Without a sound she startlingly appeared in the room.
"What's the matter?" she inquired, with her irritating assumption of tranquillity.
"You know what's the matter."
"I wish you wouldn't scream like a baby," she said.
"You know I want to speak to you, and you're keeping out of the way on purpose."
Rachel said—
"Look here, Louis! Do you want me to leave the house altogether?"
He thought—
"What is she saying? We've only been married a few weeks. This is getting serious."
Aloud he answered—
"Of course I don't want you to leave the house."
"Well, then, don't say any more. Because if you do, I shall. I've heard all I want to hear. There are some things I can bear, and some I can't bear."
"If you don't listen—!" he exclaimed. "I'm warning you!"
She glanced at the thief in him, and at the coward penitent of the night, with the most desolating disdain, and left the room. That was her answer to his warning.
"All right, my girl! All right!" he said to himself, when she had gone, pulling together his self-esteem, his self-pity, and his masculinity. "You'll regret this. You see if you don't. As to leaving the house, we shall see who'll leave the house. Wait till I'm on my legs again. If there is to be a scandal, there shall be a scandal."
One thing was absolutely sure—he could not and would not endure her contumely, nor even her indifferent scorn. For him to live with it would be ridiculous as well as impossible. He was weak, but two facts gave him enormous strength. First, he loved her less than she loved him, and hence she was at a disadvantage. But supposing her passion for him was destroyed? Then the second fact came into play. He had money. He had thousands of pounds, loose, available! To such a nature as his the control of money gives a sense of everlasting security. Already he dreamt of freedom, of roaming the wide world, subject to no yoke but a bachelor's whim.
Rachel thought she understood all Louis' mental processes. With the tragic self-confidence of the inexperienced wife, she was convinced that she had nothing to learn about the secret soul of the stranger to whom she had utterly surrendered herself, reserving from him naught of the maiden. Each fresh revelation of him she imagined to be final, completing her studies. In fact, it would have taken at least ten years of marriage to prove to her that a perception of ignorance is the summit of knowledge. She had not even realized that human nature is chiefly made up of illogical and absurd contradictions. Thus she left the house that Saturday morning gloomy, perhaps hopeless, certainly quite undecided as to the future, but serene, sure of her immediate position, and sure that Louis would act like Louis. She knew that she had the upper hand, both physically and morally. The doctor had called and done his work, and given a very reassuring report. She left Louis to Mrs. Tams, as was entirely justifiable, merely informing him that she had necessary errands, and even this information she gave through her veil, a demure contrivance which she had adapted for the first time on her honeymoon. It was his role to accept her august decisions.
The forenoon was better than the dawn. The sun had emerged; the moisture had nearly disappeared, except in the road; and the impulse of spring was moving in the trees and in the bodies of young women; the sky showed a virginal blue; the wandering clouds were milky and rounded, the breeze infinitely soft. It seemed to be in an earlier age that the dark colliers had silently climbed the steep of Bycars Lane amid the dankness and that the first column of smoke had risen forlornly from the chimney.
In spite of her desolated heart, and of her primness, Rachel stepped forward airily. She was going forth to an enormous event, namely, her first apparition in the shopping streets of the town on a Saturday morning as Mrs. Louis Fores, married woman. She might have postponed it, but into what future? Moreover, she was ashamed of being diffident about it. And, in the peculiar condition of her mind, she would have been ashamed to let a spiritual crisis, however appalling, interfere with the natural, obvious course of her duties. So far as the world was concerned, she was a happy married woman, who had to make her debut as a shopping housewife, and hence she was determined that her debut should be made.... And yet, possibly she might not have ventured away from the house at all, had she not felt that if she did not escape for a time from its unbreathable atmosphere into the liberty of the streets, she would stifle and expire. Wherever she put herself in the house she could not feel alone. In the streets she felt alone, even when saluting new acquaintances and being examined and probed by their critical stare. The sight of these acquaintances reminded her that she had a long list of calls to repay. And then the system of paying calls and repaying, and the whole system of society, seemed monstrously fanciful and unreal to her. There was only one reality. The solid bricks of the pavement suddenly trembled under her feet as though she were passing over a suspension-bridge. The enterprise of shopping became idiotic, humorous, incredibly silly in the face of that reality.
Nevertheless, the social system of Bursley, as exemplified in Wedgwood Street and the market-place, its principal shopping thoroughfares, was extremely alluring, bright, and invigorating that morning. It almost intoxicated, and had, indeed, a similar effect to that of a sparkling drink. Rachel had never shopped at large with her own money before. She had executed commissions for Mrs. Maldon. She had been an unpaid housekeeper to her father and brother. Now she was shopping as mistress of a house and of money. She owed an account of her outlay to nobody, not even to Louis. She recalled the humble and fantastic Saturday night when she had shopped with Louis as reticule-carrier ... centuries since. The swiftness and unforeseeableness of events frightened the girl masquerading as a wise, perfected woman. Her heart lay like a weight in her corsage for an instant, and the next instant she was in the bright system again, because she was so young.
