Volume Four--Chapter One.

Volume Four--Chapter One.Book Four — His Start in Life.The Birthday Visit.It was Auntie Hamps’s birthday.“She must be quite fifty-nine,” said Maggie.“Oh, stuff!” Edwin contradicted her curtly. “She can’t be anything like as much as that.”Having by this positive and sharp statement disposed of the question of Mrs Hamps’s age, he bent again with eagerness to his newspaper. The “Manchester Examiner” no longer existing as a Radical organ, he read the “Manchester Guardian,” of which that morning’s issue contained a long and vivid obituary of Charles Stewart Parnell.Brother and sister were at breakfast. Edwin had changed the character of this meal. He went fasting to business at eight o’clock, opened correspondence, and gave orders to the wonderful Stifford, a person now of real importance in the firm, and at nine o’clock flew by car back to the house to eat bacon and eggs and marmalade leisurely, like a gentleman. It was known that between nine and ten he could not be seen at the shop.“Well,” Maggie continued, with her mild persistence, “Aunt Spenser told me—”“Who’s Aunt Spenser, in God’s name?”“You know—mother’s and auntie’s cousin—the fat old thing!”“Oh! Her!” He recalled one of the unfamiliar figures that had bent over his father’s coffin.“She told me auntie was either fifty-five or fifty-six, at father’s funeral. Andthat’snearly three and a half years ago. So she must be—”“Two and a half, you mean.” Edwin interrupted with a sort of savageness.“No, I don’t. It’s nearly three years since Mrs Nixon died.”Edwin was startled to realise the passage of time. But he said nothing. Partly he wanted to read in peace, and partly he did not want to admit his mistake. Bit by bit he was assuming the historic privileges of the English master of the house. He had the illusion that if only he could maintain a silence sufficiently august his error of fact and of manner would cease to be an error.“Yes; she must be fifty-nine,” Maggie resumed placidly.“I don’t care if she’s a hundred and fifty-nine!” snapped Edwin. “Any more coffee? Hot, that is.”Without moving his gaze from the paper, he pushed his cup a little way across the table.Maggie took it, her chin slightly lifting, and her cheeks showing a touch of red.“I hope you didn’t forget to order the inkstand, after all,” she said stiffly. “It’s not been sent up yet, and I want to take it down to auntie’s myself this morning. You know what a lot she thinks of such things!”It had been arranged that Auntie Hamps should receive that year a cut-glass double inkstand from her nephew and niece. The shop occasionally dealt in such articles. Edwin had not willingly assented to the choice. He considered that a cut-glass double inkstand was a vicious concession to Mrs Hamps’s very vulgar taste in knick-knacks, and, moreover, he always now discouraged retail trade at the shop. But still, he had assented, out of indolence.“Well, it won’t come till to-morrow,” he said.“But, Edwin, how’s that?”“How’s that? Well, if you want to know, I didn’t order it till yesterday. I can’t think of everything.”“It’s very annoying!” said Maggie sincerely.Edwin put on the martyr’s crown. “Some people seem to think I’ve nothing else to do down at my shop but order birthday presents,” he remarked with disagreeable sarcasm.“I think you might be a little more polite,” said Maggie.“Do you!”“Yes; I do!” Maggie insisted stoutly. “Sometimes you get positively unbearable. Everybody notices it.”“Who’s everybody?”“You never mind!”Two.Maggie tossed her head, and Edwin knew that when she tossed her head—a gesture rare with her—she was tossing the tears back from her eyes. He was more than startled, he was intimidated, by that feminine movement of the head. She was hurt. It was absurd of her to be so susceptible, but he had undoubtedly hurt her. He had been clumsy enough to hurt her. She was nearing forty, and he also was close behind her on the road to forty; she was a perfectly decent sort, and he reckoned that he, too, was a perfectly decent sort, and yet they lacked the skill not to bicker. They no longer had the somewhat noisy altercations of old days concerning real or fancied interferences with the order and privacy of Edwin’s sacred chamber, but their general demeanour to one another had dully soured. It was as if they tolerated one another, from motives of self-interest. Why should this be so? They were, at bottom, affectionate and mutually respectful. In a crisis they could and would rely on one another utterly. Why should their demeanour be so false an index to their real feelings? He supposed it was just the fault of loose habit. He did not blame her. From mere pride he blamed himself. He knew himself to be cleverer, more perceptive, wilier, than she; and he ought to have been able to muster the diplomatic skill necessary for smooth and felicitous intercourse. Any friction, whether due to her stupidity or not, was a proof of his incompetence in the art of life...“Everybody notices it!” The phrase pricked him. An exaggeration, of course! Still, a phrase that would not be dismissed by a superior curl of the lips. Maggie was not Clara, and she did not invent allegations. His fault! Yes, his fault! Beyond doubt he was occasionally gruff, he was churlish, he was porcupinish. He did not mean to be so—indeed he most honestly meant not to be so—but he was. He must change. He must turn over a new leaf. He wished it had been his own birthday, or, better still, the New Year, instead of his auntie’s birthday, so that he might have turned over a new leaf at once with due solemnity. He actually remembered a pious saw uttered over twenty years earlier by that wretch in a white tie who had damnably devised the Saturday afternoon Bible-class, a saw which he furiously scorned—“Every day begins a New Year.” Well, every day did begin a New Year! So did every minute. Why not begin a New Year then, in that minute? He had only to say in a cajoling, good-natured tone, “All right, all right! Keep your hair on, my child. I grovel!” He had only to say some such words, and the excellent, simple, unresentful Maggie would at once be appeased. It would be a demonstration of his moral strength to say them.But he could not say them.Three.Nevertheless he did seriously determine to turn over a new leaf at the very next occasion. His eyes were now following the obituary of Parnell mechanically, without transmitting any message that his preoccupied brain would seize. He had been astonished to find that Parnell was only forty-five. He thought: “Why, at my age Parnell was famous—a great man and a power!” And there was he, Edwin, eating bacon and eggs opposite his sister in the humdrum dining-room at Bleakridge. But after all, what was the matter with the dining-room? It was not the dining-room that his father had left. He had altered and improved it to suit his own taste. He was free to do so, and he had done so. He was free in every way. The division of his father’s estate according to the will had proved unjust to himself; but he had not cared in the least. He had let Albert do as Albert and Clara pleased. In the settlement Maggie had taken the house (at a figure too high), and he paid her an adequate rent for it, while she in turn paid him for her board and lodging. They were all in clover, thanks to the terrible lifelong obstinacy of the little boy from the Bastille. And Edwin had had the business unburdened. It was not growing, but it brought in more than twice as much as he spent. Soon he would be as rich as either of the girls, and that without undue servitude. He bought books surpassing those books of Tom Orgreave which had once seemed so hopelessly beyond his reach. He went to the theatre. He went to concerts. He took holidays. He had been to London, and more than once. He had a few good friends. He was his own master. Nobody dreamed of saying him nay, and no bad habits held him in subjection. Everywhere he was treated with quite notable respect. Even when, partly from negligence, and partly to hide recurring pimples, he had allowed his beard to grow, Clara herself had not dared to titter. And although he suffered from certain disorders of the blood due to lack of exercise and to his condition, his health could not be called bad. The frequency of his colds had somewhat diminished. His career, which to others probably seemed dull and monotonous, presented itself to him as almost miraculously romantic in its development.And withal he could uneasily ask himself, “Am I happy?” Maggie did not guess that, as he bent unseeing over his precious “Manchester Guardian,” he was thinking: “I must hold an inquisition upon my whole way of existence. I must see where I stand. If ever I am to be alive, I ought to be alive now. And I’m not at all sure whether I am.” Maggie never put such questions to herself. She went on in placidness from hour to hour, ruffled occasionally.Four.An unusual occurrence gave him the opportunity to turn over a new leaf immediately. The sounds of the front-door bell and of voices in the hall were followed by the proud entrance of Auntie Hamps herself into the dining-room.“Now don’t disturb yourselves, please,” Mrs Hamps entreated. She often began with this phrase.Maggie sprang up and kissed her, somewhat effusively for Maggie, and said in a quiet, restrained tone—“Many happy returns of the day, auntie.”Then Edwin rose, scraping his arm-chair backwards along the floor, and shook hands with her, and said with a guilty grin—“A long life and a merry one, auntie!”“Eh!” she exclaimed, falling back with a sigh of satisfaction into a chair by the table. “I’m sure everybody’s very kind. Will you believe me, those darling children of Clara’s were round at my house before eight o’clock this morning!”“Is Amy’s cough better?” Maggie interjected, as she and Edwin sat down.“Bless ye!” cried Auntie Hamps, “I was in such a fluster I forgot to ask the little toddler. But I didn’t hear her cough. I do hope it is. October’s a bad time for coughs to begin. I ought to have asked. But I’m getting an old woman.”“We were just arguing whether you were thirty-eight or thirty-nine, auntie,” said Edwin.“What a tease he is—with his beard!” she archly retorted. “Well, your old aunt is sixty this day.”“Sixty!” the nephew and niece repeated together in astonishment.Auntie Hamps nodded.“You’re the finest sixty I ever saw!” said Edwin, with unaffected admiration.And she was fine. The pride in her eye as she made the avowal—probably the first frank avowal of her age that had passed those lips for thirty years—was richly justified. With her clear, rosy complexion, her white regular teeth, her straight spine, her plump figure, her brilliant gaze, her rapid gestures, and that authentic hair of hers falling in Victorian curls, she offered to the world a figure that no one could regard without a physical pleasure and stimulation. And she was so shiningly correct in her black silk and black velvet, and in the massive jet at her throat, and in the slenderness of her shoe! It was useless to recall her duplicities, her mendacities, her hypocrisies, her meannesses. At any rate she could be generous at moments, and the splendour of her vitality sometimes, as now, hid all her faults. She would confess to aches and pains like other folk, bouts of rheumatism for example—but the high courage of her body would not deign to ratify such miserable statements; it haughtily repelled the touch of time; it kept at least the appearance of victory. If you did not like Auntie Hamps willingly, in her hours of bodily triumph, you had to like her unwillingly. Both Edwin and Maggie had innumerable grievances against her, but she held their allegiance, and even their warm instinctive affection, on the morning of her sixtieth birthday. She had been a lone widow ever since Edwin could remember, and yet she had continued to bloom. Nothing could desiccate nor wither her. Even her sins did not find her out. God and she remained always on the best terms, and she thrived on insincerity.Five.“There’s a little parcel for you, auntie,” said Edwin, with a particular effort to make his voice soft and agreeable. “But it’s in Manchester. It won’t be here till to-morrow. My fault entirely! You know how awful I am for putting off things.”“We quite expected it would be here to-day,” said the loyal Maggie, when most sisters—and Clara assuredly—would have said in an eager, sarcastic tone: “Yes, it’s just like Edwin, and yet I reminded him I don’t know how many times!” (Edwin felt with satisfaction that the new leaf was already turned. He was glad that he had said ‘My fault entirely.’ He now said to himself: “Maggie’s all right, and so am I. I must keep this up. Perfect nonsense, people hinting that she and I can’t get on together!”)“Please,please!” Auntie Hamps entreated. “Don’t talk about parcels!” And yet they knew that if they had not talked about a parcel the ageing lady would have been seriously wounded. “All I want is your love. You children are all I have now. And if you knew how proud I am of you all, seeing you all so nice and good, and respected in the town, and Clara’s little darlings beginning to run about, and such strong little things. If only your poor mother—!”Impossible not to be impressed by those accents! Edwin and Maggie might writhe under Auntie Hamps’s phraseology; they might remember the most horrible examples of her cant. In vain! They were impressed. They had to say to themselves: “There’s something very decent about her, after all.”Auntie Hamps looked from one to the other, and at the quiet opulence of the breakfast-table, and the spacious solidities of the room. Admiration and respect were in that eye, always too masculine to weep under emotion. Undoubtedly she was proud of her nephew and nieces. And had she not the right to be? The bearded Edwin, one of the chief tradesmen in the town, and so fond of books, such a reader, and so quiet in his habits! And the two girls, with nice independent fortunes: Clara so fruitful and so winning, and Maggie so dependable, so kind! Auntie Hamps had scarce anything else to wish for. Her ideals were fulfilled. Undoubtedly since the death of Darius her attitude towards his children had acquired even a certain humility.“Shall you be in to-morrow morning, auntie?” Maggie asked, in the constrained silence that followed Mrs Hamps’s protestations.“Yes, I shall,” said Mrs Hamps, with assurance. “I shall be mending curtains.”“Well, then, I shall call. About eleven.” Maggie turned to Edwin benevolently. “It won’t be too soon if I pop in at the shop a little before eleven?”“No,” said Edwin with equal benevolence. “It’s not often Sutton’s delivery is after ten. That’ll be all right. I’ll have it unpacked.”Six.He lit a cigarette.“Have one?” he suggested to Mrs Hamps, holding out the case.“I shall give you a rap over the knuckles in a minute,” smiled Mrs Hamps, who was now leaning an elbow on the table in easy intimacy. And she went on in a peculiar tone, low, mysterious, and yet full of vivacity: “I can’t quite make out who that little nephew is that Janet Orgreave is taking about.”“Little nephew that Janet’s taking about!” murmured Maggie, in surprise; and to Edwin, “Do you know?”Edwin shook his head. “When?” he asked.“Well, this morning,” said Mrs Hamps. “I met them as I was coming up. She was on one side of the road, and the child was on the other—just opposite Howson’s. My belief is she’d lost all control over the little jockey. Oh! A regular little jockey! You could see that at once. ‘Now, George, come along,’ she called to him. And then he shouted, ‘I want you to come on this side, auntie.’ Of course I couldn’t stop to see it out. She was so busy with him she only just moved to me.”“George? George?” Maggie consulted her memory. “How old was he, about?”“Seven or eight, I should say.”“Well, it couldn’t be one of Tom’s children. Nor Alicia’s.”“No,” said Auntie Hamps. “And I always understood that the eldest daughter’s—what’s her name?”“Marian.”“Marian’s were all girls.”“I believe they are. Aren’t they, Edwin?”“How can I tell?” said Edwin. It was a marvel to him how his auntie collected her information. Neither she nor Clara had ever been in the slightest degree familiar with the Orgreaves, and Maggie, so far as he knew, was not a gossiper. He thought he perceived, however, the explanation of Mrs Hamps’s visit. She had encountered in the street a phenomenon which would not harmonise with facts of her own knowledge, and the discrepancy had disturbed her to such an extent that she had been obliged to call in search of relief. There was that, and there was also her natural inclination to show herself off on her triumphant sixtieth birthday.“Charles Orgreave isn’t married, is he?” she inquired.“No,” said Maggie.Seven.Silence fell upon this enigma of Janet’s entirely unaccountable nephew.“Charliemaybe married,” said Edwin humorously, at length. “You never know! It’s a funny world! I suppose you’ve seen,” he looked particularly at his auntie, “that your friend Parnell’s dead?”She affected to be outraged.“I’ve seen that Parnell is dead,” she rebuked him, with solemn quietness. “I saw it on a poster as I came up. I don’t want to be uncharitable, but it was the best thing he could do. I do hope we’ve heard the last of all this Home Rule now!”Like many people Mrs Hamps was apparently convinced that the explanation of Parnell’s scandalous fall and of his early death was to be found in the inherent viciousness of the Home Rule cause, and also that the circumstances of his end were a proof that Home Rule was cursed of God. She reasoned with equal power forwards and backwards. And she was so earnest and so dignified that Edwin was sneaped into silence. Once more he could not keep from his face a look that seemed to apologise for his opinions. And all the heroic and passionate grandeur of Parnell’s furious career shrivelled up to mere sordidness before the inability of one narrow-minded and ignorant but vigorous woman to appreciate its quality. Not only did Edwin feel apologetic for himself, but also for Parnell. He wished he had not tried to be funny about Parnell; he wished he had not mentioned him. The brightness of the birthday was for an instant clouded.“I don’t know what’s coming over things!” Auntie Hamps murmured sadly, staring out of the window at the street gay with October sun shine. “What with that! And what with those terrible baccarat scandals. And now there’s this free education, that we ratepayers have to pay for. They’ll be giving the children of the working classes free meals next!” she added, with remarkably intelligent anticipation.“Oh well! Never mind!” Edwin soothed her.She gazed at him in loving reproach. And he felt guilty because he only went to chapel about once in two months, and even then from sheer moral cowardice.“Can you give me those measurements, Maggie?” Mrs Hamps asked suddenly. “I’m on my way to Brunt’s.”The women left the room together. Edwin walked idly to the window. After all, he had been perhaps wrong concerning the motive of her visit. The next moment he caught sight of Janet and the unaccountable nephew, breasting the hill from Bursley, hand in hand.

