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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 40483
   :PG.Title: These Twain
   :PG.Released: 2012-08-11
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Arnold Bennett
   :DC.Title: These Twain
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1915
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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THESE TWAIN
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      Cover

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      THESE TWAIN

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      BY

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      ARNOLD BENNETT

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      AUTHOR OF "THE OLD WIVES' TALE," "THE OLD ADAM,"
      "CLAYHANGER," "HILDA LESSWAYS," ETC.

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      NEW YORK
      GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

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      Copyright, 1915,
      BY ARNOLD BENNETT

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      CONTENTS

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      BOOK I

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      THE WOMAN IN THE HOUSE

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      CHAPTER

      I.  `THE HOUSE`_
      II.  `HILDA ON THE STAIRS`_
      III.  `ATTACK AND REPULSE`_
      IV.  `THE WORD`_
      V.  `TERTIUS INGPEN`_
      VI.  `HUSBAND AND WIFE`_
      VII.  `THE TRUCE`_
      VIII.  `THE FAMILY AT HOME`_
      IX.  `THE WEEK-END`_
      X.  `THE ORGREAVE CALAMITY`_

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      BOOK II

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      THE PAST

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      XI.  `LITHOGRAPHY`_
      XII.  `DARTMOOR`_
      XIII.  `THE DEPARTURE`_
      XIV.  `TAVY MANSION`_
      XV.  `THE PRISON`_
      XVI.  `THE GHOST`_

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      BOOK III

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      EQUILIBRIUM

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      XVII.  `GEORGE'S EYES`_
      XVIII.  `AUNTIE HAMPS SENTENCED`_
      XIX.  `DEATH AND BURIAL`_
      XX.  `THE DISCOVERY`_

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.. _`THE HOUSE`:

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   BOOK I

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   THE WOMAN IN THE HOUSE

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   THESE TWAIN

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   CHAPTER I

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   THE HOUSE

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   I

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In the year 1892 Bleakridge, residential suburb of
Bursley, was still most plainly divided into old and
new,--that is to say, into the dull red or dull yellow
with stone facings, and the bright red with terra cotta
gimcrackery.  Like incompatible liquids congealed in
a pot, the two components had run into each other
and mingled, but never mixed.

Paramount among the old was the house of the
Member of Parliament, near the 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 extremely flattered the suburb.  Thus
you might be reading in the morning paper that the
Member had given a lunch in London on the previous
day to Cabinet Ministers and ladies as splendid as the
Countess of Chell, and--glancing out of the window--you
might see the Member himself walking down
Trafalgar Road, sad, fragile, sedately alert, with his
hands behind him, or waving a gracious hand to an
acquaintance.  Whereupon you would announce, not
apathetically: "Member's gone down to MacIlvaine's!"
(MacIlvaine's being the works in which the Member
had an interest) and there would perhaps be a rush
to the window.  Those were the last great days of
Bleakridge.

After the Member's house ranked such historic
residences as those of Osmond Orgreave, the architect,
(which had the largest, greenest garden and the best
smoke-defying trees in Bleakridge), and Fearns, the
Hanbridge lawyer; together with Manor "Cottage"
(so-called, though a spacious house), where lived the
mechanical genius who had revolutionised the pottery
industry and strangely enough made a fortune thereby,
and the dark abode of the High Church parson.

Next in importance came the three terraces,--Manor
Terrace, Abbey Terrace, 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 a
distant prospect of Hillport therefrom over the Manor
fields.  The Terraces, considered as architecture, were
unbeautiful, old-fashioned, inconvenient,--perhaps
paltry, as may be judged from the fact that rents ran
as low as £25 a year; but they had been wondrous in
their day, the pride of builders and owners and the
marvel of a barbaric populace.  They too had
histories, which many people knew.  Age had softened
them and sanctioned their dignity.  A gate might creak,
but the harsh curves of its ironwork had been mollified
by time.  Moreover the property was always maintained
in excellent repair by its landlords, and residents cared
passionately for the appearance of the windows and the
front-steps.  The plenary respectability of the
residents could not be impugned.  They were as
good as the best.  For address, they would not give the
number of the house in Trafalgar Road, but the name of
its Terrace.  Just as much as the occupiers of
detached houses, they had sorted themselves out from
the horde.  Conservative or Liberal, they were
anti-democratic, ever murmuring to themselves as they
descended the front-steps in the morning and mounted
them in the evening: "Most folks are nobodies, but I
am somebody."  And this was true.

The still smaller old houses in between the
Terraces, and even the old cottages in the side streets
(which all ran to the east) had a similar distinction of
caste, aloofness, and tradition.  The least of them was
scornful of the crowd, and deeply conscious of itself
as a separate individuality.  When the tenant-owner of
a cottage in Manor Street added a bay-window to his
front-room the event seemed enormous in Manor Street,
and affected even Trafalgar Road, as a notorious
clean-shaven figure in the streets may disconcert a whole
quarter by growing a beard.  The congeries of cottage
yards between Manor Street and Higginbotham Street,
as visible from certain high back-bedrooms in
Trafalgar Road,--a crowded higgledy-piggledy of
plum-coloured walls and chimneys, blue-brick pavements, and
slate roofs--well illustrated the grand Victorian epoch
of the Building Society, when eighteenpence was added
weekly to eighteenpence, and land haggled over by the
foot, and every brick counted, in the grim, long effort
to break away from the mass.

The traditionalism of Bleakridge protected even
Roman Catholicism in that district of Nonconformity,
where there were at least three Methodist chapels to
every church and where the adjective "popish" was
commonly used in preference to "papal."  The little
"Catholic Chapel" and the priest's house with its
cross-keys at the top of the mound were as respected as any
other buildings, because Roman Catholicism had always
been endemic there, since the age when the entire
let belonged to Cistercian monks in white robes.  A
feebly endemic Catholicism and a complete exemption
from tithes were all that remained of the Cistercian
occupation.  The exemption was highly esteemed by the
possessing class.

Alderman Sutton, towards the end of the seventies,
first pitted the new against the old in Bleakridge.  The
lifelong secretary of a first-class Building Society, he
was responsible for a terrace of three commodious
modern residences exactly opposite the house of the
Member.  The Member and Osmond Orgreave might
modernise their antique houses as much as they liked,--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 of covering his drawing-room
walls with papers at three-and-six a roll, and yet he
capriciously preferred numbers to a name!  These
houses cost twelve hundred pounds each (a lot of money
in the happy far-off days when good bricks were only
£1 a thousand, or a farthing apiece), and imposed
themselves at once upon the respect and admiration of
Bleakridge.  A year or two later the Clayhanger house
went up at the corner of Trafalgar Road and Hulton
Street, and easily outvied the Sutton houses.
Geographically at the centre of the residential suburb, it
represented the new movement in Bleakridge at its
apogee, and indeed was never beaten by later ambitious
attempts.

Such fine erections, though nearly every detail of
them challenged tradition, could not disturb
Bleakridge's belief in the stability of society.  But
simultaneously whole streets of cheap small houses (in
reality, pretentious cottages) rose round about.  Hulton
Street was all new and cheap.  Oak Street offered
a row of pink cottages to Osmond Orgreave's garden
gates, and there were three other similar new streets
between Oak Street and the Catholic Chapel.  Jerry-building
was practised in Trafalgar Road itself, on a
large plot in full view of the Catholic Chapel, where a
speculative builder, too hurried to use a measure,
"stepped out" the foundations of fifteen cottages with
his own bandy legs, and when the corner of a
freshly-constructed cottage fell into the street remarked that
accidents would happen and had the bricks replaced.
But not every cottage was jerry-built.  Many, perhaps
most, were of fairly honest workmanship.  All were
modern, and relatively spacious, and much superior in
plan to the old.  All had bay-windows.  And yet all
their bay-windows together could not produce an
effect equal to one bay-window in ancient Manor Street,
because they had omitted to be individual.  Not one
showy dwelling was unlike another, nor desired to be
unlike another.

The garish new streets were tenanted by magic.  On
Tuesday the paperhangers might be whistling in those
drawing-rooms (called parlours in Manor Street),--on
Wednesday bay-windows were curtained and chimneys
smoking.  And just as the cottages lacked
individuality, so the tenants were nobodies.  At any rate
no traditional person in Bleakridge knew who they
were, nor where they came from, except that they
came mysteriously up out of the town.  (Not that
there had been any shocking increase in the birthrate
down there!)  And no traditional person seemed to
care.  The strange inroad and portent ought to have
puzzled and possibly to have intimidated traditional
Bleakridge: but it did not.  Bleakridge merely
observed that "a lot of building was going on," and left
the phenomenon at that.  At first it was interested and
flattered; then somewhat resentful and regretful.  And
even Edwin Clayhanger, though he counted himself
among the enlightened and the truly democratic, felt
hurt when quite nice houses, copying some features of
his own on a small scale, and let to such people as
insurance agents, began to fill up the remaining empty
spaces of Trafalgar Road.  He could not help thinking
that the prestige of Bleakridge was being impaired.



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   II

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Edwin Clayhanger, though very young in marriage,
considered that he was getting on in years as a
householder.  His age was thirty-six.  He had been
married only a few months, under peculiar circumstances
which rendered him self-conscious, and on an evening
of August 1892, as he stood in the hall of his house
awaiting the commencement of a postponed and
unusual At Home, he felt absurdly nervous.  But the
nervousness was not painful; because he himself could
laugh at it.  He might be timid, he might be a little
gawky, he might often have the curious sensation of
not being really adult but only a boy after all,--the
great impressive facts would always emerge that he
was the respected head of a well-known family, that he
was successful, that he had both ideas and money, and
that his position as one of the two chief master-printers
of the district would not be challenged.  He knew that
he could afford to be nervous.  And further, since he
was house-proud, he had merely to glance round his
house in order to be reassured and puffed up.

Loitering near the foot of the stairs, discreetly
stylish in an almost new blue serge suit and a quite new
black satin tie, with the light of the gas on one
side of his face, and the twilight through the glazed
front-door mitigating the shadow on the other,
Edwin mused pleasingly upon the whole organism of
his home.  Externally, the woodwork and metalwork
of the house had just been repainted, and the
brickwork pointed.  He took pleasure in the thought of
the long even lines of fresh mortar, and of the new
sage-tinted spoutings and pipings, every foot of which
he knew by heart and where every tube began and
where it ended and what its purpose was.  The nice
fitting of a perpendicular spout into a horizontal one,
and the curve of the joint from the eave to the wall of
the house, and the elaborate staples that firmly held
the spout to the wall, and the final curve of the spout
that brought its orifice accurately over a spotless grid
in the ground,--the perfection of all these ridiculous
details, each beneath the notice of a truly celestial mind,
would put the householder Edwin into a sort of
contemplative ecstasy.  Perhaps he was comical.  But
such inner experiences were part of his great interest
in life, part of his large general passion.

Within the hall he regarded with equal interest and
pride the photogravure of Bellini's "Agony in the
Garden," from the National Gallery, and the radiator
which he had just had installed.  The radiator was
only a half-measure, but it was his precious toy, his pet
lamb, his mistress; and the theory of it was that by
warming the hall and the well of the staircase it softly
influenced the whole house and abolished draughts.  He
had exaggerated the chilliness of the late August night
so that he might put the radiator into action.  About
the small furnace in the cellar that heated it he was
both crotchetty and extravagant.  The costly efficiency
of the radiator somewhat atoned in his mind for the
imperfections of the hot water apparatus, depending on
the kitchen boiler.  Even in 1892 this middle-class
pioneer and sensualist was dreaming of an ideal house in
which inexhaustible water was always positively
steaming, so that if a succession of persons should
capriciously desire hot baths in the cold middle of the night,
their collective fancy might be satisfied.

Bellini's picture was the symbol of an artistic
revolution in Edwin.  He had read somewhere that it was
"perhaps the greatest picture in the world."  A critic's
exhortation to "observe the loving realistic passion
shown in the foreshortening of the figure of the
sleeping apostle" had remained in his mind; and, thrilled,
he would point out this feature of the picture
alike to the comprehending and the uncomprehending.
The hanging-up of the Bellini, in its strange frame
of stained unpolished oak, had been an epochal event,
closing one era and inaugurating another.  And
yet, before the event, he had not even noticed the
picture on a visit to the National Gallery!  A
hint, a phrase murmured in the right tone in a
periodical, a glimpse of an illustration,--and the mighty
magic seed was sown.  In a few months all
Victorian phenomena had been put upon their trial, and
most of them condemned.  And condemned without even
the forms of justice!  Half a word (in the right tone)
might ruin any of them.  Thus was Sir Frederick
Leighton, P.R.A., himself overthrown.  One day his "Bath
of Psyche" reigned in Edwin's bedroom, and the next
it had gone, and none knew why.  But certain aged
Victorians, such as Edwin's Auntie Hamps, took the
disappearance of the licentious engraving as a sign
that the beloved queer Edwin was at last coming to his
senses--as, of course, they knew he ultimately would.
He did not and could not explain.  More and more he
was growing to look upon his house as an island, cut
off by a difference of manners from the varnished
barbarism of multitudinous new cottages, and by an
immensely more profound difference of thought from both
the cottages and the larger houses.  It seemed astounding
to Edwin that modes of thought so violently separative
as his and theirs could exist so close together and
under such appearances of similarity.  Not even all the
younger members of the Orgreave family, who counted
as his nearest friends, were esteemed by Edwin to be
meet for his complete candour.

The unique island was scarcely a dozen years old, but
historical occurrences had aged it for Edwin.  He had
opened the doors of all three reception-rooms, partly
to extend the benign sway of the radiator, and partly
so that he might judge the total effect of the illuminated
chambers and improve that effect if possible.  And
each room bore the mysterious imprints of past emotion.

In the drawing-room, with its new orange-coloured
gas-globes that gilded everything beneath them,
Edwin's father used to sit on Sunday evenings, alone.
And one Sunday evening, when Edwin, entering, had
first mentioned to his father a woman's name, his
father had most terribly humiliated him.  But now
it seemed as if some other youth, and not Edwin, had
been humiliated, so completely was the wound
healed....  And he could remember leaning in the
doorway of the drawing-room one Sunday morning,
and his sister Clara was seated at the piano, and
his sister Maggie, nursing a baby of Clara's, by her
side, and they were singing Balfe's duet "Excelsior,"
and his father stood behind them, crying, crying
steadily, until at length the bitter old man lost control of
himself and sobbed aloud under the emotional stress
of the women's voices, and Clara cheerfully upbraided
him for foolishness; and Edwin had walked suddenly
away.  This memory was somehow far more poignant
than the memory of his humiliation....  And in the
drawing-room too he had finally betrothed himself to
Hilda.  That by comparison was only yesterday; yet
it was historical and distant.  He was wearing his
dressing-gown, being convalescent from influenza; he
could distinctly recall the feel of his dressing-gown;
and Hilda came in--over her face was a veil....

The dining-room, whose large glistening table was
now covered with the most varied and modern
"refreshments" for the At Home, had witnessed no event
specially dramatic, but it had witnessed hundreds of
monotonous tragic meals at which the progress of his
father's mental malady and the approach of his death
could be measured by the old man's increasing disability
to distinguish between his knife and his fork; it had
seen Darius Clayhanger fed like a baby.  And it had
never been the same dining-room since.  Edwin might
transform it, re-paper it, re-furnish it,--the mysterious
imprint remained....

And then there was the little "breakfast-room,"
inserted into the plan of the house between the hall and
the kitchen.  Nothing had happened there, because the
life of the household had never adjusted itself to the
new, borrowed convention of the "breakfast-room."  Nothing?
But the most sensational thing had
happened there!  When with an exquisite passing timidity
she took possession of Edwin's house as his wife, Hilda
had had a sudden gust of audacity in the breakfast-room.
A mature woman (with a boy aged ten to prove
it), she had effervesced into the naïve gestures of a
young girl who has inherited a boudoir.  "This shall
be my very own room, and I shall arrange it just how I
like, without asking you about *anything*.  And it will
be my very own."  She had not offered an idea; she
had announced a decision.  Edwin had had other
notions for the room, but he perceived that he must bury
them in eternal silence, and yield eagerly to this caprice.
Thus to acquiesce had given him deep and strange joy.
He was startled, perhaps, to discover that he had
brought into his house--not a woman, but a tripartite
creature--woman, child, and sibyl.  Neither Maggie
nor Clara, nor Janet Orgreave, nor even Hilda before
she became his wife, had ever aroused in him the least
suspicion that a woman might be a tripartite creature.
He was married, certainly--nobody could be more
legally and respectably married than was he--but the
mere marriage seemed naught in comparison with the
enormous fact that he had got this unexampled
creature in his house and was living with her, she at his
mercy, and he at hers.  Enchanting escapade!  Solemn
doom! ... By the way, she had yet done nothing with
the breakfast-room.  Yes, she had stolen a "cabinet"
gold frame from the shop, and put his photograph into
it, and stuck his picture on the mantelpiece; but that
was all.  She would not permit him to worry her about
her secret designs for the breakfast-room.  The
breakfast-room was her affair.  Indeed the whole house was
her affair.  It was no longer his house, in which he
could issue orders without considering another
individuality--orders that would infallibly be executed, either
cheerfully or glumly, by the plump spinster, Maggie.
He had to mind his p's and q's; he had to be wary,
everywhere.  The creature did not simply live in the
house; she pervaded it.  As soon as he opened the
front-door he felt her.



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   III

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She was now upstairs in their joint bedroom, dressing
for the At Home.  All day he had feared she might
be late, and as he looked at the hall-clock he saw that
the risk was getting acute.

Before the domestic rearrangements preceding the
marriage had been fully discussed, he had assumed,
and Maggie and Clara had assumed, and Auntie Hamps
had absolutely assumed, that the husband and wife
would occupy the long empty bedroom of old
Darius, because it was two-foot-six broader than
Edwin's, and because it was the "principal" bedroom.
But Hilda had said No to him privately.  Whereupon,
being himself almost morbidly unsentimental,
he had judiciously hinted that to object to a room
because an old man had died in it under distressing
circumstances was to be morbidly sentimental and
unworthy of her.  Whereupon she had mysteriously
smiled, and called him sweet bad names, and kissed him,
and hung on his neck.  *She* sentimental!  Could not
the great stupid see without being told that what
influenced her was not an aversion for his father's
bedroom, but a predilection for Edwin's.  She desired that
they should inhabit his room.  She wanted to sleep in
his room; and to wake up in it, and to feel that she
was immersing herself in his past....  (Ah!  The
exciting flattery, like an aphrodisiac!)  And she would
not allow him to uproot the fixed bookcases on either
side of the hearth.  She said that for her they were
part of the room itself.  Useless to argue that they
occupied space required for extra furniture!  She
would manage!  She did manage.  He found that the
acme of convenience for a husband had not been
achieved, but convenience was naught in the rapture of
the escapade.  He had "needed shaking up," as they
say down there, and he was shaken up.

Nevertheless, though undoubtedly shaken up, he had
the male wit to perceive that the bedroom episode had
been a peculiar triumph for himself.  Her attitude in
it, imperious superficially, was in truth an impassioned
and outright surrender to him.  And further, she had
at once become a frankly admiring partisan of his
theory of bedrooms.  The need for a comfortable solitude
earlier in life had led Edwin to make his bedroom
habitable by means of a gas-stove, an easy chair, and
minor amenities.  When teased by hardy compatriots
about his sybaritism Edwin was apt sometimes to flush
and be "nettled," and he would make offensive
un-English comments upon the average bedroom of the
average English household, which was so barbaric that
during eight months of the year you could not maintain
your temperature in it unless you were either in
bed or running about the room, and that even in
Summer you could not sit down therein at ease because there
was nothing easy to sit on, nor a table to sit at nor
even a book to read.  He would caustically ask to be
informed why the supposedly practical and comfort-loving
English were content with an Alpine hut for a
bedroom.  And in this way he would go on.  He was
rather pleased with the phrase "Alpine hut."  One day
he had overheard Hilda replying to an acquaintance
upstairs: "People may say what they like, but Edwin
and I don't care to sleep in an Alpine hut."  She had
caught it!  She was his disciple in that matter!  And
how she had appreciated his easy-chair!  As for calm
deliberation in dressing and undressing, she could
astonishingly and even disconcertingly surpass him in the
quality.  But it is to be noted that she would not permit
her son to have a gas-stove in his bedroom.  Nor would
she let him occupy the disdained principal bedroom, her
argument being that that room was too large for a little
boy.  Maggie Clayhanger's old bedroom was given to
George, and the principal bedroom remained empty.





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   CHAPTER II


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   HILDA ON THE STAIRS

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   I

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Ada descended the stairs, young, slim, very neat.
Ada was one of Hilda's two new servants.  Before
taking charge of the house Hilda had ordained the
operation called "a clean sweep," and Edwin had approved.
The elder of Maggie's two servants had been a good
one, but Hilda had shown no interest in the catalogue
of her excellences.  She wanted fresh servants.
Maggie, like Edwin, approved, but only as a general
principle.  In the particular case she had hinted that her
prospective sister-in-law was perhaps unwise to let slip
a tested servant.  Hilda wanted not merely fresh
servants, but young servants agreeable to behold.  "I will
not have a lot of middle-aged scowling women about
my house," Hilda had said.  Maggie was reserved, but
her glance was meant to remind Hilda that in those
end-of-the-century days mistresses had to be content
with what they could get.  Young and comely servants
were all very well--if you could drop on them, but
supposing you couldn't?  The fact was that Maggie could
not understand Hilda's insistence on youth and
comeliness in a servant, and she foresaw trouble for Hilda.
Hilda, however, obtained her desire.  She was outspoken
with her servants.  If Edwin after his manner implied
that she was dangerously ignoring the touchiness of the
modern servant, she would say indifferently: "It's
always open to them to go if they don't like it."  They
did not go.  It is notorious that foolhardy mistresses
are often very lucky.

As soon as Ada caught sight of her master in the
hall she became self-conscious; all the joints of her
body seemed to be hung on very resilient springs,
and,--reddening slightly,--she lowered her gaze and looked at
her tripping toes.  Edwin seldom spoke to her more
than once a day, and not always that.  He had one day
visited the large attic into which, with her colleague,
she disappeared late at night and from which she
emerged early in the morning, and he had seen two
small tin trunks and some clothes behind the door, and
an alarm-clock and a portrait of a fireman on the
mantelpiece.  (The fireman, he seemed to recollect, was her
brother.)  But she was a stranger in his house, and
he had no sustained curiosity about her.  The days
were gone when he used to be the intimate of servants--of
Mrs. Nixon, for example, sole prop of the Clayhanger
family for many years, and an entirely human
being to Edwin.  Mrs. Nixon had never been either
young, slim, or neat.  She was dead.  The last servant
whom he could be said to have known was a pert niece
of Mrs. Nixon's--now somebody's prolific wife and
much changed.  And he was now somebody's husband,
and bearded, and perhaps occasionally pompous, and
much changed in other ways.  So that enigmatic Adas
bridled at sight of him and became intensely aware of
themselves.  Still, this Ada in her smartness was a
pretty sight for his eyes as like an aspen she trembled
down the stairs, though the coarseness of her big red
hands, and the vulgarity of her accent were a
surprising contrast to her waist and her fine carriage.

He knew she had been hooking her mistress's dress,
and that therefore the hooking must be finished.  He
liked to think of Hilda being attired thus in the
bedroom by a natty deferential wench.  The process gave
to Hilda a luxurious, even an oriental quality, which
charmed him.  He liked the suddenly impressive tone
in which the haughty Hilda would say to Ada, "Your
master," as if mentioning a sultan.  He was more and
more anxious lest Hilda should be late, and he wanted
to ask Ada: "Is Mrs. Clayhanger coming down?"

But he discreetly forbore.  He might have run up
to the bedroom and burst in on the toilette--Hilda
would have welcomed him.  But he preferred to remain
with his anxiety where he was, and meditate upon Hilda
bedecking herself up there in the bedroom--to please
him; to please not the guests, but him.

Ada disappeared down the narrow passage leading
to the kitchen, and a moment later he heard a crude
giggle, almost a scream, and some echo of the rough
tones in which the servants spoke to each other when
they were alone in the kitchen.  There were in fact two
Adas; one was as timid as a fawn with a voice like a
delicate invalid's; the other a loud-mouthed hoity-toity
girl such as rushed out of potbanks in flannel apron at
one o'clock.  The Clayhanger servants were satisfactory,
more than satisfactory, the subject of favourable
comment for their neatness among the mistresses of
other servants.  He liked them to be about; their
presence and their official demeanour flattered him; they
perfected the complex superiority of his house,--that
island.  But when he overheard them alone together, or
when he set himself to imagine what their soul's life
was, he was more than ever amazed at the unnoticed
profound differences between modes of thought that in
apparently the most natural manner could exist so
close together without producing a cataclysm.  Auntie
Hamps's theory was that they were all--he, she, the
servants--equal in the sight of God!



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   II

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Hilda's son, George Edwin, sidled surprisingly into
the hall.  He was wearing a sailor suit, very new, and
he had probably been invisible somewhere against the
blue curtains of the drawing-room window--an example
of nature's protective mimicry.  George was rather
small for his ten years.  Dark, like his mother, he had
her eyes and her thick eyebrows that almost met in
the middle, and her pale skin.  As for his mind, he
seemed to be sometimes alarmingly precocious and
sometimes a case of arrested development.  In this and
many other respects he greatly resembled other boys.
The son of a bigamist can have no name, unless it be
his mother's maiden name, but George knew nothing
of that.  He had borne his father's name, and when
at the exciting and puzzling period of his mother's
marriage he had learnt that his surname would in
future be Clayhanger he had a little resented the affront
to his egoism.  Edwin's explanation, however, that the
change was for the convenience of people in general
had caused him to shrug his shoulders in concession
and to murmur casually: "Oh, well then--!"  He
seemed to be assenting with loftiness: "If it's any
particular use to the whole world, I don't really mind."

"I say, uncle," he began.

Edwin had chosen this form of address.  "Stepfather"
was preposterous, and "father" somehow
offended him; so he constituted himself an uncle.

"Hello, kid!" said he.  "Can you find room to keep
anything else in your pockets besides your hands?"

George snatched his hands out of his pockets.  Then
he smiled confidently up.  These two were friends.
Edwin was as proud as the boy of the friendship, and
perhaps more flattered.  At first he had not cared for
George, being repelled by George's loud, positive tones,
his brusque and often violent gestures, and his intense
absorption in himself.  But gradually he had been won
by the boy's boyishness, his smile, his little, soft body,
his unspoken invocations, his resentment of injustice
(except when strict justice appeared to clash with his
own interests), his absolute impotence against adult
decrees, his touching fatalism, his recondite personal
distinction that flashed and was gone, and his occasional
cleverness and wit.  He admitted that George charmed
him.  But he well knew that he also charmed George.
He had a way of treating George as an equal that few
children (save possibly Clara's) could have resisted.
True, he would quiz the child, but he did not forbid the
child to quiz.  The mother was profoundly relieved and
rejoiced by this friendship.  She luxuriated in it.  Edwin
might well have been inimical to the child; he might
through the child have shown a jealousy of the child's
father.  But, somewhat to the astonishment of even
Edwin himself, he never saw the father in the child,
nor thought of the father, nor resented the parenthood
that was not his.  For him the child was an individual.
And in spite of his stern determination not to fall into
the delusions of conceited parents, he could not help
thinking that George was a remarkable child.

"Have you seen my horse?" asked George.

"Have I seen your horse? ... Oh! ... I've seen
that you've left it lying about on the hall-table."

"I put it there so that you'd see it," George
persuasively excused himself for the untidiness.

"Well, let's inspect it," Edwin forgave him, and
picked up from the table a piece of cartridge-paper
on which was a drawing of a great cart-horse with
shaggy feet.  It was a vivacious sketch.

"You're improving," said Edwin, judicially, but in
fact much impressed.  Surely few boys of ten could
draw as well as that!  The design was strangely more
mature than certain quite infantile watercolours that
Edwin had seen scarcely a year earlier.

"It's rather good, isn't it?" George suggested,
lifting up his head so that he could just see over the edge
of the paper which Edwin held at the level of his
watch-chain.

"I've met worse.  Where did you see this particular
animal?"

"I saw him down near the Brewery this morning.
But when I'm doing a horse, I see him on the paper
before I begin to draw, and I just draw round him."

Edwin thought:

"This kid is no ordinary kid."

He said:

"Well, we'll pin it up here.  We'll have a Royal
Academy and hear what the public has to say."  He
took a pin from under his waistcoat.

"That's not level," said George.

And when Edwin had readjusted the pin, George
persisted boldly:

"That's not level either."

"It's as level as it's going to be.  I expect you've
been drawing horses instead of practising your piano."

He looked down at the mysterious little boy, who
lived always so much nearer to the earth's surface than
himself.

George nodded simply, and then scratched his head.

"I suppose if I don't practise while I'm young I shall
regret it in after life, shan't I?"

"Who told you that?"

"It's what Auntie Hamps said to me, I think...
I say, uncle."

"What's up?"

"Is Mr. John coming to-night?"

"I suppose so.  Why?"

"Oh, nothing....  I say, uncle."

"That's twice you've said it."

The boy smiled.

"You know that piece in the Bible about if two of
you shall agree on earth--?"

"What of it?" Edwin asked rather curtly, anticipating
difficulties.

"I don't think two *boys* would be enough, would
they?  Two grown-ups might.  But I'm not so sure
about two boys.  You see in the very next verse it says
two *or three*, gathered together."

"Three might be more effective.  It's always as well
to be on the safe side."

"Could you pray for anything?  A penknife, for
instance?"

"Why not?"

"But could you?"  George was a little impatient.

"Better ask your mother," said Edwin, who was
becoming self-conscious under the strain.

George exploded coarsely:

"Poh!  It's no good asking mother."

Said Edwin:

"The great thing in these affairs is to know what
you want, and to *want* it.  Concentrate as hard as you
can, a long time in advance.  No use half wanting!"

"Well, there's one thing that's poz [positive].  I
couldn't begin to concentrate to-night."

"Why not?"

"Who could?" George protested.  "We're all so
nervous to-night, aren't we, with this At Home
business.  And I know I never could concentrate in my
best clothes."

For Edwin the boy with his shocking candour had
suddenly precipitated out of the atmosphere, as it
were, the collective nervousness of the household, made
it into a phenomenon visible, tangible, oppressive.  And
the household was no longer a collection of units, but
an entity.  A bell rang faintly in the kitchen, and the
sound abraded his nerves.  The first guests were on
the threshold, and Hilda was late.  He looked at the
clock.  Yes, she was late.  The hour named in the
invitations was already past.  All day he had feared
lest she should be late, and she was late.  He looked
at the glass of the front-door; but night had come, and
it was opaque.  Ada tripped into view and ran upstairs.

"Don't you hear the front-door?" he stopped her flight.

"It was missis's bell, sir."

"Ah!"  Respite!

Ada disappeared.

Then another ring!  And no parlour-maid to answer
the bell!  Naturally!  Naturally Hilda, forgetting
something at the last moment, had taken the parlour-maid
away precisely when the girl was needed!  Oh!
He had foreseen it!  He could hear shuffling outside and
could even distinguish forms through the glass--many
forms.  All the people converging from various streets
upon the waiting nervousness of the household seemed
to have arrived at once.

George moved impulsively towards the front-door.

"Where are you going?" Edwin asked roughly.
"Come here.  It's not your place to open the door.
Come with me in the drawing-room."

It was no affair of Edwin's, thought Edwin crossly
and uncompromisingly, if guests were kept waiting at
the front-door.  It was Hilda's affair; she was the
mistress of the house, and the blame was hers.

At high speed Ada swept with streamers down the
stairs, like a squirrel down the branch of a tree.  And
then came Hilda.



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   III

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She stood at the turn of the stairs, waiting while
the front-door was opened.  He and George could see
her over and through the banisters.  And at sight of
her triumphant and happy air, all Edwin's annoyance
melted.  He did not desire that it should melt, but it
melted.  She was late.  He could not rely on her not
to be late.  In summoning the parlourmaid to her
bedroom when the parlourmaid ought to have been on
duty downstairs she had acted indefensibly and
without thought.  No harm, as it happened, was done.
Sheer chance often thus saved her, but logically her
double fault was not thereby mitigated.  He felt that
if he forgave her, if he dismissed the charge and wiped
the slate, he was being false to the great male principles
of logic and justice.  The godlike judge in him resented
the miscarriage of justice.  Nevertheless justice
miscarried.  And the weak husband said like a woman:
"What does it matter?"  Such was her shameful power
over him, of which the unscrupulous creature was quite
aware.

As he looked at her he asked himself: "Is she
magnificent?  Or is she just ordinary and am I deluded?
Does she seem her age?  Is she a mature woman
getting past the prime, or has she miraculously kept
herself a young girl for me?"

In years she was thirty-five.  She had large bones,
and her robust body, neither plump nor slim, showed
the firm, assured carriage of its age.  It said:
"I have stood before the world, and I cannot
be intimidated."  Still, marriage had rejuvenated
her.  She was marvellously young at times, and
experience would drop from her and leave the girl that
he had first known and kissed ten years earlier; but a
less harsh, less uncompromising girl.  At their first
acquaintance she had repelled him with her truculent
seriousness.  Nowadays she would laugh for no apparent
reason, and even pirouette.  Her complexion was good;
he could nearly persuade himself that that olive skin
had not suffered in a decade of distress and disasters.

Previous to her marriage she had shown little
interest in dress.  But now she would spasmodically
worry about her clothes, and she would make Edwin
worry.  He had to decide, though he had no qualifications
as an arbiter.  She would scowl at a dressmaker
as if to say: "For God's sake do realise that upon
you is laid the sacred responsibility of helping me to
please my husband!"  To-night she was wearing a
striped blue dress, imperceptibly décolletée, with the
leg-of-mutton sleeves of the period.  The colours, two
shades of blue, did not suit her.  But she imagined
that they suited her, and so did he; and the frock was
elaborate, was the result of terrific labour and
produced a rich effect, meet for a hostess of position.

The mere fact that this woman with no talent for
coquetry should after years of narrow insufficiency
scowl at dressmakers and pout at senseless refractory
silks in the yearning for elegance was utterly delicious
to Edwin.  Her presence there on the landing of the
stairs was in the nature of a miracle.  He had
wanted her, and he had got her.  In the end he
had got her, and nothing had been able to stop
him--not even the obstacle of her tragic adventure
with a rascal and a bigamist.  The strong magic
of his passion had forced destiny to render her up to
him mysteriously intact, after all.  The impossible had
occurred, and society had accepted it, beaten.  There
she was, dramatically, with her thick eyebrows, and
the fine wide nostrils and the delicate lobe of the ear,
and that mouth that would startlingly fasten on him
and kiss the life out of him.

"There is dear Hilda!" said someone at the door amid
the arriving group.

None but Auntie Hamps would have said 'dear'
Hilda.  Maggie, Clara, and even Janet Orgreave never
used sentimental adjectives on occasions of ceremony.

And in her clear, precise, dominating voice Hilda
with gay ease greeted the company from above:

"Good evening, all!"

"What the deuce was I so upset about just now?"
thought Edwin, in sudden, instinctive, exulting felicity:
"Everything is absolutely all right."





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.. _`ATTACK AND REPULSE`:

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   CHAPTER III


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   ATTACK AND REPULSE

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   I

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The entering guests were Edwin's younger sister
Clara with her husband Albert Benbow, his elder sister
Maggie, Auntie Hamps, and Mr. Peartree.  They had
arrived together, and rather unfashionably soon after
the hour named in the invitation, because the Benbows
had called at Auntie Hamps's on the way up, and the
Benbows were always early, both in arriving and in
departing, "on account of the children."  They called
themselves "early birds."  Whenever they were out of
the nest in the evening they called themselves early
birds.  They used the comparison hundreds, thousands,
of times, and never tired of it; indeed each time they
were convinced that they had invented it freshly for
the occasion.

Said Auntie Hamps, magnificent in jetty black,
handsome, and above all imposing:

"I knew you would be delighted to meet Mr. Peartree
again, Edwin.  He is staying the night at my
house--I can be so much more hospitable now Maggie is with
me--and I insisted he should come up with us.  But it
needed no insisting."

The old erect lady looked from Mr. Peartree with
pride towards her nephew.

Mr. Peartree was a medium-sized man of fifty, with
greying sandy hair.  Twenty years before, he had been
second minister in the Bursley Circuit of the Wesleyan
Methodist Connexion.  He was now Superintendent
Minister in a Cheshire circuit.  The unchangeable
canons of Wesleyanism permit its ministers to marry,
and celibacy is even discouraged, for the reason that
wives and daughters are expected to toil in the cause,
and their labour costs the circuit not a halfpenny.  But
the canons forbid ministers to take root and found a
home.  Eleven times in thirty years Mr. Peartree had
been forced to migrate to a strange circuit and to
adapt his much-travelled furniture and family to a
house which he had not chosen, and which his wife
generally did not like.  During part of the period he had
secretly resented the autocracy of Superintendent
Ministers, and during the remainder he had learnt that
Superintendent Ministers are not absolute autocrats.

He was neither overworked nor underpaid.  He
belonged to the small tradesman class, and, keeping a
shop in St. Luke's Square, he might well have worked
harder for less money than he now earned.  His
vocation, however, in addition to its desolating nomadic
quality, had other grave drawbacks.  It gave him
contact with a vast number of human beings, but the
abnormal proportion among them of visionaries, bigots,
hypocrites, and petty office-seekers falsified his general
estimate of humanity.  Again, the canons rigorously
forbade him to think freely for himself on the subjects
which in theory most interested him; with the result
that he had remained extremely ignorant through the
very fear of knowledge, that he was a warm enemy
of freedom, and that he habitually carried intellectual
dishonesty to the verge of cynicism.  Thirdly, he was
obliged always to be diplomatic (except of course with
his family), and nature had not meant him for the
diplomatic career.  He was so sick of being all things
to all men that he even dreamed diplomatic dreams as
a galley-slave will dream of the oar; and so little
gifted for the rôle that he wore insignificant tight
turned-down collars, never having perceived the
immense moral advantage conferred on the diplomatist
by a high, loose, wide-rolling collar.  Also he was sick
of captivity, and this in no wise lessened his objection
to freedom.  He had lost all youthful enthusiasm, and
was in fact equally bored with earth and with heaven.

Nevertheless, he had authority and security.  He
was accustomed to the public gaze and to the forms of
deference.  He knew that he was as secure as a judge,--and
far more secure than a cabinet-minister.  Nothing
but the inconceivable collapse of a powerful and wealthy
sect could affect his position or his livelihood to the
very end of life.  Hence, beneath his weariness and his
professional attitudinarianism there was a hint of the
devil-may-care that had its piquancy.  He could foresee
with indifference even the distant but approaching day
when he would have to rise in the pulpit and assert that
the literal inspiration of the Scriptures was not and
never had been an essential article of Wesleyan faith.

Edwin blenched at the apparition of Mr. Peartree.
That even Auntie Hamps should dare uninvited to
bring a Wesleyan Minister to the party was startling;
but that the minister should be Mr. Peartree staggered
him.  For twenty years and more Edwin had secretly,
and sometimes in public, borne a tremendous grudge
against Mr. Peartree.  He had execrated, anathematised,
and utterly excommunicated Mr. Peartree, and
had extended the fearful curse to his family, all his
ancestors, and all his descendants.  When Mr. Peartree
was young and fervent in the service of heaven he had
had the monstrous idea of instituting a Saturday
Afternoon Bible Class for schoolboys.  Abetted by
parents weak-minded and cruel, he had caught and
horribly tortured some score of miserable victims, of
whom Edwin was one.  The bitter memory of those
weekly half-holidays thieved from him and made
desolate by a sanctimonious crank had never softened, nor
had Edwin ever forgiven Mr. Peartree.

It was at the sessions of the Bible Class that Edwin,
while silently perfecting himself in the art of profanity
and blasphemy, had in secret fury envenomed his
instinctive mild objection to the dogma, the ritual, and
the spirit of conventional Christianity, especially as
exemplified in Wesleyan Methodism.  He had left
Mr. Peartree's Bible Class a convinced anti-religionist, a
hater and despiser of all that the Wesleyan Chapel
and Mr. Peartree stood for.  He deliberately was not
impartial, and he took a horrid pleasure in being
unfair.  He knew well that Methodism had produced many
fine characters, and played a part in the moral
development of the race; but he would not listen to his own
knowledge.  Nothing could extenuate, for him, the
noxiousness of Methodism.  On the other hand he was full
of glee if he could add anything to the indictment
against it and Christianity.  Huxley's controversial
victories over Gladstone were then occurring in the
monthly press, and he acclaimed them with enormous
gusto.  When he first read that the Virgin Birth was
a feature of sundry creeds more ancient than
Christianity, his private satisfaction was intense and lasted
acutely for days.  When he heard that Methodism had
difficulty in maintaining its supply of adequately
equipped ministers, he rejoiced with virulence.  His
hostility was the more significant in that it was
concealed--embedded like a foreign substance in the rather suave
gentleness of his nature.  At intervals--increasingly
frequent, it is true--he would carry it into the chapel
itself; for through mingled cowardice and sharp
prudence, he had not formally left the Connexion.  To
compensate himself for such bowings-down he would
now and then assert, judicially to a reliable male friend,
or with ferocious contempt to a scandalised defenceless
sister, that, despite all parsons, religion was not a
necessity of the human soul, and that he personally had
never felt the need of it and never would.  In which
assertion he was profoundly sincere.

And yet throughout he had always thought of
himself as a rebel against authority; and--such is the
mysterious intimidating prestige of the past--he was
outwardly an apologetic rebel.  Neither his intellectual
pride nor his cold sustained resentment, nor his
axiomatic conviction of the crude and total falseness of
Christian theology, nor all three together, had ever
sufficed to rid him of the self-excusing air.  When
Auntie Hamps spoke with careful reverence of "the
Super" (short for "superintendent minister"), the
word had never in thirty years quite failed to inspire in
him some of the awe with which he had heard it as an
infant.  Just as a policeman was not an employee but
a *policeman*, so a minister was not a person of the
trading-class who happened to have been through a
certain educational establishment, subscribed to certain
beliefs, submitted to certain ceremonies and adopted a
certain costume,--but a *minister*, a being inexplicably
endowed with authority,--in fact a sort of arch-policeman.
And thus, while detesting and despising him,
Edwin had never thought of Abel Peartree as merely a man.

Now, in the gas-lit bustle of the hall, after an
interval of about twenty years, he beheld again his enemy,
his bugbear, his loathed oppressor, the living symbol
of all that his soul condemned.

Said Mrs. Hamps:

"I reminded Mr. Peartree that you used to attend
his Bible-class, Edwin.  Do you remember?  I hope
you do."

"Oh, yes!" said Edwin, with a slight nervous laugh,
blushing.  His eye caught Clara's, but there was no
sign whatever of the old malicious grin on her maternal
face.  Nor did Maggie's show a tremor.  And, of
course, the majestic duplicity of Auntie Hamps did
not quiver under the strain.  So that the Rev. Mr. Peartree,
protesting honestly that he should have
recognised his old pupil Mr. Clayhanger anywhere, never
suspected the terrific drama of the moment.

And the next moment there was no drama....
Teacher and pupil shook hands.  The recognition was
mutual.  To Edwin, Mr. Peartree, save for the greying
of his hair, had not changed.  His voice, his form, his
gestures, were absolutely the same.  Only, instead of
being Mr. Peartree, he was a man like another
man--a commonplace, hard-featured, weary man; a spare
little man, with a greenish-black coat and bluish-white
low collar; a perfunctory, listless man with an
unpleasant voice; a man with the social code of the
Benbows and Auntie Hamps; a man the lines of whose
face disclosed a narrow and self-satisfied ignorance; a
man whose destiny had forbidden him ever to be
natural; the usual snobbish man, who had heard of the
importance and the success and the wealth of Edwin
Clayhanger and who kowtowed thereto and was naïvely
impressed thereby, and proud that Edwin Clayhanger
had once been his pupil; and withal an average decent
fellow.

Edwin rather liked the casual look in Mr. Peartree's
eyes that said: "My being here is part of my job.
I'm indifferent.  I do what I have to do, and I really
don't care.  I have paid tens of thousands of calls
and I shall pay tens of thousands more.  If I am bored
I am paid to be bored, and I repeat I really don't care."  This
was the human side of Mr. Peartree showing itself.
It endeared him to Edwin.

"Not a bad sort of cuss, after all!" thought Edwin.

All the carefully tended rage and animosity of twenty
years evaporated out of his heart and was gone.  He
did not forgive Mr. Peartree, because there was no
Mr. Peartree--there was only this man.  And there was
no Wesleyan chapel either, but only an ugly forlorn
three-quarters-empty building at the top of Duck Bank.
And Edwin was no longer an apologetic rebel, nor even
any kind of a rebel.  It occurred to nobody, not even
to the mighty Edwin, that in those few seconds the
history of dogmatic religion had passed definitely out of
one stage into another.

Abel Peartree nonchalantly, and with a practised
aplomb which was not disturbed even by the vision of
George's heroic stallion, said the proper things to
Edwin and Hilda; and it became known, somehow, that
the parson was re-visiting Bursley in order to deliver
his well-known lecture entitled "The Mantle and
Mission of Elijah,"--the sole lecture of his repertoire, but
it had served to raise him ever so slightly out of the
ruck of 'Supers.'  Hilda patronised him.  Against the
rich background of her home, she assumed the pose of
the grand lady.  Abel Peartree seemed to like the pose,
and grew momentarily vivacious in knightly response.
"And why not?" said Edwin to himself, justifying his
wife after being a little critical of her curtness.

Then, when the conversation fell, Auntie Hamps
discreetly suggested that she and the girls should "go
upstairs."  The negligent Hilda had inexcusably
forgotten in her nervous excitement that on these
occasions arriving ladies should be at once escorted to the
specially-titivated best bedroom, there to lay their
things on the best counterpane.  She perhaps ought to
have atoned for her negligence by herself leading
Auntie Hamps to the bedroom.  But instead she
deputed Ada.  "And why not?" said Edwin to himself
again.  As the ladies mounted Mr. Peartree laughed
genuinely at one of Albert Benbow's characteristic
pleasantries, which always engloomed Edwin.  "Kindred
spirits, those two!" thought the superior sardonic
Edwin, and privately raised his eyebrows to his wife,
who answered the signal.



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   II

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Somewhat later, various other guests having come
and distributed themselves over the reception-rooms,
the chandeliers glinted down their rays upon light
summer frocks and some jewellery and coats of black and
dark grey and blue; and the best counterpanes in the
best bedroom were completely hidden by mantles and
cloaks, and the hatstand in the hall heavily clustered
with hats and caps.  The reception was in being, and
the interior full of animation.  Edwin, watchful and
hospitably anxious, wandered out of the drawing-room
into the hall.  The door of the breakfast-room was
ajar, and he could hear Clara's voice behind it.  He
knew that the Benbows and Maggie and Auntie Hamps
were all in the breakfast-room, and he blamed chiefly
Clara for this provincial clannishness, which was so
characteristic of her.  Surely Auntie Hamps at any
rate ought to have realised that the duty of members
of the family was to spread themselves among the other
guests!

He listened.

"No," Clara was saying, "we don't know what's
happened to him since he came out of prison.  He got two
years."  She was speaking in what Edwin called her
'scandal' tones, low, clipped, intimate, eager, blissful.

And then Albert Benbow's voice:

"He's had the good sense not to bother us."

Edwin, while resenting the conversation, and the
Benbows' use of "we" and "us" in a matter which did
not concern them, was grimly comforted by the thought
of their ignorance of a detail which would have
interested them passionately.  None but Hilda and
himself knew that the bigamist was at that moment in
prison again for another and a later offence.  Everything
had been told but that.

"Of course," said Clara, "they needn't have said
anything about the bigamy at all, and nobody outside
the family need have known that poor Hilda was not
just an ordinary widow.  But we all thought--"

"I don't know so much about that, Clary," Albert
Benbow interrupted his wife; "you mustn't forget his
real wife came to Turnhill to make enquiries.  That
started a hare."

"Well, you know what I mean," said Clara vaguely.

Mr. Peartree's voice came in:

"But surely the case was in the papers?"

"I expect it was in the Sussex papers," Albert
replied.  "You see, they went through the ceremony of
marriage at Lewes.  But it never got into the local
rag, because he got married in his real name--Cannon
wasn't his real name; and he'd no address in the
Five Towns, then.  He was just a boarding-house
keeper at Brighton.  It was a miracle it
didn't get into the *Signal*, if you ask me; but it
didn't.  I happen to know"--his voice grew important--"that
the *Signal* people have an arrangement with
the Press Association for a full report of all matrimonial
cases that 'ud be likely to interest the district.
However, the Press Association weren't quite on the
spot that time.  And it's not surprising they weren't,
either."

Clara resumed:

"No.  It never came out.  Still, as I say, we all
thought it best not to conceal anything.  Albert
strongly advised Edwin not to attempt any such
thing."  ("What awful rot!" thought Edwin.)  "So we just
mentioned it quietly like to a few friends.  After all,
poor Hilda was perfectly innocent.  Of course she felt
her position keenly when she came to live here after
the wedding."  ("Did she indeed!" thought Edwin.)  "Edwin
would have the wedding in London.  We did
so feel for her."  ("Did you indeed!" thought Edwin.)  "She
wouldn't have an At Home.  I knew it was a
mistake not to.  We all knew.  But no, *she would not*.
Folks began to talk.  They thought it strange she
didn't have an At Home like other folks.  Many young
married women have two At Homes nowadays.  So in
the end she was persuaded.  She fixed it for August
because she thought so many people would be away at
the seaside.  But they aren't--at least not so many as
you'd think.  Albert says it's owing to the General
Election upset.  And she wouldn't have it in the
afternoon like other folks.  Mrs. Edwin isn't like other
folks, and you can't alter her."

"What's the matter with the evening for an At Home,
anyhow?" asked Benbow the breezy and consciously
broad-minded.

"Oh, of course, *I* quite agree.  I like it.  But folks
are so funny."

After a momentary pause, Mr. Peartree said uncertainly:

"And there's a little boy?"

Said Clara:

"Yes, the one you've seen."

Said Auntie Hamps:

"Poor little thing!  I do feel so sorry for
him--when he grows up--"

"You needn't, Auntie," said Maggie curtly, expressing
her attitude to George in that mild curtness.

"Of course," said Clara quickly.  "We never let it
make any difference.  In fact our Bert and he are
rather friends, aren't they, Albert?"

At this moment George himself opened the door of
the dining-room, letting out a faint buzz of talk and
clink of vessels.  His mouth was not empty.

Precipitately Edwin plunged into the breakfast-room.

"Hello!  You people!" he murmured.  "Well,
Mr. Peartree."

There they were--all of them, including the parson--grouped
together, lusciously bathing in the fluid of
scandal.

Clara turned, and without the least constraint said
sweetly:

"Oh, Edwin!  There you are!  I was just telling
Mr. Peartree about you and Hilda, you know.  We
thought it would be better."

"You see," said Auntie Hamps impressively, "Mr. Peartree
will be about the town to-morrow, and a word
from him--"

Mr. Peartree tried unsuccessfully to look as if he
was nobody in particular.

"That's all right," said Edwin.  "Perhaps the door
might as well be shut."  He thought, as many a man
has thought: "My relations take the cake!"

Clara occupied the only easy chair in the room.
Mrs. Hamps and the parson were seated.  Maggie
stood.  Albert Benbow, ever uxorious, was perched
sideways on the arm of his wife's chair.  Clara, centre
of the conclave and of all conclaves in which she took
part, was the mother of five children,--and nearing
thirty-five years of age.  Maternity had ruined her once
slim figure, but neither she nor Albert seemed to mind
that,--they seemed rather to be proud of her unshapeliness.
Her face was unspoiled.  She was pretty and had
a marvellously fair complexion.  In her face Edwin
could still always plainly see the pert, charming,
malicious girl of fourteen who loathed Auntie Hamps and
was rude to her behind her back.  But Clara and Auntie
Hamps were fast friends nowadays.  Clara's brood had
united them.  They thought alike on all topics.  Clara
had accepted Auntie Hamps's code practically entire;
but on the other hand she had dominated Auntie
Hamps.  The respect which Auntie Hamps showed for
Clara and for Edwin, and in a slightly less degree for
Maggie, was a strange phenomenon in the old age of
that grandiose and vivacious pillar of Wesleyanism and
the conventions.

Edwin did not like Clara; he objected to her domesticity,
her motherliness, her luxuriant fruitfulness, the
intonations of her voice, her intense self-satisfaction
and her remarkable duplicity; and perhaps more than
anything to her smug provinciality.  He did not
positively dislike his brother-in-law, but he objected to him
for his uxoriousness, his cheerful assurance of Clara's
perfection, his contented and conceited ignorance of
all intellectual matters, his incorrigible vulgarity of a
small manufacturer who displays everywhere the
stigmata of petty commerce, and his ingenuous love of
office.  As for Maggie, the plump spinster of forty,
Edwin respected her when he thought of her, but
reproached her for social gawkiness and taciturnity.  As
for Auntie Hamps, he could not respect, but he was
forced to admire, her gorgeous and sustained hypocrisy,
in which no flaw had ever been found, and which
victimised even herself; he was always invigorated by her
ageless energy and the sight of her handsome, erect,
valiant figure.

Edwin's absence had stopped the natural free course
of conversation.  But there were at least three people
in the room whom nothing could abash: Mrs. Hamps,
Clara, and Mr. Peartree.

Mr. Peartree, sitting up with his hands on his baggy
knees, said:

"Everything seems to have turned out very well in
the end, Mr. Clayhanger--very well, indeed."  His
features showed less of the tedium of life.

"Eh, yes!  Eh, yes!" breathed Auntie Hamps in
ecstasy.

Edwin, diffident and ill-pleased, was about to suggest
that the family might advantageously separate, when
George came after him into the room.

"Oh!" cried George.

"Well, little jockey!" Clara began instantly to him
with an exaggerated sweetness that Edwin thought must
nauseate the child, "would you like Bert to come up and
play with you one of these afternoons?"

George stared at her, and slowly flushed.

"Yes," said George.  "Only--"

"Only what?"

"Supposing I was doing something else when he came?"

Without waiting for possible developments George
turned to leave the room again.

"You're a caution, you are!" said Albert Benbow;
and to the adults: "Hates to be disturbed, I suppose."

"That's it," said Edwin responsively, as brother-in-law
to brother-in-law.  But he felt that he, with a few
months' experience of another's child, appreciated the
exquisite strange sensibility of children infinitely better
than Albert were he fifty times a father.

"What is a caution, Uncle Albert?" asked George,
peeping back from the door.

Auntie Hamps good-humouredly warned the child of
the danger of being impertinent to his elders:

"George!  George!"

"A caution is a caution to snakes," said Albert.
"Shoo!"  Making a noise like a rocket, he feinted to
pursue the boy with violence.

Mr. Peartree laughed rather loudly, and rather like
a human being, at the word "snakes."  Albert Benbow's
flashes of humour, indeed, seemed to surprise
him, if only for an instant, out of his attitudinarianism.

Clara smiled, flattered by the power of her husband
to reveal the humanity of the parson.

"Albert's so good with children," she said.  "He
always knows exactly..."  She stopped, leaving
what he knew exactly to the listeners' imagination.

Uncle Albert and George could be heard scuffling
in the hall.

Auntie Hamps rose with a gentle sigh, saying:

"I suppose we ought to join the others."

Her social sense, which was pretty well developed,
had at last prevailed.

The sisters Maggie and Clara, one in light and
the other in dark green, walked out of the room.
Maggie's face had already stiffened into mute constraint,
and Clara's into self-importance, at the prospect of
meeting the general company.



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   III

.. vspace:: 2

Auntie Hamps held back, and Edwin at once perceived
from the conspiratorial glance in her splendid
eyes that in suggesting a move she had intended to
deceive her fellow-conspirator in life, Clara.  But
Auntie Hamps could not live without chicane.  And
she was happiest when she had superimposed chicane
upon chicane in complex folds.

She put a ringed hand softly but arrestingly upon
Edwin's arm, and pushed the door to.  Alone with her
and the parson, Edwin felt himself to be at bay, and he
drew back before an unknown menace.

"Edwin, dear," said she, "Mr. Peartree has something
to suggest to you.  I was going to say 'a favour to
ask,' but I won't put it like that.  I'm sure my nephew
will look upon it as a privilege.  You know how much
Mr. Peartree has at heart the District Additional
Chapels Fund--"

Edwin did not know how much; but he had heard of
the Macclesfield District Additional Chapels Fund,
Bursley being one of the circuits in the Macclesfield
District.  Wesleyanism finding itself confronted with
lessening congregations and with a shortage of ministers,
the Macclesfield District had determined to prove
that Wesleyanism was nevertheless spiritually vigorous
by the odd method of building more chapels.  Mr. Peartree,
inventor of Saturday afternoon Bible-Classes
for schoolboys, was one of the originators of the bricky
scheme, and in fact his lecture upon the "Mantle and
Mission of Elijah" was to be in aid of it.  The next
instant Mr. Peartree had invited Edwin to act as District
Treasurer of the Fund, the previous treasurer having
died.

More chicane!  The parson's visit, then, was not a
mere friendly call, inspired by the moment.  It was
part of a scheme.  It had been planned against him.
Did they (he seemed to be asking himself) think him
so ingenuous, so simple, as not to see through their
dodge?  If not, then why the preliminary pretences?
He did not really ask himself these questions, for the
reason that he knew the answers to them.  When a
piece of chicane had succeeded Auntie Hamps forgot
it, and expected others to forget it,--or at any rate
she dared, by her magnificent front, anybody on earth
to remind her of it.  She was quite indifferent whether
Edwin saw through her dodge or not.

"You're so good at business," said she.

Ah!  She would insist on the business side of the
matter, affecting to ignore the immense moral
significance which would be attached to Edwin's acceptance
of the office!  Were he to yield, the triumph for
Methodism would ring through the town.  He read all
her thoughts.  Nothing could break down her magnificent
front.  She had cornered him by a device; she had
him at bay; and she counted on his weak good-nature,
on his easy-going cowardice, for a victory.

Mr. Peartree talked.  Mr. Peartree expressed his
certitude that Edwin was "with them at heart," and
his absolute reliance upon Edwin's sense of the
responsibilities of a man in his, Edwin's, position.  Auntie
Hamps recalled with fervour Edwin's early activities
in Methodism--the Young Men's Debating Society,
for example, which met at six o'clock on frosty winter
mornings for the proving of the faith by dialectics.

And Edwin faltered in his speech.

"You ought to get Albert," he feebly suggested.

"Oh, no!" said Auntie.  "Albert is grand in his
own line.  But for this, *we want a man like you*."

It was a master-stroke.  Edwin had the illusion of
trembling, and yet he knew that he did not tremble, even
inwardly.  He seemed to see the forces of evolution and
the forces of reaction ranged against each other in a
supreme crisis.  He seemed to see the alternative of two
futures for himself--and in one he would be a humiliated
and bored slave, and in the other a fine, reckless ensign
of freedom.  He seemed to be doubtful of his own
courage.  But at the bottom of his soul he was not doubtful.
He remembered all the frightful and degrading ennui
which when he was young he had suffered as a martyr to
Wesleyanism and dogma, all the sinister deceptions
which he had had to practise and which had been
practised upon him.  He remembered his almost life-long
intense hatred of Mr. Peartree.  And he might have
clenched his hands bitterly and said with homicidal
animosity: "*Now* I will pay you out!  And I will tell you
the truth!  And I will wither you up and incinerate you,
and be revenged for everything in one single sentence!"  But
he felt no bitterness, and his animosity was dead.
At the bottom of his soul there was nothing but a bland
indifference that did not even scorn.

"No," he said quietly.  "I shan't be your treasurer.
You must ask somebody else."

A vast satisfaction filled him.  The refusal was so
easy, the opposing forces so negligible.

Auntie Hamps and Mr. Peartree knew nothing of
the peculiar phenomena induced in Edwin's mind by
the first sight of the legendary Abel Peartree after
twenty years.  But Auntie Hamps, though puzzled for
an explanation, comprehended that she was decisively
beaten.  The blow was hard.  Nevertheless she did not
wince.  The superb pretence must be kept up, and she
kept it up.  She smiled and, tossing her curls, checked
Edwin with cheerful, indomitable rapidity.

"Now, now!  Don't decide at once.  Think it over
very carefully, and we shall ask you again.  Mr. Peartree
will write to you.  I feel sure..."

Appearances were preserved.

The colloquy was interrupted by Hilda, who came in
excited, gay, with sparkling eyes, humming an air.  She
had protested vehemently against an At Home.  She
had said again and again that the idea of an At Home
was abhorrent to her, and that she hated all such
wholesale formal hospitalities and could not bear
"people."  And yet now she was enchanted with her situation as
hostess--delighted with herself and her rich dress,
almost ecstatically aware of her own attractiveness and
domination.  The sight of her gave pleasure and
communicated zest.  Mature, she was yet only beginning
life.  And as she glanced with secret condescension at
the listless Mr. Peartree she seemed to say: "What is
all this talk of heaven and hell?  I am in love with life
and the senses, and everything is lawful to me, and I
am above you."  And even Auntie Hamps, though one
of the most self-sufficient creatures that ever lived,
envied in her glorious decay the young maturity of
sensuous Hilda.

"Well," said Hilda.  "What's going on *here*?
They're all gone mad about missing words in the drawing-room."

She smiled splendidly at Edwin, whose pride in her
thrilled him.  Her superiority to other women was
patent.  She made other women seem negative.  In fact,
she was a tingling woman before she was anything
else--that was it!  He compared her with Clara, who
was now nothing but a mother, and to Maggie, who had
never been anything at all.

Mr. Peartree made the mistake of telling her the
subject of the conversation.  She did not wait to hear
what Edwin's answer had been.

She said curtly, and with finality:

"Oh, no!  I won't have it."

Edwin did not quite like this.  The matter concerned
him alone, and he was an absolutely free agent.
She ought to have phrased her objection differently.
For example, she might have said: "I hope he has refused."

Still, his annoyance was infinitesimal.

"The poor boy works quite hard enough as it is,"
she added, with delicious caressing intonation of the
first words.

He liked that.  But she was confusing the issue.
She always would confuse the issue.  It was not because
the office would involve extra work for him that he had
declined the invitation, as she well knew.

Of course Auntie Hamps said in a flash:

"If it means overwork for him I shouldn't dream--"  She
was putting the safety of appearances beyond
doubt.

"By the way, Auntie," Hilda continued.  "What's
the trouble about the pew down at chapel?  Both Clara
and Maggie have mentioned it."

"Trouble, my dear?" exclaimed Auntie Hamps, justifiably
shocked that Hilda should employ such a word
in the presence of Mr. Peartree.  But Hilda was apt
to be headlong.

To the pew originally taken by Edwin's father, and
since his death standing in Edwin's name, Clara had
brought her husband; and although it was a long pew,
the fruits of the marriage had gradually filled it, so that
if Edwin chanced to go to chapel there was not too
much room for him in the pew, which presented the
appearance of a second-class railway carriage crowded
with season-ticket holders.  Albert Benbow had
suggested that Edwin should yield up the pew to the
Benbows, and take a smaller pew for himself and Hilda
and George.  But the women had expressed fear lest
Edwin "might not like" this break in a historic
tradition, and Albert Benbow had been forbidden to put
forward the suggestion until the diplomatic sex had
examined the ground.

"We shall be only too pleased for Albert to take
over the pew," said Hilda.

"But have you chosen another pew?" Mrs. Hamps
looked at Edwin.

"Oh, no!" said Hilda lightly.

"But--"

"Now, Auntie," the tingling woman warned Auntie
Hamps as one powerful individuality may warn
another, "don't worry about us.  You know we're not
great chapel-goers."

She spoke the astounding words gaily, but firmly.
She could be firm, and even harsh, in her triumphant
happiness.  Edwin knew that she detested Auntie
Hamps.  Auntie Hamps no doubt also knew it.  In
their mutual smilings, so affable, so hearty, so
appreciative, apparently so impulsive, the hostility between
them gleamed mysteriously like lightning in sunlight.

"Mrs. Edwin's family were Church of England,"
said Auntie Hamps, in the direction of Mr. Peartree.

"Nor great church-goers, either," Hilda finished
cheerfully.

No woman had ever made such outrageous remarks
in the Five Towns before.  A quarter of a century ago
a man might have said as much, without suffering in
esteem--might indeed have earned a certain intellectual
prestige by the declaration; but it was otherwise with a
woman.  Both Mrs. Hamps and the minister thought
that Hilda was not going the right way to live down her
dubious past.  Even Edwin in his pride was flurried.
Great matters, however, had been accomplished.  Not
only had the attack of Auntie Hamps and Mr. Peartree
been defeated, but the defence had become an onslaught.
Not only was he not the treasurer of the District
Additional Chapels Fund, but he had practically ceased
to be a member of the congregation.  He was free with
a freedom which he had never had the audacity to
hope for.  It was incredible!  Yet there it was!  A
word said, bravely, in a particular tone,--and a new
epoch was begun.  The pity was that he had not done
it all himself.  Hilda's courage had surpassed his own.
Women were astounding.  They were disconcerting
too.  His manly independence was ever so little wounded
by Hilda's boldness in initiative on their joint behalf.

"Do come and take something, Auntie," said Hilda,
with the most winning, the most loving inflection.

Auntie Hamps passed out.

Hilda turned back into the room: "Do go with
Auntie, Mr. Peartree.  I must just--"  She affected
to search for something on the mantelpiece.

Mr. Peartree passed out.  He was unmoved.  He did
not care in his heart.  And as Edwin caught his
indifferent eye, with that "it's-all-one-to-me" glint in it,
his soul warmed again slightly to Mr. Peartree.  And
further, Mr. Peartree's aloof unworldliness, his
personal practical unconcern with money, feasting,
ambition, and all the grosser forms of self-satisfaction, made
Edwin feel somewhat a sensual average man and
accordingly humiliated him.

As soon as, almost before, Mr. Peartree was beyond
the door, Hilda leaped at Edwin, and kissed him
violently.  The door was not closed.  He could hear the
varied hum of the party.

"I had to kiss you while it's all going on," she
whispered.  Ardent vitality shimmered in her eyes.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE WORD`:

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   CHAPTER IV


.. class:: center medium

   THE WORD

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

Ada was just crossing the hall to the drawing-room,
a telegram on a salver in her red hand.

"Here you are, Ada," said Edwin, stopping her,
with a gesture towards the telegram.

"It's for Mr. Tom Swetnam, sir."

Edwin and Hilda followed the starched and fussy
girl into the drawing-room, in which were about a dozen
people, including Fearns, the lawyer, and his wife, the
recently married Stephen and Vera Cheswardine,
several Swetnams, and Janet Orgreave, who sat at the
closed piano, smiling vaguely.

Tom Swetnam, standing up, took the telegram.

"I never knew they delivered telegrams at this time
o' night," said Fearns sharply, looking at his watch.
He was wont to keep a careful eye on the organisation
of railways, ships, posts, and other contrivances for
the shifting of matter from one spot to another.  An
exacting critic of detail, he was proud of them in the
mass, and called them civilisation.

"They don't," said Tom Swetnam naughtily, glad
to plague a man older than himself, and the father of
a family.  Tom was a mere son, but he had travelled,
and was, indeed, just returned from an excursion
through Scandinavia.  "Observe there's no deception.
The envelope's been opened.  Moreover, it's addressed
to Ben Clewlow, not to me.  Ben's sent it up.  I asked
him to.  Now, we'll see."

Having displayed the envelope like a conjurer, he
drew forth the telegram, and prepared to read it aloud.
One half of the company was puzzled; the other half
showed an instructed excitement.  Tom read the message:

"'Twenty-seven pounds ten nine.  Philosophers tell
us that there is nothing new under the sun.  Nevertheless
it may well be doubted whether the discovery of
gold at Barmouth, together with two earthquake shocks
following each other in quick succession in the same
district, does not constitute, in the history of the
gallant little Principality, a double event of
unique--'"  He stopped.

Vera Cheswardine, pretty, fluffy, elegant, cried out
with all the impulsiveness of her nature:

"Novelty!"

"Whatever is it all about?" mildly asked Mrs. Fearns,
a quiet and dignified, youngish woman whom motherhood
had made somewhat absent-minded when she was
away from her children.

"Missing-word competition," Fearns explained to
her with curt, genial superiority.  He laughed
outright.  "You do go it, some of you chaps," he said.
"Why, that telegram cost over a couple of bob, I bet!"

"Well, you see," said Tom Swetnam, "three of us
share it.  We get it thirty-six hours before the paper's
out--fellow in London--and there's so much more time
to read the dictionary.  No use half doing a thing!
Twenty-seven pounds odd!  Not a bad share this week, eh?"

"Won anything?"

"Rather.  We had the wire about the winning word
this morning.  We'd sent it in four times.  That makes
about £110, doesn't it?  Between three of us.  We sent
in nearly two hundred postal orders.  Which leaves
£100 clear.  Thirty-three quid apiece, net."

He tried to speak calmly and nonchalantly, but his
excitement was extreme.  The two younger Swetnams
regarded him with awe.  Everybody was deeply
impressed by the prodigious figures, and in many hearts
envy, covetousness, and the wild desire for a large,
free life of luxury were aroused.

"Seems to me you've reduced this game to a science,"
said Edwin.

"Well, we have," Tom Swetnam admitted.  "We send
in every possible word."

"It's a mere thousand per cent profit per week,"
murmured Fearns.  "At the rate of fifty thousand per
cent per annum."

Albert Benbow, entering, caught the last phrase,
which very properly whetted his curiosity as a man of
business.  Clara followed him closely.  On nearly all
ceremonial occasions these two had an instinctive need
of each other's presence and support; and if Albert did
not run after Clara, Clara ran after Albert.



.. vspace:: 3

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   II

.. vspace:: 2

Then came the proof of the genius, the cynicism
and the insight of the leviathan newspaper-proprietor
who had invented the dodge of inviting his readers to
risk a shilling and also to buy a coupon for the privilege
of supplying a missing word, upon the understanding
that the shillings of those who supplied the wrong word
should be taken for ever away from them and given to
those who supplied the right word.  The entire
company in the Clayhanger drawing-room was absorbed
in the tremendous missing-word topic, and listened to
Swetnam as to a new prophet bearing the secret of
eternal felicity.  The rumour of Swetnam's triumph
drew people out of the delectable dining-room to listen
to his remarks; and among these was Auntie Hamps.
So it was in a thousand, in ten thousand, in hundreds
of thousands of homes of all kinds throughout the
kingdom.  The leviathan journalist's readers (though
as a rule they read nothing in his paper save the
truncated paragraph and the rules of the competition) had
grown to be equivalent to the whole British public.  And
he not only held them but he had overshadowed all
other interests in their minds.  Upon honeymoons
people thought of the missing-word amid caresses, and
it is a fact that people had died with the missing word
on their lips.  Sane adults of both sexes read the
dictionary through from end to end every week with an
astounding conscientiousness.  The leviathan
newspaper-proprietor could not buy enough paper, nor hire
sufficient presses, to meet the national demands.  And
no wonder, seeing that any small news-agent in a side
street was liable at any moment to receive an order
from an impassioned student of periodical literature
for more copies of one issue of the journal than the
whole town had been used to buy before the marvellous
invention of the missing-word.  The post office was
incommoded; even the Postmaster General was
incommoded, and only by heroical efforts and miraculous
feats of resourcefulness did he save himself from the
ignominy of running out of shilling postal orders.  Post
office girls sold shilling postal orders with a sarcastic
smile, with acerbity, with reluctance,--it was naught to
them that the revenue was benefited and the pressure on
taxpayers eased.  Employers throughout the islands
suffered vast losses owing to the fact that for months
their offices and factories were inhabited not by clerks
and other employees, but by wage-paid monomaniacs
who did naught but read dictionaries and cut out and
fill up coupons.  And over all the land there hung the
dark incredible menace of an unjust prosecution under
the Gambling Laws, urged by interfering busybodies
who would not let a nation alone.

"And how much did you make last week, Mr. Swetnam?"
judicially asked Albert Benbow, who was rather
pleased and flattered, as an active Wesleyan, to rub
shoulders with frank men of the world like Tom.  As
an active Wesleyan he had hitherto utterly refused to
listen to the missing-word; but now it seemed to be
acquiring respectability enough for his ears.

Swetnam replied with a casual air:

"We didn't make much last week.  We won
something, of course.  We win every week; that's a
mathematical certainty--but sometimes the expenses mount
up a bit higher than the receipts.  It depends on the
word.  If it's an ordinary word that everybody chooses,
naturally the share is a small one because there are so
many winners."  He gave no more exact details.

Clara breathed a disillusioned "Oh!" implying that
she had known there must be some flaw in the scheme--and
her husband had at once put his finger on it.

But her husband, with incipient enthusiasm for the
word, said: "Well, it stands to reason they must take
one week with another, and average it out."

"Now, Albert!  Now, Albert!" Edwin warned him.
"No gambling."

Albert replied with some warmth: "I don't see that
there's any gambling in it.  Appears to me that it's
chiefly skill and thoroughness that does the trick."

"Gambling!" murmured Tom Swetnam shortly.  "Of
course it's not gambling."

"No!"

"Well," said Vera Cheswardine, "I say 'novelty.'
'A double event of unique novelty.'  That's it."

"I shouldn't go nap on 'novelty,' if I were you,"
said Tom Swetnam, the expert.

Tom read the thing again.

"Novelty," Vera repeated.  "I know it's novelty.
I'm always right, aren't I, Stephen?" She looked
round.  "Ask Stephen."

"You were right last week but one, my child," said
Stephen.

"And did you make anything?" Clara demanded eagerly.

"Only fifteen shillings," said Vera discontentedly.
"But if Stephen had listened to me we should have
made lots."

Albert Benbow's interest in the word was strengthened.

Fearns, leaning carefully back in his chair, asked
with fine indifference: "By the way, what is this week's
word, Tom?  I haven't your secret sources of information.
I have to wait for the paper."

"'Unaccountably,'" said Tom.  "Had you anything on it?"

"No," Fearns admitted.  "I've caught a cold this
week, it seems."

Albert Benbow stared at him.  Here was another
competitor--and as acute a man of business as you
would find in the Five Towns!

"Me, too!" said Edwin, smiling like a culprit.

Hilda sprang up gleefully, and pointed at him a
finger of delicious censure.

"Oh!  You wicked sinner!  You never told me you'd
gone in!  You deceitful old thing!"

"Well, it was a man at the shop who would have me
try," Edwin boyishly excused himself.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   III

.. vspace:: 2

Hilda's vivacity enchanted Edwin.  The charm of
her reproof was simply exquisite in its good-nature and
in the elegance of its gesture.  The lingering taste of
the feverish kiss she had given him a few minutes earlier
bemused him and he flushed.  To conceal his inconvenient
happiness in the thought of his wife he turned
to open the new enlarged window that gave on the
garden.  (He had done away with the old garden-entrance
of the house, and thrown the side corridor into the
drawing-room.)  Then he moved towards Janet
Orgreave, who was still seated at the closed piano.

"Your father isn't coming, I suppose?" he asked her.

The angelic spinster, stylishly dressed in white, and
wearing as usual her kind heart on her sleeve, smiled
with soft benignity, and shook her head.

"He told me to tell you he was too old.  He is, you
know."

"And how's your mother?"

"Oh, pretty well, considering....  I really ought
not to leave them."

"Oh, yes!" Edwin protested.  The momentary vision
of Mr. and Mrs. Orgreave in the large house close by,
now practically deserted by all their children except
Janet, saddened him.

Then a loud voice dominated the general conversation
behind him:

"I say, this is a bit stiff.  I did think I should be
free of it here.  But no!  Same old missing-word
everywhere!  What is it this week, Swetnam?"

It was Johnnie Orgreave, appreciably younger than
his sister, but a full-grown man of the world, and
somewhat dandiacal.  After shaking hands with Hilda
he came straight to Edwin.

"Awfully sorry I'm so late, old chap.  How do, Jan?"

"Of course you are," Edwin quizzed him like an uncle.

"Where's Ingpen?"

"Not come."

"Not come!  He said he should be here at eight.
Just like him!" said Johnnie.  "I expect he's had a
puncture."

"I've been looking out for him every minute," Edwin
muttered.

In the middle of the room Albert Benbow, stocky
and vulgar, but feeling himself more and more a man
of the world among men and women of the world, was
proclaiming, not without excitement:

"Well, I agree with Mrs. Cheswardine.  'Novelty' 's
much more likely than 'interest.'  'Interest' 's the wrong
kind of word altogether.  It doesn't agree with the
beginning of the paragraph."

"That's right, Mr. Benbow," Vera encouraged him
with flirtatious dimples.  "You put your money on me,
even if my own husband won't."  Albert as a dowdy
dissenter was quite out of her expensive sphere, but to
Vera any man was a man.

"Now, Albert," Clara warned him, "if you win anything,
you must give it to me for the new perambulator."

("Dash that girl's infernal domesticity!" thought
Edwin savagely.)

"Who says I'm going in for it, missis?" Albert challenged.

"I only say *if* you do, dear," Clara said smoothly.

"Then I *will*!" Albert announced the great decision.
"Just for the fun of the thing, I will.  Thank ye,
Mrs. Cheswardine."

He glanced at Mrs. Cheswardine as a knight at his
unattainable mistress.  Indeed the decision had in it
something of the chivalrous; the attention of slim
provocative Vera, costliest and most fashionably
dressed woman in Bursley, had stirred his fancy to
wander far beyond its usual limits.

"Albert!  Well, I never!" exclaimed Mrs. Hamps.

"You don't mind, do you Auntie?" said Albert
jovially, standing over her.

"Not if it's not gambling," said Mrs. Hamps stoutly.
"And I hope it isn't.  And it would be very nice for
Clara, I'm sure, if you won."

"Hurrah for Mrs. Hamps!" Johnnie Orgreave almost yelled.

At the same moment, Janet Orgreave, swinging
round on the music-stool, lifted the lid of the piano,
and, still with her soft, angelic smile, played loudly
and dashingly the barbaric, Bacchic, orgiastic melody
which had just recently inflamed England, Scotland,
Ireland, Wales, and the Five Towns--the air which
was unlike anything ever heard before by British
ears, and which meant nothing whatever that could be
avowed, the air which heralded social revolutions and
inaugurated a new epoch.  And as the ringed fingers
of the quiet, fading spinster struck out the shocking
melody, Vera Cheswardine and one or two others who
had been to London and there seen the great legendary
figure, Lottie Collins, hummed more or less brazenly
the syllables heavy with mysterious significance:

   |   "*Tarara-boom-deay!*
   |   *Tarara-boom-deay!*
   |   *Tarara-boom-deay!*
   |   *Tarara-boom-deay!*"
   |

Upon this entered Mr. Peartree, like a figure of
retribution, and silence fell.

"I'm afraid..." he began.  "Mr. Benbow."

They spoke together.

A scared servant-girl had come up from the Benbow
home with the affrighting news that Bert Benbow, who
had gone to bed with the other children as usual, was
not in his bed and could not be discovered in the house.
Mr. Peartree, being in the hall, had chosen himself to
bear the grievous tidings to the drawing-room.  In an
instant Albert and Clara were parents again.  Both
had an idea that the unprecedented, incomprehensible
calamity was a heavenly dispensation to punish them
for having trifled with the missing-word.  Their sudden
seriousness was terrific.  They departed immediately,
without ceremony of any sort.  Mrs. Hamps said that
she really ought to go too, and Maggie said that as
Auntie Hamps was going she also would go.  The
parson said that he had already stayed longer than he
ought, in view of another engagement, and he followed.
Edwin and Hilda dutifully saw them off and were as
serious as the circumstances demanded.  But those who
remained in the drawing-room sniggered, and when
Hilda rejoined them she laughed.  The house felt
lighter.  Edwin, remaining longest at the door, saw a
bicyclist on one of the still quaint pneumatic-tyred
"safety" bicycles, coming along behind a "King of the
Road" lamp.  The rider dismounted at the corner.

"That you, Mr. Ingpen?"

Said a blithe voice:

"How d'ye do, host?  When you've known me a bit
longer you'll learn that I always manage to arrive just
when other people are leaving."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`TERTIUS INGPEN`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER V


.. class:: center medium

   TERTIUS INGPEN

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

Tertius Ingpen was the new District Factory
Inspector, a man of about thirty-five, neither fair nor
dark, neither tall nor short.  He was a native of the
district, having been born somewhere in the aristocratic
regions between Knype and the lordly village of Sneyd,
but what first struck the local observer in him was that
his speech had none of the local accent.  In the pursuit
of his vocation he had lived in other places than the
Five Towns.  For example, in London, where he had
become acquainted with Edwin's friend, Charlie
Orgreave, the doctor.  When Ingpen received a goodish
appointment amid the industrial horrors of his birth,
Charlie Orgreave recommended him to Edwin, and
Edwin and Ingpen had met once, under arrangement made
by Johnnie Orgreave.  It was Johnnie who had
impulsively suggested in Ingpen's presence that Ingpen
should be invited to the At Home.  Edwin, rather
intimidated by Ingpen's other-worldliness, had said:
"You'll run up against a mixed lot."  But Ingpen,
though sternly critical of local phenomena, seemed to
be ready to meet social adventures in a broad and even
eager spirit of curiosity concerning mankind.  He was
not uncomely, and he possessed a short silky beard of
which secretly he was not less proud than of his
striking name.  He wore a neat blue suit, with the trousers
fastened tightly round the ankles for bicycle-riding,
and thick kid gloves.  He took off one glove to shake
hands, and then, having leisurely removed the other,
and talking all the time, he bent down with care and
loosed his trousers and shook them into shape.

"Now what about this jigger?" he asked, while still
bending.  "I don't care to leave it anywhere.  It's a
good jigger."

As it leaned on one pedal against the kerb of Hulton
Street, the strange-looking jigger appeared to be at
any rate a very dirty jigger.  Fastened under the
saddle were a roll of paper and a mackintosh.

"There are one or two ordinaries knocking about the
place," said Edwin, "but we haven't got a proper
bicycle-house.  I'll find a place for it somewhere in the
garden."  He lifted the front wheel.

"Don't trouble, please.  I'll take it," said Ingpen,
and before picking up the machine blew out the lamp,
whose extinction left a great darkness down the slope
of Hulton Street.

"You've got a very nice place here.  Too central
for me, of course!" Ingpen began, after they had
insinuated the bicycle through narrow paths to the back
of the house.

Edwin was leading him along the side of the lawn
furthest away from Trafalgar Road.  Certainly the
property had the air of being a very nice place.  The
garden with its screen of high rustling trees seemed
spacious and mysterious in the gloom, and the lighted
windows of the house produced an effect of much
richness--especially the half-open window of the
drawing-room.  Fearns and Cheswardine were standing in front
of it chatting (doubtless of affairs) with that
important adult air which Edwin himself could never
successfully imitate.  Behind them were bright women,
and the brilliant chandelier.  The piano faintly
sounded.  Edwin was proud of his very nice place.
"How strange!" he thought.  "This is all mine!  These
are my guests!  And my wife is mine!"

"Well, you see," he answered Ingpen's criticism with
false humility.  "I've no choice.  I've got to be central."

Ingpen answered pleasantly.

"I take your word for it; but I don't see."

The bicycle was carefully bestowed by its groping
owner in a small rustic arbour which, situated almost
under the wall that divided the Clayhanger property
from the first cottage in Hulton Street, was hidden
from the house by a clump of bushes.

In the dark privacy of this shelter Tertius Ingpen
said in a reflective tone:

"I understand that you haven't been married long,
and that this is a sort of function to inform the world
officially that you're no longer what you were?"

"It's something like that?" Edwin admitted with a
laugh.

He liked the quiet intimacy of Ingpen's voice, whose
delicate inflections indicated highly cultivated
sensibilities.  And he thought: "I believe I shall be friends
with this chap."  And was glad, and faith in Ingpen
was planted in his heart.

"Well," Ingpen continued, "I wish you happiness.
It may seem a strange thing to say to a man in your
position, but my opinion is that the proper place for
women is--behind the veil.  Only my personal opinion,
of course!  But I'm entitled to hold it, and therefore
to express it."  Whatever his matter, his manner was
faultless.

"Yes?" Edwin murmured awkwardly.  What on earth
did Ingpen expect by way of reply to such a
proposition?  Surely Ingpen should have known that he was
putting his host in a disagreeable difficulty.  His
new-born faith in Ingpen felt the harsh wind of experience
and shivered.  Nevertheless, there was a part of Edwin
that responded to Ingpen's attitude.  "Behind the veil."  Yes,
something could be said for the proposition.

They left the arbour in silence.  They had not gone
more than a few steps when a boy's shrill voice made
itself heard over the wall of the cottage yard.

"Oh Lord, thou 'ast said 'If two on ye sh'll agray
on earth as touching onything that they sh'll ask it
sh'll be done for them of my Father which is in 'eaven.
For where two or three are gathered together i' my
name theer am I in th' midst of 'em.  Oh Lord, George
Edwin Clay'anger wants a two-bladed penknife.  We
all three on us want ye to send George Edwin
Clay'anger a two-bladed penknife."

The words fell with impressive effect on the men in
the garden.

"What the--" Edwin exclaimed.

"Hsh!" Ingpen stopped him in an excited whisper.
"Don't disturb them for anything in the world!"

Silence followed.

Edwin crept away like a scout towards a swing
which he had arranged for his friend George before he
became the husband of George's mother.  He climbed
into it and over the wall could just see three boys'
heads in the yard illuminated by a lamp in the
back-window of the cottage.  Tertius Ingpen joined him, but
immediately climbed higher on to the horizontal beam
of the swing.

"Who are they?" Ingpen asked, restraining his joy
in the adventure.

"The one on the right's my stepson.  The other big
one is my sister Clara's child, Bert.  I expect the little
one's old Clowes', the gravedigger's kid.  They say he's
a regular little parson--probably to make up for his
parents.  I expect they're out somewhere having a
jollification."

"Well," Ingpen breathed.  "I wouldn't have missed
this for a good deal."  He gave a deep, almost
soundless giggle.

Edwin was startled--as much as anything by the
extraordinary deceitfulness of George.  Who could
possibly have guessed from the boy's demeanour when his
Aunt Clara mentioned Bert to him, that he had made
an outrageous rendezvous with Bert that very night?
Certainly he had blushed, but then he often blushed.  Of
course, the Benbows would assert that George had
seduced the guileless Bert.  Fancy them hunting the town
for Bert at that instant!  As regards Peter Clowes,
George, though not positively forbidden to do so, had
been warned against associating with him--chiefly
because of the bad influence which Peter's accent would
have on George's accent.  His mother had said that she
could not understand how George could wish to be
friendly with a rough little boy like Peter.  Edwin,
however, inexperienced as he was, had already
comprehended that children, like Eastern women, have no
natural class bias; and he could not persuade himself
to be the first to inculcate into George ideas which
could only be called snobbish.  He was a democrat.
Nevertheless he did not like George to play with Peter
Clowes.

The small Peter, with uplifted face and clasped
hands, repeated urgently, passionately:

"O God!  We all three on us want ye to send George
Edwin Clay'anger a two-bladed penknife.  Now lads,
kneel, and all three on us together!"

He stood between the taller and better-dressed boys
unashamed, fervent, a born religionist.  He was not
even praying for himself.  He was praying out of his
profound impersonal interest in the efficacy of prayer.

The three boys, kneeling, and so disappearing from
sight behind the wall, repeated together:

"O God!  Please send George Edwin Clayhanger a
two-bladed penknife."

Then George and Bert stood up again, shuffling
about.  Peter Clowes did not reappear.

"I can't help it," whispered Ingpen in a strange,
moved voice, "I've got to be God.  Here goes!  And
it's practically new, too!"

Edwin in the darkness could see him feeling in his
waistcoat pocket, and then raise his arm, and, taking
careful aim, throw in the direction of the dimly lighted
yard.

"Oh!" came the cry of George, in sudden pain.

The descending penknife had hit him in the face.

There was a scramble on the pavement of the yard,
and some muttered talk.  The group went to the back
window where the lamp was and examined the heavenly
penknife.  They were more frightened than delighted
by the miracle.  The unseen watchers in the swing
were also rather frightened, as though they had
interfered irremediably in a solemn and delicate crisis
beyond their competence.  In a curious way they were
ashamed.

"Yes, and what about me?" said the voice of fat Bert
Benbow, sulkily.  "This is all very well.  But what
about me?  Ye tried without me and ye couldn't do
anything.  Now I've come and ye've done it.  What am
I going to get?  Ye've got to give me something instead
of a half-share in that penknife, George."

George said:

"Let's pray for something for you now.  What d'you
want?"

"I want a bicycle.  Ye know what I want."

"Oh, no, you don't, Bert Benbow!" said George.
"You've got to want something safer than a bike.
Suppose it comes tumbling down like the penknife did!
We shall be dam well killed."

Tertius Ingpen could not suppress a snorting giggle.

"I want a bike," Bert insisted.  "And I don't want
nothin' else."

The two bigger boys moved vaguely away from the
window, and the little religionist followed them in
silence, ready to supplicate for whatever they should
decide.

"All right," George agreed.  "We'll pray for a
bicycle.  But we'd better all stand as close as we can to
the wall, under the spouting, in case."

The ceremonial was recommenced.

"No," Ingpen murmured.  "I'm not being God this
time.  It won't run to it."

Footsteps were heard on the lawn behind the swing.
Ingpen slid down and Edwin jumped down.  Johnnie
Orgreave was approaching.

"Hsh!" Ingpen warned him.

"What are you chaps--"

"Hsh!"  Ingpen was more imperative.

All three men walked away out of earshot of the
yard, towards the window of the drawing-room--Johnnie
Orgreave mystified, the other two smiling but with
spirits disturbed.  Johnnie heard the story in brief;
it was told to him in confidence, as Tertius Ingpen held
firmly that eavesdroppers, if they had any honour left,
should at least hold their tongues.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   II

.. vspace:: 2

When Tertius Ingpen was introduced to Hilda in the
drawing-room, the three men having entered by the
French window, Edwin was startled and relieved by
the deportment of the orientalist who thought that the
proper place for women was behind the veil.  In his
simplicity he had assumed that the orientalist would
indicate his attitude by a dignified reserve.  Not at all!
As soon as Ingpen reached Hilda's hospitable gaze his
whole bearing altered.  He bowed, with a deferential
bending that to an untravelled native must have seemed
exaggerated; his face was transformed by a sweet
smile; his voice became the voice of a courtier; he shook
hands with chivalrous solicitude for the fragile hand
shaken.  Hilda was pleased by him, perceiving that this
man was more experienced in the world than any of the
other worldly guests.  She liked that.  Ingpen's new
symptoms were modified after a few moments, but when
he was presented to Mrs. Fearns he reproduced them
in their original intensity, and again when he was
introduced to Vera Cheswardine.

"Been out without your cap?" Hilda questioned
Edwin, lifting her eyebrows.  She said it in order to say
something, for the entry of this ceremonious personage,
who held all the advantages of the native and of the
stranger, had a little overpowered the company.

"Only just to see after Mr. Ingpen's machine.  Give
me your cap, Mr. Ingpen.  I'll hang it up."

When he returned to the drawing-room from the
hatstand Ingpen was talking with Janet Orgreave,
whom he already knew.

"Have you seen George, Edwin?" Hilda called across
the drawing-room.

"Hasn't he gone to bed?"

"That's what I want to know.  I haven't seen him
lately."

Everyone, except Johnnie Orgreave and a Swetnam
or so, was preoccupied by the thought of children, by
the thought of this incalculable and disturbing race
that with different standards and ideals lived so
mysteriously in and among their adult selves.  Nothing
was said about the strange disappearance of Bert
Benbow, but each woman had it in mind, and coupled it
with Hilda's sudden apprehension concerning George,
and imagined weird connections between the one and
the other, and felt forebodings about children nearer to
her own heart.  Children dominated the assemblage and,
made restless, the assemblage collectively felt that the
moment for separation approached.  The At Home was
practically over.

Hilda rang the bell, and as she did so Johnnie
Orgreave winked dangerously at Edwin, who with
sternness responded.  He wondered why he should thus
deceive his wife, with whom he was so deliciously
intimate.  He thought also that women were capricious
in their anxieties, and yet now and then their
moods--once more by the favour of hazard--displayed a
marvellous appositeness.  Hilda had no reason
whatever for worrying more about George on this
night than on any other night.  Nevertheless this
night happened to be the night on which anxiety would
be justified.

"Ada," said Hilda to the entering servant.  "Have
you seen Master George?"

"No'm," Ada replied, almost defiantly.

"When did you see him last?"

"I don't remember, m'm."

"Is he in bed?"

"I don't know, m'm."

"Just go and see, will you?"

"Yes'm."

The company waited with gentle, concealed
excitement for the returning Ada, who announced:

"His bedroom door's locked, m'm."

"He will lock it sometimes, although I've positively
forbidden him to.  But what are you to do?" said
Hilda, smilingly to the other mothers.

"Take the key away, obviously," Tertius Ingpen
answered the question, turning quickly and interrupting
his chat with Janet Orgreave.

"That ought not to be necessary," said Fearns, as
an expert father.

Ada departed, thankful to be finished with the ordeal
of cross-examination in a full drawing-room.

"Don't you know anything about him?" Hilda
addressed Johnnie Orgreave suddenly.

"Me?  About your precious?  No.  Why should I know?"

"Because you're getting such friends, you two."

"Oh!  Are we?" Johnnie said carelessly.  Nevertheless
he was flattered by a certain nascent admiration
on the part of George, which was then beginning to be
noticeable.

A quarter of an hour later, when several guests had
gone, Hilda murmured to Edwin:

"I'm not easy about that boy.  I'll just run upstairs."

"I shouldn't," said Edwin.

But she did.  And the distant sound of knocking,
and "George, George," could be heard even down in
the hall.

"I can't wake him," said Hilda, back in the drawing-room.

"What do you want to wake him for, foolish girl?"
Edwin demanded.

She enjoyed being called "foolish girl," but she was
not to be tranquillised.

