Arnold Bennett (continued 11)

Five.

She dropped into a chair by the piano, and rested her elbows on the curved lid of the piano.

“You’re frightfully cruel!” she sobbed, hiding her face.

He fidgeted away to the larger of the two windows, which was bayed, so that the room could boast a view of the sea. On the floor he noticed an open book, pages downwards. He picked it up. It was the poems of Crashaw, an author he had never read but had always been intending to read. Outside, the driver of his cab was bunching up his head and shoulders together under a large umbrella, upon which the rain spattered. The flanks of the resigned horse glistened with rain.

“You needn’t talk about cruelty!” he remarked, staring hard at the signboard of an optician opposite. He could hear the faint clanging of church bells.

After a pause she said, as if apologetically—

“Keeping a boarding-house isn’t my line. But what could I do? My sister-in-law had it, and I was with her. And when she died... Besides, I dare say I can keep a boarding-house as well as plenty of other people. But—well, it’s no use going into that!”

Edwin abruptly sat down near her.

“Come, now,” he said less harshly, more persuasively. “How much do you owe?”

“Oh!” she cried, pouting, and shifting her feet. “It’s out of the question! They’ve distrained for seventy-five pounds.”

“I don’t care if they’ve distrained for seven hundred and seventy-five pounds!” She seemed just like a girl to him again now, in spite of her face and her figure. “If that was cleared off, you could carry on, couldn’t you? This is just the season. Could you get a servant in, in time for these three sisters?”

“I could get a charwoman, anyhow,” she said unwillingly.

“Well, do you owe anything else?”

“There’ll be the expenses.”

“Of the distraint?”

“Yes.”

“That’s nothing. I shall lend you a hundred pounds. It just happens that I’ve got fifty pounds on me in notes. That and a cheque’ll settle the bailiff person, and the rest of the hundred I’ll send you by post. It’ll be a bit of working capital.”

She rose and threaded between chairs and tables to the sofa, several feet from Edwin. With a vanquished and weary sigh, she threw herself on to the sofa.

“I never knew there was anybody like you in the world,” she breathed, flicking away some fluff from her breast. She seemed to be regarding him, not as a benefactor, but as a natural curiosity.

Six.

He looked at her like a conqueror. He had taught her a thing or two. He had been a man. He was proud of himself. He was proud of all sorts of details in his conduct. The fifty pounds in notes, for example, was not an accident. Since the death of his father, he had formed the habit of never leaving his base of supplies without a provision far in excess of what he was likely to need. He was extravagant in nothing, but the humiliations of his penurious youth and early manhood had implanted in him a morbid fear of being short of money. He had fantastically surmised circumstances in which he might need a considerable sum at Brighton. And lo! the sequel had transformed his morbidity into prudence.

“This time yesterday,” he reflected, in his triumph, “I hadn’t even seen her, and didn’t know where she was. Last night I was a fool. Half an hour ago she herself hadn’t a notion that I was going to get the upper hand of her... Why, it isn’t two days yet since I left home! ... And look where I am now!”

With pity and with joy he watched her slowly wiping her eyes. Thirty-four, perhaps; yet a child—compared to him! But if she did not give a natural ingenuous smile of relief, it was because she could not. If she acted foolishly it was because of her tremendous haughtiness. However, he had lowered that. He had shown her her master. He felt that she had been profoundly wronged by destiny, and that gentleness must be lavished upon her.

In a casual tone he began to talk about the most rapid means of getting rid of the bailiff. He could not tolerate the incubus of the bailiff a moment longer than was absolutely unavoidable. At intervals a misgiving shot like a thin flying needle through the solid satisfaction of his sensations: “She is a strange and an incalculable woman—why am I doing this?” Shot, and was gone, almost before perceived!

Volume Four--Chapter Six.

The Rendezvous.

In the afternoon the weather cleared somewhat. Edwin, vaguely blissful, but with nothing to occupy him save reflection, sat in the lounge drinking tea at a Moorish table. An old Jew, who was likewise drinking tea at a Moorish table, had engaged him in conversation and was relating the history of a burglary in which he had lost from his flat in Bolton Street, Piccadilly, nineteen gold cigarette-cases and thirty-seven jewelled scarf-pins, tokens of esteem and regard offered to him by friends and colleagues at various crises of his life. The lounge was crowded, but not with tea-drinkers. Despite the horrid dismalness of the morning, hope had sent down from London trains full of people whose determination was to live and to see life in a grandiose manner. And all about the lounge of the Royal Sussex were groups of elegant youngish men and flaxen, uneasily stylish women, inviting the assistance of flattered waiters to decide what liqueurs they should have next. Edwin was humanly trying to publish in nonchalant gestures the scorn which he really felt for these nincompoops, but whose free expression was hindered by a layer of envy.

The hall-porter appeared, and his eye ranged like a condor’s over the field until it discovered Edwin, whom he approached with a mien of joy and handed to him a letter.

Edwin took the letter with an air of custom, as if he was anxious to convince the company that his stay at the Royal Sussex was frequently punctuated by the arrival of special missives.

“Who brought this?” he asked.

“An oldish man, sir,” said the porter, and bowed and departed.

The handwriting was hers. Probably the broker’s man had offered to bring the letter. In the short colloquy with him in the morning, Edwin had liked the slatternly, coarse fellow. The bailiff could not, unauthorised, accept cheques, but his tone in suggesting an immediate visit to his employers had shown that he had bowels, that he sympathised with the difficulties of careless tenants in a harsh world of landlords. It was Hilda who, furnished with notes and cheque, had gone, in Edwin’s cab, to placate the higher powers. She had preferred to go herself, and to go alone. Edwin had not insisted. He had so mastered her that he could afford to yield to her in trifles.

Two.

The letter said exactly this: “Everything is all right and settled. I had no trouble at all. But I should like to speak to you this afternoon. Will you meet me on the West Pier at six?—H.C.” No form of greeting! No thanks! The bare words necessary to convey a wish! On leaving her in the morning no arrangement had been made for a further interview. She had said nothing, and he had been too proud to ask—the terrible pride of the benefactor! It was only by chance that it had even occurred to him to say: “By the way, I am staying at the Royal Sussex.” She had shown no curiosity whatever about him, his doings, his movements. She had not put to him a single question. He had intended to call at Preston Street on the Monday morning. And now a letter from her! Her handwriting had scarcely changed. He was to meet her on the pier. At her own request he now had a rendezvous with her on the pier! Why not at her house? Perhaps she was afraid of his power over her in the house. (Curious, how she, and she almost alone, roused the masculine force in him!) Perhaps she wanted to thank him in surroundings which would compel both of them to be calm. That would be like her! Essentially modest, restrained! And did she not know how to be meek, she who was so headstrong and independent!

He looked at the clock. The hour was not yet five. Nevertheless he felt obliged to go out, to bestir himself. On the misty, crowded, darkening promenade he abandoned himself afresh to indulgence in the souvenance of the great critical scene of the morning. Yes, he had done marvels; and fate was astoundingly kind to him also. But there was one aspect of the affair that intrigued and puzzled him, and weakened his self-satisfaction. She had been defeated, yet he was baffled by her. She was a mystery within folds of mysteries. He was no nearer—he secretly felt—to the essential Her than he had been before the short struggle and his spectacular triumph. He wanted to reconstruct in his fancy all her emotional existence; he wanted to get at her,—to possess her intimate mind,—and lo! he could not even recall the expressions of her face from minute to minute during the battle. She hid herself from him. She eluded him... Strange creature! The polishing of the door-plate in the night! That volume of Crashaw—on the floor! Her cold, almost daemonic smile! Her sobs! Her sudden retreats! What was at the back of it all? He remembered her divine gesture over the fond Shushions. He remembered the ecstatic quality of her surrender in the shop. He remembered her first love-letter: “Every bit of me is absolutely yours.” And yet the ground seemed to be unsure beneath his feet, and he wondered whether he had ever in reality known her, ever grasped firmly the secret of her personality, even for an instant.

He said to himself that he would be seeing her face to face in an hour, and that then he would, by the ardour of his gaze, get behind those enigmatic features to the arcana they concealed.

Three.

Before six o’clock it was quite dark. He thought it a strange notion, to fix a rendezvous at such an hour, on a day in autumn, in the open air. But perhaps she was very busy, doing servant’s work in the preparation of her house for visitors. When he reached the pier gates at five minutes to six, they were closed, and the obscure vista of the pier as deserted as some northern pier in mid-winter. Naturally it was closed! There was a notice prominently displayed that the pier would close that evening at dusk. What did she mean? The truth was, he decided, that she lived in the clouds, ordering her existence by means of sudden and capricious decisions in which facts were neglected,—and herein probably lay the explanation of her misfortunes. He was very philosophical: rather amused than disturbed, because her house was scarcely a stone’s-throw away: she could not escape him.

He glanced up and down the lighted promenade, and across the broad muddy road towards the opening of Preston Street. The crowds had disappeared; only scattered groups and couples, and now and then a solitary, passed quickly in the gloom. The hotels were brilliant, and carriages with their flitting lamps were continually stopping in front of them; but the blackness of the shop-fronts produced the sensation of melancholy proper to the day even in Brighton, and the renewed sound of church bells intensified this arid melancholy.

