Arnold Bennett - Phantom

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Read
and recorded by William Coon December two thousand six. Phantom

(00:23):
by Arnold Bennett One the heart of the Five Towns,
that undulating patch of England, covered with mean streets and
dominated by tall, smoking chimneys. Whence are derived your cups
and saucers and plates, some of your coal, and a
portion of your iron. Is Hanbridge, a borough larger and

(00:48):
busier than its four sisters, and even more grimy and
commonplace than they. And the heart of Hanbridge is probably
the offices of the Five Towns Banking Company, where the
last trace of magic and romance is beaten out of
human existence, and the meaning of life is expressed in balances, deposits, percentages,

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and overdrafts, especially overdrafts. In a fine suite of rooms
on the first floor of the bank building resides mister
Lionel Woolley, the manager, with his wife May and their children.
Yet mister Wooley was once brought into contact with the
things which cannot be defined and assessed. Once he stood

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face to face with some strange, visible resultant of those
secret forces that lie beyond the human ken. And moreover,
the adventure affected the whole of his domestic life. The
wonder and the pathos of the story lie in the
fact that nature, prodigal, though she is known to be,
should have wasted the rare and beautiful visitation on just

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mister Wooley. Mister Wooley was bathed in romance of the
most singular kind, and the precious fluid ran off him
like water off a duct's back section. Two ten years ago,
on a Thursday afternoon in July, Lionel Woolley, as he
walked up through the new park at Bursley to his

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celibate rooms in Park Terrace, was making addition sums out
of various items connected with the institution of marriage. Bursley
is next door to Hanbridge, and Lionel happened to be
the cashier of the Bursley branch of the bank. He
had in mind two possible wives, each of whom possessed
advantages which appealed to him, and he was unable to

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decide between them by any mathematical process. Suddenly, from a
glazed shelter near the empty bandstand. There emerged in front
of him one of the delectable creatures who had excited
his fancy. May Lawton was twenty eight, an orphan and
a schoolmistress. She too had celibate rooms in Park Terrace,

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and it was owing to this coincidence that Lionel had
made her acquaintance six months previously. She was not pretty,
but she was tall, straight, well dressed, well educated, and
not lacking an experience, and she had a little money
of her own. Well, mister Woolley, she said, easily, stopping

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for him as she raised her sunshade. How satisfied you look.
It's the sight of you, he replied, without a moment's hesitation.
He had a fine, assured way with women. He need
not have envy to curate. Accustomed to sewing meetings, and
May Lawton belonged to the type of girl whose demeanor
always challenges the masculine in a man. Gazing at her,

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Lionel was swiftly conscious of several things. The piquancy of
her snub nose, the brightness of her smile, at once
defiant and wistful, the lingering softness of her gloved hand,
and the extra ordinary charm of her sunshade, which matched
her dress, and formed a sort of canopy and frame
for that intelligent, tantalizing face. He remembered that of late

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he and she had grown very intimate, and it came
upon him with a shock, as though he had just
opened a telegram which said so that May, and not
the other girl, was his destined mate. And he thought
of her fortune tiny but nevertheless useful, and how clever
she was, and how inexplicably different from the rest of

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her sex, and how she would adorn his house and
set him off and help him in his career. He
heard himself saying negligently to friends, my wife speaks French
like a native. Of course, my wife has traveled a
great deal. My wife has thoroughly studied the management of children.
Now my wife does understand the art of dress. I

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put my wife's bit of money into so and so.
In short, Lionel was as near being in love as
his character permitted. And while he walked by May's side
past the bowling greens at the summit of the hill,
she lightly quizzing the raw newness of the park and
its impertinences, he wondered he honestly wondered that he could

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ever have hesitated between May Lawton and the other. Her
superiority was too obvious. She was a woman of the world.
She in a flash he knew that he would propose
to her that very afternoon, And when he had suggested
a stroll towards Morethorne and she had deliciously agreed, he
was conscious of a tumultuous, uplifting and splendid carelessness of spirits.

