Clayhanger

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Arnold Bennett

  Title Page

  Book I: His Vocation

  1 The Last of a Schoolboy

  2 The Flame

  3 Entry Into the World

  4 The Child-Man

  5 Mr Shushions’s Tear Explained

  6 In the House

  7 Auntie Hamps

  8 In the Shop

  9 The Town

  10 Free and Easy

  11 Son and Father

  12 Machinery

  13 One Result of Courage

  14 The Architect

  15 A Decision

  16 The Letter

  17 End of a Struggle

  Book II: His Love

  1 The Visit

  2 Father and Son After Seven Years

  3 The New House

  4 The Two Gardens

  5 Clothes

  6 Janet Loses Her Bet

  7 Lane End House

  8 The Family Supper

  9 In the Porch

  10 The Centenary

  11 The Bottom of the Square

  12 The Top of the Square

  13 The Oldest Sunday-School Teacher

  14 Money

  15 The Insult

  16 The Sequel

  17 Challenge and Response

  18 Curiosity

  19 A Catastrophe

  20 The Man

  21 The Marriage

  Book III: His Freedom

  1 After a Funeral

  2 The Conclave

  3 The Name

  4 The Victim of Sympathy

  5 The Slave’s Fear

  6 Keys and Cheques

  7 Laid Aside

  8 A Change of Mind

  9 The Ox

  10 Mrs Hamps as a Young Man

  11 An Hour

  12 Revenge

  13 The Journey Upstairs

  14 The Watch

  15 The Banquet

  16 After the Banquet

  17 The Chain Broken

  Book IV: His Start in Life

  1 The Birthday Visit

  2 Janet’s Nephew

  3 Adventure

  4 In Preston Street

  5 The Bully

  6 The Rendezvous

  7 The Wall

  8 The Friendship

  9 The Arrival

  10 George and the Vicar

  11 Beginning of the Night

  12 End of the Night

  13 Her Heart

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  No longer a boy, not quite a man, Edwin Clayhanger stands on a canal bridge on his last day of school, and surveys the valley of Bursley and the Five Towns. Serious, good-natured and full of incoherent ambition, Edwin’s hopes and dreams for the future are just taking shape, even as they are put to test by challenges from Edwin’s domineering father, the stifling constraints of society, and an unusual young woman.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Arnold Bennett was born in Staffordshire on 27 May 1867, the son of a solicitor. Rather than following his father into the law, Bennett moved to London at the age of twenty-one and began a career in writing. His first novel, The Man from the North, was published in 1898 during a spell as editor of a periodical – throughout his life journalism supplemented his writing career. In 1903 Bennett moved to Paris, married, and published some of his best known novels, most of which were set in The Potteries district where he grew up: Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), and the Clayhanger series (1910–18). These works, as well as several successful plays, established him both in Europe and America as one of the most popular and acclaimed writers of his era. Bennett returned to England in 1912, and during the First World War worked for Lord Beaverbrook in the Ministry of Information. In 1921, separated from his first wife, he fell in love with an actress, Dorothy Cheston, with whom he had a child. He received the James Tait Black Award for his novel Riceyman Steps in 1923. Arnold Bennett died of typhoid in London on 27 March 1931.

