Читать книгу: «These Twain», страница 3

He listened.

"No," Clara was saying, "we don't know what's happened to him since he came out of prison. He got two years." She was speaking in what Edwin called her 'scandal' tones, low, clipped, intimate, eager, blissful.

And then Albert Benbow's voice:

"He's had the good sense not to bother us."

Edwin, while resenting the conversation, and the Benbows' use of "we" and "us" in a matter which did not concern them, was grimly comforted by the thought of their ignorance of a detail which would have interested them passionately. None but Hilda and himself knew that the bigamist was at that moment in prison again for another and a later offence. Everything had been told but that.

"Of course," said Clara, "they needn't have said anything about the bigamy at all, and nobody outside the family need have known that poor Hilda was not just an ordinary widow. But we all thought-"

"I don't know so much about that, Clary," Albert Benbow interrupted his wife; "you mustn't forget his real wife came to Turnhill to make enquiries. That started a hare."

"Well, you know what I mean," said Clara vaguely.

Mr. Peartree's voice came in:

"But surely the case was in the papers?"

"I expect it was in the Sussex papers," Albert replied. "You see, they went through the ceremony of marriage at Lewes. But it never got into the local rag, because he got married in his real name-Cannon wasn't his real name; and he'd no address in the Five Towns, then. He was just a boarding-house keeper at Brighton. It was a miracle it didn't get into the Signal, if you ask me; but it didn't. I happen to know" – his voice grew important-"that the Signal people have an arrangement with the Press Association for a full report of all matrimonial cases that 'ud be likely to interest the district. However, the Press Association weren't quite on the spot that time. And it's not surprising they weren't, either."

Clara resumed:

"No. It never came out. Still, as I say, we all thought it best not to conceal anything. Albert strongly advised Edwin not to attempt any such thing." ("What awful rot!" thought Edwin.) "So we just mentioned it quietly like to a few friends. After all, poor Hilda was perfectly innocent. Of course she felt her position keenly when she came to live here after the wedding." ("Did she indeed!" thought Edwin.) "Edwin would have the wedding in London. We did so feel for her." ("Did you indeed!" thought Edwin.) "She wouldn't have an At Home. I knew it was a mistake not to. We all knew. But no, she would not. Folks began to talk. They thought it strange she didn't have an At Home like other folks. Many young married women have two At Homes nowadays. So in the end she was persuaded. She fixed it for August because she thought so many people would be away at the seaside. But they aren't-at least not so many as you'd think. Albert says it's owing to the General Election upset. And she wouldn't have it in the afternoon like other folks. Mrs. Edwin isn't like other folks, and you can't alter her."

"What's the matter with the evening for an At Home, anyhow?" asked Benbow the breezy and consciously broad-minded.

"Oh, of course, I quite agree. I like it. But folks are so funny."

After a momentary pause, Mr. Peartree said uncertainly:

"And there's a little boy?"

Said Clara:

"Yes, the one you've seen."

Said Auntie Hamps:

"Poor little thing! I do feel so sorry for him-when he grows up-"

"You needn't, Auntie," said Maggie curtly, expressing her attitude to George in that mild curtness.

"Of course," said Clara quickly. "We never let it make any difference. In fact our Bert and he are rather friends, aren't they, Albert?"

At this moment George himself opened the door of the dining-room, letting out a faint buzz of talk and clink of vessels. His mouth was not empty.

Precipitately Edwin plunged into the breakfast-room.

"Hello! You people!" he murmured. "Well, Mr. Peartree."

There they were-all of them, including the parson-grouped together, lusciously bathing in the fluid of scandal.

Clara turned, and without the least constraint said sweetly:

"Oh, Edwin! There you are! I was just telling Mr. Peartree about you and Hilda, you know. We thought it would be better."

"You see," said Auntie Hamps impressively, "Mr. Peartree will be about the town to-morrow, and a word from him-"

Mr. Peartree tried unsuccessfully to look as if he was nobody in particular.

"That's all right," said Edwin. "Perhaps the door might as well be shut." He thought, as many a man has thought: "My relations take the cake!"

Clara occupied the only easy chair in the room. Mrs. Hamps and the parson were seated. Maggie stood. Albert Benbow, ever uxorious, was perched sideways on the arm of his wife's chair. Clara, centre of the conclave and of all conclaves in which she took part, was the mother of five children, – and nearing thirty-five years of age. Maternity had ruined her once slim figure, but neither she nor Albert seemed to mind that, – they seemed rather to be proud of her unshapeliness. Her face was unspoiled. She was pretty and had a marvellously fair complexion. In her face Edwin could still always plainly see the pert, charming, malicious girl of fourteen who loathed Auntie Hamps and was rude to her behind her back. But Clara and Auntie Hamps were fast friends nowadays. Clara's brood had united them. They thought alike on all topics. Clara had accepted Auntie Hamps's code practically entire; but on the other hand she had dominated Auntie Hamps. The respect which Auntie Hamps showed for Clara and for Edwin, and in a slightly less degree for Maggie, was a strange phenomenon in the old age of that grandiose and vivacious pillar of Wesleyanism and the conventions.