Suddenly he saw her, coming not across the road from Preston Street, but from the direction of Hove. He saw her before she saw him. Under the multiplicity of lamps her face was white and clear. He had a chance to read in it. But he could read nothing in it save her sadness, save that she had suffered. She seemed querulous, preoccupied, worried, and afflicted. She had the look of one who is never free from apprehension. Yet for him that look of hers had a quality unique, a quality that he had never found in another, but which he was completely unable to define. He wanted acutely to explain to himself what it was, and he could not.

“You are frightfully cruel,” she had said. And he admitted that he had been. Yes, he had bullied her, her who, he was convinced, had always been the victim. In spite of her vigorous individuality she was destined to be a victim. He was sure that she had never deserved anything but sympathy and respect and affection. He was sure that she was the very incarnation of honesty—possibly she was too honest for the actual world. Did not the Orgreaves worship her? And could he himself have been deceived in his estimate of her character?

She recognised him only when she was close upon him. A faint, transient, wistful smile lightened her brooding face, pale and stern.

Four.

“Oh! There you are!” she exclaimed, in her clear voice. “Did I say six, or five, in my note?”

“Six.”

“I was afraid I had done, when I came here at five and didn’t find you. I’m so sorry.”

“No!” he said. “I think I ought to be sorry. It’s you who’ve had the waiting to do. The pier’s closed now.”

“It was just closing at five,” she answered. “I ought to have known. But I didn’t. The fact is, I scarcely ever go out. I remembered once seeing the pier open at night, and I thought it was always open.” She shrugged her shoulders as if stopping a shiver.

“I hope you haven’t caught cold,” he said. “Suppose we walk along a bit.”

They walked westwards in silence. He felt as though he were by the side of a stranger, so far was he from having pierced the secret of that face.

As they approached one of the new glazed shelters, she said—

“Can’t we sit down a moment. I—I can’t talk standing up. I must sit down.”

They sat down, in an enclosed seat designed to hold four. And Edwin could feel the wind on his calves, which stretched beyond the screened side of the structure. Odd people passed dimly to and fro in front of them, glanced at them with nonchalant curiosity, and glanced away. On the previous evening he had observed couples in those shelters, and had wondered what could be the circumstances or the preferences which led them to accept such a situation. Certainly he could not have dreamed that within twenty-four hours he would be sitting in one of them with her, by her appointment, at her request. He thrilled with excitement—with delicious anxieties.

“Janet told you I was a widow,” Hilda began, gazing at the ferule of her umbrella, which gleamed on the ground.

“Yes.” Again she was surprising him.

“Well, we arranged she should tell every one that. But I think you ought to know that I’m not.”

“No?” he murmured weakly. And in one small unimportant region of his mind he reflected with astonishment upon the hesitating but convincing air with which Janet had lied to him. Janet!

“After what you’ve done”—she paused, and went on with unblurred clearness—“after what you’ve insisted on doing, I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding. I’m not a widow. My husband’s in prison. He’ll be in prison for another six or seven years. That’s all I wanted to tell you.”

“I’m very sorry,” he breathed. “I’d no idea you’d had this trouble.” What could he say? What could anybody have said?

“I ought to have told you at once,” she said. “I ought to have told you last night.” Another pause. “Then perhaps you wouldn’t have come again this morning.”

“Yes, I should!” he asserted eagerly. “If you’re in a hole, you’re in a hole. What difference could it possibly make whether you were a widow or not?”

“Oh!” she said. “The wife of a convict... you know!” He felt that she was evading the point.

She went on: “It’s a good thing my three old ladies don’t know, anyhow...! I’d no chance to tell you this morning. You were too much for me.”

“I don’t care whose wife you are!” he muttered, as though to himself, as though resenting something said by some one who had gone away and left him. “If you’re in a hole, you’re in a hole.”

She turned and looked at him. His eyes fell before hers.

“Well,” she said. “I’ve told you. I must go. I haven’t a moment. Good night.” She held out her hand. “You don’t want me to thank you a lot, do you?”

“That I don’t!” he exclaimed.

“Good night.”

“But—”

“I really must go.”

He rose and gave his hand. The next instant she was gone.

There was a deafening roar in his head. It was the complete destruction by earthquake of a city of dreams. A calamity which left nothing—even to be desired! A tremendous silence reigned after the event.

Five.

On the following evening, when from the windows of the London-to-Manchester express he saw in the gloom the high-leaping flames of the blast-furnaces that seem to guard eternally the southern frontier of the Five Towns, he felt that he had returned into daily reality out of an impossible world. Waiting for the loop-line train in the familiar tedium of Knype platform, staring at the bookstall, every item on which he knew by heart and despised, surrounded once more by local physiognomies, gestures, and accent, he thought to himself: “This is my lot. And if I get messing about, it only shows what a damned fool I am!” He called himself a damned fool because Hilda had proved to have a husband; because of that he condemned the whole expedition to Brighton as a piece of idiocy. His dejection was profound and bitter. At first, after Hilda had quitted him on the Sunday night, he had tried to be cheerful, had persuaded himself indeed that he was cheerful; but gradually his spirit had sunk, beaten and miserable. He had not called at Preston Street again. Pride forbade, and the terror of being misunderstood.

And when he sat at his own table, in his own dining-room, and watched the calm incurious Maggie dispensing to him his elaborate tea-supper with slightly more fuss and more devotion than usual, his thoughts, had they been somewhat less vague, might have been summed up thus: “The right sort of women don’t get landed as the wives of convicts. Can you imagine such a thing happening to Maggie, for instance? Or Janet?” (And yet Janet was in the secret! This disturbed the flow of his reflections.) Hilda was too mysterious. Now she had half disclosed yet another mystery. But what? “Why was her husband a convict? Under what circumstances? For what crime? Where? Since when?” He knew the answer to none of these questions. More deeply than ever was that woman embedded in enigmas.

“What’s this parcel on the sideboard?” Maggie inquired.

“Oh! I want you to send it in to Janet. It’s from her particular friend, Mrs Cannon—something for the kid, I believe. I ran across her in Brighton, and she asked me if I’d bring the parcel along.”

The innocence of his manner was perfectly acted. He wondered that he could do it so well. But really there was no danger. Nobody in Bursley, or in the world, had the least suspicion of his past relations with Hilda. The only conceivable danger would have been in hiding the fact that he had met her in Brighton.

“Of course,” said Maggie, mildly interested. “I was forgetting she lived at Brighton. Well?” and she put a few casual questions, to which Edwin casually replied.

“You look tired,” she said later.

He astonished her by admitting that he was. According to all precedent her statement ought to have drawn forth a quick contradiction.

The sad image of Hilda would not be dismissed. He had to carry it about with him everywhere, and it was heavy enough to fatigue a stronger than Edwin Clayhanger. The pathos of her situation overwhelmed him, argue as he might about the immunity of ‘the right sort of women’ from a certain sort of disaster. On the Tuesday he sent her a post-office order for twenty pounds. It rather more than made up the agreed sum of a hundred pounds. She returned it, saying she did not need it. “Little fool!” he said. He was not surprised. He was, however, very much surprised, a few weeks later, to receive from Hilda her own cheque for eighty pounds odd! More mystery! An absolutely incredible woman! Whence had she obtained that eighty pounds? Needless to say, she offered no explanation. He abandoned all conjecture. But he could not abandon the image. And first Auntie Hamps said, and then Clara, and then even Maggie admitted, that Edwin was sticking too close to business and needed a change, needed rousing. Auntie Hamps urged openly that a wife ought to be found for him. But in a few days the great talkers of the family, Auntie Hamps and Clara, had grown accustomed to Edwin’s state, and some new topic supervened.

Volume Four--Chapter Seven.

The Wall.

One morning—towards the end of November—Edwin, attended by Maggie, was rearranging books in the drawing-room after breakfast, when there came a startling loud tap at the large central pane of the window. Both of them jumped.

“Who’s throwing?” Edwin exclaimed.

“I expect it’s that boy,” said Maggie, almost angrily.

“Not Georgie?”

“Yes. I wish you’d go and stop him. You’ve no idea what a tiresome little thing he is. And so rough too!”

This attitude of Maggie towards the mysterious nephew was a surprise for Edwin. She had never grumbled about him before. In fact they had seen little of him. For a fortnight he had not been abroad, and the rumour ran that he was unwell, that he was ‘not so strong as he ought to be.’ And now Maggie suddenly charged him with a whole series of misdoings! But it was Maggie’s way to keep unpleasant things from Edwin for a time, in order to save her important brother from being worried, and then in a moment of tension to fling them full in his face, like a wet clout.

“What’s he been up to?” Edwin inquired for details.

“Oh! I don’t know,” answered Maggie vaguely. At the same instant came another startling blow on the window. “There!” Maggie cried, in triumph, as if saying: “That’s what he’s been up to!” After all, the windows were Maggie’s own windows.

Edwin left on the sofa a whole pile of books that he was sorting, and went out into the garden. On the top of the wall separating him from the Orgreaves a row of damaged earthenware objects—jugs and jars chiefly—at once caught his eye. He witnessed the smashing of one of them, and then he ran to the wall, and taking a spring, rested on it with his arms, his toes pushed into crevices. Young George, with hand outstretched to throw, in the garden of the Orgreaves, seemed rather diverted by this apparition.

“Hello!” said Edwin. “What are you up to?”

“I’m practising breaking crocks,” said the child. That he had acquired the local word gave Edwin pleasure.

“Yes, but do you know you’re practising breaking my windows too? When you aim too high you simply can’t miss one of my windows.”

