Bennett Arnold
These Twain
CHAPTER XVI
THE GHOST
I
It was six-thirty. The autumn dusk had already begun to fade; and in the damp air, cold, grimy, and vaporous, men with scarves round their necks and girls with shawls over their heads, or hatted and even gloved, were going home from work past the petty shops where sweets, tobacco, fried fish, chitterlings, groceries, and novelettes were sold among enamelled advertisements of magic soaps. In the feeble and patchy illumination of the footpaths, which left the middle of the streets and the upper air all obscure, the chilled, preoccupied people passed each other rapidly like phantoms, emerging out of one mystery and disappearing into another. Everywhere, behind the fanlights and shaded windows of cottages, domesticity was preparing the warm relaxations of the night. Amid the streets of little buildings the lithographic establishment, with a yellow oblong here and there illuminated in its dark façades, stood up high, larger than reality, more important and tyrannic, one of the barracks, one of the prisons, one of the money-works where a single man or a small group of men by brains and vigour and rigour exploited the populace.
Edwin, sitting late in his private office behind those façades, was not unaware of the sensation of being an exploiter. By his side on the large flat desk lay a copy of the afternoon's Signal containing an account of the breaking up by police of an open-air meeting of confessed anarchists on the previous day at Manchester. Manchester was, and is still, physically and morally, very close to the Five Towns, which respect it more than they respect London. An anarchist meeting at Manchester was indeed an uncomfortable portent for the Five Towns. Enormous strikes, like civil wars at stalemate, characterised the autumn as they had characterised the spring, affecting directly or indirectly every industry, and weakening the prestige of government, conventions, wealth, and success. Edwin was successful. It was because he was successful that he was staying late and that a clerk in the outer office was staying late and that windows were illuminated here and there in the façades. Holding in his hand the wage-book, he glanced down the long column of names and amounts. Some names conveyed nothing to him; but most of them raised definite images in his mind-of big men, roughs, decent clerks with wristbands, undersized pale machinists, intensely respectable skilled artisans and daughtsmen, thin ragged lads, greasy, slatternly, pale girls, and one or two fat women, – all dirty, and working with indifference in dirt. Most of them kowtowed to him; some did not; some scowled askance. But they were all dependent on him. Not one of them but would be prodigiously alarmed and inconvenienced-to say nothing of going hungry-if it he did not pay wages the next morning. The fact was he could distribute ruin with a gesture and nobody could bring him to book…
Something wrong! Under the influence of strikes and anarchist meetings he felt with foreboding and even with a little personal alarm that something was wrong. Those greasy, slatternly girls, for instance, with their coarse charm and their sexuality, – they were underpaid. They received as much as other girls, on pot-banks, perhaps more, but they were underpaid. What chance had they? He was getting richer every day, and safer (except for the vague menace); yet he could not appreciably improve their lot, partly for business reasons, partly because any attempt to do so would bring the community about his ears and he would be labelled as a doctrinaire and a fool, and partly because his own commonsense was against such a move. Not those girls, not his works, not this industry and that, was wrong. All was wrong. And it was impossible to imagine any future period when all would not be wrong. Perfection was a desolating thought. Nevertheless the struggle towards it was instinctive and had to go on. The danger was (in Edwin's eyes) of letting that particular struggle monopolise one's energy. Well, he would not let it. He did a little here and a little there, and he voted democratically and in his heart was most destructively sarcastic about toryism; and for the rest he relished the adventure of existence, and took the best he conscientiously could, and thought pretty well of himself as a lover of his fellowmen. If he was born to be a master, he would be one, and not spend his days in trying to overthrow mastery. He was tired that evening, he had a slight headache, he certainly had worries; but he was not unhappy on the throbbing, tossing steamer of humanity. Nobody could seem less adventurous than he seemed, with his timidities and his love of moderation, comfort, regularity and security. Yet his nostrils would sniff to the supreme and all-embracing adventure.
He heard Hilda's clear voice in the outer office: "Mr. Clayhanger in there?" and the clerk's somewhat nervously agitated reply, repeating several times in eager affirmative. And he himself, the master, though still all alone in the sanctum, at once pretended to be very busy.