"Do you think he is in bed?" she questioned, before
the whole remaining company, and the dread suspicion
was out!

After more journeys upstairs, and more bangings,
and essays with keys, and even attempts at lock-picking,
Hilda announced that George's room must be besieged
from its window.  A ladder was found, and
interested visitors went into the back-entry, by the
kitchen, to see it reared and hear the result.  Edwin
thought that the cook in the kitchen looked as guilty
as he himself felt, though she more than once asseverated
her belief that Master George was safely in bed.  The
ladder was too short.  Edwin mounted it, and tried to
prise himself on to the window-sill, but could not.

"Here, let me try!" said Ingpen, joyous.

Ingpen easily succeeded.  He glanced through the
open window into George's bedroom, and then looked
down at the upturned faces, and Ada's apron, whitely
visible in the gloom.

"He's here all right."

"Oh, good!" said Hilda.  "Is he asleep?"

"Yes."

"He deserves to be wakened," she laughed.

"You see what a foolish girl you've been," said Edwin
affectionately.

"Never mind!" she retorted.  "*You* couldn't get on
the window.  And you were just as upset as anybody.
Do you think I don't know?  Thank you, Mr. Ingpen."

"Is he really there?" Edwin whispered to Ingpen as
soon as he could.

"Yes.  And asleep, too!"

"I wonder how the deuce he slipped in.  I'll bet
anything those servants have been telling a lot of lies for
him.  He pulls their hair down and simply does what
he likes with them."

Edwin was now greatly reassured, but he could not
quite recover from the glimpse he had had of George's
capacity for leading a double life.  Sardonically he
speculated whether the heavenly penknife would be
brought to his notice by its owner, and if so by what
ingenious method.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   III

.. vspace:: 2

The final sensation was caused by the arrival, in a
nearly empty drawing-room, of plump Maggie, nervous,
constrained, and somewhat breathless.

"Bert has turned up," she said.  "Clara thought I'd
better come along and tell you.  She felt sure you'd
like to know."

"Well, that's all right then," Hilda replied perfunctorily,
indicating that Clara's conceited assumption of
a universal interest in her dull children was ridiculous.

Edwin asked:

"Did the kid say where he'd been?"

"Been running about the streets.  They don't know
what's come over him--because, you see, he'd actually
gone to bed once.  Albert is quite puzzled; but he says
he'll have it out of him before he's done."

"When he does get it out of him," thought Edwin
again, "there will be a family row and George will be
indicted as the corrupter of innocence."

Maggie would not stay a single moment.  Hilda
attentively accompanied her to the hall.  The former
and the present mistress of the house kissed with the
conventional signs of affection.  But the fact that one
had succeeded the other seemed to divide them.  Hilda
was always lying in wait for criticism from Maggie,
ready to resent it; Maggie divined this and said never
a word.  The silence piqued Hilda as much as outspoken
criticism would have annoyed her.  She could not bear it.

"How do you like my new stair-carpet?" she
demanded defiantly.

"Very nice!  Very nice, I'm sure!" Maggie replied
without conviction.  And added, just as she stepped
outside the front-door, "You've made a lot of changes."  This
was the mild, good-natured girl's sole thrust, and
it was as effective as she could have wished.

Everybody had gone except the two Orgreaves and
Tertius Ingpen.

"I don't know about you, Johnnie, but I must go,"
said Janet Orgreave when Hilda came back.

"Hold on, Jan!" Johnnie protested.  "You're
forgetting those duets you are to try with Ingpen."

"Really?"

"Duets!" cried Hilda, instantly uplifted and
enthusiastic.  "Oh, do let's have some music!"

Ingpen by arrangement with the Orgreaves had
brought some pianoforte duets.  They were tied to his
bicycle.  He was known as an amateur of music.
Edwin, bidding Ingpen not to move, ran out into the
garden to get the music from the bicycle.  Johnnie ran
after him through the French window.

"I say!" Johnnie called in a low voice.

"What's up?" Edwin stopped for him.

"I've a piece of news for you.  About that land
you've set your heart on, down at Shawport! ... It
can be bought cheap--at least the old man says it's
cheap--whatever his opinion may be worth.  I was
telling him about your scheme for having a new
printing works altogether.  Astonishing how keen he is!
If I'd had a plan of the land, I believe he'd have sat
down and made sketches at once."

Johnnie (with his brother Jimmie) was in partnership
with old Orgreave as an architect.

"'Set my heart on?'" Edwin mumbled, intimidated
as usual by a nearer view of an enterprise which he had
himself conceived and which had enchanted him from
afar.  "'Set my heart on?'"

"Well, had you, or hadn't you?"

"I suppose I had," Edwin admitted.  "Look here,
I'll drop in and see you to-morrow morning."

"Right!"

Together they detached the music from the bicycle,
and, as Edwin unrolled it and rolled it the other side
out to flatten it, they returned silently through the
dark wind-stirred garden into the drawing-room.

There were now the two Orgreaves, Tertius Ingpen,
and Hilda and Edwin in the drawing-room.

"We will now begin the evening," said Ingpen, as he
glanced at the music.

All five were conscious of the pleasant feeling of
freedom, intimacy, and mutual comprehension which
animates a small company that by self-selection has
survived out of a larger one.  The lateness of the hour
aided their zest.  Even the more staid among them
perceived as by a revelation that it did not in fact
matter, once in a way, if they were tired and inefficient on
the morrow, and that too much regularity of habit was
bad for the soul.  Edwin had brought in a tray from
the dining-room, and rearranged the chairs according
to Hilda's caprice, and was providing cushions to raise
the bodies of the duet-players to the proper height.
Janet began to excuse herself, asserting that if there
was one member of her family who could not play duets,
she was that member, that she had never seen this
Dvorak music before, and that if they had got her
brother Tom, or her elder sister Marion, or even
Alicia,--etc., etc.

"We are quite accustomed to these formal preliminaries
from duet-players, Miss Orgreave," said
Ingpen.  "I never do them myself,--not because I can
play well, but because I am hardened.  Now shall we
start?  Will you take the treble or the bass?"

Janet answered with eager modesty that she would
take the bass.

"It's all one to me," said Ingpen, putting on
spectacles; "I play either equally badly.  You'll soon
regret leaving the most important part to me.
However...!  Clayhanger, will you turn over?"

"Er--yes," said Edwin boldly.  "But you'd better
give me the tip."

He knew a little about printed music, from his
experiences as a boy when his sisters used to sing
two-part songs.  That is to say, he had a vague idea "where
a player was" on a page.  But the enterprise of
turning over Dvorak's "Legends" seemed to him critically
adventurous.  Dvorak was nothing but a name to him;
beyond the correct English method of pronouncing that
name, he had no knowledge whatever of the subject in
hand.

Then the performance of the "Legends" began.
Despite halts, hesitations, occasional loud insistent
chanting of the time, explanations between the players, many
wrong notes by Ingpen, and a few wrong notes by
Janet, and one or two enormous misapprehensions by
Edwin, the performance was a success, in that it put a
spell on its public, and permitted the loose and tender
genius of Dvorak to dominate the room.

"Play that again, will you?" said Hilda, in a low
dramatic voice, at the third "Legend."

"We will," Ingpen answered.  "And we'll play it
better."

Edwin had the exquisite sensation of partially
comprehending music whose total beauty was beyond the
limitations of his power to enjoy--power, nevertheless,
which seemed to grow each moment.  Passages
entirely intelligible and lovely would break at intervals
through the veils of general sound and ravish him.  All
his attention was intensely concentrated on the page.
He could hear Ingpen breathing hard.  Out of the
corner of his eye he was aware of Johnnie Orgreave on
the sofa making signs to Hilda about drinks, and
pouring out something for her, and something for himself,
without the faintest noise.  And he was aware of Ada
coming to the open door and being waved away to bed
by her mistress.

"Well," he said, when the last "Legend" was played.
"That's a bit of the right sort--no mistake."  He was
obliged to be banal and colloquial.

Hilda said nothing at all.  Johnnie, who had waited
for the end in order to strike a match, showed by two
words that he was an expert listener to duets.  Tertius
Ingpen was very excited and pleased.  "More tricky
than difficult, isn't it--to read?" he said privately to
his fellow-performer, who concurred.  Janet also was
excited in her fashion.  But even amid the general
excitement Ingpen had to be judicious.

"Delightful stuff, of course," he said, pulling his
beard.  "But he's not a great composer you know, all
the same."

"He'll do to be going on with," Johnnie murmured.

"Oh, yes!  Delightful!  Delightful!" Ingpen repeated
warmly, removing his spectacles.  "What a pity
we can't have musical evenings regularly!"

"But we can!" said Hilda positively.  "Let's have
them here.  Every week!"

"A great scheme!" Edwin agreed with enthusiasm,
admiring his wife's initiative.  He had been a little
afraid that the episode of George had upset her for the
night, but he now saw that she had perfectly recovered
from it.

"Oh!" Ingpen paused.  "I doubt if I could come
every week.  I could come once a fortnight."

"Well, once a fortnight then!" said Hilda.

"I suppose Sunday wouldn't suit you?"

Edwin challenged him almost fiercely:

"Why won't it suit us?  It will suit us first-class."

Ingpen merely said, with quiet delicacy:

"So much the better....  We might go all through
the Mozart fiddle sonatas."

"And who's your violinist?" asked Johnnie.

"I am, if you don't mind."  Ingpen smiled.  "If your
sister will take the piano part."

Hilda exclaimed admiringly:

"Do you play the violin, too, Mr. Ingpen?"

"I scrape it.  Also the tenor.  But my real
instrument is the clarinet."  He laughed.  "It seems odd,"
he went on with genuine scientific unegotistic interest in
himself.  "But d'you know I thoroughly enjoy playing
the clarinet in a bad orchestra whenever I get the
chance.  When I happen to have a free evening I often
wish I could drop in at a theatre and play rotten music
in the band.  It's better than nothing.  Some of us are
born mad."

"But Mr. Ingpen," said Janet Orgreave anxiously,
after this speech had been appreciated.  "I have never
played those Mozart sonatas."

"I am glad to hear it," he replied with admirable
tranquillity.  "Neither have I.  I've often meant to.
It'll be quite a sporting event.  But of course we can
have a rehearsal if you like."

The project of the musical evenings was discussed
and discussed until Janet, having vanished silently
upstairs, reappeared with her hat and cloak on.

"I can go alone if you aren't ready, Johnnie," said
she.

Johnnie yawned.

"No.  I'm coming."

"I also must go--I suppose," said Ingpen.

They all went into the hall.  Through the open door
of the dining-room, where one gas-jet burned, could be
seen the rich remains of what had been "light
refreshments" in the most generous interpretation of the
term.

Ingpen stopped to regard the spectacle, fingering his
beard.

"I was just wondering," he remarked, with that
strange eternal curiosity about himself, "whether I'd
had enough to eat.  I've got to ride home."

"Well, what have you had?" Johnnie quizzed him.

"I haven't had anything," said Ingpen, "except drink."

Hilda cried.

"Oh!  You poor sufferer!  I am ashamed!"  And
led him familiarly to the table.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   IV

.. vspace:: 2

Edwin was kept at the front-door some time by
Johnnie Orgreave, who resumed as he was departing
the subject of the proposed new works, and maintained
it at such length that Janet, tired of waiting on the
pavement, said that she would walk on.  When he
returned to the dining-room, Ingpen and Hilda were
sitting side by side at the littered table, and the first
words that Edwin heard were from Ingpen:

"It cost me a penknife.  But it was dirt cheap at
the price.  You can't expect to be the Almighty for
much less than a penknife."  Seeing Edwin, he added
with a nonchalant smile: "I've told Mrs. Clayhanger
all about the answer to prayer.  I thought she ought
to know."

Edwin laughed awkwardly, saying to himself:

"Ingpen, my boy, you ought to have thought of my
position first.  You've been putting your finger into
a rather delicate piece of mechanism.  Supposing she
cuts up rough with me afterwards for hiding it from
her all this time! ... I'm living with her.  You
aren't."

"Of course," Ingpen added.  "I've sworn the lady to
secrecy."

Hilda said:

"I knew all the time there was something wrong."

And Edwin thought:

"No, you didn't.  And if he hadn't happened to tell
you about the thing, you'd have been convinced that
you'd been alarming yourself for nothing."

But he only said, not certain of Hilda's humour, and
anxious to placate her:

"There's no doubt George ought to be punished."

"Nothing of the kind!  Nothing of the kind!" Ingpen
vivaciously protested.  "Why, bless my soul!  The
kids were engaged in a religious work.  They were busy
with someone far more important than any parents."  And
after a pause, reflectively: "Curious thing, the
mentality of a child!  I doubt if we understand
anything about it."

Hilda smiled, but said naught.

"May I enquire what there is in that bottle?" Ingpen asked.

"Benedictine."

"Have some, Mr. Ingpen."

"I will if you will, Mrs. Clayhanger."

Edwin raised his eyebrows at his wife.

"You needn't look at me!" said Hilda.  "I'm going
to have some."

Ingpen smacked his lips over the liqueur.

"It's a very bad thing late at night, of course.  But
I believe in giving your stomach something to think
about.  I never allow my digestive apparatus to boss me."

"Quite right, Mr. Ingpen."

They touched glasses, without a word, almost instinctively.

"Well," thought Edwin, "for a chap who thinks
women ought to be behind the veil...!"

"Be a man, Clayhanger, and have some."

Edwin shook his head.

With a scarcely perceptible movement of her glass,
Hilda greeted her husband, peeping out at him as it
were for a fraction of a second in a glint of affection.
He was quite happy.  They were all seated close
together, Edwin opposite the other two at the large table.
The single gas-jet, by the very inadequacy with which
it lighted the scene of disorder, produced an effect of
informal homeliness and fellowship that warmed the
heart.  Each of the three realised with pleasure that a
new and promising friendship was in the making.  They
talked at length about the Musical Evenings, and
Edwin said that he should buy some music, and Hilda
asked him to obtain a history of music that Ingpen
described with some enthusiasm, and the date of the
first evening was settled,--Sunday week.  And after
uncounted minutes Ingpen remarked that he presumed
he had better go.

"I have to cycle home," he announced once more.

"To-night?" Hilda exclaimed.

"No.  This morning."

"All the way to Axe?"

"Oh, no!  I'm three miles this side of Axe.  It's only
six and a half miles."

"But all those hills!"

"Pooh!  Excellent for the muscles of the calf."

"Do you live alone, Mr. Ingpen?"

"I have a sort of housekeeper."

"In a cottage?"

"In a cottage."

"But what do you *do*--all alone?"

"I cultivate myself."

And Hilda, in a changed tone, said:

"How wise you are!"

"Rather inconvenient, being out there, isn't it?"
Edwin suggested.

"It may be inconvenient sometimes for my job.  But
I can't help that.  I give the State what I consider fair
value for the money it pays me, and not a grain more.
I've got myself to think about.  There are some things
I won't do, and one of them is to live all the time in a
vile hole like the Five Towns.  I won't do it.  I'd sooner
be a blooming peasant on the land."

As he was a native he had the right to criticise the
district without protest from other natives.

"You're quite right as to the vile hole," said Hilda
with conviction.

"I don't know----" Edwin muttered.  "I think old
Bosley isn't so bad."

"Yes.  But you're an old stick-in-the-mud, dearest,"
said Hilda.  "Mr. Ingpen has lived away from the
district, and so have I.  You haven't.  You're no judge.
We know, don't we, Mr. Ingpen?"

When, Ingpen having at last accumulated sufficient
resolution to move and get his cap, they went through
the drawing-room to the garden, they found that rain
was falling.

"Never mind!" said Ingpen, lifting his head sardonically
in a mute indictment of the heavens.  "I have
my mack."

Edwin searched out the bicycle and brought it to
the window, and Hilda stuck a hat on his head.
Leisurely Ingpen clipped his trousers at the ankle, and
unstrapped a mackintosh cape from the machine, and
folded the strap.  Leisurely he put on the cape, and
gazed at the impenetrable heavens again.

"I can make you up a bed, Mr. Ingpen."

"No, thanks.  Oh, no, thanks!  The fact is, I rather
like rain."

Leisurely he took a box of fusees from his pocket,
and lighted his lamp, examining it as though it
contained some hidden and perilous defect.  Then he
pressed the tyres.

"The back tyre'll do with a little more air," he said
thoughtfully.  "I don't know if my pump will work."

It did work, but slowly.  After which, gloves had to
be assumed.

"I suppose I can get out this way.  Oh!  My
music!  Never mind, I'll leave it."

Then with a sudden access of ceremoniousness he
bade adieu to Hilda; no detail of punctilio was omitted
from the formality.

"Good-bye.  Many thanks."

"Good-bye.  Thank *you*!"

Edwin preceded the bicyclist and the bicycle round
the side of the house to the front-gate at the corner of
Hulton Street and Trafalgar Road.

In the solemn and chill nocturnal solitude of
rain-swept Hulton Street, Ingpen straddled the bicycle,
with his left foot on one raised pedal and the other on
the pavement; and then held out a gloved hand to Edwin.

"Good-bye, old chap.  See you soon."

Much good-will and appreciation and hope was
implicit in that rather casual handshake.

He sheered off strongly down the dark slope of Hulton
Street in the rain, using his ankles with skill in the
pedal-stroke.  The man's calves seemed to be
enormously developed.  The cape ballooned out behind his
swiftness, and in a moment he had swerved round the
flickering mournful gas-lamp at the bottom of the mean
new street and was gone.

.. vspace:: 4

.. _`HUSBAND AND WIFE`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER VI


.. class:: center medium

   HUSBAND AND WIFE

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

"I'm upstairs," Hilda called in a powerful whisper
from the head of the stairs as soon as Edwin had closed
and bolted the front-door.

He responded humorously.  He felt very happy,
lusty, and wideawake.  The evening had had its contretemps,
its varying curve of success, but as a whole it
was a triumph.  And, above all, it was over,--a thing
that had had to be accomplished and that had been
accomplished, with dignity and effectiveness.  He
walked in ease from room to lighted empty room, and
the splendid waste of gas pleased him, arousing
something royal that is at the bottom of generous natures.
In the breakfast-room especially the gas had been
flaring to no purpose for hours.  "*Her* room, her very
own room!"  He wondered indulgently when, if ever,
she would really make it her own room by impressing
her individuality upon it.  He knew she was always
meaning to do something drastic to the room, but so
far she had got no further than his portrait.  Child!
Infant!  Wayward girl! ... Still the fact of the
portrait on the mantelpiece touched him.

He dwelt tenderly on the invisible image of the woman
upstairs.  It was marvellous how she was not the Hilda
he had married.  The new Hilda had so overlaid and
hidden the old, that he had positively to make an effort
to recall what the old one was, with her sternness and
her anxious air of responsibility.  But at the same
time she was the old Hilda too.  He desired to be
splendidly generous, to environ her with all luxuries, to lift
her clear above other women; he desired the means to
be senselessly extravagant for her.  To clasp on her
arm a bracelet whose cost would keep a workingman's
family for three years would have delighted him.  And
though he was interested in social schemes, and had a
social conscience, he would sooner have bought that
bracelet, and so purchased the momentary thrill of
putting it on her capricious arm, than have helped to
ameliorate the lot of thousands of victimised human
beings.  He had Hilda in his bones and he knew it, and
he knew that it was a grand and a painful thing.

Nevertheless he was not without a considerable
self-satisfaction, for he had done very well by Hilda.  He
had found her at the mercy of the world, and now she
was safe and sheltered and beloved, and made mistress
of a house and home that would stand comparison with
most houses and homes.  He was proud of his house;
he always watched over it; he was always improving it;
and he would improve it more and more; and it should
never be quite finished.

The disorder in it, now, irked him.  He walked to
and fro, and restored every piece of furniture to its
proper place, heaped the contents of the ash-trays into
one large ash-tray, covered some of the food, and
locked up the alcohol.  He did this leisurely, while
thinking of the woman upstairs, and while eating two
chocolates,--not more, because he had notions about
his stomach.  Then he shut and bolted the drawing-room
window, and opened the door leading to the cellar
steps and sniffed, so as to be quite certain that the
radiator furnace was not setting the house on fire.
And then he extinguished the lights, and the hall-light
last of all, and his sole illumination was the gas on the
first-floor landing inviting him upstairs.

Standing on the dark stairs, on his way to bed, eager
and yet reluctant to mount, he realised the entity of
the house.  He thought of the astounding and
mysterious George, and of those uncomprehended beings, Ada
and the cook in their attic, sleeping by the side of the
portrait of a fireman in uniform.  He felt sure that
one or both of them had been privy to George's
unlawful adventures, and he heartily liked them for
shielding the boy.  And he thought of his wife, moving about
in the bedroom upon which she *had* impressed her
individuality.  He went upstairs....  Yes, he should
proceed with the enterprise of the new works.  He had
the courage for it now.  He was rich, according to
Bursley ideas,--he would be far richer....  He gave
a faint laugh at the memory of George's objection to
Bert's choice of a bicycle as a gift from heaven.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   II

.. vspace:: 2

Hilda was brushing her hair.  The bedroom seemed
to be full of her and the disorder of her multitudinous
things.  Whenever he asked why a particular item of
her goods was in a particular spot--the spot appearing
to him to have been bizarrely chosen--she always
proved to her own satisfaction, by a quite improvised
argument, that that particular spot was the sole
possible spot for that particular item.  The bedroom was
no longer theirs--it was hers.  He picnicked in it.
He didn't mind.  In fact he rather liked the
picnic.  It pleased him to exercise his talent for order
and organisation, so as to maintain his own comfort
in the small spaces which she left to him.  To-night
the room was in a divine confusion.  He accepted it
with pleasure.  The beds had not been turned down,
because it was improper to turn them down when they
were to be used for the deposit of strangers' finery.
On Edwin's bed now lay the dress which Hilda had
taken off.  It was a most agreeable object on the bed,
and seemed even richer and more complex there than
on Hilda.  He removed it carefully to a chair.  An
antique diaphanous shawl remained, which was
unfamiliar to him.

"What's this shawl?" he asked.  "I've never seen this
shawl before.  What is it?"

Hilda was busy, her bent head buried in hair.

"Oh, Edwin, what an old fusser you are!" she mumbled.
"What shawl?"

He held it up.

"Someone must have left it."

He proceeded with the turning down of his bed.  Then
he sat on a chair to regard Hilda.

When she had done her hair she padded across the
room and examined the shawl.

"What a precious thing!" she exclaimed.  "It's
Mrs. Fearns's.  She must have taken it off to put her jacket
on, and then forgotten it.  But I'd no idea how good
it was.  It's genuine old.  I wonder how it would suit me?"

She put it round her shoulders, and then stood
smiling, posing, bold, provocative, for his verdict.  The
whiteness of her deshabille showed through the delicate
pattern and tints of the shawl, with a strange effect.
For him she was more than a woman; she was the
incarnation of a sex.  It was marvellous how all she did,
all her ideas and her gestures, were so intensely
feminine, so sure to perturb or enchant him.  Nervously he
began to wind his watch.  He wanted to spring up and
kiss her because she was herself.  But he could not.
So he said:

"Come here, chit.  Let me look at that shawl."

She obeyed.  She knelt acquiescent.  He put his
watch back into his pocket, and fingered the shawl.

Then she said:

"I suppose one'll be allowed to grumble at Georgie
for locking his bedroom door."  And she said it with
a touch of mockery in her clear, precise voice, as
though twitting him, and Ingpen too, about their
absurd theoretical sense of honour towards children.  And
there was a touch of fine bitterness in her voice also,--a
reminiscence of the old Hilda.  Incalculable creature!
Who could have guessed that she would make such a
remark at such a moment?  In his mind he dashed
George to pieces.  But as a wise male he ignored all
her implications and answered casually, mildly, with
an affirmative.

She went on:

"What were you talking such a long time to Johnnie
Orgreave about?"

"Talking a long time to Johnnie Orgreave?  Oh!
D'you mean at the front-door?  Why, it wasn't half a
minute!  He happened to mention a piece of land down
at Shawport that I had a sort of a notion of buying."

"Buying?  What for?"  Her tone hardened.

"Well, supposing I had to build a new works?"

"You never told me anything about it."

"I've only just begun to think of it myself.  You
see, if I'm to go in for lithography as it ought to be
gone in for, I can't possibly stay at the shop.  I must
have more room, and a lot more.  And it would be
cheaper to build than to rent."

She stood up.

"Why go in more for lithography?"

"You can't stand still in business.  Must either go
forward or go back."

"It seems to me it's very risky.  I wondered what
you were hiding from me."

"My dear girl, I was not hiding anything from you,"
he protested.

"Whose land is it?"

"It belongs to Tobias Hall's estate."

"Yes, and I've no doubt the Halls would be very
glad to get rid of it.  Who told you about it?"

"Johnnie."

"Of course it would be a fine thing for him too."

"But I'd asked him if he knew of any land going
cheap."

She shrugged her shoulders, and shrugged away the
disinterestedness of all Orgreaves.

"Anyone could get the better of you," she said.

He resented this estimate of himself as a good-natured
simpleton.  He assuredly did not want to quarrel,
but he was obliged to say:

"Oh!  Could they?"

An acerbity scarcely intentional somehow entered
into his tone.  As soon as he heard it he recognised the
tone as the forerunner of altercations.

"Of course!" she insisted, superiorly, and then went
on: "We're all right as we are.  We spend too much
money, but I daresay we're all right.  If you go in for
a lot of new things you may lose all we've got, and then
where shall we be?"

In his heart he said to her:

"What's it got to do with you?  You manage your
home, and I'll manage my business!  You know nothing
at all about business.  You're the very antithesis of
business.  Whatever business you've ever had to do
with you've ruined.  You've no right to judge and no
grounds for judgment.  It's odious of you to asperse
any of the Orgreaves.  They were always your best
friends.  I should never have met you if it hadn't been
for them.  And where would you be now without me?
Trying to run some wretched boarding-house and
probably starving.  Why do you assume that I'm a d----d
fool?  You always do.  Let me tell you that I'm one
of the most common-sense men in this town, and
everybody knows it except you.  Anyhow I was clever enough
to get *you* out of a mess....  You knew I was hiding
something from you, did you?  I wish you wouldn't talk
such infernal rot.  And moreover I won't have you
interfering in my business.  Other wives don't, and you
shan't.  So let that be clearly understood."  In his
heart he was very ill-used and very savage.

But he only said:

"Well, we shall see."

She retorted:

"Naturally if you've made up your mind, there's no
more to be said."

He broke out viciously:

"I've not made up my mind.  Don't I tell you I've
only just begun to think about it?"

He was angry.  And now that he actually was angry,
he took an almost sensual pleasure in being angry.  He
had been angry before, though on a smaller scale, with
less provocation, and he had sworn that he would never
be angry again.  But now that he was angry again, he
gloomily and fiercely revelled in it.

Hilda silently folded up the shawl, and, putting it
into a drawer of the wardrobe, shut the drawer with
an irritatingly gentle click....  Click!  He could
have killed her for that click....  She seized a
dressing-gown.

"I must just go and look at George," she murmured,
with cool, clear calmness,--the virtuous, anxious
mother; not a trace of coquetry anywhere in her.

"What bosh!" he thought.  "She knows perfectly
well George's door is bolted."

Marriage was a startling affair.  Who could have
foretold this finish to the evening?  Nothing had
occurred ... nothing ... and yet everything.  His
plans were all awry.  He could see naught but trouble.

She was away some time.  When she returned, he was
in bed, with his face averted.  He heard her moving
about.

"Will she, or won't she, come and kiss me?" he
thought.

She came and kissed him, but it was a meaningless
kiss.

"Good-night," she said, aloofly.

"'Night."

She slept.  But he could not sleep.  He kept
thinking the same thought: "She's no right whatever....
I must say I never bargained for this...." etc.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE TRUCE`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER VII


.. class:: center medium

   THE TRUCE

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

Nearly a week passed.  Hilda, in the leisure of a
woman of fashion after dinner, was at the piano in the
drawing-room.  She had not urgent stockings to mend,
nor jam to make, nor careless wenches to overlook, nor
food to buy, nor accounts to keep, nor a new dress to
scheme out of an old one, nor to perform her duty to
her neighbour.  She had nothing to do.  Like Edwin,
she could not play the piano, but she had picked up
a note here and a note there in the course of her life,
and with much labour and many slow hesitations she
could puzzle out a chord or a melody from the printed
page.  She was now exasperatingly spelling with her
finger a fragment of melody from one of Dvorak's
"Legends,"--a fragment that had inhabited her mind
since she first heard it, and that seemed to gather up
and state all the sweet heart-breaking intolerable
melancholy implicit in the romantic existence of that city on
the map, Prague.  On the previous day she had been
a quarter of an hour identifying the unforgetable,
indismissible fragment amid the multitude of notes.  Now
she had recognisably pieced its phrases together, and as
her stiff finger stumbled through it, her ears heard it,
once more; and she could not repeat it often enough.
What she heard was not what she was playing but
something finer,--her souvenir of what Tertius Ingpen
had played; and something finer than that, something
finer than the greatest artist could possibly play--magic!

It was in the nature of a miracle to her that she had
been able to reproduce the souvenir in physical sound.
She was proud of herself as a miracle-worker, and
somewhat surprised.  And at the same time she was abject
because she "could not play the piano."  She thought
that she would be ready to sacrifice many happinesses
in order to be able to play as well as even George
played, that she would exchange all her own gifts
multiplied by a hundred in order to be able to play as
Janet Orgreave played, and that to be a world-renowned
pianist dominating immense audiences in European
capitals must mean the summit of rapture and
glory.  (She had never listened to a world-renowned
pianist.)  Meanwhile, without the ennui and slavery of
practice, she was enchanting herself; and she savoured
her idleness, and thought of her young pretty servants
at work, and her boy loose and at large, and her
husband keeping her, and of the intensity of beautiful
sorrow palpitating behind the mediæval façades of Prague.
Had Ingpen overheard her, he might have demanded:
"Who is making that infernal noise on the piano?"

Edwin came into the room, holding a thick green
book.  He ought long ago to have been back at the
works (or "shop," as it was still called, because it had
once been principally a shop), keeping her.

"Hello!" she murmured, without glancing away
from the piano.  "I thought you were gone."

They had not quarrelled; but they had not made
peace; and the open question of lithography and the
new works still separated them.  Sometimes they had
approached each other, pretending amiably or even
affectionately that there was no open question.  But the
reality of the question could not be destroyed by any
pretence of ignoring it.

While gazing at the piano, Hilda could also see
Edwin.  She thought she knew him, but she was always
making discoveries in this branch of knowledge.  Now
and then she was so bewildered by discoveries that she
came to wonder why she had married him, and why
people do marry--really!  The fact was that she had
married him for the look in his eyes.  It was a sad look,
and beyond that it could not be described.  Also, a
little, she had married him for his bright untidy hair,
and for that short oblique shake of the head which
with him meant a greeting or an affirmative.  She had
not married him for his sentiments nor for his goodness
of heart.  Some points in him she did not like.  He had
a tendency to colds, and she hated him whenever he
had a cold.  She often detested his terrible tidiness,
though it was a convenient failing.  More and more she
herself wilfully enjoyed being untidy, as her mother
had been untidy....  And to think that her mother's
untidiness used to annoy her!  On the other hand she
found pleasure in humouring Edwin's crotchettiness in
regard to the details of a meal.  She did not like his
way of walking, which was ungainly, nor his way of
standing, which was infirm.  She preferred him to be
seated.  She could not but regret his irresolution, and
his love of ease.  However, the look in his eyes was
paramount, because she was in love with him.  She
knew that he was more deeply and helplessly in love
with her than she with him, but even she was perhaps
tightlier bound than in her pride she thought.

Her love had the maladies of a woman's love when it
is great; these may possibly be also the maladies of a
man's love.  It could be bitter.  Certainly it could
never rest from criticism, spoken or unspoken.  In the
presence of others she would criticise him to herself,
if not aloud, nearly all the time; the ordeal was
continuous.  When she got him alone she would often
endow him at a stroke with perfection, and her tenderness
would pour over him.  She trusted him profoundly;
and yet she had constant misgivings, which weakened
or temporarily destroyed her confidence.  She would
treat a statement from him with almost hostile caution,
and accept blindly the very same statement from a
stranger!  Her habit was to assume that in any
encounter between him and a stranger he would be
worsted.  She was afraid for him.  She felt that she
could protect him better than he could protect
himself,--against any danger whatever.  This instinct to
protect him was also the instinct of self-protection; for
peril to him meant peril to her.  And she had had
enough of peril.  After years of disastrous peril she
was safe and George was safe.  And if she was
passionately in love with Edwin, she was also passionately
in love with safety.  She had breathed a long sigh of
relief, and from a desperate self-defender had become
a woman.  She lay back, as it were, luxuriously on a
lounge, after exhausting and horrible exertions; she had
scarcely ceased to pant.  At the least sign of recurring
danger all her nerves were on the *qui vive*.  Hence her
inimical attitude towards the project of the new works
and the extension of lithography in Bursley.  The
simpleton (a moment earlier the perfect man) might ruin
himself--and her!  In her view he was the last
person to undertake such an enterprise.

Since her marriage, Clara, Maggie, and Auntie
Hamps had been engaged in the pleasant endless task
of telling her all about everything that related to the
family, and she had been permitted to understand that
Edwin, though utterly admirable, was not of a creative
disposition, and that he had done nothing but conserve
what his father had left.  Without his father Edwin
"would have been in a very different position."  She
believed this.  Every day, indeed, Edwin, by the texture
of his hourly life, proved the truth of it....  All the
persons standing to make a profit out of the new
project would get the better of his fine ingenuous
temperament--naturally!  She knew the world.  Did Edwin
suppose that she did not know what the world was?
... And then the interminable worry of the new
enterprise--misgivings, uncertainties, extra work, secret
preoccupations!  What room for love, what hope of
tranquillity in all that?  He might argue----  But
she did not want to argue; she would not argue.  She
was dead against the entire project.  He had not said
to her that it was no affair of hers, but she knew that
such was his thought, and she resented the attitude.
No affair of hers?  When it threatened her felicity?
No!  She would not have it.  She was happy and secure.
And while lying luxuriously back in her lounge she
would maintain all the defences of her happiness and
her security.



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   II

.. vspace:: 2

Holding the green book in front of her, Edwin said
quietly:

"Read this!"

"Which?"

He pointed with his finger.

She read:

.. vspace:: 2

"*I think I could turn and live with animals, they
are so placid and self-contained.*

*I stand and look at them long and long.*

*They do not sweat and whine about their condition.*

*They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their
sins.*

*They do not make me sick discussing their duty to
God.*

*Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the
mania of owning things.*

*Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived
thousands of years ago.*

*Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole
earth.*"

.. vspace:: 2

Edwin had lately been exciting himself, not for the
first time, over Walt Whitman.

"Fine, isn't it?" he said, sure that she would share
his thrill.

"Magnificent!" she agreed with quiet enthusiasm.
"I must read more of that."  She gazed over the top
of the book through the open blue-curtained window
into the garden.

He withdrew the book and closed it.

"You haven't got that tune exactly right, you know,"
he said, jerking his head in the direction of the music.

"Oh!"  She was startled.  What did he know about
it?  He could not play the piano.

"Where are you?" he asked.  "Show me.  Where's
the confounded place on the piano?  Well!  At the
end you play it like this."  He imitated her.  "Whereas
it ought to be like this."  He played the last four notes
differently.

"So it ought!"  She murmured with submission, after
having frowned.

"That bit of a tune's been running in my head, too,"
he said.

The strange beauty of Whitman and the strange
beauty of Dvorak seemed to unite, and both Edwin and
Hilda were uplifted, not merely by these mingled
beauties, but by their realisation of the wondrous fact that
they both took intense pleasure in the same varied
forms of beauty.  Happiness rose about them like a
sweet smell in the spaces of the comfortable impeccable
drawing-room.  And for a moment they leaned towards
each other in bliss--across the open question....
Was it still open? ... Ah!  Edwin might be
ingenuous, a simpleton, but Hilda admitted the astounding,
mystifying adroitness of his demeanour.  Had he
abandoned the lithographic project, or was he privately
nursing it?  In his friendliness towards herself was
there a reserve, or was there not?  She knew ... she
did not know ... she knew....  Yes, there was a
reserve, but it was so infinitesimal that she could not
define it,--could not decide whether it was due to
obstinacy of purpose, or merely to a sense of injury,
whether it was resentful or condescending.  Exciting
times!  And she perceived that her new life was
gradually getting fuller of such excitements.

"Well," said he.  "It's nearly three.  Quarter-day's
coming along.  I'd better be off down and earn a bit
towards Maggie's rent."

Before the June quarter-day, he had been jocular in
the same way about Maggie's rent.  In the division of
old Darius Clayhanger's estate Maggie had taken over
the Clayhanger house, and Edwin paid rent to her
therefor.

"I wish you wouldn't talk like that," said Hilda,
pouting amiably.

"Why not?"

"Well, I wish you wouldn't."

"Anyhow, the rent has to be paid, I suppose."

"And I wish it hadn't.  I wish we didn't live in
Maggie's house."

"Why?"

"I don't like the idea of it."

"You're sentimental."

"You can call it what you like.  I don't like the
idea of us living in Maggie's house.  I never feel as if
I was at home.  No, I don't feel as if I was at home."

"What a kid you are!"

"You won't change me," she persisted stoutly.

He knew that she was not sympathetic towards the
good Maggie.  And he knew the reasons for her
attitude, though they had never been mentioned.  One was
mere vague jealousy of Maggie as her predecessor in
the house.  The other was that Maggie was always very
tepid towards George.  George had annoyed her on his
visits previous to his mother's marriage, and moreover
Maggie had dimly resented Edwin's interest in the son
of a mysterious woman.  If she had encountered George
after the proclamation of Edwin's engagement she
would have accepted the child with her customary
cheerful blandness.  But she had encountered him too
soon, and her puzzled gaze had said to George: "Why
is my brother so taken up with you?  There must be
an explanation, and your strange mother is the
explanation."  Edwin did not deny Maggie's attitude to
George, but he defended Maggie as a human being.
Though dull, "she was absolutely the right sort,"
and the very slave of duty and loyalty.  He would have
liked to make Hilda see all Maggie's excellences.

"Do you know what I've been thinking?" Hilda went
on.  "Suppose you were to buy the house from
Maggie?  Then it would be ours."

He answered with a smile:

"What price 'the mania for owning things'? ... Would
you like me to?"  There was promise in his
roguish voice.

"Oh!  I should.  I've often thought of it," she said
eagerly.  And at the same time all her gestures and
glances seemed to be saying: "Humour me!  I appeal
to you as a girl pouting and capricious.  But humour
me.  You know it gives you pleasure to humour me.
You know you like me not to be too reasonable.  We
both know it.  I want you to do this."

It was not the fact that she had often thought of the
plan.  But in her eagerness she imagined it to be the
fact.  She had never seriously thought of the plan
until that moment, and it appeared doubly favourable to
her now, because the execution of it, by absorbing
capital, ought to divert Edwin from his lithographic
project, and perhaps render the lithographic project
impossible for years.

She added, aloud:

"Then you wouldn't have any rent to pay."

"How true!" said Edwin, rallying her.  "But it
would stand me in a loss, because I should have to pay
too much for the place."

"Why?" she cried, in arms.  "Why should Maggie
ask too much just because you want it?  And think
of all the money you've spent on it!"

"The money spent on it only increases its value to
Maggie.  You don't seem to understand landlordism,
my child.  But that's not the point at all.  Maggie
won't ask any price.  Only I couldn't decently pay her
less than the value she took the house over at when we
divided up.  To wit, £1,800.  It ain't worth that.  I
only pay £60 rent."

"If she took it over at too high a value that's her
look-out," said the harsh and unjust Hilda.

"Not at all.  She was a fool.  Albert and Clara
persuaded her.  It was a jolly good thing for them.  I
couldn't very well interfere."

"It seems a great shame you should have to pay for
what Albert and Clara did."

"I needn't unless I want to.  Only, if I buy the
house, £1,800 will have to be the price."

"Well," said Hilda.  "I wish you'd buy it."

"Would she feel more at home if he did?" he
seductively chaffed her.

"Yes, she would."  Hilda straightened her shoulders,
and smiled with bravado.

"And suppose Mag won't sell?"

"Will you allow me to mention it to her?"  Hilda's
submissive tone implied that Edwin was a tyrant who
ruled with a nod.

"I don't mind," he said negligently.

"Well, one of these days I just will."

Edwin departed, leaving the book behind.  Hilda was
flushed.  She thought: "It is marvellous.  I can do
what I like with him.  When I use a particular tone,
and look at him in a particular way, I can do what I
like with him."

She was ecstatically conscious of an incomprehensible
power.  What a rôle, that of the capricious, pouting
queen, reclining luxuriously on her lounge, and
subduing a tyrant to a slave!  It surpassed that of the
world-renowned pianist!...



.. vspace:: 3

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   III

.. vspace:: 2

But soon she became more serious.  She had a
delicious glow of seriousness.  She overflowed with
gratitude to Edwin.  His good-nature was exquisite.  He
was not perfect.  She could see all his faults just as
plainly as when she was angry with him.  But he was
perfect in lovableness.  She adored every aspect of him,
every manifestation of his character.  She felt her
responsibility to him and to George.  It was hers to
bring grace into their lives.  Without her, how
miserable, how uncared for, those two would be!  They
would be like lost children.  Nobody could do for them
what she did.  Money could not buy what she gave
naturally, and mere invention could not devise it.  She
looked up to Edwin, but at the same time she was
mysteriously above both him and George.  She had a
strange soft wisdom for them.  It was agreeable, and
it was proper, and it was even prudent, to be
capricious on occasion and to win by pouting and wiles and
seductions; but beneath all that lay the tremendous
sternness of the wife's duty, everlasting and intricate, a
heavy obligation that demanded all her noblest powers
for its fulfilment.  She rose heroically to the thought of
duty, conceiving it as she had never conceived it
before.  She desired intensely to be the most wonderful
wife in the whole history of marriage.  And she
believed strongly in her capabilities.

She went upstairs to put on another and a finer
dress; for since the disastrous sequel to the At Home
she had somewhat wearied in the pursuit of elegance.
She had thought: "What is the use of me putting
myself to such a lot of trouble for a husband who is
insensible enough to risk my welfare unnecessarily?"  She
was now ashamed of this backsliding.  Ada was in the
bedroom finicking with something on the dressing-table.
Ada sprang to help as soon as she knew that her
mistress had to go out.  And she openly admired the
new afternoon dress and seemed as pleased as though
she was to wear it herself.  And Ada buttoned her boots
and found her gloves and her parasol, and remembered
her purse and her bag and her handkerchief.

"I don't quite know what time I shall be back, Ada."

"No'm," said Ada eagerly, as though saying: "Of
course you don't, m'm.  You have many engagements.
But no matter when you come back we shall be
delighted to see you because the house is nothing without
you."

"Of course I shall be back for tea."

"Oh, yes'm!" Ada agreed, as though saying: "Need
you tell me that, m'm?  I know you would never leave
the master to have his tea alone."

Hilda walked regally down the stairs and glanced
round about her at the house, which belonged to
Maggie and which Edwin had practically promised to buy.
Yes, it was a fine house, a truly splendid abode.  And
it seemed all the finer because it was Maggie's.  Hilda
had this regrettable human trait of overvaluing what
was not hers and depreciating what was.  It accounted
in part, possibly, for her often very critical attitude
towards Edwin.  She passed out of the front-door in
triumph, her head full of wise schemes and plots.  But
even then she was not sure whether she had destroyed--or
could ever destroy, by no matter what arts!--the
huge dangerous lithographic project.

As soon as she was gone, Ada ran yelling to the
kitchen:

"Hooray!  She's safe."

And both servants burst like infants into the garden,
to disport themselves upon the swing.





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.. _`THE FAMILY AT HOME`:

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   CHAPTER VIII


.. class:: center medium

   THE FAMILY AT HOME

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

When Hilda knocked at the door of Auntie Hamps's
house, in King Street, a marvellously dirty and untidy
servant answered the summons, and a smell of
greengage jam in the making surged out through the
doorway into the street.  The servant wore an apron of
rough sacking.

"Is Miss Clayhanger in?" coldly asked Hilda,
offended by the sight and the smell.

The servant looked suspicious and mysterious.

"No, mum.  Her's gone out."

"Mrs. Hamps, then?"

"Missis is up yon," said the servant, jerking her
tousled head back towards the stairs.

"Will you tell her I'm here?"

The servant left the visitor on the doorstep, and
with an elephantine movement of the knees ran upstairs.

Hilda walked into the passage towards the kitchen.
On the kitchen fire was the brilliant copper pan sacred
to "preserving."  Rows of earthenware and glass jars
stood irregularly on the table.

"Her'll be down," said the brusque servant, returning,
and glared open-mouthed.

"Shall I wait in the sitting-room?"

The house, about seventy years old, was respectably
situated in the better part of King Street, at the
bottom of the slope near St. Luke's Church.  It had once
been occupied by a dentist of a certain grandeur, and
possessed a garden, of which, however, Auntie Hamps
had made a wilderness.  The old lady was magnificent,
but her magnificence was limited to herself.  She could
be sublimely generous, gorgeously hospitable, but only
upon special occasions.  Her teas, at which a fresh
and costly pineapple and wonderful confectionery and
pickled salmon and silver plate never lacked, were
renowned, but the general level of her existence was very
mean.  Her servants, of whom she had many, though
never more than one at a time, were not only obliged to
be Wesleyan Methodists and to attend the Sunday
night service, and in the week to go to class-meeting for
the purpose of confessing sins and proving the power
of Christ,--they were obliged also to eat dripping
instead of butter.  The mistress sometimes ate dripping,
if butter ran short or went up in price.  She considered
herself a tremendous housewife.  She was a martyr to
her housewifely ideals.  Her private career was chiefly
an endless struggle to keep the house clean--to get
forward with the work.  The house was always going to
be clean and never was, despite eternal soap,
furniture-polish, scrubbing, rubbing.  Auntie Hamps never
changed her frowsy house-dress for rich visiting attire
without the sad thought that she was "leaving
something undone."  The servant never went to bed
without hearing the discontented phrase: "Well, we must
do it to-morrow."  Spring-cleaning in that house lasted
for six weeks.  On days of hospitality the effort to
get the servant "dressed" for tea-time was simply
desperate, and not always successful.

Auntie Hamps had no sense of comfort and no sense
of beauty.  She was incapable of leaning back in a
chair, and she regarded linoleum as one of the most
satisfactory inventions of the modern age.  She "saved"
her carpets by means of patches of linoleum, often
stringy at the edges, and in some rooms there was more
linoleum than anything else.  In the way of renewals
she bought nothing but linoleum,--unless some chapel
bazaar forced her to purchase a satin cushion or a
hand-painted grate-screen.  All her furniture was old,
decrepit and ugly; it belonged to the worst Victorian
period, when every trace of the eighteenth century had
disappeared.  The abode was always oppressive.  It
was oppressive even amid hospitality, for then the mere
profusion on the tables accused the rest of the interior,
creating a feeling of discomfort; and moreover
Mrs. Hamps could not be hospitable naturally.  She could
be nothing and do nothing naturally.  She could no
more take off her hypocrisy than she could take off
her skin.  Her hospitality was altogether too ruthless.
And to satisfy that ruthlessness, the guests had always
to eat too much.  She was so determined to demonstrate
her hospitality to herself, that she would never leave
a guest alone until he had reached the bursting point.

Hilda sat grimly in the threadbare sitting-room amid
morocco-bound photograph albums, oleographs, and
beady knickknacks, and sniffed the strong odour of
jam; and in the violence of her revolt against that
wide-spread messy idolatrous eternal domesticity of which
Auntie Hamps was a classic example, she protested that
she would sooner buy the worst jam than make the best,
and that she would never look under a table for dust,
and that naught should induce her to do any housework
after midday, and that she would abolish
spring-cleaning utterly.

The vast mediocre respectability of the district
weighed on her heart.  She had been a mistress-drudge
in Brighton during a long portion of her adult life;
she knew the very depths of domesticity; but at
Brighton the eye could find large, rich, luxurious, and
sometimes beautiful things for its distraction; and there
was the sea.  In the Five Towns there was nothing.
You might walk from one end of the Five Towns to
the other, and not see one object that gave a
thrill--unless it was a pair of lovers.  And when you went
inside the houses you were no better off,--you were even
worse off, because you came at once into contact with
an ignoble race of slatternly imprisoned serfs driven
by narrow-minded women who themselves were serfs
with the mentality of serfs and the prodigious conceit
of virtue....  Talk to Auntie Hamps at home of
lawn-tennis or a musical evening, and she would set
you down as flighty, and shift the conversation on to
soaps or chapels.  And there were hundreds of houses
in the Five Towns into which no ideas save the ideas
of Auntie Hamps had ever penetrated, and tens and
hundreds of thousands of such houses all over the
industrial districts of Staffordshire, Cheshire,
Lancashire, and Yorkshire,--houses where to keep bits of
wood clean and to fulfil the ceremonies of pietism, and
to help the poor to help themselves, was the highest
good, the sole good.  Hilda in her mind saw every
house, and shuddered.  She turned for relief to the
thought of her own house, and in a constructive spirit
of rebellion she shaped instantaneously a conscious
policy for it....  Yes, she took oath that her house
should at any rate be intelligent and agreeable before
it was clean.  She pictured Auntie Hamps gazing at
a layer of dust in the Clayhanger hall, and heard
herself saying: "Oh, yes, Auntie, it's dust right enough.
I keep it there on purpose, to remind me of something
I want to remember."  She looked round Auntie
Hamps's sitting-room and revelled grimly in the
monstrous catalogue of its mean ugliness.

And then Auntie Hamps came in, splendidly and
yet soberly attired in black to face the world, with her
upright, vigorous figure, her sparkling eye, and her
admirable complexion; self-content, smiling hospitably;
quite unconscious that she was dead, and that her era
was dead, and that Hilda was not guiltless of the murder.

"This is nice of you, Hilda.  It's quite an honour."  And
then, archly: "I'm making jam."

"So I see," said Hilda, meaning that so she smelt.
"I just looked in on the chance of seeing Maggie."

"Maggie went out about half-an-hour ago."

Auntie Hamps's expression had grown mysterious.
Hilda thought: "What's she hiding from me?"

"Oh, well, it doesn't matter," said she.  "You're
going out too, Auntie."

"I do wish I'd known you were coming, dear.  Will
you stay and have a cup of tea?"

"No, no!  I won't keep you."

"But it will be a *pleasure*, dear," Auntie Hamps
protested warmly.

"No, no!  Thanks!  I'll just walk along with
you a little of the way.  Which direction are you
going?"

Auntie Hamps hesitated, she was in a dilemma.

"What *is* she hiding from me?" thought Hilda.

"The truth is," said Auntie Hamps, "I'm just
popping over to Clara's."

"Well, I'll go with you, Auntie."

"Oh, do!" exclaimed Mrs. Hamps almost passionately.
"Do!  I'm sure Clara will be delighted!"  She
added in a casual tone: "Maggie's there."

Thought Hilda:

"She evidently doesn't want me to go."

After Mrs. Hamps had peered into the grand
copper pan and most particularly instructed the servant,
they set off.

"I shan't be easy in my mind until I get back," said
Auntie Hamps.  "Unless you look after them all the
time they always forget to stir it."



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   II

.. vspace:: 2

When they turned in at the gate of the Benbows'
house the front-door was already open, and Clara,
holding Rupert--her youngest--by the hand, stood smiling
to receive them.  Obviously they had been descried up
the street from one of the bow-windows.  This small
fact, strengthening in Hilda's mind the gradually-formed
notion that the Benbows were always lying in
wait and that their existence was a vast machination
for getting the better of other people, enlivened her
prejudice against her sister-in-law.  Moreover Clara
was in one of her best dresses, and her glance had a
peculiar self-conscious expression, partly guilty and
partly cunning.  Nevertheless, the fair fragility of
Clara's face, with its wonderful skin, and her manner,
at once girlish and maternal, of holding fast the child's
hand, reacted considerably against Hilda's prejudice.

Rupert was freshly all in white, stitched and
embroidered with millions of plain and fancy stitches; he
had had time neither to tear nor to stain; only on his
bib there was a spot of jam.  His obese right arm was
stretched straight upwards to attain the immense
height of the hand of the protective giantess his
mother, and this reaching threw the whole balance of
his little body over towards the left, and gave him a
comical and wistful appearance.  He was a pretty and
yet sturdy child, with a look indicating a nice disposition,
and he had recently been acquiring the marvellous
gift of speech....  Astounding how the infantile
brain added word to word and phrase to phrase, and
(as though there were not enough) actually invented
delicious words and graphic droll phrases!  Nobody
could be surprised that he became at once the centre
of greetings.  His grand-aunt snatched him up, and
without the slightest repugnance he allowed the ancient
woman to bury her nose in his face and neck.

And then Hilda embraced him with not less pleasure,
for the contact of his delicate flesh, and his flushed
timid smile, were exquisite.  She wished for a moment
that George was only two and a half again, and that
she could bathe him, and wipe him, and nurse him
close.  Clara's pride, though the visitors almost
forgot to shake hands with her, was ecstatic.  At length
Rupert was safely on the step once more.  He had
made no remark whatever.  Shyness prevented him
from showing off his new marvellous gift, but his
mother, gazing at him, said that in ordinary life he
never stopped chattering.

"Come this way, will you?" said Clara effusively, and
yet conspiratorially, pointing to the drawing-room,
which was to the left of the front-door.  From the
dining-room, which was to the right of the front-door,
issued confused sounds.  "Albert's here.  I'm so glad
you've come," she added to Hilda.

Auntie Hamps murmured warningly into Hilda's ear:

"It's Bert's birthday party."

A fortnight earlier Hilda had heard rumours of
Bert's approaching birthday--his twelfth, and
therefore a high solemnity--but she had very wrongly
forgotten about it.  "I'm so glad you've come," Clara
repeated in the drawing-room.  "I was afraid you might
be hurt.  I thought I'd just bring you in here first and
explain it all to you."

"Oh!  Bless me!" exclaimed Auntie Hamps,--interrupting,
as she glanced round the drawing-room.  "We
are grand!  Well I never!  We are grand!"

"Do you like it?" said Clara, blushing.

Auntie Hamps in reply told one of the major lies of
her career.  She said with rapture that she did like
the new drawing-room suite.  This suite was a proof,
disagreeable to Auntie Hamps, that the world would
never stand still.  It quite ignored all the old
Victorian ideals of furniture; and in ignoring the past, it
also ignored the future.  Victorian furniture had
always sought after immortality; in Bursley there were
thousands of Victorian chairs and tables that defied
time and that nothing but an axe or a conflagration
could destroy.  But this new suite thought not of the
morrow; it did not even pretend to think of the
morrow.  Nobody believed that it would last, and the
owners of it simply forbore to reflect upon what it
would be after a few years of family use.  They
contemplated with joy its first state of dainty freshness,
and were content therein.  Whereas the old Victorians
lived in the future (in so far as they truly lived at
all), the neo-Victorians lived careless in the present.

The suite was of apparent rosewood, with salmon-tinted
upholstery ending in pleats and bows.  But
white also entered considerably into the scheme, for
enamel paint had just reached Bursley and was
destined to become the rage.  Among the items of the suite
was a three-legged milking-stool in deal covered with
white enamel paint heightened by salmon-tinted bows
of imitation silk.  Society had recently been
thunderstruck by the originality of putting a milking-stool in
a drawing-room; its quaintness appealed with
tremendous force to nearly all hearts; nearly every
house-mistress on seeing a milking-stool in a friend's
drawing-room, decided that she must have a milking-stool
in her drawing-room, and took measures to get one.
Clara was among the earlier possessors, the pioneers.
Ten years--five years--before, Clara had appropriated
the word "æsthetic" as a term of sneering abuse, with
but a vague idea of its meaning; and now--such is the
miraculous effect of time--she was caught up in the
movement as it had ultimately spread to the Five
Towns, a willing convert and captive, and nothing
could exceed her scorn for that which once she had
admired to the exclusion of all else.  Into that
mid-Victorian respectable house, situate in a rather
old-fashioned street leading from Shawport Lane to the
Canal, and whose boast (even when inhabited by
non-conformists) was that it overlooked the Rectory
garden, the new ideals of brightness, freshness, eccentricity,
brittleness and impermanency had entered, and Auntie
Hamps herself was intimidated by them.

Hilda gave polite but perfunctory praise.  Left
alone, she might not have been averse from the new
ideals in their more expensive forms, but the influence
of Edwin had taught her to despise them.  Edwin's
tastes in furniture, imbibed from the Orgreaves,
neglected the modern, and went even further back than
earliest Victorian.  Much of the ugliness bought by his
father remained in the Clayhanger house, but all
Edwin's own purchases were either antique, or, if new,
careful imitations of the pre-Victorian.  Had England
been peopled by Edwins, all original artists in
furniture might have died of hunger.  Yet he encouraged
original literature.  What, however, put Hilda against
Clara's drawing-room suite, was not its style, nor its
enamel, nor its frills, nor the obviously inferior quality
of its varnish, but the mere fact that it had been
exposed for sale in Nixon's shop-window in Duck Bank,
with the price marked.  Hilda did not like this.  Now
Edwin might see an old weather-glass in some frowsy
second-hand shop at Hanbridge or Turnhill, and from
indecision might leave it in the second-hand shop for
months, and then buy it and hang it up at home,--and
instantly it was somehow transformed into another
weather-glass, a superior and personal weather-glass.
But Clara's suite was not--for Hilda--thus transformed.
Indeed, as she sat there in Clara's drawing-room,
she had the illusion of sitting in Nixon's shop.

Further, Nixon had now got in his window another
suite precisely like Clara's.  It was astonishing to
Hilda that Clara was not ashamed of the publicity and
the wholesale reproduction of her suite.  But she was
not.  On the contrary she seemed to draw a mysterious
satisfaction from the very fact that suites precisely
similar to hers were to be found or would soon
be found in unnumbered other drawing-rooms.  Nor did
she mind that the price was notorious.  And in the
matter of the price the phrase "hire-purchase" flitted
about in Hilda's brain.  She felt sure that Albert
Benbow had not paid cash to Nixon.  She regarded the
hire-purchase system as unrespectable, if not immoral,
and this opinion was one of the very few she shared
with Auntie Hamps.  Both ladies in their hearts, and
in the security of their financial positions, blamed the
Benbows for imprudence.  Nobody, not even his wife,
knew just how Albert "stood," but many took leave
to guess--and guessed unfavourably.

"Do sit down," said Clara, too urgently.  She was so
preoccupied that Hilda's indifference to her new
furniture did not affect her.

They all sat down, primly, in the pretty primness of
the drawing-room, and Rupert leaned as if tired against
his mother's fine skirt.

Hilda, expectant, glanced vaguely about her.  Auntie
Hamps did the same.  On the central table lay a
dictionary of the English language, open and leaves
downwards; and near it a piece of paper containing a
long list of missing words in pencil.  Auntie Hamps, as
soon as her gaze fell on these objects, looked quickly
away, as though she had by accident met the obscene.
Clara caught the movement, flushed somewhat, and
recovered herself.

"I'm so glad you've come," she repeated yet again to
Hilda, with a sickly-sweet smile.  "I did so want to
explain to you how it was we didn't ask George--I was
afraid you might be vexed."

"What an idea!" Hilda murmured as naturally as
she could, her nostrils twitching uneasily in the
atmosphere of small feuds and misunderstandings which
Clara breathed with such pleasure.  She laughed, to
reassure Clara, and also in enjoyment of the thought
that for days Clara had pictured her as wondering
sensitively why no invitation to the party had come
for George, while in fact the party had never crossed
her mind.  She regretted that she had no gift for Bert,
but decided to give him half-a-crown for his
savings-bank account, of which she had heard a lot.

"To tell ye the truth," said Clara, launching
herself, "we've had a lot of trouble with Bert.  Albert's
been quite put about.  It was only the day before
yesterday Albert got out of him the truth about the night
of your At Home, Hilda, when he ran away after he'd
gone to bed.  Albert said to him: 'I shan't whip you,
and I shan't put you on bread and water.  Only if you
don't tell me what you were doing that night there'll
be no birthday and no birthday party--that's all.'  So
at last Bert gave in.  And d'you know what he was
doing?  Holding a prayer-meeting with your George
and that boy of Clowes's next door to your house down
Hulton Street.  Did you know?"

Hilda shook her head bravely.  Officially she did not
know.

"Did you ever hear of such a thing?" exclaimed
Auntie Hamps.

"Yes," proceeded Clara, taking breath for a new
start.  "And Bert's story is that they prayed for a
penknife for your George, and it came.  And then they
prayed for a bicycle for our Bert, but the bicycle didn't
come, and then Bert and George had a fearful
quarrel, and George gave him the penknife--made him have
it--and then said he'd never speak to him any more as
long as he lived.  At first Albert was inclined to thrash
Bert for telling lies and being irreverent, but in the
end he came to the conclusion that at any rate Bert
was telling what he thought to be the truth....  And
that Clowes boy is so *little*! ... Bert wanted his
birthday party of course, but he begged and prayed
us not to ask George.  So in the end we decided we'd
better not, and we let him have his own way.  That's
all there is to it....  So George has said nothing?"

"Not a word," replied Hilda.

"And the Clowes boy is so *little*!" said Clara again.
She went suddenly to the mantelpiece and picked up a
penknife and offered it to Hilda.

"Here's the penknife.  Of course Albert took it off
him."

"Why?" said Hilda ingenuously.

But Clara detected satire and repelled it with a
glance.

"It's not Edwin's penknife, I suppose?" she queried,
in a severe tone.

"No, it isn't.  I've never seen it before.  Why?"

"We were only thinking Edwin might have overheard
the boys and thrown a knife over the wall.  It
would be just like Edwin, that would."

"Oh, no!"  The deceitful Hilda blew away such a
possibility.

"I'm quite sure he didn't," said she, and added
mischievously as she held out the penknife: "I thought
all you folks believed in the efficacy of prayer."

These simple words were never forgiven by Clara.

The next moment, having restored the magic
penknife to the mantelpiece, and gathered up her infant,
she was leading the way to the dining-room.

"Come along, Rupy, my darling," said she.

"'Rupy!'" Hilda privately imitated her, deriding
the absurdity of the diminutive.

"If you ask me," said Auntie Hamps, determined to
save the honour of the family, "it's that little Clowes
monkey that is responsible.  I've been thinking it over
since you told me about it last night, Clara, and I feel
almost sure it must have been that little Clowes monkey."

She was magnificent.  She was no longer a house-keeper
worried about the processes of jam-making, but
a grandiose figure out in the world, a figure symbolic,
upon whom had devolved the duty of keeping up
appearances on behalf of all mankind.



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   III

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The dining-room had not yet begun to move with
the times.  It was rather a shabby apartment,
accustomed to daily ill-treatment, and its contents dated
from different periods, the most ancient object of all
stretching backwards in family history to the epoch
of Albert's great-grandfather.  This was an oak
arm-chair, occupied usually by Albert, but on the present
occasion by his son and heir, Bert.  Bert, spectacled,
was at the head of the table; and at the foot was his
auntie Maggie in front of a tea-tray.  Down the sides
of the table were his sisters, thin Clara, fat Amy, and
little Lucy--the first nearly as old as Bert--and his
father; two crumb-strewn plates showed that the
mother and Rupert had left the meal to greet the
visitors.  And there were two other empty places.  In a
tiny vase in front of Amy was a solitary flower.  The
room was nearly full; it had an odour of cake, tea, and
children.

"Well, here we are," said Clara, entering with the
guests and Rupert, very cheerfully.  "Getting on all
right?"  (She gave Albert a glance which said: "I
have explained everything, but Hilda is a very
peculiar creature.")

"A1," Albert answered.  "Hello, all you aunties!"

"Albert left the works early on purpose," Clara
explained her husband's presence.

He was a happy man.  In early adolescence he had
taken to Sunday Schools as some youths take to vice.
He loved to exert authority over children, and
experience had taught him all the principal dodges.  Under
the forms of benevolent autocracy, he could exercise a
ruthless discipline upon youngsters.  He was not at
all ashamed at being left in charge of a tableful of
children while his wife went forth to conduct
diplomatic interviews.  At the same time he had his pride.
Thus he would express no surprise, nor even pleasure,
at the presence of Hilda, his theory being that it ought
to be taken as a matter of course.  Indeed he was
preoccupied by the management of the meal, and he did
not conceal the fact.  He shook hands with the ladies
in a perfunctory style, which seemed to say: "Now
the supreme matter is this birthday repast.  I am
running it, and I am running it very well.  Slip inobtrusively
into your places in the machine, and let me continue
my work of direction."

Nevertheless, he saw to it that all the children rose
politely and saluted according to approved precedents.
His eye was upon them.  He attached importance to
every little act in any series of little acts.  If he cut
the cake, he had the air of announcing to the world:
"This is a beautiful cake.  I have carefully estimated
the merits of this cake, and mother has carefully
estimated them; we have in fact all come to a definite and
favourable conclusion about this cake,--namely that
it is a beautiful cake.  I will now cut it.  The
operation of cutting it is a major operation.  Watch me cut
it, and then watch me distribute it.  Wisdom and
justice shall preside over the distribution."  Even if he
only passed the salt, he passed it as though he were
passing extreme unction.

Auntie Hamps with apparent delight adapted
herself to his humour.  She said she would "squeeze in"
anywhere, and was soon engaged in finding perfection
in everything that appertained to the Benbow family.
Hilda, not being quite so intimate with the household,
was installed with more ceremony.  She could not keep
out of her eye the idea that it was droll to see a
stoutish, somewhat clay-dusted man neglecting his business
in order to take charge of a birthday-party of small
children; and Albert, observing this, could not keep
out of his eye the rebutting assertion that it was not
in the least droll, but entirely proper and laudable.

The first mention of birthday presents came from
Auntie Hamps, who remarked with enthusiasm that
Bert looked a regular little man in his beautiful new
spectacles.  Bert, glowering, gloomy and yet proud,
and above all self-conscious, grew even more
self-conscious at this statement.  Spectacles had been ordained
for him by the oculist, and his parents had had the
hardihood to offer him his first pair for a birthday
present.  They had so insisted on the beauty and
originality of the scheme that Bert himself had almost come
to believe that to get a pair of spectacles for a
birthday present was a great thing in a boy's life.  He was
now wearing the spectacles for the first time.  On the
whole, gloom outbalanced pride in his demeanour, and
Bert's mysterious soul, which had flabbergasted his
father for about a week, peeped out sidelong occasionally
through those spectacles in bitter criticism of
the institution of parents.  He ate industriously.  Soon
Auntie Hamps, leaning over, rapped half-a-sovereign
down on his sticky plate.  Everybody pretended to be
overwhelmed, though nobody entitled to prophesy had
expected less.  Almost simultaneously with the ring of
the gold on the plate, Clara said:

"Now what do you say?"

But Albert was judiciously benevolent:

"Leave him alone, mother--he'll say it all right."

"I'm sure he will," his mother agreed.

And Bert said it, blushing, and fingering the coin
nervously.  And Auntie Hamps sat like an antique
goddess, bland, superb, morally immense.  And even her
dirty and broken finger-nails detracted naught from her
grandiosity.  She might feed servants on dripping, but
when the proper moment came she could fling
half-sovereigns about with anybody.

And then, opening her purse, Hilda added five shillings
to the half-sovereign, amid admiring exclamations
sincere and insincere.  Beside Auntie Hamps's gold the
two half-crowns cut a poor figure, and therefore Hilda,
almost without discontinuing the gesture of largesse,
said:

"That is from Uncle Edwin.  And this," putting a
florin and three shillings more to the treasure, "is from
Auntie Hilda."

Somehow she was talking as the others talked, and
she disliked herself for yielding to the spirit of the
Benbow home, but she could not help it; the pervading
spirit conquered everybody.  She felt self-conscious;
and Bert's self-consciousness was still further increased
as the exclamations grew in power and sincerity.
Though he experienced the mournful pride of rich
possessions, he knew well that the money would be of no
real value.  His presents, all useful (save a bouquet of
flowers from Rupert), were all useless to him.  Thus the
prim young Clara had been parentally guided to give
him a comb.  If all the combs in the world had been
suddenly annihilated Bert would not have cared,--would
indeed have rejoiced.  And as to the spectacles,
he would have preferred the prospect of total
blindness in middle age to the compulsion of wearing them.
Who can wonder that his father had not fathomed the
mind of the strange creature?

Albert gazed rapt at the beautiful sight of the plate.
It reminded him pleasantly of a collection-plate at the
Sunday School Anniversary sermons.  In a moment the
conversation ran upon savings-bank accounts.  Each
child had a savings-bank account, and their riches were
astounding.  Rupert had an account and was getting
interest at the rate of two and a half per cent on six
pounds ten shillings.  The thriftiness of the elder
children had reached amounts which might be mentioned
with satisfaction even to the luxurious wife of the
richest member of the family.  Young Clara was the
wealthiest of the band.  "I've got the most, haven't I,
fardy?" she said with complacency.  "I've got more
than Bert, haven't I?"  Nobody seemed to know how
it was that she had surpassed Bert, who had had more
birthdays and more Christmases.  The inferiority of
the eldest could not be attributed to dissipation or
improvidence, for none of the children was allowed to
spend a cent.  The savings-bank devoured all, and
never rendered back.  However, Bert was now creeping
up, and his mother exhorted him to do his best in
future.  She then took the money from the plate, and
promised Bert for the morrow the treat of accompanying
her to the Post Office in order to bury it.

A bell rang within the house, and at once young
Clara exclaimed:

"Oh!  There's Flossie!  Oh, my word, she is late,
isn't she, fardy?  What a good thing we didn't wait
tea for her! ... Move up, miss."  This to Lucy.

"People who are late must take the consequences,
especially little girls," said Albert in reply.

And presently Flossie entered, tripping, shrugging
up her shoulders and throwing back her mane, and
wonderfully innocent.

"This is Flossie, who is always late," Albert
introduced her to Hilda.

"Am I really?" said Flossie, in a very low, soft voice,
with a bright and apparently frightened smile.

Dark Flossie was of Amy's age and supposed to be
Amy's particular friend.  She was the daughter of
young Clara's music mistress.  The little girl's prestige
in the Benbow house was due to two causes.  First she
was graceful and rather stylish in movement--qualities
which none of the Benbow children had, though
young Clara was pretty enough; and second her mother
had rather more pupils than she could comfortably
handle, and indeed sometimes refused a pupil.

Flossie with her physical elegance was like a
foreigner among the Benbows.  She had a precocious
demeanour.  She shook hands and embraced like a woman,
and she gave her birthday gift to Bert as if she were
distributing a prize.  It was a lead-pencil, with a
patent sharpener.  Bert would have preferred a
bicycle, but the patent sharpener made an oasis in his
day.  His father pointed out to him that as the pencil
was already sharpened he could not at present use the
sharpener.  Amy thereupon furtively passed him the
stump of a pencil to operate upon, and then his mother
told him that he had better postpone his first
sharpening until he got into the garden, where bits of wood
would not be untidy.  Flossie carefully settled her very
short white skirts on a chair, smiling all the time, and
enquired about two brothers whom she had been told
were to be among the guests.  Albert informed her with
solemnity that these two brothers were both down with
measles, and that Auntie Hamps and Auntie Hilda had
come to make up for their absence.

"Poor things!" murmured Flossie sympathetically.

Hilda laughed, and Flossie screwing up her eyes and
shrugging up her shoulders laughed too, as if saying:
"You and I alone understand me."

"What a pretty flower!" Flossie exclaimed, in her
low soft voice, indicating the flower in the vase in front
of Amy.

"There's half a crumb left," said Albert, passing the
cake-plate to Flossie carefully.  "We thought we'd
better keep it for you, though we don't reckon to keep
anything for little girls that come late."

"Amy," whispered her mother, leaning towards the
fat girl.  "Wouldn't it be nice of you to give your
flower to Flossie?"  Amy started.

"I don't want to," she whispered back, flushing.

The flower was a gift to Amy from Bert, out of the
birthday bunch presented to him by Rupert.
Mysterious relations existed between Bert and the
benignant, acquiescent Amy.

"Oh!  Amy!" her mother protested, still whispering,
but shocked.

Tears came into Amy's eyes.  These tears Amy at
length wiped away, and, straightening her face, offered
the flower with stiff outstretched arm to her friend
Flossie.  And Flossie smilingly accepted it.

"It *is* kind of you, you darling!" said Flossie, and
stuck the flower in an interstice of her embroidered
pinafore.

Amy, gravely lacking in self-control, began to
whimper again.

"That's my good little girl!" muttered Clara to her,
exhibiting pride in her daughter's victory over self,
and rubbed the child's eyes with her handkerchief.  The
parents were continually thus "bringing up" their
children.  Hilda pressed her lips together.

Immediately afterwards it was noticed that Flossie
was no longer eating.

"I've had quite enough, thank you," said she in
answer to expostulations.

"No jam, even?  And you've not finished your tea!"

"I've had quite enough, thank you," said she, and
folded up her napkin.

"Please, father, can we go and play in the garden
now?" Bert asked.

Albert looked at his wife.

"Yes, I think they might," said Clara.  "Go and
play nicely."  They all rose.

"Now quietly, qui-etly!" Albert warned them.

And they went from the room quietly, each in his
own fashion,--Flossie like a modest tsarina, young
Clara full of virtue and holding Rupert by the hand,
Amy lumpily, tiny Lucy as one who had too soon been
robbed of the privilege of being the youngest, and Bert
in the rear like a criminal who is observed in a
suspicious act.  And Albert blew out wind, as if getting
rid of a great weight.



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   IV

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"Finished your greengage, auntie?" asked Clara,
after the pause which ensued while the adults were
accustoming themselves to the absence of the children.

And it was Maggie who answered, rather eagerly:

"No, she hasn't.  She's left it to the tender mercies
of that Maria.  She wouldn't let me stay, and she
wouldn't stay herself."

These were almost the first words, save murmurings
as to cups of tea, quantities of sugar and of milk, etc.,
that the taciturn Maggie had uttered since Hilda's
arrival.  She was not sulky, she had merely been devoting
herself and allowing herself to be exploited, in the
vacuous manner customary to her,--and listening
receptively--or perhaps not even receptively--offering
no remark.  Save that the smooth-working mechanism
of the repast would have creaked and stopped at her
departure, she might have slipped from the room
unnoticed as a cat.  But now she spoke as one capable
of enthusiasm and resentment on behalf of an ideal.
To her it was scandalous that greengage jam should be
jeopardised for the sake of social pleasures, and
suddenly it became evident she and her auntie had had a
difference on the matter.

Mrs. Hamps said stoutly and defiantly, with grandeur:

"Well, I wasn't going to have my eldest grand-nephew's
twelfth birthday party interfered with for
any jam."

"Hear, hear!" said Hilda, liking the terrific woman
for an instant.

But mild Maggie was inflexible.

Clara, knowing that in Maggie very slight symptoms
had enormous significance, at once changed the
subject.  Albert went to the back window, whence by
twisting his neck he could descry a corner of the garden.

Said Clara, smiling:

"I hear you're going to have some *musical evenings*,
Hilda ... on Sunday nights."

Malice and ridicule were in Clara's tone.  On the
phrase "musical evenings" she put a strange disdainful
emphasis, as though a musical evening denoted something
not only unrighteous but snobbish, new-fangled,
and absurd.  Yet envy also was in her tone.

Hilda was startled.

"Ah!  Who told you that?"

"Never mind!  I heard," said Clara darkly.

Hilda wondered where the Benbows, from whom seemingly
naught could be concealed, had in fact got this
tit-bit of news.  By tacit consent she and Edwin had
as yet said nothing to anybody except the Orgreaves,
who alone, with Tertius Ingpen and one or two more
intimates, were invited, or were to be invited, to the
first evening.  Relations between the Orgreaves and the
Benbows scarcely existed.

"We're having a little music on Sunday night," said
Hilda, as it were apologetically, and scorning herself
for being apologetic.  Why should she be apologetic to
these base creatures?  But she couldn't help it; the
public opinion of the room was too much for her.  She
even added: "We're hoping that old Mrs. Orgreave
will come.  It will be the first time she's been out in
the evening for ever so long."  The name of Mrs. Orgreave
was calculated by Hilda to overawe them and stop their mouths.

No name, however, could overawe Mrs. Hamps.  She
smiled kindly, and with respect for the caprices of others;
she spoke in a tone exceptionally polite,--but what she
said was: "I'm sorry ... I'm sorry."

The deliverance was final.  Auntie Hamps was
almost as deeply moved about the approaching desecration
of the Sabbath as Maggie had been about the casual
treatment of jam.  In earlier years she would have said
a great deal more--just as in earlier years she would
have punctuated Bert's birthday mouthfuls with descants
upon the excellence of his parents and moral exhortations
to himself; but Auntie Hamps was growing older,
and quieter, and "I'm sorry ... I'm sorry" meant much
from her.

Hilda became sad, disgusted, indignant, moody.  The
breach which separated her and Edwin from the rest of
the family was enormous, as might be seen in the mere
fact that they had never for a moment contemplated
asking anybody in the family to the musical evening, nor
had the family ever dreamed of an invitation.  It was
astonishing that Edwin should be so different from the
others.  But after all, was he?  She could see in him
sometimes bits of Maggie, of Clara, and even of the
Unspeakable.  She was conscious of her grievances
against Edwin.  Among these was that he never, or
scarcely ever, praised her.  At moments, when she had
tried hard, she felt a great need of praise.  But Edwin
would watch her critically, with the damnable grim
detachment of the Five Towns towards a stranger or
a returned exile.

As she sat in the stuffy dining-room of the Benbows,
surrounded by hostilities and incomprehensions, she had
a sensation of unreality, or at any rate of a vast
mistake.  Why was she there?  Was she not tied by
intimate experience to a man at that very instant in
prison?  (She had a fearful vision of him in prison,--she,
sitting there in the midst of Maggie, Clara, and
Auntie Hamps!)  Was she not the mother of an
illegitimate boy?  Victimised or not, innocent or not, she,
a guest at Bert's intensely legitimate birthday fête,
was the mother of an illegitimate boy.  Incredible!  She
ought never to have married into the Clayhangers,
never to have come back to this cackling provincial
district.  All these people were inimical towards
her,--because she represented the luxury and riches and
worldly splendour of the family, and because her
illegitimate boy had tempted the heir of the Benbows
to blasphemous wickedness, and because she herself had
tempted a weak Edwin to abandon chapel and to
desecrate the Sabbath, and again because she, without a
penny of her own, had stepped in and now represented
the luxury and riches and worldly splendour of the
family.  And all the family's grievances against
Edwin were also grievances against her.  Once, long ago,
when he was yet a bachelor, and had no hope of Hilda,
Edwin had prevented his father, in dotage, from
lending a thousand pounds to Albert upon no security.
The interference was unpardonable, and Hilda would
not be pardoned for it.

Such was marriage into a family.  Such was family
life....  Yes, she felt unreal there, and also unsafe.
She had prevaricated about George and the penknife;
and she had allowed Clara to remain under the
impression that her visit to the house was a birthday visit.
Auntie Hamps and destiny, between them, would lay
bare all this lying.  The antipathy against her would
increase.  But let it increase never so much, it still
would not equal Hilda's against the family, as she
thrilled to it then.  Their narrow ignorance, their
narrow self-conceit, their detestation of beauty, their
pietism, their bigotry--revolted her.  In what century had
they been living all those years?  Was this married
life?  Had Albert and Clara ever felt a moment of
mutual passion?  They were nothing but parents,
eternally preoccupied with "oughts" and "ought nots" and
forbiddances and horrid reluctant permissions.  They
did not know what joy was, and they did not want
anybody else to know what joy was.  Even on the outskirts
of such a family, a musical evening on a Sunday night
appeared a forlorn enterprise.  And all the families in
all the streets were the same.  Hilda was hard enough
on George sometimes, but in that moment she would
have preferred George to be a thoroughly bad rude
boy and to go to the devil, and herself to be a woman
abandoned to every licence, rather than that he and
she should resemble Clara and her offspring.  All her
wrath centred upon Clara as the very symbol of what
she loathed.

"Hello!" cried the watchful Albert from the window.
"What's happening, I wonder?"

In a moment Rupert ran into the room, and without
a word scrambled on his mother's lap, absolutely
confident in her goodness and power.

"What's amiss, tuppenny?" asked his father.

"Tired," answered Rupert, with a faint, endearing smile.

He laid himself close against his mother's breast,
and drew up his knees, and Clara held his body in her
arms, and whispered to him.

"Amy 'udn't play with me," he murmured.

"Wouldn't she?  Naughty Amy!"

"Mammy tired too," he glanced upwards at his
mother's eyes in sympathy.

And immediately he was asleep.  Clara kissed him,
bending her head down and with difficulty reaching his
cheek with her lips.

Auntie Hamps enquired fondly:

"What does he mean--'mother tired too'?"

"Well," said Clara, "the fact is some of 'em were
so excited they stopped my afternoon sleep this
afternoon.  I always do have my nap, you know,"--she
looked at Hilda.  "In here!  When this door's closed
they know mother mustn't be disturbed.  Only this
afternoon Lucy or Amy--I don't know which, and I didn't
enquire too closely--forgot....  He's remembered it,
the little Turk."

"Is he asleep?" Hilda demanded in a low voice.

"Fast.  He's been like that lately.  He'll play a bit,
and then he'll stop, and say he's tired, and sometimes
cry, and he'll come to me and be asleep in two jiffs.
I think he's been a bit run down.  He said he had
toothache yesterday.  It was nothing but a little cold;
they've all had colds; but I wrapped his face up to
please him.  He looked so sweet in his bandage, I
assure you I didn't want to take it off again.  No, I
didn't....  I wonder why Amy wouldn't play with
him?  She's such a splendid playmate--when she likes.
Full of imagination!  Simply full of it!"

Albert had approached from the window.

With an air of important conviction, he said to Hilda:

"Yes, Amy's imagination is really remarkable."  As
no one responded to this statement, he drummed on
the table to ease the silence, and then suddenly added:
"Well, I suppose I must be getting on with my
dictionary reading!  I'm only at S; and there's bound
to be a lot of words under U--beginning with *un*,
you know.  I saw at once there would be."  He spoke
rather defiantly, as though challenging public opinion
to condemn his new dubious activity.

"Oh!" said Clara.  "Albert's quite taken up with
missing words nowadays."

But instead of conning his dictionary, Albert
returned to the window, drawn by his inexhaustible
paternal curiosity, and he even opened the window and
leaned out, so that he might more effectively watch
the garden.  And with the fresh air there entered
the high, gay, inspiriting voices of the children.

Clara smiled down at the boy sleeping in her lap.
She was happy.  The child was happy.  His flushed face,
with its expression of loving innocence, was exquisitely
touching.  Clara's face was full of proud tenderness.
Everybody gazed at the picture with secret and
profound pleasure.  Hilda wished once more that George
was only two and a half years old again.  George's
infancy, and her early motherhood, had been very
different from all this.  She had never been able to shut
a dining-room door, or any other door, as a sign that
she must not be disturbed.  And certainly George
had never sympathetically remarked that she was tired....
She was envious....  And yet a minute ago she
had been execrating the family life of the Benbows.
The complexity of the tissue of existence was puzzling.



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   V

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When Albert brought his head once more into the
room he suddenly discovered the stuffiness of the
atmosphere, and with the large, free gestures of a
mountaineer and a sanitarian threw open both windows as
wide as possible.  The bleak wind from the moorlands
surged in, fluttering curtains, and lowering the
temperature at a run.

"Won't Rupert catch cold?" Hilda suggested, chilled.

"He's got to be hardened, Rupert has!" Albert
replied easily.  "Fresh air!  Nothing like it!  Does
'em good to feel it!"

Hilda thought:

"Pity you didn't think so a bit earlier!"

Her countenance was too expressive.  Albert divined
some ironic thought in her brain, and turned on her
with a sort of parrying jeer:

"And how's the great man getting along?"

In this phrase, which both he and Clara employed
with increasing frequency, Albert let out not only his
jealousy of, but his respect for, the head of the family.
Hilda did not like it, but it flattered her on Edwin's
behalf, and she never showed her resentment of the
attitude which prompted it.

"Edwin?  Oh, he's all right.  He's working."  She
put a slight emphasis on the last pronoun, in order
revengefully to contrast Edwin's industry with Albert's
presence during business hours at a children's birthday
party.  "He said to me as he went out that he must
go and earn something towards Maggie's rent."  She
laughed softly.

Clara smiled cautiously; Maggie smiled and blushed
a little; Albert did not commit himself; only Auntie
Hamps laughed without reserve.

"Edwin will have his joke," said she.

Although Hilda had audaciously gone forth that
afternoon with the express intention of opening
negotiations, on her own initiative, with Maggie for
the purchase of the house, she had certainly not
meant to discuss the matter in the presence of the
entire family.  But she was seized by one of her
characteristic impulses, and she gave herself up to
it with the usual mixture of glee and apprehension.
She said:

"I suppose you wouldn't care to sell us the house,
would you, Maggie?"

Everybody became alert, and as it grew apparent
that the company was assisting at the actual birth of
a family episode or incident, a peculiar feeling of
eager pleasure spread through the room, and the
appetite for history-making leapt up.

"Indeed I should!" Maggie answered, with a deepening
flush, and all were astonished at her decisiveness,
and at the warmth of her tone.  "I never wanted the
house.  Only it was arranged that I should have it, so
of course I took it."  The long-silent victim was
speaking.  Money was useless to her, for she was incapable
of turning it into happiness; but she had her views
on finance and property, nevertheless; and though in
all such matters she did as she was told, submissively
accepting the decisions of brother or brother-in-law
as decrees of fate, yet she was quite aware of the
victimhood.  The assemblage was surprised and even
a little intimidated by her mild outburst.

"But you've got a very good tenant, Maggie," said
Auntie Hamps enthusiastically.

"She's got a very good tenant, admitted!" Albert
said judicially and almost sternly.  "But she'd never
have any difficulty in finding a very good tenant for
that house.  That's not the point.  The point is that
the investment really isn't remunerative.  Maggie could
do much better for herself than that.  Very much
better.  Why, if she went the right way about it she
could get ten per cent on her money!  I know of
things....  And I bet she doesn't get three and a
half per cent clear from the house.  Not three and
a half."  He glanced reproachfully at Hilda.

"Do you mean the rent's too low?" Hilda questioned
boldly.

He hesitated, losing courage.

"I don't say it's too low.  But Maggie perhaps took
the house over at too big a figure."

Maggie looked up at her brother-in-law.

"And whose fault was that?" she asked sharply.
The general surprise was intensified.  No one could
understand Maggie.  No one had the wit to perceive
that she had been truly annoyed by Auntie Hamps's
negligence in regard to jam, and was momentarily
capable of bitterness.  "Whose fault was that?" she
repeated.  "You and Clara and Edwin settled it
between you.  You yourself said over and over again it
was a fair figure."

"I thought so at the time!  I thought so at the
time!" said Albert quickly.  "We all acted for the
best."

"I'm sure you did," murmured Auntie Hamps.

"I should think so, indeed!" murmured Clara,
seeking to disguise her constraint by attentions to the
sleeping Rupert.

"Is Edwin thinking of buying, then?" Albert asked
Hilda in a quiet, studiously careless voice.

"We've discussed it," responded Hilda.

"Because if he is, he ought to take it over at the
price Mag took it at.  She oughtn't to lose on it.
That's only fair."

"I'm sure Edwin would never do anything unfair,"
said Auntie Hamps.

Hilda made no reply.  She had already heard the
argument from Edwin, and Albert now seemed to her
more tedious and unprincipled than usual.  Her
reason admitted the force of the argument as regards
Maggie, but instinct opposed it.

Nevertheless she was conscious of sudden sympathy
for Maggie, and of a weakening of her prejudice against
her.

"Hadn't we better be going, Auntie?" Maggie curtly
and reproachfully suggested.  "You know quite well
that jam stands a good chance of being ruined."

"I suppose we had," Auntie Hamps concurred with
a sigh, and rose.

"I shall be able to carry out my plan," thought
Hilda, full of wisdom and triumph.  And she saw
Edwin, owner of the house, with his wild lithographic
project scotched.  And the realisation of her own
sagacity thus exercised on behalf of those she loved,
made her glad.

At the same moment, just as Albert was recommencing
his flow, the door opened and Edwin entered.  He
had glimpsed the children in the garden and had come
into the house by the back way.  There were cries of
stupefaction and bliss.  Both Albert and Clara were
unmistakably startled and flattered.  Indeed, several
seconds elapsed before Albert could assume the proper
grim, casual air.  Auntie Hamps rejoiced and sat down
again.  Maggie disclosed no feeling, and she would not
sit down again.  Hilda had a serious qualm.  She was
obliged to persuade herself that in opening the
negotiations for the house she had not committed an
enormity.  She felt less sagacious and less dominant.  Who
could have dreamt that Edwin would pop in just then?
It was notorious, it was even a subject of complaint,
that he never popped in.  In reply to enquiries he
stammered in his customary hesitating way that he
happened to be in the neighbourhood on business and
that it had occurred to him, etc., etc.  In short, there
he was.

"Aren't you coming, Auntie?" Maggie demanded.

"Let me have a look at Edwin, child," said Auntie
Hamps, somewhat nettled.  "How set you are!"

"Then I shall go alone," said Maggie.

"Yes.  But what about this house business?"  Albert
tried to stop her.

He could not stop her.  Finance, houses, rents, were
not real to her.  She owned but did not possess such
things.  But the endangered jam was real to her.  She
did not own it, but she possessed it.  She departed.

"What's amiss with her to-day?" murmured Mrs. Hamps.
"I must go too, or I shall be catching it;
my word I shall!"

"What house business?" Edwin asked.

"Well," said Albert.  "I like that!  Aren't you
trying to buy her house from her?  We've just been
talking it over."

Edwin glanced swiftly at Hilda, and Hilda knew
from the peculiar constrained, almost shamefaced,
expression on his features, that he was extremely
annoyed.  He gave a little nervous laugh.

"Oh!  Have ye?" he muttered.



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   VI

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Although Edwin discussed the purchase of the house
quite calmly with Albert, and appeared to regard it as
an affair practically settled, Hilda could perceive from
a single gesture of his in the lobby as they were
leaving, that his resentment against herself had not been
diminished by the smooth course of talking.  Nevertheless
she was considerably startled by his outburst in
the street.

"It's a pity Maggie went off like that," she said
quietly.  "You might have fixed everything up immediately."

Then it was that he turned on her, glowering angrily.

"Why on earth did you go talking about it, without
telling me first?" he demanded, furious.

"But it was understood, dear----"  She smiled,
affecting not to perceive his temper, and thereby
aggravating it.

He almost shouted:

"Nothing of the kind!  Nothing of the kind!"

"Maggie was there.  I just happened to mention
it."  Hilda was still quite placid.

"You went down on purpose to tell her, so you
needn't deny it.  Do you take me for a fool?"

Her placidity was undiminished.

"Of course I don't take you for a fool, dear.  I
assure you I hadn't the slightest idea you'd be annoyed."

"Yes, you had.  I could see it on your face when I
came in.  Don't try to stuff me up.  You go blundering
into a thing, without the least notion--without
the least notion!  I've told you before, and I tell you
again--I won't have you interfering in my business
affairs.  You know nothing of business.  You'll make
my life impossible.  All you women are the same.  You
will poke your noses in.  There'll have to be a clear
understanding between you and me on one or two
points, before we go much further."

"But you told me I could mention it to her."

"No, I didn't."

"You did, Edwin.  Do be just."

"I didn't say you could go and plunge right into it
at once.  These things have to be thought out.  Houses
aren't bought like that.  A house isn't a pound of tea,
and it isn't a hat."

"I'm very sorry."

"No, you aren't.  And you know jolly well you
aren't.  Your scheme was simply to tie my hands."

She knew the truth of this, and her smile became
queer.  Nevertheless the amiable calm which she
maintained astonished even herself.  She was not happy,
but certainly she was not unhappy.  She had got, or
she was going to get, what she wanted; and here was
the only fact important to her; the means by which
she had got it, or was going to get it, were negligible
now.  It cost her very little to be magnanimous.  She
wondered at Edwin.  Was this furious brute the timid,
worshipping boy who had so marvellously kissed her
a dozen years earlier--before she had fallen into the
hands of a scoundrel?  Were these scenes what the
exquisite romance of marriage had come to? ... Well,
and if it was so, what then?  If she was not happy
she was elated, and she was philosophic, and she had
the terrific sense of realities of some of her sex.  She
was out of the Benbow house; she breathed free, she
had triumphed, and she had her man to herself.  He
might be a brute--the Five Towns (she had noticed
as a returned exile) were full of brutes whose passions
surged and boiled beneath the phlegmatic surface--but
he existed, and their love existed.  And a peep
into the depth of the cauldron was exciting....  The
injustice or the justice of his behaviour did not make
a live question.

Moreover, she did not in truth seriously regard him
as a brute.  She regarded him as an unreasonable
creature, something like a baby, to be humoured in the
inessentials of a matter of which the essentials were
now definitely in her favour.  His taunt that she went
blundering into a thing, and that she knew naught of
business, amused her.  She knew her own business,
and knew it profoundly.  The actual situation was a
proof of that.  As for abstract principles of business,
the conventions and etiquette of it--her lips
condescendingly curled.  After all, what had she done to
merit this fury?  Nothing!  Nothing!  What could it
matter whether the negotiations were begun instantly
or in a week's or a month's time?  (Edwin would have
dilly-dallied probably for three months, or six).  She
had merely said a few harmless words, offered a
suggestion.  And now he desired to tear her limb from
limb and eat her alive.  It was comical!  Impossible
for her to be angry, in her triumph!  It was too
comical!  She had married an astounding personage....
But she had married him.  He was hers.  She
exulted in the possession of him.  His absurd peculiarities
did not lower him in her esteem.  She had a perfect
appreciation of his points, including his general
wisdom.  But she was convinced that she had a special
and different and superior kind of wisdom.

"And a nice thing you've let Maggie in for!" Edwin
broke out afresh after a spell of silent walking.

"Let Maggie in for?" she exclaimed lightly.