George’s face was troubled, as he examined the facts, which had hitherto escaped his attention, that there was a whole world of consequences on the other side of the wall, and that a missile which did not prove its existence against either the wall or a crock had not necessarily ceased to exist. Edwin watched the face with a new joy, as though looking at some wonder of nature under a microscope. It seemed to him that he now saw vividly why children were interesting.

“I can’t see any windows from here,” said George, in defence.

“If you climb up here you’ll see them all right.”

“Yes, but I can’t climb up. I’ve tried to, a lot of times. Even when I stood on my toes on this stump I could only just reach to put the crocks on the top.”

“What did you want to get on the wall for?”

“I wanted to see that swing of yours.”

“Well,” said Edwin, laughing, “if you could remember the swing why couldn’t you remember the windows?”

George shook his head at Edwin’s stupidity, and looked at the ground. “A swing isn’t windows,” he said. Then he glanced up with a diffident smile: “I’ve often been wanting to come and see you.”

Edwin was tremendously flattered. If he had made a conquest, the child by this frank admission had made a greater.

“Then why didn’t you come?”

“I couldn’t, by myself. Besides, my back hasn’t been well. Did they tell you?”

George was so naturally serious that Edwin decided to be serious too.

“I did hear something about it,” he replied, with the grave confidential tone that he would have used to a man of his own age. This treatment was evidently appreciated by George, and always afterwards Edwin conversed with him as with an equal, forbearing from facetiousness.

Damp though it was, Edwin twisted himself round and sat on the wall next to the crocks, and bent over the boy beneath, who gazed with upturned face.

“Why didn’t you ask Auntie Janet to bring you?”

“I don’t generally ask for things that I really want,” said the boy, with a peculiar glance.

“I see,” said Edwin, with an air of comprehension. He did not, however, comprehend. He only felt that the boy was wonderful. Imagine the boy saying that! He bent lower. “Come on up,” he said. “I’ll give you a hand. Stick your feet into that nick there.”

Two.

In an instant George was standing on the wall, light as fluff. Edwin held him by the legs, and his hand was on Edwin’s cap. The feel of the boy was delightful; he was so lithe and so yielding, and yet firm; and his glance was so trustful and admiring. “Rough!” thought Edwin, remembering Maggie’s adjective. “He isn’t a bit rough! Unruly? Well, I dare say he can be unruly if he cares to be. It all depends how you handle him.” Thus Edwin reflected in the pride of conquest, holding close to the boy, and savouring intimately his charm. Even the boy’s slightness attracted him. Difficult to believe that he was nine years old! His body was indeed backward. So too, it appeared, was his education. And yet was there not the wisdom of centuries in, “I don’t generally ask for things that I really want?”

Suddenly the boy wriggled, and gave a sound of joy that was almost a yell. “Look!” he cried.

The covered top of the steam-car could just be seen gliding along above the high wall that separated Edwin’s garden from the street.

“Yes,” Edwin agreed. “Funny, isn’t it?” But he considered that such glee at such a trifle was really more characteristic of six or seven than of nine years. George’s face was transformed by ecstasy.

“It’s when things move like that—horizontal!” George explained, pronouncing the word carefully.

Edwin felt that there was no end to the surpassing strangeness of this boy. One moment he was aged six, and the next he was talking about horizontality.

“Why? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know!” George sighed. “But somehow—” Then, with fresh vivacity: “I tell you—when Auntie Janet comes to wake me up in the morning the cat comes in too, with its tail up in the air—you know!” Edwin nodded. “Well, when I’m lying in bed I can’t see the cat, but I can see the top of its tail sailing along the edge of the bed. But if I sit up I can see all the cat, and that spoils it, so I don’t sit up at first.”

The child was eager for Edwin to understand his pleasure in horizontal motion that had no apparent cause, like the tip of a cat’s tail on the horizon of a bed, or the roof of a tram-car on the horizon of the wall. And Edwin was eager to understand, and almost persuaded himself that he did understand; but he could not be sure. A marvellous child—disconcerting! He had a feeling of inferiority to the child, because the child had seen beauty where he had not dreamed of seeing it.

“Want a swing,” he suggested, “before I have to go off to business?”

Three.

When it occurred to him that he had had as much violent physical exercise as was good for his years, and that he had left his books in disarray, and that his business demanded him, Edwin apologetically announced that he must depart, and the child admitted that Aunt Janet was probably waiting to give him his lessons.

“Are you going back the way you came? You’d better. It’s always best,” said Edwin.

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

He lifted and pushed the writhing form on to the wall, dislodging a jar, which crashed dully on the ground.

“Auntie Janet told me I could have them to do what I liked with. So I break them,” said George, “when they don’t break themselves!”

“I bet she never told you to put them on this wall,” said Edwin.

“No, she didn’t. But it was the best place for aiming. And she told me it didn’t matter how many crocks I broke, because they make crocks here. Do they, really?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s clay here,” said Edwin glibly.

“Where?”

“Oh! Round about.”

“White, like that?” exclaimed George eagerly, handling a teapot without a spout. He looked at Edwin: “Will you take me to see it? I should like to see white ground.”

“Well,” said Edwin, more cautiously, “the clay they get about here isn’t exactly white.”

“Then do they make it white?”

“As a matter of fact the white clay comes from a long way off—Cornwall, for instance.”

“Then why do they make the things here?” George persisted; with the annoying obstinacy of his years. He had turned the teapot upside down. “This was made here. It’s got ‘Bursley’ on it. Auntie Janet showed me.”

Edwin was caught. He saw himself punished for that intellectual sloth which leads adults to fob children off with any kind of a slipshod, dishonestly simplified explanation of phenomena whose adequate explanation presents difficulty. He remembered how nearly twenty years earlier he had puzzled over the same question and for a long time had not found the answer.

“I’ll tell you how it is,” he said, determined to be conscientious. “It’s like this—” He had to pause. Queer, how hard it was to state the thing coherently! “It’s like this. In the old days they used to make crocks anyhow, very rough, out of any old clay. And crocks were first made here because the people found common yellow clay, and the coal to burn it with, lying close together in the ground. You see how handy it was for them.”

“Then the old crocks were yellow?”

“More or less. Then people got more particular, you see, and when white clay was found somewhere else they had it brought here, because everybody was used to making crocks here, and they had all the works and the tools they wanted, and the coal too. Very important, the coal! Much easier to bring the clay to the people and the works, than cart off all the people—and their families, don’t forget—and so on, to the clay, and build fresh works into the bargain... That’s why. Now are you sure you see?”

George ignored the question. “I suppose they used up all the yellow clay there was here, long ago?”

“Not much!” said Edwin. “And they never will! You don’t know what a sagger is, I reckon?”

“What is a sagger?”

“Well, I can’t stop to tell you all that now. But I will some time. They make saggers out of the yellow clay.”

“Will you show me the yellow clay?”

“Yes, and some saggers too.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. As soon as I can.”

“Will you to-morrow?”

To-morrow happened to be Thursday. It was not Edwin’s free afternoon, but it was an afternoon to which a sort of licence attached. He yielded to the ruthless egotism of the child.

“All right!” he said.

“You won’t forget?”

“You can rely on me. Ask your auntie if you may go, and if she says you may, be ready for me to pull you up over the wall here, about three o’clock.”

“Auntie will have to let me go,” said George, in a savage tone, as Edwin helped him to slip down into the garden of the Orgreaves. Edwin went off to business with a singular consciousness of virtue, and with pride in his successful manner of taming wayward children, and with a very strong new interest in the immediate future.

Volume Four--Chapter Eight.

The Friendship.

The next afternoon George’s invincible energy took both himself and the great bearded man, Edwin, to a certain spot on the hollow confines of the town towards Turnhill, where there were several pits of marl and clay. They stared in silence at a vast ochre’s-coloured glistening cavity in the ground, on the high edges of which grew tufts of grass amid shards and broken bottles. In the bottom of the pit were laid planks, and along the planks men with pieces of string tied tight round their legs beneath the knees drew large barrows full or empty, sometimes insecurely over pools of yellow water into which the plank sagged under their weight, and sometimes over little hillocks and through little defiles formed in the basin of the mine. They seemed to have no aim. The whole cavity had a sticky look which at first amused George, but on the whole he was not interested, and Edwin gathered that the clay-pit in some mysterious way fell short of expectations. A mineral line of railway which, near by, ambled at random like a pioneer over rough country, was much more successful than the pit in winning his approval.

“Can we go and see the saggers now?” he suggested.

Edwin might have taken him to the manufactory in which Albert Benbow was a partner, but he preferred not to display to the father of Clara’s offspring his avuncular patronage of George Cannon, and he chose the works of a customer down at Shawport for whom he was printing a somewhat ambitious catalogue. He would call at the works and talk about the catalogue, and then incidentally mention that his young friend desired to see saggers.

“I suppose God put that clay there so that people could practise on it first, before they tried the white clay,” George observed, as the pair descended Oldcastle Street.

Decidedly he had moments of talking like an infant, like a baby of three. Edwin recalled that Hilda used to torture herself about questions of belief when she was not three but twenty-three. The scene in the garden porch seemed to have happened after all not very long ago. Yet a new generation, unconceived on that exciting and unforgettable night, had since been born and had passed through infancy and was now trotting and arguing and dogmatising by his side. It was strange, but it was certainly a fact, that George regarded him as a being immeasurably old. He still felt a boy.

How ought he to talk to the child concerning God? He was about to make a conventional response, when he stopped himself. “Confound it! Why should I?” he thought.

“If I were you I shouldn’t worry about God,” he said, aloud, in a casual and perhaps slightly ironic tone.

