"Here's Edwin."
+
+Janet appeared in the doorway, pale.  She was wearing an apron with a
+bib.
+
+"I--I thought I'd just look in and inquire," Edwin said awkwardly,
+fiddling with his hat and a pocket of his overcoat.  "What's he like
+now?"
+
+Janet gave details.  The sick-room lay hidden behind the face of the
+door, mysterious and sacred.
+
+"Mr Edwin thinks you ought to telegraph," said Mrs Orgreave timidly.
+
+"Do you?" demanded Janet.  Her eyes seemed to pierce him.  Why did she
+gaze at him with such particularity, as though he possessed a special
+interest in Hilda?
+
+"Well--" he muttered.  "You might just wire how things are, and leave it
+to her to come as she thinks fit."
+
+"Just so," said Mr Orgreave quickly, as if Edwin had expressed his own
+thought.
+
+"But the telegram couldn't be delivered to-night," Janet objected.
+"It's nearly half-past seven now."
+
+It was true.  Yet Edwin was more than ever conscious of a keen desire to
+telegraph at once.
+
+"But it would be delivered first thing in the morning," he said.  "So
+that she'd have more time to make arrangements if she wanted to."
+
+"Well, if you think like that," Janet acquiesced.
+
+The visage of Mrs Orgreave lightened.
+
+"I'll run down and telegraph myself, if you like," said Edwin.  "Of
+course you've written to her.  She knows--"
+
+"Oh yes!"
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Five.
+
+In a minute he was walking rapidly, with his ungainly, slouching stride,
+down Trafalgar Road, his overcoat flying loose.  Another crisis was
+approaching, he thought.  As he came to Duck Square, he met a newspaper
+boy shouting shrilly and wearing the contents bill of a special edition
+of the "Signal" as an apron: "Duke of Clarence.  More serious bulletin."
+The scourge and fear of influenza was upon the town, upon the
+community, tangible, oppressive, tragic.
+
+In the evening calm of the shabby, gloomy post-office, holding a stubby
+pencil that was chained by a cable to the wall, he stood over a blank
+telegraph-form, hesitating how to word the message.  Behind the counter
+an instrument was ticking unheeded, and far within could be discerned
+the vague bodies of men dealing with parcels.  He wrote, "Cannon, 59
+Preston Street, Brighton.  George's temperature 104."  Then he paused,
+and added, "Edwin."  It was sentimental.  He ought to have signed
+Janet's name.  And, if he was determined to make the telegram personal,
+he might at least have put his surname.  He knew it was sentimental, and
+he loathed sentimentality.  But that evening he wanted to be
+sentimental.
+
+He crossed to the counter, and pushed the form under the wire-netting.
+
+A sleepy girl accepted it, and glanced mechanically at the clock, and
+then wrote the hour 7:42.
+
+"It won't be delivered to-night," she said, looking up, as she counted
+the words.
+
+"No, I know," said Edwin.
+
+"Sixpence, please."
+
+As he paid the sixpence he felt as though he had accomplished some
+great, critical, agitating deed.  And his heart asserted itself again,
+thunderously beating.
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER ELEVEN.
+
+BEGINNING OF THE NIGHT.
+
+The next day was full of strange suspense; it was coloured throughout
+with that quality of strangeness which puts a new light on all quotidian
+occupations and exposes their fundamental unimportance.  Edwin arose to
+the fact that a thick grey fog was wrapping the town.  When he returned
+home to breakfast at nine the fog was certainly more opaque than it had
+been an hour earlier.  The steam-cars passed like phantoms, with a
+continuous clanging of bells.  He breakfasted under gas--and alone.
+Maggie was invisible, or only to be seen momentarily, flying across the
+domestic horizon.  She gave out that she was very busy in the attics,
+cleaning those shockingly neglected rooms.  "Please, sir," said the
+servant, "Miss Clayhanger says she's been across to Mr Orgreave's, and
+Master George is about the same."  Maggie would not come and tell him
+herself.  On the previous evening he had not seen her after the
+reception of the news about the Vicar.  She had gone upstairs when he
+came back from the post office.  Beyond doubt, she was too disturbed,
+emotionally, to be able to face him with her customary tranquillity.
+She was getting over the shock with brush and duster up in the attics.
+He was glad that she had not attempted to be as usual.  The ordeal of
+attempting to be as usual would have tried him perhaps as severely as
+her.
+
+He went forth again into the fog in a high state of agitation,
+constricted with sympathetic distress on Maggie's account, apprehensive
+for the boy, and painfully expectant of the end of the day.  The whole
+day slipped away so, hour after monotonous hour, while people talked
+about influenza and about distinguished patients, and doctors hurried
+from house to house, and the fog itself seemed to be the visible mantle
+of the disease.  And the end of the day brought nothing to Edwin save an
+acuter expectancy.  George varied; on the whole he was worse; not much
+worse, but worse.  Dr Stirling saw him twice.  No message arrived from
+Hilda, nor did she come in person.  Maggie watched George for five hours
+in the late afternoon and evening, while Janet rested.
+
+At eight o'clock, when there was no further hope of a telegram from
+Hilda, everybody pretended to concur in the view that Hilda, knowing her
+boy better than anybody else, and having already seen him through an
+attack of influenza, had not been unduly alarmed by the telegraphic news
+of his temperature, and was content to write.  She might probably be
+arranging to come on the morrow.  After all, George's temperature had
+reached 104 in the previous attack.  Then there was the fog.  The fog
+would account for anything.
+
+Nevertheless, nobody was really satisfied by these explanations of
+Hilda's silence and absence.  In every heart lay the secret and sinister
+thought of the queerness and the incalculableness of Hilda.
+
+Edwin called several times on the Orgreaves.  He finally left their
+house about ten o'clock, with some difficulty tracing his way home from
+gas lamp to gas lamp through the fog.  Mr Orgreave himself had escorted
+him with a lantern round the wilderness of the lawn to the gates.  "We
+shall have a letter in the morning," Mr Orgreave had said.  "Bound to!"
+Edwin had replied.  And they had both superiorly puffed away into the
+fog the absurd misgivings of women.
+
+Knowing that he was in no condition to sleep, Edwin mended the
+drawing-room fire, and settled down on the sofa to read.  But he could
+no more read than sleep.  He seemed to lie on the sofa for hours while
+his thoughts jigged with fatiguing monotony in his head.  He was
+extraordinarily wakeful and alive, every sense painfully sharpened.  At
+last he decided to go to bed.  In his bedroom he gazed idly out at the
+blank density of the fog.  And then his heart leapt as his eye
+distinguished a moving glimmer below in the garden of the Orgreaves.  He
+threw up the window in a tumult of anticipation.  The air was absolutely
+still.  Then he heard a voice say, "Good night."  It was undoubtedly Dr
+Stirling's voice.  The Scotch accent was unmistakable.  Was the boy
+worse?  Not necessarily, for the doctor had said that he might look in
+again `last thing,' if chance favoured.  And the Scotch significance of
+`last thing' was notoriously comprehensive; it might include regions
+beyond midnight.  Then Edwin heard another voice: "Thanks ever so much!"