Her presence would thus often produce an excitation in the organism of the business. She was so foreign to it, so unsoiled by it, so aloof from it, so much more gracious, civilised, enigmatic than anything that the business could show! And, fundamentally, she was the cause of the business; it was all for her; it existed with its dirt, noise, crudity, strain, and eternal effort so that she might exist in her elegance, her disturbing femininity, her restricted and deep affections, her irrational capriciousness, and her strange, brusque commonsense. The clerks and some of the women felt this; Big James certainly felt it; and Edwin felt it, and denied it to himself, more than anybody. There was no economic justice in the arrangement. She would come in veiled, her face mysterious behind the veil, and after a few minutes she would delicately lift her gloved fingers to the veil, and raise it, and her dark, pale, vivacious face would be disclosed. "Here I am!" And the balance was even, her debt paid! That was how it was.
In the month that had passed since the visit to Dartmoor, Edwin, despite his resolve to live heroically and philosophically, had sometimes been forced into the secret attitude: "This woman will kill me, but without her I shouldn't be interested enough to live." He was sometimes morally above her to the point of priggishness, and sometimes incredibly below her; but for the most part living in a different dimension. She had heard nothing further from Mrs. Cannon; she knew nothing of the bigamist's fate, though more than once she had written for news. Her moods were unpredictable and disconcerting, and as her moods constituted the chief object of Edwin's study the effect on him was not tranquillising. At the start he had risen to the difficulty of the situation; but he could not permanently remain at that height, and the situation had apparently become stationary. His exasperations, both concealed and open, were not merely unworthy of a philosopher, they were unworthy of a common man. "Why be annoyed?" he would say to himself. But he was annoyed. "The tone-the right tone!" he would remind himself. Surely he could remember to command his voice to the right tone? But no! He could not. He could infallibly remember to wind up his watch, but he could not remember that. Moreover, he felt, as he had felt before, on occasions, that no amount of right tone would keep their relations smooth, for the reason that principles were opposed. Could she not see? … Well, she could not. There she was, entire, unalterable-impossible to chip inconvenient pieces off her-you must take her or leave her; and she could not see, or she would not-which in practice was the same thing.
And yet some of the most exquisite moments of their union had occurred during that feverish and unquiet month-moments of absolute surrender and devotion on her part, of protective love on his; and also long moments of peace. With the early commencement of autumn, all the family had resumed the pursuit of letters with a certain ardour. A startling feminist writer, and the writer whose parentage and whose very name lay in the Five Towns, who had re-created the East and whose vogue was a passion among the lettered-both these had published books whose success was extreme and genuine. And in the curtained gas-lit drawing-room of a night Hilda would sit rejoicing over the triumphant satire of the woman-novelist, and Edwin and George would lounge in impossible postures, each mesmerised by a story of the Anglo-Indian; and between chapters Edwin might rouse himself from the enchantment sufficiently to reflect: "How indescribably agreeable these evenings are!" And ten to one he would say aloud, with false severity: "George! Bed!" And George, a fine judge of genuineness in severity, would murmur carelessly: "All right! I'm going!" And not go.
And now Edwin in the office thought:
"She's come to fetch me away."
He was gratified. But he must not seem to be gratified. The sanctity of business from invasion had to be upheld. He frowned, feigning more diligently than ever to be occupied. She came in, with that air at once apologetic and defiant that wives have in affronting the sacred fastness. Nobody could have guessed that she had ever been a business woman, arriving regularly at just such an office every morning, shorthand-writing, twisting a copying-press, filing, making appointments. Nobody could have guessed that she had ever been in business for herself, and had known how sixpence was added to sixpence and a week's profit lost in an hour. All such knowledge had apparently dropped from her like an excrescence, had vanished like a temporary disfigurement, and she looked upon commerce with the uncomprehending, careless, and yet impressed eyes of a young girl.
"Hello, missis!" he exclaimed casually.
Then George came in. Since the visit to Dartmoor Hilda had much increased her intimacy with George, spending a lot of time with him, walking with him, and exploring in a sisterly and reassuring manner his most private life. George liked it, but it occasionally irked him and he would give a hint to Edwin that mother needed to be handled at times.
"You needn't come in here, George," said Hilda.
"Well, can I go into the engine-house?" George suggested. Edwin had always expected that he would prefer the machine-room. But the engine-house was his haunt, probably because it was dirty, fiery, and stuffy.
