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Title: Hilda Lessways

Author: Arnold Bennett

Release Date: January 9, 2004 [EBook #10658]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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HILDA LESSWAYS

BY ARNOLD BENNETT

1911




CONTENTS

BOOK I
HER START IN LIFE

    I AN EVENT IN MR. SKELLORN'S LIFE
   II THE END OF THE SCENE
  III MR. CANNON
   IV DOMESTICITY INVADED
    V MRS. LESSWAYS' SHREWDNESS
   VI VICTOR HUGO AND ISAAC PITMAN
  VII THE EDITORIAL SECRETARY
 VIII JANET ORGREAVE
   IX IN THE STREET
    X MISS GAILEY IN DECLENSION
   XI DISILLUSION
  XII THE TELEGRAM
 XIII HILDA'S WORLD
  XIV TO LONDON

BOOK II
HER RECOVERY

    I SIN
   II THE LITTLE ROOM
  III JOURNEY TO BLEAKRIDGE
   IV WITH THE ORGREAVES
    V EDWIN CLAYHANGER
   VI IN THE GARDEN
  VII THE NEXT MEETING

BOOK III
HER BURDEN

    I HILDA INDISPENSABLE
   II SARAH'S BENEFACTOR
  III AT BRIGHTON
   IV THE SEA

BOOK IV
HER FALL

    I THE GOING CONCERN
   II THE UNKNOWN ADVENTURE
  III FLORRIE AGAIN

BOOK V
HER DELIVERANCE

    I LOUISA UNCONTROLLED
   II SOME SECRET HISTORY

BOOK VI
HER PUNISHMENT

    I EVENING AT BLEAKRIDGE
   II A RENDEZVOUS
  III AT THE WORKS
   IV THE CALL FROM BRIGHTON
    V THURSDAY AFTERNOON
   VI MISCHANCE

       *       *       *       *       *




BOOK I
HER START IN LIFE




CHAPTER I
AN EVENT IN MR. SKELLORN'S LIFE


I

The Lessways household, consisting of Hilda and her widowed mother, was
temporarily without a servant. Hilda hated domestic work, and because
she hated it she often did it passionately and thoroughly. That
afternoon, as she emerged from the kitchen, her dark, defiant face was
full of grim satisfaction in the fact that she had left a kitchen
polished and irreproachable, a kitchen without the slightest indication
that it ever had been or ever would be used for preparing human nature's
daily food; a show kitchen. Even the apron which she had worn was hung
in concealment behind the scullery door. The lobby clock, which stood
over six feet high and had to be wound up every night by hauling on a
rope, was noisily getting ready to strike two. But for Mrs. Lessways'
disorderly and undesired assistance, Hilda's task might have been
finished a quarter of an hour earlier. She passed quietly up the stairs.
When she was near the top, her mother's voice, at once querulous and
amiable, came from the sitting-room:

"Where are you going to?"

There was a pause, dramatic for both of them, and in that minute pause
the very life of the house seemed for an instant to be suspended, and
then the waves of the hostile love that united these two women resumed
their beating, and Hilda's lips hardened.

"Upstairs," she answered callously.

No reply from the sitting-room!

At two o'clock on the last Wednesday of every month, old Mr. Skellorn,
employed by Mrs. Lessways to collect her cottage-rents, called with a
statement of account, and cash in a linen bag. He was now due. During
his previous visit Hilda had sought to instil some common sense into her
mother on the subject of repairs, and there had ensued an altercation
which had never been settled.

"If I stayed down, she wouldn't like it," Hilda complained fiercely
within herself, "and if I keep away she doesn't like that either! That's
mother all over!"

She went to her bedroom. And into the soft, controlled shutting of the
door she put more exasperated vehemence than would have sufficed to bang
it off its hinges.


II

At this date, late October in 1878, Hilda was within a few weeks of
twenty-one. She was a woman, but she could not realize that she was a
woman. She remembered that when she first went to school, at the age of
eight, an assistant teacher aged nineteen had seemed to her to be
unquestionably and absolutely a woman, had seemed to belong definitely
to a previous generation. The years had passed, and Hilda was now older
than that mature woman was then; and yet she could not feel adult,
though her childhood gleamed dimly afar off, and though the intervening
expanse of ten years stretched out like a hundred years, like eternity.
She was in trouble; the trouble grew daily more and more tragic; and the
trouble was that she wanted she knew not what. If her mother had said to
her squarely, "Tell me what it is will make you a bit more contented,
and you shall have it even if it kills me!" Hilda could only have
answered with the fervour of despair, "I don't know! I don't know!"

Her mother was a creature contented enough. And why not--with a
sufficient income, a comfortable home, and fair health? At the end of a
day devoted partly to sheer vacuous idleness and partly to the
monotonous simple machinery of physical existence--everlasting cookery,
everlasting cleanliness, everlasting stitchery--her mother did not with
a yearning sigh demand, "Must this sort of thing continue for ever, or
will a new era dawn?" Not a bit! Mrs. Lessways went to bed in the placid
expectancy of a very similar day on the morrow, and of an interminable
succession of such days. The which was incomprehensible and offensive to
Hilda.

She was in a prison with her mother, and saw no method of escape, saw
not so much as a locked door, saw nothing but blank walls. Even could
she by a miracle break prison, where should she look for the unknown
object of her desire, and for what should she look? Enigmas! It is true
that she read, occasionally with feverish enjoyment, especially verse.
But she did not and could not read enough. Of the shelf-ful of books
which in thirty years had drifted by one accident or another into the
Lessways household, she had read every volume, except Cruden's
Concordance. A heterogeneous and forlorn assemblage! Lavater's
_Physiognomy_, in a translation and in full calf! Thomson's _Seasons_,
which had thrilled her by its romantic beauty! Mrs. Henry Wood's
_Danesbury House_, and one or two novels by Charlotte M. Yonge and Dinah
Maria Craik, which she had gulped eagerly down for the mere interest of
their stories. Disraeli's _Ixion_, which she had admired without
understanding it. A _History of the North American Indians!_ These were
the more exciting items of the set. The most exciting of all was a green
volume of Tennyson's containing _Maud_. She knew _Maud_ by heart. By
simple unpleasant obstinacy she had forced her mother to give her this
volume for a birthday present, having seen a quotation from it in a
ladies' magazine. At that date in Turnhill, as in many other towns of
England, the poem had not yet lived down a reputation for immorality;
but fortunately Mrs. Lessways had only the vaguest notion of its
dangerousness, and was indeed a negligent kind of woman. Dangerous the
book was! Once in reciting it aloud in her room, Hilda had come so near
to fainting that she had had to stop and lie down on the bed, until she
could convince herself that she was not the male lover crying to his
beloved. An astounding and fearful experience, and not to be too lightly
renewed! For Hilda, _Maud_ was a source of lovely and exquisite pain.

Why had she not used her force of character to obtain more books? One
reason lay in the excessive difficulty to be faced. Birthdays are
infrequent; and besides, the enterprise of purchasing _Maud_ had proved
so complicated and tedious that Mrs. Lessways, with that curious
stiffness which marked her sometimes, had sworn never to attempt to buy
another book. Turnhill, a town of fifteen thousand persons, had no
bookseller; the only bookseller that Mrs. Lessways had ever heard of did
business at Oldcastle. Mrs. Lessways had journeyed twice over the
Hillport ridge to Oldcastle, in the odd quest of a book called _Maud_ by
"Tennyson--the poet laureate"; the book had had to be sent from London;
and on her second excursion to Oldcastle Mrs. Lessways had been caught
by the rain in the middle of Hillport Marsh. No! Hilda could not easily
demand the gift of another book, when all sorts of nice, really useful
presents could be bought in the High Street. Nor was there in Turnhill a
Municipal Library, nor any public lending-library.

Yet possibly Hilda's terrific egoism might have got fresh books somehow
from somewhere, had she really believed in the virtue of books. Thus
far, however, books had not furnished her with what she wanted, and her
faith in their promise was insecure.

Books failing, might she not have escaped into some vocation? The sole
vocation conceivable for her was that of teaching, and she knew, without
having tried it, that she abhorred teaching. Further, there was no
economical reason why she should work. In 1878, unless pushed by
necessity, no girl might dream of a vocation: the idea was monstrous; it
was almost unmentionable. Still further, she had no wish to work for
work's sake. Marriage remained. But she felt herself a child, ages short
of marriage. And she never met a man. It was literally a fact that,
except Mr. Skellorn, a few tradesmen, the vicar, the curate, and a
sidesman or so, she never even spoke to a man from one month's end to
the next. The Church choir had its annual dance, to which she was
invited; but the perverse creature cared not for dancing. Her mother did
not seek society, did not appear to require it. Nor did Hilda acutely
feel the lack of it. She could not define her need. All she knew was
that youth, moment by moment, was dropping down inexorably behind her.
And, still a child in heart and soul, she saw herself ageing, and then
aged, and then withered. Her twenty-first birthday was well above the
horizon. Soon, soon, she would be 'over twenty-one'! And she was not yet
born! That was it! She was not yet born! If the passionate strength of
desire could have done the miracle time would have stood still in the
heavens while Hilda sought the way of life.

And withal she was not wholly unhappy. Just as her attitude to her
mother was self-contradictory, so was her attitude towards existence.
Sometimes this profound infelicity of hers changed its hues for an
instant, and lo! it was bliss that she was bathed in. A phenomenon which
disconcerted her! She did not know that she had the most precious of all
faculties, the power to feel intensely.


III

Mr. Skellorn did not come; he was most definitely late.

From the window of her bedroom, at the front of the house, Hilda looked
westwards up toward the slopes of Chatterley Wood, where as a child she
used to go with other children to pick the sparse bluebells that thrived
on smoke. The bailiwick of Turnhill lay behind her; and all the murky
district of the Five Towns, of which Turnhill is the northern outpost,
lay to the south. At the foot of Chatterley Wood the canal wound in
large curves on its way towards the undefiled plains of Cheshire and the
sea. On the canal-side, exactly opposite to Hilda's window, was a
flour-mill, that sometimes made nearly as much smoke as the kilns and
chimneys closing the prospect on either hand. From the flour-mill a
bricked path, which separated a considerable row of new cottages from
their appurtenant gardens, led straight into Lessways Street, in front
of Mrs. Lessways' house. By this path Mr. Skellorn should have arrived,
for he inhabited the farthest of the cottages.

Hilda held Mr. Skellorn in disdain, as she held the row of cottages in
disdain. It seemed to her that Mr. Skellorn and the cottages
mysteriously resembled each other in their primness, their smugness,
their detestable self-complacency. Yet those cottages, perhaps thirty in
all, had stood for a great deal until Hilda, glancing at them, shattered
them with her scorn. The row was called Freehold Villas: a consciously
proud name in a district where much of the land was copyhold and could
only change owners subject to the payment of 'fines' and to the feudal
consent of a 'court' presided over by the agent of a lord of the manor.
Most of the dwellings were owned by their occupiers, who, each an
absolute monarch of the soil, niggled in his sooty garden of an evening
amid the flutter of drying shirts and towels. Freehold Villas symbolized
the final triumph of Victorian economics, the apotheosis of the prudent
and industrious artisan. It corresponded with a Building Society
Secretary's dream of paradise. And indeed it was a very real
achievement. Nevertheless Hilda's irrational contempt would not admit
this. She saw in Freehold Villas nothing but narrowness (what long
narrow strips of gardens, and what narrow homes all flattened
together!), and uniformity, and brickiness, and polished brassiness, and
righteousness, and an eternal laundry.

From the upper floor of her own home she gazed destructively down upon
all that, and into the chill, crimson eye of the descending sun. Her own
home was not ideal, but it was better than all that. It was one of the
two middle houses of a detached terrace of four houses built by her
grandfather Lessways, the teapot manufacturer; it was the chief of the
four, obviously the habitation of the proprietor of the terrace. One of
the corner houses comprised a grocer's shop, and this house had been
robbed of its just proportion of garden so that the seigneurial
garden-plot might be triflingly larger than the others. The terrace was
not a terrace of cottages, but of houses rated at from twenty-six to
thirty-six pounds a year; beyond the means of artisans and petty
insurance agents and rent-collectors. And further, it was well built,
generously built; and its architecture, though debased, showed some
faint traces of Georgian amenity. It was admittedly the best row of
houses in that newly settled quarter of the town. In coming to it out of
Freehold Villas Mr. Skellorn obviously came to something superior,
wider, more liberal.

Suddenly Hilda heard her mother's voice, in a rather startled
conversational tone, and then another woman speaking; then the voices
died away. Mrs. Lessways had evidently opened the back door to somebody,
and taken her at once into the sitting-room. The occurrence was unusual.
Hilda went softly out on to the landing and listened, but she could
catch nothing more than a faint, irregular murmur. Scarcely had she
stationed herself on the landing when her mother burst out of the
sitting-room, and called loudly:

"Hilda!" And again in an instant, very impatiently and excitedly, long
before Hilda could possibly have appeared in response, had she been in
her bedroom, as her mother supposed her to be: "Hilda!"

Hilda could see without being seen. Mrs. Lessways' thin, wrinkled face,
bordered by her untidy but still black and glossy hair, was upturned
from below in an expression of tragic fretfulness. It was the
uncontrolled face, shamelessly expressive, of one who thinks himself
unwatched. Hilda moved silently to descend, and then demanded in a low
tone whose harsh self-possession was a reproof to that volatile
creature, her mother:

"What's the matter?"

Mrs. Lessways gave a surprised "Oh!" and like a flash her features
changed in the attempt to appear calm and collected.

"I was just coming downstairs," said Hilda. And to herself: "She's
always trying to pretend I'm nobody, but when the least thing happens
out of the way, she runs to me for all the world like a child." And as
Mrs. Lessways offered no reply, but simply stood at the foot of the
stairs, she asked again: "What is it?"

"Well," said her mother lamentably. "It's Mr. Skellorn. Here's Mrs.
Grant--"

"Who's Mrs. Grant?" Hilda inquired, with a touch of scorn, although she
knew perfectly well that Mr. Skellorn had a married daughter of that
name.

