Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett

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CHAPTER ONE.

BOOK ONE--HIS VOCATION.

THE LAST OF A SCHOOLBOY.

Edwin Clayhanger stood on the steep-sloping, red-bricked canal bridge,
in the valley between Bursley and its suburb Hillport.  In that
neighbourhood the Knype and Mersey canal formed the western boundary of
the industrialism of the Five Towns.  To the east rose pitheads,
chimneys, and kilns, tier above tier, dim in their own mists.  To the
west, Hillport Fields, grimed but possessing authentic hedgerows and
winding paths, mounted broadly up to the sharp ridge on which stood
Hillport Church, a landmark.  Beyond the ridge, and partly protected by
it from the driving smoke of the Five Towns, lay the fine and ancient
Tory borough of Oldcastle, from whose historic Middle School Edwin
Clayhanger was now walking home.  The fine and ancient Tory borough
provided education for the whole of the Five Towns, but the relentless
ignorance of its prejudices had blighted the district.  A hundred years
earlier the canal had only been obtained after a vicious Parliamentary
fight between industry and the fine and ancient borough, which saw in
canals a menace to its importance as a centre of traffic.  Fifty years
earlier the fine and ancient borough had succeeded in forcing the
greatest railway line in England to run through unpopulated country five
miles off instead of through the Five Towns, because it loathed the mere
conception of a railway.  And now, people are inquiring why the Five
Towns, with a railway system special to itself, is characterised by a
perhaps excessive provincialism.  These interesting details have
everything to do with the history of Edwin Clayhanger, as they have
everything to do with the history of each of the two hundred thousand
souls in the Five Towns.  Oldcastle guessed not the vast influences of
its sublime stupidity.

It was a breezy Friday in July 1872.  The canal, which ran north and
south, reflected a blue and white sky.  Towards the bridge, from the
north came a long narrow canal-boat roofed with tarpaulins; and towards
the bridge, from the south came a similar craft, sluggishly creeping.
The towing-path was a morass of sticky brown mud, for, in the way of
rain, that year was breaking the records of a century and a half.
Thirty yards in front of each boat an unhappy skeleton of a horse
floundered its best in the quagmire.  The honest endeavour of one of the
animals received a frequent tonic from a bare-legged girl of seven who
heartily curled a whip about its crooked large-jointed legs.  The ragged
and filthy child danced in the rich mud round the horse's flanks with
the simple joy of one who had been rewarded for good behaviour by the
unrestricted use of a whip for the first time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

Edwin, with his elbows on the stone parapet of the bridge, stared
uninterested at the spectacle of the child, the whip, and the skeleton.
He was not insensible to the piquancy of the pageant of life, but his
mind was preoccupied with grave and heavy matters.  He had left school
that day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a
willing beast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the
advance guard of its problems bearing down on him.  Slim, gawky, untidy,
fair, with his worn black-braided clothes, and slung over his shoulders
in a bursting satchel the last load of his schoolbooks, and on his
bright, rough hair a shapeless cap whose lining protruded behind, he had
the extraordinary wistful look of innocence and simplicity which marks
most boys of sixteen.  It seemed rather a shame, it seemed even tragic,
that this naive, simple creature, with his straightforward and friendly
eyes so eager to believe appearances, this creature immaculate of
worldly experience, must soon be transformed into a man, wary,
incredulous, detracting.  Older eyes might have wept at the simplicity
of those eyes.

This picture of Edwin as a wistful innocent would have made Edwin laugh.
He had been seven years at school, and considered himself a hardened
sort of brute, free of illusions.  And he sometimes thought that he
could judge the world better than most neighbouring mortals.

"Hello!  The Sunday!" he murmured, without turning his eyes.

Another boy, a little younger and shorter, and clothed in a superior
untidiness, had somehow got on to the bridge, and was leaning with his
back against the parapet which supported Edwin's elbows.  His eyes were
franker and simpler even than the eyes of Edwin, and his lips seemed to
be permanently parted in a good-humoured smile.  His name was Charlie
Orgreave, but at school he was invariably called "the Sunday"--not
"Sunday," but "the Sunday"--and nobody could authoritatively explain how
he had come by the nickname.  Its origin was lost in the prehistoric
ages of his childhood.  He and Edwin had been chums for several years.
They had not sworn fearful oaths of loyalty; they did not constitute a
secret society; they had not even pricked forearms and written certain
words in blood; for these rites are only performed at Harrow, and
possibly at the Oldcastle High School, which imitates Harrow.  Their
fellowship meant chiefly that they spent a great deal of time together,
instinctively and unconsciously enjoying each other's mere presence, and
that in public arguments they always reinforced each other, whatever the
degree of intellectual dishonesty thereby necessitated.

"I'll bet you mine gets to the bridge first," said the Sunday.  With an
ingenious movement of the shoulders he arranged himself so that the
parapet should bear the weight of his satchel.

Edwin Clayhanger slowly turned round, and perceived that the object
which the Sunday had appropriated as "his" was the other canal-boat,
advancing from the south.

"Horse or boat?" asked Edwin.

"Boat's nose, of course," said the Sunday.

"Well," said Edwin, having surveyed the unconscious competitors, and
counting on the aid of the whipping child, "I don't mind laying you
five."

"That be damned for a tale!" protested the Sunday.  "We said we'd never
bet less than ten--you know that."

"Yes, but--" Edwin hesitatingly drawled.

"But what?"

"All right.  Ten," Edwin agreed.  "But it's not fair.  You've got a rare
start on me."

"Rats!" said the Sunday, with finality.  In the pronunciation of this
word the difference between his accent and Edwin's came out clear.  The
Sunday's accent was less local; there was a hint of a short "e" sound in
the "a," and a briskness about the consonants, that Edwin could never
have compassed.  The Sunday's accent was as carelessly superior as his
clothes.  Evidently the Sunday had some one at home who had not learnt
the art of speech in the Five Towns.

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THREE.

He began to outline a scheme, in which perpendicular expectoration
figured, for accurately deciding the winner, and a complicated argument
might have ensued about this, had it not soon become apparent that
Edwin's boat was going to be handsomely beaten, despite the joyous
efforts of the little child.  The horse that would die but would not
give up, was only saved from total subsidence at every step by his
indomitable if aged spirit.  Edwin handed over the ten marbles even
before the other boat had arrived at the bridge.

"Here," he said.  "And you may as well have these, too," adding five
more to the ten, all he possessed.  They were not the paltry marble of
to-day, plaything of infants, but the majestic "rinker," black with
white spots, the king of marbles in an era when whole populations
practised the game.  Edwin looked at them half regretfully as they lay
in the Sunday's hands.  They seemed prodigious wealth in those hands,
and he felt somewhat as a condemned man might feel who bequeaths his
jewels on the scaffold.  Then there was a rattle, and a tumour grew out
larger on the Sunday's thigh.

The winning boat, long preceded by its horse, crawled under the bridge
and passed northwards to the sea, laden with crates of earthenware.  And
then the loser, with the little girl's father and mother and her
brothers and sisters, and her kitchen, drawing-room, and bedroom, and
her smoking chimney and her memories and all that was hers, in the stern
of it, slid beneath the boys' down-turned faces while the whip cracked
away beyond the bridge.  They could see, between the whitened
tarpaulins, that the deep belly of the craft was filled with clay.

"Where does that there clay come from?" asked Edwin.  For not merely was
he honestly struck by a sudden new curiosity, but it was meet for him to
behave like a man now, and to ask manly questions.

"Runcorn," said the Sunday scornfully.  "Can't you see it painted all
over the boat?"

"Why do they bring clay all the way from Runcorn?"

"They don't bring it from Runcorn.  They bring it from Cornwall.  It
comes round by sea--see?"  He laughed.

"Who told you?"  Edwin roughly demanded.

"Anybody knows that!" said the Sunday grandly, but always maintaining
his gay smile.

"Seems devilish funny to me," Edwin murmured, after reflection, "that
they should bring clay all that roundabout way just to make crocks of it
here.  Why should they choose just this place to make crocks in?  I
always understood--"

"Oh!  Come on!" the Sunday cut him short.  "It's blessed well one
o'clock and after!"

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FOUR.

They climbed the long bank from the canal up to the Manor Farm, at which
high point their roads diverged, one path leading direct to Bleakridge
where Orgreave lived, and the other zigzagging down through neglected
pasturage into Bursley proper.  Usually they parted here without a word,
taking pride in such Spartan taciturnity, and they would doubtless have
done the same this morning also, though it were fifty-fold their last
walk together as two schoolboys.  But an incident intervened.

"Hold on!" cried the Sunday.

To the south of them, a mile and a half off, in the wreathing mist of
the Cauldon Bar Ironworks, there was a yellow gleam that even the
capricious sunlight could not kill, and then two rivers of fire sprang
from the gleam and ran in a thousand delicate and lovely hues down the
side of a mountain of refuse.  They were emptying a few tons of molten
slag at the Cauldon Bar Ironworks.  The two rivers hung slowly dying in
the mists of smoke.  They reddened and faded, and you thought they had
vanished, and you could see them yet, and then they escaped the baffled
eye, unless a cloud aided them for a moment against the sun; and their
ephemeral but enchanting beauty had expired for ever.

"Now!" said Edwin sharply.

"One minute ten seconds," said the Sunday, who had snatched out his
watch, an inestimable contrivance with a centre-seconds hand.  "By Jove!
That was a good 'un."

A moment later two smaller boys, both laden with satchels, appeared over
the brow from the canal.

"Let's wait a jiff," said the Sunday to Edwin, and as the smaller boys
showed no hurry he bawled out to them across the intervening
cinder-waste: "Run!"  They ran.  They were his younger brothers, Johnnie
and Jimmie.  "Take this and hook it!" he commanded, passing the strap of
his satchel over his head as they came up.  In fatalistic silence they
obeyed the smiling tyrant.

"What are you going to do?"  Edwin asked.

"I'm coming down your way a bit."

"But I thought you said you were peckish."

"I shall eat three slices of beef instead of my usual brace," said the
Sunday carelessly.

Edwin was touched.  And the Sunday was touched, because he knew he had
touched Edwin.  After all, this was a solemn occasion.  But neither
would overtly admit that its solemnity had affected him.  Hence, first
one and then the other began to skim stones with vicious force over the
surface of the largest of the three ponds that gave interest to the
Manor Farm.  When they had thus proved to themselves that the day
differed in no manner from any other breaking-up day, they went forward.

On their left were two pitheads whose double wheels revolved rapidly in
smooth silence, and the puffing engine-house and all the trucks and gear
of a large ironstone mine.  On their right was the astonishing farm,
with barns and ricks and cornfields complete, seemingly quite unaware of
its forlorn oddness in that foul arena of manufacture.  In front, on a
little hill in the vast valley, was spread out the Indian-red
architecture of Bursley--tall chimneys and rounded ovens, schools, the
new scarlet market, the grey tower of the old church, the high spire of
the evangelical church, the low spire of the church of genuflexions, and
the crimson chapels, and rows of little red houses with amber
chimney-pots, and the gold angel of the blackened Town Hall topping the
whole.  The sedate reddish browns and reds of the composition, all
netted in flowing scarves of smoke, harmonised exquisitely with the
chill blues of the chequered sky.  Beauty was achieved, and none saw it.

The boys descended without a word through the brick-strewn pastures,
where a horse or two cropped the short grass.  At the railway bridge,
which carried a branch mineral line over the path, they exchanged a
brief volley of words with the working-lads who always played
pitch-and-toss there in the dinner-hour; and the Sunday added to the
collection of shawds and stones lodged on the under ledges of the low
iron girders.  A strange boy, he had sworn to put ten thousand stones on
those ledges before he died, or perish in the attempt.  Hence Edwin
sometimes called him "Old Perish-in-the-attempt."  A little farther on
the open gates of a manufactory disclosed six men playing the noble game
of rinkers on a smooth patch of ground near the weighing machine.  These
six men were Messieurs Ford, Carter, and Udall, the three partners
owning the works, and three of their employees.  They were celebrated
marble-players, and the boys stayed to watch them as, bending with one
knee almost touching the earth, they shot the rinkers from their stubby
thumbs with a canon-like force and precision that no boy could ever hope
to equal.  "By gum!" mumbled Edwin involuntarily, when an impossible
shot was accomplished; and the bearded shooter, pleased by this tribute
from youth, twisted his white apron into a still narrower ring round his
waist.  Yet Edwin was not thinking about the game.  He was thinking
about a battle that lay before him, and how he would be weakened in the
fight by the fact that in the last school examination, Charlie Orgreave,
younger than himself by a year, had ousted him from the second place in
the school.  The report in his pocket said: "Position in class next
term: third;" whereas he had been second since the beginning of the
year.  There would of course be no "next term" for him, but the report
remained.  A youth who has come to grips with that powerful enemy, his
father, cannot afford to be handicapped by even such a trifle as a
report entirely irrelevant to the struggle.

Suddenly Charlie Orgreave gave a curt nod, and departed, in nonchalant
good-humour, doubtless considering that to accompany his chum any
farther would be to be guilty of girlish sentimentality.  And Edwin
nodded with equal curtness and made off slowly into the maze of Bursley.
The thought in his heart was: "I'm on my own, now.  I've got to face it
now, by myself."  And he felt that not merely his father, but the
leagued universe, was against him.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER TWO.

THE FLAME.

The various agencies which society has placed at the disposal of a
parent had been at work on Edwin in one way or another for at least a
decade, in order to equip him for just this very day when he should step
into the world.  The moment must therefore be regarded as dramatic, the
first crucial moment of an experiment long and elaborately prepared.
Knowledge was admittedly the armour and the weapon of one about to try
conclusions with the world, and many people for many years had been
engaged in providing Edwin with knowledge.  He had received, in fact, "a
good education"--or even, as some said, "a thoroughly sound education;"
assuredly as complete an equipment of knowledge as could be obtained in
the county, for the curriculum of the Oldcastle High School was less in
accord with common sense than that of the Middle School.

