Arnold Bennett (continued 6)

Worse than these merely material phenomena, was the mumbling toothless gibber of his shrill protesting; the glassy look of idiocy from his fatigued eyes; and the inane smile and impotent frown that alternated on his features. He was a horrible and offensive old man. He was Time’s obscene victim. Edwin was revolted by the spectacle of the younger men baiting him. He was astonished that they were so short-sighted as not to be able to see the image of themselves in the old man, so imprudent as not to think of their own future, so utterly brutalised. He wanted, by the simple force of desire, to seclude and shelter the old man, to protect the old man not only from the insults of stupid and crass bullies, but from the old man himself, from his own fatuous senility. He wanted to restore to him, by a benevolent system of pretences, the dignity and the self-respect which he had innocently lost, and so to keep him decent to the eye, if not to the ear, until death came to repair its omission. And it was for his own sake, for the sake of his own image, as much as for the sake of the old man, that he wanted to do this.

Three.

All that flashed through his mind and heart in a second.

“I know this old gentleman, at least I know him by sight,” Hilda was saying to the policeman. “He’s very well known in Turnhill as an old Sunday school teacher, and I’m sure he ought to be on that platform.”

Before her eye, and her precise and haughty voice, which had no trace of the local accent, the young policeman was secretly abashed, and the louts fell back sheepishly.

“Yes, he’s a friend of my father’s,—Mr Clayhanger, printer,” said Edwin, behind her.

The old man stood blinking in the glare.

The policeman, ignoring Hilda, glanced at Edwin, and touched his cap.

“His friends hadn’t ought to let him out like this, sir. Just look at him.” He sneered, and added: “I’m on point duty. If you ask me, I should say his friends ought to take him home.” He said this with a peculiar mysterious emphasis, and looked furtively at the louts for moral support in sarcasm. They encouraged him with grins.

“He must be got on to the platform, somehow,” said Hilda, and glanced at Edwin as if counting absolutely on Edwin. “That’s what he’s come for. I’m sure it means everything to him.”

“Aye!” the old man droned. “I was Super when we had to teach ’em their alphabet and give ’em a crust to start with. Many’s the man walking about in these towns i’ purple and fine raiment as I taught his letters to, and his spellings, aye, and his multiplication table,—in them days!”

“That’s all very well, miss,” said the policeman, “but who’s going to get him to the platform? He’ll be dropping in a sunstroke afore ye can say knife.”

“Can’t we?” She gazed at Edwin appealingly.

“Tak’ him into a pub!” growled the collier, audacious.

At the same moment two rosettes bustled up authoritatively. One of them was the burly Albert Benbow. For the first time Edwin was conscious of genuine pleasure at the sight of his brother-in-law. Albert was a born rosette.

“What’s all this? What’s this? What is it?” he asked sharply. “Hello! What? Mr Shushions!” He bent down and looked close at the old man. “Where you been, old gentleman?” He spoke loud in his ear. “Everybody’s been asking for you. Service is well-nigh over, but ye must come up.”

The old man did not appear to grasp the significance of Albert’s patronage. Albert turned to Edwin and winked, not only for Edwin’s benefit but for that of the policeman, who smiled in a manner that infuriated Edwin.

“Queer old stick!” Albert murmured. “No doing anything with him. He’s quarrelled with everybody at Turnhill. That’s why he wanted to come to us. And of course we weren’t going to refuse the oldest Sunday school teacher in th’ Five Towns. He’s a catch... Come along, old gentleman!”

Mr Shushions did not stir.

“Now, Mr Shushions,” Hilda persuaded him in a voice exquisitely mild, and with a lovely gesture she bent over him. “Let these gentlemen take you up to the platform. That’s what you’ve come for, you know.”

The transformation in her amazed Edwin, who could see the tears in her eyes. The tableau of the little, silly old man looking up, and Hilda looking down at him, with her lips parted in a heavenly invitation, and one gloved hand caressing his greenish-black shoulder and the other mechanically holding the parasol aloft,—this tableau was imprinted for ever on Edwin’s mind. It was a vision blended in an instant and in an instant dissolved, but for Edwin it remained one of the epochal things of his experience.

Hilda gave Edwin her parasol and quickly fastened Mr Shushions’s collar, and the old man consented to be led off between the two rosettes. The bands were playing the Austrian hymn.

“Like to come up with your young lady friend?” Albert whispered to Edwin importantly as he went.

“Oh no, thanks.” Edwin hurriedly smiled.

“Now, old gentleman,” he could hear Albert adjuring Mr Shushions, and he could see him broadly winking to the other rosettes and embracing the yielding crowd in his wink.

Thus was the doddering old fool who had given his youth to Sunday schools when Sunday schools were not patronised by princes, archbishops, and lord mayors, when Sunday schools were the scorn of the intelligent, and had sometimes to be held in public-houses for lack of better accommodation,—thus was he taken off for a show and a museum curiosity by indulgent and shallow Samaritans who had not even the wit to guess that he had sown what they were reaping. And Darius Clayhanger stood oblivious at a high window of the sacred Bank. And Edwin, who, all unconscious, owed the very fact of his existence to the doting imbecile, regarded him chiefly as a figure in a tableau, as the chance instrument of a woman’s beautiful revelation. Mr Shushions’s sole crime against society was that he had forgotten to die.

Four.

Hilda Lessways would not return to the barrels. She was taciturn, and the only remark which she made bore upon the advisability of discovering Janet and Mr Orgreave. They threaded themselves out of the moving crowd and away from the hokey-pokey stall and the barrels into the tranquillity of the market-place, where the shadow of the gold angel at the top of the Town Hall spire was a mere squat shapeless stain on the irregular paving-stones. The sound of the Festival came diminished from the Square.

“You’re very fond of poetry, aren’t you?” Edwin asked her, thinking, among many other things, of her observation upon the verse of Isaac Watts.

“Of course,” she replied disagreeably. “I can’t imagine anybody wanting to read anything else.” She seemed to be ashamed of her kindness to Mr Shushions, and to wish to efface any impression of amiability that she might have made on Edwin. But she could not have done so.

“Well,” he said to himself, “there’s no getting over it. You’re the biggest caution I’ve ever come across!” His condition was one of various agitation.

Then, just as they were passing the upper end of the Cock Yard, which was an archway, Mr Orgreave and Janet appeared in the archway.

“We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“And so have we.”

“What have you been doing?”

“What have you been doing?”

Father and daughter were gay. They had not seen much, but they were gay. Hilda Lessways and Edwin were not gay, and Hilda would characteristically make no effort to seem that which she was not. Edwin, therefore, was driven by his own diffidence into a nervous light loquacity. He began the tale of Mr Shushions, and Hilda punctuated it with stabs of phrases.

Mr Orgreave laughed. Janet listened with eager sympathy.

“Poor old thing! What a shame!” said Janet.

But to Edwin, with the vision of Hilda’s mercifulness in his mind, even the sympathy of Janet for Mr Shushions had a quality of uncomprehending, facile condescension which slightly jarred on him.

The steam-car loitered into view, discharged two passengers, and began to manoeuvre for the return journey.

“Oh! Do let’s go home by car, father!” cried Janet. “It’s too hot for anything!”

Edwin took leave of them at the car steps. Janet was the smiling incarnation of loving-kindness. Hilda shook hands grudgingly. Through the windows of the car he saw her sternly staring at the advertisements of the interior. He went down the Cock Yard into Wedgwood Street, whence he could hear the bands again and see the pennons. He thought, “This is a funny way of spending a morning!” and wondered what he should do with himself till dinner-time. It was not yet a quarter past twelve. Still, the hours had passed with extraordinary speed. He stood aimless at the corner of the pavement, and people who, having had their fill of the sun and the spectacle in the Square, were strolling slowly away, saw a fair young man, in a stylish suit, evidently belonging to the aloof classes, gazing at nothing whatever, with his hands elegantly in his pockets.

Volume Two--Chapter Fourteen.

Money.

Things sometimes fall out in a surprising way, and the removal of the Clayhanger household from the corner of Duck Square to the heights of Bleakridge was diversified by a circumstance which Edwin, the person whom alone it concerned, had not in the least anticipated.

It was the Monday morning after the Centenary. Foster’s largest furniture-van, painted all over with fine pictures of the van itself travelling by road, rail, and sea, stood loaded in front of the shop. One van had already departed, and this second one, in its crammed interior, on its crowded roof, on a swinging platform beneath its floor, and on a posterior ledge supported by rusty chains, contained all that was left of the furniture and domestic goods which Darius Clayhanger had collected in half a century of ownership. The moral effect of Foster’s activity was always salutary, in that Foster would prove to any man how small a space the acquisitions of a lifetime could be made to occupy when the object was not to display but to pack them. Foster could put all your pride on to four wheels, and Foster’s driver would crack a whip and be off with the lot of it as though it were no more than a load of coal.

The pavement and the road were littered with straw, and the straw straggled into the shop, and heaped itself at the open side door. One large brass saucepan lay lorn near the doorstep, a proof that Foster was human. For everything except that saucepan a place had been found. That saucepan had witnessed sundry ineffectual efforts to lodge it, and had also suffered frequent forgetfulness. A tin candlestick had taken refuge within it, and was trusting for safety to the might of the obstinate vessel. In the sequel, the candlestick was pitched by Edwin on to the roof of the van, and Darius Clayhanger, coming fussily out of the shop, threw a question at Edwin and then picked up the saucepan and went off to Bleakridge with it, thus making sure that it would not be forgotten, and demonstrating to the town that he, Darius, was at last ‘flitting’ into his grand new house. Even weighted by the saucepan, in which Mrs Nixon had boiled hundredweights of jam, he still managed to keep his arms slanted outwards and motionless, retaining his appearance of a rigid body that swam smoothly along on mechanical legs. Darius, though putting control upon himself, was in a state of high complex emotion, partly due to apprehensiveness about the violent changing of the habits of a quarter of a century, and partly due to nervous pride.