Here and there in the streets, and in small groups in the chief shops, you saw prim ladies of every age, each with a gloved hand clasped over a purse. (But sometimes the purse lay safe under the coverlet of a perambulator.) These purses made all the ladies equal, for their contents were absolutely secret from all save the owners. All the ladies were spending, and the delight of spending was theirs. And in theory every purse was inexhaustible. At any rate, it was impossible to conceive a purse empty. The system wore the face of the ideal. Manners were proper to the utmost degree; they neatly marked the equality of the shoppers and the profound difference between the shoppers and the shopkeepers. All ladies were agreeable, all babies in perambulators were darlings. The homes thus represented by ladies and babies were clearly polite homes, where reigned suavity, tranquillity, affection, and plenty. Civilization was justified in Wedgwood Street and the market-place—and also, to some extent, in St. Luke's Square.... And Rachel was one of these ladies. Her gloved hand closed over a purse exactly in the style of the others. And her purse, regard being had to the inheritance of her husband, was supposed to hide vast sums; so much so that ladies who had descended from distant heights in pony-carts gazed upon her with the respect due to a rival. All welcomed her into the exclusive, correct little world—not only the shopkeepers but the buyers therein. She represented youthful love. Her life must be, and was, an idyll! True, she had no perambulator, but middle-aged ladies greeted her with wistfulness in their voices and in their eyes.
She smiled often as she told and retold the story of Louis' accident, and gave positive assurances that he was in no danger, and would not bear a scar. She blushed often. She was shyly happy in her unhappiness. The experience alternated between the unreal and the real. The extraordinary complexity of life was beginning to put its spell on her. She could not determine the relative values of the various facets of the experience.
When she had done the important parts of her business, she thought she would go into the covered market, which, having one entrance in the market-place and another in Wedgwood Street, connects the two thoroughfares. She had never been into the covered market because Mrs. Maldon had a prejudice against its wares. She went out of mere curiosity, just to enlarge her knowledge of her adopted town. The huge interior, with its glazed roof, was full of clatter, shouting, and the smell of innumerable varieties of cheese. She passed a second-hand bookstall without seeing it, and then discerned admirable potatoes at three-halfpence a peck less than she had been paying—and Mrs. Maldon was once more set down as an old lady with peculiarities. However, by the time Rachel had made a critical round of the entire place, with its birds in cages, popular songs at a penny, sweetstuffs, cheap cottons and woollens, bright tinware, colonial fleshmeat, sausage displays, and particularly its cheeses, Mrs. Maldon was already recovering her reputation as a woman whose death was an irreparable loss to the town.
As Rachel passed the negligible second-hand bookstall again, it was made visible to her by the fact that Councillor Thomas Batchgrew was just emerging from the shop behind it, with a large volume in his black-gloved hands. Thomas Batchgrew came out of the dark bookshop as a famous old actor, accustomed to decades of crude public worship, comes out of a fashionable restaurant into a fashionable thoroughfare. His satisfied and self-conscious countenance showed that he knew that nearly everybody in sight was or ought to be acquainted with his identity and his renown, and showed also that his pretence of being unaware of this tremendous and luscious fact was playful and not seriously meant to deceive a world of admirers. He was wearing a light tweed suit, with a fancy waistcoat and a hard, pale-grey hat. As he aged, his tendency to striking pale attire was becoming accentuated; at any rate, it had the advantage of harmonizing with his unique whiskers—those whiskers which differentiated him from all the rest of the human race in the Five Towns.
Rachel blushed, partly because he was suddenly so close to her, partly because she disapproved of the cunning expression on his red, seamed face and was afraid he might divine her thoughts, and partly because she recalled the violent things she had said against him to Louis. But as soon as Thomas Batchgrew caught sight of her the expression of his faced changed in an instant to one of benevolence and artless joy; the change in it was indeed dramatic.
And Rachel, pleased and flattered, said to herself, almost startled—
"He really admires me. And I do believe he always did."
And since admiration is a sweet drug, whether offered by a rascal or by the pure in heart, she forgot momentarily the horror of her domestic dilemma.
"Eh, lass!" Thomas Batchgrew was saying familiarly, after he had inquired about Louis, "I'm rare glad for thy sake it was no worse." His frank implication that he was glad only for her sake gratified and did not wound her as a wife.
The next moment he had dismissed the case of Louis and was displaying to her the volume which he carried. It was a folio Bible, printed by the Cornishman Tregorthy in the town of Bursley, within two hundred yards of where they were standing, in the earliest years of the nineteenth century—a bibliographical curiosity, as Thomas Batchgrew vaguely knew, for he wet his gloved thumb and, resting the book on one raised knee, roughly turned over several pages till he came to the title-page containing the word "Bursley," which he showed with pride to Rachel. Rachel, however, not being in the slightest degree a bibliophile, discerned no interest whatever in the title-page. She merely murmured with politeness, "Oh, yes! Bursley," while animadverting privately on the old man's odious trick of wetting his gloved thumb and leaving marks on the pages.