"Hsh! Hsh!" Mrs. Lessways protested, indicating the open door of the
sitting-room. "You know Mrs. Grant! It seems Mr. Skellorn has had a
paralytic stroke. Isn't it terrible?"

Hilda continued smoothly to descend the stairs, and followed her mother
into the sitting-room.




CHAPTER II
THE END OF THE SCENE


I

The linen money-bag and the account-book, proper to the last Wednesday
in the month, lay on the green damask cloth of the round table where
Hilda and her mother took their meals. A paralytic stroke had not been
drastic enough to mar Mr. Skellorn's most precious reputation for
probity and reliability. His statement of receipts and expenditure,
together with the corresponding cash, had been due at two o'clock, and
despite the paralytic stroke it was less than a quarter of an hour late.
On one side of the bag and the book were ranged the older women,--Mrs.
Lessways, thin and vivacious, and Mrs. Grant, large and solemn; and on
the other side, as it were in opposition, the young, dark, slim girl
with her rather wiry black hair, and her straight, prominent eyebrows,
and her extraordinary expression of uncompromising aloofness.

"She's just enjoying it, that's what she's doing!" said Hilda to
herself, of Mrs. Grant.

And the fact was that Mrs. Grant, quite unconsciously, did appear to be
savouring the catastrophe with pleasure. Although paralytic strokes were
more prevalent at that period than now, they constituted even then a
striking dramatic event. Moreover, they were considered as direct
visitations of God. Also there was something mysteriously and agreeably
impressive in the word 'paralytic,' which people would repeat for the
pleasure of repeating it. Mrs. Grant, over whose mighty breast flowed a
black mantle suited to the occasion, used the word again and again as
she narrated afresh for Hilda the history of the stroke.

"Yes," she said, "they came and fetched me out of my bed at three
o'clock this morning; and would you believe me, though he couldn't
hardly speak, the money and this here book was all waiting in his desk,
and he would have me come with it! And him sixty-seven! He always was
like that. And I do believe if he'd been paralysed on both sides instead
of only all down his right side, and speechless too, he'd ha' made me
understand as I must come here at two o'clock. If I'm a bit late it's
because I was kept at home with my son Enoch; he's got a whitlow that's
worrying the life out of him, our Enoch has."

Mrs. Lessways warmly deprecated any apology for inexactitude, and wiped
her sympathetic eyes.

"It's all over with father," Mrs. Grant resumed. "Doctor hinted to me
quiet-like as he'd never leave his bed again. He's laid himself down for
the rest of his days.... And he'd been warned! He'd had warnings. But
there!..."

Mrs. Grant contemplated with solemn gleeful satisfaction the
overwhelming grandeur of the disaster that had happened to her father.
The active old man, a continual figure of the streets, had been cut off
in a moment from the world and condemned for life to a mattress. She
sincerely imagined herself to be filled with proper grief; but an
aesthetic appreciation of the theatrical effectiveness of the misfortune
was certainly stronger in her than any other feeling. Observing that
Mrs. Lessways wept, she also drew out a handkerchief.

"I'm wishful for you to count the money," said Mrs. Grant. "I wouldn't
like there to be any--"

"Nay, that I'll not!" protested Mrs. Lessways.

Mrs. Grant's pressing duties necessitated her immediate departure. Mrs.
Lessways ceremoniously insisted on her leaving by the front door.

"I don't know where you'll find another rent-collector that's worth his
salt--in this town," observed Mrs. Grant, on the doorstep. "I can't
think _what_ you'll do, Mrs. Lessways!"

"I shall collect my rents myself," was the answer.

When Mrs. Grant had crossed the road and taken the bricked path leading
to the paralytic's house, Mrs. Lessways slowly shut the door and bolted
it, and then said to Hilda:

"Well, my girl, I do think you might have tried to show just a little
more feeling!"

They were close together in the narrow lobby, of which the heavy pulse
was the clock's ticking.

Hilda replied:

"You surely aren't serious about collecting those rents yourself, are
you, mother?"

"Serious? Of course I'm serious!" said Mrs. Lessways.


II

"Why shouldn't I collect the rents myself?" asked Mrs. Lessways.

This half-defiant question was put about two hours later. In the
meantime no remark had been made about the rents. Mother and daughter
were now at tea in the sitting-room. Hilda had passed the greater part
of those two hours upstairs in her bedroom, pondering on her mother's
preposterous notion of collecting the rents herself. Alone, she would
invent conversations with her mother, silencing the foolish woman with
unanswerable sarcastic phrases that utterly destroyed her illogical
arguments. She would repeat these phrases, repeat even entire
conversations, with pleasure; and, dwelling also with pleasure upon her
grievances against her mother, would gradually arrive at a state of
dull-glowing resentment. She could, if she chose, easily free her brain
from the obsession either by reading or by a sharp jerk of volition; but
often she preferred not to do so, saying to herself voluptuously: "No, I
_will_ nurse my grievance; I'll nurse it and nurse it and nurse it! It
is mine, and it is just, and anybody with any sense at all would admit
instantly that I am absolutely right." Thus it was on this afternoon.
When she came to tea her face was formidably expressive, nor would she
attempt to modify the rancour of those uncompromising features. On the
contrary, as soon as she saw that her mother had noticed her condition,
she deliberately intensified it.

Mrs. Lessways, who was incapable of sustained thought, and who had
completely forgotten and recalled the subject of the cottage-rents
several times since the departure of Mrs. Grant, nevertheless at once
diagnosed the cause of the trouble; and with her usual precipitancy
began to repulse an attack which had not even been opened. Mrs. Lessways
was not good at strategy, especially in conflicts with her daughter. She
was an ingenuous, hasty thing, and much too candidly human. And not only
was she deficient in practical common sense and most absurdly unable to
learn from experience, but she had not even the wit to cover her
shortcomings by resorting to the traditional authoritativeness of the
mother. Her brief, rare efforts to play the mother were ludicrous. She
was too simply honest to acquire stature by standing on her maternal
dignity. By a profound instinct she wistfully treated everybody as an
equal, as a fellow-creature; even her own daughter. It was not the way
to come with credit out of the threatened altercation about
rent-collecting.

As Hilda offered no reply, Mrs. Lessways said reproachfully:

"Hilda, you're too bad sometimes!" And then, after a further silence:
"Anyhow, I'm quite decided."

"Then what's the good of talking about it?" said the merciless child.

"But _why_ shouldn't I collect the rents myself? I'm not asking you to
collect them. And I shall save the five per cent., and goodness knows we
need it."

"You're more likely to lose twenty-five per cent.," said Hilda. "I'll
have some more tea, please."

Mrs. Lessways was quite genuinely scandalized. "You needn't think I
shall be easy with those Calder Street tenants, because I shan't! Not
me! I'm more likely to be too hard!"

"You'll be too hard, and you'll be too easy, too," said Hilda savagely.
"You'll lose the good tenants and you'll keep the bad ones, and the
houses will all go to rack and ruin, and then you'll sell all the
property at a loss. That's how it will be. And what shall you do if
you're not feeling well, and if it rains on Monday mornings?"

Hilda could conceive her mother forgetting all about the rents on Monday
morning, or putting them off till Monday afternoon on some grotesque
excuse. Her fancy heard the interminable complainings, devisings, futile
resolvings, of the self-appointed collector. It was impossible to
imagine a woman less fitted by nature than her mother to collect rents
from unthrifty artisans such as inhabited Calder Street. The project
sickened her. It would render the domestic existence an inferno.

As for Mrs. Lessways, she was shocked, for her project had seemed very
beautiful to her, and for the moment she was perfectly convinced that
she could collect rents and manage property as well as anyone. She was
convinced that her habits were regular, her temper firm and tactful, and
her judgment excellent. She was more than shocked; she was wounded. She
wept, as she pushed forward Hilda's replenished cup.

"You ought to take shame!" she murmured weakly, yet with certitude.

"Why?" said Hilda, feigning simplicity. "What have I said? _I_ didn't
begin. You asked me. I can't help what I think."

"It's your tone," said Mrs. Lessways grievously.


III

Despite all Hilda's terrible wisdom and sagacity, this remark of the
foolish mother's was the truest word spoken in the discussion. It was
Hilda's tone that was at the root of the evil. If Hilda, with the
intelligence as to which she was secretly so complacent, did not
amicably rule her mother, the unavoidable inference was that she was
either a clumsy or a wicked girl, or both. She indeed felt dimly that
she was a little of both. But she did not mind. Sitting there in the
small, familiar room, close to the sewing-machine, the steel fender, the
tarnished chandelier, and all the other daily objects which she at once
detested and loved, sitting close to her silly mother who angered her,
and yet in whom she recognized a quality that was mysteriously precious
and admirable, staring through the small window at the brown, tattered
garden-plot where blackened rhododendrons were swaying in the October
blast, she wilfully bathed herself in grim gloom and in an affectation
of despair.

Somehow she enjoyed the experience. She had only to tighten her
lips--and she became oblivious of her clumsiness and her cruelty,
savouring with pleasure the pain of the situation, clasping it to her!
Now and then a thought of Mr. Skellorn's tragedy shot through her brain,
and the tenderness of pity welled up from somewhere within her and
mingled exquisitely with her dark melancholy. And she found delight in
reading her poor mother like an open book, as she supposed. And all the
while her mother was dreaming upon the first year of Hilda's life,
before she had discovered that her husband's health was as unstable as
his character, and comparing the reality of the present with her early
illusions. But the clever girl was not clever enough to read just that
page.

"We ought to be everything to each other," said Mrs. Lessways, pursuing
her reflections aloud.

Hilda hated sentimentalism. She could not stand such talk.

"And you know," said Hilda, speaking very frigidly and with even more
than her usual incisive clearness of articulation, "it's not your
property. It's only yours for life. It's my property."

The mother's mood changed in a moment.

"How do you know? You've never seen your father's will." She spoke in
harsh challenge.

"No; because you've never let me see it."

"You ought to have more confidence in your mother. Your father had. And
I'm trustee and executor." Mrs. Lessways was exceedingly jealous of her
legal position, whose importance she never forgot nor would consent to
minimize.

"That's all very well, for you," said Hilda; "but if the property isn't
managed right, I may find myself slaving when I'm your age, mother. And
whose fault will it be?... However, I shall--"

"You will what?"

"Nothing."

"I suppose her ladyship will be consulting her own lawyer next!" said
Mrs. Lessways bitterly.

They looked at each other. Hilda's face flushed to a sombre red. Mrs.
Lessways brusquely left the room. Then Hilda could hear her rattling
fussily at the kitchen range. After a few minutes Hilda followed her to
the kitchen, which was now nearly in darkness. The figure of Mrs.
Lessways, still doing nothing whatever with great vigour at the range,
was dimly visible. Hilda approached her, and awkwardly touched her
shoulder.

"Mother!" she demanded sharply; and she was astonished by her
awkwardness and her sharpness.

"Is that you?" her mother asked, in a queer, foolish tone.

They kissed. Such a candid peacemaking had never occurred between them
before. Mrs. Lessways, as simple in forgiveness as in wrath, did not
disguise her pleasure in the remarkable fact that it was Hilda who had
made the overture. Hilda thought: "How strange I am! What is coming over
me?" She glanced at the range, in which was a pale gleam of red, and
that gleam, in the heavy twilight, seemed to her to be inexpressibly,
enchantingly mournful. And she herself was mournful about the future--
very mournful. She saw no hope. Yet her sadness was beautiful to her.
And she was proud.




CHAPTER III
MR. CANNON


I

A little later Hilda came downstairs dressed to go out. Her mother was
lighting a glimmer of gas in the lobby. Ere Mrs. Lessways could descend
from her tiptoes to her heels and turn round Hilda said quickly,
forestalling curiosity:

"I'm going to get that thread you want. Just give me some money, will
you?"

Nobody could have guessed from her placid tone and indifferent demeanour
that she was in a state of extreme agitation. But so it was. Suddenly,
after kissing her mother in the kitchen, she had formed a tremendous
resolve. And in a moment the resolve had possessed her, sending her
flying upstairs, and burning her into a fever, as with the assured
movements of familiarity she put on her bonnet, mantle, 'fall,' and
gloves in the darkness of the chamber. She held herself in leash while
her mother lifted a skirt and found a large loaded pocket within and a
purse in the pocket and a sixpence in the purse. But when she had shut
the door on all that interior haunted by her mother's restlessness, when
she was safe in the porch and in the windy obscurity of the street, she
yielded with voluptuous apprehension to a thrill that shook her.

"I might have tidied my hair," she thought. "Pooh! What does my hair
matter?"

Her mind was full of an adventure through which she had passed seven
years previously, when she was thirteen and a little girl at school. For
several days, then, she had been ruthlessly mortifying her mother by
complaints about the meals. Her fastidious appetite could not be suited.
At last, one noon when the child had refused the whole of a plenteous
dinner, Mrs. Lessways had burst into tears and, slapping four pennies
down on the table, had cried, "Here! I fairly give you up! Go out and
buy your own dinner! Then perhaps you'll get what you want!" And the
child, without an instant's hesitation, had seized the coins and gone
out, hatless, and bought food at a little tripe-shop that was also an
eating-house, and consumed it there; and then in grim silence returned
home. Both mother and daughter had been stupefied and frightened by the
boldness of the daughter's initiative, by her amazing, flaunting
disregard of filial decency. Mrs. Lessways would not have related the
episode to anybody upon any consideration whatever. It was a shameful
secret, never even referred to. But Mrs. Lessways had unmistakably
though indirectly referred to it when in anger she had said to her
daughter aged twenty: "I suppose her ladyship will be consulting her own
lawyer next!" Hilda had understood, and that was why she had blushed.

And now, as she turned from Lessways Street into the Oldcastle Road, on
her way to the centre of the town, she experienced almost exactly the
intense excitement of the reckless and supercilious child in quest of
its dinner. The only difference was that the recent reconciliation had
inspired her with a certain negligent compassion for her mother, with a
curious tenderness that caused her to wonder at herself.