Maggie and Mrs Nixon had gone to the new house half an hour earlier, to devise encampments therein for the night; for the Clayhangers would definitely sleep no more at the corner of Duck Square; the rooms in which they had eaten and slept and lain awake, and learnt what life and what death was, were to be transformed into workshops and stores for an increasing business. The premises were not abandoned empty. The shop had to function as usual on that formidable day, and the printing had to proceed. This had complicated the affair of the removal; but it had helped everybody to pretend, in an adult and sedate manner, that nothing in the least unusual was afoot.

Edwin loitered on the pavement, with his brain all tingling, and excitedly incapable of any consecutive thought whatever. It was his duty to wait. Two of Foster’s men were across in the vaults of the Dragon; the rest were at Bleakridge with the first and smaller van. Only one of Foster’s horses was in the dropped double-shafts, and even he had his nose towards the van, and in a nosebag; two others were to come down soon from Bleakridge to assist.

Two.

A tall, thin, grey-bearded man crossed Trafalgar Road from Aboukir Street. He was very tall and very thin, and the peculiarity of his walk was that the knees were never quite straightened, so that his height was really greater even than it seemed. His dark suit and his boots and hat were extraordinarily neat. You could be sure at once that he was a person of immutable habits. He stopped when, out of the corner of his eye, whose gaze was always precisely parallel to the direction of his feet, he glimpsed Edwin. Deflecting his course, he went close to Edwin, and, addressing the vacant air immediately over Edwin’s pate, he said in a mysterious, confidential whisper—“when are you coming in for that money?”

He spoke as though he was anxious to avoid, by a perfect air of nonchalance, arousing the suspicions of some concealed emissary of the Russian secret police.

Edwin started. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “Is it ready?”

“Yes. Waiting.”

“Are you going to your office now?”

“Yes.”

Edwin hesitated. “It won’t take a minute, I suppose. I’ll slip along in two jiffs. I’ll be there almost as soon as you are.”

“Bring a receipt stamp,” said the man, and resumed his way.

He was the secretary of the Bursley and Turnhill Permanent 50 pounds Benefit Building Society, one of the most solid institutions of the district. And he had been its secretary for decades. No stories of the defalcation of other secretaries of societies, no rumours as to the perils of the system of the more famous Starr-Bowkett Building Societies, ever bred a doubt in Bursley or Turnhill of the eternal soundness of the Bursley and Turnhill Permanent 50 pounds Benefit Building Society. You could acquire a share in it by an entrance fee of one shilling, and then you paid eighteen-pence per week for ten years, making something less than 40 pounds, and then, after an inactive period of three months, the Society gave you 50 pounds, and you began therewith to build a house, if you wanted a house, and, if you were prudent, you instantly took out another share. You could have as many shares as you chose. Though the Society was chiefly nourished by respectable artisans with stiff chins, nobody in the district would have considered membership to be beneath him. The Society was an admirable device for strengthening an impulse towards thrift, because, once you had put yourself into its machinery, it would stand no nonsense. Prosperous tradesmen would push their children into it, and even themselves. This was what had happened to Edwin in the dark past, before he had left school. Edwin had regarded the trick with indifference at first, because, except the opening half crown, his father had paid the subscriptions for him until he left school and became a wage-earner. Thereafter he had regarded it as simple parental madness.

His whole life seemed to be nothing but a vista of Friday evenings on which he went to the Society’s office, between seven and nine, to ‘pay the Club.’ The social origin of any family in Bursley might have been decided by the detail whether it referred to the Society as the ‘Building Society’ or as ‘the Club.’ Artisans called it the Club, because it did resemble an old-fashioned benefit club. Edwin had invariably heard it called ‘Club’ at home, and he called it ‘Club,’ and he did not know why.

Three.

On ten thousand Friday evenings, as it seemed to him, he had gone into the gas-lit office with the wire-blinds, in the Cock Yard. And the procedure never varied. Behind a large table sat two gentlemen, the secretary and a subordinate, who was, however, older than the secretary. They had enormous ledgers in front of them, and at the lower corners of the immense pages was a transverse crease, like a mountain range on the left and like a valley on the right, caused by secretarial thumbs in turning over. On the table were also large metal inkstands and wooden money-coffers. The two officials both wore spectacles, and they both looked above their spectacles when they talked to members across the table. They spoke in low tones; they smiled with the most scrupulous politeness; they never wasted words. They counted money with prim and efficient gestures, ringing gold with the mien of judges inaccessible to human emotions. They wrote in the ledgers, and on the membership-cards, in a hand astoundingly regular and discreetly flourished; the pages of the ledgers had the mystic charm of ancient manuscripts, and the finality of decrees of fate. Apparently the scribes never made mistakes, but sometimes they would whisper in colloquy, and one, without leaning his body, would run a finger across the ledger of the other; their fingers knew intimately the geography of the ledgers, and moved as though they could have found a desired name, date, or number, in the dark. The whole ceremony was impressive. It really did impress Edwin, as he would wait his turn among the three or four proud and respectable members that the going and coming seemed always to leave in the room. The modest blue-yellow gas, the vast table and ledgers, and the two sober heads behind; the polite murmurings, the rustle of leaves, the chink of money, the smooth sound of elegant pens: all this made something not merely impressive, but beautiful; something that had a true if narrow dignity; something that ministered to an ideal if a low one.

But Edwin had regarded the operation as a complete loss of the money whose payment it involved. Ten years! It was an eternity! And even then his father would have some preposterous suggestion for rendering useless the unimaginable fifty pounds! Meanwhile the weekly deduction of eighteenpence from his miserable income was an exasperating strain. And then one night the secretary had told him that he was entering on his last month. If he had possessed any genuine interest in money, he would have known for himself; but he did not. And then the payments had ceased. He had said nothing to his father.

And now the share had matured, and there was the unimaginable sum waiting for him! He got his hat and a stamp, and hurried to the Cock Yard. The secretary, in his private room now, gave him five notes as though the notes had been naught but tissue paper, and he accepted them in the same inhuman manner. The secretary asked him if he meant to take out another share, and from sheer moral cowardice he said that he did mean to do so; and he did so, on the spot. And in less than ten minutes he was back at the shop. Nothing had happened there. The other horses had not come down from Bleakridge, and the men had not come out of the Dragon. But he had fifty pounds in his pocket, and it was lawfully his. A quarter of an hour earlier he positively could not have conceived the miracle.

Four.

Two days later, on the Wednesday evening, Edwin was in his new bedroom, overlooking his father’s garden, with a glimpse of the garden of Lane End House. His chamber, for him, was palatial, and it was at once the symbol and the scene of his new life. A stranger entering would have beheld a fair-sized room, a narrow bed, two chairs, an old-fashioned table, a new wardrobe, an old dressing-table, a curious carpet and hearthrug, low bookshelves on either side of the fireplace, and a few prints and drawings, not all of them framed, on the distempered walls. A stranger might have said in its praise that it was light and airy. But a stranger could not have had the divine vision that Edwin had. Edwin looked at it and saw clearly, and with the surest conviction, that it was wonderful. He stood on the hearthrug, with his back to the hearth, bending his body concavely and then convexly with the idle easy sinuousness of youth, and he saw that it was wonderful. As an organic whole it was wonderful. Its defects were qualities. For instance, it had no convenience for washing; but with a bathroom a few yards off, who would encumber his study (it was a study) with washing apparatus? He had actually presented his old ramshackle washstand to the attic which was to be occupied by Mrs Nixon’s niece, a girl engaged to aid her aunt in the terrible work of keeping clean a vast mansion.

And the bedroom could show one or two details that in a bedroom were luxurious. Chief of these were the carpet, the hearthrug, and the table. Edwin owed them to a marvellous piece of good fortune. He had feared, and even Maggie had feared, that their father would impair the practical value and the charm of the new house by parsimony in the matter of furniture. The furniture in the domestic portion of the old dwelling was quite inadequate for the new one, and scarcely fit for it either. Happily Darius had heard of a houseful of furniture for sale at Oldcastle by private treaty, and in a wild, adventurous hour he had purchased it, exceedingly cheap. Edwin had been amazed at his luck (he accepted the windfall as his own private luck) when he first saw the bought furniture in the new house, before the removal. Out of it he had selected the table, the carpet, and the rug for his bedroom, and none had demurred. He noticed that his father listened to him, in affairs of the new house, as to an individuality whose views demanded some trifle of respect. Beyond question his father was proving himself to possess a mind equal to the grand situation. What with the second servant and the furniture, Edwin felt that he would not have to blush for the house, no matter who might enter it to spy it out. As for his own room, he would not object to the Sunday seeing it. Indeed he would rather like the Sunday to see it, on his next visit. Already it was in nearly complete order, for he had shown a singular, callous disregard for the progress of the rest of the house: against which surprising display of selfishness both Maggie and Mrs Nixon had glumly protested. The truth was that he was entirely obsessed by his room; it had disabled his conscience.