He knew, however, nothing of natural history, and in particular of
himself, of the mechanism of the body and mind, through which his soul
had to express and fulfil itself.  Not one word of information about
either physiology or psychology had ever been breathed to him, nor had
it ever occurred to any one around him that such information was
needful.  And as no one had tried to explain to him the mysteries which
he carried about with him inside that fair skin of his, so no one had
tried to explain to him the mysteries by which he was hemmed in, either
mystically through religion, or rationally through philosophy.  Never in
chapel or at Sunday school had a difficulty been genuinely faced.  And
as for philosophy, he had not the slightest conception of what it meant.
He imagined that a philosopher was one who made the best of a bad job,
and he had never heard the word used in any other sense.  He had great
potential intellectual curiosity, but nobody had thought to stimulate it
by even casually telling him that the finest minds of humanity had been
trying to systematise the mysteries for quite twenty-five centuries.  Of
physical science he had been taught nothing, save a grotesque perversion
to the effect that gravity was a force which drew things towards the
centre of the earth.  In the matter of chemistry it had been practically
demonstrated to him scores of times, so that he should never forget this
grand basic truth, that sodium and potassium may be relied upon to fizz
flamingly about on a surface of water.  Of geology he was perfectly
ignorant, though he lived in a district whose whole livelihood depended
on the scientific use of geological knowledge, and though the existence
of Oldcastle itself was due to a freak of the earth's crust which
geologists call a "fault."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

Geography had been one of his strong points.  He was aware of the rivers
of Asia in their order, and of the principal products of Uruguay; and he
could name the capitals of nearly all the United States.  But he had
never been instructed for five minutes in the geography of his native
county, of which he knew neither the boundaries nor the rivers nor the
terrene characteristics.  He could have drawn a map of the Orinoco, but
he could not have found the Trent in a day's march; he did not even know
where his drinking-water came from.  That geographical considerations
are the cause of all history had never been hinted to him, nor that
history bears immediately upon modern life and bore on his own life.
For him history hung unsupported and unsupporting in the air.  In the
course of his school career he had several times approached the
nineteenth century, but it seemed to him that for administrative reasons
he was always being dragged back again to the Middle Ages.  Once his
form had "got" as far as the infancy of his own father, and concerning
this period he had learnt that "great dissatisfaction prevailed among
the labouring classes, who were led to believe by mischievous
demagogues," etcetera.  But the next term he was recoiling round Henry
the Eighth, who "was a skilful warrior and politician," but "unfortunate
in his domestic relations;" and so to Elizabeth, than whom "few
sovereigns have been so much belied, but her character comes out
unscathed after the closest examination."  History indeed resolved
itself into a series of more or less sanguinary events arbitrarily
grouped under the names of persons who had to be identified with the
assistance of numbers.  Neither of the development of national life, nor
of the clash of nations, did he really know anything that was not
inessential and anecdotic.  He could not remember the clauses of Magna
Charta, but he knew eternally that it was signed at a place amusingly
called Runnymede.  And the one fact engraved on his memory about the
battle of Waterloo was that it was fought on a Sunday.

And as he had acquired absolutely nothing about political economy or
about logic, and was therefore at the mercy of the first agreeable
sophistry that might take his fancy by storm, his unfitness to commence
the business of being a citizen almost reached perfection.

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THREE.

For his personal enjoyment of the earth and air and sun and stars, and
of society and solitude, no preparation had been made, or dreamt of.
The sentiment of nature had never been encouraged in him, or even
mentioned.  He knew not how to look at a landscape nor at a sky.  Of
plants and trees he was as exquisitely ignorant as of astronomy.  It had
not occurred to him to wonder why the days are longer in summer, and he
vaguely supposed that the cold of winter was due to an increased
distance of the earth from the sun.  Still, he had learnt that Saturn
had a ring, and sometimes he unconsciously looked for it in the
firmament, as for a tea-tray.

Of art, and the arts, he had been taught nothing.  He had never seen a
great picture or statue, nor heard great orchestral or solo music; and
he had no idea that architecture was an art and emotional, though it
moved him in a very peculiar fashion.  Of the art of English literature,
or of any other literature, he had likewise been taught nothing.  But he
knew the meaning of a few obsolete words in a few plays of Shakespeare.
He had not learnt how to express himself orally in any language, but
through hard drilling he was so genuinely erudite in accidence and
syntax that he could parse and analyse with superb assurance the most
magnificent sentences of Milton, Virgil, and Racine.  This skill,
together with an equal skill in utilising the elementary properties of
numbers and geometrical figures, was the most brilliant achievement of
his long apprenticeship.

And now his education was finished.  It had cost his father twenty-eight
shillings a term, or four guineas a year, and no trouble.  In younger
days his father had spent more money and far more personal attention on
the upbringing of a dog.  His father had enjoyed success with dogs
through treating them as individuals.  But it had not happened to him,
nor to anybody in authority, to treat Edwin as an individual.
Nevertheless it must not be assumed that Edwin's father was a callous
and conscienceless brute, and Edwin a martyr of neglect.  Old Clayhanger
was, on the contrary, an average upright and respectable parent who had
given his son a thoroughly sound education, and Edwin had had the good
fortune to receive that thoroughly sound education, as a preliminary to
entering the world.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

He was very far from realising the imperfections of his equipment for
the grand entry; but still he was not without uneasiness.  In particular
the conversation incident to the canal-boat wager was disturbing him.
It amazed him, as he reflected, that he should have remained, to such an
advanced age, in a state of ignorance concerning the origin of the clay
from which the crocks of his native district were manufactured.  That
the Sunday should have been able to inform him did not cause him any
shame, for he guessed from the peculiar eager tone of voice in which the
facts had been delivered, that the Sunday was merely retailing some
knowledge recently acquired by chance.  He knew all the Sunday's tones
of voice; and he also was well aware that the Sunday's brain was not on
the whole better stored than his own.  Further, the Sunday was satisfied
with his bit of accidental knowledge.  Edwin was not.  Edwin wanted to
know why, if the clay for making earthenware was not got in the Five
Towns, the Five Towns had become the great seat of the manufacture.  Why
were not pots made in the South, where the clay came from?  He could not
think of any answer to this enigma, nor of any means of arriving by
himself at an answer.  The feeling was that he ought to have been able
to arrive at the answer as at the answer to an equation.

He did not definitely blame his education; he did not think clearly
about the thing at all.  But, as a woman with a vague discomfort dimly
fears cancer, so he dimly feared that there might be something
fundamentally unsound in this sound education of his.  And he had
remorse for all the shirking that he had been guilty of during all his
years at school.  He shook his head solemnly at the immense and nearly
universal shirking that continually went on.  He could only acquit three
or four boys, among the hundreds he had known, of the shameful sin.  And
all that he could say in favour of himself was that there were many
worse than Edwin Clayhanger.  Not merely the boys, but the masters, were
sinners.  Only two masters could he unreservedly respect as having acted
conscientiously up to their pretensions, and one of these was an
unpleasant brute.  All the cleverness, the ingenuities, the fakes, the
insincerities, the incapacitaties, the vanities, and the dishonesties of
the rest stood revealed to him, and he judged them by the mere essential
force of character alone.  A schoolmaster might as well attempt to
deceive God as a boy who is watching him every day with the inhuman eye
of youth.

"All this must end now!" he said to himself, meaning all that could be
included in the word "shirk."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIVE.

He was splendidly serious.  He was as splendidly serious as a reformer.
By a single urgent act of thought he would have made himself a man, and
changed imperfection into perfection.  He desired--and there was real
passion in his desire--to do his best, to exhaust himself in doing his
best, in living according to his conscience.  He did not know of what he
was capable, nor what he could achieve.  Achievement was not the matter
of his desire; but endeavour, honest and terrific endeavour.  He
admitted to himself his shortcomings, and he did not under-estimate the
difficulties that lay before him; but he said, thinking of his father:
"Surely he'll see I mean business!  Surely he's bound to give in when he
sees how much in earnest I am!"  He was convinced, almost, that
passionate faith could move mountainous fathers.

"I'll show 'em!" he muttered.

And he meant that he would show the world...  He was honouring the
world; he was paying the finest homage to it.  In that head of his a
flame burnt that was like an altar-fire, a miraculous and beautiful
phenomenon, than which nothing is more miraculous nor more beautiful
over the whole earth.  Whence had it suddenly sprung, that flame?  After
years of muddy inefficiency, of contentedness with the second-rate and
the dishonest, that flame astoundingly bursts forth, from a hidden,
unheeded spark that none had ever thought to blow upon.  It bursts forth
out of a damp jungle of careless habits and negligence that could not
possibly have fed it.  There is little to encourage it.  The very
architecture of the streets shows that environment has done naught for
it: ragged brickwork, walls finished anyhow with saggars and slag;
narrow uneven alleys leading to higgledy-piggledy workshops and kilns;
cottages transformed into factories and factories into cottages,
clumsily, hastily, because nothing matters so long as "it will do;"
everywhere something forced to fulfil, badly, the function of something
else; in brief, the reign of the slovenly makeshift, shameless, filthy,
and picturesque.  Edwin himself seemed no tabernacle for that singular
flame.  He was not merely untidy and dirty--at his age such defects
might have excited in a sane observer uneasiness by their absence; but
his gestures and his gait were untidy.  He did not mind how he walked.
All his sprawling limbs were saying: "What does it matter, so long as we
get there?"  The angle of the slatternly bag across his shoulders was an
insult to the flame.  And yet the flame burned with serene and terrible
pureness.

It was surprising that no one saw it passing along the mean, black,
smoke-palled streets that huddle about Saint Luke's Church.  Sundry
experienced and fat old women were standing or sitting at their cottage
doors, one or two smoking cutties.  But even they, who in child-bed and
at gravesides had been at the very core of life for long years, they,
who saw more than most, could only see a fresh lad passing along, with
fair hair and a clear complexion, and gawky knees and elbows, a fierce,
rapt expression on his straightforward, good-natured face.  Some knew
that it was "Clayhanger's lad," a nice-behaved young gentleman, and the
spitten image of his poor mother.  They all knew what a lad is--the feel
of his young skin under his "duds," the capricious freedom of his
movements, his sudden madnesses and shoutings and tendernesses, and the
exceeding power of his unconscious wistful charm.  They could divine all
that in a glance.  But they could not see the mysterious and holy flame
of the desire for self-perfection blazing within that tousled head.  And
if Edwin had suspected that anybody could indeed perceive it, he would
have whipped it out for shame, though the repudiation had meant
everlasting death.  Such is youth in the Five Towns, if not elsewhere.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER THREE.

ENTRY INTO THE WORLD.

Edwin came steeply out of the cinder-strewn back streets by Woodisun
Bank [hill] into Duck Square, nearly at the junction of Trafalgar Road
and Wedgwood Street.  A few yards down Woodisun Bank, cocks and hens
were scurrying, with necks horizontal, from all quarters, and were even
flying, to the call of a little old woman who threw grain from the top
step of her porch.  On the level of the narrow pavement stood an immense
constable, clad in white trousers, with a gun under his arm for the
killing of mad dogs; he was talking to the woman, and their two heads
were exactly at the same height.  On a pair of small double gates near
the old woman's cottage were painted the words, "Steam Printing Works.
No admittance except on business."  And from as far as Duck Square could
be heard the puff-puff which proved the use of steam in this works to
which idlers and mere pleasure-seekers were forbidden access.

Duck Square was one of the oldest, if the least imposing, of all the
public places in Bursley.  It had no traffic across it, being only a
sloping rectangle, like a vacant lot, with Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood
Street for its exterior sides, and no outlet on its inner sides.  The
buildings on those inner sides were low and humble and, as it were,
withdrawn from the world, the chief of them being the ancient Duck Inn,
where the hand-bell ringers used to meet.  But Duck Square looked out
upon the very birth of Trafalgar Road, that wide, straight thoroughfare,
whose name dates it, which had been invented, in the lifetime of a few
then living, to unite Bursley with Hanbridge.  It also looked out upon
the birth of several old pack-horse roads which Trafalgar Road had
supplanted.  One of these was Woodisun Bank, that wound slowly up hill
and down dale, apparently always choosing the longest and hardest route,
to Hanbridge; and another was Aboukir Street, formerly known as Warm
Lane, that reached Hanbridge in a manner equally difficult and
unhurried.  At the junction of Trafalgar Road and Aboukir Street stood
the Dragon Hotel, once the great posting-house of the town, from which
all roads started.  Duck Square had watched coaches and waggons stop at
and start from the Dragon Hotel for hundreds of years.  It had seen the
Dragon rebuilt in brick and stone, with fine bay windows on each storey,
in early Georgian times, and it had seen even the new structure become
old and assume the dignity of age.  Duck Square could remember strings
of pack-mules driven by women, `trapesing' in zigzags down Woodisun Bank
and Warm Lane, and occasionally falling, with awful smashes of the
crockery they carried, in the deep, slippery, scarce passable mire of
the first slants into the valley.  Duck Square had witnessed the slow
declension of these roads into mere streets, and slum streets at that,
and the death of all mules, and the disappearance of all coaches and all
neighing and prancing and whipcracking romance; while Trafalgar Road,
simply because it was straight and broad and easily graded, flourished
with toll-bars and a couple of pair-horsed trams that ran on lines.  And
many people were proud of those cushioned trams; but perhaps they had
never known that coach-drivers used to tell each other about the state
of the turn at the bottom of Warm Lane (since absurdly renamed in honour
of an Egyptian battle), and that Woodisun Bank (now unnoticed save by
doubtful characters, policemen, and schoolboys) was once regularly
`taken' by four horses at a canter.  The history of human manners is
crunched and embedded in the very macadam of that part of the borough,
and the burgesses unheedingly tread it down every day and talk gloomily
about the ugly smoky prose of industrial manufacture.  And yet the
Dragon Hotel, safely surviving all revolutions by the mighty virtue and
attraction of ale, stands before them to remind them of the
interestingness of existence.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

At the southern corner of Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood Street, with Duck
Square facing it, the Dragon Hotel and Warm Lane to its right, and
Woodisun Bank creeping inconspicuously down to its left, stood a
three-storey building consisting of house and shop, the frontage being
in Wedgwood Street.  Over the double-windowed shop was a discreet
signboard in gilt letters, "D.  Clayhanger, Printer and Stationer," but
above the first floor was a later and much larger sign, with the single
word, "Steam-printing."  All the brickwork of the facade was painted
yellow, and had obviously been painted yellow many times; the woodwork
of the plate-glass windows was a very dark green approaching black.  The
upper windows were stumpy, almost square, some dirty and some clean and
curtained, with prominent sills and architraves.  The line of the
projecting spouting at the base of the roof was slightly curved through
subsidence; at either end of the roof-ridge rose twin chimneys each with
three salmon- chimney-pots.  The gigantic word `Steam-printing'
could be seen from the windows of the Dragon, from the porch of the big
Wesleyan chapel higher up the <DW72>, from the Conservative Club and the
playground at the top of the <DW72>; and as for Duck Square itself, it
could see little else.  The left-hand shop window was alluringly set out
with the lighter apparatus of writing and reading, and showed
incidentally several rosy pictures of ideal English maidens; that to the
right was grim and heavy with ledgers, inks, and variegated specimens of
steam-printing.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE.