+At first it puzzled him.  He knew it, and yet!  Could it be the
+Sunday's voice?  Assuredly it was not the voice of Mr Orgreave, nor of
+any one living in the house.  It reminded him of the Sunday's voice.
+
+He went out of his bedroom, striking a match, and going downstairs lit
+the gas in the hall, which he had just extinguished.  Then he put on a
+cap, found a candlestick in the kitchen, unbolted the garden door as
+quietly as he could, and passed into the garden.  The flame of the
+candle stood upright in the fog.  He blundered along to the dividing
+wall, placed the candle on the top of it, and managed to climb over.
+Leaving the candle on the wall to guide his return, he approached the
+house, which showed gleams at several windows, and rang the bell.  And
+in fact it was Charlie Orgreave himself who opened the door.  And a
+lantern, stuck carelessly on the edge of a chair, was still burning in
+the hall.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+In a moment he had learnt the chief facts.  Hilda had gone up to London,
+dragged Charlie out of Ealing, and brought him down with her to watch
+over her child.  Once more she had done something which nobody could
+have foreseen.  The train--not the London express, but the loop--was
+late.  The pair had arrived about half-past ten, and a little later Dr
+Stirling had fulfilled his promise to look in if he could.  The two
+doctors had conferred across the child's bed, and had found themselves
+substantially in agreement.  Moreover, the child was if anything
+somewhat better.  The Scotsman had gone.  Charles and Hilda had eaten.
+Hilda meant to sit up, and had insisted that Janet should go to bed; it
+appeared that Janet had rested but not slept in the afternoon.
+
+Charlie took Edwin into the small breakfast-room, where Osmond Orgreave
+was waiting, and the three men continued to discuss the situation.  They
+were all of them too excited to sit down, though Osmond and--in a less
+degree--Charlie affected the tranquillity of high philosophers.  At
+first Edwin knew scarcely what he did.  His speech and gestures were not
+the result of conscious volition.  He seemed suddenly to have two
+individualities, and the new one, which was the more intimate one,
+watched the other as in a dim-lighted dream...  She was there in a room
+above!  She had come in response to the telegram signed `Edwin!'  Last
+night she was far away.  To-night she was in the very house with him.
+Miracle!  He asked himself: "Why should I get myself into this state
+simply because she is here?  It would have been mighty strange if she
+had not come.  I must take myself in hand better than this.  I mustn't
+behave like a blooming girl."  He frowned and coughed.
+
+"Well," said Osmond Orgreave to his son, thrusting out his coat-tails
+with his hands towards the fire, and swaying slightly to and fro on his
+heels and toes, "so you've had your consultation, you eminent
+specialists!  What's the result?"
+
+He looked at his elegant son with an air half-quizzical and
+half-deferential.
+
+"I've told you he's evidently a little better, dad," Charlie answered
+casually.  His London deportment was more marked than ever.  The
+bracingly correct atmosphere of Ealing had given him a rather obvious
+sense of importance.  He had developed into a man with a stake in the
+country, and he twisted his moustache like such a man, and took out a
+cigarette like such a man.
+
+"Yes, I know," said Osmond, with controlled impatience.  "But what sort
+of influenza is it?  I'm hoping to learn something now you've come.
+Stirling will talk about anything except influenza."
+
+"What sort of influenza is it?  What do you mean?"  And Charlie's
+twinkling glance said condescendingly: "What's the old cock got hold of
+now?  This is just like him."
+
+"But is there any real danger?"  Edwin murmured.
+
+"Well," said Osmond, bringing up his regiments, "as I understand it,
+there are three types of influenza--the respiratory, the
+gastro-intestinal, and the nervous.  Which one is it?"
+
+Charlie laughed, and prodded his father with a forefinger in a soft
+region near the shoulder, disturbing his balance.  "You've been reading
+the `BMJ,'" he said, "and so you needn't pretend you haven't!"
+
+Osmond paused an instant to consider the meaning of these initials.
+
+"What if I have?" he demanded, raising his eyebrows, "I say there are
+three types--"
+
+"Thirty; you might be nearer the mark with thirty," Charlie interrupted
+him.  "The fact is that this division into types is all very well in
+theory," he proceeded, with easy disdain.  "But in practice it won't
+work out.  Now for instance, what this kid has won't square with any of
+your three types.  It's purely febrile, that's what it is.  Rare,
+decidedly rare, but less rare in children than in adults--at any rate in
+my experience--in my experience.  If his temperature wasn't so high, I
+should say the thing might last for days--weeks even.  I've known it.
+The first question I put was--has he been in a stupor?  He had.  It may
+recur.  That, and headache, _and_ the absence of localised nervous
+symptoms--" He stopped, leaving the sentence in the air, grandiose and
+formidable, but of no purport.
+
+Charlie shrugged his shoulders, allowing the beholder to choose his own
+interpretation of the gesture.
+
+"You're a devilish wonderful fellow," said Osmond grimly to his son.
+And Charlie winked grimly at Edwin, who grimly smiled.
+
+"You and your `British Medical Journal'!"  Charlie exclaimed, with an
+irony from which filial affection was not absent, and again prodded his
+father in the same spot.
+
+"Of course I know I'm an old man," said Osmond, condescendingly
+rejecting Charlie's condescension.  He thought he did not mean what he
+said; nevertheless, it was the expression of the one idea which latterly
+beyond all other ideas had possessed him.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Janet came into the room, and was surprised to see Edwin.  She was in a
+state of extreme fatigue--pale, with burning eyes, and hair that has
+lost the gracefulness of its curves.
+
+"So you know?" she said.
+
+Edwin nodded.
+
+"It seems I've got to go to bed," she went on.  "Father, you must go to
+bed too.  Mother's gone.  It's frightfully late.  Come along now!"
+
+She was insistent.  She had been worried during the greater part of the
+day by her restless parents, and she was determined not to leave either
+of them at large.
+
+"Charlie, you might run upstairs and see that everything's all right
+before I go.  I shall get up again at four."
+
+"I'll be off," said Edwin.
+
+"Here!  Hold on a bit," Charlie objected.  "Wait till I come down.
+Let's have a yarn.  You don't want to go to bed yet."
+
+Edwin agreed to the suggestion, and was left alone in the
+breakfast-room.  What struck him was that the new situation created by
+Hilda's strange caprice had instantly been accepted by everybody, and
+had indeed already begun to seem quite natural.  He esteemed highly the
+demeanour of all the Orgreaves.  Neither he himself nor Maggie could
+have surpassed them in their determination not to exaggerate the crisis,
+in their determination to bear themselves simply and easily, and to
+speak with lightness, even with occasional humour.  There were few
+qualities that he admired more than this.