It was Auntie Hamps’s birthday.

“She must be quite fifty-nine,” said Maggie.

“Oh, stuff!” Edwin contradicted her curtly. “She can’t be anything like as much as that.”

Having by this positive and sharp statement disposed of the question of Mrs Hamps’s age, he bent again with eagerness to his newspaper. The “Manchester Examiner” no longer existing as a Radical organ, he read the “Manchester Guardian,” of which that morning’s issue contained a long and vivid obituary of Charles Stewart Parnell.

Brother and sister were at breakfast. Edwin had changed the character of this meal. He went fasting to business at eight o’clock, opened correspondence, and gave orders to the wonderful Stifford, a person now of real importance in the firm, and at nine o’clock flew by car back to the house to eat bacon and eggs and marmalade leisurely, like a gentleman. It was known that between nine and ten he could not be seen at the shop.

“Well,” Maggie continued, with her mild persistence, “Aunt Spenser told me—”

“Who’s Aunt Spenser, in God’s name?”

“You know—mother’s and auntie’s cousin—the fat old thing!”

“Oh! Her!” He recalled one of the unfamiliar figures that had bent over his father’s coffin.

“She told me auntie was either fifty-five or fifty-six, at father’s funeral. Andthat’snearly three and a half years ago. So she must be—”

“Two and a half, you mean.” Edwin interrupted with a sort of savageness.

“No, I don’t. It’s nearly three years since Mrs Nixon died.”

Edwin was startled to realise the passage of time. But he said nothing. Partly he wanted to read in peace, and partly he did not want to admit his mistake. Bit by bit he was assuming the historic privileges of the English master of the house. He had the illusion that if only he could maintain a silence sufficiently august his error of fact and of manner would cease to be an error.

“Yes; she must be fifty-nine,” Maggie resumed placidly.

“I don’t care if she’s a hundred and fifty-nine!” snapped Edwin. “Any more coffee? Hot, that is.”

Without moving his gaze from the paper, he pushed his cup a little way across the table.

Maggie took it, her chin slightly lifting, and her cheeks showing a touch of red.

“I hope you didn’t forget to order the inkstand, after all,” she said stiffly. “It’s not been sent up yet, and I want to take it down to auntie’s myself this morning. You know what a lot she thinks of such things!”

It had been arranged that Auntie Hamps should receive that year a cut-glass double inkstand from her nephew and niece. The shop occasionally dealt in such articles. Edwin had not willingly assented to the choice. He considered that a cut-glass double inkstand was a vicious concession to Mrs Hamps’s very vulgar taste in knick-knacks, and, moreover, he always now discouraged retail trade at the shop. But still, he had assented, out of indolence.

“Well, it won’t come till to-morrow,” he said.

“But, Edwin, how’s that?”

“How’s that? Well, if you want to know, I didn’t order it till yesterday. I can’t think of everything.”

“It’s very annoying!” said Maggie sincerely.

Edwin put on the martyr’s crown. “Some people seem to think I’ve nothing else to do down at my shop but order birthday presents,” he remarked with disagreeable sarcasm.

“I think you might be a little more polite,” said Maggie.

“Do you!”

“Yes; I do!” Maggie insisted stoutly. “Sometimes you get positively unbearable. Everybody notices it.”

“Who’s everybody?”

“You never mind!”

Maggie tossed her head, and Edwin knew that when she tossed her head—a gesture rare with her—she was tossing the tears back from her eyes. He was more than startled, he was intimidated, by that feminine movement of the head. She was hurt. It was absurd of her to be so susceptible, but he had undoubtedly hurt her. He had been clumsy enough to hurt her. She was nearing forty, and he also was close behind her on the road to forty; she was a perfectly decent sort, and he reckoned that he, too, was a perfectly decent sort, and yet they lacked the skill not to bicker. They no longer had the somewhat noisy altercations of old days concerning real or fancied interferences with the order and privacy of Edwin’s sacred chamber, but their general demeanour to one another had dully soured. It was as if they tolerated one another, from motives of self-interest. Why should this be so? They were, at bottom, affectionate and mutually respectful. In a crisis they could and would rely on one another utterly. Why should their demeanour be so false an index to their real feelings? He supposed it was just the fault of loose habit. He did not blame her. From mere pride he blamed himself. He knew himself to be cleverer, more perceptive, wilier, than she; and he ought to have been able to muster the diplomatic skill necessary for smooth and felicitous intercourse. Any friction, whether due to her stupidity or not, was a proof of his incompetence in the art of life...

“Everybody notices it!” The phrase pricked him. An exaggeration, of course! Still, a phrase that would not be dismissed by a superior curl of the lips. Maggie was not Clara, and she did not invent allegations. His fault! Yes, his fault! Beyond doubt he was occasionally gruff, he was churlish, he was porcupinish. He did not mean to be so—indeed he most honestly meant not to be so—but he was. He must change. He must turn over a new leaf. He wished it had been his own birthday, or, better still, the New Year, instead of his auntie’s birthday, so that he might have turned over a new leaf at once with due solemnity. He actually remembered a pious saw uttered over twenty years earlier by that wretch in a white tie who had damnably devised the Saturday afternoon Bible-class, a saw which he furiously scorned—“Every day begins a New Year.” Well, every day did begin a New Year! So did every minute. Why not begin a New Year then, in that minute? He had only to say in a cajoling, good-natured tone, “All right, all right! Keep your hair on, my child. I grovel!” He had only to say some such words, and the excellent, simple, unresentful Maggie would at once be appeased. It would be a demonstration of his moral strength to say them.

But he could not say them.