  ALSO BY ARNOLD BENNETT

  Fiction

  A Man from the North

  The Grand Babylon Hotel

  Anna of the Five Towns

  The Gates of Wrath

  Leonora

  A Great Man

  Teresa of Watling Street

  Sacred and Profane Love

  Tales of the Five Towns

  Whom God Hath Joined

  Hugo

  The Grim Smile of the Five Towns

  The Ghost

  Buried Alive: A Tale of these Days

  The Old Wives’ Tale

  The Card

  Helen with a High Hand

  Hilda Lessways

  The Matador of the Five Towns

  The Regent

  Paris Nights and Other Impressions of Places and People

  The Price of Love

  These Twain

  The Pretty Lady

  The Roll-Call

  Mr Prohack

  Riceyman Steps

  Elsie and the Child

  Lord Raingo

  The Woman who Stole Everything and Other Stories

  The Vanguard

  Accident

  Imperial Palace

  Venus Rising from the Sea

  Non-fiction

  Journalism for Women

  Fame and Fiction

  How to Become an Author

  The Reasonable Life

  Literary Taste: How to Form It

  How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

  Mental Efficiency

  Those United States

  The Author’s Craft

  Self and Self-Management

  Things That Have Interested Me

  The Human Machine

  The Savour of Life

  ARNOLD BENNETT

  Clayhanger

  BOOK I

  His Vocation

  1

  The Last of a Schoolboy

  I

  EDWIN CLAYHANGER STOOD on the steep-sloping, red-bricked canal bridge, in the valley between Bursley and its suburb Hillport. In that neighbourhood the Knype and Mersey canal formed the western boundary of the industrialism of the Five Towns. To the east rose pitheads, chimneys, and kilns, tier above tier, dim in their own mists. To the west, Hillport Fields, grimed but possessing authentic hedgerows and winding paths, mounted broadly up to the sharp ridge on which stood Hillport Church, a landmark. Beyond the ridge, and partly protected by it from the driving smoke of the Five Towns, lay the fine and ancient Tory borough of Oldcastle, from whose historic Middle School Edwin Clayhanger was now walking home. The fine and ancient Tory borough provided education for the whole of the Five Towns, but the relentless ignorance of its prejudices had blighted the district. A hundred years earlier the canal had only been obtained after a vicious Parliamentary fight between industry and the fine and ancient borough, which saw in canals a menace to its importance as a centre of traffic. Fifty years earlier the fine and ancient borough had succeeded in forcing the greatest railway line in England to run through unpopulated country five miles off instead of through the Five Towns, because it loathed the mere conception of a railway. And now, people are inquiring why the Five Towns, with a railway system special to itself, is characterized by a perhaps excessive provincialism. These interesting details have everything to do with the history of Edwin Clayhanger, as they have everything to do with the history of each of the two hundred thousand souls in the Five Towns. Oldcastle guessed not the vast influences of its sublime stupidity.

  It was a breezy Friday in July, 1872. The canal, which ran north and south, reflected a blue and white sky. Towards the bridge, from the north came a long narrow canal-boat roofed with tarpaulins; and towar
ds the bridge, from the south came a similar craft, sluggishly creeping. The towing-path was a morass of sticky brown mud, for in the way of rain that year was breaking the records of a century and a half. Thirty yards in front of each boat an unhappy skeleton of a horse floundered its best in the quagmire. The honest endeavour of one of the animals received a frequent tonic from a bare-legged girl of seven who heartily curled a whip about its crooked large-jointed legs. The ragged and filthy child danced in the rich mud round the horse’s flanks with the simple joy of one who had been rewarded for good behaviour by the unrestricted use of a whip for the first time.

  II

  Edwin, with his elbows on the stone parapet of the bridge stared uninterested at the spectacle of the child, the whip, and the skeleton. He was not insensible to the piquancy of the pageant of life, but his mind was preoccupied with grave and heavy matters. He had left school that day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a willing beast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the advance guard of its problems bearing down on him. Slim, gawky, untidy, fair, with his worn black-braided clothes, and slung over his shoulders in a bursting satchel the last load of his school-books, and on his bright, rough hair a shapeless cap whose lining protruded behind, he had the extraordinary wistful look of innocence and simplicity which marks most boys of sixteen. It seemed rather a shame, it seemed even tragic, that this naïve, simple creature, with his straightforward and friendly eyes so eager to believe appearances, this creature immaculate of worldly experience, must soon be transformed into a man, wary, incredulous, detracting. Older eyes might have wept at the simplicity of those eyes.

  This picture of Edwin as a wistful innocent would have made Edwin laugh. He had been seven years at school, and considered himself a hardened sort of brute, free of illusions. And he sometimes thought that he could judge the world better than most neighbouring mortals.