+
+And what was her demeanour, up there in the bedroom?
+
+Suddenly the strangeness of Hilda's caprice presented itself to him as
+even more strange.  She had merely gone to Ealing and captured Charlie.
+Charlie was understood to have a considerable practice.  At her whim all
+his patients had been abandoned.  What an idea, to bring him down like
+this!  What tremendous faith in him she must have!  And Edwin remembered
+distinctly that the first person who had ever spoken to him of Hilda was
+Charlie!  And in what terms of admiration!  Was there a long and secret
+understanding between these two?  They must assuredly be far more
+intimate than he had ever suspected.  Edwin hated to think that Hilda
+would depend more upon Charlie than upon himself in a grave difficulty.
+The notion caused him acute discomfort.  He was resentful against
+Charlie as against a thief who had robbed him of his own, but who could
+not be apprehended and put to shame.
+
+The acute discomfort was jealousy; but this word did not occur to him.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+"I say," Edwin began, in a new intimate tone, when after what seemed a
+very long interval Charlie Orgreave returned to the breakfast-room with
+the information that for the present all had been done that could be
+done.
+
+"What's up?" said Charlie, responding quite eagerly to the appeal for
+intimacy in Edwin's voice.  He had brought in a tray with whisky and its
+apparatus, and he set this handily on a stool in front of the fire, and
+poked the fire, and generally made the usual ritualistic preparations
+for a comfortable talkative night.
+
+"Rather delicate, wasn't it, you coming down and taking Stirling's case
+off him?"
+
+Edwin smiled idly as he lolled far back in an old easy chair.  His two
+individualities had now merged again into one.
+
+"My boy," Charlie answered, pausing impressively with his curly head
+held forward, before dropping into an arm-chair by the stool, "you may
+take it from me that `delicate' is not the word!"
+
+Edwin nodded sympathetically, perceiving with satisfaction that beneath
+his Metropolitan mannerism, and his amusing pomposities, and his
+perfectly dandiacal clothes, Charlie still remained the Sunday, possibly
+more naive than ever.  This _naivete_ of Charlie's was particularly
+pleasing to him, for the reason that it gave him a feeling of
+superiority to the more brilliant being and persuaded him that the
+difference between London and the provinces was inessential and
+negligible.  Charlie's hair still curled like a boy's, and he had not
+outgrown the _naivete_ of boyhood.  Against these facts the fact that
+Charlie was a partner in a fashionable and dashing practice at Ealing
+simply did not weigh.  The deference which in thought Edwin had been
+slowly acquiring for this Charlie, as to whom impressive news reached
+Bursley from time to time, melted almost completely away.  In
+fundamentals he was convinced that Charlie was an infant compared to
+himself.
+
+"Have a drop?"
+
+"Well, it's not often I do, but I will to-night.  Steady on with the
+whisky, old chap."
+
+Each took a charged glass and sipped.  Edwin, by raising his arm, could
+just lodge his glass on the mantelpiece.  Charlie then opened his large
+gun-metal cigarette case, and one match lighted two cigarettes.
+
+"Yes, my boy," Charlie resumed, as he meditatively blew out the match
+and threw it on the fire, "you may well say `delicate.'  The truth is
+that if I hadn't seen at once that Stirling was a very decent sort of
+chap, and very friendly here, I might have funked it.  Yes, I might.  He
+came in just after we'd arrived.  So I saw him alone--here.  I made a
+clean breast of it, and put myself in his hands.  Of course he
+appreciated the situation at once; and considering he'd never seen _her_,
+it was rather clever of him...  I suppose people rather like that Scotch
+accent of his, down here?"
+
+"They say he makes over a thousand a year already," Edwin replied.  He
+was thinking.  "Is she likely to be coming downstairs?  No."
+
+"The deuce he does!"  Charlie murmured, with ingenuous animation,
+foolishly betraying by an instant's lack of self-control the fact that
+Ealing was not Utopia.  Envy was in his voice as he continued: "It's
+astonishing how some chaps can come along and walk straight into
+anything they want--whatever it happens to be!"
+
+"What do you think of him as a doctor?"  Edwin questioned.
+
+"Seems all right," said Charlie, with a fine brief effort to be
+patronising.
+
+"He's got a great reputation down here," Edwin said quietly.
+
+"Yes, yes.  I should say he's quite all right."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+"How came it that Mrs Cannon came and rummaged _you_ out?"  Edwin knew
+that he would blush, and so he reached up for his whisky, and drank,
+adding: "The old man still clings to his old brand of Scotch."
+
+"My dear fellow, I know no more than you.  I was perfectly staggered--I
+can tell you that.  I hadn't seen her since before she was married.
+Only heard of her again just lately through Janet.  I suppose it was
+Janet who told her I was at Ealing.  It's an absolute fact that just at
+the first blush I didn't even recognise her."
+
+"Didn't you?"  Edwin wondered how this could be.
+
+"I did not.  She came into our surgery, as if she'd come out of the next
+room and I'd seen her only yesterday, and she just asked me to come away
+with her at once to Bursley.  I thought she was off her nut, but she
+wasn't.  She showed me your telegram."
+
+"The dickens she did!"  Edwin was really startled.
+
+"Yes.  I told her there was nothing absolutely fatal in a temperature of
+104.  It happened in thousands of cases.  Then she explained to me
+exactly how he'd been ill before, seemingly in the same way, and I could
+judge from what she said that he wasn't a boy who would stand a high
+temperature for very long."
+
+"By the way, what's his temperature to-night?"  Edwin interrupted.
+
+"102 point 7," said Charlie.
+
+"Yes," he resumed, "she did convince me it might be serious.  But what
+then?  I told her I couldn't possibly leave.  She asked me why not.  She
+kept on asking me why not.  I said, What about my patients here?  She
+asked if any of them were dying.  I said no, but I couldn't leave them
+all to my partner.  I don't think she realised, before that, that I was
+in partnership.  She stuck to it worse than ever then.  I asked her why
+she wanted just me.  I said all we doctors were much about the same, and
+so on.  But it was no use.  The fact is, you know, Hilda always had a
+great notion of me as a doctor.  Can't imagine why!  Kept it to herself
+of course, jolly close, as she did most things, but I'd noticed it now
+and then.  You know--one of those tremendous beliefs she has.  You're
+another of her beliefs, if you want to know."
+
+"How do you know?  Give us another cigarette."  Edwin was exceedingly
+uneasy, and yet joyous.  One of his fears was that the Sunday might
+inquire how it was that he signed telegrams to Hilda with only his
+Christian name.  The Sunday, however, made no such inquiry.
+
+"How do I know!"  Charlie exclaimed.  "I could tell in a second by the
+way she showed me your telegram.  Oh!  And besides, that's an old story,
+my young friend.  You needn't flatter yourself it wasn't common property
+at one time."
+
+"Oh!  Rot!"  Edwin muttered.  "Well, go on!"
