THE PAST

CHAPTER XI

LITHOGRAPHY

I

Edwin, sitting behind a glazed door with the word "Private" elaborately patterned on the gla.s.s, heard through the open window of his own office the voices of the Benbow children and their mother in the street outside.

"Oh, Mother! What a big sign!"

"Yes. Isn't Uncle Edwin a proud man to have such a big sign?"

"Hsh!"

"It wasn't up yesterday."

"L, i, t, h, o,----"

"My word, Rupy! You are getting on!"

"They're such large letters, aren't they, mother? ... 'Lithographic' ...

'Lithographic printing. Edwin Clayhanger'."

"Hsh! ... Bert, how often do you want me to tell you about your shoe-lace?"

"I wonder if George has come."

"Mother, can't _I_ ring the bell?"

All the children were there, with their screeching voices. Edwin wondered that Rupert should have been brought. Where was the sense of showing a three-year-old infant like Rupert over a printing-works? But Clara was always like that. The difficulty of leaving little Rupert alone at home did not present itself to the august uncle.

Edwin rose, locked a safe that was let into the wall of the room, and dropped the key into his pocket. The fact of the safe being let into the wall gave him as much simple pleasure as any detail of the new works; it was an idea of Johnnie Orgreave's. He put a grey hat carelessly at the back of his head, and, hands in pockets, walked into the next and larger room, which was the clerks' office.

Both these rooms had walls distempered in a green tint, and were fitted and desked in pitchpine. Their newness was stark, and yet in the clerks' office the irrational habituating processes of time were already at work. On the painted iron mantelpiece lay a dusty white tile, brought as a sample long before the room was finished, and now without the slightest excuse for survival. Nevertheless the perfunctory cleaner lifted the tile on most mornings, dusted underneath it, and replaced it; and Edwin and his staff saw it scores of times daily and never challenged it, and gradually it was acquiring a prescriptive right to exist just where it did. And the day was distant when some inconvenient, reforming person would exclaim:

"What's this old tile doing here?"

What Edwin did notice was that the walls and desks showed marks and even wounds; it seemed to him somehow wrong that the brand new could not remain forever brand new. He thought he would give a mild reproof or warning to the elder clerk, (once the shop-clerk in the ancient establishment at the corner of Duck Bank and Wedgwood Street) and then he thought: "What's the use?" and only murmured:

"I'm not going off the works."

And he pa.s.sed out, with his still somewhat gawky gait, to the small entrance-hall of the works. On the outer face of the door, which he closed, was painted the word "Office." He had meant to have the words "Counting-House" painted on that door, because they were romantic and fine-sounding; but when the moment came to give the order he had quaked before such romance; he was afraid as usual of being sentimental and of "showing off," and with a.s.sumed satire had publicly said: "Some chaps would stick 'Counting-house' as large as life all across the door." He now regretted his poltroonery. And he regretted sundry other failures in courage connected with the scheme of the works. The works existed, but it looked rather like other new buildings, and not very much like the edifice he had dreamed. It ought to have been grander, more complete, more dashingly expensive, more of an exemplar to the slattern district. He had been (he felt) unduly influenced by the local spirit for half-measures. And his life seemed to be a life of half-measures, a continual falling-short. Once he used to read studiously on Tuesday, Thursday and Sat.u.r.day evenings. He seldom read now, and never with regularity. Scarcely a year ago he had formed a beautiful vague project of being "musical." At Hilda's instigation he had bought a book of musical criticism by Hubert Parry, and Hilda had swallowed it in three days, but he had begun it and not finished it. And the musical evenings, after feeble efforts to invigorate them, had fainted and then died on the miserable excuse that circ.u.mstances were not entirely favourable to them. And his marriage, so marvellous in its romance during the first days...!

Then either his commonsense or his self-respect curtly silenced these weak depreciations. He had wanted the woman and he had won her,--he had taken her. There she was, living in his house, bearing his name, spending his money! The world could not get over that fact, and the carper in Edwin's secret soul could not get over it either. He had said that he would have a new works, and, with all its faults and little cowardices, there the new works was! And moreover it had just been a.s.sessed for munic.i.p.al rates at a monstrous figure. He had bought his house (and mortgaged it); he had been stoical to bad debts; he had sold securities--at rather less than they cost him; he had braved his redoubtable wife; and he had got his works! His will, and naught else, was the magic wand that had conjured it into existence.

The black and gold sign that surmounted its blue roofs could be seen from the top of Acre Lane and half way along Shawport Lane, proclaiming the progress of lithography and steam-printing, and the name of Edwin Clayhanger. Let the borough put that in its pipe and smoke it! He was well aware that the borough felt pride in his works. And he had orders more than sufficient to keep the enterprise handsomely going. Even in the Five Towns initiative seemed to receive its reward.