“Oh, I don’t!” George answered positively. “But now and then He comes into your head, doesn’t He? I was only just thinking.” The boy ceased, being attracted by the marvellous spectacle of a man perilously balanced on a crate-float driving a long-tailed pony full tilt down the steep slope of Oldcastle Street: it was equal to a circus.

Two.

The visit to the works was a particularly brilliant success. By good fortune an oven was just being ‘drawn,’ and the child had sight of the finest, the most barbaric picture that the manufacture of earthenware, from end to end picturesque, offers to the imaginative observer. Within the dark and sinister bowels of the kiln, illuminated by pale rays that came down through the upper orifice from the smoke-soiled sky, half-naked figures moved like ghosts, strenuous and damned, among the saggers of ware. At rapid intervals they emerged, their hairy torsos glistening with sweat, carrying the fired ware, which was still too hot for any but inured fingers to touch: an endless procession of plates and saucers and cups and mugs and jugs and basins, thousands and thousands! George stared in an enchanted silence of awe. And presently one of the Hercules’s picked him up, and held him for a moment within the portal of the torrid kiln, and he gazed at the high curved walls, like the walls of a gigantic tomb, and at the yellow saggers that held the ware. Now he knew what a sagger was.

“I’m glad you took me,” he said afterwards, clearly impressed by the authority of Edwin, who could stroll out and see such terrific goings-on whenever he chose. During all the walk home he did not speak.

On the Saturday, nominally in charge of his Auntie Janet, he called upon his chum with some water-colour drawings that he had done; they showed naked devils carrying cups and plates amid bright salmon-tinted flames: designs horrible, and horribly crude, interesting only because a child had done them. But somehow Edwin was obscurely impressed by them, and also he was touched by the coincidence that George painted in water-colours, and he, too, had once painted in water-colours. He was moreover expected to judge the drawings as an expert. On Monday he brought up the most complicated box of water-colours that his shop contained, and presented it to George, who, astounded, dazed, bore it away to his bedroom without a single word. Their friendship was sealed and published; it became a fact recognised by the two families.

Three.

About a week later, after a visit of a couple of days to Manchester, Edwin went out into the garden as usual when breakfast was finished, and discovered George standing on the wall. The boy had learned how to climb the wall from his own side of it without help.

“I say!” George cried, in a loud, rough, angry voice, as soon as he saw Edwin at the garden door. “I’ve got to go off in a minute, you know.”

“Go off? Where?”

“Home. Didn’t they tell you in your house? Auntie Janet and I came to your house yesterday, after I’d waited on the wall for you I don’t know how long, and you never came. We came to tell you, but you weren’t in. So we asked Miss Clayhanger to tell you. Didn’t Miss Clayhanger tell you?”

“No,” said Edwin. “She must have forgot.” It occurred to him that even the simple and placid Maggie had her personal prejudices, and that one of them might be against this child. For some reason she did not like the child. She positively could not have forgotten the child’s visit with Janet. She had merely not troubled to tell him: a touch of that malice which, though it be as rare as radium, nevertheless exists even in the most benignant natures. Edwin and George exchanged a silent, puzzled glance.

“Well, that’s a nice thing!” said the boy. It was.

“When are you going home?”

“I’m going now! Mr Orgreave has to go to London to-day, and mamma wrote to Auntie Janet yesterday to say that I must go with him, if he’d let me, and she would meet me at London. She wants me back. So Auntie Janet is taking me to Knype to meet Mr Orgreave there—he’s gone to his office first. And the gardener has taken my luggage in the barrow up to Bleakridge Station. Auntie’s putting her hat on. Can’t you see I’ve got my other clothes on?”

“Yes,” said Edwin, “I noticed that.”

“And my other hat?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve promised auntie I’ll come and put my overcoat on as soon as she calls me. I say—you wouldn’t believe how jammed my trunk is with that paint box and everything! Auntie Janet had to sit on it like anything! I say—shall you be coming to Brighton soon?”

Edwin shook his head.

“I never go to Brighton.”

“But when I asked you once if you’d been, you said you had.”

“So I have, but that was an accident.”

“Was it long since?”

“Well,” said Edwin, “you ought to know. It was when I brought that parcel for you.”

“Oh! Of course!”

Edwin was saying to himself: “She’s sent for him on purpose. She’s heard that we’re great friends, and she’s sent for him! She means to stop it! That’s what it is!” He had no rational basis for this assumption. It was instinctive. And yet why should she desire to interfere with the course of the friendship? How could it react unpleasantly on her? There obviously did not exist between mother and son one of those passionate attachments which misfortune and sorrow sometimes engender. She had been able to let him go. And as for George, he seldom mentioned his mother. He seldom mentioned anybody who was not actually present, or necessary to the fulfilment of the idea that happened to be reigning in his heart. He lived a life of absorption, hypnotised by the idea of the moment. These ideas succeeded each other like a dynasty of kings, like a series of dynasties, marked by frequent dynastic quarrels, by depositions and sudden deaths; but George’s loyalty was the same to all of them; it was absolute.

“Well, anyhow,” said he, “I shall come back here. Mother will have to let me.”

And he jumped down from the wall into Edwin’s garden, carelessly, his hands in his pockets, with a familiar ease of gesture that implied practice. He had in fact often done it before. But just this time—perhaps he was troubled by the unaccustomed clothes—having lighted on his feet, he failed to maintain his balance and staggered back against the wall.

“Now, clumsy!” Edwin commented.

The boy turned pale, and bit his lip, and then Edwin could see the tears in his eyes. One of his peculiarities was that he had no shame whatever about crying. He could not, or he would not, suffer stoically. Now he put his hands to his back, and writhed.

“Hurt yourself?” Edwin asked.

George nodded. He was very white, and startled. At first he could not command himself sufficiently to be able to articulate. Then he spluttered, “My back!” He subsided gradually into a sitting posture.

Edwin ran to him, and picked him up. But he screamed until he was set down. At the open drawing-room window, Maggie was arranging curtains. Edwin reluctantly left George for an instant and hurried to the window, “I say, Maggie, bring a chair or something out, will you? This dashed kid’s fallen and hurt himself.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Maggie calmly. “What surprises me is that you should ever have given him permission to scramble over the wall and trample all about the flower-beds the way he does!”

However, she moved at once to obey.

He returned to George. Then Janet’s voice was heard from the other garden, calling him: “George! Georgie! Nearly time to go!”

Edwin put his head over the wall.

“He’s fallen and hurt his back,” he answered to Janet, without any prelude.

“His back!” she repeated in a frightened tone.

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

“I’ll get over the wall,” said Janet.

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

“Now,” said Maggie to him, “you mustn’t be a baby!”

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” said George, ceasing to cry.

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know what to do!” said Janet.

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

“I—I think I’m all right,” George announced.

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

“Are you?” she questioned doubtfully.

“It’s nothing,” said Maggie, with firmness.

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

“I can carry him,” said Edwin quickly.

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

“There’s no time to get a cab, now,” said Janet, looking at her watch. “If we aren’t at Knype, father will wonder what on earth’s happened, and I don’t know what his mother would say!”

“Where’s that old pram?” Edwin demanded suddenly of Maggie.

“What? Clara’s? It’s in the outhouse.”

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

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

The notion was accepted.

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

“I’m certain it is,” said Maggie calmly. “There’s nothing really the matter with that child.”

“Well, it’s very good of Edwin, I’m sure,” said Janet.

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

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

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

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

Volume Four--Chapter Nine.

The Arrivals.

On a Saturday in the early days of the following year, 1892, Edwin by special request had gone in to take afternoon tea with the Orgreaves. Osmond Orgreave was just convalescent after an attack of influenza, and in the opinion of Janet wanted cheering up. The task of enlivening him had been laid upon Edwin. The guest, and Janet and her father and mother sat together in a group round the fire in the drawing-room.

The drawing-room alone had grown younger with years. Money had been spent on it rather freely. During the previous decade Osmond’s family, scattering, had become very much less costly to him, but his habits of industry had not changed, nor his faculty for collecting money. Hence the needs of the drawing-room, which had been pressing for quite twenty years, had at last been satisfied; indeed Osmond was saving, through mere lack of that energetic interest in things which is necessary to spending. Possibly even the drawing-room would have remained untouched—both Janet and her elder sister Marian sentimentally preferred it as it was—had not Mrs Orgreave been ‘positively ashamed’ of it when her married children, including Marian, came to see her. They were all married now, except Janet and Charlie and Johnnie; and Alicia at any rate had a finer drawing-room than her mother. So far as the parents were concerned Charlie might as well have been married, for he had acquired a partnership in a practice at Ealing and seldom visited home. Johnnie, too, might as well have been married. Since Jimmie’s wedding he had used the house strictly as a hotel, for sleeping and eating, and not always for sleeping. He could not be retained at home. His interests were mysterious, and lay outside it. Janet alone was faithful to the changed drawing-room, with its new carpets and wall-papers and upholstery.

“I’ve got more grandchildren than children now,” said Mrs Orgreave to Edwin, “and I never thought to have!”

“Have you really?” Edwin responded. “Let me see—”

“I’ve got nine.”

“Ten, mother,” Janet corrected. “She’s forgetting her own grandchildren now!”

“Bless me!” exclaimed Mrs Orgreave, taking off her eyeglasses and wiping them, “I’d missed Tom’s youngest.”

