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<h2 class="author">Arnold Bennett</h2>
<h2 class="title">"Clayhanger"</h2>
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<h3>Volume One--Chapter One.</h3>
<h4>Book One — His Vocation.</h4>
<h4>The Last of a Schoolboy.</h4>
<p>Edwin Clayhanger stood on the steep-sloping, red-bricked canal bridge, in the valley
between Bursley and its suburb Hillport. In that neighbourhood the Knype and Mersey canal
formed the western boundary of the industrialism of the Five Towns. To the east rose
pitheads, chimneys, and kilns, tier above tier, dim in their own mists. To the west,
Hillport Fields, grimed but possessing authentic hedgerows and winding paths, mounted
broadly up to the sharp ridge on which stood Hillport Church, a landmark. Beyond the
ridge, and partly protected by it from the driving smoke of the Five Towns, lay the fine
and ancient Tory borough of Oldcastle, from whose historic Middle School Edwin Clayhanger
was now walking home. The fine and ancient Tory borough provided education for the whole
of the Five Towns, but the relentless ignorance of its prejudices had blighted the
district. A hundred years earlier the canal had only been obtained after a vicious
Parliamentary fight between industry and the fine and ancient borough, which saw in canals
a menace to its importance as a centre of traffic. Fifty years earlier the fine and
ancient borough had succeeded in forcing the greatest railway line in England to run
through unpopulated country five miles off instead of through the Five Towns, because it
loathed the mere conception of a railway. And now, people are inquiring why the Five
Towns, with a railway system special to itself, is characterised by a perhaps excessive
provincialism. These interesting details have everything to do with the history of Edwin
Clayhanger, as they have everything to do with the history of each of the two hundred
thousand souls in the Five Towns. Oldcastle guessed not the vast influences of its sublime
stupidity.</p>
<p>It was a breezy Friday in July 1872. The canal, which ran north and south, reflected a
blue and white sky. Towards the bridge, from the north came a long narrow canal-boat
roofed with tarpaulins; and towards the bridge, from the south came a similar craft,
sluggishly creeping. The towing-path was a morass of sticky brown mud, for, in the way of
rain, that year was breaking the records of a century and a half. Thirty yards in front of
each boat an unhappy skeleton of a horse floundered its best in the quagmire. The honest
endeavour of one of the animals received a frequent tonic from a bare-legged girl of seven
who heartily curled a whip about its crooked large-jointed legs. The ragged and filthy
child danced in the rich mud round the horse’s flanks with the simple joy of one who
had been rewarded for good behaviour by the unrestricted use of a whip for the first
time.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Two.</h4>
<p>Edwin, with his elbows on the stone parapet of the bridge, stared uninterested at the
spectacle of the child, the whip, and the skeleton. He was not insensible to the piquancy
of the pageant of life, but his mind was preoccupied with grave and heavy matters. He had
left school that day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a willing
beast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the advance guard of its problems
bearing down on him. Slim, gawky, untidy, fair, with his worn black-braided clothes, and
slung over his shoulders in a bursting satchel the last load of his schoolbooks, and on
his bright, rough hair a shapeless cap whose lining protruded behind, he had the
extraordinary wistful look of innocence and simplicity which marks most boys of sixteen.
It seemed rather a shame, it seemed even tragic, that this naïve, simple creature,
with his straightforward and friendly eyes so eager to believe appearances, this creature
immaculate of worldly experience, must soon be transformed into a man, wary, incredulous,
detracting. Older eyes might have wept at the simplicity of those eyes.</p>
<p>This picture of Edwin as a wistful innocent would have made Edwin laugh. He had been
seven years at school, and considered himself a hardened sort of brute, free of illusions.
And he sometimes thought that he could judge the world better than most neighbouring
mortals.</p>
<p>“Hello! The Sunday!” he murmured, without turning his eyes.</p>
<p>Another boy, a little younger and shorter, and clothed in a superior untidiness, had
somehow got on to the bridge, and was leaning with his back against the parapet which
supported Edwin’s elbows. His eyes were franker and simpler even than the eyes of
Edwin, and his lips seemed to be permanently parted in a good-humoured smile. His name was
Charlie Orgreave, but at school he was invariably called “the
Sunday”—not “Sunday,” but “the Sunday”—and
nobody could authoritatively explain how he had come by the nickname. Its origin was lost
in the prehistoric ages of his childhood. He and Edwin had been chums for several years.
