These Twain

"Janet wants to consult you," Hilda added; and even Hilda appeared to regard him as a strong saviour.

He thought:

"After all, then, I'm not the born idiot she'd like to make out. Now we're getting at her real opinion of me!"

"It's only about father's estate," said Janet.

"Why? Hasn't he made a will?"

"Oh yes! He made a will over thirty years ago. He left everything to mother and made her sole executor or whatever you call it. Just like him, wasn't it? … D'you know that he and mother never had a quarrel, nor anything near a quarrel?"

"Well," Edwin, nodding appreciatively, answered with an informed masculine air. "The law provides for all that. Tom will know. Did your mother make a will?"

"No. Dear thing! She would never have dreamt of it."

"Then letters of administration will have to be taken out," said Edwin.

Janet began afresh:

"Father was talking of making a new will two or three months ago. He mentioned it to Tom. He said he should like you to be one of the executors. He said he would sooner have you for an executor than anybody."

An intense satisfaction permeated Edwin, that he should have been desired as an executor by such an important man as Osmond Orgreave. He felt as though he were receiving compensation for uncounted detractions.

"Really?" said he. "I expect Tom will take out letters of administration, or Tom and Johnnie together; they'll make better executors than I should."

"It doesn't seem to make much difference who looks after it and who doesn't," Hilda sharply interrupted. "When there's nothing to look after."

"Nothing to look after?" Edwin repeated.

"Nothing to look after!" said Hilda in a firm and clear tone. "According to what Janet says."

"But surely there must be something!"

Janet answered mildly:

"I'm afraid there isn't much."

It was Hilda who told the tale. The freehold of Lane End House belonged to the estate, but there were first and second mortgages on it, and had been for years. Debts had always beleaguered the Orgreave family. A year ago money had apparently been fairly plentiful, but a great deal had been spent on re-furnishing. Jimmie had had money, in connection with his sinister marriage; Charlie had had money in connection with his practice, and Tom had enticed Mr. Orgreave into the Palace Porcelain Company. Mr. Orgreave had given a guarantee to the Bank for an overdraft, in exchange for debentures and shares in that company. The debentures were worthless, and therefore the shares also, and the bank had already given notice under the guarantee. There was an insurance policy-one poor little insurance policy for a thousand pounds-whose capital well invested might produce an income of twelve or fifteen shillings a week; but even that policy was lodged as security for an overdraft on one of Osmond's several private banking accounts. There were many debts, small to middling. The value of the Orgreave architectural connection was excessively dubious-so much of it had depended upon Osmond Orgreave himself. The estate might prove barely solvent; on the other hand it might prove insolvent; so Johnnie, who had had it from Tom, had told Janet that day, and Janet had told Hilda.

"Your father was let in for the Palace Porcelain Company?" Edwin breathed, with incredulous emphasis on the initial p's. "What on earth was Tom thinking of?"

"That's what Johnnie wants to know," said Janet. "Johnnie was very angry. They've had some words about it."

Except for the matter of the Palace Porcelain Company, Edwin was not surprised at the revelations, though he tried to be. The more closely he examined his attitude for years past to the Orgreave household structure, the more clearly he had to admit that a suspicion of secret financial rottenness had never long been absent from his mind-not even at the period of renewed profuseness, a year or two ago, when furniture-dealers, painters, and paperhangers had been enriched. His resentment against the deceased charming Osmond and also against the affectionate and blandly confident mother, was keen and cold. They had existed, morally, on Janet for many years; monopolised her, absorbed her, aged her, worn her out, done everything but finish her, – and they had made no provision for her survival. In addition to being useless, she was defenceless, helpless, penniless, and old; and she shivered now that the warmth of her parents' affection was withdrawn by death.

"You see," said Janet. "Father was so transparently honest and generous."

Edwin said nothing to this sincere outburst.

"Have you got any money at all, Janet?" asked Hilda.

"There's a little household money, and by a miracle I've never spent the ten-pound note poor dad gave me on my last birthday."

"Well," said Edwin, sardonically imaging that ten-pound note as a sole defence for Janet against the world. "Of course Johnnie will have to allow you something out of the business-for one thing."

"I'm sure he will, if he can," Janet agreed. "But he says it's going to be rather tight. He wants us to clear out of the house at once."