II

The Market Square of Turnhill was very large for the size of the town.
The diminutive town hall, which in reality was nothing but a
watch-house, seemed to be a mere incident on its irregular expanse, to
which the two-storey shops and dwellings made a low border. Behind this
crimson, blue-slated border rose the loftier forms of a church and a
large chapel, situate in adjacent streets. The square was calm and
almost deserted in the gloom. It typified the slow tranquillity of the
bailiwick, which was removed from the central life of the Five Towns,
and unconnected therewith by even a tram or an omnibus. Only within
recent years had Turnhill got so much as a railway station--rail-head of
a branch line. Turnhill was the extremity of civilization in those
parts. Go northwards out of this Market Square, and you would soon find
yourself amid the wild and hilly moorlands, sprinkled with iron-and-coal
villages whose red-flaming furnaces illustrated the eternal damnation
which was the chief article of their devout religious belief. And in the
Market Square not even the late edition of the _Staffordshire Signal_
was cried, though it was discreetly on sale with its excellent sporting
news in a few shops. In the hot and malodorous candle-lit factories,
where the real strenuous life of the town would remain cooped up for
another half-hour of the evening, men and women had yet scarcely taken
to horse-racing; they would gamble upon rabbits, cocks, pigeons, and
their own fists, without the mediation of the _Signal_. The one noise in
the Market Square was the bell of a hawker selling warm pikelets at a
penny each for the high tea of the tradesmen. The hawker was a deathless
institution, a living proof that withdrawn Turnhill would continue
always to be exactly what it always had been. Still, to the east of the
Square, across the High Street, a vast space was being cleared of hovels
for the erection of a new town hall daringly magnificent.

Hilda crossed the Square, scorning it.

She said to herself: "I'd better get the thing over before I buy the
thread. I should never be able to stand Miss Dayson's finicking! I
should scream out!" But the next instant, with her passion for proving
to herself how strong she could be, she added: "Well, I just _will_ buy
the thread first!" And she went straight into Dayson's little fancy
shop, which was full of counter and cardboard boxes and Miss Dayson, and
stayed therein for at least five minutes, emerging with a miraculously
achieved leisureliness. A few doors away was a somewhat new building, of
three storeys--the highest in the Square. The ground floor was an
ironmongery; it comprised also a side entrance, of which the door was
always open. This side entrance showed a brass-plate, "Q. Karkeek,
Solicitor." And the wire-blinds of the two windows of the first floor
also bore the words: "Q. Karkeek, Solicitor. Q. Karkeek, Solicitor." The
queerness of the name had attracted Hilda's attention several years
earlier, when the signs were fresh. It was an accident that she had
noticed it; she had not noticed the door-plates or the wire-blinds of
other solicitors. She did not know Mr. Q. Karkeek by sight, nor even
whether he was old or young, married or single, agreeable or repulsive.

The side entrance gave directly on to a long flight of naked stairs, and
up these stairs Hilda climbed into the unknown, towards the redoubtable
and the perilous. "I'm bound to be seen," she said to herself, "but I
don't care, and I _don't_ care!" At the top of the stairs was a passage,
at right angles, and then a glazed door with the legend in black
letters, "Q. Karkeek, Solicitor," and two other doors mysteriously
labelled "Private." She opened the glazed door, and saw a dirty
middle-aged man on a stool, and she said at once to him, in a harsh,
clear, deliberate voice, without giving herself time to reflect:

"I want to see Mr. Karkeek."

The man stared at her sourly, as if bewildered.

She said to herself: "I shan't be able to stand this excitement much
longer."

"You can't see Mr. Karkeek," said the man. "Mr. Karkeek's detained at
Hanbridge County Court. But if you're in such a hurry like, you'd better
see Mr. Cannon. It's Mr. Cannon as they generally do see. Who d'ye come
from, miss?"

"Come from?" Hilda repeated, unnerved.

"What name?"

She had not expected this. "I suppose I shall have to tell him!" she
said to herself, and aloud: "Lessways."

"Oh! Ah!" exclaimed the man. "Bless us! Yes!" It was as if he had said:
"Of course it's Lessways! And don't I know all about _you!_" And Hilda
was overwhelmed by the sense of the enormity of the folly which she was
committing.

The man swung half round on his stool, and seized the end of an
india-rubber tube which hung at the side of the battered and littered
desk, just under a gas-jet. He spoke low, like a conspirator, into the
mouthpiece of the tube. "Miss Lessways--to see you, sir." Then very
quickly he clapped the tube to his ear and listened. And then he put it
to his mouth again and repeated: "Lessways." Hilda was agonized.

"I'll ask ye to step this way, miss," said the man, slipping off his
stool. At the same time he put a long inky penholder, which he had been
holding in his wrinkled right hand, between his teeth.

"Never," thought Hilda as she followed the clerk, in a whirl of horrible
misgivings, "never have I done anything as mad as this before! I'm under
twenty-one!"


III

There she was at last, seated in front of a lawyer in a lawyer's
office--her ladyship consulting her own lawyer! It seemed incredible! A
few minutes ago she had been at home, and now she was in a world
unfamiliar and alarming. Perhaps it was a pity that her mother had
unsuspectingly put the scheme into her head!

However, the deed was done. Hilda generally acted first and reflected
afterwards. She was frightened, but rather by the unknown than by
anything she could define.

"You've come about the property?" said Mr. Cannon amiably, in a
matter-of-fact tone.

He had deep black eyes, and black hair, like Hilda's; good, regular
teeth, and a clear complexion; perhaps his nose was rather large, but it
was straight. With his large pale hands he occasionally stroked his long
soft moustache; the chin was blue. He was smartly dressed in dark blue;
he had a beautiful neck-tie, and the genuine whiteness of his wristbands
was remarkable in a district where starched linen was usually either
grey or bluish. He was not a dandy, but he respected his person; he
evidently gave careful attention to his body; and this trait alone set
him apart among the citizens of Turnhill.

"Yes," said Hilda. She thought: "He's a very handsome man! How strange I
don't remember seeing him in the streets!" She was in awe of him. He was
indefinitely older than herself; and she felt like a child, out of place
in the easy-chair.

"I suppose it's about the rent-collecting?" he pursued.

"Yes--it is," she answered, astonished that he could thus divine her
purpose. "I mean--"

"What does your mother want to do?"

"Oh!" said Hilda, speaking low. "It's not mother. I've come to consult
you myself. Mother doesn't know. I'm nearly twenty-one, and it's really
my property, you know!" She blushed with shame.

"Ah!" he exclaimed. He tried to disguise his astonishment in an easy,
friendly smile. But he was most obviously startled. He looked at Hilda
in a different way, with a much intensified curiosity.

"Yes," she resumed. He now seemed to her more like a fellow-creature,
and less like a member of the inimical older generation.

"So you're nearly twenty-one?"

"In December," she said. "And I think under my father's will--" She
stopped, at a loss. "The fact is, I don't think mother will be quite
able to look after the property properly, and I'm afraid--you see, now
that Mr. Skellorn has had this stroke--"

"Yes," said Mr. Cannon, "I heard about that, and I was thinking perhaps
Mrs. Lessways had sent you.... We collect rents, you know."

"I see!" Hilda murmured. "Well, the truth is, mother hasn't the
slightest idea I'm here. Not the slightest! And I wouldn't hurt her
feelings for anything." He nodded sympathetically. "But I thought
something ought to be done. She's decided to collect our Calder Street
rents herself, and she isn't fitted to do it. And then there's the
question of the repairs.... I know the rents are going down. I expect
it's all mother's for life, but I want there to be something left for me
when she's gone, you see! And if--I've never seen the will. I suppose
there's no way of seeing a copy of it, somewhere?... I can't very well
ask mother again."

"I know all about the will," said Mr. Cannon.

"You do?"

Wondrous, magical man!

"Yes," he explained. "I used to be at Toms and Scoles's. I was there
when it was made. I copied it."

"Really!" She felt that he would save her, not only from any possible
unpleasant consequences of her escapade, but also from suffering
ultimate loss by reason of her mother's foolishness.

"You're quite right," he continued. "I remember it perfectly. Your
mother is what we call tenant-for-life; everything goes to you in the
end."

"Well," Hilda asked abruptly. "All I want to know is, what I can do."

"Of course, without upsetting your mother?"

He glanced at her. She blushed again.

"Naturally," she said coldly.

"You say you think the property is going down--it _is_, everybody knows
that--and your mother thinks of collecting the rents herself.... Well,
young lady, it's very difficult, very difficult, your mother being the
trustee and executor."

"Yes, that's what she's always saying--she's the trustee and executor."

"You'd better let me think it over for a day or two."

"And shall I call in again?"

"You might slip in if you're passing. I'll see what can be done. Of
course it would never do for you to have any difficulty with your
mother."

"Oh no!" she concurred vehemently. "Anything would be better than that.
But I thought there was no harm in me--"

"Certainly not."

She had a profound confidence in him. And she was very content so far
with the result of her adventure.

"I hope nobody will find out I've been here," she said timidly. "Because
if it _did_ get to mother's ears--"

"Nobody will find out," he reassured her.

Assuredly his influence was tranquillizing. Even while he insisted on
the difficulties of the situation, he seemed to be smoothing them away.
She was convinced that he would devise some means of changing her
mother's absurd purpose and of strengthening her own position. But when,
at the end of the interview, he came round the large table which
separated them, and she rose and looked up at him, close, she was
suddenly very afraid of him. He was a tall and muscular man, and he
stood like a monarch, and she stood like a child. And his gesture seemed
to say: "Yes, I know you are afraid. And I rather like you to be afraid.
But I am benevolent in the exercise of my power." Under his gaze, her
gaze fastened on the wire-blind and the dark window, and she read off
the reversed letters on the blind.

Like a mouse she escaped to the stairs. She was happy and fearful and
expectant.... It was done! She had consulted a lawyer! She was astounded
at herself.

In the Market Square it was now black night. She looked shyly up at the
lighted wire-blinds over the ironmongery. "I was there!" she said. "He
is still there." The whole town, the whole future, seemed to be drenched
now in romance. Nevertheless, the causes of her immense discontent had
not apparently been removed nor in any way modified.




CHAPTER IV
DOMESTICITY INVADED


I

Early in the afternoon, two days later, Hilda came, with an air of
reproach, into her mother's empty bedroom. Mrs. Lessways had contracted
a severe cold in the head, a malady to which she was subject and which
she accepted with fatalistic submission, even pleasurably giving herself
up to it, as a martyr to the rack. Mrs. Lessways' colds annoyed Hilda,
who out of her wisdom could always point to the precise indiscretion
which had caused them, and to whom the spectacle of a head wrapped day
and night in flannel was offensively ridiculous. Moreover, Hilda in
these crises was further and still more acutely exasperated by the
pillage of her handkerchiefs. Although she possessed a supply of
handkerchiefs far beyond her own needs, she really hated to lend to her
mother in the hour of necessity. She did lend, and she lent without
spoken protest, but with frigid bitterness. Her youthful passion for
order and efficiency was aggrieved by her mother's negligent and
inadequate arrangements for coping with the inevitable plague. She now
made a police-visit to the bedroom because she considered that her
mother had been demanding handkerchiefs at a stage too early in the
progress of the disease. Impossible that her mother should have come to
the end of her own handkerchiefs! She knew with all the certitude of her
omniscience that numerous clean handkerchiefs must be concealed
somewhere in the untidiness of her mother's wardrobe.

See her as she enters the bedroom, the principal bedroom of the house,
whose wide bed and large wardrobe recall the past when she had a father
as well as a mother, and when that bedroom awed her footsteps! A thin,
brown-frocked girl, wearing a detested but enforced small black apron;
with fine, pale, determined features, rather unfeminine hair, and
glowering, challenging black eyes. She had a very decided way of putting
down her uncoquettishly shod feet. Absurdly young, of course; wistfully
young! She was undeveloped, and did not even look nearly twenty-one. You
are at liberty to smile at her airs; at that careless critical glance
which pityingly said: "Ah! if this were my room, it would be different
from what it is;" at that serious worried expression, as if the anxiety
of the whole world's deficiencies oppressed the heart within; and at
that supreme conviction of wisdom, which after all was little but an
exaggerated perception of folly and inconsistency in others!... She is
not to be comprehended on an acquaintance of three days. Years must go
to the understanding of her. She did not understand herself. She was not
even acquainted with herself. Why! She was naive enough to be puzzled
because she felt older than her mother and younger than her beautiful
girlish complexion, simultaneously!

She opened the central mirrored door of the once formidable wardrobe,
and as she did so the image of the bed and of half the room shot across
the swinging glass, taking the place of her own reflection. And
instantly, when she inserted herself between the exposed face of the
wardrobe and its door, she was precipitated into the most secret
intimacy of her mother's existence. There was the familiar odour of old
kid gloves.... She was more intimate with her mother now than she could
ever be in talking to her. The lower part of this section of the
wardrobe consisted of three deep drawers with inset brass handles, an
exquisitely exact piece of mahogany cabinetwork. From one of the drawers
a bit of white linen untidily protruded. Her mother! The upper part was
filled with sliding trays, each having a raised edge to keep the
contents from falling out. These trays were heaped pell-mell with her
mother's personal belongings--small garments, odd indeterminate trifles,
a muff, a bundle of whalebone, veils, bags, and especially cardboard
boxes. Quantities of various cardboard boxes! Her mother kept
everything, could not bear that anything which had once been useful
should be abandoned or destroyed; whereas Hilda's propensity was to
throw away with an impatient gesture whatever threatened to be an
encumbrance. Sighing, she began to arrange the contents of the trays in
some kind of method. Incompetent and careless mother! Hilda wondered how
the old thing managed to conduct her life from day to day with even a
semblance of the decency of order. It did not occur to her that for
twenty-five years before she was born, and for a long time afterwards,
Mrs. Lessways had contrived to struggle along through the world, without
her daughter's aid, to the general satisfaction of herself and some
others. At length, ferreting on the highest shelf but one, she had the
deep, proud satisfaction of the philosopher who has correctly deduced
consequences from character. Underneath a Paisley shawl she discovered a
lost treasure of clean handkerchiefs. One, two, three, four--there were
eleven! And among them was one of her own, appropriated by her mother
through sheer inexcusable inadvertence. They had probably been lying
under the shawl for weeks, months!

