II"Wo!" exclaimed Hilda broadly, bringing the mare and the vehicle to a standstill in front of the "Live and Let Live" inn in the main street of the village of Stockbrook, which lay about a mile and a half off the high road from the Five Towns to Axe. And immediately the mare stopped she was enveloped in her own vapour."Ha!" exclaimed Edwin, with faint benevolent irony. "And no bones broken!"A man came out from the stable-yard.The village of Stockbrook gave the illusion that hundreds of English villages were giving that Christmas morning,--the illusion that its name was Arcadia, that finality had been reached, and that the forces of civilisation could go no further. More suave than a Dutch village, incomparably neater and cleaner and more delicately finished than a French village, it presented, in the still, complacent atmosphere of long tradition, a picturesque medley of tiny architectures nearly every aspect of which was beautiful. And if seven people of different ages and sexes lived in a two-roomed cottage under a thatched roof hollowed by the weight of years, without drains and without water, and also without freedom, the beholder was yet bound to conclude that by some mysterious virtue their existence must be gracious, happy, and in fact ideal--especially on Christmas Day, though Christmas Day was also Quarter Day--and that they would not on any account have it altered in the slightest degree. Who could believe that fathers of families drank away their children's bread in the quaint tap-room of that creeper-clad hostel--a public-house fit to produce ecstasy in the heart of every American traveller--"The Live and Let Live"? Who could have believed that the Wesleyan Methodists already singing a Christmas hymn inside the dwarf Georgian conventicle, and their fellow-Christians straggling under the lych into the church-yard, scorned one another with an immortal detestation, each claiming a monopoly in knowledge of the unknowable? But after all the illusion of Arcadia was not entirely an illusion. In this calm, rime-decked, Christmas-imbued village, with its motionless trees enchanted beneath a vast grey impenetrable cloud, a sort of relative finality had indeed been reached,--the end of an epoch that was awaiting dissolution.Edwin had not easily agreed to the project of shutting up house for the day and eating the Christmas dinner with Tertius Ingpen. Although customarily regarding the ritual of Christmas, with its family visits, its exchange of presents, its feverish kitchen activity, its somewhat insincere gaiety, its hours of boredom, and its stomachic regrets, as an ordeal rather than a delight, he nevertheless abandoned it with reluctance and a sense of being disloyal to something sacred. But the situation of Ingpen, Hilda's strong desire and her teasing promise of a surprise, and the still continuing dearth of servants had been good arguments to persuade him.And though he had left Trafalgar Road moody and captious, thinking all the time of the deserted and cold home, he had arrived in Stockbrook tingling and happy, and proud of Hilda,--proud of her verve, her persistency, and her success. She had carried him very far on the wave of her new enthusiasm for horse-traction. She had beguiled him into immediately spending mighty sums on a dog-cart, new harness, rugs, a driving-apron, and a fancy whip. She had exhausted Unchpin, upset the routine of the lithographic business, and gravely overworked the mare, in her determination to learn to drive. She had had the equipage out at night for her lessons. On the other hand she had not in the least troubled herself about the purchase of a second horse for mercantile purposes, and a second horse had not yet been bought.When she had announced that she would herself drive her husband and son over to Stockbrook, Edwin had absolutely negatived the idea; but Unchpin had been on her side; she had done the double journey with Unchpin, who judged her capable and the mare (eight years old) quite reliable, and who moreover wanted Christmas as much as possible to himself. And Hilda had triumphed. Walking the mare uphill--and also downhill--she had achieved Stockbrook in safety; and the conquering air with which she drew up at the "Live and Let Live" was delicious. The chit's happiness and pride radiated out from her. It seemed to Edwin that by the mere strength of violition she had actually created the dog-cart and its appointments, and the mare too! And he thought that he himself had not lived in vain if he could procure her such sensations as her glowing face then displayed. Her occasionally overbearing tenacity, and the little jars which good resolutions several weeks old had naturally not been powerful enough to prevent, were forgotten and forgiven. He would have given all his savings to please her caprice, and been glad. A horse and trap, or even a pair of horses and a landau, were a trifling price to pay for her girlish joy and for his own tranquillity in his beloved house and business."Catch me, both of you!" cried Hilda.Edwin had got down, and walked round behind the vehicle to the footpath, where George stood grinning. The stableman, in classic attitude, was at the mare's head.Hilda jumped rather wildly. It was Edwin who countered the shock of her descent. The edge of her velvet hat knocked against his forehead, disarranging his cap. He could smell the velvet, as for an instant he held his wife--strangely acquiescent and yielding--in his arms, and there was something intimately feminine in the faint odour. All Hilda's happiness seemed to pass into him, and that felicity sufficed for him. He did not desire any happiness personal to himself. He wanted only to live