"Take my advice and don't do it," said Edwin. "Until the house is let or sold it may as well be occupied by you as stand empty-better in fact, because you'll look after it."

"That's right enough, anyway," said Hilda, as if to imply that by a marvellous exception a man had for once in a while said something sensible.

"You needn't use all the house," Edwin proceeded. "You won't want all the servants."

"I wish you'd say a word to Johnnie," breathed Janet.

"I'll say a word to Johnnie, all right," Edwin answered loudly. "But it seems to me it's Tom that wants talking to. I can't imagine what he was doing to let your father in for that Palace Porcelain business. It beats me."

Janet quietly protested:

"I feel sure he thought it was all right."

"Oh, of course!" said Hilda, bitterly. "Of course! They always do think it's all right. And here's my husband just going into one of those big dangerous affairs, and he thinks it's all right, and nothing I can say will stop him from going into it. And he'll keep on thinking it's all right until it's all wrong and we're ruined, and perhaps me left a widow with George." Her lowered eyes blazed at the carpet.

Janet, troubled, glanced from one to the other, and then, with all the tremendous unconscious persuasive force of her victimhood and her mourning, murmured gently to Edwin:

"Oh! Don't run any risks! Don't run any risks!"

Edwin was staggered by the swift turn of the conversation. Two thousand women hemmed him in more closely than ever. He could do nothing against them except exercise an obstinacy which might be esteemed as merely brutal. They were not accessible to argument-Hilda especially. Argument would be received as an outrage. It would be impossible to convince Hilda that she had taken a mean and disgraceful advantage of him, and that he had every right to resent her behaviour. She was righteousness and injuredness personified. She partook, in that moment, of the victimhood of Janet. And she baffled him.

He bit his lower lip.

"All that's not the business before the meeting," he said as lightly as he could. "D'you think if I stepped down now I should catch Johnnie at the office?"

And all the time, while his heart hardened against Hilda, he kept thinking:

"Suppose I did come to smash!"

Janet had put a fear in his mind, Janet who in her wistfulness and her desolating ruin seemed to be like only a little pile of dust-all that remained of the magnificent social structure of a united and numerous Orgreave family.

V

Edwin met Tertius Ingpen in the centre of the town outside the offices of Orgreave and Sons, amid the commotion caused by the return of uplifted spectators from a football match in which the team curiously known to the sporting world as "Bursley Moorthorne" had scored a broken leg and two goals to nil.

"Hello!" Ingpen greeted him. "I was thinking of looking in at your place to-night."

"Do!" said Edwin. "Come up with me now."

"Can't! … Why do these ghastly louts try to walk over you as if they didn't see you?" Then in another tone, very quietly, and nodding in the direction of the Orgreave offices: "Been in there? … What a week, eh! … How are things?"

"Bad," Edwin answered. "In a word, bad!"

Ingpen lifted his eyebrows.

They turned away out of the crowd, up towards the tranquillity of the Turnhill Road. They were manifestly glad to see each other. Edwin had had a satisfactory interview with Johnnie Orgreave, – satisfactory in the sense that Johnnie had admitted the wisdom of all that Edwin said and promised to act on it.

"I've just been talking to young Johnnie for his own good," said Edwin.

And in a moment, with eagerness, with that strange deep satisfaction felt by the carrier of disastrous tidings, he told Ingpen all that he knew of the plight of Janet Orgreave.

"If you ask me," said he, "I think it's infamous."

"Infamous," Ingpen repeated the word savagely. "There's no word for it. What'll she do?"

"Well, I suppose she'll have to live with Johnnie."

"And where will Mrs. Chris come in, then?" Ingpen asked in a murmur.

"Mrs. Chris Hamson?" exclaimed Edwin startled. "Oh! Is that affair still on the carpet? … Cheerful outlook!"

Ingpen pulled his beard.

"Anyhow," said he, "Johnnie's the most reliable of the crew. Charlie's the most agreeable, but Johnnie's the most reliable. I wouldn't like to count much on Tom, and as for Jimmie, well of course-!"

"I always look on Johnnie as a kid. Can't help it."

"There's no law against that, so long as you don't go and blub it out to Mrs. Chris," Ingpen laughed.

"I don't know her."

"You ought to know her. She's an education, my boy."