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

Mrs Orgreave absently and in somewhat stiff silence handed over the pince-nez! She was now quite an old woman, small, shapeless, and delightfully easy-going, whose sense of humour had not developed with age. She could never see a joke which turned upon her relations with her grandchildren, and in fact the jocular members of the family had almost ceased to employ this subject of humour. She was undoubtedly rather foolish about her grandchildren—‘fond,’ as they say down there. The parents of the grandchildren did not object to this foolishness—that is, they only pretended to object. The task of preventing a pardonable weakness from degenerating into a tedious and mischievous mania fell solely upon Janet. Janet was ready to admit that the health of the grandchildren was a matter which could fairly be left to their fathers and mothers, and she stood passive when Mrs Orgreave’s grandmotherly indulgences seemed inimical to their health; but Mrs Orgreave was apt to endanger her own health in her devotion to the profession of grandmother—for example by sitting up to unchristian hours with a needle. Then there would be a struggle of wills, in which of course Mrs Orgreave, being the weaker, was defeated; though her belief survived that she and she alone, by watchfulness, advice, sagacity, and energy, kept her children’s children out of the grave. On all other questions the harmony between Janet and her mother was complete, and Mrs Orgreave undoubtedly considered that no mother had ever had a daughter who combined so many virtues and charms.

Two.

Mr Orgreave, forgetful of the company, was deciphering the “British Medical Journal” in the twilight of the afternoon. His doctor had lent him this esoteric periodical because there was an article therein on influenza, and Mr Orgreave was very much interested in influenza.

“You remember the influenza of ’89, Edwin?” he asked suddenly, looking over the top of the paper.

“Do I?” said Edwin. “Yes, I fancy I do remember a sort of epidemic.”

“I should think so indeed!” Janet murmured.

“Well,” continued Mr Orgreave, “I’m like you. I thought it was an epidemic. But it seems it wasn’t. It was a pandemic. What’s a pandemic, now?”

“Give it up,” said Edwin.

“You might just look in the dictionary—Ogilvie there,” and while Edwin ferreted in the bookcase, Mr Orgreave proceeded, reading: “‘The pandemic of 1889 has been followed by epidemics, and by endemic prevalence in some areas!’ So you see how many demics there are! I suppose they’d call it an epidemic we’ve got in the town now.”

His voice had changed on the last sentence. He had meant to be a little facetious about the Greek words; but it was the slowly prepared and rather exasperating facetiousness of an ageing man, and he had dropped it listlessly, as though he himself had perceived this. Influenza had weakened and depressed him; he looked worn, and even outworn. But not influenza alone was responsible for his appearance. The incredible had happened: Osmond Orgreave was getting older. His bald head was not the worst sign of his declension, nor the thickened veins in his hands, nor the deliberation of his gestures, nor even the unsprightliness of his wit. The worst sign was that he was losing his terrific zest in life; his palate for the intense savour of it was dulled. In this last attack of influenza he had not fought against the onset of the disease. He had been wise; he had obeyed his doctor, and laid down his arms at once; and he showed no imprudent anxiety to resume them. Yes, a changed Osmond! He was still one of the most industrious professional men in Bursley; but he worked from habit, not from passion.

When Edwin had found ‘pandemic’ in Ogilvie, Mr Orgreave wanted to see the dictionary for himself, and then he wanted the Greek dictionary, which could not be discovered, and then he began to quote further from the “British Medical Journal.”

“‘It may be said that there are three well-marked types of the disease, attacking respectively the respiratory, the digestive, and the nervous system.’ Well, I should say I’d had ’em all three. ‘As a rule the attack—’”

Thus he went on. Janet made a moue at Edwin, who returned the signal. These youngsters were united in good-natured forbearing condescension towards Mr Orgreave. The excellent old fellow was prone to be tedious; they would accept his tediousness, but they would not disguise from each other their perception of it.

“I hear the Vicar of Saint Peter’s is very ill indeed,” said Mrs Orgreave, blandly interrupting her husband.

“What? Heve? With influenza?”

“Yes. I wouldn’t tell you before because I thought it might pull you down again.”

Mr Orgreave, in silence, stared at the immense fire.

“What about this tea, Janet?” he demanded.

Janet rang the bell.

“Oh! I’d have done that!” said Edwin, as soon as she had done it.

Three.

While Janet was pouring out the tea, Edwin restored Ogilvie to his place in the bookcase, feeling that he had had enough of Ogilvie.

“Not so many books here now as there used to be!” he said, vacuously amiable, as he shut the glass door which had once protected the treasures of Tom Orgreave.

For a man who had been specially summoned to the task of cheering up, it was not a felicitous remark. In the first place it recalled the days when the house, which was now a hushed retreat where settled and precise habits sheltered themselves from a changing world, had been an arena for the jolly, exciting combats of outspread individualities. And in the second place it recalled a slight difficulty between Tom and his father. Osmond Orgreave was a most reasonable father, but no father is perfect in reasonableness, and Osmond had quite inexcusably resented that Tom on his marriage should take away all Tom’s precious books. Osmond’s attitude had been that Tom might in decency have left, at any rate, some of the books. It was not that Osmond had a taste for book-collecting: it was merely that he did not care to see his house depleted and bookcases empty. But Tom had shown no compassion. He had removed not merely every scrap of a book belonging to himself, but also two bookcases which he happened to have paid for. The weight of public opinion was decidedly against Mr Orgreave, who had to yield and affect pleasantness. Nevertheless books had become a topic which was avoided between father and son.

“Ah!” muttered Mr Orgreave, satirical, in response to Edwin’s clumsiness.

“Suppose we have another gas lighted,” Janet suggested. The servant had already lighted several burners and drawn the blinds and curtains.

Edwin comprehended that he had been a blundering fool, and that Janet’s object was to create a diversion. He lit the extra burner above her head. She sat there rather straight and rather prim between her parents, sticking to them, smoothing creases for them, bearing their weight, living for them. She was the kindliest, the most dignified, the most capable creature; but she was now an old maid. You saw it even in the way she poured tea and dropped pieces of sugar into the cups. Her youth was gone; her complexion was nearly gone. And though in one aspect she seemed indispensable, in another the chief characteristic of her existence seemed to be a tragic futility. Whenever she came seriously into Edwin’s thoughts she saddened him. Useless for him to attempt to be gay and frivolous in that house!

Four.

With the inevitable passionate egotism of his humanity he almost at once withdrew his aroused pity from her to himself. Look at himself! Was he not also to be sympathised with? What was the object or the use of his being alive? He worked, saved, improved his mind, voted right, practised philosophy, and was generally benevolent; but to what end? Was not his existence miserable and his career a respectable fiasco? He too had lost zest. He had diligently studied both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus; he was enthusiastic, to others, about the merit of these two expert daily philosophers; but what had they done for him? Assuredly they had not enabled him to keep the one treasure of this world-zest. The year was scarcely a week old, and he was still young enough to have begun the year with resolutions and fresh hopes and aspirations, but already the New Year sensation had left him, and the year might have been dying in his heart.

And yet what could he have done that he had not done? With what could he reproach himself? Ought he to have continued to run after a married woman? Ought he to have set himself titanically against the conventions amid which he lived, and devoted himself either to secret intrigue or to the outraging of the susceptibilities which environed him? There was only one answer. He could not have acted otherwise than he had acted. His was not the temperament of a rebel, nor was he the slave of his desires. He could sympathise with rebels and with slaves, but he could not join them; he regarded himself as spiritually their superior.

And then the disaster of Hilda’s career! He felt, more than ever, that he had failed in sympathy with her overwhelming misfortune. In the secrecy of his heart a full imaginative sympathy had been lacking. He had not realised, as he seemed to realise then, in front of the fire in the drawing-room of the Orgreaves, what it must be to be the wife of a convict. Janet, sitting there as innocent as a doe, knew that Hilda was the wife of a convict. But did her parents know? And was she aware that he knew? He wondered, drinking his tea.

Five.

Then the servant—not the Martha who had been privileged to smile on duty if she felt so inclined—came with a tawny gold telegram on a silver plate, and hesitated a moment as to where she should bestow it.

“Give it to me, Selina,” said Janet.

Selina impassively obeyed, imitating as well as she could the deportment of an automaton; and went away.

“That’s my telegram,” said Mr Orgreave. “How is it addressed?”

“Orgreave, Bleakridge, Bursley.”

“Then it’s mine.”

“Oh no, it isn’t!” Janet archly protested. “If you have your business telegrams sent here you must take the consequences. I always open all telegrams that come here, don’t I, mother?”

Mrs Orgreave made no reply, but waited with candid and fretful impatience, thinking of her five absent children, and her ten grandchildren, for the telegram to be opened.

Janet opened it.

Her lips parted to speak, and remained so in silent astonishment. “Just read that!” she said to Edwin, passing the telegram to him; and she added to her father: “It was for me, after all.”

Edwin read, aloud: “Am sending George down to-day. Please meet 6:30 train at Knype. Love. Hilda.”

“Well, I never!” exclaimed Mrs Orgreave. “You don’t mean to tell me she’s letting that boy travel alone! What next?”

“Where’s the telegram sent from?” asked Mr Orgreave.

Edwin examined the official indications: “Victoria.”

“Then she’s brought him up to London, and she’s putting him in a train at Euston. That’s it.”

“Only there is no London train that gets to Knype at half-past six,” Edwin said. “It’s 7:12, or 7:14—I forget.”

“Oh! That’s near enough for Hilda,” Janet smiled, looking at her watch.

“She doesn’t mean any other train?” Mrs Orgreave fearfully suggested.