"Albert ought never to have known anything of it
until it was all settled.  He will be yarning away to her
about how he can use her money for her, and what he
gets hold of she'll never see again,--you may bet your
boots on that.  If you'd left it to me I could have fixed
things up for her in advance.  But no!  In you must
go!  Up to the neck!  And ruin everything!"

"Oh!" she said reassuringly.  "You'll be able to look
after Maggie all right."

He sniffed, and settled down into embittered disgust,
quickening somewhat his speed up the slope of Acre
Lane.

"Please don't walk so fast, Edwin," she breathed,
just like a nice little girl.  "I can't keep up with you."

In spite of his enormous anger he could not refuse
such a request.  She was getting the better of him
again.  He knew it; he could see through the devices.
With an irritated swing of his body he slowed down to
suit her.

She had a glimpse of his set, gloomy, savage,
ruthless face, the lower lip bulging out.  Really it was
grotesque!  Were they grown up, he and she?  She smiled
almost self-consciously, fearing that passers-by might
notice his preposterous condition.  All the way up Acre
Lane and across by St. Luke's Churchyard into
Trafalgar Road they walked thus side by side in silence.
By strange good luck they did not meet a single
acquaintance, and as Edwin had a latchkey, no servant
had to come and open the door and behold them.

Edwin, throwing his hat on the stand, ran immediately
upstairs.  Hilda passed idly into the drawing-room.
She was glad to be in her own drawing-room
again.  It was a distinguished apartment, after
Clara's.  There lay the Dvorak music on the piano....
The atmosphere seemed full of ozone.  She rang
for Ada and spoke to her with charming friendliness
about Master George.  Master George had returned
from an informal cricket match in the Manor Fields,
and was in the garden.  Yes, Ada had seen to his
school-clothes.  Everything was in order for the new
term shortly to commence.  But Master George had
received a blow from the cricket-ball on his shin, which
was black and blue....  Had Ada done anything to
the shin?  No, Master George would not let her touch
it, but she had been allowed to see it....  Very well,
Ada....  There was something beatific about the
state of being mistress of a house.  Without the
mistress, the house would simply crumble to pieces.

Hilda went upstairs; she was apprehensive, but her
apprehensiveness was agreeable to her....  No,
Edwin was not in the bedroom....  She could hear him
in the bathroom.  She tried the door.  It was bolted.
He always bolted it.

"Edwin!"

"What is it?"

He opened the door.  He was in his shirt sleeves
and had just finished with the towel.  She entered, and
shut the door and bolted it.  And then she began
to kiss him.  She kissed him time after time, on his
cheek so damp and fresh.

"Poor dear!" she murmured.

She knew that he could not altogether resist those
repeated kisses.  They were more effective than the
best arguments or the most graceful articulate
surrenders.  Thus she completed her triumph.  But
whether the virtue of the kisses lay in their sensuousness
or in their sentiment, neither he nor she knew.
And she did not care....  She did not kiss him with
abandonment.  There was a reserve in her kisses, and
in her smile.  Indeed she went on kissing him rather
sternly.  Her glance, when their eyes were very close
together, was curious.  It seemed to imply: "We are
in love.  And we love.  I am yours.  You are mine.
Life is very fine after all.  I am a happy woman.  But
still--*each is for himself in this world*, and that's the
bedrock of marriage as of all other institutions."  Her
sense of realities again!  And she went on kissing,
irresistibly.

"Kiss me."

And he had to kiss her.

Whereupon she softened to him, and abandoned
herself to the emanations of his charm, and her lips
became almost liquid as she kissed him again;
nevertheless there was still a slight reserve in her kisses.

At tea she chattered like a magpie, as the saying is.
Between her and George there seemed to be a secret
instinctive understanding that Edwin had to be
humoured, enlivened, drawn into talk,--for although he
had kissed her, his mood was yet by no means restored
to the normal.  He would have liked to remain,
majestic, within the tent of his soul.  But they were too
clever for him.  Then, to achieve his discomfiture,
entered Johnnie Orgreave, with a suggestion that they
should all four--Edwin, Hilda, Janet, and himself--go
to the theatre at Hanbridge that night.  Hilda
accepted the idea instantly.  Since her marriage, her
appetite for pleasure had developed enormously.  At
moments she was positively greedy for pleasure.  She
was incapable of being bored at the theatre, she would
sooner be in the theatre of a night than out of it.

"Oh!  Do let's go!" she cried.

Edwin did not want to go, but he had to concur.  He
did not want to be pleasant to Johnnie Orgreave or to
anybody, but he had to be pleasant.

"Be on the first car that goes up after seven fifteen,"
said Johnnie as he was departing.

Edwin grunted.

"You understand, Teddy?  The first car that goes
up after seven fifteen."

"All right!  All right!"

Blithely Hilda went to beautify herself.  And when
she had beautified herself and made herself into a queen
of whom the haughtiest master-printer might be proud,
she despatched Ada for Master George.  And Master
George had to come to her bedroom.

"Let me look at that leg," she said.  "Sit down."

Devious creature!  During tea she had not even
divulged that she had heard of the damaged shin.
Master George was taken by surprise.  He sat down.  She
knelt, and herself unloosed the stocking and exposed
the little calf.  The place was black and blue, but it
had a healthy look.

"It's nothing," she said.

And then, all in her splendid finery, she kissed the
dirty discoloured shin.  Strange!  He was only two
years old and just learning to talk.

"Now then, missis!  Here's the tram!" Edwin yelled
out loudly, roughly, from below.  He would have given
a sovereign to see her miss the car, but his
inconvenient sense of justice forced him to warn her.

"Coming!  Coming!"

She kissed Master George on the mouth eagerly, and
George seemed, unusually, to return the eagerness.  She
ran down the darkening stairs, ecstatic.

In the dusky road, Edwin curtly signalled to the vast
ascending steam-car, and it stopped.  Those were in
the old days, when people did what they liked with the
cars, stopping them here and stopping them there
according to their fancy.  The era of electricity and fixed
stopping-places, and soulless, conscienceless control
from London had not set in.  Edwin and Hilda
mounted.  Two hundred yards further on the
steam-tram was once more arrested, and Johnnie and Janet
joined them.  Hilda was in the highest spirits.  The
great affair of the afternoon had not been a quarrel,
but an animating experience which, though dangerous,
intensified her self-confidence and her zest.





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.. _`THE WEEK-END`:

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   CHAPTER IX


.. class:: center medium

   THE WEEK-END

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

The events of the portentous week-end which
included the musical evening began early on the
Saturday, and the first one was a chance word uttered by
George.

Breakfast was nearly over in the Clayhanger
dining-room.  Hilda sat opposite to Edwin, and George
between them.  They had all eaten with appetite, and the
disillusion which usually accompanies the satisfaction
of desire was upon them.  They had looked forward to
breakfast, scenting with zest its pleasing odours, and
breakfast was over, save perhaps for a final unnecessary
piece of toast or half a cup of chilled coffee.

Hilda did not want to move, because she did not
care for the Saturday morning task of shopping and
re-victualling and being bland with fellow-shoppers in
the emporiums.  The house-doors were too frequently
open on Saturday mornings, and errand-boys thereat,
and a wind blowing through the house, and it was the
morning for specially cleaning the hall--detestable
and damp operation--and servants seemed loose on
Saturday morning, and dinner was apt to be late.  But
Hilda knew she would have to move.  To postpone was
only to aggravate.  Destiny grasped her firm.  George
was not keen about moving, because he had no plan of
campaign; the desolating prospect of resuming school
on Monday had withered his energy; he was in a mood
to be either a martyr or a villain.  Edwin was lazily
sardonic, partly because the leisure of breakfast was
at an end, partly because he hated the wage-paying
slackness of Saturday morning at the shop, and partly
because his relations with Hilda had remained
indefinite and disquieting, despite a thousand mutual
urbanities and thoughtful refinements, and even some
caresses.  A sense of aimlessness dejected him; and in
the central caves of his brain the question was
mysteriously stirring: What is the use of all these
things,--success, dignity, importance, luxury, love,
sensuality, order, moral superiority?  He foresaw thirty
years of breakfasts, with plenty of the finest
home-cured bacon and fresh eggs, but no romance.

Before his marriage he used to read the paper
honestly and rudely at breakfast.  That is to say, he would
prop it up squarely in front of him, hiding his sister
Maggie, and anyhow ignoring her; and Maggie had to
"like it or lump it"; she probably lumped it.  But upon
marriage he had become a chevalier; he had nobly
decided that it was not correct to put a newspaper
between yourself and a woman who had denied you
nothing.  Nevertheless, his appetite for newspapers being
almost equal to his appetite for bacon, he would still
take nips at the newspaper during breakfast, hold it
in one hand, glance at it, drop it, pick it up, talk
amiably while glancing at it, drop it, pick it up again.
So long as the newspaper was held aside and did not
touch the table, so long as he did not read more than
ten lines at a time, he considered that punctilio was
satisfied, and that he was not in fact reading the
newspaper at all.  But towards the end of breakfast, when
the last food was disappearing, and he had lapped the
cream off the news, he would hold the newspaper in both
hands--and brazenly and conscientiously read.  His
chief interest, just then, was political.  Like most
members of his party, he was endeavouring to decipher the
party programme and not succeeding, and he feared for
his party and was a little ashamed for it.  Grave events
had occurred.  The substructure of the state was
rocking.  A newly elected supporter of the Government,
unaware that he was being admitted to the best club
in London, had gone to the House of Commons in a
tweed cap and preceded by a brass-band.  Serious
pillars of society knew that the time had come to invest
their savings abroad.  Edwin, with many another
ardent liberal, was seeking to persuade himself that
everything was all right after all.  The domestic
atmosphere--Hilda's baffling face, the emptied table, the shadow
of business, repletion, early symptoms of indigestion,
the sound of a slop-pail in the hall--did not aid him to
optimism.  In brief the morning was a fair specimen
of a kind of morning that seemed likely to be for him
an average morning.

"Can't I leave the table, mother?" asked George
discontentedly.

Hilda nodded.

George gave a coarse sound of glee.

"George! ... That's so unlike you!" his mother
frowned.

Instead of going directly towards the door, he must
needs pass right round the table, behind the chair of
his occupied uncle.  As he did so, he scanned the
newspaper and read out loudly in passing for the benefit
of the room:

"'Local Divorce Case.  Etches v. Etches.  Painful
details.'"

The words meant nothing to George.  They had
happened to catch his eye.  He read them as he might have
read an extract from the books of Euclid, and noisily
and ostentatiously departed, not without a further
protest from Hilda.

And Edwin and Hilda, left alone together, were
self-conscious.

"Lively kid!" murmured Edwin self-consciously.

And Hilda, self-consciously:

"You never told me that case was on."

"I didn't know till I saw it here."

"What's the result?"

"Not finished....  Here you are, if you want to
read it."

He handed the sheet across the table.  Despite his
serious interest in politics he had read the report
before anything else.  Etches v. Etches, indeed,
surpassed Gladstonian politics as an aid to the dubious
prosperity of the very young morning newspaper,
which represented the latest and most original attempt
to challenge the journalistic monopoly of the
afternoon *Staffordshire Signal*.  It lived scarcely longer
than the divorce case, for the proprietors, though
Non-conformists and therefore astute, had failed to foresee
that the Five Towns public would not wait for racing
results until the next morning.

"Thanks," Hilda amiably and negligently murmured.

Edwin hummed.

Useless for Hilda to take that casual tone!  Useless
for Edwin to hum!  The unconcealable thought in both
their minds was--and each could divine the other's
thought and almost hear its vibration:

"We might end in the divorce court, too."

Hence their self-consciousness.

The thought was absurd, irrational, indefensible,
shocking, it had no father and no mother, it sprang
out of naught; but it existed, and it had force enough
to make them uncomfortable.

The Etches couple, belonging to the great, numerous,
wealthy, and respectable family of Etches, had
been married barely a year.

Edwin rose and glanced at his well-tended fingernails.
The pleasant animation of his skin caused by
the bath was still perceptible.  He could feel it in his
back, and it helped his conviction of virtue.  He chose
a cigarette out of his silver case,--a good cigarette, a
good case--and lit it, and waved the match into
extinction, and puffed out much smoke, and regarded
the correctness of the crease in his trousers (the
vertical trouser-crease having recently been introduced
into the district and insisted on by that tailor and
artist and seeker after perfection, Shillitoe), and
walked firmly to the door.  But the self-consciousness
remained.

Just as he reached the door, his wife, gazing at the
newspaper, stopped him:

"Edwin."

"What's up?"

He did not move from the door, and she did not look
up from the newspaper.

"Seen your friend Big James this morning?"

Edwin usually went down to business before breakfast,
so that his conscience might be free for a leisurely
meal at nine o'clock.  Big James was the oldest
employee in the business.  Originally he had been
foreman compositor, and was still technically so described,
but in fact he was general manager and Edwin's
majestic vicegerent in all the printing-shops.  "Ask Big
James," was the watchword of the whole organism.

"No," said Edwin.  "Why?"

"Oh, nothing!  It doesn't matter."

Edwin had made certain resolutions about his
temper, but it seemed to him that such a reply justified
annoyance, and he therefore permitted himself to be
annoyed, failing to see that serenity is a positive
virtue only when there is justification for annoyance.
The nincompoop had not even begun to perceive that
what is called "right-living" means the acceptance of
injustice and the excusing of the inexcusable.

"Now then," he said, brusquely.  "Out with it."  But
there was still a trace of rough tolerance in his voice.

"No.  It's all right.  I was wrong to mention it."

Her admission of sin did not in the least placate him.

He advanced towards the table.

"You haven't mentioned it," he said stiffly.

Their eyes met, as Hilda's quitted the newspaper.
He could not read hers.  She seemed very calm.  He
thought as he looked at her: "How strange it is that
I should be living with this woman!  What is she to
me?  What do I know of her?"

She said with tranquillity:

"If you do see Big James you might tell him not
to trouble himself about that programme."

"Programme?  What programme?" he asked, startled.

"Oh!  Edwin!" She gave a little laugh.  "The
musical evening programme, of course.  Aren't we having
a musical evening to-morrow night?"

More justification for annoyance!  Why should she
confuse the situation by pretending that he had
forgotten the musical evening?  The pretence was idiotic,
deceiving no one.  The musical evening was constantly
being mentioned.

Reports of assiduous practising had reached them;
and on the previous night they had had quite a
subdued altercation over a proposal of Hilda's for
altering the furniture in the drawing-room.

"This is the first I've heard of any programme," said
Edwin.  "Do you mean a printed programme?"

Of course she could mean nothing else.  He was
absolutely staggered at the idea that she had been down
to his works, without a word to him, and given orders
to Big James, or even talked to Big James, about a
programme.  She had no remorse.  She had no sense of
danger.  Had she the slightest conception of what
business was?  Imagine Maggie attempting such a thing!
It was simply not conceivable.  A wife going to her
husband's works, and behind his back giving
orders----!  It was as though a natural law had
suspended its force.

"Why, Edwin," she said in extremely clear, somewhat
surprised, and gently benevolent accents.  "What
ever's the matter with you?  There *is* a programme of
music, I suppose?"  (There she was, ridiculously
changing the meaning of the word programme!  What
infantile tactics!)  "It occurred to me all of a sudden
yesterday afternoon how nice it would be to have it
printed on gilt-edged cards, so I ran down to the shop,
but you weren't there.  So I saw Big James."

"You never said anything to me about it last night.
Nor this morning."

"Didn't I? ... Well, I forgot."

Grotesque creature!

"Well, what did Big James say?"

"Oh!  Don't ask me.  But if he treats all your
customers as he treated me ... However, it doesn't
matter now.  I shall write the programme out myself."

"What did he say?"

"It wasn't what he said....  But he's very rude,
you know.  Other people think so too."

"What other people?"

"Oh!  Never mind who!  Of course, *I* know how to
take it.  And I know you believe in him blindly.  But
his airs are preposterous.  And he's a dirty old man.
And I say, Edwin, seeing how very particular you are
about things at home, you really ought to see that the
front shop is kept cleaner.  It's no affair of mine, and
I never interfere,--but really...!"

Not a phrase of this speech but what was highly and
deliberately provocative.  Assuredly no other person
had ever said that Big James was rude.  (But *had*
someone else said so, after all?  Suppose, challenged,
she gave a name!)  Big James's airs were not preposterous;
he was merely old and dignified.  His apron and
hands were dirty, naturally....  And then the
implication that Big James was a fraud, and that he,
Edwin, was simpleton enough to be victimised by the
fraud, while the great all-seeing Hilda exposed it at a
single glance!  And the implication that he, Edwin,
was fussy at home, and negligent at the shop!  And
the astounding assertion that she never interfered!

He smothered up all his feelings, with difficulty, as
a sailor smothers up a lowered sail in a high wind, and
merely demanded, for the third time:

"What did Big James say?"

"I was given to understand," said Hilda roguishly,
"that it was quite, quite, quite impossible.  But his
majesty would see! ... Well, he needn't 'see.'  I see
how wrong I was to suggest it at all."

Edwin moved away in silence.

"Are you going, Edwin?" she asked innocently.

"Yes," glumly.

"You haven't kissed me."

She did not put him to the shame of returning to
her.  No, she jumped up blithely, radiant.  Her
make-believe that nothing had happened was maddening.  She
kissed him lovingly, with a smile, more than once.  He
did not kiss; he was kissed.  Nevertheless somehow the
kissing modified his mental position and he felt better
after it.

"Don't work yourself up, darling," she counselled
him, with kindness and concern, as he went out of the
room.  "You know how sensitive you are."  It was a
calculated insult, but an insult which had to be ignored.
To notice it would have been a grave tactical error.



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   II

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When he reached the shop, he sat down at his old
desk in the black-stained cubicle, and spied forth and
around for the alleged dust which he would tolerate in
business but would not tolerate at home.  It was there.
He could see places that had obviously not been touched
for weeks, withdrawn places where the undisturbed
mounds of stock and litter had the eternal character of
Roman remains or vestiges of creation.  The senior
errand-boy was in the shop, snuffling over a blue-paper
parcel.

"Boy," said Edwin.  "What time do you come here
in the morning?"

"'A' past seven, sir."

"Well, on Monday morning you'll be here at seven
and you'll move everything--there and there and
there--and sweep and dust properly.  This shop's like a
pigstye.  I believe you never dust anything but the
counters."

He was mild but firm.  He knew himself for a just
man; yet the fact that he was robbing this boy of
half-an-hour's sleep and probably the boy's mother also,
and upsetting the ancient order of the boy's household,
did not trouble him, did not even occur to him.  For
him the boy had no mother and no household, but was a
patent self-causing boy that came miraculously into
existence on the shop doorstep every morning and
achieved annihilation thereon every night.

The boy was a fatalist, but his fatalism had limits,
because he well knew that the demand for errand-boys
was greater than the supply.  Though the limits of his
fatalism had not yet been reached, he was scarcely
pleased.

"If I come at seven who'll gi' me th' kays, sir?" he
demanded rather surlily, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

"I'll see that you have the keys," said Edwin, with
divine assurance, though he had not thought of the
difficulty of the keys.

The boy left the shop, his body thrown out of the
perpendicular by the weight of the blue-paper parcel.

"You ought to keep an eye on this place," said
Edwin quietly to the young man who combined the function
of clerk with that of salesman to the rare retail
customers.  "I can't see to everything.  Here, check
these wages for me."  He indicated small piles of
money.

"Yes, sir," said the clerk with self-respect, but
admitting the justice of the animadversion.

Edwin seldom had difficulty with his employees.
Serious friction was unknown in the establishment.

He went out by the back-entrance, thinking:

"It's no affair whatever of hers.  Moreover the shop's
as clean as shops are, and a damned sight cleaner than
most.  A shop isn't a drawing-room....  And now
there's the infernal programme."

He would have liked to bury and forget the matter
of the programme.  But he could not.  His conscience,
or her fussiness, would force him to examine into it.
There was no doubt that Big James was getting an old
man, with peculiar pompous mannerisms and a
disposition towards impossibilism.  Big James ought to have
remembered, in speaking to Hilda, that he was
speaking to the wife of his employer.  That Hilda should
give an order, or even make a request, direct was
perhaps unusual, but--dash it!--you knew what women
were, and if that old josser of a bachelor, Big James,
didn't know what women were, so much the worse for
him.  He should just give Big James a hint.  He could
not have Big James making mischief between himself
and Hilda.

But the coward would not go straight to Big James.
He went first up to what had come to be called "the
litho room," partly in order to postpone Big James,
but partly also because he had quite an affectionate
proud interest in the litho room.  In Edwin's childhood
this room, now stripped and soiled into a workshop,
had been the drawing-room of the Clayhanger family;
and it still showed the defect which it had always
shown; the window was too small and too near the
corner of the room.  No transformation could render
it satisfactory save a change in the window.  Old
Darius Clayhanger had vaguely talked of altering the
window.  Edwin had thought seriously of it.  But nothing
had been done.  Edwin was continuing the very policy
of his father which had so roused his disdain when he
was young: the policy of "making things do."  Instead
of entering upon lithography in a manner bold, logical,
and decisive, he had nervously and half-heartedly
slithered into it.  Thus at the back of the yard was a
second-hand "Newsom" machine in quarters too small
for it, and the apparatus for the preliminary polishing
of the stones; while up here in the ex-drawing-room
were grotesquely mingled the final polishing process
and the artistic department.

The artist who drew the designs on the stone was a
German, with short fair hair and moustache, a thick
neck and a changeless expression.  Edwin had surprisingly
found him in Hanbridge.  He was very skilled in
judging the amount of "work" necessary on the stone
to produce a desired result on the paper, and very
laborious.  Without him the nascent lithographic trade
could not have prospered.  His wages were extremely
moderate, but they were what he had asked, and in
exchange for them he gave his existence.  Edwin liked
to watch him drawing, slavishly, meticulously,
endlessly.  He was absolutely without imagination, artistic
feeling, charm, urbanity, or elasticity of any sort,--a
miracle of sheer gruff positiveness.  He lived
somewhere in Hanbridge, and had once been seen by Edwin
on a Sunday afternoon, wheeling a perambulator and
smiling at a young enceinte woman who held his free
arm.  An astounding sight, which forced Edwin to
adjust his estimates!  He grimly called himself an
Englishman, and was legally entitled to do so.  On this
morning he was drawing a ewer and basin, for the
illustrated catalogue of an earthenware manufacturer.

"Not a very good light to-day," murmured Edwin.

"Eh?"

"Not a very good light."

"No," said Karl sourly and indifferently, bent over
the stone, and breathing with calm regularity.  "My
eyesight is being de-stroit."

Behind, a young man in a smock was industriously
polishing a stone.

Edwin beheld with pleasure.  It was a joy to think
that here was the sole lithography in Bursley, and
that his own enterprise had started it.  Nevertheless
he was ashamed too,--ashamed of his hesitations, his
half-measures, his timidity, and of Karl's impaired
eyesight.  There was no reason why he should not
build a proper works, and every reason why he should;
the operation would be remunerative; it would set an
example; it would increase his prestige.  He grew
resolute.  On the day of the party at the Benbows' he had
been and carefully inspected the plot of land at
Shawport, and yesterday he had made a very low offer for
it.  If the offer was refused, he would raise it.  He
swore to himself he would have his works.

Then Big James came into the litho room.

"I was seeking ye, sir," said Big James majestically,
with a mysterious expression.

Edwin tried to look at him anew, as it were with
Hilda's eyes.  Certainly his bigness amounted now to
an enormity, for proportionately his girth more than
matched his excessive height.  His apron descended
from the semicircle of his paunch like a vast grey wall.
The apron was dirty, this being Saturday, but it was
at any rate intact; in old days Big James and others
at critical moments of machining used to tear strips
off their aprons for machine-rags....  Yes, he was
conceivably a grotesque figure, with his spectacles,
which did not suit him, his heavy breathing, his
mannerisms, and his grandiose air of Atlas supporting the
moral world.  A woman might be excused for seeing
the comic side of him.  But surely he was honest and
loyal.  Surely he was not the adder that Hilda with an
intonation had suggested!

"I'm coming," said Edwin, rather curtly.

He felt just in the humour for putting Big James
"straight."  Still his reply had not been too curt, for
to his staff he was the opposite of a bully; he always
scorned to take a facile advantage of his power, often
tried even to conceal his power in the fiction that the
employee was one man and himself merely another.  He
would be far more devastating to his wife and his sister
than to any employee.  But at intervals a bad or
careless workman had to meet the blaze of his eye and
accept the lash of his speech.

"It's about that little job for the mistress, sir," said
Big James in a soft voice, when they were out on the
landing.

Edwin gave a start.  The ageing man's tones were so
eager, so anxiously loyal!  His emphasis on the word
'mistress' conveyed so clearly that the mistress was a
high and glorious personage to serve whom was an
honour and a fearful honour!  The ageing man had
almost whispered, like a boy, glancing with jealous
distrust at the shut door of the room that contained the
German.

"Oh!" muttered Edwin, taken aback.

"I set it up myself," said Big James, and holding his
head very high looked down at Edwin under his
spectacles.

"Why!" said Edwin cautiously.  "I thought you'd
given Mrs. Clayhanger the idea it couldn't be done in
time."

"Bless ye, sir!  Not if I know it!  I intimated to
her the situation in which we were placed, with urgent
jobs on hand, as in duty bound, sir, she being the
mistress.  Ye know how slow I am to give a promise, sir.
But not to do it--such was not my intention.  And as I
have said already, sir, I've set it up myself, and here's
a rough pull."

He produced a piece of paper.

Edwin's ancient affection for Big James grew
indignant.  The old fellow was the very mirror of loyalty.
He might be somewhat grotesque and mannered upon
occasion, but he was the soul of the Clayhanger
business.  He had taught Edwin most of what he knew
about both typesetting and machining.  It seemed not
long since that he used to call Edwin "young sir," and
to enter into tacit leagues with him against the
dangerous obstinacies of his decaying father.  Big James had
genuinely admired Darius Clayhanger.  Assuredly he
admired Darius's son not less.  His fidelity to the
dynasty was touching; it was wistful.  The order from
the mistress had tremendously excited and flattered
him in his secret heart....  And yet Hilda must call
him names, must insinuate against his superb integrity,
must grossly misrepresent his attitude to herself.
Whatever in his pompous old way he might have said,
she could not possibly have mistaken his anxiety to
please her.  No, she had given a false account of their
interview,--and Edwin had believed it!  Edwin
now swerved violently back to his own original view.
He firmly believed Big James against his wife.  He
reflected: "How simple I was to swallow all Hilda said
without confirmation!  I might have known!"  And
that he should think such a thought shocked him
tremendously.

The programme was not satisfactorily set up.  Apart
from several mistakes in the spelling of proper names,
the thing with its fancy types, curious centring, and
superabundance of full-stops, resembled more the
libretto of a Primitive Methodist Tea-meeting than a
programme of classical music offered to refined
dilettanti on a Sunday night.  Though Edwin had
endeavoured to modernise Big James, he had failed.  It
was perhaps well that he had failed.  For the majority
of customers preferred Big James's taste in printing to
Edwin's.  He corrected the misspellings and removed a
few full-stops, and then said:

"It's all right.  But I doubt if Mrs. Clayhanger'll
care for all these fancy founts," implying that it was
a pity, of course, that Big James's fancy founts would
not be appreciated at their true value, but women were
women.  "I should almost be inclined to set it all again
in old-face.  I'm sure she'd prefer it.  Do you mind?"

"With the greatest of pleasure, sir," Big James
heartily concurred, looking at his watch.  "But I must
be lively."

He conveyed his immense bulk neatly and
importantly down the narrow stairs.



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   III

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Edwin sat in his cubicle again, his affection for Big
James very active.  How simple and agreeable it was to
be a man among men only!  The printing-business was
an organism fifty times as large as the home, and it
worked fifty times more smoothly.  No misunderstandings,
no secrecies (at any rate among the chief persons
concerned), and a general recognition of the
principles of justice!  Even the errand-boy had understood.
And the shop-clerk by his tone had admitted that he
too was worthy of blame.  The blame was not
overdone, and common-sense had closed the episode in a
moment.  And see with what splendid good-will Big
James, despite the intense conservatism of old age,
had accepted the wholesale condemnation of his idea of
a programme!  The relations of men were truly
wonderful, when you come to think about it.  And to be
at business was a relief and even a pleasure.  Edwin
could not remember having ever before regarded the
business as a source of pleasure.  A youth, he had
gone into it greatly against his will, and by tradition
he had supposed himself still to hate it.

Why had Hilda misled him as to Big James?  For
she had misled him.  Yes, she had misled him.  What
was her motive?  What did she think she could gain
by it?  He was still profoundly disturbed by this
deception.  "Why!" he thought, "I can't trust her!  I
shall have to be on my guard!  I've been in the habit
of opening my mouth and swallowing practically
everything she says!"  His sense of justice very sharply
resented her perfidy to Big James.  His heart warmed
to the defence of the excellent old man.  What had she
got against Big James?  Since the day when the
enormous man had first shown her over the printing shops,
before their original betrothal, a decade and more ago,
he had never treated her with anything but an elaborate
and sincere respect.  Was she jealous of him, because
of his, Edwin's, expressed confidence in and ancient
regard for him, and because Edwin and he had always
been good companions?  Or had she merely taken a
dislike to him,--a physical dislike?  Edwin had noticed
that some women had a malicious detestation for some
old men, especially when the old men had any touch of
the grotesque or the pompous....  Well, he should
defend Big James against her.  She should keep her
hands off Big James.  His sense of justice was so
powerful in that moment that if he had had to choose
between his wife and Big James he would have chosen Big
James.

He came out of the cubicle into the shop, and
arranged his countenance so that the clerk should
suppose him to be thinking in tremendous concentration
upon some complex problem of the business.  And
simultaneously Hilda passed up Duck Bank on the way
to market.  She passed so close to the shop that she
seemed to brush it like a delicious, exciting, and
exasperating menace.  If she turned her head she could
scarcely fail to see Edwin near the door of the shop.
But she did not turn her head.  She glided up the slope
steadily and implacably.  And even in the distance of
the street her individuality showed itself mysterious
and strong.  He could never decide whether she was
beautiful or not; he felt that she was impressive, and
not to be scorned or ignored.  Perhaps she was not
beautiful.  Certainly she was not young.  She had not
the insipidity of the young girl unfulfilled.  Nor did
she inspire melancholy like the woman just beyond her
prime.  The one was going to be; the other had been.
Hilda was.  And she had lived.  There was in her none
of the detestable ignorance and innocence that, for
Edwin, spoilt the majority of women.  She knew.  She
was an equal, and a dangerous equal.  Simultaneously
he felt that he could crush and kill the little thing, and
that he must beware of the powerful, unscrupulous,
inscrutable individuality....  And she receded still
higher up Duck Bank and then turned round the
corner to the Market Place and vanished.  And there was
a void.

She would return.  As she had receded gradually, so
she would gradually approach the shop again with her
delicious, exciting, exasperating menace.  And he had
a scheme for running out to her and with candour
inviting her in and explaining to her in just the right
tone of good-will that loyalty to herself simply hummed
and buzzed in the shop and the printing-works, and
that Big James worshipped her, and that though she
was perfect in sagacity she had really been mistaken
about Big James.  And he had a vision of her smiling
kindly and frankly upon Big James, and Big James
twisting upon his own axis in joyous pride.  Nothing
but good-will and candour was required to produce this
bliss.

But he knew that he would never run out to her and
invite her to enter.  The enterprise was perilous to the
point of being foolhardy.  With a tone, with a
hesitation, with an undecipherable pout, she might, she would,
render it absurd....  And then, his pride! ... At
that moment young Alec Batchgrew, perhaps then the
town's chief mooncalf, came down Duck Bank in
dazzling breeches on a superb grey horse.  And Edwin
went abruptly back to work lest the noodle should rein
in at the shop door and talk to him.



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   IV

.. vspace:: 2

When he returned home, a few minutes before the
official hour of one o'clock, he heard women's voices
and laughter in the drawing-room.  And as he stood in
the hall, fingering the thin little parcel of six
programmes which he had brought with him, the laughter
overcame the voices and then expended itself in shrieks
of quite uncontrolled mirth.  The drawing-room door
was half open.  He stepped quietly to it.

The weather, after being thunderous, had cleared,
and the part of the drawing-room near the open
window was shot with rays of sunshine.

Janet Orgreave, all dressed in white, lay back in an
easy chair; she was laughing and wiping the tears from
her eyes.  At the piano sat very upright a seemingly
rather pert young woman, not laughing, but smiling,
with arch sparkling eyes fixed on the others; this was
Daisy Marrion, a cousin of Mrs. Tom Orgreave, and
the next to the last unmarried daughter of a large
family up at Hillport.  Standing by the piano was a
young timid girl of about sixteen, whom Edwin, who
had not seen her before, guessed to be Janet's niece,
Elaine, eldest daughter of Janet's elder sister in
London; Elaine's approaching visit had been announced.
These other two, like Janet, were in white.  Lastly
there was Hilda, in grey, with a black hat, laughing like
a child.  "They are all children," he thought as,
unnoticed, he watched them in their bright fragile frocks
and hats, and in their excessive gaiety, and in the
strange abandon of their gestures.  "They are a
foreign race encamped among us men.  Fancy women of
nearly forty giggling with these girls as Janet and
Hilda are giggling!"  He felt much pleasure in the
sight.  It could not have happened in poor old
Maggie's reign.  It was delicious.  It was one of the
rewards of existence, for the grace of these creatures was
surpassing.  But at the same time it was hysterical and
infantile.  He thought: "I've been taking women too
seriously."  And his heart lightened somewhat.

Elaine saw him first.  A flush flowed from her
cheeks to her neck.  Her body stiffened.  She
became intensely self-conscious.  She could not speak,
but she leaned forward and gazed with a passion of
apprehension at Janet, as if murmuring: "Look!  The
enemy!  Take care!"  The imploring silent movement
was delightful in its gawky ingenuousness.

"Do tell us some more, Daisy," Hilda implored weakly.

"There is no more," said Daisy, and then started:
"Oh, Mr. Clayhanger!  How long have you been there?"

He entered the room, yielding himself, proud, masculine,
acutely aware of his sudden effect on these girls.
For even Hilda was naught but a girl at the moment;
and Janet was really a girl, though the presence of that
shy niece, just awaking to her own body and to the
world, made Janet seem old in spite of her slimness
and of that smoothness of skin that was due to a
tranquil, kind temperament.  The shy niece was
enchantingly constrained upon being introduced to Edwin,
whom she was enjoined to call uncle.  Only yesterday
she must have been a child.  Her marvellously clear
complexion could not have been imitated by any aunt
or elder sister.

"And now perhaps you'll tell me what it's all about,"
said Edwin.

Hilda replied:

"Janet's called about tennis.  It seems they're sick
of the new Hillport Club.  I knew they would be.  And
so next year Janet's having a private club on her
lawn----"

"Bad as it is," said Janet.

"Where the entire conversation won't be remarks by
girls about other girls' frocks and remarks by men
about the rotten inferiority of other men."

"This is all very sound," said Edwin, rather struck
by Hilda's epigrammatic quality.  "But what I ask
is--what were you laughing at?"

"Oh, nothing!" said Daisy Marrion.

"Very well then," said Edwin, going to the door and
shutting it.  "Nobody leaves this room till I know....
Now, niece Elaine!"

Elaine went crimson and squirmed on her only
recently hidden legs, but she did not speak.

"Tell him, Daisy," said Janet.

Daisy sat still straighter.

"It was only about Alec Batchgrew, Mr. Clayhanger;
I suppose you know him."

Alec was the youngest scion of the great and detested
plutocratic family of Batchgrew,--enormously
important in his nineteen years.

"Yes, I know him," said Edwin.  "I saw him on his
new grey horse this morning."

"His 'orse," Janet corrected.  They all began to
laugh again loudly.

"He's taken a terrific fancy to Maud, my kiddie
sister," said Daisy.  "She's sixteen.  Yesterday
afternoon at the tennis club he said to Maud: 'Look 'ere.
I shall ride through the town to-morrow morning on
my 'orse, while you're all marketing.  I shan't take
any notice of any of the other girls, but if you bow
to me I'll take my 'at off to you.'"  She imitated the
Batchgrew intonation.

"That's a good tale," said Edwin calmly.  "What
a cuckoo!  He ought to be put in a museum."

Daisy, made rather nervous by the success of her
tale, bent over the piano, and skimmed pianissimo and
rapidly through the "Clytie" waltz.  Elaine moved her
shoulders to the rhythm.

Janet said they must go.

"Here!  Hold on a bit!" said Edwin, through the
light film of music, and undoing the little parcel he
handed one specimen of the programme to Hilda and
another to Janet, simultaneously.

"Oh, so my ideas are listened to, sometimes!" murmured
Hilda, who was, however, pleased.

A malicious and unjust remark, he thought.  But the
next instant Hilda said in a quite friendly natural
tone:

"Janet's going to bring Elaine.  And she says Tom
says she is to tell you that he's coming whether he's
wanted or not.  Daisy won't come."

"Why?" asked Edwin, but quite perfunctorily; he
knew that the Marrions were not interested in interesting
music, and his design had been to limit the
audience to enthusiasts.

"Church," answered Daisy succinctly.

"Come after church."

She shook her head.

"And how's the practising?" Edwin enquired from Janet.

"Pretty fair," said she.  "But not so good as this
programme.  What swells we are, my word!"

"Hilda's idea," said Edwin generously.  "Your
mother coming?"

"Oh, yes, I think so."

As the visitors were leaving, Hilda stopped Janet.

"Don't you think it'll be better if we have the piano
put over there, and all the chairs together round here,
Janet?"

"It might be," said Janet uncertainly.

Hilda turned sharply to Edwin:

"There!  What did I tell you?"

"Well," he protested good-humouredly, "what on
earth do you expect her to say, when you ask her like
that?  Anyhow I may announce definitely that I'm not
going to have the piano moved.  We'll try things as
they are, for a start, and then see.  Why, if you put all
the chairs together over there, the place'll look like
a blooming boarding-house."

The comparison was a failure in tact, which he at
once recognised but could not retrieve.  Hilda faintly
reddened, and the memory of her struggles as
manageress of a boarding-house was harshly revived in her.

"Some day I shall try the piano over there," she
said, low.

And Edwin concurred, amiably:

"All right.  Some day we'll try it together, just to
see what it is like."

The girls, the younger ones still giggling, slipped
elegantly out of the house, one after another.

Dinner passed without incident.



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   V

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The next day, Sunday, Edwin had a headache; and
it was a bilious headache.  Hence he insisted to himself
and to everyone that it was not a bilious headache, but
just one of those plain headaches which sometimes visit
the righteous without cause or excuse; for he would
never accept the theory that he had inherited his
father's digestive weakness.  A liability to colds he would
admit, but not on any account a feeble stomach.  Hence,
further, he was obliged to pretend to eat as usual.
George was rather gnat-like that morning, and Hilda
was in a susceptible condition, doubtless due to
nervousness occasioned by the novel responsibilities of the
musical evening--and a Sabbath musical evening at that!
After the one o'clock dinner, Edwin lay down on the
sofa in the dining-room and read and slept; and when
he woke up he felt better, and was sincerely almost
persuaded that his headache had not been and was not a
bilious headache.  He said to himself that a short walk
might disperse the headache entirely.  He made one or
two trifling adjustments in the disposition of the
drawing-room furniture--his own disposition of it, and
immensely and indubitably superior to that so
pertinaciously advocated by Hilda--and then he went out.
Neither Hilda nor George was visible.  Possibly
during his rest they had gone for a walk; they had fits of
intimacy.

He walked in the faint September sunshine down
Trafalgar Road into the town.  Except for a few girls
in dowdy finery and a few heavy youths with their
black or dark-blue trousers turned up round the ankles
far enough to show the white cotton lining, the street
was empty.  The devout at that hour were either
dozing at home or engaged in Sunday school work;
thousands of children were concentrated in the hot Sunday
schools.  As he passed the Bethesda Chapel and School
he heard the voices of children addressing the Lord of
the Universe in laudatory and intercessory song.  Near
the Bethesda chapel, by the Duke of Cambridge Vaults,
two men stood waiting, their faces firm in the sure
knowledge that within three hours the public-houses
would again be open.  Thick smoke rose from the
chimneys of several manufactories and thin smoke from
the chimneys of many others.  The scheme of a Sunday
musical evening in that land presented itself to Edwin
as something rash, fantastic, and hopeless,--and yet
solacing.  Were it known it could excite only hostility,
horror, contempt, or an intense bovine indifference;
chiefly the last....  Breathe the name of Chopin in
that land!...

As he climbed Duck Bank he fumbled in his pocket
for his private key of the shop, which he had brought
with him; for, not the desire for fresh air, but an acute
curiosity as to the answer to his letter to the solicitor
to the Hall trustees making an offer for the land at
Shawport, had sent him out of the house.  Would the
offer be accepted or declined, or would a somewhat
higher sum be suggested?  The reply would have been
put into the post on Saturday, and was doubtless then
lying in the letter-box within the shop.  The whole
future seemed to be lying unopened in that letter-box.

He penetrated into his own shop like a thief, for it
was not meet for an important tradesman to be seen
dallying with business of a Sunday afternoon.  As he
went into the shutter-darkened interior he thought of
Hilda, whom many years earlier he had kissed in that
very same shutter-darkened interior one Thursday
afternoon.  Life appeared incredible to him, and in his
wife he could see almost no trace of the girl he had
kissed there in the obscure shop.  There was a fair
quantity of letters in the box.  The first one he opened
was from a solicitor; not the solicitor to the Hall
trustees, but Tom Orgreave, who announced to Edwin
Clayhanger, Esquire, dear sir, that his clients, the Palace
Porcelain Company of Longshaw, felt compelled to call
their creditors together.  The Palace Porcelain
Company, who had believed in the efficacy of printed
advertising matter and expensive catalogues, owed Edwin
a hundred and eighty pounds.  It was a blow, and the
more so in that it was unexpected.  "Did I come
messing down here on a Sunday afternoon to receive this
sort of news?" he bitterly asked.  A moment earlier
he had not doubted the solvency of the Palace
Porcelain Company; but now he felt that the Company
wouldn't pay two shillings in the pound,--perhaps not
even that, as there were debenture-holders.  The next
letter was an acceptance of his offer for the Shawport
land.  The die was cast, then.  The new works would
have to be created; lithography would increase; in the
vast new enterprise he would be hampered by the
purchase of Maggie's house; he had just made a bad debt;
and he would have Hilda's capricious opposition to deal
with.  He quitted the shop abruptly, locked the door,
and went back home, his mind very active but undirected.



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   VI

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Something unfamiliar in the aspect of the breakfast-room
as glimpsed through the open door from the hall,
drew him within.  Hilda had at last begun to make it
into "her" room.  She had brought an old writing-desk
from upstairs and put it between the fireplace
and the window.  Edwin thought: "Doesn't she even
know the light ought to fall over the left shoulder, not
over the right?"  Letter paper and envelopes and even
stamps were visible; and a miscellaneous mass of
letters and bills had been pushed into the space between
the flat of the desk and the small drawers about it.
There was also an easy-chair, with a freshly-covered
cushion on it; a new hearthrug that Edwin neither
recognised nor approved of; several framed prints, and
other oddments.  His own portrait still dominated the
mantelpiece, but it was now flanked by two brass
candle-sticks.  He thought: "If she'd ask me, I could
have arranged it for her much better than
that."  Nevertheless the idea of her being absolute monarch of the
little room, and expressing her individuality in it and
by it, both pleased and touched him.  Nor did he at all
resent the fact that she had executed her plan in
secret.  She must have been anxious to get the room
finished for the musical evening.

Thence he passed into the drawing-room,--and was
thunderstruck.  The arrangement of the furniture was
utterly changed, and the resemblance to a boarding-house
parlour after all achieved.  The piano had
crossed the room; the chairs were massed together in
the most ridiculous way; the sofa was so placed as to
be almost useless.  His anger was furious but cold.  The
woman had considerable taste in certain directions, but
she simply did not understand the art of fixing up a
room.  Whereas he did.  Each room in the house
(save her poor little amateurish breakfast-room or
"boudoir") had been arranged by himself, even to small
details,--and well arranged.  Everyone admitted that
he had a talent for interiors.  The house was complete
before she ever saw it, and he had been responsible for
it.  He was not the ordinary inexperienced ignorant
husband who "leaves all that sort of thing to the
missis."  Interiors mattered to him; they influenced his
daily happiness.  The woman had clearly failed to
appreciate the sacredness of the *status quo*.  He
appreciated it himself, and never altered anything without
consulting her and definitely announcing his intention
to alter.  She probably didn't care a fig for the *status
quo*.  Her conduct was inexcusable.  It was an attack
on vital principles.  It was an outrage.  Doubtless, in
her scorn for the *status quo*, she imagined that he
would accept the *fait accompli*.  She was mistaken.
With astounding energy he set to work to restore the
*status quo ante*.  The vigour with which he dragged
and pushed an innocent elephantine piano was
marvellous.  In less than five minutes not a trace remained
of the *fait accompli*.  He thought: "This is a queer
start for a musical evening!"  But he was triumphant,
resolute, and remorseless.  He would show her a thing
or two.  In particular he would show that fair play
had to be practised in his house.  Then, perceiving that
his hands were dirty, and one finger bleeding, he went
majestically, if somewhat breathless, upstairs to the
bathroom, and washed with care.  In the glass he saw
that, despite his exertions, he was pale.  At length he
descended, wondering where she was, where she had
hidden herself, who had helped her to move the
furniture, and what exactly the upshot would be.  There
could be no doubt that he was in a state of high
emotion, in which unflinching obstinacy was shot through
with qualms about disaster.

He revisited the drawing-room to survey his labours.
She was there.  Whence she had sprung, he knew
not.  But she was there.  He caught sight of her
standing by the window before entering the room.

When he got into the room he saw that her emotional
excitement far surpassed his own.  Her lips and her
hands were twitching; her nostrils dilated and
contracted; tears were in her eyes.

"Edwin," she exclaimed very passionately, in a thick
voice, quite unlike her usual clear tones, as she
surveyed the furniture, "this is really too much!"

Evidently she thought of nothing but her
resentment.  No consideration other than her outraged
dignity would have affected her demeanour.  If a whole
regiment of their friends had been watching at the
door, her demeanour would not have altered.  The
bedrock of her nature had been reached.

"It's war, this is!" thought Edwin.

He was afraid; he was even intimidated by her anger;
but he did not lose his courage.  The determination to
fight for himself, and to see the thing through no
matter what happened, was not a bit weakened.  An
inwardly feverish but outwardly calm vindictive desperation
possessed him.  He and she would soon know who
was the stronger.

At the same time he said to himself:

"I was hasty.  I ought not to have acted in such a
hurry.  Before doing anything I ought to have told
her quietly that I intended to have the last word as
regards furniture in this house.  I was within my rights
in acting at once, but it wasn't very clever of me,
clumsy fool!"

Aloud he said, with a kind of self-conscious snigger:

"What's too much?"

Hilda went on:

"You simply make me look a fool in my own house,
before my own son and the servants."

"You've brought it on yourself," said he fiercely.
"If you will do these idiotic things you must take the
consequences.  I told you I didn't want the furniture
moved, and immediately my back's turned you go and
move it.  I won't have it, and so I tell you straight."

"You're a brute," she continued, not heeding him,
obsessed by her own wound.  "You're a brute!"  She
said it with terrifying conviction.  "Everybody knows
it.  Didn't Maggie warn me?  You're a brute and a
bully.  And you do all you can to shame me in my
own house.  Who'd think I was supposed to be the
mistress here?  Even in front of my friends you insult
me."

"Don't act like a baby.  How do I insult you?"

"Talking about boarding-houses.  Do you think
Janet and all of them didn't notice it?"

"Well," he said.  "Let this be a lesson to you."

She hid her face in her hands and sobbed, moving
towards the door.

He thought:

"She's beaten.  She knows she's got to take it."

Then he said:

"Do *I* go altering furniture without consulting you?
Do *I* do things behind your back?  Never!"

"That's no reason why you should try to make me
look a fool in my own house.  I told Ada how I wanted
the furniture, and George and I helped her.  And then
a moment afterwards you give them contrary orders.
What will they think of me?  Naturally they'll think
I'm not your wife, but your slave.  You're a
brute."  Her voice rose.

"I didn't give any orders.  I haven't seen the damned
servants and I haven't seen George."

She looked up suddenly:

"Then who moved the furniture?"

"I did."

"Who helped you?"

"Nobody helped me."

"But I was here only a minute or two since."

"Well, do you suppose it takes me half a day to
move a few sticks of furniture?"

She was impressed by his strength and his swiftness,
and apparently silenced; she had thought that the
servants had been brought into the affair.

"You ought to know perfectly well," he proceeded,
"I should never dream of insulting you before the
servants.  Nobody's more careful of your dignity than
I am.  I should like to see anybody do anything against
your dignity while I'm here."

She was still sobbing.

"I think you ought to apologise to me," she blubbered.
"Yes, I really do."

"Why should I apologise to you?  You moved the
furniture against my wish.  I moved it against yours.
That's all.  You began.  I didn't begin.  You want
everything your own way.  Well, you won't have it."

She blubbered once more:

"You ought to apologise to me."

And then she wept hysterically.

He meditated sourly, harshly.  He had conquered.
The furniture was as he wished, and it would remain
so.  The enemy was in tears, shamed, humiliated.  He
had a desire to restore her dignity, partly because she
was his wife and partly because he hated to see any
human being beaten.  Moreover, at the bottom of his
heart he had a tremendous regard for appearances, and
he felt fears for the musical evening.  He could not
contemplate the possibility of visitors perceiving that
the host and hostess had violently quarrelled.  He
would have sacrificed almost anything to the social
proprieties.  And he knew that Hilda would not think of
them, or at any rate would not think of them
effectively.  He did not mind apologising to her, if an
apology would give her satisfaction.  He was her superior
in moral force, and naught else mattered.

"I don't think I ought to apologise," he said, with a
slight laugh.  "But if you think so I don't mind
apologising.  I apologise.  There!"  He dropped into an
easy-chair.

To him it was as if he had said:

"You see what a magnanimous chap I am."

She tried to conceal her feelings, but she was pleased,
flattered, astonished.  Her self-respect returned to her
rapidly.

"Thank you," she murmured, and added: "It was
the least you could do."

At her last words he thought:

"Women are incapable of being magnanimous."

She moved towards the door.

"Hilda," he said.

She stopped.

"Come here," he commanded with gentle bluffness.

She wavered towards him.

"Come here, I tell you," he said again.

He drew her down to him, all fluttering and sobbing
and wet, and kissed her, kissed her several times; and
then, sitting on his knees, she kissed him.  But, though
she mysteriously signified forgiveness, she could not
smile; she was still far too agitated and out of control
to be able to smile.

The scene was over.  The proprieties of the musical
evening were saved.  Her broken body and soul huddled
against him were agreeably wistful to his triumphant
manliness.

But he had had a terrible fright.  And even now
there was a certain mere bravado in his attitude.  In
his heart he was thinking:

"By Jove!  Has it come to this?"

The responsibilities of the future seemed too
complicated, wearisome and overwhelming.  The earthly
career of a bachelor seemed almost heavenly in its
wondrous freedom....  Etches v. Etches....  The
unexampled creature, so recently the source of ineffable
romance, still sat on his knees, weighing them down.
Suddenly he noticed that his head ached very
badly--worse than it had ached all day.



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   VII

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The Sunday musical evening, beyond its artistic
thrills and emotional quality, proved to be exciting as
a social manifestation.  Those present at it felt as must
feel Russian conspirators in a back room of some
big grey house of a Petrograd suburb when the
secret printing-press begins to function before their
eyes.  This concert of profane harmonies, deliberately
planned and pouring out through open windows to
affront the ears of returners from church and chapel,
was considered by its organisers as a remarkable event;
and rightly so.  The Clayhanger house might have
been a fortress, with the blood-red standard of art and
freedom floating from a pole lashed to its chimney.  Of
course everybody pretended to everybody else that the
musical evening was a quite ordinary phenomenon.

It was a success, and a flashing success, yet not
unqualified.  The performers--Tertius Ingpen on the
piano, on the fiddle, and on the clarinet, Janet
Orgreave on the piano, and very timidly in a
little song by Grieg, Tom Orgreave on the piano
and his contralto wife in two famous and affecting
songs by Schumann and also on the piano, and Edwin
sick but obstinate as turner-over of pages--all did
most creditably.  The music was given with ardent
sympathy, and in none of it did any marked pause
occur which had not been contemplated by the
composer himself.  But abstentions had thinned the women
among the audience.  Elaine Hill did not come, and,
far more important, Mrs. Orgreave did not come.  Her
husband, old Osmond Orgreave, had not been expected,
as of late (owing to the swift onset of renal disease,
hitherto treated by him with some contempt) he had
declined absolutely to go out at night; but Edwin had
counted on Mrs. Orgreave.  She simply sent word that
she did not care to leave her husband, and that Elaine
was keeping her company.  Disappointment, keen but
brief, resulted.  Edwin's severe sick headache was also
a drawback.  It did, however, lessen the bad social
effect of an altercation between him and Hilda, in which
Edwin's part was attributed to his indisposition.  This
altercation arose out of an irresponsible suggestion
from somebody that something else should be played
instead of something else.  Now, for Edwin, a
programme was a programme,--sacred, to be executed
regardless of every extrinsic consideration.  And seeing
that the programme was printed...!  Edwin negatived
the suggestion instantly, and the most weighty
opinion in the room agreed with him, but Hilda must
needs fly out: "Why not change it?  I'm sure it will
be better," etc.  Whereas she could be sure of nothing
of the sort, and was incompetent to offer an opinion.
And she unreasonably and unnecessarily insisted,
despite Tertius Ingpen, and the change was made.  It
was astounding to Edwin that, after the shattering
scene of the afternoon, she should be so foolhardy, so
careless, so obstinate.  But she was.  He kept his
resentment neatly in a little drawer in his mind, and
glanced at it now and then.  And he thought of Tertius
Ingpen's terrible remark about women at Ingpen's first
visit.  He said to himself: "There's a lot in it, no
doubt about that."

At the close of the last item, two of Brahms's
Hungarian Dances for pianoforte duet (played with truly
electrifying *brio* by little wizening Tom Orgreave and
his wife), both Tertius Ingpen and Tom fussed
consciously about the piano, triumphant, not knowing
quite what to do next, and each looking rather like a
man who has told a good story, and in the midst of
the applause tries to make out by an affectation of
casualness that the story is nothing at all.

"Of course," said Tom Orgreave carelessly, and
glancing at the ground as he usually did when speaking,
"Fine as those dances are on the piano, I should
prefer to hear them with the fiddle."

"Why?" demanded Ingpen challengingly.

"Because they were written for the fiddle," said Tom
Orgreave with finality.

"Written for the fiddle?  Not a bit of it!"

With superiority outwardly unruffled, Tom said:

"Pardon me.  Brahms wrote them for Joachim.  I've
heard him play them."

"So have I," said Tertius Ingpen, lightly but
scornfully.  "But they were written originally for
pianoforte duet, as you played them to-night.  Brahms
arranged them afterwards for Joachim."

Tom Orgreave shook under the blow, for in musical
knowledge his supremacy had never been challenged in
Bleakridge.

"Surely----!" he began weakly.

"My dear fellow, it is so," said Ingpen impatiently.

"Look it up," said Edwin, with false animation, for
his head was thudding.  "George, fetch the
encyclopædia B--and J too."

Delighted, George ran off.  He had been examining
Johnnie Orgreave's watch, and it was to Johnnie he
delivered the encyclopædia, amid mock protests from
his uncle Edwin.  More than one person had remarked
the growing alliance between Johnnie and young
George.

But the encyclopædia gave no light.

Then the eldest Swetnam (who had come by
invitation at the last moment) said:

"I'm sure Ingpen is right."

He was not sure, but from the demeanour of the two
men he could guess, and he thought he might as well
share the glory of Ingpen's triumph.

The next instant Tertius Ingpen was sketching out
future musical evenings at which quartets and
quintets should be performed.  He knew men in the
orchestra at the Theatre Royal, Hanbridge; he knew
girl-violinists who could be drilled, and he was quite certain
that he could get a 'cello.  From this he went on to
part-songs, and in answer to scepticism about local
gift for music, he said that during his visits of
inspection to factories he had heard spontaneous part-singing
"that would knock spots off the Savoy chorus."  Indeed,
since his return to it, Ingpen had developed some
appreciation of certain aspects of his native district.
He said that the kindly commonsense with which as an
inspector he was received on pot-banks, surpassed
anything in the whole country.

"Talking of pot-banks, you'll get a letter from me
about the Palace Porcelain Company," Tom Orgreave
lifting his eyebrows muttered to Edwin with a strange
gloomy constraint.

"I've had it," said Edwin.  "You've got some nice
clients, I must say."

In a moment, though Tom said not a word more, the
Palace Porcelain Company was on the carpet, to
Edwin's disgust.  He hated to talk about a misfortune.
But others beside himself were interested in the Palace
Porcelain Company, and the news of its failure had
boomed mysteriously through the Sabbath air of the
district.

Hilda and Janet were whispering together.  And
Edwin, gazing at them, saw in them the giggling
tennis-playing children of the previous day,--specimens of a
foreign race encamped among the men.

Suddenly Hilda turned her head towards the men,
and said:

"Of course *Edwin's* been let in!"

It was a reference to the Palace Porcelain Company.
How ungracious!  How unnecessary!  How unjust!
And somehow Edwin had been fearing it.  And that was
really why he had not liked the turn of the
conversation,--he had been afraid of one of her darts!

Useless for Tom Swetnam to say that a number of
business men quite as keen as Edwin had been "let in"!
From her disdainful silence it appeared that Hilda's
conviction of the unusual simplicity of her husband
was impregnable.

"I hear you've got that Shawport land," said
Johnnie Orgreave.

The mystic influences of music seemed to have been
overpowered.

"Who told ye?" asked Edwin in a low voice, once
more frightened of Hilda.

"Young Toby Hall.  Met him at the Conservative
Club last night."

But Hilda had heard.

"What land is that?" she demanded curtly.

"'What land is that?'" Johnnie mimicked her.  "It's
the land for the new works, missis."

Hilda threw her shoulders back, glaring at Edwin
with a sort of outraged fury.  Happily most of the
people present were talking among themselves.

"You never told me," she muttered.

He said:

"I only knew this afternoon."

Her anger was unmistakable.  She was no longer a
fluttering feminine wreck on his manly knee.

"Well, good-bye," said Janet Orgreave startlingly
to him.  "Sorry I have to go so soon."

"You aren't going!" Edwin protested with unnatural
loudness.  "What about the victuals?  I shan't touch
'em myself.  But they must be consumed.  Here!  You
and I'll lead the way."

Half playfully he seized her arm.  She glanced at
Hilda uncertainly.

"Edwin," said Hilda very curtly and severely, "don't
be so clumsy.  Janet has to go at once.  Mr. Orgreave
is very ill--very ill indeed.  She only came to oblige
us."  Then she passionately kissed Janet.

It was like a thunderclap in the room.  Johnnie and
Tom confirmed the news.  Of the rest only Tom's wife
and Hilda knew.  Janet had told Hilda before the
music began.  Osmond Orgreave had been taken ill
between five and six in the afternoon.  Dr. Stirling had
gone in at once, and pronounced the attack serious.
Everything possible was done; even a nurse was
obtained instantly, from the Clowes Hospital by the
station.  From reasons of sentiment, if from no other,
Janet would have stayed at home and foregone the
musical evening.  But those Orgreaves at home had
put their heads together and decided that Janet should
still go, because without her the entire musical evening
would crumble to naught.  Here was the true reason
of the absence of Mrs. Orgreave and Elaine--both
unnecessary to the musical evening.  The boys had come,
and Tom's wife had come, because, even considered
only as an audience, the Orgreave contingent was
almost essential to the musical evening.  And so Janet,
her father's especial favourite and standby, had come,
and she had played, and not a word whispered except
to Hilda.  It was wondrous.  It was impressive.  All
the Orgreaves departed, and the remnant of guests
meditated in proud, gratified silence upon the singular
fortitude and heroic commonsense that distinguished
their part of the world.  The musical evening was
dramatically over, the refreshments being almost
wasted.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   VIII

.. vspace:: 2

Hilda was climbing on to the wooden-seated chair in
the hall to put out the light there when she heard a
noise behind the closed door of the kitchen, which she
had thought to be empty.  She went to the door and
pushed it violently open.  Not only was the gas flaring
away in an unauthorised manner, not only were both
servants (theoretically in bed) still up, capless and
apronless and looking most curious in unrelieved black,
but the adventurous and wicked George was surreptitiously
with them, flattering them with his aristocratic
companionship, and eating blanc-mange out of a
cut-glass dish with a tablespoon.  Twice George had been
sent to bed.  Once the servants had been told to go to
bed.  The worst of carnivals is that the dregs of the
population, such as George, will take advantage of
them to rise to the surface and, conscienceless and
mischievous, set at defiance the conventions by which
society protects itself.

She merely glanced at George; the menace of her
eyes was alarming.  His lower lip fell; he put down the
dish and spoon, and slunk timorously past her on his
way upstairs.

Then she said to the servants:

"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, encouraging
him!  Go to bed at once."  And as they began
nervously to handle the things on the table, she added,
more imperiously: "At once!  Don't keep me waiting.
I'll see to all this."

And they followed George meekly.

She gazed in disgust at the general litter of broken
refreshments, symbolising the traditional inefficiency of
servants, and extinguished the gas.

The three criminals were somewhat the victims of
her secret resentment against Edwin, who, a mere
martyrised perambulating stomach, had retired.  Edwin
had defeated her in the afternoon; and all the evening,
in the disposition of the furniture, the evidence of his
victory had confronted her.  By prompt and brutal
action, uncharacteristic of him and therefore mean, he
had defeated her.  True he had embraced and
comforted her tears, but it was the kiss of a conqueror.
And then, on the top of that, he had proved his
commercial incompetence by making a large bad debt, and
his commercial rashness by definitely adopting a scheme
of whose extreme danger she was convinced.  One part
of her mind intellectually knew that he had not
wilfully synchronised these events in order to wound her,
but another part of her mind felt deeply that he had.
She had been staggered by the revelation that he was
definitely committed to the project of lithography and
the new works.  Not one word about the matter had
he said to her since their altercation on the night of the
reception; and she had imagined that, with his usual
indecision, he was allowing it to slide.  She scarcely
recognised her Edwin.  Now she accused him of a
malicious obstinacy, not understanding that he was
involved in the great machine of circumstance and
perhaps almost as much surprised as herself at the
movement of events.  At any rate she was being beaten once
more, and her spirit rebelled.  Through all the
misfortunes previous to her marriage that spirit, if
occasionally cowed, had never been broken.  She had sat
grim and fierce against even bum-bailiffs in her time.
Yes, her spirit rebelled, and the fact that others had
known about the Shawport land before she knew made
her still more mutinous against destiny.  She looked
round dazed at the situation.  What?  The mild
Edwin defying and crushing her?  It was scarcely
conceivable.  The tension of her nerves from this cause
only was extreme.  Add to it the strain of the musical
evening, intensified by the calamity at the Orgreaves'!

A bell rang in the kitchen, and all the ganglions of
her spinal column answered it.  Had Edwin rung?  No.
It was the front-door.

"Pardon me," said Tertius Ingpen, when she
opened.  "But all my friends soon learn how difficult
it is to get rid of me."

"Come in," she said, liking his tone, which flattered
her by assuming her sense of humour.

"As I'm sleeping at the office to-night, I thought I
might as well take one or two of my musical instruments
after all.  So I came back."

"You've been round?" she asked, meaning round to
the Orgreaves'.

"Yes."

"What is it, really?"

"Well, it appears to be pericarditis supervening on
renal disease.  He lost consciousness, you know."

"Yes, I know.  But what is pericarditis?"

"Pericarditis is inflammation of the pericardium."

"And what's the pericardium?"

They both smiled faintly.

"The pericardium is the membrane that encloses the
heart.  I don't mind telling you that I've only just
acquired this encyclopædic knowledge from
Stirling,--he was there."

"And is it supposed to be very dangerous?"

"I don't know.  Doctors never want to tell you
anything except what you can find out for yourself."

After a little hesitating pause they went into the
drawing-room, where the lights were still burning, and
the full disorder of the musical evening persisted,
including the cigarette-ash on the carpet.  Tertius
Ingpen picked up his clarinet case, took out the
instrument, examined the mouthpiece lovingly, and with
tenderness laid it back.

"Do sit down a moment," said Hilda, sitting limply
down.  "It's stifling, isn't it?"

"Let me open the window," he suggested politely.

As he returned from the window, he said, pulling
his short beard:

"It was wonderful how those Orgreaves went through
the musical evening, wasn't it?  Makes you proud of
being English....  I suppose Janet's a great friend
of yours?"

His enthusiasm touched her, and her pride in Janet
quickened to it.  She gave a deliberate, satisfied nod
in reply to his question.  She was glad to be alone with
him in the silence of the house.

"Ed gone to bed?" he questioned, after another
little pause.

Already he was calling her husband Ed, and with an
affectionate intonation!

She nodded again.

"He stuck it out jolly well," said Ingpen, still
standing.

"He brings these attacks on himself," said Hilda,
with the calm sententiousness of a good digestion
discussing a bad one.  She was becoming pleased with
herself--with her expensive dress, her position, her
philosophy, and her power to hold the full attention
of this man.

Ingpen replied, looking steadily at her:

"We bring everything on ourselves."

Then he smiled, as a comrade to another.

She shifted her pose.  A desire to discuss Edwin
with this man grew in her, for she needed sympathy
intensely.

"What do you think of this new scheme of his?" she
demanded somewhat self-consciously.

"The new works?  Seems all right.  But I don't
know much about it."

"Well, I'm not so sure."  And she exposed her
theory of the entire satisfactoriness of their present
situation, of the needlessness of fresh risks, and of
Edwin's unsuitability for enterprise.  "Of course he's
splendid," she said.  "But he'll never push.  I can
look at him quite impartially--I mean in all those
things."

Ingpen murmured as it were dreamily:

"Have you had much experience of business yourself?"

"It depends what you call business.  I suppose you
know I used to keep a boarding-house."  She was a
little defiant.

"No, I didn't know.  I may have heard vaguely.
Did you make it pay?"

"It did pay in the end."

"But not at first? ... Any disasters?"

She could not decide whether she ought to rebuff
the cross-examiner or not.  His manner was so objective,
so disinterested, so innocent, so disarming, that
in the end she smiled uncertainly, raising her thick
eyebrows.

"Oh yes," she said bravely.

"And who came to the rescue?" Ingpen proceeded.

"Edwin did."

"I see," said Ingpen, still dreamily.

"I believe you knew all about it," she remarked,
having flushed.

"Pardon me!  Almost nothing."

"Of course you take Edwin's side."

"Are we talking man to man?" he asked suddenly,
in a new tone.

"Most decidedly!"  She rose to the challenge.

"Then I'll tell you my leading theory," he said in a
soft, polite voice.  "The proper place for women is
the harem."

"Mr. Ingpen!"

"No, no!" he soothed her, but firmly.  "We're
talking man to man.  I can whisper sweet nothings to you,
if you prefer it, but I thought we were trying to be
honest.  I hold a belief.  I state it.  I may be wrong,
but I hold that belief.  You can persecute me for my
belief if you like.  That's your affair.  But surely you
aren't afraid of an idea!  If you don't like the mere
word, let's call it zenana.  Call it the drawing-room
and kitchen."

"So we're to be kept to our sphere!"

"Now don't be resentful.  Naturally you're to be
kept to your own sphere.  If Edwin began dancing
around in the kitchen, you'd soon begin to talk about
*his* sphere.  You can't have the advantages of married
life for nothing--neither you nor he.  But some of you
women nowadays seem to expect them gratis.  Let
me tell you, everything has to be paid for on this
particular planet.  I'm a bachelor.  I've often thought
about marrying, of course.  I might get married some
day.  You never know your luck.  If I do----"

"You'll keep your wife in the harem, no doubt!  And
she'll have to accept without daring to say a word all
the risks you choose to take."

"There you are again!" he said.  "This notion that
marriage ought to be the end of risks for a woman is
astonishingly rife, I find.  Very curious!  Very
curious!"  He seemed to address the wall.  "Why, it's the
beginning of them.  Doesn't the husband take risks?"

"He chooses his own.  He doesn't have business
risks thrust upon him by his wife."

"Doesn't he?  What about the risk of finding himself
tied for life to an inefficient housekeeper?  That's
a bit of a business risk, isn't it?  I've known more than
one man let in for it."

"And you've felt so sorry for him!"

"No, not specially.  You must run risks.  When
you've finished running risks you're dead and you
ought to be buried.  If I was a wife I should enjoy
running a risk with my husband.  I swear I shouldn't
want to shut myself up in a glass case with him out of
all the draughts!  Why, what are we all alive for?"

The idea of the fineness of running risks struck her
as original.  It challenged her courage, and she began
to meditate.

"Yes," she murmured.  "So you sleep at the office
sometimes?"

"A certain elasticity in one's domestic
arrangements."  He waved a hand, seeming to pooh-pooh
himself lightly.  Then, quickly changing his mood, he bent
and said good-night, but not quite with the saccharine
artificiality of his first visit--rather with honest,
friendly sincerity, in which were mingled both thanks
and appreciation.  Hilda jumped up responsively.
And, the clarinet-case under his left arm, and the
fiddle-case in his left hand, leaving the right arm free,
Ingpen departed.

She did not immediately go to bed.  Now that Ingpen
was gone she perceived that though she had really
said little in opposition to Edwin's scheme, he had at
once assumed that she was a strong opponent of it.
Hence she must have shown her feelings far too openly
at the first mention of the affair before anybody had
left.  This annoyed her.  Also the immense injustice
of nearly all Ingpen's argument grew upon her moment
by moment.  She was conscious of a grudge against
him, even while greatly liking him.  But she swore that
she would never show the grudge, and that he should
never suspect it.  To the end she would play a man's
part in the man-to-man discussion.  Moreover her anger
against Edwin had not decreased.  Nevertheless, a sort
of zest, perhaps an angry joy, filled her with novel
and intoxicating sensations.  Let the scheme of the
new works go forward!  Let it fail!  Let it ruin them!
She would stand in the breach.  She would show the
whole world that no ordeal could lower her head.  She
had had enough of being the odalisque and the queen,
reclining on the soft couch of security.  Her nostrils
scented life on the wind....  Then she heard a door
close upstairs, and began at last rapidly, as it were
cruelly, to put out the lights.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   IX

.. vspace:: 2

The incubus and humiliations of a first-class bilious
attack are not eternal.  Edwin had not retired very
long before the malignant phase of the terrible malady
passed inevitably, by phenomena according with all
clinical experience, into the next phase.  And the
patient, who from being chiefly a stomach, had now
become chiefly a throbbing head, lay on his pillow
exhausted but once more capable of objective thought.
His resentment against his wife on account of her
gratuitous disbelief in his business faculty, and on
account of her interference in a matter that did not
concern her, flickered up into new flame.  He was
absolutely innocent.  She was absolutely guilty; no excuse
existed or could be invented for her rude and wounding
attitude.  He esteemed Tertius Ingpen, bachelor, the
most fortunate of men....  Women--unjust, dishonourable,
unintelligent, unscrupulous, giggling,
pleasure-loving!  Their appetite for pleasure was infantile
and tigerish.  He had noticed it growing in Hilda.
Previous to marriage he had regarded Hilda as
combining the best feminine with the best masculine
qualities.  In many ways she had exhibited the comforting
straightforward characteristics of the male.  But
since marriage her mental resemblance to a man had
diminished daily, and now she was the most feminine
woman he had ever met, in the unsatisfactory sense
of the word.  Women ... Still, the behaviour of
Janet and Hilda during the musical evening had been
rather heroic.  Impossible to dismiss them as being
exclusively of the giggling race!  They had decided to
play a part, and they had played it with impressive
fortitude....  And the house of the Orgreaves--was
it about to fall?  He divined that it was about to fall.
No death had so far occurred in the family, which had
seemed to be immune through decades and forever.
He wondered what would have happened to the house
of Orgreave in six months' time....  Then he went
back into the dark origins of his bilious attack....
And then he was at inexcusable Hilda again.

At length he heard her on the landing.

She entered the bedroom, and quickly he shut his
eyes.  He felt unpleasantly through his eyelids that
she had turned up the gas.  Then she was close to him,
sat down on the edge of the bed.  She asked him
a question, calmly, as to occurrences since his
retirement.  He nodded an affirmative.

"Your forehead's all broken out," she said, moving
away.

In a few moments he was aware of the delicious,
soothing, heavenly application to his forehead of a
handkerchief drenched in eau de cologne and water.
The compress descended upon his forehead with the
infinite gentleness of an endearment and the sudden
solace of a reprieve.  He made faint, inarticulate
noises.

The light was extinguished for his ease.

He murmured weakly:

"Are you undressed already?"

"No," she said quietly.  "I can undress all right in
the dark."

He opened his eyes, and could dimly see her moving
darkly about, brushing her hair, casting garments.
Then she came towards him, a vague whiteness against
the gloom, and, bending, felt for his face, and kissed
him.  She kissed him with superb and passionate
violence; she drew his life out of him, and poured in her
own.  The tremendous kiss seemed to prove that there
is no difference between love and hate.  It contained
everything--surrender, defiance, anger and tenderness.

Neither of them spoke.  The kiss dominated and
assuaged him.  Its illogicalness overthrew him.  He could
never have kissed like that under such circumstances.
It was a high and bold gesture.  It expressed and
transmitted confidence.  She had explained nothing,
justified nothing, made no charge, asked no forgiveness.
She had just confronted him with one unarguable
fact.  And it was the only fact that mattered.
His pessimism about marriage lifted.  If his spirit
was splendidly romantic enough to match hers,
marriage remained a feasible state.  And he threw away
logic and the past, and in a magic vision saw that
success in marriage was an affair of goodwill and the
right tone.  With the whole force of his heart he
determined to succeed in marriage.  And in the mighty
resolve marriage presented itself to him as really
rather easy after all.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE ORGREAVE CALAMITY`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER X


.. class:: center medium

   THE ORGREAVE CALAMITY

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

On the following Saturday afternoon--that is, six
days later--Edwin had unusually been down to the
shop after dinner, and he returned home about four
o'clock.  Ada, hearing his entrance, came into the
hall and said:

"Please, sir, missis is over at Miss Orgreave's and
will ye please go over?"

"Where's Master George?"

"In missis's own room, sir."

"All right."

The "mistress's own room" was the new nomenclature
adopted by the kitchen, doubtless under suggestion,
for the breakfast-room or boudoir.  Edwin
opened the door and glanced in.  George, apparently
sketching, sat at his mother's desk, with the light
falling over his right shoulder.

He looked up quickly in self-excuse:

"Mother said I could!  Mother said I could!"

For the theory of the special sanctity of the
boudoir had mysteriously established itself in the
house during the previous eight or ten days.  George
was well aware that even Edwin was not entitled to
go in and out as he chose.

"Keep calm, sonny," said Edwin, teasing him.

With permissible and discreet curiosity he glanced
from afar at the desk, its upper drawers and its
pigeon-holes.  Obviously it was very untidy.  Its
untidiness gave him sardonic pleasure, because Hilda was
ever implying, or even stating, that she was a very
tidy woman.  He remembered that many years ago
Janet had mentioned orderliness as a trait of the
wonderful girl, Hilda Lessways.  But he did not
personally consider that she was tidy; assuredly she by no
means reached his standard of tidiness, which standard
indeed she now and then dismissed as old-maidish.
Also, he was sardonically amused by the air of
importance and busyness which she put on when using
the desk and the room; her household accounts,
beheld at a distance, were his wicked joy.  He saw a
bluish envelope lying untidily on the floor between the
desk and the fireplace, and he picked it up.  It had
been addressed to "Mrs. George Cannon, 59 Preston
Street, Brighton," and readdressed in a woman's
hand to "Mrs. Clayhanger, Trafalgar Road,
Bursley."  Whether the handwriting of the original
address was masculine or feminine he could not decide.
The envelope had probably contained only a bill or
a circular.  Nevertheless he felt at once inimically
inquisitive towards the envelope.  Without quite
knowing it he was jealous of all Hilda's past life up
to her marriage with him.  After a moment, reflecting
that she had made no mention of a letter, he
dropped the envelope superciliously, and it floated to
the ground.

"I'm going to Lane End House," he said.

"Can I come?"

"No."



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   II

.. vspace:: 2

The same overhanging spirit of a great event which
had somehow justified him in being curt to the boy,
rendered him self-conscious and furtive as he stood in
the porch of the Orgreaves, waiting for the door to
open.  Along the drive that curved round the oval
lawn under the high trees were wheel-marks still
surviving from the previous day.  The house also
survived; the curtains in all the windows, and the plants
or the pieces of furniture between the curtains, were
exactly as usual.  Yet the solid building and its
contents had the air of an illusion.

A servant appeared.

"Good afternoon, Selina."

He had probably never before called her by name,
but to-day his self-consciousness impelled him to do
uncustomary things.

"Good afternoon, sir," said Selina, whose changeless
attire ignored even the greatest events.  And it
was as if she had said:

"Ah, sir!  To what have we come!"

She too was self-conscious and furtive.

Aloud she said:

"Miss Orgreave and Mrs. Clayhanger are upstairs,
sir.  I'll tell Miss Orgreave."

Coughing nervously, he went into the drawing-room,
the large obscure room, crowded with old furniture
and expensive new furniture, with books, knickknacks,
embroidery, and human history, in which he had first
set eyes on Hilda.  It was precisely the same as it
had been a few days earlier; absolutely nothing had
been changed, and yet now it had the archæological
and forlorn aspect of a museum.

He dreaded the appearance of Janet and Hilda.
What could he say to Janet, or she to him?  But he
was a little comforted by the fact that Hilda had
left a message for him to join them.

On the previous Tuesday Osmond Orgreave had
died, and within twenty-four hours Mrs. Orgreave
was dead also.  On the Friday they were buried
together.  To-day the blinds were up again; the funereal
horses with their artificially curved necks had already
dragged other corpses to the cemetery; the town
existed as usual; and the family of Orgreave was
scattered once more.  Marian, the eldest daughter, had
not been able to come at all, because her husband
was seriously ill.  Alicia Hesketh, the youngest
daughter, far away in her large house in Devonshire, had
not been able to come at all, because she was hourly
expecting her third child; nor would Harry, her
husband, leave her.  Charlie, the doctor at Ealing, had
only been able to run down for the funeral, because,
his partner having broken his leg, the whole work of
the practice was on his shoulders.  And to-day Tom,
the solicitor, was in his office exploring the financial
side of his father's affairs; Johnnie was in the office
of Orgreave and Sons, busy with the professional
side of his father's affairs; Jimmie, who had made a
sinister marriage, was nobody knew precisely where;
Tom's wife had done what she could and gone home;
Jimmie's wife had never appeared; Elaine, Marian's
child, was shopping at Hanbridge for Janet; and
Janet remained among her souvenirs.  An epoch was
finished, and the episode that concluded it, in its
strange features and its swiftness, resembled a vast
hallucination.

Certain funerals will obsess a whole town.  And
the funeral of Mr. and Mrs. Osmond Orgreave might
have been expected to do so.  Not only had their
deaths been almost simultaneous, but they had been
preceded by superficially similar symptoms, though
the husband had died of pericarditis following renal
disease, and the wife of hyperæmia of the lungs
following increasingly frequent attacks of bronchial
catarrh.  The phenomena had been impressive, and
rumour had heightened them.  Also Osmond Orgreave
for half a century had been an important and
celebrated figure in the town; architecturally a large
portion of the new parts of it were his creation.  Yet the
funeral had not been one of the town's great feverish
funerals.  True, the children would have opposed
anything spectacular; but had municipal opinion decided
against the children, they would have been compelled
to yield.  Again and again prominent men in the
town had as it were bought their funeral processions
in advance by the yard--processions in which their
families, willing or not, were reduced to the rôle of
stewards.

Tom and Janet, however, had ordained that nobody
whatever beyond the family should be invited to the
funeral, and there had been no sincere protest from
outside.

The fact was that Osmond Orgreave had never related
himself to the crowd.  He was not a Freemason;
he had never been President of the Society for the
Prosecution of Felons; he had never held municipal
office; he had never pursued any object but the good
of his family.  He was a particularist.  His charm
was kept chiefly for his own home.  And beneath the
cordiality of his more general connections, there had
always been a subtle reservation--on both sides.  He
was admired for his cleverness and his distinction,
liked where he chose to be liked, but never loved save
by his own kin.  Further, he had a name for being
"pretty sharp" in business.  Clients had had
prolonged difficulties with him--Edwin himself among
them.  The town had made up its mind about Osmond
Orgreave, and the verdict, as with most popular
verdicts, was roughly just so far as it went, but unjust
in its narrowness.  The laudatory three-quarters of
a column in the *Signal* and the briefer effusive
notice in the new half-penny morning paper, both
reflected, for those with perceptions delicate enough to
understand, the popular verdict.  And though Edwin
hated long funerals and the hysteria of a public woe,
he had nevertheless a sense of disappointment in the
circumstances of the final disappearance of Osmond
Orgreave.

The two women entered the room, silently.  Hilda
looked fierce and protective.  Janet Orgreave, pale
and in black, seemed very thin.  She did not speak.
She gave a little nod of greeting.

Edwin, scarcely controlling his voice and his eyes,
murmured:

"Good afternoon."

They would not shake hands; the effort would have
broken them.  All remained standing, uncertainly.
Edwin saw before him two girls aged by the
accumulation of experience.  Janet, though apparently
healthy, with her smooth fair skin, was like an old
woman in the shell of a young one.  Her eyes were
dulled, her glance plaintive, her carriage slack.  The
conscious wish to please had left her, together with
her main excuse for being alive.  She was over
thirty-seven, and more and more during the last ten years
she had lived for her parents.  She alone among all
the children had remained absolutely faithful to them.
To them, and to nobody else, she had been essential--a
fountain of vigour and brightness and kindliness from
which they drew.  To see her in the familiar and
historic room which she had humanised and illuminated
with her very spirit, was heartrending.  In a day she
had become unnecessary, and shrunk to the unneeded,
undesired virgin which in truth she was.  She knew
it.  Everybody knew it.  All the waves of passionate
sympathy which Hilda and Edwin in their different
ways ardently directed towards her broke in vain
upon that fact.

Edwin thought:

"And only the other day she was keen on tennis!"

"Edwin," said Hilda.  "Don't you think she ought
to come across to our place for a bit?  I'm sure it
would be better for her not to sleep here."

"Most decidedly," Edwin answered, only too glad
to agree heartily with his wife.

"But Johnnie?" Janet objected.

"Pooh!  Surely he can stay at Tom's."

"And Elaine?"

"She can come with you.  Heaps of room for two."

"I couldn't leave the servants all alone.  I really
couldn't.  They wouldn't like it," Janet persisted.
"Moreover, I've got to give them notice."

Edwin had to make the motion of swallowing.

"Well," said Hilda obstinately.  "Come along now--for
the evening, anyhow.  We shall be by ourselves."

"Yes, you must," said Edwin, curtly.

"I--I don't like walking down the street," Janet
faltered, blushing.

"You needn't.  You can get over the wall," said
Edwin.

"Of course you can," Hilda concurred.  "Just as
you are now.  I'll tell Selina."

She left the room with decision, and the next
instant returned with a telegram in her hand.

"Open it, please.  I can't," said Janet.

Hilda read:

"Mother and boy both doing splendidly.  Harry."

Janet dropped onto a chair and burst into tears.

"I'm so glad.  I'm so glad," she spluttered.  "I can't
help it."

Then she jumped up, wiped her eyes, and smiled.

For a few yards the Clayhanger and the Orgreave
properties were contiguous, and separated by a fairly
new wall, which, after much procrastination on the
part of owners, had at last replaced an unsatisfactory
thorn-hedge.  While Selina put a chair in position for
the ladies to stand on as a preliminary to climbing
the wall, Edwin suddenly remembered that in the days
of the untidy thorn-hedge Janet had climbed a pair of
steps in order to surmount the hedge and visit his
garden.  He saw her balanced on the steps, and smiling
and then jumping, like a child.  Now, he preceded her
and Hilda on to the wall, and they climbed carefully,
and when they were all up Selina handed him the chair
and he dropped it on his own side of the wall so that
they might descend more easily.

"Be careful, Edwin.  Be careful," cried Hilda,
neither pleasantly nor unpleasantly.

And as he tried to read her mood in her voice, the
mysterious and changeful ever-flowing undercurrent of
their joint life bore rushingly away his sense of Janet's
tragedy; and he knew that no events exterior to his
marriage could ever overcome for long that constant
secret preoccupation of his concerning Hilda's mood.



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   III

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When they came into the house, Ada met them with
zest and calamity in her whispering voice:

"Please 'm, Mr. and Mrs. Benbow are here.  They're
in the drawing-room.  They said they'd wait a bit to
see if you came back."

Ada had foreseen that, whatever their superficially
indifferent demeanour as members of the powerful
ruling caste, her master and mistress would be struck
all of a heap by this piece of news.  And they were.
For the Benbows did not pay chance calls; in the
arrangement of their lives every act was neatly planned
and foreordained.  Therefore this call was formal, and
behind it was an intention.

"*I* can't see them.  I can't possibly, dear," Janet
murmured, as it were intimidated.  "I'll run back
home."

Hilda replied with benevolent firmness:

"No you won't.  Come upstairs with me till they're
gone.  Edwin, you go and see what they're after."

Janet faltered and obeyed, and the two women crept
swiftly upstairs.  They might have been executing a
strategic retirement from a bad smell.  The instinctive
movement, and the manner, were a judgment on
the ideals of the Benbows so terrible and final that
even the Benbows, could they have seen it, must have
winced and doubted for a moment their own moral
perfection.  It came to this, that the stricken fled from
their presence.

"'What they're after'!" Edwin muttered to himself,
half resenting the phrase; because Clara was his
sister; and though she bored and exasperated him, he
could not class her with exactly similar boring and
exasperating women.

And, throwing down his cap, he went with false
casual welcoming into the drawing-room.

Young Bert Benbow, prodigiously solemn and
uncomfortable in his birthday spectacles, was with his
father and mother.  Immense satisfaction, tempered
by a slight nervousness, gleamed in the eyes of the
parents.  And the demeanour of all three showed
instantly that the occasion was ceremonious.  Albert and
Clara could not have been more pleased and uplifted
had the occasion been a mourning visit of commiseration
or even a funeral.

The washed and brushed schoolboy, preoccupied,
did not take his share in the greetings with sufficient
spontaneity and promptitude.

Clara said, gently shocked:

"Bert, what do you say to your uncle?"

"Good afternoon, uncle."

"I should think so indeed!"

Clara of course sprang at once to the luscious first
topic, as to a fruit:

"How is poor Janet bearing up?"

Edwin was very characteristically of the Five Towns
in this,--he hated to admit, in the crisis itself, that
anything unusual was happening or had just happened.
Thus he replied negligently:

"Oh!  All right!"

As though his opinion was that Janet had nothing
to bear up against.

"I hear it was a *very* quiet funeral," said Clara,
suggesting somehow that there must be something
sinister behind the quietness of the funeral.

"Yes," said Edwin.

"Didn't they ask *you*?"

"No."

"Well--my word!"

There was a silence, save for faint humming from
Albert.  And then, just as Clara was mentioning her
name, in rushed Hilda.

"What's the matter?" the impulsive Hilda demanded
bluntly.

This gambit did not please Edwin, whose instinct
was always to pretend that nothing was the matter.
He would have maintained as long as anybody that
the call was a chance call.

After a few vague exchanges, Clara coughed and
said:

"It's really about your George and our Bert....
Haven't you heard? ... Hasn't George said anything?"

"No....  What?"

Clara looked at her husband expectantly, and
Albert took the grand male rôle.

"I gather they had a fight yesterday at school,"
said he.

The two boys went to the same school, the
new-fangled Higher Grade School at Hanbridge, which
had dealt such a blow at the ancient educational
foundations at Oldcastle.  That their Bert should attend
the same school as George was secretly a matter of
pride to the Benbows.

"Oh," said Edwin.  "We've seen no gaping wounds,
have we, Hilda?"

Albert's face did not relax.

"You've only got to look at Bert's chin," said Clara.

Bert shuffled under the world's sudden gaze.
Undeniably there was a small discoloured lump on his
chin.

"I've had it out with Bert," Albert continued
severely.  "I don't know who was in the wrong--it was
about that penknife business, you know--but I'm
quite sure that Bert was not in the right.  And as he's
the older we've decided that he must ask George's
forgiveness."

"Yes," eagerly added Clara, tired of listening.
"Albert says we can't have quarrels going on like
this in the family--they haven't spoken friendly to
each other since that night we were here--and it's the
manly thing for Bert to ask George's forgiveness, and
then they can shake hands."

"That's what I say."  Albert massively corroborated her.

Edwin thought:

"I suppose these people imagine they're doing
something rather fine."

Whatever they imagined they were doing, they
had made both Edwin and Hilda sheepish.  Either of
them would have sacrificed a vast fortune and the
lives of thousands of Sunday school officers in order
to find a dignified way of ridiculing and crushing the
expedition of Albert and Clara; but they could think
of naught that was effective.

Hilda asked, somewhat curtly, but lamely:

"Where is George?"

"He was in your boudoir a two-three minutes ago,
drawing," said Edwin.

Clara's neck was elongated at the sound of the word
"boudoir."

"Boudoir?" said she.  And Edwin could in fancy
hear her going down Trafalgar Road and giggling at
every house-door: "Did ye know Mrs. Clayhanger
has a boudoir?  That's the latest."  Still he had
employed the word with intention, out of deliberate
bravado.

"Breakfast-room," he added, explanatory.

"I should suggest," said Albert, "that Bert goes
to him in the breakfast-room.  They'll settle it much
better by themselves."  He was very pleased by this
last phrase, which proved him a man of the world
after all.

"So long as they don't smash too much furniture
while they're about it," murmured Edwin.

"Now, Bert, my boy," said Albert, in the tone of a
father who is also a brother.

And, as Hilda was inactive, Bert stalked forth upon
his mission of manliness, smiling awkwardly and blushing.
He closed the door after him, and not one of the
adults dared to rise and open it.

"Had any luck with missing words lately?" Albert
asked, in a detached airy manner, showing that the
Bert-George affair was a trifle to him, to be dismissed
from the mind at will.

"No," said Edwin.  "I've been off missing words
lately."

"Of course you have," Clara agreed with gravity.
"All this must have been very trying to you all....
Albert's done very well of course."

"I was on 'politeness,' my boy," said Albert.

"Didn't you know?" Clara expressed surprise.

"'Politeness'?"

"Sixty-four pounds nineteen shillings per share,"
said Albert tremendously.

Edwin appreciatively whistled.

"Had the money?"

"No.  Cheques go out on Monday, I believe.  Of
course," he added, "I go in for it scientifically.  I
leave no chances, I don't.  I'm making a capital
outlay of over five pounds ten on next week's competition,
and I may tell you I shall get it back again, *with*
interest."

At the same moment, Bert re-entered the room.

"He's not there," said Bert.  "His drawing's there,
but he isn't."

This news was adverse to the cause of manly peace.

"Are you sure?" asked Clara, implying that Bert
might not have made a thorough search for George in
the boudoir.

Hilda sat grim and silent.

"He may be upstairs," said the weakly amiable Edwin.

Hilda rang the bell with cold anger.

"Is Master George in the house?" she harshly
questioned Ada.

"No'm.  He went out a bit since."

The fact was that George, on hearing from the
faithful Ada of the arrival of the Benbows, had
retired through the kitchen and through the back-door,
into the mountainous country towards Bleakridge
railway-station, where kite-flying was practised on
immense cinder-heaps.

"Ah!  Well," said Albert, undefeated, to Edwin.
"You might tell him Bert's been up specially to
apologise to him.  Oh!  And here's that penknife!"  He
looked now at Hilda, and, producing Tertius Ingpen's
knife, he put it with a flourish on the mantelpiece.  "I
prefer it to be on your mantelpiece than on ours," he
added, smiling rather grandiosely.  His manner as a
whole, though compound, indicated with some clearness
that while he adhered to his belief in the efficacy of
prayer, he could not allow his son to accept from
George earthly penknives alleged to have descended
from heaven.  It was a triumphant hour for Albert
Benbow, as he stood there dominating the drawing-room.
He perceived that, in addition to silencing and
sneaping the elder and richer branch of the family, he
was cutting a majestic figure in the eyes of his own son.

In an awful interval, Clara said with a sweet bright
smile:

"By the way, Albert, don't forget about what
Maggie asked you to ask."

"Oh, yes!  By the way," said Albert, "Maggie wants
to know how soon you can complete the purchase of
this house of yours."

Edwin moved uneasily.

"I don't know," he mumbled.

"Can you stump up in a month?  Say the end of
October anyway, at latest."  Albert persisted, and
grew caustic.  "You've only got to sell a few of your
famous securities."

"Certainly.  Before the end of October," Hilda
replied, with impulsive and fierce assurance.

Edwin was amazed by this interference on her part.
Was she incapable of learning from experience?  Let
him employ the right tone with absolutely perfect skill,
marriage would still be impossible if she meant to carry
on in this way!  What did she know about the
difficulties of completing the purchase?  What right had
she to put in a word apparently so decisive?  Such
behaviour was unheard of.  She must be mad.
Nevertheless he did not yield to anger.  He merely said
feebly and querulously:

"That's all very well!  That's all very well!  But
I'm not quite so sure as all that.  Will she let some
of it be on mortgage?"

"No, she won't," said Albert.

"Why not?"

"Because I've got a new security for the whole
amount myself."

"Oh!"

Edwin glanced at his wife and his resentful eyes
said: "There you are!  All through your infernal
hurry and cheek Maggie's going to lose eighteen
hundred pounds in a rotten investment.  I told you
Albert would get hold of that money if he heard of it.
And just look!"