They had not sworn fearful oaths of loyalty; they did not constitute a secret society;
they had not even pricked forearms and written certain words in blood; for these rites are
only performed at Harrow, and possibly at the Oldcastle High School, which imitates
Harrow. Their fellowship meant chiefly that they spent a great deal of time together,
instinctively and unconsciously enjoying each other’s mere presence, and that in
public arguments they always reinforced each other, whatever the degree of intellectual
dishonesty thereby necessitated.</p>
<p>“I’ll bet you mine gets to the bridge first,” said the Sunday. With
an ingenious movement of the shoulders he arranged himself so that the parapet should bear
the weight of his satchel.</p>
<p>Edwin Clayhanger slowly turned round, and perceived that the object which the Sunday
had appropriated as “his” was the other canal-boat, advancing from the
south.</p>
<p>“Horse or boat?” asked Edwin.</p>
<p>“Boat’s nose, of course,” said the Sunday.</p>
<p>“Well,” said Edwin, having surveyed the unconscious competitors, and
counting on the aid of the whipping child, “I don’t mind laying you
five.”</p>
<p>“That be damned for a tale!” protested the Sunday. “We said
we’d never bet less than ten—you know that.”</p>
<p>“Yes, but—” Edwin hesitatingly drawled.</p>
<p>“But what?”</p>
<p>“All right. Ten,” Edwin agreed. “But it’s not fair.
You’ve got a rare start on me.”</p>
<p>“Rats!” said the Sunday, with finality. In the pronunciation of this word
the difference between his accent and Edwin’s came out clear. The Sunday’s
accent was less local; there was a hint of a short “e” sound in the
“a,” and a briskness about the consonants, that Edwin could never have
compassed. The Sunday’s accent was as carelessly superior as his clothes. Evidently
the Sunday had some one at home who had not learnt the art of speech in the Five
Towns.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Three.</h4>
<p>He began to outline a scheme, in which perpendicular expectoration figured, for
accurately deciding the winner, and a complicated argument might have ensued about this,
had it not soon become apparent that Edwin’s boat was going to be handsomely beaten,
despite the joyous efforts of the little child. The horse that would die but would not
give up, was only saved from total subsidence at every step by his indomitable if aged
spirit. Edwin handed over the ten marbles even before the other boat had arrived at the
bridge.</p>
<p>“Here,” he said. “And you may as well have these, too,” adding
five more to the ten, all he possessed. They were not the paltry marble of to-day,
plaything of infants, but the majestic “rinker,” black with white spots, the
king of marbles in an era when whole populations practised the game. Edwin looked at them
half regretfully as they lay in the Sunday’s hands. They seemed prodigious wealth in
those hands, and he felt somewhat as a condemned man might feel who bequeaths his jewels
on the scaffold. Then there was a rattle, and a tumour grew out larger on the
Sunday’s thigh.</p>
<p>The winning boat, long preceded by its horse, crawled under the bridge and passed
northwards to the sea, laden with crates of earthenware. And then the loser, with the
little girl’s father and mother and her brothers and sisters, and her kitchen,
drawing-room, and bedroom, and her smoking chimney and her memories and all that was hers,
in the stern of it, slid beneath the boys’ down-turned faces while the whip cracked
away beyond the bridge. They could see, between the whitened tarpaulins, that the deep
belly of the craft was filled with clay.</p>
<p>“Where does that there clay come from?” asked Edwin. For not merely was he
honestly struck by a sudden new curiosity, but it was meet for him to behave like a man
now, and to ask manly questions.</p>
<p>“Runcorn,” said the Sunday scornfully. “Can’t you see it
painted all over the boat?”</p>
<p>“Why do they bring clay all the way from Runcorn?”</p>
<p>“They don’t bring it from Runcorn. They bring it from Cornwall. It comes
round by sea—see?” He laughed.</p>
<p>“Who told you?” Edwin roughly demanded.</p>
<p>“Anybody knows that!” said the Sunday grandly, but always maintaining his
gay smile.</p>
<p>“Seems devilish funny to me,” Edwin murmured, after reflection, “that
they should bring clay all that roundabout way just to make crocks of it here. Why should
they choose just this place to make crocks in? I always understood—”</p>
<p>“Oh! Come on!” the Sunday cut him short. “It’s blessed well one
o’clock and after!”</p>
<hr>
<h4>Four.</h4>
<p>They climbed the long bank from the canal up to the Manor Farm, at which high point
their roads diverged, one path leading direct to Bleakridge where Orgreave lived, and the
other zigzagging down through neglected pasturage into Bursley proper. Usually they parted
here without a word, taking pride in such Spartan taciturnity, and they would doubtless
have done the same this morning also, though it were fifty-fold their last walk together
as two schoolboys. But an incident intervened.</p>
<p>“Hold on!” cried the Sunday.</p>
<p>To the south of them, a mile and a half off, in the wreathing mist of the Cauldon Bar
Ironworks, there was a yellow gleam that even the capricious sunlight could not kill, and
then two rivers of fire sprang from the gleam and ran in a thousand delicate and lovely
hues down the side of a mountain of refuse. They were emptying a few tons of molten slag
at the Cauldon Bar Ironworks. The two rivers hung slowly dying in the mists of smoke. They
reddened and faded, and you thought they had vanished, and you could see them yet, and
then they escaped the baffled eye, unless a cloud aided them for a moment against the sun;
and their ephemeral but enchanting beauty had expired for ever.</p>
<p>“Now!” said Edwin sharply.</p>
<p>“One minute ten seconds,” said the Sunday, who had snatched out his watch,
an inestimable contrivance with a centre-seconds hand. “By Jove! That was a good
’un.”</p>
<p>A moment later two smaller boys, both laden with satchels, appeared over the brow from
the canal.</p>
<p>“Let’s wait a jiff,” said the Sunday to Edwin, and as the smaller
boys showed no hurry he bawled out to them across the intervening cinder-waste:
“Run!” They ran. They were his younger brothers, Johnnie and Jimmie.