“She can’t mean any other train. There is no other. Only probably she’s been looking at the wrong time-table,” Janet reassured her mother.

“Because if the poor little thing found no one to meet him at Knype—”

“Don’t worry, dear,” said Janet. “The poor little thing would soon be engaging somebody’s attention. Trust him!”

“But has she been writing to you lately?” Mrs Orgreave questioned.

“No.”

“Then why—”

“Don’t ask me!” said Janet. “No doubt I shall get a letter to-morrow, after George has come and told us everything! Poor dear, I’m glad she’s doing so much better now.”

“Is she?” Edwin murmured, surprised.

“Oh yes!” said Janet. “She’s got a regular bustling partner, and they’re that busy they scarcely know what to do. But they only keep one little servant.”

In the ordinary way Janet and Edwin never mentioned Hilda to one another. Each seemed to be held back by a kind of timid shame and by a cautious suspicion. Each seemed to be inquiring: “What does he know?” “What does she know?”

“If I thought it wasn’t too cold, I’d go with you to Knype,” said Mr Orgreave.

“Now, Osmond!” Mrs Orgreave sat up.

“Shall I go?” said Edwin.

“Well,” said Janet, with much kindliness, “I’m sure he’d be delighted to see you.”

Mrs Orgreave rang the bell.

“What do you want, mother?”

“There’ll be the bed—”

“Don’t you trouble with those things, dear,” said Janet, very calmly. “There’s heaps of time.”

But Janet was just as excited as her parents. In two minutes the excitement had spread through the whole house, like a piquant and agreeable odour. The place was alive again.

“I’ll just step across and ask Maggie to alter supper,” said Edwin, “and then I’ll call for you. I suppose we’ll go down by train.”

“I’m thankful he’s had influenza,” observed Mrs Orgreave, implying that thus there would be less chance of George catching the disease under her infected roof.

That George had been down with influenza before Christmas was the sole information about him that Edwin obtained. Nobody appeared to consider it worth while to discuss the possible reasons for his sudden arrival. Hilda’s caprices were accepted in that house like the visitations of heaven.

Six.

Edwin and Janet stood together on the windy and bleak down-platform of Knype Station, awaiting the express, which had been signalled. Edwin was undoubtedly very nervous and constrained, and it seemed to him that Janet’s demeanour lacked naturalness.

“It’s just occurred to me how she made that mistake about the time of the train,” said Edwin, chiefly because he found the silence intolerably irksome. “It stops at Lichfield, and in running her eye across the page she must have mixed up the Lichfield figures with the Knype figures—you know how awkward it is in a time-table. As a matter of fact, the train does stop at Lichfield about 6:30.”

“I see,” said Janet reflectively.

And Edwin was saying to himself—

“It’s a marvel to me how I can talk to her at all. What made me offer to come with her? How much does she know about me and Hilda? Hilda may have told her everything. If she’s told her about her husband why shouldn’t she have told her about me? And here we are both pretending that there’s never been anything at all between me and Hilda!”

Then the train appeared, obscure round the curve, and bore down formidable and dark upon them, growing at every instant in stature and in noise until it deafened and seemed to fill the station; and the platform was suddenly in an uproar.

And almost opposite Janet and Edwin, leaning forth high above them from the door of a third-class carriage, the head and the shoulders of George Cannon were displayed in the gaslight. He seemed to dominate the train and the platform. At the windows on either side of him were adult faces, excited by his excitement, of the people who had doubtless been friendly to him during the journey. He distinguished Janet and Edwin almost at once, and shouted, and then waved.

“Hello, young son of a gun!” Edwin greeted him, trying to turn the handle of the door. But the door was locked, and it was necessary to call a porter, who tarried.

“I made mamma let me come!” George cried victoriously. “I told you I should!” He was far too agitated to think of shaking hands, and seemed to be in a state of fever. All his gestures were those of a proud, hysterical conqueror, and like a conqueror he gazed down at Edwin and Janet, who stood beneath him with upturned faces. He had absolutely forgotten the existence of his acquaintances in the carriage. “Did you know I’ve had the influenza? My temperature was up to 104 once—but it didn’t stay long,” he added regretfully.

When the door was at length opened, he jumped headlong, and Edwin caught him. He shook hands with Edwin and allowed Janet to kiss him.

“How hot you are!” Janet murmured.

The people in the compartment passed down his luggage, and after one of them had shouted good-bye to him twice, he remembered them, as it were by an effort, and replied, “Good-bye, good-bye,” in a quick, impatient tone.

It was not until his anxious and assiduous foster-parents had bestowed him and his goods in the tranquillity of an empty compartment of the Loop Line train that they began to appreciate the morbid unusualness of his condition. His eyes glittered with extraordinary brilliance. He talked incessantly, not listening to their answers. And his skin was burning hot.

“Why, whatever’s the matter with you, my dear?” asked Janet, alarmed. “You’re like an oven!”

“I’m thirsty,” said George. “If I don’t have something to drink soon, I don’t know what I shall do.”

Janet looked at Edwin.

“There won’t be time to get something at the refreshment room?”

They both felt heavily responsible.

“I might—” Edwin said irresolutely.

But just then the guard whistled.

“Never mind!” Janet comforted the child. “In twenty minutes we shall be in the house... No! you must keep your overcoat buttoned.”

“How long have you been like that, George?” Edwin asked. “You weren’t like that when you started, surely?”

“No,” said George judicially. “It came on in the train.”

After this, he appeared to go to sleep.

“He’s certainly not well,” Janet whispered.

Edwin shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t you think he’s grown?” he observed.

“Oh yes!” said Janet. “It’s astonishing, isn’t it, how children shoot up in a few weeks!”

They might have been parents exchanging notes, instead of celibates playing at parenthood for a hobby.

“Mamma says I’ve grown an inch.” George opened his eyes. “She says it’s about time I had! I dare say I shall be very tall. Are we nearly there?” His high, curt, febrile tones were really somewhat alarming.

When the train threw them out into the sodden waste that surrounds Bleakridge Station, George could scarcely stand. At any rate he showed no wish to stand. His protectors took him strongly by either arm, and thus bore him to Lane End House, with irregular unwilling assistance from his own feet. A porter followed with the luggage. It was an extremely distressing passage. Each protector in secret was imagining for George some terrible fever, of swift onslaught and fatal effect. At length they entered the garden, thanking their gods.

“He’s not well,” said Janet to her mother, who was fussily awaiting them in the hall. Her voice showed apprehension, and she was not at all convincing when she added: “But it’s nothing serious. I shall put him straight to bed and let him eat there.”

Instantly George became the centre of the house. The women disappeared with him, and Edwin had to recount the whole history of the arrival to Osmond Orgreave in the drawing-room. This recital was interrupted by Mrs Orgreave.

“Mr Edwin, Janet thinks if we sent for the doctor, just to be sure. As Johnnie isn’t in, would you mind—”

“Stirling, I suppose?” said Edwin.

Stirling was the young Scottish doctor who had recently come into the town and taken it by storm.

When Edwin at last went home to a much-delayed meal, he was in a position to tell Maggie that young George Cannon had thought fit to catch influenza a second time in a couple of months. And Maggie, without a clear word, contrived to indicate that it was what she would have expected from a boy of George’s violent temperament.

Volume Four--Chapter Ten.

George and the Vicar.

On the Tuesday evening Edwin came home from business at six o’clock, and found that he was to eat alone. The servant anxiously explained that Miss Clayhanger had gone across to the Orgreaves’ to assist Miss Orgreave. It was evident that before going Miss Clayhanger had inspired the servant with a full sense of the importance of Mr Clayhanger’s solitary meal, and of the terrible responsibility lying upon the person in charge of it. The girl was thrillingly alive; she would have liked some friend or other of the house to be always seriously ill, so that Miss Clayhanger might often leave her to the voluptuous savouring of this responsibility whose formidableness surpassed words. Edwin, as he went upstairs and as he came down again, was conscious of her excited presence somewhere near him, half-visible in the warm gas-lit house, spying upon him in order to divine the precise moment for the final service of the meal.

And in the dining-room the table was laid differently, so that he might be well situated, with regard to the light, for reading. And by the side of his plate were the newspaper, the magazines, and the book, among which Maggie had well guessed that he would make his choice for perusal. He was momentarily touched. He warmed his hands at the splendid fire, and then he warmed his back, watching the servant as with little flouncings and perkings she served, and he was touched by the placid and perfect efficiency of Maggie as a housekeeper. Maggie gave him something that no money could buy.

The servant departed and shut the door.

When he sat down he minutely changed the situation of nearly everything on the table, so that his magazine might be lodged at exactly the right distance and angle, and so that each necessary object might be quite handy. He was in luxury, and he yielded himself to it absolutely. The sense that unusual events were happening, that the course of social existence was disturbed while his comfort was not disturbed, that danger hung cloudy on the horizon—this sense somehow intensified the appreciation of the hour, and positively contributed to his pleasure. Moreover, he was agreeably excited by a dismaying anticipation affecting himself alone.

Two.

The door opened again, and Auntie Hamps was shown in by the servant. Before he could move the old lady had with overwhelming sweet supplications insisted that he should not move—no, not even to shake hands! He rose only to shake hands, and then fell back into his comfort. Auntie Hamps fixed a chair for herself opposite him, and drummed her black-gloved hands on the white table-cloth. She was steadily becoming stouter, and those chubby little hands seemed impossibly small against the vast mountain of fur which was crowned by her smirking crimson face and the supreme peak of her bonnet.