At this point Albert, who knew fairly well how to
draw an advantage from his brother-in-law's characteristic
weaknesses, perceived suddenly the value of an
immediate departure.  And amid loud enquiries of all
sorts from Clara, and magnificent generalities from
Albert, and gloomy, stiff salutations from
uncomfortable Bert, the visit closed.

But destiny lay in wait at the corner of the street
for Albert Benbow's pride.  Precisely as the
Benbows were issuing from the portico, the front-door
being already closed upon them, the second Swetnam
son came swinging down Trafalgar Road.  He stopped,
raising his hat.

"Hallo, Mr. Benbow," he said.  "You've heard
the news, I suppose?"

"What about?"

"Missing word competitions."

It is a fact that Albert paled.

"What?"

"Injunction in the High Court this morning.  All
the money's impounded, pending a hearing as to
whether the competitions are illegal or not.  At the
very least half of it will go in costs.  It's all over with
missing words."

"Who told you?"

"I've had a wire to stop me from sending in for
next week's."

Albert Benbow gave an oath.  His wife ought surely
to have been horrorstruck by the word; but she did
not blench.  Flushing and scowling she said:

"What a shame!  We've sent ours in."

The faithful creature had for days past at odd
moments been assisting her husband in the dictionary
and as a clerk....  And lo! at last, confirmation of
those absurd but persistent rumours to the effect that
certain busybodies meant if they could to stop missing
word competitions on the ground that they were
simply a crude appeal to the famous "gambling
instincts" of mankind and especially of Englishmen!

Albert had rebutted the charge with virtuous warmth,
insisting on the skill involved in word-choosing, and
insisting also on the historical freedom of the
institutions of his country.  He maintained that it was
inconceivable that any English court of justice should
ever interfere with a pastime so innocent and so tonic
for the tired brain.  And though he had had secret
fears, and had been disturbed and even hurt by the
comments of a religious paper to which he subscribed,
he would not waver from his courageous and sensible
English attitude.  Now the fearful blow had fallen,
and Albert knew in his heart that it was heaven's
punishment for him.  He turned to shut the gate after
him, and noticed Bert.  It appeared to him that in
hearing the paternal oath, Bert had been guilty of a
crime, or at least an indiscretion, and he at once began
to make Bert suffer.

Meanwhile Swetnam had gone on, to spread the tale
which was to bring indignation and affliction into tens
of thousands of respectable homes.



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   IV

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Janet came softly and timidly into the drawing-room.

"They are gone?" she questioned.  "I thought I
heard the front-door."

"Yes, thank goodness!" Hilda exclaimed candidly,
disdaining the convention (which Edwin still had in
respect) that a weakness in family ties should never
be referred to, beyond the confines of the family, save
in urbane terms of dignity and regret excusing so far
as possible the sinner.  But in this instance the
immense ineptitude of the Benbows had so affected
Edwin that, while objecting to his wife's outbreak, he
could not help giving a guffaw which supported it.
And all the time he kept thinking to himself:

"Imagine that d----d pietistic rascal dragging the
miserable shrimp up here to apologise to George!"

He was ashamed, not merely of his relatives, but
somehow of all humanity.  He could scarcely look even
a chair in the face.  The Benbows had left behind
them desolation, and this desolation affected everything,
and could be tasted on the tongue.  Janet of
course instantly noticed it, and felt that she ought not
to witness the shaming of her friends.  Moreover, her
existence now was chiefly an apology for itself.

She said:

"I really think I ought to go back and see about a
meal for Johnnie in case he turns up."

"Nonsense!" said Hilda, sharply.  "With three
servants in the house, I suppose Johnnie won't starve!
Now just sit down.  Sit *down*!"  Her tone softened.
"My dear, you're worse than a child....  Tell
Edwin."  She put a cushion behind Janet in the easy
chair.  And the gesture made Janet's eyes humid once
more.

Edwin had the exciting, disquieting, vitalising
sensation of being shut up in an atmosphere of women.
Not two women, but two thousand, seemed to hem him
in with their incalculable impulses, standards,
inspirations.

"Janet wants to consult you," Hilda added; and
even Hilda appeared to regard him as a strong saviour.

He thought:

"After all, then, I'm not the born idiot she'd like
to make out.  Now we're getting at her real opinion
of me!"

"It's only about father's estate," said Janet.

"Why?  Hasn't he made a will?"

"Oh yes!  He made a will over thirty years ago.
He left everything to mother and made her sole
executor or whatever you call it.  Just like him, wasn't
it? ... D'you know that he and mother never had a
quarrel, nor anything near a quarrel?"

"Well," Edwin, nodding appreciatively, answered
with an informed masculine air.  "The law provides
for all that.  Tom will know.  Did your mother make
a will?"

"No.  Dear thing!  She would never have dreamt of it."

"Then letters of administration will have to be
taken out," said Edwin.

Janet began afresh:

"Father was talking of making a new will two or
three months ago.  He mentioned it to Tom.  He said
he should like you to be one of the executors.  He
said he would sooner have you for an executor than
anybody."

An intense satisfaction permeated Edwin, that he
should have been desired as an executor by such an
important man as Osmond Orgreave.  He felt as
though he were receiving compensation for uncounted
detractions.

"Really?" said he.  "I expect Tom will take out
letters of administration, or Tom and Johnnie
together; they'll make better executors than I
should."

"It doesn't seem to make much difference who looks
after it and who doesn't," Hilda sharply interrupted.
"When there's nothing to look after."

"Nothing to look after?" Edwin repeated.

"Nothing to look after!" said Hilda in a firm and
clear tone.  "According to what Janet says."

"But surely there must be something!"

Janet answered mildly:

"I'm afraid there isn't much."

It was Hilda who told the tale.  The freehold of
Lane End House belonged to the estate, but there
were first and second mortgages on it, and had been
for years.  Debts had always beleaguered the
Orgreave family.  A year ago money had apparently
been fairly plentiful, but a great deal had been spent
on re-furnishing.  Jimmie had had money, in connection
with his sinister marriage; Charlie had had money
in connection with his practice, and Tom had enticed
Mr. Orgreave into the Palace Porcelain Company.
Mr. Orgreave had given a guarantee to the Bank for
an overdraft, in exchange for debentures and shares
in that company.  The debentures were worthless, and
therefore the shares also, and the bank had already
given notice under the guarantee.  There was an
insurance policy--one poor little insurance policy for
a thousand pounds--whose capital well invested
might produce an income of twelve or fifteen shillings
a week; but even that policy was lodged as security
for an overdraft on one of Osmond's several private
banking accounts.  There were many debts, small to
middling.  The value of the Orgreave architectural
connection was excessively dubious--so much of it had
depended upon Osmond Orgreave himself.  The estate
might prove barely solvent; on the other hand it might
prove insolvent; so Johnnie, who had had it from
Tom, had told Janet that day, and Janet had told Hilda.

"Your father was let in for the Palace Porcelain
Company?" Edwin breathed, with incredulous emphasis
on the initial p's.  "What on earth was Tom thinking of?"

"That's what Johnnie wants to know," said Janet.
"Johnnie was very angry.  They've had some words
about it."

Except for the matter of the Palace Porcelain
Company, Edwin was not surprised at the revelations,
though he tried to be.  The more closely he examined
his attitude for years past to the Orgreave household
structure, the more clearly he had to admit that a
suspicion of secret financial rottenness had never long
been absent from his mind--not even at the period of
renewed profuseness, a year or two ago, when
furniture-dealers, painters, and paperhangers had been
enriched.  His resentment against the deceased
charming Osmond and also against the affectionate and
blandly confident mother, was keen and cold.  They
had existed, morally, on Janet for many years;
monopolised her, absorbed her, aged her, worn her out,
done everything but finish her,--and they had made no
provision for her survival.  In addition to being
useless, she was defenceless, helpless, penniless, and old;
and she shivered now that the warmth of her
parents' affection was withdrawn by death.

"You see," said Janet.  "Father was so transparently
honest and generous."

Edwin said nothing to this sincere outburst.

"Have you got any money at all, Janet?" asked Hilda.

"There's a little household money, and by a miracle
I've never spent the ten-pound note poor dad gave
me on my last birthday."

"Well," said Edwin, sardonically imaging that
ten-pound note as a sole defence for Janet against the
world.  "Of course Johnnie will have to allow you
something out of the business--for one thing."

"I'm sure he will, if he can," Janet agreed.  "But
he says it's going to be rather tight.  He wants us to
clear out of the house at once."

"Take my advice and don't do it," said Edwin.
"Until the house is let or sold it may as well be
occupied by you as stand empty--better in fact, because
you'll look after it."

"*That's* right enough, anyway," said Hilda, as if to
imply that by a marvellous exception a man had for
once in a while said something sensible.

"You needn't use all the house," Edwin proceeded.
"You won't want all the servants."

"I wish you'd say a word to Johnnie," breathed
Janet.

"I'll say a word to Johnnie, all right," Edwin
answered loudly.  "But it seems to me it's Tom that
wants talking to.  I can't imagine what he was doing
to let your father in for that Palace Porcelain
business.  It beats me."

Janet quietly protested:

"I feel sure he thought it was all right."

"Oh, of course!" said Hilda, bitterly.  "Of course!
They always do think it's all right.  And here's my
husband just going into one of those big dangerous
affairs, and *he* thinks it's all right, and nothing I can
say will stop him from going into it.  And he'll keep
on thinking it's all right until it's all wrong and we're
ruined, and perhaps me left a widow with George."  Her
lowered eyes blazed at the carpet.

Janet, troubled, glanced from one to the other, and
then, with all the tremendous unconscious persuasive
force of her victimhood and her mourning, murmured
gently to Edwin:

"Oh!  Don't run any risks!  Don't run any risks!"

Edwin was staggered by the swift turn of the
conversation.  Two thousand women hemmed him in more
closely than ever.  He could do nothing against them
except exercise an obstinacy which might be esteemed
as merely brutal.  They were not accessible to
argument--Hilda especially.  Argument would be received
as an outrage.  It would be impossible to convince
Hilda that she had taken a mean and disgraceful
advantage of him, and that he had every right to resent
her behaviour.  She was righteousness and injuredness
personified.  She partook, in that moment, of
the victimhood of Janet.  And she baffled him.

He bit his lower lip.

"All that's not the business before the meeting," he
said as lightly as he could.  "D'you think if I stepped
down now I should catch Johnnie at the office?"

And all the time, while his heart hardened against
Hilda, he kept thinking:

"Suppose I *did* come to smash!"

Janet had put a fear in his mind, Janet who in
her wistfulness and her desolating ruin seemed to be
like only a little pile of dust--all that remained of
the magnificent social structure of a united and
numerous Orgreave family.


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   V

.. vspace:: 2

Edwin met Tertius Ingpen in the centre of the
town outside the offices of Orgreave and Sons, amid
the commotion caused by the return of uplifted spectators
from a football match in which the team curiously
known to the sporting world as "Bursley Moorthorne"
had scored a broken leg and two goals to nil.

"Hello!" Ingpen greeted him.  "I was thinking of
looking in at your place to-night."

"Do!" said Edwin.  "Come up with me now."

"Can't! ... Why do these ghastly louts try to
walk over you as if they didn't see you?"  Then in
another tone, very quietly, and nodding in the
direction of the Orgreave offices: "Been in there? ... What
a week, eh! ... How are things?"

"Bad," Edwin answered.  "In a word, bad!"

Ingpen lifted his eyebrows.

They turned away out of the crowd, up towards the
tranquillity of the Turnhill Road.  They were
manifestly glad to see each other.  Edwin had had a
satisfactory interview with Johnnie Orgreave,--satisfactory
in the sense that Johnnie had admitted the wisdom
of all that Edwin said and promised to act on it.

"I've just been talking to young Johnnie for his
own good," said Edwin.

And in a moment, with eagerness, with that strange
deep satisfaction felt by the carrier of disastrous
tidings, he told Ingpen all that he knew of the plight of
Janet Orgreave.

"If you ask me," said he, "I think it's infamous."

"Infamous," Ingpen repeated the word savagely.
"There's no word for it.  What'll she do?"

"Well, I suppose she'll have to live with Johnnie."

"And where will Mrs. Chris come in, then?" Ingpen
asked in a murmur.

"Mrs. Chris Hamson?" exclaimed Edwin startled.
"Oh!  Is that affair still on the carpet? ... Cheerful
outlook!"

Ingpen pulled his beard.

"Anyhow," said he, "Johnnie's the most reliable of
the crew.  Charlie's the most agreeable, but Johnnie's
the most reliable.  I wouldn't like to count much on
Tom, and as for Jimmie, well of course----!"

"I always look on Johnnie as a kid.  Can't help it."

"There's no law against that, so long as you don't
go and blub it out to Mrs. Chris," Ingpen laughed.

"I don't know her."

"You ought to know her.  She's an education, my boy."

"I've been having a fair amount of education
lately," said Edwin.  "Only this afternoon I was
practically told that I ought to give up the idea of my new
works because it has risks and the Palace Porcelain
Co. was risky and Janet hasn't a cent.  See the point?"

He was obliged to talk about the affair, because it
was heavily on his mind.  A week earlier he had
persuaded himself that the success of a marriage depended
chiefly on the tone employed to each other by the
contracting parties.  But in the disturbing scene of the
afternoon, his tone had come near perfection, and yet
marriage presented itself as even more stupendously
difficult than ever.  Ingpen's answering words salved
and strengthened him.  The sensation of being
comprehended was delicious.  Intimacy progressed.

"I say," said Edwin, as they parted.  "You'd better
not know anything about all this when you come to-night."

"Right you are, my boy."

Their friendship seemed once more to be suddenly
and surprisingly intensified.

When Edwin returned, Janet had vanished again.
Like an animal which fears the hunt and whose
shyness nothing can cure, she had fled to cover at the
first chance.  According to Hilda she had run home
because it had occurred to her that she must go
through her mother's wardrobe and chest of drawers
without a moment's delay.

Edwin's account to his wife of the interview with
Johnnie Orgreave was given on a note justifiably
triumphant.  In brief he had "talked sense" to Johnnie,
and Johnnie had been convicted and convinced.  Hilda
listened with respectful propriety.  Edwin said
nothing as to his encounter with Tertius Ingpen, partly
from prudence and partly from timidity.  When
Ingpen arrived at the house, much earlier than he might
have been expected to arrive, Edwin was upstairs, and
on descending he found his wife and his friend
chatting in low and intimate voices close together in the
drawing-room.  The gas had been lighted.

"Here's Mr. Ingpen," said Hilda, announcing a surprise.

"How do, Ingpen?"

"How do, Ed?"

Ingpen did not rise.  Nor did they shake hands, but
in the Five Towns friends who have reached a certain
degree of intimacy proudly omit the ceremony of
handshaking when they meet.  It was therefore impossible
for Hilda to divine that Edwin and Tertius had
previously met that day, and apparently Ingpen had not
divulged the fact.  Edwin felt like a plotter.

The conversation of course never went far away
from the subject of the Orgreaves--and Janet in
particular.  Ingpen's indignation at the negligence which
had left Janet in the lurch was more than warm enough
to satisfy Hilda, whose grievance against the wicked
carelessness of heads of families in general seemed
to be approaching expression again.  At length she
said:

"It's enough to make every woman think seriously of
where she'd be--if anything happened."

Ingpen smiled teasingly.

"Now you're getting personal."

"And what if I am?  With my headstrong husband
going in for all sorts of schemes!"  Hilda's voice was
extraordinarily clear and defiant.

Edwin nervously rose.

"I'll just get some cigarettes," he mumbled.

Hilda and Ingpen scarcely gave him any attention.
Already they were exciting themselves.  Although he
knew that the supply of cigarettes was in the
dining-room, he toured half the house before going there;
and then lit the gas and with strange deliberation drew
the blinds; next he rang the bell for matches, and,
having obtained them, lit a cigarette.

When he re-entered the drawing-room, Ingpen was
saying with terrific conviction:

"You're quite wrong, as I've told you before.  It's
your instinct that's wrong, not your head.  Women
will do anything to satisfy their instincts, simply
anything.  They'll ruin your life in order to satisfy their
instincts.  Yes, even when they know jolly well their
instincts are wrong!"

Edwin thought:

"Well, if these two mean to have a row, it's no
affair of mine."

But Hilda, seemingly overfaced, used a very moderate
tone to retort:

"You're very outspoken."

Tertius Ingpen answered firmly:

"I'm only saying aloud what every man thinks....
Mind--every man."

"And how comes it that *you* know so much about women?"

"I'll tell you sometime," said Ingpen, shortly, and
then smiled again.

Edwin, advancing, murmured:

"Here.  Have a cigarette."

A few moments later Ingpen was sketching out a
Beethoven symphony unaided on the piano, and holding
his head back to keep the cigarette-smoke out of
his eyes.



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   VI

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When the hour struck for which Hilda had
promised a sandwich supper Edwin and Tertius Ingpen
were alone in the drawing-room, and Ingpen was again
at the piano, apparently absorbed in harmonic
inventions of his own.  No further word had been said
upon the subject of the discussion between Ingpen
and Hilda.  On the whole, despite the reserve of Hilda's
demeanour, Edwin considered that marriage at the
moment was fairly successful, and the stream of
existence running in his favour.  At five minutes after
the hour, restless, he got up and said:

"I'd better be seeing what's happened to that supper."

Ingpen nodded, as in a dream.

Edwin glanced into the dining-room, where the
complete supper was waiting in illuminated silence and
solitude.  Then he went to the boudoir.  There, the
two candlesticks from the mantelpiece had been put
side by side on the desk, and the candles lit the figures
of Hilda and her son.  Hilda, kneeling, held a stamped
and addressed letter in her hand, the boy was bent
over the desk at his drawing, which his mother
regarded.  Edwin in his heart affectionately derided
them for employing candles when the gas would have
been so much more effective; he thought that the use
of candles was "just like" one of Hilda's unforeseeable
caprices.  But in spite of his secret derision he was
strangely affected by the group as revealed by the
wavering candle-flames in the general darkness of the
room.  He seldom saw Hilda and George together;
neither of them was very expansive; and certainly he
had never seen Hilda kneeling by her son's side since
a night at the Orgreaves' before her marriage, when
George lay in bed unconscious and his spirit hesitated
between earth and heaven.  He knew that Hilda's love
for George had in it something of the savage, but,
lacking demonstrations of it, he had been apt to forget
its importance in the phenomena of their united
existence.  Kneeling by her son, Hilda had the look of a
girl, and the ingenuousness of her posture touched
Edwin.  The idea shot through his brain like a star,
that life was a marvellous thing.

As the door had been ajar, they scarcely heard
him come in.  George turned first.

And then Ada was standing at the door.

"Yes'm?"

"Oh!  Ada!  Just run across with this letter to
the pillar, will you?"

"Yes'm."

"You've missed the post, you know," said Edwin.

Hilda got up slowly.

"It doesn't matter.  Only I want it to be in the post."

As she gave the letter to Ada he speculated idly as
to the address of the letter, and why she wanted it
to be in the post.  Anyhow, it was characteristic of
her to want the thing to be in the post.  She would
delay writing a letter for days, and then, having
written it, be "on pins" until it was safely taken out of
the house; and even when the messenger returned
she would ask: "Did you put that letter in the post?"

Ada had gone.

"What's he drawing, this kid?" asked Edwin, genially.

Nobody answered.  Standing between his wife and
the boy he looked at the paper.  The first thing he
noticed was some lettering, achieved in an imitation
of architect's lettering: "*Plan for proposed new
printing-works to be erected by Edwin Clayhanger,
Esq., upon land at Shawport.  George Edwin
Clayhanger, architect.*"  And on other parts of the paper,
"Ground-floor plan" and "Elevation."  The plan at a
distance resembled the work of a real architect.  Only
when closely examined did it reveal itself as a piece of
boyish mimicry.  The elevation was not finished....
It was upon this that, with intervals caused by the
necessity of escaping from bores, George had been
labouring all day.  And here was exposed the secret and
the result of his chumminess with Johnnie Orgreave.
Yet the boy had never said a word to Edwin in
explanation of that chumminess; nor had Johnnie himself.

"He's been telling me he's going to be an architect,"
said Hilda.

"Is this plan a copy of Johnnie's, or is it his own
scheme?" asked Edwin.

"Oh, his own!" Hilda answered, with a rapidity and
an earnestness which disclosed all her concealed pride
in the boy.

Edwin was thrilled.  He pored over the plan, making
remarks and putting queries, in a dull matter-of-fact
tone; but he was so thrilled that he scarcely
knew what he was saying or understood the replies to
his questions.  It seemed to him wondrous, miraculous,
overwhelming, that his own disappointed ambition to
be an architect should have re-flowered in his wife's
child who was not his child.  He was reconciled to
being a printer, and indeed rather liked being a
printer, but now all his career presented itself to him
as a martyrisation.  And he passionately swore that
such a martyrisation should not happen to George.
George's ambition should be nourished and forwarded
as no boyish ambition had ever been nourished and
forwarded before.  For a moment he had a genuine
conviction that George must be a genius.

Hilda, behind the back of proud, silent George,
pulled Edwin's face to hers and kissed it.  And as she
kissed she gazed at Edwin and her eyes seemed to
be saying: "Have your works; I have yielded.
Perhaps it is George's plan that has made me yield, but
anyhow I am strong enough to yield.  And my
strength remains."

And Edwin thought: "This woman is unique.  What
other woman could have done that in just that way?"  And
in their embrace, intensifying and complicating
its significance, were mingled the sensations of their
passion, his triumph, her surrender, the mysterious
boy's promise, and their grief for Janet's tragedy.

"Old Ingpen's waiting for his supper, you know,"
said Edwin tenderly.  "George, you must show that
to Mr. Ingpen."





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.. _`LITHOGRAPHY`:

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   BOOK II

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   THE PAST

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.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER XI

.. class:: center medium

   LITHOGRAPHY

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.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

Edwin, sitting behind a glazed door with the word
"Private" elaborately patterned on the glass, heard
through the open window of his own office the voices
of the Benbow children and their mother in the street
outside.

"Oh, Mother!  What a big sign!"

"Yes.  Isn't Uncle Edwin a proud man to have such
a big sign?"

"Hsh!"

"It wasn't up yesterday."

"L, i, t, h, o,----"

"My word, Rupy!  You are getting on!"

"They're such large letters, aren't they,
mother? ... 'Lithographic' ... 'Lithographic printing.
Edwin Clayhanger'."

"Hsh! ... Bert, how often do you want me to tell
you about your shoe-lace?"

"I wonder if George has come."

"Mother, can't *I* ring the bell?"

All the children were there, with their screeching
voices.  Edwin wondered that Rupert should have been
brought.  Where was the sense of showing a
three-year-old infant like Rupert over a printing-works?
But Clara was always like that.  The difficulty of
leaving little Rupert alone at home did not present
itself to the august uncle.

Edwin rose, locked a safe that was let into the wall
of the room, and dropped the key into his pocket.  The
fact of the safe being let into the wall gave him as
much simple pleasure as any detail of the new works;
it was an idea of Johnnie Orgreave's.  He put a grey
hat carelessly at the back of his head, and, hands in
pockets, walked into the next and larger room, which
was the clerks' office.

Both these rooms had walls distempered in a green
tint, and were fitted and desked in pitchpine.  Their
newness was stark, and yet in the clerks' office the
irrational habituating processes of time were already
at work.  On the painted iron mantelpiece lay a dusty
white tile, brought as a sample long before the room
was finished, and now without the slightest excuse for
survival.  Nevertheless the perfunctory cleaner lifted
the tile on most mornings, dusted underneath it, and
replaced it; and Edwin and his staff saw it scores of
times daily and never challenged it, and gradually it
was acquiring a prescriptive right to exist just where
it did.  And the day was distant when some inconvenient,
reforming person would exclaim:

"What's this old tile doing here?"

What Edwin did notice was that the walls and desks
showed marks and even wounds; it seemed to him
somehow wrong that the brand new could not remain
forever brand new.  He thought he would give a
mild reproof or warning to the elder clerk, (once the
shop-clerk in the ancient establishment at the corner
of Duck Bank and Wedgwood Street) and then he
thought: "What's the use?" and only murmured:

"I'm not going off the works."

And he passed out, with his still somewhat gawky
gait, to the small entrance-hall of the works.  On the
outer face of the door, which he closed, was painted
the word "Office."  He had meant to have the words
"Counting-House" painted on that door, because they
were romantic and fine-sounding; but when the
moment came to give the order he had quaked before
such romance; he was afraid as usual of being
sentimental and of "showing off," and with assumed satire
had publicly said: "Some chaps would stick
'Counting-house' as large as life all across the door."  He
now regretted his poltroonery.  And he regretted
sundry other failures in courage connected with the scheme
of the works.  The works existed, but it looked rather
like other new buildings, and not very much like the
edifice he had dreamed.  It ought to have been grander,
more complete, more dashingly expensive, more of an
exemplar to the slattern district.  He had been (he
felt) unduly influenced by the local spirit for
half-measures.  And his life seemed to be a life of
half-measures, a continual falling-short.  Once he used to
read studiously on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday
evenings.  He seldom read now, and never with
regularity.  Scarcely a year ago he had formed a
beautiful vague project of being "musical."  At Hilda's
instigation he had bought a book of musical criticism by
Hubert Parry, and Hilda had swallowed it in three
days, but he had begun it and not finished it.  And the
musical evenings, after feeble efforts to invigorate
them, had fainted and then died on the miserable
excuse that circumstances were not entirely favourable
to them.  And his marriage, so marvellous in its
romance during the first days...!

Then either his commonsense or his self-respect
curtly silenced these weak depreciations.  He had
wanted the woman and he had won her,--he had taken
her.  There she was, living in his house, bearing his
name, spending his money!  The world could not get
over that fact, and the carper in Edwin's secret soul
could not get over it either.  He had said that he
would have a new works, and, with all its faults and
little cowardices, there the new works was!  And
moreover it had just been assessed for municipal rates at
a monstrous figure.  He had bought his house (and
mortgaged it); he had been stoical to bad debts; he
had sold securities--at rather less than they cost him;
he had braved his redoubtable wife; and he had got
his works!  His will, and naught else, was the magic
wand that had conjured it into existence.

The black and gold sign that surmounted its blue
roofs could be seen from the top of Acre Lane and
half way along Shawport Lane, proclaiming the
progress of lithography and steam-printing, and the name
of Edwin Clayhanger.  Let the borough put that in
its pipe and smoke it!  He was well aware that the
borough felt pride in his works.  And he had orders
more than sufficient to keep the enterprise handsomely
going.  Even in the Five Towns initiative seemed to
receive its reward.

Life might be as profoundly unsatisfactory as you
pleased, but there was zest in it.

The bell had rung.  He opened the main door, and
there stood Clara and her brood.  And Edwin was the
magnificent, wonderful uncle.  The children entered,
with maternal precautions and recommendations.
Every child was clean and spruce: Bert clumsy,
Clara minxlike, Amy heavy and benignant, Lucy the
pretty little thing, and Rupert simply adorable--each
representing a separate and considerable effort of
watchful care.  The mother came last, worn, still
pretty, with a slight dragging movement of the limbs.
In her glittering keen eyes were both envy and naïve
admiration of her brother.  "What a life!" thought
Edwin, meaning what a narrow, stuffy, struggling,
conventional, unlovely existence was the Benbows'!  He
and they lived in different worlds of intelligence.
Nevertheless he savoured the surpassing charm of Rupert,
the goodness of Amy, the floral elegance of Lucy, and
he could appreciate the unending labours of that
mother of theirs, malicious though she was.  He was
bluff and jolly with all of them.  The new works being
fairly close to the Benbow home, the family had often
come *en masse* to witness its gradual mounting,
regarding the excursions as a sort of picnic.  And now
that the imposing place was inaugurated and the signs
up, Uncle Edwin had been asked to show them over
it in a grand formal visit, and he had amiably consented.

"Has George come, Uncle Edwin?" asked Bert.

George had not come.  A reconciliation had
occurred between the cousins (though by no means at
the time nor in the manner desired by Albert); they
were indeed understood by the Benbows to be on the
most touching terms of intimacy, which was very
satisfactory to the righteousness of Albert and Clara; and
George was to have been of the afternoon party; but
he had not arrived.  Edwin, knowing the
unknowableness of George, suspected trouble.

"Machines!  Machines!" piped tiny white-frocked
Rupert, to whom wondrous tales had been told.

"You'll see machines all right," said Edwin
promisingly.  It was not his intention to proceed straight
to the machine-room.  He would never have admitted
it, but his deliberate intention was to display the
works dramatically, with the machine-room as a
culmination.  The truth was, the man was full of secret
tricks, contradicting avuncular superior indifference.
He was a mere boy--he was almost a school-girl.

He led them through a longish passage, and up
steps and down steps--steps which were not yet
hollowed, but which would be hollowed--into the
stone-polishing shop, which was romantically obscure, with
a specially dark corner where a little contraption was
revolving all by itself in the process of smoothing a
stone.  Young Clara stared at the two workmen, while
the rest stared at the contraption, and Edwin, feeling
ridiculously like a lecturer, mumbled words of
exposition.  And then next, after climbing some steps, they
were in a lofty apartment with a glass roof,
sunshine-drenched and tropical.  Here lived two more men,
including Karl the German, bent in perspiration over
desks, and laboriously drawing.  Round about were
coloured designs, and stones covered with pencilling,
and boards, and all sorts of sheets of paper and
cardboard.

"Ooh!" murmured Bert, much impressed by the
meticulous cross-hatching of Karl's pencil on a stone.

And Edwin said:

"This is the drawing-office."

"Oh yes!" murmured Clara vaguely.  "It's very
warm, isn't it?"

None of them except Bert was interested.  They
gazed about dully, uncomprehendingly, absolutely
incurious.

"Machines!" Rupert urged again.

"Come on, then," said Edwin going out with
assumed briskness and gaiety.

At the door stood Tertius Ingpen, preoccupied and
alert, with all the mien of a factory inspector in full
activity.

"Don't mind me," said Ingpen, "I can look after
myself.  In fact I prefer to."

At the sight of an important stranger speaking
familiarly to Uncle Edwin, all the children save Rupert
grew stiff, dismal and apprehensive, and Clara looked
about as though she had suddenly discovered very
interesting phenomena in the corners of the workshop.

"My sister, Mrs. Benbow--Mr. Ingpen.  Mr. Ingpen
is Her Majesty's Inspector of Factories, so we
must mind what we're about," said Edwin.

Clara gave a bright, quick smile as she limply
shook hands.  The sinister enchantment which
precedes social introduction was broken.  And Clara,
overcome by the extraordinary chivalry and deference
of Ingpen's customary greeting to women, decided that
he was a particularly polite man; but she reserved her
general judgment on him, having several times heard
Albert inveigh against the autocratic unreasonableness
of this very inspector, who, according to Albert,
forgot that even an employer had to live, and that
that which handicapped the employer could not
possibly help the workman--"in the long run."

"Machines!" Rupert insisted.

They all laughed; the other children laughed
suddenly and imitatively, and an instant later than the
elders; and Tertius Ingpen, as he grasped the full
purport of the remark, laughed more than anyone.
He turned sideways and bent slightly in order to give
vent to his laughter, which, at first noiseless and
imprisoned, gradually grew loud in freedom.  When he
had recovered, he said thoughtfully, stroking his soft
beard:

"Now it would be very interesting to know exactly
what that child understands by 'machines'--what his
mental picture of them is.  Very interesting!  Has
he ever seen any?"

"No," said Clara.

"Ah!  That makes it all the more interesting,"
Ingpen added roguishly: "I suppose you think you do
know, Mrs. Benbow?"

Clara smiled the self-protective, non-committal smile
of one who is not certain of having seen the point.

"It's very hot in here, Edwin," she said, glancing
at the door.  The family filed out, shepherded by
Edwin.

"I'll be back in a sec," said he to Clara, on the
stairs, and returned to the drawing-office.

Ingpen was in apparently close conversation with
Karl.

"Yes," murmured Ingpen, thoughtfully tapping his
teeth.  "The whole process is practically a contest
between grease and water on the stone."

"Yes," said Karl gruffly, but with respect.

And Edwin could almost see the tentacles of
Ingpen's mind feeling and tightening round a new
subject of knowledge, and greedily possessing it.  What
a contrast to the vacuous indifference of Clara, who
was so narrowed by specialisation that she could never
apply her brain to anything except the welfare and
the aggrandizement of her family!  He dwelt sardonically
upon the terrible results of family life on the
individual, and dreamed of splendid freedoms.

"Mr. Clayhanger," said Ingpen, in his official
manner, turning.

The two withdrew to the door.  Invisible, at the foot
of the stairs, could be heard the family, existing.

"Haven't seen much of lithography, eh?" said
Edwin, in a voice discreetly restrained.

Ingpen, ignoring the question, murmured:

"I say, you know this place is much too hot."

"Well," said Edwin.  "What do you expect in August?"

"But what's the object of all that glass roof?"

"I wanted to give 'em plenty of light.  At the old
shop they hadn't enough, and Karl, the Teuton there,
was always grumbling."

"Why didn't you have some ventilation in the roof?"

"We did think of it.  But Johnnie Orgreave said if
we did we should never be able to keep it watertight."

"It certainly isn't right as it is," said Ingpen.  "And
our experience is that these skylighted rooms that are
too hot in summer are too cold in winter.  How should
you like to have your private office in here?"

"Oh!" protested Edwin.  "It isn't so bad as all that."

Ingpen said quietly:

"I should suggest you think it over--I mean the
ventilation."

"But you don't mean to say that this shop here
doesn't comply with your confounded rules?"

Ingpen answered:

"That may or may not be.  But we're entitled to
make recommendations in any case, and I should like
you to think this over, if you don't mind.  I haven't
any thermometer with me, but I lay it's ninety
degrees here, if not more."  In Ingpen's urbane,
reasonable tone there was just a hint of the potential
might of the whole organised kingdom.

"All serene," said Edwin, rather ashamed of the
temperature after all, and loyally responsive to Ingpen's
evident sense of duty, which somehow surprised him;
he had not chanced, before, to meet Ingpen at work;
earthenware manufactories were inspected once a
quarter, but other factories only once a year.  The thought
of the ameliorating influence that Ingpen must
obviously be exerting all day and every day somewhat
clashed with and overset his bitter scepticism
concerning the real value of departmental administrative
government,--a scepticism based less upon experience
than upon the persuasive tirades of democratic apostles.

They walked slowly towards the stairs, and Ingpen
scribbled in a notebook.

"You seem to take your job seriously," said Edwin, teasing.

"While I'm at it.  Did you imagine that I'd dropped
into a sinecure?  Considering that I have to keep an
eye on three hundred and fifty potbanks, over a
thousand other factories, and over two thousand workshops
of sorts, my boy...!  *And* you should see some
of 'em.  *And* you should listen to the excuses."

"No wonder," thought Edwin, "he hasn't told me
what a fine and large factory mine is! ... Still, he
might have said something, all the same.  Perhaps he
will."

When, after visiting the composing-room, and
glancing from afar at the engine-house, the
sight-seeing party reached the machine-room, Rupert was so
affected by the tremendous din and the confusing whir
of huge machinery in motion that he began to cry,
and, seizing his mother's hand, pressed himself hard
against her skirt.  The realisation of his ambition had
overwhelmed him.  Amy protectingly took Lucy's hand.
Bert and Clara succeeded in being very casual.

In the great lofty room there were five large or fairly
large machines, and a number of small ones.  The
latter had chiefly to do with envelope and bill-head
printing and with bookbinding, and only two of them
were in use.  Of the large machines, three were
functioning--the cylinder printing-machine which had been
the pride of Edwin's father, the historic "old machine,"
also his father's, which had been so called ever since
Edwin could remember and which was ageless, and
Edwin's latest and most expensive purchase, the
"Smithers" litho-printer.  It was on the guarded
flank of the Smithers, close to the roller-racks, that
Edwin halted his convoy.  The rest of the immense
shop with its complex masses of metal revolving,
sliding, or paralysed, its shabby figures of men, boys,
and girls shifting mysteriously about, its smell of
iron, grease, and humanity, and its fearful racket,
was a mere background for the Smithers in its moving
might.

The Smithers rose high above the spectators, and
at one end of it, higher even than the top parts of the
machine, was perched a dirty, frowsy, pretty girl.
With a sweeping gesture of her bare arms this girl
took a wide sheet of blank paper from a pile of sheets,
and lodged it on the receiving rack, whereupon it was
whirled off, caught into the clutches of the machine,
turned, reversed, hidden away from sight among
revolving rollers red and black, and finally thrust out
at the other end of the machine, where it was picked
up by a dirty, frowsy girl, not pretty, smaller and
younger than the high-perched creature, indeed
scarcely bigger than Amy.  And now on the sheet
was printed four times in red the words "Knype
Mineral Water Mnfg. Co.  Best and cheapest.
Trademark."  Clara screeched a question about the
trademark, which was so far invisible.  Edwin made a sign
to the lower dirty, frowsy girl, who respectfully
but with extreme rapidity handed him a sheet as it came
off the machine, and he shouted through the roar in
explanation that the trademark, a soda-water syphon in
blue, would be printed on the same sheet later from
another stone, and the sheets cut into fours, each quarter
making a complete poster.  "I thought it must be like
that," replied Clara superiorly.  From childhood she
had been well accustomed to printing processes, and it
was not her intention to be perplexed by "this
lithography."  Edwin made a gesture to hand back the sheet
to the machine-girl, but the machine would not pause
to allow her to take it.  She was the slave of the
machine; so long as it functioned, every second of
her existence was monopolised, and no variation of
conduct permissible.  The same law applied to the
older girl up near the ceiling.  He put the sheet in its
place himself, and noticed that to do so required
appreciable care and application of the manipulative
faculty.

These girls, and the other girls at their greasy
task in the great shaking interior which he had created,
vaguely worried him.  Exactly similar girls were
employed in thousands on the pot-banks, and had once
been employed also at the pit-heads and even in the
pits; but until lately he had not employed girls, nor
had his father ever employed girls; and these girls
so close to him, so dependent on him, so submissive,
so subjugated, so soiled, so vulgar, whose wages would
scarcely have kept his wife in boots and gloves, gave
rise to strange and disturbing sensations in his heart--not
merely in regard to themselves, but in regard to
the whole of the workpeople.  A question obscure and
lancinating struck upwards through his industrial
triumph and through his importance in the world, a
question scarcely articulate, but which seemed to form
itself into the words: Is it right?

"Is what right?" his father would have snapped at
him.  "Is what right?" would have respectfully
demanded Big James, who had now sidled grandiosely
to the Smithers, and was fussing among the rollers
in the rack.  Neither of them would have been capable
of comprehending his trouble.  To his father an
employee was an employee, to be hired as cheaply as
possible, and to be exploited as completely as possible.
And the attitude of Big James towards the underlings
was precisely that of his deceased master.  They
would not be unduly harsh, they would often be
benevolent, but the existence of any problem, and
especially any fundamental problem, beyond the direct
inter-relation of wages and work could not conceivably
have occurred to them.  After about three quarters of
a century of taboo trade-unions had now for a dozen
years ceased to be regarded as associations of
anarchistic criminals.  Big James was cautiously in favor
of trade-unions, and old Darius Clayhanger in late
life had not been a quite uncompromising opponent of
them.  As for Edwin, he had always in secret
sympathised with them, and the trade-unionists whom
he employed had no grievance against him.  Yet this
unanswerable, persistent question would pierce the
complacency of Edwin's prosperity.  It seemed to
operate in a sort of fourth dimension; few even amongst
trade-unionists themselves would have reacted to it.
But Edwin lived with it more and more.  He was indeed
getting used to it.  Though he could not answer it,
he could parry it, thanks to scientific ideas obtained
from Darwin and Spencer, by the reflection that both
he and his serfs, whatever their sex, were the almost
blind agencies of a vast process of evolution.  And
this he did, exulting with pride sometimes in the sheer
adventure of the affair, and sharing his thoughts with
none....  Strange that once, and not so many years
ago either, he had been tempted to sell the business
and live inert and ignobly secure on the interest of
invested moneys!  But even to-day he felt sudden
fears of responsibility; they came and went.

The visitors, having wandered to and fro, staring,
trailed out of the machine-room, led by Edwin.  A
wide door swung behind them, and they were in the
abrupt, startling peace of another corridor.  Clara
wiped Rupert's eyes, and he smiled, like a blossom
after a storm.  The mother and the uncle exchanged
awkward glances.  They had nothing whatever to say
to each other.  Edwin could seldom think of anything
that he really wanted to say to Clara.  The children
were very hot and weary of wonders.

"Well," said Clara, "I suppose we'd better be
moving on now."  She had somewhat the air of a
draught-animal about to resume the immense labour of
dragging a train.  "It's very queer about George.  He was
to have come with us for tea."

"Oh!  Was he?"

"Of course he was," Clara replied sharply.  "It
was most distinctly arranged."

At this moment Tertius Ingpen and Hilda appeared
together at the other end of the corridor.  Hilda's
unsmiling face seemed enigmatic.  Ingpen was talking
with vivacity.

Edwin thought apprehensively:

"What's up now?  What's she doing here, and not
George?"

And when the sisters-in-law, so strangely
contrasting, shook hands, he thought:

"Is it possible that Albert looks on his wife as
something unpredictable?  Do those two also have
moods, and altercations and antagonisms?  Are they
always preoccupied about what they are thinking of
each other?  No!  It's impossible.  Their life must
be simply fiendishly monotonous."  And Clara's
inferiority before the erect, flashing individuality of
Hilda appeared to him despicable.  Hilda bent and
kissed Rupert, Lucy, Amy and young Clara, as it
were with passion.  She was marvellous as she bent
over Rupert.  She scarcely looked at Edwin.  Ingpen
stood aside.

"I'm very sorry," said Hilda perfunctorily.  "I had
to send George on an errand to Hanbridge at the last
moment."

Nothing more!  No genuine sign of regret!  Edwin
blamed her severely.  "Send George on an errand to
Hanbridge!"  That was Hilda all over!  Why the
devil should she go out of her way to make unpleasantness
with Clara?  She knew quite well what kind of a
woman Clara was, and that the whole of Clara's
existence was made up of domestic trifles, each of which
was enormous for her.

"Will he be down to tea?" asked Clara.

"I doubt it."

"Well ... another day, then."

Clara, gathering her offspring, took leave at a door
in the corridor which gave on to the yard.  Mindful
to the last of Mr. Ingpen's presence (which Hilda
apparently now ignored), she smiled sweetly as she
went.  But behind the smile, Edwin with regret, and
Hilda with satisfaction, could perceive her everlasting
grudge against their superior splendour.  Even had
they sunk to indigence Clara could never have
forgiven Edwin for having towards the end of their
father's life prevented Albert from wheedling a
thousand pounds out of old Darius, nor Hilda for her
occasional pricking, unanswerable sarcasms....  Still,
Rupert, descending two titanic steps into the yard,
clung to his mother as to an angel.

"And *what* errand to Hanbridge?" Edwin asked
himself mistrustfully.



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   II

.. vspace:: 2

Scarcely a minute later, when Edwin, with Hilda and
Ingpen, was back at the door of the machine-room,
the office boy could be seen voyaging between roaring
machines across the room towards his employer.  The
office boy made a sign of appeal, and Edwin answered
with a curt sign that the office boy was to wait.

"What's that ye say?" Edwin yelled in Ingpen's ear.

Ingpen laughed, and made a trumpet with his hands:

"I was only wondering what your weekly running
expenses are."

Even Ingpen was surprised and impressed by the
scene, and Edwin was pleased now, after the flatness
of Clara's inspection, that he had specially arranged
for two of the machines to be running which strictly
need not have been running that afternoon.  He had
planned a spectacular effect, and it had found a good
public.

"Ah!"  He hesitated, in reply to Ingpen.  Then
he saw Hilda's face, and his face showed confusion and
he smiled awkwardly.

Hilda had caught Ingpen's question.  She said
nothing.  Her expressive, sarcastic, unappeasable
features seemed to say: "Running expenses!  Don't
mention them.  Can't you see they must be enormous?
How can he possibly make this place pay?  It's a
gigantic folly--and what will be the end of it?"

After all, her secret attitude towards the new
enterprise was unchanged.  Arguments, facts, figures,
persuasions, brutalities had been equally and totally
ineffective.  And Edwin thought:

"She is the bitterest enemy I have."

Said Ingpen:

"I like that girl up there on the top of that machine.
And doesn't she just know where she is!  What a
movement of the arms, eh?"

Edwin nodded, appreciative, and then beckoned to
the office boy.

"What is it?"

"Please, Sir, Mrs. 'Amps in the office to see you."

"All right," he bawled, casually.  But in reality he
was taken aback.  "It's Auntie Hamps now!" he said
to the other two.  "We shall soon have all Bursley
here this afternoon."

Hilda raised her eyebrows.

"D'you know 'Auntie Hamps'?" she grimly asked
Ingpen.  Her voice, though she scarcely raised it, was
plainer than the men's when they shouted.  As Ingpen
shook his head, she added: "You ought to."

Edwin did not altogether care for this public ridicule
of a member of the family.  Auntie Hamps, though
possibly a monster, had her qualities.  Hilda,
assuming the lead, beckoned with a lift of the head.  And
Edwin did not care for that either, on his works.
Ingpen followed Hilda as though to a menagerie.

Auntie Hamps, in her black attire, which by virtue
of its changeless style amounted to a historic uniform,
was magnificent in the private office.  The three found
her standing in wait, tingling with vitality and
importance and eagerness.  She watched carefully that
Edwin shut the door, and kept her eye not only on the
door but also on the open window.  She received the
presentation of Mr. Tertius Ingpen with grandeur and
with high cordiality, and she could appreciate even
better than Clara the polished fealty of his greeting.

"Sit down, Auntie."

"No, I won't sit down.  I thought Clara was here.
I told her I might come if I could spare a moment.
I must say, Edwin"--she looked around the small office,
and seemed to be looking round the whole works in a
superb glance--"you make me proud of you.  You
make me proud to be your Auntie."

"Well," said Edwin, "you can be proud sitting down."

She smiled.  "No, I won't sit down.  I only just
popped in to catch Clara.  I was going to tea with her
and the chicks."  Then she lowered her voice: "I
suppose you've heard about Mr. John Orgreave?"  Her
tone proved, however, that she supposed nothing of
the kind.

"No.  What about Johnnie?"

"He's run away with Mrs. Chris Hamson."

Her triumph was complete.  It was perhaps one of
her last triumphs, but it counted among the greatest
of her career as a watchdog of society.

The thing was a major event, and the report was
convincing.  Useless to protest "Never!"  "Surely
not!"  "It can't be true!"  It carried truth on its face.
Useless to demand sternly: "Who told you?"  The news
had reached Auntie Hamps through a curious
channel--the stationmaster at Latchett.  Heaven alone
could say how Auntie Hamps came to have relations
with the stationmaster at Latchett.  But you might
be sure that, if an elopement was to take place from
Latchett station, Auntie Hamps would by an
instinctive prescience have had relations with the
station-master for twenty years previously.  Latchett was the
next station, without the least importance, to
Shawport on the line to Crewe.  Johnnie Orgreave had got
into the train at Shawport, and Mrs. Chris had joined
it at Latchett, her house being near by.  Once on the
vast platforms of Crewe, the guilty couple would be
safe from curiosity, lost in England, like needles in a
haystack.

The Orgreave-Hamson flirtation had been afoot for
over two years, but had only been seriously talked
about for less than a year.  Mrs. Chris did not "move"
much in town circles.  She was older than Johnnie,
but she was one of your blonde, slim, unfruitful women,
who under the shade of a suitable hat-brim are ageless.
Mr. Chris was a heavy man, "glumpy" as they say
down there, a moneymaker in pots, and great on the
colonial markets.  He made journeys to America and
to Australia.  His Australian journey occupied usually
about four months.  He was now on his way back
from Sydney, and nearly home.  Mrs. Chris had not
long since inherited a moderate fortune.  It must have
been the fortune, rendering them independent, that had
decided the tragic immoralists to abandon all for love.
The time of the abandonment was fixed for them by
circumstance, for it had to occur before the husband's
return.

Imagine the Orgreave business left in the hands of
an incompetent irresponsible like Jimmie Orgreave!
And then, what of that martyr, Janet?  Janet and
Johnnie had been keeping house together--a tiny house.
And Janet had had to "have an operation."  Women,
talking together, said exactly what the operation was,
but the knowledge was not common.  The phrase "have
an operation" was enough in its dread.  As a fact the
operation, for calculus, was not very serious; it had
perfectly succeeded, and Janet, whom Hilda had
tenderly visited, was to emerge from the nursing home at
Knype Vale within three days.  Could not Johnnie
and his Mrs. Chris have waited until she was re-established?
No, for the husband was unpreventibly approaching,
and romantic love must not be baulked.
Nothing could or should withstand romantic love.
Janet had not even been duly warned; Hilda had seen
her that very morning, and assuredly she knew
nothing then.  Perhaps Johnnie would write to her softly
from some gay seaside resort where he and his leman
were hiding their strong passion.  The episode was
shocking; it was ruinous.  The pair could never
return.  Even Johnnie alone would never dare to return.

"He was a friend of yours, was he not?" asked
Auntie Hamps in bland sorrow of Tertius Ingpen.

He was a friend, and a close friend, of all three of
them.  And not only had he outraged their feelings--he
had shamed them, irretrievably lowered their prestige.
They could not look Auntie Hamps in the face.
But Auntie Hamps could look them in the face.  And
her glance, charged with grief and with satisfaction,
said: "How are the mighty fallen, with their jaunty
parade of irreligion, and their musical evenings on
Sundays, with the windows open while folks are
coming home from chapel!"  And there could be no retort.

"Another good man ruined by women!" observed
Tertius Ingpen, with a sigh, stroking his beard.

Hilda sprang up; and all her passionate sympathy
for Janet, and her disappointment and disgust with
Johnnie, the victim of desire, and her dissatisfaction
with her husband and her hatred of Auntie Hamps,
blazed forth and devastated the unwise Ingpen as she
scathingly replied:

"Mr. Ingpen, that is a caddish thing to say!"

She despised convention; she was frankly and
atrociously rude; and she did not care.  Edwin blushed.
Tertius Ingpen blushed.

"I'm sorry," said Ingpen, keeping his temper.  "I
think I ought to have left a little earlier.  Good-bye,
Ed.  Mrs. Hamps--"  He bowed with extreme urbanity
to the ladies, and departed.

Shortly afterwards Auntie Hamps also departed,
saying that she must not be late for tea at dear
Clara's.  She was secretly panting to disclose the whole
situation to dear Clara.  What a scene had Clara
missed by leaving the works too soon!





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.. _`DARTMOOR`:

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   CHAPTER XII


.. class:: center medium

   DARTMOOR

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   I

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"What was that telegram you had this afternoon, Hilda?"

The question was on Edwin's tongue as he walked
up Acre Lane from the works by his wife's side.  But
it did not achieve utterance.  A year had passed since
he last walked up Acre Lane with Hilda; and now of
course he recalled the anger of that previous
promenade.  In the interval he had acquired to some extent
the habit of containing his curiosity and his criticism.
In the interval he had triumphed, but Hilda also had
consolidated her position, so that despite the increase
of his prestige she was still his equal; she seemed to
take strength from him in order to maintain the
struggle against him.

During the final half-hour at the works the great,
the enormous problem in his mind had been--not
whether such and such a plan of action for Janet's
welfare in a very grave crisis would be advisable, but
whether he should demand an explanation from Hilda
of certain disquieting phenomena in her boudoir.  In
the excitement of his indecision Janet's tragic case
scarcely affected his sensibility.  For about twelve
months Hilda had, he knew, been intermittently
carrying on a correspondence as to which she had said no
word to him; she did not precisely conceal it, but she
failed to display it.  Lately, so far as his observation
went, it had ceased.  And then to-day he had caught
sight of an orange telegraph-envelope in her
wastepaper basket.  Alone in the boudoir, and glancing back
cautiously and guiltily at the door, he had picked up
the little ball of paper and smoothed it out, and read
the words: "Mrs. Edwin Clayhanger."  In those days
the wives of even prominent business men did not
customarily receive such a rain of telegrams that the
delivery of a telegram would pass unmentioned and be
forgotten.  On the contrary, the delivery of a telegram
was an event in a woman's life.  The telegram which
he had detected might have been innocently negligible,
in forty different ways.  It might, for example, have
been from Janet, or about a rehearsal of the Choral
Society, or from a tradesman at Oldcastle, or about
rooms at the seaside.  But supposing that it was not
innocently negligible?  Supposing that she was
keeping a secret? ... What secret?  What conceivable
secret?  He could conceive no secret.  Yes, he could
conceive a secret.  He had conceived and did conceive
a secret, and his private thoughts elaborated it....
He had said to himself at the works: "I may ask
her as we go home.  I shall see."  But, out in the
street, with the disturbing sense of her existence over
his shoulder, he knew that he should not ask her.
Partly timidity and partly pride kept him from asking.
He knew that, as a wise husband, he ought to ask.
He knew that commonsense was not her strongest
quality, and that by diffidence he might be inviting
unguessed future trouble; but he would not ask.  In
the great, passionate war of marriage they would draw
thus apart, defensive and watchful, rushing together at
intervals either to fight or to kiss.  The heat of their
kisses had not cooled; but to him at any rate the kisses
often seemed intensely illogical; for, though he
regarded himself as an improving expert in the science
of life, he had not yet begun to perceive that those
kisses were the only true logic of their joint career.

He was conscious of grievances against her as they
walked up Acre Lane, but instead of being angrily
resentful, he was content judicially to register the
grievances as further corroboration of his estimate
of her character.  They were walking up Acre Lane
solely because Hilda was Hilda.  A year ago they
had walked up Acre Lane in order that Edwin might
call at the shop.  But Acre Lane was by no means
on the shortest way from Shawport to Bleakridge.
Hilda, however, on emerging from the works, full of
trouble concerning Janet, had suddenly had the
beautiful idea of buying some fish for tea.  In earlier days
he would have said: "How accidental you are!  What
would have happened to our tea if you hadn't been
down here, or if you hadn't by chance thought of fish?"  He
would have tried to show her that her activities
were not based in the principles of reason, and that
even the composition of meals ought not to depend
upon the hazard of an impulse.  Now, wiser, he said
not a word.  He resigned himself in silence to an extra
three-quarters of a mile of walking.  In such matters,
where her deep instinctiveness came into play, she had
established over him a definite ascendancy.

Then another grievance was that she had sent George
to Hanbridge, knowing that George, according to a
solemn family engagement, ought to have been at the
works.  She was conscienceless.  A third grievance,
naturally, was her behaviour to Ingpen.  And a fourth
came back again to George.  Why had she sent George
to Hanbridge at all?  Was it not to despatch a telegram
which she was afraid to submit to the inquisitiveness
of the Post Office at Bursley?  A daring supposition,
but plausible; and if correct, of what duplicity
was she not guilty!  The mad, shameful episode of
Johnnie Orgreave, the awful dilemma of Janet--colossal
affairs though they were--interested him less and
less as he grew more and more preoccupied with his
relations to Hilda.  And he thought, not caring:

"Something terrific will occur between us, one of
these days."

And then his bravado would turn to panic.



.. vspace:: 3

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   II

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They passed along Wedgwood Street, and Hilda
preceded him into the chief poulterer-and-fishmonger's.
Here was another slight grievance of Edwin's; for the
chief poulterer-and-fishmonger's happened now to be
the Clayhanger shop at the corner of Wedgwood
Street and Duck Bank.  Positively there had been
competitors for the old location!  Why should Hilda go
there and drag him there?  Could she not comprehend
that he had a certain fine delicacy about entering? ... The
place where the former sign had been was
plainly visible on the brickwork above the shop-front.
Rabbits, fowl, and a few brace of grouse hung in the
right-hand window, from which most of the glass had
been removed; and in the left, upon newly-embedded
slabs of Sicilian marble, lay amid ice the curved forms
of many fish, and behind them was the fat white-sleeved
figure of the chief poulterer-and-fishmonger's
wife with her great, wet hands.  He was sad.  He
seriously thought yet again: "Things are not what
they were in this town, somehow."  For this place had
once been a printer's; and he had a conviction that
printing was an aristocrat among trades.  Indeed, could
printing and fishmongering be compared?

The saleswoman greeted them with deference, calling
Edwin "sir," and yet with a certain complacent
familiarity, as an occupant to ex-occupants.  Edwin
casually gave the short shake of the head which in the
district may signify "Good-day," and turned,
humming, to look at the hanging game.  It seemed to him
that he could only keep his dignity as a man of the
world by looking at the grouse with a connoisseur's
eye.  Why didn't Hilda buy grouse?  The shop was a
poor little interior.  It smelt ill.  He wondered what
the upper rooms were like, and what had happened to
the decrepit building at the end of the yard.  The
saleswoman slapped the fish about on the marble, and
running water could be heard.

"Edwin," said Hilda, with enchanting sweetness and
simplicity, "would you like hake or turbot, dear?"

Impossible to divine from her voice that the ruin of
their two favourite Orgreaves was complete, that she
was conducting a secret correspondence, and that she
had knowingly and deliberately offended her husband!

Both women waited, moveless, for the decision, as
for an august decree.

When the transaction was finished, the saleswoman
handed over the parcel into Hilda's gloved hands; it
was a rough-and-ready parcel, not at all like the neat
stiff paper-bag of the modern age.

"Very hot, isn't it, ma'am?" said the saleswoman.

And Hilda, utterly distinguished in gesture and
tone, replied with calm, impartial urbanity:

"Very.  Good afternoon."

"I'd better take that thing," said Edwin outside, in
spite of himself.

She gave up the parcel to him.

"Tell cook to fry it," said Hilda.  "She always
fries better than she boils."

He repeated:

"'Tell cook to fry it.'  What's up now?"  His tone
challenged.

"I must go over and see Janet at once.  I shall take
the next car."

He lifted the end of his nose in disgust.  There was
no end to the girl's caprices.

"Why at once?" the superior male demanded.  Disdain
and resentment were in his voice.  Hundreds of
times, when alone, he had decided that he would never
use that voice--first, because it was unworthy of a
philosopher, second, because it never achieved any
good result, and third, because it often did harm.  Yet
he would use it.  The voice had an existence and a
volition of its own within his being; he marvelled that
the essential mechanism of life should be so clumsy and
inefficient.  He heard the voice come out, and yet was
not displeased, was indeed rather pleasantly excited.
A new grievance had been created for him; he might
have ignored it, just as he might ignore a solitary
cigarette lying in his cigarette case.  Both cigarettes
and grievances were bad for him.  But he could not
ignore them.  The last cigarette in the case
magnetised him.  Useless to argue with himself that he had
already smoked more than enough,--the cigarette had
to emerge from the case and be burnt; and the
grievance too was irresistible.  In an instant he had it
between his teeth and was darkly enjoying it.  Of
course Hilda's passionate pity for Janet was a fine
thing.  Granted!  But therein was no reason why
she should let it run away with her.  The worst of
these capricious, impulsive creatures was that they
could never do anything fine without an enormous fuss
and upset.  What possible difference would it make
whether Hilda went to break the news of disaster to
Janet at once or in an hour's time?  The mere desire
to protect and assuage could not properly furnish an
excuse for unnecessarily dislocating a household and
depriving oneself of food.  On the contrary, it was
wiser and more truly kind to take one's meals
regularly in a crisis.  But Hilda would never appreciate
that profound truth--never, never!

Moreover, it was certain that Johnnie had written
to Janet.

"I feel I must go at once," said Hilda.

He spoke with more marked scorn:

"And what about your tea?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter about my tea."

"Of course it matters about your tea.  If you have
your tea quietly, you'll find the end of the world won't
have come, and you can go and see Janet just the
same, and the whole house won't have been turned
upside down."

She put her lips together and smiled mysteriously,
saying nothing.  The racket of the Hanbridge and
Knype steam-car could be heard behind them.  She
did not turn her head.  The car overtook them, and
then stopped a few yards in front.  But she did not
hail the conductor.  The car went onwards.

He had won.  His argument had been so convincing
that she could not help being convinced.  It was too
powerful for even her obstinacy, which as a rule
successfully defied any argument whatever.

Did he smile and forgive?  Did he extend to her
the blessing of his benevolence?  No.  He could not
have brought himself to such a point.  After all, she
had done nothing to earn approval; she had simply
refrained from foolishness.  She had had to be
reminded of considerations which ought ever to have
been present in her brain.  Doubtless she thought that
he was hard, that he was incapable of her divine pity
for Janet.  But that was only because she could not
imagine a combination of emotional generosity and
calm commonsense; and she never would be able to
imagine it.  Hence she would always be unjust to him.

When they arrived home, she was still smiling
mysteriously to herself.  She did not take her hat
off--sign of disturbance!  He moved with careful
tranquillity through the ritual that preceded tea.  He could
feel her in the house, ordering it, softening it, civilising
it.  He could smell the fish.  He could detect the
subservience of Ada to her mistress's serious mood.
He went into the dining-room.  Ada followed him with
a tray of hot things.  Hilda followed Ada.  Then
George entered, cleaner than ordinary.  Edwin
savoured deeply the functioning of his home.  And his
wife had yielded.  Her instinct had compelled her not
to neglect him; his sagacity had mastered her.  In her
heart she must admire his sagacity, whatever she said
or looked, and her unreasoning passion for him was
still the paramount force in her vitality.

"Now, are you two all right?" said Hilda, when
she had poured out the tea, and Edwin was carving
the fish.

Edwin glanced up.

"I don't want any tea," she said.  "I couldn't
touch it."

She bent and kissed George, took her gloves from
the sideboard, and left the house, the mysterious smile
still on her face.



.. vspace:: 3

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   III

.. vspace:: 2

Edwin controlled his vexation at this dramatic move.
It was only slight, and he had to play the serene
omniscient to George.  Further, the attractive food
helped to make him bland.

"Didn't you know your mother had to go out?" said
Edwin, with astounding guile.

"Yes, she told me upstairs," George murmured,
"while she was washing me.  She said she had to go
and see Auntie Janet again."

The reply was a blow to Edwin.  She had said nothing
to him, but she had told the boy.  Still, his
complacency was not overset.  Boy and stepfather began
to talk, with the mingled freedom and constraint
practised by males accustomed to the presence of a woman,
when the woman is absent.  Each was aware of the
stress of a novel, mysterious, and grave situation.
Each also thought of the woman, and each knew that
the other was thinking of the woman.  Each, over a
serious apprehension, seemed to be lightly saying: "It's
rather fun to be without her for a bit.  But we must be
able to rely on her return."  Nothing stood between
them and domestic discomfort.  Possible stupidity in
the kitchen had no check.  As regards the mere
household machine, they had a ridiculous and amusing sense
of distant danger.

Edwin had to get up in order to pour out more tea.
He reckoned that he could both make tea and pour it
out with more exactitude than his wife, who often
forgot to put the milk in first.  But he could not pour
it out with the same grace.  His brain, not his heart,
poured the tea out.  He left the tray in disorder.  The
symmetry of the table was soon wrecked.

"Glad you're going back to school, I suppose?" said
Edwin satirically.

George nodded.  He was drinking, and he glanced
at Edwin over the rim of the cup.  He had grown
much in twelve months, and was more than twelve
months older.  Edwin was puzzled by the almost
sudden developments of his intelligence.  Sometimes the
boy was just like a young man; his voice had become
a little uncertain.  He still showed the greatest
contempt for his fingernails, but he had truly discovered
the toothbrush, and was preaching it at school among
a population that scoffed yet was impressed.

"Yes, I'm glad," he answered.

"Oh!  You're glad, are you?"

"Well, I'm glad in a way.  A boy does have to go
to school, doesn't he, uncle?  And the sooner it's over
the better.  I tell you what I should like--I should
like to go to school night and day and have no holidays
till it was all done.  I sh'd think you could save at
least three years with that."

"A bit hard on the masters, wouldn't it be?"

"I never thought of that.  Of course it would never
be over for them.  I expect they'd gradually die."

"Then you don't like school?"

George shook his head.

"Did you like school, uncle?"

Edwin shook his head.  They both laughed.

"Uncle, can I leave school when I'm sixteen?"

"I've told you once."

"Yes, I know.  But did you mean it?  People
change so."

"I told you you could leave school when you're
sixteen if you pass the London Matric."

"But what good's the London Matric to an architect?
Mr. Orgreave says it isn't any good, anyway."

"When did he tell you that?"

"Yesterday."

"But not so long since you were all for being a
stock-breeder!"

"Ah!  I was only pretending to myself!" George smiled.

"Well, fetch me my cigarettes off the mantelpiece
in the drawing-room."

The boy ran off, eager to serve, and Edwin's glance
followed him with affection.  George's desire to be
an architect had consistently strengthened, save
during a brief period when the Show of the North
Staffordshire Agricultural Society, held with much
splendour at Hanbridge, had put another idea into his
noddle--an idea that fed itself richly on glorious bulls
and other prize cattle for about a week, and then
expired.  Indeed, already it had been in a kind of
way arranged that the youth should ultimately be
articled to Johnnie Orgreave.  Among many
consequences of Johnnie's defiance to society would
probably be the quashing of that arrangement.  And there
was Johnnie, on the eve of his elopement, chatting to
George about the futility of the London Matriculation!
Edwin wondered how George would gradually
learn what had happened to his friend and inspirer,
John Orgreave.

He arrived with the cigarettes, and offered them, and
lit the match, and offered that.

"And what have you been doing with yourself all
afternoon?" Edwin enquired, between puffs of smoke.

"Oh, nothing much!"

"I thought you were coming to the works and then
going down to Auntie Clara's for tea."

"So I was.  But mother sent me to Hanbridge."

"Oh," murmured Edwin casually.  "So your mother
packed you off to Hanbridge, did she?"

"I had to go to the Post Office," George continued.
"I think it was a telegram, but it was in an envelope,
and some money."

"*In*\deed!" said Edwin, with a very indifferent air.

He was, however, so affected that he jumped up
abruptly from the table, and went into the darkening,
chill garden, ignoring George.  George, accustomed
to these sudden accessions of interest and these sudden
forgettings, went unperturbed his ways.

About half past eight Hilda returned.  Edwin was
closing the curtains in the drawing-room.  The gas
had been lighted.

"Johnnie has evidently written to Alicia," she burst
out somewhat breathless.  "Because Alicia's
telegraphed to Janet that she must positively go straight
down there and stay with them when she leaves the Home."

"What, on Dartmoor?" Edwin muttered, in a strange
voice.  The very word "Dartmoor" made him shake.

"It isn't actually on the moor," said Hilda.  "And
so I shall take her down myself.  I've told her all
about things.  She wasn't a bit surprised.  They're a
strange lot."

She tried to speak quite naturally, but he knew that
she was not succeeding.  Their eyes would not meet.
Edwin thought:

"How far away we are from this morning!"  Hazard
and fate, like converging armies, seemed to be closing
upon him.





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.. _`THE DEPARTURE`:

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   CHAPTER XIII


.. class:: center medium

   THE DEPARTURE

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.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

It was a wet morning.  Hilda, already in full street
attire, save for her gloves, and with a half empty cup
of tea by her side, sat at the desk in the boudoir.
She unlocked the large central drawer immediately
below the flap of the desk, with a peculiar, quick,
ruthless gesture, which gesture produced a very short
snappy click that summed up all the tension spreading
from Hilda's mind throughout the house and even into
the town.  It had been decided that in order to call
for Janet at the Nursing Home and catch the Crewe
train at Knype for the Bristol and Southwest of
England connexion, Hilda must leave the house at
five minutes to nine.

This great fact was paramount in the minds of
various people besides Hilda.  Ada upstairs stood bent
and flushed over a huge portmanteau into which she
was putting the last things, while George hindered
her by simultaneously tying to the leather handle a
wet label finely directed by himself in architectural
characters.  The cook in the kitchen was preparing the
master's nine o'clock breakfast with new solicitudes
caused by a serious sense of responsibility; for Hilda,
having informed her in moving tones that the master's
welfare in the mistress's absence would depend finally
on herself, had solemnly entrusted that welfare to
her--had almost passed it to her from hand to hand, with
precautions, like a jewel in a casket.  Ada, it may be
said, had immediately felt the weight of the cook's
increased importance.  Edwin and the clerks at the
works knew that Edwin had to be home for breakfast
at a quarter to nine instead of nine, and that he must
not be late, as Mrs. Clayhanger had a train to catch,
and accordingly the morning's routine of the office
was modified.  And, finally, a short old man in a rainy
stable-yard in Acre Parade, between Acre Lane and
Oldcastle Street, struggling to force a collar over the
head of a cab-horse that towered above his own head,
was already blasphemously excited by those pessimistic
apprehensions about the flight of time which forty
years of train-catching had never sufficed to allay in
him.  As for Janet, she alone in her weakness and
her submissiveness was calm; the nurse and Hilda
understood one another, and she was "leaving it all"
to them.

Hilda opened the drawer, half lifting the flap of
the desk to disclose its contents.  It was full of odd
papers, letters, bills, blotting-paper, door-knobs,
finger-plates, envelopes, and a small book or two.  A
prejudiced observer, such as Edwin, might have said that
the drawer was extremely untidy.  But to Hilda, who
had herself put in each item separately, and each for
a separate reason, the drawer was not untidy, for her
intelligence knew the plan of it, and every item as it
caught her eye suggested a justifying reason, and a
good one.  Nevertheless, she formed an intention to
"tidy out" the drawer (the only drawer in the desk
with a safe lock), upon her return home.  She felt
at the back of the drawer, drew forth the drawer a
little further, and felt again, vainly.  A doubt of her
own essential orderliness crossed her mind.  "Surely
I can't have put those letters anywhere else?  Surely
I've not mislaid them?"  Then she closed the flap of
the desk, and pulled the drawer right out, letting it
rest on her knees.  Yes, the packet was there, hidden,
and so was another packet of letters--in the
handwriting of Edwin.  She was reassured.  She knew she
was tidy, had always been tidy.  And Edwin's
innuendos to the contrary were inexcusable.  Jerking the
drawer irregularly back by force into its place, she
locked it, reopened the desk, laid the packet on the
writing-pad, and took a telegram from her purse to
add to the letters in the packet.

The letters were all in the same loose, sloping
hand, and on the same tinted notepaper.  The
signature was plain on one of them, "Charlotte
M. Cannon," and then after it, in brackets "(Canonges),"--the
latter being the real name of George Cannon's
French father, and George Cannon's only legal name.
The topmost letter began: "Dear Madam, I think it
is my duty to inform you that my husband still
declares his innocence of the crime for which he is now
in prison.  He requests that you shall be informed of
this.  I ought perhaps to tell you that, since the change
in my religious convictions, my feelings--"  The first
page ended there.  Hilda turned the letters over,
preoccupied, gazing at them and deciphering chance
phrases here and there.  The first letter was dated
about a year earlier; it constituted the beginning of
the resuscitation of just that part of her life which
she had thought to be definitely interred in memory.

Hilda had only once--and on a legal occasion--met
Mrs. Canonges (as with strict correctness she called
herself in brackets)--a surprisingly old lady, with
quite white hair, and she had thought: "What a shame
for that erotic old woman to have bought and
married a man so much younger than herself!  No
wonder he ran away from her!"  She had been positively
shocked by the spectacle of the well-dressed,
well-behaved, quiet-voiced, prim, decrepit creature with her
aristocratic voice.  And her knowledge of the possibilities
of human nature was thenceforth enlarged.  And
when George Cannon (known to the law only as
Canonges) had received two years' hard labour for going
through a ceremony of marriage with herself, she had
esteemed, despite all her resentment against him, that
his chief sin lay in his real first marriage, not in his
false second one, and that for that sin the old woman
was the more deserving of punishment.  And when
the old woman had with strange naïvete written to
say that she had become a convert to Roman
Catholicism and that her marriage and her imprisoned
bigamous husband were henceforth to her sacred, Hilda
had reflected sardonically: "Of course it is always
that sort of woman that turns to religion, when she's
too old for anything else!"  And when the news came
that her deceiver had got ten years' penal servitude
(and might have got penal servitude for life) for
uttering a forged Bank-of-England note, Hilda had
reflected in the same strain: "Of course, a man who
would behave as George behaved to me would be just
the man to go about forging bank notes!  I am not
in the least astonished.  What an inconceivable
simpleton I was!"

A very long time had elapsed before the letter
arrived bearing the rumour of Cannon's innocence.  It
had not immediately produced much effect on her
mind.  She had said not a word to Edwin.  The idea
of reviving the shames of that early episode in
conversation with Edwin was extremely repugnant to her.
She would not do it.  She had not the right to do it.
All her proud independence forbade her to do it.  The
episode did not concern Edwin.  The effect on her of
the rumour came gradually.  It was increased when
Mrs. Cannon wrote of evidence, a petition to the Home
Secretary, and employing a lawyer.  Mrs. Cannon's
attitude seemed to say to Hilda: "You and I have
shared this man, we alone in all the world."  Mrs. Cannon
seemed to imagine that Hilda would be interested.
She was right.  Hilda was interested.  Her
implacability relented.  Her vindictiveness forgave.
She pondered with almost intolerable compassion upon
the vision of George Cannon suffering unjustly month
after long month interminably the horrors of a
convict's existence.  She read with morbidity reports of
Assizes, and picked up from papers and books and
from Mrs. Cannon pieces of information about prisons.
When he was transferred to Parkhurst in the Isle of
Wight on account of ill-health, she was glad, because
she knew that Parkhurst was less awful than
Portland, and when from Parkhurst he was sent to
Dartmoor she tried to hope that the bracing air would do
him good.  She no longer thought of him as a criminal
at all, but simply as one victim of his passion for
herself; she, Hilda, had been the other victim.  She
raged in secret against the British Judicature, its
delays, its stoniness, its stupidity.  And when the
principal witness in support of Cannon's petition died, she
raged against fate.  The movement for Cannon's
release slackened for months.  Of late it had been
resumed, and with hopefulness.  One of Cannon's
companions had emerged from confinement (due to an
unconnected crime), and was ready to swear affidavits.
Lastly, Mrs. Cannon had written stating that she
was almost beggared, and suggesting that Hilda should
lend her ten pounds towards the expenses of the affair.
Hilda had not ten pounds.  That very day Hilda,
seeing Janet in the Nursing Home, had demanded:
"I say Jan, I suppose you haven't got ten pounds you
can let me have for about a day or so?"  And had
laughed self-consciously.  Janet, flushing with eager
pleasure, had replied: "Of course!  I've still got that
ten-pound note the poor old dad gave me.  I've always
kept it in case the worst should happen."  Janet was
far too affectionate to display curiosity.  Hilda had
posted the bank-note late at night.  The next day had
come a telegram from Mrs. Cannon: "Telegraph if
you are sending money."  Not for a great deal would
Hilda have despatched through the hands of the old
postmaster at Bursley--who had once been postmaster
at Turnhill and known her parents--a telegram such
as hers addressed to anybody named "Cannon."  The
fear of chatter and scandal was irrational, but it was
a very genuine fear.  She had sent her faithful George
with the telegram to Hanbridge--it was just as easy.

Hilda now, after hesitation, put the packet of letters
in her handbag, to take with her.  It was a precaution
of secrecy which she admitted to be unnecessary, for
she was quite certain that Edwin never looked into her
drawers; much less would he try to open a locked
drawer; his incurious confidence in her was in some
respects almost touching.  Certainly nobody else
would invade the drawer.  Still, she hid the letters in
her handbag.  Then, in her fashion, she scribbled a
bold-charactered note to Mrs. Cannon, giving a
temporary address, and this also she put in the handbag.

Her attitude to Mrs. Cannon, like her attitude to the
bigamist, had slowly changed, and she thought of the
old woman now with respect and sympathetic sorrow.
Mrs. Cannon, before she knew that Hilda was married
to Edwin, had addressed her first letter to Hilda,
"Mrs. Cannon," when she would have been justified in
addressing it, "Miss Lessways."  In the days of her
boarding-house it had been impossible, owing to
business reasons, for Hilda to drop the name to which she
was not entitled and to revert to her own.  The
authentic Mrs. Cannon, despite the violence of her
grievances, had respected Hilda's difficulty; the act showed
kindly forbearance and it had aroused Hilda's
imaginative gratitude.  Further, Mrs. Cannon's pertinacity
in the liberation proceedings, and her calm, logical
acceptance of all the frightful consequences of being
the legal wife of a convict, had little by little impressed
Hilda, who had said to herself: "There is something
in this old woman."  And Hilda nowadays never thought
of her as an old woman who had been perverse and
shameless in desire, but as a victim of passion like
George Cannon.  She said to herself: "This old
woman still loves George Cannon; her love was the
secret of her rancour against him, and it is also the
secret of her compassion."  These constant reflections,
by their magnanimity, and their insistence upon the
tremendous reality of love, did something to ennoble
the clandestine and demoralising life of the soul which
for a year Hilda had hidden from her husband and
from everybody.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   II

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It still wanted twenty minutes to nine o'clock.  She
was too soon.  The night before, Edwin had abraded
her sore nerves by warning her not to be late--in a
tone that implied habitual lateness on her part.  Hilda
was convinced that she was an exact woman.  She
might be late--a little late--six times together, but
as there was a sound explanation of and excuse for
each shortcoming, her essential exactitude remained
always unimpaired in her own mind.  But Edwin
would not see this.  He told her now and then that
she belonged to that large class of people who have
the illusion that a clock stands still at the last moment
while last things are being done.  She resented the
observation, as she resented many of Edwin's
assumptions concerning her.  Edwin seemed to forget that
she had been one of the first women-stenographers in
England, that she had been a journalist-secretary and
accustomed to correct the negligences of men of
business, and finally that she had been in business by
herself for a number of years.  Edwin would sweep all
that away, and treat her like one of your mere
brainless butterflies.  At any rate, on the present occasion
she was not late.  And she took pride, instead of shame,
in her exaggerated earliness.  She had the air of
having performed a remarkable feat.

She left the boudoir to go upstairs and superintend
Ada, though she had told the impressed Ada that she
should put full trust in her, and should not superintend
her.  However, as she opened the door she heard the
sounds of Ada and George directing each other in the
joint enterprise of bringing a very large and unwieldy
portmanteau out of the bedroom.  The hour for
superintendence was therefore past.  Hilda went into the
drawing-room, idly, nervously, to wait till the
portmanteau should have reached the hall.  The French
window was ajar, and a wet wind entered from the
garden.  The garden was full of rain.  Two workmen
were in it, employed by the new inhabitants of the
home of the Orgreaves.  Those upstarts had decided
that certain branches of the famous Orgreave elms
were dangerous and must be cut, and the workmen,
shirt sleeved in the rain, were staying one of the elms
with a rope made fast to the swing in the Clayhanger
garden.  Hilda was unreasonably but sincerely
antipathetic to her new neighbours.  The white-ended
stumps of great elm-branches made her feel sick.
Useless to insist to her on the notorious treachery of
elms!  She had an affection for those elms, and, to
her, amputation was an outrage.  The upstarts had
committed other sacrilege upon the house and grounds,
not heeding that the abode had been rendered holy by
the sacraments of fate.  Hilda stared and stared at
the rain.  And the prospect of the long, jolting,
acutely depressing drive through the mud and the rain
to Knype Vale, and of the interminable train journey
with a tragic convalescent, braced her.

"Mother!"

George stood behind her.

"Well, have you got the luggage down?"  She
frowned, but George knew her nervous frown and could
rightly interpret it.

He nodded.

"Ought I to put 'Dartmoor' on the luggage-label?"

She gave a negative sign.

Why should he ask such a question?  She had
never breathed the name of Dartmoor.  Why should
he mention it?  Edwin also had mentioned
Dartmoor.  "What, on Dartmoor?" Edwin had said.  Did
Edwin suspect her correspondence?  No.  Had he
suspected he would have spoken.  She knew him.  And
even if Edwin had suspected, George could not
conceivably have had suspicions, of any sort....  There
he stood, the son of a convict, with no name of his
own.  He existed--because she and the convict had
been unable to keep apart; his ignorance of the past
was appalling to think of, the dangers incident to it
dreadful; his easy confidence before the world affected
her almost intolerably.  She felt that she could never
atone to him for having borne him.

A faint noise at the front-door reached the drawing-room.

"Here's Nunks," exclaimed George, and ran off
eagerly.

This was his new name for his stepfather.

Hilda returned quickly to the boudoir.  As she
disappeared therein, she heard George descanting to
Edwin on the beauties of his luggage-label, and Edwin
rubbing his feet on the mat and removing his mackintosh.

She came back to the door of the boudoir.

"Edwin."

"Hello!"

"One moment."

He came into the boudoir, wiping the rain off his
face.

"Shut the door, will you?"

Her earnest, self-conscious tone stirred into
activity the dormant secret antagonisms that seemed ever
to lie between them.  She saw them animating his eyes,
stiffening his pose.

Pointing to the cup and saucer on the desk, Edwin
said, critically:

"That all you've had?"

"Can you let me have ten pounds?" she asked
bluntly, ignoring his implication that in the matter
of nourishment she had not behaved sensibly.

"Ten pounds?  More?"  He was on the defensive, as
it were crouching warily behind a screen of his
suspicions.

She nodded, awkwardly.  She wanted to be graceful,
persuasive, enveloping, but she could not.  It was to
repay Janet that she had need of the money.  She
ought to have obtained it before, but she had
postponed the demand, and she had been wrong.  Janet
would not require the money, she would have no
immediate use for it, but Hilda could not bear to be in
debt to her; to leave the sum outstanding would seem
so strange, so sinister, so equivocal; it would mar all
their intercourse.

"But look here, child," said Edwin, protesting,
"I've given you about forty times as much as you can
possibly want already."

He had never squarely refused any demand of hers
for money; he had almost always acceded instantly and
without enquiry to her demands.  Obviously he felt
sympathy with the woman who by eternal custom is
forced to ask, and had a horror of behaving as the
majority of husbands notoriously behaved in such
circumstances; obviously he was anxious not to avail
himself of the husband's overwhelming economic
advantage.  Nevertheless the fact that he earned and
she didn't was ever mysteriously present in his
relatively admirable attitude.  And sometimes--perhaps
not without grounds, she admitted--he would hesitate
before a request, and in him a hesitation was as
humiliating as a refusal would have been from another man.
And Hilda resented, not so much his attitude, as the
whole social convention upon which it was unassailably
based.  He earned--she knew.  She would not deny
that he was the unique source and that without him
there would be naught.  But still she did not think that
she ought to have to ask.  On the other hand she had
no alternative plan to offer.  Her criticism of the
convention was destructive, not constructive.  And
all Edwin's careful regard for a woman's susceptibilities
seemed only to intensify her deep-hidden revolt.
It was a mere chance that he was thus chivalrous.  And
whether he was chivalrous or not, she was in his power;
and she chafed.

"I should be glad if you could let me have it," she
said, grimly.

The appeal, besides being unpersuasive in manner,
was too general; it did not particularize.  There was
no frankness between them.  She saw his suspicions
multiplying.  What did he suspect?  What could he
suspect? ... Ah!  And why was she herself so
timorous, so strangely excited, about going even to
the edge of Dartmoor?  And why did she feel guilty,
why was her glance so constrained?

"Well, I can't," he answered.  "Not now; but if
anything unexpected turns up, I can send you a cheque."

She was beaten.

The cab stopped at the front-door, well in advance
of time.

"It's for Janet," she muttered to him, desperately.

Edwin's face changed.

"Why in thunder didn't you say so to start with?"
he exclaimed.  "I'll see what I can do.  Of course I've
got a fiver in my pocket-book."

There were a number of men in the town who made
a point of always having a reserve five-pound note and
a telegraph-form upon their persons.  It was the
dandyism of well-off prudence.

He sprang out of the room.  The door swung to
behind him.

In a very few moments he returned.

"Here you are!" he said, taking the note from his
pocket-book and adding it to a collection of gold and
silver.

Hilda was looking out of the window at the tail of
the cab.  She did not move.

"I don't want it, thanks," she replied coldly.  And
she thought: "What a fool I am!"

"Oh!" he murmured, with constraint.

"You'd do it for her!" said Hilda, chill and clear,
"But you wouldn't do it for me."  And she thought:
"Why do I say such a thing?"

He slapped all the money crossly down on the desk
and left the room.  She could hear him instructing Ada
and the cabman in the manipulation of the great
portmanteau.

"Now, mother!" cried George.

She gazed at the money, and, picking it up, shovelled
it into her purse.  It was irresistible.

In the hall she kissed George, and nodded with a
plaintive smile at Ada.  Edwin was in the porch.  He
held back; she held back.  She knew from his face that
he would not offer to kiss her.  The strange power
that had compelled her to alienate him refused to allow
her to relent.  She passed down the steps out into the
rain.  They nodded, the theory for George and Ada
being that they had made their farewells in the
boudoir.  But George and Ada none the less had their
notions.  It appeared to Hilda that instead of going
for a holiday with her closest friend, she was going
to some recondite disaster that involved the end of
marriage.  And the fact that she and Edwin had not
kissed outweighed all other facts in the universe.  Yet
what was a kiss?  Until the cab laboriously started
she hoped for a miracle.  It did not happen.  If only
on the previous night she had not absolutely insisted
that nobody from the house should accompany her to
Knype! ... The porch slipped from her vision.





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.. _`TAVY MANSION`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER XIV


.. class:: center medium

   TAVY MANSION

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

Hilda and Harry Hesketh stood together in the
soft warm Devonshire sunshine bending above the
foot-high wire-netting that separated the small ornamental
pond from the lawn.  By their side was a St. Bernard
dog with his great baptising tongue hanging out.
Two swans, glittering in the strong light, swam slowly
to and fro; one had a black claw tucked up on his
back among downy white feathers; the other hissed
at the dog, who in his vast and shaggy good-nature
simply could not understand this malevolence on the
part of a fellow-creature.  Round about the elegant
haughtiness of the swans clustered a number of
iridescent Muscovy ducks, and a few white Aylesburys
with gamboge beaks that intermittently quacked, all
restless and expectant of blessings to fall over the
wire-netting that eternally separated them from the
heavenly hunting-ground of the lawn.  Across the
pond, looking into a moored dinghy, an enormous drake
with a vermilion top-knot reposed on the balustrade
of the landing-steps.  The water reflected everything
in a rippled medley--blue sky, rounded woolly clouds,
birds, shrubs, flowers, grasses, and browny-olive
depths of the plantation beyond the pond, where tiny
children in white were tumbling and shrieking with a
nurse in white.

Harry was extraordinarily hospitable, kind, and
agreeable to his guest.  Scarcely thirty, tall and slim,
he carried himself with distinction.  His flannels were
spotless; his white shirt was spotless; his tennis shoes
were spotless; but his blazer, cap and necktie (which
all had the same multicoloured pattern of stripes)
were shabby, soiled, and without shape; nevertheless
their dilapidation seemed only to adorn his dandyism,
for they possessed a mysterious sacred quality.  He
had a beautiful moustache, nice eyes, hands excitingly
dark with hair, and no affectations whatever.
Although he had inherited Tavy Mansion and a fortune
from an aunt who had left Oldcastle and the smoke to
marry a Devonshire landowner, he was boyish, modest,
and ingenuous.  Nobody could have guessed from his
manner that he had children, nurses, servants,
gardeners, grooms, horses, carriages, a rent-roll, and a
safe margin at every year's end.  He spoke of the
Five Towns with a mild affection.  Hilda thought,
looking at him: "He has everything, simply everything!
And yet he's quite unspoilt!"  In spite of the
fact that in previous years he had seen Hilda only a
few times--and that quite casually at the Orgreaves'--he
had assumed and established intimacy at the very
moment of meeting her and Janet at Tavistock station
the night before, and their friendship might now have
been twenty years old instead of twenty hours.  Very
obviously he belonged to a class superior to Hilda's,
but he was apparently quite unconscious of what was
still the most deeply-rooted and influential institution
of English life.  His confiding confidential tone
flattered her.

"How do you think Alicia's looking?" he asked.

"Magnificent," said Hilda, throwing a last piece of
bread into the water.

"So do I," said he.  "But she's ruined for tennis,
you know.  This baby business is spiffing, only it puts
you right off your game.  As a rule she manages to
be hors de combat bang in the middle of the season.
She has been able to play a bit this year, but she's not
keen--that's what's up with her ladyship--she's not
keen now."

"Well," said Hilda.  "Even you can't have everything."

"Why 'even' me?" He laughed.

She merely gazed at him with a mysterious smile.
She perceived that he was admiring her--probably for
her enigmatic quality, so different from Alicia's--and
she felt a pleasing self-content.

"Edwin do much tennis nowadays?"

"Edwin?"  She repeated the name in astonishment,
as though it were the name of somebody who could
not possibly be connected with tennis.  "Not he!  He's
not touched a racket all this season.  He's quite
otherwise employed."

"I hear he's a fearful pot in the Five Towns,
anyway," said Harry seriously.  "Making money hand
over fist."

Hilda raised her eyebrows and shook her head
deprecatingly.  But the marked respectfulness of Harry's
reference to Edwin was agreeable.  She thought: "I
do believe I'm becoming a snob!"

"It's hard work making money, even in our small
way, in Bursley," she said--and seemed to indicate the
expensive spaciousness of the gardens.

"I should like to see old Edwin again."

"I never knew you were friends."

"Well, I used to see him pretty often at Lane End
House, after Alicia and I were engaged.  In fact once
he jolly nearly beat me in a set."

"Edwin did?" she exclaimed.

"The same....  He had a way of saying things
that a feller somehow thought about afterwards."

"Oh!  So you noticed that!"

"Does he still?"

"I--I don't know.  But he used to."

"You ought to have brought him.  In fact I quite
thought he was coming.  Anyhow, I told Alicia to
invite him, too, as soon as we knew you were bringing
old Jan down."

"She did mention it, Alicia did.  But, oh!  He
wouldn't hear of it.  Works!  Works!  No holiday all
summer."

"I'll tell you a scheme," said Harry roguishly.  "Refuse
to rejoin the domestic hearth until he comes and
fetches you."

She gave a little laugh.  "Oh, he won't come to fetch me."

"Well," said Harry shortly and decisively, "we shall
see what can be done.  I may tell you we're rather
great at getting people down here....  I wonder
where those girls are?"  He turned round and Hilda
turned round.

The red Georgian house with its windows in octagonal
panes, its large pediment hiding the centre of the
roof, and its white paint, showed brilliantly across the
hoop-studded green, between some cypresses and an
ilex; on either side were smooth walls of green--trimmed
shrubs forming long alleys whose floors were
also green; and here and there a round or oval flowerbed,
and, at the edges of the garden, curved borders of
flowers.  Everything was still, save the ship-like birds
on the pond, the distant children in the plantation,
and the slow-moving, small clouds overhead.  The
sun's warmth was like an endearment.

Janet and Alicia, their arms round each other's
shoulders, sauntered into view from behind the
cypresses.  On the more sheltered lawn nearest the house
they were engaged in a quiet but tremendous palaver;
nobody but themselves knew what they were talking
about; it might have been the affair of Johnnie and
Mrs. Chris Hamson, as to which not a word had been
publicly said at Tavy Mansion since Janet and Hilda's
arrival.  Janet still wore black, and now she carried
a red sunshade belonging to Alicia.  Alicia was in
white, not very clean white, and rather tousled.  She
was only twenty-five.  She had grown big and jolly and
downright (even to a certain shamelessness) and
careless of herself.  Her body had the curves, and her face
the emaciation, of the young mother.  She used abrupt,
gawky, kind-hearted gestures.  Her rough affectionateness
embraced not merely her children, but all young
living things, and many old.  For her children she had a
passion.  And she would say openly, as it were,
defiantly, that she meant to be the mother of more
children--lots more.

"Hey, lass!" cried out Harry, using the broad
Staffordshire accent for the amusement of Hilda.

The sisters stopped and untwined their arms.

"Hey, lad!" Alicia loudly responded.  But instead
of looking at her husband she was looking through
him at the babies in the plantation behind the pond.

Janet smiled, in her everlasting resignation.  Hilda,
smiling at her in return from the distance, recalled
the tone in which Harry had said 'old Jan'--a tone at
once affectionate and half-contemptuous.  She was
old Jan, now; destined to be a burden upon somebody
and of very little use to anybody; no longer necessary.
If she disappeared, life would immediately close over
her, and not a relative, not a friend, would be
inconvenienced.  Some among them would remark:
"Perhaps it's for the best."  And Janet knew it.  In the
years immediately preceding the death of Mr. and
Mrs. Orgreave, she had hardened a little from her earlier
soft, benevolent self--hardened to everybody save her
father and mother, whom she protected--and now she
was utterly tender again, and her gentle acquiescences
seemed to say: "I am defenceless, and to-morrow I
shall be old."

"I'm going to telegraph to Edwin Clayhanger to
come down for the week-end," shouted Harry.

And Alicia shouted in reply:

"Oh!  Spiffing!"

Hilda said nervously:

"You aren't, really?"

She had no intention of agreeing to the pleasant
project.  A breach definitely existed between Edwin
and herself, and the idea of either maintaining it or
ending it on foreign ground was inconceivable.  Such
things could only be done at home.  She had telegraphed
a safe arrival, but she had not yet written
to him nor decided in what tone she should write.

Two gardeners, one pushing a wheeled water-can,
appeared from an alley and began silently and
assiduously to water a shaded flower-bed.  Alicia and Harry
continued to shout enthusiastically to each other in
a manner sufficiently disturbing, but the gardeners
gave no sign that anybody except themselves lived in
the garden.  Alicia, followed by Janet, was slowly
advancing towards the croquet lawn, when a parlourmaid
tripping from the house overtook her, and with
modest deference murmured something to the bawling, jolly
mistress.  Alicia, still followed by Janet, turned and
went into the house, while the parlourmaid with bent
head waited discreetly to bring up the rear.

