IVHe went back to the private room, self-conscious and rather tongue-tied, with a clear feeling of relief that Hilda was disposed of, removed from the equation--and not unsuccessfully. After the woman, to deal with the man, in the plain language of men, seemed simple and easy. He was astounded, equally, by the grudging tardiness of Mrs. Cannon's information to Hilda as to the release, and by the baffling, inflexible detraction of Hilda's words: "Well, I'm not surprised." And the flitting image of Auntie Hamps fighting for life still left him untouched. He looked at George Cannon, and George Cannon, with his unreliable eyes, looked at him. He almost expected Cannon to say: "Was that Hilda you were talking to out there?" But Cannon seemed to have no suspicion that, in either the inner or the outer room, he had been so close to her. No doubt, when he was waiting by the mantel-piece in the outer room, he had lifted the paper as soon as he heard the door unlatched, expressly in order to screen himself from observation. Probably he had not even guessed that the passer was a woman. Had Simpson been there, the polite young man would doubtless have said: "Good night, Mrs. Clayhanger," but Simpson had happened not to be there."Are you going to help me?" asked George Cannon, after a moment, and his heavy voice was so beseeching, so humble, so surprisingly sycophantic, so fearful, that Edwin could scarcely bear to hear it. He hated to hear that one man could be so slavishly dependent on another. Indeed, he much preferred Cannon's defiant, half-bullying tone."Yes," said he. "I shall do what I can. What do you want?""A hundred pounds," said George Cannon, and, as he named the sum, his glance was hard and steady.Edwin was startled. But immediately he began to readjust his ideas, persuading himself that after all the man could not prudently have asked for less."I can't give it you all now."Cannon's face lighted up in relief and joy. His black eyes sparkled feverishly with the impatience of an almost hopeless desire about to be satisfied. Although he did not move, his self-control had for the moment gone completely, and the secrets of his soul were exposed."Can you send it me--in notes? I can give you an address in Liverpool." His voice could hardly utter the words."Wait a second," said Edwin.He went to the safe let into the wall, of which he was still so naïvely proud, and unlocked it with the owner's gesture. The perfect fitting of the bright key, the ease with which it turned, the silent, heavy swing of the massive door on its hinges--these things gave him physical as well as moral pleasure. He savoured the security of his position and his ability to rescue people from destruction. From the cavern of the safe he took out a bag of gold, part of the money required for wages on the morrow,--he would have to send to the Bank again in the morning. He knew that the bag contained exactly twenty pounds in half-sovereigns, but he shed the lovely twinkling coins on the desk and counted them."Here," he said. "Here's twenty pounds. Take the bag, too--it'll be handier," and he put the money into the bag. Then a foolish, grand idea struck him. "Write down the address on this envelope, will you, and I'll send you a hundred to-morrow. You can rely on it.""Eighty, you mean," muttered George Cannon."No," said Edwin, with affected nonchalance, blushing, "a hundred. The twenty will get you over and you'll have a hundred clear when you arrive on the other side.""Ye're very kind," said Cannon weakly. "I--""Here. Here's the envelope. Here's a bit of pencil." Edwin stopped him hastily. His fear of being thanked made him harsh.While Cannon was nervously writing the address, he noticed that the man's clumsy fingers were those of a day-labourer."You'll get it all back. You'll see," said Cannon, as he stood up to leave, holding his glossy felt hat in his left hand."Don't worry about that. I don't want it. You owe me nothing.""You'll have every penny back, and before long, too."Edwin smiled, deprecating the idea."Well, good luck!" he said. "You'll get to Crewe all right. There's a train at Shawport at eight seven."They shook hands, and quitted the inner office. As he traversed the outer office on his way forth, in front of Edwin, Cannon turned his head, as if to say something, but, confused, he said nothing and went on, and at once he disappeared into the darkness outside. And Edwin was left with a memory of his dubious eyes, hard rather than confident, profoundly relieved rather than profoundly grateful."By Jove!" Edwin murmured by himself. "Who'd have thought it? ... They say those chaps always turn up again like bad pennies, but I bet he won't." Simultaneously he reflected upon the case of Mrs. Cannon, deserted; but it did not excite his pity. He fastened the safe, extinguished the lights, shut the office, and prepared his mind for the visit to Auntie Hamps.VHilda and her son were in the dining-room, in which the table, set for a special meal--half-tea, half-supper--made a glittering oblong of white. On the table, among blue-and-white plates, and knives and forks, lay some of George's shabby school-books. In most branches of knowledge George privately knew that he could instruct his parents--especially his mother. Nevertheless that beloved outgrown creature was still occasionally useful at home-lessons, as for instance in "poetry." George, disdainful, had to learn some verses each week, and now his mother held a book entitled "The Poetry Reciter," while George mumbled with imperfect verbal accuracy the apparently immortal lines:Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase,Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.His mother, however, scarcely regarded the book. She knew the poem by heart, and had indeed recited it to George, who, though he was much impressed by her fire, could not by any means have been persuaded to imitate the freedom of her delivery. His elocution to-night was unusually bad, for the reason that he had been pleasurably excited by the immense news of Auntie Hamps's illness. Not that he had any grudge against Auntie Hamps! His pleasure would have been as keen in the grave illness of any other important family connection, save his mother and Edwin. Such notable events gave a sensational interest to domestic life which domestic life as a rule lacked.Then, through the half-open door of the dining-room came the sound of Edwin's latch-key in the front-door."There's uncle!" exclaimed George, and jumped up.Hilda stopped him."Put your books together," said she. "You know uncle likes to go up to the bathroom before he does anything!"It was a fact that the precisian hated even to be greeted, on his return home in the evening, until he came downstairs from the bathroom.Hilda herself collected the books and put them on the sideboard."Shall I tell Ada?" George suggested, champing the bit."No. Ada knows."With deliberation Hilda tended the fire. Her mind was in a state of emotional flux. Memories and comparisons mournfully and yet agreeably animated it. She thought of the days when she used to recite amid enthusiasm in the old drawing-room of the Orgreaves; and of the days when she was a wanderer, had no home, no support, little security; and of the brief, uncertain days with George Cannon; and of the eternal days when her only assurance was the assurance of disaster. She glanced at George, and saw in him reminders of his tragic secret father now hidden away, forced into the background, like something obscene. Nearly every development of the present out of the past seemed to her, now, to be tragic. Johnnie Orgreave had of course not come back from his idyll with the ripping Mrs. Chris Hamson; their seclusion was not positively known; but the whole district knew that the husband had begun proceedings and that the Orgreave business was being damaged by the incompetence of Jimmie Orgreave, whose deplorable wife had a few days earlier been seen notoriously drunk in the dress-circle of the Hanbridge Theatre Royal. Janet was still at Tavy Mansion because there was no place for her in the Five Towns. Janet had written to Hilda, sadly, and the letter breathed her sense of her own futility and superfluousness in the social scheme. In one curt phrase, that very afternoon, the taciturn Maggie, who very seldom complained, had disclosed something of what it was to live day and night with Auntie Hamps. Even Clara, the self-sufficient, protected by an almost impermeable armour of conceit, showed signs of the anxiety due to obscure chronic disease and a husband who financially never knew where he was. Finally, the last glories of Auntie Hamps were sinking to ashes. Only Hilda herself was, from nearly every point of view, in a satisfactory and promising situation. She possessed love, health, money, stability. When danger threatened, a quiet and unfailingly sagacious husband was there to meet and destroy it. Surely nothing whatever worth mentioning, save the fact that she was distantly approaching forty, troubled the existence of Hilda now; and her age certainly did not trouble her.Ada entered with the hot dishes, and went out.At length Hilda heard the bathroom door. She left the dining-room, shutting the door on George, who could take a hint very well--considering his years. Edwin, brushed and spruce, was coming downstairs, rubbing his clean hands with physical satisfaction. He nodded amiably, but without smiling."Has he gone?" said Hilda, in a low voice.Edwin nodded. He was at the foot of the stairs.She did not offer to kiss him, having a notion that he would prefer not to be kissed just then."How much did you give him?" She knew he would not care for the question, but she could not help putting it.He smiled, and touched her shoulder. She liked him to touch her shoulder."That's all right," he said, with a faint condescension. "Don't you worry about that."She did not press the point. He could be free enough with information--except when it was demanded. Some time later he would begin of his own accord to talk."How was Auntie Hamps?""Well, if anything, she's a bit easier. I don't mind betting she gets over it."They went into the dining-room almost side by side, and she enquired again about his headache.The meal was tranquil. After a few moments Edwin opened the subject of Auntie Hamps's illness with some sardonic remarks upon the demeanour of Albert Benbow."Is Auntie dying?" asked George with gusto.Edwin replied:"What are those schoolbooks doing there on the sideboard? I thought it was clearly understood that you were to do your lessons in your mother's boudoir."He spoke without annoyance, but coldly. He was aware that neither Hilda nor her son could comprehend that to a bookman schoolbooks were not books, but merely an eyesore. He did not blame them for their incapacity, but he considered that an arrangement was an arrangement."Mother