He regarded the shabbiness of his clothes; he had been preoccupied by
their defects for about a quarter of an hour; now he examined them in
detail, and said to himself disgusted, that really it was ridiculous for
a man about to occupy a house like that to be wearing garments like
those. Could he call on the Orgreaves in garments like those? His
Sunday suit was not, he felt, in fact much better. It was newer, less
tumbled, but scarcely better. His suits did not cost enough. Finance
was at the root of the crying scandal of his career as a dandy. The
financial question must be reopened and settled anew. He should attack
his father. His father was extremely dependent on him now, and must be
brought to see reason. (His father who had never seen reason!) But the
attack must not be made with the weapon of clothes, for on that subject
Darius was utterly unapproachable. Whenever Darius found himself in a
conversation about clothes, he gave forth the antique and well-tried
witticism that as for him he didn't mind what he wore, because if he was
at home everybody knew him and it didn't matter, and if he was away from
home nobody knew him and it didn't matter. And he always repeated the
saying with gusto, as if it was brand-new and none could possibly have
heard it before.
No, Edwin decided that he would have to found his attack on the
principle of abstract justice; he would never be able to persuade his
father that he lacked any detail truly needful to his happiness. To go
into details would be to invite defeat.
Of course it would be a bad season in which to raise the financial
question. His father would talk savagely in reply about the enormous
expenses of house-building, house-furnishing, and removing,--and
architects' and lawyers' fees; he would be sure to mention the rapacity
of architects and lawyers. Nevertheless Edwin felt that at just this
season, and no other, must the attack be offered.
Because the inauguration of the new house was to be for Edwin, in a very
deep and spiritual sense, the beginning of the new life! He had settled
that. The new house inspired him. It was not paradise. But it was a
temple.
You of the younger generation cannot understand that--without
imagination. I say that the hot-water system of the new house, simple
and primitive as it was, affected and inspired Edwin like a poem. There
was a cistern-room, actually a room devoted to nothing but cisterns, and
the main cistern was so big that the builders had had to install it
before the roof was put on, for it would never have gone through a door.
This cistern, by means of a ball-tap, filled itself from the main
nearly as quickly as it was emptied. Out of it grew pipes, creeping in
secret downwards between inner walls of the house, penetrating
everywhere. One went down to a boiler behind the kitchen-range and
filled it, and as the fire that was roasting the joint heated the
boiler, the water mounted again magically to the cistern-room and filled
another cistern, spherical and sealed, and thence descended, on a third
journeying, to the bath and to the lavatory basin in the bathroom. All
this was marvellous to Edwin; it was romantic. What! A room solely for
baths! And a huge painted zinc bath! Edwin had never seen such a
thing. And a vast porcelain basin, with tiles all round it, in which
you could splash! An endless supply of water on the first floor!
At the shop-house, every drop of water on the first floor had to be
carried upstairs in jugs and buckets; and every drop of it had to be
carried down again. No hot water could be obtained until it had been
boiled in a vessel on the fire. Hot water had the value of champagne.
To take a warm hip-bath was an immense enterprise of heating, fetching,
decanting, and general derangement of the entire house; and at best the
bath was not hot; it always lost its virtue on the stairs and landing.
And to splash--one of the most voluptuous pleasures in life--was
forbidden by the code. Mrs Nixon would actually weep at a splashing.
Splashing was immoral. It was as wicked as amorous dalliance in a
monastery. In the shop-house godliness was child's play compared to
cleanliness.
And the shop-house was so dark! Edwin had never noticed how dark it was
until the new house approached completion. The new house was radiant
with light. It had always, for Edwin, the somewhat blinding brilliance
which filled the sitting-room of the shop-house only when Duck Bank
happened to be covered with fresh snow. And there was a dining-room,
solely for eating, and a drawing-room. Both these names seemed `grand'
to Edwin, who had never sat in any but a sitting-room. Edwin had never
dined; he had merely had dinner. And, having dined, to walk
ceremoniously into another room! (Odd! After all, his father was a man
of tremendous initiative.) Would he and Maggie be able to do the thing
naturally? Then there was the square hall--positively a room! That
alone impelled him to a new life. When he thought of it all, the
reception-rooms, the scientific kitchen, the vast scullery, the four
large bedrooms, the bathroom, the three attics, the cistern-room
murmurous with water, and the water tirelessly, inexhaustibly coursing
up and down behind walls--he thrilled to fine impulses.
He took courage. He braced himself. The seriousness which he had felt
on the day of leaving school revisited him. He looked back across the
seven years of his life in the world, and condemned them unsparingly.
He blamed no one but Edwin. He had forgiven his father for having
thwarted his supreme ambition; long ago he had forgiven his father;
though, curiously, he had never quite forgiven Mrs Hamps for her share
in the catastrophe. He honestly thought he had recovered from the
catastrophe undisfigured, even unmarked. He knew not that he would
never be the same man again, and that his lightest gesture and his
lightest glance were touched with the wistfulness of resignation. He
had frankly accepted the fate of a printer. And in business he was
convinced, despite his father's capricious complaints, that he had
acquitted himself well. In all the details of the business he
considered himself superior to his father. And Big James would
invariably act on his secret instructions given afterwards to counteract
some misguided hasty order of the old man's.
It was the emptiness of the record of his private life that he
condemned. What had he done for himself? Nothing large! Nothing
heroic and imposing! He had meant to pursue certain definite courses of
study, to become the possessor of certain definite groups of books, to
continue his drawing and painting, to practise this, that and the other,
to map out all his spare time, to make rules and to keep them,--all to
the great end of self-perfecting. He had said: "What does it matter
whether I am an architect or a printer, so long as I improve myself to
the best of my powers?" He hated young men who talked about improving
themselves. He spurned the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society
(which had succeeded the Debating Society--defunct through
over-indulgence in early rising). Nevertheless in his heart he was far
more enamoured of the idea of improvement than the worst prig of them
all. He could never for long escape from the dominance of the idea. He
might violently push it away, arguing that it could lead to nothing and
was futile and tedious; back it would come! It had always worried him.
And yet he had accomplished nothing. His systems of reading never
worked for more than a month at a time. And for several months at a
time he simply squandered his spare hours, the hours that were his very
own, in a sort of coma of crass stupidity, in which he seemed to be
thinking of nothing whatever. He had not made any friends whom he could
esteem. He had not won any sort of notice. He was remarkable for
nothing. He was not happy. He was not content. He had the
consciousness of being a spendthrift of time and of years... A fair
quantity of miscellaneous reading--that was all he had done. He was not
a student. He knew nothing about anything. He had stood still.
Thus he upbraided himself. And against this futility was his courage
now braced by the inspiration of the new house, and tightened to a
smarting tension by the brief interview with Janet Orgreave. He was
going to do several feats at once: tackle his father, develop into a
right expert on _some_ subject, pursue his painting, and--for the moment
this had the chief importance--`come out of his shell.' He meant to be
social, to impress himself on others, to move about, to form
connections, to be Edwin Clayhanger, an individuality in the town,--to
live. Why had he refused Janet's invitation? Mere silliness. The old
self nauseated the new. But the next instant he sought excuses for the
old self... Wait a bit! There was time yet.
He was happy in the stress of one immense and complex resolve.