When he had oscillated on his heels and toes for a few moments with his gaze on the table, he faced about, and stared in a sort of vacant beatitude at the bookshelves to the left hand; those to the right hand were as yet empty. Twilight was deepening.

Five.

He heard his father’s heavy and clumsy footstep on the landing. The old man seemed to wander uncertainly a little, and then he pushed open Edwin’s door with a brusque movement and entered the room. The two exchanged a look. They seldom addressed each other, save for an immediate practical purpose, and they did not address each other now. But Darius ejaculated “Um!” as he glanced around. They had no intimacy. Darius never showed any interest in his son as an independent human being with a developing personality, though he might have felt such an interest; and Edwin was never conscious of a desire to share any of his ideas or ideals with his father, whom he was content to accept as a creature of inscrutable motives. Now, he resented his father’s incursion. He considered his room as his castle, whereof his rightful exclusive dominion ran as far as the door-mat; and to placate his pride Darius should have indicated by some gesture or word that he admitted being a visitor on sufferance. It was nothing to Edwin that Darius owned the room and nearly everything in it. He was generally nervous in his father’s presence, and his submissiveness only hid a spiritual independence that was not less fierce for being restrained. He thought Darius a gross fleshly organism, as he indeed was, and he privately objected to many paternal mannerisms, of eating, drinking, breathing, eructation, speech, deportment, and garb. Further, he had noted, and felt, the increasing moroseness of his father’s demeanour. He could remember a period when Darius had moods of grim gaiety, displaying rough humour; these moods had long ceased to occur.

“So this is how ye’ve fixed yerself up!” Darius observed.

“Yes,” Edwin smiled, not moving from the hearthrug, and not ceasing to oscillate on heels and toes.

“Well, I’ll say this. Ye’ve got a goodish notion of looking after yerself. When ye can spare a few minutes to do a bit downstairs—” This sentence was sarcastic and required no finishing.

“I was just coming,” said Edwin. And to himself, “What on earth does he want here, making his noises?”

With youthful lack of imagination and of sympathy, he quite failed to perceive the patent fact that his father had been drawn into the room by the very same instinct which had caused Edwin to stand on the hearthrug in an idle bliss of contemplation. It did not cross his mind that his father too was during those days going through wondrous mental experiences, that his father too had begun a new life, that his father too was intensely proud of the house and found pleasure in merely looking at it, and looking at it again, and at every corner of it.

A glint of gold attracted the eye of Darius to the second shelf of the left-hand bookcase, and he went towards it with the arrogance of an autocrat whose authority recognises no limit. Fourteen fine calf-backed volumes stood on that shelf in a row; twelve of them were uniform, the other two odd. These books were taller and more distinguished than any of their neighbours. Their sole possible rivals were half a dozen garishly bound Middle School prizes, machine-tooled, and to be mistaken for treasures only at a distance of several yards.

Edwin trembled, and loathed himself for trembling. He walked to the window.

“What be these?” Darius inquired.

“Oh! Some books I’ve been picking up.”

Six.

That same morning Edwin had been to the Saint Luke’s Covered Market to buy some apples for Maggie, who had not yet perfected the organisation necessary to a house-mistress who does not live within half a minute of a large central source of supplies. And, to his astonishment, he had observed that one of the interior shops was occupied by a second-hand bookseller with an address at Hanbridge. He had never noticed the shop before, or, if he had noticed it, he had despised it. But the chat with Tom Orgreave had awakened in him the alertness of a hunter. The shop was not formally open—Wednesday’s market being only half a market. The shopkeeper, however, was busy within. Edwin loitered. Behind the piles of negligible sermons, pietisms, keepsakes, schoolbooks, and ‘Aristotles’ (tied up in red twine, these last), he could descry, in the farther gloom, actual folios and quartos. It was like seeing the gleam of nuggets on the familiar slopes of Mow Cop, which is the Five Towns’ mountain. The proprietor, an extraordinarily grimy man, invited him to examine. He could not refuse. He found Byron’s “Childe Harold” in one volume and “Don Juan” in another, both royal octavo editions, slightly stained, but bound in full calf. He bought them. He knew that to keep his resolutions he must read a lot of poetry. Then he saw Voltaire’s prose tales in four volumes, in French,—an enchanting Didot edition, with ink as black as Hades and paper as white as snow; also bound in full calf. He bought them. And then the proprietor showed him, in eight similar volumes, Voltaire’s “Dictionnaire Philosophique.” He did not want it; but it matched the tales and it was impressive to the eye. And so he bought the other eight volumes. The total cost was seventeen shillings. He was intoxicated and he was frightened. What a nucleus for a collection of real books, of treasures! Those volumes would do no shame even to Tom Orgreave’s bookcase. And they had been lying in the Covered Market, of all places in the universe... Blind! How blind he had been to the possibilities of existence! Laden with a bag of apples in one hand and a heavy parcel of books in the other, he had had to go up to dinner in the car. It was no matter; he possessed riches. The car stopped specially for him at the portals of the new house. He had introduced the books into the new house surreptitiously, because he was in fear, despite his acute joy. He had pushed the parcel under the bed. After tea, he had passed half an hour in gazing at the volumes, as at precious contraband. Then he had ranged them on the shelf, and had gazed at them for perhaps another quarter of an hour. And now his father, with the infallible nose of fathers for that which is no concern of theirs, had lighted upon them and was peering into them, and fingering them with his careless, brutal hands,—hands that could not differentiate between a ready reckoner and a treasure. As the light failed, he brought one of them and then another to the window.

“Um!” he muttered. “Voltaire!”

“Um! Byron!”

And: “How much did they ask ye for these?”

“Fifteen shillings,” said Edwin, in a low voice.

“Here! Take it!” said his father, relinquishing a volume to him. He spoke in a queer, hard voice; and instantly left the room. Edwin followed him shortly, and assisted Maggie to hang pictures in that wilderness, the drawing-room. Supper was eaten in silence; and Maggie looked askance from her father to her brother, both of whom had a strained demeanour.

Volume Two--Chapter Fifteen.

The Insult.

The cold bath, the early excursion into the oblong of meadow that was beginning to be a garden, the brisk stimulating walk down Trafalgar Road to business,—all these novel experiences, which for a year Edwin had been anticipating with joyous eagerness as bliss final and sure, had lost their savour on the following morning. He had been ingenuous enough to believe that he would be happy in the new house—that the new house somehow meant the rebirth of himself and his family. Strange delusion! The bath-splashings and the other things gave him no pleasure, because he was saying to himself all the time, “There’s going to be a row this morning. There’s going to be a regular shindy this morning!” Yet he was accustomed to his father’s scenes... Not a word at breakfast, for which indeed Darius was very late. But a thick cloud over the breakfast-table! Maggie showed that she felt the cloud. So did even Mrs Nixon. The niece alone, unskilled in the science of meteorology, did not notice it, and was pertly bright. Edwin departed before his father, hurrying. He knew that his father, starting from the luxurious books, would ask him brutally what he meant by daring to draw out his share from the Club without mentioning the affair, and particularly without confiding to his safe custody the whole sum withdrawn. He knew that his father would persist in regarding the fifty pounds as sacred, as the ark of the covenant, and on the basis of the alleged outrage would build one of those cold furies that seemed to give him so perverse a delight. On the other hand, despite his father’s peculiar intonation of the names of Edwin’s authors—Voltaire and Byron—he did not fear to be upbraided for possessing himself of loose and poisonous literature. It was a point to his father’s credit that he never attempted any kind of censorship. Edwin never knew whether this attitude was the result of indifference or due to a grim sporting instinct.

There was no sign of trouble in the shop until noon. Darius was very busy superintending the transformation of the former living-rooms upstairs into supplementary workshops, and also the jobbing builder was at work according to the plans of Osmond Orgreave. But at five minutes past twelve—just before Stifford went out to his dinner—Darius entered the ebonised cubicle, and said curtly to Edwin, who was writing there—

“Show me your book.”

This demand surprised Edwin. ‘His’ book was the shop-sales book. He was responsible for it, and for the petty cash-book, and for the shop till. His father’s private cash-book was utterly unknown to him, and he had no trustworthy idea of the financial totality of the business; but the management of the shop till gave him the air of being in his father’s confidence accustomed him to the discipline of anxiety, and also somewhat flattered him.

He produced the book. The last complete page had not been added up.

“Add this,” said his father.

Darius himself added up the few lines on the incomplete page.

“Stiff;” he shouted, “bring me the sales-slip.”

The amounts of sales conducted by Stifford himself were written on a slip of paper from which Edwin transferred the items at frequent intervals to the book.

“Go to yer dinner,” said Darius to Stifford, when he appeared at the door of the cubicle with the slip.

“It’s not quite time yet, sir.”

“Go to yer dinner, I tell ye.”

Stifford had three-quarters of an hour for his dinner.

Two.

Darius combined the slip with the book and made a total.

“Petty cash,” he muttered shortly.

Edwin produced the petty cash-book, a volume of very trifling importance.

“Now bring me the till.”

Edwin went out of the cubicle and brought the till, which was a large and battered japanned cash-box with a lid in two independent parts, from its well-concealed drawer behind the fancy-counter. Darius counted the coins in it and made calculations on blotting-paper, breathing stertorously all the time.

“What on earth are you trying to get at?” Edwin asked, with innocent familiarity. He thought that the Club-share crisis had been postponed by one of his father’s swift strange caprices.

Darius turned on him glaring: “I’m trying to get at where ye got the brass from to buy them there books as I saw last night. Where did ye get it from? There’s nowt wrong here, unless ye’re a mighty lot cleverer than I take ye for. Where did ye get it from? Ye don’t mean to tell me as ye saved it up!”