put them there," said the base George."Well, you can take them away," said Edwin firmly. "Run along now."George rose from his place between Hilda and Edwin, and from his luscious plate, and removed the books. Hilda watched him meekly go. His father, too, had gone. Edwin was in the right; his position could not be assailed. He had not been unpleasant, but he had spoken as one sublimely confident that his order would not be challenged. Within her heart Hilda rebelled. If Edwin had been responsible for some act contrary to one of her decrees, she would never in his presence have used the tone that he used to enforce obedience. She would have laughed or she would have frowned, but she would never have been the polite autocrat. Nor would he have expected her to play the rôle; he would probably have resented it.Why? Were they not equals? No, they were not equals. The fundamental unuttered assumption upon which the household life rested was that they were not equals. She might cross him, she might momentarily defy him, she might torture him, she might drive him to fury, and still be safe from any effective reprisals, because his love for her made her necessary to his being; but in spite of all that his will remained the seat of government, and she and George were only the Opposition. In the end, she had to incline. She was the complement of his existence, but he was not the complement of hers. She was just a parasite, though an essential parasite. Why? ... The reason, she judged, was economic, and solely economic. She rebelled. Was she not as individual, as original, as he? Had she not a powerful mind of her own, experience of her own, ideals of her own? Was she not of a nature profoundly and exceptionally independent?...Her lot was unalterable. She had of course, not the slightest desire to leave him; she was devoted to him; what irked her was that, even had she had the desire, she could not have fulfilled it, for she was too old now, and too enamoured of comfort and security, to risk such an enterprise. She was a captive, and she recalled with a gentle pang, less than regret, the days when she was unhappy and free as a man, when she could say, "I will go to London," "I will leave London," "I am deceived and ruined, but I am my own mistress."These thoughts in the idyllic tranquillity of the meal, mingled, below her smiling preoccupations of an honoured house-mistress, with the thoughts of her love for her husband and son and of their excellences, of the masculine love which enveloped and shielded her, of her security, of the tragedy of the bribed and dismissed victim and villain, George Cannon, of the sorrows of some of her friends, and of the dead. In her heart was the unquiet whispering: "I submit, and yet I shall never submit."BOOK IIIEQUILIBRIUMCHAPTER XVIIGEORGE'S EYESIHilda sat alone in the boudoir, before the fire. She had just come out of the kitchen, and she was wearing the white uniform of the kitchen, unsuited for a boudoir; but she wore it with piquancy. The November afternoon had passed into dusk, and through the window, over the roofs of Hulton Street, stars could be seen in a darkening clear sky. After a very sharp fall and rise of the barometer, accounting for heavy rainstorms, the first frosts were announced, and winter was on the doorstep. The hardy inhabitants of the Five Towns, Hilda among them, were bracing themselves to the discipline of winter, with its mud, increased smuts, sleet, and damp, piercing chills; and they were taking pleasure in the tonic prospect of discomfort. The visitation had threatened ever since September. Now it had positively come. Let it come! Build up the fire, stamp the feet, and defy it! Hilda was exhilarated, having been reawakened to the zest and the romance of life, not merely by the onset of winter, but by dramatic events in the kitchen.A little over three years had elapsed since the closing of the episode of George Cannon, and for two of those years Hilda had had peace in the kitchen. She had been the firm mistress who knows what she wants, and, knowing also how to handle the peculiar inmates of the kitchen, gets it; she had been the mistress who "won't put up with" all sorts of things, including middle-age and ugliness in servants, and whom heaven has spoilt by too much favour. Then the cook, with the ingratitude of a cherished domestic, had fallen in love and carried her passion into a cottage miles away at Longshaw. And from that moment Hilda had ceased to be the mistress who by firmness commands fate; she had become as other mistresses. In a year she had had five cooks, giving varying degrees of intense dissatisfaction. She had even dismissed the slim and constant Ada once, but, yielding to an outburst of penitent affection, had withdrawn the notice. The last cook, far removed from youthfulness or prettiness, had left suddenly that day, after insolence, after the discovery of secret beer and other vileness in the attic-bedroom, after a scene in which Hilda had absolutely silenced her, reducing ribaldry to sobs. Cook and trunk expelled, Hilda had gone about the house like a fumigation, and into the kitchen like the embodiment of calm and gay efficiency. She would do the cooking herself. She would show the kitchen that she was dependent upon nobody. She had quickened the speed of Ada, accused her "tartly," but not without dry good-humour, of a disloyal secretiveness, and counselled her to mind what she was about if she wanted to get on in the world.Edwin knew nothing, for all had happened since his departure to the works after midday dinner. He would be back in due course, and George would be back, and Tertius Ingpen (long ago reconciled) was coming for the evening. She would show them all three what a meal was, and incidentally Ada would learn what a meal was. There was nothing like demonstrating to servants that you could beat them easily at their own game.She had just lived through her thirty-ninth birthday. "Forty!" she had murmured to herself with a shiver of apprehension, meaning that the next would be the fortieth. It was an unpleasant experience. She had told Edwin not to mention her birthday abroad. Clumsy George had enquired: "Mother, how old are you?" To which she had replied, "Lay-ours for meddlers!" a familiar phrase whose origin none of them understood, but George knew that it signified, "Mind your own business." No! She had not been happy on that birthday. She had gazed into the glass and decided that she looked old, that she did not look old, that she looked old, endlessly alternating. She was not stout, but her body was solid, too solid; it had no litheness, none whatever; it was absolutely set; the cleft under the chin was quite undeniable, and the olive complexion subtly ravaged. Still, not a hair of her dark head had changed colour. It was perhaps her soul that was greying. Her married life was fairly calm. It had grown monotonous in ease and tranquillity. The sharp, respectful admiration for her husband roused in her by his handling of the Cannon episode, had gradually been dulled. She had nothing against him. Yet she had everything against him, because apart from his grave abiding love for her he possessed an object and interest in life, and because she was a mere complement and he was not. She had asked herself the most dreadful of questions: "Why have I lived? Why do I go on living?" and had answered: "Because ofthem," meaning Edwin and her son. But it was not enough for her, who had once been violently enterprising, pugnacious, endangered, and independent. For after she had watched over them she had energy to spare, and such energy was not being employed and could not be employed. Reading--a diversion! Fancy work--a detestable device for killing time and energy! Social duties--ditto! Charity--hateful! She had slowly descended into marriage as into a lotus valley. And more than half her life was gone. She could never detect that any other married woman in the town felt as she felt. She could never explain herself to Edwin, and indeed had not tried to explain herself.Now the affair of the alcoholic cook, aided by winter's first fillip, stimulated and brightened her. And while thinking with a glance at the clock of the precise moment when she must return to the kitchen and put a dish down to the fire, she also thought, rather hopefully and then quite hopefully, about the future of her marriage. Her brain seemed to straighten and correct itself, like the brain of one who, waking up in the morning, slowly perceives that the middle-of-the-night apprehensiveness about eventualities was all awry in its pessimism. She saw that everything could and must be improved, that the new life must begin. Edwin needed to be inspired; she must inspire him. He slouched more and more in his walk; he was more and more absorbed in his business, quieter in the evenings, more impatient in the mornings. Moreover, the household machine had been getting slack. A general tonic was required; she would administer it--and to herself also. They should all feel the invigorating ozone that very night. She would organise social distractions; on behalf of the home she would reclaim from the works those odd hours and half-hours of Edwin's which it had imperceptibly filched. She would have some new clothes, and she would send Edwin to the tailor's. She would make him buy a dog-cart and a horse. Oh! She could do it. She had the mastery of him in many things when she chose to be aroused. In a word, she would "branch out."She was not sure that she would not prosecute a campaign for putting Edwin on the Town Council, where he certainly ought to be. It was his duty to take a share in public matters, and ultimately to dominate the town. Suggestions had already been made by wirepullers, and unreflectively repulsed by the too casual Edwin. She saw him mayor, and herself mayoress. Once, the prospect of any such formal honour, with all that it entailed of ceremoniousness and insincere civilities, would have annoyed if not frightened her. But now she thought, proudly and timidly and desirously, that she would make as good a mayoress as most mayoresses, and that she could set one or two of them an example in tact and dignity. Why not? Of late neither mayors nor mayoresses in the Five Towns had been what they used to be. The grand tradition was apparently in abeyance, the people who ought to carry it on seeming somehow to despise it. She could remember mayors, especially Chief Bailiffs at Turnhill, who imposed themselves upon the imagination of the town. But nowadays the name of a mayor was never a household word. She had even heard Ingpen ask Edwin: "See, who is the new mayor?" and Edwin start his halting answer: "Let me see--"And she had still another and perhaps greater ambition--to possess a country house. In her fancy her country house was very like Alicia Hesketh's house, Tavy