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Imagine me bringing it to a climax to day, he reflected, profoundly,
pleased with himself. Ah, well, it will be settled once
for all. He admired his own decision. He was quite
struck by it. I shall call her May before I
leave her, he thought, gazing at her and discovering how
well the name suited her, with its significances of alertness, geniality,

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and half mocking coynus. So school is closed, he said,
and added humorously broken up is the technical term. I believe, yes,
she answered, And I had walked out into the park
to meditate seriously upon the question of my holiday. She
caught his eye in a net of bright glances, and

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romance was in the air. They had crossed the couple
of smoke soiled fields and struck into the old Hanbridge road,
just below the abandoned toll house with its broad eaves.
And whither do your meditation's point, he demanded, playfully. My
meditations point to Switzerland, she said, I have friends in Lausanne.

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The reference to foreign climes impressed him. Would that I
could go to Switzerland too, he exclaimed, and privately, Now
for it, I'm about to begin, she questioned, with elaborate simplicity.
At the moment, as they were passing the toll house,
the other girl appeared, surprisingly from round the corner of

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the toll house, where the lane from toft End joins
the high road. This second creature was smaller than Miss Lawton,
less assertive, less intelligent, perhaps, but much more beautiful. Everyone halted,
and everyone blushed. May, the interrupter, at length stammered, May,

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responded Miss Lawton lamely. The other girl was named May too,
May Dean, the child of the well known Majollica manufacturer
who lived with his sons and daughters in a solitary
and ancient house at toft End. Lionel Woolley said nothing
until they had all shaken hands. His famous way with

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women seemed to have deserted him, and then he actually
stated that he had forgotten am appointment and must depart.
He had gone before the girls could move. When they
were alone, the two Mays fronted each other, confused, hostile,
almost homicidal. I hope I didn't spoil a tete a tete,

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said May Dean, stiffly and sharply, in a manner quite
foreign to her soft and yielding nature. The schoolmistress, abandoning
herself to an inexplicable but overwhelming impulse, took breath for
a proud lie. No, she answered, but if you had
come three minutes earlier, she smiled, calmly, oh murmured May

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Deane after a pause. Three that evening, May Deane returned
home at half past nine. She had been with her
two brothers to a lawn tennis party at Hillport, and
she told her father, who was reading the Staffordshire signal
in his accustomed solitude, that the boys were staying later
for cards, but that she had declined to stay because

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she felt tired. She kissed the old widower good night
and said that she should go to bed at once,
But before retiring, she visited the housekeeper in the kitchen
in order to discuss certain household matters, Jim's early breakfast,
the proper method of washing Herbert's new flannels, Herbert would
be very angry if they were shrunk, and the dog
biscuits for Carlo. These questions settled, she went to her room,

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drew the blind, lighted some candles, and sat down near
the window. She was twenty two, and she had about
her that strange and charming nun like mystery which often
comes to a woman who lives alone and unguessed at
among male relatives. Her room was her bower. No one
save the servants and herself ever entered it. Mister Dean

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and Jim and Birdie might glance carelessly through the open
door in passing along the corridor. But had they chain
danced in idle curiosity to enter the room would have
struck them as unfamiliar, and they might perhaps have exclaimed
with momentary interest. So this is May's room, and some
hint that May was more than a daughter and sister,

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A woman withdrawn secret disturbing living her own inner life
side by side with the household life, might have penetrated
their obtuse, paternal and fraternal masculinity, her beautiful face, the
nose and mouth were perfect, and at either extremity of
the upper lip grew a soft down. Her dark hair,

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her quiet voice, and her gentle acquiescence, diversified by occasional
outbursts of sarcasm, appealed to them and won them. But
they accepted her as something, of course, as something which
went without saying. They adored her, and did not know
that they adored her. May took off her hat, stuck

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the pins into it again, and threw it on the bed,
whose white and green counterpane hung down nearly to the
floor on either side. Then she lay back in the chair, and,
pulling away the blind, glanced through the window. The moon,
rather dim behind the furnace lights of red Cow Ironworks,
was rising over Morethorne. May dropped the blind with a

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wearied gesture and turned within the room, examining its contents
as if she had not seen them before. The wardrobe,
the chest of drawers, which was also a dressing table,
the washstand, the dwarf bookcase with its store of Edna
Lyle's Elizabeth gaskells, Thackeray's Charlotte, Young's Charlotte Bronte's, A Thomas

