She conducted him to the so-called breakfast-room and shut the door on
him. It was a small chamber behind the drawing-room, and shabbier than
the drawing-room. In earlier days the children had used it for their
lessons and hobbies. And now it was used as a sitting-room when mere
cosiness was demanded by a decimated family. Edwin stooped down and
mended the fire. Then he went to the wall and examined a framed
water-colour of the old Sytch Pottery, which was signed with his
initials. He had done it, aided by a photograph, and by Johnnie
Orgreave in details of perspective, and by dint of preprandial
frequentings of the Sytch, as a gift for Mrs Orgreave. It always
seemed to him to be rather good.
Then he bent to examine bookshelves. Like the hall, the drawing-room,
and the dining-room, this apartment too was plenteously full of
everything, and littered over with the apparatus of various
personalities. Only from habit did Edwin glance at the books. He knew
their backs by heart. And books in quantity no longer intimidated him.
Despite his grave defects as a keeper of resolves, despite his paltry
trick of picking up a newspaper or periodical and reading it all
through, out of sheer vacillation and mental sloth, before starting
serious perusals, despite the human disinclination which he had to
bracing himself, and keeping up the tension, in a manner necessary for
the reading of long and difficult works, and despite sundry ignominious
backslidings into original sluggishness--still he had accomplished
certain literary adventures. He could not enjoy "Don Juan." Expecting
from it a voluptuous and daring grandeur, he had found in it nothing
whatever that even roughly fitted into his idea of what poetry was. But
he had had a passion for "Childe Harold," many stanzas of which thrilled
him again and again, bringing back to his mind what Hilda Lessways had
said about poetry. And further, he had a passion for Voltaire. In
Voltaire, also, he had been deceived, as in Byron. He had expected
something violent, arid, closely argumentative; and he found gaiety,
grace, and really the funniest jokes. He could read "Candide" almost
without a dictionary, and he had intense pride in doing so, and for some
time afterwards "Candide" and "La Princesse de Babylone," and a few
similar witty trifles, were the greatest stories in the world for him.
Only a faint reserve in Tom Orgreave's responsive enthusiasm made him
cautiously reflect.
He could never be intimate with Tom, because Tom somehow never came out
from behind his spectacles. But he had learnt much from him, and in
especial a familiarity with the less difficult of Bach's preludes and
fugues, which Tom loved to play. Edwin knew not even the notes of
music, and he was not sure that Bach gave him pleasure. Bach affected
him strangely. He would ask for Bach out of a continually renewed
curiosity, so that he could examine once more and yet again the
sensations which the music produced; and the habit grew. As regards the
fugues, there could be no doubt that, the fugue begun, a desire was
thereby set up in him for the resolution of the confusing problem
created in the first few bars, and that he waited, with a pleasant and
yet a trying anxiety, for the indications of that resolution, and that
the final reassuring and utterly tranquillising chords gave him deep
joy. When he innocently said that he was `glad when the end came of a
fugue,' all the Orgreaves laughed heartily, but after laughing, Tom said
that he knew what Edwin meant and quite agreed.
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