Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: Cover]
THESE TWAIN
BY
ARNOLD BENNETT
AUTHOR OF "THE OLD WIVES' TALE," "THE OLD ADAM,"
"CLAYHANGER," "HILDA LESSWAYS," ETC.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1915,
BY ARNOLD BENNETT
CONTENTS
BOOK I
THE WOMAN IN THE HOUSE
CHAPTER
I. THE HOUSE
II. HILDA ON THE STAIRS
III. ATTACK AND REPULSE
IV. THE WORD
V. TERTIUS INGPEN
VI. HUSBAND AND WIFE
VII. THE TRUCE
VIII. THE FAMILY AT HOME
IX. THE WEEK-END
X. THE ORGREAVE CALAMITY
BOOK II
THE PAST
XI. LITHOGRAPHY
XII. DARTMOOR
XIII. THE DEPARTURE
XIV. TAVY MANSION
XV. THE PRISON
XVI. THE GHOST
BOOK III
EQUILIBRIUM
XVII. GEORGE'S EYES
XVIII. AUNTIE HAMPS SENTENCED
XIX. DEATH AND BURIAL
XX. THE DISCOVERY
BOOK I
THE WOMAN IN THE HOUSE
THESE TWAIN
CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE
I
In the year 1892 Bleakridge, residential suburb of Bursley, was still
most plainly divided into old and new,--that is to say, into the dull
red or dull yellow with stone facings, and the bright red with terra
cotta gimcrackery. Like incompatible liquids congealed in a pot, the
two components had run into each other and mingled, but never mixed.
Paramount among the old was the house of the Member of Parliament, near
the top of the important mound that separates Hanbridge from Bursley.
The aged and widowed Member used the house little, but he kept it up,
and sometimes came into it with an unexpectedness that extremely
flattered the suburb. Thus you might be reading in the morning paper
that the Member had given a lunch in London on the previous day to
Cabinet Ministers and ladies as splendid as the Countess of Chell,
and--glancing out of the window--you might see the Member himself
walking down Trafalgar Road, sad, fragile, sedately alert, with his
hands behind him, or waving a gracious hand to an acquaintance.
Whereupon you would announce, not apathetically: "Member's gone down to
MacIlvaine's!" (MacIlvaine's being the works in which the Member had an
interest) and there would perhaps be a rush to the window. Those were
the last great days of Bleakridge.
After the Member's house ranked such historic residences as those of
Osmond Orgreave, the architect, (which had the largest, greenest garden
and the best smoke-defying trees in Bleakridge), and Fearns, the
Hanbridge lawyer; together with Manor "Cottage" (so-called, though a
spacious house), where lived the mechanical genius who had
revolutionised the pottery industry and strangely enough made a fortune
thereby, and the dark abode of the High Church parson.
Next in importance came the three terraces,--Manor Terrace, Abbey
Terrace, and the Sneyd Terrace--each consisting of three or four houses,
and all on the west side of Trafalgar Road, with long back-gardens and a
distant prospect of Hillport therefrom over the Manor fields. The
Terraces, considered as architecture, were unbeautiful, old-fashioned,
inconvenient,--perhaps paltry, as may be judged from the fact that rents
ran as low as L25 a year; but they had been wondrous in their day, the
pride of builders and owners and the marvel of a barbaric populace.
They too had histories, which many people knew. Age had softened them
and sanctioned their dignity. A gate might creak, but the harsh curves
of its ironwork had been mollified by time. Moreover the property was
always maintained in excellent repair by its landlords, and residents
cared passionately for the appearance of the windows and the
front-steps. The plenary respectability of the residents could not be
impugned. They were as good as the best. For address, they would not
give the number of the house in Trafalgar Road, but the name of its
Terrace. Just as much as the occupiers of detached houses, they had
sorted themselves out from the horde. Conservative or Liberal, they
were anti-democratic, ever murmuring to themselves as they descended the
front-steps in the morning and mounted them in the evening: "Most folks
are nobodies, but I am somebody." And this was true.