Edwin had had some shocks in his life. This was the greatest. He could feel his cheeks and his hands growing dully hot, and his eyes smarting; and he was suddenly animated by an almost murderous hatred and an inexpressible disgust for his father, who in the grossness of his perceptions and his notions had imagined his son to be a thief. “Loathsome beast!” he thought savagely.

“I’m waiting,” said his father.

“I’ve drawn my Club money,” said Edwin.

For an instant the old man was at a loss; then he understood. He had entirely forgotten the maturing of the Club share, and assuredly he had not dreamed that Edwin would accept and secrete so vast a sum as fifty pounds without uttering a word. Darius had made a mistake, and a bad one; but in those days fathers were never wrong; above all they never apologised. In Edwin’s wicked act of concealment Darius could choose new and effective ground, and he did so.

“And what dost mean by doing that and saying nowt? Sneaking—”

“What do you mean by calling me a thief?” Edwin and Darius were equally startled by this speech. Edwin knew not what had come over him, and Darius, never having been addressed in such a dangerous tone by his son, was at a loss.

“I never called ye a thief.”

“Yes, you did! Yes, you did!” Edwin nearly shouted now. “You starve me for money, until I haven’t got sixpence to bless myself with. You couldn’t get a man to do what I do for twice what you pay me. And then you call me a thief. And then you jump down my throat because I spend a bit of money of my own.” He snorted. He knew that he was quite mad, but there was a strange drunken pleasure in this madness.

“Hold yer tongue, lad!” said Darius, as stiffly as he could. But Darius, having been unprepared, was intimidated. Darius vaguely comprehended that a new and disturbing factor had come into his life. “Make a less row!” he went on more strongly. “D’ye want all th’ street to hear ye?”

“I won’t make a less row. You make as much noise as you want, and I’ll make as much noise as I want!” Edwin cried louder and louder. And then in bitter scorn, “Thief, indeed!”

“I never called ye a—”

“Let me come out!” Edwin shouted. They were very close together. Darius saw that his son’s face was all drawn. Edwin snatched his hat off its hook, pushed violently past his father and, sticking his hands deep in his pockets, strode into the street.

Three.

In four minutes he was hammering on the front door of the new house. Maggie opened, in alarm. Edwin did not see how alarmed she was by his appearance.

“What—”

“Father thinks I’ve been stealing his damned money!” Edwin snapped, in a breaking voice. The statement was not quite accurate, but it suited his boiling anger to put it in the present tense instead of in the past. He hesitated an instant in the hall, throwing a look behind at Maggie, who stood entranced with her hand on the latch of the open door. Then he bounded upstairs, and shut himself in his room with a tremendous bang that shook the house. He wanted to cry, but he would not.

Nobody disturbed him till about two o’clock, when Maggie knocked at the door, and opened it, without entering.

“Edwin, I’ve kept your dinner hot.”

“No, thanks.” He was standing with his legs wide apart on the hearth rug.

“Father’s had his dinner and gone.”

“No, thanks.”

She closed the door again.

Volume Two--Chapter Sixteen.

The Sequel.

“I say, Edwin,” Maggie called through the door.

“Well, come in, come in,” he replied gruffly. And as he spoke he sped from the window, where he was drumming on the pane, to the hearthrug, so that he should have the air of not having moved since Maggie’s previous visit. He knew not why he made this manoeuvre, unless it was that he thought vaguely that Maggie’s impression of the seriousness of the crisis might thereby be intensified.

She stood in the doorway, evidently placatory and sympathetic, and behind her stood Mrs Nixon, in a condition of great mental turmoil.

“I think you’d better come and have your tea,” said Maggie firmly, and yet gently. She was soft and stout, and incapable of asserting herself with dignity; but she was his elder, and there were moments when an unusual, scarce-perceptible quality in her voice would demand from him a particular attention.

He shook his head, and looked sternly at his watch, in the manner of one who could be adamant. He was astonished to see that the hour was a quarter past six.

“Where is he?” he asked.

“Father? He’s had his tea and gone back to the shop. Come along.”

“I must wash myself first,” said Edwin gloomily. He did not wish to yield, but he was undeniably very hungry indeed.

Mrs Nixon could not leave him alone at tea, worrying him with offers of specialities to tempt him. He wondered who had told the old thing about the affair. Then he reflected that she had probably heard his outburst when he entered the house. Possibly the pert, nice niece also had heard it. Maggie remained sewing at the bow-window of the dining-room while he ate a plenteous tea.

“Father said I could tell you that you could pay yourself an extra half-crown a week wages from next Saturday,” said Maggie suddenly, when she saw he had finished. It was always Edwin who paid wages in the Clayhanger establishment.

He was extremely startled by this news, with all that it implied of surrender and of pacific intentions. But he endeavoured to hide what he felt, and only snorted.

“He’s been talking, then? What did he say?”

“Oh! Not much! He told me I could tell you if I liked.”

“It would have looked better of him, if he’d told me himself,” said Edwin, determined to be ruthless. Maggie offered no response.

Two.

After about a quarter of an hour he went into the garden, and kicked stones in front of him. He could not classify his thoughts. He considered himself to be perfectly tranquillised now, but he was mistaken. As he idled in the beautiful August twilight near the garden-front of the house, catching faintly the conversation of Mrs Nixon and her niece as it floated through the open window of the kitchen, round the corner, together with quiet soothing sounds of washing-up, he heard a sudden noise in the garden-porch, and turned swiftly. His father stood there. Both of them were off guard. Their eyes met.

“Had your tea?” Darius asked, in an unnatural tone.

“Yes,” said Edwin.

Darius, having saved his face, hurried into the house, and Edwin moved down the garden, with heart sensibly beating. The encounter renewed his agitation.

And at the corner of the garden, over the hedge, which had been repaired, Janet entrapped him. She seemed to have sprung out of the ground. He could not avoid greeting her, and in order to do so he had to dominate himself by force. She was in white. She appeared always to wear white on fine summer days. Her smile was exquisitely benignant.

“So you’re installed?” she began.

They talked of the removal, she asking questions and commenting, and he giving brief replies.

“I’m all alone to-night,” she said, in a pause, “except for Alicia. Father and mother and the boys are gone to a fête at Longshaw.”

“And Miss Lessways?” he inquired self-consciously.

“Oh! She’s gone,” said Janet. “She’s gone back to London. Went yesterday.”

“Rather sudden, isn’t it?”

“Well, she had to go.”

“Does she live in London?” Edwin asked, with an air of indifference.

“She does just now.”

“I only ask because I thought from something she said she came from Turnhill way.”

“Her people do,” said Janet. “Yes, you may say she’s a Turnhill girl.”

“She seems very fond of poetry,” said Edwin.

“You’ve noticed it!” Janet’s face illuminated the dark. “You should hear her recite!”

“Recites, does she?”

“You’d have heard her that night you were here. But when she knew you were coming, she made us all promise not to ask her.”

“Really!” said Edwin. “But why? She didn’t know me. She’d never seen me.”

“Oh! She might have just seen you in the street. In fact I believe she had. But that wasn’t the reason,” Janet laughed. “It was just that you were a stranger. She’s very sensitive, you know.”

“Ye–es,” he admitted.

Three.

He took leave of Janet, somehow, and went for a walk up to Toft End, where the wind blows. His thoughts were more complex than ever in the darkness. So she had made them all promise not to ask her to recite while he was at the Orgreaves’! She had seen him, previous to that, in the street, and had obviously discussed him with Janet... And then, at nearly midnight, she had followed him to the new house! And on the day of the Centenary she had manoeuvred to let Janet and Mr Orgreave go in front... He did not like her. She was too changeable, too dark, and too light... But it was exciting. It was flattering. He saw again and again her gesture as she bent to Mr Shushions; and the straightening of her spine as she left the garden-porch on the night of his visit to the Orgreaves... Yet he did not like her. Her sudden departure, however, was a disappointment; it was certainly too abrupt... Probably very characteristic of her... Strange day! He had been suspected of theft. He had stood up to his father. He had remained away from the shop. And his father’s only retort was to give him a rise of half a crown a week!

“The old man must have had a bit of a shock!” he said to himself, grimly vain. “I lay I don’t hear another word about that fifty pounds.”

Yes, amid his profound resentment, there was some ingenuous vanity at the turn which things had taken. And he was particularly content about the rise of half a crown a week, because that relieved him from the most difficult of all the resolutions the carrying out of which was to mark the beginning of the new life. It settled the financial question, for the present at any rate. It was not enough, but it was a great deal—from his father. He was ashamed that he could not keep his righteous resentment pure from this gross satisfaction at an increase of income. The fineness of his nature was thereby hurt. But the gross satisfaction would well up in his mind.

And in the night, with the breeze on his cheek, and the lamps of the Five Towns curving out below him, he was not unhappy, despite what he had suffered and was still suffering. He had a tingling consciousness of being unusually alive.

Four.

Later, in his bedroom, shut in, and safe and independent, with the new blind drawn, and the gas fizzing in its opaline globe, he tried to read “Don Juan.” He could not. He was incapable of fixity of mind. He could not follow the sense of a single stanza. Images of his father and of Hilda Lessways mingled with reveries of the insult he had received and the triumph he had won, and all the confused wonder of the day and evening engaged his thoughts. He dwelt lovingly on the supreme disappointment of his career. He fancied what he would have been doing, and where he would have been then, if his appalling father had not made it impossible for him to be an architect. He pitied himself. But he saw the material of happiness ahead, in the faithful execution of his resolves for self-perfecting. And Hilda had flattered him. Hilda had given him a new conception of himself... A tiny idea arose in his brain that there was perhaps some slight excuse for his father’s suspicion of him. After all, he had been secretive. He trampled on that idea, and it arose again.