+
+"Well, then I explained that there was such a thing as medical
+etiquette...  Ah! you should have heard Hilda on medical etiquette.  You
+should just have heard her on that lay--medical etiquette versus the
+dying child.  I simply had to chuck that.  I said to her, `But suppose
+you hadn't caught me at home?  I might have been out for the day--a
+hundred things.'  It was sheer accident she had caught me.  At last she
+said: `Look here, Charlie, will you come, or won't you?'"
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+SIX.
+
+"Well, and what did you say?"
+
+"I should tell you she went down on her knees.  What should you have
+said, eh, my boy?  What could I say?  They've got you when they put it
+that way.  Especially a woman like she is!  I tell you she was simply
+terrific.  I tell you I wouldn't go through it again--not for
+something."
+
+Edwin responsively shook.
+
+"I just threw up the sponge and came.  I told Huskisson a thundering
+lie, to save my face, and away I came, and I've been with her ever
+since.  Dashed if I haven't!"
+
+"Who's Huskisson?"
+
+"My partner.  If anybody had told me beforehand that I should do such a
+thing I should have laughed.  Of course, if you look at it calmly, it's
+preposterous.  Preposterous--there's no other word--from my point of
+view.  But when they begin to put it the way she put it--well, you've
+got to decide quick whether you'll be sensible and a brute, or whether
+you'll sacrifice yourself and be a damned fool...  What good am I here?
+No more good than anybody else.  Supposing there _is_ danger?  Well, there
+may be.  But I've left twenty or thirty influenza cases at Ealing.
+Every influenza case is dangerous, if it comes to that."
+
+"Exactly," breathed Edwin.
+
+"I wouldn't have done it for any other woman," Charlie recommenced.
+"Not much!"
+
+"Then why did you do it for her?"
+
+Charlie shrugged his shoulders.  "There's something about her...  I
+don't know--" He lifted his nostrils fastidiously and gazed at the fire.
+"There's not many women knocking about like _her_...  She gets hold of
+you.  She's nothing at all for about six months at a stretch, and then
+she has one minute of the grand style...  That's the sort of woman she
+is.  Understand?  But I expect you don't know her as we do."
+
+"Oh yes, I understand," said Edwin.  "She must be tremendously fond of
+the kid."
+
+"You bet she is!  Absolute passion.  What sort is he?"
+
+"Oh!  He's all right.  But I've never seen them together, and I never
+thought she was so particularly keen on him."
+
+"Don't you make any mistake," said Charlie loftily.  "I believe women
+often are like that about an only child when they've had a rough time.
+And by the look of her she must have had a pretty rough time.  I've
+never made out why she married that swine, and I don't think anyone else
+has either."
+
+"Did you know him?"  Edwin asked, with sudden eagerness.
+
+"Not a bit.  But I've sort of understood he was a regular outsider.  Do
+you know how long she's been a widow?"
+
+"No," said Edwin.  "I've barely seen her."
+
+At these words he became so constrained, and so suspicious of the look
+on his own face, that he rose abruptly and began to walk about the room.
+
+"What's the matter?" demanded Charlie.  "Got pins and needles?"
+
+"Only fidgets," said Edwin.
+
+"I hope this isn't one of your preliminaries for clearing out and
+leaving me alone," Charlie complained.  "Here--where's that glass of
+yours?  Have another cigarette."
+
+There was a sound that seemed to resemble a tap on the door.
+
+"What's that noise?" said Edwin, startled.  The whole of his epidermis
+tingled, and he stood still.  They both listened.
+
+The sound was repeated.  Yes, it was a tap on the door; but in the
+night, and in the repose of the house, it had the character of some
+unearthly summons.
+
+Edwin was near the door.  He hesitated for an instant afraid, and then
+with an effort brusquely opened the door and looked forth beyond the
+shelter of the room.  A woman's figure was disappearing down the passage
+in the direction of the stairs.  It was she.
+
+"Did you--" he began.  But Hilda had gone.  Agitated, he said to
+Charlie, his hand still on the knob: "It's Mrs Cannon.  She just
+knocked and ran off.  I expect she wants you."
+
+Charlie jumped up and scurried out of the room exactly like a boy,
+despite his tall, mature figure of a man of thirty-five.
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER TWELVE.
+
+END OF THE NIGHT.
+
+For the second time that night Edwin was left alone for a long period in
+the little breakfast-room.  Charlie's phrase, `You're another of her
+beliefs,' shone like a lamp in his memory, beneficent.  And though he
+was still jealous of Charlie, with whom Hilda's relations were obviously
+very intimate; although he said to himself, `She never made any appeal
+to _me_, she would scarcely have _my_ help at any price;' nevertheless he
+felt most singularly uplifted and, without any reason, hopeful.  So much
+so that the fate of the child became with him a matter of secondary
+importance.  He excused this apparent callousness by making sure in his
+own mind that the child was in no real danger.  On the other hand he
+blamed himself for ever having fancied that Hilda was indifferent to
+George.  She, indifferent to her own son!  What a wretched, stupid
+slander!  He ought to have known better than that.  He ought to have
+known that a Hilda would bring to maternity the mightiest passions.  All
+that Charlie had said confirmed him in his idolisation of her.  `One
+minute of the grand style.'  That was it.  Charlie had judged her very
+well--damn him!  And the one minute was priceless, beyond all
+estimation.
+
+The fire sank, with little sounds of decay; and he stared at it,
+prevented as if by a spell from stooping to make it up, prevented even
+from looking at his watch.  At length he shivered slightly, and the
+movement broke the trance.  He wandered to the door, which Charlie had
+left ajar, and listened.  No sign of life!  He listened intently, but
+his ear could catch nothing whatever.  What were those two doing
+upstairs with the boy?  Cautiously he stepped out into the passage, and
+went to the foot of the stairs, where a gas jet was burning.  He was
+reminded of the nights preceding his father's death.
+
+Another gas jet showed along the corridor at the head of the stairs.  He
+put his foot on the first step; it creaked with a noise comparable to
+the report of a pistol in the dead silence.  But there was no responsive
+sound to show that anyone had been alarmed by this explosion.  Impelled
+by nervous curiosity, and growing careless, he climbed the
+reverberating, complaining stairs, and, entering the corridor, stood
+exactly in front of the closed door of the sick-room, and listened
+again, and heard naught.  His heart was obstreperously beating.  Part of
+the household slept; the other part watched; and he was between the two,
+like a thief, like a spy.  Should he knock, discreetly, and ask if he
+could be of help?  The strange romance of his existence, and of all
+existence, flowed around him in mysterious currents, obsessing him.
+
+Suddenly the door opened, and Charlie, barely avoiding a collision,
+started back in alarm.  Then Charlie recovered his self-possession and
+carefully shut the door.
+
+"I was just wondering whether I could be any use," Edwin stammered in a
+whisper.
+
+Charlie whispered: "It's all right, but I must run round to Stirling's,
+and get a drug I want."