"The good old Book!" he said. "I've been after that volume for six months and more. I knew I should get it, but he's a stiff un—yon is," jerking his shoulder in the direction of the second-hand bookseller. Then he put the folio under his arm, delighted at the souvenir of having worsted somebody in a bargain, and repeated, "The good old Book!"
Rachel reflected—
"You unspeakable old sinner!"
Still, she liked his attitude towards herself. In addition to the book he insisted on carrying a small white parcel of hers which she had not put into the reticule. They climbed the steps out of the covered market and walked along the market-place together. And Rachel unmistakably did find pleasure in being seen thus with the great and powerful, if much criticized, Thomas Batchgrew, him to whom several times, less than a year earlier, she had scathingly referred asthat man. His escort in the thoroughfare, and especially his demeanour towards herself, gave her a standing which she could otherwise scarcely have attained. Moreover, people might execrate him in private, but that he had conquered the esteem of their secret souls was well proved by their genuine eagerness to salute him as he walked sniffing along. He counted himself one of the seven prides of the district, and perhaps he was not far out.
"Come in a minute, lass," he said in a low, confidential voice, as they reached his branch shop, just beyond Malkin's. "I'll—" He paused.
A motor, apparently enormous, was buzzing motion-less in the wide entry by the side of the shop. It very slowly moved forward, crossed the footpath and half the street opposite the Town Hall, impeding a tram-car, and then curved backward into a position by the kerbstone. John's Ernest was at the steering-wheel. Councillor Batchgrew stood still with his mouth open to watch the manoeuvre.
"This is John's Ernest—my son John's eldest. Happen ye know him?" said Batchgrew to Rachel. "He's a good lad."
John's Ernest, a pleasant-featured young man of twenty-five, blushed and raised his hat. And Rachel also blushed as she nodded. It was astonishing that old Batchgrew could have a grandson with so honest a look on his face, but she had heard that son John, too, was very different from his father.
"Dunna go till I've seen thee," said Mr. Batchgrew to John's Ernest, and to Rachel, "Come in, Mrs. Fores."
John's Ernest silenced the car, and extricated himself with practised rapidity from the driver's seat.
"Where are ye going?" asked his grandfather.
"I'm going to lock the garage doors," said John's Ernest, with a humorous smile which seemed to add, "Unless you'd like them to be left open all Saturday afternoon." Rachel vividly remembered the playful, boyish voice which she had heard one night when the motor-car had called to take Mr. Batchgrew to Red Cow.
The councillor nodded.
In the small, untidy, disagreeable, malodorous shop, which in about half a century had scarcely altered its aspect, Thomas Batchgrew directed Rachel to a corner behind the counter and behind a partition, with a view of a fragment of the window. As she passed she saw one of the Batchgrew women (the wife of another grandson) and three little girls of various sizes flash in succession across an open doorway at the back. The granddaughter-in-law, who had an abode full of costly wedding-presents over the shop, had been one of her callers, but when they flashed across that doorway the Batchgrew women made a point of ignoring all phenomena in the shop.
"Has Louis decided about them debentures?" Thomas Batchgrew asked, still in a very low and confidential tone, as the two stood together in the corner. He had put the Book and the parcel down on a very ragged blotting-pad that lay on a chipped and ink-stained deal desk, and began to finger a yellow penholder. There was nobody else in the shop.
Rachel had foreseen his question.
She answered calmly: "Yes. He's quite decided that on the whole it'll be better if he doesn't put his money into debentures."
There was no foundation whatever for this statement; yet, in uttering the lie, she was clearly conscious of a feeling of lofty righteousness. She faced Thomas Batchgrew, though not with a tranquillity perfectly maintained, and she still enjoyed his appreciation of her, but she did not seem to care whether he guessed that she was lying or not.
"I'm sorry, lass!" he said simply, sniffing. "The lad's a fool. It isn't as if I've got to go hawking seven per cent. debentures to get rid of 'em—and in a concern like that, too! They'd never ha' been seven per cent if it hadna been for me. But it was you as I was thinking of when I offered 'em to Louis. I thought I should be doing ye a good turn."
The old man smiled amid his loud sniffs. He was too old to have retained any save an artistic interest in women. But an artistic interest in them he certainly had; and at an earlier period he had acquainted himself with life, as his eye showed. Rachel blushed a third time that morning, and more deeply than before. He was seriously nattering her now. Endearing qualities that had expired in him long ago seemed to be resuscitated and to animate his ruined features. Rachel dimly understood how it was that some woman had once married him and borne him a lot of children, and how it was that he had been so intimate and valued a friend of the revered husband of such a woman as Mrs. Maldon. She was, in the Five Towns phrase, "flustered." She almost believed what Thomas Batchgrew had said. She did believe it. She had misjudged him on the Thursday night when he spread the lure of the seven per cent. in front of Louis. At any rate, he assuredly did not care, personally, whether Louis accepted the debentures or not.
