The company divided itself into intimate groups, leaving empty white
spaces at the disordered tables. The attendants now served whisky, and
more liqueurs and coffee. Those guests who knew no qualm lighted fresh
cigars; a few produced beloved pipes; the others were content with
cigarettes. Some one ordered a window to be opened, and then, when the
fresh night air began to disturb the curtains and scatter the fumes of
the banquet, some one else crept aside and furtively closed it again.
Edwin found himself with Jos Curtenty and Osmond Orgreave and a few
others. He felt gay and enheartened; he felt that there was a great
deal of pleasure to be had on earth with very little trouble. Politics
had been broached, and he made a mild joke about the Tory candidate.
And amid the silence that followed it he mistily perceived that the
remainder of the group, instead of becoming more jolly, had grown grave.
For them the political situation was serious. They did not trouble to
argue against the Labour candidate. All their reasoning was based on
the assumption, which nobody denied or questioned, that at any cost the
Labour candidate must be defeated. The success of the Labour candidate
was regarded as a calamity. It would jeopardise the entire social
order. It would deliver into the destroying hands of an ignorant,
capricious, and unscrupulous rabble all that was best in English life.
It would even mean misery for the rabble itself. The tones grew more
solemn. And Edwin, astonished, saw that beneath the egotism of their
success, beneath their unconscious arrogance due to the habit of
authority, there was a profound and genuine patriotism and sense of
duty. And he was abashed. Nevertheless, he had definitely taken sides,
and out of mere self-respect he had gently to remind them of the fact.
Silence would have been cowardly.
"Then what about `trusting to the people'?" he murmured, smiling.
"If trusting to the people means being under the thumb of the British
working man, my boy," said Osmond Orgreave, "you can scratch me out, for
one."
Edwin had never heard him speak so colloquially.
"I've always found 'em pretty decent," said Edwin, but lamely.
Jos Curtenty fixed him with a grim eye.
"How many hands do you employ, Mr Clayhanger?"
"Fourteen," said Edwin.
"Do you?" exclaimed another voice, evidently surprised and impressed.
Jos Curtenty pulled at his cigar. "I wish I could make as much money as
you make out of fourteen hands!" said he. "Well, I've got two hundred
of 'em at my place. And I know 'em! I've known 'em for forty years and
more. There's not ten of 'em as I'd trust to do an honest day's work,
of their own accord... And after the row in '80, when they'd agreed to
arbitration--fifteen thousand of 'em--did they accept the award, or
didn't they? Tell me that, if it isn't troubling ye too much."
Only in the last phase did the irrepressible humorous card in him assert
itself.
Edwin mumbled inarticulately. His mind was less occupied by politics
than by the fact that in the view of all these men he had already
finally and definitely taken the place of his father. But for the
inquiries made at intervals during the evening, he might have supposed
that Darius, lying in helpless obscurity up there at Bleak ridge, had
been erased from the memory of the town.
A crony who had not hitherto spoken began to give sarcastic and
apparently damning details of the early record of the Labour candidate.
Among other delinquencies the fellow had condoned the inexcusable
rejection of the arbitrators' award long ago. And then some one said:
"Hello! Here's Benbow back again!"
Albert, in overcoat and cap, beckoned to Edwin, who sprang up, pricked
into an exaggerated activity by his impatient conscience.
"It's nothing particular," said Albert at the door. "But the missus has
been round to your father's to-night, and it seems the nurse has knocked
up. She thought I'd perhaps better come along and tell you, in case you
hadn't gone."
"Knocked up, has she?" said Edwin. "Well, it's not to be wondered at.
Nurse or no nurse, she's got no more notion of looking after herself
than anybody else has. I was just going. It's only a little after
eleven."
The last thing he heard on quitting the precincts of the banqueting
chamber was the violent sound of the mallet. Its wielder seemed to have
developed a slight affection for the senseless block of wood.