These Twain

Arnold Bennett

Description

The third book in his sweeping Clayhanger Family series, These Twain recounts the courtship and marriage of Hilda Lessways and Edwin Clayhanger. It's a nuanced, complex depiction of the ups and downs of long-term intimate relationships, focusing on the ways that marriage can both help and hurt people, often at the same time.

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776588817
• Langue: English

Extrait

THESE TWAIN
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ARNOLD BENNETT
 
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These Twain First published in 1916 Epub ISBN 978-1-77658-881-7 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77658-882-4 © 2014 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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BOOK I - THE WOMAN IN THE HOUSE Chapter I - The House Chapter II - Hilda on the Stairs Chapter III - Attack and Repulse Chapter IV - The Word Chapter V - Tertius Ingpen Chapter VI - Husband and Wife Chapter VII - The Truce Chapter VIII - The Family at Home Chapter IX - The Week-End Chapter X - The Orgreave Calamity BOOK II - THE PAST Chapter XI - Lithography Chapter XII - Dartmoor Chapter XIII - The Departure Chapter XIV - Tavy Mansion Chapter XV - The Prison Chapter XVI - The Ghost BOOK III - EQUILIBRIUM Chapter XVII - George's Eyes Chapter XVIII - Auntie Hamps Sentenced Chapter XIX - Death and Burial Chapter XX - The Discovery
BOOK I - THE WOMAN IN THE HOUSE
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Chapter I - The House
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I
In the year 1892 Bleakridge, residential suburb of Bursley, was stillmost plainly divided into old and new,—that is to say, into the dullred or dull yellow with stone facings, and the bright red with terracotta gimcrackery. Like incompatible liquids congealed in a pot, thetwo components had run into each other and mingled, but never mixed.
Paramount among the old was the house of the Member of Parliament, nearthe top of the important mound that separates Hanbridge from Bursley.The aged and widowed Member used the house little, but he kept it up,and sometimes came into it with an unexpectedness that extremelyflattered the suburb. Thus you might be reading in the morning paperthat the Member had given a lunch in London on the previous day toCabinet Ministers and ladies as splendid as the Countess of Chell,and—glancing out of the window—you might see the Member himselfwalking down Trafalgar Road, sad, fragile, sedately alert, with hishands behind him, or waving a gracious hand to an acquaintance.Whereupon you would announce, not apathetically: "Member's gone down toMacIlvaine's!" ('MacIlvaine's being the works in which the Member had aninterest) and there would perhaps be a rush to the window. Those werethe last great days of Bleakridge.
After the Member's house ranked such historic residences as those ofOsmond Orgreave, the architect, (which had the largest, greenest gardenand the best smoke-defying trees in Bleakridge), and Fearns, theHanbridge lawyer; together with Manor "Cottage" (so-called, though aspacious house), where lived the mechanical genius who hadrevolutionised the pottery industry and strangely enough made a fortunethereby, and the dark abode of the High Church parson.
Next in importance came the three terraces,—Manor Terrace, AbbeyTerrace, and the Sneyd Terrace—each consisting of three or four houses,and all on the west side of Trafalgar Road, with long back-gardens and adistant prospect of Hillport therefrom over the Manor fields. TheTerraces, considered as architecture, were unbeautiful, old-fashioned,inconvenient,—perhaps paltry, as may be judged from the fact that rentsran as low as £25 a year; but they had been wondrous in their day, thepride of builders and owners and the marvel of a barbaric populace.They too had histories, which many people knew. Age had softened themand sanctioned their dignity. A gate might creak, but the harsh curvesof its ironwork had been mollified by time. Moreover the property wasalways maintained in excellent repair by its landlords, and residentscared passionately for the appearance of the windows and thefront-steps. The plenary respectability of the residents could not beimpugned. They were as good as the best. For address, they would notgive the number of the house in Trafalgar Road, but the name of itsTerrace. Just as much as the occupiers of detached houses, they hadsorted themselves out from the horde. Conservative or Liberal, theywere anti-democratic, ever murmuring to themselves as they descended thefront-steps in the morning and mounted them in the evening: "Most folksare nobodies, but I am somebody." And this was true.
