As he opened the garden door, he saw, in the porch where had passed his
first secret interview with Hilda, the figure of his father as it were
awkwardly rising from the step. The gas had not been turned out in the
hall, and it gave a feeble but sufficient illumination to the porch and
the nearest parts of the garden. Darius stood silent and apparently
irresolute, with a mournful and even despairing face. He wore his best
black suit, and a new silk hat and new black gloves, and in one hand he
carried a copy of "The Signal" that was very crumpled. He ignored
Edwin.
"Hello, father!" said Edwin persuasively. "Anything wrong?"
The heavy figure moved itself into the house without a word, and Edwin
shut and bolted the door.
"Funeral go off all right?" Edwin inquired with as much nonchalance as
he could. (The thought crossed his mind: "I suppose he hasn't been
having a drop too much, for once in a way? Why did he come round into
the garden?")
Darius loosed a really terrible sigh. "Yes," he answered, expressing
with a single word the most profound melancholy.
Four days previously Edwin and Maggie had seen their father considerably
agitated by an item of gossip, casually received, to which it seemed to
them he attached an excessive importance. Namely, that old Shushions,
having been found straying and destitute by the authorities appointed to
deal with such matters, had been taken to the workhouse and was dying
there. Darius had heard the news as though it had been a message
brought on horseback in a melodrama. "The Bastille!" he exclaimed, in a
whisper, and had left the house on the instant. Edwin, while the name
of Shushions reminded him of moments when he had most intensely lived,
was disposed to regard the case of Mr Shushions philosophically. Of
course it was a pity that Mr Shushions should be in the workhouse; but
after all, from what Edwin remembered and could surmise, the workhouse
would be very much the same as any other house to that senile mentality.
Thus Edwin had sagely argued, and Maggie had agreed with him. But to
them the workhouse was absolutely nothing but a name. They were no more
afraid of the workhouse than of the Russian secret police; and of their
father's early history they knew naught.
Mr Shushions had died in the workhouse, and Darius had taken his body
out of the workhouse, and had organised for it a funeral which was to be
rendered impressive by a procession of Turnhill Sunday school teachers.
Edwin's activity in connexion with the funeral had been limited to the
funeral cards, in the preparation of which his father had shown an
irritability more than usually offensive. And now the funeral was over.
Darius had devoted to it the whole of Home Rule Tuesday, and had
returned to his house at a singular hour and in a singular condition.
And Edwin, loathing sentimentality and full of the wisdom of nearly
thirty years, sedately pitied his father for looking ridiculous and
grotesque. He knew for a fact that his father did not see Mr Shushions
from one year's end to the next: hence they could not have been intimate
friends, or even friends: hence his father's emotion was throughout
exaggerated and sentimental. His acquaintance with history and with
biography told him that tyrants often carried sentimentality to the
absurd, and he was rather pleased with himself for being able thus to
correlate the general past and the particular present. What he did not
suspect was the existence of circumstances which made the death of Mr
Shushions in the workhouse the most distressing tragedy that could by
any possibility have happened to Darius Clayhanger.
"Shall I put the gas out, or will you?" he asked, with kindly secret
superiority, unaware, with all his omniscience, that the being in front
of him was not a successful steam-printer and tyrannical father, but a
tiny ragged boy who could still taste the Bastille skilly and still see
his mother weeping round the knees of a powerful god named Shushions.
"I--I don't know," said Darius, with another sigh.
The next instant he sat down heavily on the stairs and began openly to
blubber. His hat fell off and rolled about undecidedly.
"By Jove!" said Edwin to himself, "I shall have to treat this man like a
blooming child!" He was rather startled, and interested. He picked up
the hat.
"Better not sit there," he advised. "Come into the dining-room a bit."
"What?" Darius asked feebly.
"Is he deaf?" Edwin thought, and half shouted: "Better not sit there.
It's chilly. Come into the dining-room a bit. Come on."
Darius held out a hand, with a gesture inexpressibly sad; and Edwin,
almost before he realised what he was doing, took it and assisted his
father to his feet and helped him to the twilit dining-room, where
Darius fell into a chair. Some bread and cheese had been laid for him
on a napkin, and there was a gleam of red in the grate. Edwin turned up
the gas, and Darius blinked. His coarse cheeks were all wet.