The still smaller old houses in between the Terraces, and even the old
cottages in the side streets (which all ran to the east) had a similar
distinction of caste, aloofness, and tradition. The least of them was
scornful of the crowd, and deeply conscious of itself as a separate
individuality. When the tenant-owner of a cottage in Manor Street added
a bay-window to his front-room the event seemed enormous in Manor
Street, and affected even Trafalgar Road, as a notorious clean-shaven
figure in the streets may disconcert a whole quarter by growing a beard.
The congeries of cottage yards between Manor Street and Higginbotham
Street, as visible from certain high back-bedrooms in Trafalgar Road,--a
crowded higgledy-piggledy of plum-coloured walls and chimneys,
blue-brick pavements, and slate roofs--well illustrated the grand
Victorian epoch of the Building Society, when eighteenpence was added
weekly to eighteenpence, and land haggled over by the foot, and every
brick counted, in the grim, long effort to break away from the mass.
The traditionalism of Bleakridge protected even Roman Catholicism in
that district of Nonconformity, where there were at least three
Methodist chapels to every church and where the adjective "popish" was
commonly used in preference to "papal." The little "Catholic Chapel"
and the priest's house with its cross-keys at the top of the mound were
as respected as any other buildings, because Roman Catholicism had
always been endemic there, since the age when the entire let belonged to
Cistercian monks in white robes. A feebly endemic Catholicism and a
complete exemption from tithes were all that remained of the Cistercian
occupation. The exemption was highly esteemed by the possessing class.
Alderman Sutton, towards the end of the seventies, first pitted the new
against the old in Bleakridge. The lifelong secretary of a first-class
Building Society, he was responsible for a terrace of three commodious
modern residences exactly opposite the house of the Member. The Member
and Osmond Orgreave might modernise their antique houses as much as they
liked,--they could never match the modernity of the Alderman's Terrace,
to which, by the way, he declined to give a name. He was capable of
covering his drawing-room walls with papers at three-and-six a roll, and
yet he capriciously preferred numbers to a name! These houses cost
twelve hundred pounds each (a lot of money in the happy far-off days
when good bricks were only L1 a thousand, or a farthing apiece), and
imposed themselves at once upon the respect and admiration of
Bleakridge. A year or two later the Clayhanger house went up at the
corner of Trafalgar Road and Hulton Street, and easily outvied the
Sutton houses. Geographically at the centre of the residential suburb,
it represented the new movement in Bleakridge at its apogee, and indeed
was never beaten by later ambitious attempts.
Such fine erections, though nearly every detail of them challenged
tradition, could not disturb Bleakridge's belief in the stability of
society. But simultaneously whole streets of cheap small houses (in
reality, pretentious cottages) rose round about. Hulton Street was all
new and cheap. Oak Street offered a row of pink cottages to Osmond
Orgreave's garden gates, and there were three other similar new streets
between Oak Street and the Catholic Chapel. Jerry-building was
practised in Trafalgar Road itself, on a large plot in full view of the
Catholic Chapel, where a speculative builder, too hurried to use a
measure, "stepped out" the foundations of fifteen cottages with his own
bandy legs, and when the corner of a freshly-constructed cottage fell
into the street remarked that accidents would happen and had the bricks
replaced. But not every cottage was jerry-built. Many, perhaps most,
were of fairly honest workmanship. All were modern, and relatively
spacious, and much superior in plan to the old. All had bay-windows.
And yet all their bay-windows together could not produce an effect equal
to one bay-window in ancient Manor Street, because they had omitted to
be individual. Not one showy dwelling was unlike another, nor desired
to be unlike another.
The garish new streets were tenanted by magic. On Tuesday the
paperhangers might be whistling in those drawing-rooms (called parlours
in Manor Street),--on Wednesday bay-windows were curtained and chimneys
smoking. And just as the cottages lacked individuality, so the tenants
were nobodies. At any rate no traditional person in Bleakridge knew who
they were, nor where they came from, except that they came mysteriously
up out of the town. (Not that there had been any shocking increase in
the birthrate down there!) And no traditional person seemed to care.