"However," the councillor went on, "he's got to know his own business best. And I don't know as it's any affair o' mine. But I was just thinking of you. When the husband has a good investment, th' wife generally comes in for something.... And what's more, it 'ud ha' stopped him from doing anything silly with his brass!Youknow."
"Yes," she murmured.
"I'm talking to ye because I've taken a fancy to ye," said the councillor. "I knew what you were the first time I set eyes on ye. Oh, I don't mind telling ye now—what harm is there in it? I'd a sort of a fancy as one day you and John's Ernest might ha' hit it off. I had it in my mind like."
A crude compliment, possibly in bad taste, possibly offensive; but Rachel was singularly moved by the revelation thus made. Before she could find a reply John's Ernest came into the shop, followed by an aproned assistant.
Then she was sitting by John's Ernest's side in the big motor-car, with her possessions at her feet. The enthronement had happened in a few moments. John's Ernest was going to Hanbridge.
"Ye can run Mrs. Fores up home on yer way," Thomas Batchgrew had suggested.
"But Bycars Lane is miles out of your way!" Rachel had cried.
Both men had smiled. "Won't make a couple of minutes' difference in the car," John's Ernest had modestly murmured.
She had been afraid to get into the automobile—afraid with a sort of stage-fright; afraid, as she might have been had she been called upon to sing at a concert in the Town Hall. She had imagined that all Bursley was gazing at her as she climbed into the car. Over the face of England automobiles are far more common than cuckoos, and yet for the majority, even of the proud and solvent middle class, they still remain as unattainable, as glitteringly wondrous, as a title. Rachel had never been in an automobile before; she had never hoped to be in an automobile. A few days earlier, and she had been regarding a bicycle as rather romantic! Louis had once mentioned a motor-cycle and side-carriage for herself, but she had rebuffed the idea with a shudder.
The whole town slid away behind her. The car was out of the market-place and crossing the top of Duck Bank, the scene of Louis' accident, before she had settled her skirts. She understood why the men had smiled at her; it was no more trouble for the car to go to Bycars than it would be for her to run upstairs. The swift movement of the car, silent and arrogant, and the occasional deep bass mysterious menace of its horn, and the grace of John's Ernest's gestures on the wheel as he curved the huge vehicle like a phantom round lumbering obstacles—these things fascinated and exalted her.
In spite of the horrible secret she carried all the time in her heart, she was somehow filled with an instinctive joy. And she began to perceive changes in her own perspective. The fine Louis, whom she had regarded as the summit of mankind, could never offer her an automobile; he existed entirely in a humbler world; he was, after all, a young man in a very small way of affairs. Batchgrew's automobile would swallow up, week by week, more than the whole of Louis' income. And further, John's Ernest by her side was invested with the mighty charm of one who easily and skilfully governs a vast and dangerous organism. All the glory of the inventors and perfecters of automobiles, and of manufacturing engineers, and of capitalists who could pay for their luxurious caprices, was centred in John's Ernest, merely because he directed and subjugated the energy of the miraculous machine.
And John's Ernest was so exquisitely modest and diffident, and yet had an almost permanent humorous smile. But the paramount expression on his face was honesty. She had never hitherto missed the expression of honesty on Louis' face, but she realized now that it was not there.... And she had been adjudged worthy of John's Ernest! The powerful of the world had had their eyes on her! Not Louis alone had noted her! Had Fate chosen, and had she herself chosen, that very motor-car might have been hers, and she at that instant riding in it as the mistress thereof! Strange thoughts, which intensely flattered and fostered her self-esteem. But she still had the horrible secret to carry with her.
When the car stopped in front of her gate, she forced open the door and jumped down with almost hysterical speed, said "Good-bye" and "Thank you" to John's Ernest, who becomingly blushed, and ran round the back of the car with her purchases. The car went on up the lane, the intention of John's Ernest being evident to proceed along Park Road and the Moorthorne ridge to Hanbridge rather than turn the car in the somewhat narrow lane. Rachel, instead of entering the house, thrust her parcels frantically on to the top step against the front door, and rushed down the steps again and down the lane. In a minute she was overtaking a man.
"Louis!" she cried.
From the car she had seen the incredible vision of Louis walking down the lane from the house. He and John's Ernest had not noticed each other, nor had Louis noticed that his wife was in the car.
Louis stopped now and looked back, hesitant.
There he was, with his plastered, pale face all streaked with greyish-white lines! Really Rachel had difficulty in believing her eyes. She had left him in bed, weak, broken; and he was there in the road fully dressed for the town and making for the town—a dreadful sight, but indubitably moving unaided on his own legs. It was simply monstrous! Fury leaped up in her. She had never heard of anything more monstrous. The thing was an absolute outrage on her nursing of him.