Still, she did not allow herself to be vexed. Since the singular
hysterical embrace in the twilight of the kitchen, she had felt for her
mother a curious, kind, forbearing, fatalistic indulgence. "Mother is
like that, and there you are!" And further, her mood had been so changed
and uplifted by excitement and expectation that she could not be
genuinely harsh. She had been thrilled by the audacity of the visit to
Mr. Cannon. And though she hoped from it little but a negative
advantage, she was experiencing the rare happiness of adventure. She had
slipped out for a moment from the confined and stifling circle of
domestic dailiness. She had scented the feverish perfume of the world.
And she owed all this to herself alone! She meant on the morrow, while
her mother was marketing, to pursue the enterprise; the consciousness of
this intention was sweet, but she knew not why it was sweet. She only
knew that she lived in the preoccupation of a dream.

Having taken two of the handkerchiefs, she shut the wardrobe and turned
the key. She went first to her own small, prim room to restore stolen
property to its rightful place, and then she descended towards the
kitchen with the other handkerchief. Giving it to her mother, and
concealing her triumph beneath a mask of wise, long-suffering
benevolence, she would say: "I've found ten of your handkerchiefs,
mother. Here's one!" And her mother, ingenuously startled and pleased,
would exclaim: "Where, child?" And she, still controlling herself, as
befitted a superior being, would reply casually: "In your wardrobe, of
course! You stuck to it there weren't any; but I was sure there were."


II

The dialogue which actually did accompany the presentation of the
handkerchief, though roughly corresponding to her rehearsal of it, was
lacking in the dramatic pungency necessary for a really effective
triumph; the reason being that the thoughts of both mother and daughter
were diverted in different ways from the handkerchief by the presence of
Florrie in the kitchen.

Florrie was the new servant, and she had come into the house that
morning. Sponsored by an aunt who was one of the best of the Calder
Street tenants, Florrie had been accepted rather unwillingly, the
objection to her being that she was too young--thirteen and a half. Mrs.
Lessways had a vague humanitarian sentiment against the employment of
children; as for Hilda's feeling, it was at one moment more
compassionate even than her mother's, and at another almost cynically
indifferent. The aunt, however, a person of powerful common sense, had
persuaded Mrs. Lessways that the truest kindness would be to give
Florrie a trial. Florrie was very strong, and she had been brought up to
work hard, and she enjoyed working hard. "Don't you, Florrie?" "Yes,
aunt," with a delightful smiling, whispering timidity. She was the
eldest of a family of ten, and had always assisted her mother in the
management of a half-crown house and the nurture of a regiment of
infants. But at thirteen and a half a girl ought to be earning money for
her parents. Bless you! She knew what a pawnshop was, her father being
often out of a job owing to potter's asthma; and she had some knowledge
of cookery, and was in particular very good at boiling potatoes. To take
her would be a real kindness on the part of Mrs. Lessways, for the
'place' was not merely an easy place, it was a 'good' place. Supposing
that Mrs. Lessways refused to have her,--well, Florrie might go on to a
'potbank' and come to harm, or she might engage herself with
tradespeople, where notoriously the work was never finished, or she
might even be forced into a public-house. Her aunt knew that they wanted
a servant at the "Queen Adelaide," where the wages would be pretty high.
But no! No niece of hers should ever go into service at a public-house
if she could help it! What with hot rum and coffee to be ready for
customers at half-past five of a morning, and cleaning up at nights
after closing, a poor girl would never see her bed! Whereas at Mrs.
Lessways'...! So Mrs. Lessways took Florrie in order to save her from
slavery.

The slim child was pretty, with graceful and eager movements, and
certainly a rapid comprehension. Her grey eyes sparkled, and her brown
hair was coquettishly tied up, rather in the manner of a horse's tail on
May Day. She had arrived all by herself in the morning, with a tiny
bundle, and she made a remarkably neat appearance--if you did not look
at her boots, which had evidently been somebody else's a long time
before. Hilda had been clearly aware of a feeling of pleasure at the
prospect of this young girl's presence in the house.

Hilda now saw her in another aspect. She wore a large foul apron of
sacking, which made her elegant body quite shapeless, and she was
kneeling on the red-and-black tiled floor of the kitchen, with her
enormous cracked boots sticking out behind her. At one side of her was a
pail full of steaming brown water, and in her red coarse little hands,
which did not seem to belong to those gracile arms, she held a dripping
clout. In front of her, on a half-dried space of clean, shining floor,
stood Mrs. Lessways, her head wrapped in a flannel petticoat. Nearer to
the child stretched a small semi-circle of liquid mud; to the rear was
the untouched dirty floor. Florrie was looking up at her mistress with
respectful, strained attention. She could not proceed with her work
because Mrs. Lessways had chosen this moment to instruct her, with much
snuffling, in the duties and responsibilities of her position.

"Yes, mum," Florrie whispered. She seemed to be incapable of speaking
beyond a whisper. But the whisper was delicate and agreeable; and
perhaps it was a mysterious sign of her alleged unusual physical
strength.

"You'll have to be down at half-past six. Then you'll light your kitchen
fire, but of course you'll get your coal up first. And then you'll do
your boots. Now the bacon--but never mind that--either Miss Hilda or me
will be down to-morrow morning to show you."

"Yes, mum," Florrie's whisper was grateful.

"When you've got things going a bit like, you'll do your parlour--I've
told you all about that, though. But I didn't tell you--except on
Wednesdays. On Wednesdays you give your parlour a thorough turn-out
_after_ breakfast, and mind it's got to be all straight for dinner at
half-past twelve."

"Yes, mum."

"I shall show you about your fire-irons--" Mrs. Lessways was continuing
to make everything in the house the private property of Florrie, when
Hilda interrupted her about the handkerchief, and afterwards with an
exhortation to beware of the dampness of the floor, which exhortation
Mrs. Lessways faintly resented; whereupon Hilda left the kitchen; it was
always imprudent to come between Mrs. Lessways and a new servant.

Hilda remained listening in the lobby to the interminable and rambling
instruction. At length Mrs. Lessways said benevolently:

"There's no reason why you shouldn't go to bed at half-past eight, or
nine at the latest. No reason whatever. And if you're quick and handy
--and I'm sure you are--you'll have plenty of time in the afternoon for
plain sewing and darning. I shall see how you can darn," Mrs. Lessways
added encouragingly.

"Yes, mum."

Hilda's heart revolted, less against her mother's defects as an
organizer than against the odious mess of the whole business of
domesticity. She knew that, with her mother in the house, Florrie would
never get to bed at half-past eight and very seldom at nine, and that
she would never be free in the afternoons. She knew that if her mother
would only consent to sit still and not interfere, the housework could
be accomplished with half the labour that at present went to it. There
were three women in the place, or at any rate, a woman, a young woman,
and a girl--and in theory the main preoccupation of all of them was this
business of domesticity. It was, of course, ridiculous, and she would
never be able to make anyone see that it was ridiculous. But that was
not all. The very business itself absolutely disgusted her. It disgusted
her to such a point that she would have preferred to do it with her own
hands in secret rather than see others do it openly in all its squalor.
The business might be more efficiently organized--for example, there was
no reason why the sitting-room should be made uninhabitable between
breakfast and dinner once a week--but it could never be other than
odious. The kitchen floor must inevitably be washed every day by a girl
on her knees in sackcloth with terrible hands. She was witnessing now
the first stage in the progress of a victim of the business of
domesticity. To-day Florrie was a charming young creature, full of
slender grace. Soon she would be a dehumanized drudge. And Hilda could
not stop it! All over the town, in every street of the town, behind all
the nice curtains and blinds, the same hidden shame was being enacted: a
vast, sloppy, steaming, greasy, social horror--inevitable! It amounted
to barbarism, Hilda thought in her revolt. She turned from it with
loathing. And yet nobody else seemed to turn from it with loathing.
Nobody else seemed to perceive that this business of domesticity was not
life itself, was at best the clumsy external machinery of life. On the
contrary, about half the adult population worshipped it as an exercise
sacred and paramount, enlarging its importance and with positive gusto
permitting it to monopolize their existence. Nine-tenths of her mother's
conversation was concerned with the business of domesticity--and withal
Mrs. Lessways took the business more lightly than most!


III

There was an impatient knock at the front door,--rare phenomenon, but
not unknown.

Mrs. Lessways cried out thickly from the folds of her flannel petticoat:

"Hilda, just see who that is, will you?... knocking like that! Florrie
can't come."

And just as Hilda reached the front door, her mother opened the kitchen
door wide, to view the troublesome disturber and to inform him, if as
was probable he was exceeding his rights, that he would have done better
to try the back door.

It was Mr. Cannon at the front door.

Hilda heard the kitchen door slammed to behind her, but the noise was
like a hallucination in her brain. She was staggered by the apparition
of Mr. Cannon in the porch. She had vaguely wondered what he might do to
execute his promise of aid; she had felt that time was running short if
her mother was to be prevented from commencing rent-collector on the
Monday; she had perhaps ingenuously expected from him some kind of
miracle; but of a surety she had never dreamed that he would call in
person at her home. "He must be mad!" she would have exclaimed to
herself, if the grandeur of his image in her heart had not made any such
accusation impossible to her. He was not mad; he was merely inscrutable,
terrifyingly so. It was as if her adventurous audacity, personified, had
doubled back on her, and was exquisitely threatening her.

"Good afternoon!" said Mr. Cannon, smiling confidently and yet with
ceremoniousness. "Is your mother about?"

"Yes." Hilda did not know it, but she was whispering quite in the manner
of Florrie.

"Shall I come in?"

"Oh! Please do!" The words jumped out of her mouth all at once, so
anxious was she to destroy any impression conceivably made that she did
not desire him to come in.

He crossed the step and took her hand with one gesture. She shut the
door. He waited in suave silence. There was barely space for them
together in the narrow lobby, and she scarce dared look up at him. He
easily dominated her. His bigness subdued her, and the handsomeness of
his face and his attire was like a moral intimidation. He had a large
physical splendour that was well set off and illustrated by the
brilliance of his linen and his broadcloth. She was as modest as a mouse
beside him. The superior young woman, the stern and yet indulgent
philosopher, had utterly vanished, and only a poor little mouse
remained.

"Will you please come into the drawing-room?" she murmured when, after
an immense effort to keep full control of her faculties, she had decided
where he must be put.

"Thanks," he said.

As she diminished herself, with beautiful shy curves of her body,
against the wall so that he could manoeuvre his bigness through the
drawing-room doorway, he gave her a glance half benign and half politely
malicious, which seemed to say again: "I know you're afraid, and I
rather like it. But you know you needn't be."

"Please take a seat," she implored. And then quickly, as he seemed to
have no intention of speaking to her confidentially, "I'll tell mother."

Leaving the room, she saw him sink smoothly into a seat, his rich-piled
hat in one gloved hand and an ebony walking-stick in the other. His
presence had a disastrous effect on the chill, unfrequented
drawing-room, reducing it instantly to a condition of paltry shabbiness.

The kitchen door was still shut. Yes, all the squalor of the business of
domesticity must be hidden from this splendid being! Hilda went as a
criminal into the kitchen. Mrs. Lessways with violent movements
signalled her to close the door before speaking. Florrie gazed
spellbound upwards at both of them. The household was in a high fever.

"You don't mean to tell me that's Mr. Cannon!" Mrs. Lessways excitedly
whispered.

"Do--do--you know him?" Hilda faltered.

"Do I know him!... What does he want?"

"He wants to see you."

"What about?"

"I suppose it's about property or something," Hilda replied, blushing.
Never had she felt so abject in front of her mother.

Mrs. Lessways rapidly unpinned the flannel petticoat and then threw it,
with a desperate gesture of sacrifice, on to the deal table. The
situation had to be met. The resplendent male awaited her in the
death-cold room. The resplendent male had his overcoat, but she,
suffering, must face the rigour and the risk unprotected. No matter if
she caught bronchitis! The thing had to be done. Even Hilda did not
think of accusing her mother of folly. Mrs. Lessways having patted her
hair, emptied several handkerchiefs from the twin pockets of her
embroidered black apron, and, snatching at the clean handkerchief
furnished by Hilda, departed to her fate. She was certainly startled and
puzzled, but she was not a whit intimidated, and the perception of this
fact inspired Hilda with a new, reluctant respect for her mother.

Hilda, from the kitchen, heard the greetings in the drawing-room, and
then the reverberations of the sufferer's nose. She desired to go into
the drawing-room. Her mother probably expected her to go in. But she
dared not. She was afraid.

"I was wondering," said the voice of Mr. Cannon, "whether you've ever
thought of selling your Calder Street property, Mrs. Lessways." And then
the drawing-room door was closed, and the ticking of the grandfather's
clock resumed possession of the lobby.




CHAPTER V
MRS. LESSWAYS' SHREWDNESS


I

Waiting irresolute in the kitchen doorway, Hilda passed the most
thrillingly agreeable moments that destiny had ever vouchsafed to her.
She dwelt on the mysterious, attractive quality of Mr. Cannon's
voice,--she was sure that, though in speaking to her mother he was
softly persuasive, he had used to herself a tone even more intimate and
ingratiating. He and she had a secret; they were conspirators together:
which fact was both disconcerting and delicious. She recalled their
propinquity in the lobby; the remembered syllables which he had uttered
mingled with the faint scent of his broadcloth, the whiteness of his
wristbands, the gleam of his studs, the droop of his moustaches, the
downward ray of his glance, and the proud, nimble carriage of his great
limbs,--and formed in her mind the image of an ideal. An image regarded
not with any tenderness, but with naive admiration, and unquestioning
respect! And yet also with more than that, for when she dwelt on his
glance, she had a slight transient feeling of faintness which came and
went in a second, and which she did not analyse--and could not have
analysed.