"No, you can't," said Edwin. "Pratt's gone by this, and it's shut up."
"No, it isn't. Pratt's there."
"All right."
"Shut the door, dear," said Hilda.
"Hooray!" George ran off and banged the glass door.
Hilda, glancing by habit at the unsightly details of the deteriorating room, walked round the desk. With apprehension Edwin saw resolve and perturbation in her face. He was about to say: "Look here, infant, I'm supposed to be busy." But he refrained.
Holding out a letter which she nervously snatched from her bag, Hilda said:
"I've just had this-by the afternoon post. Read it."
He recognised at once the sloping handwriting; but the paper was different; it was a mere torn half-sheet of very cheap notepaper. He read: "Dear Mrs. Clayhanger. Just a line to say that my husband is at last discharged. It has been weary waiting. We are together, and I am looking after him. With renewed thanks for your sympathy and help. Believe me, Sincerely yours, Charlotte M. Cannon." The signature was scarcely legible. There was no address, no date.
Edwin's first flitting despicable masculine thought was: "She doesn't say anything about that ten pounds!" It fled. He was happy in an intense relief that affected all his being. He said to himself: "Now that's over, we can begin again."
"Well," he murmured. "That's all right. Didn't I always tell you it would take some time? … That's all right."
He gazed at the paper, waving it in his hand as he held it by one corner. He perceived that it was the letter of a jealous woman, who had got what she wanted and meant to hold it, and entirely to herself; and his mood became somewhat sardonic.
"Very curt, isn't it?" said Hilda strangely. "And after all this time, too!"
He looked up at her, turning his head sideways to catch her eyes.
"That letter," he said in a voice as strange as Hilda's, "that letter is exactly what it ought to be. It could not possibly have been better turned… You don't want to keep it, I suppose, do you?"
"No," she muttered.
He tore it into very small pieces, and dropped them into the waste-paper-basket beneath the desk.
"And burn all the others," he said, in a low tone.
"Edwin," after a pause.
"Yes?"
"Don't you think George ought to know? Don't you think one of us ought to tell him, – either you or me? You might tell him?"
"Tell him what?" Edwin demanded sharply, pushing back his chair.
"Well, everything!"
He glowered. He could feel himself glowering. He could feel the justifiable anger animating him.
"Certainly not!" he enunciated resentfully, masterfully, overpoweringly. "Certainly not!"
"But supposing he hears from outsiders?"
"You needn't begin supposing."
"But he's bound to have to know sometime."
"Possibly. But he isn't going to know now, any road! Not with my consent. The thing's absolute madness."
Hilda almost whispered:
"Very well, dear. If you think so."
"I do think so."
He suddenly felt very sorry for her. He was ready to excuse her astounding morbidity as a consequence of extreme spiritual tribulation. He added with brusque good-nature:
"And so will you, in the morning, my child."
"Shall you be long?"
"No. I told you I should be late. If you'll run off, my chuck, I'll undertake to be after you in half an hour."
"Is your headache better?"
"No. On the other hand, it isn't worse."
He gazed fiercely at the wages-book.
She bent down.
"Kiss me," she murmured tearfully.
As he kissed her, and as she pressed against him, he absorbed and understood all the emotions through which she had passed and was passing, and from him to her was transmitted an unimaginable tenderness that shamed and atoned for the inclemency of his refusals. He was very happy. He knew that he would not do another stroke of work that night, but still he must pretend to do some. Playfully, without rising, he drew down her veil, smacked her gently on the back, and indicated the door.
"I have to call at Clara's about that wool for Maggie," she said, with courage. His fingering of her veil had given her extreme pleasure.
"I'll bring the kid up," he said.
"Will you?"
She departed, leaving the door unlatched.
II
A draught from the outer door swung wide-open the unlatched door of Edwin's room.
"What are doors for?" he muttered, pleasantly impatient; then he called aloud:
"Simpson. Shut the outer door-and this one, too."
There was no answer. He arose and went to the outer office. Hilda had passed through it like an arrow. Simpson was not there. But a man stood leaning against the mantelpiece; he held at full spread a copy of the Signal, which concealed all the upper part of him except his fingers and the crown of his head. Though the gas had been lighted in the middle of the room, it must have been impossible for him to read by it, since it shone through the paper. He lowered the newspaper with a rustle and looked at Edwin. He was a big, well-dressed man, wearing a dark grey suit, a blue Melton overcoat, and a quite new glossy "boiler-end" felt hat. He had a straight, prominent nose, and dark, restless eyes, set back; his short hair was getting grey, but not his short black moustache.