in her. His contentment was profound, complete, rapturous.And yet in the same moment, reflecting that Hilda would certainly have neglected the well-being of the mare, he could say to the stableman:"Put the rug over her, will you?""Hello! Here's Mr. Ingpen!" announced George, as he threw the coloured rug on the mare.Ingpen, pale and thickly enveloped, came slowly round the bend of the road, waving and smiling. He had had a relapse, after a too early sortie, and was recovering from it."I made sure you'd be about here," he said, shaking hands. "Merry Christmas, all!""Ought you to be out, my lad?" Edwin asked heartily."Out? Yes. I'm as fit as a fiddle. And I've been ordered mild exercise." He squared off gaily against George and hit the stout adolescent in the chest."What about all your parcels, Hilda?" Edwin enquired."Oh! We'll call for them afterwards.""Afterwards?""Yes. Come along--before you catch a chill." She winked openly at Ingpen, who returned the wink. "Come along, dear. It's not far. We have to walk across the fields.""Put her up, sir?" the stableman demanded of Edwin."Yes. And give her a bit of a rub down," he replied absently, remembering various references of Hilda's to a surprise. His heart misgave him. Ingpen and Hilda looked like plotters, very intimate and mischievous. He had a notion that living with a woman was comparable to living with a volcano--you never knew when a dangerous eruption might not occur.Within three minutes the first and minor catastrophe had occurred."Bit sticky, this field path of yours," said Edwin, uneasily.They were all four slithering about in brown clay under a ragged hedge in which a few red berries glowed."It was as hard as iron the day before yesterday," said Hilda."Oh! So you were here the day before yesterday, were you? ... What's that house there?" Edwin turned to Ingpen."He's guessed it in one!" Ingpen murmured, and then went off into his characteristic crescendo laugh.The upper part of a late eighteenth-century house, squat and square, with yellow walls, black uncurtained windows, high slim chimney, and a blue slate roof, showed like a gigantic and mysterious fruit in a clump of variegated trees, some of which were evergreen."Ladderedge Hall, my boy," said Ingpen. "Seat of the Beechinors for about a hundred years.""'Seat', eh!" Edwin murmured sarcastically."It's been empty for two years," remarked Hilda brightly. "So we thought we'd have a look at it."And Edwin said to himself that he had divined all along what the surprise was. It was astounding that a man could pass with such rapidity as Edwin from vivid joy to black and desolate gloom. She well knew that the idea of living in the country was extremely repugnant to him, and that nothing would ever induce him to consent to it. And yet she must needs lay this trap for him, prepare this infantile surprise, and thereby spoil his Christmas, she who a few moments earlier had been the embodiment of surrender in his arms! He said no word. He hummed a few notes and glanced airily to right and left with an effort after unconcern. The presence of Ingpen and the boy, and the fact of Christmas, forbade him to speak freely. He could not suddenly stop and drive his stick into the earth and say savagely:"Now listen to me! Once for all, I won't have this country house idea! So let it be understood,--if you want a row, you know how to get it."The appearance of amity--and the more high-spirited the better--must be kept up throughout the day. Nevertheless in his heart he challenged Hilda desperately. All her good qualities became insignificant, all his benevolent estimates of her seemed ridiculous. She was the impossible woman. He saw a tremendous vista of unpleasantness, for her obstinacy in warfare was known to him, together with her perfect lack of scruple, of commonsense, and of social decency. He had made her a present of a horse and trap--solely to please her--and this was his reward! The more rope you gave these creatures, the more they wanted! But he would give no more rope. Compromise was at an end. The battle would be joined that night.... In his grim and resolute dejection there was something almost voluptuous. He continued to glance airily about, and at intervals to hum a few notes.Over a stile they dropped into a rutty side-road, and opposite was the worn iron gate of Ladderedge Hall, with a house-agent's board on it. A short curved gravel drive, filmed with green, led to the front-door of the house. In front were a lawn and a flower-garden, beyond a paddock, and behind a vegetable garden and a glimpse of stabling; a compact property! Ingpen drew a great key from his pocket. The plotters were all prepared; they took their victim for a simpleton, a ninny, a lamb!In the damp echoing interior Edwin gazed without seeing, and heard as in a dream without listening. This was the hall, this the dining-room, this the drawing-room, this the morning-room.... White marble mantelpieces, pre-historic grates, wall-paper hanging in strips, cobwebs, uneven floors, scaly ceilings, the invisible vapour of human memories! This was the kitchen, enormous; then the larder, enormous, and the scullery still more enormous (with a pump-handle flanking the slopstone)! No water. No gas. And what was this room opening out of the kitchen? Oh! That must be the servants' hall.... Servants' hall indeed! Imagine Edwin Clayhanger living in a "Hall," with a servants' hall therein! Snobbishness unthinkable! He would not be able to look his friends in the face.... On the first floor, endless bedrooms, but no bath-room. Here, though, was a small bedroom that would make a splendid bath-room.... Ingpen, the ever expert, conceived a tank-room in the