Mansion, which she had never ceased to envy. She felt that in a new home, spacious, with space around it, she could really commence the new life. She saw the place perfectly appointed and functioning perfectly--no bother about smuts on white curtains; no half-trained servants; none of the base, confined, promiscuity of filthy Trafalgar Road; and the Benbows and Auntie Hamps at least eight or ten miles off! She saw herself driving Edwin to the station in the morning, or perhaps right into Bursley if she wanted to shop.... No, she would of course shop at Oldcastle.... She would leave old Darius Clayhanger's miracle-house without one regret. And in the new life she would be always active, busy, dignified, elegant, influential, and kind. And to Edwin she would be absolutely indispensable.In these imaginings their solid but tarnished love glittered and gleamed again. She saw naught but the charming side of Edwin and the romantic side of their union. She was persuaded that there really was nobody like Edwin, and that no marriage had ever had quite the mysterious, secretly exciting quality of hers. She yearned for him to come home at once, to appear magically in the dusk of the doorway. The mood was marvellous.IIThe door opened."Can I speak to you, m'm?"It was the voice of Ada, somewhat perturbed. She advanced a little and stood darkly in front of the open doorway."What is it, Ada?" Hilda asked curtly, without turning to look at her."It's--" Ada began and stopped.Hilda glanced round quickly, recognising now in the voice a peculiar note with which experience had familiarised her. It was a note between pertness and the beginning of a sob, and it always indicated that Ada was feeling more acutely than usual the vast injustice of the worldly scheme. It might develop into tears; on the other hand it might develop into mere insolence. Hilda discerned that Ada was wearing neither cap nor apron. She thought: "If this stupid girl wants trouble, she has come to me at exactly and precisely the right moment to get it. I'm not in the humour, after all I've gone through to-day, to stand any nonsense either from her or from anybody else.""What is it, Ada?" she repeated, with restraint, and yet warningly. "And where's your apron and your cap?""In the kitchen, m'm.""Well, go and put them on, and then come and say what you have to say," said Hilda, thinking: "I don't give any importance to her cap and apron, but she does.""I was thinking I'd better give ye notice, m'm," said Ada, and she said it pertly, ignoring the command.The two women were alone together in the house. Each felt it; each felt the large dark emptiness of the house behind them, and the solid front and back doors cutting them off from succour; each had to depend entirely upon herself.Hilda asked quietly:"What's the matter now?"She knew that Ada's grievance would prove to be silly. The girl had practically no commonsense. Not one servant girl in a hundred had any appreciable commonsense. And when girls happened to be "upset"--as they were all liable to be, and as Ada by the violent departure of the cook no doubt was--even such minute traces of gumption as they possessed were apt to disappear."There's no pleasing you, m'm!" said Ada. "The way you talked to me in the kitchen, saying I was always a-hiding things from ye. I've felt it very much!"She threw her head back, and the gesture signified: "I'm younger than you, and young men are always running after me. And I can get a new situation any time. And I've not gone back into my kitchen to put my cap and apron on.""Ada," said Hilda. "Shall I tell you what's wrong with you? You're a little fool. You know you're talking rightdown nonsense. You know that as well as I do. And you know you'll never get a better place than you have here. But you've taken an idea into your head--and there you are! Now do be sensible. You say you think you'd better give notice. Think it over before you do anything ridiculous. Sleep on it. We'll see how you feel in the morning.""I think I'd better give notice, m'm, especially seeing I'm a fool, and silly," Ada persisted.Hilda sighed. Her voice hardened slightly:"So you'd leave me without a maid just at Christmas! And that's all the thanks I get for all I've done for you.""Well, m'm. We've had such a queer lot of girls here lately, haven't we?" The pertness was intensified. "I don't hardly care to stay. I feel we sh'd both be better for a change like."It was perhaps Ada's subtly insolent use of the word "we" and "both" that definitely brought about a new phase of the interview. Hilda suddenly lost all desire for an amicable examination of the crisis."Very well, Ada," she said, shortly. "But remember I shan't take you back again, whatever happens."Ada moved away, and then returned."Could I leave at once, m'm, same as cook?"Hilda was astonished and outraged, despite all her experience and its resulting secret sardonic cynicism in regard to servants. The girl was ready to walk out instantly."And may I enquire where you'd go to?" asked Hilda with a sneer. "At this time of night you couldn't possibly get home to your parents.""Oh!" answered Ada brightly. "I could go to me cousin's up at Toft End. And her could send down a lad with a barrow for me box."The plot, then, had been thought out. "Her cousin's!" thought Hilda, and seemed to be putting her finger on the cause of Ada's disloyalty. "Her cousin's!" It was a light in a dark mystery. "Her cousin's!""I suppose you know you're forfeiting the wages due to you the day after to-morrow?""I shall ask me cousin about that, m'm," said Ada, as it were menacingly."I should!" Hilda sarcastically agreed. "I certainly should." And she thought with bitter resignation: "She'll have to leave anyhow after this. She may as well leave on the spot.""There's those as'll see as I have me rights," said Ada pugnaciously, with another toss of the head.Hilda had a mind to retort in anger; but she controlled herself. Already that afternoon she had imperilled her dignity in the altercation with the cook. The cook, however, had not Ada's ready tongue, and, while the mistress had come off best against the cook, she might through impulsiveness find herself worsted by Ada's more youthful impudence, were it once unloosed."That will do, then, Ada," she said. "You can go and pack your box first thing."In less than three quarters of an hour Ada was gone, and her corded trunk lay just within the scullery door, waiting the arrival of the cousin's barrow. She had bumped it down the stairs herself.All solitary in the house, which had somehow been transformed into a strange and unusual house, Hilda wept. She had only parted with an unfaithful and ungrateful servant, but she wept. She dashed into the kitchen and began to do Ada's work, still weeping, and she was savage against her own tears; yet they continued softly to fall, misting her vision of fire and utensils and earthenware vessels. Ada had left everything in a moment; she had left the kettle on the fire, and the grease in the square tin in which the dinner-joint had been cooked, and the ashes in the fender, and tea-leaves in the kitchen teapot and a cup and saucer unwashed. She had cared naught for the inconvenience she was causing; had shewn not the slightest consideration; had walked off without a pang, smilingly hoity-toity. And all servants were like that. Such conduct might be due as much to want of imagination, to a simple inability to picture to themselves the consequences of certain acts, as to stark ingratitude; but the consequences remained the same; and Hilda held fiercely to the theory of stark ingratitude.She had made Ada; she had created her. When Hilda engaged her, Ada was little more than an "oat-cake girl,"--that is to say, one of those girls who earn a few pence by delivering oat-cakes fresh from the stove at a halfpenny each before breakfast at the houses of gormandising superior artisans and the middle-classes. True, she had been in one situation prior to Hilda's, but it was a situation where she learnt nothing and could have learnt nothing. Nevertheless, she was very quick to learn, and in a month Hilda had done wonders with her. She had taught her not only her duties, but how to respect herself, to make the best of herself, and favourably to impress others. She had enormously increased Ada's value in the universe. And she had taught her some worldly wisdom, and permitted and even encouraged certain coquetries, and in the bed-room during dressings and undressings had occasionally treated her as a soubrette if not as a confidante; had listened to her at length, and had gone so far as to ask her views on this matter or that--the supreme honour for a menial. Also she had very conscientiously nursed her in sickness. She had really liked Ada, and had developed a sentimental weakness for her. She had taken pleasure in her prettiness, in her natural grace, and in her crude youth. She enjoyed seeing Ada arrange a bedroom, or answer the door, or serve a meal. And Ada's stupidity--that half-cunning stupidity of her class, which immovably underlay her superficial aptitudes--had not sufficed to spoil her affection for the girl. She had been indulgent to Ada's stupidity; she had occasionally in some soft moods hoped that it was curable. And she had argued in moments of discouragement that at any rate stupidity could be faithful. In her heart she had counted Ada as a friend, as a true standby in the more or less tragic emergencies of the household. And now Ada had deserted her. Stupidity had proved to be neither faithful nor grateful. Why had Ada been so silly and so base? Impossible to say! A nothing! A whim! Nerves! Fatuity! The whole affair was horribly absurd. These creatures were incalculable. Of course Hilda would have been wiser not to upbraid her so soon after the scene with the cook, and to have spoken more smoothly to the chit in the boudoir. Hilda admitted that. But what then? Was that an excuse for the chit's turpitude? There must be a limit to the mistress's humouring. And probably after all the chit had meant to go.... If she had not meant to go she would not have entered the boudoir apronless and capless. Some rankling word, some ridiculous sympathy with the cook, some wild dream of a Christmas holiday--who could tell what might have influenced her? Hilda gave it up--and returned to it a thousand times. One truth emerged--and it was the great truth of housemistresses--namely, that it never, never, never pays to be too kind to servants. "Servants do not understand kindness." You think they do; they themselves think they do; but they don't,--they don't and they don't. Hilda went back into the immensity of her desolating experience as an employer of female domestic servants of all kinds, but chiefly bad--for the landlady of a small boarding house must take what servants she can get--and she raged at the