In the wedge-shaped doorway between the windows stood two men, one
middle-aged and one old, one bareheaded and the other with a beaver hat,
engaged in conversation.  They were talking easily, pleasantly, with
free gestures, the younger looking down in deferential smiles at the
elder, and the elder looking up benignantly at the younger.  You could
see that, having begun with a business matter, they had quitted it for a
topic of the hour.  But business none the less went forward, the shop
functioned, the presses behind the shop were being driven by steam as
advertised; a customer emerged, and was curtly nodded at by the
proprietor as he squeezed past; a girl with a small flannel apron over a
large cotton apron went timidly into the shop.  The trickling, calm
commerce of a provincial town was proceeding, bit being added to bit and
item to item, until at the week's end a series of apparent nothings had
swollen into the livelihood of near half a score of people.  And nobody
perceived how interesting it was, this interchange of activities, this
ebb and flow of money, this sluggish rise and fall of reputations and
fortunes, stretching out of one century into another and towards a
third!  Printing had been done at that corner, though not by steam,
since the time of the French Revolution.  Bibles and illustrated herbals
had been laboriously produced by hand at that corner, and hawked on the
backs of asses all over the county; and nobody heard romance in the
puffing of the hidden steam-engine multiplying catalogues and billheads
on the self-same spot at the rate of hundreds an hour.

The younger and bigger of the two men chatting in the doorway was Darius
Clayhanger, Edwin's father, and the first printer to introduce steam
into Bursley.  His age was then under forty-five, but he looked more.
He was dressed in black, with an ample shirt-front and a narrow black
cravat tied in an angular bow; the wristbands were almost tight on the
wrists, and, owing to the shortness of the alpaca coat-sleeves, they
were very visible even as Darius Clayhanger stood, with his two hands
deep in the horizontal pockets of his `full-fall' trousers.  They were
not precisely dirty, these wristbands, nor was the shirt-front, nor the
turned-down pointed collar, but all the linen looked as though it would
scarcely be wearable the next day.  Clayhanger's linen invariably looked
like that, not dirty and not clean; and further, he appeared to wear
eternally the same suit, ever on the point of being done for and never
being done for.  The trousers always had marked transverse creases; the
waistcoat always showed shiningly the outline of every article in the
pockets thereof, and it always had a few stains down the front (and
never more than a few), and the lowest button insecure.  The coat,
faintly discoloured round the collar and fretted at the cuffs, fitted
him easily and loosely like the character of an old crony; it was as if
it had grown up with him, and had expanded with his girth.  His head was
a little bald on the top, but there was still a great deal of mixed
brown and greyish hair at the back and the sides, and the moustache,
hanging straight down with an effect recalling the mouth of a seal, was
plenteous and defiant--a moustache of character, contradicting the full
placidity of the badly shaved chin.  Darius Clayhanger had a habit, when
reflective or fierce, of biting with his upper teeth as far down as he
could on the lower lip; this trick added emphasis to the moustache.  He
stood, his feet in their clumsy boots planted firmly about sixteen
inches apart, his elbows sticking out, and his head bent sideways,
listening to and answering his companion with mien now eager, now
roguish, now distinctly respectful.

The older man, Mr Shushions, was apparently very old.  He was one of
those men of whom one says in conclusion that they are very old.  He
seemed to be so fully occupied all the time in conducting those physical
operations which we perform without thinking of them, that each in his
case became a feat.  He balanced himself on his legs with conscious
craft; he directed carefully his shaking and gnarled hand to his beard
in order to stroke it.  When he collected his thoughts into a sentence
and uttered it in his weak, quavering voice, he did something wonderful;
he listened closely, as though to an imperfectly acquired foreign
language; and when he was not otherwise employed, he gave attention to
the serious business of breathing.  He wore a black silk stock, in a
style even more antique than his remarkable headgear, and his trousers
were very tight.  He had survived into another and a more fortunate age
than his own.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

Edwin, his heavy bag on his shoulders, found the doorway blocked by
these two.  He hesitated with a diffident charming smile, feeling, as he
often did in front of his father, that he ought to apologise for his
existence, and yet fiercely calling himself an ass for such a sentiment.
Darius Clayhanger nodded at him carelessly, but not without a
surprising benevolence, over his shoulder.

"This is him," said Darius briefly.

Edwin was startled to catch a note of pride in his father's voice.

Little Mr Shushions turned slowly and looked up at Edwin's face (for he
was shorter even than the boy), and gradually acquainted himself with
the fact that Edwin was the son of his father.

"Is this thy son, Darius?" he asked; and his ancient eyes were shining.

Edwin had scarcely ever heard any one address his father by his
Christian name.

Darius nodded; and then, seeing the old man's hand creeping out towards
him, Edwin pulled off his cap and took the hand, and was struck by the
hot smooth brittleness of the skin and the earnest tremulous weakness of
the caressing grasp.  Edwin had never seen Mr Shushions before.

"Nay, nay, my boy," trembled the old man, "don't bare thy head to me ...
not to me!  I'm one o' th' ould sort.  Eh, I'm rare glad to see thee!"
He kept Edwin's hand, and stared long at him, with his withered face
transfigured by solemn emotion.  Slowly he turned towards Darius, and
pulled himself together.  "Thou'st begotten a fine lad, Darius! ... a
fine, honest lad!"

"So-so!" said Darius gruffly, whom Edwin was amazed to see in a state of
agitation similar to that of Mr Shushions.

The men gazed at each other; Edwin looked at the ground and other
unresponsive objects.

"Edwin," his father said abruptly, "run and ask Big James for th' proof
of that Primitive Methodist hymn-paper; there's a good lad."

And Edwin hastened through the shadowy shop as if loosed from a
captivity, and in passing threw his satchel down on a bale of goods.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIVE.

He comprehended nothing of the encounter; neither as to the origin of
the old man's status in his father's esteem, nor as to the cause of his
father's strange emotion.  He regarded the old man impatiently as an
aged simpleton, probably over pious, certainly connected with the
Primitive Methodists.  His father had said `There's a good lad' almost
cajolingly.  And this was odd; for, though nobody could be more
persuasively agreeable than his father when he chose, the occasions when
he cared to exert his charm, especially over his children, were
infrequent, and getting more so.  Edwin also saw something symbolically
ominous in his being sent direct to the printing office.  It was no
affair of his to go to the printing office.  He particularly did not
want to go to the printing office.

However, he met Big James, with flowing beard and flowing apron,
crossing the yard.  Big James was brushing crumbs from the beard.

"Father wants the proof of some hymn-paper--I don't know what," he said.
"I was just coming--"

"So was I, Mister Edwin," replied Big James in his magnificent voice,
and with his curious humorous smile.  And he held up a sheet of paper in
his immense hand, and strode majestically on towards the shop.

Here was another detail that struck the boy.  Always Big James had
addressed him as `Master Edwin' or `Master Clayhanger.'  Now it was
`Mister.'  He had left school.  Big James was, of course, aware of that,
and Big James had enough finesse and enough gentle malice to change
instantly the `master' to `mister.'  Edwin was scarcely sure if Big
James was not laughing at him.  He could not help thinking that Big
James had begun so promptly to call him `mister' because the foreman
compositor expected that the son of the house would at once begin to
take a share in the business.  He could not help thinking that his
father must have so informed Big James.  And all this vaguely disturbed
Edwin, and reminded him of his impending battle and of the complex
forces marshalled against him.  And his hand, wandering in his pockets,
touched that unfortunate report which stated that he had lost one place
during the term.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

SIX.

He lingered in the blue-paved yard, across which cloud-shadows swept
continually, and then Big James came back and spectacularly ascended the
flight of wooden steps to the printing office, and disappeared.  Edwin
knew that he must return to the shop to remove his bag, for his father
would assuredly reprimand him if he found it where it had been untidily
left.  He sidled, just like an animal, to the doorway, and then slipped
up to the counter, behind the great mahogany case of `artists'
materials.'  His father and the old man were within the shop now, and
Edwin overheard that they were discussing a topic that had lately been
rife in religious circles, namely, Sir Henry Thompson's ingenious device
for scientifically testing the efficacy of prayer, known as the `Prayer
Gauge.'  The scheme was to take certain hospitals and to pray for the
patients in particular wards, leaving other wards unprayed for, and then
to tabulate and issue the results.

Mr Shushions profoundly resented the employment of such a dodge; the
mere idea of it shocked him, as being blasphemous; and Darius Clayhanger
deferentially and feelingly agreed with him, though Edwin had at least
once heard his father refer to the topic with the amused and
non-committal impartiality of a man who only went to chapel when he
specially felt like going.

"I've preached in the pulpits o' our Connexion," said Mr Shushions with
solemn, quavering emotion, "for over fifty year, as you know.  But I'd
ne'er gi' out another text if Primitives had ought to do wi' such a
flouting o' th' Almighty.  Nay, I'd go down to my grave dumb afore God!"

He had already been upset by news of a movement that was on foot for
deferring Anniversary Sermons from August to September, so that people
should be more free to go away for a holiday, and collections be more
fruitful.  What!  Put off God's ordinance, to enable chapel-members to
go `a-wakesing'!  Monstrous!  Yet September was tried, in spite of Mr
Shushions, and when even September would not work satisfactorily, God's
ordinance was shifted boldly to May, in order to catch people, and their
pockets well before the demoralisation incident to holidays.

Edwin thought that his father and the mysterious old man would talk for
ever, and timorously he exposed himself to obtain possession of his
satchel, hoping to escape unseen.  But Mr Shushions saw him, and called
him, and took his hand again.

"Eh, my boy," he said, feebly shaking the hand, "I do pray as you'll
grow up to be worthy o' your father.  That's all as I pray for."

Edwin had never considered his father as an exemplar.  He was a just and
unmerciful judge of his father, against whom he had a thousand
grievances.  And in his heart he resentfully despised Mr Shushions, and
decided again that he was a simpleton, and not a very tactful one.  But
then he saw a round yellow tear slowly form in the red rim of the old
man's eye and run crookedly down that wrinkled cheek.  And his impatient
scorn expired.  The mere sight of him, Edwin, had brought the old man to
weeping!  And the tear was so genuine, so convincing, so majestic that
it induced in Edwin a blank humility.  He was astounded, mystified; but
he was also humbled.  He himself was never told, and he never learnt,
the explanation of that epic tear.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FOUR.

THE CHILD-MAN.

The origin of the tear on the aged cheek of Mr Shushions went back
about forty years, and was embedded in the infancy of Darius Clayhanger.

The earliest memory of Darius Clayhanger had to do with the capital
letters Q W and S.  Even as the first steam-printer in Bursley, even as
the father of a son who had received a thoroughly sound middle-class
education, he never noticed a capital Q W or S without recalling the
Widow Susan's school, where he had wonderingly learnt the significance
of those complicated characters.  The school consisted of the entire
ground floor of her cottage, namely, one room, of which the far corner
was occupied by a tiny winding staircase that led to the ancient widow's
bedchamber.  The furniture comprised a few low forms for scholars, a
table, and a chair; and there were some brilliant  prints on the
whitewashed walls.  At this school Darius acquired a knowledge of the
alphabet, and from the alphabet passed to Reading-Made-Easy, and then to
the Bible.  He made such progress that the widow soon singled him out
for honour.  He was allowed the high and envied privilege of raking the
ashes from under the fire-place and carrying them to the ash-pit, which
ash-pit was vast and lofty, being the joint production of many cottages.
To reach the summit of the ash-pit, and thence to fling backwards down
its steep sides all assailants who challenged your supremacy, was a
precious joy.  The battles of the ash-pit, however, were not battles of
giants, as no children had leisure for ash-carrying after the age of
seven.  A still greater honour accorded to Darius was permission to sit,
during lessons, on the topmost visible step of the winding stair.  The
widow Susan, having taught Darius to read brilliantly, taught him to
knit, and he would knit stockings for his father, mother, and sister.

At the age of seven, his education being complete, he was summoned into
the world.  It is true that he could neither write nor deal with the
multiplication table; but there were always night-schools which studious
adults of seven and upwards might attend if business permitted.
Further, there was the Sunday school, which Darius had joyously
frequented since the age of three, and which he had no intention of
leaving.  As he grew older the Sunday school became more and more
enchanting to him.  Sunday morning was the morning which he lived for
during six days; it was the morning when his hair was brushed and
combed, and perfumed with a delightful oil, whose particular fragrance
he remembered throughout his life.  At Sunday school he was petted and
caressed.  His success at Sunday school was shining.  He passed over the
heads of bigger boys, and at the age of six he was in a Bible class.

Upon hearing that Darius was going out into the world, the
superintendent of the Sunday school, a grave whiskered young man of
perhaps thirty, led him one morning out of the body of the Primitive
Methodist Chapel which served as schoolroom before and after chapel
service, up into the deserted gallery of the chapel, and there seated
him on a stair, and knelt on the stair below him, and caressed his head,
and called him a good boy, and presented him with an old battered Bible.
This volume was the most valuable thing that Darius had ever possessed.
He ran all the way home with it, half suffocated by his triumph.
Sunday school prizes had not then been invented.  The young
superintendent of the Sunday school was Mr Shushions.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

The man Darius was first taken to work by his mother.  It was the winter
of 1835, January.  They passed through the marketplace of the town of
Turnhill where they lived.  Turnhill lies a couple of miles north of
Bursley.  One side of the market-place was barricaded with stacks of
coal, and the other with loaves of a species of rye and straw bread.
This coal and these loaves were being served out by meticulous and
haughty officials, all invisibly, braided with red-tape, to a crowd of
shivering, moaning, and weeping wretches, men, women and children--the
basis of the population of Turnhill.  Although they were all
endeavouring to make a noise they made scarcely any noise, from mere
lack of strength.  Nothing could be heard, under the implacable bright
sky, but faint ghosts of sound, as though people were sighing and crying
from within the vacuum of a huge glass bell.