Nevertheless he did seriously determine to turn over a new leaf at the very next occasion. His eyes were now following the obituary of Parnell mechanically, without transmitting any message that his preoccupied brain would seize. He had been astonished to find that Parnell was only forty-five. He thought: “Why, at my age Parnell was famous—a great man and a power!” And there was he, Edwin, eating bacon and eggs opposite his sister in the humdrum dining-room at Bleakridge. But after all, what was the matter with the dining-room? It was not the dining-room that his father had left. He had altered and improved it to suit his own taste. He was free to do so, and he had done so. He was free in every way. The division of his father’s estate according to the will had proved unjust to himself; but he had not cared in the least. He had let Albert do as Albert and Clara pleased. In the settlement Maggie had taken the house (at a figure too high), and he paid her an adequate rent for it, while she in turn paid him for her board and lodging. They were all in clover, thanks to the terrible lifelong obstinacy of the little boy from the Bastille. And Edwin had had the business unburdened. It was not growing, but it brought in more than twice as much as he spent. Soon he would be as rich as either of the girls, and that without undue servitude. He bought books surpassing those books of Tom Orgreave which had once seemed so hopelessly beyond his reach. He went to the theatre. He went to concerts. He took holidays. He had been to London, and more than once. He had a few good friends. He was his own master. Nobody dreamed of saying him nay, and no bad habits held him in subjection. Everywhere he was treated with quite notable respect. Even when, partly from negligence, and partly to hide recurring pimples, he had allowed his beard to grow, Clara herself had not dared to titter. And although he suffered from certain disorders of the blood due to lack of exercise and to his condition, his health could not be called bad. The frequency of his colds had somewhat diminished. His career, which to others probably seemed dull and monotonous, presented itself to him as almost miraculously romantic in its development.

And withal he could uneasily ask himself, “Am I happy?” Maggie did not guess that, as he bent unseeing over his precious “Manchester Guardian,” he was thinking: “I must hold an inquisition upon my whole way of existence. I must see where I stand. If ever I am to be alive, I ought to be alive now. And I’m not at all sure whether I am.” Maggie never put such questions to herself. She went on in placidness from hour to hour, ruffled occasionally.

An unusual occurrence gave him the opportunity to turn over a new leaf immediately. The sounds of the front-door bell and of voices in the hall were followed by the proud entrance of Auntie Hamps herself into the dining-room.

“Now don’t disturb yourselves, please,” Mrs Hamps entreated. She often began with this phrase.

Maggie sprang up and kissed her, somewhat effusively for Maggie, and said in a quiet, restrained tone—

“Many happy returns of the day, auntie.”

Then Edwin rose, scraping his arm-chair backwards along the floor, and shook hands with her, and said with a guilty grin—

“A long life and a merry one, auntie!”

“Eh!” she exclaimed, falling back with a sigh of satisfaction into a chair by the table. “I’m sure everybody’s very kind. Will you believe me, those darling children of Clara’s were round at my house before eight o’clock this morning!”

“Is Amy’s cough better?” Maggie interjected, as she and Edwin sat down.

“Bless ye!” cried Auntie Hamps, “I was in such a fluster I forgot to ask the little toddler. But I didn’t hear her cough. I do hope it is. October’s a bad time for coughs to begin. I ought to have asked. But I’m getting an old woman.”

“We were just arguing whether you were thirty-eight or thirty-nine, auntie,” said Edwin.

“What a tease he is—with his beard!” she archly retorted. “Well, your old aunt is sixty this day.”

“Sixty!” the nephew and niece repeated together in astonishment.

Auntie Hamps nodded.

“You’re the finest sixty I ever saw!” said Edwin, with unaffected admiration.

And she was fine. The pride in her eye as she made the avowal—probably the first frank avowal of her age that had passed those lips for thirty years—was richly justified. With her clear, rosy complexion, her white regular teeth, her straight spine, her plump figure, her brilliant gaze, her rapid gestures, and that authentic hair of hers falling in Victorian curls, she offered to the world a figure that no one could regard without a physical pleasure and stimulation. And she was so shiningly correct in her black silk and black velvet, and in the massive jet at her throat, and in the slenderness of her shoe! It was useless to recall her duplicities, her mendacities, her hypocrisies, her meannesses. At any rate she could be generous at moments, and the splendour of her vitality sometimes, as now, hid all her faults. She would confess to aches and pains like other folk, bouts of rheumatism for example—but the high courage of her body would not deign to ratify such miserable statements; it haughtily repelled the touch of time; it kept at least the appearance of victory. If you did not like Auntie Hamps willingly, in her hours of bodily triumph, you had to like her unwillingly. Both Edwin and Maggie had innumerable grievances against her, but she held their allegiance, and even their warm instinctive affection, on the morning of her sixtieth birthday. She had been a lone widow ever since Edwin could remember, and yet she had continued to bloom. Nothing could desiccate nor wither her. Even her sins did not find her out. God and she remained always on the best terms, and she thrived on insincerity.

“There’s a little parcel for you, auntie,” said Edwin, with a particular effort to make his voice soft and agreeable. “But it’s in Manchester. It won’t be here till to-morrow. My fault entirely! You know how awful I am for putting off things.”

“We quite expected it would be here to-day,” said the loyal Maggie, when most sisters—and Clara assuredly—would have said in an eager, sarcastic tone: “Yes, it’s just like Edwin, and yet I reminded him I don’t know how many times!” (Edwin felt with satisfaction that the new leaf was already turned. He was glad that he had said ‘My fault entirely.’ He now said to himself: “Maggie’s all right, and so am I. I must keep this up. Perfect nonsense, people hinting that she and I can’t get on together!”)

“Please,please!” Auntie Hamps entreated. “Don’t talk about parcels!” And yet they knew that if they had not talked about a parcel the ageing lady would have been seriously wounded. “All I want is your love. You children are all I have now. And if you knew how proud I am of you all, seeing you all so nice and good, and respected in the town, and Clara’s little darlings beginning to run about, and such strong little things. If only your poor mother—!”

Impossible not to be impressed by those accents! Edwin and Maggie might writhe under Auntie Hamps’s phraseology; they might remember the most horrible examples of her cant. In vain! They were impressed. They had to say to themselves: “There’s something very decent about her, after all.”

Auntie Hamps looked from one to the other, and at the quiet opulence of the breakfast-table, and the spacious solidities of the room. Admiration and respect were in that eye, always too masculine to weep under emotion. Undoubtedly she was proud of her nephew and nieces. And had she not the right to be? The bearded Edwin, one of the chief tradesmen in the town, and so fond of books, such a reader, and so quiet in his habits! And the two girls, with nice independent fortunes: Clara so fruitful and so winning, and Maggie so dependable, so kind! Auntie Hamps had scarce anything else to wish for. Her ideals were fulfilled. Undoubtedly since the death of Darius her attitude towards his children had acquired even a certain humility.

“Shall you be in to-morrow morning, auntie?” Maggie asked, in the constrained silence that followed Mrs Hamps’s protestations.

“Yes, I shall,” said Mrs Hamps, with assurance. “I shall be mending curtains.”

“Well, then, I shall call. About eleven.” Maggie turned to Edwin benevolently. “It won’t be too soon if I pop in at the shop a little before eleven?”

“No,” said Edwin with equal benevolence. “It’s not often Sutton’s delivery is after ten. That’ll be all right. I’ll have it unpacked.”

He lit a cigarette.

“Have one?” he suggested to Mrs Hamps, holding out the case.

“I shall give you a rap over the knuckles in a minute,” smiled Mrs Hamps, who was now leaning an elbow on the table in easy intimacy. And she went on in a peculiar tone, low, mysterious, and yet full of vivacity: “I can’t quite make out who that little nephew is that Janet Orgreave is taking about.”

“Little nephew that Janet’s taking about!” murmured Maggie, in surprise; and to Edwin, “Do you know?”

Edwin shook his head. “When?” he asked.

“Well, this morning,” said Mrs Hamps. “I met them as I was coming up. She was on one side of the road, and the child was on the other—just opposite Howson’s. My belief is she’d lost all control over the little jockey. Oh! A regular little jockey! You could see that at once. ‘Now, George, come along,’ she called to him. And then he shouted, ‘I want you to come on this side, auntie.’ Of course I couldn’t stop to see it out. She was so busy with him she only just moved to me.”

“George? George?” Maggie consulted her memory. “How old was he, about?”

“Seven or eight, I should say.”

“Well, it couldn’t be one of Tom’s children. Nor Alicia’s.”

“No,” said Auntie Hamps. “And I always understood that the eldest daughter’s—what’s her name?”

“Marian.”

“Marian’s were all girls.”

“I believe they are. Aren’t they, Edwin?”

“How can I tell?” said Edwin. It was a marvel to him how his auntie collected her information. Neither she nor Clara had ever been in the slightest degree familiar with the Orgreaves, and Maggie, so far as he knew, was not a gossiper. He thought he perceived, however, the explanation of Mrs Hamps’s visit. She had encountered in the street a phenomenon which would not harmonise with facts of her own knowledge, and the discrepancy had disturbed her to such an extent that she had been obliged to call in search of relief. There was that, and there was also her natural inclination to show herself off on her triumphant sixtieth birthday.

“Charles Orgreave isn’t married, is he?” she inquired.

“No,” said Maggie.

Silence fell upon this enigma of Janet’s entirely unaccountable nephew.

“Charliemaybe married,” said Edwin humorously, at length. “You never know! It’s a funny world! I suppose you’ve seen,” he looked particularly at his auntie, “that your friend Parnell’s dead?”

She affected to be outraged.

“I’ve seen that Parnell is dead,” she rebuked him, with solemn quietness. “I saw it on a poster as I came up. I don’t want to be uncharitable, but it was the best thing he could do. I do hope we’ve heard the last of all this Home Rule now!”

Like many people Mrs Hamps was apparently convinced that the explanation of Parnell’s scandalous fall and of his early death was to be found in the inherent viciousness of the Home Rule cause, and also that the circumstances of his end were a proof that Home Rule was cursed of God. She reasoned with equal power forwards and backwards. And she was so earnest and so dignified that Edwin was sneaped into silence. Once more he could not keep from his face a look that seemed to apologise for his opinions. And all the heroic and passionate grandeur of Parnell’s furious career shrivelled up to mere sordidness before the inability of one narrow-minded and ignorant but vigorous woman to appreciate its quality. Not only did Edwin feel apologetic for himself, but also for Parnell. He wished he had not tried to be funny about Parnell; he wished he had not mentioned him. The brightness of the birthday was for an instant clouded.

“I don’t know what’s coming over things!” Auntie Hamps murmured sadly, staring out of the window at the street gay with October sun shine. “What with that! And what with those terrible baccarat scandals. And now there’s this free education, that we ratepayers have to pay for. They’ll be giving the children of the working classes free meals next!” she added, with remarkably intelligent anticipation.

“Oh well! Never mind!” Edwin soothed her.

She gazed at him in loving reproach. And he felt guilty because he only went to chapel about once in two months, and even then from sheer moral cowardice.

“Can you give me those measurements, Maggie?” Mrs Hamps asked suddenly. “I’m on my way to Brunt’s.”

The women left the room together. Edwin walked idly to the window. After all, he had been perhaps wrong concerning the motive of her visit. The next moment he caught sight of Janet and the unaccountable nephew, breasting the hill from Bursley, hand in hand.