"Were you waiting to see me?" Edwin said, in a defensive, half-hostile tone. The man might be a belated commercial traveller of a big house-some of those fellows considered themselves above all laws; on the other hand he might be a new; customer in a hurry.
"Yes," was the reply, in a deep, full and yet uncertain voice. "The clerk said you couldn't be disturbed, and asked me to wait. Then he went out."
"What can I do for you? It's really after hours, but some of us are working a bit late."
The man glanced at the outer door, which Edwin was shutting, and then at the inner door, which exposed Edwin's room.
"I'm George Cannon," he said, advancing a step, as it were defiantly.
For an instant Edwin was frightened by the sudden melodrama of the situation. Then he thought:
"I am up against this man. This is a crisis."
And he became almost agreeably aware of his own being. The man stood close to him, under the gas, with all the enigmatic quality of another being. He could perceive now-at any rate he could believe-that it was George Cannon. Forgetful of what the man had suffered, Edwin felt for him nothing but the instinctive inimical distrust of the individual who has never got at loggerheads with society for the individual who once and for always has. To this feeling was added a powerful resentment of the man's act in coming-especially unannounced-to just him, the husband of the woman he had dishonoured. It was a monstrous act-and doubtless an act characteristic of the man. It was what might have been expected. The man might have been innocent of a particular crime, might have been falsely imprisoned; but what had he originally been doing, with what rascals had he been consorting, that he should be even suspected of crime? George Cannon's astonishing presence, so suddenly after his release, at the works of Edwin Clayhanger, was unforgiveable. Edwin felt an impulse to say savagely:
"Look here. You clear out. You understand English, don't you? Hook it."
But he had not the brutality to say it. Moreover, the clerk returned, carrying, full to the brim, the tin water-receptacle used for wetting the damping-brush of the copying-press.
"Will you come in, please?" said Edwin curtly. "Simpson, I'm engaged."
The two men went into the inner room.
"Sit down," said Edwin grimly.
George Cannon, with a firm gesture, planted his hat on the flat desk between them. He looked round behind him at the shut glazed door.
"You needn't be afraid," said Edwin. "Nobody can hear-unless you shout."
He gazed curiously but somewhat surreptitiously at George Cannon, trying to decide whether it was possible to see in him a released convict. He decided that it was not possible. George Cannon had a shifty, but not a beaten, look; many men had a shifty look. His hair was somewhat short, but so was the hair of many men, if not of most. He was apparently in fair health; assuredly his constitution had not been ruined. And if his large, coarse features were worn, marked with tiny black spots, and seamed and generally ravaged, they were not more ravaged than the features of numerous citizens of Bursley aged about fifty who saved money, earned honours, and incurred the envy of presumably intelligent persons. And as he realised all this, Edwin's retrospective painful alarm as to what might have happened if Hilda had noticed George Cannon in the outer office lessened until he could dismiss it entirely. By chance she had ignored Cannon, perhaps scarcely seeing him in her preoccupied passage, perhaps taking him vaguely for a customer; but supposing she had recognised him, what then? There would have been an awkward scene-nothing more. Awkward scenes do not kill; their effect is transient. Hilda would have had to behave, and would have behaved, with severe commonsense. He, Edwin himself, would have handled the affair. A demeanour matter-of-fact and impassible was what was needed. After all, a man recently out of prison was not a wild beast, nor yet a freak. Hundreds of men were coming out of prisons every day… He should know how to deal with this man-not pharisaically, not cruelly, not unkindly, but still with a clear indication to the man of his reprehensible indiscretion in being where he then was.
"Did she recognise me-down there-Dartmoor?" asked George Cannon, without any preparing of the ground, in a deep, trembling voice; and as he spoke a flush spread slowly over his dark features.
"Er-yes!" answered Edwin, and his voice also trembled.
"I wasn't sure," said George Cannon. "We were halted before I could see. And I daren't look round-I should ha' been punished. I've been punished before now for looking up at the sky at exercise." He spoke more quickly and then brought himself up with a snort. "However, I've not come all the way here to talk prison, so you needn't be afraid. I'm not one of your reformers."