+
+"Is he worse?"
+
+"Yes.  That is--yes.  You never know with a child.  They're up and down
+and all over the place inside of an hour."
+
+"Can I go?"  Edwin suggested.
+
+"No.  I can explain to him quicker than you."
+
+"You'll never find your way in this fog."
+
+"Bosh, man!  D'you think I don't know the town as well as you?  Besides,
+it's lifted considerably."
+
+By a common impulse they tiptoed to the window at the end of the
+corridor.  Across the lawn could be dimly discerned a gleam through the
+trees.
+
+"I'll come with you," said Edwin.
+
+"You'd much better stay here--in case."
+
+"Shall I go into the bedroom?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+Charlie turned to descend the stairs.
+
+"I say," Edwin called after him in a loud whisper, "when you get to the
+gate--you know the house--you go up the side entry.  The night bell's
+rather high up on the left hand."
+
+"All right!  All right!"  Charlie replied impatiently.  "Just come and
+shut the front door after me.  I don't want to bang it."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+When Edwin crept into the bedroom he was so perturbed by continually
+growing excitement that he saw nothing clearly except the central group
+of objects: that is to say, a narrow bed, whose burden was screened from
+him by its foot, a table, an empty chair, the gas-globe luminous against
+a dark-green blind, and Hilda in black, alert and erect beneath the
+down-flowing light.  The rest of the chamber seemed to stretch obscurely
+away into no confines.  Not for several seconds did he even notice the
+fire.  This confusing excitement was not caused by anything external
+such as the real or supposed peril of the child; it had its source
+within.
+
+As soon as Hilda identified him her expression changed from the intent
+frowning stare of inquiry to a smile.  Edwin had never before seen her
+smile in that way.  The smile was weak, resigned, almost piteous; and it
+was extraordinarily sweet.  He closed the door quietly, and moved in
+silence towards the bed.  She nodded an affectionate welcome.  He
+returned her greeting eagerly, and all his constraint was loosed away,
+and he felt at ease, and happy.  Her face was very pale indeed against
+the glittering blackness of her eyes, and her sombre disordered hair and
+untidy dress; but it did not show fatigue nor extreme anxiety; it was a
+face of calm meekness.  The sleeves of her dress were reversed, showing
+the forearms, which gave her an appearance of deshabille, homely,
+intimate, confiding.  "So it was common property at one time," Edwin
+thought, recalling a phrase of Charlie's in the breakfast-room.
+Strange: he wanted her in all her disarray, with all her woes,
+anxieties, solicitudes; he wanted her, piteous, meek, beaten by destiny,
+weakly smiling; he wanted her because she stood so, after the immense,
+masterful effort of the day, watching in acquiescence by that bed!
+
+"Has he gone?" she asked, in a voice ordinarily loud, but, for her,
+unusually tender.
+
+"Yes," said Edwin.  "He's gone.  He told me I'd better come in here.  So
+I came."
+
+She nodded again.  "Have that chair."
+
+Without arguing, he took the chair.  She remained standing.
+
+The condition of George startled him.  Evidently the boy was in a heavy
+stupor.  His body was so feverish that it seemed to give off a
+perceptible heat.  There was no need to touch the skin in order to know
+that it burned: one divined this.  The hair was damp.  About the pale
+lips an irregular rash had formed, purplish, patchy, and the rash seemed
+to be the mark and sign of some strange dreadful disease that nobody had
+ever named: a plague.  Worse than all this was the profound,
+comprehensive discomfort of the whole organism, showing itself in the
+unnatural pose of the limbs, and in multitudinous faint instinctive ways
+of the inert but complaining body.  And the child was so slight beneath
+the blanket, so young, so helpless, spiritually so alone.  How could
+even Hilda communicate her sympathy to that spirit, withdrawn and
+inaccessible?  During the illness of his father Edwin had thought that
+he was looking upon the extreme tragic limit of pathos, but this present
+spectacle tightened more painfully the heart.  It was more shameful: a
+more excruciating accusation against the order of the universe.  To
+think of George in his pride, strong, capricious, and dominant, while
+gazing at this victim of malady ... the contrast was intolerable!
+
+George was very ill.  And yet Hilda, despite the violence of her nature,
+could stand there calm, sweet, and controlled.  What power!  Edwin was
+humbled.  "This is the sort of thing that women of her sort can do," he
+said to himself.  "Why, Maggie and I are simply nothing to her!"  Maggie
+and he could be self-possessed in a crisis; they could stand a strain;
+but the strain would show itself either in a tense harshness, or in some
+unnatural lightness, or even flippancy.  Hilda was the very image of
+soft caressing sweetness.  He felt that he must emulate her.
+
+"Surely his temperature's gone up?" he said quietly.
+
+"Yes," Hilda replied, fingering absently the clinical thermometer that
+with a lot of other gear lay on the table.  "It's nearly 105.  It can't
+last like this.  It won't.  I've been through it with him before, but
+not quite so bad."
+
+"I didn't think anyone could have influenza twice, so soon," Edwin
+murmured.
+
+"Neither did I," said she.  "Still, he must have been sickening for it
+before he came down here."  There was a pause.  She wiped the boy's
+forehead.  "This change has come on quite suddenly," she said, in a
+different voice.  "Two hours ago--less than two hours ago--there was
+scarcely a sign of that rash."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Charlie says it's nothing particular."
+
+"What's Charlie gone for?"
+
+"I don't know."  She shook her head; then smiled.  "_Isn't_ it a good
+thing I brought him?"
+
+Indubitably it was.  Her caprice, characterised as preposterous by
+males, had been justified.  Thus chance often justifies women, setting
+at naught the high priests of reason.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+Looking at the unconscious and yet tormented child, Edwin was aware of a
+melting protective pity for him, of an immense desire to watch over his
+rearing with all insight, sympathy, and help, so that in George's case
+none of the mistakes and cruelties and misapprehensions should occur
+which had occurred in his own.  This feeling was intense to the point of
+being painful.
+
+"I don't know whether you know or not," he said, "but we're great pals,
+the infant and I."
+
+Hilda smiled, and in the very instant of seeing the smile its effect
+upon him was such that he humiliated himself before her in secret for
+ever having wildly suspected that she was jealous of the attachment.
+"Do you think I don't know all about that?" she murmured.  "He wouldn't
+be here now if it hadn't been for that."  After a silence she added:
+"You're the only person that he ever has really cared for, and I can
+tell you he likes you better than he likes me."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"I know by the way he talks and looks."
+
+"If he takes after his mother, that's no sign," Edwin retorted, without
+considering what he said.
+
+"What do you mean--`if he takes after his mother'?"  She seemed puzzled.
+
+"Could anyone tell _your_ real preferences from the way _you_ talked and
+looked?"  His audacious rashness astounded him.  Nevertheless he stared
+her in the eyes, and her glance fell.
+
+"No one but you could have said a thing like that," she observed mildly,
+yieldingly.