The next morning, at half-past five, Darius began his career in earnest.
He was `mould-runner' to a `muffin-maker,' a muffin being not a
comestible but a small plate, fashioned by its maker on a mould.  The
business of Darius was to run as hard as he could with the mould, and a
newly, created plate adhering thereto, into the drying-stove.  This
`stove' was a room lined with shelves, and having a red-hot stove and
stove-pipe in the middle.  As no man of seven could reach the upper
shelves, a pair of steps was provided for Darius, and up these he had to
scamper.  Each mould with its plate had to be leaned carefully against
the wall and if the soft clay of a new-born plate was damaged, Darius
was knocked down.  The atmosphere outside the stove was chill, but owing
to the heat of the stove, Darius was obliged to work half naked.  His
sweat ran down his cheeks, and down his chest, and down his back, making
white channels, and lastly it soaked his hair.

When there were no moulds to be sprinted into the drying-stove, and no
moulds to be carried less rapidly out, Darius was engaged in
clay-wedging.  That is to say, he took a piece of raw clay weighing more
than himself, cut it in two with a wire, raised one half above his head
and crashed it down with all his force upon the other half, and he
repeated the process until the clay was thoroughly soft and even in
texture.  At a later period it was discovered that hydraulic machinery
could perform this operation more easily and more effectually than the
brawny arms of a man of seven.  At eight o'clock in the evening Darius
was told that he had done enough for that day, and that he must arrive
at five sharp the next morning to light the fire, before his master the
muffin-maker began to work.  When he inquired how he was to light the
fire his master kicked him jovially on the thigh and suggested that he
should ask another mould-runner.  His master was not a bad man at heart,
it was said, but on Tuesdays, after Sunday, and Saint Monday, masters
were apt to be capricious.

Darius reached home at a quarter to nine, having eaten nothing but bread
all day.  Somehow he had lapsed into the child again.  His mother took
him on her knee, and wrapped her sacking apron round his ragged clothes,
and cried over him and cried into his supper of porridge, and undressed
him and put him to bed.  But he could not sleep easily because he was
afraid of being late the next morning.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE.

And the next morning wandering about the yards of the manufactory in a
storm of icy sleet a little before five o'clock, he learnt from a more
experienced companion that nobody would provide him with kindling for
his fire, that on the contrary everybody who happened to be on the place
at that hour would unite to prevent him from getting kindling, and that
he must steal it or expect to be thrashed before six o'clock.  Near them
a vast kiln of ware in process of firing showed a white flaming glow at
each of its mouths in the black winter darkness.  Darius's mentor crept
up to the archway of the great hovel which protected the kiln, and
pointed like a conspirator to the figure of the guardian fireman dozing
near his monster.  The boy had the handle-less remains of an old spade,
and with it he crept into the hovel, dangerously abstracted fire from
one of the scorching mouths, and fled therewith, and the fireman never
stirred.  Then Darius, to whom the mentor kindly lent his spade,
attempted to do the same, but being inexpert woke the fireman, who held
him spellbound by his roaring voice and then flung him like a sack of
potatoes bodily into the slush of the yard, and the spade after him.
Happily the mentor, whose stove was now alight, lent fire to Darius, so
that Darius's stove too was cheerfully burning when his master came.
And Darius was too excited to feel fatigue.

By six o'clock on Saturday night Darius had earned a shilling for his
week's work.  But he could only possess himself of the shilling by going
to a magnificent public-house with his master the muffin-maker.  This
was the first time that he had ever been inside a public-house.  The
place was crowded with men, women, and children eating the most lovely,
hot rolls and drinking beer, in an atmosphere exquisitely warm.  And
behind a high counter a stout jolly man was counting piles and piles and
piles of silver.  Darius's master, in company, with other boys' masters,
gave this stout man four sovereigns to change, and it was an hour before
he changed them.  Meanwhile Darius was instructed that he must eat a
roll like the rest, together with cheese.  Never had he tasted anything
so luscious.  He had a match with his mentor, as to which of them could
spin out his roll the longer, honestly chewing all the time; and he won.
Some one gave him half a glass of beer.  At half-past seven he received
his shilling which consisted of a sixpenny-piece and four pennies; and
leaving the gay, public-house, pushed his way through a crowd of tearful
women with babies in their arms at the doors, and went home.  And such
was the attraction of the Sunday school that he was there the next
morning, with scented hair, two minutes before the opening.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

In about a year Darius's increasing knowledge of the world enabled him
to rise in it.  He became a handle-maker in another manufactory, and
also he went about with the pride of one who could form the letters of
the alphabet with a pen.  In his new work he had to put a bit of clay
between two moulds, and then force the top mould on to the bottom one by
means of his stomach which it was necessary to press downwards and at
the same time to wriggle with a peculiar movement.  The workman to whom
he was assigned, his new `master,' attached these handles, with strange
rapid skill, to beer-mugs.  For Darius the labour was much lighter than
that of mould-running and clay-wedging, and the pay was somewhat higher.
But there were minor disadvantages.  He descended by twenty steps to
his toil, and worked in a long cellar which never received any air
except by way of the steps and a passage, and never any daylight at all.
Its sole illumination was a stove used for drying.  The `throwers'' and
the `turners'' rooms were also subterranean dungeons.  When in full
activity all these stinking cellars were full of men, boys, and young
women, working close together in a hot twilight.  Certain boys were
trained contrabandists of beer, and beer came as steadily into the
dungeons as though it had been laid on by a main pipe.  It was not
honourable even on the part of a young woman, to refuse beer,
particularly when the beer happened to arrive in the late afternoon.  On
such occasions young men and women would often entirely omit to go home
of a night, and seasoned men of the world aged eight, on descending into
the dungeons early the next morning, would have a full view of
pandemonium, and they would witness during the day salutary scenes of
remorse, and proofs of the existence of a profound belief in the
homeopathic properties of beer.

But perhaps the worst drawback of Darius's new position was the long and
irregular hours, due partly to the influences of Saint Monday and of the
scenes above indicated but not described, and partly to the fact that
the employes were on piece-work and entirely unhampered by grandmotherly
legislation.  The result was that six days' work was generally done in
four.  And as the younger the workman the earlier he had to start in the
morning, Darius saw scarcely enough of his bed.  It was not of course to
be expected that a self-supporting man of the world should rigorously
confine himself to an eight-hour day or even a twelve-hour day, but
Darius's day would sometimes stretch to eighteen and nineteen hours:
which on hygienic grounds could not be unreservedly defended.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIVE.

One Tuesday evening his master, after three days of debauch, ordered him
to be at work at three o'clock the next morning.  He quickly and even
eagerly agreed, for he was already intimate with his master's rope-lash.
He reached home at ten o'clock on an autumn night, and went to bed and
to sleep.  He woke up with a start, in the dark.  There was no watch or
clock in the house, from which nearly all the furniture had gradually
vanished, but he knew it must be already after three o'clock; and he
sprang up and rushed out.  Of course he had not undressed; his life was
too strenuous for mere formalities.  The stars shone above him as he ran
along, wondering whether after all, though late, he could by
unprecedented effort make the ordained number of handles before his
master tumbled into the cellar at five o'clock.

When he had run a mile he met some sewage men on their rounds, who in
reply, to his question told him that the hour was half after midnight.
He dared not risk a return to home and bed, for within two and a half
hours he must be at work.  He wandered aimlessly over the surface of the
earth until he came to a tile-works, more or less unenclosed, whose
primitive ovens showed a glare.  He ventured within, and in spite of
himself sat down on the ground near one of those heavenly ovens.  And
then he wanted to get up again, for he could feel the strong breath of
his enemy, sleep.  But he could not get up.  In a state of terror he
yielded himself to his enemy.  Shameful cowardice on the part of a man
now aged nine!  God, however, is merciful, and sent to him an angel in
the guise of a night-watchman, who kicked him into wakefulness and off
the place.  He ran on limping, beneath the stellar systems, and reached
his work at half-past four o'clock.

Although he had never felt so exhausted in his long life, he set to work
with fury.  Useless!  When his master arrived he had scarcely got
through the preliminaries.  He dully faced his master in the narrow
stifling cellar, lit by candles impaled on nails and already peopled by
the dim figures of boys, girls, and a few men.  His master was of
taciturn habit and merely told him to kneel down.  He knelt.  Two bigger
boys turned hastily from their work to snatch a glimpse of the affair.
The master moved to the back of the cellar and took from a box a piece
of rope an inch thick and clogged with clay.  At the same moment a
companion offered him, in silence, a tin with a slim neck, out of which
he drank deep; it contained a pint of porter owing on loan from the
previous day.  When the master came in due course with the rope to do
justice upon the sluggard he found the lad fallen forward and breathing
heavily and regularly.  Darius had gone to sleep.  He was awakened with
some violence, but the public opinion of the dungeon saved him from a
torn shirt and a bloody back.

This was Darius's last day on a pot-bank.  The next morning he and his
went in procession to the Bastille, as the place was called.  His
father, having been too prominent and too independent in a strike, had
been black-listed by every manufacturer in the district; and Darius,
though nine, could not keep the family.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FIVE.

MR. SHUSHIONS'S TEAR EXPLAINED.

The Bastille was on the top of a hill about a couple of miles long, and
the journey thither was much lengthened by the desire of the family to
avoid the main road.  They were all intensely ashamed; Darius was
ashamed to tears, and did not know why; even his little sister wept and
had to be carried, not because she was shoeless and had had nothing to
eat, but because she was going to the Ba-ba-bastille; she had no notion
what the place was.  It proved to be the largest building that Darius
had ever seen; and indeed it was the largest in the district; they stood
against its steep sides like flies against a kennel.  Then there was
rattling of key-bunches, and the rasping voices of sour officials, who
did not inquire if they would like a meal after their stroll.  And they
were put into a cellar and stripped and washed and dressed in other
people's clothes, and then separated, amid tears.  And Darius was
pitched into a large crowd of other boys, all clothed like himself.  He
now understood the reason for shame; it was because he could have no
distinctive clothes of his own, because he had somehow lost his identity.
All the boys had a sullen, furtive glance, and when they spoke it was in
whispers.

In the low room where the boys were assembled there fell a silence, and
Darius heard some one whisper that the celebrated boy who had run away
and been caught would be flogged before supper.  Down the long room ran
a long table.  Some one brought in three candles in tin candlesticks and
set them near the end of this table.  Then somebody else brought in a
pickled birch-rod, dripping with the salt water from which it had been
taken, and also a small square table.  Then came some officials, and a
clergyman, and then, surpassing the rest in majesty, the governor of the
Bastille, a terrible man.  The governor made a speech about the crime of
running away from the Bastille, and when he had spoken for a fair time,
the clergyman talked in the same sense; and then a captured tiger,
dressed like a boy, with darting fierce eyes, was dragged in by two men,
and laid face down on the square table, and four boys were commanded to
step forward and hold tightly the four members of this tiger.  And, his
clothes having previously been removed as far as his waist, his breeches
were next pulled down his legs.  Then the rod was raised and it
descended swishing, and blood began to flow; but far more startling than
the blood were the shrill screams of the tiger; they were so loud and
deafening that the spectators could safely converse under their shelter.
The boys in charge of the victim had to cling hard and grind their
teeth in the effort to keep him prone.  As the blows succeeded each
other, Darius became more and more ashamed.  The physical spectacle did
not sicken nor horrify him, for he was a man of wide experience; but he
had never before seen flogging by lawful authority.  Flogging in the
workshop was different, a private if sanguinary affair between free
human beings.  This ritualistic and cold-blooded torture was infinitely
more appalling in its humiliation.  The screaming grew feebler, then
ceased; then the blows ceased, and the unconscious infant (cured of
being a tiger) was carried away leaving a trail of red drops along the
floor.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

After this, supper was prepared on the long table, and the clergyman
called down upon it the blessing of God, and enjoined the boys to be
thankful, and departed in company with the governor.  Darius, who had
not tasted all day, could not eat.  The flogging had not nauseated him,
but the bread and the skilly revolted his pampered tastes.  Never had
he, with all his experience, seen nor smelt anything so foully
disgusting.  When supper was completed, a minor official interceded with
the Almighty in various ways for ten minutes, and at last the boys were
marched upstairs to bed.  They all slept in one room.  The night also
could be set down in words, but must not be, lest the setting-down
should be disastrous...

Darius knew that he was ruined; he knew that he was a workhouse boy for
evermore, and that the bright freedom of sixteen hours a day in a cellar
was lost to him for evermore.  He was now a prisoner, branded, hopeless.
He would never be able to withstand the influences that had closed
around him and upon him.  He supposed that he should become desperate,
become a tiger, and then...

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE.

But the following afternoon he was forcibly reclothed in his own
beautiful and beloved rags, and was pushed out of the Bastille, and
there he saw his pale father and his mother, and his little sister, and
another man.  And his mother was on her knees in the cold autumn
sunshine, and hysterically clasping the knees of the man, and weeping;
and the man was trying to raise her, and the man was weeping too.
Darius wept.  The man was Mr Shushions.  Somehow, in a way that Darius
comprehended not, Mr Shushions had saved them.  Mr Shushions, in a
beaver tall-hat and with an apron rolled round his waist under his coat,
escorted them back to their house, into which some fresh furniture had
been brought.  And Darius knew that a situation was waiting for his
father.  And further, Mr Shushions, by his immense mysterious power,
found a superb situation for Darius himself as a printer's devil.  All
this because Mr Shushions, as superintendent of a Sunday school, was
emotionally interested in the queer, harsh boy who had there picked up
the art of writing so quickly.

Such was the origin of the tear that ran down Mr Shushions's cheek when
he beheld Edwin, well-nourished, well-dressed and intelligent, the son
of Darius the successful steam-printer.  Mr Shushions's tear was the
tear of the creator looking upon his creation and marvelling at it.  Mr
Shushions loved Darius as only the benefactor can love the benefited.
He had been out of the district for over thirty years, and, having
returned there to die, the wonder of what he had accomplished by merely
saving a lad from the certain perdition of a prolonged stay in the
workhouse, struck him blindingly in the face and dazzled him.

Darius had never spoken to a soul of his night in the Bastille.  All his
infancy was his own fearful secret.  His life, seen whole, had been a
miracle.  But none knew that except himself and Mr Shushions.
Assuredly Edwin never even faintly suspected it.  To Edwin Mr Shushions
was nothing but a feeble and tedious old man.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SIX.

IN THE HOUSE.