Volume Four--Chapter Two.Janet’s Nephew.Edwin was a fairly conspicuous object at the dining-room window. As Janet and the child drew level with the corner her eye accidentally caught Edwin’s. He nodded, smiling, and took the cigarette out of his mouth and waved it. They were old friends. He was surprised to notice that Janet blushed and became self-conscious. She returned his smile awkwardly, and then, giving a gesture to signify her intention, she came in at the gate. Which action surprised Edwin still more. With all her little freedoms of manner, Janet was essentially a woman stately and correct, and time had emphasised these qualities in her. It was not in the least like her to pay informal, capricious calls at a quarter to ten in the morning.He went to the front door and opened it. She was persuading the child up the tiled steps. The breeze dashed gaily into the house.“Good morning. You’re out early.”“Good morning. Yes. We’ve just been down to the post-office to send off a telegram, haven’t we, George?”She entered the hall, the boy following, and shook hands, meeting Edwin’s gaze fairly. Her esteem for him, her confidence in him, shone in her troubled, candid eyes. She held herself proudly, mastering her curious constraint. “Now just see that!” she said, pointing to a fleck of black mud on the virgin elegance of her pale brown costume. Edwin thought anew, as he had often thought, that she was a distinguished and delightful piece of goods. He never ceased to be flattered by her regard. But with harsh masculine impartiality he would not minimise to himself the increasing cleft under her chin, nor the deterioration of her once brilliant complexion.“Well, young man!” Edwin greeted the boy with that insolent familiarity which adults permit themselves to children who are perfect strangers.“I thought I’d just run in and introduce my latest nephew to you,” said Janet quickly, adding, “and then that would be over.”“Oh!” Edwin murmured. “Come into the drawing-room, will you? Maggie’s upstairs.”They passed into the drawing-room, where a servant in striped print was languidly caressing the glass of a bookcase with a duster. “You can leave this a bit,” Edwin said curtly to the girl, who obsequiously acquiesced and fled, forgetting a brush on a chair.“Sit down, will you?” Edwin urged awkwardly. “And which particular nephew is this? I may tell you he’s already raised a great deal of curiosity in the town.”Janet most unusually blushed again.“Has he?” she replied. “Well, he isn’t my nephew at all really, but we pretend he is, don’t we, George? It’s cosier. This is Master George Cannon.”“Cannon? You don’t mean—”“You remember Mrs Cannon, don’t you? Hilda Lessways? Now, Georgie, come and shake hands with Mr Clayhanger.”But George would not.Two.“Indeed!” Edwin exclaimed, very feebly. He knew not whether his voice was natural or unnatural. He felt as if he had received a heavy blow with a sandbag over the heart: not a symbolic, but a real physical blow. He might, standing innocent in the street, have been staggeringly assailed by a complete stranger of mild and harmless appearance, who had then passed tranquilly on. Dizzy astonishment held him, to the exclusion of any other sentiment. He might have gasped, foolish and tottering: “Why—what’s the meaning of this? What’s happened?” He looked at the child uncomprehendingly, idiotically. Little by little—it seemed an age, and was in fact a few seconds—he resumed his faculties, and remembered that in order to keep a conventional self-respect he must behave in such a manner as to cause Janet to believe that her revelation of the child’s identity had in no way disturbed him. To act a friendly indifference seemed to him, then, to be the most important duty in life. And he knew not why.“I thought,” he said in a low voice, and then he began again, “I thought you hadn’t been seeing anything of her, of Mrs Cannon, for a long time now.”The child was climbing on a chair at the window that gave on the garden, absorbed in exploration and discovery, quite ignoring the adults. Either Janet had forgotten him, or she had no hope of controlling him and was trusting to chance that the young wild stag would do nothing too dreadful.“Well,” she admitted, “we haven’t.” Her constraint recurred. Very evidently she had to be careful about what she said. There were reasons why even to Edwin she would not be frank. “I only brought him down from London yesterday.”Edwin trembled as he put the question—“Is she here too—Mrs Cannon?”Somehow he could only refer to Mrs Cannon as “her” and “she.”“Oh no!” said Janet, in a tone to indicate that there was no possibility of Mrs Cannon being in Bursley.He was relieved. Yes, he was glad. He felt that he could not have endured the sensation of her nearness, of her actually being in the next house. Her presence at the Orgreaves’ would have made the neighbourhood, the whole town, dangerous. It would have subjected him to the risk of meeting her suddenly at any corner. Nay, he would have been forced to go in cold blood to encounter her. And he knew that he could not have borne to look at her. The constraint of such an interview would have been torture too acute. Strange, that though he was absolutely innocent, though he had done nought but suffer, he should feel like a criminal, should have the criminal’s shifting downcast glance!Three.“Auntie!” cried the boy. “Can’t I go into this garden? There’s a swing there.”“Oh no!” said Janet. “This isn’t our garden. We must go home. We only just called in. And big boys who won’t shake hands—”“Yes, yes!” Edwin dreamily stopped her. “Let him go into the garden for a minute if he wants to. You can’t run off like that! Come along, my lord.”He saw an opportunity of speaking to her out of the child’s hearing. Janet consented, perhaps divining his wish. The child turned and stared deliberately at Edwin, and then plunged forward, too eager to await guidance, towards the conquest of the garden.Standing silent and awkward in the garden porch, they watched him violently agitating the swing, a contrivance erected by a good-natured Uncle Edwin for the diversion of Clara’s offspring.“How old is he?” Edwin demanded, for the sake of saying something.“About nine,” said Janet.“He doesn’t look it.”“No, but he talks it—sometimes.”George did not in fact look his age. He was slight and small, and he seemed to have no bones—nothing but articulations that functioned with equal ease in all possible directions. His skin was pale and unhealthy. His eyes had an expression of fatigue, or he might have been ophthalmic. He spoke loudly, his gestures were brusque, and his life was apparently made up of a series of intense, absolute absorptions. The general effect of his personality upon Edwin was not quite agreeable, and Edwin’s conclusion was that George, in addition to being spoiled, was a profound and rather irritating egoist by nature.“By the way,” he murmured, “what’sMrCannon?”“Oh!” said Janet, hesitating, with emotion, “she’s a widow.”He felt sick. Janet might have been a doctor who had informed him that he was suffering from an unexpected disease, and that an operation severe and perilous lay in front of him. The impartial observer in him asked somewhat disdainfully why he should allow himself to be deranged in this physical manner, and he could only reply feebly and very meekly that he did not know. He felt sick.Suddenly he said to himself making a discovery—“Of course she won’t come to Bursley. She’d be ashamed to meet me.”“How long?” he demanded of Janet.“It was last year, I think,” said Janet, with emotion increased, her voice heavy with the load of its sympathy. When he first knew Janet an extraordinary quick generous concern for others had been one of her chief characteristics. But of late years, though her deep universal kindness had not changed, she seemed to have hardened somewhat on the surface. Now he found again the earlier Janet.“You never told me.”“The truth is, we didn’t know,” Janet said, and without giving Edwin time to put another question, she continued: “The poor thing’s had a great deal of trouble, a very great deal. George’s health, now! The sea air doesn’t suit him. And Hilda couldn’t possibly leave Brighton.”“Oh! She’s still at Brighton?”“Yes.”“Let me see—she used to be at—what was it?—Preston Street?”Janet glanced at him with interest: “What a memory you’ve got! Why, it’s ten years since she was here!”“Nearly!” said Edwin. “It just happened to stick in my mind. You remember she came down to the shop to ask me about trains and things the day she left.”“Did she?” Janet exclaimed, raising her eyebrows.Edwin had been suspecting that possibly Hilda had given some hint to Janet as to the nature of her relations with him. He now ceased to suspect that. He grew easier. He gathered up the reins again, though in a rather limp hand.“Why is she so bound to stay in Brighton?” he inquired with affected boldness.“She’s got a boarding-house.”“I see. Well, it’s a good thing she has a private income of her own.”“That’s just the point,” said Janet sadly. “We very much doubt if she has any private income any longer.”Edwin waited for further details, but Janet seemed to speak unwilling. She would follow him, but she would not lead.Four.Behind them he could hear the stir of Mrs Hamps’s departure. She and Maggie were coming down the stairs. Guessing not the dramatic arrival of Janet Orgreave and the mysterious nephew, Mrs Hamps, having peeped into the empty dining-room, said: “I suppose the dear boy has gone,” and forthwith went herself. Edwin smiled cruelly at the thought of what her joy would have been actually to inspect the mysterious nephew at close quarters, and to learn the strange suspicious truth that he was not a nephew after all.“Auntie!” yelled the boy across the garden.“Come along, we must go now,” Janet retorted.“No! I want you to swing me. Make me swing very high.”“George!”“Let him swing a bit,” said Edwin. “I’ll go and swing him.” And calling loud to the boy: “I’ll come and swing you.”“He’s dreadfully spoiled,” Janet protested. “You’ll make him worse.”“I don’t care,” said Edwin carelessly.He seemed to understand, better than he had ever done with Clara’s litter, how and why parents came to spoil their children. It was not because they feared a struggle of wills; but because of the unreasoning instinctive pleasure to be derived from the conferring of pleasure, especially when the pleasure thus conferred might involve doubtful consequences. He had not cared for the boy, did not care for him. In theory he had the bachelor’s factitious horror of a spoiled child. Nevertheless he would now support the boy against Janet. His instinct said: “He wants something. I can give it him. Let him have it. Never mind consequences. He shall have it.”He crossed the damp grass, and felt the breeze and the sun. The sky was a moving medley of Chinese white and Prussian blue, that harmonised admirably with the Indian red architecture which framed it on all sides. The high trees in the garden of the Orgreaves were turning to rich yellows and browns, and dead leaves slanted slowly down from their summits a few reaching even the Clayhanger garden, speckling its evergreen with ochre. On the other side of the west wall traps and carts rattled and rumbled and creaked along Trafalgar Road.The child had stopped swinging, and greeted him with a most heavenly persuasive grateful smile. A different child! A sudden angel, with delicate distinguished gestures! ... A wondrous screwing-up of the eyes in the sun! Weak eyes, perhaps! The thick eyebrows recalled Hilda’s. Possibly he had Hilda’s look! Or was that fancy? Edwin was sure that he would never have guessed George’s parentage.“Now!” he warned. “Hold tight.” And, going behind the boy, he strongly clasped his slim little waist in its blue sailor-cloth, and sent the whole affair—swing-seat and boy and all—flying to the skies. And the boy shrieked in the violence of his ecstasy, and his cap fell on the grass. Edwin worked hard without relaxing.“Go on! Go on!” The boy shriekingly commanded.And amid these violent efforts and brusque delicious physical contacts, Edwin was calmly penetrated and saturated by the mystic effluence that is disengaged from young children. He had seen his father dead, and had thought: “Here is the most majestic and impressive enigma that the earth can show!” But the child George—aged nine and seeming more like seven—offered an enigma surpassing in solemnity that of death. This was Hilda’s. This was hers, who had left him a virgin. With a singular thrilled impassivity he imagined, not bitterly, the history of Hilda. She who was his by word and by kiss, had given her mortal frame to the unknown Cannon—yielded it. She had conceived. At some moment when he, Edwin, was alive and suffering, she had conceived. She had ceased to be a virgin. Quickly, with an astounding quickness—for was not George nine years old?—she had passed from virginity to motherhood. And he imagined all that too; all of it; clearly. And here, swinging and shrieking, exerting the powerful and unique charm of infancy, was the miraculous sequel! Another individuality; a new being; definitely formed, with character and volition of its own; unlike any other individuality in the universe! Something fresh! Something unimaginably created! A phenomenon absolutely original of the pride and the tragedy of life! George!Yesterday she was a virgin, and to-day there was this! And this might have been his, ought to have been his! Yes, he thrilled secretly amid all those pushings and joltings! The mystery obsessed him. He had no rancour against Hilda. He was incapable of rancour, except a kind of wilful, fostered rancour in trifles. Thus he never forgave the inventor of Saturday afternoon Bible-classes. But rancour against Hilda! No! Her act had been above rancour, like an act of Heaven! And she existed yet. On a spot of the earth’s surface entitled Brighton, which he could locate upon a map, she existed: a widow, in difficulty, keeping a boarding-house. She ate, slept, struggled; she brushed her hair. He could see her brushing her hair. And she was thirty-four—was it? The wonder of the world amazed and shook him. And it appeared to him that his career was more romantic than ever.George with dangerous abruptness wriggled his legs downwards and slipped off the seat of the swing, not waiting for Edwin to stop it. He rolled on the grass and jumped up in haste. He had had enough.“Well, want any more?” Edwin asked, breathing hard.The child made a shy, negative sigh, twisting his tousled head down into his right shoulder. After all he was not really impudent, brazen. He could show a delicious timidity. Edwin decided that he was an enchanting child. He wanted to talk to him, but he could not think of anything natural and reasonable to say by way of opening.“You haven’t told me your name, you know,” he began at length. “How do I know what your name is? George, yes—but George what? George is nothing by itself, I know ten million Georges.”The child smiled.“George Edwin Cannon,” he replied shyly.Five.“Now, George!” came Janet’s voice, more firmly than before. After all, she meant in the end to be obeyed. She was learning her business as aunt to this new and difficult nephew; but learn it she would, and thoroughly!“Come on!” Edwin counselled the boy.They went together to the house. Maggie had found Janet, and the two were conversing. Soon afterwards aunt and nephew departed.“How very odd!” murmured Maggie, with an unusual intonation, in the hall, as Edwin was putting on his hat to return to the shop. But whether she was speaking to herself or to him, he knew not.“What?” he asked gruffly.“Well,” she said, “isn’t it?”She was more like Auntie Hamps, more like Clara, than herself in that moment. He resented the suspicious implications of her tone. He was about to give her one of his rude, curt rejoinders, but happily he remembered in time that scarce half an hour earlier he had turned over a new leaf; so he kept silence. He walked down to the shop in a deep dream.