Life might be as profoundly unsatisfactory as you pleased, but there was zest in it.

The bell had rung. He opened the main door, and there stood Clara and her brood. And Edwin was the magnificent, wonderful uncle. The children entered, with maternal precautions and recommendations. Every child was clean and spruce: Bert clumsy, Clara minxlike, Amy heavy and benignant, Lucy the pretty little thing, and Rupert simply adorable--each representing a separate and considerable effort of watchful care. The mother came last, worn, still pretty, with a slight dragging movement of the limbs. In her glittering keen eyes were both envy and nave admiration of her brother. "What a life!" thought Edwin, meaning what a narrow, stuffy, struggling, conventional, unlovely existence was the Benbows'! He and they lived in different worlds of intelligence. Nevertheless he savoured the surpa.s.sing charm of Rupert, the goodness of Amy, the floral elegance of Lucy, and he could appreciate the unending labours of that mother of theirs, malicious though she was. He was bluff and jolly with all of them. The new works being fairly close to the Benbow home, the family had often come _en ma.s.se_ to witness its gradual mounting, regarding the excursions as a sort of picnic. And now that the imposing place was inaugurated and the signs up, Uncle Edwin had been asked to show them over it in a grand formal visit, and he had amiably consented.

"Has George come, Uncle Edwin?" asked Bert.

George had not come. A reconciliation had occurred between the cousins (though by no means at the time nor in the manner desired by Albert); they were indeed understood by the Benbows to be on the most touching terms of intimacy, which was very satisfactory to the righteousness of Albert and Clara; and George was to have been of the afternoon party; but he had not arrived. Edwin, knowing the unknowableness of George, suspected trouble.

"Machines! Machines!" piped tiny white-frocked Rupert, to whom wondrous tales had been told.

"You'll see machines all right," said Edwin promisingly. It was not his intention to proceed straight to the machine-room. He would never have admitted it, but his deliberate intention was to display the works dramatically, with the machine-room as a culmination. The truth was, the man was full of secret tricks, contradicting avuncular superior indifference. He was a mere boy--he was almost a school-girl.

He led them through a longish pa.s.sage, and up steps and down steps--steps which were not yet hollowed, but which would be hollowed--into the stone-polishing shop, which was romantically obscure, with a specially dark corner where a little contraption was revolving all by itself in the process of smoothing a stone. Young Clara stared at the two workmen, while the rest stared at the contraption, and Edwin, feeling ridiculously like a lecturer, mumbled words of exposition. And then next, after climbing some steps, they were in a lofty apartment with a gla.s.s roof, sunshine-drenched and tropical. Here lived two more men, including Karl the German, bent in perspiration over desks, and laboriously drawing. Round about were coloured designs, and stones covered with pencilling, and boards, and all sorts of sheets of paper and cardboard.

"Ooh!" murmured Bert, much impressed by the meticulous cross-hatching of Karl's pencil on a stone.

And Edwin said:

"This is the drawing-office."

"Oh yes!" murmured Clara vaguely. "It's very warm, isn't it?"

None of them except Bert was interested. They gazed about dully, uncomprehendingly, absolutely incurious.

"Machines!" Rupert urged again.

"Come on, then," said Edwin going out with a.s.sumed briskness and gaiety.

At the door stood Tertius Ingpen, preoccupied and alert, with all the mien of a factory inspector in full activity.

"Don't mind me," said Ingpen, "I can look after myself. In fact I prefer to."

At the sight of an important stranger speaking familiarly to Uncle Edwin, all the children save Rupert grew stiff, dismal and apprehensive, and Clara looked about as though she had suddenly discovered very interesting phenomena in the corners of the workshop.

"My sister, Mrs. Benbow--Mr. Ingpen. Mr. Ingpen is Her Majesty's Inspector of Factories, so we must mind what we're about," said Edwin.

Clara gave a bright, quick smile as she limply shook hands. The sinister enchantment which precedes social introduction was broken. And Clara, overcome by the extraordinary chivalry and deference of Ingpen's customary greeting to women, decided that he was a particularly polite man; but she reserved her general judgment on him, having several times heard Albert inveigh against the autocratic unreasonableness of this very inspector, who, according to Albert, forgot that even an employer had to live, and that that which handicapped the employer could not possibly help the workman--"in the long run."

"Machines!" Rupert insisted.

They all laughed; the other children laughed suddenly and imitatively, and an instant later than the elders; and Tertius Ingpen, as he grasped the full purport of the remark, laughed more than anyone. He turned sideways and bent slightly in order to give vent to his laughter, which, at first noiseless and imprisoned, gradually grew loud in freedom. When he had recovered, he said thoughtfully, stroking his soft beard:

"Now it would be very interesting to know exactly what that child understands by 'machines'--what his mental picture of them is. Very interesting! Has he ever seen any?"

"No," said Clara.