Edwin did not like Clara; he objected to her domesticity, her motherliness, her luxuriant fruitfulness, the intonations of her voice, her intense self-satisfaction and her remarkable duplicity; and perhaps more than anything to her smug provinciality. He did not positively dislike his brother-in-law, but he objected to him for his uxoriousness, his cheerful assurance of Clara's perfection, his contented and conceited ignorance of all intellectual matters, his incorrigible vulgarity of a small manufacturer who displays everywhere the stigmata of petty commerce, and his ingenuous love of office. As for Maggie, the plump spinster of forty, Edwin respected her when he thought of her, but reproached her for social gawkiness and taciturnity. As for Auntie Hamps, he could not respect, but he was forced to admire, her gorgeous and sustained hypocrisy, in which no flaw had ever been found, and which victimised even herself; he was always invigorated by her ageless energy and the sight of her handsome, erect, valiant figure.

Edwin's absence had stopped the natural free course of conversation. But there were at least three people in the room whom nothing could abash: Mrs. Hamps, Clara, and Mr. Peartree.

Mr. Peartree, sitting up with his hands on his baggy knees, said:

"Everything seems to have turned out very well in the end, Mr. Clayhanger-very well, indeed." His features showed less of the tedium of life.

"Eh, yes! Eh, yes!" breathed Auntie Hamps in ecstasy.

Edwin, diffident and ill-pleased, was about to suggest that the family might advantageously separate, when George came after him into the room.

"Oh!" cried George.

"Well, little jockey!" Clara began instantly to him with an exaggerated sweetness that Edwin thought must nauseate the child, "would you like Bert to come up and play with you one of these afternoons?"

George stared at her, and slowly flushed.

"Yes," said George. "Only-"

"Only what?"

"Supposing I was doing something else when he came?"

Without waiting for possible developments George turned to leave the room again.

"You're a caution, you are!" said Albert Benbow; and to the adults: "Hates to be disturbed, I suppose."

"That's it," said Edwin responsively, as brother-in-law to brother-in-law. But he felt that he, with a few months' experience of another's child, appreciated the exquisite strange sensibility of children infinitely better than Albert were he fifty times a father.

"What is a caution, Uncle Albert?" asked George, peeping back from the door.

Auntie Hamps good-humouredly warned the child of the danger of being impertinent to his elders:

"George! George!"

"A caution is a caution to snakes," said Albert. "Shoo!" Making a noise like a rocket, he feinted to pursue the boy with violence.

Mr. Peartree laughed rather loudly, and rather like a human being, at the word "snakes." Albert Benbow's flashes of humour, indeed, seemed to surprise him, if only for an instant, out of his attitudinarianism.

Clara smiled, flattered by the power of her husband to reveal the humanity of the parson.

"Albert's so good with children," she said. "He always knows exactly…" She stopped, leaving what he knew exactly to the listeners' imagination.

Uncle Albert and George could be heard scuffling in the hall.

Auntie Hamps rose with a gentle sigh, saying:

"I suppose we ought to join the others."

Her social sense, which was pretty well developed, had at last prevailed.

The sisters Maggie and Clara, one in light and the other in dark green, walked out of the room. Maggie's face had already stiffened into mute constraint, and Clara's into self-importance, at the prospect of meeting the general company.

III

Auntie Hamps held back, and Edwin at once perceived from the conspiratorial glance in her splendid eyes that in suggesting a move she had intended to deceive her fellow-conspirator in life, Clara. But Auntie Hamps could not live without chicane. And she was happiest when she had superimposed chicane upon chicane in complex folds.

She put a ringed hand softly but arrestingly upon Edwin's arm, and pushed the door to. Alone with her and the parson, Edwin felt himself to be at bay, and he drew back before an unknown menace.