persistence of the proof that kindness never paid. What did pay was severity and inhuman strictness, and the maintenance of an impassable gulf between employer and employed. Not again would she make the mistake which she had made a hundred times. She hardened herself to the consistency of a slave-driver. And all the time it was the woman in her, not the mistress, that the hasty thoughtless Ada had wounded. To the woman the kitchen was not the same place without Ada--Ada on whom she had utterly relied in the dilemma caused by the departure of the cook. As with angrily wet eyes she went about her new work in the kitchen, she could almost see the graceful ghost of Ada tripping to and fro therein.And all that the world, and the husband, would know or understand was that a cook had been turned out for drunkenness, and that a quite sober parlour-maid had most preposterously walked after her. Hilda was aware that in Edwin she had a severe, though a taciturn, critic of her activities as employer of servants. She had no hope whatever of his sympathy, and so she closed all her gates against him. She waited for him as for an adversary, and all the lustre faded from her conception of their love.IIIWhen Edwin approached his home that frosty evening, he was disturbed to perceive that there was no light from the hall-gas shining through the panes of the front-door, though some light showed at the dining-room window, the blinds of which had not been drawn. "What next?" he thought crossly. He was tired, and the keenness of the weather, instead of bracing him, merely made him petulant. He was astonished that several women in a house could all forget such an important act as the lighting of the hall-gas at nightfall. Never before had the hall-gas been forgotten, and the negligence appeared to Edwin as absolutely monstrous. The effect of it on the street, the effect on a possible caller, was bad enough (Edwin, while pretending to scorn social opinion, was really very deferential towards it), but what was worse was the revelation of the feminine mentality.In opening the door with his latchkey he was purposely noisy, partly in order to give expression to his justified annoyance, and partly to warn all peccant women that the male had arrived, threatening.As his feet fumbled into the interior gloom and he banged the door, he quite expected a rush of at least one apologetic woman with a box of matches. But nobody came. Nevertheless he could hear sharp movements through the half-open door of the kitchen. Assuredly women had the irresponsibility of infants. He glanced for an instant into the dining-room; the white cloth was laid, but the table was actually not set. With unusual righteous care he wiped the half-congealed mud off his boots on the mat; then removed his hat and his overcoat, took a large new piece of indiarubher from his pocket and put it on the hall-table, felt the radiator (which despite all his injunctions and recommendations was almost cold); and lastly he lighted the gas himself. This final act was contrary to his own rule, for he had often told Hilda that half her trouble with servants arose through her impatiently doing herself things which they had omitted, instead of ringing the bell and seeing the things done. But he was not infrequently inconsistent, both in deed and in thought. For another example, he would say superiorly that a woman could never manage women, ignoring that he the all-wise had never been able to manage Hilda.He turned to go upstairs. At the same moment somebody emerged obscurely from the kitchen. It was Hilda, in a white apron."Oh! I'm glad you've lighted it," said she curtly, without the least symptom of apology, but rather affrontingly.He continued his way."Have you seen anything of George?" she asked, and her tone stopped him.Yet she well knew that he hated to be stopped of an evening on his way to the bathroom. It could not be sufficiently emphasized that to accost him before he had descended from the bathroom was to transgress one of the most solemn rules of his daily life."Of course I haven't seen George," he answered. "How should I have seen George?""Because he's not back from school yet, and I can't help wondering----"She was worrying about George as usual.He grunted and passed on."There's no light on the landing, either," he said, over the banisters. "I wish you'd see to those servants of yours.""As it happens there aren't any servants."Her tone, getting more peculiar with each phrase, stopped him again."Aren't any servants? What d'you mean?""Well, I found the attic full of beer bottles, so I sent her off on the spot.""Sent who off?""Eliza.""And where's Ada?""She's gone too," said Hilda defiantly, and as though rebutting an accusation before it could be made."Why?""She seemed to want to. And she was very impertinent over it."He snorted and shrugged his shoulders."Well, it's your affair," he muttered, too scornful to ask details."It is," said she, significantly laconic.In the bathroom, vexed and gloomy as he brushed his nails and splashed in the wash basin, he mused savagely over the servant problem. The servant problem had been growing acute. He had predicted several times that a crisis would arrive; a crisis had arrived; he was always right; his rightness was positively uncanny. He had liked Ada; he had not disliked the cook. He knew that Hilda was to blame. How should she not be to blame,--losing her entire staff in one afternoon? It was not merely that she lacked the gift of authoritative control,--it was also that she had no feeling for democratic justice as between one human being and another. And yet among his earliest recollections of her was her passionate sympathy with men on strike as against their employers. Totally misleading manifestations! For her a servant was nothing but a "servant." She was convinced that all her servants were pampered and spoilt; and as for Edwin's treatment of his workpeople she considered it to be ridiculously, criminally soft. If she had implied once she had implied a hundred times that the whole lot of them laughed at him behind his back for a sentimental simpleton. Occasionally Edwin was quite outraged by her callousness. The topic of the eight-hours day, of the ten-hours day, and even of the twelve-hours day (the last for tramwaymen) had been lately exciting the district. And Edwin was distressed that in his own house a sixteen-hour day for labour was in vogue and that the employer perceived no shame in it. He did not clearly see how the shame was to be abolished, but he thought that it ought to be admitted. It was not admitted. From six in the morning until ten at night these mysterious light-headed young women were the slaves of a bell. They had no surcease except one long weekday evening each week and a short Sunday evening each fortnight. At one period Hilda had had a fad for getting them out of bed at half-past five, to cure them of laziness. He remembered one cook whose family lived at the village of Brindley Edge, five miles off. This cook on her weekday evening would walk to Brindley Edge, spend three quarters of an hour in her home, and walk back to Bursley, reaching Trafalgar Road just in time to get to bed. Hilda saw nothing very odd in that. She said the girl could always please herself about going to Brindley Edge.Edwin's democratic sense was gradually growing in force; it disturbed more and more the peace of his inmost mind. He seldom displayed his sympathies (save to Tertius Ingpen who, though a Tory, was in some ways astoundingly open to ideas, which seemed to interest him as a pretty equation would interest him), but they pursued their secret activity in his being, annoying him at his lithographic works, and still more in his home. He would suppress them, and grin, and repeat his ancient consoling truth that what was, was. The relief, however, was not permanent.In that year the discovery of Rontgen Rays, the practical invention of the incandescent gas-mantle, the abolition of the man with the red flag in front of self-propelled vehicles, and the fact that Consols stood at 113, had combined to produce in innumerable hearts the illusion that civilisation was advancing at a great rate. But Edwin in his soul scarcely thought so. He was worrying not only about Liberal principles, but about the world; in his youth he had never worried about the world. And of his own personal success he would ask and ask: Is it right? He said to himself in the bathroom: "There's a million domestic servants in this blessed country, and not one of them works less than a hundred hours a week, and nobody cares. I don't think I really care myself. But there it is all the same!" And he was darkly resentful against Hilda on account of the entire phenomenon.... He foresaw, too, a period of upset and discomfort in his house. Would there, indeed, ever be any real tranquillity in his house, with that strange, primeval cave-woman in charge of it?As he descended the stairs, Hilda came out of the dining-room with an empty tray.She said:"I wish you'd go out and look for George."Imagine it--going out into the Five Towns to look for one boy!"Oh! He'll be all right. I suppose you haven't forgotten Ingpen's coming to-night.""Of course I haven't. But I want you to go out and look for George."He knew what was in her mind,--namely an absurd vision of George and his new bicycle crushed under a tramcar somewhere between Bleakridge and Hanbridge. In that year everybody with any pretension to youthfulness and modernity rode a bicycle. Both Edwin and Hilda rode occasionally--such was the power of fashion. Maternal apprehensions had not sufficed to keep George from having a bicycle, nor from riding on it unprotected up and down the greasy slopes of Trafalgar Road to and from school. Edwin himself had bought the bicycle, pooh-poohing danger, and asserting that anyhow normal risks must always be accepted with an even mind.He was about to declare that he would certainly not do anything so silly as to go out and look for George,--and then all of a sudden he had the queer sensation of being alone with Hilda in the house made strange and romantic by a domestic calamity. He gazed at Hilda with her apron, and the calamity had made her strange and romantic also. He was vexed, annoyed, despondent, gloomy, fearful of the immediate future; he had immense grievances; he hated Hilda, he loathed giving way to her. He thought: "What is it binds me to this incomprehensible woman? I will not be bound!" But he felt that he would be compelled (not by her but by something in himself) to commit the folly of going out to look for George. And he felt that though his existence was an exasperating adventure, still it was an adventure."Oh! Damn!" he exploded, and reached for a cap.And then George came into the hall through the kitchen. The boy often preferred to enter by the back, the stalking Indian way.