Clouds of fear sailed in swift capriciousness across the sky of her
dreaming, obscuring it: fear of Mr. Cannon's breath-taking initiative,
fear of the upshot of her adventure, and a fear without a name.
Nevertheless she exulted. She exulted because she was in the very midst
of her wondrous adventure and tingling with a thousand apprehensions.

After a long time the latch of the drawing-room door cracked warningly.
Hilda retired within the kitchen out of sight of the lobby. She knew
that the child in her would compel her to wait like a child until the
visitor was gone, instead of issuing forth boldly like a young woman.
But to Florrie the young mistress with her stern dark mask and
formidable eyebrows and air of superb disdain was as august as a
goddess. Florrie, moving backwards, had now got nearly to the scullery
door with her wringing and splashing and wiping; and she had dirtied
even her face. As Hilda absently looked at her, she thought somehow of
Mr. Cannon's white wristbands. She saw the washing and the ironing of
those wristbands, and a slatternly woman or two sighing and grumbling
amid wreaths of steam, and a background of cinders and suds and
sloppiness.... All that, so that the grand creature might have a rim of
pure white to his coat-sleeves for a day! It was inevitable. But the
grand creature must never know. The shame necessary to his splendour
must be concealed from him, lest he might be offended. And this was
woman's loyalty! Her ideas concerning the business of domesticity were
now mixed and opposing and irreconcileable, and she began to suspect
that the bases of society might be more complex and confusing than in
her youthful downrightness she had imagined.


II

"Well, you've got your way!" said Mrs. Lessways, with a certain grim,
disdainful cheerfulness, from which benevolence was not quite absent.
The drastic treatment accorded to her cold seemed to have done it good.
At any rate she had not resumed the flannel petticoat, and the nasal
symptoms were much less pronounced.

"Got my way?" Hilda repeated, at a loss and newly apprehensive.

Mother and daughter were setting tea. Florrie had been doing very well,
but she was not yet quite equal to her situation, and the mistresses
were now performing her lighter duties while she changed from the
offensive drudge to the neat parlour-maid. Throughout the afternoon
Hilda had avoided her mother's sight; partly because she wanted to be
alone (without knowing why), and partly because she was afraid lest Mr.
Cannon, as a member of the older generation, might have betrayed her to
her mother. This fear was not very genuine, though she pretended that it
was and enjoyed playing with it: as if she really desired a catastrophe
for the outcome of her adventure. She had only come downstairs in
response to her mother's direct summons, and instantly on seeing her she
had known that Mr. Cannon was not a traitor. Which knowledge somehow
rendered her gay in spite of herself. So that, what with this gaiety,
and the stimulation produced in Mrs. Lessways by the visit of Mr.
Cannon, and the general household relief at the obvious fact that
Florrie would rather more than 'do,' the atmosphere around the tinkling
tea-table in the half-light was decidedly pleasant.

Nevertheless the singular turn of Mrs. Lessways' phrase,--"You've got
your way,"--had startled the guilty Hilda.

"Mr. Cannon's going to see to the collecting of the Calder Street
rents," explained Mrs. Lessways. "So I hope you're satisfied, miss."

Hilda was aware of self-consciousness.

"Yes, you may well colour up!" Mrs. Lessways pursued, genial but
malicious. "You're as pleased as Punch, and you're saying to yourself
you've made your old mother give way to ye again! And so you needn't
tell me!"

"I thought," said Hilda, with all possible prim worldliness,--"I thought
I heard him saying something about buying the property?"

Mrs. Lessways laughed, sceptically, confidently, as one who could not be
deceived. "Pooh!" she said. "That was only a try-on. That was only so
that he could begin his palaver! Don't tell me! I may be a simpleton,
but I'm not such a simpleton as he thinks for, nor as some other folks
think for, either!" (At this point Hilda had to admit that in truth her
mother was not completely a simpleton. In her mother was a vein of
perceptive shrewdness that occasionally cropped out and made all Hilda's
critical philosophy seem school-girlish.) "Do you think I don't know
George Cannon? He came here o' purpose to get that rent-collecting.
Well, he's got it, and he's welcome to it, for I doubt not he'll do it a
sight better than poor Mr. Skellorn! But he needn't hug himself that
he's been too clever for me, because he hasn't. I gave him the
rent-collecting because I thought I would!... Buy! He's no more got a
good customer for Calder Street than he's got a good customer for this
slop-bowl!"

Hilda resented this casual detraction of a being who had so deeply
impressed her. And moreover she was convinced that her mother, secretly
very flattered and delighted by the visit, was adopting a derisive
attitude in order to 'show off' before her daughter. Parents are thus
ingenuous! But she was so shocked and sneaped that she found it more
convenient to say nothing.

"George Cannon could talk the hind leg off a horse," Mrs. Lessways
continued quite happily. "And yet it isn't as if he said a great deal.
He doesn't. I'll say this for him. He's always the gentleman. And I
couldn't say as much for his sister being a lady, and I'm sorry for it.
He's the most gentlemanly man in Turnhill, and always so spruce, too!"

"His sister?"

"Well, his half-sister, since you're so particular, Miss Precise!"

"Not Miss Gailey?" said Hilda, who began faintly to recall a forgotten
fact of which she thought she had once been cognizant.

"Yes, Miss Gailey," Mrs. Lessways snapped, still very genial and
content. "I did hear she's quarrelled out and out with _him_, too, at
last!" She tightened her lips. "Draw the blind down."

Miss Gailey, a spinster of superior breeding and a teacher of dancing,
had in the distant past been an intimate friend of Mrs. Lessways. The
friendship was legendary in the house, and the grand quarrel which had
finally put an end to it dated in Hilda's early memories like a
historical event. For many years the two had not exchanged a word.

Mrs. Lessways lit the gas, and the china and the white cloth and the
coloured fruit-jelly and the silver spoons caught the light and threw it
off again, with gaiety.

"Has she swept the hearth? Yes, she has," said Mrs. Lessways, glancing
round at the red fire.

Hilda sat down to wait, folding her hands as it were in meekness. In a
few moments Florrie entered with the teapot and the hot-water jug. The
child wore proudly a new white apron that was a little too long for her,
and she smiled happily at Mrs. Lessways' brief compliment on her
appearance and her briskness. She might have been in paradise.

"Come in for your cup in three minutes," said Mrs. Lessways; and to
Hilda when Florrie had whispered and gone: "Now we shall see if she can
make tea. I told her very particularly this morning, and she seems quick
enough."

And when three minutes had expired Mrs. Lessways tasted the tea. Yes, it
was good. It was quite good. Undeniably the water had boiled within five
seconds of being poured on the leaves. There was something _in_ this
Florrie. Already she was exhibiting the mysterious quality of
efficiency. The first day, being the first day, had of course not been
without its discouraging moments, but on the whole Florrie had proved
that she could be trusted to understand, and to do things.

"Here's an extra piece of sugar for you," said Mrs. Lessways, beaming,
as Florrie left the parlour with her big breakfast-cup full of steaming
tea, to drink with the thick bread-and-butter on the scrubbed kitchen-
table, all by herself. "And don't touch the gas in the kitchen--it's
quite high enough for young eyes," Mrs. Lessways cried out after her.

"Little poppet!" she murmured to herself, maternally reflecting upon
Florence's tender youth.


III

She was happy, was Mrs. Lessways, in her domesticity. She foresaw an
immediate future that would be tranquil. She was preparing herself to
lean upon the reliability of Florrie as upon a cushion. She liked the
little poppet. And she liked well-made tea and pure jelly. And she had
settled the Calder Street problem; and incidentally Hilda was thereby
placated. Why should she not be happy? She wished for nothing else. And
she was not a woman to meet trouble half-way. One of her greatest
qualities was that she did not unduly worry. (Hilda might say that she
did not worry enough, letting things go.) In spite of her cold, she
yielded with more gusto than usual to the meal, and even said that if
Florrie 'continued to shape' they would have hot toast again. Hot toast
had long since been dropped from the menu, as an item too troublesome.
As a rule the meals were taken hurriedly and negligently, like a
religious formality which has lost its meaning but which custom insists
on.

Hilda could not but share her mother's satisfaction. She could not
entirely escape the soft influence of the tranquillity in which the
household was newly bathed. The domestic existence of unmated women
together, though it is full of secret exasperations, also has its hours
of charm--a charm honied, perverse, and unique. Hilda felt the charm.
But she was suddenly sad, and she again found pleasure in her sadness.
She was sad because her adventure was over--over too soon and too
easily. She thought, now, that really she would have preferred a
catastrophe as the end of it. She had got what she desired; but she was
no better off than she had been before the paralytic stroke of Mr.
Skellorn. Domesticity had closed in on her once more. Her secret
adventure had become sterile. Its risks were destroyed, and nothing
could spring from it. Nevertheless it lived in her heart. After all it
had been tremendous! And the virtue of audacious initiative was
miraculous!... Yes, her mother was shrewd enough--that could not be
denied--but she was not so shrewd as she imagined; for it had never
occurred to her, and it never would occur to her, even in the absurdest
dream--that the author of Mr. Cannon's visit was the girl sitting
opposite to her and delicately pecking at jelly!

"How is he Miss Gailey's half-brother?" Hilda demanded half-way through
the meal.

"Why! Mrs. Gailey--Sarah Gailey's mother, that is--married a foreigner
after her first husband died."

"But Mr. Cannon isn't a foreigner?"

"He's half a foreigner. Look at his eyes. Surely you knew all about
that, child!... No, it was before your time."

Hilda then learnt that Mrs. Gailey had married a French modeller named
Canonges, who had been brought over from Limoges (or some such sounding
place) by Peels at Bursley, the great rivals of Mintons and of
Copelands. And that in course of time the modeller had informally
changed the name to Cannon, because no one in the Five Towns could
pronounce the true name rightly. And that George Cannon, the son of the
union, had been left early an orphan.

"How did he come to be a solicitor?" Hilda questioned eagerly.

"They say he isn't really a solicitor," said Mrs. Lessways. "That is, he
hasn't passed his examinations like. But I dare say he knows as much law
as a lot of 'em, _and_ more! And he has that Mr. Karkeek to cover him
like. That's what they _say_.... He used to be a lawyer's clerk--at Toms
and Scoles's, I think it was. Then he left the district for a year or
two--or it might be several. And then his lordship comes back all of a
sudden, and sets up with Mr. Karkeek, just like that."

"Can he talk French?"

"Who? Mr. Cannon? He can talk _English_! My word, he can that! Eh, he's
a 'customer,' he is--a regular' customer'!"

Hilda, instead of being seated at the table, was away in far realms of
romance.

The startling thought occurred to her:

"Of course, he'll expect me to go and see him! He's done what I asked
him, and he'll expect me to go and see him and talk it over. And I
suppose I shall have to pay him something. I'd forgotten that, and I
ought not to have forgotten it."




CHAPTER VI
VICTOR HUGO AND ISAAC PITMAN


I

The next morning, Saturday, Hilda ran no risk in visiting Mr. Cannon.
Her mother's cold, after a fictitious improvement, had assumed an
aggravated form in order to prove that not with impunity may nature be
flouted in unheated October drawing-rooms; and Hilda had been requested
to go to market alone. She was free. And even supposing that the visit
should be observed by the curious, nobody would attach any importance to
it, because everybody would soon be aware that Mr. Cannon had assumed
charge of the Calder Street property.

Past the brass plates of Mr. Q. Karkeek, out of the straw-littered
hubbub of the market-place, she climbed the long flight of stairs
leading to the offices on the first floor. In one worsted-gloved hand
she held a market-basket of multi-coloured wicker, which dangled a
little below the frilled and flounced edge of her blue jacket. Secure in
the pocket of her valanced brown skirt--for at that time and in that
place it had not yet occurred to any woman that pockets were a
superfluity--a private half-sovereign lay in the inmost compartment of
her purse; this coin was destined to recompense Mr. Cannon. Her free
hand went up to the heavy chignon that hung uncertainly beneath her
bonnet--a gesture of coquetry which she told herself she despised.

Her face was a prim and rather forbidding mask, assuredly a mysterious
mask. She could not have explained her own feelings. She was still in
the adventure, but the end of it was immediate. She had nothing to hope
from the future. Her essential infelicity was as profound and as
enigmatic as ever. She might have said with deliberate and vehement
sincerity that she was not happy. Wise, experienced observers, studying
her as she walked her ways in the streets, might have said of her with
sympathetically sad conviction, "That girl is not happy! What a pity!"
It was so. And yet, in her unhappiness she was blest. She savoured her
unhappiness. She drank it down passionately, as though it were the very
water of life--which it was. She lived to the utmost in every moment.
The recondite romance of existence was not hidden from her. The sudden
creation--her creation--of the link with Mr. Cannon seemed to her
surpassingly strange and romantic; and in so regarding it she had no
ulterior thought whatever: she looked on it with the single-mindedness
of an artist looking on his work. And was it not indeed astounding that
by a swift caprice and stroke of audacity she should have changed and
tranquillized the ominous future for her unsuspecting mother and
herself? Was it not absolutely disconcerting that she and this Mr.
Cannon, whom she had never known before and in whom she had no other
interest, should bear between them this singular secret, at once
innocent and guilty, in the midst of the whole town so deaf and blind?


II

A somewhat shabby-genteel, youngish man appeared at the head of the
stairs; he was wearing a silk hat and a too ample frock-coat. And
immediately, from the hidden corridor at the top, she heard the voice of
Mr. Cannon, imperious:

"Karkeek!"

The shabby-genteel man stopped. Hilda wanted to escape, but she could
not, chiefly because her pride would not allow. She had to go on. She
went on, frowning.

The man vanished back into the corridor. She could hear that Mr. Cannon
had joined him in conversation. She arrived at the corridor.