“Take this and hook it!” he commanded, passing the strap of his satchel over
his head as they came up. In fatalistic silence they obeyed the smiling tyrant.</p>
<p>“What are you going to do?” Edwin asked.</p>
<p>“I’m coming down your way a bit.”</p>
<p>“But I thought you said you were peckish.”</p>
<p>“I shall eat three slices of beef instead of my usual brace,” said the
Sunday carelessly.</p>
<p>Edwin was touched. And the Sunday was touched, because he knew he had touched Edwin.
After all, this was a solemn occasion. But neither would overtly admit that its solemnity
had affected him. Hence, first one and then the other began to skim stones with vicious
force over the surface of the largest of the three ponds that gave interest to the Manor
Farm. When they had thus proved to themselves that the day differed in no manner from any
other breaking-up day, they went forward.</p>
<p>On their left were two pitheads whose double wheels revolved rapidly in smooth silence,
and the puffing engine-house and all the trucks and gear of a large ironstone mine. On
their right was the astonishing farm, with barns and ricks and cornfields complete,
seemingly quite unaware of its forlorn oddness in that foul arena of manufacture. In
front, on a little hill in the vast valley, was spread out the Indian-red architecture of
Bursley—tall chimneys and rounded ovens, schools, the new scarlet market, the grey
tower of the old church, the high spire of the evangelical church, the low spire of the
church of genuflexions, and the crimson chapels, and rows of little red houses with amber
chimney-pots, and the gold angel of the blackened Town Hall topping the whole. The sedate
reddish browns and reds of the composition, all netted in flowing scarves of smoke,
harmonised exquisitely with the chill blues of the chequered sky. Beauty was achieved, and
none saw it.</p>
<p>The boys descended without a word through the brick-strewn pastures, where a horse or
two cropped the short grass. At the railway bridge, which carried a branch mineral line
over the path, they exchanged a brief volley of words with the working-lads who always
played pitch-and-toss there in the dinner-hour; and the Sunday added to the collection of
shawds and stones lodged on the under ledges of the low iron girders. A strange boy, he
had sworn to put ten thousand stones on those ledges before he died, or perish in the
attempt. Hence Edwin sometimes called him “Old Perish-in-the-attempt.” A
little farther on the open gates of a manufactory disclosed six men playing the noble game
of rinkers on a smooth patch of ground near the weighing machine. These six men were
Messieurs Ford, Carter, and Udall, the three partners owning the works, and three of their
employees. They were celebrated marble-players, and the boys stayed to watch them as,
bending with one knee almost touching the earth, they shot the rinkers from their stubby
thumbs with a canon-like force and precision that no boy could ever hope to equal.
“By gum!” mumbled Edwin involuntarily, when an impossible shot was
accomplished; and the bearded shooter, pleased by this tribute from youth, twisted his
white apron into a still narrower ring round his waist. Yet Edwin was not thinking about
the game. He was thinking about a battle that lay before him, and how he would be weakened
in the fight by the fact that in the last school examination, Charlie Orgreave, younger
than himself by a year, had ousted him from the second place in the school. The report in
his pocket said: “Position in class next term: third;” whereas he had been
second since the beginning of the year. There would of course be no “next
term” for him, but the report remained. A youth who has come to grips with that
powerful enemy, his father, cannot afford to be handicapped by even such a trifle as a
report entirely irrelevant to the struggle.</p>
<p>Suddenly Charlie Orgreave gave a curt nod, and departed, in nonchalant good-humour,
doubtless considering that to accompany his chum any farther would be to be guilty of
girlish sentimentality. And Edwin nodded with equal curtness and made off slowly into the
maze of Bursley. The thought in his heart was: “I’m on my own, now. I’ve
got to face it now, by myself.” And he felt that not merely his father, but the
leagued universe, was against him.</p>
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