+
+And what he had said suddenly acquired a mysterious and wise
+significance and became oracular.  She alone had the power of inspiring
+him to be profound.  He had noticed that before, years ago, and first at
+their first meeting.  Or was it that she saw in him an oracle, and
+caused him to see with her?
+
+Slowly her face coloured, and she walked away to the fireplace, and
+cautiously tended it.  Constraint had seized him again, and his heart
+was loud.
+
+"Edwin," she summoned him, from the fireplace.
+
+He rose, shaking with emotion, and crossed the undiscovered spaces of
+the room to where she was.  He had the illusion that they were by
+themselves not in the room but in the universe.  She was leaning with
+one hand on the mantelpiece.
+
+"I must tell you something," she said, "that nobody at all knows except
+George's father, and probably nobody ever will know.  His sister knew,
+but she's dead."
+
+"Yes!" he muttered, in an exquisite rush of happiness.  After all, it
+was not with Charlie, nor even with Janet, that she was most intimate;
+it was with himself!
+
+"George's father was put in prison for bigamy.  George is illegitimate."
+She spoke with her characteristic extreme clearness of enunciation, in
+a voice that showed no emotion.
+
+"You don't mean it!"  He gasped foolishly.
+
+She nodded.  "I'm not a married woman.  I once thought I was, but I
+wasn't.  That's all."
+
+"But--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"You--you said six or seven years, didn't you?  Surely they don't give
+that long for bigamy?"
+
+"Oh!" she replied mildly.  "That was for something else.  When he came
+out of prison the first time they arrested him again instantly--so I was
+told.  It was in Scotland."
+
+"I see."
+
+There was a rattle as of hailstones on the window.  They both started.
+
+"That must be Charlie!" she exclaimed, suddenly loosing her excitement
+under this pretext.  "He doesn't want to ring and wake the house."
+
+Edwin ran out of the room, sliding and slipping down the deserted stairs
+that waited patiently through the night for human feet.
+
+"Forgot to take a key," said Charlie, appearing, breathless, just as the
+door opened.  "I meant to take the big key, and then I forgot."  He had
+a little round box in his hand.  He mounted the stairs two and three at
+a time.
+
+Edwin slowly closed the door.  He could not bring himself to follow
+Charlie and, after a moment's vacillation, he went back into the
+breakfast-room.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FOUR.
+
+Amazing, incalculable woman, wrapped within fold after fold of mystery!
+He understood better now, but even now there were things that he did not
+understand; and the greatest enigma of all remained unsolved, the
+original enigma of her treachery to himself...  And she had chosen just
+that moment, just that crisis, to reveal to him that sinister secret
+which by some unguessed means she had been able to hide from her
+acquaintance.  Naturally, if she wished to succeed with a boarding-house
+in Brighton she would be compelled to conceal somehow the fact that she
+was the victim of a bigamist and her child without a lawful name!  The
+merest prudence would urge her to concealment so long as concealment was
+possible; yes, even from Janet!  Her other friends deemed her a widow;
+Janet thought her the wife of a convict; he alone knew that she was
+neither wife nor widow.  Through what scathing experience she must have
+passed!  An unfamiliar and disconcerting mood gradually took complete
+possession of him.  At first he did not correctly analyse it.  It was
+sheer, exuberant, instinctive, unreasoning, careless joy.
+
+Then, after a long period of beatific solitude in the breakfast-room, he
+heard stealthy noises in the hall, and his fancy jumped to the idea of
+burglary.  Excited, unreflecting, he hurried into the hall.  Johnnie
+Orgreave, who had let himself in with a latchkey, was shutting and
+bolting the front door.  Johnnie's surprise was the greater.  He started
+violently on seeing Edwin, and then at once assumed the sang-froid of a
+hero of romance.  When Edwin informed him that Hilda had come, and
+Charlie with her, and that those two were watching by the boy, the rest
+of the household being in bed, Johnnie permitted himself a few verbal
+symptoms of astonishment.
+
+"How is Georgie?" he asked with an effort, as if ashamed.
+
+"He isn't much better," said Edwin evasively.
+
+Johnnie made a deprecatory sound with his tongue against his lips, and
+frowned, determined to take his proper share in the general anxiety.
+
+With careful, dignified movements, he removed his silk hat and his heavy
+ulster, revealing evening-dress, and a coloured scarf that overhung a
+crumpled shirt-front.
+
+"Where've you been?"  Edwin asked.
+
+"Tennis dance.  Didn't you know?"
+
+"No," said Edwin.
+
+"Really!"  Johnnie murmured, with a falsely ingenuous air.  After a
+pause he said: "They've left you all alone, then?"
+
+"I was in the breakfast-room," said Edwin, when he had given further
+information.
+
+They walked into the breakfast-room together.  Charlie's cigarette-case
+lay on the tray.
+
+"Those your cigarettes?"  Johnnie inquired.
+
+"No.  They're Charlie's."
+
+"Oh!  Master Charlie's, are they?  I wonder if they're any good."  He
+took one fastidiously.  Between two enormous outblowings of smoke he
+said: "Well, I'm dashed!  So Charlie's come with her!  I hope the kid'll
+soon be better...  I should have been back long ago, only I took Mrs
+Chris Hamson home."
+
+"Who's Mrs Chris Hamson?"
+
+"Don't you know her?  She's a ripping woman."
+
+He stood there in all the splendour of thirty years, with more than
+Charlie's _naivete_, politely trying to enter into the life of the
+household, but failing to do so because of his preoccupation with the
+rippingness of Mrs Chris Hamson.  The sight of him gave pleasure to
+Edwin.  It did not occur to him to charge the young man with being
+callous.
+
+When the cigarette was burnt, Johnnie said--
+
+"Well, I think I shall leave seeing Charlie till breakfast."
+
+And he went to bed.  On reaching the first-floor corridor he wished that
+he had gone to bed half a minute sooner; for in the corridor he
+encountered Janet, who had risen and was returning to her post; and
+Janet's face, though she meant it not, was an accusation.  Four o'clock
+had struck.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+FIVE.
+
+It was nearly half-past seven before Edwin left the house.  In the
+meantime he had seen Charlie briefly twice, and Janet once, but he had
+not revisited the sick-room nor seen Hilda again.  The boy's condition
+was scarcely altered; if there was any change, it was for the better.
+
+Dawn had broken.  The fog was gone, but a faint mist hung in the trees
+over the damp lawn.  The air was piercingly chill.  Yawning and glancing
+idly about him, he perceived a curious object on the dividing wall.  It
+was the candlestick which he had left there on the previous night.  The
+candle was entirely consumed.  "I may as well get over the wall," he
+said to himself, and he scrambled up it with adventurous cheerfulness,
+and took the candlestick with him; it was covered with drops of
+moisture.  He deposited it in the kitchen, where the servant was
+cleaning the range.  On the oak chest in the hall lay the "Manchester
+Guardian," freshly arrived.  He opened it with another heavy yawn.  At
+the head of one column he read, "Death of the Duke of Clarence," and at
+the head of another, "Death of Cardinal Manning."  The double news
+shocked him strangely.  He thought of what those days had been to others
+beside himself.  And he thought: "Supposing after all the kid doesn't
+come through?"