Edwin was a fairly conspicuous object at the dining-room window. As Janet and the child drew level with the corner her eye accidentally caught Edwin’s. He nodded, smiling, and took the cigarette out of his mouth and waved it. They were old friends. He was surprised to notice that Janet blushed and became self-conscious. She returned his smile awkwardly, and then, giving a gesture to signify her intention, she came in at the gate. Which action surprised Edwin still more. With all her little freedoms of manner, Janet was essentially a woman stately and correct, and time had emphasised these qualities in her. It was not in the least like her to pay informal, capricious calls at a quarter to ten in the morning.

He went to the front door and opened it. She was persuading the child up the tiled steps. The breeze dashed gaily into the house.

“Good morning. You’re out early.”

“Good morning. Yes. We’ve just been down to the post-office to send off a telegram, haven’t we, George?”

She entered the hall, the boy following, and shook hands, meeting Edwin’s gaze fairly. Her esteem for him, her confidence in him, shone in her troubled, candid eyes. She held herself proudly, mastering her curious constraint. “Now just see that!” she said, pointing to a fleck of black mud on the virgin elegance of her pale brown costume. Edwin thought anew, as he had often thought, that she was a distinguished and delightful piece of goods. He never ceased to be flattered by her regard. But with harsh masculine impartiality he would not minimise to himself the increasing cleft under her chin, nor the deterioration of her once brilliant complexion.

“Well, young man!” Edwin greeted the boy with that insolent familiarity which adults permit themselves to children who are perfect strangers.

“I thought I’d just run in and introduce my latest nephew to you,” said Janet quickly, adding, “and then that would be over.”

“Oh!” Edwin murmured. “Come into the drawing-room, will you? Maggie’s upstairs.”

They passed into the drawing-room, where a servant in striped print was languidly caressing the glass of a bookcase with a duster. “You can leave this a bit,” Edwin said curtly to the girl, who obsequiously acquiesced and fled, forgetting a brush on a chair.

“Sit down, will you?” Edwin urged awkwardly. “And which particular nephew is this? I may tell you he’s already raised a great deal of curiosity in the town.”

Janet most unusually blushed again.

“Has he?” she replied. “Well, he isn’t my nephew at all really, but we pretend he is, don’t we, George? It’s cosier. This is Master George Cannon.”

“Cannon? You don’t mean—”

“You remember Mrs Cannon, don’t you? Hilda Lessways? Now, Georgie, come and shake hands with Mr Clayhanger.”

But George would not.

“Indeed!” Edwin exclaimed, very feebly. He knew not whether his voice was natural or unnatural. He felt as if he had received a heavy blow with a sandbag over the heart: not a symbolic, but a real physical blow. He might, standing innocent in the street, have been staggeringly assailed by a complete stranger of mild and harmless appearance, who had then passed tranquilly on. Dizzy astonishment held him, to the exclusion of any other sentiment. He might have gasped, foolish and tottering: “Why—what’s the meaning of this? What’s happened?” He looked at the child uncomprehendingly, idiotically. Little by little—it seemed an age, and was in fact a few seconds—he resumed his faculties, and remembered that in order to keep a conventional self-respect he must behave in such a manner as to cause Janet to believe that her revelation of the child’s identity had in no way disturbed him. To act a friendly indifference seemed to him, then, to be the most important duty in life. And he knew not why.

“I thought,” he said in a low voice, and then he began again, “I thought you hadn’t been seeing anything of her, of Mrs Cannon, for a long time now.”

The child was climbing on a chair at the window that gave on the garden, absorbed in exploration and discovery, quite ignoring the adults. Either Janet had forgotten him, or she had no hope of controlling him and was trusting to chance that the young wild stag would do nothing too dreadful.

“Well,” she admitted, “we haven’t.” Her constraint recurred. Very evidently she had to be careful about what she said. There were reasons why even to Edwin she would not be frank. “I only brought him down from London yesterday.”

Edwin trembled as he put the question—

“Is she here too—Mrs Cannon?”

Somehow he could only refer to Mrs Cannon as “her” and “she.”

“Oh no!” said Janet, in a tone to indicate that there was no possibility of Mrs Cannon being in Bursley.

He was relieved. Yes, he was glad. He felt that he could not have endured the sensation of her nearness, of her actually being in the next house. Her presence at the Orgreaves’ would have made the neighbourhood, the whole town, dangerous. It would have subjected him to the risk of meeting her suddenly at any corner. Nay, he would have been forced to go in cold blood to encounter her. And he knew that he could not have borne to look at her. The constraint of such an interview would have been torture too acute. Strange, that though he was absolutely innocent, though he had done nought but suffer, he should feel like a criminal, should have the criminal’s shifting downcast glance!

“Auntie!” cried the boy. “Can’t I go into this garden? There’s a swing there.”

“Oh no!” said Janet. “This isn’t our garden. We must go home. We only just called in. And big boys who won’t shake hands—”

“Yes, yes!” Edwin dreamily stopped her. “Let him go into the garden for a minute if he wants to. You can’t run off like that! Come along, my lord.”

He saw an opportunity of speaking to her out of the child’s hearing. Janet consented, perhaps divining his wish. The child turned and stared deliberately at Edwin, and then plunged forward, too eager to await guidance, towards the conquest of the garden.

Standing silent and awkward in the garden porch, they watched him violently agitating the swing, a contrivance erected by a good-natured Uncle Edwin for the diversion of Clara’s offspring.

“How old is he?” Edwin demanded, for the sake of saying something.

“About nine,” said Janet.

“He doesn’t look it.”

“No, but he talks it—sometimes.”

George did not in fact look his age. He was slight and small, and he seemed to have no bones—nothing but articulations that functioned with equal ease in all possible directions. His skin was pale and unhealthy. His eyes had an expression of fatigue, or he might have been ophthalmic. He spoke loudly, his gestures were brusque, and his life was apparently made up of a series of intense, absolute absorptions. The general effect of his personality upon Edwin was not quite agreeable, and Edwin’s conclusion was that George, in addition to being spoiled, was a profound and rather irritating egoist by nature.

“By the way,” he murmured, “what’sMrCannon?”

“Oh!” said Janet, hesitating, with emotion, “she’s a widow.”

He felt sick. Janet might have been a doctor who had informed him that he was suffering from an unexpected disease, and that an operation severe and perilous lay in front of him. The impartial observer in him asked somewhat disdainfully why he should allow himself to be deranged in this physical manner, and he could only reply feebly and very meekly that he did not know. He felt sick.

Suddenly he said to himself making a discovery—

“Of course she won’t come to Bursley. She’d be ashamed to meet me.”

“How long?” he demanded of Janet.

“It was last year, I think,” said Janet, with emotion increased, her voice heavy with the load of its sympathy. When he first knew Janet an extraordinary quick generous concern for others had been one of her chief characteristics. But of late years, though her deep universal kindness had not changed, she seemed to have hardened somewhat on the surface. Now he found again the earlier Janet.

“You never told me.”

“The truth is, we didn’t know,” Janet said, and without giving Edwin time to put another question, she continued: “The poor thing’s had a great deal of trouble, a very great deal. George’s health, now! The sea air doesn’t suit him. And Hilda couldn’t possibly leave Brighton.”

“Oh! She’s still at Brighton?”

“Yes.”

“Let me see—she used to be at—what was it?—Preston Street?”

Janet glanced at him with interest: “What a memory you’ve got! Why, it’s ten years since she was here!”

“Nearly!” said Edwin. “It just happened to stick in my mind. You remember she came down to the shop to ask me about trains and things the day she left.”

“Did she?” Janet exclaimed, raising her eyebrows.

Edwin had been suspecting that possibly Hilda had given some hint to Janet as to the nature of her relations with him. He now ceased to suspect that. He grew easier. He gathered up the reins again, though in a rather limp hand.

“Why is she so bound to stay in Brighton?” he inquired with affected boldness.

“She’s got a boarding-house.”

“I see. Well, it’s a good thing she has a private income of her own.”

“That’s just the point,” said Janet sadly. “We very much doubt if she has any private income any longer.”

Edwin waited for further details, but Janet seemed to speak unwilling. She would follow him, but she would not lead.

Behind them he could hear the stir of Mrs Hamps’s departure. She and Maggie were coming down the stairs. Guessing not the dramatic arrival of Janet Orgreave and the mysterious nephew, Mrs Hamps, having peeped into the empty dining-room, said: “I suppose the dear boy has gone,” and forthwith went herself. Edwin smiled cruelly at the thought of what her joy would have been actually to inspect the mysterious nephew at close quarters, and to learn the strange suspicious truth that he was not a nephew after all.

“Auntie!” yelled the boy across the garden.

“Come along, we must go now,” Janet retorted.

“No! I want you to swing me. Make me swing very high.”

“George!”

“Let him swing a bit,” said Edwin. “I’ll go and swing him.” And calling loud to the boy: “I’ll come and swing you.”

“He’s dreadfully spoiled,” Janet protested. “You’ll make him worse.”

“I don’t care,” said Edwin carelessly.

He seemed to understand, better than he had ever done with Clara’s litter, how and why parents came to spoil their children. It was not because they feared a struggle of wills; but because of the unreasoning instinctive pleasure to be derived from the conferring of pleasure, especially when the pleasure thus conferred might involve doubtful consequences. He had not cared for the boy, did not care for him. In theory he had the bachelor’s factitious horror of a spoiled child. Nevertheless he would now support the boy against Janet. His instinct said: “He wants something. I can give it him. Let him have it. Never mind consequences. He shall have it.”

He crossed the damp grass, and felt the breeze and the sun. The sky was a moving medley of Chinese white and Prussian blue, that harmonised admirably with the Indian red architecture which framed it on all sides. The high trees in the garden of the Orgreaves were turning to rich yellows and browns, and dead leaves slanted slowly down from their summits a few reaching even the Clayhanger garden, speckling its evergreen with ochre. On the other side of the west wall traps and carts rattled and rumbled and creaked along Trafalgar Road.