To return to Edwin.  On that Friday afternoon of the breaking-up he was,
in the local phrase, at a loose end.  That is, he had no task, no
programme, and no definite desires.  Not knowing, when he started out in
the morning, whether school would formally end before or after the
dinner-hour, he had taken his dinner with him, as usual, and had eaten
it at Oldcastle.  Thus, though the family dinner had not begun when he
reached home, he had no share in it, partly because he was not hungry,
and partly because he was shy about having left school.  The fact that
he had left school affected him as he was affected by the wearing of a
new suit for the first time, or by the cutting of his hair after a
prolonged neglect of the barber.  It inspired him with a wish to avoid
his kind, and especially his sisters, Maggie and Clara.  Clara might
make some facetious remark.  Edwin could never forget the Red Indian
glee with which Clara had danced round him when for the first time--and
quite unprepared for the exquisite shock--she had seen him in long
trousers.  There was also his father.  He wanted to have a plain talk
with his father--he knew that he would not be at peace until he had had
that talk--and yet in spite of himself he had carefully kept out of his
father's way during all the afternoon, save for a moment when, strolling
with affected nonchalance up to Darius's private desk in the shop, he
had dropped thereon his school report, and strolled off again.

Towards six o'clock he was in his bedroom, an attic with a floor very
much more spacious than its ceiling, and a window that commanded the
<DW72> of Trafalgar Road towards Bleakridge.  It had been his room, his
castle, his sanctuary, for at least ten years, since before his mother's
death of cancer.  He did not know that he loved it, with all its
inconveniences and makeshifts; but he did love it, and he was jealous
for it; no one should lay a hand on it to rearrange what he had once
arranged.  His sisters knew this; the middle-aged servant knew it; even
his father, with a curt laugh, would humorously acquiesce in the theory
of the sacredness of Edwin's bedroom.  As for Edwin, he saw nothing
extraordinary in his attitude concerning his bedroom; and he could not
understand, and he somewhat resented, that the household should perceive
anything comic in it.  He never went near his sisters' bedroom, never
wished to go near it, never thought about it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

Now he sat idly on the patchwork counterpane of his bed and gazed at the
sky.  He was feeling a little happier, a little less unsettled, for his
stomach was empty and his mind had begun to fix itself with pleasure on
the images of hot toast and jam.  He `wanted his tea:' the manner in
which he glanced at his old silver watch proved that.  He wished only
that before six o'clock struck he could settle upon the necessary
changes in his bedroom.  A beautiful schooner, which for over a year,
with all sails spread, had awaited the breeze in a low dark corner to
the right of the window, would assuredly have to be dismissed to the
small, empty attic.  Once that schooner had thrilled him; the slight
rake of its masts and the knotted reality of its rigging had thrilled
him; and to navigate it had promised the most delicious sensations
conceivable.  Now, one moment it was a toy as silly as a doll, and the
next moment it thrilled him once more, and he could believe again its
promises of bliss--and then he knew that it was for ever a vain toy, and
he was sad, and his sadness was pleasure.  He had already stacked most
of his school-books in the other attic.  He would need a table and a
lamp; he knew not for what precise purpose; but a table and a lamp were
necessary to the continuance of his self-respect.  The only question
was, Should he remodel his bedroom, or should he demand the other attic,
and plant his flag in it and rule over it in addition to his bedroom?
Had he the initiative and the energy to carry out such an enterprise?
He was not able to make up his mind.  And, moreover, he could not decide
anything until after that plain talk with his father.

His sister Clara's high voice sounded outside, on the landing, or
half-way up the attic stairs.

"Ed-_win_!  Ed-_win_!"

"What's up?" he called in answer, rising with a nervous start.  The door
of the room was unlatched.

"You're mighty mysterious in your bedroom," said Clara's voice behind
the door.

"Come in!  Come in!  Why don't you come in?" he replied, with
good-natured impatience.  But somehow he could not speak in a natural
tone.  The mere fact that he had left school that day and that the world
awaited him, and that everybody in the house knew this, rendered him
self-conscious.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE.

Clara entered, with a curious sidelong movement, half-winning and
half-serpentine.  She was aged fourteen, a very fair and very slight
girl, with a thin face and thin lips, and extraordinarily slender hands;
in general appearance fragile.  She wore a semi-circular comb on the
crown of her head, and her abundant hair hung over her shoulders in two
tight pigtails.  Edwin considered that Clara was harsh and capricious;
he had much fault to find with her; but nevertheless the sight of her
usually affected him pleasurably (of course without his knowing it), and
he never for long sat definitely in adverse judgement upon her.  Her
gestures had a charm for him which he felt but did not realise.  And
this charm was similar to his own charm.  But nothing would have so
surprised him as to learn that he himself had any charm at all.  He
would have laughed, and been ashamed--to hear that his gestures and the
play of his features had an ingratiating, awkward, and wistful grace; he
would have tried to cure that.

"Father wants you," said Clara, her hand on the handle of the thin
attic-door hung with odd garments.

Edwin's heart fell instantly, and all the agreeable images of tea
vanished from his mind.  His father must have read the school report and
perceived that Edwin had been beaten by Charlie Orgreave, a boy younger
than himself!

"Did he send you up for me?"  Edwin asked.

"No," said Clara, frowning.  "But I heard him calling out for you all
over.  So Maggie told me to run up.  Not that I expect any _thanks_."  She
put her head forward a little.

The episode, and Clara's tone, showed clearly the nature and force of
the paternal authority in the house.  It was an authority with the gift
of getting its commands anticipated.

"All right!  I'm coming," said Edwin superiorly.

"I know what you want," Clara said teasingly as she turned towards the
passage.

"What do I want?"

"You want the empty attic all to yourself, and a fine state it would be
in in a month, my word!"

"How do you know I want the empty attic?"  Edwin repelled the onslaught;
but he was considerably taken aback.  It was a mystery to him how those
girls, and Clara in particular, got wind of his ideas before he had even
formulated them definitely to himself.  It was also a mystery to him how
they could be so tremendously interested in matters which did not
concern them.

"You never mind!"  Clara gibed, with a smile that was malicious, but
charmingly malicious.  "I know!"

She had merely seen him staring into the empty attic, and from that
brief spectacle she had by divination constructed all his plans.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

The Clayhanger sitting-room, which served as both dining-room and
drawing-room, according to the more primitive practices of those days,
was over one half of the shop, and looked on Duck Square.  Owing to its
northern aspect it scarcely ever saw the sun.  The furniture followed
the universal fashion of horse-hair, mahogany, and wool embroidery.
There was a piano, with a high back-fretted wood over silk pleated in
rays from the centre; a bookcase whose lower part was a cupboard; a
sofa; and a large leather easy-chair which did not match the rest of the
room.  This easy-chair had its back to the window and its front legs a
little towards the fireplace, so that Mr Clayhanger could read his
newspaper with facility in daytime.  At night the light fell a little
awkwardly from the central chandelier, and Mr Clayhanger, if he
happened to be reading, would continually shift his chair an inch or two
to left or right, backwards or forwards, and would also continually
glance up at the chandelier, as if accusing it of not doing its best.  A
common sight in the sitting-room was Mr Clayhanger balanced on a chair,
the table having been pushed away, screwing the newest burner into the
chandelier.  When he was seated in his easy-chair the piano could not be
played, because there was not sufficient space for the stool between the
piano and his chair; nor could the fire be made up without disturbing
him, because the japanned coal-box was on the same side of the
hearth-rug as the chair.  Thus, when the fire languished and Mr
Clayhanger neglected it, the children had either to ask permission to
step over his legs, or suggest that he should attend to the fire
himself.  Occasionally, when he was in one of his gay moods, he would
humorously impede the efforts of the fire-maker with his feet, and if
the fire-maker was Clara or Edwin, the child would tickle him, which
brought him to his senses and forced him to shout: "None o' that!  None
o' that!"

The position of Mr Clayhanger's easy-chair--a detail apparently
trifling--was in reality a strongly influencing factor in the family
life, for it meant that the father's presence obsessed the room.  And it
could not be altered, for it depended on the window; the window was too
small to be quite efficient.  When the children reflected upon the
history of their childhood they saw one important aspect of it as a long
series of detached hours spent in the sitting-room, in a state of desire
to do something that could not be done without disturbing father, and in
a state of indecision whether or not to disturb him.  If by chance, as
sometimes occurred, he chose to sit on the sofa, which was unobtrusive
in the corner away from the window, between the fireplace and the door,
the room was instantly changed into something larger, freer, and less
inconvenient.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIVE.

As the hour was approaching six, Edwin, on the way downstairs, looked in
at the sitting-room for his father; but Darius was not there.

"Where's father?" he demanded.

"I don't know, I'm sure," said Maggie, at the sewing-machine.  Maggie
was aged twenty; dark, rather stout, with an expression at once
benevolent and worried.  She rarely seemed to belong to the same
generation as her brother and sister.  She consorted on equal terms with
married women, and talked seriously of the same things as they did.  Mr
Clayhanger treated her somewhat differently from the other two.  Yet,
though he would often bid them accept her authority, he would now and
then impair that authority by roughly `dressing her down' at the
meal-table.  She was a capable girl; she had much less firmness, and
much more good-nature, than she seemed to have.  She could not assert
herself adequately.  She `managed' very well; indeed she had `done
wonders' in filling the place of the mother who had died when Clara was
four and Edwin six, and she herself only ten.  Responsibility,
apprehension, and strained effort had printed their marks on her
features.  But the majority of acquaintances were more impressed by her
good intention than by her capacity; they would call her `a nice thing.'
The discerning minority, while saying with admiring conviction that she
was `a very fine girl,' would regret that somehow she had not the
faculty of `making the best of herself,' of `putting her best foot
foremost.'  And would they not heartily stand up for her with the
superficial majority!

A thin, grey-haired, dreamy-eyed woman hurried into the room, bearing a
noisy tray and followed by Clara with a white cloth.  This was Mrs
Nixon, the domestic staff of the Clayhanger household for years.  Clara
and Mrs Nixon swept Maggie's sewing materials from the corner of the
table on to a chair, put Maggie's flower-glasses on to the ledge of the
bookcase, folded up the green cloth, and began rapidly to lay the tea.
Simultaneously Maggie, glancing at the clock, closed up her
sewing-machine, and deposited her work in a basket.  Clara, leaving the
table, stooped to pick up the bits of cotton and white stuff that
littered the carpet.  The clock struck six.

"Now, sharpy!" she exclaimed curtly to Edwin, who stood hesitatingly
with his hands in his pockets.  "Can't you help Maggie to push that
sewing-machine into the corner?"

"What on earth's up?" he inquired vaguely, but starting forward to help
Maggie.

"_She'll_ be here in a minute," said Maggie, almost under her breath, as
she fitted on the cover of the sewing-machine.

"Who?" asked Edwin.  "Oh!  Auntie!  I'd forgotten it was her night."

"As if anyone could forget!" murmured Clara, with sarcastic unbelief.

By this time the table was completely set.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

SIX.

Edwin wondered mildly, as he often wondered, at the extremely bitter
tone in which Clara always referred to their Aunt Clara Hamps,--when
Mrs Hamps was not there.  Even Maggie's private attitude to Auntie
Clara was scarcely more Christian.  Mrs Hamps was the widowed younger
sister of their mother, and she had taken a certain share in the
supervision of Darius Clayhanger's domestic affairs after the death of
Mrs Clayhanger.  This latter fact might account, partially but not
wholly, for the intense and steady dislike in which she was held by
Maggie, Clara, and Mrs Nixon.  Clara hated her own name because she had
been `called after' her auntie.  Mr Clayhanger `got on' excellently
with his sister-in-law.  He `thought highly' of her, and was indeed
proud to have her for a relative.  In their father's presence the girls
never showed their dislike of Mrs Hamps; it was a secret pleasure
shared between them and Mrs Nixon, and only disclosed to Edwin because
the girls were indifferent to what Edwin might think.  They casually
despised him for somehow liking his auntie, for not seeing through her
wiles; but they could count on his loyalty to themselves.

"Are you ready for tea, or aren't you?"  Clara asked him.  She
frequently spoke to him as if she was the elder instead of the younger.

"Yes," he said.  "But I must find father."

He went off, but he did not find his father in the shop, and after a few
futile minutes he returned upstairs.  Mrs Nixon preceded him, carrying
the tea-urn, and she told him that his father had sent word into the
kitchen that they were not to `wait tea' for him.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER SEVEN.

AUNTIE HAMPS.

Mrs Hamps had splendidly arrived.  The atmosphere of the sitting-room
was changed.  Maggie, smiling, wore her second-best black silk apron.
Clara, smiling and laughing, wore a clean long white pinafore.  Mrs
Nixon, with her dreamy eyes less vacant than usual, greeted Mrs Hamps
effusively, and effusively gave humble thanks for kind inquiries after
her health.  A stranger might have thought that these women were
strongly attached to one another by ties of affection and respect.
Edwin never understood how his sisters, especially Maggie, could
practise such vast and eternal hypocrisy with his aunt.  As for him, his
aunt acted on him now, as generally, like a tonic.  Some effluence from
her quickened him.  He put away the worry in connection with his father,
and gave himself up to the physical pleasures of tea.

Aunt Clara was a handsome woman.  She had been called--but not by men
whose manners and code she would have approved--`a damned fine woman.'
Her age was about forty, which at that period, in a woman's habit of
mind, was the equivalent of about fifty to-day.  Her latest photograph
was considered to be very successful.  It showed her standing behind a
velvet chair and leaning her large but still shapely bust slightly over
the chair.  Her forearms, ruffled and braceleted, lay along the fringed
back of the chair, and from one negligent hand depended a rose.  A heavy
curtain came downwards out of nothing into the picture, and the end of
it lay coiled and draped on the seat of the chair.  The great dress was
of slate- silk, with sleeves tight to the elbow, and thence,
from a ribbon-bow, broadening to a wide, triangular climax that revealed
quantities of lace at the wrists.  The pointed ends of the sleeves were
picked out with squares of velvet.  A short and highly ornamental
fringed and looped flounce waved grandly out behind from the waist to
the level of the knees; and the stomacher recalled the ornamentation of
the flounce; and both the stomacher and flounce gave contrasting value
to the severe plainness of the skirt, designed to emphasise the quality
of the silk.  Round the neck was a lace collarette to match the
furniture of the wrists, and the broad ends of the collarette were
crossed on the bosom and held by a large jet brooch.  Above that you saw
a fine regular face, with a firm hard mouth and a very straight nose and
dark eyebrows; small ears weighted with heavy jet ear-rings.

The photograph could not render the clear perfection of Aunt Clara's
rosy skin; she had the colour and the flashing eye of a girl.  But it
did justice to her really magnificent black hair.  This hair was all her
own, and the coiffure seemed as ample as a judge's wig.  From the low
forehead the hair was parted exactly in the middle for about two inches;
then plaited bands crossed and recrossed the scalp in profusion, forming
behind a pattern exceedingly complicated, and down either side of the
head, now behind the ear, now hiding it, now resting on the shoulders,
now hanging clear of them, fell long multitudinous glossy curls.  These
curls--one of them in the photograph reached as far as the stomacher--
could not have been surpassed in Bursley.