The strange inroad and portent ought to have puzzled and possibly to
have intimidated traditional Bleakridge: but it did not. Bleakridge
merely observed that "a lot of building was going on," and left the
phenomenon at that. At first it was interested and flattered; then
somewhat resentful and regretful. And even Edwin Clayhanger, though he
counted himself among the enlightened and the truly democratic, felt
hurt when quite nice houses, copying some features of his own on a small
scale, and let to such people as insurance agents, began to fill up the
remaining empty spaces of Trafalgar Road. He could not help thinking
that the prestige of Bleakridge was being impaired.
II
Edwin Clayhanger, though very young in marriage, considered that he was
getting on in years as a householder. His age was thirty-six. He had
been married only a few months, under peculiar circumstances which
rendered him self-conscious, and on an evening of August 1892, as he
stood in the hall of his house awaiting the commencement of a postponed
and unusual At Home, he felt absurdly nervous. But the nervousness was
not painful; because he himself could laugh at it. He might be timid,
he might be a little gawky, he might often have the curious sensation of
not being really adult but only a boy after all,--the great impressive
facts would always emerge that he was the respected head of a well-known
family, that he was successful, that he had both ideas and money, and
that his position as one of the two chief master-printers of the
district would not be challenged. He knew that he could afford to be
nervous. And further, since he was house-proud, he had merely to glance
round his house in order to be reassured and puffed up.
Loitering near the foot of the stairs, discreetly stylish in an almost
new blue serge suit and a quite new black satin tie, with the light of
the gas on one side of his face, and the twilight through the glazed
front-door mitigating the shadow on the other, Edwin mused pleasingly
upon the whole organism of his home. Externally, the woodwork and
metalwork of the house had just been repainted, and the brickwork
pointed. He took pleasure in the thought of the long even lines of
fresh mortar, and of the new sage-tinted spoutings and pipings, every
foot of which he knew by heart and where every tube began and where it
ended and what its purpose was. The nice fitting of a perpendicular
spout into a horizontal one, and the curve of the joint from the eave to
the wall of the house, and the elaborate staples that firmly held the
spout to the wall, and the final curve of the spout that brought its
orifice accurately over a spotless grid in the ground,--the perfection
of all these ridiculous details, each beneath the notice of a truly
celestial mind, would put the householder Edwin into a sort of
contemplative ecstasy. Perhaps he was comical. But such inner
experiences were part of his great interest in life, part of his large
general passion.
Within the hall he regarded with equal interest and pride the
photogravure of Bellini's "Agony in the Garden," from the National
Gallery, and the radiator which he had just had installed. The radiator
was only a half-measure, but it was his precious toy, his pet lamb, his
mistress; and the theory of it was that by warming the hall and the well
of the staircase it softly influenced the whole house and abolished
draughts. He had exaggerated the chilliness of the late August night so
that he might put the radiator into action. About the small furnace in
the cellar that heated it he was both crotchetty and extravagant. The
costly efficiency of the radiator somewhat atoned in his mind for the
imperfections of the hot water apparatus, depending on the kitchen
boiler. Even in 1892 this middle-class pioneer and sensualist was
dreaming of an ideal house in which inexhaustible water was always
positively steaming, so that if a succession of persons should
capriciously desire hot baths in the cold middle of the night, their
collective fancy might be satisfied.