A sudden and terrific envy possessed Hilda as she
contrasted the circumstances of these people with her
own.  These people lived in lovely and cleanly
surroundings without a care beyond the apprehension of
nursery ailments.  They had joyous and kindly
dispositions.  They were well-bred, and they were
attended by servants who, professionally, were even
better bred than themselves, and who were rendered happy
by smooth words and good pay.  They lived at peace
with everyone.  Full of health, they ate well and slept
well.  They suffered no strain.  They had absolutely
no problems, and they did not seek problems.  Nor
had they any duties, save agreeable ones to each other.
Their world was ideal.  If you had asked them how
their world could be improved for them, they would not
have found an easy reply.  They could only have
demanded less taxes and more fine days....  Whereas
Hilda and hers were forced to live among a brutal
populace, amid the most horrible surroundings of
smoke, dirt, and squalor.  In Devonshire the Five
Towns was unthinkable; the whiteness of the
window-curtains at Tavy Mansion almost broke the heart of
the housewife in Hilda.  And compare--not Hilda's
handkerchief-garden, but even the old garden of the
Orgreaves, with this elysium, where nothing offended
the eye and the soot nowhere lay on the trees,
blackening the shiny leaves and stunting the branches.  And
compare the too mean planning and space-saving of
the house in Trafalgar Road with the lavish generosity
of space inside Tavy Mansion!...

Edwin in the Bursley sense was a successful man,
and had consequence in the town, but the most that
he had accomplished or could accomplish would not
amount to the beginning of appreciable success
according to higher standards.  Nobody in Bursley really
knew the meaning of the word success.  And even such
local success as Edwin had had--at what peril and
with what worry was it won!  These Heskeths were
safe forever.  Ah!  She envied them, and she intensely
depreciated everything that was hers.  She stood in
the Tavy Mansion garden--it seemed to her--like an
impostor.  Her husband was merely struggling
upwards.  And moreover she had quarrelled with him,
darkly and obscurely; and who could guess what
would be the end of marriage?  Harry and Alicia never
quarrelled; they might have tiffs--nothing worse than
that; they had no grounds for quarrelling....  And
supposing Harry and Alicia guessed the link
connecting her with Dartmoor prison! ... No, it could
not be supposed.  Her envy melted into secret deep
dejection amid the beautiful and prosperous scene.

"Evidently some one's called," said Harry, of his
wife's disappearance.  "I hope she's nice."

"Who?"

"Whoever's called.  Shall we knock the balls about
a bit?"

They began a mild game of croquet.  But after a
few minutes Hilda burst out sharply:

"You aren't playing your best, Mr. Hesketh.  I
wish you would."

He was startled by her eyes and her tone.

"Honest Injun!  I am," he fibbed in answer.  "But
I'll try to do better.  You must remember croquet
isn't my game.  Alicia floors me at it five times out
of six."

Then the parlourmaid and another maid came out to
lay tea on two tables under the ilex.

"Bowley," said Harry over his shoulder.  "Bring
me a telegraph-form next time you come out, will you?"

"Yes, sir," said the parlourmaid.

Hilda protested:

"No, Mr. Hesketh!  Really!  I assure you--"

The telegraph-form came with the tea.  Harry
knocked a ball against a coloured stick, and both he
and Hilda sat down with relief.

"Who's called, Bowley?"

"Mrs. Rotherwas, sir."

Harry counted the cups.

"Isn't she staying for tea?"

"No, sir.  I think not, sir."

Hilda, humming, rose and walked about.  At the
same moment Alicia, Janet, and a tall young woman
in black and yellow emerged from the house.  Hilda
moved behind a tree.  She could hear good-byes.  The
group vanished round the side of the house, and then
came the sound of hoofs and of wheels crunching.
An instant later Alicia arrived at the ilex, bounding
and jolly; Janet moved more sedately.  The St. Bernard,
who had been reposing near the pond, now smelt
the tea and hot cakes and joined the party.  The
wagging of his powerful tail knocked over a wicker-chair,
and Alicia gave a squeal.  Then Alicia, putting her
hands to her mouth, shouted across the lawn and the
pond:

"Nursey!  Nursey!  Take them in!"

And a faint reply came.

"What was the Rotherwas dame after?" asked
Harry, sharpening a pencil, when Alicia had ascertained
the desires of her guests as to milk and sugar.

"She was after you, of course," said Alicia.
"Tennis party on Monday.  She wants you to balance
young Truscott.  I just told her so.  We shall all go.
You'll go, Hilda.  She'll be delighted.  I should have
brought her along only she was in such a hurry."

Hilda enquired:

"Who is Mrs. Rotherwas?"

"Her husband's a big coal-owner at Cardiff.  But
she's a niece or something of the governor of
Dartmoor prison, and she's apparently helping to keep
house for dear uncle just now.  They'll take us over
the prison before tennis.  It's awfully interesting.
Harry and I have been once."

"Oh!" murmured Hilda, staggered.

"Now about this 'ere woire," said Harry.  "What
price this?"  He handed over the message which he
had just composed.  It was rather long, and on the
form was left space for only two more words.

Hilda could not decipher it.  She saw the characters
with her eyes, but she was incapable of interpreting
them.  All the time she thought:

"I shall go to that prison.  I can't help it.  I shan't
be able to keep from going.  I shall go to that prison.
I must go.  Who could have imagined this?  I am
bound to go, and I shall go."

But instead of objecting totally to the despatch of
the telegram, she said in a strange voice:

"It's very nice of you."

"You fill up the rest of the form," said Harry,
offering the pencil.

"What must I put?"

"Well, you'd better put 'Countersigned, Hilda.'  That'll
fix it."

"Will you write it?" she muttered.

He wrote the words.

"Let poor mummy see!" Alicia complained, seizing
the telegraph-form.

Harry called out:

"Leeks!"

A shirt-sleeved gardener half hidden by foliage
across the garden looked up sharply, saw Harry's
beckoning finger, and approached running.

"Have that sent off for me, will you?  Tell Jos to
take it," said Harry, and gave Leeks the form and a
florin.

"Why, Hilda, you aren't eating anything!" protested
Alicia.

"I only want tea," said Hilda casually, wondering
whether they had noticed anything wrong in her face.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   II

.. vspace:: 2

Edwin, looking curiously out of the carriage-window
as the train from Plymouth entered Tavistock
station early on the Monday, was surprised to
perceive Harry Hesketh on the platform.  While, in the
heavenly air of the September morning, the train was
curving through Bickleigh Vale and the Valley of the
Plym and through the steeper valley of the Meavy up
towards the first fastnesses of the Moor, he had felt
his body to be almost miraculously well and his soul
almost triumphant.  But when he saw Harry--the
remembered figure, but a little stouter and coarser--he
saw a being easily more triumphant than himself.

Harry had great reason for triumph, for he had
proved himself to possess a genius for deductive
psychological reasoning and for prophecy.  Edwin had
been characteristically vague about the visit.  First he
had telegraphed that he could not come, business
preventing.  Then he had telegraphed that he would come,
but only on Sunday, and he had given no particulars
of trains.  They had all assured one another that this
was just like Edwin.  "The man's mad!" said Harry
with genial benevolence, and had set himself to one
of his favourite studies--Bradshaw.  He always
handled Bradshaw like a master, accomplishing feats of
interpretation that amazed his wife.  He had
announced, after careful connotations, that Edwin was
perhaps after all not such a chump, but that he was
in fact a chump, in that, having chosen the
Bristol-Plymouth route, he had erred about the Sunday night
train from Plymouth to Tavistock.  How did he know
that Edwin would choose the Bristol-Plymouth
route?  Well, his knowledge was derived from
divination, based upon vast experience of human nature.
Edwin would "get stuck" at Plymouth.  He would
sleep at Plymouth--staying at the Royal (he hoped)--and
would come on by the 8.1 a.m. on Monday,
arriving at 8.59 a.m., where he would be met by
Harry in the dog-cart drawn by Joan.  The
telegraph was of course closed after 10 a.m. on Sunday,
but if it had been open and he had been receiving
hourly despatches about Edwin's tortuous progress
through England, Harry could not have been more
sure of his position.  And on the Monday Harry
had risen up in the very apogee of health, and had
driven Joan to the station.  "Mark my words!" he
had said.  "I shall bring him back with me for
breakfast."  He had offered to take Hilda to the station
to witness his triumph; but Hilda had not accepted.

And there Edwin was!  Everything had happened
according to Harry's prediction, except that, from an
unfortunate modesty, Edwin had gone to the wrong
hotel at Plymouth.

They shook hands in a glow of mutual pleasure.

"How on earth did you know?" Edwin began.

The careful-casual answer rounded off Harry's
triumph.  And Edwin thought: "Why, he's just like
a grown-up boy!"  But he was distinguished; his
club-necktie in all its decay was still impressive; and
his expansive sincere goodwill was utterly delightful.
Also the station, neat, clean, solid--the negation of
all gimcrackery--had an aspect of goodwill to man;
its advertisements did not flare; and it seemed to be
the expression of a sound and self-respecting race.
The silvern middle-aged guard greeted Harry with
deferential heartiness and saluted Edwin with even
more warmth than he had used at Plymouth.  On
the Sunday Edwin had noticed that in the western
country guards were not guards (as in other parts
of England), but rather the cordial hosts of their
trains.  As soon as the doors had banged in a
fusillade and the engine whistled, a young porter came
and, having exchanged civilities with Harry, picked
up Edwin's bag.  This porter's face and demeanour
showed perfect content.  His slight yet eager smile
and his quick movements seemed to be saying: "It
is natural and proper that I should salute you and
carry your bag while you walk free.  You are
gentlemen by divine right, and by the same right I am
a railway porter and happy."  To watch the man
at his job gave positive pleasure, and it was
extraordinarily reassuring--reassuring about everything.
Outside the station, the groom stood at Joan's head,
and a wonderful fox-terrier sat alert under the
dog-cart.  Instantly the dog sprang out and began to
superintend the preparations for departure, rushing
to and fro and insisting all the time that delay would
be monstrous, if not fatal.  The dog's excellence as
a specimen of breeding was so superlative as to
accuse its breeder and owner of a lack of perspective
in life.  It was as if the entire resources of
civilization had been employed towards the perfecting of the
points of that dog.

"Balanced the cart, I suppose, Jos?" asked Harry,
kindly.

"Yes, sir," was all that Jos articulated, but his
bright face said: "Sir, your assumption that I have
already balanced the cart for three and a bag is
benevolent and justified.  You trust me.  I trust you,
sir.  All is well."

The bag was stowed and the porter got threepence
and was so happy in his situation that apparently
he could not bring himself to leave the scene.  Harry
climbed up on the right, Edwin on the left.  The dog
gave one short bark and flew madly forward.  Jos
loosed Joan's head, and at the same moment Harry
gave a click, and the machine started.  It did not
wait for young Jos.  Jos caught the back step as the
machine swung by, and levered himself dangerously to
the groom's place.  And when he had done it he
grinned, announcing to beholders that his mission in
life was to do just that, and that it was a grand life
and he a lucky and enviable fellow.

Harry drove across the Tavy, and through the small
grey and brown town, so picturesque, so clean, so solid,
so respectable, so content in its historicity.  A policeman
saluted amiably and firmly, as if saying: "I am
protecting all this,--what a treasure!"  Then they
passed the Town Hall.

"Town Hall," said Harry.

"Oh!"

"The Dook's," said Harry.

He put on a certain facetiousness, but there
nevertheless escaped from him the conviction that the
ownership of a town hall by a Duke was a wondrous rare
phenomenon and fine, showing the strength of grand
English institutions and traditions, and meet for
honest English pride.  (And you could say what you
liked about progress!)  And Edwin had just the same
feeling.  In another minute they were out of the town.
The countryside, though bleak, with its spare hedges
and granite walls, was exquisitely beautiful in the
morning light; and it was tidy, tended, mature; it
was as though it had nothing to learn from the
future.  Beyond rose the slopes of the moor, tonic and
grim.  An impression of health, moral and physical,
everywhere disengaged itself.  The wayfarer, sturdy
and benign, invigorated by his mere greeting.  The
trot of the horse on the smooth winding road, the
bounding of the dog, the resilience of the cart-springs,
the sharp tang of the air on the cheek, all helped to
perfect Edwin's sense of pleasure in being alive.  He
could not deny that he had stood in need of a change.
He had been worrying, perhaps through overwork.
Overwork was a mistake.  He now saw that
there was no reason why he should not be happy
always, even with Hilda.  He had received a short but
nice and almost apologetic letter from Hilda.  As for
his apprehensions, what on earth did it matter about
Dartmoor being so near?  Nothing!  This district
was marvellously reassuring.  He thought: "There
simply is no social question down here!"

"Had your breakfast?" asked Harry.

"Yes, thanks."

"Well, you just haven't, then!" said Harry.  "We
shall be in the nick of time for it."

"When do you have breakfast?"

"Nine thirty."

"Bit late, isn't it?"

"Oh no!  It suits us....  I say!"  Harry stared
straight between the horse's ears.

"What?"

Harry murmured:

"No more news about Johnnie, I suppose?"

(Edwin glanced half round at the groom behind.
Harry with a gesture indicated that the groom was
negligible.)

"Not that I've heard.  Bit stiff, isn't it?" Edwin
answered.

"Bit stiff?  I should rather say it was.  Especially
after Jimmie's performance.  Rather hard lines on
Alicia, don't you think?"

"On all of 'em," said Edwin, not seeing why Johnnie's
escapade should press more on Alicia than, for
example, on Janet.

"Yes, of course," Harry agreed, evidently seeing
and accepting the point.  "The less said the better!"

"I'm with you," said Edwin.

Harry resumed his jolly tone:

"Well, you'd better peck a bit.  We've planned a
hard day for you."

"Oh!"

"Yes.  Early lunch, and then we're going to drive
over to Princetown.  Tennis with the Governor of the
prison.  He'll show us all over the prison.  It's worth
seeing."

Impulsively Edwin exclaimed:

"All of you?  Is Hilda going?"

"Certainly.  Why not?"  He raised the whip and
pointed: "Behold our noble towers."

Edwin, feeling really sick, thought:

"Hilda's mad.  She's quite mad.....  Morbid
isn't the word!"

He was confounded.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   III

.. vspace:: 2

At Tavy Mansion Edwin and Harry were told by
a maid that Mrs. Hesketh and Miss Orgreave were
in the nursery and would be down in a moment, but
that Mrs. Clayhanger had a headache and was
remaining in bed for breakfast.  The master of the house
himself took Edwin to the door of his wife's bedroom.
Edwin's spirits had risen in an instant, as he
perceived the cleverness of Hilda's headache.  There
could be no doubt that women were clever, though
perhaps unscrupulously and crudely clever, in a way
beyond the skill of men.  By the simple device of
suffering from a headache Hilda had avoided the ordeal
of meeting a somewhat estranged husband in public;
she was also preparing an excuse for not going to
Princetown and the prison.  Certainly it was better, in
the Dartmoor affair, to escape at the last moment than
to have declined the project from the start.

As he opened the bedroom-door, apprehensions and
bright hope were mingled in him.  He had a weighty
grievance against Hilda, whose behaviour at parting
had been, he considered, inexcusable; but the warm
tone of her curt private telegram to him and of her
almost equally curt letter, re-stating her passionate
love, was really equivalent to an apology, which he
accepted with eagerness.  Moreover he had done a lot in
coming to Devonshire, and for this great act he lauded
himself and he expected some gratitude.  Nevertheless,
despite the pacificism of his feelings, he could not smile
when entering the room.  No, he could not!

Hilda was lying in the middle of a very wide bed,
and her dark hair was spread abroad upon the pillow.
On the pedestal was a tea-tray.  Squatted comfortably
at Hilda's side, with her left arm as a support,
was a baby about a year old, dressed for the day.
This was Cecil, born the day after his grandparents'
funeral.  Cecil, with mouth open and outstretched pink
hands, of which the fingers were spread like the rays of
half a starfish, from wide eyes gazed at Edwin with
a peculiar expression of bland irony.  Hilda smiled
lovingly; she smiled without reserve.  And as soon as
she smiled, Edwin could smile, and his heart was
suddenly quite light.

Hilda thought:

"That wistful look in his eyes has never changed,
and it never will.  Imagine him travelling on Sunday,
when the silly old thing might just as well have come
on Saturday, if he'd had anybody to decide him!  He's
been travelling for twenty-four hours or more, and
now he's here!  What a shame for me to have dragged
him down here in spite of himself!  But he would do
it for me!  He has done it....  I had to have him,
for this afternoon! ... After all he must be very
good at business.  Everyone respects him, even here.
We may end by being really rich.  Have I ever really
appreciated him? ... And now of course he's going
to be annoyed again.  Poor boy!"

"Hello!  Who's this?" cried Edwin.

"This is Cecil.  His mummy's left him, here with
his Auntie Hilda," said Hilda.

"Another clever dodge of hers!" thought Edwin.
He liked the baby being there.

He approached the bed, and, staring nervously
about, saw that his bag had already mysteriously
reached the bedroom.

"Well, my poor boy!  What a journey!" Hilda
murmured compassionately.  She could not help
showing that she was his mother in wisdom and sense.

"Oh no!" he amiably dismissed this view.

He was standing over her by the bedside.  She
looked straight up at him timid and expectant.  He
bent and kissed her.  Under his kiss she shifted slightly
in the bed, and her arms clung round his neck, and
by her arms she lifted herself a little towards him.

She shut her eyes.  She would not loose him.  She
seemed again to be drawing the life out of him.  At
last she let him go, and gave a great sigh.  All the past
which did not agree with that kiss and that sigh of
content was annihilated, and an immense reassurance
filled Edwin's mind.

"So you've got a headache?"

She gave a succession of little nods, smiling happily.

"I'm so glad you've come, dearest," she said, after
a pause.  She was just like a young girl, like a child,
in her relieved satisfaction.  "What about George?"

"Well, as it was left to me to decide, I thought I'd
better ask Maggie to come and stay in the house.
Much better than packing him off to Auntie Hamps's."

"And she came?"

"Oh yes!" said Edwin, indifferently, as if to say:
"Of course she came."

"Then you did get my letter in time?"

"I shouldn't have got it in time if I'd left Saturday
morning as you wanted.  Oh!  And here's a letter
for *you*."

He pulled a letter from his pocket.  The envelope
was of the peculiar tinted paper with which he had
already been familiarised.  Hilda became self-conscious
as she took the letter and opened it.  Edwin too
was self-conscious.  To lighten the situation, he put his
little finger in the baby's mouth.  Cecil much appreciated
this form of humour, and as soon as the finger was
withdrawn from his toothless gums, he made a bubbling
whirring noise, and waved his arms to indicate that
the game must continue.  Hilda, frowning, read the
letter.  Edwin sat down, ledging himself cautiously
on the brink of the bed, and leaned back a little so as
to be able to get at the baby and tickle it among its
frills.  From the distance, beyond walls, he could hear
the powerful happy cries of older babies, beings fully
aware of themselves, who knew their own sentiments
and could express them.  And he glanced round the
long low room with its two small open windows
showing sunlit yellow cornfields and high trees, and its
monumental furniture, and the disorder of Hilda's
clothes and implements humanising it and individualising
it and making it her abode, her lair.  And he
glanced prudently at Hilda over the letter-paper.  She
had no headache; it was obvious that she had no
headache.  Yet in the most innocent touching way she had
nodded an affirmative to his question about the
headache.  He could not possibly have said to her: "Look
here, you know you haven't got a headache."  She
would not have tolerated the truth.  The truth would
have made her transform herself instantly into a
martyr, and him into a brute.  She would have stuck
to it, even if the seat of eternal judgment had
suddenly been installed at the brassy foot of the bed,
that she had a headache.

It was with this mentality (he reflected, assuming
that his own mentality never loved anything as well
as truth) that he had to live till one of them expired.
He reminded himself wisely that the woman's code is
different from the man's.  But the honesty of his
intelligence rejected such an explanation, such an excuse.
It was not that the woman had a different code,--she
had no code except the code of the utter opportunist.
To live with her was like living with a marvellous
wild animal, full of grace, of cunning, of magnificent
passionate gestures, of terrific affection, and of cruelty.
She was at once indispensable and intolerable.  He
felt that to match her he had need of all his force, all
his prescience, all his duplicity.  The mystery that
had lain between him and Hilda for a year was in the
letter within two feet of his nose.  He could watch
her as she read, study her face; he knew that he was
the wiser of the two; she was at a disadvantage; as
regards the letter, she was fighting on ground chosen
by him; and yet he could not in the least foresee the
next ten minutes,--whether she would advance, retreat,
feint, or surrender.

"Did you bring your dress-clothes?" she murmured,
while she was reading.  She had instructed him in her
letter on this point.

"Of course," he said, manfully, striving to imply
the immense untruth that he never stirred from home
without his dress-clothes.

She continued to read, frowning, and drawing her
heavy eyebrows still closer together.  Then she said:

"Here!"

And passed him the letter.  He could see now that
she was becoming excited.

The letter was from the legitimate Mrs. George
Cannon, and it said that, though nothing official was
announced or even breathed, her solicitor had
gathered from a permanent and important underling of
the Home Office that George Cannon's innocence was
supposed to be established, and that the Queen's
pardon would, at some time or other, be issued.  It was an
affecting letter.  Edwin, totally ignorant of all that
had preceded it, did not immediately understand its
significance.  At first he did not even grasp what it
was about.  When he did begin to comprehend he had
the sensation of being deprived momentarily of his
bearings.  He had expected everything but this.  That
is to say, he had absolutely not known what to
expect.  The shock was severe.

"*What* is it?  *What* is it?" he questioned, as if
impatient.

Hilda replied:

"It's about George Cannon.  It seems he was quite
innocent in that bank-note affair.  It's his wife who's
been writing to me about it.  I don't know why she
should.  But she did, and of course I had to reply."

"You never said anything to me about it."

"I didn't want to worry you, dearest.  I knew you'd
quite enough on your mind with the works.  Besides,
I'd no right to worry you with a thing like *that*.
But of course I can show you all her letters,--I've
kept them."

Unanswerable!  Unanswerable!  Insincere, concocted,
but unanswerable!  The implications in her
spoken defence were of the simplest and deepest
ingenuity, and withal they hurt him.  For example, the
implication that the strain of the new works was
breaking him!  As if he could not support it, and had
not supported it, easily!  As if the new works meant
that he could not fulfil all his duties as a helpmeet!
And then the devilishly adroit plea that her
concealment was morally necessary since he ought not to be
troubled with any result of her pre-conjugal life!  And
finally the implication that he would be jealous of the
correspondence and might exact the production of
it! ... He now callously ignored Cecil's signals for
attention....  He knew that he would receive no
further enlightenment as to the long secrecy of the
past twelve months.  His fears and apprehensions and
infelicity were to be dismissed with those few words.
They would never be paid for, redeemed, atoned.  The
grand scenic explanation and submission which was
his right would never come.  Sentimentally, he was
cheated, and had no redress.  And, as a climax, he
had to assume, to pretend, that justice still prevailed
on earth.

"Isn't it awful!" Hilda muttered.  "Him in prison
all this time!"

He saw that her eyes were wet, and her emotion
increasing.

He nodded in sympathy.

He thought:

"She'll want some handling,--I can see that!"

He too, as well as she, imaginatively comprehended
the dreadful tragedy of George Cannon's false
imprisonment.  He had heart enough to be very glad
that the innocent man (innocent at any rate of that
one thing) was to be released.  But at the same time
he could not stifle a base foreboding and regret.
Looking at his wife, he feared the moment when George
Cannon, with all the enormous prestige of a victim in a
woman's eyes, should be at large.  Yes, the lover in
him would have preferred George Cannon to be
incarcerated forever.  Had he not heard, had he not read,
had he not seen on the stage, that a woman never
forgets the first man?  Nonsense, all that!  Invented
theatrical psychology!  And yet--if it was true! ... Look
at her eyes!

"I suppose he *is* innocent?" he said gruffly, for he
mistrusted, or affected to mistrust, the doings of these
two women together,--Cannon's wife and Cannon's
victim.  Might they not somehow have been hoodwinked?
He knew nothing, no useful detail, naught that was
convincing--and he never would know!  Was it not
astounding that the bigamist should have both these
women on his side, either working for him, or weeping
over his woes?

"He must be innocent," Hilda answered, thoughtfully,
in a breaking voice.

"Where is he now,--up yon?"

He indicated the unvisited heights of Dartmoor.

"I believe so."

"I thought they always shifted 'em back to
London before they released 'em."

"I expect they will do.  They may have moved him
already."

His mood grew soft, indulgent.  He conceded that
her emotion was natural.  She had been bound up
with the man.  Cannon's admitted guilt on the one
count, together with all that she had suffered through
it, only intensified the poignancy of his innocence on
the other count.  Contrary to the general assumption,
you must be sorrier for an unfortunate rascal than
for an unfortunate good man.  He could feel all that.
He, Edwin, was to be pitied; but nobody save
himself would perceive that he was to be pitied.  His
rôle would be difficult, but all his pride and
self-reliance commanded him to play it well, using every
resource of his masculine skill, and so prove that he
was that which he believed himself to be.  The future
would be all right, because he would be equal to the
emergency.  Why should it not be all right?  His
heart in kindliness and tenderness drew nearer to
Hilda's, and he saw, or fancied he saw, that all their
guerilla had been leading up to this, had perhaps been
caused by this, and would be nobly ended by it.

Just then a mysterious noise penetrated the room,
growing and growing until it became a huge deafening
din, and slowly died away.

"I expect that's breakfast," said Edwin in a casual
tone.

The organism of the English household was
functioning.  Even in the withdrawn calm of the bedroom
they could feel it irresistibly functioning.  The gong
had a physical effect on Cecil; all his disappointment
and his sense of being neglected were gathered up in
his throat and exploded in a yell.  Hilda took him
in her right arm and soothed him and called him
silly names.

Edwin rose from the bed, and as he did so, Hilda
retained him with her left hand, and pulled him very
gently towards her, inviting a kiss.  He kissed her.
She held to him.  He could see at a distance of two
inches all the dark swimming colour of her wet eyes
half veiled by the long lashes.  And he could feel the
soft limbs of the snuffling baby somewhere close to
his head.

"You'd better stick where you are," he advised her
in a casual tone.

Hilda thought:

"Now the time's come.  He'll be furious.  But I
can't help it."

She said:

"Oh no.  I shall be quite all right soon.  I'm going
to get up in about half an hour."

"But then how shall you get out of going to Princetown?"

"Oh!  Edwin!  I must go.  I told them I should go."

He was astounded.  There was no end to her
incalculability,--no end!  His resentment was violent.
He stood right away from her.

"'Told them you should go'!" he exclaimed.  "What
in the name of heaven does that matter?  Are you
absolutely mad?"

She stiffened.  Her features hardened.  In the midst
of her terrible relief as to the fate of George Cannon
and of her equal terrible excitement under the
enigmatic and irresistible mesmerism of Dartmoor prison,
she was desperate, and resentment against Edwin
kindled deep within her.  She felt the brute in him.
She felt that he would never really understand.  She
felt all her weakness and all his strength, but she was
determined.  At bottom she knew well that her
weakness was the stronger.

"I must go!" she repeated.

"It's nothing but morbidness!" he said savagely.
"Morbidness! ... Well, I shan't have it.  I shan't
let you go.  And that's flat."

She kept silent.  Frightfully disturbed, cursing
women, forgetting utterly in a moment his sublime
resolves, Edwin descended to breakfast in the large,
strange house.  Existence was monstrous.

And before the middle of the morning Hilda came
into the garden where everyone else was idling.  And
Alicia and Janet fondly kissed her.  She said her
headache had vanished.

"Sure you feel equal to going this afternoon,
dearest?" asked Janet.

"Oh yes!" Hilda replied lightly.  "It will do me
good."

Edwin was helpless.  He thought, recalling with
vexation his last firm forbidding words to Hilda in
the bedroom:

"Nobody *could* be equal to this emergency."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE PRISON`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER XV


.. class:: center medium

   THE PRISON

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

Harry had two stout and fast cobs in a light
wagonette.  He drove himself, and Hilda sat by his side.
The driver's boast was that he should accomplish the
ten miles, with a rise of a thousand feet, in an hour
and a quarter.  A hired carriage would have spent two
hours over the journey.

It was when they had cleared the town, and were
on the long straight rise across the moor towards
Longford, that the horses began to prove the faith that
was in them, eager, magnanimous, conceiving grandly
the splendour of their task in life, and irrepressibly
performing it with glory.  The stones on the loose-surfaced
road flew from under the striding of their hoofs
into the soft, dark ling on either hand.  Harry's whip
hovered in affection over their twin backs, never
touching them, and Harry smiled mysteriously to himself.
He did not wish to talk.  Nor did Hilda.  The movement
braced and intoxicated her, and rendered thought
impossible.  She brimmed with emotion, like a vase with
some liquid unanalysable and perilous.  She was not
happy, she was not unhappy; the sensation of her
vitality and of the kindred vitality of the earth and the
air was overwhelming.  She would have prolonged the
journey indefinitely, and yet she intensely desired the
goal, whatever terrors it might hold for her.  At
intervals she pulled up the embroidered and
monogrammed apron that slipped slowly down over her skirt
and over Harry's tennis-flannels, disclosing two
rackets in a press that lay between them.  Perhaps Harry
was thinking of certain strokes at tennis.

"Longford!" ejaculated Harry, turning his head
slightly towards the body of the vehicle, as they
rattled by a hamlet.

Soon afterwards the road mounted steeply,--five
hundred feet in little more than a mile, and the horses
walked, but they walked in haste, fiercely, clawing at
the road with their forefeet and thrusting it behind
them.  And some of the large tors emerged clearly
into view--Cox Tor, the Staple Tors, and Great Mis
lifting its granite above them and beyond.

They were now in the midst of the moor, trotting
fast again.  Behind and before them, and on either
side, there was nothing but moor and sky.  The sky,
a vast hemisphere of cloud and blue and sunshine, with
a complex and ever elusive geography of its own,
discovered all the tints of heath and granite.  It was one
of those days when every tint was divided into ten
thousand shades, and each is richer and more softly
beautiful than the others.  On the shoulder of Great
Mis rain fell, while little Vixen Tor glittered with mica
points in the sun.  Nothing could be seen over the
whole moor save here and there a long-tailed pony, or
a tiny cottage set apart in solitude.  And the
yellowish road stretched forward, wavily, narrowing,
disappeared for a space, reappeared still narrower,
disappeared once more, reappeared like a thin meandering
line, and was lost on the final verge.  It was an
endless road.  Impossible that the perseverance of horses
should cover it yard by yard!  But the horses strained
onward, seeing naught but the macadam under their
noses.  Harry checked them at a descent.

"Walkham River!" he announced.

They crossed a pebbly stream by a granite bridge.

"Hut-circles!" said Harry laconically.

They were climbing again.

Edwin, in the body of the wagonette with Janet and
Alicia, looked for hut-circles and saw none; but he did
not care.  He was content with the knowledge that
prehistoric hut-circles were somewhere there.  He had
never seen wild England before, and its primeval
sanity awoke in him the primeval man.  The healthiness
and simplicity and grandiose beauty of it created the
sublime illusion that civilisation was worthy to be
abandoned.  The Five Towns seemed intolerable by
their dirt and ugliness, and by the tedious intricacy
of their existence.  Lithography,--you had but to think
of the word to perceive the paltriness of the thing!
Riches, properties, proprieties, all the safeties,--futile!
He could have lived alone with Hilda on the
moor, begetting children by her, watching with
satisfaction the growing curves of her fecundity--his work,
and seeing her with her brood, all their faces beaten
by wind and rain and browned with sun.  He had a
tremendous, a painful longing for such a life.  His
imagination played round the idea of it with
voluptuous and pure pleasure, and he wondered that he had
never thought of it before.  He felt that he had never
before peered into the depths of existence.  And though
he knew that the dream of such an arcadian career
was absurd, yet he seemed to guess that beneath the
tiresome surfaces of life in the Five Towns the
essence of it might be mystically lived.  And he thought
that Hilda would be capable of sharing it with
him,--nay, he knew she would!

His mood became gravely elated, even optimistic.
He saw that he had worried himself about nothing.  If
she wanted to visit the prison, let her visit it!  Why
not?  At any rate he should not visit it.  He had an
aversion for morbidity almost as strong as his
aversion for sentimentality.  But her morbidity could do
no harm.  She could not possibly meet George
Cannon.  The chances were utterly against such an
encounter.  Her morbidity would cure itself.  He pitied
her, cherished her, and in thought enveloped her
fondly with his sympathetic and protective wisdom.

"North Hessary," said Harry, pointing with his
whip to a jutting tor on the right hand.  "We go
round by the foot of it.  There in a jiff!"

Soon afterwards they swerved away from the main
road, obeying a signpost marked "Princetown."

"Glorious, isn't it?" murmured Janet, after a long
silence which had succeeded the light chatter of
herself and Alicia about children, servants, tennis,
laundries.

He nodded, with a lively responsive smile, and
glanced at Hilda's mysterious back.  Only once
during the journey had she looked round.  Alicia with
her coarse kind voice and laugh began to rally him,
saying he had dozed.

A town, more granite than the moor itself, gradually
revealed its roofs in the heart of the moor.  The
horses, indefatigable, quickened their speed.  Villas, a
school, a chapel, a heavy church-tower followed in
succession; there were pavements; a brake full of
excursionists had halted in front of a hotel;
holiday-makers--simple
folk who disliked to live in flocks--wandered
in ecstatic idleness.  Concealed within the warmth of
the mountain air, there pricked a certain sharpness.
All about, beyond the little town, the tors raised their
shaggy flanks surmounted by colossal masses of stone
that recalled the youth of the planet.  The feel of the
world was stimulating like a tremendous tonic.  Then
the wagonette passed a thick grove of trees, hiding a
house, and in a moment, like magic, appeared a huge
gated archway of brick and stone, and over it the
incised words:

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   PARCERE SUBJECTIS

.. vspace:: 2

"Stop!  Stop!  Harry," cried Alicia shrilly.
"What are you doing?  You'll have to go to the
house first."

"Shall I?" said Harry.  "All right.  Two thirty-five,
be it noted."

The vehicle came to a standstill, and instantly
clouds of vapour rose from the horses.

"Virgil!" thought Edwin, gazing at the archway,
which filled him with sudden horror, like an obscenity
misplaced.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   II

.. vspace:: 2

Less than ten minutes later, he and Hilda and Alicia,
together with three strange men, stood under the
archway.  Events had followed one another quickly, to
Edwin's undoing.  When the wagonette drew up in
the grounds of the Governor's house, Harry Hesketh
had politely indicated that for his horses he
preferred the stables of a certain inn down the road to
any stables that hospitality might offer; and he had
driven off, Mrs. Rotherwas urging him to return
without any delay so that tennis might begin.  The
Governor had been called from home, and in his absence
a high official of the prison was deputed to show the
visitors through the establishment.  This official was
the first of the three strange men; the other two were
visitors.  Janet had said that she would not go over the
prison, because she meant to play tennis and wished
not to tire herself.  Alicia said kindly that she at any
rate would go with Hilda,--though she had seen it all
before, it was interesting enough to see again.

Edwin had thereupon said that he should remain
with Janet.  But immediately Mrs. Rotherwas, whose
reception of him had been full of the most friendly
charm, had shown surprise, if not pain.  What,--come
to Princetown without inspecting the wonderful prison,
when the chance was there?  Inconceivable!  Edwin
might in his blunt Five Towns way have withstood
Mrs. Rotherwas, but he could not withstand Hilda,
who, frowning, seemed almost ready to risk a public
altercation in order to secure his attendance.  He had
to yield.  To make a scene, even a very little one, in
the garden full of light dresses and polite suave voices
would have been monstrous.  He thought of all that he
had ever heard of the subjection of men to women.
He thought of Johnnie and of Mrs. Chris Hamson,
who was known for her steely caprices.  And he
thought also of Jimmie and of the undesirable
Mrs. Jimmie, who, it was said, had threatened to love
Jimmie no more unless he took her once a week without
fail to the theatre, whatever the piece, and played
cards with her and two of her friends on all the other
nights of the week.  He thought of men as a sex
conquered by the unscrupulous and the implacable, and in
this mood, superimposed on his mood of disgust at
the mere sight of the archway, he followed the high
official and his train.  Mrs. Rotherwas's last words were
that they were not to be long.  But the official said
privately to the group that they must at any rate
approach the precincts of the prison with all ceremony,
and he led them proudly, with an air of ownership,
round to the main entrance where the wagonette had
first stopped.

A turnkey on the other side of the immense gates,
using a theatrical gesture, jangled a great bouquet
of keys; the portal opened, increasing the pride of
the official, and the next moment they were interned
in the outer courtyard.  The moor and all that it
meant lay unattainably beyond that portal.  As the
group slowly crossed the enclosed space, with the grim
façades of yellow-brown buildings on each side and
vistas of further gates and buildings in front, the
official and the two male visitors began to talk together
over the heads of Alicia and Hilda.  The women held
close to each other, and the official kept upon them
a chivalrous eye; the two visitors were friends; Edwin
was left out of the social scheme, and lagged
somewhat behind, like one who is not wanted but who
cannot be abandoned.  He walked self-conscious,
miserable, resentful, and darkly angry.  In one instant the
three men had estimated him, decided that he was not
of their clan nor of any related clan, and ignored
him.  Whereas the official and the two male visitors,
who had never met before, grew more and more friendly
each minute.  One said that he did not know So-and-So
of the Scots Greys, but he knew his cousin Trevor
of the Hussars, who had in fact married a niece of
his own.  And then another question about somebody
else was asked, and immediately they were engaged
in following clues, as explorers will follow the intricate
mouths of a great delta and so unite in the main
stream.  They were happy.

Edwin did not seriously mind that; but what he did
mind was their accent--in those days termed throughout
the Midlands "lah-di-dah" (an onomatopoeic
description), which, falsifying every vowel sound in the
language, and several consonants, magically created
around them an aura of utter superiority to the rest
of the world.  He quite unreasonably hated them, and
he also envied them, because this accent was their
native tongue, and because their clothes were not cut
like his, and because they were entirely at their ease.
Useless for the official to throw him an urbane word
now and then; neither his hate nor his constraint would
consent to be alleviated; the urbane words grew less
frequent.  Also Edwin despised them because they
were seemingly insensible to the tremendous horror of
the jail set there like an outrage in the midst of
primitive and sane Dartmoor.  "Yes," their attitude said.
"This is a prison, one of the institutions necessary to
the well being of society, like a workhouse or an opera
house,--an interesting sight!"

A second pair of iron gates were opened with the
same elaborate theatricality as the first, and while
the operation was being done the official, invigorated
by the fawning of turnkeys, conversed with Alicia,
who during her short married life had acquired some
shallow acquaintance with the clans, and he even drew
a reluctant phrase from Hilda.  Then, after another
open space, came a third pair of iron gates, final and
terrific, and at length the party was under cover, and
even the sky of the moor was lost.  Edwin, bored,
disgusted, shamed, and stricken, yielded himself proudly
and submissively to the horror of the experience.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   III

.. vspace:: 2

Hilda had only one thought--would she catch sight
of the innocent prisoner?  The party was now deeply
engaged in a system of corridors and stairways.  The
official had said that as the tour of inspection was to
be short he would display to them chiefly the modern
part of the prison.  So far not a prisoner had been
seen, and scarcely a warder.  The two male visitors
were scientifically interested in the question of escapes.
Did prisoners ever escape?

"Never!" said the official, with satisfaction.

"Impossible, I suppose.  Even when they're
working out on the moor?  Warders are pretty good
shots, eh?"

"Practically impossible," said the official.  "But
there is one way."  He looked up the stairway on
whose landing they stood, and down the stairway, and
cautiously lowered his voice.  "Of course what I tell
you is confidential.  If one of our Dartmoor fogs
came on suddenly, and kind friends outside had
hidden a stock of clothes and food in an arranged spot,
then theoretically--I say, theoretically--a man might
get away.  But nobody ever has done."

"I suppose you still have the silent system?"

The official nodded.

"Absolutely?"

"Absolutely."

"How awful it must be!" said Alicia, with a nervous
laugh.

The official shrugged his shoulders, and the other
two males murmured reassuring axioms about discipline.

They emerged from the stairway into a colossal and
resounding iron hall.  Round the emptiness of this
interior ran galleries of perforated iron protected from
the abyss by iron balustrades.  The group stood on
the second of the galleries from the stony floor, and
there were two galleries above them.  Far away,
opposite, a glint of sunshine had feloniously slipped in,
transpiercing the gloom, and it lighted a series of
doors.  There was a row of these doors along every
gallery.  Each had a peep-hole, a key-hole and a
number.  The longer Hilda regarded, the more
nightmarishly numerous seemed the doors.  The place was
like a huge rabbit-hutch designed for the claustration
of countless rabbits.  Across the whole width and
length of the hall, and at the level of the lowest
gallery, was stretched a great net.

"To provide against suicides?" suggested one of
the men.

"Yes," said the official.

"A good idea."

When the reverberation of the words had ceased, a
little silence ensued.  The ear listened vainly for the
slightest sound.  In the silence the implacability of
granite walls and iron reticulations reigned over the
accursed vision, stultifying the soul.

"Are these cells occupied?" asked Alicia timidly.

"Not yet, Mrs. Hesketh.  It's too soon.  A few are."

Hilda thought:

"He may be here,--behind one of those doors."  Her
heart was liquid with compassion and revolt.  "No,"
she assured herself.  "They must have taken him
away already.  It's impossible he should be here.  He's
innocent."

"Perhaps you would like to see one of the cells?"
the official suggested.

A warder appeared, and, with the inescapable jangle
of keys, opened a door.  The party entered the cell,
ladies first, then the official and his new acquaintances;
then Edwin, trailing.  The cell was long and narrow,
fairly lofty, bluish-white colour, very dimly lighted by a
tiny grimed window high up in a wall of extreme thickness.
The bed lay next the long wall; except the bed, a
stool, a shelf, and some utensils, there was nothing to
furnish the horrible nakedness of the cell.  One of the
visitors picked up an old book from the shelf.  It was a
Greek Testament.  The party seemed astonished at this
evidence of culture among prisoners, of the height from
which a criminal may have fallen.

The official smiled.

"They often ask for such things on purpose," said
he.  "They think it's effective.  They're very naïve,
you know, at bottom."

"This very cell may be his cell," thought Hilda.
"He may have been here all these months, years,
knowing he was innocent.  He may have thought about me
in this cell."  She glanced cautiously at Edwin, but
Edwin would not catch her eye.

They left.  On the way to the workshops, they had a
glimpse of the old parts of the prison, used during
the Napoleonic wars, incredibly dark, frowsy, like
catacombs.

"We don't use this part--unless we're very full up,"
said the official, and he contrasted it with the bright,
spacious, healthy excellences of the hall which they
had just quitted, to prove that civilisation never stood
still.

And then suddenly, at the end of a passage, a door
opened and they were in the tailors' shop, a large
irregular apartment full of a strong stench and of
squatted and grotesque human beings.  The human beings,
for the most part, were clothed in a peculiar brown
stuff, covered with broad arrows.  The dress consisted
of a short jacket, baggy knickerbockers, black
stockings, and coloured shoes.  Their hair was cut so short
that they had the appearance of being bald, and their
great ears protruded at a startling angle from the sides
of those smooth heads.  They were of every age, yet
they all looked alike, ridiculous, pantomimic, appalling.
Some gazed with indifference at the visitors;
others seemed oblivious of the entry.  They all stitched
on their haunches, in the stench, under the surveillance
of eight armed warders in blue.

"How many?" asked the official mechanically.

"Forty-nine, sir," said a warder.

And Hilda searched their loathsome and vapid faces
for the face of George Cannon.  He was not there.
She trembled,--whether with relief or with disappointment
she knew not.  She was agonised, but in her torture
she exulted that she had come.

No comment had been made in the workshop, the
official having hinted that silence was usual on such
occasions.  But in a kind of antechamber--one of
those amorphous spaces, serving no purpose and
resembling nothing, which are sometimes to be found
between definable rooms and corridors in a vast building
imperfectly planned--the party halted in the midst of
a discussion as to discipline.  The male visitors,
except Edwin, showed marked intelligence and detachment;
they seemed to understand immediately how it
was that forty-nine ruffians could be trusted to squat
on their thighs and stitch industriously and use
scissors and other weapons for hours without being chained
to the ground; they certainly knew something of the
handling of men.  The official, triumphant, stated that
every prisoner had the right of personal appeal to the
Governor every day.

"They come with their stories of grievances," said
he, tolerant and derisive.

"Which often aren't true?"

"Which are never true," said the official quietly.
"Never!  They are always lies--always! ... Shows
the material we have to deal with!"  He gave a short
laugh.

"Really!" said one of the men, rather pleased and
excited by this report of universal lying.

"I suppose," Edwin blurted out, "you can tell for
certain when they aren't speaking the truth?"

Everybody looked at him surprised, as though the
dumb had spoken.  The official's glance showed some
suspicion of sarcasm and a tendency to resent it.

"We can," he answered shortly, commanding his
features to a faint smile.  "And now I wonder what
Mrs. Rotherwas will be saying if I don't restore you
to her."  It was agreed that regard must be had for
Mrs. Rotherwas's hospitable arrangements, though the
prison was really very interesting and would repay
study.

They entered a wide corridor--one of two that met
at right-angles in the amorphous space--leading in
the direction of the chief entrance.  From the end of
this corridor a file of convicts was approaching in
charge of two warders with guns.  The official offered
no remark, but held on.  Hilda, falling back near to
Edwin in the procession, was divided between a
dreadful fear and a hope equally dreadful.  Except in the
tailors' shop, these were the only prisoners they had
seen, and they appeared out of place in the half-freedom
of the corridor; for nobody could conceive a prisoner
save in a cell or shop, and these were moving in a
public corridor, unshackled.

Then she distinguished George Cannon among them.
He was the third from the last.  She knew him by his
nose and the shape of his chin, and by his walk, though
there was little left of his proud walk in the desolating,
hopeless prison-shuffle which was the gait of all
six convicts.  His hair was iron-grey.  All these
details she could see and be sure of in the distance of the
dim corridor.  She no longer had a stomach; it had
gone, and yet she felt a horrible nausea.

She cried out to herself:

"Why did I come?  Why did I come?  I am always
doing these mad things.  Edwin was right.  Why
do I not listen to him?"

The party of visitors led by the high official, and
the file of convicts in charge of armed warders, were
gradually approaching one another in the wide corridor.
It seemed to Hilda that a fearful collision was
imminent, and that something ought to be done.  But
nobody among the visitors did anything or seemed to
be disturbed.  Only they had all fallen silent; and in
the echoing corridor could be heard the firm steps of
the male visitors accompanying the delicate tripping
of the women, and the military tramp of the warders
with the confused shuffling of the convicts.

"Has he recognised me?" thought Hilda, wildly.

She hoped that he had and that he had not.  She
recalled with the most poignant sorrow the few days
of their union, their hours of intimacy, his kisses, her
secret realisation of her power over him, and of his
passion.  She wanted to scream:

"That man there is as innocent as any of you, and
soon the whole world will know it!  He never
committed any crime except that of loving me too much.
He could not do without me, and so I was his ruin.  It
is horrible that he should be here in this hell.  He must
be set free at once.  The Home Secretary knows he
is innocent, but they are so slow.  How can anyone
bear that he should stop here one instant longer?"

But she made no sound.  The tremendous force of
an ancient and organised society kept her lips closed
and her feet in a line with the others.  She thought in
despair:

"We are getting nearer, and I cannot meet him.  I
shall drop."  She glanced at Edwin, as if for help, but
Edwin was looking straight ahead.

Then a warder, stopping, ejaculated with the harsh
brevity of a drill-serjeant:

"Halt!"

The file halted.

"Right turn!"

The six captives turned, with their faces close
against the wall of the corridor, obedient, humiliated,
spiritless, limp, stooping.  Their backs presented the
most ridiculous aspect; all the calculated grotesquerie
of the surpassingly ugly prison uniform was
accentuated as they stood thus, a row of living
scarecrows, who knew that they had not the right even to
look upon free men.  Every one of them except George
Cannon had large protuberant ears that completed
the monstrosity of their appearance.

The official gave his new acquaintances a satisfied
glance, as if saying:

"That is the rule by which we manage these chance
encounters."

The visitors went by in silence, instinctively edging
away from the captives.  And as she passed, Hilda
lurched very heavily against Edwin, and recovered
herself.  Edwin seized her arm near the shoulder, and
saw that she was pale.  The others were in front.

Behind them they could hear the warder:

"Left turn!  March!"

And the shuffling and the tramping recommenced.



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   IV

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In the garden of the Governor's house tennis had
already begun when the official brought back his
convoy.  Young Truscott and Mrs. Rotherwas were pitted
against Harry Hesketh and a girl of eighteen who
possessed a good wrist but could not keep her head.
Harry was watching over his partner, quietly
advising her upon the ruses of the enemy, taking the more
difficult strokes for her, and generally imparting to
her the quality which she lacked.  Harry was fully
engaged; the whole of his brain and body was at strain;
he let nothing go by; he missed no chance, and within
the laws of the game he hesitated at no stratagem.
And he was beating young Truscott and Mrs. Rotherwas,
while an increasing and polite audience looked on.
To the entering party, the withdrawn scene, lit by
sunshine, appeared as perfect as a stage-show, with
its trees, lawn, flowers, toilettes, the flying balls, the
grace of the players, and the grey solidity of the
governor's house in the background.

Alicia ran gawkily to Janet, who had got a box of
chocolates from somewhere, and one of the men
followed her, laughing.  Hilda sat apart; she was less
pale.  Edwin remained cautiously near her.  He had
not left her side since she lurched against him in the
corridor.  He knew; he had divined that that which he
most feared had come to pass,--the supreme punishment
of Hilda's morbidity.  He had not definitely
recognised George Cannon, for he was not acquainted with
him, and in the past had only once or twice by chance
caught sight of him in the streets of Bursley or
Turnhill.  But he had seen among the six captives one who
might be he, and who certainly had something of the
Five Towns look.  Hilda's lurch told him that by
vindictiveness of fate George Cannon was close to
them.

He had ignored his own emotion.  The sudden transient
weight of Hilda's body had had a strange moral
effect upon him.  "This," he thought, "is the burden
I have to bear.  This, and not lithography, nor riches,
is my chief concern.  She depends on me.  I am all
she has to stand by."  The burden with its immense
and complex responsibilities was sweet to his inmost
being; and it braced him and destroyed his resentment
against her morbidity.  His pity was pure.  He felt
that he must live more nobly--yes, more heroically--than
he had been living; that all irritable pettiness
must drop away from him, and that his existence in
her regard must have simplicity and grandeur.  The
sensation of her actual weight stayed with him.  He
had not spoken to her; he dared not; he had scarcely
met her eyes; but he was ready for any emergency.
Every now and then, in the garden, Hilda glanced
over her shoulder at the house, as though her gaze
could pierce the house and see the sinister prison beyond.

The set ended, to Harry Hesketh's satisfaction; and,
another set being arranged, he and Mrs. Rotherwas,
athletic in a short skirt and simple blouse, came
walking, rather flushed and breathless, round the garden
with one or two others, including Harry's late
partner.  The conversation turned upon the great South
Wales colliery strike against a proposed reduction
of wages.  Mrs. Rotherwas' husband was a colliery
proprietor near Monmouth, and she had just received
a letter from him.  Everyone sympathised with her
and her husband, and nobody could comprehend the
wrongheadedness of the miners, except upon the
supposition that they had been led away by mischievous
demagogues.  As the group approached, the timid
young girl, having regained her nerve, was exclaiming
with honest indignation: "The leaders ought to be
shot, and the men who won't go down the pits ought to
be forced to go down and made to work."  And she
picked at fluff on her yellow frock.  Edwin feared an
uprising from Hilda, but naught happened.  Mrs. Rotherwas
spoke about tea, though it was rather early,
and they all, Hilda as well, wandered to a large yew
tree under which was a table; through the pendant
branches of the tree the tennis could be watched as
through a screen.

The prison clock tolled the hour over the roofs of
the house, and Mrs. Rotherwas gave the definite signal
for refreshments.

"You're exhausted," she said teasingly to Harry.

"You'll see," said Harry.

"No," Mrs. Rotherwas delightfully relented.  "You're
a dear, and I love to watch you play.  I'm sure you
could give Mr. Truscott half fifteen."

"Think so?" said Harry, pleased, and very conscious
that he was living fully.

"You see what it is to have an object in life,
Hesketh," Edwin remarked suddenly.

Harry glanced at him doubtfully, and yet with a
certain ingenuous admiration.  At the same time a
white ball rolled near the tree.  He ducked under the
trailing branches, returned the ball, and moved slowly
towards the court.

"Alicia tells me you're very old friends of theirs,"
said Mrs. Rotherwas, agreeably, to Hilda.

Hilda smiled quietly.

"Yes, we are, both of us."

Who could have guessed, now, that her condition was
not absolutely normal?

"Charming people, aren't they, the Heskeths?" said
Mrs. Rotherwas.  "Perfectly charming.  They're an
ideal couple.  And I do like their house, it's so
deliciously quaint, isn't it, Mary?"

"Lovely," agreed the young girl.

It was an ideal world, full of ideal beings.

Soon after tea the irresistible magnetism of Alicia's
babies drew Alicia off the moor, and with her the
champion player, Janet, Hilda and Edwin.  Mrs. Rotherwas
let them go with regret, adorably expressed.
Harry would have liked to stay, but on the other hand
he was delightfully ready to yield to Alicia.



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   V

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On arriving at Tavy Mansion Hilda announced that
she should lie down.  She told Edwin, in an exhausted
but friendly voice, that she needed only rest, and he
comprehended, rightly, that he was to leave her.  Not
a word was said between them as to the events within
the prison.  He left her, and spent the time before
dinner with Harry Hesketh, who had the idea of
occupying their leisure with a short game of bowls, for
which it was necessary to remove the croquet hoops.

Hilda undressed and got into bed.  Soon afterwards
both Alicia, with an infant, and Janet came to see her.
Had Janet been alone, Hilda might conceivably in her
weakness have surrendered the secret to her in
exchange for that soft and persuasive sympathy of which
Janet was the mistress, but the presence of Alicia made
a confidence impossible, and Hilda was glad.  She
plausibly fibbed to both sisters, and immediately
afterwards the household knew that Hilda would not appear
at dinner.  There was not the slightest alarm or
apprehension, for the affair explained itself in the
simplest way,--Hilda had had a headache in the
morning, and had been wrong to go out; she was now
merely paying for the indiscretion.  She would be
quite recovered the next day.  Alicia whispered a word
to her husband, who, besides, was not apt easily to
get nervous about anything except his form at games.
Edwin also, with his Five Towns habit of mind, soberly
belittled the indisposition.  The household remained
natural and gay.  When Edwin went upstairs to
prepare for dinner, moving very quietly, his wife had
her face towards the wall and away from the light.
He came round the bed to look at her.

"I'm all right," she murmured.

"Want nothing at all?" he asked, with nervous
gruffness.

She shook her head.

Very impatiently she awaited his departure,
exasperated more than she had ever been by his precise
deliberation over certain details of his toilet.  As soon
as he was gone she began to cry; but the tears came
so gently from her eyes that the weeping was as passive,
as independent of volition, as the escape of blood
from a wound.

She had a grievance against Edwin.  At the crisis in
the prison she had blamed herself for not submitting
to his guidance, but now she had reacted against all
such accusations, and her grievance amounted to just
an indictment of his commonsense, his quietude, his
talent for keeping out of harm's way, his lack of
violent impulses, his formidable respectability.  She was
a rebel; he was not.  He would never do anything
wrong, or even perilous.  Never, never would he find
himself in need of a friend's help.  He would always
direct his course so that society would protect him.
He was a firm part of the structure of society; he was
the enemy of impulses.  When he foresaw a danger,
the danger was always realised: she had noticed that,
and she resented it.  He was infinitely above the George
Cannons of the world.  He would be incapable of
bigamy, incapable of being caught in circumstances
which could bring upon him suspicion of any crime
whatever.  Yet for her the George Cannons had a
quality which he lacked, which he could never possess,
and which would have impossibly perfected him--a
quality heroic, foolish, martyr-like!  She was almost
ready to decide that his complete social security was
due to cowardice and resulted in self-righteousness! ... Could
he really feel pity as she felt it, for the
despised and rejected, and a hatred of injustice equal
to hers?

These two emotions were burning her up.  Again
and again, ceaselessly, her mind ran round the circle
of George Cannon's torture and the callousness of
society.  He had sinned, and she had loathed him; but
both his sin and her loathing were the fruit of passion.
He had been a proud man, and she had shared his
pride; now he was broken, unutterably humiliated, and
she partook of his humiliation.  The grotesque and
beaten animal in the corridor was all that society had
left of him who had once inspired her to acts of
devotion, who could make her blush, and to satisfy whom
she would recklessly spend herself.  The situation was
intolerable, and yet it had to be borne.  But surely
it must be ended!  Surely at the latest on the morrow
the prisoner must be released, and soothed and
reinstated! ... Pardoned?  No!  A pardon was an
insult, worse than an insult.  She would not listen to the
word.  Society might use it for its own purposes; but
she would never use it.  Pardon a man after deliberately
and fiendishly achieving his ruin?  She could
have laughed.

Exhaustion followed, tempering emotion and reducing
it to a profound despairing melancholy that was
stirred at intervals by frantic revolt.  The light failed.
The windows became vague silver squares.  Outside
fowls clucked, a horse's hoof clattered on stones;
servants spoke to each other in their rough, good-natured
voices.  The peace of the world had its effect on
her, unwilling though she was.  Then there was a
faint tap at the door.  She made no reply, and shut
her eyes.  The door gently opened, and someone tripped
delicately in.  She heard movements at the washstand....
One of the maids.  A match was struck.  The
blinds were stealthily lowered, the curtains drawn;
garments were gathered together, and at last the
door closed again.

She opened her eyes.  The room was very dimly
illuminated.  A night-light, under a glass hemisphere
of pale rose, stood on the dressing-table.  By magic,
order had been restored; a glinting copper ewer of
hot water stood in the whiteness of the basin with a
towel over it; the blue blinds, revealed by the
narrowness of the red curtains, stirred in the depths of the
windows; each detail of the chamber was gradually
disclosed, and the chamber was steeped in the first
tranquillity of the night.  Not a sound could be heard.
Through the depths of her bitterness, there rose slowly
the sensation of the beauty of existence even in its
sadness....

A long time afterwards it occurred to her in the
obscurity that the bed was tumbled.  She must have
turned over and over.  The bed must be arranged
before Edwin came.  He had to share it.  After all, he
had committed no fault; he was entirely innocent.
She and fate between them had inflicted these difficulties
and these solicitudes upon him.  He had said little
or nothing, but he was sympathetic.  When she had
stumbled against him she had felt his upholding
masculine strength.  He was dependable, and would be
dependable to the last.  The bed must be creaseless when
he came; this was the least she could do.  She arose.
Very faintly she could descry her image in the mirror
of the great wardrobe--a dishevelled image.  Forgetting
the bed, she bathed her face, and, unusually, took
care to leave the washstand as tidy as the maid had
left it.  Then, having arranged her hair, she set about
the bed.  It was not easy for one person unaided to
make a wide bed.  Before she had finished she heard
footsteps outside the door.  She stood still.  Then she
heard Edwin's voice:

"Don't trouble, thanks.  I'll take it in myself."

He entered, carrying a tray, and shut the door, and
instantly she busied herself once more with the bed.

"My poor girl," he said with quiet kindliness, "what
are you doing?"

"I'm just putting the bed to rights," she answered,
and almost with a single movement she slid back into
the bed.  "What have you got there?"

"I thought I'd ask for some tea for you," he said.
"Nearly the whole blessed household wanted to come
and see you, but I wouldn't have it."

She could not say: "It's very nice of you."  But
she said, simply to please him: "I should like some
tea."

He put the tray on the dressing-table; then lit three
candles, two on the dressing-table and one on the
night-table, and brought the tray to the night-table.

He himself poured out the tea, and offered the cup.
She raised herself on an elbow.

"Did you recognise him?" she muttered suddenly,
after she had blown on the tea to cool it.

Under ordinary conditions Edwin would have
replied to such an unprepared question with another,
petulant and impatient: "Recognise who?" pretending
that he did not understand the allusion.  But now he
made no pretences.

"Not quite," he said.  "But I knew at once.  I could
see which of them it must be."

The subject at last opened between them, Hilda felt
an extraordinary solace and relief.  He stood by the
bedside, in black, with a great breastplate of white, his
hair rough, his hands in his pockets.  She thought he
had a fine face; she thought of him as, at such a time,
her superior; she wanted powerfully to adopt his
attitude, to believe in everything he said.  They were
talking together in safety, quietly, gravely, amicably,
withdrawn and safe in the strange house--he benevolent
and assuaging and comprehending, she desiring the
balm which he could give.  It seemed to her that they
had never talked to each other in such tones.

"Isn't it awful--awful?" she exclaimed.

"It is," said Edwin, and added carefully, tenderly:
"I suppose he *is* innocent."

She might have flown at him: "That's just like
you--to assume he isn't!"  But she replied:

"I'm quite sure of it.  I say--I want you to read all
the letters I've had from Mrs. Cannon.  I've got them
here.  They're in my bag there.  Read them now.
Of course I always meant to show them to you."

"All right," he agreed, drew a chair to the dressing-table
where the bag was, found the letters, and read
them.  She waited, as he read one letter, put it down,
read another, laid it precisely upon the first one, with
his terrible exactitude and orderliness, and so on
through the whole packet.

"Yes," said he at the end, "I should say he's innocent
this time, right enough."

"But something ought to be done!" she cried.  "Don't
you think something ought to be done, Edwin?"

"Something has been done.  Something is being done."

"But something else!"

He got up and walked about the room.

"There's only one thing to be done," he said.

He came towards her, and stood over her again, and
the candle on the night-table lighted his chin and the
space between his eyelashes and his eyebrows.  He
timidly touched her hair, caressing it.  They were
absolutely at their ease together in the intimacy of the
bedroom.  In her brief relations with George Cannon
there had not been time to establish anything like such
intimacy.  With George Cannon she had always had
the tremors of the fawn.

"What is it?"

"Wait.  That's all.  It's not the slightest use trying
to hurry these public departments.  You can't do it.
You only get annoyed for nothing at all.  You can
take that from me, my child."

He spoke with such delicate persuasiveness, such an
evident desire to be helpful, that Hilda was convinced
and grew resigned.  It did not occur to her that he
had made a tremendous resolve which had raised him
above the Edwin she knew.  She thought she had
hitherto misjudged and underrated him.

"I wanted to explain to you about that ten pounds,"
she said.

"That's all right--that's all right," said he hastily.

"But I *must* tell you.  You saw Mrs. Cannon's letter
asking me for money.  Well, I borrowed the ten
pounds from Janet.  So of course I had to pay it back,
hadn't I?"

"How is Janet?" he asked in a new, lighter tone.

"She seems to be going on splendidly, don't you
think so?"

"Well then, we'll go home to-morrow."

"Shall we?"

She lifted her arms and he bent.  She was crying.
In a moment she was sobbing.  She gave him violent
kisses amid her sobs, and held him close to her until
the fit passed.  Then she said, in her voice reduced to
that of a child:

"What time's the train?"





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.. _`THE GHOST`:

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   CHAPTER XVI


.. class:: center medium

   THE GHOST

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   I

.. vspace:: 2

It was six-thirty.  The autumn dusk had already
begun to fade; and in the damp air, cold, grimy, and
vaporous, men with scarves round their necks and girls
with shawls over their heads, or hatted and even gloved,
were going home from work past the petty shops where
sweets, tobacco, fried fish, chitterlings, groceries, and
novelettes were sold among enamelled advertisements
of magic soaps.  In the feeble and patchy illumination
of the footpaths, which left the middle of the streets
and the upper air all obscure, the chilled, preoccupied
people passed each other rapidly like phantoms,
emerging out of one mystery and disappearing into another.
Everywhere, behind the fanlights and shaded windows
of cottages, domesticity was preparing the warm
relaxations of the night.  Amid the streets of little
buildings the lithographic establishment, with a yellow
oblong here and there illuminated in its dark façades,
stood up high, larger than reality, more important and
tyrannic, one of the barracks, one of the prisons, one
of the money-works where a single man or a small
group of men by brains and vigour and rigour
exploited the populace.

Edwin, sitting late in his private office behind those
façades, was not unaware of the sensation of being an
exploiter.  By his side on the large flat desk lay a copy
of the afternoon's *Signal* containing an account of
the breaking up by police of an open-air meeting of
confessed anarchists on the previous day at
Manchester.  Manchester was, and is still, physically and
morally, very close to the Five Towns, which respect
it more than they respect London.  An anarchist
meeting at Manchester was indeed an uncomfortable
portent for the Five Towns.  Enormous strikes, like civil
wars at stalemate, characterised the autumn as they
had characterised the spring, affecting directly or
indirectly every industry, and weakening the prestige
of government, conventions, wealth, and success.
Edwin was successful.  It was because he was successful
that he was staying late and that a clerk in the outer
office was staying late and that windows were
illuminated here and there in the façades.  Holding in his
hand the wage-book, he glanced down the long column
of names and amounts.  Some names conveyed nothing
to him; but most of them raised definite images in his
mind--of big men, roughs, decent clerks with wristbands,
undersized pale machinists, intensely respectable
skilled artisans and daughtsmen, thin ragged lads,
greasy, slatternly, pale girls, and one or two fat
women,--all dirty, and working with indifference in
dirt.  Most of them kowtowed to him; some did not;
some scowled askance.  But they were all dependent
on him.  Not one of them but would be prodigiously
alarmed and inconvenienced--to say nothing of going
hungry--if it he did not pay wages the next morning.
The fact was he could distribute ruin with a gesture
and nobody could bring him to book....

Something wrong!  Under the influence of strikes
and anarchist meetings he felt with foreboding and even
with a little personal alarm that something was wrong.
Those greasy, slatternly girls, for instance, with their
coarse charm and their sexuality,--they were
underpaid.  They received as much as other girls, on
pot-banks, perhaps more, but they were underpaid.  What
chance had they?  He was getting richer every day,
and safer (except for the vague menace); yet he could
not appreciably improve their lot, partly for business
reasons, partly because any attempt to do so would
bring the community about his ears and he would be
labelled as a doctrinaire and a fool, and partly
because his own commonsense was against such a move.
Not those girls, not his works, not this industry and
that, was wrong.  All was wrong.  And it was
impossible to imagine any future period when all would
not be wrong.  Perfection was a desolating thought.
Nevertheless the struggle towards it was instinctive
and had to go on.  The danger was (in Edwin's eyes)
of letting that particular struggle monopolise one's
energy.  Well, he would not let it.  He did a little
here and a little there, and he voted democratically
and in his heart was most destructively sarcastic about
toryism; and for the rest he relished the adventure of
existence, and took the best he conscientiously could,
and thought pretty well of himself as a lover of his
fellowmen.  If he was born to be a master, he would
be one, and not spend his days in trying to overthrow
mastery.  He was tired that evening, he had a slight
headache, he certainly had worries; but he was not
unhappy on the throbbing, tossing steamer of
humanity.  Nobody could seem less adventurous than he
seemed, with his timidities and his love of moderation,
comfort, regularity and security.  Yet his
nostrils would sniff to the supreme and all-embracing
adventure.

He heard Hilda's clear voice in the outer office:
"Mr. Clayhanger in there?" and the clerk's somewhat
nervously agitated reply, repeating several times in
eager affirmative.  And he himself, the master, though
still all alone in the sanctum, at once pretended to
be very busy.

Her presence would thus often produce an excitation
in the organism of the business.  She was so
foreign to it, so unsoiled by it, so aloof from it, so
much more gracious, civilised, enigmatic than
anything that the business could show!  And, fundamentally,
she was the cause of the business; it was all for
her; it existed with its dirt, noise, crudity, strain, and
eternal effort so that she might exist in her elegance,
her disturbing femininity, her restricted and deep
affections, her irrational capriciousness, and her
strange, brusque commonsense.  The clerks and some
of the women felt this; Big James certainly felt it; and
Edwin felt it, and denied it to himself, more than
anybody.  There was no economic justice in the arrangement.
She would come in veiled, her face mysterious
behind the veil, and after a few minutes she would
delicately lift her gloved fingers to the veil, and raise
it, and her dark, pale, vivacious face would be
disclosed.  "Here I am!"  And the balance was even, her
debt paid!  That was how it was.

In the month that had passed since the visit to
Dartmoor, Edwin, despite his resolve to live heroically
and philosophically, had sometimes been forced into
the secret attitude: "This woman will kill me, but
without her I shouldn't be interested enough to live."  He
was sometimes morally above her to the point of
priggishness, and sometimes incredibly below her; but
for the most part living in a different dimension.  She
had heard nothing further from Mrs. Cannon; she
knew nothing of the bigamist's fate, though more than
once she had written for news.  Her moods were
unpredictable and disconcerting, and as her moods
constituted the chief object of Edwin's study the effect on
him was not tranquillising.  At the start he had risen
to the difficulty of the situation; but he could not
permanently remain at that height, and the situation
had apparently become stationary.  His exasperations,
both concealed and open, were not merely unworthy of
a philosopher, they were unworthy of a common man.
"Why be annoyed?" he would say to himself.  But he
was annoyed.  "The tone--the right tone!" he would
remind himself.  Surely he could remember to
command his voice to the right tone?  But no!  He could
not.  He could infallibly remember to wind up his
watch, but he could not remember that.  Moreover, he
felt, as he had felt before, on occasions, that no amount
of right tone would keep their relations smooth, for
the reason that principles were opposed.  Could she not
see? ... Well, she could not.  There she was, entire,
unalterable--impossible to chip inconvenient pieces off
her--you must take her or leave her; and she could
not see, or she would not--which in practice was the
same thing.

And yet some of the most exquisite moments of their
union had occurred during that feverish and unquiet
month--moments of absolute surrender and devotion
on her part, of protective love on his; and also long
moments of peace.  With the early commencement of
autumn, all the family had resumed the pursuit of
letters with a certain ardour.  A startling feminist
writer, and the writer whose parentage and whose very
name lay in the Five Towns, who had re-created the
East and whose vogue was a passion among the
lettered--both these had published books whose success
was extreme and genuine.  And in the curtained gas-lit
drawing-room of a night Hilda would sit rejoicing over
the triumphant satire of the woman-novelist, and
Edwin and George would lounge in impossible postures,
each mesmerised by a story of the Anglo-Indian; and
between chapters Edwin might rouse himself from the
enchantment sufficiently to reflect: "How indescribably
agreeable these evenings are!"  And ten to one
he would say aloud, with false severity: "George!
Bed!"  And George, a fine judge of genuineness in
severity, would murmur carelessly: "All right!  I'm
going!"  And not go.

And now Edwin in the office thought:

"She's come to fetch me away."

He was gratified.  But he must not seem to be
gratified.  The sanctity of business from invasion had
to be upheld.  He frowned, feigning more diligently
than ever to be occupied.  She came in, with that air
at once apologetic and defiant that wives have in
affronting the sacred fastness.  Nobody could have
guessed that she had ever been a business woman,
arriving regularly at just such an office every morning,
shorthand-writing, twisting a copying-press, filing,
making appointments.  Nobody could have guessed
that she had ever been in business for herself, and had
known how sixpence was added to sixpence and a week's
profit lost in an hour.  All such knowledge had
apparently dropped from her like an excrescence, had
vanished like a temporary disfigurement, and she looked
upon commerce with the uncomprehending, careless,
and yet impressed eyes of a young girl.

"Hello, missis!" he exclaimed casually.

Then George came in.  Since the visit to Dartmoor
Hilda had much increased her intimacy with George,
spending a lot of time with him, walking with him, and
exploring in a sisterly and reassuring manner his most
private life.  George liked it, but it occasionally irked
him and he would give a hint to Edwin that mother
needed to be handled at times.

"You needn't come in here, George," said Hilda.

"Well, can I go into the engine-house?" George
suggested.  Edwin had always expected that he would
prefer the machine-room.  But the engine-house was
his haunt, probably because it was dirty, fiery, and
stuffy.

"No, you can't," said Edwin.  "Pratt's gone by
this, and it's shut up."

"No, it isn't.  Pratt's there."

"All right."

"Shut the door, dear," said Hilda.

"Hooray!"  George ran off and banged the glass door.

Hilda, glancing by habit at the unsightly details
of the deteriorating room, walked round the desk.
With apprehension Edwin saw resolve and
perturbation in her face.  He was about to say: "Look
here, infant, I'm supposed to be busy."  But he
refrained.

Holding out a letter which she nervously snatched
from her bag, Hilda said:

"I've just had this--by the afternoon post.  Read it."

He recognised at once the sloping handwriting;
but the paper was different; it was a mere torn
half-sheet of very cheap notepaper.  He read: "Dear
Mrs. Clayhanger.  Just a line to say that my husband
is at last discharged.  It has been weary waiting.
We are together, and I am looking after him.  With
renewed thanks for your sympathy and help.  Believe
me, Sincerely yours, Charlotte M. Cannon."  The
signature was scarcely legible.  There was no address, no
date.

Edwin's first flitting despicable masculine thought
was: "She doesn't say anything about that ten
pounds!"  It fled.  He was happy in an intense relief
that affected all his being.  He said to himself: "Now
that's over, we can begin again."

"Well," he murmured.  "That's all right.  Didn't I
always tell you it would take some time? ... That's
all right."

He gazed at the paper, waving it in his hand as he
held it by one corner.  He perceived that it was the
letter of a jealous woman, who had got what she
wanted and meant to hold it, and entirely to herself;
and his mood became somewhat sardonic.

"Very curt, isn't it?" said Hilda strangely.  "And
after all this time, too!"

He looked up at her, turning his head sideways to
catch her eyes.

"That letter," he said in a voice as strange as
Hilda's, "that letter is exactly what it ought to be.
It could not possibly have been better turned....
You don't want to keep it, I suppose, do you?"

"No," she muttered.

He tore it into very small pieces, and dropped them
into the waste-paper-basket beneath the desk.

"And burn all the others," he said, in a low tone.

"Edwin," after a pause.

"Yes?"

"Don't you think George ought to know?  Don't
you think one of us ought to tell him,--either you or
me?  You might tell him?"

"Tell him what?" Edwin demanded sharply, pushing
back his chair.

"Well, everything!"

He glowered.  He could feel himself glowering.  He
could feel the justifiable anger animating him.

"Certainly not!" he enunciated resentfully,
masterfully, overpoweringly.  "Certainly not!"

"But supposing he hears from outsiders?"

"You needn't begin supposing."

"But he's bound to have to know sometime."

"Possibly.  But he isn't going to know now, any
road!  Not with my consent.  The thing's absolute
madness."

Hilda almost whispered:

"Very well, dear.  If you think so."

"I do think so."

He suddenly felt very sorry for her.  He was ready
to excuse her astounding morbidity as a consequence
of extreme spiritual tribulation.  He added with
brusque good-nature:

"And so will you, in the morning, my child."

"Shall you be long?"

"No.  I told you I should be late.  If you'll run
off, my chuck, I'll undertake to be after you in half
an hour."

"Is your headache better?"

"No.  On the other hand, it isn't worse."

He gazed fiercely at the wages-book.

She bent down.

"Kiss me," she murmured tearfully.

As he kissed her, and as she pressed against him, he
absorbed and understood all the emotions through
which she had passed and was passing, and from him
to her was transmitted an unimaginable tenderness
that shamed and atoned for the inclemency of his
refusals.  He was very happy.  He knew that he would
not do another stroke of work that night, but still he
must pretend to do some.  Playfully, without rising,
he drew down her veil, smacked her gently on the back,
and indicated the door.

"I have to call at Clara's about that wool for
Maggie," she said, with courage.  His fingering of her veil
had given her extreme pleasure.

"I'll bring the kid up," he said.

"Will you?"

She departed, leaving the door unlatched.



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   II

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A draught from the outer door swung wide-open the
unlatched door of Edwin's room.

"What are doors for?" he muttered, pleasantly
impatient; then he called aloud:

"Simpson.  Shut the outer door--and this one, too."

There was no answer.  He arose and went to the
outer office.  Hilda had passed through it like an
arrow.  Simpson was not there.  But a man stood
leaning against the mantelpiece; he held at full spread
a copy of the *Signal*, which concealed all the upper
part of him except his fingers and the crown of his
head.  Though the gas had been lighted in the middle
of the room, it must have been impossible for him to
read by it, since it shone through the paper.  He
lowered the newspaper with a rustle and looked at Edwin.
He was a big, well-dressed man, wearing a dark grey
suit, a blue Melton overcoat, and a quite new glossy
"boiler-end" felt hat.  He had a straight, prominent
nose, and dark, restless eyes, set back; his short hair
was getting grey, but not his short black moustache.

"Were you waiting to see me?" Edwin said, in a
defensive, half-hostile tone.  The man might be a
belated commercial traveller of a big house--some of
those fellows considered themselves above all laws; on
the other hand he might be a new; customer in a
hurry.

"Yes," was the reply, in a deep, full and yet uncertain
voice.  "The clerk said you couldn't be disturbed,
and asked me to wait.  Then he went out."

"What can I do for you?  It's really after hours,
but some of us are working a bit late."

The man glanced at the outer door, which Edwin
was shutting, and then at the inner door, which
exposed Edwin's room.

"I'm George Cannon," he said, advancing a step, as
it were defiantly.

For an instant Edwin was frightened by the sudden
melodrama of the situation.  Then he thought:

"I am up against this man.  This is a crisis."

And he became almost agreeably aware of his own
being.  The man stood close to him, under the gas,
with all the enigmatic quality of another being.  He
could perceive now--at any rate he could believe--that
it was George Cannon.  Forgetful of what the
man had suffered, Edwin felt for him nothing but the
instinctive inimical distrust of the individual who has
never got at loggerheads with society for the individual
who once and for always has.  To this feeling was
added a powerful resentment of the man's act in
coming--especially unannounced--to just *him*, the
husband of the woman he had dishonoured.  It was a
monstrous act--and doubtless an act characteristic
of the man.  It was what might have been expected.
The man might have been innocent of a particular
crime, might have been falsely imprisoned; but what
had he originally been doing, with what rascals had
he been consorting, that he should be even suspected
of crime?  George Cannon's astonishing presence, so
suddenly after his release, at the works of Edwin
Clayhanger, was unforgiveable.  Edwin felt an impulse
to say savagely:

"Look here.  You clear out.  You understand
English, don't you?  Hook it."

But he had not the brutality to say it.  Moreover,
the clerk returned, carrying, full to the brim, the tin
water-receptacle used for wetting the damping-brush
of the copying-press.

"Will you come in, please?" said Edwin curtly.
"Simpson, I'm engaged."

The two men went into the inner room.

"Sit down," said Edwin grimly.

George Cannon, with a firm gesture, planted his hat
on the flat desk between them.  He looked round
behind him at the shut glazed door.

"You needn't be afraid," said Edwin.  "Nobody can
hear--unless you shout."

He gazed curiously but somewhat surreptitiously at
George Cannon, trying to decide whether it was
possible to see in him a released convict.  He decided that
it was not possible.  George Cannon had a shifty, but
not a beaten, look; many men had a shifty look.  His
hair was somewhat short, but so was the hair of many
men, if not of most.  He was apparently in fair health;
assuredly his constitution had not been ruined.  And
if his large, coarse features were worn, marked with
tiny black spots, and seamed and generally ravaged,
they were not more ravaged than the features of
numerous citizens of Bursley aged about fifty who saved
money, earned honours, and incurred the envy of
presumably intelligent persons.  And as he realised all
this, Edwin's retrospective painful alarm as to what
might have happened if Hilda had noticed George
Cannon in the outer office lessened until he could dismiss
it entirely.  By chance she had ignored Cannon,
perhaps scarcely seeing him in her preoccupied passage,
perhaps taking him vaguely for a customer; but
supposing she *had* recognised him, what then?  There
would have been an awkward scene--nothing more.
Awkward scenes do not kill; their effect is transient.
Hilda would have had to behave, and would have
behaved, with severe commonsense.  He, Edwin himself,
would have handled the affair.  A demeanour matter-of-fact
and impassible was what was needed.  After
all, a man recently out of prison was not a wild beast,
nor yet a freak.  Hundreds of men were coming out
of prisons every day....  He should know how to
deal with this man--not pharisaically, not cruelly, not
unkindly, but still with a clear indication to the man
of his reprehensible indiscretion in being where he then
was.

"Did she recognise me--down there--Dartmoor?"
asked George Cannon, without any preparing of the
ground, in a deep, trembling voice; and as he spoke a
flush spread slowly over his dark features.

"Er--yes!" answered Edwin, and his voice also
trembled.

"I wasn't sure," said George Cannon.  "We were
halted before I could see.  And I daren't look round--I
should ha' been punished.  I've been punished before
now for looking up at the sky at exercise."  He spoke
more quickly and then brought himself up with a snort.
"However, I've not come all the way here to talk prison,
so you needn't be afraid.  I'm not one of your reformers."

In his weak but ungoverned nervous excitement, from
which a faint trace of hysteria was not absent, he now
seemed rather more like an ex-convict, despite his good
clothes.  He had become, to Edwin's superior
self-control, suddenly wistful.  And at the same time, the
strange opening question, and its accent, had stirred
Edwin, and he saw with remorse how much finer had
been Hilda's morbid and violent pity than his own
harsh commonsense and anxiety to avoid emotion.  The
man in good clothes moved him more than the convict
had moved him.  He seemed to have received vision, and
he saw not merely the unbearable pathos of George
Cannon, but the high and heavenly charitableness of
Hilda, which he had constantly douched, and his own
common earthliness.  He was exceedingly humbled.
And he also thought, sadly: "This chap's still
attached to her.  Poor devil!"

"What have you come for?" he enquired.

George Cannon cleared his throat.  Edwin waited,
in fear, for the avowal.  He could make nothing out
of the visitor's face; its expression was anxious and
drew sympathy, but there was something in it which
chilled the sympathy it invoked and which seemed to
say: "I shall look after myself."  It yielded naught.
You could be sorry for the heart within, and yet
could neither like nor esteem it.  "Punished for
looking up at the sky." ... Glimpses of prison life
presented themselves to Edwin's imagination.  He
saw George Cannon again halted and turning like
a serf to the wall of the corridor.  And this man
opposite to him, close to him in the familiar room,
was the same man as the serf!  Was he the same
man? ... Inscrutable, the enigma of that
existence whose breathing was faintly audible across
the desk.

"You know all about it--about my affair, of course?"

"Well," said Edwin.  "I expect you know how much
I know."

"I'm an honest man--you know that.  I needn't
begin by explaining that to you."

Edwin nerved himself:

"You weren't honest towards Hilda, if it comes to that."

He used his wife's Christian name, to this man with
whom he had never before spoken, naturally, inevitably.
He would not say "my wife."  To have said "my wife"
would somehow have brought some muddiness upon
that wife, and by contact upon her husband.

"When I say 'honest' I mean--you know what I mean.
About Hilda--I don't defend that.  Only I couldn't
help myself....  I daresay I should do it again."  Edwin
could feel his eyes smarting and he blinked, and
yet he was angry with the man, who went on: "It's
no use talking about that.  That's over.  And I
couldn't help it.  I had to do it.  She's come out of
it all right.  She's not harmed, and I thank God for
it!  If there'd been a child living ... well, it would
ha' been different."

Edwin started.  This man didn't know he was a
father--and his son was within a few yards of
him--might come running in at any moment!  (No!  Young
George would not come in.  Nothing but positive
orders would get the boy out of the engine-house so long
as the engine-man remained there.)  Was it possible
that Hilda had concealed the existence of her child,
or had announced the child's death?  If so, she had
never done a wiser thing, and such sagacity struck
him as heroic.  But if Mrs. Cannon knew as to the
child, then it was Mrs. Cannon who, with equal
prudence and for a different end, had concealed its
existence from George Cannon or lied to him as to its
death.  Certainly the man was sincere.  As he said
"Thank God!" his full voice had vibrated like the voice
of an ardent religionist at a prayer-meeting.

George Cannon began again:

"All I mean is I'm an honest man.  I've been
damnably treated.  Not that I want to go into that.  No!
I'm a fatalist.  That's over.  That's done with.  I'm
not whining.  All I'm insisting on is that I'm not a
thief, and I'm not a forger, and I've nothing to hide.
Perhaps I brought my difficulties about that bank-note
business on myself.  But when you've once been in
prison, you don't choose your friends--you can't.
Perhaps I might have ended by being a thief or a
forger, only on this occasion it just happens that I've
had a good six years for being innocent.  I never did
anything wrong, or even silly, except let myself get too
fond of somebody.  That might happen to anyone.
It did happen to me.  But there's nothing else.  You
understand?  I never--"

"Yes, yes, certainly!" said Edwin, stopping him as
he was about to repeat all the argument afresh.  It
was a convincing argument.

"No one's got the right to look down on me, I
mean," George Cannon insisted, bringing his face
forward over the desk.  "On the contrary this country
owes me an apology.  However, I don't want to go
into that.  That's done with.  Spilt milk's spilt.  I
know what the world is."

"I agree.  I agree!" said Edwin.

He did.  The honesty of his intelligence admitted
almost too eagerly and completely the force of the
pleading.

"Well," said George Cannon, "to cut it short, I want
help.  And I've come to you for it."

"Me!" Edwin feebly exclaimed.

"You, Mr. Clayhanger!  I've come straight here
from London.  I haven't a friend in the whole world,
not one.  It's not everybody can say that.  There was
a fellow named Dayson at Turnhill--used to work for
me--he'd have done something if he could.  But he
was too big a fool to be able to; and besides, he's gone,
no address.  I wrote to him."

"Oh, that chap!" murmured Edwin, trying to find
relief in even a momentary turn of the conversation.
"I know who you mean.  Shorthand-writer.  He died
in the Isle of Man on his holiday two years ago.  It
was in the papers."

"*That's* his address, is it?  Good old Dead Letter
Office!  Well, he is crossed off the list, then; no
mistake!" Cannon snarled bitterly.  "I'm aware you're
not a friend of mine.  I've no claim on you.  You
don't know me; but you know about me.  When I
saw you in Dartmoor I guessed who you were, and
I said to myself you looked the sort of man who might
help another man....  Why did you come into the
prison?  Why did you bring her there?  You must
have known I was there."  He spoke with a sudden
change to reproachfulness.

"I didn't bring her there."  Edwin blushed.  "It
was----  However, we needn't go into that, if you
don't mind."

"Was she upset?"

"Of course."

Cannon sighed.

"What do you want me to do?" asked Edwin gloomily.
In secret he was rather pleased that George Cannon
should have deemed him of the sort likely to help.
Was it the flattery of a mendicant?  No, he did not
think it was.  He believed implicitly everything the
man was saying.

"Money!" said Cannon sharply.  "Money!  You
won't feel it, but it will save me.  After all, Mr. Clayhanger,
there's a bond between us, if it comes to that.
There's a bond between us.  And you've had all the
luck of it."

Again Edwin blushed.

"But surely your wife--" he stammered.  "Surely
Mrs. Cannon isn't without funds.  Of course I know
she was temporarily rather short a while back, but
surely--"

"How do you know she was short?" Cannon grimly
interrupted.

"My wife sent her ten pounds--I fancy it was ten
pounds--towards expenses, you know."

Cannon ejaculated, half to himself, savagely:

"Never told me!"

He remained silent.

"But I've always understood she's a woman of
property," Edwin finished.

Cannon put both elbows on the desk, leaned further
forward, and opened his mouth several seconds before
speaking.

"Mr. Clayhanger, I've left my wife--as you call
her.  If I'd stayed with her I should have killed her.
I've run off.  Yes, I know all she's done for me.  I
know without her I might have been in prison to-day
and for a couple o' years to come.  But I'd sooner be
in prison or in hell or anywhere you like than with
Mrs. Cannon.  She's an old woman.  She always was
an old woman.  She was nearly forty when she hooked
me, and I was twenty-two.  And I'm young yet.  I'm
not middle-aged yet.  She's got a clear conscience,
Mrs. Cannon has.  She always does her duty.  She'd
let me walk over her, she'd never complain, if only she
could keep me.  She'd just play and smile.  Oh yes,
she'd turn the other cheek--and keep on turning it.
But she isn't going to have me.  And for all she's
done I'm not grateful.  Hag.  That's what she is!"  He
spoke loudly, excitedly, under considerable
emotion.

"Hsh!" Edwin, alarmed, endeavoured gently to
soothe him.

"All right!  All right!" Cannon proceeded in a
lower but still impassioned voice.  "But look here!
You're a man.  You know what's what.  You'll
understand what I mean.  Believe me when I say that I
wouldn't live with that woman for eternal salvation.
I couldn't.  I couldn't do it.  I've taken some of her
money, only a little, and run off..."  He paused,
and went on with conscious persuasiveness now: "I've
just got here.  I had to ask your whereabouts.  I
might have been recognised in the streets, but I haven't
been.  I didn't expect to find you here at this time.
I might have had to sleep in the town to-night.  I
wouldn't have come to your private house.  Now I've
seen you I shall get along to Crewe to-night.  I shall
be safer there.  And it's on the way to Liverpool and
America.  I want to go to America.  With a bit o'
capital I shall be all right in America.  It's my one
chance; but it's a good one.  But I must have some
capital.  No use landing in New York with empty
pockets."

Said Edwin, still shying at the main issues:

"I was under the impression you had been to
America once."

"Yes, that's why I know.  I hadn't any money.
And what's more," he added with peculiar emphasis,
"I was brought back."

Edwin thought:

"I shall yield to this man."

At that instant he saw the shadow of Hilda's head
and shoulders on the glass of the door.

"Excuse me a second," he murmured, bounded with
astonishing velocity out of the room, and pulled the
door to after him with a bang.



.. vspace:: 3

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   III

.. vspace:: 2

Hilda, having observed the strange, excited gesture,
paused a moment, in an equally strange tranquillity,
before speaking.  Edwin fronted her at the very door.
Then she said, clearly and deliberately, through her
veil:

"Auntie Hamps has had an attack--heart.  The
doctor says she can't possibly live through the night.
It was at Clara's."

This was the first of Mrs. Hamps's fatal heart-attacks.

"Ah!" breathed Edwin, with apparently a purely
artistic interest in the affair.  "So that's it, is it?
Then she's at Clara's."

"Yes."

"What doctor?"

"I forget his name.  Lives in Acre Lane.  They
sent for the nearest.  She can't get her breath--has
to fight for it.  She jumped out of bed, struggling
to breathe."

"Have you seen her?"

"Yes.  They made me."

"Albert there?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well, I suppose I'd better go round.  You go
back.  I'll follow you."

He was conscious of not the slightest feeling of
sorrow at the imminent death of Auntie Hamps.  Even
the image of the old lady fighting to fetch her
breath scarcely moved him, though the deathbed of
his father had been harrowing enough.  He and
Hilda had the same thought: "At last something
has happened to Auntie Hamps!"  And it gave zest.

"I must speak to you," said Hilda, low, and moved
towards the inner door.

The clerk Simpson was behind them at his ink-stained
desk, stamping letters, and politely pretending
to be deaf.

"No," Edwin stopped her.  "There's someone in
there.  We can't talk there."

"A customer?"

"Yes ... I say, Simpson.  Have you done those
letters?"

"Yes, sir," answered Simpson, smiling.  He had
been recommended as a "very superior" youth, and
had not disappointed, despite a constitutional
nervousness.

"Take them to the pillar, and call at Mr. Benbow's
and tell them that I'll be round in about a quarter
of an hour.  I don't know as you need come back.
Hurry up."

"Yes, sir."

Edwin and Hilda watched Simpson go.

"Whatever's the matter?" Hilda demanded in a low,
harsh voice, as soon as the outer door had clicked.
It was as if something sinister in her had been
suddenly released.

"Matter?  Nothing.  Why?"

"You look so queer."

"Well--you come along with these shocks."  He
gave a short, awkward laugh.  He felt and looked
guilty, and he knew that he looked guilty.

"You looked queer when you came out."

"You've upset yourself, my child, that's all."  He
now realised the high degree of excitement which he
himself, without previously being aware of it, had
reached.

"Edwin, who is it in there?"

"Don't I tell you--it's a customer."

He could see her nostrils twitching through, the
veil.

"It's George Cannon in there!" she exclaimed.

He laughed again.  "What makes you feel that?"
he asked, feeling all the while the complete absurdity
of such fencing.

"When I ran out I noticed somebody.  He was reading
a newspaper and I couldn't see him.  But he just
moved it a bit, and I seemed to catch sight of the top
of his head.  And when I got into the street I said
to myself, 'It looked like George Cannon,' and then
I said, 'Of course it couldn't be.'  And then with this
business about Auntie Hamps the idea went right out
of my head."

"Well, it is, if you want to know."

Her mysterious body and face seemed to radiate a
disastrous emotion that filled the whole office.

"Did you know he was coming?"

"I did not.  Hadn't the least notion!"  The sensation
of criminality began to leave Edwin.  As Hilda
seemed to move and waver, he added:

"Now you aren't going to see him!"

And his voice menacingly challenged her, and defied
her to stir a step.  The most important thing in the
world, then, was that Hilda should not see George
Cannon.  He would stop her by force.  He would let
himself get angry and brutal.  He would show her
that he was the stronger.  He had quite abandoned
his earlier attitude of unsentimental callousness which
argued that after all it wouldn't ultimately matter
whether they encountered each other or not.  Far
from that, he was, so it appeared to him, standing
between them, desperate and determined, and acting
instinctively and conventionally.  Their separate pasts,
each full of grief and tragedy, converged terribly upon
him in an effort to meet in just that moment, and he
was ferociously resisting.

"What does he want?"

"He wants me to help him to go to America."

"*You!*"

"He says he hasn't a friend."

"But what about his wife?"

"That's just what I said....  He's left her.  Says
he can't live with her."

There was a silence, in which the tension
appreciably lessened.

"Can't live with her!  Well, I'm not surprised.  But
I do think it's strange, him coming to you."

"So do I," said Edwin drily, taking the upper hand;
for the change in Hilda's tone--her almost childlike
satisfaction in the news that Cannon would not live with
his wife--seemed to endow him with superiority.  "But
there's a lot of strange things in this world.  Now
listen here.  I'm not going to keep him waiting; I
can't."

He then spoke very gravely, authoritatively and
ominously: "Find George and take him home at once."

Hilda, impressed, gave a frown.