He slept very heavily, and woke with a headache. A week elapsed before his agitation entirely disappeared, and hence before he could realise how extreme that agitation had been. He was ashamed of having so madly and wildly abandoned himself to passion.

Volume Two--Chapter Seventeen.

Challenge and Response.

Time passed, like a ship across a distant horizon, which moves but which does not seem to move. One Monday evening Edwin said that he was going round to Lane End House. He had been saying so for weeks, and hesitating. He thoroughly enjoyed going to Lane End House; there was no reason why he should not go frequently and regularly, and there were several reasons why he should. Yet his visitings were capricious because his nature was irresolute. That night he went, sticking a hat carelessly on his head, and his hands deep into his pockets. Down the slope of Trafalgar Road, in the biting November mist, between the two rows of gas-lamps that flickered feebly into the pale gloom, came a long straggling band of men who also, to compensate for the absence of overcoats, stuck hands deep into pockets, and strode quickly. With reluctance they divided for the passage of the steam-car, and closed growling together again on its rear. The potters were on strike, and a Bursley contingent was returning in embittered silence from a mass meeting at Hanbridge. When the sound of the steam-car subsided, as the car dipped over the hill-top on its descent towards Hanbridge, nothing could be heard but the tramp-tramp of the procession on the road.

Edwin hurried down the side street, and in a moment rang at the front door of the Orgreaves’. He nodded familiarly to the servant who opened, stepped on to the mat, and began contorting his legs in order to wipe the edge of his boot-soles.

“Quite a stranger, sir!” said Martha, bridling, and respectfully aware of her attractiveness for this friend of the house.

“Yes,” he laughed. “Anybody in?”

“Well, sir, I’m afraid Miss Janet and Miss Alicia are out.”

“And Mr Tom?”

“Mr Tom’s out, sir. He pretty nearly always is now, sir.” The fact was that Tom was engaged to be married, and the servant indicated, by a scarcely perceptible motion of the chin, that fiancés were and ever would be all the same. “And Mr John and Mr James are out too, sir.” They also were usually out. They were both assisting their father in business, and sought relief from his gigantic conception of a day’s work by evening diversions at Hanbridge. These two former noisy Liberals had joined the Hanbridge Conservative Club because it was a club, and had a billiard-table that could only be equalled at the Five Towns Hotel at Knype.

“And Mr Orgreave?”

“He’s working upstairs, sir. Mrs Orgreave’s got her asthma, and so he’s working upstairs.”

“Well, tell them I’ve called.” Edwin turned to depart.

“I’m sure Mr Orgreave would like to know you’re here, sir,” said the maid firmly. “If you’ll just step into the breakfast-room.” That maid did as she chose with visitors for whom she had a fancy.

Two.

She conducted him to the so-called breakfast-room and shut the door on him. It was a small chamber behind the drawing-room, and shabbier than the drawing-room. In earlier days the children had used it for their lessons and hobbies. And now it was used as a sitting-room when mere cosiness was demanded by a decimated family. Edwin stooped down and mended the fire. Then he went to the wall and examined a framed water-colour of the old Sytch Pottery, which was signed with his initials. He had done it, aided by a photograph, and by Johnnie Orgreave in details of perspective, and by dint of preprandial frequentings of the Sytch, as a gift for Mrs Orgreave. It always seemed to him to be rather good.

Then he bent to examine bookshelves. Like the hall, the drawing-room, and the dining-room, this apartment too was plenteously full of everything, and littered over with the apparatus of various personalities. Only from habit did Edwin glance at the books. He knew their backs by heart. And books in quantity no longer intimidated him. Despite his grave defects as a keeper of resolves, despite his paltry trick of picking up a newspaper or periodical and reading it all through, out of sheer vacillation and mental sloth, before starting serious perusals, despite the human disinclination which he had to bracing himself, and keeping up the tension, in a manner necessary for the reading of long and difficult works, and despite sundry ignominious backslidings into original sluggishness—still he had accomplished certain literary adventures. He could not enjoy “Don Juan.” Expecting from it a voluptuous and daring grandeur, he had found in it nothing whatever that even roughly fitted into his idea of what poetry was. But he had had a passion for “Childe Harold,” many stanzas of which thrilled him again and again, bringing back to his mind what Hilda Lessways had said about poetry. And further, he had a passion for Voltaire. In Voltaire, also, he had been deceived, as in Byron. He had expected something violent, arid, closely argumentative; and he found gaiety, grace, and really the funniest jokes. He could read “Candide” almost without a dictionary, and he had intense pride in doing so, and for some time afterwards “Candide” and “La Princesse de Babylone,” and a few similar witty trifles, were the greatest stories in the world for him. Only a faint reserve in Tom Orgreave’s responsive enthusiasm made him cautiously reflect.

He could never be intimate with Tom, because Tom somehow never came out from behind his spectacles. But he had learnt much from him, and in especial a familiarity with the less difficult of Bach’s preludes and fugues, which Tom loved to play. Edwin knew not even the notes of music, and he was not sure that Bach gave him pleasure. Bach affected him strangely. He would ask for Bach out of a continually renewed curiosity, so that he could examine once more and yet again the sensations which the music produced; and the habit grew. As regards the fugues, there could be no doubt that, the fugue begun, a desire was thereby set up in him for the resolution of the confusing problem created in the first few bars, and that he waited, with a pleasant and yet a trying anxiety, for the indications of that resolution, and that the final reassuring and utterly tranquillising chords gave him deep joy. When he innocently said that he was ‘glad when the end came of a fugue,’ all the Orgreaves laughed heartily, but after laughing, Tom said that he knew what Edwin meant and quite agreed.

Three.

It was while he was glancing along the untidy and crowded shelves with sophisticated eye that the door brusquely opened. He looked up mildly, expecting a face familiar, and saw one that startled him, and heard a voice that aroused disconcerting vibrations in himself. It was Hilda Lessways. She had in her hand a copy of the “Signal.” Over fifteen months had gone since their last meeting, but not since he had last thought of her. Her features seemed strange. His memory of them had not been reliable. He had formed an image of her in his mind, and had often looked at it, and he now saw that it did not correspond with the reality. The souvenir of their brief intimacy swept back upon him. Incredible that she should be there, in front of him; and yet there she was! More than once, after reflecting on her, he had laughed, and said lightly to himself: “Well, the chances are I shall never see her again! Funny girl!” But the recollection of her gesture with Mr Shushions prevented him from dismissing her out of his head with quite that lightness...

“I’m ordered to tell you that Mr Orgreave will be down in a few minutes,” she said.

“Hello!” he exclaimed. “I’d no idea you were in Bursley!”

“Came to-day!” she replied.

“How odd,” he thought, “that I should call like this on the very day she comes!” But he pushed away that instinctive thought with the rational thought that such a coincidence could not be regarded as in any way significant.

They shook hands in the middle of the room, and she pressed his hand, while looking downwards with a smile. And his mind was suddenly filled with the idea that during all those months she had been existing somewhere, under the eye of some one, intimate with some one, and constantly conducting herself with a familiar freedom that doubtless she would not use to him. And so she was invested, for him, with mysteriousness. His interest in her was renewed in a moment, and in a form much more acute than its first form. Moreover, she presented herself to his judgement in a different aspect. He could scarcely comprehend how he had ever deemed her habitual expression to be forbidding. In fact, he could persuade himself now that she was beautiful, and even nobly beautiful. From one extreme he flew to the other. She sat down on an old sofa; he remained standing. And in the midst of a little conversation about Mrs Orgreave’s indisposition, and the absence of the members of the family (she said she had refused an invitation to go with Janet and Alicia to Hillport), she broke the thread, and remarked—

“You would have known I was coming if you’d been calling here recently.” She pushed her feet near the fender, and gazed into the fire.

“Ah! But you see I haven’t been calling recently.”

She raised her eyes to his. “I suppose you’ve never thought about me once since I left!” she fired at him. An audacious and discomposing girl!

“Oh yes, I have,” he said weakly. What could you reply to such speeches? Nevertheless he was flattered.

“Really? But you’ve never inquired about me.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Only once.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked Janet.”

“Damn her!” he said to himself, but pleased with her. And aloud, in a tone suddenly firm, “That’s nothing to go by.”

“What isn’t?”

“The number of times I’ve inquired.” He was blushing.

Four.