  ‘Hello! The Sunday!’ he murmured, without turning his eyes.

  Another boy, a little younger and shorter, and clothed in a superior untidiness, had somehow got on to the bridge, and was leaning with his back against the parapet which supported Edwin’s elbows. His eyes were franker and simpler even than the eyes of Edwin, and his lips seemed to be permanently parted in a good-humoured smile. His name was Charlie Orgreave, but at school he was invariably called ‘the Sunday’ – not ‘Sunday,’ but ‘the Sunday’ – and nobody could authoritatively explain how he had come by the nickname. Its origin was lost in the prehistoric ages of his childhood. He and Edwin had been chums for several years. They had not sworn fearful oaths of loyalty; they did not constitute a secret society; they had not even pricked forearms and written certain words in blood; for these rites are only performed at Harrow, and possibly at the Oldcastle High School, which imitates Harrow. Their fellowship meant chiefly that they spent a great deal of time together, instinctively and unconsciously enjoying each other’s mere presence, and that in public arguments they always reinforced each other, whatever the degree of intellectual dishonesty thereby necessitated.

  ‘I’ll bet you mine gets to the bridge first,’ said the Sunday. With an ingenious movement of the shoulders he arranged himself so that the parapet should bear the weight of his satchel.

  Edwin Clayhanger slowly turned round, and perceived that the object which the Sunday had appropriated as ‘his’ was the other canal-boat, advancing from the south.

  ‘Horse or boat?’ asked Edwin.

  ‘Boat’s nose, of course,’ said the Sunday.

  ‘Well,’ said Edwin, having surveyed the unconscious competitors, and counting on the aid of the whipping child, ‘I don’t mind laying you five.’

  ‘That be damned for a tale!’ protested the Sunday. ‘We said we’d never bet less than ten – you know that.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ Edwin hesitatingly drawled.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘All right. Ten,’ Edwin agreed. ‘But it’s not fair. You’ve got a rare start on me.’

  ‘Rats!’ said the Sunday, with finality. In the pronunciation of this word the difference between his accent and Edwin’s came out clear. The Sunday’s accent was less local; there was a hint of a short ‘e’ sound in the ‘a,’ and a briskness about the consonants, that Edwin could never have compassed. The Sunday’s accent was as carelessly superior as his clothes. Evidently the Sunday had some one at home who had not learnt the art of speech in the Five Towns.

  III

  He began to outline a scheme, in which perpendicular expectoration figured, for accurately deciding the winner, and a complicated argument might have ensued about this, had it not soon become apparent that Edwin’s boat was going to be handsomely beaten, despite the joyous efforts of the little child. The horse that would die but would not give up, was only saved from total subsidence at every step by his indomitable if aged spirit. Edwin handed over the ten marbles even before the other boat had arrived at the bridge.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘And you may as well have these, too,’ adding five more to the ten, all he possessed. They were not the paltry marble of today, plaything of infants, but the majestic ‘rinker,’ black with white spots, the king of marbles in an era when whole populations practised the game. Edwin looked at them half regretfully as they lay in the Sunday’s hands. They seemed prodigious wealth in those hands, and he felt somewhat as a condemned man might feel who bequeaths his jewels on the scaffold. Then there was a rattle, and a tumour grew out larger on the Sunday’s thigh.

  The winning boat, long preceded by its horse, crawled under the bridge and passed northwards to the sea, laden with crates of earthenware. And then the loser, with the little girl’s father and mother and her brothers and sisters, and her kitchen, drawing-room, and bedroom, and her smoking chimney and her memories and all that was hers, in the stern of it, slid beneath the boys’ downturned faces while the whip cracked away beyond the bridge. They could see, between the whitened tarpaulins, that the deep belly of the craft was filled with clay.

  ‘Where does that there clay come from?’ asked Edwin. For not merely was he honestly struck by a sudden new curiosity, but it was meet for him to behave like a man now, and to ask manly questions.