"Are you stark, staring mad?" she demanded.
He stood weakly regarding her. It was clear that he was already very enfeebled by his fantastic exertions.
"I wonder how much farther you would have gone without falling!" she said. "I'll thank you to come back this very instant!... This very instant!"
He had no strength to withstand her impetuous anger. His lower lip fell. He obeyed with some inarticulate words.
"And I should like to know what Mrs. Tams was doing!" said Rachel.
She neither guessed nor cared what was the intention of Louis' shocking, impossible escapade. She grasped his arm firmly. In ten minutes he was in bed again, under control, and Rachel was venting herself on Mrs. Tams, who took oath that she had been utterly unaware of the master's departure from the house.
Exactly a week passed, and Easter had come, before Rachel could set out upon an enterprise which she both longed and hated to perform. In the meantime the situation in the house remained stationary, except that after a relapse Louis' condition had gradually improved. She nursed him; he permitted himself to be nursed; she slept near him every night; no scene of irritation passed between them. But nothing was explained; even the fact that Rachel on the Saturday morning had overtaken Louis instead of meeting him—a detail which in secret considerably puzzled Louis, since it implied that his wife had been in the house when he left it—even this was not explained; as for the motor-car, Louis, absorbed, had scarcely noticed it, and Rachel did not mention it. She went on from one day into the next, proud, self-satisfied, sure of her strength and her position, indifferently scornful of Louis, and yet fatally stricken; she knew not in the least what was to be done, and so she waited for Destiny. Louis had to stop in bed for five days. His relapse worried Dr. Yardley, who, however, like many doctors, was kept in complete ignorance of the truth; Rachel was ashamed to confess that her husband had monstrously taken advantage of her absence to rise up and dress and go out; and Louis had said no word. On the Friday he was permitted to sit in a chair in the bedroom, and on Saturday he had the freedom of the house. It surprised Rachel that on the Saturday he had not dashed for the street, for after the exploit of the previous Saturday she was ready to expect anything. Had he done so she would not have interfered; he was really convalescent, and also the number of white stripes over his face and hair had diminished. In the afternoon he reclined on the Chesterfield to read, and fell asleep. Then it was that Rachel set out upon her enterprise. She said not a word to Louis, but instructed Mrs. Tams to inform the master, if he inquired, that she had gone over to Knype to see Mr. Maldon.
"Are you a friend of Mester Maldon's?" asked the grey-haired slattern who answered her summons at the door of Julian's lodgings in Granville Street, Knype. There was a challenge in the woman's voice. Rachel accepted it at once.
"Yes, I am," she said, with decision.
"Well, I don't know as I want any o' Mester Maldon's friends here," said the landlady loudly. "Mester Maldon's done a flit from here, Mester Maldon has; and," coming out on to the pavement and pointing upward to a broken pane in the first-floor window, "that's a bit o' his fancy work afore he flitted!"
Rachel put her lips together.
"Can you give me his new address?"
"Can I give yer his new address? Pr'aps I can and pr'aps I canna, but I dunna see why I should waste my breath on Mester Maldon's friends—that I dunna! And I wunna!"
Rachel walked away. Before she reached the end of the frowsy street, whose meanness and monotony of tiny-bow-windows exemplified intensely the most deplorable characteristics of a district where brutish licence is decreasing, she was overtaken by a lanky girl in a pinafore.
"If ye please, miss, Mester Maldon's gone to live at 29 Birches Street, 'anbridge."
Having made this announcement, the girl ran off, with a short giggle.
Rachel, had to walk half a mile to reach the tram-route. This re-visiting of her native town, which she had quitted only a few weeks earlier, seemed to her like the sad resumption of an existence long forgotten. She was self-conscious and hoped that she would not encounter the curiosity of any of her Knype acquaintances. She felt easier when she was within the sheltering car and rumbling and jerking through the gloomy carnival of Easter Saturday afternoon in Knype and Cauldon on the way to Hanbridge.
After leaving the car in Crown Square, she had to climb through all the western quarter of Hanbridge to the very edge of the town, on the hummock that separates it from the Axe Moorlands. Birches Street, as she had guessed, was in the suburb known as Birches Pike. It ran right to the top of the hill, and the upper portion consisted of new cottage-houses in groups of two or three, with vacant lots between. Why should Julian have chosen Birches Street for residence, seeing that his business was in Knype? It was a repellent street; it was out even of the little world where sordidness is at any rate dignified by tradition and anaemic ideals can support each other in close companionship. It had neither a past nor a future. The steep end of it was an horizon of cloud. The April east wind blew the smoke of Hanbridge right across it.