"How-d'ye-do, Miss Lessways?" Mr. Cannon greeted her with calm
politeness, turning from Mr. Karkeek, who raised his hat. "Will you come
this way? One moment, Mr. Karkeek."

Through a door marked "Private" Mr. Cannon introduced Hilda straight
into his own room; then shut the door on her. He held in one hand a
large calf-bound volume, from which evidently he was expounding
something to Mr. Karkeek. The contrast between the expensive informality
of Mr. Cannon's new suit and the battered ceremoniousness of Mr.
Karkeek's struck her just as much as the contrast between their
demeanours; and she felt, vaguely, the oddness of the fact that the name
of the deferential Mr. Karkeek, and not the name of the commanding Mr.
Cannon, should be upon the door-plates and the wire-blinds of the
establishment. But of course she was not in a position to estimate the
full significance of this remarkable phenomenon. Further, though she
perfectly remembered her mother's observations upon Mr. Cannon's status,
they did not in the slightest degree damage him in her eyes--when once
those eyes had been set on him again. They seemed to her inessential.
The essential, for her, was the incontestable natural authority and
dignity of his bearing.

She sat down, self-consciously, in the chair--opposite the owner's
chair--which she had occupied at her first visit, and thus surveyed,
across the large flat desk, all the ranged documents and bundles with
the writing thereon upside down. There also was his blotting-pad, and
his vast inkstand, and his pens, and his thick diary. The disposition of
the things on the desk seemed to indicate, sharply and incontrovertibly,
that orderliness, that inexorable efficiency, which more than aught else
she admired in the external conduct of life. The spectacle satisfied
her, soothed her, and seemed to explain the attractiveness of Mr.
Cannon.

Immediately to her left was an open bookcase almost filled with heavy
volumes. The last of a uniform row of Law Reports was absent from its
place--being at that moment in the corridor, in the hands of Mr. Cannon.
The next book, a thin one, had toppled over sideways and was bridging
the vacancy at an angle; several other similar thin books filled up the
remainder of the shelf. She stared, with the factitious interest of one
who is very nervously awaiting an encounter, at the titles, and
presently deciphered the words, 'Victor Hugo,' on each of the thin
volumes. Her interest instantly became real. Characteristically abrupt
and unreflecting, she deposited her basket on the floor and, going to
the bookcase, took out the slanting volume. Its title was _Les Rayons et
Les Ombres_. She opened it by hazard at the following poem, which had no
heading and which stood, a small triptych of print, rather solitary in
the lower half of a large white page:

    Dieu qui sourit et qui donne
    Et qui vient vers qui l'attend
    Pourvu que vous soyez bonne,
            Sera content.
    Le monde ou tout etincelle,
    Mais ou rien n'est enflamme,
    Pourvu que vous soyez belle,
            Sera charme.
    Mon coeur, dans l'ombre amoureuse,
    Ou l'enivrent deux beaux yeux,
    Pourvu que tu sois heureuse,
            Sera joyeux.

That was all. But she shook as though a miracle had been enacted. Hilda,
owing partly to the fondness of an otherwise stern grandfather and
partly to the vanity of her unimportant father, had finally been sent to
a school attended by girls who on the average were a little above
herself in station--Chetwynd's, in the valley between Turnhill and
Bursley. (It was still called Chetwynd's though it had changed hands.)
Among the staff was a mistress who was known as Miss Miranda--she seemed
to have no surname. One of Miss Miranda's duties had been to teach
optional French, and one of Miss Miranda's delights had been to dictate
this very poem of Victor Hugo's to her pupils for learning by heart. It
was Miss Miranda's sole French poem, and she imposed it with unfading
delight on the successive generations whom she 'grounded' in French.
Hilda had apparently forgotten most of her French, but as she now read
the poem (for the first time in print), it re-established itself in her
memory as the most lovely verse that she had ever known, and the
recitations of it in Miss Miranda's small classroom came back to her
with an effect beautiful and tragic. And also there was the name of
Victor Hugo, which Miss Miranda's insistent enthusiasm had rendered
sublime and legendary to a sensitive child! Hilda now saw the sacred
name stamped in gold on a whole set of elegant volumes! It was
marvellous that she should have turned the page containing just that
poem! It was equally marvellous that she should have discovered the
works of Victor Hugo in the matter-of-fact office of Mr. Cannon! But was
it? Was he not half-French, and were not these books precisely a
corroboration of what her mother had told her? Mr. Cannon's origin at
once assumed for her the strange seductive hues of romance; he shared
the glory of Victor Hugo. Then the voices in the corridor ceased, and
with a decisive movement he unlatched the door. She relinquished the
book and calmly sat down as he entered.


III

"Of course, your mother's told you?"

"Yes."

"I had no difficulty at all. I just asked her what she was going to do
about the rent-collecting."

Standing up in front of Hilda, but on his own side of the desk, Mr.
Cannon smiled as a conqueror who can recount a triumph with pride, but
without conceit. She looked at him with naive admiration. To admire him
was agreeable to her; and she liked also to feel unimportant in his
presence. But she fought, unsuccessfully, against the humiliating idea
that his personal smartness convicted her of being shabby--of being even
inefficient in one department of her existence; and she could have
wished to be magnificently dressed.

"Mrs. Lessways is a very shrewd lady--very shrewd indeed!" said Mr.
Cannon, with a smile, this time, to indicate humorously that Mrs.
Lessways was not so easy to handle as might be imagined, and that even
the cleverest must mind their p's and q's with such a lady.

"Oh yes, she _is_!" Hilda agreed, with an exaggerated emphasis that
showed a lack of conviction. Indeed, she had never thought of her mother
as a _very_ shrewd lady.

Mr. Cannon continued to smile in silence upon the shrewdness of Mrs.
Lessways, giving little appreciative movements of the diaphragm, drawing
in his lips and by consequence pushing out his cheeks like a child's;
and his eyes were all the time saying lightly: "Still, I managed her!"
And while this pleasant intimate silence persisted, the noises of the
market-place made themselves prominent, quite agreeably--in particular
the hard metallic stamping and slipping, on the bricked pavement under
the window, of a team of cart-horses that were being turned in a space
too small for their grand, free movements, and the good-humoured
cracking of a whip. Again Hilda was impressed, mystically, by the
strangeness of the secret relation between herself and this splendid
effective man. There they were, safe within the room, almost on a
footing of familiar friendship! The atmosphere was different from that
of the first interview. And none knew! And she alone had brought it all
about by a simple caprice!

"I was fine and startled when I saw you at our door, Mr. Cannon!" she
said.

He might have said, "Were you? You didn't show it." She was half
expecting him to say some such thing. But he became reflective, and
began: "Well, you see--" and then hesitated.

"You didn't tell me you thought of calling."

"Well," he proceeded at last--and she could not be sure whether he was
replying to her or not--"I was pretty nearly ready to buy that Calder
Street property. And I thought I'd talk _that_ over with your mother
first! It just happened to make a good beginning, you see." He spoke
with all the flattering charm of the confidential.

Hilda flushed. Under her mother's suggestion, she had been misjudging
him. He had not been guilty of mere scheming. She was profoundly glad.
The act of apology to him, performed in her own mind, gave her a curious
delight.

"I wish she would sell," said Hilda, to whom the ownership of a slum was
obnoxious.

"Very soon your consent would be necessary to any sale."

"Really!" she exclaimed, agreeably flattered, but scarcely surprised by
this information. "I should consent quick enough! I can't bear to walk
down the street!"

He laughed condescendingly. "Well, I don't think your mother _would_
care to sell, if you ask me." He sat down.

Hilda frowned, regretting her confession and resenting his laughter.

"What will your charges be, please, Mr. Cannon?" she demanded abruptly,
and yet girlishly timid. And at the same moment she drew forth her
purse, which she had been holding ready in her hand.

For a second he thought she was referring to the price of
rent-collecting, but the appearance of the purse explained her meaning.
"Oh! There's no charge!" he said, in a low voice, seizing a penholder.

"But I must pay you something! I can't--"

"No, you mustn't!"

Their glances met in conflict across the table. She had known that he
would say exactly that. And she had been determined to insist on paying
a fee--utterly determined! But she could not, now, withstand the force
of his will. Her glance failed her. She was disconcerted by the sudden
demonstration of her inferiority. She was distressed. And then a feeling
of faintness, and the gathering of a mist in the air, positively
frightened her. The mist cleared. His glance seemed to say, with
kindness: "You see how much stronger I am than you! But you can trust
me!" The sense of adventure grew even more acute in her. She marvelled
at what life was, and hid the purse like a shame.

"It's very kind of you," she murmured.

"Not a bit!" he said. "I've got a job through this. Don't forget that.
We don't collect rents for nothing, you know--especially Calder Street
sort of rents!"

She picked up her basket and rose. He also rose.

"So you've been looking at my Victor Hugo," he remarked, putting his
right hand negligently into his pocket instead of holding it forth in
adieu.


IV

So overset was she by the dramatic surprise of his challenging remark,
and so enlightened by the sudden perception of it being perfectly
characteristic of him, that her manner changed in an instant to a
delicate, startled timidity. All the complex sensitiveness of her nature
was expressed simultaneously in the changing tints of her face, the
confusion of her eyes and her gestures, and the exquisite hesitations of
her voice as she told him about the coincidence which had brought back
to her in his office the poem of her schooldays.

He came to the bookcase and, taking out the volume, handled it
carelessly.

"I only brought these things here because they're nicely bound and fill
up the shelf," he said. "Not much use in a lawyer's office, you know!"
He glanced from the volume to her, and from her to the volume. "Ah! Miss
Miranda! Yes! Well! It isn't so wonderful as all that. My father used to
give her lessons in French. This Hugo was his. He thought a great deal
of it." Mr. Cannon's pose exhibited pride, but it was obvious that he
did not share his father's taste. His tone rather patronized his father,
and Hugo too. As he let the pages of the book slip by under his thumb,
he stopped, and with a very good French accent, quite different from
Hilda's memory of Miss Miranda's, murmured in a sort of chanting--"_Dieu
qui sourit et qui donne_."

"That's the very one!" cried Hilda.

"Ah! There you are then! You see--the bookmark was at that page." Hilda
had not noticed the thin ribbon almost concealed in the jointure of the
pages. "I wouldn't be a bit astonished if my father had lent her this
very book! Curious, isn't it?"

It was. Nevertheless, Hilda felt that his sense of the miraculousness of
life was not so keen as her own; and she was disappointed.

"I suppose you're very fond of reading?" he said.

"No, I'm not," she replied. Her spirit lifted a little courageously, to
meet his with defiance, like a ship lifting its prow above the
threatening billow. Her eyes wavered, but did not fall before his.

"Really! Now, I should have said you were a great reader. What do you do
with yourself?" He now spoke like a brother, confident of a trustful
response.

"I just waste my time," she answered coldly. She saw that he was
puzzled, interested, and piqued, and that he was examining her quite
afresh.

"Well," he said shortly, after a pause, adopting the benevolent tone of
an uncle or even a great-uncle, "you'll be getting married one of these
days."

"I don't want to get married," she retorted obstinately, and with a
harder glance.

"Then what do you want?"

"I don't know." She discovered great relief, even pleasure, in thus
callously exposing her mind to a stranger.

Tapping his teeth with one thumb, he gazed at her, apparently in
meditation upon her peculiar case. At last he said:

"I tell you what you ought to do. You ought to go in for phonography."

"Phonography?" She was at a loss.

"Yes; Pitman's shorthand, you know."

"Oh! shorthand--yes. I've heard of it. But why?"

"Why? It's going to be the great thing of the future. There never was
anything like it!" His voice grew warm and his glance scintillated. And
now Hilda understood her mother's account of his persuasiveness; she
felt the truth of that odd remark that he could talk the hind leg off a
horse.

"But does it lead to anything?" she inquired, with her strong sense of
intrinsic values.

"I should say it did!" he answered. "It leads to everything! There's
nothing it won't lead to! It's the key of the future. You'll see. Look
at Dayson. He's taken it up, and now he's giving lessons in it. He's got
a room over his aunt's. I can tell you he staggered me. He wrote in
shorthand as fast as ever I could read to him, and then he read out what
he'd written, without a single slip. I'm having one of my chaps taught.
I'm paying for the lessons. I thought of learning myself--yes, really!
Oh! It's a thing that'll revolutionize all business and secretarial work
and so on--revolutionize it! And it's spreading. It'll be the Open
Sesame to everything. Anybody that can write a hundred and twenty words
a minute'll be able to walk into any situation he wants--straight _into_
it! There's never been anything like it. Look! Here it is!"

He snatched up a pale-green booklet from the desk and opened it before
her. She saw the cryptic characters for the first time. And she saw them
with his glowing eyes. In their mysterious strokes and curves and dots
she saw romance, and the key of the future; she saw the philosopher's
stone. She saw a new religion that had already begun to work like leaven
in the town. The revelation was deliciously intoxicating. She was
converted, as by lightning. She yielded to the ecstasy of discipleship.
Here--somehow, inexplicably, incomprehensively--here was the answer to
the enigma of her long desire. And it was an answer original, strange,
distinguished, unexpected, unique; yes, and divine! How lovely, how
beatific, to be the master of this enchanted key!

"It must be very interesting!" she said, low, with the venturesome
shyness of a deer that is reassured.

"I don't mind telling you this," Mr. Cannon went on, with the fire of
the prophet. "I've got something coming along pretty soon"--he repeated
more slowly--"I've got something coming along pretty soon, where
there'll be scope for a young lady that can write shorthand _well_. I
can't tell you what it is, but it's something different from anything
there's ever been in this town; _and_ better."

His eyes masterfully held hers, seeming to say: "I'm vague. But I was
vague when I told you I'd see what could be done about your mother--and
look at what I did, and how quickly and easily I did it! When I'm vague,
it means a lot." And she entirely understood that his vagueness was
calculated--out of pride.

They talked about Mr. Dayson a little.

"I must go now," said Hilda awkwardly.

"I'd like you to take that Hugo," he said. "I dare say it would interest
you.... Remind you of old times."

"Oh no!"

"You can return it, when you like."