The child had stopped swinging, and greeted him with a most heavenly persuasive grateful smile. A different child! A sudden angel, with delicate distinguished gestures! ... A wondrous screwing-up of the eyes in the sun! Weak eyes, perhaps! The thick eyebrows recalled Hilda’s. Possibly he had Hilda’s look! Or was that fancy? Edwin was sure that he would never have guessed George’s parentage.

“Now!” he warned. “Hold tight.” And, going behind the boy, he strongly clasped his slim little waist in its blue sailor-cloth, and sent the whole affair—swing-seat and boy and all—flying to the skies. And the boy shrieked in the violence of his ecstasy, and his cap fell on the grass. Edwin worked hard without relaxing.

“Go on! Go on!” The boy shriekingly commanded.

And amid these violent efforts and brusque delicious physical contacts, Edwin was calmly penetrated and saturated by the mystic effluence that is disengaged from young children. He had seen his father dead, and had thought: “Here is the most majestic and impressive enigma that the earth can show!” But the child George—aged nine and seeming more like seven—offered an enigma surpassing in solemnity that of death. This was Hilda’s. This was hers, who had left him a virgin. With a singular thrilled impassivity he imagined, not bitterly, the history of Hilda. She who was his by word and by kiss, had given her mortal frame to the unknown Cannon—yielded it. She had conceived. At some moment when he, Edwin, was alive and suffering, she had conceived. She had ceased to be a virgin. Quickly, with an astounding quickness—for was not George nine years old?—she had passed from virginity to motherhood. And he imagined all that too; all of it; clearly. And here, swinging and shrieking, exerting the powerful and unique charm of infancy, was the miraculous sequel! Another individuality; a new being; definitely formed, with character and volition of its own; unlike any other individuality in the universe! Something fresh! Something unimaginably created! A phenomenon absolutely original of the pride and the tragedy of life! George!

Yesterday she was a virgin, and to-day there was this! And this might have been his, ought to have been his! Yes, he thrilled secretly amid all those pushings and joltings! The mystery obsessed him. He had no rancour against Hilda. He was incapable of rancour, except a kind of wilful, fostered rancour in trifles. Thus he never forgave the inventor of Saturday afternoon Bible-classes. But rancour against Hilda! No! Her act had been above rancour, like an act of Heaven! And she existed yet. On a spot of the earth’s surface entitled Brighton, which he could locate upon a map, she existed: a widow, in difficulty, keeping a boarding-house. She ate, slept, struggled; she brushed her hair. He could see her brushing her hair. And she was thirty-four—was it? The wonder of the world amazed and shook him. And it appeared to him that his career was more romantic than ever.

George with dangerous abruptness wriggled his legs downwards and slipped off the seat of the swing, not waiting for Edwin to stop it. He rolled on the grass and jumped up in haste. He had had enough.

“Well, want any more?” Edwin asked, breathing hard.

The child made a shy, negative sigh, twisting his tousled head down into his right shoulder. After all he was not really impudent, brazen. He could show a delicious timidity. Edwin decided that he was an enchanting child. He wanted to talk to him, but he could not think of anything natural and reasonable to say by way of opening.

“You haven’t told me your name, you know,” he began at length. “How do I know what your name is? George, yes—but George what? George is nothing by itself, I know ten million Georges.”

The child smiled.

“George Edwin Cannon,” he replied shyly.

“Now, George!” came Janet’s voice, more firmly than before. After all, she meant in the end to be obeyed. She was learning her business as aunt to this new and difficult nephew; but learn it she would, and thoroughly!

“Come on!” Edwin counselled the boy.

They went together to the house. Maggie had found Janet, and the two were conversing. Soon afterwards aunt and nephew departed.

“How very odd!” murmured Maggie, with an unusual intonation, in the hall, as Edwin was putting on his hat to return to the shop. But whether she was speaking to herself or to him, he knew not.

“What?” he asked gruffly.

“Well,” she said, “isn’t it?”

She was more like Auntie Hamps, more like Clara, than herself in that moment. He resented the suspicious implications of her tone. He was about to give her one of his rude, curt rejoinders, but happily he remembered in time that scarce half an hour earlier he had turned over a new leaf; so he kept silence. He walked down to the shop in a deep dream.