“They keep very friendly—those two,” she remarked, with a strangely significant air, when he told her where Maggie was. She had shown no surprise at finding him alone, for the reason that she had already learnt everything from the servant in the hall.

“Janet and Maggie? They’re friendly enough when they can be of use to each other.”

“How kind Miss Janet was when your father was ill! I’m sure Maggie feels she must do all she can to return her kindness,” Mrs Hamps murmured, with emotion. “I shall always be grateful for her helpfulness! She’s a grand girl, a grand girl!”

“Yes,” said Edwin awkwardly.

“She’s still waiting for you,” said Mrs Hamps, not archly, but sadly.

Edwin restively poohed. At the first instant of her arrival he had been rather glad to see her, for unusual events create a desire to discuss them; but if she meant to proceed in that strain unuttered curses would soon begin to accumulate for her in his heart.

“I expect the kid must be pretty bad,” he said.

“Yes,” sighed Mrs Hamps. “And probably poor Mrs Orgreave is more in the way than anything else. And Mr Orgreave only just out of bed, as you may say! ... That young lady must have her hands full! My word! What a blessing it is she has made such friends with Maggie!”

Mrs Hamps had the peculiar gift, which developed into ever-increasing perfection as her hair grew whiter, of being able to express ideas by means of words which had no relation to them at all. Within three minutes, by three different remarks whose occult message no stranger could have understood but which forced itself with unpleasant clearness upon Edwin, Mrs Hamps had conveyed, “Janet Orgreave only cultivates Maggie because Maggie is the sister of Edwin Clayhanger.”

“You’re all very devoted to that child,” she said, meaning, “There is something mysterious in that quarter which sooner or later is bound to come out.” And the meaning was so clear that Edwin was intimidated. What did she guess? Did she know anything? To-night Auntie Hamps was displaying her gift at its highest.

“I don’t know that Maggie’s so desperately keen on the infant!” he said.

“She’s not like you about him, that’s sure!” Mrs Hamps admitted. And she went on, in a tone that was only superficially casual, “I wonder the mother doesn’t come down to him!”

Not ‘his’ mother—‘the’ mother. Odd, the effect of that trifle! Mrs Hamps was a great artist in phrasing.

“Oh!” said Edwin. “It’s not serious enough for that.”

“Well, I’m not so sure,” Auntie Hamps gravely replied. “The Vicar is dead.”

The emphasis which she put on these words was tremendous.

“Is he,” Edwin stammered. “But what’s that got to do with it?”

He tried to be condescending towards her absurdly superstitious assumption that the death of the Vicar of Saint Peter’s could increase the seriousness of George’s case. And he feebly succeeded in being condescending. Nevertheless he could not meet his auntie’s gaze without self-consciousness. For her emphasis had been double, and he knew it. It had implied, secondly, that the death of the Vicar was an event specially affecting Edwin’s household. The rough sketch of a romance between the Vicar and Maggie had never been completed into a picture, but on the other hand it had never been destroyed. The Vicar and Maggie had been supposed to be still interested in each other, despite the Vicar’s priestliness, which latterly had perhaps grown more marked, just as his church had grown more ritualistic. It was a strange affair, thin, elusive; but an affair it was. The Vicar and Maggie had seldom met of recent years, they had never—so far as anyone knew—met alone; and yet, upon the news of the Vicar’s death, the first thought of nearly everybody was for Maggie Clayhanger.

Mrs Hamps’s eyes, swimming in the satisfaction of several simultaneous woes, said plainly, “What about poor Maggie?”

“When did you hear?” Edwin asked. “It isn’t in this afternoon’s paper.”

“I’ve only just heard. He died at four o’clock.”

She had come up immediately with the news as fresh as orchard fruit.

“And the Duke of Clarence is no better,” she said, in a luxurious sighing gloom. “And I’m afraid it’s all over with Cardinal Manning.” She made a peculiar noise in her throat, not quite a sigh; rather a brave protest against the general fatality of things, stiffened by a determination to be strong though melancholy in misfortune.

Three.

Maggie suddenly entered, hatted, with a jacket over her arm.

“Hello, auntie, you here!” They had already met that morning.

“I just called,” said Mrs Hamps guiltily. Edwin felt as though Maggie had surprised them both in some criminal act. They knew that Mr Heve was dead. She did not know. She had to be told. He wished violently that Auntie Hamps had been elsewhere.

“Everything all right?” Maggie asked Edwin, surveying the table. “I gave particular orders about the eggs.”

“As right as rain,” said Edwin, putting into his voice a note of true appreciation. He saw that her sense of duty towards him had brought her back to the house. She had taken every precaution to ensure his well-being, but she could not be content without seeing for herself that the servant had not betrayed the trust.

“How are things—across?” he inquired.

“Well,” said Maggie, frowning, “that’s one reason why I came back sooner than I meant. The doctor’s just been. His temperature is getting higher and higher. I wish you’d go over as soon as you’ve finished. If you ask me, I think they ought to telegraph to his mother. But Janet doesn’t seem to think so. Of course it’s enough when Mrs Orgreave begins worrying about telegraphing for Janet to say there’s no need to telegraph. She’s rather trying, Mrs Orgreave is, I must admit. All that I’ve been doing is to keep her out of the bedroom. Janet has everything on her shoulders. Mr Orgreave is just about as fidgety as Mrs. And of course the servants have their own work to do. Naturally Johnnie isn’t in!” Her tone grew sarcastic and bitter.

“What does Stirling say about telegraphing?” Edwin demanded. He had intended to say ‘telegraphing for Mrs Cannon,’ but he could not utter the last words; he could not compel his vocal organs to utter them. He became aware of the beating of his heart. For twenty-four hours he had been contemplating the possibility of a summons to Hilda. Now the possibility had developed into a probability. Nay, a certainty! Maggie was the very last person to be alarmist.

Maggie replied: “He says it might be as well to wait till to-morrow. But then you know he is like that—a bit.”

“So they say,” Auntie Hamps agreed.

“Have you seen the kid?” Edwin asked.

“About two minutes,” said Maggie. “It’s pitiable to watch him.”

“Why? Is he in pain?”

“Not what you’d call pain. No! But he’s so upset. Worried about himself. He’s got a terrific fever on him. I’m certain he’s delirious sometimes. Poor little thing!”

Tears gleamed in her eyes. The plight of the boy had weakened her prejudices against him. Assuredly he was not ‘rough’ now.

Astounded and frightened by those shimmering tears, Edwin exclaimed, “You don’t mean to say there’s actual danger?”

“Well—” Maggie hesitated, and stopped.

There was silence for a moment. Edwin felt that the situation was now further intensified.

“I expect you’ve heard about the poor Vicar,” Mrs Hamps funereally insinuated. Edwin mutely damned her.

Maggie looked up sharply. “No! ... He’s not—”

Mrs Hamps nodded twice.

The tears vanished from Maggie’s eyes, forced backwards by all the secret pride that was in her. It was obvious that not the news of the Vicar had originally caused those tears; but nevertheless there should be no shadow of misunderstanding. The death of the Vicar must be associated with no more serious sign of distress in Maggie than in others. She must be above suspicion. For one acute moment, as he read her thoughts and as the profound sacrificial tragedy of her entire existence loomed less indistinctly than usual before him, Edwin ceased to think about himself and Hilda.

She made a quick hysterical movement.

“I wish you’d go across, Edwin,” she said harshly.

“I’ll go now,” he answered, with softness. And he was glad to go.

Four.

It was Osmond Orgreave who opened to him the front door of Lane End House. Maggie had told the old gentleman that she should send Edwin over, and he was wandering vaguely about in nervous expectation. In an instant they were discussing George’s case, and the advisability of telegraphing to Hilda. Mrs Orgreave immediately joined them in the hall. Both father and mother clearly stood in awe of the gentle but powerful Janet. And somehow the child was considered as her private affair, into which others might not thrust themselves save on sufferance. Perceiving that Edwin was slightly inclined to the course of telegraphing, they drew him towards them as a reinforcement, but while Mrs Orgreave frankly displayed her dependence on him, Mr Orgreave affected to be strong, independent, and judicial.

“I wish you’d go and speak to her,” Mrs Orgreave entreated.

“Upstairs?”

“It won’t do any harm, anyhow,” said Osmond, finely indifferent.

They went up the stairs in a procession. Edwin did not wish to tell them about the Vicar. He could see no sense in telling them about the Vicar. And yet, before they reached the top of the stairs, he heard himself saying in a concerned whisper—

“You know about the Vicar of Saint Peter’s?”

“No.”

“Died at four o’clock.”

“Oh dear me! Dear me!” murmured Mrs Orgreave, agonised.

Most evidently George’s case was aggravated by the Vicar’s death—and not only in the eyes of Mrs Orgreave and her falsely stoic husband, but in Edwin’s eyes too! Useless for him to argue with himself about idiotic superstitiousness! The death of the Vicar had undoubtedly influenced his attitude towards George.

They halted on the landing, outside a door that was ajar. Near them burned a gas jet, and beneath the bracket was a large framed photograph of the bridal party at Alicia’s wedding. Farther along the landing were other similar records of the weddings of Marion, Tom, and Jimmie.

Mr Orgreave pushed the door half open.

“Janet,” said Mr Orgreave conspiratorially.

“Well?” from within the bedroom.

“Here’s Edwin.”

Janet appeared in the doorway, pale. She was wearing an apron with a bib.