"I think it's very wrong that you should be asked
to help him."  Her voice shook and nearly broke.
"Shall you help him, Edwin?"

"I shall get him out of this town at once, and out
of the country.  Do as I say.  As things are he
doesn't know there is any George, and it's just as well
he shouldn't.  But if he stays anywhere about, he's
bound to know."

All Hilda's demeanour admitted that George Cannon
had never been allowed to know that he had a
son; and the simple candour of the admission
frightened Edwin by its very simplicity.

"Now!  Off you go!  George is in the engine-house."

Hilda moved reluctantly towards the outer-door,
like a reproved and rebellious schoolgirl.  Suddenly
she burst into tears, sprang at Edwin, and, putting
her arms round his neck, kissed him through the veil.

"Nobody but you would have helped him--in your
place!" she murmured passionately, half admiring,
half protesting.  And with a backward look as she
hurried off, her face stern and yet soft seemed to
appeal: "Help him."

Edwin was at once deeply happy and impregnated
with a sense of the frightful sadness that lurks in the
hollows of the world.  He stood alone with the flaring
gas, overcome.



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   IV

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He went back to the private room, self-conscious
and rather tongue-tied, with a clear feeling of relief
that Hilda was disposed of, removed from the
equation--and not unsuccessfully.  After the woman, to
deal with the man, in the plain language of men, seemed
simple and easy.  He was astounded, equally, by the
grudging tardiness of Mrs. Cannon's information to
Hilda as to the release, and by the baffling, inflexible
detraction of Hilda's words: "Well, I'm not surprised."  And
the flitting image of Auntie Hamps fighting for
life still left him untouched.  He looked at George
Cannon, and George Cannon, with his unreliable eyes,
looked at him.  He almost expected Cannon to say:
"Was that Hilda you were talking to out there?"  But
Cannon seemed to have no suspicion that, in either
the inner or the outer room, he had been so close to
her.  No doubt, when he was waiting by the
mantel-piece in the outer room, he had lifted the paper as
soon as he heard the door unlatched, expressly in order
to screen himself from observation.  Probably he had
not even guessed that the passer was a woman.  Had
Simpson been there, the polite young man would
doubtless have said: "Good night, Mrs. Clayhanger,"
but Simpson had happened not to be there.

"Are you going to help me?" asked George Cannon,
after a moment, and his heavy voice was so beseeching,
so humble, so surprisingly sycophantic, so fearful, that
Edwin could scarcely bear to hear it.  He hated to
hear that one man could be so slavishly dependent on
another.  Indeed, he much preferred Cannon's defiant,
half-bullying tone.

"Yes," said he.  "I shall do what I can.  What do
you want?"

"A hundred pounds," said George Cannon, and, as
he named the sum, his glance was hard and steady.

Edwin was startled.  But immediately he began to
readjust his ideas, persuading himself that after all
the man could not prudently have asked for less.

"I can't give it you all now."

Cannon's face lighted up in relief and joy.  His
black eyes sparkled feverishly with the impatience of
an almost hopeless desire about to be satisfied.
Although he did not move, his self-control had for the
moment gone completely, and the secrets of his soul
were exposed.

"Can you send it me--in notes?  I can give you an
address in Liverpool."  His voice could hardly utter
the words.

"Wait a second," said Edwin.

He went to the safe let into the wall, of which he
was still so naïvely proud, and unlocked it with the
owner's gesture.  The perfect fitting of the bright key,
the ease with which it turned, the silent, heavy swing
of the massive door on its hinges--these things gave
him physical as well as moral pleasure.  He savoured
the security of his position and his ability to rescue
people from destruction.  From the cavern of the safe
he took out a bag of gold, part of the money required
for wages on the morrow,--he would have to send to
the Bank again in the morning.  He knew that the
bag contained exactly twenty pounds in half-sovereigns,
but he shed the lovely twinkling coins on the
desk and counted them.

"Here," he said.  "Here's twenty pounds.  Take
the bag, too--it'll be handier," and he put the money
into the bag.  Then a foolish, grand idea struck
him.  "Write down the address on this envelope, will
you, and I'll send you a hundred to-morrow.  You
can rely on it."

"Eighty, you mean," muttered George Cannon.

"No," said Edwin, with affected nonchalance, blushing,
"a hundred.  The twenty will get you over and
you'll have a hundred clear when you arrive on the
other side."

"Ye're very kind," said Cannon weakly.  "I--"

"Here.  Here's the envelope.  Here's a bit of
pencil."  Edwin stopped him hastily.  His fear of being
thanked made him harsh.

While Cannon was nervously writing the address,
he noticed that the man's clumsy fingers were those of
a day-labourer.

"You'll get it all back.  You'll see," said Cannon, as
he stood up to leave, holding his glossy felt hat in his
left hand.

"Don't worry about that.  I don't want it.  You
owe me nothing."

"You'll have every penny back, and before long, too."

Edwin smiled, deprecating the idea.

"Well, good luck!" he said.  "You'll get to Crewe
all right.  There's a train at Shawport at eight
seven."

They shook hands, and quitted the inner office.  As
he traversed the outer office on his way forth, in front
of Edwin, Cannon turned his head, as if to say
something, but, confused, he said nothing and went on, and
at once he disappeared into the darkness outside.  And
Edwin was left with a memory of his dubious eyes, hard
rather than confident, profoundly relieved rather than
profoundly grateful.

"By Jove!" Edwin murmured by himself.  "Who'd
have thought it? ... They say those chaps always
turn up again like bad pennies, but I bet he
won't."  Simultaneously he reflected upon the case of
Mrs. Cannon, deserted; but it did not excite his pity.  He
fastened the safe, extinguished the lights, shut the
office, and prepared his mind for the visit to Auntie
Hamps.



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   V

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Hilda and her son were in the dining-room, in which
the table, set for a special meal--half-tea, half-supper--made
a glittering oblong of white.  On the table,
among blue-and-white plates, and knives and forks, lay
some of George's shabby school-books.  In most
branches of knowledge George privately knew that he
could instruct his parents--especially his mother.
Nevertheless that beloved outgrown creature was still
occasionally useful at home-lessons, as for instance in
"poetry."  George, disdainful, had to learn some verses
each week, and now his mother held a book entitled
"The Poetry Reciter," while George mumbled with
imperfect verbal accuracy the apparently immortal
lines:

   |   Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase,
   |   Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.
   |

His mother, however, scarcely regarded the book.
She knew the poem by heart, and had indeed recited
it to George, who, though he was much impressed by
her fire, could not by any means have been persuaded
to imitate the freedom of her delivery.  His elocution
to-night was unusually bad, for the reason that he had
been pleasurably excited by the immense news of
Auntie Hamps's illness.  Not that he had any grudge
against Auntie Hamps!  His pleasure would have
been as keen in the grave illness of any other important
family connection, save his mother and Edwin.  Such
notable events gave a sensational interest to domestic
life which domestic life as a rule lacked.

Then, through the half-open door of the dining-room
came the sound of Edwin's latch-key in the
front-door.

"There's uncle!" exclaimed George, and jumped up.

Hilda stopped him.

"Put your books together," said she.  "You know
uncle likes to go up to the bathroom before he does
anything!"

It was a fact that the precisian hated even to be
greeted, on his return home in the evening, until he came
downstairs from the bathroom.

Hilda herself collected the books and put them on
the sideboard.

"Shall I tell Ada?" George suggested, champing
the bit.

"No.  Ada knows."

With deliberation Hilda tended the fire.  Her mind
was in a state of emotional flux.  Memories and
comparisons mournfully and yet agreeably animated it.
She thought of the days when she used to recite amid
enthusiasm in the old drawing-room of the Orgreaves;
and of the days when she was a wanderer, had no
home, no support, little security; and of the brief,
uncertain days with George Cannon; and of the
eternal days when her only assurance was the assurance
of disaster.  She glanced at George, and saw in him
reminders of his tragic secret father now hidden away,
forced into the background, like something obscene.
Nearly every development of the present out of the
past seemed to her, now, to be tragic.  Johnnie
Orgreave had of course not come back from his idyll with
the ripping Mrs. Chris Hamson; their seclusion was
not positively known; but the whole district knew that
the husband had begun proceedings and that the
Orgreave business was being damaged by the
incompetence of Jimmie Orgreave, whose deplorable wife had
a few days earlier been seen notoriously drunk in the
dress-circle of the Hanbridge Theatre Royal.  Janet
was still at Tavy Mansion because there was no place
for her in the Five Towns.  Janet had written to
Hilda, sadly, and the letter breathed her sense of her
own futility and superfluousness in the social scheme.
In one curt phrase, that very afternoon, the taciturn
Maggie, who very seldom complained, had disclosed
something of what it was to live day and night with
Auntie Hamps.  Even Clara, the self-sufficient,
protected by an almost impermeable armour of conceit,
showed signs of the anxiety due to obscure chronic
disease and a husband who financially never knew
where he was.  Finally, the last glories of Auntie
Hamps were sinking to ashes.  Only Hilda herself was,
from nearly every point of view, in a satisfactory and
promising situation.  She possessed love, health,
money, stability.  When danger threatened, a quiet
and unfailingly sagacious husband was there to meet
and destroy it.  Surely nothing whatever worth
mentioning, save the fact that she was distantly
approaching forty, troubled the existence of Hilda now; and
her age certainly did not trouble her.

Ada entered with the hot dishes, and went out.

At length Hilda heard the bathroom door.  She left
the dining-room, shutting the door on George, who
could take a hint very well--considering his years.
Edwin, brushed and spruce, was coming downstairs,
rubbing his clean hands with physical satisfaction.
He nodded amiably, but without smiling.

"Has he gone?" said Hilda, in a low voice.

Edwin nodded.  He was at the foot of the stairs.

She did not offer to kiss him, having a
notion that he would prefer not to be kissed just
then.

"How much did you give him?"  She knew he would
not care for the question, but she could not help
putting it.

He smiled, and touched her shoulder.  She liked him
to touch her shoulder.

"That's all right," he said, with a faint condescension.
"Don't you worry about that."

She did not press the point.  He could be free
enough with information--except when it was
demanded.  Some time later he would begin of his own
accord to talk.

"How was Auntie Hamps?"

"Well, if anything, she's a bit easier.  I don't mind
betting she gets over it."

They went into the dining-room almost side by side,
and she enquired again about his headache.

The meal was tranquil.  After a few moments Edwin
opened the subject of Auntie Hamps's illness with
some sardonic remarks upon the demeanour of Albert
Benbow.

"Is Auntie dying?" asked George with gusto.

Edwin replied:

"What are those schoolbooks doing there on the
sideboard?  I thought it was clearly understood that
you were to do your lessons in your mother's boudoir."

He spoke without annoyance, but coldly.  He was
aware that neither Hilda nor her son could
comprehend that to a bookman schoolbooks were not books,
but merely an eyesore.  He did not blame them for
their incapacity, but he considered that an
arrangement was an arrangement.

"Mother put them there," said the base George.

"Well, you can take them away," said Edwin firmly.
"Run along now."

George rose from his place between Hilda and
Edwin, and from his luscious plate, and removed the
books.  Hilda watched him meekly go.  His father, too,
had gone.  Edwin was in the right; his position could
not be assailed.  He had not been unpleasant, but he
had spoken as one sublimely confident that his order
would not be challenged.  Within her heart Hilda
rebelled.  If Edwin had been responsible for some act
contrary to one of her decrees, she would never in his
presence have used the tone that he used to enforce
obedience.  She would have laughed or she would have
frowned, but she would never have been the polite
autocrat.  Nor would he have expected her to play the rôle;
he would probably have resented it.

Why?  Were they not equals?  No, they were not
equals.  The fundamental unuttered assumption upon
which the household life rested was that they were
not equals.  She might cross him, she might momentarily
defy him, she might torture him, she might drive
him to fury, and still be safe from any effective
reprisals, because his love for her made her necessary to
his being; but in spite of all that his will remained the
seat of government, and she and George were only the
Opposition.  In the end, she had to incline.  She was
the complement of his existence, but he was not the
complement of hers.  She was just a parasite, though
an essential parasite.  Why? ... The reason, she
judged, was economic, and solely economic.  She
rebelled.  Was she not as individual, as original, as he?
Had she not a powerful mind of her own, experience
of her own, ideals of her own?  Was she not of a
nature profoundly and exceptionally independent?...

Her lot was unalterable.  She had of course, not
the slightest desire to leave him; she was devoted to
him; what irked her was that, even had she had the
desire, she could not have fulfilled it, for she was too
old now, and too enamoured of comfort and security,
to risk such an enterprise.  She was a captive, and
she recalled with a gentle pang, less than regret, the
days when she was unhappy and free as a man, when
she could say, "I will go to London," "I will leave
London," "I am deceived and ruined, but I am my
own mistress."

These thoughts in the idyllic tranquillity of the
meal, mingled, below her smiling preoccupations of an
honoured house-mistress, with the thoughts of her love
for her husband and son and of their excellences, of
the masculine love which enveloped and shielded her,
of her security, of the tragedy of the bribed and
dismissed victim and villain, George Cannon, of the
sorrows of some of her friends, and of the dead.  In
her heart was the unquiet whispering: "I submit, and
yet I shall never submit."





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.. _`GEORGE'S EYES`:

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   BOOK III

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.. class:: center large

   EQUILIBRIUM

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   CHAPTER XVII

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   GEORGE'S EYES

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   I

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Hilda sat alone in the boudoir, before the fire.  She
had just come out of the kitchen, and she was
wearing the white uniform of the kitchen, unsuited for a
boudoir; but she wore it with piquancy.  The
November afternoon had passed into dusk, and through the
window, over the roofs of Hulton Street, stars could
be seen in a darkening clear sky.  After a very sharp
fall and rise of the barometer, accounting for heavy
rainstorms, the first frosts were announced, and
winter was on the doorstep.  The hardy inhabitants of
the Five Towns, Hilda among them, were bracing
themselves to the discipline of winter, with its mud,
increased smuts, sleet, and damp, piercing chills; and
they were taking pleasure in the tonic prospect of
discomfort.  The visitation had threatened ever since
September.  Now it had positively come.  Let it come!
Build up the fire, stamp the feet, and defy it!  Hilda
was exhilarated, having been reawakened to the zest
and the romance of life, not merely by the onset of
winter, but by dramatic events in the kitchen.

A little over three years had elapsed since the
closing of the episode of George Cannon, and for two of
those years Hilda had had peace in the kitchen.  She
had been the firm mistress who knows what she wants,
and, knowing also how to handle the peculiar inmates
of the kitchen, gets it; she had been the mistress who
"won't put up with" all sorts of things, including
middle-age and ugliness in servants, and whom heaven
has spoilt by too much favour.  Then the cook, with
the ingratitude of a cherished domestic, had fallen in
love and carried her passion into a cottage miles away
at Longshaw.  And from that moment Hilda had
ceased to be the mistress who by firmness commands
fate; she had become as other mistresses.  In a year
she had had five cooks, giving varying degrees of
intense dissatisfaction.  She had even dismissed the slim
and constant Ada once, but, yielding to an outburst
of penitent affection, had withdrawn the notice.  The
last cook, far removed from youthfulness or prettiness,
had left suddenly that day, after insolence, after
the discovery of secret beer and other vileness in the
attic-bedroom, after a scene in which Hilda had
absolutely silenced her, reducing ribaldry to sobs.  Cook
and trunk expelled, Hilda had gone about the house
like a fumigation, and into the kitchen like the
embodiment of calm and gay efficiency.  She would do the
cooking herself.  She would show the kitchen that she
was dependent upon nobody.  She had quickened the
speed of Ada, accused her "tartly," but not without
dry good-humour, of a disloyal secretiveness, and
counselled her to mind what she was about if she
wanted to get on in the world.

Edwin knew nothing, for all had happened since his
departure to the works after midday dinner.  He would
be back in due course, and George would be back, and
Tertius Ingpen (long ago reconciled) was coming for
the evening.  She would show them all three what a
meal was, and incidentally Ada would learn what a
meal was.  There was nothing like demonstrating to
servants that you could beat them easily at their own
game.

She had just lived through her thirty-ninth birthday.
"Forty!" she had murmured to herself with a
shiver of apprehension, meaning that the next would
be the fortieth.  It was an unpleasant experience.  She
had told Edwin not to mention her birthday abroad.
Clumsy George had enquired: "Mother, how old are
you?"  To which she had replied, "Lay-ours for
meddlers!" a familiar phrase whose origin none of them
understood, but George knew that it signified, "Mind
your own business."  No!  She had not been happy
on that birthday.  She had gazed into the glass and
decided that she looked old, that she did not look old,
that she looked old, endlessly alternating.  She was
not stout, but her body was solid, too solid; it had
no litheness, none whatever; it was absolutely set; the
cleft under the chin was quite undeniable, and the olive
complexion subtly ravaged.  Still, not a hair of her
dark head had changed colour.  It was perhaps her
soul that was greying.  Her married life was fairly
calm.  It had grown monotonous in ease and
tranquillity.  The sharp, respectful admiration for her
husband roused in her by his handling of the Cannon
episode, had gradually been dulled.  She had nothing
against him.  Yet she had everything against him,
because apart from his grave abiding love for her he
possessed an object and interest in life, and because
she was a mere complement and he was not.  She had
asked herself the most dreadful of questions: "Why
have I lived?  Why do I go on living?" and had
answered: "Because of *them*," meaning Edwin and her
son.  But it was not enough for her, who had once
been violently enterprising, pugnacious, endangered,
and independent.  For after she had watched over
them she had energy to spare, and such energy was
not being employed and could not be employed.
Reading--a diversion!  Fancy work--a detestable device
for killing time and energy!  Social duties--ditto!
Charity--hateful!  She had slowly descended into
marriage as into a lotus valley.  And more than half her
life was gone.  She could never detect that any other
married woman in the town felt as she felt.  She could
never explain herself to Edwin, and indeed had not
tried to explain herself.

Now the affair of the alcoholic cook, aided by
winter's first fillip, stimulated and brightened her.  And
while thinking with a glance at the clock of the
precise moment when she must return to the kitchen and
put a dish down to the fire, she also thought, rather
hopefully and then quite hopefully, about the future of
her marriage.  Her brain seemed to straighten and
correct itself, like the brain of one who, waking up in
the morning, slowly perceives that the middle-of-the-night
apprehensiveness about eventualities was all
awry in its pessimism.  She saw that everything could
and must be improved, that the new life must begin.
Edwin needed to be inspired; she must inspire him.
He slouched more and more in his walk; he was more
and more absorbed in his business, quieter in the
evenings, more impatient in the mornings.  Moreover, the
household machine had been getting slack.  A general
tonic was required; she would administer it--and to
herself also.  They should all feel the invigorating
ozone that very night.  She would organise social
distractions; on behalf of the home she would reclaim from
the works those odd hours and half-hours of Edwin's
which it had imperceptibly filched.  She would have
some new clothes, and she would send Edwin to the
tailor's.  She would make him buy a dog-cart and a
horse.  Oh!  She could do it.  She had the mastery of
him in many things when she chose to be aroused.  In
a word, she would "branch out."

She was not sure that she would not prosecute a
campaign for putting Edwin on the Town Council, where he
certainly ought to be.  It was his duty to take a share in
public matters, and ultimately to dominate the town.
Suggestions had already been made by wirepullers, and
unreflectively repulsed by the too casual Edwin.  She
saw him mayor, and herself mayoress.  Once, the prospect
of any such formal honour, with all that it entailed
of ceremoniousness and insincere civilities, would have
annoyed if not frightened her.  But now she thought,
proudly and timidly and desirously, that she would
make as good a mayoress as most mayoresses, and that
she could set one or two of them an example in tact
and dignity.  Why not?  Of late neither mayors nor
mayoresses in the Five Towns had been what they used
to be.  The grand tradition was apparently in
abeyance, the people who ought to carry it on seeming
somehow to despise it.  She could remember mayors,
especially Chief Bailiffs at Turnhill, who imposed
themselves upon the imagination of the town.  But
nowadays the name of a mayor was never a household word.
She had even heard Ingpen ask Edwin: "See, who is
the new mayor?" and Edwin start his halting answer:
"Let me see--"

And she had still another and perhaps greater
ambition--to possess a country house.  In her
fancy her country house was very like Alicia
Hesketh's house, Tavy Mansion, which she had never
ceased to envy.  She felt that in a new home, spacious,
with space around it, she could really commence the
new life.  She saw the place perfectly appointed and
functioning perfectly--no bother about smuts on
white curtains; no half-trained servants; none of the
base, confined, promiscuity of filthy Trafalgar Road;
and the Benbows and Auntie Hamps at least eight or
ten miles off!  She saw herself driving Edwin to the
station in the morning, or perhaps right into Bursley
if she wanted to shop....  No, she would of course
shop at Oldcastle....  She would leave old Darius
Clayhanger's miracle-house without one regret.  And in
the new life she would be always active, busy, dignified,
elegant, influential, and kind.  And to Edwin she would
be absolutely indispensable.

In these imaginings their solid but tarnished love
glittered and gleamed again.  She saw naught but
the charming side of Edwin and the romantic side of
their union.  She was persuaded that there really was
nobody like Edwin, and that no marriage had ever had
quite the mysterious, secretly exciting quality of hers.
She yearned for him to come home at once, to appear
magically in the dusk of the doorway.  The mood was
marvellous.


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   II

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The door opened.

"Can I speak to you, m'm?"

It was the voice of Ada, somewhat perturbed.  She
advanced a little and stood darkly in front of the
open doorway.

"What is it, Ada?" Hilda asked curtly, without
turning to look at her.

"It's--" Ada began and stopped.

Hilda glanced round quickly, recognising now in the
voice a peculiar note with which experience had
familiarised her.  It was a note between pertness and the
beginning of a sob, and it always indicated that Ada
was feeling more acutely than usual the vast injustice
of the worldly scheme.  It might develop into tears;
on the other hand it might develop into mere insolence.
Hilda discerned that Ada was wearing neither cap nor
apron.  She thought: "If this stupid girl wants
trouble, she has come to me at exactly and precisely
the right moment to get it.  I'm not in the humour,
after all I've gone through to-day, to stand any
nonsense either from her or from anybody else."

"What is it, Ada?" she repeated, with restraint, and
yet warningly.  "And where's your apron and your cap?"

"In the kitchen, m'm."

"Well, go and put them on, and then come and say
what you have to say," said Hilda, thinking: "I don't
give any importance to her cap and apron, but she
does."

"I was thinking I'd better give ye notice, m'm," said
Ada, and she said it pertly, ignoring the command.

The two women were alone together in the house.
Each felt it; each felt the large dark emptiness of the
house behind them, and the solid front and back doors
cutting them off from succour; each had to depend
entirely upon herself.

Hilda asked quietly:

"What's the matter now?"

She knew that Ada's grievance would prove to be
silly.  The girl had practically no commonsense.  Not
one servant girl in a hundred had any appreciable
commonsense.  And when girls happened to be "upset"--as
they were all liable to be, and as Ada by the
violent departure of the cook no doubt was--even such
minute traces of gumption as they possessed were
apt to disappear.

"There's no pleasing you, m'm!" said Ada.  "The
way you talked to me in the kitchen, saying I was
always a-hiding things from ye.  I've felt it very
much!"

She threw her head back, and the gesture signified:
"I'm younger than you, and young men are always
running after me.  And I can get a new situation any
time.  And I've not gone back into my kitchen to
put my cap and apron on."

"Ada," said Hilda.  "Shall I tell you what's wrong
with you?  You're a little fool.  You know you're
talking rightdown nonsense.  You know that as well
as I do.  And you know you'll never get a better place
than you have here.  But you've taken an idea into
your head--and there you are!  Now do be sensible.
You say you think you'd better give notice.  Think
it over before you do anything ridiculous.  Sleep on
it.  We'll see how you feel in the morning."

"I think I'd better give notice, m'm, especially seeing
I'm a fool, and silly," Ada persisted.

Hilda sighed.  Her voice hardened slightly:

"So you'd leave me without a maid just at Christmas!
And that's all the thanks I get for all I've done
for you."

"Well, m'm.  We've had such a queer lot of girls here
lately, haven't we?"  The pertness was intensified.  "I
don't hardly care to stay.  I feel we sh'd both be
better for a change like."

It was perhaps Ada's subtly insolent use of the word
"we" and "both" that definitely brought about a new
phase of the interview.  Hilda suddenly lost all desire
for an amicable examination of the crisis.

"Very well, Ada," she said, shortly.  "But remember
I shan't take you back again, whatever happens."

Ada moved away, and then returned.

"Could I leave at once, m'm, same as cook?"

Hilda was astonished and outraged, despite all her
experience and its resulting secret sardonic cynicism in
regard to servants.  The girl was ready to walk out
instantly.

"And may I enquire where you'd go to?" asked
Hilda with a sneer.  "At this time of night you couldn't
possibly get home to your parents."

"Oh!" answered Ada brightly.  "I could go to me
cousin's up at Toft End.  And her could send down
a lad with a barrow for me box."

The plot, then, had been thought out.  "Her
cousin's!" thought Hilda, and seemed to be putting
her finger on the cause of Ada's disloyalty.  "Her
cousin's!"  It was a light in a dark mystery.  "Her
cousin's!"

"I suppose you know you're forfeiting the wages
due to you the day after to-morrow?"

"I shall ask me cousin about that, m'm," said Ada, as
it were menacingly.

"I should!" Hilda sarcastically agreed.  "I certainly
should."  And she thought with bitter resignation:
"She'll have to leave anyhow after this.  She may as
well leave on the spot."

"There's those as'll see as I have me rights," said
Ada pugnaciously, with another toss of the head.

Hilda had a mind to retort in anger; but she
controlled herself.  Already that afternoon she had
imperilled her dignity in the altercation with the cook.
The cook, however, had not Ada's ready tongue, and,
while the mistress had come off best against the cook,
she might through impulsiveness find herself worsted
by Ada's more youthful impudence, were it once unloosed.

"That will do, then, Ada," she said.  "You can
go and pack your box first thing."

In less than three quarters of an hour Ada was
gone, and her corded trunk lay just within the scullery
door, waiting the arrival of the cousin's barrow.
She had bumped it down the stairs herself.

All solitary in the house, which had somehow been
transformed into a strange and unusual house, Hilda
wept.  She had only parted with an unfaithful and
ungrateful servant, but she wept.  She dashed into the
kitchen and began to do Ada's work, still weeping, and
she was savage against her own tears; yet they
continued softly to fall, misting her vision of fire and
utensils and earthenware vessels.  Ada had left
everything in a moment; she had left the kettle on the fire,
and the grease in the square tin in which the
dinner-joint had been cooked, and the ashes in the fender,
and tea-leaves in the kitchen teapot and a cup and
saucer unwashed.  She had cared naught for the
inconvenience she was causing; had shewn not the
slightest consideration; had walked off without a pang,
smilingly hoity-toity.  And all servants were like that.
Such conduct might be due as much to want of
imagination, to a simple inability to picture to themselves
the consequences of certain acts, as to stark ingratitude;
but the consequences remained the same; and
Hilda held fiercely to the theory of stark ingratitude.

She had made Ada; she had created her.  When
Hilda engaged her, Ada was little more than an "oat-cake
girl,"--that is to say, one of those girls who earn
a few pence by delivering oat-cakes fresh from the stove
at a halfpenny each before breakfast at the houses
of gormandising superior artisans and the middle-classes.
True, she had been in one situation prior
to Hilda's, but it was a situation where she learnt
nothing and could have learnt nothing.  Nevertheless,
she was very quick to learn, and in a month Hilda
had done wonders with her.  She had taught her not
only her duties, but how to respect herself, to make
the best of herself, and favourably to impress others.
She had enormously increased Ada's value in the
universe.  And she had taught her some worldly wisdom,
and permitted and even encouraged certain coquetries,
and in the bed-room during dressings and undressings
had occasionally treated her as a soubrette if not as a
confidante; had listened to her at length, and had gone
so far as to ask her views on this matter or that--the
supreme honour for a menial.  Also she had very
conscientiously nursed her in sickness.  She had really
liked Ada, and had developed a sentimental weakness
for her.  She had taken pleasure in her prettiness, in
her natural grace, and in her crude youth.  She
enjoyed seeing Ada arrange a bedroom, or answer the
door, or serve a meal.  And Ada's stupidity--that
half-cunning stupidity of her class, which immovably
underlay her superficial aptitudes--had not sufficed
to spoil her affection for the girl.  She had been
indulgent to Ada's stupidity; she had occasionally in
some soft moods hoped that it was curable.  And she
had argued in moments of discouragement that at any
rate stupidity could be faithful.  In her heart she had
counted Ada as a friend, as a true standby in the
more or less tragic emergencies of the household.  And
now Ada had deserted her.  Stupidity had proved to
be neither faithful nor grateful.  Why had Ada been
so silly and so base?  Impossible to say!  A nothing!
A whim!  Nerves!  Fatuity!  The whole affair was
horribly absurd.  These creatures were incalculable.
Of course Hilda would have been wiser not to upbraid
her so soon after the scene with the cook, and to have
spoken more smoothly to the chit in the boudoir.  Hilda
admitted that.  But what then?  Was that an excuse
for the chit's turpitude?  There must be a limit to
the mistress's humouring.  And probably after all the
chit had meant to go....  If she had not meant
to go she would not have entered the boudoir
apronless and capless.  Some rankling word, some
ridiculous sympathy with the cook, some wild dream of a
Christmas holiday--who could tell what might have
influenced her?  Hilda gave it up--and returned to it
a thousand times.  One truth emerged--and it was the
great truth of housemistresses--namely, that it never,
never, never pays to be too kind to servants.
"Servants do not understand kindness."  You think they
do; they themselves think they do; but they don't,--they
don't and they don't.  Hilda went back into the
immensity of her desolating experience as an employer
of female domestic servants of all kinds, but chiefly
bad--for the landlady of a small boarding house must
take what servants she can get--and she raged at
the persistence of the proof that kindness never paid.
What did pay was severity and inhuman strictness,
and the maintenance of an impassable gulf between
employer and employed.  Not again would she make
the mistake which she had made a hundred times.  She
hardened herself to the consistency of a slave-driver.
And all the time it was the woman in her, not the
mistress, that the hasty thoughtless Ada had wounded.
To the woman the kitchen was not the same place
without Ada--Ada on whom she had utterly relied in
the dilemma caused by the departure of the cook.  As
with angrily wet eyes she went about her new work in
the kitchen, she could almost see the graceful ghost
of Ada tripping to and fro therein.

And all that the world, and the husband, would
know or understand was that a cook had been turned
out for drunkenness, and that a quite sober parlour-maid
had most preposterously walked after her.  Hilda
was aware that in Edwin she had a severe, though a
taciturn, critic of her activities as employer of
servants.  She had no hope whatever of his sympathy,
and so she closed all her gates against him.  She
waited for him as for an adversary, and all the lustre
faded from her conception of their love.



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   III

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When Edwin approached his home that frosty evening,
he was disturbed to perceive that there was no
light from the hall-gas shining through the panes of
the front-door, though some light showed at the
dining-room window, the blinds of which had not been
drawn.  "What next?" he thought crossly.  He was
tired, and the keenness of the weather, instead of
bracing him, merely made him petulant.  He was astonished
that several women in a house could all forget such
an important act as the lighting of the hall-gas at
nightfall.  Never before had the hall-gas been forgotten,
and the negligence appeared to Edwin as absolutely
monstrous.  The effect of it on the street, the
effect on a possible caller, was bad enough (Edwin,
while pretending to scorn social opinion, was really
very deferential towards it), but what was worse was
the revelation of the feminine mentality.

In opening the door with his latchkey he was purposely
noisy, partly in order to give expression to his
justified annoyance, and partly to warn all peccant
women that the male had arrived, threatening.

As his feet fumbled into the interior gloom and he
banged the door, he quite expected a rush of at least
one apologetic woman with a box of matches.  But
nobody came.  Nevertheless he could hear sharp
movements through the half-open door of the kitchen.
Assuredly women had the irresponsibility of infants.  He
glanced for an instant into the dining-room; the white
cloth was laid, but the table was actually not set.
With unusual righteous care he wiped the half-congealed
mud off his boots on the mat; then removed his
hat and his overcoat, took a large new piece of
indiarubher from his pocket and put it on the hall-table,
felt the radiator (which despite all his injunctions
and recommendations was almost cold); and lastly he
lighted the gas himself.  This final act was contrary
to his own rule, for he had often told Hilda that half
her trouble with servants arose through her
impatiently doing herself things which they had omitted,
instead of ringing the bell and seeing the things done.
But he was not infrequently inconsistent, both in deed
and in thought.  For another example, he would say
superiorly that a woman could never manage women,
ignoring that he the all-wise had never been able to
manage Hilda.

He turned to go upstairs.  At the same moment
somebody emerged obscurely from the kitchen.  It was
Hilda, in a white apron.

"Oh!  I'm glad you've lighted it," said she curtly,
without the least symptom of apology, but rather
affrontingly.

He continued his way.

"Have you seen anything of George?" she asked,
and her tone stopped him.

Yet she well knew that he hated to be stopped of
an evening on his way to the bathroom.  It could
not be sufficiently emphasized that to accost him
before he had descended from the bathroom was to
transgress one of the most solemn rules of his daily
life.

"Of course I haven't seen George," he answered.
"How should I have seen George?"

"Because he's not back from school yet, and I can't
help wondering----"

She was worrying about George as usual.

He grunted and passed on.

"There's no light on the landing, either," he said,
over the banisters.  "I wish you'd see to those
servants of yours."

"As it happens there aren't any servants."

Her tone, getting more peculiar with each phrase,
stopped him again.

"Aren't any servants?  What d'you mean?"

"Well, I found the attic full of beer bottles, so I
sent her off on the spot."

"Sent who off?"

"Eliza."

"And where's Ada?"

"She's gone too," said Hilda defiantly, and as
though rebutting an accusation before it could be
made.

"Why?"

"She seemed to want to.  And she was very impertinent
over it."

He snorted and shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, it's your affair," he muttered, too scornful
to ask details.

"It is," said she, significantly laconic.

In the bathroom, vexed and gloomy as he brushed
his nails and splashed in the wash basin, he mused
savagely over the servant problem.  The servant
problem had been growing acute.  He had predicted several
times that a crisis would arrive; a crisis had arrived;
he was always right; his rightness was positively
uncanny.  He had liked Ada; he had not disliked the
cook.  He knew that Hilda was to blame.  How should
she not be to blame,--losing her entire staff in one
afternoon?  It was not merely that she lacked the
gift of authoritative control,--it was also that she had
no feeling for democratic justice as between one
human being and another.  And yet among his earliest
recollections of her was her passionate sympathy with
men on strike as against their employers.  Totally
misleading manifestations!  For her a servant was
nothing but a "servant."  She was convinced that all
her servants were pampered and spoilt; and as for
Edwin's treatment of his workpeople she considered
it to be ridiculously, criminally soft.  If she had
implied once she had implied a hundred times that the
whole lot of them laughed at him behind his back for
a sentimental simpleton.  Occasionally Edwin was
quite outraged by her callousness.  The topic of the
eight-hours day, of the ten-hours day, and even of
the twelve-hours day (the last for tramwaymen) had
been lately exciting the district.  And Edwin was
distressed that in his own house a sixteen-hour day for
labour was in vogue and that the employer perceived
no shame in it.  He did not clearly see how the shame
was to be abolished, but he thought that it ought to
be admitted.  It was not admitted.  From six in the
morning until ten at night these mysterious
light-headed young women were the slaves of a bell.  They
had no surcease except one long weekday evening each
week and a short Sunday evening each fortnight.  At
one period Hilda had had a fad for getting them out
of bed at half-past five, to cure them of laziness.  He
remembered one cook whose family lived at the village
of Brindley Edge, five miles off.  This cook on her
weekday evening would walk to Brindley Edge, spend
three quarters of an hour in her home, and walk back
to Bursley, reaching Trafalgar Road just in time to
get to bed.  Hilda saw nothing very odd in that.  She
said the girl could always please herself about going
to Brindley Edge.

Edwin's democratic sense was gradually growing in
force; it disturbed more and more the peace of his
inmost mind.  He seldom displayed his sympathies (save
to Tertius Ingpen who, though a Tory, was in some
ways astoundingly open to ideas, which seemed to
interest him as a pretty equation would interest him),
but they pursued their secret activity in his being,
annoying him at his lithographic works, and still more
in his home.  He would suppress them, and grin, and
repeat his ancient consoling truth that what was, was.
The relief, however, was not permanent.

In that year the discovery of Rontgen Rays, the
practical invention of the incandescent gas-mantle, the
abolition of the man with the red flag in front of
self-propelled vehicles, and the fact that Consols stood
at 113, had combined to produce in innumerable
hearts the illusion that civilisation was advancing at a
great rate.  But Edwin in his soul scarcely thought
so.  He was worrying not only about Liberal
principles, but about the world; in his youth he had never
worried about the world.  And of his own personal
success he would ask and ask: Is it right?  He said to
himself in the bathroom: "There's a million domestic
servants in this blessed country, and not one of them
works less than a hundred hours a week, and nobody
cares.  I don't think I really care myself.  But there
it is all the same!"  And he was darkly resentful against
Hilda on account of the entire phenomenon....
He foresaw, too, a period of upset and discomfort in
his house.  Would there, indeed, ever be any real
tranquillity in his house, with that strange, primeval
cave-woman in charge of it?

As he descended the stairs, Hilda came out of the
dining-room with an empty tray.

She said:

"I wish you'd go out and look for George."

Imagine it--going out into the Five Towns to look
for one boy!

"Oh!  He'll be all right.  I suppose you haven't
forgotten Ingpen's coming to-night."

"Of course I haven't.  But I want you to go out
and look for George."

He knew what was in her mind,--namely an absurd
vision of George and his new bicycle crushed under
a tramcar somewhere between Bleakridge and
Hanbridge.  In that year everybody with any pretension
to youthfulness and modernity rode a bicycle.  Both
Edwin and Hilda rode occasionally--such was the
power of fashion.  Maternal apprehensions had not
sufficed to keep George from having a bicycle, nor from
riding on it unprotected up and down the greasy
slopes of Trafalgar Road to and from school.  Edwin
himself had bought the bicycle, pooh-poohing danger,
and asserting that anyhow normal risks must always
be accepted with an even mind.

He was about to declare that he would certainly
not do anything so silly as to go out and look for
George,--and then all of a sudden he had the queer
sensation of being alone with Hilda in the house made
strange and romantic by a domestic calamity.  He
gazed at Hilda with her apron, and the calamity had
made her strange and romantic also.  He was vexed,
annoyed, despondent, gloomy, fearful of the
immediate future; he had immense grievances; he hated
Hilda, he loathed giving way to her.  He thought:
"What is it binds me to this incomprehensible
woman?  I will not be bound!"  But he felt that
he would be compelled (not by her but by
something in himself) to commit the folly of going out
to look for George.  And he felt that though his
existence was an exasperating adventure, still it was an
adventure.

"Oh!  Damn!" he exploded, and reached for a cap.

And then George came into the hall through the
kitchen.  The boy often preferred to enter by the back,
the stalking Indian way.



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   IV

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George wore spectacles.  He had grown considerably.
He was now between fourteen and fifteen years
of age, and he had begun to look his age.  His mental
outlook and conversation were on the whole in advance
of his age.  Even when he was younger he had
frequently an adult manner of wise talking, but it had
appeared unreal, naïve,--it was amusing rather than
convincing.  Now he imposed himself even on his family
as a genuine adolescent, though the idiom he employed
was often schoolboyish and his gestures were immaturely
rough.  The fact was he was not the same boy.  Everybody
noticed it.  His old charm and delicacy seemed to
have gone, and his voice was going.  He had become
harsh, defiant, somewhat brutal, and egotistic if not
conceited.  He held a very low opinion of all his
school-fellows, and did not conceal it.  Yet he was not very
high in his form (the lower fifth); his reports were
mediocre; and he cut no figure in the playfield.  In
the home he was charged with idleness, selfishness, and
irresolution.  It was pointed out to him that he was
not making the best of his gifts, and that if he only
chose to make the best of them he might easily, etc.,
etc.  Apparently he did not care a bit.  He had marked
facility on the piano, but he had insisted on giving up
his piano lessons and would not open the piano for a
fortnight at a time.  He still maintained his intention
of being an architect, but he had ceased to show any
interest in architecture.  He would, however, still paint
in water-colours; and he read a lot, but gluttonously,
without taste.  Edwin and Hilda, and especially Hilda,
did not hide their discontent.  Hilda had outbursts
against him.  In regard to Hilda he was disobedient.
Edwin always spoke quietly to him, and was seldom
seriously disobeyed.  When disobeyed Edwin would
show a taciturn resentment against the boy, who would
sulk and then melt.

"Oh!  He'll grow out of it," Edwin would say to
Hilda, yet Edwin, like Hilda, thought that the boy
was deliberately naughty, and they held themselves
towards him as grieved persons of superior righteousness
towards a person of inferior righteousness.  Not
even Edwin reflected that profound molecular changes
might be proceeding in George's brain, for which
changes he was in no way responsible.  Nevertheless,
despite the blighting disappointment of George's
evolution, the home was by no means deeply engloomed.
No!  George had an appealing smile, a mere gawky
boyishness, a peculiar way of existing, that somehow
made joy in the home.  Also he was a centre of intense
and continual interest, and of this he was very well
aware.

In passing through the kitchen George had of course
been struck by the astounding absence of the cook;
he had noticed further a fancy apron and a cap lying
on the window sill therein.  And when he came into the
hall, the strange aspect of his mother (in a servant's
apron) and his uncle proved to him that something
marvellously unusual, exciting, and uplifting was
afoot.  He was pleased, agog, and he had the additional
satisfaction that great events would conveniently
divert attention from his lateness.  Still he must be
discreet, for the adults were evidently at loggerheads,
and therefore touchy.  He slipped between Edwin and
Hilda with a fairly good imitation of innocent
casualness, as if saying: "Whatever has occurred, I am
guiltless, and going on just as usual."

"Ooh!  Bags I!" he exclaimed loudly, at the
hall-table, and seized the indiarubber, which Edwin had
promised him.  His school vocabulary comprised an
extraordinary number of words ending in *gs*.  He would
never, for example, say "first," but "foggs"; and never
"second," but "seggs."  That very morning, for
example, meeting Hilda on the mat at the foot of the
stairs, he had shocked her by saying: "You go up
foggs, mother, and I'll go seggs."

"George!" Hilda severely protested.  Her anxiety
concerning him was now turned into resentment.
"Have you had an accident?"

"An accident?" said George, as though at a loss.
Yet he knew perfectly that his mother was referring
to the bicycle.

Edwin said curtly:

"Now, don't play the fool.  Have you fallen off
your bike?  Look at your overcoat.  Don't leave that
satchel there, and hang your coat up properly."

The overcoat was in a grievous state.  A few days
earlier it had been new.  Besides money, it had cost
an enormous amount of deliberation and discussion, like
everything else connected with George.  Against his
will, Edwin himself had been compelled to conduct
George to Shillitoe's, the tailor's, and superintend a
third trying-on, for further alterations, after the
overcoat was supposed to be finished.  And lo, now it had no
quality left but warmth!  Efforts in regard to George
were always thus out of proportion to the trifling
results obtained.  At George's age Edwin doubtless had
an overcoat, but he positively could not remember
having one, and he was quite sure that no schoolboy
overcoat of his had ever preoccupied a whole household for
two minutes, to say nothing of a week.

George's face expressed a sense of injury, and his
face hardened.

"Mother made me take my overcoat.  You know I
can't cycle in my overcoat.  I've not been on my
bicycle all day.  Also my lamp's broken," he said, with
gloomy defiance.

His curiosity about wondrous events in the house
was quenched.

And Edwin felt angry with Hilda for having quite
unjustifiably assumed that George had gone to school
on his bicycle.  Ought she not to have had the ordinary
gumption to assure herself, before worrying, that the
lad's bicycle was not in the shed?  Incredible
thoughtlessness!  All these alarms for nothing!

"Then why are you so late?" Hilda demanded,
diverting to George her indignation at Edwin's
unuttered but yet conveyed criticism of herself.

"Kept in."

"All this time?" Hilda questioned, suspiciously.

George sullenly nodded.

"What for?"

"Latin."

"Homework?  Again?" ejaculated Edwin.  "Why
hadn't you done it properly?"

"I had a headache last night.  And I've got one
to-day."

"Another of your Latin headaches!" said Edwin
sarcastically.  There was nothing, except possibly cod
liver oil, that George detested more than Edwin's
serious sarcasm.

The elders glanced at one another and glanced
away.  Both had the same fear--the dreadful fear
that George might be developing the worse characteristics
of his father.  Both had vividly in mind the fact
that this boy was the son of George Cannon.  They
never mentioned to each other either the fear or the
fact; they dared not.  But each knew the thoughts of
the other.  The boy was undoubtedly crafty; he could
conceal subtle designs under a simple exterior; he was
also undoubtedly secretive.  The recent changes in his
disposition had put Edwin and Hilda on their guard,
and every time young George displayed cunning, or
economised the truth, or lied, the fear visited them.
"I hope he'll turn out all right!" Hilda had said once.
Edwin had nearly replied: "What are you worrying
about?  The sons of honest men are often rascals.
Why on earth shouldn't the son of a rascal be an
honest man?"  But he had only said, with good-humoured
impatience: "Of course he'll turn out all
right!"  Not that he himself was convinced.

Edwin now attacked the boy gloomily:

"You didn't seem to have much of a headache when
you came in just now."

It was true.

But George suddenly burst into tears.  His
headaches were absolutely genuine.  The emptiness of the
kitchen and the general queer look of things in the
house had, however, by their promise of adventurous
happenings, caused him to forget his headache
altogether, and the discovery of the new indiarubber had
been like a tonic to a convalescent.  The menacing
attitude of the elders had now brought about a relapse.
The headache established itself as his chief physical
sensation.  His chief moral sensation was that of a
terrible grievance.  He did not often cry; he had not
indeed cried for about a year.  But to-night there was
something nervous in the very air, and the sob took him
unawares.  The first sob having prostrated all
resistance, others followed victoriously, and there was no
stopping them.  He did not quite know why he should
have been more liable to cry on this particular
occasion than on certain others, and he was rather
ashamed; on the other hand it was with an almost
malicious satisfaction that he perceived the troubling
effect of his tears on the elders.  They were obviously
in a quandary.  Serve them right!

"It's my eyes," he blubbered.  "I told you these
specs would never suit me.  But you wouldn't believe
me, and the headmaster won't believe me."

The discovery that George's eyesight was defective,
about two months earlier, had led to a desperate but
of course hopeless struggle on his part against the
wearing of spectacles.  It was curious that in the
struggle he had never even mentioned his strongest
objection to spectacles,--namely, the fact that Bert
Benbow wore spectacles.

"Why didn't you tell us?" Edwin demanded.

Between sobs George replied with overwhelming
disillusioned disgust:

"What's the good of telling you anything?  You
only think I'm codding."

And he passed upstairs, apparently the broken
victim of fate and parents, but in reality triumphant.
His triumph was such that neither Edwin nor Hilda
dared even to protest against the use of such an
inexcusable word as 'codding.'

Hilda went into the kitchen, and Edwin rather
aimlessly followed her.  He felt incompetent.  He could
do nothing except carry trays, and he had no desire to
carry trays.  Neither spoke.  Hilda was bending over
the fire, then she arranged the grid in front of the
fire to hold a tin, and she greased the tin.  He thought
she looked very wistful, for all the somewhat bitter
sturdiness of her demeanour.  Tertius Ingpen was due
for the evening; she had no servants--through her
own fault; and now a new phase had arrived in the
unending responsibility for George's welfare.  He
knew that she was blaming him on account of George.
He knew that she believed in the sincerity of George's
outburst; he believed in it himself.  The spectacles were
wrong; the headache was genuine.  And he, Edwin,
was guilty of the spectacles because he had forced
Hilda, by his calm bantering commonsense, to consult
a small local optician of good reputation.

Hilda had wanted to go to Birmingham or
Manchester; but Edwin said that such an idea was
absurd.  The best local optician was good enough
for the great majority of the inhabitants of the Five
Towns and would be good enough for George.  Why
not indeed?  Why the craze for specialists?
There could be nothing uniquely wrong with the
boy's eyes,--it was a temporary weakness.  And
so on and so on, in accordance with Edwin's
instinct for denying the existence of a crisis.  And
the local optician, consulted, had borne him out.  The
local optician said that every year he dealt with
dozens of cases similar to George's.  And now both
the local optician and Edwin were overthrown by a
boy's sobbing tears.

Suddenly Hilda turned round upon her husband.

"I shall take George to London to-morrow about
his eyes," she said, with immense purpose and
sincerity, in a kind of fierce challenge.

This was her amends to George for having often
disbelieved him, and for having suspected him of
taking after his father.  She made her amends
passionately, and with all the force of her temperament.  In
her eyes George was now a martyr.

"To London?" exclaimed Edwin weakly.

"Yes.  It's no use half doing these things.  I shall
ask Charlie Orgreave to recommend me a first-class
oculist."

Edwin dared say nothing.  Either Manchester or
Birmingham would have been just as good as London,
perhaps better.  Moreover, she had not even consulted
him.  She had decided by a violent impulse and
announced her decision.  This was not right; she would
have protested against a similar act by Edwin.  But
he could not argue with her.  She was far beyond
argument.

"I wouldn't have that boy's eyesight played with
for anything!" she said fiercely.

"Well, of course you wouldn't!  Who would?"
Edwin thought, but he did not say it.

"Go and see what he's doing," she said.

Edwin slouched off.  He was no longer the master
of the house.  He was only an economic factor and
general tool in the house.  And as he wandered like
a culprit up the stairs of the mysteriously transformed
dwelling he thought again: "What is it that binds me
to her?"  But he was abashed and in spite of himself
impressed by the intensity of Hilda's formidable
emotion.  Nevertheless as he began vaguely to perceive all
that was involved in her threat to go to London on
the morrow, he stiffened, and said to himself: "We
shall see about that.  We shall just see about that!"



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   V

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They were at the meal.  Hilda had covered George's
portion of fish with a plate and put it before the fire
to keep warm.  She was just returning to the table.
Tertius Ingpen, who sat with his back to the fire, looked
at her over his shoulder with an admiring smile and said:

"Well, I've had some good meals in this house, but
this is certainly the best bit of fish I ever tasted.  So
that the catastrophe in the kitchen leaves me unmoved."

Hilda, with face suddenly transformed by a responsive
smile, insinuated herself between the table and her
arm-chair, drew forward the chair by its arms, and
sat down.  Her keen pleasure in the compliment was
obvious.  Edwin noted that the meal was really very
well served, the table brighter than usual, the toast
crisper, and the fish--a fine piece of hake white as
snow within its browned exterior--merely perfect.
There was no doubt that Hilda could be extremely
efficient when she desired; Edwin's criticism was that
she was too often negligent, and that in her moods of
conscientiousness she gave herself too urgently and
completely, producing an unnecessary disturbance in
the atmosphere of the home.  Nevertheless Edwin too
felt pleasure in the compliment to Hilda; and he
calmly enjoyed the spectacle of his wife and his friend
side by side on such mutually appreciative terms.  The
intimacy of the illuminated table in the midst of the
darker room, the warmth and crackling of the fire, the
grave solidity of the furniture, the springiness of the
thick carpet, and the delicate odours of the repast,--all
these things satisfied in him something that was
profound.  And the two mature, vivacious, intelligent
faces under the shaded gas excited his loyal affection.

"That's right," Hilda murmured, in her clear
enunciation.  "I do like praise!"

"Now then, you callous brute," said Ingpen to
Edwin.  "What do you say?"

And Hilda cried with swift, complaining sincerity:

"Oh!  Edwin never praises me!"

Her sincerity convinced by its very artlessness.  The
complaint had come unsought from her heart.  And
it was so spontaneous and forcible that Tertius Ingpen,
as a tactful guest, saw the advisability of easing
the situation by laughter.

"Yes, I do!" Edwin protested, and though he was
shocked, he laughed, in obedience to Ingpen's cue.  It
was true; he did praise her; but not frequently, and
almost always in order to flatter her rather than to
express his own emotion.  Edwin did not care for praising
people; he would enthusiastically praise a book, but not
a human being.  His way was to take efficiency for
granted.  "Not so bad," was a superlative of laudation with
him.  He was now shocked as much by the girl's outrageous
candour as by the indisputable revelation that she
went hungry for praise.  Even to a close friend such as
Ingpen, surely a wife had not the right to be quite so
desperately sincere.  Edwin considered that in the
presence of a third person husband and wife should always
at any cost maintain the convention of perfect conjugal
amenity.  He knew couples who achieved the feat,--Albert
and Clara, for example.  But Hilda, he surmised,
had other ideas, if indeed she had ever consciously
reflected upon this branch of social demeanour.  Certainly
she seemed at moments to lose all regard for appearances.

Moreover, she was polluting by acerbity the pure
friendliness of the atmosphere, and endangering cheer.

"He's too wrapped up in the works to think about
praising his wife," Hilda continued, still in the
disconcerting vein of sincerity, but with less violence and a
more philosophical air.  The fact was that, although
she had not regained the zest of the mood so rudely
dissipated by the scene with Ada, she was kept cheerful
by the mere successful exercise of her own energy in
proving to these two men that servants were not in the
least essential to the continuance of plenary comfort
in her house; and she somewhat condescended towards
Edwin.

"By the way, Teddie," said Ingpen, pulling lightly at
his short beard, "I heard a rumour that you were going
to stand for the Town Council in the South ward.  Why
didn't you?"

Edwin looked a little confused.

"Who told you that tale?"

"It was about."

"It never came from me," said Edwin.

Hilda broke in eagerly:

"He was invited to stand.  But he wouldn't.  I
thought he ought to.  I begged him to.  But no, he
wouldn't.  And did you know he refused a J.P.ship
too?"

"Oh!" mumbled Edwin.  "That sort o' thing's not
my line."

"Oh, isn't it!" Ingpen exclaimed.  "Then whose line
is it?"

"Look at all the rotters in the Council!" said Edwin.

"All the more reason why you should be on it!"

"Well, I've got no time," Edwin finished gloomily
and uneasily.

Ingpen paused, tapping his teeth with his finger,
before proceeding, in a judicial, thoughtful manner
which in recent years he had been developing:

"I'll tell you what's the matter with you, old man.
You don't know it, but you're in a groove.  You go
about like a shuttle from the house to the works and
the works to the house.  And you never think beyond
the works and the house."

"Oh, don't I?"

Ingpen went placidly on:

"No, you don't.  You've become a good specimen of
the genus 'domesticated business man.'  You've
forgotten what life is.  You fancy you're at full stretch
all the time, but you're in a coma.  I suppose you'll
never see forty again--and have you ever been outside
this island?  You went to Llandudno this year because
you went last year.  And you'll go next year because
you went this year.  If you happen now and then to
worry about the failure of your confounded Liberal
Party you think you're a blooming broad-minded
publicist.  Where are your musical evenings?  When I
asked you to go with me to a concert at Manchester
last week but one, you thought I'd gone dotty, simply
because it meant your leaving the works early and not
getting to bed until the unheard-of-time of one thirty a.m."

"I was never told anything about any concert," Hilda
interjected sharply.

"Go on!  Go on!" said Edwin raising his eyebrows.

"I will," said Ingpen with tranquillity, as though
discussing impartially and impersonally the conduct
of some individual at the Antipodes.  "Where am I?
Well, you're always buying books, and I believe you
reckon yourself a bit of a reader.  What d'you get
out of them?  I daresay you've got decided views on
the transcendent question whether Emily Brontë was
a greater writer than Charlotte.  That's about what
you've got.  Why, dash it, you haven't a vice left.  A
vice would interfere with your lovely litho.  There's
only one thing that would upset you more than a
machinery breakdown at the works----"

"And what's that?"

"What's that?  If one of the hinges of your
garden-gate came off, or you lost your latchkey!  Why,
just look how you've evidently been struck all of a
heap by this servant affair!  I expect it occurred to
you your breakfast might be five minutes late in the
morning."

"Stuff!" said Edwin, amiably.  He regarded Ingpen's
observations as fantastically unjust and beside
the mark.  But his sense of fairness and his admiration
of the man's intellectual honesty would not allow
him to resent them.  Ingpen would discuss and dissect
either his friends or himself with equal detachment; the
detachment was complete.  And his assumption that
his friends fully shared his own dispassionate, curious
interest in arriving at the truth appealed very strongly
to Edwin's loyalty.  That Ingpen was liable to preach
and even to hector was a drawback which he silently
accepted.

"Struck all of a heap indeed!" muttered Edwin.

"Wasn't he, Hilda?"

"I should just say he was!  And I know he thinks
it's all my fault," said Hilda.

Tertius Ingpen glanced at her an instant, and gave
a short half-cynical laugh, which scarcely concealed
his mild scorn of her feminine confusion of the argument.

"It's the usual thing!" said Ingpen, with scorn still
more marked.  At this stage of a dissertation he was
inclined to be less a human being than the trumpet of a
sacred message.  "It's the usual thing!  I never knew
a happy marriage yet that didn't end in the same
way."  Then, perceiving that he was growing too
earnest, and that his emphasis on the phrase 'happy
marriage' had possibly been too sarcastic, he sniggered.

"I really don't see what marriage has to do with it,"
said Hilda, frowning.

"No, of course you don't," Ingpen agreed.

"If you'd said business----" she added.

"Now we've had the diagnosis," Edwin sardonically
remarked, looking at his plate, "what's the
prescription?"  He was reflecting: "'Happy marriage,' does
he call it! ... Why on earth does she say I think
it's all her fault?  I've not breathed a word."

"Well," replied Ingpen.  "You live much too close
to your infernal works.  Why don't you get away,
right away, and live out in the country like a sensible
man, instead of sticking in this filthy hole--among all
these new cottages? ... Barbarian hordes...."

"Oh!  Hurrah!" cried Hilda.  "At last I've got
somebody who takes my side."

"Of course you say it's impossible.  You naturally
would----" Ingpen resumed.

He was interrupted by the entrance of George.  Soon
after Tertius Ingpen's arrival, George had been
despatched to summon urgently Mrs. Tams, the
charwoman who had already more than once helped to fill
a hiatus between two cooks.  George showed now no
trace of his late martyrdom, nor of a headache.  To
conquer George in these latter days you had to
demand of him a service.  It was Edwin who had first
discovered the intensity of the boy's desire to take a
useful share in any adult operation whatever.  He came
in red-cheeked, red-handed, rough, defiant, shy, proud,
and making a low intermittent "Oo-oo" noise with
protruding lips to indicate the sharpness of the frost
outside.  As he had already greeted Ingpen he was able
to go without ceremony straight to his chair.

Confidentially, in the silence, Hilda raised her
eyebrows to him interrogatively.  In reply he gave one
short nod.  Thus in two scarcely perceptible gestures
the assurance was asked for and given that the mission
had been successful and that Mrs. Tams would be
coming up at once.  George loved these private and
laconic signallings, which produced in him the illusion
that he was getting nearer to the enigma of life.

As he persisted in the "Oo-oo" manifestation, Hilda
amicably murmured:

"Hsh-hsh!"

George pressed his lips swiftly and hermetically
together, and raised his eyebrows in protest against his
own indecorum.  He glanced at his empty place; whereupon
Hilda glanced informingly in the direction of the
fire, and George, skilled in the interpretation of minute
signs, skirted stealthily round the table behind his
mother's chair, and snatched his loaded plate from
the hearth.

Nobody said a word.  The sudden stoppage of the
conversation had indeed caused a slight awkwardness
among the elders.  George, for his part, was quite
convinced that they had been discussing his eyesight.

"Furnace all right again, sonny?" asked Edwin,
quietly, when the boy had sat down.  Hilda was
replenishing Ingpen's plate.

"Blop!" muttered George, springing up aghast.  This
meant that he had forgotten the furnace in the cellar,
source of heat to the radiator in the hall.  By a recent
arrangement he received sixpence a week for stoking the
furnace.

"Never mind!  It'll do afterwards," said Edwin.

But George, masticating fish, shook his head.  He
must be stern with himself, possibly to atone for his
tears.  And he went off instantly to the cellar.

"Bit chill," observed Edwin to him as he left the
room.  "A bit chilly" was what he meant; but George
delighted to chip the end off a word, and when Edwin
chose to adopt the same practice, the boy took it as a
masonic sign of profound understanding between them.

George nodded and vanished.  And both Edwin and
Hilda dwelt in secret upon his boyish charm, and
affectionate satisfaction mingled with and softened their
apprehensions and their brooding responsibility and
remorse.  They thought: "He is simply exquisite," and
in their hearts apologised to him.

Tertius Ingpen asked suddenly:

"What's happened to the young man's spectacles?"

"They don't suit him," said Hilda eagerly.  "They
don't suit him at all.  They give him headaches.
Edwin would have me take him to the local man,
what's-his-name at Hanbridge.  I was afraid it would be risky,
but Edwin would have it.  I'm going to take him to
London to-morrow.  He's been having headaches for
some time and never said a word.  I only found it out
by accident."

"Surely," Ingpen smiled, "it's contrary to George's
usual practice to hide his troubles like that, isn't it?"

"Oh!" said Hilda.  "He's rather secretive, you know."

"I've never noticed," said Ingpen, "that he was more
secretive than most of us are about a grievance."

Edwin, secretly agitated, said in a curious light tone:

"If you ask me, he kept it quiet just to pay us out."

"Pay you out?  What for?"

"For making him wear spectacles at all.  These
kids want a deuce of a lot of understanding; but that's
my contribution.  He simply said to himself: 'Well,
if they think they're going to cure my eyesight for
me with their beastly specs they just aren't, and I
won't tell 'em!'"

"Edwin!" Hilda protested warmly.  "I wonder you
can talk like that!"

Tertius Ingpen went off into one of his peculiar long
fits of laughter; and Edwin quizzically smiled, feeling
as if he was repaying Hilda for her unnecessary
insistence upon the fact that he was responsible for the
choosing of an optician.  Hilda, suspecting that the
two men saw something droll which was hidden from
her, blushed and then laughed in turn, somewhat
self-consciously.

"Don't *you* think it's best to go to London, about
an affair like eyesight?" she asked Ingpen pointedly.

"The chief thing in these cases," said Ingpen
solemnly, "is to satisfy the maternal instinct.  Yes, I
should certainly go to London.  If Teddie disagrees,
I'm against him.  Who are you going to?"

"You are horrid!" Hilda exclaimed, and added with
positiveness: "I shall ask Charlie Orgreave first.  He'll
tell me the best man."

"You seem to have a great belief in Charlie," said Ingpen.

"I have," said Hilda, who had seen Charlie at
George's bedside when nobody knew whether George
would live or die.

And while they were talking about Charlie and about
Janet, who was now living with her brother at Ealing,
the sounds of George stoking the furnace below came
dully up through the floor-boards.

"If you and George are going away," asked Ingpen,
"what'll happen to his worship--with not a
servant in the house?"

This important point had been occupying Edwin's
mind ever since Hilda had first announced her
intention to go to London.  But he had not mentioned it
to her, nor she to him, their relations being rather
delicate.  It had, for him, only an academic interest,
since he had determined that she should not go to
London on the morrow.  Nevertheless he awaited
anxiously the reply.

Hilda answered with composure:

"I'm hoping he'll come with us."

He had been prepared for anything but this.  The
proposition was monstrously impossible.  Could a man
leave his works at a moment's notice?  The notion
was utterly absurd.

"That's quite out of the question," he said at once.
He was absolutely sincere.  The effect of Ingpen's
discourse was, however, such as to upset the assured
dignity of his pronouncement; for the decision was simply
an illustration of Ingpen's theory concerning him.
He blushed.

"Why is it out of the question?" demanded Hilda,
inimically gazing at him.

She had lost her lenient attitude towards him of
the afternoon.  Nevertheless, reflecting upon Tertius
Ingpen's indictment of the usual happy marriage, she
had been planning the expedition to London as a
revival of romance in their lives.  She saw it as
a marvellous rejuvenating experience.  When she
thought of all that she had suffered, and all that
Edwin had suffered, in order that they might come
together, she was quite desolated by the prosaic flatness
of the ultimate result.  Was it to attain their present
stolid existence that they had endured affliction for
a decade?  She wanted passionately to break the
mysterious bands that held them both back from ecstasy
and romance.  And he would not help her.  He would not
enter into her desire.  She had known that he would
refuse.  He refused everything--he was so set in his
own way.  Resentment radiated from her.

"I can't," said Edwin.  "What d'you want to go
to-morrow for?  What does a day or two matter?"

Then she loosed her tongue.  Why to-morrow?
Because you couldn't trifle with a child's eyesight.
Already the thing had been dragging on for goodness
knew how long.  Every day might be of importance.
And why not to-morrow?  They could shut the house
up, and go off together and stay at Charlie's.  Hadn't
Janet asked them many a time?  Maggie would look
out for new servants.  And Mrs. Tams would clean
the house.  It was really the best way out of the
servant question too, besides being the best for
George.

"And there's another thing," she went on without a
pause, speaking rapidly and clearly.  "Your eyes want
seeing to as well.  Do you think I don't know?" she
sneered.

"Mine!" he exclaimed.  "My eyes are as right as
rain."  It was not true.  His eyes had been troubling
him.

"Then why have you had a double candle-bracket
fixed at your bed-head, when a single one's been enough
for you all these years?" she demanded.

"I just thought of it, that's all," said Edwin glumly,
and with no attempt to be diplomatic.  "Anyhow I
can't go to London to-morrow.  And when I want an
oculist," he finished with grimness, "Hanbridge'll be
good enough for me, I'm thinking."

Strange, she had never before said a word to him
about his eyes!

"Then what shall you do while I'm away?" she asked
implacably.

But if she was implacable, he also could be implacable.
If she insisted on leaving him in the lurch,--well,
she should leave him in the lurch!  Tertius Ingpen
was witness of a plain breach between them.  It was
unfortunate; it was wholly Hilda's fault; but he had
to face the fact.

"I don't know," he replied curtly.

The next moment George returned.

"Hasn't Mrs. Tams been quick, mother?" said
George.  "She's come."



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   VI

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In the drawing-room, after the meal, Edwin could
hear through the half open door the sounds of
conversation between Hilda and Mrs. Tams, with an
occasional word from George, who was going to help
Mrs. Tams to "put the things away" after she had washed
and wiped.  The voice of Mrs. Tams was very gentle
and comforting.  Edwin's indignant pity went out to
her.  Why should Mrs. Tams thus cheerfully bear the
misfortunes of others?  Why should she at a moment's
notice leave a cottageful of young children and a
husband liable at any time to get drunk and maim either
them or her, in order to meet a crisis caused by Hilda's
impulsiveness and lack of tact?  The answer, as in so
many cases, was of course economic.  Mrs. Tams could
not afford not to be at Mrs. Clayhanger's instant call;
also she was born the victim of her own altruism; her
soul was soft like her plump cushionlike body, and
she lived as naturally in injustice as a fish in water.
But could anything excuse those who took advantage of
such an economic system and such a devoted nature?
Edwin's conscience uneasily stirred; he could have
blushed.  However, he was helpless; and he was basely
glad that he was helpless, that it was no affair of
his after all, and that Mrs. Tams had thus to work
out her destiny to his own benefit.  He saw in her a
seraph for the next world, and yet in this world he
contentedly felt himself her superior.  And her voice,
soothing, acquiescent, expressive of the spirit which
gathers in extraneous woes as the mediæval saint drew
to his breast the swords of the executioners, continued
to murmur in the hall.

Edwin thought:

"I alone in this house feel the real significance of
Mrs. Tams.  I'm sure she doesn't feel it herself."

But these reflections were only the vague unimportant
background to the great matter in his mind,--the
difficulty with Hilda.  When he had entered the
house, questions of gaslight and blinds were enormous
to him.  The immense general question of servants had
diminished them to a trifle.  Then the question of
George's headache and eyesight had taken precedence.
And now the relations of husband and wife were mightily
paramount over everything else.  Tertius Ingpen,
having as usual opened the piano, was idly diverting
himself with strange chords, while cigarette smoke rose
into his eyes, making him blink.  Like Edwin, Ingpen
was a little self-conscious after the open trouble in the
dining-room.  It would have been absurd to pretend
that trouble did not exist; on the other hand the
trouble was not of the kind that could be referred to,
by even a very intimate friend.  The acknowledgment
of it had to be mute.  But in addition to being
self-conscious, Ingpen was also triumphant.  There was a
peculiar sardonic and somewhat disdainful look on his
face as he mused over the chords, trying to keep the
cigarette smoke out of his eyes.  His oblique glance
seemed to be saying to Edwin: "What have I always
told you about women?  Well, you've married and
you must take the consequences.  Your wife's no worse
than other wives.  Here am I, free!  And wouldn't you
like to be in my place, my boy! ... How wise I
have been!"

Edwin resented these unspoken observations.  The
contrast between Ingpen's specious support and
flattery of Hilda when she was present, and his sardonic
glance when she was absent, was altogether too marked.
Himself in revolt against the institution of marriage,
Edwin could not bear that Ingpen should attack it.
Edwin had, so far as concerned the outside world, taken
the institution of marriage under his protection.
Moreover Ingpen's glance was a criticism of Hilda such as
no husband ought to permit.  And it was also a
criticism of the husband--that slave and dupe! ... Yet,
at bottom what Edwin resented was Ingpen's contemptuous
pity for the slave and the dupe.

"Why London--and why to-morrow?" said Edwin,
cheerfully, with a superior philosophical air, as though
impartially studying an argumentative position, as
though he could regard the temporary vagaries of an
otherwise fine sensible woman with bland detachment.
He said it because he was obliged to say something, in
order to prove that he was neither a slave nor a dupe.

"Ask me another," replied Ingpen curtly, continuing
to produce chords.

"Well, we shall see," said Edwin mysteriously, firmly,
and loftily; meaning that, if his opinion were invited,
his opinion would be that Hilda would not go away
to-morrow and that whenever she went she would not go
to London.

He had decided to have a grand altercation with his
wife that night, when Ingpen and Mrs. Tams had
departed and George was asleep and they had the house
to themselves.  He knew his ground and he could force
a decisive battle.  He felt no doubt as to the result.
The news of his triumph should reach Ingpen.

Ingpen was apparently about to take up the conversation
when George came clumsily and noisily into the
drawing-room.  All his charm seemed to have left him.

"I thought you were going to help," said Edwin.

"So I am," George challenged him; and, lacking the
courage to stop at that point, added: "But they aren't
ready yet."

"Let's try those Haydn bits, George," Ingpen suggested.

"Oh no!" said George curtly.

Ingpen and the boy had begun to play easy fragments
of duets together.

Edwin said with sternness:

"Sit down to that piano and do as Mr. Ingpen asks
you."

George flushed and looked foolish and sat down; and
Ingpen quizzed him.  All three knew well that Edwin's
fierceness was only one among sundry consequences of
the mood of the housemistress.  The slow movement and
the scherzo from the symphony were played.  And while
the music went on, Edwin heard distantly the opening
and shutting of the front-door and an arrival in the
hall, and then chattering.  Maggie had called.  "What's
she after?" thought Edwin.

"Hoo!  There's Auntie Maggie!" George exclaimed,
as soon as the scherzo was finished, and ran off.

"That boy is really musical," said Ingpen with conviction.

"Yes, I suppose he is," Edwin agreed casually, as
though deprecating a talent which however was
undeniable.  "But you'd never guess he's got a bad
headache, would you?"

It was a strange kind of social evening, and Hilda--it
seemed to the august Edwin--had a strange notion
of the duties of hostess.  Surely, if Mrs. Tams was in
the kitchen, Hilda ought to be in the drawing-room
with their guest!  Surely Maggie ought to have been
brought into the drawing-room,--she was not a school
girl, she was a woman of over forty, and yet she had
quite inexcusably kept her ancient awkwardness and
timidities.  He could hear chatterings from the
dining-room, scurryings through the hall, and chatterings
from the kitchen; then a smash of crockery, a slight
scream, and girlish gigglings.  They were all the same,
all the women he knew, except perhaps Clara,--they had
hours when they seemed to forget that they were adult
and that their skirts were long.  And how was it that
Hilda and Maggie were suddenly so intimate, they
whose discreet mutual jealousy was an undeniable
phenomenon of the family life?  With all his majesty he
was simpleton enough never to have understood that
two women who eternally suspect each other may yet
dissolve upon occasion into the most touching playful
tenderness.  The whole ground-floor was full of the
rumour of an apparent alliance between Hilda and
Maggie.  And as he listened Edwin glanced sternly at the
columns of the evening *Signal*, while Tertius Ingpen,
absorbed, worked his way bravely through a sonata of
Beethoven.

Then George reappeared.

"Mother's going to take me to London to-morrow
about my eyes," said George to Ingpen, stopping the
sonata by his mere sense of the terrific importance of
such tidings.  And he proceeded to describe the
projected doings in London, the visit to Charlie and Janet
Orgreave, and possibly to the Egyptian Hall.

Edwin did not move.  He kept an admirable and complete
calm under the blow.  Hilda was decided, then, to
defy him.  In telling the boy, who during the meal had
been permitted to learn nothing, she had burnt her
boats; she had even burnt Edwin's boats also: which
seemed to be contrary to the rules laid down by society
for conjugal warfare,--but women never could fight
according to rules!  The difficulties and dangers of the
great pitched battle which Edwin had planned for the
close of the evening were swiftly multiplied.  He had
misgivings.

The chattering, giggling girls entered the
drawing-room.  But as Maggie came through the doorway her
face stiffened; her eyes took on a glaze; and when
Ingpen bent over her hand in all the false ardour of his
excessive conventional chivalry, the spinster's terrible
constraint--scourge of all her social existence--gripped
her like a disease.  She could scarcely speak.

"Hello, Mag," Edwin greeted her.

Impossible to divine in this plump, dowdy, fading,
dumb creature the participator in all those chatterings
and gigglings of a few moments earlier!  Nevertheless
Edwin, who knew her profoundly, could see beneath the
glaze of those eyes the commonsense soul of the
sagacious woman protesting against Ingpen's affected
manners and deciding that she did not care for Ingpen at
all.

"Auntie Hamps is being naughty again," said Hilda
bluntly.

Ingpen, and then Edwin, sniggered.

"*I* can't do anything with her, Edwin," said Maggie,
speaking quickly and eagerly, as she and Hilda sat
down.  "She's bound to let herself in for another attack
if she doesn't take care of herself.  And she won't take
care of herself.  She won't listen to the doctor or
anybody else.  She's always on her feet, and she's got
sewing-meetings on the brain just now.  I've got her
to bed early to-night--she's frightfully shaky--and I
thought I'd come up and tell you.  You're the only
one that can do anything with her at all, and you
really must come and see her to-morrow on your way
to the works."

Maggie spoke as though she had been urging Edwin
for months to take the urgent matter in hand and was
now arrived at desperation.

"All right!  All right!" said he, with amiable
impatience; it was the first he had heard of the matter.
"I'll drop in.  But I've got no influence over her," he
added, with sincerity.

"Oh yes, you have!" said Maggie, mildly now.  "I'm
very sorry to hear about George's eyes.  Seeing it's
absolutely necessary for Hilda to take him to London
to-morrow, and you've got no servants at all, can't you
come and sleep at Auntie's for a night or two?  You've
no idea what a relief it would be to me."

In an instant Edwin saw that he was beaten, that
Hilda and Maggie, in the intervals of their giggling,
had combined to overthrow him.  The tone in which
Maggie uttered the words 'George's eyes,' 'absolutely
necessary' and 'such a relief' precluded argument.
His wife would have her capricious unnecessary way,
and he would be turned out of his own house.

"I think you might, dear," said Hilda, with the
angelic persuasiveness of a loving and submissive wife.
Nobody could have guessed from that marvellous
tone that she had been determined to defeat him and
was then, so to speak, standing over his prostrate
form.

Maggie, having said what was necessary to be said,
fell back into the constraint from which no efforts of
her companions could extricate her.  Such was the
effect upon her of the presence of Tertius Ingpen, a
stranger.  Presently Ingpen was scanning time-tables
for Hilda, and George was finding notepaper for her,
and Maggie was running up and down stairs for her.
She was off to London.  "In that woman's head,"
thought Edwin, as, observing his wife, he tried in vain
to penetrate the secrets behind her demeanour, "there's
only room for one idea at a time."



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   VII

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Edwin sat alone in the drawing-room, at the end
of an evening which he declined to call an evening at
all.  His eyes regarded a book on his knee, but he was
not reading it.  His mind was engaged upon the enigma
of his existence.  He had entered his house without the
least apprehension, and brusquely, in a few hours,
everything seemed to be changed for him.  Impulse
had conquered commonsense; his ejectment was a
settled thing; and he was condemned to the hated abode
of Auntie Hamps.  Events seemed enormous; they
desolated him; his mouth was full of ashes.  The
responsibilities connected with George were increasing;
his wife, incalculable and unforeseeable, was getting
out of hand; and the menace of a future removal to
another home in the country was raised again.

He looked about the room; and he imagined all the
house, every object in which was familiar and beloved,
and he simply could not bear to think of the disintegration
of these interiors by furniture-removers, and
of the endless rasping business of creating a new home
in partnership with a woman whose ideas about
furnishing were as unsound as they were capricious.  He
utterly dismissed the fanciful scheme, as he dismissed the
urgings towards public activity.  He deeply resented all
these headstrong intentions to disturb him in his
tranquillity.  They were indefensible, and he would not
have them.  He would die in sullen obstinacy rather
than yield.  Impulse might conquer commonsense, but
not beyond a certain degree.  He would never yield.

Ingpen had departed, to sleep in a room in the same
building as his office at Hanbridge.  He knew that
Ingpen had no comprehension of domestic comfort and a
well-disposed day.  Nevertheless he envied the man his
celestial freedom.  If he, Edwin, were free, what an
ideal life he could make for himself, a life presided
over by commonsense, regularity, and order!  He was
not free; he would never be free; and what had he
obtained in exchange for freedom? ... Ingpen's
immense criticism smote him.  He had a wife and her
child; servants--at intervals; a fine works and many
workpeople; a house, with books; money, security.  The
organised machinery of his existence was tremendous;
and it was all due to him, made by him in his own
interests and to satisfy his own desires.  Without him
the entire structure would crumble in a week; without
him it would have no excuse.  And what was the result?
Was he ever, in any ideal sense, happy: that is, free
from foreboding, from friction, from responsibility,
and withal lightly joyous?  Was any quarter of an
hour of his day absolutely what he would have wished?
He ranged over his day, and concluded that the best
part of it was the very last....  He got into bed, the
candles in the sconce were lit, the gas diminished to a
blue speck, and most of the room in darkness; he lay
down on his left side, took the marker from the volume
in his hand, and began to read; the house was silent
and enclosed; the rumbling tramcar--to whose sound
he had been accustomed from infancy--did not a bit
disturb him; it was in another world; over the edge of
his book he could see the form of his wife, fast asleep
in the other bed, her plaited hair trailing over the
pillow; the feel of the sheets to his limbs was exquisite; he
read, the book was good; the chill of winter just
pleasantly affected the hand that held the book; nothing
annoyed; nothing jarred; sleep approached....  That
fifteen minutes, that twenty or thirty minutes, was all
that he could show as the result of the tremendous
organised machinery of his existence--his house, his
works, his workpeople, his servants, his wife with her
child....

Hilda came with quick determination into the
drawing-room.  They had not spoken to each other alone
since the decision and his defeat.  He was aware of his
heart beating resentfully.

"I'm going to bed now, dear," she said in an
ordinary tone.  "I've got a frightful headache, and I
must sleep.  Be sure and wake me up at seven in the
morning, will you?  I shall have such lots to do."

He thought:

"Has she a frightful headache?"

She bent down and kissed him several times, very
fervently; her lips lingered on his.  And all the time
she frowned ever so little; and it was as if she was
conveying to him: "But--each for himself in marriage,
after all."

In spite of himself, he felt just a little relieved; and
he could not understand why.  He watched her as she
left the room.  How had it come about that the still
finally mysterious creature was living in his house,
imposing her individuality upon him, spoiling his
existence?  He considered that it was all disconcertingly
strange.

He rose, lit a cigarette, and opened the window; and
the frosty air, entering, braced him and summoned his
self-reliance.  The night was wondrous.  And when he
had shut the window and turned again within, the room,
beautiful, withdrawn, peaceful, was wondrous too.  He
reflected that soon he would be in bed, calmly reading,
with his wife unconscious as an infant in the other bed.
And then his grievance against Hilda slowly surged up
and he began for the first time to realise how vast it
was.

"Confound that woman!" he muttered, meaning
Auntie Hamps.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`AUNTIE HAMPS SENTENCED`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER XVIII


.. class:: center medium

   AUNTIE HAMPS SENTENCED

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

On the next evening it was Maggie who opened
Mrs. Hamps's front-door for Edwin.  There was no light in
the lobby, but a faint gleam coming through the open
door of the sitting-room disclosed the silhouette of
Maggie's broad figure.

"I thought you'd call in this morning," said Maggie
discontentedly.  "I asked you to.  I've been expecting
you all day."

"Didn't you get my message?"

"No.  What message?"

"D'you mean to say a lad hasn't been here with my
portmanteau?" demanded Edwin, alarmed and ready
to be annoyed.

"Yes.  A lad's been with your portmanteau.  But he
gave no message."

"D--n him.  I told him to tell you I couldn't possibly
get here before night."

"Well, he didn't!" said Maggie stoutly, throwing back
the blame upon Edwin and his hirelings.  "I particularly
wanted you to come early.  I told Auntie you'd
be coming."

"How's she getting on?" Edwin asked with laconic
gruffness, dismissing Maggie's grievance without an
apology.  He might have to stand nonsense from
Hilda; but he would not stand it from Maggie, of
whose notorious mildness he at once began to take
advantage, as in the old days of their housekeeping
together.  Moreover, his entrance into this abode was a
favour, exhibiting the condescension of the only human
being who could exercise influence upon Auntie Hamps.

"She's worse," said Maggie, briefly and significantly.

"In bed?" said Edwin, less casually, marking her tone.

Maggie nodded.

"Had the doctor?"

"I should think so indeed!"

"Hm!  Why don't you have a light in this lobby?"
he enquired suddenly, on a drily humorous note, as
he groped to suspend his overcoat upon an unstable
hatstand.  It seemed to be a very cold lobby, after
his own radiator-heated half.

"She never will have a light here, unless she's doing
the grand for someone.  Are you going to wash ye?"

"No.  I cleaned up at the works."  A presentiment
of the damp chilliness of the Hamps bedroom had
suggested this precaution.

Maggie preceded him into the sitting-room, where
a hexagonal occasional-table was laid for tea.

"Hello!  Do you eat here?  What's the matter with
the dining-room?"

"The chimney always smokes when the wind's in the
south-west."

"Well, why doesn't she have a cowl put on it?"

"You'd better ask her....  Also she likes to save
a fire.  She can't bear to have two fires going as well
as the kitchen-range.  I'll bring tea in.  It's all ready."

Maggie went away.

Edwin looked round the shabby Victorian room.  A
length of featureless linoleum led from the door to the
table.  This carpet-protecting linoleum exasperated
him.  It expressed the very spirit of his aunt's house.
He glanced at the pictures, the texts, the beady and the
woolly embroideries, the harsh chairs, and the
magnificent morocco exteriors of the photograph-albums in
which Auntie Hamps kept the shiny portraits of all
her relatives, from grand-nieces back to the third and
fourth generation of ancestors.  And a feeling of
desolation came over him.  He thought: "How many days
shall I have to spend in this deadly hole?"  It was
extremely seldom that he visited King Street, and when
he did come the house was brightened to receive him.
He had almost forgotten what the house really was.
And, suddenly thrown back into it at its most
lugubrious and ignoble, after years of the amenities of
Trafalgar Road, he was somehow surprised that that
sort of thing had continued to exist, and he resented
that it should have dared to continue to exist.  He had
a notion that, since he had left it behind, it ought to
have perished.

He cautiously lifted the table and carried it to the
hearthrug.  Then he sat down in the easy-chair, whose
special property, as he remembered, was slowly and
inevitably to slide the sitter forward to the hard
edge of the seat; and he put his feet inside the fender.
In the grate a small fire burned between two
fire-bricks.  He sneezed.  Maggie came in with a tray.

"Are you cold?" she asked, seeing the new situation
of the table.

"Am I cold!" Edwin repeated.

"Well," said Maggie, "I always think your rooms
are so hot."

Edwin seized the small serviceable tongs which saved
the wear of the large tongs matching the poker and
the shovel, and he dragged both firebricks out of the
grate.

"No coal here, I suppose!" he exclaimed gloomily,
opening the black japanned coal-scuttle.  "Oh!  Corn
in Egypt!"  The scuttle was full of coal.  He threw
on to the fire several profuse shovelfuls of best
household nuts which had cost sixteen shillings a ton even
in that district of cheap coal.

"Well," Maggie murmured, aghast.  "It's a good
thing it's you.  If it had been anybody else--"

"What on earth does she do with her money?" he
muttered.

Shrugging her shoulders, Maggie went out again
with an empty tray.

"No servant, either?" Edwin asked, when she returned.

"She's sitting with Auntie."

"Must I go up before I have my tea?"

"No.  She won't have heard you come."

There was a grilled mutton-chop and a boiled egg
on the crowded small table, with tea, bread-and-butter,
two rounds of dry bread, some cakes, and jam.

"Which are you having--egg or chop?" Edwin
demanded as Maggie sat down.

"Oh!  They're both for you."

"And what about you?"

"I only have bread-and-butter as a rule."

Edwin grunted, and started to eat.

"What's supposed to be the matter with her?" he
enquired.

"It seems it's congestion of the lung, and thickened
arteries.  It wouldn't matter so much about the lung
being congested, in itself, only it's the strain on her
heart."

"I see."

"Been in bed all day, I suppose."

"No, she would get up.  But she had to go back to
bed at once.  She had a collapse."

"Hm!"

He could not think of anything else to say.

"Haven't got to-night's *Signal*, have you?"

"Oh no!" said Maggie, astonished at such a strange
demand.  "Hilda get off all right?"

"Yes, they went by the nine train."

"She told me that she should, if she could manage
it.  I expect Mrs. Tams was up there early."

Edwin nodded, recalling with bitterness certain
moments of the early morning.  And then silence ensued.
The brother and sister could not keep the conversation
alive.  Edwin thought: "We know each other
intimately, and we respect each other, and yet we cannot
even conduct a meal together without awkwardness and
constraint.  Has civilisation down here got no further
than that?"  He felt sorry for Maggie, and also kindly
disdainful of her.  He glanced at her furtively and
tried to see in her the girl of the far past.  She had
grown immensely older than himself.  She was now at
home in the dreadful Hamps environment.  True, she
had an income, but had she any pleasures?  It was
impossible to divine what her pleasures might be, what she
thought about when she lay in bed, to what hours she
looked forward.  First his father, then himself, and
lastly Auntie Hamps had subjugated her.  And of the
three Auntie Hamps had most ruthlessly succeeded,
and in the shortest time.  And yet--Edwin felt--even
Auntie Hamps had not quite succeeded, and the original
individual still survived in Maggie and was silently
critical of all the phenomena which surrounded her
and to which she had apparently submitted.  Realising
this, Edwin ceased to be kindly disdainful.

Towards the end of the meal a heavy foot was heard
on the stairs.

"Minnie!" Maggie called.

After shuffling and hesitation the sitting-room door
was pushed ever so little open.

"Yes, miss," said someone feebly.

"Why have you left Mrs. Hamps?  Do you need
anything?"

"Missis made me go, miss," came the reply, very
loosely articulated.

"Come in and take your bread," said Maggie, and
aside to Edwin: "Auntie's at it again!"

After another hesitation the door opened wide, and
Minnie became visible.  She was rather a big girl, quite
young, fat, too fair, undecided, obviously always
between two minds.  Her large apron, badly-fitting over
the blue frock, was of a dubious yellow colour.  She
wore spectacles.  Behind her spectacles she seemed to
be blinking in confusion at all the subtle complexities of
existence.  She advanced irregularly to the table with
a sort of nervous desperation, as if saying: "I have
to go through this ordeal."  Edwin could not judge
whether she was about to smile or about to weep.

"Here's your bread," said Maggie, indicating the two
rounds of dry bread.  "I've left the dripping on the
kitchen table for you."

Edwin, revolted, perceived of course in a flash what
the life of Minnie was under the regime of Auntie
Hamps.

"Thank ye, miss."

He noticed that the veiled voice was that of a rather
deaf person.

Blushing, Minnie took the bread, and moved away.
Just as she reached the door, she gave a great sob,
followed by a number of little ones; and the bread fell
on to the carpet.  She left it there, and vanished, still
violently sobbing.

Edwin, spellbound, stopped masticating.  A momentary
sensation almost of horror seized him.  Maggie
turned pale, and he was glad that she turned pale.  If
she had shown by no sign that such happenings were
unusual, he would have been afraid of the very house
itself, of its mere sinister walls which seemed to shelter
sick tyrants, miserable victims, and enchanted captives;
he would have begun to wonder whether he himself
was safe in it.

"What next?" muttered Maggie, intimidated but
plucky, rising and following Minnie.  "Just go up to
Auntie, will you?" she called to Edwin over her shoulder.
"She oughtn't really to be left alone for a minute."



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   II

.. vspace:: 2

Edwin pushed open the door and crept with precautions
into the bedroom.  Mrs. Hamps was dozing.  In
the half-light of the lowered gas he looked at her and
was alarmed, shocked, for it was at once apparent that
she must be very ill.  She lay reclining against
several crumpled and crushed pillows, with her head on
one side and her veined hands limp on the eiderdown,
between the heavy brown side-curtains that hung from
the carved mahogany tester.  The posture seemed to
be that of an exhausted animal, surprised by the
unconsciousness of final fatigue, shameless in the intense
need of repose.  Auntie Hamps had ceased to be a
Wesleyan, a pillar of society, a champion of the
conventions, and a keeper-up of appearances; she was just
an utterly wearied and beaten creature, breathing
noisily through wide-open mouth.  Edwin could not
remember ever having seen her when she was not to
some extent arrayed for the world's gaze; he had not
seen her at the crisis of any of her recent attacks.  He
knew that more than once she had recovered when
good judges had pronounced recovery impossible; but
he was quite sure, now, that she would never rise from
that bed.  He had the sudden dreadful thought: "She
is done for, sentenced, cut off from the rest of us.
This is the end for her.  She won't be able to pretend
any more.  All her efforts have come to this."  The
thought affected him like a blow.  And two somewhat
contradictory ideas sprang from it: first, the entire
absurdity of her career as revealed by its close, and
secondly, the tragic dignity with which its close was
endowing her.

At once contemptible and august, she was diminished,
even in size.  Her scanty grey hair was tousled.
Her pink flannel night-dress with its long, loose sleeves
was grotesque; the multitude of her patched outer
wrappings, from which peeped her head on its withered
neck, and safety-pins, and the orifice of a hot-water
bag, were equally grotesque.  None of the bed-linen was
clean, or of good quality.  The eiderdown was old, and
the needle-points of its small white feathers were
piercing it.  The table at the bed-head had a strange
collection of poor, odd crockery.  The whole room, with
its distempered walls of an uncomfortable green colour,
in spite of several respectable pieces of mahogany
furniture, seemed to be the secret retreat of a graceless and
mean indigence.  And above all it was damply cold;
the window stood a little open, and only the tiniest
fire burnt in the inefficient grate.

For decades Auntie Hamps, with her erect figure
and handsome face, her black silks, jet ornaments, and
sealskins, her small regular subscriptions and her
spasmodic splendours of golden generosity, her heroic
relentless hypocrisies and her absolute self-reliance and
independence, had exhibited a glorious front to the
world.  With her, person and individuality were almost
everything, and the environment she had made for
herself almost nothing.  The ground-floor of her house
was presentable, especially when titivated for
occasional hospitalities, but not more than presentable.  The
upper floor was never shown.  In particular, Auntie
Hamps was not one of those women who invite other
women to their bedrooms.  Her bedroom was guarded
like a fastness.  In it, unbeheld, lived the other Auntie
Hamps, complementary to the grand and massive Mrs. Hamps
known to mankind.  And now the fastness was
exposed, defenceless, and its squalid avaricious secrets
discovered; and she was too broken to protest.  There
was something unbearably pitiful in that.  Her pose
was pitiful and her face was pitiful.  Those features
were still far from ugly; the contours of the flushed
cheeks, the chin, and the convex eyelids were astonishingly
soft, and recalled the young girl of about half a
century earlier.  She was both old and young in her
troubled unconsciousness.  The reflection was inevitable:
"She was a young girl--and now she is sentenced."  Edwin
felt himself desolated by a terrible gloom which
questioned the justification of all life.  The cold of the
room made him shiver.  After gazing for a long time
at the sufferer, he tiptoed to the fire.  On the painted
iron mantelpiece were a basalt clock and three
photographs; a recent photograph of smirking Clara
surrounded by her brood; a faded photograph of Maggie
as a young girl, intolerably dowdy; and an equally
faded photograph of himself as a young man of twenty,--he
remembered the suit and the necktie in which he
had been photographed.  The simplicity, the
ingenuousness, of his own boyish face moved him deeply and
at the same time disgusted him.  "Was I like that?"
he thought, astounded, and he felt intensely sorry
for the raw youth.  Above the clock was suspended by
a ribbon a new green card, lettered in silver with some
verses entitled "Lean Hard."  This card, he knew,
had superseded a booklet of similar tenor that used
to lie on the dressing-table when he was an infant.
The verses began:

   |   *Child of My love, "Lean hard",*
   |   *And let Me feel the pressure of thy care.*
   |

And they ended:

   |   *Thou lovest Me.  I knew it.  Doubt not then,*
   |   *But loving Me, LEAN HARD.*
   |

All his life he had laughed at the notion of his
Auntie leaning hard upon anything whatever.  Yet
she had lived continually with these verses ever since
the year of their first publication; she had never
tired of their message.  And now Edwin was touched.
He seemed to see some sincerity, some beauty, in them.
He had a vision of their author, unknown to literature,
but honoured in a hundred thousand respectable homes.
He thought: "Did Auntie only pretend to believe in
them?  Or did she think she did believe in them?  Or
did she really believe in them?"  The last seemed a
possibility.  Supposing she did really believe in
them? ... Yes, he was touched.  He was ready to admit
that spirituality was denied to none.  He seemed to
come into contact with the universal immanent spirituality.