Volume Four--Chapter Three.Adventure.It was when Edwin fairly reached the platform at Victoria Station and saw the grandiose express waiting its own moment to start, that the strange irrational quality of his journey first fully impressed him and frightened him—so much that he was almost ready to walk out of the station again. To come gradually into London from the North, to pass from the Manchester train half-full of Midlanders through Bloomsbury into the preoccupied, struggling, and untidy Strand—this gave no shock, typified nothing definite. But, having spent a night in London, deliberately to leave it for the South, where he had never been, of which he was entirely ignorant,—that was like an explicit self-committal, like turning the back on the last recognisable landmark in an ill-considered voyage of pure adventure.The very character of Victoria Station and of this express was different from that of any other station and express in his experience. It was unstrenuous, soft; it had none of the busy harshness of the Midlands; it spoke of pleasure, relaxation, of spending free from all worry and humiliation of getting. Everybody who came towards this train came with an assured air of wealth and of dominion. Everybody was well dressed; many if not most of the women were in furs; some had expensive and delicate dogs; some had pale, elegant footmen, being too august even to speak to porters. All the luggage was luxurious; handbags could be seen that were worth fifteen or twenty pounds apiece. There was no question of first, second, or third class; there was no class at all on this train. Edwin had the apologetic air of the provincial who is determined to be as good as anybody else. When he sat down in the vast interior of one of those gilded vehicles he could not dismiss from his face the consciousness that he was an intruder, that he did not belong to that world. He was ashamed of his hand-baggage, and his gesture in tipping the porter lacked carelessness. Of course he pretended a frowning, absorbed interest in a newspaper—but the very newspaper was strange; he guessed not that unless he glanced first at the penultimate column of page one thereof he convicted himself of not knowing his way about.He could not think consecutively, not even of his adventure. His brain was in a maze of anarchy. But at frequent intervals recurred the query: “What the devil am I up to?” And he would uneasily smile to himself. When the train rolled with all its majesty out of the station and across the Thames, he said to himself, fearful, “Well, I’ve done it now!”Two.On the Thursday he had told Maggie, with affected casualness, that on the Friday he might have to go to London, about a new machine. Sheer invention! Fortunately Maggie had been well drilled by her father in the manner proper to women in accepting announcements connected with ‘business.’ And Edwin was just as laconic and mysterious as Darius had been about ‘business.’ It was a word that ended arguments, or prevented them. On the Friday he had said that he should go in the afternoon. On being asked whether he should return on the Saturday, he had replied that he did not know, but that he would telegraph. Whereupon Maggie had said that if he stayed away for the week-end she should probably have all the children up for dinner and tea. At the shop, “Stifford,” he had said, “I suppose you don’t happen to know a good hotel in Brighton? I might run down there for the week-end if I don’t come back to-morrow. But you needn’t say anything.” “No, sir,” Stifford had discreetly concurred in this suggestion. “They say there’s really only one hotel in Brighton, sir—the Royal Sussex. But I’ve never been there.” Edwin had replied: “Not the Metropole, then?” “Ohno, sir!” Stifford had become a great and wonderful man, and Edwin’s constant fear was that he might lose this indispensable prop to his business. For Stifford, having done a little irregular commercial travelling in Staffordshire and the neighbouring counties, had been seised of the romance of travelling; he frequented the society of real commercial travellers, and was gradually becoming a marvellous encyclopaedia of information about hotels, routes, and topography.Edwin having been to the Bank himself, instead of sending Stifford, had departed with the minimum of ostentation. He had in fact crept away. Since the visit of Janet and the child he had not seen either of them again, nor had he mentioned the child to anybody at all.Three.When, in an astounding short space of time, he stood in the King’s Road at Brighton, it seemed to him that he was in a dream; that he was not really at Brighton, that town which for so many years had been to him naught but a romantic name. Had his adventurousness, his foolhardiness, indeed carried him so far? As for Brighton, it corresponded with no dream. It was vaster than any imagining of it. Edwin had only seen the pleasure cities of the poor and of the middling, such as Blackpool and Llandudno. He had not conceived what wealth would do when it organised itself for the purposes of distraction. The train had prepared him to a certain extent, but not sufficiently. He suddenly saw Brighton in its autumnal pride, Brighton beginning one of its fine week-ends, and he had to admit that the number of rich and idle people in the world surpassed his provincial notions. For miles westwards and miles eastwards, against a formidable background of high, yellow and brown architecture, persons the luxuriousness of any one of whom would have drawn remarks in Bursley, walked or drove or rode in thronging multitudes. Edwin could comprehend lolling by the sea in August, but in late October it seemed unnatural, fantastic. The air was full of the trot of glossy horses and the rattle of bits and the roll of swift wheels, and the fall of elegant soles on endless clean pavements; it was full of the consciousness of being correct and successful. Many of the faces were monstrously ugly, most were dissatisfied and querulous; but they were triumphant. Even the pale beings in enlarged perambulators, pulled solemnly to and fro by their aged fellow-beings, were triumphant. The scared, the maimed, yes, and the able-bodied blind trusting to the arms of friends, were triumphant. And the enormous policemen, respectfully bland, confident in the system which had chosen them and fattened them, gave as it were to the scene an official benediction.The bricks and stucco which fronted the sea on the long embanked promenade never sank lower than a four-storey boarding-house, and were continually rising to the height of some gilt-lettered hotel, and at intervals rose sheer into the skies—six, eight, ten storeys—where a hotel, admittedly the grandest on any shore of ocean sent terra-cotta chimneys to lose themselves amid the pearly clouds. Nearly every building was a lodgement waiting for the rich, and nearly every great bow-window, out of tens of thousands of bow-windows bulging forward in an effort to miss no least glimpse of the full prospect, exhibited the apparatus and the menials of gourmandise. And the eye, following the interminable irregular horizontal lines of architecture, was foiled in the far distances, and, still farther off, after a break of indistinguishable brown, it would catch again the receding run of roofs, simplified by atmosphere into featureless rectangles of grey against sapphire or rose. There were two piers that strode and sprawled into the sea, and these also were laden with correctness and with domination. And, between the two, men were walking miraculously on the sea to build a third, that should stride farther and deeper than the others.Four.Amid the crowd, stamping and tapping his way monotonously along with the assured obstinacy of a mendicant experienced and hardened, came a shabby man bearing on his breast a large label with these words: “Blind through boy throwing mortar. Discharged from four hospitals. Incurable.” Edwin’s heart seemed to be constricted. He thought of the ragged snarling touts who had fawned to him at the station, and of the creatures locked in the cellars whence came beautiful odours of confectionery and soup through the pavement gratings, and of the slatternly women who kept thrusting flowers under his nose, and the half-clad infants who skimmed before the wind yelling the names of newspapers. All was not triumph! Where triumph was, there also must be the conquered.Shewas there, she too! Somewhere, close to him. He recalled the exact tone of Janet’s voice as she had said: “The poor thing’s had a great deal of trouble.” A widow, trying to run a boarding-house and not succeeding! Why, there were hundreds upon hundreds of boarding-houses, all large, all imposing, all busy at the end of October! Where was hers hidden away, her pathetic little boarding-house? Preston Street! He knew not where Preston Street was, and he had purposely refrained from inquiring. But he might encounter it at any moment. He was afraid to look too closely at the street-signs as he passed them; afraid!“What am I doing here?” he asked himself curiously, and sometimes pettishly. “What’s my object? Where’s the sense of it? I’m nothing but a damned fool. I’ve got no plan. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” It was true. He had no plan, and he did not know what he was going to do. What he did most intimately know was that the idea of her nearness made him tremble.“I’d much better go back at once,” he said.He walked miles, until he came to immense and silent squares of huge palatial houses, and wide transversal avenues running far up into the land and into the dusk. In these vast avenues and across these vast squares infrequent carriages sped like mechanical toys guided by mannikins. The sound of the sea waxed. And then he saw the twinkle of lights, and then fire ran slowly along the promenade: until the whole map of it was drawn out in flame; and he perceived that though he had walked a very long way, the high rampart of houses continued still interminably beyond him. He turned. He was tired. His face caught the full strength of the rising wind. Foam gleamed on the rising tide. In the profound violet sky to the east stars shone and were wiped out, in fields; but to the west, silver tarried. He had not seen Preston Street, and it was too dark now to decipher the signs. He was glad. He went on and on, with rapidly increasing fatigue, disgust, impatience. The thronging multitudes had almost disappeared; but many illuminated vehicles were flitting to and fro, and the shops were brilliant. He was so exhausted by the pavements that he could scarcely walk. And Brighton became for him the most sorrowful city on earth.“What am I doing here?” he asked himself savagely. However, by dint of sticking doggedly to it he did in the end reach the hotel.Five.After dinner, and wine, both of which, by their surprising and indeed unique excellence, fostered the prestige of Stifford as an authority upon hotels, Edwin was conscious of new strength and cheerfulness. He left the crowded and rose-lit dining-room early, because he was not at ease amid its ceremoniousness of attire and of service, and went into the turkey-carpeted hall, whose porter suddenly sprang into propitiatory life on seeing him. He produced a cigarette, and with passionate haste the porter produced a match, and by his method of holding the flame to the cigarette, deferential and yet firm, proved that his young existence had not been wasted in idleness. When the cigarette was alight, the porter surveyed his work with a pleased smile.“Another rare storm blowing up, sir,” said the porter.“Yes,” said Edwin. “It’s been giving the window of my room a fine shake.”The porter glanced at the clock. “High tide in half an hour, sir.”“I think I’ll go out and have a look at it,” said Edwin.“Yes, sir.”“By the way,” Edwin added, “I suppose you haven’t got a map of Brighton?”“Certainly, sir,” said the porter, and with a rebirth of passion began to search among the pile of time-tables and other documents on a table behind him.Edwin wished he had not asked for the map. He had not meant to ask for it. The words had said themselves. He gazed unseeing at the map for a few instants.“What particular street did you want, sir?” the porter murmured.In deciding how to answer, it seemed to Edwin that he was deciding the hazard of his life.“Preston Street.”“Oh! Preston Street!” the porter repeated in a relieved tone, as if assuring Edwin that there was nothing very esoteric about Preston Street. “It’s just beyond the Metropole. You know Regency Square. Well, it’s the next street after that. There’s a club at the corner.”In the afternoon, then, Edwin must have walked across the end of Preston Street twice. This thought made him tremble as at the perception of a danger past but unperceived at the moment.The porter gave his whole soul to the putting of Edwin’s overcoat on Edwin’s back; he offered the hat with an obeisance, and having ushered Edwin into the night so that the illustrious guest might view the storm, he turned with a sudden new mysterious supply of zeal to other guests who were now emerging from the dining-room.Six.The hotel fronted north on an old sheltered square where no storm raged, but simultaneously with Edwin’s first glimpse of the sea the wind struck him a tremendous blow, and continued to strike. He had the peculiar grim joy of the Midlander and Northerner in defying an element. All the lamps of the promenade were insecurely flickering. Grouped opposite a small jetty was a crowd of sightseers. The dim extremity of the jetty was wreathed in spray, and the waves ran along its side, making curved lines on the masonry like curved lines of a rope shaken from one end. The wet floor of the jetty shone like a mirror. Edwin approached the crowd, and, peeping over black shoulders, could see down into the hollow of the corner between the jetty and the sea-wall, where boys on the steps dared the spent waves, amid jeering laughter. The crowd had the air of being a family intimately united. Farther on was another similar crowd, near an irregular high fountain of spray that glittered in the dark. On the beach below, at vague distances were curious rows of apparently tiny people silhouetted like the edge of a black saw against an excessive whiteness. This whiteness was the sheet of foam that the sea made. It stretched everywhere, until the eye lost it seawards. Edwin descended to the beach, adding another tooth to the saw. The tide ran up absolutely white in wide chords of a circle, and then, to the raw noise of disturbed shingle, the chord vanished; and in a moment was re-created. This play went on endlessly, hypnotising the spectators who, beaten by the wind and deafened by sound, stared and stared, safe, at the mysterious and menacing world of spray and foam and darkness. Before, was the open malignant sea. Close behind, on their eminence, the hotels rose in vast cubes of yellow light, moveless, secure, strangely confident that nothing sinister could happen to them.Edwin was aware of emotion. The feel of his overcoat-collar upturned against the chin was friendly to him amid that onset of the pathos of the human world. He climbed back to the promenade. Always at the bottom of his mind, the foundation of all the shifting structures in his mind, was the consciousness of his exact geographical relation to Preston Street. He walked westwards along the promenade. “Why am I doing this?” he asked himself again and again. “Why don’t I go home? I must be mad to be doing this.” Still his legs carried him on, past lamp-post after lamp-post of the wind-driven promenade, now almost deserted. And presently the high lighted windows of the grandest hotels were to be seen, cut like square holes in the sky; and then the pier, which had flung a string of lanterns over the waves into the storm; and opposite the pier a dark empty space and a rectangle of gas-lamps: Regency Square. He crossed over, and passed up the Square, and out of it by a tiny side street, at hazard, and lo! he was in Preston Street. He went hot and cold.Seven.Well, and what then? Preston Street was dark and lonely. The wind charged furiously through it, panting towards the downs. He was in Preston Street, but what could he do? She was behind the black walls of one of those houses. But what then? Could he knock at the door in the night and say: “I’ve come. I don’t know why?”He said: “I shall walk up and down this street once, and then I shall go back to the hotel. That’s the only thing to do. I’ve gone off my head, that’s what’s the matter with me! I ought to have written to her. Why in the name of God didn’t I begin by writing to her? ... Of course I might write to her from the hotel ... send the letter by messenger, to-night ... or early to-morrow. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.”He set himself to make the perambulation of the street. Many of the numbers were painted on the fanlights over the doors and showed plain against illumination. Suddenly he saw the large figures ‘59.’ He was profoundly stirred. He had said that the matter with him was that he had gone off his head; but now, staring at that number on the opposite side of the street, he really did not know what was the matter with him. He might have been dying. The front of the house was dark save for the fanlight. He crossed over and peered down into the area and at the black door. A brass plate: “Cannon’s Boarding-House,” he could read. He perspired. It seemed to him that he could see her within the house, mysteriously moving at her feminine tasks. Or did she lie in bed? He had come from Bursley to London, from London to Brighton, and now he had found her portal; it existed. The adventure seemed incredible in its result. Enough for the present! He could stand no more. He walked away, meaning not to return.When he returned, five minutes later, the fanlight was dark. Hadshe, in the meantime, come into the hall of the house and extinguished the gas? Strange, that all lights should be out in a boarding establishment before ten o’clock! He stood hesitant quite near the house, holding himself against the wind. Then the door opened a little, as it were stealthily, and a hand and arm crept out and with a cloth polished the face of the brass plate. He thought, in his excited fancy, that it was her hand and arm. Within, he seemed to distinguish a dim figure. He did not move; could not. The door opened wider, and the figure stood revealed, a woman’s. Surely it was she! She gazed at him suspiciously, duster in hand.“What are you standing there for?” she questioned inimically. “We’ve had enough of loiterers in this street. Please go away.”She took him for a knave expectant of some chance to maraud. She was not fearful, however. It was she. It was her voice.

It was when Edwin fairly reached the platform at Victoria Station and saw the grandiose express waiting its own moment to start, that the strange irrational quality of his journey first fully impressed him and frightened him—so much that he was almost ready to walk out of the station again. To come gradually into London from the North, to pass from the Manchester train half-full of Midlanders through Bloomsbury into the preoccupied, struggling, and untidy Strand—this gave no shock, typified nothing definite. But, having spent a night in London, deliberately to leave it for the South, where he had never been, of which he was entirely ignorant,—that was like an explicit self-committal, like turning the back on the last recognisable landmark in an ill-considered voyage of pure adventure.

The very character of Victoria Station and of this express was different from that of any other station and express in his experience. It was unstrenuous, soft; it had none of the busy harshness of the Midlands; it spoke of pleasure, relaxation, of spending free from all worry and humiliation of getting. Everybody who came towards this train came with an assured air of wealth and of dominion. Everybody was well dressed; many if not most of the women were in furs; some had expensive and delicate dogs; some had pale, elegant footmen, being too august even to speak to porters. All the luggage was luxurious; handbags could be seen that were worth fifteen or twenty pounds apiece. There was no question of first, second, or third class; there was no class at all on this train. Edwin had the apologetic air of the provincial who is determined to be as good as anybody else. When he sat down in the vast interior of one of those gilded vehicles he could not dismiss from his face the consciousness that he was an intruder, that he did not belong to that world. He was ashamed of his hand-baggage, and his gesture in tipping the porter lacked carelessness. Of course he pretended a frowning, absorbed interest in a newspaper—but the very newspaper was strange; he guessed not that unless he glanced first at the penultimate column of page one thereof he convicted himself of not knowing his way about.

He could not think consecutively, not even of his adventure. His brain was in a maze of anarchy. But at frequent intervals recurred the query: “What the devil am I up to?” And he would uneasily smile to himself. When the train rolled with all its majesty out of the station and across the Thames, he said to himself, fearful, “Well, I’ve done it now!”

On the Thursday he had told Maggie, with affected casualness, that on the Friday he might have to go to London, about a new machine. Sheer invention! Fortunately Maggie had been well drilled by her father in the manner proper to women in accepting announcements connected with ‘business.’ And Edwin was just as laconic and mysterious as Darius had been about ‘business.’ It was a word that ended arguments, or prevented them. On the Friday he had said that he should go in the afternoon. On being asked whether he should return on the Saturday, he had replied that he did not know, but that he would telegraph. Whereupon Maggie had said that if he stayed away for the week-end she should probably have all the children up for dinner and tea. At the shop, “Stifford,” he had said, “I suppose you don’t happen to know a good hotel in Brighton? I might run down there for the week-end if I don’t come back to-morrow. But you needn’t say anything.” “No, sir,” Stifford had discreetly concurred in this suggestion. “They say there’s really only one hotel in Brighton, sir—the Royal Sussex. But I’ve never been there.” Edwin had replied: “Not the Metropole, then?” “Ohno, sir!” Stifford had become a great and wonderful man, and Edwin’s constant fear was that he might lose this indispensable prop to his business. For Stifford, having done a little irregular commercial travelling in Staffordshire and the neighbouring counties, had been seised of the romance of travelling; he frequented the society of real commercial travellers, and was gradually becoming a marvellous encyclopaedia of information about hotels, routes, and topography.

Edwin having been to the Bank himself, instead of sending Stifford, had departed with the minimum of ostentation. He had in fact crept away. Since the visit of Janet and the child he had not seen either of them again, nor had he mentioned the child to anybody at all.

