Four and a half years later, on a Tuesday night in April 1886, Edwin was reading in an easy-chair in his bedroom. He made a very image of comfort. The easy-chair had been taken from the dining-room, silently, without permission, and Darius had not noticed its removal. A deep chair designed by some one learned in the poses natural to the mortal body, it was firm where it ought to be firm, and where it ought to yield, there it yielded. By its own angles it threw the head slightly back, and the knees slightly up. Edwin’s feet rested on a hassock, and in front of the hassock was a red-glowing gas-stove. That stove, like the easy-chair, had been acquired by Edwin at his father’s expense without his father’s cognisance. It consumed gas whose price the quarterly bill three times a year, and Darius observed nothing. He had not even entered his son’s bedroom for several years. Each month seemed to limit further his interest in surrounding , and to centralise more completely all his in his business. Over Edwin’s head the gas jet flamed through one of Darius’s special private burners, the page of a little book, one of Cassell’s “National Library,” a new series of sixpenny reprints which had excited the book-selling and the book-reading worlds, but which Darius had apparently quite ignored, though confronted in his house and in his shop by multitudinous examples of it. Sometimes Edwin would almost be persuaded to think that he might safely indulge any caprice whatever under his father’s nose, and then the old man would notice some unusual trifle, of no conceivable importance, and go into a passion about it, and Maggie would say quietly, “I told you what would be happening one of these days,” which would annoy Edwin. His was caused less by Maggie’s ‘I told you so,’ than by her lack of . If his father had ever overtaken him in some large and desperate caprice, such as the purchase of the gas-stove on the account, he would have submitted in to Maggie’s ; but his father never did. It was always upon some innocent nothing, which the timidest son might have permitted himself, that the of Darius overwhelmingly burst.
Maggie and Edwin understood each other on the whole very well. Only in points did their sympathy fail. And as Edwin would be because Maggie’s attitude towards argument was that of a woman, so would Maggie resent a certain mulishness in him characteristic of the unfathomable stupid sex. Once a week, for example, when his room was ‘done out,’ there was invariably a skirmish between them, because Edwin really did hate anybody to ‘meddle among his things.’ The of even a brush on the dressing-table would in his mind. Also he was very ‘crotchety about his meals,’ and on the subject of fresh air. Unless he was sitting in a perceptible , he thought he was being poisoned by nitrogen: but when he could see the curtain or blind trembling in the wind he was hygienically at ease. His existence was a series of catarrhal colds, which, however, as he would learnedly explain to Maggie, could not be connected, in the brain of a reasonable person, with currents of fresh air. Maggie mutely his science. This, too, him. Occasionally she would somewhat assert that he was a regular old maid. The made no impression on him at all. But when, more than ordinarily , she sang out that he was ‘exactly like his father,’ he felt wounded.
Two.
The appearance of his bedroom, and the fact that he enjoyed being in it alone, gave some ground for Maggie’s first accusation. A screen hid the bed, and this screen was half covered with written papers of ; roughly, it divided the room into dormitory and study. The whole was occupied by Edwin’s personal goods, great and small, ranged in the most careful order; it was full; in the occupation of a young man who was not an old maid, it would have been littered. It was a complex and yet practical for daily use, completely organised for the production of comfort. Edwin would move about in it with the loving and assured gestures of a creator; and always he was improving its perfection. His bedroom was his passion.
Often, during the of the day, he would think of his bedroom as of a refuge, to which in the evening he should hasten. the stairs after the meal, his heart would run on in advance of his legs, and be within the room before his hand had opened the door. And then he would close the door, as upon the whole tedious world, and turn up the gas, and light the stove with an explosive plop, and settle himself. And in the first few minutes of reading he would with distinct, conscious pleasure, allow his attention to circle the room, upon piled and volumes, and delighting in orderliness and in convenience. And he would reflect: “This is my life. This is what I shall always live for. This is the best. And why not?” It seemed to him when he was alone in his bedroom and in the night, that he had respectably well solved the problem offered to him by destiny. He insisted to himself sharply that he was not made for marriage, that he had always known marriage to be impossible for him, that what had happened was bound to have happened. For a few weeks he had lived in a fool’s paradise: that was all... Fantastic scheme, mad self-deception! In such wise he thought of his love-affair. His profound satisfaction was that none except his father knew of it, and even his father did not know how far it had gone. He felt that if the town had been aware of his jilting, he could not have borne the . To himself he had been horribly ; but he had recovered in his own .
It was only by very slow processes, by insensible degrees, that he had arrived at the stage of being able to say to his mirror, “I’ve got over that!” And who could judge better than he? He could trace no mark of the episode in his face. Save for the detail of a moustache, it seemed to him that he had looked on the same unchangeable face for a dozen years. Strange, that suffering had left no sign! Strange, that, in the months just after Hilda’s marriage, no acquaintance had taken him on one side and said, “What is the tragedy I can read on your features?”