In his weak but ungoverned nervous excitement, from which a faint trace of hysteria was not absent, he now seemed rather more like an ex-convict, despite his good clothes. He had become, to Edwin's superior self-control, suddenly wistful. And at the same time, the strange opening question, and its accent, had stirred Edwin, and he saw with remorse how much finer had been Hilda's morbid and violent pity than his own harsh commonsense and anxiety to avoid emotion. The man in good clothes moved him more than the convict had moved him. He seemed to have received vision, and he saw not merely the unbearable pathos of George Cannon, but the high and heavenly charitableness of Hilda, which he had constantly douched, and his own common earthliness. He was exceedingly humbled. And he also thought, sadly: "This chap's still attached to her. Poor devil!"
"What have you come for?" he enquired.
George Cannon cleared his throat. Edwin waited, in fear, for the avowal. He could make nothing out of the visitor's face; its expression was anxious and drew sympathy, but there was something in it which chilled the sympathy it invoked and which seemed to say: "I shall look after myself." It yielded naught. You could be sorry for the heart within, and yet could neither like nor esteem it. "Punished for looking up at the sky." … Glimpses of prison life presented themselves to Edwin's imagination. He saw George Cannon again halted and turning like a serf to the wall of the corridor. And this man opposite to him, close to him in the familiar room, was the same man as the serf! Was he the same man? … Inscrutable, the enigma of that existence whose breathing was faintly audible across the desk.
"You know all about it-about my affair, of course?"
"Well," said Edwin. "I expect you know how much I know."
"I'm an honest man-you know that. I needn't begin by explaining that to you."
Edwin nerved himself:
"You weren't honest towards Hilda, if it comes to that."
He used his wife's Christian name, to this man with whom he had never before spoken, naturally, inevitably. He would not say "my wife." To have said "my wife" would somehow have brought some muddiness upon that wife, and by contact upon her husband.
"When I say 'honest' I mean-you know what I mean. About Hilda-I don't defend that. Only I couldn't help myself… I daresay I should do it again." Edwin could feel his eyes smarting and he blinked, and yet he was angry with the man, who went on: "It's no use talking about that. That's over. And I couldn't help it. I had to do it. She's come out of it all right. She's not harmed, and I thank God for it! If there'd been a child living … well, it would ha' been different."
Edwin started. This man didn't know he was a father-and his son was within a few yards of him-might come running in at any moment! (No! Young George would not come in. Nothing but positive orders would get the boy out of the engine-house so long as the engine-man remained there.) Was it possible that Hilda had concealed the existence of her child, or had announced the child's death? If so, she had never done a wiser thing, and such sagacity struck him as heroic. But if Mrs. Cannon knew as to the child, then it was Mrs. Cannon who, with equal prudence and for a different end, had concealed its existence from George Cannon or lied to him as to its death. Certainly the man was sincere. As he said "Thank God!" his full voice had vibrated like the voice of an ardent religionist at a prayer-meeting.
George Cannon began again:
"All I mean is I'm an honest man. I've been damnably treated. Not that I want to go into that. No! I'm a fatalist. That's over. That's done with. I'm not whining. All I'm insisting on is that I'm not a thief, and I'm not a forger, and I've nothing to hide. Perhaps I brought my difficulties about that bank-note business on myself. But when you've once been in prison, you don't choose your friends-you can't. Perhaps I might have ended by being a thief or a forger, only on this occasion it just happens that I've had a good six years for being innocent. I never did anything wrong, or even silly, except let myself get too fond of somebody. That might happen to anyone. It did happen to me. But there's nothing else. You understand? I never-"
"Yes, yes, certainly!" said Edwin, stopping him as he was about to repeat all the argument afresh. It was a convincing argument.
"No one's got the right to look down on me, I mean," George Cannon insisted, bringing his face forward over the desk. "On the contrary this country owes me an apology. However, I don't want to go into that. That's done with. Spilt milk's spilt. I know what the world is."
"I agree. I agree!" said Edwin.
He did. The honesty of his intelligence admitted almost too eagerly and completely the force of the pleading.
"Well," said George Cannon, "to cut it short, I want help. And I've come to you for it."