In this east wind men in shirt-sleeves, and women with aprons over their heads, stood nonchalantly at cottage gates contemplating the vacuum of leisure. On two different parcels of land teams of shrieking boys were playing football, with piles of caps and jackets to serve as goal-posts. To the left, in a clough, was an enormous yellow marlpit, with pools of water in its depths, and gangways of planks along them, and a few overturned wheelbarrows lying here and there. A group of men drove at full speed up the street in a dogcart behind a sweating cob, stopped violently at the summit, and, taking watches from pockets, began to let pigeons out of baskets. The pigeons rose in wide circles and were lost in the vast dome of melancholy that hung over the district.
No. 29 was the second house from the top, new, and already in decay. It and its attached twin were named "Prospect Villas" in vermilion tiles on the yellowish-red bricks of the façade. Hot, and yet chilled by the wind, Rachel hesitated a moment at the gate, suddenly realizing the perils of her mission. And then she saw Julian Maldon standing in the bay-window of the ground floor; he was eating. Simultaneously he recognized her.
She thought, "I can't go back now."
He came sheepishly to the front door and asked her to walk in.
"Who'd have thought of seeing you?" he exclaimed. "You must take me as I am. I've only just moved in."
"I've been to your old address," she said, smiling, with an attempt at animation.
"A rare row I had there!" he murmured.
She understood, with a pang of compassion and yet with feminine disdain, the horrible thing that his daily existence was. No wonder he would never allow Mrs. Maldon to go and see him! The spectacle of his secret squalor would have desolated the old lady.
"Don't take any notice of all this," he said apologetically, as he preceded her into the room where she had seen him standing. "I'm not straight yet.... Not that it matters. By the way, take a seat, will you?"
Rachel courageously sat down.
Just as there were no curtains to the windows, so there was no carpet on the planked floor. A few pieces of new, cheap, ignoble furniture half filled the room. In one corner was a sofa-bedstead covered with an army blanket, in the middle a crimson-legged deal table, partly covered with a dirty cloth, and on the cloth were several apples, an orange, and a hunk of brown bread—his meal. Although he had only just "moved in," dust had had time to settle thickly on all the furniture. No pictures of any kind hid the huge sunflower that made the pattern of the wall-paper. In the hearth, which lacked a fender, a small fire was expiring.
"Ye see," said Julian, "I only eat when I'm hungry. It's a good plan. So I'm eating now. I've turned vegetarian. There's naught like it. I've chucked all that guzzling an swilling business. It's no good. I never touch a drop of liquor, nor a morsel of fleshmeat. Nor smoke, either. When you come to think of it, smoking's a disgusting habit."
Rachel said, pleasantly, "But you were smoking last week, surely?"
"Ah! But it's since then. I don't mind telling you. In fact, I meant to tell you, anyhow. I've turned over a new leaf. And it wasn't too soon. I've joined the Knype Ethical Society. So there you are!" His voice grew defiant and fierce, as in the past, and he proceeded with his meal.
Rachel knew nothing of the Knype Ethical Society, except that in spite of its name it was regarded with unfriendly suspicion by the respectable as an illicit rival of churches and chapels and a haunt of dubious characters who, under high-sounding mottoes, were engaged in the wicked scheme of setting class against class. She had accepted the general verdict on the Knype Ethical Society. And now she was confirmed in it. As she gazed at Julian Maldon in that dreadful interior, chewing apples and brown bread and sucking oranges, only when he felt hungry, she loathed the Knype Ethical Society. It was nothing to her that the Knype Ethical Society was responsible for a religious and majestic act in Julian Maldon—the act of turning over a new leaf.
"And why did you come up here?"
"Oh, various reasons!" said Julian, with a certain fictitious nonchalance, beneath which was all his old ferocious domination. "You see, I didn't get enough exercise before. Lived too close to the works. In fact, a silly existence. I saw it all plain enough as soon as I got back from South Africa.... Exercise! What you want is for your skin to act at least once every day. Don't you think so?" He seemed to be appealing to her for moral support in some revolutionary theory.
"Well—I'm sure I don't know."
Julian continued—
"If you ask me, I believe there are some people who never perspire from one year's end to another. Never! How can they expect to be well? How can they expect even to be clean? The pores, you know. I've been reading a lot about it. Well, I walk up here from Knype full speed every day. Everybody ought to do it. Then I have a bath."
"Oh! Is there a bathroom?"
"No, there isn't," he answered curtly. Then in a tone of apology: "But I manage. You see, I'm going to save. I was spending too much down there—furnished rooms. Here I took two rooms—this one and a kitchen—unfurnished; very much cheaper, of course. I've just fixed them up temporarily. Little by little they'll be improved. The woman upstairs comes in for half an hour in the morning and just cleans up when I'm gone."
"And does your cooking?"
"Not much!" said Julian bravely. "I do that myself. In the first place, I want very little cooking. Cooking's not natural. And what bit I do want—well, I have my own ideas about it, I've got a little pamphlet about rational eating and cooking. You might read it. Everybody ought to read it."