Bellini's picture was the symbol of an artistic revolution in Edwin. He
had read somewhere that it was "perhaps the greatest picture in the
world." A critic's exhortation to "observe the loving realistic passion
shown in the foreshortening of the figure of the sleeping apostle" had
remained in his mind; and, thrilled, he would point out this feature of
the picture alike to the comprehending and the uncomprehending. The
hanging-up of the Bellini, in its strange frame of stained unpolished
oak, had been an epochal event, closing one era and inaugurating
another. And yet, before the event, he had not even noticed the picture
on a visit to the National Gallery! A hint, a phrase murmured in the
right tone in a periodical, a glimpse of an illustration,--and the
mighty magic seed was sown. In a few months all Victorian phenomena had
been put upon their trial, and most of them condemned. And condemned
without even the forms of justice! Half a word (in the right tone)
might ruin any of them. Thus was Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A.,
himself overthrown. One day his "Bath of Psyche" reigned in Edwin's
bedroom, and the next it had gone, and none knew why. But certain aged
Victorians, such as Edwin's Auntie Hamps, took the disappearance of the
licentious engraving as a sign that the beloved queer Edwin was at last
coming to his senses--as, of course, they knew he ultimately would. He
did not and could not explain. More and more he was growing to look
upon his house as an island, cut off by a difference of manners from the
varnished barbarism of multitudinous new cottages, and by an immensely
more profound difference of thought from both the cottages and the
larger houses. It seemed astounding to Edwin that modes of thought so
violently separative as his and theirs could exist so close together and
under such appearances of similarity. Not even all the younger members
of the Orgreave family, who counted as his nearest friends, were
esteemed by Edwin to be meet for his complete candour.
The unique island was scarcely a dozen years old, but historical
occurrences had aged it for Edwin. He had opened the doors of all three
reception-rooms, partly to extend the benign sway of the radiator, and
partly so that he might judge the total effect of the illuminated
chambers and improve that effect if possible. And each room bore the
mysterious imprints of past emotion.
In the drawing-room, with its new orange-coloured gas-globes that gilded
everything beneath them, Edwin's father used to sit on Sunday evenings,
alone. And one Sunday evening, when Edwin, entering, had first mentioned
to his father a woman's name, his father had most terribly humiliated
him. But now it seemed as if some other youth, and not Edwin, had been
humiliated, so completely was the wound healed.... And he could
remember leaning in the doorway of the drawing-room one Sunday morning,
and his sister Clara was seated at the piano, and his sister Maggie,
nursing a baby of Clara's, by her side, and they were singing Balfe's
duet "Excelsior," and his father stood behind them, crying, crying
steadily, until at length the bitter old man lost control of himself and
sobbed aloud under the emotional stress of the women's voices, and Clara
cheerfully upbraided him for foolishness; and Edwin had walked suddenly
away. This memory was somehow far more poignant than the memory of his
humiliation.... And in the drawing-room too he had finally betrothed
himself to Hilda. That by comparison was only yesterday; yet it was
historical and distant. He was wearing his dressing-gown, being
convalescent from influenza; he could distinctly recall the feel of his
dressing-gown; and Hilda came in--over her face was a veil....
The dining-room, whose large glistening table was now covered with the
most varied and modern "refreshments" for the At Home, had witnessed no
event specially dramatic, but it had witnessed hundreds of monotonous
tragic meals at which the progress of his father's mental malady and the
approach of his death could be measured by the old man's increasing
disability to distinguish between his knife and his fork; it had seen
Darius Clayhanger fed like a baby. And it had never been the same
dining-room since. Edwin might transform it, re-paper it, re-furnish
it,--the mysterious imprint remained....
And then there was the little "breakfast-room," inserted into the plan
of the house between the hall and the kitchen. Nothing had happened
there, because the life of the household had never adjusted itself to
the new, borrowed convention of the "breakfast-room." Nothing? But the
most sensational thing had happened there! When with an exquisite
passing timidity she took possession of Edwin's house as his wife, Hilda
had had a sudden gust of audacity in the breakfast-room. A mature woman
(with a boy aged ten to prove it), she had effervesced into the naive
gestures of a young girl who has inherited a boudoir. "This shall be my
very own room, and I shall arrange it just how I like, without asking
you about _anything_. And it will be my very own." She had not offered
an idea; she had announced a decision. Edwin had had other notions for
the room, but he perceived that he must bury them in eternal silence,
and yield eagerly to this caprice. Thus to acquiesce had given him deep
and strange joy. He was startled, perhaps, to discover that he had
brought into his house--not a woman, but a tripartite creature--woman,
child, and sibyl. Neither Maggie nor Clara, nor Janet Orgreave, nor
even Hilda before she became his wife, had ever aroused in him the least
suspicion that a woman might be a tripartite creature. He was married,
certainly--nobody could be more legally and respectably married than was
he--but the mere marriage seemed naught in comparison with the enormous
fact that he had got this unexampled creature in his house and was
living with her, she at his mercy, and he at hers. Enchanting escapade!
