Arnold Bennett (continued 9)

“Good afternoon, 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 naïve 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.