Clayhanger. Arnold Bennett

arrived. The atmosphere of the sitting-room was changed. Maggie, smiling, wore her second-best black silk apron. Clara, smiling and laughing, wore a clean long white pinafore. Mrs. Nixon, with her dreamy eyes less vacant than usual, greeted Mrs. Hamps effusively, and effusively gave humble thanks for kind inquiries after her health. A stranger might have thought that these women were strongly attached to one another by ties of affection and respect. Edwin never understood how his sisters, especially Maggie, could practise such vast and eternal hypocrisy with his aunt. As for him, his aunt acted on him now, as generally, like a tonic. Some effluence from her quickened him. He put away the worry in connection with his father, and gave himself up to the physical pleasures of tea.

      Aunt Clara was a handsome woman. She had been called—but not by men whose manners and code she would have approved—‘a damned fine woman.’ Her age was about forty, which at that period, in a woman’s habit of mind, was the equivalent of about fifty to-day. Her latest photograph was considered to be very successful. It showed her standing behind a velvet chair and leaning her large but still shapely bust slightly over the chair. Her forearms, ruffled and braceleted, lay along the fringed back of the chair, and from one negligent hand depended a rose. A heavy curtain came downwards out of nothing into the picture, and the end of it lay coiled and draped on the seat of the chair. The great dress was of slate-coloured silk, with sleeves tight to the elbow, and thence, from a ribbon-bow, broadening to a wide, triangular climax that revealed quantities of lace at the wrists. The pointed ends of the sleeves were picked out with squares of velvet. A short and highly ornamental fringed and looped flounce waved grandly out behind from the waist to the level of the knees; and the stomacher recalled the ornamentation of the flounce; and both the stomacher and flounce gave contrasting value to the severe plainness of the skirt, designed to emphasise the quality of the silk. Round the neck was a lace collarette to match the furniture of the wrists, and the broad ends of the collarette were crossed on the bosom and held by a large jet brooch. Above that you saw a fine regular face, with a firm hard mouth and a very straight nose and dark eyebrows; small ears weighted with heavy jet ear-rings.

      The photograph could not render the clear perfection of Aunt Clara’s rosy skin; she had the colour and the flashing eye of a girl. But it did justice to her really magnificent black hair. This hair was all her own, and the coiffure seemed as ample as a judge’s wig. From the low forehead the hair was parted exactly in the middle for about two inches; then plaited bands crossed and recrossed the scalp in profusion, forming behind a pattern exceedingly complicated, and down either side of the head, now behind the ear, now hiding it, now resting on the shoulders, now hanging clear of them, fell long multitudinous glossy curls. These curls—one of them in the photograph reached as far as the stomacher—could not have been surpassed in Bursley.

      She was a woman of terrific vitality. Her dead sister had been nothing in comparison with her. She had a glorious digestion, and was the envy of her brother-in-law—who suffered much from biliousness—because she could eat with perfect impunity hot buttered toast and raw celery in large quantities. Further, she had independent means, and no children to cause anxieties. Yet she was always, as the phrase went, ‘bearing up,’ or, as another phrase went, ‘leaning hard.’ Frances Ridley Havergal was her favourite author, and Frances Ridley Havergal’s little book Lean Hard, was kept on her dressing-table. (The girls, however, averred that she never opened it.) Aunt Clara’s spiritual life must be imagined as a continual, almost physical leaning on Christ. Nevertheless she never complained, and she was seldom depressed. Her desire, and her achievement, was to be bright, to take everything cheerfully, to look obstinately on the best side of things, and to instil this religion into others.

      Two.

      Thus, when it was announced that father had been called out unexpectedly, leaving an order that they were not to wait for him, she said gaily that they had better be obedient and begin, though it would have been more agreeable to wait for father. And she said how beautiful the tea was, and how beautiful the toast, and how beautiful the strawberry-jam, and how beautiful the pikelets. She would herself pour some hot water into the slop basin, and put a pikelet on a plate thereon, covered, to keep warm for father. She would not hear a word about the toast being a little hard, and when Maggie in her curious quiet way ‘stuck her out’ that the toast was in fact hard, she said that that precise degree of hardness was the degree which she, for herself, preferred. Then she talked of jams, and mentioned gooseberry-jam, whereupon Clara privately put her tongue out, with the quickness of a snake, to signal to Maggie.

      “Ours isn’t good this year,” said Maggie.

      “I told auntie we weren’t so set up with it, a fortnight ago,” said Clara simply, like a little angel.

      “Did you, dear?” Mrs. Hamps exclaimed, with great surprise, almost with shocked surprise. “I’m sure it’s beautiful. I was quite looking forward to tasting it; quite! I know what your gooseberry-jam is.”

      “Would you like to try it now?” Maggie suggested. “But we’ve warned you.”

      “Oh, I don’t want to trouble you now. We’re all so cosy here. Any time—”

      “No trouble, auntie,” said Clara, with her most captivating and innocent smile.

      “Well, if you talk about ‘warning’ me, of course I must insist on having some,” said Auntie Clara.

      Clara jumped up, passed behind Mrs. Hamps, making a contemptuous face at those curls as she did so, and ran gracefully down to the kitchen.

      “Here,” she said crossly to Mrs. Nixon. “A pot of that gooseberry, please. A small one will do. She knows it’s short of sugar, and so she’s determined to try it, just out of spite; and nothing will stop her.”

      Clara returned smiling to the tea-table, and Maggie neatly unsealed the jam; and Auntie Clara, with a face beaming with pleasurable anticipation, helped herself circumspectly to a spoonful.

      “Beautiful!” she murmured.

      “Don’t you think it’s a bit tart?” Maggie asked.

      “Oh no!” protestingly.

      “Don’t you?” asked Clara, with an air of delighted deferential astonishment.

      “Oh no!” Mrs. Hamps repeated. “It’s beautiful!” She did not smack her lips over it, because she would have considered it unladylike to smack her lips, but by less offensive gestures she sought to convey her unbounded pleasure in the jam. “How much sugar did you put in?” she inquired after a while. “Half and half?”

      “Yes,” said Maggie.

      “They do say gooseberries were a tiny bit sour this year, owing to the weather,” said Mrs. Hamps reflectively.

      Clara kicked Edwin under the table, as it were viciously, but her delightful innocent smile, directed vaguely upon Mrs. Hamps, did not relax. Such duplicity passed Edwin’s comprehension; it seemed to him purposeless. Yet he could not quite deny that there might be a certain sting, a certain insinuation, in his auntie’s last remark.

      Three.

      Then Mr. Clayhanger entered, blowing forth a long breath as if trying to repulse the oppressive heat of the July afternoon. He came straight to the table, with a slightly preoccupied air, quickly, his arms motionless at his sides, and slanting a little outwards. Mr. Clayhanger always walked like this, with motionless arms so that in spite of a rather clumsy and heavy step, the upper part of him appeared to glide along. He shook hands genially with Auntie Clara, greeting her almost as grandiosely as she greeted him, putting on for a moment the grand manner, not without dignity. Each admired the other. Each often said that the other was ‘wonderful.’ Each undoubtedly flattered the other, made a fuss of the other. Mr. Clayhanger’s admiration was the greater. The bitterest thing that Edwin had ever heard Maggie say was: “It’s something to be thankful for that she’s his deceased wife’s sister!” And she had said the bitter thing with such quiet bitterness! Edwin had not instantly perceived the point of it.

      Darius