And indeed the truth was that no one suspected. The vision of his face would remain with people long after he had passed them in the street, or spoken to them in the shop. The charm of his sadness persisted in their memory. But they would easily explain it to themselves by saying that his face had a naturally cast—a sort of accident that had happened to him in the beginning! He had a considerable reputation, of which he was imperfectly aware, for secretiveness, timidity, gentleness, and intellectual superiority. young women thought of him wistfully when smiling upon quite other young men, and would even kiss him while kissing them, according to the notorious of love.
Three.
He was reading Swift’s “Tale of a Tub” eagerly, tasting with a palate consciously fastidious and yet catholic, the fine savour of a masterpiece. By his secret enthusiasm, which would escape from him at rare in a word to a friend, he was continuing the reputation of the “Tale of a Tub” from one century towards the next. A classic a classic only because a few hundred Edwins up and down England enjoy it so that their pleasure becomes religious. Edwin, according to his programme, had no right to be amusing himself with Swift at that hour. The portly Hallam, whom he found tedious, ought to have been in his hands. But Swift had caught him and would not let him go. Herein was one of the consequences of the pocketableness of Cassell’s new series. Edwin had been obliged to agree with Tom Orgreave (now a married man) that the books were not volumes for a collector; but they were so cheap, and they came from the press so often—once a week, and they could be carried so comfortably over the heart, that he could not resist most of them. His idea was that by their aid he could read smaller works in odd moments, at any time, thus surpassing his programme. He had not foreseen that Swift would make a in his programme, which was already in a bad way.
But he went on reading , despite the damage to it; for in the future shone the hope of the new life, when programmes would never be neglected. In less than a month he would be thirty years of age. At twenty, it had seemed a great age, an age of absolute . Now, he felt as young and as boyish as ever, especially before his father, and he perceived that his vague early notion about the finality of such an age as thirty had been infantile. Nevertheless, the entry into another decade presented itself to him as solemn, and he meant to signalise it by new and resolutions to execute vaster programmes. He was engaged, during these weeks, in the delicious, the business of constructing the ideal programme and scheming the spare hours to ensure its achievement. He lived in a dream and illusion of ultimate perfection.
Several times, despite the spell of Swift, he glanced at his watch. The hand went from nine to ten minutes past ten. And then he thought he heard the sound for which he had been listening. He jumped up, abandoned the book with its marker, opened the window wide, and lifting the blind by its rod, put his head out. Yes, he could hear the yelling afar off, over the hill, by distance into something gentle and attractive.
“‘Signal!’ ‘Signal!’ Special edition! ‘Signal!’” And then words incomprehensible.
It came nearer in the night.
He drew down the window, and left the room. The distant sound of the newsboys’ voices had roused him to a pleasing excitement. He in his pockets. He had neither a halfpenny nor a penny—it was just like him—and those newsboys with their valuable tidings would not care to halt and weigh out change with a balance.
“Got a halfpenny? Quick!” he cried, running into the kitchen, where Maggie and Mrs Nixon were engaged in some calm and endless domestic occupation amid that hung down whitely.
“What for?” Maggie mechanically asked, feeling the while under her .
“Paper,” he said.
“At this time of night? You’ll never get one at this time of night!” she said, in her .
“Come on!”
He stamped his foot with . It was absolutely astonishing, the ignorance in which Maggie lived, and lived and in content. Edwin filled the house with newspapers, and she never looked at them, never had the idea of looking at them, unless occasionally at the ‘Signal’ for an account of a wedding or a . In which case she would glance at the world for an instant with mild naïveté, shocked by the horrible things that were apparently going on there, and in five minutes would forget all about it again. Here the whole of England, Ireland, and Scotland was at its front doors that night waiting for newsboys, and to her the night was like any other night! Yet she read many books.
“Here’s a penny,” she said. “Don’t forget to give it me back.”
He ran out bareheaded. At the corner of the street somebody else was expectant. He could distinguish all the words now—
“‘Signal!’ Special edition! Mester Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill. Full report. Gladstone’s speech. Special!”
The dark running figures approached, stopping at frequent gates, and their voices split the night. The next moment they had gone by, in a flying column, and Edwin and the other man found themselves with fluttering paper in their hands, they knew not how! It was the most unceremonious snatch-and-thrust transaction that could be imagined. Bleakridge was silent again, and its gates closed, and the shouts were violently into Bursley.
“Where’s father?” Maggie called out when she heard Edwin in the hall.
“Hasn’t he come in yet?” Edwin replied , as he mounted the stairs with his desire.
In his room he settled himself once more under the gas, and opened the flimsy newspaper with joy. Yes, there it was—columns, columns, in small type! An hour or two Gladstone had been speaking in Parliament, and by magic the whole of his speech, with all the little convolutions of his intricate sentences, had got into Edwin’s bedroom. Edwin began to read, as it were . Not that he had a interest in Irish politics! What he had was a passion for great news, for news long expected. He could thrill responsively to a fine event. I say that his pleasure had the of an sensation.
Moreover, the attraction of politics in general was increasing for him. Politics occupied his mind, often it. And this was so in spite of the fact that he had done almost nothing in the last election, and that the pillars of the Liberal Club were beginning to suspect him of being a weakling who might follow his father into the wilderness between two frontiers.
As he read the speech, slowly disengaging its signifi............