"Edwin, dear," said she, "Mr. Peartree has something to suggest to you. I was going to say 'a favour to ask,' but I won't put it like that. I'm sure my nephew will look upon it as a privilege. You know how much Mr. Peartree has at heart the District Additional Chapels Fund-"

Edwin did not know how much; but he had heard of the Macclesfield District Additional Chapels Fund, Bursley being one of the circuits in the Macclesfield District. Wesleyanism finding itself confronted with lessening congregations and with a shortage of ministers, the Macclesfield District had determined to prove that Wesleyanism was nevertheless spiritually vigorous by the odd method of building more chapels. Mr. Peartree, inventor of Saturday afternoon Bible-Classes for schoolboys, was one of the originators of the bricky scheme, and in fact his lecture upon the "Mantle and Mission of Elijah" was to be in aid of it. The next instant Mr. Peartree had invited Edwin to act as District Treasurer of the Fund, the previous treasurer having died.

More chicane! The parson's visit, then, was not a mere friendly call, inspired by the moment. It was part of a scheme. It had been planned against him. Did they (he seemed to be asking himself) think him so ingenuous, so simple, as not to see through their dodge? If not, then why the preliminary pretences? He did not really ask himself these questions, for the reason that he knew the answers to them. When a piece of chicane had succeeded Auntie Hamps forgot it, and expected others to forget it, – or at any rate she dared, by her magnificent front, anybody on earth to remind her of it. She was quite indifferent whether Edwin saw through her dodge or not.

"You're so good at business," said she.

Ah! She would insist on the business side of the matter, affecting to ignore the immense moral significance which would be attached to Edwin's acceptance of the office! Were he to yield, the triumph for Methodism would ring through the town. He read all her thoughts. Nothing could break down her magnificent front. She had cornered him by a device; she had him at bay; and she counted on his weak good-nature, on his easy-going cowardice, for a victory.

Mr. Peartree talked. Mr. Peartree expressed his certitude that Edwin was "with them at heart," and his absolute reliance upon Edwin's sense of the responsibilities of a man in his, Edwin's, position. Auntie Hamps recalled with fervour Edwin's early activities in Methodism-the Young Men's Debating Society, for example, which met at six o'clock on frosty winter mornings for the proving of the faith by dialectics.

And Edwin faltered in his speech.

"You ought to get Albert," he feebly suggested.

"Oh, no!" said Auntie. "Albert is grand in his own line. But for this, we want a man like you."

It was a master-stroke. Edwin had the illusion of trembling, and yet he knew that he did not tremble, even inwardly. He seemed to see the forces of evolution and the forces of reaction ranged against each other in a supreme crisis. He seemed to see the alternative of two futures for himself-and in one he would be a humiliated and bored slave, and in the other a fine, reckless ensign of freedom. He seemed to be doubtful of his own courage. But at the bottom of his soul he was not doubtful. He remembered all the frightful and degrading ennui which when he was young he had suffered as a martyr to Wesleyanism and dogma, all the sinister deceptions which he had had to practise and which had been practised upon him. He remembered his almost life-long intense hatred of Mr. Peartree. And he might have clenched his hands bitterly and said with homicidal animosity: "Now I will pay you out! And I will tell you the truth! And I will wither you up and incinerate you, and be revenged for everything in one single sentence!" But he felt no bitterness, and his animosity was dead. At the bottom of his soul there was nothing but a bland indifference that did not even scorn.

"No," he said quietly. "I shan't be your treasurer. You must ask somebody else."

A vast satisfaction filled him. The refusal was so easy, the opposing forces so negligible.

Auntie Hamps and Mr. Peartree knew nothing of the peculiar phenomena induced in Edwin's mind by the first sight of the legendary Abel Peartree after twenty years. But Auntie Hamps, though puzzled for an explanation, comprehended that she was decisively beaten. The blow was hard. Nevertheless she did not wince. The superb pretence must be kept up, and she kept it up. She smiled and, tossing her curls, checked Edwin with cheerful, indomitable rapidity.

"Now, now! Don't decide at once. Think it over very carefully, and we shall ask you again. Mr. Peartree will write to you. I feel sure…"

Appearances were preserved.

The colloquy was interrupted by Hilda, who came in excited, gay, with sparkling eyes, humming an air. She had protested vehemently against an At Home. She had said again and again that the idea of an At Home was abhorrent to her, and that she hated all such wholesale formal hospitalities and could not bear "people." And yet now she was enchanted with her situation as hostess-delighted with herself and her rich dress, almost ecstatically aware of her own attractiveness and domination. The sight of her gave pleasure and communicated zest. Mature, she was yet only beginning life. And as she glanced with secret condescension at the listless Mr. Peartree she seemed to say: "What is all this talk of heaven and hell? I am in love with life and the senses, and everything is lawful to me, and I am above you." And even Auntie Hamps, though one of the most self-sufficient creatures that ever lived, envied in her glorious decay the young maturity of sensuous Hilda.

"Well," said Hilda. "What's going on here? They're all gone mad about missing words in the drawing-room."