She was a woman of terrific vitality.  Her dead sister had been nothing
in comparison with her.  She had a glorious digestion, and was the envy
of her brother-in-law--who suffered much from biliousness--because she
could eat with perfect impunity hot buttered toast and raw celery in
large quantities.  Further, she had independent means, and no children
to cause anxieties.  Yet she was always, as the phrase went, `bearing
up,' or, as another phrase went, `leaning hard.'  Frances Ridley
Havergal was her favourite author, and Frances Ridley Havergal's little
book _Lean Hard_, was kept on her dressing-table.  (The girls, however,
averred that she never opened it.)  Aunt Clara's spiritual life must be
imagined as a continual, almost physical leaning on Christ.
Nevertheless she never complained, and she was seldom depressed.  Her
desire, and her achievement, was to be bright, to take everything
cheerfully, to look obstinately on the best side of things, and to
instil this religion into others.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

Thus, when it was announced that father had been called out
unexpectedly, leaving an order that they were not to wait for him, she
said gaily that they had better be obedient and begin, though it would
have been more agreeable to wait for father.  And she said how beautiful
the tea was, and how beautiful the toast, and how beautiful the
strawberry-jam, and how beautiful the pikelets.  She would herself pour
some hot water into the slop basin, and put a pikelet on a plate
thereon, covered, to keep warm for father.  She would not hear a word
about the toast being a little hard, and when Maggie in her curious
quiet way `stuck her out' that the toast was in fact hard, she said that
that precise degree of hardness was the degree which she, for herself,
preferred.  Then she talked of jams, and mentioned gooseberry-jam,
whereupon Clara privately put her tongue out, with the quickness of a
snake, to signal to Maggie.

"Ours isn't good this year," said Maggie.

"I told auntie we weren't so set up with it, a fortnight ago," said
Clara simply, like a little angel.

"Did you, dear?"  Mrs Hamps exclaimed, with great surprise, almost with
shocked surprise.  "I'm sure it's beautiful.  I was quite looking
forward to tasting it; quite!  I know what your gooseberry-jam is."

"Would you like to try it now?"  Maggie suggested.  "But we've warned
you."

"Oh, I don't want to trouble you _now_.  We're all so cosy here.  Any
time--"

"No trouble, auntie," said Clara, with her most captivating and innocent
smile.

"Well, if you talk about `warning' me, of course I must insist on having
some," said Auntie Clara.

Clara jumped up, passed behind Mrs Hamps, making a contemptuous face at
those curls as she did so, and ran gracefully down to the kitchen.

"Here," she said crossly to Mrs Nixon.  "A pot of that gooseberry,
please.  A small one will do.  She knows it's short of sugar, and so
she's determined to try it, just out of spite; and nothing will stop
her."

Clara returned smiling to the tea-table, and Maggie neatly unsealed the
jam; and Auntie Clara, with a face beaming with pleasurable
anticipation, helped herself circumspectly to a spoonful.

"Beautiful!" she murmured.

"Don't you think it's a bit tart?"  Maggie asked.

"Oh no!" protestingly.

"_Don't_ you?" asked Clara, with an air of delighted deferential
astonishment.

"Oh _no_!"  Mrs Hamps repeated.  "It's beautiful!"  She did not smack her
lips over it, because she would have considered it unladylike to smack
her lips, but by less offensive gestures she sought to convey her
unbounded pleasure in the jam.  "How much sugar did you put in?" she
inquired after a while.  "Half and half?"

"Yes," said Maggie.

"They do say gooseberries were a tiny bit sour this year, owing to the
weather," said Mrs Hamps reflectively.

Clara kicked Edwin under the table, as it were viciously, but her
delightful innocent smile, directed vaguely upon Mrs Hamps, did not
relax.  Such duplicity passed Edwin's comprehension; it seemed to him
purposeless.  Yet he could not quite deny that there might be a certain
sting, a certain insinuation, in his auntie's last remark.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE.

Then Mr Clayhanger entered, blowing forth a long breath as if trying to
repulse the oppressive heat of the July afternoon.  He came straight to
the table, with a slightly preoccupied air, quickly, his arms motionless
at his sides, and slanting a little outwards.  Mr Clayhanger always
walked like this, with motionless arms so that in spite of a rather
clumsy and heavy step, the upper part of him appeared to glide along.
He shook hands genially with Auntie Clara, greeting her almost as
grandiosely as she greeted him, putting on for a moment the grand
manner, not without dignity.  Each admired the other.  Each often said
that the other was `wonderful.'  Each undoubtedly flattered the other,
made a fuss of the other.  Mr Clayhanger's admiration was the greater.
The bitterest thing that Edwin had ever heard Maggie say was: "It's
something to be thankful for that she's his deceased wife's sister!"
And she had said the bitter thing with such quiet bitterness!  Edwin had
not instantly perceived the point of it.

Darius Clayhanger then sat down, with a thud, snatched at the cup of tea
which Maggie had placed before him, and drank half of it with a
considerable in-drawing noise.  No one asked where or why he had been
detained; it was not etiquette to do so.  If father had been `called
away,' or had `had to go away,' or was `kept somewhere,' the details
were out of deference allowed to remain in mystery, respected by
curiosity ...  `Father-business.' ...  All business was sacred.  He
himself had inculcated this attitude.

In a short silence the sound of the bell that the carman rang before the
tram started for Hanbridge floated in through the open window.

"There's the tram!" observed Auntie Clara, apparently with warm and
special interest in the phenomena of the tram.  Then another little
silence.

"Auntie," said Clara, writhing about youthfully on her chair.

"Can't ye sit still a bit?" the father asked, interrupting her roughly,
but with good humour.  "Ye'll be falling off th' chair in a minute."

Clara blushed swiftly, and stopped.

"Yes, love?"  Auntie Clara encouraged her.  It was as if Auntie Clara
had said: "Your dear father is of course quite right, more than right,
to insist on your sitting properly at table.  However, do not take the
correction too much to heart.  I sympathise with all your difficulties."

"I was only going to ask you," Clara went on, in a weaker, stammering
voice, "if you knew that Edwin's left school to-day."  Her archness had
deserted her.

"Mischievous little thing!" thought Edwin.  "Why must she deliberately
go and draw attention to that?"  And he too blushed, feeling as if he
owed an apology to the company for having left school.

"Oh yes!" said Auntie Clara with eager benevolence.  "I've got something
to say about that to my nephew."

Mr Clayhanger searched in a pocket of his alpaca, and drew forth an
open envelope.

"Here's the lad's report, auntie," said he.  "Happen ye'd like to look
at it."

"I should indeed!" she replied fervently.  "I'm sure it's a very good
one."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

She took the paper, and assumed her spectacles.

"Conduct--Excellent," she read, poring with enthusiasm over the
document.  And she read again: "Conduct--Excellent."  Then she went down
the list of subjects, declaiming the number of marks for each; and at
the end she read: "Position in class next term: Third.  Splendid, Eddy!"
she exclaimed.

"I thought you were second," said Clara, in her sharp manner.

Edwin blushed again, and hesitated.

"Eh?  What's that?  What's that?" his father demanded.  "I didn't notice
that.  Third?"

"Charlie Orgreave beat me in the examination," Edwin muttered.

"Well, that's a pretty how d'ye do!" said his father.  "Going down one!
Ye ought to ha' been first instead o' third.  And would ha' been,
happen, if ye'd pegged at it."

"Now I won't have that!  I won't have it!"  Auntie Clara protested,
laughingly showing her fine teeth and gazing first at Darius, and then
at Edwin, from under her spectacles, her head being thrown back and the
curls hanging far behind.  "No one shall say that Edwin doesn't work,
not even his father, while his auntie's about!  Because I know he does
work!  And besides, he hasn't gone down.  It says, `position _next
term_'--not this term.  You were still second to-day, weren't you, my
boy?"

"I suppose so.  Yes," Edwin answered, pulling himself together.

"Well!  There you are!"  Auntie Clara's voice rang triumphantly.  She
was opening her purse.  "And _there_ you are!" she repeated, popping half
a sovereign down in front of him.  "That's a little present from your
auntie on your leaving school."

"Oh, auntie!" he cried feebly.

"Oh!" cried Clara, genuinely startled.

Mrs Hamps was sometimes thus astoundingly munificent.  It was she who
had given the schooner to Edwin.  And her presents of elaborately
enveloped and costly toilet soap on the birthdays of the children, and
at Christmas, were massive.  Yet Clara always maintained that she was
the meanest old thing imaginable.  And Maggie had once said that she
knew that Auntie Clara made her servant eat dripping instead of butter.
To give inferior food to a servant was to Maggie the unforgivable in
parsimony.

"Well," Mr Clayhanger warningly inquired, "what do you say to your
aunt?"

"Thank you, auntie," Edwin sheepishly responded, fingering the coin.

It was a princely sum.  And she had stuck up for him famously in the
matter of the report.  Strange that his father should not have read the
report with sufficient attention to remark the fall to third place!
Anyway, that aspect of the affair was now safely over, and it seemed to
him that he had not lost much prestige by it.  He would still be able to
argue with his father on terms not too unequal, he hoped.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIVE.

As the tea drew to an end, and the plates of toast, bread and butter,
and tea-cake grew emptier, and the slop-basin filled, and only Maggie's
flowers remained fresh and immaculate amid the untidy debris of the
meal; and as Edwin and Clara became gradually indifferent to jam, and
then inimical to it; and as the sounds of the street took on the softer
quality of summer evening, and the first filmy shades of twilight
gathered imperceptibly in the corners of the room, and Mr Clayhanger
performed the eructations which signified that he had had enough; so
Mrs Hamps prepared herself for one of her classic outbursts of feeling.

"Well!" she said at last, putting her spoon to the left of her cup as a
final indication that seriously she would drink no more.  And she gave a
great sigh.  "School over!  And the only son going out into the world!
How time flies!"  And she gave another great sigh, implying an immense
melancholy due to this vision of the reality of things.  Then she
remembered her courage, and the device of leaning hard, and all her
philosophy.

"But it's all for the best!" she broke forth in a new brave tone.
"Everything is ordered for the best.  We must never forget that!  And
I'm quite sure that Edwin will be a very great credit to us all, with
help from above."

She proceeded powerfully in this strain.  She brought in God, Christ,
and even the Holy Spirit.  She mentioned the dangers of the world, and
the disguises of the devil, and the unspeakable advantages of a good
home, and the special goodness of Mr Clayhanger and of Maggie, yes, and
of her little Clara; and the pride which they all had in Edwin, and the
unique opportunities which he had of doing good, by example, and also,
soon, by precept, for others younger than himself would begin to look up
to him; and again her personal pride in him, and her sure faith in him;
and what a solemn hour it was...

Nothing could stop her.  The girls loathed these exhibitions.  Maggie
always looked at the table during their progress, and she felt as though
she had done something wrong and was ashamed of it.  Clara not merely
felt like a criminal--she felt like an unrepentant criminal; she
blushed, she glanced nervously about the room, and all the time she
repeated steadily in her heart a highly obscene word which she had heard
at school.  This unspoken word, hurled soundlessly but savagely at her
aunt in that innocent heart, afforded much comfort to Clara in the
affliction.  Even Edwin, who was more lenient in all ways than his
sisters, profoundly deplored these moralisings of his aunt.  They filled
him with a desire to run fast and far, to be alone at sea, or to be deep
somewhere in the bosom of the earth.  He could not understand this side
of his auntie's individuality.  But there was no delivery from Mrs
Hamps.  The only person who could possibly have delivered them seemed to
enjoy the sinister thraldom.  Mr Clayhanger listened with appreciative
and admiring nods; he appeared to be quite sincere.  And Edwin could not
understand his father either.  "How simple father must be!" he thought
vaguely.  Whereas Clara fatalistically dismissed her father's attitude
as only one more of the preposterously unreasonable phenomena which she
was constantly meeting in life; and she persevered grimly with her
obscene word.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

SIX.

"Eh!" said Mrs Hamps enthusiastically, after a trifling pause.  "It
does me good when I think what a _help_ you'll be to your father in the
business, with that clever head of yours."

She gazed at him fondly.

Now this was Edwin's chance.  He did not wish to be any help at all to
his father in the business.  He had other plans for himself.  He had never
mentioned them before, because his father had never talked to him about
his future career, apparently assuming that he would go into the
business.  He had been waiting for his father to begin.  "Surely," he
had said to himself "father's bound to speak to me sometime about what
I'm going to do, and when he does I shall just tell him."  But his
father never had begun; and by timidity, negligence, and perhaps
ill-luck, Edwin had thus arrived at his last day at school with the
supreme question not merely unsolved but unattacked.  Oh he blamed
himself!  Any ordinary boy (he thought) would have discussed such a
question naturally long ago.  After all, it was not a crime, it was no
cause for shame, to wish not to be a printer.  Yet he was ashamed!
Absurd!  He blamed himself.  But he also blamed his father.  Now,
however, in responding to his auntie's remark, he could remedy all the
past by simply and boldly stating that he did not want to follow his
father.  It would be unpleasant, of course, but the worst shock would be
over in a moment, like the drawing of a tooth.  He had merely to utter
certain words.  He must utter them.  They were perfectly easy to say,
and they were also of the greatest urgency.  "I don't want to be a
printer."  He mumbled them over in his mind.  "I don't want to be a
printer."  What could it matter to his father whether he was a printer
or not?  Seconds, minutes, seemed to pass.  He knew that if he was so
inconceivably craven as to remain silent, his self-respect would never
recover from the blow.  Then, in response to Mrs Hamps's prediction
about his usefulness to his father in the business, he said, with a
false-jaunty, unconvinced, unconvincing air--

"Well, that remains to be seen."

This was all he could accomplish.  It seemed as if he had looked death
itself in the face, and drawn away.

"Remains to be _seen_?"  Auntie Clara repeated, with a hint of startled
pain, due to this levity.

He was mute.  No one suspected, as he sat there, so boyish, wistful, and
uneasily squirming, that he was agonised to the very centre of his
being.  All the time, in his sweating soul, he kept trying to persuade
himself: "I've given them a hint, anyhow!  I've given them a hint,
anyhow!"

"Them" included everybody at the table.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

SEVEN.