Her features became apologetic. She had too hastily assumed that he
wished to force a gift on her.

"Please!" he ejaculated. No abuse this time of moral authority! But an
appeal, boyish, wistful, supplicating. It was irresistible, completely
irresistible. It gave her an extraordinary sense of personal power.

He wrapped up the book for her in a sheet of blue "draft" paper that
noisily crackled. While he was doing so, a tiny part of her brain was,
as it were, automatically exploring a box of old books in the attic at
home and searching therein for a Gasc's French-English Dictionary which
she had used at school and never thought of since.

"My compliments to your mother," he said at parting.

She gazed at him questioningly.

"Oh! I was forgetting," he corrected himself, with an avuncular, ironic
smile. "You're not supposed to have seen me, are you?"

Then she was outside in the din; and from thrilling altitudes she had to
bring her mind to marketing. She hid under apples the flat blue parcel
in the basket.




CHAPTER VII
THE EDITORIAL SECRETARY


I

Arthur Dayson, though a very good shorthand writer, and not without
experience as a newspaper reporter and sub-editor, was a nincompoop.
There could be no other explanation of his bland, complacent
indifference as he sat poking at a coke stove one cold night of January,
1880, in full view of a most marvellous and ravishing spectacle. The
stove was in a room on the floor above the offices labelled as Mr. Q.
Karkeek's; its pipe, supported by wire stays, went straight up nearly to
the grimy ceiling, and then turned horizontally and disappeared through
a clumsy hole in the scorched wall. It was a shabby stove, but not more
so than the other few articles of furniture--a large table, a small
desk, three deteriorated cane-chairs, two gas brackets, and an old
copying-press on its rickety stand. The sole object that could emerge
brightly from the ordeal of the gas-flare was a splendid freshly printed
blue poster gummed with stamp-paper to the wall: which poster bore the
words, in vast capitals of two sizes: "_The Five Towns Chronicle and
Turnhill Guardian_." Copies of this poster had also been fixed, face
outwards, on the two curtainless black windows, to announce to the
Market Square what was afoot in the top storey over the ironmonger's.

A young woman, very soberly attired, was straining at the double
iron-handles of the copying-press. Some copying-presses have a screw so
accurately turned and so well oiled, and handles so massively like a
fly-wheel, that a touch will send the handles whizzing round and round
till they stop suddenly, and then one slight wrench more, and the
letters are duly copied! But this was not such a press. It had been
outworn in Mr. Karkeek's office; rust had intensified its original
defects of design, and it produced the minimum of result with the
maximum of means. Nevertheless, the young woman loved it. She clenched
her hands and her teeth, and she frowned, as though she loved it. And
when she had sufficiently crushed the letter-book in the press, she
lovingly unscrewed and drew forth the book; and with solicitude she
opened the book on the smaller table, and tenderly detached the
blotting-paper from the damp tissue paper, and at last extracted the
copied letter and examined its surface.

"Smudged!" she murmured, tragic.

And the excellent ass Dayson, always facetiously cheerful, and without a
grain of humour, remarked:

"Copiousness with the H2O, Miss Lessways, is the father of smudged
epistles. I'm ready to go through these proofs with you as soon as you
are."

He was over thirty. He had had affairs with young women. He reckoned
that there remained little for him to learn. He had deliberately watched
this young woman at the press. He had clearly seen her staring under the
gas-jet at the copied letter. And yet in her fierce muscular movements,
and in her bendings and straightenings, and in her delicate caressings,
and in her savage scowlings and wrinklings, and in her rapt gazings, and
in all her awful absorption, he had quite failed to perceive the
terrible eager outpouring of a human soul, mighty, passionate, and
wistful. He had kept his eyes on her slim bust and tight-girded waist
that sprung suddenly neat and smooth out of the curving skirt-folds, and
it had not occurred to him to exclaim even in his own heart: "With your
girlishness and your ferocity, your intimidating seriousness and your
delicious absurdity, I would give a week's wages just to take hold of
you and shake you!" No! The dolt had seen absolutely naught but a
conscientious female beginner learning the duties of the post which he
himself had baptized as that of 'editorial secretary.'


II

Hilda was no longer in a nameless trouble. She no longer wanted she knew
not what. She knew beyond all questioning that she had found that which
she had wanted. For nearly a year she had had lessons in phonography
from Miss Dayson's nephew, often as a member of a varying night-class,
and sometimes alone during the day. She could not write shorthand as
well as Mr. Dayson, and she never would, for Mr. Dayson had the
shorthand soul; but, as the result of sustained and terrific effort, she
could write it pretty well. She had grappled with Isaac Pitman as with
Apollyon and had not been worsted. She could scarcely believe that in
class she had taken down at the rate of ninety words a minute Mr.
Dayson's purposely difficult political speechifyings (which always
contained the phrase 'capital punishment,' because 'capital punishment'
was a famous grammalogue); but it was so, Mr. Dayson's watch proved it.

About half-way through the period of study, she had learnt from Mr.
Cannon, on one of his rare visits to her mother's, something about his
long-matured scheme for a new local paper. She had at once divined that
he meant to offer her some kind of a situation in the enterprise, and
she was right. Gratitude filled her. Mrs. Lessways, being one of your
happy-go-lucky, broad-minded women, with an experimental disposition--a
disposition to let things alone and see how they will turn out--had made
little objection, though she was not encouraging.

Instantly the newspaper had become the chief article of Hilda's faith.
She accepted the idea of it as a nun accepts the sacred wafer, in
ecstasy. Yet she knew little about it. She was aware that Mr. Cannon
meant to establish it first as a weekly, and then, when it had grown, to
transform it into a daily and wage war with that powerful monopolist,
_The Staffordshire Signal_, which from its offices at Hanbridge covered
the entire district. The original title had been _The Turnhill Guardian
and Five Towns General Chronicle,_ and she had approved it; but when Mr.
Cannon, with a view to the intended development, had inverted the title
to _The Five Towns Chronicle and Turnhill Guardian_, she had
enthusiastically applauded his deep wisdom. Also she had applauded his
project of moving, later on, to Hanbridge, the natural centre of the
Five Towns. This was nearly the limit of her knowledge. She neither knew
nor cared anything about the resources or the politics or the programme
or the prospects of the paper. To her all newspapers were much alike.
She did not even explore, in meditation, the extraordinary psychology of
Mr. Cannon--the man whose original energy and restless love of
initiative was leading him to found a newspaper on the top of a
successful but audaciously irregular practice as a lawyer. She
incuriously and with religious admiration accepted Mr. Cannon as she
accepted the idea of the paper. And being, of course, entirely ignorant
of journalism, she was not in a position to criticize the organizing
arrangements of the newspaper. Not that these would have seemed
excessively peculiar to anybody familiar with the haphazard
improvisations of minor journalism in the provinces! She had indeed, in
her innocence, imagined that the basic fact of a newspaper enterprise
would be a printing-press; but when Mr. Dayson, who had been on _The
Signal_ and on sundry country papers in Shropshire, assured her that the
majority of weekly sheets were printed on jobbing presses in private
hands, she corrected her foolish notion.

Her sole interest--but it was tremendous!--lay in what she herself had
to do--namely, take down from dictation, transcribe, copy, classify, and
keep letters and documents, and occasionally correct proofs. All beyond
this was misty for her, and she never adjusted her sight in order to
pierce the mist.

Save for her desire to perfect herself in her duties, she had no desire.
She was content. In the dismal, dirty, untidy, untidiable, uncomfortable
office, arctic near the windows, and tropic near the stove, with dust on
her dress and ink on her fingers and the fumes of gas in her quivering
nostrils, and her mind strained and racked by an exaggerated sense of
her responsibilities, she was in heaven! She who so vehemently objected
to the squalid mess of the business of domesticity, revelled in the
squalid mess of this business. She whose heart would revolt because
Florrie's work was never done, was delighted to wait all hours on the
convenience of men who seemed to be the very incarnation of incalculable
change and caprice. And what was she? Nothing but a clerk, at a
commencing salary of fifteen shillings per week! Ah! but she was a
priestess! She had a vocation which was unsoiled by the economic excuse.
She was a pioneer. No young woman had ever done what she was doing. She
was the only girl in the Five Towns who knew shorthand. And in a
fortnight (they said) the paper was to come out!


III

At the large table which was laden with prodigious, heterogeneous masses
of paper and general litter, she bent over the proofs by Mr. Dayson's
side. He had one proof; she had a duplicate; the copy lay between them.
It was the rough galley of a circular to the burgesses that they were
correcting together. Reading and explaining aloud, he inscribed the
cabalistic signs of correction in the margin of his proof, and she
faithfully copied them in the margin of hers, for practice.

"l.c.," he intoned.

"What does that mean?"

"Lower case," he explained grandiosely, in the naive vanity of his
knowledge. "Small letter; not a capital."

"Thank you," she said, and, writing "l.c.," noted in her striving brain
that 'lower case' meant a small letter instead of a capital; but she
knew not why, and she did not ask; the reason did not trouble her.

"I think we'll put 'enlightened' there, before 'public' Ring it, will
you?"

"Ring it? Oh! I see!"

"Yes, put a ring round the word in the margin. That's to show it isn't
the intelligent compositor's mistake, you see!"

Then there was a familiar and masterful footstep on the stairs, and the
attention of both of them wavered.


IV

Arthur Dayson and his proof-correcting lost all interest and all
importance for Hilda as Mr. Cannon came into the room. The unconscious,
expressive gesture, scornful and abrupt, with which she neglected them
might have been terribly wounding to a young man more sensitive than
Dayson. But Dayson, in his self-sufficient, good-natured mediocrity, had
the hide of an alligator. He even judged her movement quite natural, for
he was a flunkey born. Hilda gazed at her master with anxiety as he
deposited his black walking-stick in the corner behind the door and
loosed his white muffler and large overcoat (which Dayson called an
'immensikoff.') She thought the master looked tired and worried.
Supposing he fell ill at this supreme juncture! The whole enterprise
would be scotched, and not forty Daysons could keep it going! The master
was doing too much--law by day and journalism by night. They were
perhaps all doing too much, but the others did not matter. Nevertheless,
Mr. Cannon advanced to the table buoyant and faintly smiling,
straightening his shoulders back, proudly proving to himself and to them
that his individual force was inexhaustible. That straightening of the
shoulders always affected Hilda as something wistful, as almost pathetic
in its confident boyishness. It made her feel maternal and say to
herself (but not in words) with a sort of maternal superiority: "How
brave he is, poor thing!" Yes, in her heart she would apply the epithet
'poor thing' to this grand creature whose superiority she acknowledged
with more fervour than anybody. As for the undaunted straightening of
the shoulders, she adopted it, and after a time it grew to be a
characteristic gesture with her.

"Well?" Mr. Cannon greeted them.

"Well," said Arthur Dayson, with a factitious air of treating him as an
equal, "I've been round to Bennions and made it clear to him that if he
can't guarantee to run off a maximum of two thousand of an eight-page
sheet we shall have to try Clayhanger at Bursley, even if it's the last
minute."

"What did he say?"

"Grunted."

"I shall risk two thousand, any way."

"Paper delivered, governor?" Dayson asked in a low voice, leering
pawkily, as though to indicate that he was a man who could be trusted to
think of everything.

"Will be to-morrow, I think," said Mr. Cannon. "Got that letter ready,
Miss Lessways?"

Hilda sprang into life.

"Yes," she said, handing it diffidently. "But if you'd like me to do it
again--you see it's--"

"Plethora of H2O," Dayson put in, indulgent.

"Oh no!" Mr. Cannon decided. Having read the letter, he gave it to
Dayson. "It doesn't matter, but you ought to have signed it before it
was copied in the letter-book."

"Gemini! Miss!" murmured Dayson, glancing at Hilda with uplifted brows.

The fact was that both of them had forgotten this formality. Dayson took
a pen, and after describing a few flourishes in the air, about a quarter
of an inch above the level of the paper, he magnificently signed:
"Dayson & Co." Such was the title of the proprietorship. Just as Karkeek
was Mr. Cannon's dummy in the law, so was Dayson in the newspaper
business. But whereas Karkeek was privately ashamed, Dayson was proud of
his role, which gave him the illusion of power and glory.

"Just take this down, will you?" said Mr. Cannon.

Hilda grasped at her notebook and seized a pencil, and then held herself
tense to receive the message, staring downwards at the blank page.
Dayson lolled in his chair, throwing his head back. He knew that the
presence of himself, the great shorthand expert, made Hilda nervous when
she had to write from dictation; and this flattered his simple vanity.
Hilda hated and condemned her nervousness, but she could not conquer it.

Mr. Cannon, standing over the table, pushed his hat away from his broad,
shining forehead, and then, meditative, absently lifted higher his
carefully tended hand and lowered the singing gas-jet, only to raise it
again.

"Mr. Ezra Brunt. Dear Sir, Re advertisement. With reference to your
letter replying to ours in which you inquire as to the circulation of
the above newspaper, we beg to state that it is our intention to print
four thousand of--"

"Two thousand," Hilda interrupted confidently.

Unruffled, Mr. Cannon went on politely: "No--four thousand of the first
number. Our representative would be pleased to call upon you by
appointment. Respectfully yours.--You might sign that, Dayson, and get
it off to-night. Is Sowter here?"

For answer, Dayson jerked his head towards an inner door. Sowter was the
old clerk who had first received Hilda into the offices of Mr. Q.
Karkeek. He was earning a little extra money by clerical work at nights
in connection with the advertisement department of the new organ.

Mr. Cannon marched to the inner door and opened it. Then he turned and
called:

"Dayson--a moment."

"Certainly," said Dayson, jumping up. He planted his hat doggishly at
the back of his head, stuck his hands into his pockets, and swaggered
after his employer.

The inner door closed on the three men. Hilda, staring at the notebook,
blushing and nibbling at the pencil, was left alone under the gas. She
could feel her heart beating violently.




CHAPTER VIII
JANET ORGREAVE


I

"Our friend is waiting for that letter to Brunt," said Arthur Dayson,
emerging from the inner room, a little later.