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Hardy or so, and some old school books. She looked
at the pictures, including a sampler worked by a deceased aunt,
at the loud ticking Swiss clock on the mantelpiece, at
the Higglely Piggley photographs there, at the new Axminster carpet,
the piece of linoleum in front of the washstand, and
the bad joining of the wallpaper to the left of

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the door. She missed none of the details which she
knew so well with such long, monotonous intimacy, and sighed.
Then she got up from the chair, and, opening a
small drawer in the chest of drawers, put her hand
familiarly to the back and drew forth a photograph. She
carried the photograph to the light of the candles on

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the mantelpiece and gazed at it attentively, puckering her brows.
It was a portrait of Lionel Woolley. Heaven knows by
what SUBTERFUSEDI or lucky accident. She had obtained it for
Lionel certainly had not given it to her. She loved Lionel.
She had loved him for five years, with a love silent, blind, intense,

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irrational and too elemental to be concealed. Everyone knew of
May's passion. Many women admired her taste, a few were
shocked and puzzled by it. All the men of her
acquaintance either pitied or despised her for it. Her father
said nothing. Her brothers were less cautious, and summed up
their opinion of Lionel in the curt scornful assertion that

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he showed a tendency to cheat at tennis, but May
would never hear ill of him. He was a god
to her, and she could not hide her worship for
more than a year, until lately she had been almost
sure of him, And then came a faint, vague rumor
concerning Lionel and May Lawton, a rumor which she had

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refused to take seriously. The encounter of that afternoon and
Miss Lawton's triumphant remark had dazed her For seven hours.
She had existed in a kind of semi conscious delirium,
and which she could perceive nothing but the fatal fact,
emerging more clearly every moment from the welter of her
thoughts that she had lost Lionel. Lionel had proposed to

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May Lawton had been accepted just before she surprised them together,
and Lionel, with a man's excusable cowardice, had left his
betrothed to announce the engagement. She tore up the photograph,
put the fragments in the grate, and set a light
to them. Her father's step sounded on the stairs. He

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hesitated and knocked sharply at her door. What's burning, may?
It's all right, father, she answered calmly. I'm only burning
some papers in the firegrate. Well, see, you don't burn
the house down. He passed on. Then she found a

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sheet of notepaper and wrote on it in pencil, using
the mantelpiece for a desk, dear home, good night, goodbye.
She cogitated and wrote further, forgive me may. She put
the message in an envelope and wrote on the envelope Jim,

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and placed it prominently in front of the clock. But
after she had looked at it for a minute, she
wrote Father above Jim, and then Herbert below. There were
noises in the hall. The boys had returned earlier than
she expected. As they went along the corridor and caught
a glimpse of her light under the door. Jim cried gaily.

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Now then out with that light, a little thing like
you ought to be asleep hours since. She listened for
the bang of their door, and then very hurriedly she
removed her pink frock and put on an old black one,
which was rather tight in the waist, and she donned
her hat, securing it carefully with both pins, extinguished the candles,

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and crept quietly downstairs, and so by the back door
into the garden. Carlo the retriever came half way out
of his kennel and greeted her in the moonlight with
a yawn. She patted his head and ran stealthily up
the garden, through the gate and up the waste greenland
toward the crown of the Hill four. The top of

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toft End is the highest land in the five towns,
and from it may be clearly seen all the lurid
evidences of manufacture which sweep across the borders of the
sky on north east west and south northeastwards lie the Moorlands,
and far off Manifold, the Metropolis of the Moorlands, as
it is called on this night, the furnaces of Red

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Cow Ironworks in the hollow to the east were in
full blast. Their fluctuating yellow light illuminated queerly the grass
of the fields above Dean's House, and the regular roar
of their breathing reached that solitary spot, like the distant
rumor of some leviathan beast, angrily fuming. Further away to

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the southwest, the cauldron bar ironworks reproduced the same phenomena,
and round the whole horizon near and far, except to
the northeast, the lesser fires of labour leaped and flickered
and glinted in their mists of smoke, burning ceaselessly as
they burned every night and every day at all seasons
of all years. The town of Bursley slept in the