Mr Clayhanger, completely ignoring Edwin's reply to his aunt and her
somewhat shocked repetition of it, turned suddenly towards his son and
said, in a manner friendly but serious, a manner that assumed
everything, a manner that begged the question, unconscious even that
there was a question--

"I shall be out the better part o' to-morrow.  I want ye to be sure to
be in the shop all afternoon--I'll tell you what for downstairs."  It
was characteristic of him thus to make a mystery of business in front of
the women.

Edwin felt the net closing about him.  Then he thought of one of those
`posers' which often present themselves to youths of his age.

"But to-morrow's Saturday," he said, perhaps perkily.  "What about the
Bible class?"

Six months previously a young minister of the Wesleyan Circuit, to whom
Heaven had denied both a sense of humour and a sense of honour, had
committed the infamy of starting a Bible class for big boys on Saturday
afternoons.  This outrage had appalled and disgusted the boyhood of
Wesleyanism in Bursley.  Their afternoon for games, their only fair
afternoon in the desert of the week, to be filched from them and used
against them for such an odious purpose as a Bible class!  Not only
Sunday school on Sunday afternoon, but a Bible class on Saturday
afternoon!  It was incredible.  It was unbearable.  It was gross
tyranny, and nothing else.  Nevertheless the young minister had his way,
by dint of meanly calling upon parents and invoking their help.  The
scurvy worm actually got together a class of twelve to fifteen boys, to
the end of securing their eternal welfare.  And they had to attend the
class, though they swore they never would, and they had to sing hymns,
and they had to kneel and listen to prayers, and they had to listen to
the most intolerable tedium, and to take notes of it.  All this, while
the sun was shining, or the rain was raining, on fields and streets and
open spaces and ponds!

Edwin had been trapped in the snare.  His father, after only three words
from the young minister, had yielded up his son like a burnt sacrifice--
and with a casual nonchalance that utterly confounded Edwin.  In vain
Edwin had pointed out to his elders that a Saturday afternoon of
confinement must be bad for his health.  His attention had been directed
to his eternal health.  In vain he had pointed out that on wet Saturday
afternoons he frequently worked at his home-lessons, which therefore
might suffer under the regime of a Bible class.  His attention had been
directed to the peace which passeth understanding.  So he had been
beaten, and was secretly twitted by Clara as an abject victim.  Hence it
was with a keen and peculiar feeling of triumph, of hopelessly cornering
the inscrutable generation which a few months ago had cornered him, that
he demanded, perhaps perkily: "What about the Bible class?"

"There'll be no more Bible classing," said his father, with a mild but
slightly sardonic smile, as who should say: "I'm ready to make all
allowances for youth; but I must get you to understand, as gently as I
can, that you can't keep on going to Bible classes for ever and ever."

Mrs Hamps said--

"It won't be as if you were at school.  But I do hope you won't neglect
to study your Bible.  Eh, but I do hope you'll always find time for
that, to your dying day!"

"Oh--but I say--" Edwin began, and stopped.

He was beaten by the mere effrontery of the replies.  His father and his
aunt (the latter of whom at any rate was a firm and confessed
religionist, who had been responsible for converting Mr Clayhanger from
Primitive Methodism to Wesleyan Methodism) did not trouble to defend
their new position by argument.  They made no effort to reconcile it
with their position of a few months back, when the importance of
heavenly welfare far exceeded the importance of any conceivable earthly
welfare.  The fact was that they had no argument.  If God took
precedence of knowledge and of health, he took precedence of a peddling
shop!  That was unanswerable.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

EIGHT.

Edwin was dashed.  His faith in humanity was dashed.  These elders were
not sincere.  And as Mrs Hamps continued to embroider the original
theme of her exhortation about the Bible, Edwin looked at her
stealthily, and the doubt crossed his mind whether that majestic and
vital woman was ever sincere about anything, even to herself--whether
the whole of her daily existence, from her getting-up to her down-lying,
was not a grandiose pretence.

Not that he had the least desire to cling to the Bible class, even as an
alternative to the shop!  No!  He was much relieved to be rid of the
Bible class.  What overset him was the crude illogicality of the new
decree, and the shameless tacit admission of previous insincerity.

Two hours later, as he stood idly at the window of his bedroom, watching
the gas lamps of Trafalgar Road wax brighter in the last glooms of
twilight, he was still occupied with the sham and the unreason and the
lack of scruple suddenly revealed in the life of the elder generation.
Unconsciously imitating a trick of his father's when annoyed but calm,
he nodded his head several times, and with his tongue against his teeth
made the noise which in writing is represented by `tut-tut.'  Yet
somehow he had always known that it would be so.  At bottom, he was only
pretending to himself to be shocked and outraged.

His plans were no further advanced; indeed they were put back, for this
Saturday afternoon vigil in the shop would be in some sort a symbolic
temporary defeat for him.  Why had he not spoken out clearly?  Why was
he always like a baby in presence of his father?  The future was all
askew for him.  He had forgotten his tremendous serious resolves.  The
touch of the half-sovereign in his pocket, however, was comforting in a
universe of discomfort.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER EIGHT.

IN THE SHOP.

"Here, lad!" said his father to Edwin, as soon as he had scraped up the
last crumbs of cheese from his plate at the end of dinner on the
following day.

Edwin rose obediently and followed him out of the room.  Having waited
at the top of the stairs until his father had reached the foot, he
leaned forward as far as he could with one hand on the rail and the
other pressing against the wall, swooped down to the mat at the bottom,
without touching a single step on the way, and made a rocket-like noise
with his mouth. He had no other manner of descending the staircase,
unless he happened to be in disgrace.  His father went straight to the
desk in the corner behind the account-book window, assumed his
spectacles, and lifted the lid of the desk.

"Here!" he said, in a low voice.  "Mr Enoch Peake is stepping in this
afternoon to look at this here."  He displayed the proof--an unusually
elaborate wedding card, which announced the marriage of Mr Enoch Peake
with Mrs Louisa Loggerheads.  "Ye know him as I mean?"

"Yes," said Edwin, "The stout man.  The Cocknage Gardens man."

"That's him.  Well ye'll tell him I've been called away.  Tell him who
ye are.  Not but what he'll know.  Tell him I think it might be
better"--Darius's thick finger ran along a line of print--"if we
put--`widow of the late Simon Loggerheads Esquire,' instead of--`Esq.'
See?  Otherwise it's all right.  Tell him I say as otherwise it's all
right.  And ask him if he'll have it printed in silver, and how many he
wants, and show him this sample envelope.  Now, d'ye understand?"

"Yes," said Edwin, in a tone to convey, not disrespectfully, that there
was nothing to understand.  Curious, how his father had the air of
bracing all his intellect as if to a problem!

"Then ye'll take it to Big James, and he can start Chawner on it.  Th'
job's promised for Monday forenoon."

"Will Big James be working?" asked Edwin, for it was Saturday afternoon,
when, though the shop remained open, the printing office was closed.

"They're all on overtime," said Mr Clayhanger; and then he added, in a
voice still lower, and with a surreptitious glance at Miss Ingamells,
the shop-woman, who was stolidly enfolding newspapers in wrappers at the
opposite counter, "See to it yourself, now.  He won't want to talk to
_her_ about a thing like that.  Tell him I told you specially.  Just let
me see how well ye can do it."

"Right!" said Edwin; and to himself, superciliously: "It might be life
and death."

"We ought to be doing a lot o' business wi' Enoch Peake, later on," Mr
Clayhanger finished, in a whisper.

"I see," said Edwin, impressed, perceiving that he had perhaps been
supercilious too soon.

Mr Clayhanger returned his spectacles to their case, and taking his hat
from its customary hook behind him, over the job-files, consulted his
watch and passed round the counter to go.  Then he stopped.

"I'm going to Manchester," he murmured confidentially.  "To see if I can
pick up a machine as I've heard of."

Edwin was flattered.  At the dinner-table Mr Clayhanger had only
vouchsafed that he had a train to catch, and would probably not be in
till late at night.

The next moment he glimpsed Darius through the window, his arms
motionless by his sides and sticking slightly out; hurrying in the
sunshine along Wedgwood Street in the direction of Shawport station.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

So this was business!  It was not the business he desired and meant to
have; and he was uneasy at the extent to which he was already entangled
in it; but it was rather amusing, and his father had really been very
friendly.  He felt a sense of importance.

Soon afterwards Clara ran into the shop to speak to Miss Ingamells.  The
two chatted and giggled together.

"Father's gone to Manchester," he found opportunity to say to Clara as
she was leaving.

"Why aren't you doing those prizes he told you to do?" retorted Clara,
and vanished, She wanted none of Edwin's superior airs.

During dinner Mr Clayhanger had instructed his son to go through the
Sunday school prize stock and make an in_ven_tory of it.

This injunction from the child Clara, which Miss Ingamells had certainly
overheard, prevented him, as an independent man, from beginning his work
for at least ten minutes.  He whistled, opened his father's desk and
stared vacantly into it, examined the pen-nib case in detail, and tore
off two leaves from the date calendar so that it should be ready for
Monday.  He had a great scorn for Miss Ingamells, who was a personable
if somewhat heavy creature of twenty-eight, because she kept company
with a young man.  He had caught them arm-in-arm and practically hugging
each other, one Sunday afternoon in the street.  He could see naught but
silliness in that kind of thing.

The entrance of a customer caused him to turn abruptly to the high
shelves where the books were kept.  He was glad that the customer was
not Mr Enoch Peake, the expectation of whose arrival made him curiously
nervous.  He placed the step-ladder against the shelves, climbed up, and
began to finger volumes and parcels of volumes.  The dust was
incredible.  The disorder filled him with contempt.  It was astounding
that his father could tolerate such disorder; no doubt the whole shop
was in the same condition.  "Thirteen Archie's Old Desk," he read on a
parcel, but when he opened the parcel he found seven "From Jest to
Earnest."  Hence he had to undo every parcel.  However, the work was
easy.  He first wrote the inventory in pencil, then he copied it in ink;
then he folded it, and wrote very carefully on the back, because his
father had a mania for endorsing documents in the legal manner:
"Inventory of Sunday school prize stock."  And after an instant's
hesitation he added his own initials.  Then he began to tie up and
restore the parcels and the single volumes.  None of all this literature
had any charm for him.  He possessed five or six such books, all gilt
and chromatic, which had been awarded to him at Sunday school, `suitably
inscribed,' for doing nothing in particular; and he regarded them
without exception as frauds upon boyhood.  However, Clara had always
enjoyed reading them.  But lying flat on one of the top shelves he
discovered, nearly at the end of his task, an oblong tome which did
interest him: "Cazenove's Architectural Views of European Capitals, with
descriptive letterpress."  It had an old-fashioned look, and was
probably some relic of his father's predecessor in the establishment.
Another example of the lack of order which prevailed!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE.

He took the volume to the retreat of the desk, and there turned over its
pages of  illustrations.  At first his interest in them, and in
the letterpress, was less instinctive than deliberate.  He said to
himself: "Now, if there is anything in me, I ought really to be
interested in this, and I must be interested in it."  And he was.  He
glanced carelessly at the clock, which was hung above the shelves of
exercise-books and notebooks, exactly opposite the door.  A quarter past
four.  The afternoon was quietly passing, and he had not found it too
tedious.  In the background of the task which (he considered) he had
accomplished with extraordinary efficiency, his senses noted faintly the
continual trickle of customers, all of whom were infallibly drawn to
Miss Ingamells's counter by her mere watchful and receptive appearance.
He had heard phrases and ends of phrases, such as: "No, we haven't
anything smaller," "A camel-hair brush," "Gum but not glue," "Very
sorry, sir.  I'll speak firmly to the paper boy," and the sound of coins
dragged along the counter, the sound of the testing of half a sovereign,
the opening and shutting of the till-drawer; and occasionally Miss
Ingamells exclaiming to herself upon the stupidity of customers after a
customer had gone; and once Miss Ingamells crossing angrily to fix the
door ajar which some heedless customer had closed: "Did they suppose
that people didn't want air like other people?"  And now it was a
quarter past four.  Undoubtedly he had a peculiar, and pleasant, feeling
of importance.  In another half-minute he glanced at the clock again,
and it was a quarter to five.

What hypnotism attracted him towards the artists' materials cabinet
which stood magnificent, complicated, and complete in the middle of the
shop, like a monument?  His father, after one infantile disastrous raid,
had absolutely forbidden any visitation of that cabinet, with its glass
case of assorted paints, crayons, brushes and pencils, and its
innumerable long drawers full of paper and cards and wondrous perfectly
equipped boxes, and T-squares and set-squares, with a hundred other
contrivances.  But of course the order had now ceased to have force.
Edwin had left school; and, if he was not a man, he was certainly not a
boy.  He began to open the drawers, at first gingerly, then boldly;
after all it was no business of Miss Ingamells's!  And, to be just, Miss
Ingamells made no sort of pretence that it was any business of hers.
She proceeded with her own business.  Edwin opened a rather large wooden
water-colour box.  It was marked five and sixpence.  It seemed to
comprise everything needed for the production of the most entrancing and
majestic architectural views, and as Edwin took out its upper case and
discovered still further marvellous devices and apparatus in its
basement beneath, he dimly but passionately saw, in his heart, bright
masterpieces that ought to be the fruit of that box.  There was a key to
it.  He must have it.  He would have given all that he possessed for it,
if necessary.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

"Miss Ingamells," he said: and, as she did not look up immediately, "I
say, Miss Ingamells!  How much does father take off in the shilling to
auntie when she buys anything?"

"Don't ask _me_, Master Edwin," said Miss Ingamells; "_I_ don't know.  How
should I know?"

"Well, then," he muttered, "I shall pay full price for it--that's all."
He could not wait, and he wanted to be on the safe side.

Miss Ingamells gave him change for his half-sovereign in a strictly
impartial manner, to indicate that she accepted no responsibility.  And
the squaring of Edwin's shoulders conveyed to Miss Ingamells that he
advised her to keep carefully within her own sphere, and not to make
impertinent inquiries about the origin of the half-sovereign, which he
could see intrigued her acutely.  He now owned the box; it was not a box
of colours, but a box of enchantment.  He had had colour-boxes before,
but nothing to compare with this, nothing that could have seemed magical
to anybody wiser than a very small boy.  Then he bought some
cartridge-paper; he considered that cartridge-paper would be good enough
for preliminary experiments.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIVE.

It was while he was paying for the cartridge-paper--he being, as was
indeed proper, on the customers' side of the counter--that a heavy
loutish boy in an apron entered the shop, blushing.  Edwin turned away.
This was Miss Ingamells's affair.