+
+
+
+VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
+
+HER HEART.
+
+After having been to business and breakfasted as usual, Edwin returned
+to the shop at ten o'clock.  He did not feel tired, but his manner was
+very curt, even with Stifford, and melancholy had taken the place of his
+joy.  The whole town was gloomy, and seemed to savour its gloom
+luxuriously.  But Edwin wondered why he should be melancholy.  There was
+no reason for it.  There was less reason for it than there had been for
+ten years.  Yet he was; and, like the town, he found pleasure in his
+state.  He had no real desire to change it.  At noon he suddenly went
+off home, thus upsetting Stifford's arrangements for the dinner-hour.
+"I shall lie down for a bit," he said to Maggie.  He slept till a little
+after one o'clock, and he could have slept longer, but dinner was ready.
+He said to himself, with an extraordinary sense of satisfaction, "_I
+have had a sleep._"  After dinner he lay down again, and slept till
+nearly three o'clock.  It was with the most agreeable sensations that he
+awakened.  His melancholy was passing; it had not entirely gone, but he
+could foresee the end of it as of an eclipse.  He made the discovery
+that he had only been tired.  Now he was somewhat reposed.  And as he
+lay in repose he was aware of an intensified perception of himself as a
+physical organism.  He thought calmly, "_What a fine thing life is!_"
+
+"I was just going to bring you some tea up," said Maggie, who met him on
+the stairs as he came down.  "I heard you moving.  Will you have some?"
+
+He rubbed his eyes.  His head seemed still to be distended with sleep,
+and this was a part of his well-being.  "Aye!" he replied, with lazy
+satisfaction.  "That'll just put me right."
+
+"George is much better," said Maggie.
+
+"Good!" he said heartily.
+
+Joy, wild and exulting, surged through him once more; and it was of such
+a turbulent nature that it would not suffer any examination of its
+origin.  It possessed him by its might.  As he drank the admirable tea
+he felt that he still needed a lot more sleep.  There were two points of
+pressure at the top of his head.  But he knew that he could sleep, and
+sleep well, whenever he chose; and that on the morrow his body would be
+perfectly restored.
+
+He walked briskly back to the shop, intending to work, and he was a
+little perturbed to find that he could not work.  His head refused.  He
+sat in the cubicle vaguely staring.  Then he was startled by a
+tremendous yawn, which seemed to have its inception in the very centre
+of his being, and which by the pang of its escape almost broke him in
+pieces.  "I've never yawned like that before," he thought, apprehensive.
+Another yawn of the same seismic kind succeeded immediately, and these
+frightful yawns continued one after another for several minutes, each
+leaving him weaker than the one before.  "I'd better go home while I
+can," he thought, intimidated by the suddenness and the mysteriousness
+of the attack.  He went home.  Maggie at once said that he would be
+better in bed, and to his own astonishment he agreed.  He could not eat
+the meal that Maggie brought to his room.
+
+"There's something the matter with you," said Maggie.
+
+"No.  I'm only tired."  He knew it was a lie.
+
+"You're simply burning," she said, but she refrained from any argument,
+and left him.
+
+He could not sleep.  His anticipations in that respect were painfully
+falsified.
+
+Later, Maggie came back.
+
+"Here's Dr Heve," she said briefly, in the doorway.  She was
+silhouetted against the light from the landing.  The doctor, in
+mourning, stood behind her.
+
+"Dr Heve?  What the devil--" But he did not continue the protest.
+
+Maggie advanced into the room and turned up the gas, and the glare
+wounded his eyes.
+
+"Yes," said Dr Heve, at the end of three minutes.  "You've got it.  Not
+badly, I hope.  But you've got it all right."
+
+Humiliating!  For the instinct of the Clayhangers was always to assume
+that by virtue of some special prudence, or immunity, or resisting
+power, peculiar to them alone, they would escape any popular affliction
+such as an epidemic.  In the middle of the night, amid feverish tossings
+and crises of thirst, and horrible malaise, it was more than
+humiliating!  Supposing he died?  People did die of influenza.  The
+strangest, the most monstrous things did happen.  For the first time in
+his life he lay in the genuine fear of death.  He had never been ill
+before.  And now he was ill.  He knew what it was to be ill.  The
+stupid, blundering clumsiness of death aroused his angry resentment.
+No!  It was impossible that he should die!  People did not die of
+influenza.
+
+The next day the doctor laughed.  But Edwin said to himself: "He may
+have laughed only to cheer me up.  They never tell their patients the
+truth."  And every cell of his body was vitiated, poisoned, inefficient,
+profoundly demoralised.  Ordinary health seemed the most precious and
+the least attainable boon.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TWO.
+
+After wildernesses of time that were all but interminable, the attack
+was completely over.  It had lasted a hundred hours, of which the first
+fifty had each been an age.  It was a febrile attack similar to
+George's, but less serious.  Edwin had possibly caught the infection at
+Knype Railway Station: yet who could tell?  Now he was in the
+drawing-room, shaved, clothed, but wearing slippers for a sign that he
+was only convalescent, and because the doctor had forbidden him the
+street.  He sat in front of the fire, in the easy chair that had been
+his father's favourite.  On his left hand were an accumulation of
+newspapers and a book; on his right, some business letters and documents
+left by the assiduous Stifford after a visit of sympathy and of affairs.
+The declining sun shone with weak goodwill on the garden.
+
+"Please, sir, there's a lady," said the servant, opening the door.
+
+He was startled.  His first thought naturally was, "It's Hilda!" in
+spite of the extreme improbability of it being Hilda.  Hilda had never
+set foot in his house.  Nevertheless, supposing it was Hilda, Maggie
+would assuredly come into the drawing-room--she could not do otherwise--
+and the three-cornered interview would, he felt, be very trying.  He
+knew that Maggie, for some reason inexplicable by argument, was out of
+sympathy with Hilda, as with Hilda's son.  She had given him regular
+news of George, who was now at about the same stage of convalescence as
+himself, but she scarcely mentioned the mother, and he had not dared to
+inquire.  These thoughts flashed through his brain in an instant.
+
+"Who is it?" he asked gruffly.
+
+"I--I don't know, sir.  Shall I ask?" replied the servant, blushing as
+she perceived that once again she had sinned.  She had never before been
+in a house where aristocratic ceremony was carried to such excess as at
+Edwin's.  Her unconquerable instinct, upon opening the front door to a
+well-dressed stranger, was to rush off and publish the news that
+somebody mysterious and grand had come, leaving the noble visitor on the
+door-mat.  She had been instructed in the ritual proper to these crises,
+but with little good result, for the crises took her unawares.