The still smaller old houses in between the Terraces, and even the oldcottages in the side streets (which all ran to the east) had a similardistinction of caste, aloofness, and tradition. The least of them wasscornful of the crowd, and deeply conscious of itself as a separateindividuality. When the tenant-owner of a cottage in Manor Street addeda bay-window to his front-room the event seemed enormous in ManorStreet, and affected even Trafalgar Road, as a notorious clean-shavenfigure in the streets may disconcert a whole quarter by growing a beard.The congeries of cottage yards between Manor Street and HigginbothamStreet, as visible from certain high back-bedrooms in Trafalgar Road,—acrowded higgledy-piggledy of plum-coloured walls and chimneys,blue-brick pavements, and slate roofs—well illustrated the grandVictorian epoch of the Building Society, when eighteenpence was addedweekly to eighteenpence, and land haggled over by the foot, and everybrick counted, in the grim, long effort to break away from the mass.
The traditionalism of Bleakridge protected even Roman Catholicism inthat district of Nonconformity, where there were at least threeMethodist chapels to every church and where the adjective "popish" wascommonly used in preference to "papal." The little "Catholic Chapel"and the priest's house with its cross-keys at the top of the mound wereas respected as any other buildings, because Roman Catholicism hadalways been endemic there, since the age when the entire let belonged toCistercian monks in white robes. A feebly endemic Catholicism and acomplete exemption from tithes were all that remained of the Cistercianoccupation. The exemption was highly esteemed by the possessing class.
Alderman Sutton, towards the end of the seventies, first pitted the newagainst the old in Bleakridge. The lifelong secretary of a first-classBuilding Society, he was responsible for a terrace of three commodiousmodern residences exactly opposite the house of the Member. The Memberand Osmond Orgreave might modernise their antique houses as much as theyliked,—they could never match the modernity of the Alderman's Terrace,to which, by the way, he declined to give a name. He was capable ofcovering his drawing-room walls with papers at three-and-six a roll, andyet he capriciously preferred numbers to a name! These houses costtwelve hundred pounds each (a lot of money in the happy far-off dayswhen good bricks were only £1 a thousand, or a farthing apiece), andimposed themselves at once upon the respect and admiration ofBleakridge. A year or two later the Clayhanger house went up at thecorner of Trafalgar Road and Hulton Street, and easily outvied theSutton houses. Geographically at the centre of the residential suburb,it represented the new movement in Bleakridge at its apogee, and indeedwas never beaten by later ambitious attempts.
Such fine erections, though nearly every detail of them challengedtradition, could not disturb Bleakridge's belief in the stability ofsociety. But simultaneously whole streets of cheap small houses (inreality, pretentious cottages) rose round about. Hulton Street was allnew and cheap. Oak Street offered a row of pink cottages to OsmondOrgreave's garden gates, and there were three other similar new streetsbetween Oak Street and the Catholic Chapel. Jerry-building waspractised in Trafalgar Road itself, on a large plot in full view of theCatholic Chapel, where a speculative builder, too hurried to use ameasure, "stepped out" the foundations of fifteen cottages with his ownbandy legs, and when the corner of a freshly-constructed cottage fellinto the street remarked that accidents would happen and had the bricksreplaced. But not every cottage was jerry-built. Many, perhaps most,were of fairly honest workmanship. All were modern, and relativelyspacious, and much superior in plan to the old. All had bay-windows.And yet all their bay-windows together could not produce an effect equalto one bay-window in ancient Manor Street, because they had omitted tobe individual. Not one showy dwelling was unlike another, nor desiredto be unlike another.
The garish new streets were tenanted by magic. On Tuesday thepaperhangers might be whistling in those drawing-rooms (called parloursin Manor Street),—on Wednesday bay-windows were curtained and chimneyssmoking. And just as the cottages lacked individuality, so the tenantswere nobodies. At any rate no traditional person in Bleakridge knew whothey were, nor where they came from, except that they came mysteriouslyup out of the town. (Not that there had been any shocking increase inthe birthrate down there!) And no traditional person seemed to care.The strange inroad and portent ought to have puzzled and possibly tohave intimidated traditional Bleakridge: but it did not. Bleakridgemerely observed that "a lot of building was going on," and left thephenomenon at that. At first it was interested and flattered; thensomewhat resentful and regretful. And even Edwin Clayhanger, though hecounted himself among the enlightened and the truly democratic, felthurt when quite nice houses, copying some features of his own on a smallscale, and let to such people as insurance agents, began to fill up theremaining empty spaces of Trafalgar Road. He could not help thinkingthat the prestige of Bleakridge was being impaired.
II
Edwin Clayhanger, though very young in marriage, considered th