In the smallness of the room, sitting as it were at his feet on the sofa, surrounded and encaged by a hundred domestic objects and by the glow of the fire and the radiance of the gas, she certainly did seem to Edwin to be an organism exceedingly mysterious. He could follow with his eye every fold of her black dress, he could trace the waving of her hair, and watch the play of light in her eyes. He might have physically hurt her, he might have killed her, she was beneath his hand—and yet she was most bafflingly withdrawn, and the essence of her could not be touched nor got at. Why did she challenge him by her singular attitude? Why was she always saying such queer things to him? No other girl (he thought, in the simplicity of his inexperience) would ever talk as she talked. He wanted to test her by being rude to her. “Damn her!” he said to himself again. “Supposing I took hold of her and kissed her—I wonder what sort of a face she’d pull then!” (And a moment ago he had been appraising her as nobly beautiful! A moment ago he had been dwelling on the lovely compassion of her gesture with Mr Shushions!) This quality of daring and naughty enterprise had never before shown itself in Edwin, and he was surprised to discover in himself such impulses. But then the girl was so provocative. And somehow the sight of the girl delivered him from an excessive fear of consequences. He said to himself, “I’ll do something or I’ll say something, before I leave her to-night, just to show her!” He screwed up his resolution to the point of registering a private oath that he would indeed do or say something. Without a solemn oath he could not rely upon his valour. He knew that whatever he said or did in the nature of a bold advance would be accomplished clumsily. He knew that it would be unpleasant. He knew that inaction suited much better his instinct for tranquillity. No matter! All that was naught. She had challenged, and he had to respond. Besides, she allured... And, after her scene with him in the porch of the new house, had he not the right? ... A girl who had behaved as she did that night cannot effectively contradict herself!

“I was just reading about this strike,” she said, rustling the newspaper.

“You’ve soon got into local politics.”

“Well,” she said, “I saw a lot of the men as we were driving from the station. I should think I saw two thousand of them. So of course I was interested. I made Mr Orgreave tell me all about it. Will they win?”

“It depends on the weather.” He smiled.

She remained silent, and grave. “I see!” she said, leaning her chin on her hand. At her tone he ceased smiling. She said “I see,” and she actually had seen.

“You see,” he repeated. “If it was June instead of November! But then it isn’t June. Wages are settled every year in November. So if there is to be a strike it can only begin in November.”

“But didn’t the men ask for the time of year to be changed?”

“Yes,” he said. “But you don’t suppose the masters were going to agree to that, do you?” He sneered masculinely.

“Why not?”

“Because it gives them such a pull.”

“What a shame!” Hilda exclaimed passionately. “And what a shame it is that the masters want to make the wages depend on selling prices! Can’t they see that selling prices ought to depend on wages?”

Edwin said nothing. She had knocked suddenly out of his head all ideas of flirting, and he was trying to reassemble them.

“I suppose you’re like all the rest?” she questioned gloomily.

“How like all the rest?”

“Against the men. Mr Orgreave is, and he says your father is very strongly against them.”

“Look here,” said Edwin, with an air of resentment as to which he himself could not have decided whether it was assumed or genuine, “what earthly right have you to suppose that I’m like all the rest?”

“I’m very sorry,” she surrendered. “I knew all the time you weren’t.” With her face still bent downwards, she looked up at him, smiling sadly, smiling roguishly.

“Father’s against them,” he proceeded, somewhat deflated. And he thought of all his father’s violent invective, and of Maggie’s bland acceptance of the assumption that workmen on strike were rascals—how different the excellent simple Maggie from this feverish creature on the sofa! “Father’s against them, and most people are, because they broke the last arbitration award. But I’m not my father. If you ask me, I’ll tell you what I think—workmen on strike are always in the right; at bottom I mean. You’ve only got to look at them in a crowd together. They don’t starve themselves for fun.”

He was not sure if he was convinced of the truth of these statements; but she drew them out of him by her strange power. And when he had uttered them, they appeared fine to him.

“What does your father say to that?”

“Oh!” said Edwin uneasily. “Him—and me—we don’t argue about these things.”

“Why not?”

“Well, we don’t.”

“You aren’t ashamed of your own opinions, are you?” she demanded, with a hint in her voice that she was ready to be scornful.

“You know all the time I’m not.” He repeated the phrase of her previous confession with a certain acrimonious emphasis. “Don’t you?” he added curtly.

She remained silent.

“Don’t you?” he said more loudly. And as she offered no reply, he went on, marvelling at what was coming out of his mouth. “I’ll tell you what I am ashamed of. I’m ashamed of seeing my father lose his temper. So you know!”

She said—

“I never met anybody like you before. No, never!”

At this he really was astounded, and most exquisitely flattered.

“I might say the same of you,” he replied, sticking his chin out.

“Oh no!” she said. “I’m nothing.”

The fact was that he could not foretell their conversation even ten seconds in advance. It was full of the completely unexpected. He thought to himself, “You never know what a girl like that will say next.” But what would he say next?

Five.

They were interrupted by Osmond Orgreave, with his, “Well, Edwin,” jolly, welcoming, and yet slightly quizzical. Edwin could not look him in the face without feeling self-conscious. Nor dared he glance at Hilda to see what her demeanour was like under the good-natured scrutiny of her friend’s father.

“We thought you’d forgotten us,” said Mr Orgreave. “But that’s always the way with neighbours.” He turned to Hilda. “It’s true,” he continued, jerking his head at Edwin. “He scarcely ever comes to see us, except when you’re here.”

“Steady on!” Edwin murmured. “Steady on, Mr Orgreave!” And hastily he asked a question about Mrs Orgreave’s asthma; and from that the conversation passed to the doings of the various absent members of the family.

“You’ve been working, as usual, I suppose,” said Edwin.

“Working!” laughed Mr Orgreave. “I’ve done what I could, with Hilda there! Instead of going up to Hillport with Janet, she would stop here and chatter about strikes.”

Hilda smiled at him benevolently as at one to whom she permitted everything.

“Mr Clayhanger agrees with me,” she said.

“Oh! You needn’t tell me!” protested Mr Orgreave. “I could see you were as thick as thieves over it.” He looked at Edwin. “Has she told you she wants to go over a printing works?”

“No,” said Edwin. “But I shall be very pleased to show her over ours, any time.”

She made no observation.

“Look here,” said Edwin suddenly, “I must be off. I only slipped in for a minute, really.” He did not know why he said this, for his greatest wish was to probe more deeply into the tantalising psychology of Hilda Lessways. His tongue, however, had said it, and his tongue reiterated it when Mr Orgreave urged that Janet and Alicia would be back soon and that food would then be partaken of. He would not stay. Desiring to stay, he would not. He wished to be alone, to think. Clearly Hilda had been talking about him to Mr Orgreave, and to Janet. Did she discuss him and his affairs with everybody?

Nor would he, in response to Mr Orgreave’s suggestion, promise definitely to call again on the next evening. He said he would try. Hilda took leave of him nonchalantly. He departed.

And as he made the half-circuit of the misty lawn, on his way to the gates, he muttered in his heart, where even he himself could scarcely hear: “I swore I’d do something, and I haven’t. Well, of course, when she talked seriously like that, what could I do?” But he was disgusted with himself and ashamed of his namby-pambiness.

He strolled thoughtfully up Oak Street, and down Trafalgar Road; and when he was near home, another wayfarer saw him face right about and go up Trafalgar Road and disappear at the corner of Oak Street.

The Orgreave servant was surprised to see him at the front door again when she answered a discreet ring.

“I wish you’d tell Miss Lessways I want to speak to her a moment, will you?”

“Miss Lessways?”

“Yes.” What an adventure!

“Certainly, sir. Will you come in?” She shut the door.

“Ask her to come here,” he said, smiling with deliberate confidential persuasiveness. She nodded, with a brighter smile.

The servant vanished, and Hilda came. She was as red as fire. He began hurriedly.

“When will you come to look over our works? To-morrow? I should like you to come.” He used a tone that said: “Now don’t let’s have any nonsense! You know you want to come.”

She frowned frankly. There they were in the hall, like a couple of conspirators, but she was frowning; she would not meet him half-way. He wished he had not permitted himself this caprice. What importance had a private oath? He felt ridiculous.

“What time?” she demanded, and in an instant transformed his disgust into delight.

“Any time.” His heart was beating with expectation.

“Oh no! You must fix the time.”

“Well, after tea. Say between half-past six and a quarter to seven. That do?”

She nodded.

“Good,” he murmured. “That’s all! Thanks. Good-night!”

He hastened away, with a delicate photograph of the palm of her hand printed in minute sensations on the palm of his.

“I did it, anyhow!” he muttered loudly, in his heart. At any rate he was not shamed. At any rate he was a man. The man’s face was burning, and the damp noxious chill of the night only caressed him agreeably.

Volume Two--Chapter Eighteen.

Curiosity.

He was afraid that, from some obscure motive of propriety or self-protection, she would bring Janet with her, or perhaps Alicia. On the other hand, he was afraid that she would come alone. That she should come alone seemed to him, in spite of his reason, too brazen. Moreover, if she came alone would he be equal to the situation? Would he be able to carry the thing off in a manner adequate? He lacked confidence. He desired the moment of her arrival, and yet he feared it. His heart and his brain were all confused together in a turmoil of emotion which he could not analyse nor define.

He was in love. Love had caught him, and had affected his vision so that he no longer saw any phenomenon as it actually was; neither himself, nor Hilda, nor the circumstances which were uniting them. He could not follow a train of thought. He could not remain of one opinion nor in one mind. Within himself he was perpetually discussing Hilda, and her attitude. She was marvellous! But was she? She admired him! But did she? She had shown cunning! But was it not simplicity? He did not even feel sure whether he liked her. He tried to remember what she looked like, and he positively could not. The one matter upon which he could be sure was that his curiosity was hotly engaged. If he had had to state the case in words to another he would not have gone further than the word ‘curiosity.’ He had no notion that he was in love. He did not know what love was; he had not had sufficient opportunity of learning. Nevertheless the processes of love were at work within him. Silently and magically, by the force of desire and of pride, the refracting glass was being specially ground which would enable him, which would compel him, to see an ideal Hilda when he gazed at the real Hilda. He would not see the real Hilda any more unless some cataclysm should shatter the glass. And he might be likened to a prisoner on whom the gate of freedom is shut for ever, or to a stricken sufferer of whom it is known that he can never rise again and go forth into the fields. He was as somebody to whom the irrevocable had happened. And he knew it not. None knew. None guessed. All day he went his ways, striving to conceal the whirring preoccupation of his curiosity (a curiosity which he thought showed a fine masculine dash), and succeeded fairly well. The excellent, simple Maggie alone remarked in secret that he was slightly nervous and unnatural. But even she, with all her excellent simplicity, did not divine his victimhood.