"If ye please, Mester Peake's sent me.  He canna come in this
afternoon--he's got a bit o' ratting on--and will Mester Clayhanger step
across to th' Dragon to-night after eight, with that there peeper
[paper] as he knows on?"

At the name of Peake, Edwin started.  He had utterly forgotten the
matter.

"Master Edwin," said Miss Ingamells drily.  "You know all about that,
don't you?"  Clearly she resented that he knew all about that while she
didn't.

"Oh!  Yes," Edwin stammered.  "What did you say?"  It was his first
piece of real business.

"If you please, Mester Peake sent me."  The messenger blundered through
his message again word for word.

"Very well.  I'll attend to it," said Edwin, as nonchalantly as he
could.

Nevertheless he was at a loss what to do, simple though the situation
might have seemed to a person with an experience of business longer than
Edwin's.  Just as three hours previously his father had appeared to be
bracing all his intellect to a problem that struck Edwin as entirely
simple, so now Edwin seemed to be bracing all his intellect to another
aspect of the same problem.  Time, revenging his father! ...  What!  Go
across to the Dragon and in cold blood demand Mr Enoch Peake, and then
parley with Mr Enoch Peake as one man with another!  He had never been
inside the Dragon.  He had been brought up in the belief that the Dragon
was a place of sin.  The Dragon was included in the generic
term--`gin-palace,' and quite probably in the Siamese-twin
term--`gaming-saloon.'  Moreover, to discuss business with Mr Enoch
Peake...  Mr Enoch Peake was as mysterious to Edwin as, say, a Chinese
mandarin!  Still, business was business, and something would have to be
done.  He did not know what.  Ought he to go to the Dragon?  His father
had not foreseen the possibility of this development.  He instantly
decided one fundamental: he would not consult Miss Ingamells; no, nor
even Maggie!  There remained only Big James.  He went across to see Big
James, who was calmly smoking a pipe on the little landing at the top of
the steps leading to the printing office.

Big James showed no astonishment.

"You come along o' me to the Dragon to-night, young sir, at eight
o'clock, or as soon after as makes no matter, and I'll see as you see
Mr Enoch Peake.  I shall be coming up Woodisun Bank at eight o'clock,
or as soon after as makes no matter.  You be waiting for me at the back
gates there, and I'll see as you see Mr Enoch Peake."

"Are you going to the Dragon?"

"Am I going to the Dragon, young sir!" exclaimed Big James, in his
majestic voice.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER NINE.

THE TOWN.

James Yarlett was worthy of his nickname.  He stood six feet four and a
half inches in height, and his girth was proportionate; he had enormous
hands and feet, large features, and a magnificent long dark brown beard;
owing to this beard his necktie was never seen.  But the most
magnificent thing about him was his bass voice, acknowledged to be the
finest bass in the town, and one of the finest even in Hanbridge, where,
in his earlier prime, James had lived as a `news comp' on the
"Staffordshire Signal."  He was now a `jobbing comp' in Bursley, because
Bursley was his native town and because he preferred jobbing.  He made
the fourth and heaviest member of the celebrated Bursley Male Glee
Party, the other three being Arthur Smallrice, an old man with a
striking falsetto voice, Abraham Harracles, and Jos Rawnpike (pronounced
Rampick).  These men were accustomed to fame, and Big James was the king
of them, though the mildest.  They sang at dinners, free-and-easies,
concerts, and Martinmas tea-meetings.  They sang for the glory, and when
there was no demand for their services, they sang to themselves, for the
sake of singing.  Each of them was a star in some church or chapel
choir.  And except Arthur Smallrice, they all shared a certain
elasticity of religious opinion.  Big James, for example, had varied in
ten years from Wesleyan, through Old Church, to Roman Catholic up at
Bleakridge.  It all depended on niceties in the treatment accorded to
him, and on the choice of anthems.  Moreover, he liked a change.

He was what his superiors called `a very superior man.'  Owing to the
more careful enunciation required in singing, he had lost a great deal
of the Five Towns accent, and one cannot be a compositor for a quarter
of a century without insensibly acquiring an education and a store of
knowledge far excelling the ordinary.  His manner was gentle, and
perhaps somewhat pompous, as is common with very big men; but you could
never be sure whether an extremely subdued humour did not underlie his
pomposity.  He was a bachelor, aged forty-five, and lived quietly with a
married sister at the bottom of Woodisun Bank, near the National
Schools.  The wonder was that, with all his advantages, he had not more
deeply impressed himself upon Bursley as an individuality, and not
merely as a voice.  But he seemed never to seek to do so.  He was
without ambition; and, though curiously careful sometimes about
preserving his own dignity, and beyond question sensitive by
temperament, he showed marked respect, and even humility, to the
worldly-successful.  Despite his bigness and simplicity there was
something small about him which came out in odd trifling details.  Thus
it was characteristic of Big James to ask Edwin to be waiting for him at
the back gates in Woodisun Bank when he might just as easily have met
him at the side door by the closed shop in Wedgwood Street.

Edwin, who from mere pride had said nothing to his sisters about the
impending visit to the Dragon, was a little surprised and dashed to see
Big James in broadcloth and a high hat; for he had not dreamed of
changing his own everyday suit, nor had it occurred to him that the
Dragon was a temple of ceremoniousness.  Big James looked enormous.  The
wide lapel of his shining frock-coat was buttoned high up under his
beard and curved downwards for a distance of considerably more than a
yard to his knees: it was a heroic frock-coat.  The sleeves were wide,
but narrowing at the wrists, and the white wristbands were very tight.
The trousers fell in ample folds on the uppers of the gigantic boots.
Big James had a way of sticking out his chest and throwing his head back
which would have projected the tip of his beard ten inches forth from
his body, had the beard been stiff; but the soft silkiness of the beard
frustrated this spectacular phenomenon, which would have been very
interesting to witness.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

The pair stepped across Trafalgar Road together, Edwin, though he tried
to be sedate, nothing but a frisking morsel by the side of the vast
monument.  Compared with the architectural grandeur of Mr Varlett, his
thin, supple, free-moving limbs had an almost pathetic appearance of
ephemeral fragility.

Big James directed himself to the archway leading to the Dragon stables,
and there he saw an ostler or oddman.  Edwin, feeling the imminence of
an ordeal, surreptitiously explored a pocket to be sure that the proof
of the wedding-card was safely there.

The ostler raised his reddish eyebrows to Big James.  Big James jerked
his head to one side, indicating apparently the entire Dragon, and
simultaneously conveying a query.  The ostler paused immobile an instant
and then shook his insignificant turnip-pate.  Big James turned away.
No word had been spoken; nevertheless, the men had exchanged a dialogue
which might be thus put into words--

"I wasn't thinking to see ye so soon," from the ostler.

"Then nobody of any importance has yet gone into the assembly room?"
from Big James.

"Nobody worth speaking of, and won't, for a while," from the other.

"Then I'll take a turn," from Big James.

The latter now looked down at Edwin, and addressed him in words--

"Seemingly we're too soon, Mr Edwin.  What do you say to a turn round
the town--playground way?  I doubted we should be too soon."

Edwin showed alacrity.  As a schoolboy it had been definitely forbidden
to him to go out at night; and unless sent on a special and hurried
errand, he had scarcely seen the physiognomy of the streets after eight
o'clock.  He had never seen the playground in the evening.  And this
evening the town did not seem like the same town; it had become a new
and mysterious town of adventure.  And yet Edwin was not fifty yards
away from his own bedroom.

They ascended Duck Bank together, Edwin proud to be with a celebrity of
the calibre of Big James, and Big James calmly satisfied to show himself
thus formally with his master's son.  It appeared almost incredible that
those two immortals, so diverse, had issued from the womb practically
alike; that a few brief years on the earth had given Big James such a
tremendous physical advantage.  Several hours' daily submission to the
exact regularities of lines of type and to the unvarying demands of
minutely adjusted machines in motion had stamped Big James's body and
mind with the delicate and quasi-finicking preciseness which
characterises all compositors and printers; and the continual monotonous
performance of similar tasks that employed his faculties while never
absorbing or straining them, had soothed and dulled the fever of life in
him to a beneficent calm, a calm refined and beautified by the
pleasurable exercise of song.  Big James had seldom known a violent
emotion.  He had craved nothing, sought for nothing, and lost nothing.

Edwin, like Big James in progress from everlasting to everlasting, was
all inchoate, unformed, undisciplined, and burning with capricious
fires; all expectant, eager, reluctant, tingling, timid, innocently and
wistfully audacious.  By taking the boy's hand, Big James might have
poetically symbolised their relation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE.

"Are you going to sing to-night at the Dragon, Mr Yarlett?" asked
Edwin.  He lengthened his step to Big James's, controlled his ardent
body, and tried to remember that he was a man with a man.

"I am, young sir," said Big James.  "There is a party of us."

"Is it the Male Glee Party?"  Edwin pursued.

"Yes, Mr Edwin."

"Then Mr Smallrice will be there?"

"He will, Mr Edwin."

"Why can Mr Smallrice sing such high notes?"

Big James slowly shook his head, as Edwin looked up at him.  "I tell you
what it is, young sir.  It's a gift, that's what it is, same as I can
sing low."

"But Mr Smallrice is very old, isn't he?"

"There's a parrot in a cage over at the Duck, there, as is eighty-five
years old, and that's proved by record kept, young sir."

"No!" protested Edwin's incredulity politely.

"By record kept," said Big James.

"Do you often sing at the Dragon, Mr Yarlett?"

"Time was," said Big James, "when some of us used to sing there every
night, Sundays excepted, and concerts and whatnot excepted.  Aye!  For
hours and hours every night.  And still do sometimes."

"After your work?"

"After our work.  Aye!  And often till dawn in summer.  One o'clock, two
o'clock, half-past two o'clock, every night.  But now they say that this
new Licensing Act will close every public-house in this town at eleven
o'clock, and a straight-up eleven at that!"

"But what do you do it for?"

"What do we do it for?  We do it to pass the time and the glass, young
sir.  Not as I should like you to think as I ever drank, Mr Edwin.  One
quart of ale I take every night, and have ever done; no more, no less."

"But"--Edwin's rapid, breaking voice interrupted eagerly the deep
majestic tones--"aren't you tired the next day?  _I_ should be!"

"Never," said Big James.  "I get up from my bed as fresh as a daisy at
six sharp.  And I've known the nights when my bed ne'er saw me."

"You must be strong, Mr Yarlett, my word!"  Edwin exclaimed.  These
revelations of the habits and prowess of Big James astounded him.  He
had never suspected that such things went on in the town.

"Aye!  Middling!"

"I suppose it's a free-and-easy at the Dragon, to-night, Mr Yarlett?"

"In a manner of speaking," said Big James.

"I wish I could stay for it."

"And why not?"  Big James suggested, and looked down at Edwin with
half-humorous incertitude.

Edwin shrugged his shoulders superiorly, indicating by instinct, in
spite of himself, that possibly Big James was trespassing over the
social line that divided them.  And yet Big James's father would have
condescended to Edwin's grandfather.  Only, Edwin now belonged to the
employing class, whilst Big James belonged to the employed.  Already
Edwin, whose father had been thrashed by workmen whom a compositor would
hesitate to call skilled--already Edwin had the mien natural to a ruler,
and Big James, with dignified deference, would submit unresentingly to
his attitude.  It was the subtlest thing.  It was not that Edwin
obscurely objected to the suggestion of his being present at the
free-and-easy; it was that he objected (but nicely, and with good
nature) to any assumption of Big James's right to influence him towards
an act that his father would not approve.  Instead of saying, "Why not?"
Big James ought to have said: "Nobody but you can decide that, as your
father's away."  James ought to have been strictly impartial.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

"Well," said Big James, when they arrived at the playground, which lay
north of the covered Meat Market or Shambles, "it looks as if they
hadn't been able to make a start yet at the Blood Tub."  His tone was
marked by a calm, grand disdain, as of one entertainer talking about
another.

The Blood Tub, otherwise known as Snaggs's, was the centre of nocturnal
pleasure in Bursley.  It stood almost on the very spot where the jawbone
of a whale had once lain, as a supreme natural curiosity.  It
represented the softened manners which had developed out of the old
medievalism of the century.  It had supplanted the bear-pit and the
cock-pit.  It corresponded somewhat with the ideals symbolised by the
new Town Hall.  In the tiny odorous beer-houses of all the undulating,
twisting, reddish streets that surrounded the contiguous open spaces of
Duck Bank, the playground, the market-place, and Saint Luke's Square,
the folk no longer discussed eagerly what chance on Sunday morning the
municipal bear would have against five dogs.  They had progressed as far
as a free library, boxing-gloves, rabbit-coursing, and the Blood Tub.

This last was a theatre with wooden sides and a canvas roof, and it
would hold quite a crowd of people.  In front of it was a platform, and
an orchestra, lighted by oil flares that, as Big James and Edwin
approached, were gaining strength in the twilight.  Leaning against the
platform was a blackboard on which was chalked the announcement of two
plays: "The Forty Thieves" (author unstated) and Cruikshank's "The
Bottle."  The orchestra, after terrific concussions, fell silent, and
then a troupe of players in costume, cramped on the narrow trestle
boards, performed a sample scene from "The Forty Thieves," just to give
the crowd in front an idea of the wonders of this powerful work.  And
four thieves passed and repassed behind the screen hiding the doors, and
reappeared nine times as four fresh thieves until the tale of forty was
complete.  And then old Hammerad, the beloved clown who played the drum
(and whose wife kept a barber's shop in Buck Row and shaved for a
penny), left his drum and did two minutes' stiff clowning, and then the
orchestra burst forth again, and the brazen voice of old Snaggs (in his
moleskin waistcoat) easily rode the storm, adjuring the folk to walk up
and walk up: which some of the folk did do.  And lastly the band played
"God Save the Queen," and the players, followed by old Snaggs,
processionally entered the booth.

"I lay they come out again," said Big James, with grim blandness.

"Why?" asked Edwin.  He was absolutely new to the scene.

"I lay they haven't got twenty couple inside," said Big James.

And in less than a minute the troupe did indeed emerge, and old Snaggs
expostulated with a dilatory public, respectfully but firmly.  It had
been a queer year for Mr Snaggs.  Rain had ruined the Wakes; rain had
ruined everything; rain had nearly ruined him.  July was obviously not a
month in which a self-respecting theatre ought to be open, but Mr
Snaggs had got to the point

Question: Summarize the above passage in exactly 500 words and give a brief outlook on it.