"I've been having a fair amount of education lately," said Edwin. "Only this afternoon I was practically told that I ought to give up the idea of my new works because it has risks and the Palace Porcelain Co. was risky and Janet hasn't a cent. See the point?"

He was obliged to talk about the affair, because it was heavily on his mind. A week earlier he had persuaded himself that the success of a marriage depended chiefly on the tone employed to each other by the contracting parties. But in the disturbing scene of the afternoon, his tone had come near perfection, and yet marriage presented itself as even more stupendously difficult than ever. Ingpen's answering words salved and strengthened him. The sensation of being comprehended was delicious. Intimacy progressed.

"I say," said Edwin, as they parted. "You'd better not know anything about all this when you come to-night."

"Right you are, my boy."

Their friendship seemed once more to be suddenly and surprisingly intensified.

When Edwin returned, Janet had vanished again. Like an animal which fears the hunt and whose shyness nothing can cure, she had fled to cover at the first chance. According to Hilda she had run home because it had occurred to her that she must go through her mother's wardrobe and chest of drawers without a moment's delay.

Edwin's account to his wife of the interview with Johnnie Orgreave was given on a note justifiably triumphant. In brief he had "talked sense" to Johnnie, and Johnnie had been convicted and convinced. Hilda listened with respectful propriety. Edwin said nothing as to his encounter with Tertius Ingpen, partly from prudence and partly from timidity. When Ingpen arrived at the house, much earlier than he might have been expected to arrive, Edwin was upstairs, and on descending he found his wife and his friend chatting in low and intimate voices close together in the drawing-room. The gas had been lighted.

"Here's Mr. Ingpen," said Hilda, announcing a surprise.

"How do, Ingpen?"

"How do, Ed?"

Ingpen did not rise. Nor did they shake hands, but in the Five Towns friends who have reached a certain degree of intimacy proudly omit the ceremony of handshaking when they meet. It was therefore impossible for Hilda to divine that Edwin and Tertius had previously met that day, and apparently Ingpen had not divulged the fact. Edwin felt like a plotter.

The conversation of course never went far away from the subject of the Orgreaves-and Janet in particular. Ingpen's indignation at the negligence which had left Janet in the lurch was more than warm enough to satisfy Hilda, whose grievance against the wicked carelessness of heads of families in general seemed to be approaching expression again. At length she said:

"It's enough to make every woman think seriously of where she'd be-if anything happened."

Ingpen smiled teasingly.

"Now you're getting personal."

"And what if I am? With my headstrong husband going in for all sorts of schemes!" Hilda's voice was extraordinarily clear and defiant.

Edwin nervously rose.

"I'll just get some cigarettes," he mumbled.

Hilda and Ingpen scarcely gave him any attention. Already they were exciting themselves. Although he knew that the supply of cigarettes was in the dining-room, he toured half the house before going there; and then lit the gas and with strange deliberation drew the blinds; next he rang the bell for matches, and, having obtained them, lit a cigarette.

When he re-entered the drawing-room, Ingpen was saying with terrific conviction:

"You're quite wrong, as I've told you before. It's your instinct that's wrong, not your head. Women will do anything to satisfy their instincts, simply anything. They'll ruin your life in order to satisfy their instincts. Yes, even when they know jolly well their instincts are wrong!"

Edwin thought:

"Well, if these two mean to have a row, it's no affair of mine."

But Hilda, seemingly overfaced, used a very moderate tone to retort:

"You're very outspoken."

Tertius Ingpen answered firmly:

"I'm only saying aloud what every man thinks… Mind-every man."

"And how comes it that you know so much about women?"

"I'll tell you sometime," said Ingpen, shortly, and then smiled again.

Edwin, advancing, murmured:

"Here. Have a cigarette."

A few moments later Ingpen was sketching out a Beethoven symphony unaided on the piano, and holding his head back to keep the cigarette-smoke out of his eyes.

VI

When the hour struck for which Hilda had promised a sandwich supper Edwin and Tertius Ingpen were alone in the drawing-room, and Ingpen was again at the piano, apparently absorbed in harmonic inventions of his own. No further word had been said upon the subject of the discussion between Ingpen and Hilda. On the whole, despite the reserve of Hilda's demeanour, Edwin considered that marriage at the moment was fairly successful, and the stream of existence running in his favour. At five minutes after the hour, restless, he got up and said:

"I'd better be seeing what's happened to that supper."