+
+"Yes.  Go and ask the name, and then tell my sister," said Edwin
+shortly.
+
+"Miss Clayhanger is gone out, sir."
+
+"Well, run along," he told her impatiently.
+
+He was standing anxiously near the door when she returned to the room.
+
+"Please, sir, it's a Mrs Cannon, and it's you she wants."
+
+"Show her in," he said, and to himself: "My God!"
+
+In the ten seconds that elapsed before Hilda appeared he glanced at
+himself in the mantel mirror, fidgeted with his necktie, and walked to
+the window and back again to his chair.  She had actually called to see
+him! ...  His agitation was extreme...  But how like her it was to call
+thus boldly! ...  Maggie's absence was providential.
+
+Hilda entered, to give him a lesson in blandness.  She wore a veil, and
+carried a muff--outworks of her self-protective, impassive demeanour.
+She was pale, and as calm as pale.  She would not take the easy chair
+which he offered her.  Useless to insist--she would not take it.  He
+brushed away letters and documents from the small chair to his right,
+and she took that chair...  Having taken it, she insisted that he should
+resume the easy chair.
+
+"I called just to say good-bye," she said.  "I knew you couldn't come
+out, and I'm going to-night."
+
+"But surely he isn't fit to travel?"  Edwin exclaimed.
+
+"George?  Not yet.  I'm leaving him behind.  You see I mustn't stay away
+longer than's necessary."
+
+She smiled, and lifted her veil as far as her nose.  She had not smiled
+before.
+
+"Charlie's gone back?"
+
+"Oh yes.  Two days ago.  He left a message for you."
+
+"Yes.  Maggie gave it me.  By the way, I'm sorry she's not in."
+
+"I've just seen her," said Hilda.
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"She came in to see Janet.  They're having a cup of tea in George's
+bedroom.  So I put my things on and walked round here at once."
+
+As Hilda made this surprising speech she gazed full at Edwin.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+THREE.
+
+A blush slowly covered his face.  They both sat silent.  Only the fire
+crackled lustily.  Edwin thought, as his agitation increased and
+entirely confused him, "No other woman was ever like this woman!"  He
+wanted to rise masterfully, to accomplish some gesture splendid and
+decisive, but he was held in the hollow of the easy chair as though by
+paralysis.  He looked at Hilda; he might have been looking at a
+stranger.  He tried to read her face, and he could not read it.  He
+could only see in it vague trouble.  He was afraid of her.  The idea
+even occurred to him that, could he be frank with himself, he would
+admit that he hated her.  The moments were intensely painful; the
+suspense exasperating and excruciating.  Ever since their last encounter
+he had anticipated this scene; his fancy had been almost continuously
+busy in fashioning this scene.  And now the reality had swept down upon
+him with no warning, and he was overwhelmed.
+
+She would not speak.  She had withdrawn her gaze, but she would not
+speak.  She would force him to speak.
+
+"I say," he began gruffly, in a resentful tone, careless as to what he
+was saying, "you might have told me earlier what you told me on
+Wednesday night.  Why didn't you tell me when I was at Brighton?"
+
+"I wanted to," she said meekly.  "But I couldn't.  I really couldn't
+bring myself to do it."
+
+"Instead of telling me a lie," he went on.  "I think you might have
+trusted me more than that."
+
+"A lie?" she muttered.  "I told you the truth.  I told you he was in
+prison."
+
+"You told me your husband was in prison," he corrected her, in a voice
+meditative and judicial.  He knew not in the least why he was talking in
+this strain.
+
+She began to cry.  At first he was not sure that she was crying.  He
+glanced surreptitiously, and glanced away as if guilty.  But at the next
+glance he was sure.  Her eyes glistened behind the veil, and tear-drops
+appeared at its edge and vanished under her chin.
+
+"You don't know how much I wanted to tell you!" she wept.
+
+She hid her half-veiled face in her hands.  And then he was victimised
+by the blackest desolation.  His one desire was that the scene should
+finish, somehow, anyhow.
+
+"I never wrote to you because there was nothing to say.  Nothing!"  She
+sobbed, still covering her face.
+
+"Never wrote to me--do you mean--"
+
+She nodded violently twice.  "Yes.  _Then!_"  He divined that suddenly she
+had begun to talk of ten years ago.  "I knew you'd know it was because I
+couldn't help it."  She spoke so indistinctly through her emotion and
+her tears, and her hands, that he could not distinguish the words.
+
+"What do you say?"
+
+"I say I couldn't help doing what I did.  I knew you'd know I couldn't
+help it.  I couldn't write.  It was best for me to be silent.  What else
+was there for me to do except be silent?  I knew you'd know I couldn't
+help it.  It was a--" Sobs interrupted her.
+
+"Of course I knew that," he said.  He had to control himself very
+carefully, or he too would have lost command of his voice.  Such was her
+power of suggestion over him that her faithlessness seemed now scarcely
+to need an excuse.
+
+(Somewhere within himself he smiled as he reflected that he, in his
+father's place, in his father's very chair, was thus under the spell of
+a woman whose child was nameless.  He smiled grimly at the thought of
+Auntie Hamps, of Clara, of the pietistic Albert!  They were of a
+different race, a different generation!  They belonged to a dead world!)
+
+"I shall tell you," Hilda recommenced mournfully, but in a clear and
+steady voice, at last releasing her face, which was shaken like that of
+a child in childlike grief.  "You'll never understand what I had to go
+through, and how I couldn't help myself"--she was tragically
+plaintive--"but I shall tell you...  You _must_ understand!"
+
+She raised her eyes.  Already for some moments his hands had been
+desiring the pale wrists between her sleeve and her glove.  They
+fascinated his hands, which, hesitatingly, went out towards them.  As
+soon as she felt his touch, she dropped to her knees, and her chin
+almost rested on the arm of his chair.  He bent over a face that was
+transfigured.
+
+"My heart never kissed any other man but you!" she cried.  "How often
+and often and often have I kissed you, and you never knew! ...  It was
+for a message that I sent George down here--a message to you!  I named
+him after you...  Do you think that if dreams could make him your
+child--he wouldn't be yours?"
+
+Her courage, and the expression of it, seemed to him to be sublime.
+
+"You don't know me!" she sighed, less convulsively.
+
+"Don't I!" he said, with lofty confidence.
+
+After a whole decade his nostrils quivered again to the odour of her
+olive skin.  Drowning amid the waves of her terrible devotion, he was
+recompensed in the hundredth part of a second for all that through her
+he had suffered or might hereafter suffer.  The many problems and
+difficulties which marriage with her would raise seemed trivial in the
+light of her heart's magnificent and furious loyalty.  He thought of the
+younger Edwin whom she had kissed into rapture, as of a boy too
+inexperienced in sorrow to appreciate this Hilda.  He braced himself to
+the exquisite burden of life.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Clayhanger, by Arnold Bennett
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