Then he stooped to put some bits of coal silently
on the fire.

"Who's that putting coal on the fire?" said a faint
but sharply protesting voice from the bed.

The weakness of the voice gave Edwin a fresh shock.
The voice seemed to be drawing on the very last reserves
of its owner's vitality.  Owing to the height of the
foot of the bed, Auntie Hamps could not see anything
at the fireplace lower than the mantelpiece.  As she
withdrew from earth she employed her fading faculties
to expostulate against a waste of coal and to identify
the unseen criminal.

"I am," said Edwin cheerfully.  "It was nearly out."

He stood up, smiling slightly, and faced her.

Auntie Hamps, lifting her head and frowning in
surprise, gazed at him for a few moments, as if trying
to decide who he was.  Then she said, in the same
enfeebled tone as before:

"Eh, Edwin!  I never heard you come in.  This is
an honour!"  And her head dropped back.

"I'm sleeping here," said Edwin, with determined
cheerfulness.  "Did ye know?"

She reflected, and answered deliberately, using her
volition to articulate every syllable:

"Yes.  Ye're having Maggie's room."

"Oh no, Auntie!"

"Yes, you are.  I've told her."  The faint voice
became harshly obstinate.  "Turn the gas up a bit,
Edwin, so that I can see you.  Well, this is an honour.
Did Maggie give ye a proper tea?"

"Oh yes, thanks.  Splendid."

He raised the gas.  Auntie Hamps blinked.

"You want something to shade this gas," said Edwin.
"I'll fix ye something."

The gas-bracket was a little to the right of the
fireplace, over the dressing-table, and nearly opposite the
bed.  Auntie Hamps nodded.  Having glanced about,
Edwin put a bonnet-box on the dressing-table and on
that, upright and open, the Hamps family Bible from
the ottoman.  The infirm creation was just lofty
enough to come between the light and the old woman's eyes.

"That'll be better," said he.  "You're not at all
well, I hear, Auntie."  He endeavoured to be tactful.

She slowly shook her head as it lay on the pillow.

"This is one of my bad days....  But I shall pick
up....  Then has Hilda taken George to London?"

Edwin nodded.

"Eh, I do hope and pray it'll be all right.  I've had
such good eyesight myself, I'm all the more afraid for
others.  What a blessing it's been to me! ... Eh,
what a good mother dear Hilda is!"  She added after
a pause: "I daresay there never was such a mother
as Hilda, unless it's Clara."

"Has Clara been in to-day?" Edwin demanded, to
change the subject of conversation.

"No, she hasn't.  But she will, as soon as she has a
moment.  She'll be popping in.  They're such a tie on
her, those children are--and how she looks after
them! ... Edwin!"  She called him, as though he were receding.

"Yes?"

The frail voice continued, articulating with great
carefulness, and achieving each sentence as though it
were a miracle, as indeed it was:

"I think no one ever had such nephews and nieces
as I have.  I've never had children of my own--that
was not to be!--but I must say the Lord has made it
up to me in my nephews and nieces.  You and Hilda
... and Clara and Albert ... and the little
chicks!"  Tears stood in her eyes.

"You're forgetting Maggie," said Edwin, lightly.

"Yes," Auntie Hamps agreed, but in a quite different
tone, reluctant and critical.  "I'm sure Maggie does
her best.  Oh!  I'm sure she does ... Edwin!"  Again
she called him.

He approached the tumbled bed, and even sat on
the edge of it, his hands in his pockets.  Auntie Hamps,
though breathing now more rapidly and with more
difficulty, seemed to have revitalised herself at some
mysterious source of energy.  She was still preoccupied
by the mental concentration and the effort of volition
required for the smallest physical acts incident to her
continued existence; but she had accumulated power for
the furtherance of greater ends.

"D'ye want anything?" Edwin suggested, indicating
the contents of the night-table.

She moved her head to signify a negative.  Her
pink-clad arms did not stir.  And her whole being seemed
to be suspended while she prepared for an exertion.

"I'm so relieved you've come," she said at length,
slowly and painfully.  "You can't think what a relief
it is to me.  I've really no one but you....  It's
about that girl."

"What girl?"

"Minnie."

"The servant?"

Mrs. Hamps inclined her head, and fetched breath
through the wide-open mouth.  "I've only just found
it out.  She's in trouble.  Oh!  She admitted it to
me a bit ago.  I sent her downstairs.  I wouldn't have
her in my bedroom a minute longer.  She's in trouble.
I felt sure she was....  She was at class-meeting
last Wednesday.  And only yesterday I paid her her
wages.  Only yesterday!  Here she lives on the fat of
the land, and what does she do for it?  I assure you
I have to see to everything myself.  I'm always after
her....  In a month she won't be fit to be seen
... Edwin, I've never been so ashamed....  That I
should have to tell such a thing to my own
nephew!"  She ceased, exhausted.

Edwin was somewhat amused.  He could not help
feeling amused at such an accident happening in the
house of Mrs. Hamps.

"Who's the man?" he asked.

"Yes, and that's another thing!" answered Mrs. Hamps
solemnly, in her extreme weakness.  "It's the
barman at the Vaults, of all people.  She wouldn't
admit it, but I know."

"What are you going to do?"

"She must leave my house at once."

"Where does she live--I mean her people?"

"She has no parents."  Auntie Hamps reflected for
a few moments.  "She has an aunt at Axe."

"Well, she can't get to Axe to-night," said Edwin
positively.  "Does Maggie know about it?"

"Maggie!" exclaimed Mrs. Hamps scornfully.
"Maggie never notices *anything*."  She added in a
graver tone: "And there's no reason why Maggie
should know.  It's not the sort of thing that Maggie
ought to know about.  You can speak to the girl
herself.  It will come much better from you.  I shall
simply tell Maggie I've decided the girl must go."

"She can't go to-night," Edwin repeated, humouringly,
but firmly.

Auntie Hamps proved the sincerity of her regard
for him by yielding.

"Well," she murmured, "to-morrow morning, then.
She can turn out the sitting-room, and clean the silver
in the black box, and then she can go--before dinner.
I don't see why I should give her her dinner.  Nor her
extra day's wages either."

"And what shall you do for a servant?  Get a
charwoman?"

"Charwoman?  No!  Maggie will manage."  And
then with a sudden flare of relished violence: "I
always knew that girl was a mopsy slut.  And what's
more, if you ask me, she brought him into the
house--and after eleven o'clock at night too!"

"All right!" Edwin muttered, to soothe the patient.

And Mrs. Hamps sadly smiled.

"It's such a relief to me," she breathed.  "You don't
know what a relief to me it is to put it in your hands."

Her eyelids dropped.  She said no more.  Having
looked back for an instant in a supreme effort on
behalf of the conventions upon which society was
established, Auntie Hamps turned again exhausted
towards the lifting veil of the unknown.  And Edwin
began to realise the significance of the scene that was
ended.



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   III

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"I say," Edwin began, when he had silently closed the
door of the sitting-room.  "Here's a lark, if you
like!"  And he gave a short laugh.  It was under such language
and such demeanour that he concealed his real emotion,
which was partly solemn, partly pleasurable, and
wholly buoyant.

Maggie looked up gloomily.  With a bit of pencil
held very close to the point in her heavy fingers, she
was totting up the figures of household accounts in a
penny red-covered cash-book.

Edwin went on:

"It seems the girl yon"--he indicated the kitchen
with a jerk of the head--"'s been and got herself into
a mess."

Maggie leaned her chin on her hand.

"Has she been talking to you about it?"  With a
similar jerk of the head Maggie indicated Mrs. Hamps's
bedroom.

"Yes."

"I suppose she's only just found it out?"

"Who?  Auntie?  Yes.  Did you know about it?"

"Did I know about it?" Maggie repeated with mild
disdainful impatience.  "Of course I knew about it.
I've known for weeks.  But I wasn't going to tell
*her*."  She finished bitterly.

Edwin regarded his sister with new respect and not
without astonishment.  Never before in their lives had
they discussed any inconvenient sexual phenomenon.
Save for vague and very careful occasional reference
to Clara's motherhood, Maggie had never given any
evidence to her brother that she was acquainted with
what are called in Anglo-Saxon countries "the facts of
life," and he had somehow thought of her as not
having emerged, at the age of forty-four or so, from the
naïve ignorance of the young girl.  Now her
perfectly phlegmatic attitude in front of the Minnie
episode seemed to betoken a familiarity that approached
cynicism.  And she was not at all tongue-tied; she was
at her ease.  She had become a woman of the world.
Edwin liked her; he liked her manner and her tone.
His interest in the episode even increased.

"She was for turning her out to-night," said he.
"I stopped that."

"I should think so indeed!"

"I've got her as far as to-morrow morning."

"The girl won't go to-morrow morning either!" said
Maggie.  "At least, if she goes, I go."  She spoke with
tranquillity, adding: "But we needn't bother about
that.  Auntie'll be past worrying about Minnie
to-morrow morning....  I'd better go up to her.  She
can't possibly be left alone."

Maggie shut the account-book, and rose.

"I only came down for a sec to tell you.  She was
dozing," said Edwin apologetically.  "She's awfully
ill.  I'd no idea."

"Yes, she's ill right enough."

"Who'll sit up with her?"

"I shall."

"Did you sit up with her last night?"

"No--only part of the night."

"We ought to get a nurse."

"Well, we can't get one to-night."

"And what about Clara?  Can't she take a turn?
Surely in a case like this she can chuck her eternal
kids for a bit."

"I expect she could.  But she doesn't know."

"Haven't you sent round?"  He expressed surprise.

"I couldn't," said Maggie with undisturbed
equanimity.  "Who could I send?  I couldn't spare Minnie.
The thing didn't seem at all serious until this morning.
Since then I've had my hands full."

"Yes, I can see you have," Edwin agreed appreciatively.

"It was lucky the doctor called on his own.  He
does sometimes, you know, since she began to have
her attacks."

"Well, I'll go round to Clara's myself," said Edwin.

"I shouldn't," said Maggie.  "At least not to-night."

"Why not?"  He might have put the question angrily,
overbearingly; but Maggie was so friendly, suave,
confidential, persuasive, and so sure of herself, that with
pleasure he copied her accents.  He enjoyed thus
talking to her intimately in the ugly dark house, with the
life-bearing foolish Minnie on the one hand, and the
dying old woman on the other.  He thought: "There's
something splendid about Mag.  In fact I always knew
there was."  And he forgot her terrible social
shortcomings, her utter lack of the feminine seductiveness
that for him ought to be in every woman, and her
invincible stolidity.  Her sturdy and yet scarcely
articulate championship of Minnie delighted him and
quickened his pulse.

"I'd sooner not have her here to-night," said Maggie.
"You knew they'd had a tremendous rumpus, didn't you?"

"Who?  Auntie and Clara?"

"Yes."

"I didn't.  What about?  When?  Nobody ever said
anything to me."

"Oh, it must have been two or three months ago.
Auntie said something about Albert not paying me my
interest on my money he's got.  And then Clara flared
up, and the fat was in the fire."

"D'you mean to say he's not paying you your
interest?  Why didn't you tell me?"

"Oh!  It doesn't matter.  I didn't want to bother you."

"Well, you ought to have bothered me," said
Edwin, with a trace of benevolent severity.  He was
astounded, and somewhat hurt, that this great family
event should have been successfully concealed from
him.  He felt furious against Albert and Clara, and at
the same time proud that his prognostication about
the investment with Albert had proved correct.

"Did Hilda know?"

"Oh yes.  Hilda knew."

"Well, I'm dashed!"  The exclamation showed
naïvete.  His impression of the chicanery of women was
deepened, so that it actually disquieted him.  "But I
suppose," he went on, "I suppose this row isn't going
to stop Clara from coming here, seeing the state
Auntie's in?"

"No, certainly not.  Clara would come like a shot
if she knew, and Albert as well.  She's a good
nurse--in some ways."

"Well, if they aren't told, and anything happens to
Auntie in the night, there'll be a fine to-do
afterwards,--don't forget that."

"Nothing'll happen to Auntie in the night," said
Maggie, with tranquil reassurance.  "And I don't think
I could stand 'em to-night."

The hint of her nervous susceptibility, beneath that
stolid exterior, appealed to him.

Maggie, since closing the account-book, had moved
foot by foot anxiously towards the door, and had only
been kept in the room by the imperative urgency of
the conversation.  She now had her hand on the door.

"I say!"  He held her yet another moment.  "What's
this about me taking your room?  I don't want to
turn you out of your room."

"That's all right," she said, with a kind smile.  "It's
easiest, really.  Moreover, I daresay there won't be such
a lot of sleeping....  I must go up at once.  She
can't possibly be left alone."

Maggie opened the door and she had scarcely
stepped forth when Minnie from the kitchen rushed
into the lobby and dropped, intentionally or
unintentionally, on her knees before her.  Edwin, unobserved
by Minnie, witnessed the scene through the doorway.
Minnie, agitated almost to the point of hysteria, was
crying violently and as she breathed her shoulders
lifted and fell, and the sound of her sobbing rose
periodically to a shriek and sank to a groan.  She knelt with
her body and thighs upright and her head erect,
making no attempt to stem the tears or to hide her face.
In her extreme desolation she was perhaps as
unconscious of herself as she had ever been.  Her cap was
awry on her head, and her hair disarranged; the
blinking spectacles made her ridiculous; only the blue print
uniform, and the sinister yellowish apron drawn down
tight under her knees, gave a certain respectable
regularity to her extraordinary and grotesque appearance.

To Edwin she seemed excessively young and yet far
too large and too developed for her age.  The girl was
obviously a fool.  Edwin could perceive in her no charm
whatever, except that of her innocence; and it was not
easy to imagine that any man, even the barman at the
Vaults, could have mistaken her, even momentarily,
for the ideal.  And then some glance of her spectacled
eyes, or some gesture of the great red hand, showed him
his own blindness and mysteriously made him realise
the immensity of the illusion and the disillusion through
which she had passed in her foolish and incontinent
simplicity.  What had happened to her was miraculous,
exquisite, and terrible.  He felt the magic of her
illusion and the terror of her disillusion.  Already in her
girlishness and her stupidity she had lived through
supreme hours.  "Compared to her," he thought, "I don't
know what life is.  No man does."  And he not only
suffered for her sorrow, he gave her a sacred quality.
It seemed to him that heaven itself ought to endow
her with beauty, grace, and wisdom, so that she might
meet with triumphant dignity the ordeals that awaited
her; and that mankind should supplement the work of
heaven by clothing her richly and housing her in
secluded splendour, and offering her the service which
only victims merit.  Surely her caprices ought to be
indulged and honoured! ... Edwin was indignant;
indignation positively burnt his body.  She was
helpless and defenceless and she had been exploited by
Auntie Hamps.  And after having been exploited she
had been driven out by ukase on week-night to
class-meeting and on Sunday night to chapel, to find Christ,
with the result that she had found the barman at
the Vaults.  The consequences were inevitable.  She
was definitely ruined, unless the child should bereave
her by dying; and even then she might still be ruined.
And what about the child, if the child lived?  And
although Edwin had never seen the silly girl before, he
said to himself, while noticing that a crumb or two of
the bread dropped by her still remained on the floor:
"I'll see that girl through whatever it costs!"  He was
not indignant against Auntie Hamps.  How could he
be indignant against an expiring old creature already
desperate in the final dilemma.  He felt nearly as sorry
for Auntie Hamps as for Minnie.  He was indignant
against destiny, of which Auntie Hamps was only the
miserable, unimaginative instrument.

"I'd better go to-night, miss.  Let me go to-night!"
cried Minnie.  And she cried so loudly that Edwin was
afraid Auntie Hamps might hear and might make an
apparition at the head of the stairs and curse Minnie
with fearful Biblical names.  And the old woman in the
curtained bed upstairs was almost as present to him
as the girl kneeling before his eyes on the linoleum
of the lobby.

"Minnie!  Minnie!  Don't be foolish!" said Maggie,
standing over her and soothing her, not with her hands
but with her voice.

Maggie had shown no perturbation or even surprise
at Minnie's behaviour.  She stood looking down at her
benevolent, deprecating, and calm.  And by contrast
with Minnie she seemed to be quite middle-aged.  Her
tone was exactly right.  It reminded Edwin of the
tone which she would use to himself when, she was
sixteen and the housekeeper, and he was twelve.  Maggie
had long since lost authority over him; she had lost
everything; she would die without having lived; she
had never begun to live--(No, perhaps once she had
just begun to live!)--Minnie had prime knowledge far
exceeding hers.  And yet she had power over Minnie
and could exercise it with skill.

Minnie, hesitating, sobbed more slowly, and then
ceased to sob.

"Go back into the kitchen and have something to
eat, and then you can go to bed.  You'll feel differently
in the morning," said Maggie with the same gentle
blandness.

And Minnie, as though fascinated, rose from her knees.

Edwin, surmising what had passed between the two
in the kitchen while he was in the bedroom, was aware
of a fresh, intense admiration for Maggie.  She might
be dowdy, narrow, dull, obstinate, virgin,--but she
was superb.  She had terrific reserves.  He was proud
of her.  The tone merely of her voice as she spoke
to the girl seemed to prove the greatness of her
deeply-hidden soul.

Suddenly Minnie caught sight of Edwin through the
doorway, flushed red, had the air of slavishly
apologising to the unapproachable male for having disturbed
him by her insect-woes, and vanished.  Maggie
hurried upstairs to the departing.  Edwin was alone with
the chill draught from the lobby into the room, and
with the wonder of life.



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   IV

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In the middle of the night Edwin kept watch over
Auntie Hamps, who was asleep.  He sat in a rocking-chair,
with his back to the window and the right side of
his face to the glow of the fire.  The fire was as
effective as the size and form of the grate would allow;
it burnt richly red; but its influence did not seem to
extend beyond a radius of four feet outwards from its
centre.  The terrible damp chill of the Five Towns
winter hung in the bedroom like an invisible miasma.
He could feel the cold from the window, which was
nevertheless shut, through the shawl with which he had
closed the interstices of the back of the chair, and,
though he had another thick shawl over his knees, the
whole of his left side felt the creeping attack of the
insidious miasma.  A thermometer which he had found
and which lay on the night-table five yards from the
fire registered only fifty-two degrees.  His expelled
breath showed in the air.  It was as if he were fighting
with all resources against frigidity, and barely holding
his own.

In the half-light of the gas, still screened from the
bed by the bonnet-box and the Bible, he glanced round
amid the dark meadows at the mean and sinister
ugliness of the historic chamber, the secret nest and
withdrawing place of Auntie Hamps; and the real asceticism
of her life and of the life of all her generation
almost smote him.  Half a century earlier such a room had
represented comfort; in some details, as for instance
in its bed, it represented luxury; and in half a century
Auntie Hamps had learnt nothing from the material
progress of civilisation but the use of the hot-water
bag; her vanished and forgotten parents would have
looked askance at the enervating luxuriousness of her
hot-water bag--unknown even to the crude wistful boy
Edwin on the mantelpiece.  And Auntie Hamps herself
was wont as it were to atone for it by using the still
tepid water therefrom for her morning toilet instead
of having truly hot water brought up from the kitchen.
Edwin thought: "Are we happier for these changes
brought about by the mysterious force of evolution?"  And
answered very emphatically: "Yes, we are."  He
would not for anything have gone back to the austerities
of his boyhood.

He rocked gently to and fro in the chair, excited
by events and by the novel situation, and he was not
dissatisfied with himself.  Indeed he was aware of a
certain calm complacency, for his commonsense had
triumphed over Maggie's devoted silly womanishness.
Maggie was for sitting up through the night; she was
anxious to wear herself out for no reason whatever;
but he had sent her to bed until three o'clock, promising
to call her if she should be needed.  The exhausted
girl was full of sagacity save on that one point of
martyrdom to the fullest--apparently with her a point
of honour.  For the sake of the sensation of having
martyrised herself utterly she was ready to imperil her
fitness for the morrow.  She secretly thought it was
unfair to call upon him, a man, to share her fatigues.
He regarded himself as her superior in wisdom, and
he was relieved that anyone so wise and balanced as
Edwin Clayhanger had taken supreme charge of the
household organism.

Restless, he got up from the chair and looked at
the bed.  He had heard no unusual sound therefrom,
but to excuse his restlessness he had said: "Suppose
some change had occurred and I didn't notice it!"  No
change had occurred.  Auntie Hamps lay like a
mite, like a baby forlorn, senile and defenceless, amid
the heaped pillows and coverings of the bed.  Within
the deep gloom of the canopy and the over-arching
curtains only her small, soft face was alive; even her
hair was hidden in the indentation made by the weight
of her head in the pillows.  She was unconscious,
either in sleep or otherwise,--he could not tell how.
And in her unconsciousness the losing but obstinate
fight against the power which was dragging her over
the edge of eternity still went on.  It showed in the
apprehensive character of her breathing, which made
a little momentary periodic cloud above her face, and
in the uneasy muscular movements of the lips and
jaws, and in the vague noises in her throat.  A
tremendous pity for her re-entered his heart, almost
breaking it, because she was so beaten, and so fallen from
the gorgeousness of her splendour.  Even Minnie could
have imposed her will upon Auntie Hamps now; each
hour she weakened.

He had no more resentment against her on account
of Minnie, no accusation to formulate.  He was merely
grieved, with a compassionate grief, that Auntie Hamps
had learnt so little while living so long.  He knew that
she was cruel only because she was incapable of
imagining what it was to be Minnie.  He understood.  She
worshipped God under the form of respectability, but
she did worship God.  Like all religious votaries she
placed religion above morality; hence her chicane, her
inveterate deceit and self-deceit.  It was with a
religious aim that she had concealed from him the
estrangement between herself and Clara.  The unity of
the family was one of her major canons (as indeed
it was one of Edwin's).  She had a passion for her
nephew and nieces.  It was a grand passion.  Her
pride in them must have been as terrific as her longing
that they and all theirs should conform to the sole
ideal that she comprehended.  Undeniably there was
something magnificent in her religion--her unscrupulousness
in the practice of it, and the mighty consistency
of her career.  She had lived.  He ceased to pity
her, for she towered above pity.  She was dying, but
only for an instant.  He would smile at his aunt's
primeval notions of a future life, yet he had to admit that
his own notions, though far less precise, could not
be appreciably less crude.  He and she were anyhow
at one in the profound and staggering conviction of
immortality.  Enlightened by that conviction, he was able
to reduce the physical and mental tragedy of the
death-bed to its right proportions as a transiency
between the heroic past and the inconceivable future.
And in the stillness of the room and the stillness of
the house, perfumed by the abnegation of Maggie and
the desolate woe of the ruined Minnie whom the
Clayhangers would save, and in the outer stillness of the
little street with the Norman church-tower sticking up
out of history at the bottom of its slope, Edwin felt
uplifted and serene.

He returned to the rocking-chair.

"She's asleep now in some room I've never seen!"
he reflected.

He was suddenly thinking of his wife.  During the
previous night, lying sleepless close to her while she
slept soundly, he had reflected long and with increasing
pessimism.  The solace of Hilda's kiss had proved
fleeting.  She had not realised--he himself was then only
realising little by little--the enormity of the thing
she had done.  What she had deliberately and
obstinately done was to turn him out of his house.  No
injury that she might have chosen could have touched
him more closely, more painfully,--for his house to
him was sacred.  Her blundering with the servants
might be condoned, but what excuse was it possible to
find for this precipitate flight to London involving the
summary ejectment from the home of him who had
created the home and for and by whom the home chiefly
existed?  True the astounding feat of wrong-headedness
had been aided by the mere chance of Maggie's
calling (capricious women were always thus lucky!),--Maggie's
suggestion and request had given some afterglow
of reason to the mad project.  But the justification
was still far from sufficient.  And the odious idea
haunted him that, even if Maggie had not called with
her tale, Hilda would have persisted in her scheme all
the same.  Yes, she was capable of that!  The argument
that George's eyes (of whose condition she had
learnt by mere hazard) could not wait until domestic
affairs were arranged, was too grotesque to deserve an
answer.

Lying thus close to his wife in the dark, he had
perceived that the conflict between his individuality
and hers could never cease.  No diplomatic devices
of manner could put an end to it.  And he had seen
also that as they both grew older and developed more
fully, the conflict was becoming more serious.  He
assumed that he had faults, but he was solemnly
convinced that the faults of Hilda were tremendous,
essential, and ineradicable.  She had a faculty for acting
contrary to justice and contrary to sense which was
simply monstrous.  And it had always been so.  Her
whole life had been made up of impulsiveness and
contumacy in that impulsiveness.  Witness the incredible
scenes of the strange Dartmoor episode--all due to her
stubborn irrationality!  The perspective of his
marriage was plain to him in the night,--and it ended in
a rupture.  He had been resolutely blind to Hilda's
peculiarities, dismissing incident after incident as an
isolated misfortune.  But he could be blind no more.  His
marriage was all of a piece, and he must and would
recognise the fact....  The sequel would be a
scandal! ... Well, let it be a scandal!  As the minutes
and hours passed in grim meditation, the more attractive
grew the lost freedom of the bachelor and the more
ready he felt to face any ordeal that lay between him
and it....  And just as it was occurring to him
that his proper course was to have fought a terrific
open decisive battle with her in front of both Maggie
and Ingpen he had fallen asleep.

Upon awaking, barely in time to arouse Hilda, he
knew that the mood of the night had not melted away
as such moods are apt to melt when the window begins
to show a square of silver-grey.  The mood was even
intensified.  Hilda had divined nothing.  She never did
divine the tortures which she inflicted in his heart.  She
did not possess the gumption to divine.  Her demeanour
had been amazing.  She averred that she had not
slept at all.  Instead of cajoling, she bullied.  Instead
of tacitly admitting that she was infamously
wronging him, she had assumed a grievance of her
own--without stating it.  Once she had said discontentedly
about some trifle: "You might *at any rate*----" as
though the victim should caress the executioner.  She
had kissed him at departure, but not as usual effusively,
and he had suffered the kiss in enmity; and after an
unimaginable general upset and confusion, in which
George had shown himself strangely querulous, she
had driven off with her son,--unconscious, stupidly
unaware, that she was leaving a disaster behind her.  And
last of all Edwin, solitary, had been forced to
perform the final symbolic act, that of locking him out
of his own sacred home!  The affair had transcended
belief.

All day at the works his bitterness and melancholy
had been terrible, and the works had been shaken with
apprehension, for no angry menaces are more
disconcerting than those of a man habitually mild.  Before
evening he had decided to write to his wife from Auntie
Hamps's,--a letter cold, unanswerable, crushing, that
would confront her unescapably with the alternatives
of complete submission or complete separation.  The
phrases of the letter came into his mind....  He
would see who was master....  He had been full of
the letter when he entered Auntie Hamps's lobby.  But
the strange tone in which Maggie had answered his
questions about the sick woman had thrust the letter
and the crisis right to the back of his mind, where
they had uneasily remained throughout the evening.
And now in the rocking-chair he was reflecting:

"She's asleep in some room I've never seen!"

He smiled, such a smile, candid, generous, and affectionate,
as was Hilda's joy, such a smile as Hilda dwelt
on in memory when she was alone.  The mood of
resentment passed away, vanished like a nightmare at
dawn, and like one of his liverish headaches dispersed
suddenly after the evening meal.  He saw everything
differently.  He saw that he had been entirely wrong in
his estimate of the situation, and of Hilda.  Hilda was
a mother.  She had the protective passion of maternity.
She was carried away by her passions; but her passions
were noble, marvellous, unique.  He himself could
never--he thought, humbled--attain to her emotional
heights.  He was incapable of feeling about anything
or anybody as she felt about George.  The revelation
concerning George's eyesight had shocked her,
overwhelmed her with remorse, driven every other idea out
of her head.  She must atone to George instantly;
instantly she must take measures--the most drastic and
certain--to secure him from the threatened danger.
She could not count the cost till afterwards.  She was
not a woman in such moments,--she was an instinct, a
desire, a ruthless purpose.  And as she felt towards
George, so she must feel, in other circumstances,
towards himself.  Her kisses proved it, and her soothing
hand when he was unwell.  Mrs. Hamps had said: "Eh,
dear!  What a good mother dear Hilda is!"  A
sentimental outcry!  But there was profound truth in it,
truth which the old woman had seen better than he
had seen it.  "I daresay there never was such a
mother--unless it's Clara!"  Hyperbole!  And yet he himself
now began to think that there never could have been
such a mother as Hilda.  Clara too in her way was
wonderful....  Smile as you might, these mothers
were tremendous.  The mysterious sheen of their
narrow and deep lives dazzled him.  For the first time,
perhaps, he bowed his head to Clara.

But Hilda was far beyond Clara.  She was not
only a mother but a lover.  Would he cut himself off
from her loving?  Why?  For what?  To live alone
in the arid and futile freedom of a Tertius Ingpen?
Such a notion was fatuous.  Where lay the difficulty
between himself and Hilda?  There was no difficulty.
How had she harmed him?  She had not harmed him.
Everything was all right.  He had only to understand.
He understood.  As for her impulsiveness,
her wrongheadedness, her bizarre ratiocination,--he
knew how to accept them, for was he not a philosopher?
They were indeed part of the incomparable romance
of existence with these prodigious and tantalising
creatures.  He admitted that Hilda in some aspects
transcended him, but in others he was comfortably
confident of his own steady, conquering superiority.  He
thought of her with the most exquisite devotion.  He
pictured the secret tenderness of their reunion amid the
conventional gloom of Auntie Hamps's death-bed....
He was confident of his ability to manage Hilda,
at any rate in the big things,--for example the
disputed points of his entry into public activity and their
removal from Trafalgar Road into the country.  The
sturdiness of the male inspired him.  At the same time
the thought of the dark mood from which he had
emerged obscurely perturbed him, like a fearful danger
passed; and he argued to himself with satisfaction,
and yet not quite with conviction, that he had yielded
to Maggie, and not to Hilda, in the affair of the
journey to London, and that therefore his masculine
marital dignity was intact.

And then he started at a strange sound below, which
somehow recalled him to the nervous tension of the
house.  It was a knocking at the front-door.  His heart
thumped at the formidable muffled noise in the middle
of the night.  He jumped up, and glanced at the bed.
Auntie Hamps was not wakened.  He went downstairs
where the gas which he had lighted was keeping watch.





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.. _`DEATH AND BURIAL`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER XIX


.. class:: center medium

   DEATH AND BURIAL

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

Albert Benbow was at the front-door.  Edwin
curbed the expression of his astonishment.

"Hello, Albert!"

"Oh!  You aren't gone to bed?"

"Not likely.  Come in.  What's up?"

Albert, with the habit of one instructed never to
tread actually on a doorstep lest it should be newly
whitened, stepped straight on to the inner mat.  He
seemed excited, and Edwin feared that he had just
learnt of Auntie Hamps's illness and had come in the
middle of the night ostensibly to make enquiries, but
really to make a grievance of the fact that the
Benbows had been "kept in ignorance."  He could already
hear Albert demanding: "Why have you kept us in
ignorance?" It was quite a Benbow phrase.

Edwin shut the door and shut out the dark and
windy glimpse of the outer world which had emphasised
for a moment the tense seclusion of the house.

"You've heard of course about the accident to
Ingpen?" said Albert.  His hands were deep in his
overcoat pockets; the collar of the thin, rather shabby
overcoat was turned up; an old cap adhered to the
back of his head.  While talking he slowly lifted his
feet one after the other, as though desiring to get
warmth by stamping but afraid to stamp in the night.

"No, I haven't," said Edwin, with false calmness.
"What accident?"

The perspective of events seemed to change; Auntie
Hamps's illness to recede, and a definite and familiar
apprehension to be supplanted by a fear more
formidable because it was a fear of the unknown.

"It was all in the late special *Signal*!" Benbow
protested, as if his pride had been affronted.

"Well, I haven't seen the *Signal*.  What is it?"  And
Edwin thought: "Is somebody else dying too?"

"Fly-wheel broke.  Ingpen was inspecting the slip-house
next to the engine-house.  Part of the fly-wheel
came through and knocked a loose nut off the blunger
right into his groin."

"Whose works?"

Albert answered in a light tone:

"Mine."

"And how's he going on?"

"Well, he's had an operation and Sterling's got the
nut out.  Of course they didn't know what it was till
they got it out.  And now Ingpen wants to see you at
once.  That's why I've come."

"Where is he?"

"At the hospital."

"Pirehill?"

"No.  The Clowes--Moorthorne Road, you know."

"Is he going on all right?"

"He's very weak.  He can scarcely whisper.  But
he wants you.  I've been up there all the time,
practically."

Edwin seized his overcoat from the rack.

"I had a rare job finding ye," Benbow went on.  "I'd
no idea you weren't all at home.  I wakened most of
Hulton Street over it.  It was Smiths next door came
out at last and told me missis and George had gone
to London and you were over here."

"I wonder who told them!" Edwin mumbled as
Albert helped him with the overcoat.  "I must tell
Maggie.  We've got some illness here, you know."

"Oh?"

"Yes.  Auntie.  Very sudden.  Seemed to get worse
to-night.  Fact is I was sitting up while Maggie has a
bit of sleep.  She was going to send round for Clara
in the morning.  I'll just run up to Mag."

Having thus by judicious misrepresentation deprived
the Benbows of a grievance, Edwin moved towards the
stairs.  Maggie, dressed, already stood at the top of
them, alert, anxious, adequate.

"Albert, is that you?"

After a few seconds of quick murmured explanation,
Edwin and Albert departed, and as they went Maggie,
in a voice doubly harassed but cheerful and oily called
out after them how glad she would be, and what a help
it would be, if Clara could come round early in the
morning.

The small Clowes Hospital was high up in the town
opposite the Park, near the station and the
railway-cutting and not far from the Moorthorne ridge.
Behind its bushes, through which the wet night-wind
swished and rustled, it looked still very new and red
in the fitful moonlight.  And indeed it was scarcely
older than the Park and swimming-baths close by, and
Bursley had not yet lost its naïve pride in the
possession of a hospital of its own.  Not much earlier in
the decade this town of thirty-five thousand inhabitants
had had to send all its "cases" five miles in cabs to
Pirehill Infirmary.  Albert Benbow, with the satisfaction
of a habitué, led Edwin round through an aisle
of bushes to the side-entrance for out-patients.  He
pushed open a dark door, walked into a gaslit vestibule,
and with the assured gestures of a proprietor invited
Edwin to follow.  A fat woman who looked like a
char-woman made tidy sat in a windsor-chair in the vestibule,
close to a radiator.  She signed to Albert as an old
acquaintance to go forward, and Albert nodded in the
manner of one conspirator to another.  What struck
Edwin was that this middle-aged woman showed no
sign of being in the midst of the unusual.  She was
utterly casual and matter-of-fact.  And Edwin had the
sensation of moving in a strange nocturnal world--a
world which had always co-existed with his own, but of
which he had been till then most curiously ignorant.
His passage through the town listening absently to
Albert's descriptions of the structural damage to
Ingpen and to the works, and Albert's defence against
unbrought accusations, had shown him that the silent
streets lived long after midnight in many a lighted
window here and there and in the movements of mysterious
but not furtive frequenters.  And he seemed to have been
impinging upon half-veiled enigmas of misfortune or of
love.  At the other end of the thread of adventure
was his aunt's harsh bedroom with Maggie stolidly
watching the last ebb of senile vitality, and at this
end was the hospital, full of novel and disturbing
vibrations and Tertius Ingpen waiting to impose upon
him some charge or secret.

At the top of the naked stairs which came after a
dark corridor was a long naked resounding passage
lighted by a tiny jet at either end.  A cough from
behind a half-open door came echoing out and filled the
night and the passage.  And then at another door
appeared a tall, thin, fair nurse in blue and white, with
thin lips and a slight smile hard and disdainful.

"Here's Mr. Clayhanger, nurse!" muttered Albert
Benbow, taking off his cap, with a grimace at once
sycophantic and grandiose.

Edwin imagined that he knew by sight everybody in
the town above a certain social level, but he had no
memory of the face of the nurse.

"How is he?" he asked awkwardly, fingering his hat.

The girl merely raised her eyebrows.

"You mustn't stay," said she, in a mincing but rather
loud voice that matched her lips.

"Oh no, I won't!"

"I suppose *I'd* better stop outside!" said Benbow.

Edwin followed the nurse into a darkened room, of
which the chief article of furniture appeared to be a
screen.  Behind the screen was a bed, and on the bed
in the deep obscurity lay a form under creaseless
bedclothes.  Edwin first recognised Ingpen's beard, then
his visage very pale and solemn, and without the
customary spectacles.  Of the whole body only the eyes
moved.  As Edwin approached the bed he cast across
Ingpen a shadow from the distant gas.

"Well, old chap!" he began with constraint.  "This
is a nice state of affairs!  How are you getting on?"

Ingpen's enquiring apprehensive dumb glance silenced
the clumsy greeting.  It was just as if he had rebuked:
"This is no time for How d'ye do's."  When he had
apparently made sure that Edwin was Edwin, Ingpen
turned his eyes to the nurse.

"Water," he whispered.

The nurse shook her head.

"Net yet," she replied, with tepid indifference.

Ingpen's eyes remained on her a moment and then
went back to Edwin.

"Ed," he whispered, and gazed once more at the
nurse, who, looking away from the bed, did not move.

Edwin bent over the bed.

"Ed," Ingpen demanded, speaking very deliberately.
"Go to my office.  In the top drawer of the
desk in the bedroom there's some photos and letters....
Burn them....  Before morning....  Understand?"

Edwin was profoundly stirred.  In his emotion was
pride at Ingpen's trust, astonishment at the sudden,
utterly unexpected revelation, and the thrill of romance.

He thought:

"The man is dying!"

And the tragic sensation of the vigil of the nocturnal
world almost overcame him.

"Yes," he said.  "Anything else?"

"No."

"What about keys?"

Ingpen gave him another long glance.

"Trousers."

"Where are his clothes?" Edwin asked the nurse,
whose lips were ironic.

"Oh!  They'll tell you downstairs.  You'd better go now."

As he went from the room he could feel Ingpen's
glance following him.  He raged inwardly against the
callousness of the nurse.  It seemed monstrous that
he should abandon Ingpen for the rest of the night,
defenceless, to the cold tyranny of the nurse, whose
power over the sufferer was as absolute as that of an
eastern monarch, who had never heard of public
opinion, over the meanest slave.  He could not bear
to picture to himself Ingpen and the nurse alone
together.

"Isn't he allowed to drink?" he could not help
murmuring, at the door.

"Yes.  At intervals."

He wanted to chastise the nurse.  He imagined an
endless succession of sufferers under her appalling,
inimical nonchalance.  Who had allowed her to be a
nurse?  Had she become a nurse in order to take some
needed revenge against mankind?  And then he thought
of Hilda's passionate, succouring tenderness when he
himself was unwell,--he had not been really ill for
years.  What was happening to Ingpen could never
happen to him, because Hilda stood everlastingly
between him and such a horror.  He considered that a
bachelor was the most pathetic creature on the earth.
He was drenched in the fearful, wistful sadness of all
life....  The sleeping town; Auntie Hamps on the
edge of eternity; Minnie trembling at the menaces of
her own body; Hilda lying in some room that he had
never seen; and Ingpen...!

"Soon over!" observed Albert Benbow in the corridor.

Edwin could have winced at the words.

"How do you think he is?" asked Albert.

"Don't know!" Edwin replied.  "Look here, I've got
to get hold of his clothes--downstairs."

"Oh!  That's it, is it?  Pocket-book!  Keys!  Eh?"



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   II

.. vspace:: 2

Edwin had once been in Tertius Ingpen's office at the
bottom of Crown Square, Hanbridge, but never in the
bedroom which Ingpen rented on the top floor of the
same building.  It had been for seventy or eighty years
a building of four squat storeys; but a new landlord,
seeing the architectural development of the town as a
local metropolis and determined to join in it at a
minimum of expense, had knocked the two lower storeys
into one, fronted them with fawn-coloured terra cotta,
and produced a lofty shop whose rent exceeded the
previous rent of the entire house.

The landlord knew that passers-by would not look
higher up the façade than the ground-floor, and that
therefore any magnificence above that level was merely
wasted.  The shop was in the occupation of a
tea-dealer who gave away beautiful objects such as vases
and useful objects such as tea-trays, to all purchasers.
Ingpen's office, and a solicitor's office, were on the first
floor, formerly the second; the third floor was the
headquarters of the Hanbridge and District Ethical
Society; the top floor was temporarily unlet, save for
Ingpen's room.  Nobody except Ingpen slept in the
building, and he very irregularly.

The latchkey for the sidedoor was easy to choose
in the glittering light of the latest triple-jetted and
reflectored gaslamps which the corporation, to match
the glories of the new town-hall, had placed
in Crown Square.  The lock, strange to say, worked
easily.  Edwin entered somewhat furtively, and as
it were guiltily, though in Crown Square and the
streets and the other squares visible therefrom, not
a soul could be seen.  The illuminated clock of the
Old Town Hall at the top of the square showed twenty-five
minutes to four.  Immediately within the door began
a new, very long and rather mean staircase, with which
Edwin was acquainted.  He closed the door, shutting
out the light and the town, and struck a match in the
empty building.  He had walked into Hanbridge from
Bursley, and as soon as he began to climb the stairs he
was aware of great fatigue, both physical and mental.
The calamity to Ingpen had almost driven Auntie
Hamps out of his mind; it had not, however, driven
Minnie out of his mind.  He was gloomy and indignant
on behalf of both Ingpen and Minnie.  They were both
victims.  Minnie was undoubtedly a fool, and he was
about to learn, perhaps, to what extent Ingpen had
been a fool.

Each footstep sounded loud on the boards of
deserted house.  Having used several matches and
arrived at the final staircase, Edwin wondered how
he was to distinguish Ingpen's room there from the
others without trying keys in all of them till he got to
the right one.  But on the top landing he had no
difficulty, for Ingpen's card was fastened with a
drawing-pin on to the first door he saw.  A match burnt his
fingers and expired just as he was shaking out a likely
key from Ingpen's bunch.  And then, in the black
darkness, he perceived a line of light under the door in front
of which he stood.  He forgot his fatigue in an instant.
His heart leaped.  A burglar?  Or had Ingpen left the
gas burning?  Ingpen could not have left the gas
burning since, according to Albert Benbow, he had been in
Bursley all afternoon.  With precautions, and feeling
very desperate and yet also craven, he lit a fresh match
and managed quietly to open the door, which was not
locked.

As soon as he beheld the illuminated interior of the
room, all his skin crept and flushed as though he had
taken a powerful stimulant.  A girl reclined asleep in
a small basket lounge-chair by the gas-fire.  He could
not see her face, which was turned towards the wall
and away from the gas-jet that hung from the ceiling
over an old desk; but she seemed slim and graceful,
and there was something in the abandonment of
unconsciousness that made her marvellously alluring.
Her hat and gloves had been thrown on the desk, and
a cloak lay on a chair.  These coloured and intimate
objects--extensions of the veritable personality of the
girl--had the effect of delightfully completing the
furniture of a room which was in fact rather bare.  A
narrow bed in the far corner, disguised under a green rug
as a sofa; a green square of carpet, showing the
unpolished boards at the sides; the desk, and three chairs;
a primitive hanging wardrobe in another corner,
hidden by a bulging linen curtain; a portmanteau; a few
unframed prints on the walls; an alarm-clock on the
mantelpiece,--there was nothing else in the chamber
where Ingpen slept when it was too late, or he was too
slack, to go to his proper home.  But nothing else
was needed.  The scene was perfect; the girl rendered
it so.  And immense envy of, and admiration for,
Ingpen surged through Edwin, who saw here the realisation
of a dream that was to marriage what poetry is
to prose.  Ingpen might rail against women and against
marriage in a manner exaggerated and indefensible; but
he had at any rate known how to arrange his life and
how to keep his own counsel.  He had all the careless
masculine freedom of his condition,--and in the
background this exquisite phenomenon!  The girl, her
trustfulness, her abandonment, her secrecy, that white
ear peeping out of her hair,--were his!  It was
staggering that such romance could exist in the Five Towns,
of all places--for Edwin had the vague notion,
common to all natives, that his own particular district fell
short of full human nature in certain characteristics.
For example, he could credit a human nature dying for
love in Manchester, but never in the Five Towns.  Even
the occasional divorces that gave piquancy to life in
the Five Towns seemed to lack the mysterious glamour
of all other divorces.

He thought:

"Was it because he was expecting her that he sent
me?  Perhaps the desk was only a blind--and he
couldn't tell me any more.  Anyhow I shall have to
break it to her."

He felt exceedingly awkward and unequal to the situation
so startling in its novelty.  Yet he did not wish
himself away.

As timidly, hat in hand, he went forward into the
room, the girl stirred and woke up, to the creaking
of the chair.

"Oh!  Tert!" she murmured between sleeping and
waking.

Edwin did not like her voice.  It reminded him of
the voice of the nurse whom he had just left.

The girl, looking round, perceived that it was not
Tertius Ingpen who had come in.  She gave a short,
faint scream, then gathered herself together and with
a single movement stood up, perfectly collected and
on the defensive.

"It's all right!  It's all right!" said Edwin.  "Mr. Ingpen
gave me his keys and asked me to come over
and get some papers he wants....  I hope I didn't
frighten you.  I'd no idea----"

She was old!  She was old!  That is to say, she was
not the girl he had seen asleep.  Before his marriage
he would have put her age at thirty-two, but now he
knew enough to be sure that she must be more than
that.  She was not graceful in movement.  The
expression of her pale face was not agreeable.  Her
gestures were not distinguished.  And she could not act
her part in the idyll.  Moreover her frock was shabby
and untidy.  But chiefly she was old.  Had she been
young, Edwin would have excused all the rest.
Romance was not entirely destroyed, but very little
remained.

He thought, disdainfully, and as if resenting a
deception:

"Is this the best he can do?"

And the Five Towns sank back to its ancient humble
place in his esteem.

The woman said with a silly nervous giggle:

"I called to see Mr. Ingpen.  He wasn't expecting
me.  And I suppose while I was waiting I must have
dropped off to sleep."

It might have been true, but to Edwin it was
inexpressibly inane.

She seized her hat and then her cloak.

"I'm sorry to say Mr. Ingpen's had an accident,"
said Edwin.

She stopped, both hands above her head fingering
her hat.

"An accident?  Nothing serious?"

"Oh no!  I don't think so," he lied.  "A machinery
accident.  They had to take him to the Clowes
Hospital at Bursley.  I've just come from there."

She asked one or two more questions, all the time
hurrying her preparations to leave.  But Edwin judged
with disgust that she was not deeply interested in the
accident.  True, he had minimised it, but she ought not
to have allowed him to minimise it.  She ought to have
obstinately believed that it was very grave.

"I do hope he'll soon be all right," she said, snatching
at her gloves and going to the door.  "Good night!"  She
gave another silly giggle, preposterous in a woman
of her age.  Then she stopped.  "I think you're
gentleman enough not to say anything about me being
here," she said, rather nastily.  "It was quite an
accident.  I could easily explain it, but you know what
people are!"

What a phrase--"I think you're gentleman enough!"

He blushed and offered the required assurance.

"Can I let you out?" he started forward.

"No, thanks!"

"But you can't open the door."

"Yes I can."

"The stairs are all dark."

"Please don't trouble yourself," she said drily, in the
tone of a woman who sees offence in the courtesy of
a male travelling companion on the railway.

He heard her steps *diminuendo* down the stairs.

Closing the door, he went to the window, and drew
aside the blind.  Perhaps she would pass up the Square.
But she did not pass up the Square which was peopled
by nothing but meek gaslamps under the empire of the
glowing clock in the pediment of the Old Town Hall.
Where had she gone?  Where did she come from?  Her
accent had no noticeable peculiarity.  Was she
married, or single, or a widow?  Perhaps there was hidden
in her some strange and seductive quality which he
had missed....  He saw the slim girl again reclining
in the basket-chair....  After all, she was a
woman, and she had been in Ingpen's room, waiting for him!

Later, seated in front of the open drawer in the
old desk, gathering together letters and
photographs--photographs of her in adroitly managed poses, taken
at Oldham; letters in a woman's hand--he was
penetrated to the marrow by the disastrous and yet
beautiful infelicity of things.  The mere sight of the
letters (of which he forebore to decipher a single word,
even a signature) nearly made him cry; the photographs
were tragic with the intolerable evanescence of
life.  By the will of Tertius Ingpen helpless on the
bed in the hospital, these documents of a passion or
of a fancy were to be burnt.  Why?  Was it true that
Ingpen was dying?  Better to keep them.  No, they
must be burnt.  He rose, and, with difficulty, burnt
them by instalments in a shovel over the tiny fender
that enclosed the gas-stove,--the room was soon half
full of smoke....  Why had he deceived the woman
as to the seriousness of Ingpen's accident?  To simplify
and mitigate the interview, to save himself trouble; that
was all!  Well, she would learn soon enough!

His eye caught a print on the wall above the
bed,--a classic example of the sentimentality of Marcus
Stone: departing cavalier, drooping maiden, terraced
garden.  It was a dreadful indictment of the Tertius
Ingpen who talked so well, with such intellectual
aplomb, with such detachment and exceptional cynicism.
It was like a ray exposing some secret sinister corner
in the man's soul.  He had hung up that print because
it gave him pleasure!  Poor chap!  But Edwin loved
him.  He decided that he would call again at the
hospital before returning to Auntie Hamps's.  Impossible
that the man was dying!  If the doctor or the matron
had thought he was in danger they would have
summoned his relatives.  He might be dying.  He might be
dead.  He must have immediately feared death, or he
would not have imposed upon Edwin such an errand....
What simple, touching, admirable trust in a
friend's loyalty the man had displayed!

Edwin put out the gas-stove, which exploded, lit a
match, gave a great yawn, put out the gas, and began
the enterprise of leaving the house.



.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   III

.. vspace:: 2

"Look here!  I must have some tea, *now*!" said
Edwin curtly and yet appealingly to Maggie, who
opened the door for him at Auntie Hamps's.

It was nearly eight o'clock.  He had been to the
hospital again, and, having reported in three words to
Ingpen, whose condition was unchanged, had remained there
some time.  But he had said nothing to Ingpen about
the woman.  At six o'clock the matron had come into
the room, and the nurse thenceforward until seven
o'clock, when she went off duty, was a changed girl.
Edwin slightly knew the matron, who was sympathetic
but strangely pessimistic--considering her healthy, full
figure.

"The water's boiling," answered Maggie, in a
comforting tone, and disappeared instantly into the
kitchen.

Edwin thought:

"There are some things that girl understands!"

She had shown no curiosity, no desire to impart
news, because she had immediately comprehended that
Edwin was, or imagined himself to be, at the end of his
endurance.  Maggie, with simple and surpassing
wisdom had just said to herself: "He's been out all night,
and he's not used to it."  For a moment he felt that
Maggie was wiser, and more intimately close to him,
than anybody else in the world.

"In the dining-room," she called out from the kitchen.

And in the small dining-room there was a fire!  It was
like a living, welcoming creature.  The cloth was laid,
the gas was lighted.  On the table was beautiful fresh
bread and butter.  A word, a tone, a glance of his on
the previous evening had been enough to bring back
the dining-room into use!  Happily the wind suited the
chimney.  He had scarcely sat down in front of the
fire when Maggie entered with the teapot.  And at
the sight of the teapot Edwin felt that he was saved.
Before the tea was out of the teapot it had already
magically alleviated the desperate sensations of
physical fatigue and moral weariness which had almost
overcome him on the way from the hospital in the chill and
muddy dawn.

"What will you have to eat?" said Maggie.

"Nothing.  I couldn't eat to save my life."

"Perhaps you'll have a bit of bread-and-butter
later," said Maggie blandly.

He shook his head.

"How is she?"

"Worse," said Maggie.  "But she's slept."

"Who's up with her now?  Minnie?"

"No.  Clara."

"Oh!  She's come?"

"She came at seven."

Edwin was drinking the divine tea.  After a few
gulps he told Maggie briefly about Tertius Ingpen,
saying that he had had to go "on business" for
Ingpen to Hanbridge.

"Are you all right for the present?" she asked after
a few moments.

He nodded.  He was eating bread-and-butter.

"You had any sleep at all?" he mumbled, munching.

"Oh yes!  A little," she answered cheerfully, leaving
the room.

He poured out more tea, and then sat down in the
sole easy-chair for a minute's reflection before going
upstairs and thence to the works.

Not until he woke up did he realise that there had
been any danger of his going to sleep.  The earthenware
clock on the mantelpiece (a birthday gift from
Clara and Albert) showed five minutes past eleven.
Putting no reliance on the cheap, horrible clock, he
looked at his watch, which had stopped for lack of
winding up.  The fire was very low.  His chief thought
was: "It can't possibly be eleven o'clock, because I
haven't been down to the works, and I haven't sent
word I'm not coming either!"  He got up hurriedly
and had reached the door when a sound of a voice on
the stairs held him still like an enchantment.  It seemed
to be the voice, eloquent, and indeed somewhat
Church-of-England, of the Rev. Christian Flowerdew, the new
superintendent of the Bursley Wesleyan Methodist
Circuit.  The voice said: "I do hope so!" and then
offered a resounding remark about the weather being
the kind of weather that, bad as it was, people must
expect in view of the time of year.  Maggie's voice concurred.

As soon as the front-door closed, Edwin peeped
cautiously out of the dining-room.

"Who was that?" he murmured.

"Mr. Flowerdew.  She wanted him.  Albert sent for
him early this morning."

Maggie came into the room and shut the door.

"I've been to sleep," said Edwin.

"Yes, I know.  I wasn't going to have you disturbed.
They're all here."

"Who are all here?"

"Clara and the children.  Auntie asked to see all of
them.  They waited in the drawing-room for Mr. Flowerdew
to go.  Bert didn't go to school this morning,
in case--because it was so far off.  Clara fetched the
others out of school, except Rupy of course--he doesn't go--"

"Good heavens!  I never came across such a morbid
lot in my life.  I believe they like it."

Clara could be heard marshalling the brood up the
stairs.

"You'd better go up," said Maggie persuasively.

"I'd better go to the works--I'm no use here.  What
time is it?"

"After eleven.  I think you'd better go up."

"Does she ask for me?"

"Oh yes.  All the time sometimes.  But she forgets
for a bit."

"Well, anyhow I must wash myself and change my
collar."

"All right.  Wash yourself, then."

"How is she now?"

"She isn't taking anything."

When Edwin nervously pushed open the bedroom
door, the room seemed to be crowded.  Over the heads
of clustering children towered Clara and Albert.  As
soon as the watchful Albert caught sight of Edwin, he
made a conspiratorial sign and hurried to the door,
driving Edwin out again.

"Didn't know you were here," Edwin muttered.

"I say," Albert whispered.  "Has she made a will?"

"I don't know."

The bedroom door half opened, and Clara in her
shabby morning dress glidingly joined them.

"He doesn't know," said Albert to Clara.

Clara's pretty face scowled a little as she asked
sharply and resentfully:

"Then who does know?"

"I should ha' thought *you'd* know," said Edwin.

"Me!  I like that!  She hasn't spoken to me for
months, has she, Albert?  And she was always
frightfully close about all these things."

"About what things?"

"Well, you know."

It was a fact.  Auntie Hamps had never discussed
her own finance, or her testamentary dispositions, with
anybody.  And nobody had ever dared to mention such
subjects to her.

"Don't you think you'd better ask her?" said Clara.
"Albert thinks you ought."

"No, I don't," said Edwin, with curt disdain.

"Well, then I shall," Albert decided.

"So long as you don't do it while I'm there!" Edwin
said menacingly.  "If you want to ask people about
their wills you ought to ask them before they're
actually dying.  Can't you see you can't worry her about
her will now?"

He was intensely disgusted.  He thought of Mrs. Hamps's
bed, and of Tertius Ingpen's bed, and of the
woman at dead of night in Ingpen's room, and of
Minnie's case; and the base insensibility of Albert and
Clara made him feel sick.  He wondered whether any
occasion would ever have solemnity enough for them
to make them behave with some distinction, some
grandeur.  For himself, if he could have secured a fortune
by breathing one business word to Auntie Hamps just
then, he would have let the fortune go.

"There's nothing more to be said," Clara murmured.

In the glance of both Clara and Albert Edwin saw
hatred and envy.  Clara especially had never forgiven
him for preventing their father from pouring money
into that sieve, her husband, nor for Hilda's wounding
tongue, nor for his worldly success.  And they both
suspected that either Maggie or Auntie Hamps had
told him of Albert's default in the payment of interest,
and so fear was added to their hatred and envy.

They all entered the bedroom, the children having
been left alone only a few seconds.  Rupert, wearing
a new blue overcoat with gilt buttons, had partially
scrambled on to the bed; the pale veiled hands of
Auntie Hamps could be seen round his right hand;
Rupert had grown enormous, and had already utterly
forgotten the time when he was two years old.  The
others, equally altered, stood two on either side of the
bed,--Bert and young Clara to the right, and Amy and
Lucy to the left.  Lucy was crying and Amy was
benignantly wiping her eyes.  Bert, a great lump of a boy,
was to leave school at Christmas, but he was still ranked
with the other children as a child.  Young Clara sharply
and Bert heavily turned round to witness the entrance
of their elders.

"Oh!  Here's Uncle Edwin!"

"Edwin!"

"Yes, Auntie!"

The moral values of the room were instantly changed
by the tone in which Auntie Hamps had murmured
"Edwin."  All the Benbows knew, and Edwin himself
knew, that a personage of supreme importance in
Auntie Hamps's eyes had come into the scene.  The
Benbows became secondary, and even Auntie Hamps's
grasp of Rupert's hand loosened, and, having already
kissed her, the child slipped off the bed.  Edwin
approached, and over the heads of the children, and
between the great darkening curtains, he could at last
see the face of the dying woman like a senile doll's face
amid the confusion of wrappings and bedclothes.  The
deep-set eyes seemed to burn beneath the white
forehead and sparse grey hair; the cheeks, still rounded,
were highly flushed over a very small part of their
surface; the mouth, always open, was drawn in, and the
chin, still rounded like the cheeks, protruded.  The
manner of Auntie Hamps's noisy breathing, like the
puzzled gaze of her eyes, indicated apprehension of the
profoundest, acutest sort.

"Eh!" said she, in a somewhat falsetto voice, jerky
and excessively feeble.  "I thought--I'd--lost you."  Her
hand was groping about.

"No, no," said Edwin, leaning over between young
Clara and Rupert.

"She's feeling for your hand, Edwin," said Clara.

He quickly took her hot, brittle fingers; they seemed
to cling to his for essential support.

"Have you--been to the works?" Auntie Hamps
asked the question as though the answer to it would
end all trouble.

"No," he said.  "Not yet."

"Eh!  That's right!  That's right!" she murmured,
apparently much impressed by a new proof of Edwin's
wisdom.

"I've had a sleep."

"What?"

"I've been having a sleep," he repeated more loudly.

"Eh!  That's right!  That's right....  I'm so
glad--the children have been to see me....  Amy--did
you kiss me?"  Auntie Hamps looked at Amy hard,
as if for the first time.

"Yes, Auntie."

And then Amy began to cry.

"Better take them away," Edwin suggested aside to
Albert.  "It's as much as she can stand.  The
parson's only just gone, you know."

Albert, obedient, gave the word of command, and
the room was full of movement.

"Eh, children--children!" Auntie Hamps appealed.

Everybody stood stockstill, gazing attendant.

"Eh, children, bless you all for coming.  If you
grow up--as good as your mother--it's all I ask--all
I ask....  Your mother and I--have never had a
cross word--have we, mother?"

"No, auntie," said Clara, with a sweet, touching
smile that accentuated the fragile charm of her face.

"Never--since mother was--as tiny as you are."

Auntie Hamps looked up at the ceiling during a few
strained breaths, and then smiled for an instant at the
departing children, who filed out of the room.  Rupert
loitered behind, gazing at his mother.  The mere
contrast between the infant so healthy and the dying old
woman was pathetic to Edwin.  Clara, with an exquisite
reassuring gesture and smile picked up the stout
Rupert and kissed him and carried him to the door, while
Auntie Hamps looked at mother and son, ecstatic.

"Edwin!"

"Yes, Auntie?"

They were alone now.  She had not loosed his hand.
Her voice was very faint, and he bent over her still
lower in the alcove of the curtains, which seemed to
stretch very high above them.

"Have you heard from Hilda?"

"Not yet.  By the second post, perhaps."

"It's about George's eyes--isn't it?"

"Yes."

"She's done quite right--quite right.  It's just--like
Hilda.  I do hope--and pray--the boy's eyesight--is
safe."

"Oh yes!" said Edwin.  "Safe enough."

"You really think so?"  She had the air of hanging
on his words.

He nodded.

"What a blessing!"  She sighed deeply with relief.

Edwin thought:

"I believe her relations must have been her passion."  And
he was impressed by the intensity of that passion.

"Edwin!"

"Yes, Auntie."

"Has--that girl--gone yet?"

"Who?" he questioned, and added more softly:
"Minnie d'you mean?"  His own voice sounded too
powerful, too healthy and dominating, in comparison
with her failing murmurs.

Auntie Hamps nodded.  "Yes--Minnie."

"Not yet."

"She's going?"

"Yes."

"Because I can't trust--Maggie--to see to it."

"I'll see to it."

"Has she done--the silvers--d'you know?"

"She's doing them," answered Edwin, who thought it
would be best to carry out the deception with artistic
completeness.

"She needn't have her dinner before she goes."

"No?"

"No."  Auntie Hamps's face and tone hardened.
"Why should she?"

"All right."

"And if she asks--for her wages--tell her--I say
there's nothing due--under the circumstances."

"All right, Auntie," Edwin agreed, desperate.

Maggie, followed by Clara, softly entered the room.
Auntie Hamps glanced at them with a certain
cautious suspicion, as though one or other of them was
capable of thwarting her in the matter of Minnie.
Then her eyes closed, and Edwin was aware of a
slackening of her hold on his hand.  The doctor, who called
half an hour later, said that she might never speak
again, and she never did.  Her last conscious moments
were moments of satisfaction.

Edwin slowly released his hand.

"Where's Albert?" he asked Clara, merely for the
sake of saying something.

"He's taking the children home, and then he's going
to the works.  He ought to have gone long ago.  There's
a dreadful upset there."

"I suppose there is," said Edwin, who had forgotten
that the fly-wheel accident must have almost brought
Albert's manufactory to a standstill.  And he
wondered whether it was the family instinct, or anxiety
about Auntie Hamps's will, that had caused Albert to
absent himself from business on such a critical morning.

"I ought to go too," he muttered, as a full picture
of a lithographic establishment masterless swept into
his mind.

"Have you telegraphed to Hilda?" Clara demanded.

"No."

"Haven't you!"

"What's the use?"

"Well, I should have thought you would."

"Oh, no!" he said, falsely mild.  "I shall write."  He
was immensely glad that Hilda was not present in
the house to complicate still further the human equation.

Maggie was silently examining the face obscured in
the gloom of the curtains.

Instead of remaining late that night at the works,
Edwin came back to the house before six o'clock.  He
had had word that the condition of Tertius Ingpen
was still unchanged.  Clara had gone home to see to
her children's evening meal.  Maggie sat alone in the
darkened bedroom, where Auntie Hamps, her features
a mere pale blur between the over-arching curtains,
still withheld the secret of her soul's reality from the
world.  Even in the final unconsciousness there was
something grandiose which lingered from her crowning
magnificent deceptions and obstinate effort to
safeguard the structure of society.  The sublime obstinacy
of the woman had transformed hypocrisy into a virtue,
and not the imminence of the infinite unknown had
sufficed to make her apostate to the steadfast
principles of her mortal career.

"What about to-night?" Edwin asked.

"Oh!  Clara and I will manage."

There was a tap at the door.  Edwin opened it.
Minnie, abashed but already taking courage, stood there
blinking with a letter in her hand.  "Ah!" he breathed.
Hilda's scrawling calligraphy was on the envelope.

The letter read: "Darling boy.  George has influenza,
Charlie says.  Temp. 102 anyway.  So of course
he can't go out to-morrow.  I knew this morning there
was something wrong with him.  Janet and Charlie
send their love.  Your ever loving wife, Hilda."

He was exceedingly uplifted and happy and
exhausted.  Hilda's handwriting moved him.  The whole
missive was like a personal emanation from her.  It
lived with her vitality.  It fought for the mastery of
the household interior against the mysterious,
far-reaching spell of the dying woman.  "Your loving
wife."  Never before, during their marriage, had she written
a phrase so comforting and exciting.  He thought:
"My faith in her is never worthy of her."  And his
faith leaped up and became worthy of her.

"George has got influenza," he said indifferently.

"George!  But influenza's very serious for him, isn't
it?" Maggie showed alarm.

"Why should it be?"

"Considering he nearly died of it at Orgreaves'!"

"Oh!  *Then*! ... He'll be all right."

But Maggie had put fear into Edwin,--a superstitious
fear.  Influenza indeed might be serious for
George.  Suppose he died of it.  People did die of
influenza.  Auntie Hamps--Tertius Ingpen--and now
George! ... All these anxieties mingling with his
joy in the thought of Hilda!  And all the brooding
rooms of the house waiting in light or in darkness for
a decisive event!

"I must go and lie down," he said.  He could
contain no more sensations.

"Do," said Maggie.




.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center medium

   IV

.. vspace:: 2

At two o'clock in the afternoon of Auntie Hamps's
funeral, a procession consisting of the following people
moved out of the small, stuffy dining-room of her house
across the lobby into the drawing-room:--the
Rev. Christian Flowerdew, the Rev. Guy Cliffe (second
minister), the aged Reverend Josiah Higginbotham
(supernumerary minister), the chapel and the circuit
stewards, the doctor, Edwin, Maggie, Clara, Bert and
young Clara (being respectively the eldest nephew and
the eldest niece of the deceased), and finally Albert
Benbow; Albert came last because he had constituted
himself the marshal of the ceremonies.  In the drawing-room
the coffin with its hideous brass plate and handles
lay upon two chairs, and was covered with white
wreaths.  At the head of the coffin was placed a small
table with a white cloth; on the cloth a large inlaid
box (in which Auntie Hamps had kept odd
photographs), and on the box a black book.  The drawn
blinds created a beautiful soft silvery gloom which
solemnised everything and made even the clumsy
carving on the coffin seem like the finest antique work.  The
three ministers ranged themselves round the small
table; the others stood in an irregular horseshoe about
the coffin, nervous, constrained, and in dread of
catching each other's glances.  Mr. Higginbotham, by
virtue of his age, began to read the service, and Auntie
Hamps became "she," "her," and "our sister,"--nameless.
In the dining-room she had been the paragon of
all excellences,--in the drawing-room, packed securely
and neatly in the coffin, she was a sinner snatched from
the consequences of sin by a miracle of divine sacrifice.

The interment thus commenced was the result of a
compromise between two schools of funebrial manners
sharply divergent.  Edwin, immediately after the
demise, had become aware of influences far stronger than
those which had shaped the already half-forgotten
interment of old Darius Clayhanger into a form
repugnant to him.  Both Albert and Clara, but especially
Albert, had assumed an elaborate funeral, with a
choral service at the Wesleyan chapel, numerous guests,
a superb procession, and a substantial and costly meal
in the drawing-room to conclude.  Edwin had at once
and somewhat domineeringly decided: no guests
whatever outside the family, no service at the chapel, every
rite reduced to its simplest.  When asked why, he had
no logical answer.  He soon saw that it would be
impossible not to invite a minister and the doctor.  He
yielded, intimidated by the sacredness of custom.  Then
not only the Wesleyan chapel but its Sunday School
sent dignified emissaries, who so little expected a No
to their honorific suggestions that the No was
unuttered and unutterable.  Certain other invitations were
agreed upon.  The Sunday School announced that it
would "walk," and it prepared to "walk."

All the emissaries spoke of Auntie Hamps as a saint;
they all averred with restrained passion that her death
was an absolutely irreparable loss to the circuit; and
their apparent conviction was such that Edwin's whole
estimate of Auntie Hamps and of mankind was
momentarily shaken.  Was it conceivable that none of these
respectable people had arrived at the truth concerning
Auntie Hamps?  Had she deceived them all?  Or
were they simply rewarding her in memory for her
ceaseless efforts on behalf of the safety of society?

Edwin stood like a rock against a service in the
Wesleyan Chapel.  Clara cunningly pointed out to him
that the Wesleyan Chapel would be heated for the
occasion, whereas the chapel at the cemetery, where
scores of persons had caught their deaths in the few
years of its existence, was never heated.  His reply
showed genius.  He would have the service at the
house itself.  The decision of the chief mourner might
be regretted, and was regretted, but none could
impugn its correctitude, nor its social distinction; some
said approvingly that it was 'just like' Edwin.
Thenceforward the arrangements went more smoothly,
the only serious difficulty being about the route to the
cemetery.  Edwin was met by a saying that "the last
journey must be the longest," which meant that the
cortège must go up St. Luke's Square and along the
Market Place past the Town Hall and the Shambles,
encountering the largest number of sightseers, instead
of taking the nearest way along Wedgwood Street.
Edwin chose Wedgwood Street.

In the discussions, Maggie was neutral, thus losing
part of the very little prestige which she possessed.
Clara and Albert considered Edwin to be excessively
high-handed.  But they were remarkably moderate in
criticism, for the reason that no will had been found.
Maggie and Clara had searched the most secret places
of the house for a will, in vain.  All that they had
found was a brass and copper paper-knife wrapped in
tissue-paper and labelled "For Edwin, with Auntie's
love," and a set of tortoise-shell combs equally wrapped
in tissue-paper and labelled "For Maggie, with Auntie's
love."  Naught for Clara!  Naught for the chicks.

Albert (who did all the running about) had been to
see Mr. Julian Pidduck, the Wesleyan solicitor, who
had a pew at the back of the chapel and was famous
for invariably arriving at morning service half an
hour late.  Mr. Pidduck knew of no will.  Albert had
also been to the Bank--that is to say, the Bank, at the
top of St. Luke's Square, whose former manager had
been a buttress of Wesleyanism.  The new manager
(after nearly eight years he was still called the "new"
manager, because the previous manager, old Lovatt,
had been in control for nearly thirty years), Mr. Breeze,
was ill upstairs on the residential floor with
one of his periodic attacks of boils; the cashier,
however, had told Albert that certain securities, but no
testament, were deposited at the Bank; he had offered
to produce the securities, but only to Edwin, as the
nearest relative.  Albert had then secretly looked up
the pages entitled "Intestates' Estates" in Whitaker's
Almanac and had discovered that whereas Auntie
Hamps being intestate, her personal property would
be divided equally between Edwin, Maggie, and Clara,
her real property would go entirely to Edwin.
(Edwin also had secretly looked up the same pages.)  This
gross injustice nearly turned Albert from a Tory
into a Land Laws reformer.  It accounted for the
comparative submissiveness of Clara and Albert before
Edwin's arrogance as the arbiter of funerals.  They
hoped that, if he was humoured, he might forego his
rights.  They could not credit, and Edwin maliciously
did not tell them, that no matter what they did he
was incapable of insisting on such rights.

While the ministers succeeded each other in the
conduct of the service, each after his different manner,
Edwin scrutinised the coffin, and the wreaths, and the
cards inscribed with mournful ecstatic affection that
nestled amid the flowers, and the faces of the audience,
and his thought was: "This will soon be over
now!"  Beneath his gloomy and wearied expression he was
unhappy, but rather hopeful and buoyant, looking
forward to approaching felicity.  His reflections upon
the career of Auntie Hamps were kind, and utterly
uncritical; he wondered what her spirit was doing in
that moment; the mystery ennobled his mind.  Yet he
wondered also whether the ministers believed all they
were saying, why the superintendent minister read so
well and prayed with such a lack of distinction, how
much the wreaths cost, whether the Sunday School
deputation had silently arrived in the street, and why
men in overcoats and hatless looked so grotesque in a
room, and why when men and women were assembled
on a formal occasion the women always clung together.

Probing his left-hand pocket, he felt a letter.  He
had received it that morning from Hilda.  George
was progressing very well, and Charlie Orgreave had
actually brought the oculist with his apparatus to
see him at Charlie's house.  Charlie would always do
impossibilities for Hilda.  It was Charlie who had
once saved George's life--so Hilda was convinced.
The oculist had said that George's vision was normal,
and that he must not wear glasses, but that on
account of a slight weakness he ought to wear a shade
at night in rooms which were lighted from the top.
In a few days Hilda and George would return.  Edwin
anticipated their arrival with an impatience almost
gleeful, so anxious was he to begin the new life with
Hilda.  Her letters had steadily excited him.  He
pictured the intimacies of their reunion.  He saw her
ideally.  His mind rose to the finest manifestations of
her individuality, and the inconveniences of that
individuality grew negligible.  Withal, he was relieved that
George's illness had kept her out of Bursley during the
illness, death, and burial of Auntie Hamps.  Had she
been there, he would have had three persons to
manage instead of two, and he could not have asserted
himself with the same freedom.

And then there was a sound of sobbing outside the
door.  Minnie, sharing humbly but obstinately in the
service according to her station, had broken down in
irrational grief at the funeral of the woman whose
dying words amounted to an order for her execution.
Edwin, though touched, could have smiled; and he felt
abashed before the lofty and incomprehensible
marvels of human nature.  Several outraged bent heads
twisted round in the direction of the door, but the
minister intrepidly continued with the final prayer.
Maggie slipped out, the door closed, and the sound of
sobbing receded.

After the benediction Albert resumed full activity,
while the remainder of the company stared and cleared
their throats without exchanging a word.  The news
that the hearse and coaches had not arrived helped
them to talk a little.  The fault was not that of the
undertaker, but Edwin's.  The service had finished too
soon, because in response to Mr. Flowerdew's official
question: "How much time do you give me?" he had
replied: "Oh!  A quarter of an hour," whereas Albert
the organiser had calculated upon half an hour.  The
representatives of the Sunday School were already
lined up on the pavement and on the opposite
pavement and in the roadway were knots of ragged,
callously inquisitive spectators.  The vehicles could at
length be described on the brow of Church Street.
They descended the slope in haste.  The four mutes
nipped down with agility from the hammer cloths, hung
their greasy top-hats on the ornamental spikes of the
hearse, and sneaked grimly into the house.  In a
second the flowers were shifted from the coffin, and with
startling accomplished swiftness the coffin was darted
out of the room without its fraudulent brass handles
even being touched, and down the steps into the hearse,
and the flowers replaced.  The one hitch was due to
Edwin attempting to get into the first coach instead of
waiting for the last one.  Albert, putting on his new
black gloves, checked him.  The ministers and the
doctor had to go first, the chapel officials next, and
the chief mourners--Edwin, Albert, and Bert--had
the third coach.  The women stayed behind at the
door, frowning at the murmurous crowd of shabby
idlers.  Albert gave a supreme glance at the vehicles
and the walkers, made a signal, and joined Edwin
and Bert in the last coach, buttoning his left hand
glove.  Edwin would only hold his gloves in his hand.
The cortège moved.  Rain was threatening, and the
street was muddy.

At the cemetery it was raining, and the walkers
made a string of glistening umbrellas; only the paid
mutes had no umbrellas.  Near the gates, under an
umbrella, stood a man with a protruding chin and a
wiry grey moustache.  He came straight to Edwin and
shook hands.  It was Mr. Breeze, the Bank manager.
His neck, enveloped in a white muffler, showed a large
excrescence behind, and he kept his head very
carefully in one position.

He said, in his defiant voice:

"I only had the news this morning, and I felt that
I should pay the last tribute of respect to the
deceased.  I had known her in business and privately for
many years."

His greeting of Albert was extremely reserved, and
Albert showed him a meek face.  Albert's overdraft
impaired the cordiality of their relations.

"Sorry to hear you've got your old complaint!" said
Edwin, astounded at this act of presence by the
terrible bank-manager.

Vehicles, by some municipal caprice, were forbidden
to enter the cemetery.  And in the rain, between the
stone-perpetuated great names of the town's history--the
Boultons, the Lawtons, the Blackshaws, the
Beardmores, the Dunns, the Longsons, the Hulmes,
the Suttons, the Greenes, the Gardiners, the Calverts,
the Dawsons, the Brindleys, the Baineses, and the
Woods--the long procession preceded by Auntie Hamps
tramped for a third of a mile along the asphalted
path winding past the chapel to the graveside.  And
all the way Mr. Breeze, between Edwin and Albert,
with Bert a yard to the rear, talked about boils, and
Edwin said "Yes" and "No," and Albert said nothing.
And at the graveside the three ministers removed their
flat round hats and put on skull-caps while skilfully
holding their umbrellas aloft.

And while Mr. Flowerdew was reading from a little
book in the midst of the large encircling bare-headed
crowd with umbrellas, and the gravedigger with absolute
precision accompanied his words with three castings
of earth into the hollow of the grave, Edwin scanned an
adjoining tombstone, which marked the family vault
of Isaac Plant, a renowned citizen.  He read, chased
in gilt letters on the Aberdeen granite, the following
lines:

"Sacred to the memory of Adelaide Susan, wife of
Isaac Plant, died 27th June, 1886, aged 47 years.
And of Mary, wife of Isaac Plant, died 11th December,
1890, aged 33 years.  And of Effie Harriet, wife
of Isaac Plant, died 9th December, 1893, aged 27
years.  *The Flower Fadeth*.  And of Isaac Plant,
died 9th February, 1894, aged 79 years.  *I know that
my Redeemer Liveth*."  And the passionate career of
the aged and always respectable rip seemed to Edwin
to have been a wondrous thing.  The love of life was in
Isaac Plant.  He had risen above death again and
again.  After having detested him, Edwin now liked
him on the tombstone.

And even in that hilly and bleak burial ground,
with melancholy sepulchral parties and white
wind-blown surplices dotted about the sodden slopes, and
the stiff antipathetic multitude around the pit which
held Auntie Hamps, and the terrible seared, harsh,
grey-and-brown industrial landscape of the great
smoking amphitheatre below, Edwin felt happy in the
sensation of being alive and of having to contend with
circumstance.  He was inspired by the legend of Isaac
Plant and of Auntie Hamps, who in very different
ways had intensely lived.  And he thought in the
same mood of Tertius Ingpen, who was now understood
to be past hope.  If he died,--well, he also had
intensely lived!  And he thought too of Hilda, whose
terrific vitality of emotion had caused him such hours
of apprehension and exasperation.  He exulted in all
those hours.  It seemed almost a pity that, by reason
of his new-found understanding of Hilda, such hours
would not recur.  His heart flew impatiently forward
into the future, to take up existence with her again.

When the ministers pocketed their skull-caps and
resumed their hats, everybody except Edwin appeared
to feel relief in turning away from the grave.  Faces
brightened; footsteps were more alert.  In the
drawing-room Edwin had thought: "It will soon be over,"
and every face near him was saying, "It is over"; but
now that it was over Edwin had a pang of depression
at the eagerness with which all the mourners
abandoned Auntie Hamps to her strange and desolate grave
amid the sinister population of corpses.

He lingered, glancing about.  Mr. Breeze also
lingered, and then in his downright manner squarely
approached Edwin.

"I'll walk down with ye to the gates," said he.

"Yes," said Edwin.

Mr. Breeze moved his head round with care.  Their
umbrellas touched.  In front of them the broken units
of a procession tramped in disorder, chatting.

"I've got that will for you," said Mr. Breeze in a
confidential tone.

"What will?"

"Mrs. Hamps's."

"But your cashier said there was no will at your place!"

"My cashier doesn't know everything," remarked
Mr. Breeze.  And in his voice was the satisfied grimness
of a true native of the district, and a Longshaw man.
"Mrs. Hamps deposited her will with me as much as a
friend as anything else.  The fact is I had it in my
private safe.  I should have called with it this morning,
but I knew that you'd be busy, and what's more I
can't go paying calls of a morning.  Here it is."

Mr. Breeze drew an endorsed foolscap envelope from
the breast pocket of his overcoat, and handed it to
Edwin.

"Thanks," said Edwin very curtly.  He could be as
native as any native.  But beneath the careful
imperturbability of his demeanour he was not unagitated.

"I've got a receipt for you to sign," said Mr. Breeze.
"It's slipped into the envelope.  Here's an ink-pencil."

Edwin comprehended that he must stand still in the
rain and sign a receipt for the will as best he could
under an umbrella.  He complied.  Mr. Breeze said no
more.

"Good-bye, Mr. Breeze," said Edwin at the gates.

"Good-day to you, Mr. Clayhanger."

The coaches trotted down the first part of the hill
into Bursley but as soon as the road became a street,
with observant houses on either side, the pace was
reduced to a proper solemnity.  Edwin was amused
and even uplifted by the thought of the will in his
pocket; his own curiosity concerning it diverted him;
he anticipated complications with a light heart.  To
Albert he said nothing on the subject, which somehow
he could not bring himself to force bluntly into the
conversation.  Albert talked about his misfortunes at
the works, including the last straw of the engine
accident; and all the time he was vaguely indicating
reasons--the presence of Bert in the carriage necessitated
reticence--for his default in the interest-paying to
Maggie.  At intervals he gave out that he was
expecting much from Bert, who at the New Year was
to leave school for the works--and Bert taciturn
behind his spectacles had to seem loyal, earnest, and
promising.

As they approached the Clowes Hospital Edwin
saw a nurse in a bonnet, white bow, and fluent blue
robe emerging from the shrubbery and putting up an
umbrella.  She looked delightful,--at once modest and
piquant, until he saw that she was the night-nurse; and
even then she still looked delightful.  He thought:
"I'd no idea she could look like that!" and began to
admit to himself that perhaps in his encounters with
her in the obscurity of the night he had not envisaged
the whole of her personality.  Involuntarily he leaned
forward.  Her eyes were scintillant and active, and
they caught his.  He saluted; she bowed, with a most
inviting, challenging and human smile.

"There's Nurse Faulkner!" he exclaimed to Albert.
"I must just ask her how Ingpen is.  I haven't heard
to-day."  He made as if to lean out of the window.

"But you can't stop the procession!" Albert protested
in horror, unable to conceive such an enormity.

"I'll just slip out!" said Edwin, guiltily.

He spoke to the coachman and the coach halted.

In an instant he was on the pavement.

"Drive on," he instructed the coachman, and to the
outraged Albert: "I'll walk down."

Nurse Faulkner, apparently flattered by the proof
of her attractiveness, stopped and smiled upon the
visitor.  She had a letter in one hand.

"Good afternoon, nurse."

"Good morning, Mr. Clayhanger.  I'm just going out
for my morning walk before breakfast," said she.

She had dimples.  These dimples quite ignored
Edwin's mourning and the fact that he had quitted a
funeral in order to speak to her.

"How is Mr. Ingpen to-day?" Edwin asked.  He
could read on the envelope in her hand the words "The Rev."

She grew serious, and said in a low, cheerful tone:
"I think he's going on pretty well."

Edwin was startled.

"D'you mean he's getting better?"

"Slowly.  He's taking food more easily.  He was
undoubtedly better this morning.  I haven't seen him
since, of course."

"But the matron seemed to think----"  He stopped,
for the dimples began to reappear.

"Matron always fears the worst, you know," said
Nurse Faulkner, not without irony.

"Does she?"

The matron had never held out hope to Edwin; and
he had unquestioningly accepted her opinion.  It had
not occurred to him that the matron of a hospital
could be led astray by her instinctive unconscious
appetite for gloom and disaster.

The nurse nodded.

"Then you think he'll pull through?"

"I'm pretty sure he will.  But of course I've not
seen the doctor--I mean since the first night."

"I'm awfully glad."

"His brother came over from Darlington to see
him yesterday evening, you know."

"Yes.  I just missed him."

The nurse gave a little bow as she moved up the road.

"Just going to the pillar-box," she explained.
"Dreadful weather we're having!"

He left her, feeling that he had made a new acquaintance.

"She's in love with a parson, I bet," he said to
himself.  And he had to admit that she had
charm--when off duty.

The news about Ingpen filled him with bright joy.
Everything was going well.  Hilda would soon be home;
George's eyes were not seriously wrong; the awful
funeral was over; and his friend was out of
danger--marvellously restored to him.  Then he thought of the
will.  He glanced about to see whether anybody of
importance was observing him.  There was nobody.
The coaches were a hundred yards in front.  He drew
out the envelope containing the will, managed to
extract the will from the envelope, and opened the
document,--not very easily because he was holding his
umbrella.

A small printed slip fluttered to the muddy pavement.
He picked it up; it was a printed form of attestation
clause, seemingly cut from Whitaker's Almanac:--"Signed
by the testator (or testatrix as the case may
be) in the presence of us, both present at the same
time," etc.

"She's got that right, anyhow," he murmured.

Then, walking along, he read the will of Auntie
Hamps.  It was quickly spotted with raindrops.

At the house the blinds were drawn up, and the
women sedately cheerful.  Maggie was actually teasing
Bert about his new hat, and young Clara, active among
the preparations for tea for six, was intensely and
seriously proud at being included in the ceremonial
party of adults.  She did not suspect that the adults
themselves had a novel sensation of being genuinely
adult, and that the last representative of the older
generation was gone, and that this common sensation
drew them together rather wistfully.

"Oh!  By the way, there's a telegram for you,"
said Maggie, as Minnie left the dining-room after
serving the last trayful of hot dishes and pots.

Edwin took the telegram.  It was from Hilda, to say
that she and George would return on the morrow.

"But what about the house being cleaned, and what
about servants?" cried Edwin, affecting, in order to
conceal his pleasure, an annoyance which he did not in
the least feel.

"Oh!  Mrs. Tams has been looking after the house--I
shall go round and see her after tea.  I've got
one servant for Hilda."

"You never told me anything about it," said Edwin,
who was struck, by no means for the first time,
by the concealment which all the women practised.

"Didn't I?" Maggie innocently murmured.  "And
then Minnie can go and help if necessary until you're
all settled again.  Hadn't we better have the gas lighted
before we begin?"

And in the warm cosiness of the small, ugly,
dining-room shortly to be profaned by auctioneers and
furniture-removers, amid the odours of tea and hot
tea-cakes, and surrounded by the family faces intimate,
beloved, and disdained, Edwin had an exciting vision
of the new life with Hilda, and the vision was shot
through with sharp flitting thoughts of the once
gorgeous Auntie Hamps forlorn in the cemetery and
already passing into oblivion.

After tea, immediately the children had been sent
home, he said, self-consciously to Albert:

"I've got something for you."

And offered the will.  Maggie and Clara were upstairs.

"What is it?"

"It's Auntie's will.  Breeze had it.  He gave it to
me in the cemetery.  It seems he only knew this morning
Auntie was dead.  I think that was why he came up."

"Well, I'm----!" Albert muttered.

His hand trembled as he opened the paper.

Auntie Hamps had made Edwin sole executor, and
had left all her property in trust for Clara's children.
Evidently she had reasoned that Edwin and Maggie
had all they needed, and that the children of such a
father as Albert could only be effectually helped in
one way, which way she had chosen.  The will was
seven years old, and the astounding thing was that
she had drawn it herself, having probably copied
some of the wording from some source unknown.  It
was a wise if a rather ruthless will; and its provisions,
like the manner of making it, were absolutely
characteristic of the testatrix.  Too mean to employ a
lawyer, she had yet had a magnificent gesture of
generosity towards that Benbow brood which she adored
in her grandiose way.  And further she had been clever
enough not to invalidate the will by some negligent
informality.  It was as tight as if Julian Pidduck
himself had drawn it.

And she had managed to put Albert in a position
highly exasperating.  For he was both very pleased
and very vexed.  In slighting him, she had aggrandized
his children.

"What of it?" he asked nervously.

"It's all right so far as I'm concerned," said
Edwin, with a short laugh.  And he was sincere, for he
had no desire whatever to take a share of his aunt's
modest wealth.  He shrank from the trusteeship, but
he knew that he could not avoid it, and he was getting
accustomed to power and dominion.  Albert would have
to knuckle down to him, and Clara too.

Maggie and Clara came back together into the
room, noticeably sisterly.  They perceived at once
from the men's faces that they were in the presence
of a historic event.

"I say, Clary," Albert began; his voice quavered.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE DISCOVERY`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER XX


.. class:: center medium

   THE DISCOVERY

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   I

.. vspace:: 2

Hilda showed her smiling, flattering face at the door
of Edwin's private office at a few minutes to one on
Saturday morning, and she said:

"I had to go to the dressmaker's after my shopping,
so I thought I might as well call for you."  She added
with deference: "But I can wait if you're busy."

True that the question of mourning had taken her
to the dressmaker's, and that the dressmaker lived in
Shawport Lane, not four minutes from the works; but
such accidents had nothing to do with her call, which,
being part of a scheme of Hilda's, would have
occurred in any case.

"I'm ready," said Edwin, pleased by the vision of
his wife in the stylish wide-sleeved black jacket and
black hat which she had bought in London.  "What
have you got in that parcel?"

"It's your new office-coat," Hilda replied,
depositing on the desk the parcel which had been partly
concealed behind her muff.  "I've mended the sleeves."

"Aha!" Edwin lightly murmured.  "Let's have a look
at it."

His benevolent attitude towards the new office-coat
surprised and charmed her.  Before her journey to
London with George he would have jealously resented
any interfering hand among his apparel, but since her
return he had been exquisitely amenable.  She thought,
proud of herself:

"It's really quite easy to manage him.  I never used
to go quite the right way about it."

Her new system, which was one of the results of
contact with London and which had been inaugurated
a week earlier on the platform of Knype station when
she stepped down from the London train, consisted
chiefly in smiles, voice-control, and other devices to
make Edwin believe in any discussion that she fully
appreciated his point of view.  Often (she was startled
to find) this simulation had the unexpected result
of causing her actually to appreciate his point of view.
Which was very curious.

London indeed had had its effect on Hilda.  She
had seen the Five Towns from a distance, and as
something definitely provincial.  Having lived for years
at Brighton, which is almost a suburb of London, and
also for a short time in London itself, she could not
think of herself as a provincial, in the full sense in
which Edwin, for example, was a provincial.  She had
gone to London with her son, not like a staring and
intimidated provincial, but with the confidence of an
initiate returning to the scene of initiation.  And once
she was there, all her old condescensions towards the
dirty and primitive ingenuous Five Towns had very
quickly revived.  She discovered Charlie Orgreave, the
fairly successful doctor in Ealing (a suburb rich in
doctors), to be the perfect Londoner, and Janet, no
longer useless and forlorn, scarcely less so.  These two,
indeed, had the air of having at length reached their
proper home after being born in exile.  The same was
true of Johnnie Orgreave, now safely through the
matrimonial court and married to his blonde Adela
(formerly the ripping Mrs. Chris Hamson), whose money
had bought him a junior partnership in an important
architectural firm in Russell Square.  Johnnie and
Adela had come over from Bedford Park to Ealing
to see Hilda, and Hilda had dined with them at
Bedford Park at a table illuminated by crimson-shaded
night-lights,--a repast utterly different in its
appointments and atmosphere from anything conceivable in
Trafalgar Road.  The current Five Towns notion of
Johnnie and his wife as two morally ruined creatures
hiding for the rest of their lives in shame from an
outraged public opinion, seemed merely comic in Ealing
and Bedford Park.  These people referred to the Five
Towns with negligent affection, but with disdain, as to
a community that, with all its good qualities, had not
yet emerged from barbarism.  They assumed that their
attitude was also Hilda's, and Hilda, after a moment's
secret resentment, had indeed made their attitude her
own.  When she mentioned that she hoped soon to
move Edwin into a country house, they applauded and
implied that no other course was possible.  Withal,
their respect, to say nothing of their regard, for
Edwin, the astute and successful man of business, was
obvious and genuine.  The two brothers Orgreave, amid
their possibly superficial splendours of professional
men, hinted envy of the stability of Edwin's trade
position.  And both Janet and Adela, shopping with Hilda,
showed her, by those inflections and eyebrow-liftings of
which women possess the secret, that the wife of a
solid and generous husband had quite as much economic
importance in London as in the Five Towns.

Thus when Hilda got into the train at Euston, she
had in her head a plan of campaign compared to
which the schemes entertained by her on the
afternoon of the disastrous servants episode seemed
amateurish and incomplete.  And also she was like a
returning adventurer, carrying back to his savage land the
sacred torch of civilisation.  She had perceived, as
never before, the superior value of the suave and refined
social methods of the metropolitan middle-classes,
compared with the manners of the Five Towns, and it
seemed to her, in her new enthusiasm for the art of
life, that if she had ever had a difficulty with Edwin,
her own clumsiness was to blame.  She saw Edwin as an
instrument to be played upon, and herself as a
virtuoso.  In such an attitude was necessarily a
condescension.  Yet this condescension somehow did not in
the least affect the tenderness and the fever of her
longing for Edwin.  Her excitement grew as the train
passed across the dusky December plain towards him.
She thought of the honesty of his handshake and of
his wistful glance.  She knew that he was better than
any of the people she had left,--either more capable, or
more reliable, or more charitable, or all three.  She
knew that most of the people she had left were at
heart snobs.  "Am I getting a snob?" she asked
herself.  She had asked herself the question before.  "I
don't care if it is snobbishness.  I want certain things,
and I will have them, and they can call it what they
like."  Like the majority of women, she was incapable
of being frightened by the names of her desires.  She
might be snobbish in one part of her, but in another
she had the fiercest scorn for all that Ealing stood
for.  And in Edwin she admired nothing more than
the fact that success had not modified his politics,
which were as downright as they had ever been; she
could not honestly say the same for herself; and
assuredly the Orgreaves could not say the same for
themselves.  In politics, Edwin was an inspiration to her.