IV
He went back to the private room, self-conscious and rather tongue-tied, with a clear feeling of relief that Hilda was disposed of, removed from the equation--and not unsuccessfully. After the woman, to deal with the man, in the plain language of men, seemed simple and easy. He was astounded, equally, by the grudging tardiness of Mrs. Cannon's information to Hilda as to the release, and by the baffling, inflexible detraction of Hilda's words: "Well, I'm not surprised." And the flitting image of Auntie Hamps fighting for life still left him untouched. He looked at George Cannon, and George Cannon, with his unreliable eyes, looked at him. He almost expected Cannon to say: "Was that Hilda you were talking to out there?" But Cannon seemed to have no suspicion that, in either the inner or the outer room, he had been so close to her. No doubt, when he was waiting by the mantel-piece in the outer room, he had lifted the paper as soon as he heard the door unlatched, expressly in order to screen himself from observation. Probably he had not even guessed that the passer was a woman. Had Simpson been there, the polite young man would doubtless have said: "Good night, Mrs. Clayhanger," but Simpson had happened not to be there.
"Are you going to help me?" asked George Cannon, after a moment, and his heavy voice was so beseeching, so humble, so surprisingly sycophantic, so fearful, that Edwin could scarcely bear to hear it. He hated to hear that one man could be so slavishly dependent on another. Indeed, he much preferred Cannon's defiant, half-bullying tone.
"Yes," said he. "I shall do what I can. What do you want?"
"A hundred pounds," said George Cannon, and, as he named the sum, his glance was hard and steady.
Edwin was startled. But immediately he began to readjust his ideas, persuading himself that after all the man could not prudently have asked for less.
"I can't give it you all now."
Cannon's face lighted up in relief and joy. His black eyes sparkled feverishly with the impatience of an almost hopeless desire about to be satisfied. Although he did not move, his self-control had for the moment gone completely, and the secrets of his soul were exposed.
"Can you send it me--in notes? I can give you an address in Liverpool." His voice could hardly utter the words.
"Wait a second," said Edwin.
He went to the safe let into the wall, of which he was still so naïvely proud, and unlocked it with the owner's gesture. The perfect fitting of the bright key, the ease with which it turned, the silent, heavy swing of the massive door on its hinges--these things gave him physical as well as moral pleasure. He savoured the security of his position and his ability to rescue people from destruction. From the cavern of the safe he took out a bag of gold, part of the money required for wages on the morrow,--he would have to send to the Bank again in the morning. He knew that the bag contained exactly twenty pounds in half-sovereigns, but he shed the lovely twinkling coins on the desk and counted them.
"Here," he said. "Here's twenty pounds. Take the bag, too--it'll be handier," and he put the money into the bag. Then a foolish, grand idea struck him. "Write down the address on this envelope, will you, and I'll send you a hundred to-morrow. You can rely on it."
"Eighty, you mean," muttered George Cannon.
"No," said Edwin, with affected nonchalance, blushing, "a hundred. The twenty will get you over and you'll have a hundred clear when you arrive on the other side."
"Ye're very kind," said Cannon weakly. "I--"
"Here. Here's the envelope. Here's a bit of pencil." Edwin stopped him hastily. His fear of being thanked made him harsh.
While Cannon was nervously writing the address, he noticed that the man's clumsy fingers were those of a day-labourer.
"You'll get it all back. You'll see," said Cannon, as he stood up to leave, holding his glossy felt hat in his left hand.
"Don't worry about that. I don't want it. You owe me nothing."
"You'll have every penny back, and before long, too."
Edwin smiled, deprecating the idea.
"Well, good luck!" he said. "You'll get to Crewe all right. There's a train at Shawport at eight seven."
They shook hands, and quitted the inner office. As he traversed the outer office on his way forth, in front of Edwin, Cannon turned his head, as if to say something, but, confused, he said nothing and went on, and at once he disappeared into the darkness outside. And Edwin was left with a memory of his dubious eyes, hard rather than confident, profoundly relieved rather than profoundly grateful.
"By Jove!" Edwin murmured by himself. "Who'd have thought it? ... They say those chaps always turn up again like bad pennies, but I bet he won't." Simultaneously he reflected upon the case of Mrs. Cannon, deserted; but it did not excite his pity. He fastened the safe, extinguished the lights, shut the office, and prepared his mind for the visit to Auntie Hamps.
V
Hilda and her son were in the dining-room, in which the table, set for a special meal--half-tea, half-supper--made a glittering oblong of white. On the table, among blue-and-white plates, and knives and forks, lay some of George's shabby school-books. In most branches of knowledge George privately knew that he could instruct his parents--especially his mother. Nevertheless that beloved outgrown creature was still occasionally useful at home-lessons, as for instance in "poetry." George, disdainful, had to learn some verses each week, and now his mother held a book entitled "The Poetry Reciter," while George mumbled with imperfect verbal accuracy the apparently immortal lines:
Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase,Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.
Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase,Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.
Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase,
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.
His mother, however, scarcely regarded the book. She knew the poem by heart, and had indeed recited it to George, who, though he was much impressed by her fire, could not by any means have been persuaded to imitate the freedom of her delivery. His elocution to-night was unusually bad, for the reason that he had been pleasurably excited by the immense news of Auntie Hamps's illness. Not that he had any grudge against Auntie Hamps! His pleasure would have been as keen in the grave illness of any other important family connection, save his mother and Edwin. Such notable events gave a sensational interest to domestic life which domestic life as a rule lacked.
Then, through the half-open door of the dining-room came the sound of Edwin's latch-key in the front-door.
"There's uncle!" exclaimed George, and jumped up.
Hilda stopped him.
"Put your books together," said she. "You know uncle likes to go up to the bathroom before he does anything!"
It was a fact that the precisian hated even to be greeted, on his return home in the evening, until he came downstairs from the bathroom.
Hilda herself collected the books and put them on the sideboard.
"Shall I tell Ada?" George suggested, champing the bit.
"No. Ada knows."
With deliberation Hilda tended the fire. Her mind was in a state of emotional flux. Memories and comparisons mournfully and yet agreeably animated it. She thought of the days when she used to recite amid enthusiasm in the old drawing-room of the Orgreaves; and of the days when she was a wanderer, had no home, no support, little security; and of the brief, uncertain days with George Cannon; and of the eternal days when her only assurance was the assurance of disaster. She glanced at George, and saw in him reminders of his tragic secret father now hidden away, forced into the background, like something obscene. Nearly every development of the present out of the past seemed to her, now, to be tragic. Johnnie Orgreave had of course not come back from his idyll with the ripping Mrs. Chris Hamson; their seclusion was not positively known; but the whole district knew that the husband had begun proceedings and that the Orgreave business was being damaged by the incompetence of Jimmie Orgreave, whose deplorable wife had a few days earlier been seen notoriously drunk in the dress-circle of the Hanbridge Theatre Royal. Janet was still at Tavy Mansion because there was no place for her in the Five Towns. Janet had written to Hilda, sadly, and the letter breathed her sense of her own futility and superfluousness in the social scheme. In one curt phrase, that very afternoon, the taciturn Maggie, who very seldom complained, had disclosed something of what it was to live day and night with Auntie Hamps. Even Clara, the self-sufficient, protected by an almost impermeable armour of conceit, showed signs of the anxiety due to obscure chronic disease and a husband who financially never knew where he was. Finally, the last glories of Auntie Hamps were sinking to ashes. Only Hilda herself was, from nearly every point of view, in a satisfactory and promising situation. She possessed love, health, money, stability. When danger threatened, a quiet and unfailingly sagacious husband was there to meet and destroy it. Surely nothing whatever worth mentioning, save the fact that she was distantly approaching forty, troubled the existence of Hilda now; and her age certainly did not trouble her.
Ada entered with the hot dishes, and went out.
At length Hilda heard the bathroom door. She left the dining-room, shutting the door on George, who could take a hint very well--considering his years. Edwin, brushed and spruce, was coming downstairs, rubbing his clean hands with physical satisfaction. He nodded amiably, but without smiling.
"Has he gone?" said Hilda, in a low voice.
Edwin nodded. He was at the foot of the stairs.
She did not offer to kiss him, having a notion that he would prefer not to be kissed just then.
"How much did you give him?" She knew he would not care for the question, but she could not help putting it.
He smiled, and touched her shoulder. She liked him to touch her shoulder.
"That's all right," he said, with a faint condescension. "Don't you worry about that."
She did not press the point. He could be free enough with information--except when it was demanded. Some time later he would begin of his own accord to talk.
"How was Auntie Hamps?"
"Well, if anything, she's a bit easier. I don't mind betting she gets over it."
They went into the dining-room almost side by side, and she enquired again about his headache.
The meal was tranquil. After a few moments Edwin opened the subject of Auntie Hamps's illness with some sardonic remarks upon the demeanour of Albert Benbow.
"Is Auntie dying?" asked George with gusto.
Edwin replied:
"What are those schoolbooks doing there on the sideboard? I thought it was clearly understood that you were to do your lessons in your mother's boudoir."
He spoke without annoyance, but coldly. He was aware that neither Hilda nor her son could comprehend that to a bookman schoolbooks were not books, but merely an eyesore. He did not blame them for their incapacity, but he considered that an arrangement was an arrangement.