At six o’clock he was back at the shop from his tea. It was a wet, chill night. On the previous evening he had caught cold, and he was beginning to sneeze. He said to himself that Hilda could not be expected to come on such a night. But he expected her. When the shop clock showed half-past six, he glanced at his watch, which also showed half-past six. Now at any instant she might arrive. The shop door opened, and simultaneously his heart ceased to beat. But the person who came in, puffing and snorting, was his father, who stood within the shop while shaking his soaked umbrella over the exterior porch. The draught from the shiny dark street and square struck cold, and Edwin responsively sneezed; and Darius Clayhanger upbraided him for not having worn his overcoat, and he replied with foolish unconvincingness that he had got a cold, that it was nothing. Darius grunted his way into the cubicle. Edwin remained in busy idleness at the right-hand counter; Stifford was tidying the contents of drawers behind the fancy-counter. And the fizzing gas-burners, inevitable accompaniment of night at the period, kept watch above. Under the heat of the stove, the damp marks of Darius Clayhanger’s entrance disappeared more quickly than the minutes ran. It grew almost impossible for Edwin to pass the time. At moments when his father was not stirring in the cubicle, and Stifford happened to be in repose, he could hear the ticking of the clock, which he could not remember ever having heard before, except when he mounted the steps to wind it.

At a quarter to seven he said to himself that he gave up hope, while pretending that he never had hoped, and that Hilda’s presence was indifferent to him. If she came not that day she would probably come some other day. What could it matter? He was very unhappy. He said to himself that he should have a long night’s reading, but the prospect of reading had no savour. He said: “No, I shan’t go in to see them to-night, I shall stay in and nurse my cold, and read.” This was mere futile bravado, for the impartial spectator in him, though far less clear-sighted and judicial now than formerly, foresaw with certainty that if Hilda did not come he would call at the Orgreaves’. At five minutes to seven he was miserable: he had decided to hope until five minutes to seven. He made it seven in despair. Then there were signs of a figure behind the misty glass of the door. The door opened. It could not be she! Impossible that it should be she! But it was she; she had the air of being a miracle.

Two.

His feelings were complex and contradictory, flitting about and crossing each other in his mind with astounding rapidity. He wished she had not come, because his father was there, and the thought of his father would intensify his self-consciousness. He wondered why he should care whether she came or not; after all she was only a young woman who wanted to see a printing works; at best she was not so agreeable as Janet, at worst she was appalling, and moreover he knew nothing about her. He had a glimpse of her face as, with a little tightening of the lips, she shut her umbrella. What was there in that face judged impartially? Why should he be to so absurd a degree curious about her? He thought how exquisitely delicious it would be to be walking with her by the shore of a lovely lake on a summer evening, pale hills in the distance. He had this momentary vision by reason of a coloured print of the “Silver Strand” of a Scottish loch which was leaning in a gilt frame against the artists’ materials cabinet and was marked twelve-and-six. During the day he had imagined himself with her in all kinds of beautiful spots and situations. But the chief of his sensations was one of exquisite relief... She had come. He could wreak his hungry curiosity upon her.

Yes, she was alone. No Janet! No Alicia! How had she managed it? What had she said to the Orgreaves? That she should have come alone, and through the November rain, in the night, affected him deeply. It gave her the quality of a heroine of high adventure. It was as though she had set sail unaided, in a frail skiff, on a formidable ocean, to meet him. It was inexpressibly romantic and touching. She came towards him, her face sedately composed. She wore a small hat, a veil, and a mackintosh, and black gloves that were splashed with wet. Certainly she was a practical woman. She had said she would come, and she had come, sensibly, but how charmingly, protected against the shocking conditions of the journey. There is naught charming in a mackintosh. And yet there was, in this mackintosh! ... Something in the contrast between its harshness and her fragility... The veil was supremely charming. She had half lifted it, exposing her mouth; the upper part of her flushed face was caged behind the bars of the veil; behind those bars her eyes mysteriously gleamed... Spanish! ... No exaggeration in all this! He felt every bit of it honestly, as he stood at the counter in thrilled expectancy. By virtue of his impassioned curiosity, the terraces of Granada and the mantillas of señoritas were not more romantic than he had made his father’s shop and her dripping mackintosh. He tried to see her afresh; he tried to see her as though he had never seen her before; he tried desperately once again to comprehend what it was in her that piqued him. And he could not. He fell back from the attempt. Was she the most wondrous? Or was she commonplace? Was she deceiving him? Or did he alone possess the true insight? ... Useless! He was baffled. Far from piercing her soul, he could scarcely even see her at all; that is, with intelligence. And it was always so when he was with her: he was in a dream, a vapour; he had no helm, his faculties were not under control. She robbed him of judgement.

And then the clear tones of her voice fell on the listening shop: “Good evening, Mr Clayhanger. What a night, isn’t it? I hope I’m not too late.”

Firm, business-like syllables... And she straightened her shoulders. He suffered. He was not happy. Whatever his feelings, he was not happy in that instant. He was not happy because he was wrung between hope and fear, alike divine. But he would not have exchanged his sensations for the extremest felicity of any other person.

They shook hands. He suggested that she should remove her mackintosh. She consented. He had no idea that the effect of the removal of the mackintosh would be so startling as it was. She stood intimately revealed in her frock. The mackintosh was formal and defensive; the frock was intimate and acquiescent.

Darius blundered out of the cubicle and Edwin had a dreadful moment introducing her to Darius and explaining their purpose. Why had he not prepared the ground in advance? His pusillanimous cowardice again! However, the directing finger of God sent a customer into the shop, and Edwin escaped with his Hilda through the aperture in the counter.

Three.

The rickety building at the back of the premises, which was still the main theatre of printing activities, was empty save for Big James, the hour of seven being past. Big James was just beginning to roll his apron round his waist, in preparation for departure. This happened to be one of the habits of his advancing age. Up till a year or two previously he would have taken off his apron and left it in the workshop; but now he could not confide it to the workshop; he must carry it about him until he reached home and a place of safety for it. When he saw Edwin and a young lady appear in the doorway, he let the apron fall over his knees again. As the day was only the second of the industrial week, the apron was almost clean; and even the office towel, which hung on a roller somewhat conspicuously near the door, was not offensive. A single gas jet burned. The workshop was in the languor of repose after toil which had officially commenced at 8 a.m.

The perfection of Big James’s attitude, an attitude symbolised by the letting down of his apron, helped to put Edwin at ease in the original and difficult circumstances. “Good evening, Mr Edwin. Good evening, miss,” was all that the man actually said with his tongue, but the formality of his majestic gestures indicated in the most dignified way his recognition of a sharp difference of class and his exact comprehension of his own rôle in the affair. He stood waiting: he had been about to depart, but he was entirely at the disposal of the company.

“This is Mr Yarlett, our foreman,” said Edwin, and to Big James: “Miss Lessways has just come to look round.”

Hilda smiled. Big James suavely nodded his head.

“Here are some of the types,” said Edwin, because a big case was the object nearest him, and he glanced at Big James.

In a moment the foreman was explaining to Hilda, in his superb voice, the use of the composing-stick, and he accompanied the theory by a beautiful exposition of the practice; Edwin could stand aside and watch. Hilda listened and looked with an extraordinary air of sympathetic interest. And she was so serious, so adult. But it was the quality of sympathy, he thought, that was her finest, her most attractive. It was either that or her proud independence, as of a person not accustomed to bend to the will of others or to go to others for advice. He could not be sure... No! Her finest quality was her mystery. Even now, as he gazed at her comfortably, she baffled him; all her exquisite little movements and intonations baffled him. Of one thing, however, he was convinced: that she was fundamentally different from other women. There was she, and there was the rest of the sex.

For appearance’s sake he threw in short phrases now and then, to which Big James, by his mere deportment, gave the importance of the words of a master.

“I suppose you printers did something special among yourselves to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the invention of printing?” said Hilda suddenly, glancing from Edwin to Big James. And Big James and Edwin glanced at one another. Neither had ever heard of the four-hundredth anniversary of the invention of printing. In a couple of seconds Big James’s downcast eye had made it clear that he regarded this portion of the episode as master’s business.

“When was that?—let me see,” Edwin foolishly blurted out.

“Oh! Some years ago. Two or three—perhaps four.”

“I’m afraid we didn’t,” said Edwin, smiling.

“Oh!” said Hilda slowly. “I think they made a great fuss of it in London.” She relented somewhat. “I don’t really know much about it. But the other day I happened to be reading the new history of printing, you know—Cranswick’s, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes!” Edwin concurred, though he had never heard of Cranswick’s new history of printing either.

He knew that he was not emerging creditably from this portion of the episode. But he did not care. The whole of his body went hot and then cold as his mind presented the simple question: “Why had she been reading the history of printing?” Could the reason be any other than her interest in himself? Or was she a prodigy among young women, who read histories of everything in addition to being passionate about verse? He said that it was ridiculous to suppose that she would read a history of printing solely from interest in himself. Nevertheless he was madly happy for a few moments, and as it were staggered with joy. He decided to read a history of printing at once.