Ingpen nodded, as in a dream.

Edwin glanced into the dining-room, where the complete supper was waiting in illuminated silence and solitude. Then he went to the boudoir. There, the two candlesticks from the mantelpiece had been put side by side on the desk, and the candles lit the figures of Hilda and her son. Hilda, kneeling, held a stamped and addressed letter in her hand, the boy was bent over the desk at his drawing, which his mother regarded. Edwin in his heart affectionately derided them for employing candles when the gas would have been so much more effective; he thought that the use of candles was "just like" one of Hilda's unforeseeable caprices. But in spite of his secret derision he was strangely affected by the group as revealed by the wavering candle-flames in the general darkness of the room. He seldom saw Hilda and George together; neither of them was very expansive; and certainly he had never seen Hilda kneeling by her son's side since a night at the Orgreaves' before her marriage, when George lay in bed unconscious and his spirit hesitated between earth and heaven. He knew that Hilda's love for George had in it something of the savage, but, lacking demonstrations of it, he had been apt to forget its importance in the phenomena of their united existence. Kneeling by her son, Hilda had the look of a girl, and the ingenuousness of her posture touched Edwin. The idea shot through his brain like a star, that life was a marvellous thing.

As the door had been ajar, they scarcely heard him come in. George turned first.

And then Ada was standing at the door.

"Yes'm?"

"Oh! Ada! Just run across with this letter to the pillar, will you?"

"Yes'm."

"You've missed the post, you know," said Edwin.

Hilda got up slowly.

"It doesn't matter. Only I want it to be in the post."

As she gave the letter to Ada he speculated idly as to the address of the letter, and why she wanted it to be in the post. Anyhow, it was characteristic of her to want the thing to be in the post. She would delay writing a letter for days, and then, having written it, be "on pins" until it was safely taken out of the house; and even when the messenger returned she would ask: "Did you put that letter in the post?"

Ada had gone.

"What's he drawing, this kid?" asked Edwin, genially.

Nobody answered. Standing between his wife and the boy he looked at the paper. The first thing he noticed was some lettering, achieved in an imitation of architect's lettering: "Plan for proposed new printing-works to be erected by Edwin Clayhanger, Esq., upon land at Shawport. George Edwin Clayhanger, architect." And on other parts of the paper, "Ground-floor plan" and "Elevation." The plan at a distance resembled the work of a real architect. Only when closely examined did it reveal itself as a piece of boyish mimicry. The elevation was not finished… It was upon this that, with intervals caused by the necessity of escaping from bores, George had been labouring all day. And here was exposed the secret and the result of his chumminess with Johnnie Orgreave. Yet the boy had never said a word to Edwin in explanation of that chumminess; nor had Johnnie himself.

"He's been telling me he's going to be an architect," said Hilda.

"Is this plan a copy of Johnnie's, or is it his own scheme?" asked Edwin.

"Oh, his own!" Hilda answered, with a rapidity and an earnestness which disclosed all her concealed pride in the boy.

Edwin was thrilled. He pored over the plan, making remarks and putting queries, in a dull matter-of-fact tone; but he was so thrilled that he scarcely knew what he was saying or understood the replies to his questions. It seemed to him wondrous, miraculous, overwhelming, that his own disappointed ambition to be an architect should have re-flowered in his wife's child who was not his child. He was reconciled to being a printer, and indeed rather liked being a printer, but now all his career presented itself to him as a martyrisation. And he passionately swore that such a martyrisation should not happen to George. George's ambition should be nourished and forwarded as no boyish ambition had ever been nourished and forwarded before. For a moment he had a genuine conviction that George must be a genius.

Hilda, behind the back of proud, silent George, pulled Edwin's face to hers and kissed it. And as she kissed she gazed at Edwin and her eyes seemed to be saying: "Have your works; I have yielded. Perhaps it is George's plan that has made me yield, but anyhow I am strong enough to yield. And my strength remains."

And Edwin thought: "This woman is unique. What other woman could have done that in just that way?" And in their embrace, intensifying and complicating its significance, were mingled the sensations of their passion, his triumph, her surrender, the mysterious boy's promise, and their grief for Janet's tragedy.

"Old Ingpen's waiting for his supper, you know," said Edwin tenderly. "George, you must show that to Mr. Ingpen."