She smiled splendidly at Edwin, whose pride in her thrilled him. Her superiority to other women was patent. She made other women seem negative. In fact, she was a tingling woman before she was anything else-that was it! He compared her with Clara, who was now nothing but a mother, and to Maggie, who had never been anything at all.

Mr. Peartree made the mistake of telling her the subject of the conversation. She did not wait to hear what Edwin's answer had been.

She said curtly, and with finality:

"Oh, no! I won't have it."

Edwin did not quite like this. The matter concerned him alone, and he was an absolutely free agent. She ought to have phrased her objection differently. For example, she might have said: "I hope he has refused."

Still, his annoyance was infinitesimal.

"The poor boy works quite hard enough as it is," she added, with delicious caressing intonation of the first words.

He liked that. But she was confusing the issue. She always would confuse the issue. It was not because the office would involve extra work for him that he had declined the invitation, as she well knew.

Of course Auntie Hamps said in a flash:

"If it means overwork for him I shouldn't dream-" She was putting the safety of appearances beyond doubt.

"By the way, Auntie," Hilda continued. "What's the trouble about the pew down at chapel? Both Clara and Maggie have mentioned it."

"Trouble, my dear?" exclaimed Auntie Hamps, justifiably shocked that Hilda should employ such a word in the presence of Mr. Peartree. But Hilda was apt to be headlong.

To the pew originally taken by Edwin's father, and since his death standing in Edwin's name, Clara had brought her husband; and although it was a long pew, the fruits of the marriage had gradually filled it, so that if Edwin chanced to go to chapel there was not too much room for him in the pew, which presented the appearance of a second-class railway carriage crowded with season-ticket holders. Albert Benbow had suggested that Edwin should yield up the pew to the Benbows, and take a smaller pew for himself and Hilda and George. But the women had expressed fear lest Edwin "might not like" this break in a historic tradition, and Albert Benbow had been forbidden to put forward the suggestion until the diplomatic sex had examined the ground.

"We shall be only too pleased for Albert to take over the pew," said Hilda.

"But have you chosen another pew?" Mrs. Hamps looked at Edwin.

"Oh, no!" said Hilda lightly.

"But-"

"Now, Auntie," the tingling woman warned Auntie Hamps as one powerful individuality may warn another, "don't worry about us. You know we're not great chapel-goers."

She spoke the astounding words gaily, but firmly. She could be firm, and even harsh, in her triumphant happiness. Edwin knew that she detested Auntie Hamps. Auntie Hamps no doubt also knew it. In their mutual smilings, so affable, so hearty, so appreciative, apparently so impulsive, the hostility between them gleamed mysteriously like lightning in sunlight.

"Mrs. Edwin's family were Church of England," said Auntie Hamps, in the direction of Mr. Peartree.

"Nor great church-goers, either," Hilda finished cheerfully.

No woman had ever made such outrageous remarks in the Five Towns before. A quarter of a century ago a man might have said as much, without suffering in esteem-might indeed have earned a certain intellectual prestige by the declaration; but it was otherwise with a woman. Both Mrs. Hamps and the minister thought that Hilda was not going the right way to live down her dubious past. Even Edwin in his pride was flurried. Great matters, however, had been accomplished. Not only had the attack of Auntie Hamps and Mr. Peartree been defeated, but the defence had become an onslaught. Not only was he not the treasurer of the District Additional Chapels Fund, but he had practically ceased to be a member of the congregation. He was free with a freedom which he had never had the audacity to hope for. It was incredible! Yet there it was! A word said, bravely, in a particular tone, – and a new epoch was begun. The pity was that he had not done it all himself. Hilda's courage had surpassed his own. Women were astounding. They were disconcerting too. His manly independence was ever so little wounded by Hilda's boldness in initiative on their joint behalf.

"Do come and take something, Auntie," said Hilda, with the most winning, the most loving inflection.

Auntie Hamps passed out.

Hilda turned back into the room: "Do go with Auntie, Mr. Peartree. I must just-" She affected to search for something on the mantelpiece.

Mr. Peartree passed out. He was unmoved. He did not care in his heart. And as Edwin caught his indifferent eye, with that "it's-all-one-to-me" glint in it, his soul warmed again slightly to Mr. Peartree. And further, Mr. Peartree's aloof unworldliness, his personal practical unconcern with money, feasting, ambition, and all the grosser forms of self-satisfaction, made Edwin feel somewhat a sensual average man and accordingly humiliated him.

As soon as, almost before, Mr. Peartree was beyond the door, Hilda leaped at Edwin, and kissed him violently. The door was not closed. He could hear the varied hum of the party.

"I had to kiss you while it's all going on," she whispered. Ardent vitality shimmered in her eyes.