Big James came to the end of his expositions of the craft. The stove was dying out, and the steam-boiler cold. Big James regretted that the larger machines could not be seen in action, and that the place was getting chilly. Edwin began to name various objects that were lying about, with their functions, but it was evident that the interest of the workshop was now nearly exhausted. Big James suggested that if Miss could make it convenient to call, say, on the next afternoon, she could see the large new Columbia in motion. Edwin seized the idea and beautified it. And on this he wavered towards the door, and she followed, and Big James in dignity bowed them forth to the elevated porch, and began to rewind his flowing apron once more. They pattered down the dark steps (now protected with felt roofing) and ran across six feet of exposed yard into what had once been Mrs Nixon’s holy kitchen.

Four.

After glancing at sundry minor workshops in delicious propinquity and solitude, they mounted to the first floor, where there was an account-book ruling and binding shop: the site of the old sitting-room and the girls’ bedroom. In each chamber Edwin had to light a gas, and the corridors and stairways were traversed by the ray of matches. It was excitingly intricate. Then they went to the attics, because Edwin was determined that she should see all. There he found a forgotten candle.

“I used to work here,” he said, holding high the candle. “There was no other place for me to work in.”

They were in his old work attic, now piled with stocks of paper wrapped up in posters.

“Work? What sort of work?”

“Well—reading, drawing, you know... At that very table.” To be sure, there the very table was, thick with dust! It had been too rickety to deserve removal to the heights of Bleakridge. He was touched by the sight of the table now, though he saw it at least once every week. His existence at the corner of Duck Square seemed now to have been beautiful and sad, seemed to be far off and historic. And the attic seemed unhappy in its present humiliation.

“But there’s no fireplace,” murmured Hilda.

“I know,” said Edwin.

“But how did you do in winter?”

“I did without.”

He had in fact been less of a martyr than those three telling words would indicate. Nevertheless it appeared to him that he really had been a martyr; and he was glad. He could feel her sympathy and her quiet admiration vibrating through the air towards him. Had she not said that she had never met anybody like him? He turned and looked at her. Her eyes glittered in the candle-light with tears too proud to fall. Solemn and exquisite bliss! Profound anxiety and apprehension! He was an arena where all the sensations of which a human being is capable struggled in blind confusion.

Afterwards, he could recall her visit only in fragments. The next fragment that he recollected was the last. She stood outside the door in her mackintosh. The rain had ceased. She was going. Behind them he could feel his father in the cubicle, and Stifford arranging the toilette of the shop for the night.

“Please don’t come out here,” she enjoined, half in entreaty, half in command. Her solicitude thrilled him. He was on the step, she was on the pavement: so that he looked down at her, with the sodden, light-reflecting slope of Duck Square for a background to her.

“Oh! I’m all right. Well, you’ll come to-morrow afternoon?”

“No, you aren’t all right. You’ve got a cold and you’ll make it worse, and this isn’t the end of winter, it’s the beginning; I think you’re very liable to colds.”

“N–no!” he said, enchanted, beside himself in an ecstasy of pleasure. “I shall expect you to-morrow about three.”

“Thank you,” she said simply. “I’ll come.”

They shook hands.

“Now do go in!”

She vanished round the corner.

All the evening he neither read nor spoke.

Volume Two--Chapter Nineteen.

A Catastrophe.

At half-past two on the following afternoon he was waiting for the future in order to recommence living. During this period, to a greater extent even than the average individual in average circumstances, he was incapable of living in the present. Continually he looked either forward or back. All that he had achieved, or that had been achieved for him—the new house with its brightness and its apparatus of luxury, his books, his learning, his friends, his experience: not long since regarded by him as the precious materials of happiness—all had become negligible trifles, nothings, devoid of import. The sole condition precedent to a tolerable existence was now to have sight and speech of Hilda Lessways. He was intensely unhappy in the long stretches of time which separated one contact with her from the next. And in the brief moments of their companionship he was far too distraught, too apprehensive, too desirous, too puzzled, to be able to call himself happy. Seeing her apparently did naught to assuage the pain of his curiosity about her—not his curiosity concerning the details of her life and of her person, for these scarcely interested him, but his curiosity concerning the very essence of her being. At seven o’clock on the previous day, he had esteemed her visit as possessing a decisive importance which covered the whole field of his wishes. The visit had occurred, and he was not a whit advanced; indeed he had retrograded, for he was less content and more confused, and more preoccupied. The medicine had aggravated the disease. Nevertheless, he awaited a second dose of it in the undestroyed illusion of its curative property.

In the interval he had behaved like a very sensible man. Without appetite, he had still forced himself to eat, lest his relatives should suspect. Short of sleep, he had been careful to avoid yawning at breakfast, and had spoken in a casual tone of Hilda’s visit. He had even said to his father: “I suppose the big Columbia will be running off those overseer notices this afternoon?” And on the old man asking why he was thus interested, he had answered: “Because that girl, Miss Lessways, thought of coming down to see it. For some reason or other she’s very keen on printing, and as she’s such a friend of the Orgreaves—”

Nobody, he considered, could have done that better than he had done it.

And now that girl, Miss Lessways, was nearly due. He stood behind the counter again, waiting, waiting. He could not apply himself to anything; he could scarcely wait. He was in a state that approached fever, if not agony. To exist from half-past two to three o’clock equalled in anguish the dreadful inquietude that comes before a surgical operation.

He said to himself: “If I keep on like this I shall be in love with her one of these days.” He would not and could not believe that he already was in love with her, though the possibility presented itself to him. “No,” he said, “you don’t fall in love in a couple of days. You mustn’t tell me—” in a wise, superior, slightly scornful manner. “I dare say there’s nothing in it at all,” he said uncertainly, after having strongly denied throughout that there was anything in it.

The recollection of his original antipathy to Hilda troubled him. She was the same girl. She was the same girl who had followed him at night into his father’s garden and merited his disdain. She was the same girl who had been so unpleasant, so sharp, so rudely disconcerting in her behaviour. And he dared not say that she had altered. And yet now he could not get her out of his head. And although he would not admit that he constantly admired her, he did admit that there were moments when he admired her passionately and deemed her unique and above all women. Whence the change in himself? How to justify it? The problem was insoluble, for he was intellectually too honest to say lightly that originally he had been mistaken.

He did not pretend to solve the problem. He looked at it with perturbation, and left it. The consoling thing was that the Orgreaves had always expressed high esteem for Hilda. He leaned on the Orgreaves.

He wondered how the affair would end? It could not indefinitely continue on its present footing. How indeed would it end? Marriage... He apologised to himself for the thought... But just for the sake of argument ... supposing... well, supposing the affair went so far that one day he told her ... men did such things, young men! No! ... Besides, she wouldn’t... It was absurd... No such idea really! ... And then the frightful worry there would be with his father about money, and so on... And the telling of Clara, and of everybody. No! He simply could not imagine himself married, or about to be married. Marriage might happen to other young men, but not to him. His case was special, somehow... He shrank from such formidable enterprises. The mere notion of them made him tremble.

Two.

He brushed all that away impatiently, pettishly. The intense and terrible longing for her arrival persisted. It was now twenty-five to three. His father would be down soon from his after-dinner nap. Suddenly the door opened, and he saw the Orgreaves’ servant, with a cloak over her white apron, and hands red with cold. And also he saw disaster like a ghostly figure following her. His heart sickeningly sank. Martha smiled and gave him a note, which he smilingly accepted. “Miss Lessways asked me to come down with this,” she said confidentially. She was a little breathless, and she had absolutely the manner of a singing chambermaid in light opera. He opened the note, which said: “Dear Mr Clayhanger, so sorry I can’t come to-day.—Yours, H.L.” Nothing else. It was scrawled. “It’s all right, thanks,” he said, with an even brighter smile to the messenger, who nodded and departed.

It all occurred in an instant.

Three.

A catastrophe! He suffered then as he had never suffered.

His was no state approaching agony; it was agony itself, black and awful. She was not coming. She had not troubled herself to give a reason, nor to offer an excuse. She merely was not coming. She had showed no consideration for his feelings. It had not happened to her to reflect that she would be causing him disappointment. Disappointment was too mild a word. He had been building a marvellously beautiful castle, and with a thoughtless, careless stroke of the pen she had annihilated all his labour; she had almost annihilated him. Surely she owed him some reason, some explanation! Had she the right to play fast and loose with him like that? “What a shame!” he sobbed violently in his heart, with an excessive and righteous resentment. He was innocent; he was blameless; and she tortured him thus! He supposed that all women were like her... “What a shame!” He pitied himself for a victim. And there was no glint of hope anywhere. In half an hour he would have been near her, with her, guiding her to the workshop, discussing the machine with her; and savouring her uniqueness; feasting on her delicious and adorable personality! ... ‘So sorry I can’t come to-day!’ “She doesn’t understand. She can’t understand!” he said to himself. “No woman, however cruel, would ever knowingly be so cruel as she has been. It isn’t possible!” Then he sought excuse for her, and then he cast the excuse away angrily. She was not coming. There was no ground beneath his feet. He was so exquisitely miserable that he could not face a future of even ten hours ahead. He could not look at what his existence would be till bedtime. The blow had deprived him of all force, all courage. It was a wanton blow. He wished savagely that he had never seen her... No! no! He could not call on the Orgreaves that night. He could not do it. She might be out. And then...