"Mother put them there," said the base George.
"Well, you can take them away," said Edwin firmly. "Run along now."
George rose from his place between Hilda and Edwin, and from his luscious plate, and removed the books. Hilda watched him meekly go. His father, too, had gone. Edwin was in the right; his position could not be assailed. He had not been unpleasant, but he had spoken as one sublimely confident that his order would not be challenged. Within her heart Hilda rebelled. If Edwin had been responsible for some act contrary to one of her decrees, she would never in his presence have used the tone that he used to enforce obedience. She would have laughed or she would have frowned, but she would never have been the polite autocrat. Nor would he have expected her to play the rôle; he would probably have resented it.
Why? Were they not equals? No, they were not equals. The fundamental unuttered assumption upon which the household life rested was that they were not equals. She might cross him, she might momentarily defy him, she might torture him, she might drive him to fury, and still be safe from any effective reprisals, because his love for her made her necessary to his being; but in spite of all that his will remained the seat of government, and she and George were only the Opposition. In the end, she had to incline. She was the complement of his existence, but he was not the complement of hers. She was just a parasite, though an essential parasite. Why? ... The reason, she judged, was economic, and solely economic. She rebelled. Was she not as individual, as original, as he? Had she not a powerful mind of her own, experience of her own, ideals of her own? Was she not of a nature profoundly and exceptionally independent?...
Her lot was unalterable. She had of course, not the slightest desire to leave him; she was devoted to him; what irked her was that, even had she had the desire, she could not have fulfilled it, for she was too old now, and too enamoured of comfort and security, to risk such an enterprise. She was a captive, and she recalled with a gentle pang, less than regret, the days when she was unhappy and free as a man, when she could say, "I will go to London," "I will leave London," "I am deceived and ruined, but I am my own mistress."
These thoughts in the idyllic tranquillity of the meal, mingled, below her smiling preoccupations of an honoured house-mistress, with the thoughts of her love for her husband and son and of their excellences, of the masculine love which enveloped and shielded her, of her security, of the tragedy of the bribed and dismissed victim and villain, George Cannon, of the sorrows of some of her friends, and of the dead. In her heart was the unquiet whispering: "I submit, and yet I shall never submit."
BOOK III
EQUILIBRIUM
CHAPTER XVII
GEORGE'S EYES
I
Hilda sat alone in the boudoir, before the fire. She had just come out of the kitchen, and she was wearing the white uniform of the kitchen, unsuited for a boudoir; but she wore it with piquancy. The November afternoon had passed into dusk, and through the window, over the roofs of Hulton Street, stars could be seen in a darkening clear sky. After a very sharp fall and rise of the barometer, accounting for heavy rainstorms, the first frosts were announced, and winter was on the doorstep. The hardy inhabitants of the Five Towns, Hilda among them, were bracing themselves to the discipline of winter, with its mud, increased smuts, sleet, and damp, piercing chills; and they were taking pleasure in the tonic prospect of discomfort. The visitation had threatened ever since September. Now it had positively come. Let it come! Build up the fire, stamp the feet, and defy it! Hilda was exhilarated, having been reawakened to the zest and the romance of life, not merely by the onset of winter, but by dramatic events in the kitchen.
A little over three years had elapsed since the closing of the episode of George Cannon, and for two of those years Hilda had had peace in the kitchen. She had been the firm mistress who knows what she wants, and, knowing also how to handle the peculiar inmates of the kitchen, gets it; she had been the mistress who "won't put up with" all sorts of things, including middle-age and ugliness in servants, and whom heaven has spoilt by too much favour. Then the cook, with the ingratitude of a cherished domestic, had fallen in love and carried her passion into a cottage miles away at Longshaw. And from that moment Hilda had ceased to be the mistress who by firmness commands fate; she had become as other mistresses. In a year she had had five cooks, giving varying degrees of intense dissatisfaction. She had even dismissed the slim and constant Ada once, but, yielding to an outburst of penitent affection, had withdrawn the notice. The last cook, far removed from youthfulness or prettiness, had left suddenly that day, after insolence, after the discovery of secret beer and other vileness in the attic-bedroom, after a scene in which Hilda had absolutely silenced her, reducing ribaldry to sobs. Cook and trunk expelled, Hilda had gone about the house like a fumigation, and into the kitchen like the embodiment of calm and gay efficiency. She would do the cooking herself. She would show the kitchen that she was dependent upon nobody. She had quickened the speed of Ada, accused her "tartly," but not without dry good-humour, of a disloyal secretiveness, and counselled her to mind what she was about if she wanted to get on in the world.
Edwin knew nothing, for all had happened since his departure to the works after midday dinner. He would be back in due course, and George would be back, and Tertius Ingpen (long ago reconciled) was coming for the evening. She would show them all three what a meal was, and incidentally Ada would learn what a meal was. There was nothing like demonstrating to servants that you could beat them easily at their own game.
She had just lived through her thirty-ninth birthday. "Forty!" she had murmured to herself with a shiver of apprehension, meaning that the next would be the fortieth. It was an unpleasant experience. She had told Edwin not to mention her birthday abroad. Clumsy George had enquired: "Mother, how old are you?" To which she had replied, "Lay-ours for meddlers!" a familiar phrase whose origin none of them understood, but George knew that it signified, "Mind your own business." No! She had not been happy on that birthday. She had gazed into the glass and decided that she looked old, that she did not look old, that she looked old, endlessly alternating. She was not stout, but her body was solid, too solid; it had no litheness, none whatever; it was absolutely set; the cleft under the chin was quite undeniable, and the olive complexion subtly ravaged. Still, not a hair of her dark head had changed colour. It was perhaps her soul that was greying. Her married life was fairly calm. It had grown monotonous in ease and tranquillity. The sharp, respectful admiration for her husband roused in her by his handling of the Cannon episode, had gradually been dulled. She had nothing against him. Yet she had everything against him, because apart from his grave abiding love for her he possessed an object and interest in life, and because she was a mere complement and he was not. She had asked herself the most dreadful of questions: "Why have I lived? Why do I go on living?" and had answered: "Because ofthem," meaning Edwin and her son. But it was not enough for her, who had once been violently enterprising, pugnacious, endangered, and independent. For after she had watched over them she had energy to spare, and such energy was not being employed and could not be employed. Reading--a diversion! Fancy work--a detestable device for killing time and energy! Social duties--ditto! Charity--hateful! She had slowly descended into marriage as into a lotus valley. And more than half her life was gone. She could never detect that any other married woman in the town felt as she felt. She could never explain herself to Edwin, and indeed had not tried to explain herself.
Now the affair of the alcoholic cook, aided by winter's first fillip, stimulated and brightened her. And while thinking with a glance at the clock of the precise moment when she must return to the kitchen and put a dish down to the fire, she also thought, rather hopefully and then quite hopefully, about the future of her marriage. Her brain seemed to straighten and correct itself, like the brain of one who, waking up in the morning, slowly perceives that the middle-of-the-night apprehensiveness about eventualities was all awry in its pessimism. She saw that everything could and must be improved, that the new life must begin. Edwin needed to be inspired; she must inspire him. He slouched more and more in his walk; he was more and more absorbed in his business, quieter in the evenings, more impatient in the mornings. Moreover, the household machine had been getting slack. A general tonic was required; she would administer it--and to herself also. They should all feel the invigorating ozone that very night. She would organise social distractions; on behalf of the home she would reclaim from the works those odd hours and half-hours of Edwin's which it had imperceptibly filched. She would have some new clothes, and she would send Edwin to the tailor's. She would make him buy a dog-cart and a horse. Oh! She could do it. She had the mastery of him in many things when she chose to be aroused. In a word, she would "branch out."
She was not sure that she would not prosecute a campaign for putting Edwin on the Town Council, where he certainly ought to be. It was his duty to take a share in public matters, and ultimately to dominate the town. Suggestions had already been made by wirepullers, and unreflectively repulsed by the too casual Edwin. She saw him mayor, and herself mayoress. Once, the prospect of any such formal honour, with all that it entailed of ceremoniousness and insincere civilities, would have annoyed if not frightened her. But now she thought, proudly and timidly and desirously, that she would make as good a mayoress as most mayoresses, and that she could set one or two of them an example in tact and dignity. Why not? Of late neither mayors nor mayoresses in the Five Towns had been what they used to be. The grand tradition was apparently in abeyance, the people who ought to carry it on seeming somehow to despise it. She could remember mayors, especially Chief Bailiffs at Turnhill, who imposed themselves upon the imagination of the town. But nowadays the name of a mayor was never a household word. She had even heard Ingpen ask Edwin: "See, who is the new mayor?" and Edwin start his halting answer: "Let me see--"
And she had still another and perhaps greater ambition--to possess a country house. In her fancy her country house was very like Alicia Hesketh's house, Tavy Mansion, which she had never ceased to envy. She felt that in a new home, spacious, with space around it, she could really commence the new life. She saw the place perfectly appointed and functioning perfectly--no bother about smuts on white curtains; no half-trained servants; none of the base, confined, promiscuity of filthy Trafalgar Road; and the Benbows and Auntie Hamps at least eight or ten miles off! She saw herself driving Edwin to the station in the morning, or perhaps right into Bursley if she wanted to shop.... No, she would of course shop at Oldcastle.... She would leave old Darius Clayhanger's miracle-house without one regret. And in the new life she would be always active, busy, dignified, elegant, influential, and kind. And to Edwin she would be absolutely indispensable.