“I—I thought I’d just look in and inquire,” Edwin said awkwardly, fiddling with his hat and a pocket of his overcoat. “What’s he like now?”

Janet gave details. The sick-room lay hidden behind the face of the door, mysterious and sacred.

“Mr Edwin thinks you ought to telegraph,” said Mrs Orgreave timidly.

“Do you?” demanded Janet. Her eyes seemed to pierce him. Why did she gaze at him with such particularity, as though he possessed a special interest in Hilda?

“Well—” he muttered. “You might just wire how things are, and leave it to her to come as she thinks fit.”

“Just so,” said Mr Orgreave quickly, as if Edwin had expressed his own thought.

“But the telegram couldn’t be delivered to-night,” Janet objected. “It’s nearly half-past seven now.”

It was true. Yet Edwin was more than ever conscious of a keen desire to telegraph at once.

“But it would be delivered first thing in the morning,” he said. “So that she’d have more time to make arrangements if she wanted to.”

“Well, if you think like that,” Janet acquiesced.

The visage of Mrs Orgreave lightened.

“I’ll run down and telegraph myself, if you like,” said Edwin. “Of course you’ve written to her. She knows—”

“Oh yes!”

Five.

In a minute he was walking rapidly, with his ungainly, slouching stride, down Trafalgar Road, his overcoat flying loose. Another crisis was approaching, he thought. As he came to Duck Square, he met a newspaper boy shouting shrilly and wearing the contents bill of a special edition of the “Signal” as an apron: “Duke of Clarence. More serious bulletin.” The scourge and fear of influenza was upon the town, upon the community, tangible, oppressive, tragic.

In the evening calm of the shabby, gloomy post-office, holding a stubby pencil that was chained by a cable to the wall, he stood over a blank telegraph-form, hesitating how to word the message. Behind the counter an instrument was ticking unheeded, and far within could be discerned the vague bodies of men dealing with parcels. He wrote, “Cannon, 59 Preston Street, Brighton. George’s temperature 104.” Then he paused, and added, “Edwin.” It was sentimental. He ought to have signed Janet’s name. And, if he was determined to make the telegram personal, he might at least have put his surname. He knew it was sentimental, and he loathed sentimentality. But that evening he wanted to be sentimental.

He crossed to the counter, and pushed the form under the wire-netting.

A sleepy girl accepted it, and glanced mechanically at the clock, and then wrote the hour 7:42.

“It won’t be delivered to-night,” she said, looking up, as she counted the words.

“No, I know,” said Edwin.

“Sixpence, please.”

As he paid the sixpence he felt as though he had accomplished some great, critical, agitating deed. And his heart asserted itself again, thunderously beating.

Volume Four--Chapter Eleven.

Beginning of the Night.

The next day was full of strange suspense; it was coloured throughout with that quality of strangeness which puts a new light on all quotidian occupations and exposes their fundamental unimportance. Edwin arose to the fact that a thick grey fog was wrapping the town. When he returned home to breakfast at nine the fog was certainly more opaque than it had been an hour earlier. The steam-cars passed like phantoms, with a continuous clanging of bells. He breakfasted under gas—and alone. Maggie was invisible, or only to be seen momentarily, flying across the domestic horizon. She gave out that she was very busy in the attics, cleaning those shockingly neglected rooms. “Please, sir,” said the servant, “Miss Clayhanger says she’s been across to Mr Orgreave’s, and Master George is about the same.” Maggie would not come and tell him herself. On the previous evening he had not seen her after the reception of the news about the Vicar. She had gone upstairs when he came back from the post office. Beyond doubt, she was too disturbed, emotionally, to be able to face him with her customary tranquillity. She was getting over the shock with brush and duster up in the attics. He was glad that she had not attempted to be as usual. The ordeal of attempting to be as usual would have tried him perhaps as severely as her.

He went forth again into the fog in a high state of agitation, constricted with sympathetic distress on Maggie’s account, apprehensive for the boy, and painfully expectant of the end of the day. The whole day slipped away so, hour after monotonous hour, while people talked about influenza and about distinguished patients, and doctors hurried from house to house, and the fog itself seemed to be the visible mantle of the disease. And the end of the day brought nothing to Edwin save an acuter expectancy. George varied; on the whole he was worse; not much worse, but worse. Dr Stirling saw him twice. No message arrived from Hilda, nor did she come in person. Maggie watched George for five hours in the late afternoon and evening, while Janet rested.

At eight o’clock, when there was no further hope of a telegram from Hilda, everybody pretended to concur in the view that Hilda, knowing her boy better than anybody else, and having already seen him through an attack of influenza, had not been unduly alarmed by the telegraphic news of his temperature, and was content to write. She might probably be arranging to come on the morrow. After all, George’s temperature had reached 104 in the previous attack. Then there was the fog. The fog would account for anything.

Nevertheless, nobody was really satisfied by these explanations of Hilda’s silence and absence. In every heart lay the secret and sinister thought of the queerness and the incalculableness of Hilda.

Edwin called several times on the Orgreaves. He finally left their house about ten o’clock, with some difficulty tracing his way home from gas lamp to gas lamp through the fog. Mr Orgreave himself had escorted him with a lantern round the wilderness of the lawn to the gates. “We shall have a letter in the morning,” Mr Orgreave had said. “Bound to!” Edwin had replied. And they had both superiorly puffed away into the fog the absurd misgivings of women.

Knowing that he was in no condition to sleep, Edwin mended the drawing-room fire, and settled down on the sofa to read. But he could no more read than sleep. He seemed to lie on the sofa for hours while his thoughts jigged with fatiguing monotony in his head. He was extraordinarily wakeful and alive, every sense painfully sharpened. At last he decided to go to bed. In his bedroom he gazed idly out at the blank density of the fog. And then his heart leapt as his eye distinguished a moving glimmer below in the garden of the Orgreaves. He threw up the window in a tumult of anticipation. The air was absolutely still. Then he heard a voice say, “Good night.” It was undoubtedly Dr Stirling’s voice. The Scotch accent was unmistakable. Was the boy worse? Not necessarily, for the doctor had said that he might look in again ‘last thing,’ if chance favoured. And the Scotch significance of ‘last thing’ was notoriously comprehensive; it might include regions beyond midnight. Then Edwin heard another voice: “Thanks ever so much!” At first it puzzled him. He knew it, and yet! Could it be the Sunday’s voice? Assuredly it was not the voice of Mr Orgreave, nor of any one living in the house. It reminded him of the Sunday’s voice.

He went out of his bedroom, striking a match, and going downstairs lit the gas in the hall, which he had just extinguished. Then he put on a cap, found a candlestick in the kitchen, unbolted the garden door as quietly as he could, and passed into the garden. The flame of the candle stood upright in the fog. He blundered along to the dividing wall, placed the candle on the top of it, and managed to climb over. Leaving the candle on the wall to guide his return, he approached the house, which showed gleams at several windows, and rang the bell. And in fact it was Charlie Orgreave himself who opened the door. And a lantern, stuck carelessly on the edge of a chair, was still burning in the hall.

Two.

In a moment he had learnt the chief facts. Hilda had gone up to London, dragged Charlie out of Ealing, and brought him down with her to watch over her child. Once more she had done something which nobody could have foreseen. The train—not the London express, but the loop—was late. The pair had arrived about half-past ten, and a little later Dr Stirling had fulfilled his promise to look in if he could. The two doctors had conferred across the child’s bed, and had found themselves substantially in agreement. Moreover, the child was if anything somewhat better. The Scotsman had gone. Charles and Hilda had eaten. Hilda meant to sit up, and had insisted that Janet should go to bed; it appeared that Janet had rested but not slept in the afternoon.

Charlie took Edwin into the small breakfast-room, where Osmond Orgreave was waiting, and the three men continued to discuss the situation. They were all of them too excited to sit down, though Osmond and—in a less degree—Charlie affected the tranquillity of high philosophers. At first Edwin knew scarcely what he did. His speech and gestures were not the result of conscious volition. He seemed suddenly to have two individualities, and the new one, which was the more intimate one, watched the other as in a dim-lighted dream... She was there in a room above! She had come in response to the telegram signed ‘Edwin!’ Last night she was far away. To-night she was in the very house with him. Miracle! He asked himself: “Why should I get myself into this state simply because she is here? It would have been mighty strange if she had not come. I must take myself in hand better than this. I mustn’t behave like a blooming girl.” He frowned and coughed.

“Well,” said Osmond Orgreave to his son, thrusting out his coat-tails with his hands towards the fire, and swaying slightly to and fro on his heels and toes, “so you’ve had your consultation, you eminent specialists! What’s the result?”

He looked at his elegant son with an air half-quizzical and half-deferential.

“I’ve told you he’s evidently a little better, dad,” Charlie answered casually. His London deportment was more marked than ever. The bracingly correct atmosphere of Ealing had given him a rather obvious sense of importance. He had developed into a man with a stake in the country, and he twisted his moustache like such a man, and took out a cigarette like such a man.

“Yes, I know,” said Osmond, with controlled impatience. “But what sort of influenza is it? I’m hoping to learn something now you’ve come. Stirling will talk about anything except influenza.”

“What sort of influenza is it? What do you mean?” And Charlie’s twinkling glance said condescendingly: “What’s the old cock got hold of now? This is just like him.”

“But is there any real danger?” Edwin murmured.

“Well,” said Osmond, bringing up his regiments, “as I understand it, there are three types of influenza—the respiratory, the gastro-intestinal, and the nervous. Which one is it?”