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deep valley to the west and vast Handbridge and the
shallower depression to the south, like two sleepers accustomed to
rest quietly amid great disturbances. The beacons of their town
halls and churches kept watch, and the whole scene was
dominated by the placidity of the moon, which had now
risen clear of the red cow furnace clouds, and was

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passing upwards through tracts of stars into this scene, climbing
up from the direction of Manifold came Lionel Woolley nearly
at midnight, having walked some eighteen miles in a vain
effort to re establish his self satisfaction by a process
of reasoning and ingenious excuses. Lionel felt that in the

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brief episode of the afternoon he had scarcely behaved with dignity.
In other words, he was fully and painfully aware that
he must have looked a fool, a coward, an ass
a contempt and pitiful person in the eyes of at
least one girl, if not too. He did not like this,
No man would have liked it. And to Lionel the

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memory of an undignified act was acute torture. Why had
he bidden the girls adieu and departed? Why had he
in fact run away? What precisely would may Lawton think
of him? How could he explain his conduct to her
and to himself? And had that worshiping, affectionate thing may

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Dean taken note of his confusion, of the confusion of
him who was never confused, who was equal to every
occasion and every emergency. These were some of the questions
which harried him and declined to be settled. He had
walked to Manifold and had tea at the roebuck, and
walked back, And still the questions were harrying. And as

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he came over the hill by the field path and
described the lone house of the Deans in the light
of the red cow furnaces and of the moon, the
worship of Maine Dean seemed suddenly very precious to him,
and he could not bear to think that any stupidity
of his could have impaired it. Then he saw May
Dean walking slowly across the field, close to an abandoned

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pit shaft, whose low protecting circular wall of brick was
crumbling to ruin on the side nearest to him. She stopped,
appeared to gaze at him intently, turned and began to
approach him, And he, too, moved by a mysterious impulse
which he did not pause to examine, swerved and quickened

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his step in order to lessen the distance between them.
He did not at first even feel surprised that she
should be wandering solitary on the hill at that hour. Presently,
she stood still while he continued to move forward. It
was as if she drew him, and soon in the
pale moonlight and the wavering light of the furnaces, he
could decipher all the details of her face, and he

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saw that she was smiling, fond, invitingly, admiringly, lustrously with
the old, undiminished worship and affection. And he perceived a
dark discoloration on her right cheek, as though she had
suffered a blow. But this mark did not long occupy
his mind. He thought suddenly of the strong probability that

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her father would leave a nice little bit of money
to each of his three children. And he thought of
her beauty, and of her timid fragility in the tight
black dress, and of her immense and unquestioning love for him,
which would survive all accidents and mishaps. He seemed to
sink luxuriously into this grand passion of hers, which he

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deemed quite natural and proper, as into a soft feather bed.
To live secure in an atmosphere of exhaustless worship, To
keep a fount of balm and admiration forever in the house,
a bubbling spring of passionate appreciation which would be continually
availed for the refreshment of his self esteem. To be

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always sure of an obedience, blind and willing a subservience
which no tyranny, and no harshness and no whim would
rouse into revolt. To sit on a throne with so
much beauty kneeling at his feet, and the possession of
her beauty would be a source of legitimate pride to him.

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People would often refer to the beautiful missus Woolley. He
felt that in sending May Dean to interrupt his highly
emotional conversation with May Lawton, Providence had watched over him
and done him a good turn. May Lawton had advantages
and striking advantages, but he could not be sure of her.