BOOK II

THE PAST

CHAPTER XI

LITHOGRAPHY

I

Edwin, sitting behind a glazed door with the word "Private" elaborately patterned on the glass, heard through the open window of his own office the voices of the Benbow children and their mother in the street outside.

"Oh, Mother! What a big sign!"

"Yes. Isn't Uncle Edwin a proud man to have such a big sign?"

"Hsh!"

"It wasn't up yesterday."

"L, i, t, h, o, – "

"My word, Rupy! You are getting on!"

"They're such large letters, aren't they, mother? … 'Lithographic' … 'Lithographic printing. Edwin Clayhanger'."

"Hsh! … Bert, how often do you want me to tell you about your shoe-lace?"

"I wonder if George has come."

"Mother, can't I ring the bell?"

All the children were there, with their screeching voices. Edwin wondered that Rupert should have been brought. Where was the sense of showing a three-year-old infant like Rupert over a printing-works? But Clara was always like that. The difficulty of leaving little Rupert alone at home did not present itself to the august uncle.

Edwin rose, locked a safe that was let into the wall of the room, and dropped the key into his pocket. The fact of the safe being let into the wall gave him as much simple pleasure as any detail of the new works; it was an idea of Johnnie Orgreave's. He put a grey hat carelessly at the back of his head, and, hands in pockets, walked into the next and larger room, which was the clerks' office.

Both these rooms had walls distempered in a green tint, and were fitted and desked in pitchpine. Their newness was stark, and yet in the clerks' office the irrational habituating processes of time were already at work. On the painted iron mantelpiece lay a dusty white tile, brought as a sample long before the room was finished, and now without the slightest excuse for survival. Nevertheless the perfunctory cleaner lifted the tile on most mornings, dusted underneath it, and replaced it; and Edwin and his staff saw it scores of times daily and never challenged it, and gradually it was acquiring a prescriptive right to exist just where it did. And the day was distant when some inconvenient, reforming person would exclaim:

"What's this old tile doing here?"

What Edwin did notice was that the walls and desks showed marks and even wounds; it seemed to him somehow wrong that the brand new could not remain forever brand new. He thought he would give a mild reproof or warning to the elder clerk, (once the shop-clerk in the ancient establishment at the corner of Duck Bank and Wedgwood Street) and then he thought: "What's the use?" and only murmured:

"I'm not going off the works."

And he passed out, with his still somewhat gawky gait, to the small entrance-hall of the works. On the outer face of the door, which he closed, was painted the word "Office." He had meant to have the words "Counting-House" painted on that door, because they were romantic and fine-sounding; but when the moment came to give the order he had quaked before such romance; he was afraid as usual of being sentimental and of "showing off," and with assumed satire had publicly said: "Some chaps would stick 'Counting-house' as large as life all across the door." He now regretted his poltroonery. And he regretted sundry other failures in courage connected with the scheme of the works. The works existed, but it looked rather like other new buildings, and not very much like the edifice he had dreamed. It ought to have been grander, more complete, more dashingly expensive, more of an exemplar to the slattern district. He had been (he felt) unduly influenced by the local spirit for half-measures. And his life seemed to be a life of half-measures, a continual falling-short. Once he used to read studiously on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday evenings. He seldom read now, and never with regularity. Scarcely a year ago he had formed a beautiful vague project of being "musical." At Hilda's instigation he had bought a book of musical criticism by Hubert Parry, and Hilda had swallowed it in three days, but he had begun it and not finished it. And the musical evenings, after feeble efforts to invigorate them, had fainted and then died on the miserable excuse that circumstances were not entirely favourable to them. And his marriage, so marvellous in its romance during the first days…!

Then either his commonsense or his self-respect curtly silenced these weak depreciations. He had wanted the woman and he had won her, – he had taken her. There she was, living in his house, bearing his name, spending his money! The world could not get over that fact, and the carper in Edwin's secret soul could not get over it either. He had said that he would have a new works, and, with all its faults and little cowardices, there the new works was! And moreover it had just been assessed for municipal rates at a monstrous figure. He had bought his house (and mortgaged it); he had been stoical to bad debts; he had sold securities-at rather less than they cost him; he had braved his redoubtable wife; and he had got his works! His will, and naught else, was the magic wand that had conjured it into existence.