Solemn doom! ... By the way, she had yet done nothing with the
breakfast-room. Yes, she had stolen a "cabinet" gold frame from the
shop, and put his photograph into it, and stuck his picture on the
mantelpiece; but that was all. She would not permit him to worry her
about her secret designs for the breakfast-room. The breakfast-room was
her affair. Indeed the whole house was her affair. It was no longer
his house, in which he could issue orders without considering another
individuality--orders that would infallibly be executed, either
cheerfully or glumly, by the plump spinster, Maggie. He had to mind his
p's and q's; he had to be wary, everywhere. The creature did not simply
live in the house; she pervaded it. As soon as he opened the front-door
he felt her.
III
She was now upstairs in their joint bedroom, dressing for the At Home.
All day he had feared she might be late, and as he looked at the
hall-clock he saw that the risk was getting acute.
Before the domestic rearrangements preceding the marriage had been fully
discussed, he had assumed, and Maggie and Clara had assumed, and Auntie
Hamps had absolutely assumed, that the husband and wife would occupy the
long empty bedroom of old Darius, because it was two-foot-six broader
than Edwin's, and because it was the "principal" bedroom. But Hilda had
said No to him privately. Whereupon, being himself almost morbidly
unsentimental, he had judiciously hinted that to object to a room
because an old man had died in it under distressing circumstances was to
be morbidly sentimental and unworthy of her. Whereupon she had
mysteriously smiled, and called him sweet bad names, and kissed him, and
hung on his neck. _She_ sentimental! Could not the great stupid see
without being told that what influenced her was not an aversion for his
father's bedroom, but a predilection for Edwin's. She desired that they
should inhabit his room. She wanted to sleep in his room; and to wake
up in it, and to feel that she was immersing herself in his past....
(Ah! The exciting flattery, like an aphrodisiac!) And she would not
allow him to uproot the fixed bookcases on either side of the hearth.
She said that for her they were part of the room itself. Useless to
argue that they occupied space required for extra furniture! She would
manage! She did manage. He found that the acme of convenience for a
husband had not been achieved, but convenience was naught in the rapture
of the escapade. He had "needed shaking up," as they say down there,
and he was shaken up.
Nevertheless, though undoubtedly shaken up, he had the male wit to
perceive that the bedroom episode had been a peculiar triumph for
himself. Her attitude in it, imperious superficially, was in truth an
impassioned and outright surrender to him. And further, she had at once
become a frankly admiring partisan of his theory of bedrooms. The need
for a comfortable solitude earlier in life had led Edwin to make his
bedroom habitable by means of a gas-stove, an easy chair, and minor
amenities. When teased by hardy compatriots about his sybaritism Edwin
was apt sometimes to flush and be "nettled," and he would make offensive
un-English comments upon the average bedroom of the average English
household, which was so barbaric that during eight months of the year
you could not maintain your temperature in it unless you were either in
bed or running about the room, and that even in Summer you could not sit
down therein at ease because there was nothing easy to sit on, nor a
table to sit at nor even a book to read. He would caustically ask to be
informed why the supposedly practical and comfort-loving English were
content with an Alpine hut for a bedroom. And in this way he would go
on. He was rather pleased with the phrase "Alpine hut." One day he had
overheard Hilda replying to an acquaintance upstairs: "People may say
what they like, but Edwin and I don't care to sleep in an Alpine hut."
She had caught it! She was his disciple in that matter! And how she
had appreciated his easy-chair! As for calm deliberation in dressing
and undressing, she could astonishingly and even disconcertingly surpass
him in the quality. But it is to be noted that she would not permit her
son to have a gas-stove in his bedroom. Nor would she let him occupy
the disdained principal bedroom, her argument being that that room was
too large for a little boy. Maggie Clayhanger's old bedroom was given
to George, and the principal bedroom remained empty.