"Me!" Edwin feebly exclaimed.
"You, Mr. Clayhanger! I've come straight here from London. I haven't a friend in the whole world, not one. It's not everybody can say that. There was a fellow named Dayson at Turnhill-used to work for me-he'd have done something if he could. But he was too big a fool to be able to; and besides, he's gone, no address. I wrote to him."
"Oh, that chap!" murmured Edwin, trying to find relief in even a momentary turn of the conversation. "I know who you mean. Shorthand-writer. He died in the Isle of Man on his holiday two years ago. It was in the papers."
"That's his address, is it? Good old Dead Letter Office! Well, he is crossed off the list, then; no mistake!" Cannon snarled bitterly. "I'm aware you're not a friend of mine. I've no claim on you. You don't know me; but you know about me. When I saw you in Dartmoor I guessed who you were, and I said to myself you looked the sort of man who might help another man… Why did you come into the prison? Why did you bring her there? You must have known I was there." He spoke with a sudden change to reproachfulness.
"I didn't bring her there." Edwin blushed. "It was- However, we needn't go into that, if you don't mind."
"Was she upset?"
"Of course."
Cannon sighed.
"What do you want me to do?" asked Edwin gloomily. In secret he was rather pleased that George Cannon should have deemed him of the sort likely to help. Was it the flattery of a mendicant? No, he did not think it was. He believed implicitly everything the man was saying.
"Money!" said Cannon sharply. "Money! You won't feel it, but it will save me. After all, Mr. Clayhanger, there's a bond between us, if it comes to that. There's a bond between us. And you've had all the luck of it."
Again Edwin blushed.
"But surely your wife-" he stammered. "Surely Mrs. Cannon isn't without funds. Of course I know she was temporarily rather short a while back, but surely-"
"How do you know she was short?" Cannon grimly interrupted.
"My wife sent her ten pounds-I fancy it was ten pounds-towards expenses, you know."
Cannon ejaculated, half to himself, savagely:
"Never told me!"
He remained silent.
"But I've always understood she's a woman of property," Edwin finished.
Cannon put both elbows on the desk, leaned further forward, and opened his mouth several seconds before speaking.
"Mr. Clayhanger, I've left my wife-as you call her. If I'd stayed with her I should have killed her. I've run off. Yes, I know all she's done for me. I know without her I might have been in prison to-day and for a couple o' years to come. But I'd sooner be in prison or in hell or anywhere you like than with Mrs. Cannon. She's an old woman. She always was an old woman. She was nearly forty when she hooked me, and I was twenty-two. And I'm young yet. I'm not middle-aged yet. She's got a clear conscience, Mrs. Cannon has. She always does her duty. She'd let me walk over her, she'd never complain, if only she could keep me. She'd just play and smile. Oh yes, she'd turn the other cheek-and keep on turning it. But she isn't going to have me. And for all she's done I'm not grateful. Hag. That's what she is!" He spoke loudly, excitedly, under considerable emotion.
"Hsh!" Edwin, alarmed, endeavoured gently to soothe him.
"All right! All right!" Cannon proceeded in a lower but still impassioned voice. "But look here! You're a man. You know what's what. You'll understand what I mean. Believe me when I say that I wouldn't live with that woman for eternal salvation. I couldn't. I couldn't do it. I've taken some of her money, only a little, and run off…" He paused, and went on with conscious persuasiveness now: "I've just got here. I had to ask your whereabouts. I might have been recognised in the streets, but I haven't been. I didn't expect to find you here at this time. I might have had to sleep in the town to-night. I wouldn't have come to your private house. Now I've seen you I shall get along to Crewe to-night. I shall be safer there. And it's on the way to Liverpool and America. I want to go to America. With a bit o' capital I shall be all right in America. It's my one chance; but it's a good one. But I must have some capital. No use landing in New York with empty pockets."
Said Edwin, still shying at the main issues:
"I was under the impression you had been to America once."
"Yes, that's why I know. I hadn't any money. And what's more," he added with peculiar emphasis, "I was brought back."
Edwin thought:
"I shall yield to this man."
At that instant he saw the shadow of Hilda's head and shoulders on the glass of the door.
"Excuse me a second," he murmured, bounded with astonishing velocity out of the room, and pulled the door to after him with a bang.