In these imaginings their solid but tarnished love glittered and gleamed again. She saw naught but the charming side of Edwin and the romantic side of their union. She was persuaded that there really was nobody like Edwin, and that no marriage had ever had quite the mysterious, secretly exciting quality of hers. She yearned for him to come home at once, to appear magically in the dusk of the doorway. The mood was marvellous.
II
The door opened.
"Can I speak to you, m'm?"
It was the voice of Ada, somewhat perturbed. She advanced a little and stood darkly in front of the open doorway.
"What is it, Ada?" Hilda asked curtly, without turning to look at her.
"It's--" Ada began and stopped.
Hilda glanced round quickly, recognising now in the voice a peculiar note with which experience had familiarised her. It was a note between pertness and the beginning of a sob, and it always indicated that Ada was feeling more acutely than usual the vast injustice of the worldly scheme. It might develop into tears; on the other hand it might develop into mere insolence. Hilda discerned that Ada was wearing neither cap nor apron. She thought: "If this stupid girl wants trouble, she has come to me at exactly and precisely the right moment to get it. I'm not in the humour, after all I've gone through to-day, to stand any nonsense either from her or from anybody else."
"What is it, Ada?" she repeated, with restraint, and yet warningly. "And where's your apron and your cap?"
"In the kitchen, m'm."
"Well, go and put them on, and then come and say what you have to say," said Hilda, thinking: "I don't give any importance to her cap and apron, but she does."
"I was thinking I'd better give ye notice, m'm," said Ada, and she said it pertly, ignoring the command.
The two women were alone together in the house. Each felt it; each felt the large dark emptiness of the house behind them, and the solid front and back doors cutting them off from succour; each had to depend entirely upon herself.
Hilda asked quietly:
"What's the matter now?"
She knew that Ada's grievance would prove to be silly. The girl had practically no commonsense. Not one servant girl in a hundred had any appreciable commonsense. And when girls happened to be "upset"--as they were all liable to be, and as Ada by the violent departure of the cook no doubt was--even such minute traces of gumption as they possessed were apt to disappear.
"There's no pleasing you, m'm!" said Ada. "The way you talked to me in the kitchen, saying I was always a-hiding things from ye. I've felt it very much!"
She threw her head back, and the gesture signified: "I'm younger than you, and young men are always running after me. And I can get a new situation any time. And I've not gone back into my kitchen to put my cap and apron on."
"Ada," said Hilda. "Shall I tell you what's wrong with you? You're a little fool. You know you're talking rightdown nonsense. You know that as well as I do. And you know you'll never get a better place than you have here. But you've taken an idea into your head--and there you are! Now do be sensible. You say you think you'd better give notice. Think it over before you do anything ridiculous. Sleep on it. We'll see how you feel in the morning."
"I think I'd better give notice, m'm, especially seeing I'm a fool, and silly," Ada persisted.
Hilda sighed. Her voice hardened slightly:
"So you'd leave me without a maid just at Christmas! And that's all the thanks I get for all I've done for you."
"Well, m'm. We've had such a queer lot of girls here lately, haven't we?" The pertness was intensified. "I don't hardly care to stay. I feel we sh'd both be better for a change like."
It was perhaps Ada's subtly insolent use of the word "we" and "both" that definitely brought about a new phase of the interview. Hilda suddenly lost all desire for an amicable examination of the crisis.
"Very well, Ada," she said, shortly. "But remember I shan't take you back again, whatever happens."
Ada moved away, and then returned.
"Could I leave at once, m'm, same as cook?"
Hilda was astonished and outraged, despite all her experience and its resulting secret sardonic cynicism in regard to servants. The girl was ready to walk out instantly.
"And may I enquire where you'd go to?" asked Hilda with a sneer. "At this time of night you couldn't possibly get home to your parents."
"Oh!" answered Ada brightly. "I could go to me cousin's up at Toft End. And her could send down a lad with a barrow for me box."
The plot, then, had been thought out. "Her cousin's!" thought Hilda, and seemed to be putting her finger on the cause of Ada's disloyalty. "Her cousin's!" It was a light in a dark mystery. "Her cousin's!"
"I suppose you know you're forfeiting the wages due to you the day after to-morrow?"
"I shall ask me cousin about that, m'm," said Ada, as it were menacingly.
"I should!" Hilda sarcastically agreed. "I certainly should." And she thought with bitter resignation: "She'll have to leave anyhow after this. She may as well leave on the spot."
"There's those as'll see as I have me rights," said Ada pugnaciously, with another toss of the head.
Hilda had a mind to retort in anger; but she controlled herself. Already that afternoon she had imperilled her dignity in the altercation with the cook. The cook, however, had not Ada's ready tongue, and, while the mistress had come off best against the cook, she might through impulsiveness find herself worsted by Ada's more youthful impudence, were it once unloosed.
"That will do, then, Ada," she said. "You can go and pack your box first thing."
In less than three quarters of an hour Ada was gone, and her corded trunk lay just within the scullery door, waiting the arrival of the cousin's barrow. She had bumped it down the stairs herself.
All solitary in the house, which had somehow been transformed into a strange and unusual house, Hilda wept. She had only parted with an unfaithful and ungrateful servant, but she wept. She dashed into the kitchen and began to do Ada's work, still weeping, and she was savage against her own tears; yet they continued softly to fall, misting her vision of fire and utensils and earthenware vessels. Ada had left everything in a moment; she had left the kettle on the fire, and the grease in the square tin in which the dinner-joint had been cooked, and the ashes in the fender, and tea-leaves in the kitchen teapot and a cup and saucer unwashed. She had cared naught for the inconvenience she was causing; had shewn not the slightest consideration; had walked off without a pang, smilingly hoity-toity. And all servants were like that. Such conduct might be due as much to want of imagination, to a simple inability to picture to themselves the consequences of certain acts, as to stark ingratitude; but the consequences remained the same; and Hilda held fiercely to the theory of stark ingratitude.
She had made Ada; she had created her. When Hilda engaged her, Ada was little more than an "oat-cake girl,"--that is to say, one of those girls who earn a few pence by delivering oat-cakes fresh from the stove at a halfpenny each before breakfast at the houses of gormandising superior artisans and the middle-classes. True, she had been in one situation prior to Hilda's, but it was a situation where she learnt nothing and could have learnt nothing. Nevertheless, she was very quick to learn, and in a month Hilda had done wonders with her. She had taught her not only her duties, but how to respect herself, to make the best of herself, and favourably to impress others. She had enormously increased Ada's value in the universe. And she had taught her some worldly wisdom, and permitted and even encouraged certain coquetries, and in the bed-room during dressings and undressings had occasionally treated her as a soubrette if not as a confidante; had listened to her at length, and had gone so far as to ask her views on this matter or that--the supreme honour for a menial. Also she had very conscientiously nursed her in sickness. She had really liked Ada, and had developed a sentimental weakness for her. She had taken pleasure in her prettiness, in her natural grace, and in her crude youth. She enjoyed seeing Ada arrange a bedroom, or answer the door, or serve a meal. And Ada's stupidity--that half-cunning stupidity of her class, which immovably underlay her superficial aptitudes--had not sufficed to spoil her affection for the girl. She had been indulgent to Ada's stupidity; she had occasionally in some soft moods hoped that it was curable. And she had argued in moments of discouragement that at any rate stupidity could be faithful. In her heart she had counted Ada as a friend, as a true standby in the more or less tragic emergencies of the household. And now Ada had deserted her. Stupidity had proved to be neither faithful nor grateful. Why had Ada been so silly and so base? Impossible to say! A nothing! A whim! Nerves! Fatuity! The whole affair was horribly absurd. These creatures were incalculable. Of course Hilda would have been wiser not to upbraid her so soon after the scene with the cook, and to have spoken more smoothly to the chit in the boudoir. Hilda admitted that. But what then? Was that an excuse for the chit's turpitude? There must be a limit to the mistress's humouring. And probably after all the chit had meant to go.... If she had not meant to go she would not have entered the boudoir apronless and capless. Some rankling word, some ridiculous sympathy with the cook, some wild dream of a Christmas holiday--who could tell what might have influenced her? Hilda gave it up--and returned to it a thousand times. One truth emerged--and it was the great truth of housemistresses--namely, that it never, never, never pays to be too kind to servants. "Servants do not understand kindness." You think they do; they themselves think they do; but they don't,--they don't and they don't. Hilda went back into the immensity of her desolating experience as an employer of female domestic servants of all kinds, but chiefly bad--for the landlady of a small boarding house must take what servants she can get--and she raged at the persistence of the proof that kindness never paid. What did pay was severity and inhuman strictness, and the maintenance of an impassable gulf between employer and employed. Not again would she make the mistake which she had made a hundred times. She hardened herself to the consistency of a slave-driver. And all the time it was the woman in her, not the mistress, that the hasty thoughtless Ada had wounded. To the woman the kitchen was not the same place without Ada--Ada on whom she had utterly relied in the dilemma caused by the departure of the cook. As with angrily wet eyes she went about her new work in the kitchen, she could almost see the graceful ghost of Ada tripping to and fro therein.