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The suspicion that if she married him, she would marry
him for her own ends caused him a secret disquiet,
and he feared that one day, perhaps one morning, at breakfast,
she might take it into her intelligent head, to mock him,
to exercise upon him her gift of iron, and to
intimate to him that if he fancied she was his slave.
He was deceived that she sincerely admired him. He never

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for an instant doubted, But and moreover, the unfortunate episode
of the afternoon might have cooled her ardor to the
freezing point. He stood now in front of his worshiper,
and the notion crossed his mind that in after years
he could say to his friends, I proposed to my

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wife at midnight under the moon. Not many men have
done that. Good evening, he ventured to the girl, and
he added, with bravado, we've met before to day, haven't we.
She made no reply, but her smile was more affectionate,
more inviting than ever. I am glad of this opportunity,

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very glad, he proceeded, I've been wanting to you. Must know,
my dear girl, how I feel. She gave a gesture
charming in its sweet humility, as if to say, who
am I that I should dare? And then he proposed
to her, asked her to share his life and all

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that sort of thing, And when he had finished, he thought,
it's done now, anyway, strange to relate. She offered no
immediate reply, but she bent a little towards him with shining,
happy eyes. He had an impulse to seize her in
his arms and kiss her, but prudence suggested that he

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should defer the right. She turned and began to walk
slowly and meditatively towards the pit shaft. He followed almost
at her side, but a foot or so behind, waiting
for her to speak. And as he waited, expectant, he
looked at her profile and reflected how well the name
May suited her, with its significances of shyness and dreamy

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hope and hidden fire in the modern spring. And while
he was thus savoring her face, and there were still
ten yards from the pit shaft, she suddenly disappeared from
his vision, as it were, by a conjuring trick. He
had a horrible sensation in his spinal column. He was
not the man to mistrust the evidence of his senses,

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and he knew therefore that he had been proposing to
a phantom. Five The next morning early because of Jim's
early breakfast, When Maindine's disappearance became known to the members
of the household, Jim had the idea of utilizing Carlo
in the search for her. The retriever went straight without

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a fault to the pit shaft, and May was discovered
alive and unscathed, save for a contusion of the face
and a spray in the wrist. Her suicidal plunge had
been arrested at only a few feet from the top
of the shaft by a cross stay of timber upon
which she lay prone. There was no reason why the

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affair should be made public, and it was not. It
was suppressed into one of those secrets which imbed themselves
in the histories of families, and after two or three generations,
blossom into romantic legends of appropriate circumstantial detail. Lionel Woolley
spent a woeful night at his rooms. He did not

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know what to do, and on the following day May
Lawton encountered him again and proved by her demeanor that
the episode of the previous afternoon had caused no estrangement.
Lionel vacillated. The sway of the schoolmistress was almost restored,
and it would have been restored fully had he not
been preoccupied by a feverish curiosity, the curiosity to know

(25:44):
whether or not May Dean was dead. He felt that
she must indeed be dead, and he lived through the
day expectant of the news of her sudden decease. Towards night,
his state of mind was such that he was obliged
to call at The deans heard him and insisted upon
seeing him more. She insisted on seeing him alone in

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the breakfast room, where she reclined interestingly white on the sofa.
Her father and brothers objected strongly to the interview, but
they yielded, afraid that a refusal might induce hysteria and
worse things. And when Lionel Wooley came into the room,
May steeped in felicity, related to him the story of

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her impulsive crime. I was so happy, she said, when
I knew that miss Lawton had deceived me. And before
he could inquire what she meant, she continued rapidly, I
must have been unconscious, but I felt you were there,
and something of me went towards you. And oh, the
answer to your question. I heard your question, The real

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me heard it, but that something could not speak my question.
You asked the question, didn't you? She faltered, sitting up.
He hesitated and then surrendered himself to her immense love
and sank into it and forgot May Lawton. Yes, he said,

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the answer is yes. Oh, you must have known the
answer would be yes. You did know, didn't you? He
nodded grandly. She sighed with delicious and overwhelming joy. In
the ecstasy of the achievement of her desire, the girl
gave little thought to the psychic aspect of the possibly

(27:32):
unique wooing. As for Lionel, he refused to dwell on
it even in thought, and so that strange, magic, yearning
effluence of a soul into a visible projection and shape
was ignored, slurred over, and after ten years of domesticity
in the bank premises is gradually being forgotten. He is

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a man of business, and she with her fading beauty,
her ardent continuous worship of the idol, her half dozen
small children, the eldest of whom is only eight, and
the white window curtains to change every week because of
the smuts. Do you suppose that she has time or
inclination to ponder upon the theory of the subliminal consciousness?

(28:17):
And Kindred Mysteries and of Phantom by Arnold Bennett