“What do I want?”
“You want the empty attic all to yourself, and a fine state it would be in in a month, my word!”
“How do you know I want the empty attic?” Edwin repelled the onslaught; but he was considerably taken aback. It was a mystery to him how those girls, and Clara in particular, got wind of his ideas before he had even formulated them definitely to himself. It was also a mystery to him how they could be so tremendously interested in matters which did not concern them.
“You never mind!” Clara gibed, with a smile that was malicious, but charmingly malicious. “I know!”
She had merely seen him staring into the empty attic, and from that brief spectacle she had by divination constructed all his plans.
Four.
The Clayhanger sitting-room, which served as both dining-room and drawing-room, according to the more primitive practices of those days, was over one half of the shop, and looked on Duck Square. Owing to its northern aspect it scarcely ever saw the sun. The furniture followed the universal fashion of horse-hair, mahogany, and wool embroidery. There was a piano, with a high back-fretted wood over silk pleated in rays from the centre; a bookcase whose lower part was a cupboard; a sofa; and a large leather easy-chair which did not match the rest of the room. This easy-chair had its back to the window and its front legs a little towards the fireplace, so that Mr. Clayhanger could read his newspaper with facility in daytime. At night the light fell a little awkwardly from the central chandelier, and Mr. Clayhanger, if he happened to be reading, would continually shift his chair an inch or two to left or right, backwards or forwards, and would also continually glance up at the chandelier, as if accusing it of not doing its best. A common sight in the sitting-room was Mr. Clayhanger balanced on a chair, the table having been pushed away, screwing the newest burner into the chandelier. When he was seated in his easy-chair the piano could not be played, because there was not sufficient space for the stool between the piano and his chair; nor could the fire be made up without disturbing him, because the japanned coal-box was on the same side of the hearth-rug as the chair. Thus, when the fire languished and Mr. Clayhanger neglected it, the children had either to ask permission to step over his legs, or suggest that he should attend to the fire himself. Occasionally, when he was in one of his gay moods, he would humorously impede the efforts of the fire-maker with his feet, and if the fire-maker was Clara or Edwin, the child would tickle him, which brought him to his senses and forced him to shout: “None o’ that! None o’ that!”
The position of Mr. Clayhanger’s easy-chair—a detail apparently trifling—was in reality a strongly influencing factor in the family life, for it meant that the father’s presence obsessed the room. And it could not be altered, for it depended on the window; the window was too small to be quite efficient. When the children reflected upon the history of their childhood they saw one important aspect of it as a long series of detached hours spent in the sitting-room, in a state of desire to do something that could not be done without disturbing father, and in a state of indecision whether or not to disturb him. If by chance, as sometimes occurred, he chose to sit on the sofa, which was unobtrusive in the corner away from the window, between the fireplace and the door, the room was instantly changed into something larger, freer, and less inconvenient.
Five.
As the hour was approaching six, Edwin, on the way downstairs, looked in at the sitting-room for his father; but Darius was not there.
“Where’s father?” he demanded.
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Maggie, at the sewing-machine. Maggie was aged twenty; dark, rather stout, with an expression at once benevolent and worried. She rarely seemed to belong to the same generation as her brother and sister. She consorted on equal terms with married women, and talked seriously of the same things as they did. Mr. Clayhanger treated her somewhat differently from the other two. Yet, though he would often bid them accept her authority, he would now and then impair that authority by roughly ‘dressing her down’ at the meal-table. She was a capable girl; she had much less firmness, and much more good-nature, than she seemed to have. She could not assert herself adequately. She ‘managed’ very well; indeed she had ‘done wonders’ in filling the place of the mother who had died when Clara was four and Edwin six, and she herself only ten. Responsibility, apprehension, and strained effort had printed their marks on her features. But the majority of acquaintances were more impressed by her good intention than by her capacity; they would call her ‘a nice thing.’ The discerning minority, while saying with admiring conviction that she was ‘a very fine girl,’ would regret that somehow she had not the faculty of ‘making the best of herself,’ of ‘putting her best foot foremost.’ And would they not heartily stand up for her with the superficial majority!
A thin, grey-haired, dreamy-eyed woman hurried into the room, bearing a noisy tray and followed by Clara with a white cloth. This was Mrs. Nixon, the domestic staff of the Clayhanger household for years. Clara and Mrs. Nixon swept Maggie’s sewing materials from the corner of the table on to a chair, put Maggie’s flower-glasses on to the ledge of the bookcase, folded up the green cloth, and began rapidly to lay the tea. Simultaneously Maggie, glancing at the clock, closed up her sewing-machine, and deposited her work in a basket. Clara, leaving the table, stooped to pick up the bits of cotton and white stuff that littered the carpet. The clock struck six.
“Now, sharpy!” she exclaimed curtly to Edwin, who stood hesitatingly with his hands in his pockets. “Can’t you help Maggie to push that sewing-machine into the corner?”
“What on earth’s up?” he inquired vaguely, but starting forward to help Maggie.
“She’ll be here in a minute,” said Maggie, almost under her breath, as she fitted on the cover of the sewing-machine.
“Who?” asked Edwin. “Oh! Auntie! I’d forgotten it was her night.”
“As if anyone could forget!” murmured Clara, with sarcastic unbelief.
By this time the table was completely set.
Six.
Edwin wondered mildly, as he often wondered, at the extremely bitter tone in which Clara always referred to their Aunt Clara Hamps—when Mrs. Hamps was not there. Even Maggie’s private attitude to Auntie Clara was scarcely more Christian. Mrs. Hamps was the widowed younger sister of their mother, and she had taken a certain share in the supervision of Darius Clayhanger’s domestic affairs after the death of Mrs. Clayhanger. This latter fact might account, partially but not wholly, for the intense and steady dislike in which she was held by Maggie, Clara, and Mrs. Nixon. Clara hated her own name because she had been ‘called after’ her auntie. Mr. Clayhanger ‘got on’ excellently with his sister-in-law. He ‘thought highly’ of her, and was indeed proud to have her for a relative. In their father’s presence the girls never showed their dislike of Mrs. Hamps; it was a secret pleasure shared between them and Mrs. Nixon, and only disclosed to Edwin because the girls were indifferent to what Edwin might think. They casually despised him for somehow liking his auntie, for not seeing through her wiles; but they could count on his loyalty to themselves.
“Are you ready for tea, or aren’t you?” Clara asked him. She frequently spoke to him as if she was the elder instead of the younger.
“Yes,” he said. “But I must find father.”
He went off, but he did not find his father in the shop, and after a few futile minutes he returned upstairs. Mrs. Nixon preceded him, carrying the tea-urn, and she told him that his father had sent word into the kitchen that they were not to ‘wait tea’ for him.
Volume One--Chapter Seven.