And all that the world, and the husband, would know or understand was that a cook had been turned out for drunkenness, and that a quite sober parlour-maid had most preposterously walked after her. Hilda was aware that in Edwin she had a severe, though a taciturn, critic of her activities as employer of servants. She had no hope whatever of his sympathy, and so she closed all her gates against him. She waited for him as for an adversary, and all the lustre faded from her conception of their love.
III
When Edwin approached his home that frosty evening, he was disturbed to perceive that there was no light from the hall-gas shining through the panes of the front-door, though some light showed at the dining-room window, the blinds of which had not been drawn. "What next?" he thought crossly. He was tired, and the keenness of the weather, instead of bracing him, merely made him petulant. He was astonished that several women in a house could all forget such an important act as the lighting of the hall-gas at nightfall. Never before had the hall-gas been forgotten, and the negligence appeared to Edwin as absolutely monstrous. The effect of it on the street, the effect on a possible caller, was bad enough (Edwin, while pretending to scorn social opinion, was really very deferential towards it), but what was worse was the revelation of the feminine mentality.
In opening the door with his latchkey he was purposely noisy, partly in order to give expression to his justified annoyance, and partly to warn all peccant women that the male had arrived, threatening.
As his feet fumbled into the interior gloom and he banged the door, he quite expected a rush of at least one apologetic woman with a box of matches. But nobody came. Nevertheless he could hear sharp movements through the half-open door of the kitchen. Assuredly women had the irresponsibility of infants. He glanced for an instant into the dining-room; the white cloth was laid, but the table was actually not set. With unusual righteous care he wiped the half-congealed mud off his boots on the mat; then removed his hat and his overcoat, took a large new piece of indiarubher from his pocket and put it on the hall-table, felt the radiator (which despite all his injunctions and recommendations was almost cold); and lastly he lighted the gas himself. This final act was contrary to his own rule, for he had often told Hilda that half her trouble with servants arose through her impatiently doing herself things which they had omitted, instead of ringing the bell and seeing the things done. But he was not infrequently inconsistent, both in deed and in thought. For another example, he would say superiorly that a woman could never manage women, ignoring that he the all-wise had never been able to manage Hilda.
He turned to go upstairs. At the same moment somebody emerged obscurely from the kitchen. It was Hilda, in a white apron.
"Oh! I'm glad you've lighted it," said she curtly, without the least symptom of apology, but rather affrontingly.
He continued his way.
"Have you seen anything of George?" she asked, and her tone stopped him.
Yet she well knew that he hated to be stopped of an evening on his way to the bathroom. It could not be sufficiently emphasized that to accost him before he had descended from the bathroom was to transgress one of the most solemn rules of his daily life.
"Of course I haven't seen George," he answered. "How should I have seen George?"
"Because he's not back from school yet, and I can't help wondering----"
She was worrying about George as usual.
He grunted and passed on.
"There's no light on the landing, either," he said, over the banisters. "I wish you'd see to those servants of yours."
"As it happens there aren't any servants."
Her tone, getting more peculiar with each phrase, stopped him again.
"Aren't any servants? What d'you mean?"
"Well, I found the attic full of beer bottles, so I sent her off on the spot."
"Sent who off?"
"Eliza."
"And where's Ada?"
"She's gone too," said Hilda defiantly, and as though rebutting an accusation before it could be made.
"Why?"
"She seemed to want to. And she was very impertinent over it."
He snorted and shrugged his shoulders.
"Well, it's your affair," he muttered, too scornful to ask details.
"It is," said she, significantly laconic.
In the bathroom, vexed and gloomy as he brushed his nails and splashed in the wash basin, he mused savagely over the servant problem. The servant problem had been growing acute. He had predicted several times that a crisis would arrive; a crisis had arrived; he was always right; his rightness was positively uncanny. He had liked Ada; he had not disliked the cook. He knew that Hilda was to blame. How should she not be to blame,--losing her entire staff in one afternoon? It was not merely that she lacked the gift of authoritative control,--it was also that she had no feeling for democratic justice as between one human being and another. And yet among his earliest recollections of her was her passionate sympathy with men on strike as against their employers. Totally misleading manifestations! For her a servant was nothing but a "servant." She was convinced that all her servants were pampered and spoilt; and as for Edwin's treatment of his workpeople she considered it to be ridiculously, criminally soft. If she had implied once she had implied a hundred times that the whole lot of them laughed at him behind his back for a sentimental simpleton. Occasionally Edwin was quite outraged by her callousness. The topic of the eight-hours day, of the ten-hours day, and even of the twelve-hours day (the last for tramwaymen) had been lately exciting the district. And Edwin was distressed that in his own house a sixteen-hour day for labour was in vogue and that the employer perceived no shame in it. He did not clearly see how the shame was to be abolished, but he thought that it ought to be admitted. It was not admitted. From six in the morning until ten at night these mysterious light-headed young women were the slaves of a bell. They had no surcease except one long weekday evening each week and a short Sunday evening each fortnight. At one period Hilda had had a fad for getting them out of bed at half-past five, to cure them of laziness. He remembered one cook whose family lived at the village of Brindley Edge, five miles off. This cook on her weekday evening would walk to Brindley Edge, spend three quarters of an hour in her home, and walk back to Bursley, reaching Trafalgar Road just in time to get to bed. Hilda saw nothing very odd in that. She said the girl could always please herself about going to Brindley Edge.
Edwin's democratic sense was gradually growing in force; it disturbed more and more the peace of his inmost mind. He seldom displayed his sympathies (save to Tertius Ingpen who, though a Tory, was in some ways astoundingly open to ideas, which seemed to interest him as a pretty equation would interest him), but they pursued their secret activity in his being, annoying him at his lithographic works, and still more in his home. He would suppress them, and grin, and repeat his ancient consoling truth that what was, was. The relief, however, was not permanent.
In that year the discovery of Rontgen Rays, the practical invention of the incandescent gas-mantle, the abolition of the man with the red flag in front of self-propelled vehicles, and the fact that Consols stood at 113, had combined to produce in innumerable hearts the illusion that civilisation was advancing at a great rate. But Edwin in his soul scarcely thought so. He was worrying not only about Liberal principles, but about the world; in his youth he had never worried about the world. And of his own personal success he would ask and ask: Is it right? He said to himself in the bathroom: "There's a million domestic servants in this blessed country, and not one of them works less than a hundred hours a week, and nobody cares. I don't think I really care myself. But there it is all the same!" And he was darkly resentful against Hilda on account of the entire phenomenon.... He foresaw, too, a period of upset and discomfort in his house. Would there, indeed, ever be any real tranquillity in his house, with that strange, primeval cave-woman in charge of it?
As he descended the stairs, Hilda came out of the dining-room with an empty tray.
She said:
"I wish you'd go out and look for George."
Imagine it--going out into the Five Towns to look for one boy!
"Oh! He'll be all right. I suppose you haven't forgotten Ingpen's coming to-night."
"Of course I haven't. But I want you to go out and look for George."
He knew what was in her mind,--namely an absurd vision of George and his new bicycle crushed under a tramcar somewhere between Bleakridge and Hanbridge. In that year everybody with any pretension to youthfulness and modernity rode a bicycle. Both Edwin and Hilda rode occasionally--such was the power of fashion. Maternal apprehensions had not sufficed to keep George from having a bicycle, nor from riding on it unprotected up and down the greasy slopes of Trafalgar Road to and from school. Edwin himself had bought the bicycle, pooh-poohing danger, and asserting that anyhow normal risks must always be accepted with an even mind.
He was about to declare that he would certainly not do anything so silly as to go out and look for George,--and then all of a sudden he had the queer sensation of being alone with Hilda in the house made strange and romantic by a domestic calamity. He gazed at Hilda with her apron, and the calamity had made her strange and romantic also. He was vexed, annoyed, despondent, gloomy, fearful of the immediate future; he had immense grievances; he hated Hilda, he loathed giving way to her. He thought: "What is it binds me to this incomprehensible woman? I will not be bound!" But he felt that he would be compelled (not by her but by something in himself) to commit the folly of going out to look for George. And he felt that though his existence was an exasperating adventure, still it was an adventure.
"Oh! Damn!" he exploded, and reached for a cap.
And then George came into the hall through the kitchen. The boy often preferred to enter by the back, the stalking Indian way.