Clayhanger Part 84

"His back!" she repeated in a frightened tone.

Everybody was afraid of that mysterious back. And George himself was most afraid of it.

"I'll get over the wall," said Janet.

Edwin quitted the wall. Maggie was coming out of the house with a large cane easy-chair and a large cus.h.i.+on. But George was now standing up, though still crying. His beautiful best sailor hat lay on the winter ground.

"Now," said Maggie to him, "you mustn't be a baby!"

He glared at her resentfully. She would have dropped down dead on the spot if his wet and angry glance could have killed her. She was a powerful woman. She seized him carefully and set him in the chair, and supported the famous spine with the cus.h.i.+on.

"I don't think he's much hurt," she decided. "He couldn't make that noise if he was, and see how his colour's coming back!"

In another case Edwin would have agreed with her, for the tendency of both was to minimise an ill and to exaggerate the philosophical att.i.tude in the first moments of any occurrence that looked serious. But now he honestly thought that her judgement was being influenced by her prejudice, and he felt savage against her. The worst was that it was all his fault. Maggie was odiously right. He ought never to have encouraged the child to be acrobatic on the wall. It was he who had even put the idea of the wall as a means of access into the child's head.

"Does it hurt?" he inquired, bending down, his hands on his knees.

"Yes," said George, ceasing to cry.

"Much?" asked Maggie, dusting the sailor hat and sticking it on his head.

"No, not much," George unwillingly admitted. Maggie could not at any rate say that he did not speak the truth.

Janet, having obtained steps, stood on the wall in her elaborate street-array.

"Who's going to help me down?" she demanded anxiously. She was not so young and sprightly as once she had been. Edwin obeyed the call.

Then the three of them stood round the victim's chair, and the victim, like a G.o.d, permitted himself to be contemplated. And Janet had to hear Edwin's account of the accident, and also Maggie's account of it, as seen from the window.

"I don't know what to do!" said Janet.

"It is annoying, isn't it?" said Maggie. "And just as you were going to the station too!"

"I--I think I'm all right," George announced.

Janet pa.s.sed a hand down his back, as though expecting to be able to judge the condition of his spine through the thickness of all his clothes.

"Are you?" she questioned doubtfully.

"It's nothing," said Maggie, with firmness.

"He'd be all right in the train," said Janet. "It's the walking to the station that I'm afraid of... You never know."

"I can carry him," said Edwin quickly.

"Of course you can't!" Maggie contradicted. "And even if you could you'd jog him far worse than if he walked himself."

"There's no time to get a cab, now," said Janet, looking at her watch.

"If we aren't at Knype, father will wonder what on earth's happened, and I don't know what his mother would say!"

"Where's that old pram?" Edwin demanded suddenly of Maggie.

"What? Clara's? It's in the outhouse."

"I can run him up to the station in two jiffs in that."

"Oh yes! Do!" said George. "You must. And then lift me into the carriage!"

The notion was accepted.

"I hope it's the best thing to do," said Janet, apprehensive and doubtful, as she hurried off to the other house in order to get the boy's overcoat and meet Edwin and the perambulator at the gates.

"I'm certain it is," said Maggie calmly. "There's nothing really the matter with that child."

"Well, it's very good of Edwin, I'm sure," said Janet.

Edwin had already rushed for the perambulator, an ancient vehicle which was sometimes used in the garden for infant Benbows.

In a few moments Trafalgar Road had the spectacle of the bearded and eminent master-printer, Edwin Clayhanger, steaming up its muddy pavement behind a perambulator with a grown boy therein. And dozens of persons who had not till then distinguished the boy from other boys, inquired about his ident.i.ty, and gossip was aroused. Maggie was displeased.

In obedience to the command Edwin lifted George into the train; and the feel of his little slippery body, and the feel of Edwin's mighty arms, seemed to make them more intimate than ever. Except for dirty tear-marks on his cheeks, George's appearance was absolutely normal.

Edwin expected to receive a letter from him, but none came, and this negligence wounded Edwin.

VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER NINE.

THE ARRIVALS.

On a Sat.u.r.day in the early days of the following year, 1892, Edwin by special request had gone in to take afternoon tea with the Orgreaves.

Osmond Orgreave was just convalescent after an attack of influenza, and in the opinion of Janet wanted cheering up. The task of enlivening him had been laid upon Edwin. The guest, and Janet and her father and mother sat together in a group round the fire in the drawing-room.

The drawing-room alone had grown younger with years. Money had been spent on it rather freely. During the previous decade Osmond's family, scattering, had become very much less costly to him, but his habits of industry had not changed, nor his faculty for collecting money. Hence the needs of the drawing-room, which had been pressing for quite twenty years, had at last been satisfied; indeed Osmond was saving, through mere lack of that energetic interest in things which is necessary to spending. Possibly even the drawing-room would have remained untouched--both Janet and her elder sister Marian sentimentally preferred it as it was--had not Mrs Orgreave been 'positively ashamed'

of it when her married children, including Marian, came to see her.

They were all married now, except Janet and Charlie and Johnnie; and Alicia at any rate had a finer drawing-room than her mother. So far as the parents were concerned Charlie might as well have been married, for he had acquired a partners.h.i.+p in a practice at Ealing and seldom visited home. Johnnie, too, might as well have been married. Since Jimmie's wedding he had used the house strictly as a hotel, for sleeping and eating, and not always for sleeping. He could not be retained at home.

His interests were mysterious, and lay outside it. Janet alone was faithful to the changed drawing-room, with its new carpets and wall-papers and upholstery.

"I've got more grandchildren than children now," said Mrs Orgreave to Edwin, "and I never thought to have!"

"Have you really?" Edwin responded. "Let me see--"

"I've got nine."

"Ten, mother," Janet corrected. "She's forgetting her own grandchildren now!"

"Bless me!" exclaimed Mrs Orgreave, taking off her eyegla.s.ses and wiping them, "I'd missed Tom's youngest."

"You'd better not tell Emily that," said Janet. (Emily was the mother of Tom's children.) "Here, give me those eyegla.s.ses, dear. You'll never get them right with a linen handkerchief. Where's your bit of chamois?"