"Better have your overcoat off, hadn't you?"
Darius shook his head.
"Well, will you eat something?"
Darius shook his head again; then hid his face and violently sobbed.
Edwin was not equal to this situation. It alarmed him, and yet he did
not see why it should alarm him. He left the room very quietly, went
upstairs, and knocked at Maggie's door. He had to knock several times.
"Who's there?"
"I say, Mag!"
"What is it?"
"Open the door," he said.
"You can come in."
He opened the door, and within the darkness of the room he could vaguely
distinguish a white bed.
"Father's come. He's in a funny state."
"How?"
"Well, he's crying all over the place, and he won't eat, or do
anything!"
"All right," said Maggie--and a figure sat up in the bed. "Perhaps I'd
better come down."
She descended immediately in an ulster and loose slippers. Edwin waited
for her in the hall.
"Now, father," she said brusquely, entering the dining-room, "what's
amiss?"
Darius gazed at her stupidly. "Nothing," he muttered.
"You're very late, I think. When did you have your last meal?"
He shook his head.
"Shall I make you some nice hot tea?"
He nodded.
"Very well," she said comfortingly.
Soon with her hair hanging about her face and hiding it, she was bending
over the gleam of fire, and insinuating a small saucepan into the middle
of it, and encouraging the gleam with a pair of bellows. Meanwhile
Edwin uneasily ranged the room, and Darius sat motionless.
"Seen Gladstone's speech, I suppose?" Edwin said, daring a fearful
topic in the extraordinary circumstances.
Darius paid no heed. Edwin and Maggie exchanged a glance. Maggie made
the tea direct into a large cup, which she had previously warmed by
putting it upside down on the saucepan lid. When it was infused and
sweetened, she tasted it, as for a baby, and blew on it, and gave the
cup to her father, who, by degrees, emptied it, though not exclusively
into his mouth.
"Will you eat something now?" she suggested.
He would not.
"Very well, then, Edwin will help you upstairs."
From her manner Darius might have been a helpless and half-daft invalid
for years.
The ascent to bed was processional; Maggie hovered behind. But at the
dining-room door Darius, giving no explanation, insisted on turning
back: apparently he tried to speak but could not. He had forgotten his
"Signal." Snatching at it, he held it like a treasure. All three of
them went into the father's bedroom. Maggie turned up the gas. Darius
sat on the bed, looking dully at the carpet.
"Better see him into bed," Maggie murmured quickly to Edwin, and Edwin
nodded--the nod of capability--as who should say, "Leave all that to
me!" But in fact he was exceedingly diffident about seeing his father
into bed.
Maggie departed.
"Now then," Edwin began the business. "Let's get that overcoat off,
eh?" To his surprise Darius was most pliant. When the great clumsy
figure, with its wet cheeks, stood in trousers, shirt, and socks, Edwin
said, "You're all right now, aren't you?" And the figure nodded.
"Well, good-night."
Edwin came out on to the landing, shut the door, and walked about a
little in his own room. Then he went back to his father's room.
Maggie's door was closed. Darius was already in bed, but the gas was
blazing at full.
"You've forgotten the gas," he said lightly and pleasantly, and turned
it down to a blue point.
"I say, lad," the old man stopped him, as he was finally leaving.
"Yes?"
"What about that Home Rule?"
The voice was weak, infantile. Edwin hesitated. The "Signal" made a
patch of white on the ottoman.
"Oh!" he answered soothingly, and yet with condescension, "it's much
about what everybody expected. Better leave that till to-morrow."
He shut the door. The landing received light through the open door of
his bedroom and from the hall below. He went downstairs, bolted the
front door, and extinguished the hall gas. Then he came softly up, and
listened at his father's door. Not a sound! He entered his own room
and began to undress, and then, half clothed, crept back to his father's
door. Now he could hear a heavy, irregular snoring.
"Devilish odd, all this!" he reflected, as he got into bed. Assuredly
he had disconcerting thoughts, not all unpleasant. His excitement had
even an agreeable, zestful quality.