  ‘Runcorn,’ said the Sunday scornfully. ‘Can’t you see it painted all over the boat?’

  ‘Why do they bring clay all the way from Runcorn?’

  ‘They don’t bring it from Runcorn. They bring it from Cornwall. It comes round by sea – see?’ He laughed.

  ‘Who told you?’ Edwin roughly demanded.

  ‘Anybody knows that!’ said the Sunday grandly, but always maintaining his gay smile.

  ‘Seems devilish funny to me,’ Edwin murmured, after reflection, ‘that they should bring clay all that roundabout way just to make crocks of it here. Why should they choose just this place to make crocks in? I always understood—’

  ‘Oh! Come on!’ the Sunday cut him short. ‘It’s blessed well one o’clock and after!’

  IV

  They climbed the long bank from the canal up to the Manor Farm, at which high point their roads diverged, one path leading direct to Bleakridge where Orgreave lived, and the other zigzagging down through neglected pasturage into Bursley proper. Usually they parted here without a word, taking pride in such Spartan taciturnity, and they would doubtless have done the same this morning also, though it were fiftyfold their last walk together as two schoolboys. But an incident intervened.

  ‘Hold on!’ cried the Sunday.

  To the south of them, a mile and a half off, in the wreathing mist of the Cauldon Bar Ironworks, there was a yellow gleam that even the capricious sunlight could not kill, and then two rivers of fire sprang from the gleam and ran in a thousand delicate and lovely hues down the side of a mountain of refuse. They were emptying a few tons of molten slag at the Cauldon Bar Ironworks. The two rivers hung slowly dying in the mists of smoke. They reddened and faded, and you thought they had vanished, and you could see them yet, and then they escaped the baffled eye, unless a cloud
aided them for a moment against the sun; and their ephemeral but enchanting beauty had expired for ever.

  ‘Now!’ said Edwin sharply.

  ‘One minute ten seconds,’ said the Sunday, who had snatched out his watch, an inestimable contrivance with a centre-seconds hand. ‘By Jove! That was a good ’un.’

  A moment later two smaller boys, both laden with satchels, appeared over the brow from the canal.

  ‘Let’s wait a jiff,’ said the Sunday to Edwin, and as the smaller boys showed no hurry he bawled out to them across the intervening cinder-waste: ‘Run!’ They ran. They were his younger brothers, Johnnie and Jimmie. ‘Take this and hook it!’ he commanded, passing the strap of his satchel over his head as they came up. In fatalistic silence they obeyed the smiling tyrant.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Edwin asked.

  ‘I’m coming down your way a bit.’

  ‘But I thought you said you were peckish.’

  ‘I shall eat three slices of beef instead of my usual brace,’ said the Sunday carelessly.

  Edwin was touched. And the Sunday was touched, because he knew he had touched Edwin. After all, this was a solemn occasion. But neither would overtly admit that its solemnity had affected him. Hence, first one and then the other began to skim stones with vicious force over the surface of the largest of the three ponds that gave interest to the Manor Farm. When they had thus proved to themselves that the day differed in no manner from any other breaking-up day, they went forward.

  On their left were two pitheads whose double wheels revolved rapidly in smooth silence, and the puffing engine-house and all the trucks and gear of a large ironstone mine. On their right was the astonishing farm, with barns and ricks and cornfields complete, seemingly quite unaware of its forlorn oddness in that foul arena of manufacture. In front, on a little hill in the vast valley, was spread out the Indian-red architecture of Bursley – tall chimneys and rounded ovens, schools, the new scarlet market, the grey tower of the old church, the high spire of the evangelical church, the low spire of the church of genuflexions, and the crimson chapels, and rows of little red houses with amber chimney-pots, and the gold angel of the blackened Town Hall topping the whole. The sedate reddish browns and reds of the composition, all netted in flowing scarves of smoke, harmonized exquisitely with the chill blues of the chequered sky. Beauty was achieved, and none saw it.