"I suppose all that sort of thing's very interesting," Rachel remarked at large, with politeness.
"It is," Julian said emphatically.
Neither of them felt the necessity of defining what was meant by "all that sort of thing." The phrase had been used with intention and was perfectly understood.
"But if you want to know what I really came up here for," Julian resumed, "I'll show you."
"Where?"
"Outside." And he repeated, "I'll show you."
She followed him as, bareheaded, he hurried out of the room into the street.
"Shan't you take cold without anything on your head in this wind?" she suggested mildly.
He would have snapped off the entire head of any other person who had ventured to make the suggestion. But he treated Rachel more gently because he happened to think that she was the only truly sensible and kind woman he had ever met in his life.
"No fear!" he muttered.
At the front gate he stopped and looked back at his bay-window.
"Now—curtains!" he said. "I won't have curtains. Blinds, at night, yes, if you like. But curtains! I never could see any use in curtains. Fallals! Keep the light out! Dust-traps!"
Rachel gazed at him. Despite his beard, he appeared to her as a big schoolboy, blundering about in the world, a sort of leviathan puppy in earnest. She liked him, on account of an occasional wistful expression in his eyes, and because she had been kind to him during his fearful visit to Bycars. She even admired him, for his cruel honesty and force. At the same time, he excited her compassion to an acute degree. As she gazed at him the tears were ready to start from her eyes. What she had seen, and what she had heard of the new existence which he was organizing for himself made her feel sick with pity. But mingled with her pity was a sharp disdain. The idea of Julian talking about cleanliness, dust-traps, and rationality gave her a desire to laugh and cry at once. All the stolid and yet wary conservatism of her character revolted against meals at odd hours, brown bread, apples, orange-sucking, action of the skin, male cooking, camp-beds, the frowsiness of casual charwomen, bare heads, and especially bare windows. If Rachel had been absolutely free to civilize Julian's life, she would have begun by measuring the bay-window.
She said firmly—
"I must say I don't agree with you about curtains."
His gestures of impatience were almost violent; but she would not flinch.
"Don't ye?"
"No."
"Straight?"
She nodded.
He drew breath. "Well, I'll get some—if it'll satisfy you."
His surrender was intensely dramatic to her. It filled her with happiness, with a consciousness of immense power. She thought: "I can influence him. I alone can influence him. UnlessIlook after him his existence will be dreadful—dreadful."
"You'd much better let me buy them for you." She smiled persuasively.
"Have it your own way!" he said gloomily. "Just come along up here."
He led her up to the top of the street.
"Ye'll see what I live up here for," he muttered as they approached the summit.
The other half of the world lay suddenly at their feet as they capped the brow, but it was obscured by mist and cloud. The ragged downward road was lost in the middle distance amid vaporous grey-greens and earthy browns.
"No go!" he exclaimed crossly. "Not clear enough! But on a fine day ye can see Axe and Axe Edge.... Finest view in the Five Towns."
The shrill cries of the footballers reached them.
"What a pity!" she sympathized eagerly. "I'm sure it must be splendid." His situation seemed extraordinarily tragic to her. His short hair, ruffled by the keen wind, was just like a boy's hair and somehow the sight of it touched her deeply.
He put his hands far into his pockets and drummed one foot on the ground.
"What brought ye up here?" he demanded, with his eyes on an invisible town of Axe.
She opened her hand-bag.
"I came to bring you this," she said, and offered him an envelope, which he took, wonderingly.
Then, when he had it in his hands, he said abruptly, angrily, "If it's that money, I won't take it."
"Yes you will."
"Has Louis sent ye?" This was the first mention of Louis, though he was well aware of the accident.
She shook her head.
"Well, let him keep his half, and you can keep mine."
"It's all there."
"How—all there?"
"All that you left the other night."
"But—but—" He seemed to be furious as he faced her.
Rachel went on—
"The other part of the missing money's been found ... Louis had it. So all this belongs to you. If some one hadn't told you it wouldn't have been fair."
She flushed slowly, trembling, but looking at him.
"Well!" Julian burst out with savage solemnity, "there's not many of your sort knocking about. By G—— there isn't!"
She walked quickly away from his passionate homage to her.
"Here!" he shouted, fingering the envelope.
But she kept on at a swift pace towards Hanbridge. About a quarter of a mile down the road the pigeon-flyer's dogcart stood empty outside a public-house.
Rachel stood at her own front door and took off her glove in order more easily to manipulate the latch-key, which somehow, since coming into frequent use again, had never been the same manageable latch-key, but a cantankerous old thing, though still very bright. She opened the door quietly, and stepped inside quietly, lest by chance she might disturb Louis, the invalid—but also because she was a little afraid.