When, in an astounding short space of time, he stood in the King’s Road at Brighton, it seemed to him that he was in a dream; that he was not really at Brighton, that town which for so many years had been to him naught but a romantic name. Had his adventurousness, his foolhardiness, indeed carried him so far? As for Brighton, it corresponded with no dream. It was vaster than any imagining of it. Edwin had only seen the pleasure cities of the poor and of the middling, such as Blackpool and Llandudno. He had not conceived what wealth would do when it organised itself for the purposes of distraction. The train had prepared him to a certain extent, but not sufficiently. He suddenly saw Brighton in its autumnal pride, Brighton beginning one of its fine week-ends, and he had to admit that the number of rich and idle people in the world surpassed his provincial notions. For miles westwards and miles eastwards, against a formidable background of high, yellow and brown architecture, persons the luxuriousness of any one of whom would have drawn remarks in Bursley, walked or drove or rode in thronging multitudes. Edwin could comprehend lolling by the sea in August, but in late October it seemed unnatural, fantastic. The air was full of the trot of glossy horses and the rattle of bits and the roll of swift wheels, and the fall of elegant soles on endless clean pavements; it was full of the consciousness of being correct and successful. Many of the faces were monstrously ugly, most were dissatisfied and querulous; but they were triumphant. Even the pale beings in enlarged perambulators, pulled solemnly to and fro by their aged fellow-beings, were triumphant. The scared, the maimed, yes, and the able-bodied blind trusting to the arms of friends, were triumphant. And the enormous policemen, respectfully bland, confident in the system which had chosen them and fattened them, gave as it were to the scene an official benediction.

The bricks and stucco which fronted the sea on the long embanked promenade never sank lower than a four-storey boarding-house, and were continually rising to the height of some gilt-lettered hotel, and at intervals rose sheer into the skies—six, eight, ten storeys—where a hotel, admittedly the grandest on any shore of ocean sent terra-cotta chimneys to lose themselves amid the pearly clouds. Nearly every building was a lodgement waiting for the rich, and nearly every great bow-window, out of tens of thousands of bow-windows bulging forward in an effort to miss no least glimpse of the full prospect, exhibited the apparatus and the menials of gourmandise. And the eye, following the interminable irregular horizontal lines of architecture, was foiled in the far distances, and, still farther off, after a break of indistinguishable brown, it would catch again the receding run of roofs, simplified by atmosphere into featureless rectangles of grey against sapphire or rose. There were two piers that strode and sprawled into the sea, and these also were laden with correctness and with domination. And, between the two, men were walking miraculously on the sea to build a third, that should stride farther and deeper than the others.

Amid the crowd, stamping and tapping his way monotonously along with the assured obstinacy of a mendicant experienced and hardened, came a shabby man bearing on his breast a large label with these words: “Blind through boy throwing mortar. Discharged from four hospitals. Incurable.” Edwin’s heart seemed to be constricted. He thought of the ragged snarling touts who had fawned to him at the station, and of the creatures locked in the cellars whence came beautiful odours of confectionery and soup through the pavement gratings, and of the slatternly women who kept thrusting flowers under his nose, and the half-clad infants who skimmed before the wind yelling the names of newspapers. All was not triumph! Where triumph was, there also must be the conquered.

Shewas there, she too! Somewhere, close to him. He recalled the exact tone of Janet’s voice as she had said: “The poor thing’s had a great deal of trouble.” A widow, trying to run a boarding-house and not succeeding! Why, there were hundreds upon hundreds of boarding-houses, all large, all imposing, all busy at the end of October! Where was hers hidden away, her pathetic little boarding-house? Preston Street! He knew not where Preston Street was, and he had purposely refrained from inquiring. But he might encounter it at any moment. He was afraid to look too closely at the street-signs as he passed them; afraid!

“What am I doing here?” he asked himself curiously, and sometimes pettishly. “What’s my object? Where’s the sense of it? I’m nothing but a damned fool. I’ve got no plan. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” It was true. He had no plan, and he did not know what he was going to do. What he did most intimately know was that the idea of her nearness made him tremble.

“I’d much better go back at once,” he said.

He walked miles, until he came to immense and silent squares of huge palatial houses, and wide transversal avenues running far up into the land and into the dusk. In these vast avenues and across these vast squares infrequent carriages sped like mechanical toys guided by mannikins. The sound of the sea waxed. And then he saw the twinkle of lights, and then fire ran slowly along the promenade: until the whole map of it was drawn out in flame; and he perceived that though he had walked a very long way, the high rampart of houses continued still interminably beyond him. He turned. He was tired. His face caught the full strength of the rising wind. Foam gleamed on the rising tide. In the profound violet sky to the east stars shone and were wiped out, in fields; but to the west, silver tarried. He had not seen Preston Street, and it was too dark now to decipher the signs. He was glad. He went on and on, with rapidly increasing fatigue, disgust, impatience. The thronging multitudes had almost disappeared; but many illuminated vehicles were flitting to and fro, and the shops were brilliant. He was so exhausted by the pavements that he could scarcely walk. And Brighton became for him the most sorrowful city on earth.

“What am I doing here?” he asked himself savagely. However, by dint of sticking doggedly to it he did in the end reach the hotel.

After dinner, and wine, both of which, by their surprising and indeed unique excellence, fostered the prestige of Stifford as an authority upon hotels, Edwin was conscious of new strength and cheerfulness. He left the crowded and rose-lit dining-room early, because he was not at ease amid its ceremoniousness of attire and of service, and went into the turkey-carpeted hall, whose porter suddenly sprang into propitiatory life on seeing him. He produced a cigarette, and with passionate haste the porter produced a match, and by his method of holding the flame to the cigarette, deferential and yet firm, proved that his young existence had not been wasted in idleness. When the cigarette was alight, the porter surveyed his work with a pleased smile.

“Another rare storm blowing up, sir,” said the porter.

“Yes,” said Edwin. “It’s been giving the window of my room a fine shake.”

The porter glanced at the clock. “High tide in half an hour, sir.”

“I think I’ll go out and have a look at it,” said Edwin.

“Yes, sir.”

“By the way,” Edwin added, “I suppose you haven’t got a map of Brighton?”

“Certainly, sir,” said the porter, and with a rebirth of passion began to search among the pile of time-tables and other documents on a table behind him.

Edwin wished he had not asked for the map. He had not meant to ask for it. The words had said themselves. He gazed unseeing at the map for a few instants.

“What particular street did you want, sir?” the porter murmured.

In deciding how to answer, it seemed to Edwin that he was deciding the hazard of his life.

“Preston Street.”

“Oh! Preston Street!” the porter repeated in a relieved tone, as if assuring Edwin that there was nothing very esoteric about Preston Street. “It’s just beyond the Metropole. You know Regency Square. Well, it’s the next street after that. There’s a club at the corner.”

In the afternoon, then, Edwin must have walked across the end of Preston Street twice. This thought made him tremble as at the perception of a danger past but unperceived at the moment.

The porter gave his whole soul to the putting of Edwin’s overcoat on Edwin’s back; he offered the hat with an obeisance, and having ushered Edwin into the night so that the illustrious guest might view the storm, he turned with a sudden new mysterious supply of zeal to other guests who were now emerging from the dining-room.

The hotel fronted north on an old sheltered square where no storm raged, but simultaneously with Edwin’s first glimpse of the sea the wind struck him a tremendous blow, and continued to strike. He had the peculiar grim joy of the Midlander and Northerner in defying an element. All the lamps of the promenade were insecurely flickering. Grouped opposite a small jetty was a crowd of sightseers. The dim extremity of the jetty was wreathed in spray, and the waves ran along its side, making curved lines on the masonry like curved lines of a rope shaken from one end. The wet floor of the jetty shone like a mirror. Edwin approached the crowd, and, peeping over black shoulders, could see down into the hollow of the corner between the jetty and the sea-wall, where boys on the steps dared the spent waves, amid jeering laughter. The crowd had the air of being a family intimately united. Farther on was another similar crowd, near an irregular high fountain of spray that glittered in the dark. On the beach below, at vague distances were curious rows of apparently tiny people silhouetted like the edge of a black saw against an excessive whiteness. This whiteness was the sheet of foam that the sea made. It stretched everywhere, until the eye lost it seawards. Edwin descended to the beach, adding another tooth to the saw. The tide ran up absolutely white in wide chords of a circle, and then, to the raw noise of disturbed shingle, the chord vanished; and in a moment was re-created. This play went on endlessly, hypnotising the spectators who, beaten by the wind and deafened by sound, stared and stared, safe, at the mysterious and menacing world of spray and foam and darkness. Before, was the open malignant sea. Close behind, on their eminence, the hotels rose in vast cubes of yellow light, moveless, secure, strangely confident that nothing sinister could happen to them.

Edwin was aware of emotion. The feel of his overcoat-collar upturned against the chin was friendly to him amid that onset of the pathos of the human world. He climbed back to the promenade. Always at the bottom of his mind, the foundation of all the shifting structures in his mind, was the consciousness of his exact geographical relation to Preston Street. He walked westwards along the promenade. “Why am I doing this?” he asked himself again and again. “Why don’t I go home? I must be mad to be doing this.” Still his legs carried him on, past lamp-post after lamp-post of the wind-driven promenade, now almost deserted. And presently the high lighted windows of the grandest hotels were to be seen, cut like square holes in the sky; and then the pier, which had flung a string of lanterns over the waves into the storm; and opposite the pier a dark empty space and a rectangle of gas-lamps: Regency Square. He crossed over, and passed up the Square, and out of it by a tiny side street, at hazard, and lo! he was in Preston Street. He went hot and cold.

Well, and what then? Preston Street was dark and lonely. The wind charged furiously through it, panting towards the downs. He was in Preston Street, but what could he do? She was behind the black walls of one of those houses. But what then? Could he knock at the door in the night and say: “I’ve come. I don’t know why?”

He said: “I shall walk up and down this street once, and then I shall go back to the hotel. That’s the only thing to do. I’ve gone off my head, that’s what’s the matter with me! I ought to have written to her. Why in the name of God didn’t I begin by writing to her? ... Of course I might write to her from the hotel ... send the letter by messenger, to-night ... or early to-morrow. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.”

He set himself to make the perambulation of the street. Many of the numbers were painted on the fanlights over the doors and showed plain against illumination. Suddenly he saw the large figures ‘59.’ He was profoundly stirred. He had said that the matter with him was that he had gone off his head; but now, staring at that number on the opposite side of the street, he really did not know what was the matter with him. He might have been dying. The front of the house was dark save for the fanlight. He crossed over and peered down into the area and at the black door. A brass plate: “Cannon’s Boarding-House,” he could read. He perspired. It seemed to him that he could see her within the house, mysteriously moving at her feminine tasks. Or did she lie in bed? He had come from Bursley to London, from London to Brighton, and now he had found her portal; it existed. The adventure seemed incredible in its result. Enough for the present! He could stand no more. He walked away, meaning not to return.

When he returned, five minutes later, the fanlight was dark. Hadshe, in the meantime, come into the hall of the house and extinguished the gas? Strange, that all lights should be out in a boarding establishment before ten o’clock! He stood hesitant quite near the house, holding himself against the wind. Then the door opened a little, as it were stealthily, and a hand and arm crept out and with a cloth polished the face of the brass plate. He thought, in his excited fancy, that it was her hand and arm. Within, he seemed to distinguish a dim figure. He did not move; could not. The door opened wider, and the figure stood revealed, a woman’s. Surely it was she! She gazed at him suspiciously, duster in hand.

“What are you standing there for?” she questioned inimically. “We’ve had enough of loiterers in this street. Please go away.”

She took him for a knave expectant of some chance to maraud. She was not fearful, however. It was she. It was her voice.

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