And when the train entered the fiery zone of
industry, and slackened speed amid the squalid twilit
streets, and stopped at Knype station in front of a
crowd of local lowering faces and mackintoshed and
gaitered forms, and the damp chill of the Five Towns
came in through the opened door of the compartment,
her heart fell, and she regretted the elegance of
Ealing.  But simultaneously her heart was beating with
ecstatic expectation.  She saw Edwin's face.  It was a
local face.  He wore mourning.  He saw her; his eye
lighted; his wistful smile appeared.  "Yes," she
thought, "he is the same as my image of him.  He
is better than any of them.  I am safe.  What a
shame to have left him all alone!  He was quite
right--there was no need for it.  But I am so impulsive.
He must have suffered terribly with those Benbows,
and shut out of his own house too." ... His hand
thrilled her.  In the terrible sincerity and outpouring of
her kiss she sought to compensate him for all wrongs
past and future.  Her joy in being near him again made
her tingle.  His matter-of-fact calmness pleased her.
She thought: "I know him, with his matter-of-fact
calmness!"  "Hello, kid," Edwin addressed George with
man-to-man negligence.  "Been looking after your
mother?" George answered like a Londoner.  She
had them side by side.  It was the fact that George
had looked after her.  London had matured him; he
had picked up a little Ealing.  He was past Edwin's
shoulder.  Indeed he was surprisingly near to being a
man.  She had both of them.  On the platform they
surrounded her with their masculine protection.
George's secret deep respect for Edwin was not
hidden from her.

And yet, all the time, in her joy, reliance, love,
admiration, eating him with her eyes, she was condescending
to Edwin,--because she had plans for his good.
She knew better than he did what would be for his
good.  And he was a provincial and didn't suspect it.
"My poor boy!" she had said gleefully in the cab,
pulling suddenly at a loose button of the old grey
coat which he wore surreptitiously under his new black
overcoat.  "My poor boy, what a state you are in!"
implying in her tone of affectionate raillery that
without her he was a lost man.  Through this loose
button, she was his mother, his good angel, his saviour.
The trifle had led to a general visitation of his
wardrobe, conducted by her with metropolitan skill in
humouring his susceptibilities.

Edwin now tried on the new office-coat with the
self-consciousness that none but an odious dandy can avoid
on such occasions.

"It seems warmer than it used to be," he said,
pleased to have her beholding him and interesting
herself in him, especially in his office.  Her presence
there, unless it happened to arouse his jealousy for his
business independence, always pleasurably excited
him.  Her muff on the desk had the air of being the
muff of a woman who was amorously interested in him,
but his relations with whom were not regularised by
the law or the church.

"Yes," said she.  "I've put some wash-leather inside
the lining at the back."

"Why?"

"Well, didn't you say you felt the cold from the
window, and it's bad for your liver?"

Her glance said:

"Am I not a clever woman?"

And his replied:

"You are."

"That's the end of that, I hope, darling," she
remarked, picking up the old office-coat and dropping it
with charming affected disgust into the waste-paper
basket.

He shouted for the clerk, who entered with some
letters for signature.  Under the eyes of his wife
Edwin signed them with the demeanour of a secretary of
state signing the destiny of provinces, while the clerk
respectfully waited.

"I've asked Maggie to come up for the week-end,"
said Hilda carelessly, when they were alone together,
and Edwin was straightening the desk preparatory to
departure.

Since her return she had become far more friendly
with Maggie than ever before,--not because Maggie
had revealed any new charm, but because she saw in
Maggie a victim of injustice.  Nothing during the week
had more severely tested Hilda's new methods of
intercourse with Edwin than the disclosure of the
provisions of Auntie Hamps's will, which she had at once
and definitely set down as monstrous.  She simply
could not comprehend Edwin's calm acceptance of them,
and a month earlier she would have been bitter about
it.  It was not (she was convinced) that she coveted
money, but that she hated unfairness.  Why should
the Benbows have all Auntie Hamps's possessions, and
Edwin and Maggie, who had done a thousand times
more for her than the Benbows, nothing?  Hilda's
conversation implied that the Benbows ought to be
ashamed of themselves, and when Edwin pointed out
that their good luck was not their fault, only a
miracle of self-control had enabled her to say nicely:
"That's quite true," instead of sneering: "That's
you all over, Edwin!"  When she learnt that Edwin
would receive not a penny for his labours as executor
and trustee for the Benbow children, she was
speechless.  Perceiving that he did not care for her to
discourse upon what she considered to be the wrong done
to him, she discoursed upon the wrong done to
Maggie--Maggie who was already being deprived by the
wicked Albert of interest due to her.  And Edwin had
to agree with her about Maggie's case.  It appeared
that Maggie also agreed with her about Maggie's case.
As for the Benbows, Hilda had not deigned to say one
word to them on the matter.  A look, a tone, a silence,
had sufficed to express the whole of Hilda's mind to
those Benbows.

"Oh!" said Edwin.  "So Maggie's coming for the
week-end, is she?  Well, that's not a bad scheme."  He
knew that Maggie had been very helpful about
servants, and that, the second servant having not yet
arrived, she would certainly do much more work in
the house than she "made."  He pictured her and
Hilda becoming still more intimate as they turned
sheets and blankets and shook pillows on opposite sides
of beds, and he was glad.

"Yes," said Hilda.  "I've called there this morning."

"And what's she doing with Minnie?"

"We've settled all that," said Hilda proudly.
Edwin had told her in detail the whole story of Minnie,
and she had behaved exactly as he had anticipated.
Her championship of Minnie had been as passionate
as her ruthless verdict upon Minnie's dead mistress.
"The girl's aunt was there when I called.  We've
settled she is to go to Stone, and Maggie and I shall do
something for her, and when it's all over I may take
her on as housemaid.  Maggie says she probably
wouldn't make a bad housemaid.  Anyhow it's all
arranged for the present."

"Then Maggie'll be without a servant?"

"No, she won't.  We shall manage that.  Besides,
I suppose Maggie won't stay on in that house all by
herself for ever! ... It's just the right size, I see."

"Just!" said Edwin.

He was spreading over his desk a dust-sheet with a
red scolloped edging which Hilda had presented to
him three days earlier.

She gazed at him with composed and justifiable
self-satisfaction, as if saying: "Leave absolutely to me
everything in my department, and see how smooth your
life will be!"

He would never praise her, and she had a very
healthy appetite for praise, which appetite always
went hungry.  But now, instead of resenting his
niggardly reserve, she said to herself: "Poor boy!  He
can't bring himself to pay compliments; that's it.  But
his eyes are full of delicious compliments."  She was
happy, even if apprehensive for the immediate future.
There she was, established and respected in his office,
which was his church and the successful rival of her
boudoir.  Her plans were progressing.

She approached the real business of her call:

"I was thinking we might have gone over to see
Ingpen this afternoon."

"Well, let's."

Ingpen, convalescent, had insisted, two days earlier,
on being removed to his own house, near the village of
Stockbrook, a few miles south of Axe.  The departure
was a surprising example of the mere power of
volition on the part of a patient.  The routine of
hospital life had exasperated the recovering soul of
this priest of freedom to such a point that doctor,
matron, and friends had had to yield to a mere instinct.

"There's no decent train to go, and none at all to
come back until nearly nine o'clock.  And we can't
cycle in this weather--at least I can't, especially in the
dark."

"Well, what about Sunday?"

"The Sunday trains are worse."

"What a ghastly line!" said Edwin.  "And they
have the cheek to pay five per cent!  I remember
Ingpen telling me there was one fairish train into Knype
in the morning, and one out in the afternoon.  And
there wouldn't be that if the Locomotive
Superintendent didn't happen to live at Axe."

"It's a pity you haven't got a dog-cart, isn't it?"
said Hilda, lightly smiling.  "Because then we could
use the works horse now and then, and it wouldn't
really cost anything extra, would it?"

Her heart was beating perceptibly.

Edwin shook his head, agreeably, but with firmness.

"Can't mix up two different things like that!" he said.

She knew it.  She was aware of the whole theory
of horse-owning among the upper trading-class in the
Five Towns.  A butcher might use his cob for
pleasure on Sundays--he never used it for pleasure on any
other day--but traders on a higher plane than
butchers drew between the works and the house a line
which a works horse was not permitted to cross.  One
or two, perhaps,--but not the most solid--would put
a carter into a livery overcoat and a shabby top-hat
and describe him as a coachman while on rare
afternoons he drove a landau or a victoria picked up cheap
at Axe or Market Drayton.  But the majority had
no pretensions to the owning of private carriages.
The community was not in fact a carriage community.
Even the Orgreaves had never dreamed of a carriage.
Old Darius Clayhanger would have been staggered into
profanity by the suggestion of such a thing.  Indeed,
until some time after old Clayhanger's death the
printing business had been content to deliver all its orders
in a boy-pushed handcart.  Only when Edwin discovered
that, for instance, two thousand catalogues on
faced clay paper could not be respectably delivered in
a handcart, had he steeled himself to the prodigious
move of setting up a stable.  He had found an entirely
trustworthy ostler-carter with the comfortable name
of Unchpin, and, an animal and a tradesman's
covered cart having been bought, he had left the affair
to Unchpin.  Naturally he had never essayed to drive
the tradesman's cart.  And Edwin Clayhanger could
not be seen on the insecure box of a tradesman's cart.
He had learnt nothing about horses except that a horse
should be watered before, and not after, being fed, that
shoeing cost a shilling a week and fodder a shilling a
day, and that a horse driven over a hundred and fifty
miles a week was likely to get "a bit over" at the
knees.  At home the horse and cart had always been
regarded as being just as exclusively a works item as
the printing-machines or the steam-engine.

"I suppose," said Hilda carefully, "you've got all
the work one horse can do?"

"And more."

"Well, then, why don't you buy another one?"  She
tried to speak carelessly, without genuine interest.

"Yes, no doubt!" Edwin answered drily.  "And
build fresh stables, too."

"Haven't you got room for two?"

"Come along and look, and then perhaps you'll be
satisfied."

Buzzers, syrens, and whistles began to sound in the
neighbourhood.  It was one o'clock.

"Shall I? ... Your overcoat collar's turned up
behind.  Let me do it."

She straightened the collar.

They went out, through the clerk's office.  Edwin
gave a sideways nod to Simpson.  In the passage some
girls and a few men were already hurrying forth.  None
of them took notice of Edwin and Hilda.  They all
plunged for the street as though the works had been
on fire.

"They are in a hurry, my word!" Hilda murmured,
with irony.

"And why shouldn't they be?" the employer
protested almost angrily.

In the small yard stood the horseless cart, with
"Edwin Clayhanger, Lithographer and Steam Printer,
Bursley," on both its sides.  The stable and cart-shed
were in one penthouse, and to get to the stable it was
necessary to pass through the cart-shed.  Unchpin,
a fat man of forty with a face marked by black seams,
was bending over a chaff-cutter in the cart-shed.  He
ignored the intruders.  The stable consisted of one
large loose-box, in which a grey animal was restlessly
moving.

"You see!" Edwin muttered curtly.

"Oh!  What a beautiful horse!  I've never seen him
before."

"Her," Edwin corrected.

"Is it a mare?"

"So they say!"

"I never knew you'd got a fresh one."

"I haven't--yet.  I've taken this one for a
fortnight's trial, from Chawner....  How's she doing,
Unchpin?" he called to the cart-shed.

Unchpin looked round and stared.

"Bit light," he growled and turned back to the
chaff-cutter, which he seemed to be repairing.

"I thought so," said Edwin.

"But her's a good 'un," he added.

"But where's the old horse?" asked Hilda.

"With God," Edwin replied.  "Dropped down dead
last week."

"What of?"

Edwin shook his head.

"It's a privilege of horses to do that sort of thing,"
he said.  "They're always doing it."

"You never told me."

"Well, you weren't here, for one thing."

The mare inquisitively but cautiously put her
muzzle over the door of the box.  Hilda stroked her.  The
animal's mysterious eyes, her beautiful coat, her broad
back, her general bigness relatively to Hilda, the sound
of her feet among the litter on the paving stones, the
smell of the stable,--these things enchanted Hilda.

"I should adore horses!" she breathed, half to
herself, ecstatically; and wondered whether she would
ever be able to work her will on Edwin in the matter
of a dog-cart.  She pictured herself driving the grey
mare, who had learnt to love her, in a flashing
dog-cart, Edwin by her side on the front-seat.  Her mind
went back enviously to Tavy Mansion and Dartmoor.
But she felt that Edwin had not enough elasticity to
comprehend the rapture of her dream.  She foresaw
nearly endless trouble and altercation and chicane
before she could achieve her end.  She was ready to
despair, but she remembered her resolutions and took
heart.

"I say, Unchpin," said Edwin.  "I suppose this
box couldn't be made into two stalls?"

Unchpin on his gaitered legs clumped towards the
stable, and gazed gloomily into the box.  When he
had gazed for some time, he touched his cap to Hilda.

"It could," he announced.

"Could you get a trap into the shed as well as the
cart?"

"Ay!  If ye dropped th' shafts o' th' trap under th'
cart.  What of it, mester?"

"Nothing.  Only missis is going to have this mare."

After a pause, Unchpin muttered:

"Missis, eh!"

Hilda had moved a little away into the yard.  Edwin
approached her, flushing slightly, and with a
self-consciousness which he tried to dissipate with one wink.
Hilda's face was set hard.

"I must just go back to the office," she said, in a
queer voice.

She walked quickly, Edwin following.  Simpson
beheld their return with gentle surprise.  In the private
office Hilda shut the door.  She then ran to the
puzzled Edwin, and kissed him with the most startling
vehemence, clasping her arms--in one hand she still held
the muff--round his neck.  She loved him for being
exactly as he was.  She preferred his strange, uncouth
method of granting a request, of yielding, of flattering
her caprice, to any politer, more conventional methods
of the metropolis.  She thought that no other man
could be as deeply romantic as Edwin.  She despised
herself for ever having been misled by the surface of
him.  And even the surface of him she saw now as it
were, through the prism of passionate affection, to be
edged with the blending colours of the rainbow.  And
when they came again out of the office, after the sacred
rite, and Edwin, as uplifted as she, glanced back
nevertheless at the sheeted desk and the safe and the other
objects in the room with the half-mechanical habitual
solicitude of a man from whom the weight of responsibility
is never lifted, she felt saddened because she
could not enter utterly into his impenetrable soul,
and live through all his emotions, and comprehend
like a creator the always baffling wistfulness of
his eyes.  This sadness was joy; it was the aura of her
tremendous satisfaction in his individuality and in her
triumph and in the thought: "I alone stand between
him and desolation."



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   II

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"Wo!" exclaimed Hilda broadly, bringing the mare
and the vehicle to a standstill in front of the "Live
and Let Live" inn in the main street of the village of
Stockbrook, which lay about a mile and a half off the
high road from the Five Towns to Axe.  And immediately
the mare stopped she was enveloped in her
own vapour.

"Ha!" exclaimed Edwin, with faint benevolent irony.
"And no bones broken!"

A man came out from the stable-yard.

The village of Stockbrook gave the illusion that
hundreds of English villages were giving that Christmas
morning,--the illusion that its name was Arcadia,
that finality had been reached, and that the forces of
civilisation could go no further.  More suave than a
Dutch village, incomparably neater and cleaner and
more delicately finished than a French village, it
presented, in the still, complacent atmosphere of long
tradition, a picturesque medley of tiny architectures
nearly every aspect of which was beautiful.  And if
seven people of different ages and sexes lived in a
two-roomed cottage under a thatched roof hollowed by the
weight of years, without drains and without water, and
also without freedom, the beholder was yet bound to
conclude that by some mysterious virtue their
existence must be gracious, happy, and in fact
ideal--especially on Christmas Day, though Christmas Day was
also Quarter Day--and that they would not on any
account have it altered in the slightest degree.  Who
could believe that fathers of families drank away their
children's bread in the quaint tap-room of that creeper-clad
hostel--a public-house fit to produce ecstasy in
the heart of every American traveller--"The Live
and Let Live"?  Who could have believed that
the Wesleyan Methodists already singing a Christmas
hymn inside the dwarf Georgian conventicle, and their
fellow-Christians straggling under the lych into the
church-yard, scorned one another with an immortal
detestation, each claiming a monopoly in knowledge of the
unknowable?  But after all the illusion of Arcadia was
not entirely an illusion.  In this calm, rime-decked,
Christmas-imbued village, with its motionless trees
enchanted beneath a vast grey impenetrable cloud, a sort
of relative finality had indeed been reached,--the end
of an epoch that was awaiting dissolution.

Edwin had not easily agreed to the project of
shutting up house for the day and eating the Christmas
dinner with Tertius Ingpen.  Although customarily
regarding the ritual of Christmas, with its family visits,
its exchange of presents, its feverish kitchen activity,
its somewhat insincere gaiety, its hours of boredom,
and its stomachic regrets, as an ordeal rather than a
delight, he nevertheless abandoned it with reluctance
and a sense of being disloyal to something sacred.
But the situation of Ingpen, Hilda's strong desire and
her teasing promise of a surprise, and the still
continuing dearth of servants had been good arguments to
persuade him.

And though he had left Trafalgar Road moody and
captious, thinking all the time of the deserted and
cold home, he had arrived in Stockbrook tingling and
happy, and proud of Hilda,--proud of her verve, her
persistency, and her success.  She had carried him very
far on the wave of her new enthusiasm for horse-traction.
She had beguiled him into immediately spending
mighty sums on a dog-cart, new harness, rugs, a
driving-apron, and a fancy whip.  She had exhausted
Unchpin, upset the routine of the lithographic business,
and gravely overworked the mare, in her determination
to learn to drive.  She had had the equipage out at
night for her lessons.  On the other hand she had not
in the least troubled herself about the purchase of a
second horse for mercantile purposes, and a second
horse had not yet been bought.

When she had announced that she would herself drive
her husband and son over to Stockbrook, Edwin had
absolutely negatived the idea; but Unchpin had been
on her side; she had done the double journey with
Unchpin, who judged her capable and the mare (eight
years old) quite reliable, and who moreover wanted
Christmas as much as possible to himself.  And Hilda
had triumphed.  Walking the mare uphill--and also
downhill--she had achieved Stockbrook in safety; and
the conquering air with which she drew up at the "Live
and Let Live" was delicious.  The chit's
happiness and pride radiated out from her.  It seemed
to Edwin that by the mere strength of violition
she had actually created the dog-cart and its
appointments, and the mare too!  And he thought that he
himself had not lived in vain if he could procure her
such sensations as her glowing face then displayed.
Her occasionally overbearing tenacity, and the little
jars which good resolutions several weeks old had
naturally not been powerful enough to prevent, were
forgotten and forgiven.  He would have given all his
savings to please her caprice, and been glad.  A horse and
trap, or even a pair of horses and a landau, were a
trifling price to pay for her girlish joy and for his own
tranquillity in his beloved house and business.

"Catch me, both of you!" cried Hilda.

Edwin had got down, and walked round behind the
vehicle to the footpath, where George stood grinning.
The stableman, in classic attitude, was at the mare's
head.

Hilda jumped rather wildly.  It was Edwin who
countered the shock of her descent.  The edge of her
velvet hat knocked against his forehead, disarranging
his cap.  He could smell the velvet, as for an instant
he held his wife--strangely acquiescent and yielding--in
his arms, and there was something intimately
feminine in the faint odour.  All Hilda's happiness seemed
to pass into him, and that felicity sufficed for him.  He
did not desire any happiness personal to himself.  He
wanted only to live in her.  His contentment was
profound, complete, rapturous.

And yet in the same moment, reflecting that Hilda
would certainly have neglected the well-being of the
mare, he could say to the stableman:

"Put the rug over her, will you?"

"Hello!  Here's Mr. Ingpen!" announced George, as
he threw the coloured rug on the mare.

Ingpen, pale and thickly enveloped, came slowly
round the bend of the road, waving and smiling.  He
had had a relapse, after a too early sortie, and was
recovering from it.

"I made sure you'd be about here," he said, shaking
hands.  "Merry Christmas, all!"

"Ought you to be out, my lad?" Edwin asked heartily.

"Out?  Yes.  I'm as fit as a fiddle.  And I've been
ordered mild exercise."  He squared off gaily against
George and hit the stout adolescent in the chest.

"What about all your parcels, Hilda?" Edwin enquired.

"Oh!  We'll call for them afterwards."

"Afterwards?"

"Yes.  Come along--before you catch a chill."  She
winked openly at Ingpen, who returned the wink.
"Come along, dear.  It's not far.  We have to walk
across the fields."

"Put her up, sir?" the stableman demanded of Edwin.

"Yes.  And give her a bit of a rub down," he replied
absently, remembering various references of
Hilda's to a surprise.  His heart misgave him.  Ingpen
and Hilda looked like plotters, very intimate and
mischievous.  He had a notion that living with a woman
was comparable to living with a volcano--you never
knew when a dangerous eruption might not occur.

Within three minutes the first and minor catastrophe
had occurred.

"Bit sticky, this field path of yours," said Edwin,
uneasily.

They were all four slithering about in brown clay
under a ragged hedge in which a few red berries
glowed.

"It was as hard as iron the day before yesterday,"
said Hilda.

"Oh!  So you were here the day before yesterday,
were you? ... What's that house there?"  Edwin
turned to Ingpen.

"He's guessed it in one!" Ingpen murmured, and
then went off into his characteristic crescendo laugh.

The upper part of a late eighteenth-century house,
squat and square, with yellow walls, black uncurtained
windows, high slim chimney, and a blue slate roof,
showed like a gigantic and mysterious fruit in a
clump of variegated trees, some of which were evergreen.

"Ladderedge Hall, my boy," said Ingpen.  "Seat of
the Beechinors for about a hundred years."

"'Seat', eh!" Edwin murmured sarcastically.

"It's been empty for two years," remarked Hilda
brightly.  "So we thought we'd have a look at it."

And Edwin said to himself that he had divined all
along what the surprise was.  It was astounding that
a man could pass with such rapidity as Edwin from
vivid joy to black and desolate gloom.  She well knew
that the idea of living in the country was extremely
repugnant to him, and that nothing would ever induce
him to consent to it.  And yet she must needs lay
this trap for him, prepare this infantile surprise, and
thereby spoil his Christmas, she who a few moments
earlier had been the embodiment of surrender in his
arms!  He said no word.  He hummed a few notes and
glanced airily to right and left with an effort after
unconcern.  The presence of Ingpen and the boy, and the
fact of Christmas, forbade him to speak freely.  He
could not suddenly stop and drive his stick into the
earth and say savagely:

"Now listen to me!  Once for all, I won't have this
country house idea!  So let it be understood,--if you
want a row, you know how to get it."

The appearance of amity--and the more high-spirited
the better--must be kept up throughout the day.
Nevertheless in his heart he challenged Hilda desperately.
All her good qualities became insignificant, all
his benevolent estimates of her seemed ridiculous.  She
was the impossible woman.  He saw a tremendous vista
of unpleasantness, for her obstinacy in warfare was
known to him, together with her perfect lack of scruple,
of commonsense, and of social decency.  He had made
her a present of a horse and trap--solely to please
her--and this was his reward!  The more rope you
gave these creatures, the more they wanted!  But he
would give no more rope.  Compromise was at an end.
The battle would be joined that night....  In
his grim and resolute dejection there was something
almost voluptuous.  He continued to glance airily
about, and at intervals to hum a few notes.

Over a stile they dropped into a rutty side-road,
and opposite was the worn iron gate of Ladderedge
Hall, with a house-agent's board on it.  A short curved
gravel drive, filmed with green, led to the front-door
of the house.  In front were a lawn and a flower-garden,
beyond a paddock, and behind a vegetable garden
and a glimpse of stabling; a compact property!
Ingpen drew a great key from his pocket.  The plotters
were all prepared; they took their victim for a
simpleton, a ninny, a lamb!

In the damp echoing interior Edwin gazed without
seeing, and heard as in a dream without listening.
This was the hall, this the dining-room, this the
drawing-room, this the morning-room....  White marble
mantelpieces, pre-historic grates, wall-paper hanging
in strips, cobwebs, uneven floors, scaly ceilings, the
invisible vapour of human memories!  This was the
kitchen, enormous; then the larder, enormous, and the
scullery still more enormous (with a pump-handle
flanking the slopstone)!  No water.  No gas.  And what
was this room opening out of the kitchen?  Oh!  That
must be the servants' hall....  Servants' hall indeed!
Imagine Edwin Clayhanger living in a "Hall," with a
servants' hall therein!  Snobbishness unthinkable!  He
would not be able to look his friends in the face....
On the first floor, endless bedrooms, but no bath-room.
Here, though, was a small bedroom that would make a
splendid bath-room....  Ingpen, the ever expert,
conceived a tank-room in the roof, and traced routes for
plumbers' pipes.  George, excited, and comprehending
that he must conduct himself as behoved an architect,
ran up to the attic floor to study on the spot the
problem of the tank-room, and Ingpen followed.  Edwin
stared out of a window at the prospect of the Arcadian
village lying a little below across the sloping fields.

"Come along, Edwin," Hilda coaxed.

Yes, she had pretended a deep concern for the
welfare of the suffering feckless bachelor, Tertius
Ingpen.  She had paid visit after visit in order to watch
over his convalescence.  Choosing to ignore his scorn
for all her sex, she had grown more friendly with him
than even Edwin had ever been.  Indeed by her
sympathetic attentions she had made Edwin seem callous in
comparison.  And all the time she had merely been
pursuing a private design--with what girlish deceitfulness.

In the emptiness of the house the voices of Ingpen
and George echoed from above down the second flight of
stairs.

"No good going to the attics," muttered Edwin, on
the landing.

Hilda, half cajoling, half fretful, protested:

"Now, Edwin, don't be disagreeable."

He followed her on high, martyrised.  The front
wall of the house rose nearly to the top of the attic
windows, screening and darkening them.

"Cheerful view!" Edwin growled.

He heard Ingpen saying that the place could be had
on a repairing lease for sixty-five pounds a year, and
that perhaps £1,200 would buy it.  Dirt cheap.

"Ah!" Edwin murmured.  "I know those repairing
leases.  £1,000 wouldn't make this barn fit to live in."

He knew that Ingpen and Hilda exchanged glances.

"It's larger than Tavy Mansion," said Hilda.

Tavy Mansion!  There was the secret!  Tavy
Mansion was at the bottom of her scheme.  Alicia
Hesketh had a fine house, and Hilda must have a finer.
She, Hilda, of all people, was a snob.  He had long
suspected it.

He rejoined sharply: "Of course it isn't larger than
Tavy Mansion!  It isn't as large."

"Oh! Edwin.  How can you say such things!"

In the portico, as Ingpen was re-locking the door,
the husband said negligently, superiorly, cheerfully:

"It's not so bad.  I expect there's hundreds of places
like this up and down the country--going cheap."

The walk back to the "Live and Let Live" was irked
by constraint, against which everyone fought nobly,
smiling, laughing, making remarks about cockrobins,
the sky, the Christmas dinner.

"So I hear it's settled you're going to London when
you leave school, kiddie," said Tertius Ingpen, to
bridge over a fearful hiatus in the prittle-prattle.

George, so big now and so mannishly dressed as to
be amused and not a bit hurt by the appellation
"kiddie," confirmed the statement in his deepening voice.

Edwin thought:

"It's more than *I* hear, anyway!"

Hilda had told him that during the visit to London
the project for articling George to Johnnie Orgreave
had been revived, but she had not said that a decision
had been taken.  Though Edwin from careful pride
had not spoken freely--George being Hilda's affair
and not his--he had shown no enthusiasm.  Johnnie
Orgreave had sunk permanently in his esteem--scarcely
less so than Jimmie, whose conjugal eccentricities had
scandalised the Five Towns and were achieving the
ruin of the Orgreave practice; or than Tom, who was
developing into a miser.  Moreover, he did not at all
care for George going to London.  Why should it be
thought necessary for George to go to London?  The
sagacious and successful provincial in Edwin was
darkly jealous of London, as a rival superficial and
brilliant.  And now he learnt from Ingpen that
George's destiny was fixed....  A matter of small
importance, however!

Did "they" seriously expect him to travel from
Ladderedge Hall to his works, and from his works to
Ladderedge Hall every week-day of his life?  He laughed
sardonically to himself.

Out came the sun, which George greeted with a
cheer.  And Edwin, to his own surprise, began to feel
hungry.



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   III

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"I shan't take that house, you know," said Edwin,
casually and yet confidentially, in a pause which
followed a long analysis, by Ingpen, of Ingpen's
sensations in hospital before he was out of danger.

They sat on opposite sides of a splendid extravagant
fire in Ingpen's dining-room.

Ingpen, sprawling in a shabby, uncomfortable easychair,
and flushed with the activity of digestion, raised
his eyebrows, squinted down at the cigarette between
his lips, and answered impartially:

"No.  So I gather.  Of course you must understand
it was Hilda's plan to go up there.  I merely fell in
with it,--simplest thing to do in these cases!"

"Certainly."

Thus they both condescended to the feather-headed
capricious woman, dismissed her, and felt a marked
access of sincere intimacy on a plane of civilisation
exclusively masculine.

In the succeeding silence of satisfaction and relief
could be heard George, in the drawing-room above,
practising again the piano part of a Haydn violin
sonata which he had very nervously tried over with
Ingpen while they were awaiting dinner.

Ingpen said suddenly:

"I say, old chap!  Why have you never mentioned
that you happened to meet a certain person in my
room at Hanbridge that night you went over there
for me?"  He frowned.

Edwin had a thrill, pleasurable and apprehensive,
at the prospect of a supreme confidence.

"It was no earthly business of mine," he answered
lightly.  But his tone conveyed: "You surely ought
to be aware that my loyalty and my discretion are
complete."

And Ingpen, replying to Edwin's tone, said with a
simple directness that flattered Edwin to the heart:

"Naturally I knew I was quite safe in your hands....
I've reassured the lady."  Ingpen smiled slightly.

Edwin was too proud to tell Ingpen that he had not
said a word to Hilda, and Ingpen was too proud to tell
Edwin that he assumed as much.

At that moment Hilda came into the room, murmuring
a carol that some children of Stockbrook had
sung on the doorstep during dinner.

"Don't be afraid--I'm not going to interrupt.  I
know you're in the thick of it," said she archly, not
guessing how exactly truthful she was.

Ingpen, keeping his presence of mind in the most
admirable manner, rejoined with irony:

"You don't mean to say you've finished already
explaining to Mrs. Dummer how she ought to run my
house for me!"

"How soon do you mean to have this table cleared?"
asked Hilda.

The Christmas dinner, served by a raw girl in a
large bluish-white pinafore, temporarily hired to
assist Mrs. Dummer the housekeeper, had been a good
one.  Its only real fault was that it had had a little too
much the air of being a special and mighty effort; and
although it owed something to Hilda's parcels,
Ingpen was justified in the self-satisfaction which he did
not quite conceal as a bachelor host.  But now, under
Hilda's quizzing gaze, not merely the table but the
room and the house sank to the tenth-rate.  The coarse
imperfections of the linen and the cutlery grew very
apparent; the disorder of bottles and glasses and cups
recalled the refectory of an inferior club.  And the
untidiness of the room, heaped with accumulations of
newspapers, magazines, documents, books, boxes and
musical-instrument cases, loudly accused the solitary
despot whose daily caprices of arrangement were
perpetuated and rendered sacred by the ukase that
nothing was to be disturbed.  Hilda's glinting eyes seemed
to challenge each corner and dark place to confess
its shameful dirt, and the malicious poise of her head
mysteriously communicated the fact that in the past
fortnight she had spied out every sinister secret in
the whole graceless, primitive wigwam.

"This table," retorted Ingpen bravely, "is going
to be cleared when it won't disturb me to have it
cleared."

"All right," said Hilda.  "But Mrs. Dummer does
want to get on with her washing-up."

"Look here, madam," Ingpen replied.  "You're a
little ray of sunshine, and all that, and I'm the first
to say so; but I'm not your husband."  He made a
warning gesture.  "Now don't say you'd be sorry for
any woman I was the husband of.  Think of something
more original."  He burst out laughing.

Hilda went to the window and looked out at the
fading day.

"Please, I only popped in to say it's nearly a quarter
to three, and George and I will go down to the inn and
bring the dog-cart up here.  I want a little walk.  We
shan't get home till dark as it is."

"Oh!  Chance it and stop for tea, and all will be
forgiven."

"Drive home in the dark?  Not much!" Edwin murmured.

"He's afraid of my driving," said Hilda.

When Edwin and Ingpen were alone together once
more, Ingpen's expression changed back instantly to
that which Hilda had disturbed, and Edwin's impatience,
which had uneasily simmered during the
interruption, began to boil.

"Her husband's in a lunatic asylum, I may tell you,"
said Ingpen.

"Whose?"

"The young woman's in question."

For Edwin, it was as if a door had opened in a wall
and disclosed a vast unsuspected garden of romance.

"Really!"

"Yes, my boy," Ingpen went on, quietly, with
restraint, but not without a naïve and healthy pride in
the sudden display of the marvellous garden.  "And
I didn't meet her at a concert, or on the Grand Canal,
or anything of that sort.  I met her in a mill at
Oldham while I was doing my job.  He was the boss of the
mill; I walked into an office and he was lying on the
floor on the flat of his back, and she was wiping her
feet on his chest.  He was saying in a very anxious
tone: 'You aren't half wiping them.  Harder!
Harder!'  That was his little weakness, you see.  He
happened to be convinced that he was a doormat.
She had been hiding the thing for weeks, coming with
him to the works, and so on, to calm him."  Ingpen
spoke more quickly and excitedly: "I never saw a
more awful thing in my life!  I never saw a more
awful thing in my life!  And coming across it
suddenly, you see....  There was something absolutely
odious in him lying down like that, and her trying to
soothe him in the way he wanted.  You should have
seen the serious expression of his face, simply bursting
with anxiety for her to wipe her boots properly on
him.  And her face when she caught sight of me.  Oh!
Dreadful!  Dreadful!"  Ingpen paused, and then
continued calmly: "Of course I soon tumbled to it.  For
the matter of that, it didn't want much tumbling to.
He went raving mad the same afternoon.  And he's
been more or less raving mad ever since."

"What a ghastly business....  Any children?"

"No, thank God!" Ingpen answered with fresh
emotion.  "But don't you forget that she's still the wife
of that lunatic, and he'll probably live for ever.  She's
tied up to him just as if she was tied up to a post.
Those are our Divorce Laws!  Isn't it appalling?  Isn't
it inconceivable?  Just think of the situation of that
woman!"  Ingpen positively glared at Edwin in the
intensity of his indignation.

"Awful!" Edwin murmured.

"Quite alone in the world, you know!" said Ingpen.
"I'm hanged if I know what she'd have done without me.
She hadn't a friend--at any rate she hadn't a friend
with a grain of sense.  Astonishing how solitary some
couples are! ... It aged her frightfully.  She's much
younger than she looks.  Happily there was a bit of
money--enough in fact."

Deeply as Edwin had been impressed by his
romantic discovery of a woman in Ingpen's room at
Hanbridge, he was still more impressed by it now.  He saw
the whole scene again, and saw it far more poetically.
He accused himself of blindness, and also of a
certain harshness of attitude towards the woman.  He
endowed her now with wondrous qualities.  The
adventure, in its tragicalness and its clandestine tenderness,
was enchanting.  How exquisite must be the relations
between Ingpen and the woman if without warning she
could go to his lair at night and wait confidently for
his return!  How divine the surprise for him, how
ardent the welcome!  He envied Ingpen.  And also he
admired him, for Ingpen had obviously conducted the
affair with worthy expertise.  And he had known how
to win devotion.

With an air of impartiality Ingpen proceeded:

"You wouldn't see her quite at her best, I'm afraid.
She's very shy--and naturally she'd be more shy than
ever when you saw her.  She's quite a different woman
when the shyness has worn off.  The first two or three
times I met her I must say I didn't think she was
anything more than a nice well-meaning creature,--you
know what I mean.  But she's much more than that.
Can't play, but I believe she has a real feeling for
music.  She has time for reading, and she does read.
And she has a more masculine understanding than
nearly any other woman I've ever come across."

"You wait a bit!" thought Edwin.  This simplicity
on the part of a notable man of the world pleased him
and gave him a comfortable sense of superiority.

Aloud he responded sympathetically:

"Good! ... Do I understand she's living in the
Five Towns now?"

"Yes," said Ingpen, after a hesitation.  He spoke
in a peculiar, significant voice, carefully modest.  The
single monosyllable conveyed to Edwin: "I cannot
deny it.  I was necessary to this woman, and in the end
she followed me!"

Edwin was impressed anew by the full revelation of
romance which had concealed itself in the squalid
dailiness of the Five Towns.

"In fact," said Ingpen, "you never know your
luck.  If she'd been free I might have been fool enough
to get married."

"Why do you say a thing like that?"

"Because I think I should be a fool to marry."  Ingpen
tapping his front teeth with his finger-nail, spoke
reflectively, persuasively, and with calm detachment.

"Why?" asked Edwin, persuasively also, but nervously,
as though the spirit of adventure in the search
for truth was pushing him to fatal dangers.

"Marriage isn't worth the price--for me, that is.
I daresay I'm peculiar."  Ingpen said this quite
seriously, prepared to consider impartially the
proposition that he was peculiar.  "The fact is, my boy, I
think my freedom is worth a bit more than I could
get out of any marriage."

"That's all very well," said Edwin, trying to speak
with the same dispassionate conviction as Ingpen, and
scarcely succeeding.  "But look what you miss!  Look
how you live!"  Almost involuntarily he glanced with
self-complacence round the unlovely, unseemly room,
and his glance seemed to penetrate ceilings and walls,
and to discover and condemn the whole charmless house
from top to bottom.

"Why?  What's the matter with it?" Ingpen
replied uneasily; a slight flush came into his cheeks.
"Nobody has a more comfortable bed or more
comfortable boots than I have.  How many women can
make coffee as good as mine?  No woman ever born
can make first-class tea.  I have all I want."

"No, you don't.  And what's the good of talking
about coffee, and tea, and beds?"

"Well, what else is there I want that I haven't
got?  If you mean fancy cushions and draperies, no,
thanks!"

"You know what I mean all right....  And then
'freedom' as you say.  What do you mean by freedom?"

"I don't specially mean," said Ingpen, tranquil and
benevolent, "what I may call physical freedom.  I'd
give that up.  I like a certain amount of untidiness,
for instance, and I don't think an absence of dust is
the greatest thing in the world; but I wouldn't in the
least mind giving all that up.  It wouldn't really
matter to me.  What I won't give up is my intellectual
freedom.  Perhaps I mean intellectual honesty.  I'd
give up even my intellectual freedom if I could be
deprived of it fairly and honestly.  But I shouldn't be.
There's almost no intellectual honesty in marriage.
There can't be.  The entire affair is a series of
compromises, chiefly base on the part of the man.  The
alternative is absolute subjection of the woman, which
is offensive.  No woman not absolutely a slave ever
hears the truth except in anger.  You can't say the
same about men, and you know it.  I'm not blaming;
I'm stating.  Even assuming a married man gets a
few advantages that I miss, they're all purely physical----"

"Oh no!  Not at all."

"My boy," Ingpen insisted, sitting up, and gazing
earnestly at Edwin.  "Analyse them down, and they're
all physical--all!  And I tell you I won't pay the
price for them.  I won't.  I've no grievance against
women; I can enjoy being with women as much as
anybody, but I won't--I will not--live permanently on
their level.  That's why I say I might have been fool
enough to get married.  It's quite simple."

"Hm!"

Edwin, although indubitably one of those who had
committed the vast folly of marriage, and therefore
subject to Ingpen's indictment, felt not the least
constraint, nor any need to offer an individual defence.
Ingpen's demeanour seemed to have lifted the
argument above the personal.  His assumption that Edwin
could not be offended was positively inspiring to
Edwin.  The fear of truth was exorcised.  Freedom of
thought existed in that room in England.  Edwin
reflected: "If he's right and I'm condemned accordingly,--well,
I can't help it.  Facts are facts, and they're
extremely interesting."

He also reflected:

"Why on earth can't Hilda and I discuss like that?"

He did not know why, but he profoundly and sadly
knew that such discussion would be quite impossible
with Hilda.

The red-hot coals in the grate subsided together.

"And I'll tell you another thing----" Ingpen commenced.

He was stopped by the entrance of Mrs. Dummer,
a fat woman, with an old japanned tray.  Mrs. Dummer
came in like a desperate forlorn hope.  Her aged,
grim, and yet somewhat hysterical face seemed to say:
"I'm going to clear this table and get on with my work,
even if I die for it at the hands of a brutal tyrant."  Her
gestures as she made a space for the tray and
set it down on the table were the formidable gestures of
the persecuted at bay.

"Mrs. Dummer," said Ingpen, in a weak voice,
leaning back in his chair, "would you mind fetching me
my tonic off my dressing-table?  I've forgotten it."

"Bless us!" exclaimed Mrs. Dummer.

As she had hurried out, Ingpen winked placidly at
Edwin in the room in which the shadows were already
falling.

Nevertheless, when the dog-cart arrived at the
front-door, Ingpen did seem to show some signs of
exhaustion.  Hilda would not get down.  She sent word into
the house by George that the departure must occur at
once.  Ingpen went out with Edwin, plaintively teased
Hilda about the insufferable pride of those who sit in
driving-seats, and took leave of her with the most
punctilious and chivalrous ceremonial, while Hilda
inscrutably smiling bent down to him with condescension
from her perch.

"I'll sit behind going home, I think," said Edwin.
"George, you can sit with your mother."

"Tchik!  Tchik!" Hilda signalled.

The mare with a jerk started off down the misty and
darkening road.



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   IV

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The second and major catastrophe occurred very
soon after the arrival in Trafalgar Road.  It was
three-quarters of an hour after sunset and the street
lamps were lighted.  Unchpin, with gloomy fatalism,
shivered obscurely in the dark porch, waiting to drive
the dog-cart down to the stable.  Hilda had requested
his presence; it was she also who had got him to bring
the equipage up to the house in the morning.  She
had implied, but not asserted, that to harness the mare
and trot up to Bleakridge was the work of a few
minutes, and that a few minutes' light labour could make
no real difference to Unchpin's Christmas Day.
Edwin, descrying Unchpin in the porch, saw merely a
defenceless man who had been robbed of the most sacred
holiday of the year in order to gratify the selfish
caprice of an overbearing woman.  When asked how long
he had been in the porch, Unchpin firmly answered
that he had been there since three o'clock, the hour
appointed by Mrs. Clayhanger.  Edwin knew nothing
of this appointment, and in it he saw more evidence of
Hilda's thoughtless egotism.  He perceived that he
would be compelled to stop her from using his
employees as her private servants, and that the
prohibition would probably cause trouble.  Hilda demanded
curtly of Unchpin why he had not waited in the warm
kitchen, according to instructions, instead of catching
his death of cold in the porch.  The reply was that
he had rung and knocked fifteen times without getting
a response.

At this Hilda became angry, not only with Emmie,
the defaulting servant, but with the entire servant
class and with the world.  Emmie, the new cook, and
temporarily the sole resident servant, was to have gone
to Maggie's for her Christmas dinner, and to have
returned at half past two without fail in order to light
the drawing-room fire and prepare for tea-making.
But, Maggie at the last moment having decided to go to
Clara's for the middle of the day, Emmie was told to
go with her and be as useful as she could at
Mrs. Benbow's until a quarter past two.

"I hope you've got your latch-key, Edwin," said
Hilda threateningly, as if ready to assume that with
characteristic and inexcusable negligence he had left
his latch-key at home.

"I have," he said drily, drawing the key from his
pocket.

"Oh!" she muttered, as if saying: "Well, after
all, you're no better than you ought to be."  And
took the key.

While she opened the door, Edwin surreptitiously
gave half a crown to Unchpin, who was lighting the
carriage-lamps.

George, with the marvellous self-preserving instinct
of a small animal unprotected against irritated
prowling monsters, had become invisible.

The front-doorway yawned black like the portal of
a tomb.  The place was a terrible negation of
Christmas.  Edwin felt for the radiator; it was as cold to
the touch as a dead hand.  He lit the hall-lamp, and
the decorations of holly and mistletoe contrived by
Hilda and George with smiles and laughter on
Christmas Eve stood revealed as the very symbol of
insincerity.  Without taking off his hat and coat, he went
into the unlighted glacial drawing-room, where Hilda
was kneeling at the grate and striking matches.  A
fragment of newspaper blazed, and then the flame
expired.  The fire was badly laid.

"I'm sick of servants!" Hilda exclaimed with fury.
"Sick!  They're all alike!"  Her tone furiously blamed
Edwin and everybody.

And Edwin knew that the day was a pyramid of
which this moment was the dreadful apex.  At
intervals during the drive home Hilda had talked
confidentially to George of the wondrous things he and she
could do if they only resided in the country--things
connected with flowers, vegetables, cocks, hens, ducks,
cows, rabbits, horses.  She had sketched out the life
of a mistress of Ladderedge Hall, and she had sketched
it out for the benefit of the dull, hard man sitting
behind.  Her voice, so persuasive and caressing to George,
had been charged with all sorts of accusations against
the silent fellow whose back now and then collided with
hers.  She had exasperated him.  She had wilfully and
deliberately exasperated him....  Her treatment of
Unchpin, her childish outburst concerning servants,
her acutely disagreeable demeanour, all combined now
to exhaust the poor remainder of Edwin's patience.
Not one word had been said about Ladderedge Hall,
but Ladderedge Hall loomed always between them.
Deadly war was imminent.  Let it come!  He would
prefer war to a peace which meant for him nothing
but insults and injustice.  He would welcome war.  He
turned brusquely and lit the chandelier.  On the table
beneath it lay the writing-case that Hilda had given to
George, and the edition of Matthew Arnold that she had
given to Edwin, for a Christmas present.  One of
Edwin's Christmas presents to her, an ermine stole, she was
wearing round her neck.  Tragic absurdities, these
false tokens of love....  There they were, both of
them in full street attire, she kneeling at the grate
and he standing at the table, in the dank drawing-room
which now had no resemblance to a home.

Edwin said with frigid and disdainful malevolence:

"I wish you could control yourself, Hilda.  The fact
that a servant's a bit late on Christmas Day is no
reason for you to behave like a spoilt child.  You're
offensive."

His words, righteously and almost murderously
resentful, seemed to startle and frighten the very
furniture, which had the air of waiting, enchanted, for
disaster.

Hilda turned her head and glared at Edwin.  She
threw back her shoulders, and her thick eyebrows
seemed to meet in a passionate frown.

"Yes," she said, with her clear, stinging articulation.
"That's just like you, that is!  I lend my servant to
your sister.  She doesn't send her back,--and it's my
fault!  I should have thought the Benbows twisted
you round their little finger enough, without you
having to insult me because of them.  Goodness knows
what tricks they didn't play to get your Aunt's
money--every penny of it!  And now they make you do all
the work of the estate, for their benefit, and of course
you do it like a lamb!  You can never spare a minute
from the works for me, but you can spare hours and
hours for Auntie Hamps's estate and the Benbows!
It's always like that."  She paused and spoke more
thickly: "But I don't see why you should insult me on
the top of it!"

Her features went awry.  She sobbed.

"You make me ill!" said Edwin savagely.

He walked out of the room and pulled the door to.

George was descending the stairs.

"Where are you going to, uncle?" demanded George,
as Edwin opened the front-door.

"I'm going down to see Auntie Maggie," Edwin
answered, forcing himself to speak very gently.  "Tell
your mother if she asks."  The boy guessed the
situation.  It was humiliating that he should guess it, and
still more humiliating to be compelled to make use of
him in the fatal affair.



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   V

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He walked at a moderate pace down Trafalgar
Road.  He did not know where he was going.
Certainly he was not going to see Maggie.  He had
invented the visit to Maggie instantly in answer to
George's question, and he could not understand why he
had invented it.  Maggie would be at Clara's; and, in
a misfortune, he would never go to Clara's; only when
he was successful and triumphant could he expose
himself to the Benbows.

The weather was damp and chill without rain.  The
chilliness was rather tonic and agreeable to his body,
and he felt quite warm, though on getting down from
the dog-cart a few minutes earlier he had been cold
almost to the point of numbness.  He could not
remember how, nor when, the change had occurred.

Every street lamp was the centre of a greenish-grey
sphere, which presaged rain as though the street-lamp
were the moon.  The pavements were greasy with black
slime, the road deep in lamp-reflecting mire through
which the tram-lines ran straight and gleaming.  Far
down the slope a cage of light moving obscurely
between the glittering avenue of lamps indicated the
steam-tram as it lifted towards the further hill into
the heart of the town.  Where the lamps merged
together and vanished, but a little to the left, the
illuminated dial of the clock in the Town Hall tower
glowed in the dark heavens.  The street was deserted;
no *Signal* boys, no ragged girls staring into sweet
shops, no artisans returning from work, no rattling
carts, no vehicles of any kind save the distant tram.
All the little shops were shut; even the little
greengrocer's shop, which never closed, was shut now, and its
customary winter smell of oranges and apples withdrawn.
The little inns, not yet open, showed through
their lettered plate windows one watching jet of gas
amid blue-and-red paper festoons and bunches of holly.
The gloomy fronts of nearly all the houses were pierced
with oblongs of light on which sometimes appeared
transient shadows of human beings.  A very few other
human beings, equally mysterious, passed furtive and
baffling up and down the slope.  Melancholy, familiar,
inexplicable, and piteous--the melancholy of existence
itself--rose like a vapour out of the sodden ground,
ennobling all the scene.  The lofty disc of the Town
Hall clock solitary in the sky was somehow so
heart-rending, and the lives of the people both within and
without the houses seemed to be so woven of futility and
sorrow, that the menace of eternity grew intolerable.

Edwin's brain throbbed and shook like an engine-house
in which the machinery was his violent thoughts.
He no longer saw his marriage as a chain of disconnected
episodes; he saw it as a drama the true meaning
of which was at last revealed by the climax now upon
him.  He had had many misgivings about it, and had
put them away, and they all swept back presenting
themselves as a series of signs that pointed to inevitable
disaster.  He had been blind, from wilfulness or
cowardice.  He now had vision.  He had arrived at
honesty.  He said to himself, as millions of men and
women have said to themselves, with awestruck calm:
"My marriage was a mistake."  And he began to face
the consequences of the admission.  He was not such a
fool as to attach too much importance to the immediate
quarrel, nor even to the half-suppressed but supreme
dissension concerning a place of residence.  He
assumed, even, that the present difficulties would
somehow, with more or less satisfaction, be adjusted.  What,
however, would not and could not be adjusted was the
temperament that produced them.  Those difficulties,
which had been preceded by smaller difficulties, would
be followed by greater.  It was inevitable.  To hope
otherwise would be weakly sentimental, as his optimism
during the vigil in Auntie Hamps's bedroom had been
weakly sentimental.  He must face the truth: "She
won't alter her ways--and I shan't stand them."  No
matter what their relations might in future superficially
appear to be, their union was over.  Or, if it was not
actually over, it soon would be over, for the forces to
shatter it were uncontrollable and increasing in
strength.

"Of course she can't help being herself!" he said
impartially.  "But what's that got to do with me?"

His indictment of his wife was terrific and not to be
answered.  She had always been a queer girl.  On the
first night he ever saw her, she had run after him into
his father's garden, and stood with him in the
garden-porch that he had since done away with, and spoken
to him in the strangest manner.  She was abnormal.
The dismal and perilous adventure with George Cannon
could not have happened to a normal woman.  She
could not see reason, and her sense of justice was
non-existent.  If she wanted a thing she must have it.  In
reality she was a fierce and unscrupulous egotist,
incapable of understanding a point of view other than
her own.  Imagine her bursting out like that about
Auntie Hamps's will!  It showed how her mind ran.
That Auntie Hamps had an absolute right to dispose
of her goods as she pleased; that there was a great
deal to be said for Auntie Hamps's arrangements; that
in any case the Benbows were not to blame; that
jealousy was despicable and the mark of a mean mind;
that the only dignified course for himself was to
execute the trust imposed upon him without complaining,--these
things were obvious; but not to her!  No human
skill could ever induce her to grant them.  She did
not argue,--she felt; and the disaster was that she
did not feel rightly....  Imagine her trying to
influence Ingpen's housekeeping, to worry the man,--she
the guest and he the host!  What would she say
if anybody played the same game on her?...

She could not be moderate.  She expected every
consideration from others, but she would yield none.  She
had desired a horse and trap.  She had received it.  And
how had she used the gift?  She had used it in defiance
of the needs of the works.  She had upset everybody
and everything, and assuredly Unchpin had a very
legitimate grievance....  She had said that she could
not feel at home in her own house while the house
belonged to Maggie.  Edwin had obediently bought the
house,--and now she wanted another house.  She
scorned her husband's convenience and preferences,
and she wanted a house that was preposterously
inaccessible.  The satisfaction of her caprice for a
dog-cart had not in the slightest degree appeased her
egotism.  On the contrary it had further excited her
egotism and sharpened its aggressiveness.  And by what
strange infantile paths had she gone about the
enterprise of shifting Edwin into the country!  Not a frank
word to Edwin of the house she had found and decided
upon!  Silly rumours of a "surprise!"  And she had
counted upon the presence of Ingpen to disarm Edwin
and to tie his hands.  The conspiracy was simply
childish.  And because Edwin had at once shown his
distaste for her scheme, she had taken offence.  Her
acrimony had gradually increased throughout the day,
hiding for a time under malicious silences and
enigmatic demeanours, darting out in remarks to third
persons and drawing back, and at last displaying
itself openly, cruelly, monstrously.  The injustice of it
all passed belief.  There was no excuse for Hilda, and
there never would be any excuse for her.  She was
impossible; she would be still more impossible.  He did
not make her responsible; he admitted that she was not
responsible.  But at the same time, with a disdainful
and cold resentment, he condemned and hated her.

He recalled Ingpen's: "I won't pay the price."

"And I won't!" he said.  "The end has come!"

He envied Ingpen.

And there flitted through his mind the dream of
liberty--not the liberty of ignorant youth, but liberty
with experience and knowledge to use it.  Ravishing
prospect!  Marriage had advantages.  But he could
retain those advantages in freedom.  He knew what a
home ought to be; he had the instinct of the interior;
he considered that he could keep house as well as any
woman, and better than most; he was not, in that
respect, at all like Ingpen, who suffered from his inability
to produce and maintain comfort....  He remembered
Ingpen's historic habitual phrase about the
proper place for women,--"behind the veil."  It was a
phrase which intensely annoyed women; but nevertheless
how true!  And Ingpen had put it into practice.
Ingpen, even in the banal Five Towns, had shown the way....
He saw the existence of males, with its rationality
and its dependableness, its simplicity, its directness,
its honesty, as something ideal.  And as he pictured
such an existence--with or without the romance of
mysterious and interesting creatures ever modestly
waiting for attention behind the veil--further souvenirs
of Hilda's wilful naughtiness and injustice rushed into
his mind by thousands; in formulating to himself his
indictment against her, he had overlooked ninety per
cent of them; they were endless, innumerable.  He
marshalled them again and again, with the fiercest
virulence, the most sombre gloom, with sardonic, bitter
pleasure.

In the hollow where Trafalgar Road begins to be
known as Duck Bank, he turned to the left and,
crossing the foot of Woodisun Bank, arrived at one of the
oldest quarters of the town, where St. Luke's Church
stands in its churchyard amid a triangle of little
ancient houses.  By the light of a new and improved
gas-lamp at the churchyard gates could be seen the
dark silhouette of the Norman tower and the
occasional white gleam of gravestones.

One solitary couple, arm-in-arm, and bending slightly
towards each other, came sauntering in the mud past
the historic National Schools towards the illumination
of the lamp.  The man was a volunteer, with a brilliant
vermilion tunic, white belt, and black trousers; he
wore his hat jauntily and carried a diminutive cane;
pride was his warm overcoat.  The girl was stout and
short, with a heavily flowered hat and a dark
amorphous cloak; under her left arm she carried a
parcel.  They were absorbed in themselves.  Edwin
discerned first the man's face, in which was a gentle and
harmless coxcombry, and then the girl's face, ecstatic,
upward-gazing, seeing absolutely naught but the youth....
It was Emmie's face, as Edwin perceived after a
momentary doubt due to his unfamiliarity with the
inhabitants of his own house.  Emmie, so impatiently
and angrily awaited by her mistress, had lost her head
about a uniform.  Emmie, whose place was in the
kitchen among saucepans and crockery, dish-clouts and
brushes, had escaped into another realm, where time
is not.  That she had no immediate intention of
returning to her kitchen was shown by the fact that she
was moving deliberately in a direction away from it.
She was not pretty, for Hilda had perforce long since
ceased to insist upon physical charm in her servants.
She was not even young,--she was probably older than
the adored soldier.  But her rapt ecstasy, her fearful
bliss, made a marvellous sight, rendered touching by
the girl's coarse gawkiness.

It seemed lamentable, pathetic, to Edwin that
destiny should not permit her to remain forever in that
dream.  "Can it be possible," he thought, "that a
creature capable of such surpassing emotion is
compelled to cook my bacon and black my boots?"

The couple, wordless, strolled onwards, sticking
close to the railings.  The churchyard was locked, but
Emmie and the soldier were doing the best they could
to satisfy that instinct which in the Five Towns seems
to drive lovers to graves for their pleasure.  The little
houses cast here and there a blind yellow eye on the
silent and tranquil scene.  Edwin turned abruptly back
into Woodisun Bank, feeling that he was a disturber
of the peace.

Suddenly deciding to walk up to Hillport "for the
sake of exercise," he quickened his pace.  After a
mile and a half, when he had crossed the railway at
Shawport and was on the Hillport rise, and the Five
Towns had begun to spread out in a map behind him,
he noticed that he was perspiring.  He very seldom
perspired, and therefore he had the conviction that
the walk was "doing him good."  He felt exhilarated,
and moved still faster.

His mood was now changed.  The spectacle of Emmie
and the soldier had thrown him violently out of
resentment into wonder.  His indignation was somewhat
exhausted, and though he tried again and again to flick
it back into full heat and activity, he could not.  He
kept thinking of the moment in the morning when,
standing ready to jump from the dog-cart, his wife had
said: "Catch me, both of you," and he recalled vividly
the sensation of her acquiescence, her momentary
yielding--imperceptible yet unforgettable--as he supported
her strongly in his arms; and with this memory was
mingled the smell of velvet.  Strange that a woman so
harsh, selfish and overbearing, could thus contradict
her whole character in an instant of surrender!  Was
she in that gesture confiding to him the deepest
secret? ... Rubbish!  But now he no longer looked down on
her disdainfully.  Honesty made him admit that it was
puerile to affect disdain of an individuality so powerful
and so mysterious.  If she was a foe, she was at any
rate a dangerous fighter, and not to be played with.
And yet she could be a trifle, a wisp of fragile flesh
in his arms!

He saw the beatific face of Emmie against the
churchyard gates under the lamp....  Why not humour
Hilda?  Why not let her plant their home according
to her caprice? ... Certainly not!  Never would he
do it!  Why should he?  Time after time he angrily
rejected the idea.  Time after time it returned.  What
did it matter to Hilda where she lived?  And had he
not bought their present house solely in order to please
her?  The first consideration in choosing a home ought
to be and must be the consideration of business
convenience....  Yet, what did it matter to him where
his home was?  (He remembered a phrase of Ingpen's:
"I don't live on that plane.")  Could he not adapt
himself?  He dreamt of very rapid transit between
Ladderedge Hall and the works.  Motor-cars had just
become lawful; but he had never happened to see one,
though he had heard of several in the district, or
passing through.  His imagination could not rise so high as
a motor-car.  That he could ever use or possess one did
not even occur to him.  He thought only of a
fast-trotting horse, and a trap with indiarubber tyres;
himself the driver; sometimes Hilda the driver....  An
equipage to earn renown in the district.  "Clayhanger's
trap,"--"He drives in from Ladderedge in thirty-five
minutes.  The horse simply won't walk; doesn't know
how to!"  And so on.  He had heard such talk of
others.  Why should not others hear it of him? ... Then,
the pleasure, the mere pleasure--call it sensual
or what you like--of granting a caprice to the
capricious creature!  If a thing afforded her joy, why
not give it? ... To see her in the rôle of mistress of
a country-house, delicately horsey, excited about
charitable schemes, protecting the poor, working her will
upon gardeners and grooms, stamping her foot in the
violence of her resolution to have her own way, offering
sugar to a horse, nursing a sick dog!  Amusing;
Agreeable! ... And all that activity of hers a mere
dependence of his own!  Flattering to his pride! ... He
could afford it easily, for he was richer even than
his wife supposed.  To let the present house ought not
to be difficult.  To sell it advantageously ought not
to be impossible.  In this connection, he thought, though
not seriously, of Tom Swetman, who had at last got
himself engaged to one of those Scandinavian women
about whom he had been chaffed for years; Tom would
be wanting an abode, and probably a good one.

He was carried away by his own dream.  To realise
that dream he had only to yield, to nod negligently,
to murmur with benevolent tolerance: "All right.  Do
as you please."  He would have nothing to withdraw,
for he had uttered no refusal.  Not a word had passed
between them as to Ladderedge Hall since they had
quitted it.  He had merely said that he did not like
it,--"poured cold water on it" as the phrase was.  True,
his demeanour had plainly intimated that he was still
opposed in principle to the entire project of living in
the country; but a demeanour need not be formally
retracted; it could be negatived without any humiliation....

No, he would never yield, though yielding seemed to
open up a pleasant, a delicious prospect.  He could
not yield.  It would be wrong, and it would be
dangerous, to yield.  Had he not already quite clearly
argued out with himself the whole position?  And yet
why not yield? ... He was afraid as before a temptation.

He re-crossed the railway, and crossed Fowlea Brook,
a boundary, back into the borough.  The dark path
lay parallel with the canal, but below it.  He had gone
right through Hillport and round Hillport Marsh and
returned down the flank of the great ridge that
protects the Five Towns on the West.  He could not
recollect the details of the walk; he only knew that he
had done it all, that time and the miles had passed with
miraculous rapidity, and that his boots were very
muddy.  A change in the consistency of the mud caused
him to look up at the sky, which was clearing and
showed patches of faint stars.  A frost had set in,
despite the rainy prophecy of street-lamps.  In a few
moments he had climbed the short steep curving slope
on to the canal-bridge.  He was breathless and very hot.

He stopped and sat on the parapet.  In his school-days
he had crossed this bridge twice a day on the
journey to and from Oldcastle.  Many times he had
lingered on it.  But he had forgotten the little episodes
of his schooldays, which seemed now almost to belong
to another incarnation.  He did, however, recall that
as a boy he could not sit on the parapet unless he
vaulted up to it.  He thought he must have been
ridiculously small and boyish.  The lights of Bursley,
Bleakridge, Hanbridge and Cauldon hung round the eastern
horizon in an arc.  To the north presided the clock of
Bursley Town Hall, and to the south the clock of
Cauldon Church; but both were much too far off to be
deciphered.  Below and around the Church clock the
vague fires of Cauldon Bar Ironworks played, and the
tremendous respiration of the blast-furnaces filled the
evening.  Beneath him gleamed the foul water of the
canal....  He trembled with the fever that precedes
a supreme decision.  He trembled as though he was
about to decide whether or not he would throw
himself into the canal.  Should he accept the country-house
scheme?  Ought he to accept it?  The question
was not simply that of a place of residence,--it
concerned all his life.

He admitted that marriage must be a mutual
accommodation.  He was, and always had been, ready
to accommodate.  But Hilda was unjust, monstrously
unjust.  Of that he was definitely convinced....
Well, perhaps not monstrously unjust, but very unjust.
How could he excuse such injustice as hers?  He
obviously could not excuse it....  On previous
occasions he had invented excuses for her conduct, but they
were not convincing excuses.  They were compromises
between his intellectual honesty and his desire for
peace.  They were, at bottom, sentimentalism.

And then there flashed into his mind, complete, the
great discovery of all his career.  It was banal; it
was commonplace; it was what everyone knew.  Yet
it was the great discovery of all his career.  If Hilda
had not been unjust in the assertion of her own
individuality, there could be no merit in yielding to her.  To
yield to a just claim was not meritorious, though to
withstand it would be wicked.  He was objecting to
injustice as a child objects to rain on a holiday.
Injustice was a tremendous actuality!  It had to be
faced and accepted.  (He himself was unjust.  At any
rate he intellectually conceived that he must be
unjust, though honestly he could remember no instance
of injustice on his part.)  To reconcile oneself to
injustice was the master achievement.  He had read it;
he had been aware of it; but he had never really felt
it till that moment on the dark canal-bridge.  He was
awed, thrilled by the realisation.  He longed ardently
to put it to the test.  He did put it to the test.  He
yielded on the canal-bridge.  And in yielding, it seemed
to him that he was victorious.

He thought confidently and joyously:

"I'm not going to be beaten by Hilda!  And I'm not
going to be beaten by marriage.  Dashed if I am!  A
nice thing if I had to admit that I wasn't clever enough
to be a husband!"

He was happy, but somewhat timorously so.  He had
the sense to suspect that his discovery would scarcely
transform marriage into an everlasting Eden, and that
serious trouble would not improbably recur.  "Marriage
keeps on all the time till you're dead!" he said
to himself.  But he profoundly knew that he had
advanced a stage, that he had acquired new wisdom and
new power, and that no danger in the future could
equal the danger that was past.

He thought:

"I know where I am!"

It had taken him years to discover where he was.
Why should the discovery occur just then?  He could
only suppose that the cumulative battering of
experience had at length knocked a hole through his thick
head, and let saving wisdom in.  The length of time
necessary for the operation depended upon the
thickness of the head.  Some heads were impenetrable and
their owners came necessarily to disaster.  His head
was probably of an average thickness.

When he got into Trafalgar Road, at the summit of
Bleakridge, he hesitated to enter his own house, on
account of the acute social difficulties that awaited him
there, and passed it like a beggar who is afraid.  One
by one he went by all the new little streets of cottages
with drawing-rooms--Millett Street, Wilcox Street,
Paul Street, Oak Street, Hulton Street,--and the two
old little streets, already partly changed--Manor
Street and Higginbotham Street.  Those mysterious
newcoming families from nowhere were driving him
out--through the agency of his wife!  The Orgreaves had
gone, and been succeeded by excellent people with whom
it was impossible to fraternise.  There were rumours
that in view of Tom Swetnam's imminent defection the
Swetnam household might be broken up and the home
abandoned.  The Suttons, now that Beatrice Sutton
had left the district, talked seriously of going.  Only
Dr. Sterling was left on that side of the road, and
he stayed because he must.  The once exclusive
Terraces on the other side were losing their quality.  Old
Darius Clayhanger had risen out of the mass, but he
was fiercely exceptional.  Now the whole mass seemed
to be rising, under the action of some strange leaven,
and those few who by intelligence, by manners, or by
money counted themselves select were fleeing as from an
inundation.

Edwin had not meant to join in the exodus.  But
he too would join it.  Destiny had seized him.  Let
him be as democratic in spirit as he would, his fate
was to be cut off from the democracy, with which, for
the rest, he had very little of speech or thought or
emotion in common, but in which, from an implacable
sense of justice, he was religiously and unchangeably
determined to put his trust.

He braced himself, and, mounting the steps of the
porch, felt in his pocket for his latchkey.  It was not
there.  Hilda had taken it and not returned it.  She
never did return it when she borrowed it, and probably
she never would.  He had intended to slip quietly into
the house, and prepare if possible an astute opening
to minimise the difficulty of the scenes which must
inevitably occur.  For his dignity would need some
protection.  In the matter of his dignity, he wished that
he had not said quite so certainly to Ingpen: "I shan't
take that house."

With every prim formality, Emmie answered his
ring.  She was wearing the mask and the black frock
and the white apron and cap of her vocation.  Not
the slightest trace of the beatified woman in the
flowered hat under the lamp at the gates of the
churchyard!  No sign of a heart or of passion or of
ecstasy!  Incredible creatures--they were all incredible!

He thought, nervous:

"I shall meet Hilda in half a second."

George ran into the hall, wearing his new green shade
over his eyes.

"Here he is, mother!" cried George.  "I say, nunks,
Emmie brought up a parcel for you from Uncle Albert,
and Auntie Clara.  Here it is.  It wasn't addressed
outside, so I opened it."

He indicated the hall-table, on which, in a bed of
tissue paper and brown paper, lay a dreadful flat
ink-stand of blue glass and bronze, with a card: "Best
wishes to Edwin from Albert and Clara."

George and Edwin gazed at each other with understanding.

"Just my luck isn't it, sonny?" said Edwin.  "It's
worse than last year's."

"You poor dear!" said Hilda, appearing, all smiles
and caressing glances.  She was in a pale grey dress.
"Whatever shall you do with it?  You know you'll have
to put it on view when they come up.  Emmie----"
to the maid vanishing into the kitchen--"We'll have
supper now."

"Yes," said Edwin to himself, with light but
sardonic tolerance.  "Yes, my lady.  You're all smiles
because you're bent on getting Ladderedge Hall out of
me.  But you don't know what a near shave you've had
of getting something else."

He was elated.  The welcome of his familiar home
was beautiful to him.  And the incalculable woman with
a single gesture had most unexpectedly annihilated the
unpleasant past and its consequences.  He could yield
upon the grand contention how and when he chose.  He
had his acquiescence waiting like a delightful surprise
for Hilda.  As he looked at her lovingly, with all her
crimes of injustice thick upon her, he clearly realised
that he saw her as no other person saw her, and that
because it was so she in her entirety was indispensable
to him.  And when he tried to argue impartially and
aloofly with himself about rights and wrongs, asinine
reason was swamped by an entirely irrational and wise
joy in the simple fact of the criminal's existence.



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   VI

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In the early spring of 1897 there was an evening
party at the Clayhangers'.  But it was not called a
party; it was not even called a reception.  The theory
of the affair was that Hilda had "just asked a few
people to come in, without any fuss."  The inhabitants
of the Five Towns had, and still have, an aversion for
every sort of formal hospitality, or indeed for any
hospitality other than the impulsive and the haphazard.
One or two fathers with forceful daughters agitated by
newly revealed appetites in themselves, might hire a
board-schoolroom in January, and give a dance at
which sharp exercise and hot drinks alone kept bodies
warm in the icy atmosphere.  Also musical and
dramatic societies and games clubs would have annual
conversaziones and dances, which however were
enterprises of coöperation rather than of hospitality.
Beyond these semi-public entertainments there was almost
nothing, in the evening, save card-parties and the small
regular reunions of old friends who had foregathered
on a certain night of the week for whiskey or tea and
gossip ever since the beginning of time, and would
continue to do so till some coffin or other was ordered.
Every prearranged assemblage comprising more than
two persons beyond the family was a "function"--a
term implying both contempt and respect for
ceremonial; and no function could be allowed to occur
without an excuse for it,--such as an anniversary.  The
notion of deliberately cultivating human intercourse for
its own sake would have been regarded as an affectation
approaching snobbishness.  Hundreds of well-to-do and
socially unimpeachable citizens never gave or received
an invitation to a meal.  The reason of all this was
not meanness, for no community outside America has
more generous instincts than the Five Towns; it was
merely a primitive self-consciousness striving to
conceal itself beneath breezy disdain for those more highly
developed manners which it read about with industry
and joy in the weekly papers, but which it lacked the
courage to imitate.

The break-up of the Orgreave household had been a
hard blow to the cult of hospitality in Bleakridge.
Lane End House in the old days was a creative centre
of hospitality; for the force of example, the desire to
emulate, and the necessity of paying in kind for what
one has permitted oneself to receive will make hosts of
those who by their own initiative would never have
sent out an invitation.  When the Orgreaves vanished,
sundry persons in Bleakridge were discouraged,--and
particularly Edwin and Hilda, whose musical evenings
had never recovered from the effect of the circumstances
of the first one.  They entertained only by fits
and starts, when Hilda happened to remember that she
held a high position in the suburb.  Hilda was
handicapped by the fact that she could not easily strike up
friendships with other women.  She had had one friend,
and after Janet's departure she had fully confided in
no woman.  Moreover it was only at intervals that
Hilda felt the need of companionship.  Her present
party was due chiefly to what Edwin in his more bitter
moods would have called snobbishness,--to-wit, partly
a sudden resolve not to be outshone by the Swetnams,
who in recent years, as the younger generation of the
family grew up, had beyond doubt increased their
ascendancy; and partly the desire to render memorable
the last months of her residence in Bleakridge.

The list of Hilda's guests, and the names absent
from it, gave an indication of the trend of social
history.  The Benbows were not asked; the relations of
the two families remained as friendly as ever they
were, but the real breach between them, caused by
profound differences of taste and intelligence, was now
complete.  Maggie would have been asked, had she not
refused in advance, from a motive of shyness.  In all
essential respects Maggie had been annexed by Clara
and Albert.  She had given up Auntie Hamps's house
(of which the furniture had been either appropriated
or sold) and gone to live with the Benbows as a
working aunt,--this in spite of Albert's default in the
matter of interest; she forewent her rights, slept in a
small room with Amy, paid a share of the household
expenses, and did the work of a nursemaid and servant
combined--simply because she was Maggie.  She might,
had she chosen, have lived in magnificence with the
Clayhangers, but she would not face the intellectual
and social strain of doing so.  Jim Orgreave was not
invited; briefly he had become impossible, though he
was still well-dressed.  More strange--Tom Orgreave
and his wife had only been invited after some discussion,
and had declined!  Tom was growing extraordinarily
secretive, solitary, and mysterious.  It was reported
that Mrs. Tom had neither servant nor nursemaid,
and that she dared not ask her husband for money to
buy clothes.  Yet Edwin and Tom when they met in
the street always stopped for a talk, generally about
books.  Daisy Marrion, who said openly that Tom and
Mrs. Tom were a huge disappointment to everybody,
was invited and she accepted.  Janet Orgreave had
arrived in Bursley on a visit to the Clayhangers on the
very day of the party.  The Cheswardines were asked,
mainly on account of Stephen, whose bluff, utterly
unintellectual, profound good-nature, and whose
adoration of his wife, were gradually endearing him to the
perceptive.  Mr. and Mrs. Fearns were requested to
bring their daughter Annunciata, now almost
marriageable, and also Mademoiselle Renée Souchon, the
French governess, newly arrived in the district, of the
Fearns younger children.  Folks hinted their astonishment
that Alma Fearns should have been imprudent
enough to put so exotic a woman under the same roof
with her husband.  Ingpen needed no invitation;
nothing could occur at the Clayhangers' without him.
Doctor Stirling was the other mature bachelor.  Finally in
the catalogue were four Swetnams, the vigorous and
acute Sarah (who was a mere acquaintance), aged
twenty-five, Tom Swetnam, and two younger brothers.
Tom had to bring with him the prime excuse for the
party,--namely, Miss Manna Höst of Copenhagen, to
whom Hilda intended to show that the Swetnams were
not the only people on earth.  There were thus eight
women, eight men (who had put on evening dress out of
respect for the foreigner), and George.

At eleven o'clock, when the musical part of the
entertainment was over, Miss Höst had already fully
secured for herself the position which later she was to
hold as the wife of Tom Swetnam.  Bleakridge had
been asked to meet her and inspect her, and the
opinion of Bleakridge was soon formed that Copenhagen
must be a wondrous and a romantic place and that
Tom Swetnam knew his way about.  In the earliest
years when the tourist agencies first discovered the
advertising value of the phrase "Land of the Midnight
Sun," Tom the adventurous had made the Scandinavian
round trip, and each subsequent Summer he had gone
off again in the same direction.  The serpents of the
Hanbridge and the Bursley Conservative clubs, and of
the bar of the Five Towns Hotel, had wagered that
there was a woman at the bottom of it.  There was.
He had met her at Marienlyst, the watering-place near
Helsingor (called by the tourist agencies Elsinore).
Manna Höst was twenty-three, tall and athletically
slim, and more blonde than any girl ever before seen
in the Five Towns.  She had golden hair and she wore
white.  It was understood that she spoke Danish,
Swedish and Norwegian.  She talked French with
facility to Renée Souchon.  And Tom said that her
knowledge of German surpassed her knowledge of either
French or English.  She spoke English excellently, with
a quaint, endearing accent, but with correctness.
Sometimes she would use an idiom (picked up from the
Swetnam boys), exquisitely unaware that it was
not quite suited to the lips of a young woman in
a strange drawing-room; her innocence, however, purified it.

She sang classical songs in German, with dramatic
force, and she could play accompaniments.  She was
thoroughly familiar with all the music haltingly
performed by Ingpen, Janet, Annunciata, and young
George.  Ingpen was very seriously interested in her
views thereon.  She knew about the French authors
from whose works Renée Souchon chose her recitations.
And standing up at the buffet table in the dining-room,
she had fabricated astounding sandwiches in the
Danish style.  She stated that Danish cooks reckoned
ninety-three sorts of sandwiches.  She said in her light,
eager voice, apropos of cooking: "There is one thing
I cannot understand.  I cannot understand why you
English throw your potatoes to melt in cold water
for an hour before you boil them."  "Nor I!"
interjected Renée Souchon.  No other woman standing
round the table had ever conceived the propriety of
boiling potatoes without first soaking them in cold
water, and Manna was requested to explain.
"Because," she said, "it--it lets go the salts of potassium
which are so necessary for the pheesical deve*lop*ment
of the body."  Whereupon Tertius Ingpen had been
taken by one of his long *crescendo* laughs, a laugh that
ended by his being bent nearly double below the level
of the table.  Everybody was much impressed, and
Ingpen himself not the least.  Ingpen wondered what
a girl so complex could see in a man like Tom
Swetnam, who, although he could talk about the arts, had
no real feeling for any of them.

But what impressed the company even more than
Miss Höst's accomplishments was the candid fervour
of her comprehensive interest in life, which was
absolutely without self-consciousness or fear.  She talked
with the same disarming ingenuous eager directness to
hard-faced Charles Fearns, the secret rake; to his wife,
the ageing and sweetly-sad mother of a family; to
Renée Souchon, who despite her plainness and her
rumoured bigotry seemed to attract all the men in the
room by something provocative in her eye and the
carriage of her hips; to the simple and powerful Stephen
Cheswardine; to Vera, the delicious and elegant cat;
to Doctor Stirling with his Scotch mysticism, and to
Tertius Ingpen the connoisseur and avowed bachelor.
She spoke to Hilda, Janet and Daisy Marrion as one
member of a secret sisterhood to other members, to
Annunciata as a young girl, and to George as an
initiated sister.  She left them to turn to Edwin with a
trustful glance as to one whose special reliability she
had divined from the first.  "Have a liqueur, Miss
Höst," Edwin enjoined her.  In a moment she was
sipping Chartreuse.  "I love it!" she murmured.

But somehow beneath all such freedoms and frankness
she did not cease to be a maiden with reserves of
mystery.  Her assumption that nobody could misinterpret
her demeanour was remarkable to the English
observers, and far more so to Renée Souchon.  All gazed
at her piquant blonde face, scarcely pretty, with its
ardent restless eyes, and felt the startling compliment
of her quick, searching sympathy.  And she, tinglingly
aware of her success, proved easily equal to the ordeal
of it.  Only at rare intervals did she give a look at
the betrothed, as if for confirmation of her security.
As for Tom, he was positively somewhat unnerved by
the brilliance of the performance.  He left her alone,
without guidance, as a ring-master who should stand
aside during a turn and say: "See this marvel!  I am
no longer necessary."  When people glanced at him
after one of her effects, he would glance modestly
away, striving to hide from them his illusion that he
himself had created the bewitching girl.  At half past
eleven, when the entire assemblage passed into the
drawing-room, she dropped on to the piano-stool and began
a Waldteufel waltz with irresistible seductiveness.

Hilda's heart leaped.  In a minute the carpet was up,
and the night, which all had supposed to be at an
end, began.

At nearly one o'clock in the morning the party was
moving strongly by its own acquired momentum and
needed neither the invigoration nor the guidance which
hosts often are compelled to give.  Hilda, having
finished a schottische with Dr. Stirling, missed Janet
from the drawing-room.  Leaving the room in search
of her, she saw Edwin with Tom Swetnam and the
glowing Manna at the top of the stairs.

"Hello!" she called out.  "What are you folks doing?"

Manna's light laugh descended like a shower of crystals.

"Just taking a constitutional," Edwin answered.

Hilda waved to them in passing.  She was extremely
elated.  Among other agreeable incidents was the
success of her new black lace frock.  Edwin's voice pleased
her,--it was so calm, wise, and kind, and at the same
time mysteriously ironical.  She occasionally admitted,
at the sound of that voice when Edwin was in high
spirits, that she had never been able to explore
completely the more withdrawn arcana of his nature.  He
had behaved with perfection that evening.  She
admitted that he was the basis of the evening, that
without him she could never have such triumphs.  It was
strange that a man by spending so many hours per
day at a works could create the complicated ease and
luxury of a home.  She perceived how steadily and
surely he had progressed since their marriage, and how
his cautiousness always justified itself, and how he had
done all that he had said he would do.  And she had a
vision of that same miraculous creative force of his at
work, by her volition, in the near future upon
Ladderedge Hall.  Her mood became a strange compound
of humility before him and of self-confident pride in
her own power to influence him.

In the boudoir Janet was reclining in the sole easy
chair.  Dressed in grey (she had abandoned white),
she was as slim as ever, and did not look her age.  With
face flushed, eyes glinting under drooping lids, and
bosom heaving rather quickly, she might have passed
in the half-light for a young married woman still under
the excitement of matrimony, instead of a virgin of
forty.

"I was so done up I had to come and hide myself!"
she murmured in a dreamy tone.

"Well, of course you've had the journey to-day and
everything..."

"I never did come across such a dancer as Charles
Fearns!" Janet went on.

"Yes," said Hilda, standing with her back to the
fire, with one hand on the mantelpiece.  "He's a great
dancer--or at least he makes you think so.  But I'm
sure he's a bad man."

"Yes, I suppose he is!" Janet agreed with a sigh.

Neither of the women spoke for a moment, and each
looked away.

Through the closed door came the muffled sound of
the piano, played by Annunciata.  No melody was
distinguishable,--only the percussion of the bass chords
beating out the time of a new mazurka.  It was as if
the whole house faintly but passionately pulsed in the
fever of the dance.

"I see you've got a Rossetti," said Janet at last,
fingering a blue volume that lay on the desk.

"Edwin gave it me," Hilda replied.  "He's gradually
giving me all my private poets.  But somehow
I haven't been able to read much lately.  I expect it's
the idea of moving into the country that makes me
restless."

"But is it settled, all that?"

"Of course it's settled, my dear.  I'm determined to
take him away--"  Hilda spoke of her husband as of
a parcel or an intelligent bear on a chain, as loving
wives may--"right out of all this.  I'm sure it will be
a good thing for him.  He doesn't mind, really.  He's
promised me.  Only he wants to make sure of either
selling or letting this house first.  He's always very
cautious, Edwin is.  He simply hates doing a thing
straight off."

"Yes, he is rather that way inclined," said Janet.

"I wanted him to take Ladderedge at once, even if we
didn't move into it.  Anyhow we couldn't move into it
immediately, because of the repairs and things.  They'll
take a fine time, I know.  We can get it for sixty pounds
a year.  And what's sixty pounds more or less to
Edwin?  It's no more than what the rent of this house
would be.  But no, he wouldn't!  He must see where
he stands with this house before he does anything else!
You can't alter him, you know!"

The door was cautiously pushed, and Ingpen entered.

"So you're discussing her!" he said, low, with a
satiric grin.

"Discussing who?" Hilda sharply demanded.

"You know."

"Tertius," said Hilda, "you're worse than a woman."

He giggled with delight.

"I suppose you mean that to be very severe."

"If you want to know, we were talking about Ladderedge."

"So apologise!" added Janet, sitting up.

Ingpen's face straightened, and he began to tap his
teeth with his thumb.

"Curious!  That's just what I came in about.  I've
been trying to get a chance to tell you all the evening.
There's somebody else after Ladderedge, a man from
Axe.  He's been to look over it twice this week.  I
thought I'd tip you the wink."

Hilda stood erect, putting her shoulders back.

"Have you told Edwin?" she asked very curtly.

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"He said it was only a dodge of the house-agent's
to quicken things up."

"And do you think it is?"

"Well, I doubt it," Ingpen answered apprehensively.
"That's why I wanted to warn you--his lordship being
what he is."

Voices, including Edwin's, could be heard in the hall.

"Here, I'm not going to be caught conspiring with
you!" Ingpen whispered.  "It's more than my place
is worth."  And he departed.

The voices receded, and Hilda noiselessly shut the
door.  Everything was now changed for her by a
tremendous revulsion.  The beating of the measure of the
mazurka seemed horrible and maddening.  Her thought
was directed upon Edwin with the cold fury of which
only love is capable.  It was not his fault that some
rival was nibbling at Ladderedge, but it was his fault
that Ladderedge should still be in peril.  She saw all
her grandiose plan ruined.  She felt sure that the rival
was powerful and determined, and that Edwin would
let him win, either by failing to bid against him, or by
mere shilly-shallying.  Ladderedge was not the only
suitable country residence in the county; there were
doubtless many others; but Ladderedge was just what
she wanted, and--more important with her--it had
become a symbol.  She had a misgiving that if they did
not get Ladderedge they would remain in Trafalgar
Road, Bursley, for ever and ever.  Yet, angry and
desperate though she was, she somehow did not accuse
and arraign Edwin--any more than she would have
accused and arraigned a climate.  He was in fact the
climate in which she lived.  A moment ago she had
said: "You can't alter him!"  But now all the energy
of her volition cried out that he must be altered.

"My girl," she said, turning to Janet, "do you
think you can stand a scene to-morrow?"

"A scene?"  Janet repeated the word guardedly.  The
look on Hilda's face somewhat alarmed her.

"Between Edwin and me.  I'm absolutely determined
that we shall take Ladderedge, and I don't care how
much of a row we have over it."

"It isn't as bad as all that?" Janet softly murmured,
with her skill to soothe.

"Yes it is!" said Hilda violently.

"I was wondering the other day, after one of your
letters," Janet proceeded gently, "why after all you
were so anxious to go into the country.  I thought you
wanted Edwin to be on the Town Council or something
of that kind.  How can he do that if you're right
away at a place like Stockbrook?"

"So I should like him to be on the Town Council!
But all I really want is to get him away from his
business.  You don't know, Janet!" she spoke bitterly, and
with emotion.  "Nobody knows except me.  He'll soon
be the slave of his business if he keeps on.  Oh!  I don't
mean he stays at nights at it.  He scarcely ever does.
But he's always thinking about it.  He simply can't
bear being a minute late for it, everything must give
way to it,--he takes that as a matter of course, and
that's what annoys me, especially as there's no reason
for it, seeing how much he trusts Big James and
Simpson.  I believe he'd do anything for Big James.  He'd
listen to Big James far sooner than he'd listen to me....
Disagreeable fawning old man, and quite stupid.
Simpson isn't so bad.  I tell you Edwin only looks on
his home as a nice place to be quiet in when he isn't at
the works.  I've never told him so, and I don't think he
suspects it, but I will tell him one of these days.  He's
very good, Edwin is, in all the little things.  He
always tries to be just.  But he isn't just in the big thing.
He's most frightfully unjust.  I sometimes wonder
where he imagines I come in.  Of course he'd do any
mortal thing for me--except spare half a minute from
the works....  What do I care about money?  I don't
care that much about money.  When there's money I
can spend it, that's all.  But I'd prefer to be poor, and
him to be rude and cross and impatient--which he
scarcely ever is--than have this feeling all the time
that it's the works first, and everything else second.
I don't mind for myself--no, really I don't, at least
very little!  But I do mind for him.  I call it
humiliating for a man to get like that.  It puts everything
upside down.  Look at Stephen Cheswardine, for
instance.  There's a pretty specimen!  And Edwin'll
be as bad as him soon."

"But everyone says how fond Stephen is of his wife!"

"And isn't Edwin fond of me?  Stephen Cheswardine
despises his wife--only he can't do without her.  That's
all.  And he treats her accordingly.  And I shall be
the same."

"Oh!  Hilda!'

"Yes, I shall.  Yes, I shall.  But I won't have it.
I'd as lief be married to a man like Charles Fearns.
He isn't a slave to his business anyhow.  I shall get
Edwin further away.  And when I've got him away
I shall see he doesn't go to the works on Saturdays,
too.  I've quite made up my mind about that.  And if
he isn't on the Town Council he can be on the County
Council--that's quite as good, I hope!"

Never before had Hilda spoken so freely to anyone,
not even to Janet.  Fierce pride had always kept her
self-contained.  But now she had no feeling of shame at
her outburst.  Tears stood in her eyes--and yet she
faced Janet, making no effort to hide them.

"My dear!" breathed the deprecating Janet, shocked
out of her tepid virginal calm by a revelation of
conjugal misery such as had never been vouchsafed to
her.  She was thinking: "How can the poor thing face
her guests after this?  Everybody will see that
something's happened--it will be awful!  She really ought
to think of her position."

There was a silence.

The door opened with a sharp sound, and Hilda
turned away her head as from the suddenly visible
mouth of a cannon.  The music could be heard plainly,
and beneath it the dull shuffling of feet on the bare
boards of the drawing-room.  Manna Höst came in
radiant, followed by Edwin and Tom Swetnam.

"Well, Hilda," said Edwin, with a slight timid
constraint.  "I've got rid of your house for you.  Here
are the deluded victims."

"We have seen every corner of it, Mrs. Clayhanger,"
said Manna Höst, enthusiastically.  "It is lovely.  But
how can you wish to leave it?  It is so practical!"

Perceiving the agitation of Hilda's face, Edwin
added in a lower voice to his wife:

"I thought I wouldn't say anything until it was settled,
for fear you might be let in for a disappointment.
He'll buy it if I leave fifteen hundred on mortgage.
So I shall.  But of course he wanted her to have a
good look at it first."

"How unfair I am!" thought Hilda, as she made
some banal remark to Miss Höst.  "Don't I know I
can always rely on him?"

"Mr. Clayhanger made us promise not to----" Miss
Höst began to explain.

"It was just like him!" Hilda interrupted, smiling.

She had a strong desire to jump at Edwin and kiss
him.  She was saved.  Her grandiose plan would
proceed.  The house sold, Edwin was bound to secure
Ladderedge Hall against no matter what rival; and he
would do it.  But it was the realisation of her power
over her husband that gave her the profoundest joy.

About an hour later, when everyone felt that the
party was over, the guests, reluctant to leave, and
excited afresh by the news that the house had changed
hands during the revel, were all assembled in the
drawing-room.  A few were seated on the chairs which, with
the tables, had been pushed against the walls.  George
had squatted on the carpet rolled up into the hearth,
where the fire was extinct; he was not wearing his
green shade.  The rest were grouped around Manna
Höst in the middle of the room.

Miss Höst, the future mistress of the abode, was now
more than ever the centre of regard.  Apparently as
fresh as at the start, and picking delicately at a sweet
biscuit, the flushed blonde stood answering questions
about her views on England and especially on the Five
Towns.  She was quite sure of herself, and utterly
charming in her confidence.  Annunciata Fearns envied
her acutely.  The other women were a little saddened
by the thought of all the disillusions that inevitably lay
before her.  It was touching to see her glance at Tom
Swetnam, convinced that she understood him to the
core, and in him all the psychology of his sex.

"Everybody knows," she was saying, "that the English
are the finest nation, and I think the Five Towns
are much more English than London.  That's why I
adore the Five Towns.  You do not know how English
you are here.  It makes me laugh because you are so
English, and you do not know it.  I love you."

"You're flattering us," said Stephen Cheswardine,
enchanted with the girl.

Everybody waited in eager delight for her next
words.  Such tit-bits of attention and laudation did
not often fall to the district.  It occurred to people
that after all the local self-conceit might not be
entirely unjustified.

"Ah!" Manna pouted.  "But you have spots!"

"Spots!" repeated young Paul Swetnam, amid a general laugh.

She turned to him: "You said there were no spots
on Knype Football Club, did you not?  Well, there
is a spot on you English.  You are dreadfully
exasperating to us Danes.  Oh, I mean it!  You are
exasperating because you will not show your feelings!"

"Tom, that must be one for you," said Charlie Fearns.

"We're too proud," said Dr. Stirling.

"No," replied Manna maliciously.  "It is not pride.
You are afraid to show your feelings.  It is because
you are cowards--in that!"

"We aren't!" cried Hilda, inspired.  And yielding to
the temptation which had troubled her incessantly ever
since she left the boudoir, she put her arms round
Edwin and kissed him.  "So there!"

"Loud applause!" said young George on the roll of
carpet.  He said it kindly, but with a certain
superiority, perhaps due to the facts that he was wearing
a man's "long trousers" for the first time that night,
and that he regarded himself as already almost a
Londoner.  There was some handclapping.

Edwin's eyes had seduced Hilda.  Looking at them
surreptitiously she had suddenly recalled another of his
tricks,--tricks of goodness.  When she had told him one
evening that Minnie was prematurely the mother of a
girl, he had said: "Well, we'll put £130 in the savings
bank for the kid."  "£130?  Whatever are you
talking about?"  "£130.  I received it from America this
very morning as ever is."  And he showed her a draft
on Brown, Shipley & Co.  He said 'from America.'  He
was too delicate to say 'from George Cannon.'  It
had been a triumphant moment for him.  And now,
as before them all Hilda held him to her, the delicious
thought that she had power over him, that she was
shaping the large contours of his existence, made her
feel solemn in her bliss.  And yet simultaneously she
was reflecting with a scarcely perceptible hardness:
"It's each for himself in marriage after all, and I've
got my own way."  And then she noticed the whiteness
of his shirt-front under her chin, and that
reminded her of his mania for arranging his linen
according to his own ideas in his own drawer, and the
absurd tidiness of his linen; and she wanted to laugh.

"What a romance she has made of my life!" thought
Edwin, confused and blushing, as she loosed him.  And
though he looked round with affection at the walls
which would soon no longer be his, the greatness of the
adventure of existence with this creature, to him unique,
and the eternal expectation of some new ecstasy, left no
room in his heart for a regret.

He caught sight of Ingpen alone in a corner by the
piano, nervously stroking his silky beard.  The
memory of the secret woman in Ingpen's
room came back to him.  Without any
process of reasoning, he felt very
sorry for both of them, and he was
aware of a certain condescension in
himself towards Ingpen.

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