The most contradictory feelings can exist together in the mind. After the desolate discomfort of Julian Maldon's lodging and the spectacle of his clumsiness in the important affair of mere living, Rachel was conscious of a deep and proud happiness as she re-entered the efficient, cosy, and gracious organism of her own home. But simultaneously with this feeling of happiness she had a dreadful general apprehension that the organism might soon be destroyed, and a particular apprehension concerning her next interview with Louis, for at the next interview she would be under the necessity of telling him about her transaction with Julian. She had been absolutely determined upon that transaction. She had said to herself, "Whatever happens, I shall take that money to Julian and insist on his keeping all of it." She had, in fact, been very brave—indeed, audacious. Now the consequences were imminent, and they frightened her; she was less brave now. One awkward detail of the immediate future was that to tell Louis would be to reopen the entire question of the theft, which she had several times in the most abrupt and arrogant manner refused to discuss with him.
As soon as she had closed the front door she perceived that twilight was already obscuring the interior of the house. But she could plainly see that the parlour door was about two inches ajar, exactly as she had left it a couple of hours earlier. Probably Louis had not stirred. She listened vainly for a sign of life from him. Probably he was reading, for on rare occasions when he read a novel he would stick to the book with surprising pertinacity. At any rate, he would be too lofty to give any sign that he had heard her return. Under less sinister circumstances he might have yelled gaily: "I say, Rache!" for in a teasing mood he would sometimes prefer "Rache" to "Louise."
Rachel from the lobby could see the fire bright in the kitchen, and a trayful of things on the kitchen table ready to be brought into the parlour for high tea.
Mrs. Tams was out. It was not among Mrs. Tams's regular privileges to be out in the afternoon. But this was Easter Saturday—rather a special day—and, further, one of her daughters had gone away for Easter and left a child with one of her daughters-in-law, and Mrs. Tams had desired to witness some of the dealings of her daughter-in-law with her grandchild. Not without just pride had Mrs. Tams related the present circumstances to Rachel. In Mrs. Tams's young maturity parents who managed a day excursion to Blackpool in the year did well, and those who went away for four or five days at Knype Wakes in August were princes and plutocrats. But nowadays even a daughter of Mrs. Tams, not satisfied with a week at Knype Wakes, could take a week-end at Easter just like great folk such as Louis. Which proved that the community at large, or Mrs. Tams's family, had famously got up in the world. Rachel recalled Louis' suggestion, more than a week earlier, of a trip to Llandudno. The very planet itself had aged since then.
She looked at the clock. In twenty minutes Mrs. Tams would be back. She and Louis were alone together in the house. She might go straight into the parlour, and say, in as indifferent and ordinary a voice as she could assume: "I've just been over to Julian Maldon's to give him that money—all of it, you know," and thus get the affair finished before Mrs. Tams's reappearance. Louis was within a few feet of her, hidden only by the door which a push would cause to swing!... Yes, but she could not persuade herself to push the door! The door seemed to be protected from her hand by a mysterious spell which she dared not break. She was, indeed, overwhelmed by the simple but tremendous fact that Louis and herself were alone together in the darkening house. She decided, pretending to be quite calm: "I'll just run upstairs and take my things off first. There's no use in my seeming to be in a hurry."
In the bedroom she arranged her toilet for the evening, and established order in every corner of the chamber. Under the washstand lay the long row of Louis' boots and shoes, each pair in stretchers. She suddenly contrasted Julian's heavy and arrogant dowdiness with the nice dandyism of Louis. She could not help thinking that Julian would be a terrible person to live with. This was the first thought favourable to Louis which had flitted through her mind for a long time. She dismissed it. Nothing in another man could be as terrible to live with as the defects of Louis. She set herself—she was obliged to set herself—high above Louis. The souvenir of the admiration of old Batchgrew and John's Ernest, the touching humility before her of Julian Maldon, once more inflated her self-esteem—it could not possibly have failed to do so. She knew that she was an extraordinary woman, and a prize.
Invigorated and reassured by these reflections, she descended proudly to the ground floor. And then, hesitating at the entrance to the parlour, she went into the kitchen and poked the fire. As the fire was in excellent condition there was no reason for this act except her diffidence at the prospect of an encounter with Louis. At last, having examined the tea-tray and invented other delays, she tightened her nerves and passed into the parlour to meet the man who seemed to be waiting for her like the danger of a catastrophe. He was not there. The parlour was empty. His book was lying on the Chesterfield.
She felt relieved. It was perhaps not very wise for him to have gone out for a walk, but if he chose to run risks, he was free to do so, for all she cared. In the meantime the interview was postponed; hence her craven relief. She lit the gas, but not by the same device as in Mrs. Maldon's day; and then she saw an envelope lying on the table. It was addressed in Louis' handwriting to "Mrs. Louis Fores." She was alone in the house. She felt sick. Why should he write a letter to her and leave it there on the table? She invented half a dozen harmless reasons for the letter, but none of them was the least convincing. The mere aspect of the letter frightened her horribly. There was no strength in her limbs. She tore the envelope in a daze.
The letter ran—