"In one moment," Hilda replied coldly, though she had not begun to write
the letter.

Dayson disappeared, nodding.

She resented his referring to Mr. Cannon as 'our friend,' but she did
not know why, unless it was that she vaguely regarded it as
presumptuous, or, in the alternative, if he meant to be facetious, as
ill-bred, on the part of Arthur Dayson. She chose a sheet of paper, and
wrote the letter in longhand, as quickly as she could, but with arduous
care in the formation of every character; she wrote with the whole of
her faculties fully applied. Even in the smallest task she could not
economize herself; she had to give all or nothing. When she came to the
figures--4000--she intensified her ardour, lavishing enormous
unnecessary force: it was like a steamhammer cracking a nut. Her
conscience had instantly and finally decided against her. But she
ignored her conscience. She knew and owned that she was wrong to abet
Mr. Cannon's deception. And she abetted it. She would have abetted it if
she had believed that the act would involve her in everlasting
damnation,--not solely out of loyalty to Mr. Cannon; only a little out
of loyalty; chiefly out of mere unreasoning pride and obstinate
adherence to a decision.

The letter finished, she took it into the inner room, where the three
men sat in mysterious conclave. Mr. Cannon read it over, and then Arthur
Dayson borrowed the old clerk's vile pen and with the ceremonious delays
due to his sense of his own importance, flourishingly added the
signature.

When she came forth she heard a knock at the outer door.

"Come in," she commanded defiantly, for she was still unconsciously in
the defiant mood in which she had offered the lying letter to Mr.
Cannon.


II

A well-dressed, kind-featured, and almost beautiful young woman, of
about the same age as Hilda, opened the door, with a charming gesture of
diffidence.

For a second the two gazed at each other astounded.

"Well, Hilda, of all the--"

"Janet!"

It was an old schoolfellow, Janet Orgreave, daughter of Osmond Orgreave,
a successful architect at Bursley. Janet had passed part of her
schooldays at Chetwynd's; and with her brother Charlie she had also
attended Sarah Gailey's private dancing-class (famous throughout
Turnhill, Bursley, and Hanbridge) at the same time as Hilda. She was
known, she was almost notorious, as a universal favourite. By instinct,
without taking thought, she pleased everybody, great and small. Nature
had spoiled her, endowing her with some beauty, and undeniable elegance,
and abundant sincere kindliness. She had only to smile, and she made a
friend; it cost her nothing. She smiled now, and produced the illusion,
not merely in Hilda but in herself also, that her pleasure in this very
astonishing encounter was quite peculiarly poignant.

They shook hands, as women of the world.

"Did you know I was here?" Hilda questioned, characteristically on her
guard, with a nervous girlish movement of the leg that perhaps sinned
against the code of authentic worldliness.

"No indeed!" exclaimed Janet.

"Well, I am! I'm engaged here."

"How splendid of you!" said Janet enthusiastically, with no suggestion
whatever in her tone that Hilda's situation was odd, or of dubious
propriety, or aught but enviable.

But Hilda surveyed her with secret envy, transient yet real. In the
half-dozen years that had passed since the days of the dancing-class,
Janet had matured. She was now the finished product. She had the charm
of her sex, and she depended on it. She had grace and an overflowing
goodness. She had a smooth ease of manner. She was dignified. And, with
her furs, and her expensive veil protecting those bright apple-red
cheeks, and all the studied minor details of her costume, she was
admirably and luxuriously attired. She was the usual, as distinguished
from the unusual, woman, brought to perfection. She represented no
revolt against established custom. Doubts and longings did not beset
her. She was content within her sphere: a destined queen of the home.
And yet she could not be accused of being old-fashioned. None would dare
to despise her. She was what Hilda could never be, had never long
desired to be. She was what Hilda had definitely renounced being. And
there stood Hilda, immature, graceless, harsh, inelegant, dowdy, holding
the letter between her inky fingers, in the midst of all that hard
masculine mess,--and a part of it, the blindly devoted subaltern, who
could expect none of the ritual of homage given to women, who must sit
and work and stand and strain and say 'yes,' and pretend stiffly that
she was a sound, serviceable, thick-skinned imitation man among men! If
Hilda had been a valkyrie or a saint she might have felt no envy and no
pang. But she was a woman. Self-pity shot through her tremendous pride;
and the lancinating stab made her inattentive even to her curiosity
concerning the purpose of Janet's visit.


III

"I came to see Mr. Cannon," said Janet. "The housekeeper downstairs told
me he was here somewhere."

"He's engaged," answered Hilda in a low voice, with the devotee's
instinct to surround her superior with mystery.

"Oh!" murmured Janet, checked.

Hilda wondered furiously what she could be wanting with Mr. Cannon.

Janet recommenced: "It's really about Miss Gailey, you know."

"Yes--what?"

Hilda nodded eagerly, speaking in a tone still lower and more careful.

Janet dropped her voice accordingly: "She's Mr. Cannon's sister, of
course?"

"Half-sister."

"I mean. I've just come away from seeing her." She hesitated. "I only
heard by accident. So I came over with father. He had to come to a
meeting of the Guardians here, or something. They've quarrelled, haven't
they?"

"Who? Miss Gailey and Mr. Cannon? Well, you see, she quarrels with every
one." Hilda appeared to defend Mr. Cannon.

"I'm afraid she does, poor thing!"

"She quarrelled with mother."

"Really! when was that?"

"Oh! Years and years ago! I don't know when. I was always surprised
mother let me go to the class."

"It was very nice of your mother," said Janet, appreciative.

"Is she in trouble?" Hilda asked bluntly.

"I'm afraid she is."

"What?"

Janet suddenly gave a gesture of intimacy. "I believe she's starving!"

"Starving!" Hilda repeated in a blank whisper.

"Yes, I do! I do really believe she hasn't got enough to eat. She's
quarrelled with just about everybody there was to quarrel with. She
suffers fearfully with rheumatism. She never goes out--or scarcely
ever. You know her dancing-classes have all fallen away to nothing. I
fancy she tried taking lodgers--"

"Yes, she did. I understood she was very good at housekeeping."

"She hasn't got any lodgers now. There she is, all alone in that house,
and--"

"But she can't be _starving_!" Hilda protested. At intervals she glanced
at the inner door, alarmed.

"I really think she is," Janet persisted, softly persuasive.

"But what's to be done?"

"That's the point. I've just seen her. I went on purpose, because I'd
heard.... But I had to pretend all sorts of things to make an excuse for
myself. I couldn't offer her anything, could I? Isn't it dreadful?"

They were much worried, these two young maids, full of health and vigour
and faith, and pride and simplicity, by this startling first glimpse
into one of the nether realities of existence. And they loyally tried to
feel more worried than they actually were; they did their best, out of
sympathy, to moderate the leaping, joyous vitality that was in them,--
and did not succeed very well. They were fine, they were touching--but
they were also rather deliciously amusing--as they concentrated all
their resources of solemnity and of worldly experience on the tragic
case of the woman whom life had defeated. Hilda's memory rushed
strangely to Victor Hugo. She was experiencing the same utter
desolation--but somehow less noble--as had gripped her when she first
realized the eternal picture, in _Oceana Nox_, of the pale-fronted
widows who, tired of waiting for those whose barque had never returned
out of the tempest, talked quietly among themselves of the
lost--stirring the cinders in the fireplace and in their hearts.... Yet
Sarah Gailey was not even a widow. She was an ageing dancing-mistress.
She had once taught the grace of rhythmic movement to young limbs; and
now she was rheumatic.

"Nobody but Mr. Cannon can do anything," Janet murmured.

"I'm sure he hasn't the slightest idea--not the slightest!" said Hilda
half defensively. But she was saying to herself: "This man made me write
a lie, and now I hear that his sister is starving--in the same town!"
And she thought of his glossy opulence. "I'm quite sure of _that_!" she
repeated to Janet.

"Oh! So am I!" Janet eagerly concurred. "That's why I came.... Somebody
had to give him a hint.... I never dreamt of finding you, dear!"

"It is strange, isn't it?" said Hilda, the wondrous romance of things
seizing her. Seen afresh, through the eyes of this charming, sympathetic
acquaintance, was not Mr. Cannon's originality in engaging her
positively astounding?

"I suppose _you_ couldn't give him a hint?"

"Yes, I'll tell him," said Hilda. "Of course!" In spite of herself she
was assuming a certain proprietorship in Mr. Cannon.

"I'm so glad!" Janet replied. "It is good of you!"

"It seems to me it's you that's good, Janet," Hilda said grimly. She
thought: "Should _I_, out of simple kindliness and charity, have
deliberately come to tell a man I didn't know... that his sister was
starving? Never!"

"He's bound to see after it!" said Janet, content.

"Why, of course!" said Hilda, clinching the affair, in an intimate,
confidential murmur.

"You'll tell him to-night?"

Hilda nodded.

They exchanged a grave glance of mutual appreciation and understanding.
Each was sure of the other's high esteem. Each was glad that chance had
brought about the meeting between them. Then they lifted away their
apprehensive solicitude for Sarah Gailey, and Janet, having sighed
relief, began to talk about old times. And their voices grew louder and
more free.

"Can you tell me what time it is?" Janet asked, later. "I've broken the
spring of my watch, and I have to meet father at the station at
ten-fifteen."

"I haven't a notion!" said Hilda, rather ashamed.

"I hope it isn't ten o'clock."

"I could ask," said Hilda hesitatingly. The hour, for aught she knew,
was nine, eleven, or even midnight. She was oblivious of time.

"I'll run," said Janet, preparing to go. "I shall tell Charlie I've seen
you, next time I write to him. I'm sure he'll be glad. And you must come
to see us. You really must, now! Mother and father will be delighted. Do
you still recite, like you used to?"

Hilda shook her head, blushing.

She made no definite response to the invitation, which surprised,
agitated, and flattered her. She wanted to accept it, but she was
convinced that she never would accept it. Before departing, Janet lifted
her veil, with a beautiful gesture, and offered her lips to kiss. They
embraced affectionately. The next moment Hilda, at the top of the dim,
naked, resounding stair, was watching Janet descend--a figure infinitely
stylish and agreeable to the eye.




CHAPTER IX
IN THE STREET


I

A few minutes later, just as Hilda had sealed up the last of the
letters, Mr. Cannon issued somewhat hurriedly out of the inner room,
buttoning his overcoat at the neck.

"Good night," he said, and took his stick from the corner where he had
placed it.

"Mr. Cannon!"

"Well?"

"I wanted to speak to you."

"What is it? I'm in a hurry."

She glanced at the inner door, which he had left open. From beyond that
door came the voices of Arthur Dayson and the old clerk; Hilda lacked
the courage to cross the length of the room and deliberately close it,
and though Mr. Cannon did not seem inclined to move, his eyes followed
the direction of hers and he must have divined her embarrassment. She
knew not what to do. A crisis seemed to rise up monstrous between them,
in an instant. She was trembling, and in acute trouble.

"It's rather important," she said timidly, but not without an
unintentional violence.

"Well, to-morrow afternoon."

He, too, was apparently in a fractious state. The situation was perhaps
perilous. But she could not allow her conduct to be influenced by danger
or difficulty, which indeed nearly always had the effect of confirming
her purpose. If something had to be done, it had to be done--and let
that suffice! He waited, impatient, for her to agree and allow him to
go.

"No," she answered, with positive resentment in her clear voice. "I must
speak to you to-night. It's very important."

He made with his tongue an inarticulate noise of controlled
exasperation.

"If you've finished, put your things on and walk along with me," he
said.

She hurried to obey, and overtook him as he slowly descended the lower
flight of stairs. She had buttoned her jacket and knotted her thick
scarf, and now, with the letters pressed tightly under her arm lest they
should fall, she was pulling on her gloves.

"I have an appointment at the Saracen's," he said mildly, meaning the
Saracen's Head--the central rendezvous of the town, where Conservative
and Liberal met on neutral ground.


II

He turned to the left, toward the High Street and the great cleared
space out of which the cellarage of the new Town Hall had already been
scooped. He carried his thick gloves in his white and elegant hand, as
one who did not feel the frost. She stepped after him. Their breaths
whitened the keen air. She was extremely afraid, and considered herself
an abject coward, but she was determined to the point of desperation. He
ought to know the truth and he ought to know it at once: nothing else
mattered. She reflected in her terror: "If I don't begin right off, he
will be asking me to begin, and that will be worse than ever." She was
like one who, having boastfully undertaken to plunge into deep, cold
water from a height, has climbed to the height, and measured the fearful
distance, and is sick, and dares not leap, but knows that he must leap.

"I suppose you know Miss Gailey is practically starving," she said
abruptly, harshly, staring at the gutter.

She had leapt. Life seemed to leave her. She had not intended to use
such words, nor such a tone. She certainly did not suppose that he knew
about Miss Gailey's condition. She had affirmed to Janet Orgreave her
absolute assurance that he did not know. As for the tone, it was
accusing, it was brutal, it was full of the unconscious and terrible
clumsy cruelty of youth.

"What?" His head moved sharply sideways, to look at her.

"Miss Gailey--she's starving, it seems!" Hilda said timidly now, almost
apologetically. "I felt sure you didn't know. I thought _some_ one
should tell you."

"What do you mean--starving?" he asked gruffly.

"Not enough to eat," she replied, with the direct simplicity of a child.

"And how did this tale get about?"

"It's true," she said. "I was told to-night."

"Who told you?"

"A friend of mine--who's seen her!"

"But who?"

"It wouldn't be right for me to tell you who."

They walked on in an appalling silence to the corner of the Square and
the High Street.

"Here's the letter-box," he said, stopping.

She dropped the letters with nervous haste into the box. Then she looked
up at him appealingly. In the brightness of the starry night she saw
that his face had a sardonic, meditative smile. The middle part of the
lower lip was pushed out, while the corners were pulled down--an
expression of scornful disgust. She burst out:

"Of course, I know very well it's not your fault. I know, if you'd
_kno