roof, and traced routes for plumbers' pipes. George, excited, and comprehending that he must conduct himself as behoved an architect, ran up to the attic floor to study on the spot the problem of the tank-room, and Ingpen followed. Edwin stared out of a window at the prospect of the Arcadian village lying a little below across the sloping fields."Come along, Edwin," Hilda coaxed.Yes, she had pretended a deep concern for the welfare of the suffering feckless bachelor, Tertius Ingpen. She had paid visit after visit in order to watch over his convalescence. Choosing to ignore his scorn for all her sex, she had grown more friendly with him than even Edwin had ever been. Indeed by her sympathetic attentions she had made Edwin seem callous in comparison. And all the time she had merely been pursuing a private design--with what girlish deceitfulness.In the emptiness of the house the voices of Ingpen and George echoed from above down the second flight of stairs."No good going to the attics," muttered Edwin, on the landing.Hilda, half cajoling, half fretful, protested:"Now, Edwin, don't be disagreeable."He followed her on high, martyrised. The front wall of the house rose nearly to the top of the attic windows, screening and darkening them."Cheerful view!" Edwin growled.He heard Ingpen saying that the place could be had on a repairing lease for sixty-five pounds a year, and that perhaps £1,200 would buy it. Dirt cheap."Ah!" Edwin murmured. "I know those repairing leases. £1,000 wouldn't make this barn fit to live in."He knew that Ingpen and Hilda exchanged glances."It's larger than Tavy Mansion," said Hilda.Tavy Mansion! There was the secret! Tavy Mansion was at the bottom of her scheme. Alicia Hesketh had a fine house, and Hilda must have a finer. She, Hilda, of all people, was a snob. He had long suspected it.He rejoined sharply: "Of course it isn't larger than Tavy Mansion! It isn't as large.""Oh! Edwin. How can you say such things!"In the portico, as Ingpen was re-locking the door, the husband said negligently, superiorly, cheerfully:"It's not so bad. I expect there's hundreds of places like this up and down the country--going cheap."The walk back to the "Live and Let Live" was irked by constraint, against which everyone fought nobly, smiling, laughing, making remarks about cockrobins, the sky, the Christmas dinner."So I hear it's settled you're going to London when you leave school, kiddie," said Tertius Ingpen, to bridge over a fearful hiatus in the prittle-prattle.George, so big now and so mannishly dressed as to be amused and not a bit hurt by the appellation "kiddie," confirmed the statement in his deepening voice.Edwin thought:"It's more thanIhear, anyway!"Hilda had told him that during the visit to London the project for articling George to Johnnie Orgreave had been revived, but she had not said that a decision had been taken. Though Edwin from careful pride had not spoken freely--George being Hilda's affair and not his--he had shown no enthusiasm. Johnnie Orgreave had sunk permanently in his esteem--scarcely less so than Jimmie, whose conjugal eccentricities had scandalised the Five Towns and were achieving the ruin of the Orgreave practice; or than Tom, who was developing into a miser. Moreover, he did not at all care for George going to London. Why should it be thought necessary for George to go to London? The sagacious and successful provincial in Edwin was darkly jealous of London, as a rival superficial and brilliant. And now he learnt from Ingpen that George's destiny was fixed.... A matter of small importance, however!Did "they" seriously expect him to travel from Ladderedge Hall to his works, and from his works to Ladderedge Hall every week-day of his life? He laughed sardonically to himself.Out came the sun, which George greeted with a cheer. And Edwin, to his own surprise, began to feel hungry.III"I shan't take that house, you know," said Edwin, casually and yet confidentially, in a pause which followed a long analysis, by Ingpen, of Ingpen's sensations in hospital before he was out of danger.They sat on opposite sides of a splendid extravagant fire in Ingpen's dining-room.Ingpen, sprawling in a shabby, uncomfortable easychair, and flushed with the activity of digestion, raised his eyebrows, squinted down at the cigarette between his lips, and answered impartially:"No. So I gather. Of course you must understand it was Hilda's plan to go up there. I merely fell in with it,--simplest thing to do in these cases!""Certainly."Thus they both condescended to the feather-headed capricious woman, dismissed her, and felt a marked access of sincere intimacy on a plane of civilisation exclusively masculine.In the succeeding silence of satisfaction and relief could be heard George, in the drawing-room above, practising again the piano part of a Haydn violin sonata which he had very nervously tried over with Ingpen while they were awaiting dinner.Ingpen said suddenly:"I say, old chap! Why have you never mentioned that you happened to meet a certain person in my room at Hanbridge that night you went over there for me?" He frowned.Edwin had a thrill, pleasurable and apprehensive, at the prospect of a supreme confidence."It was no earthly business of mine," he answered lightly. But his tone conveyed: "You surely ought to be aware that my loyalty and my discretion are complete."And Ingpen, replying to Edwin's tone, said with a simple directness that flattered Edwin to the heart:"Naturally I knew I was quite safe in your hands.... I've reassured the lady." Ingpen smiled slightly.Edwin was too proud to tell Ingpen that he had not said a word to Hilda, and Ingpen was too proud to tell Edwin that he assumed as much.At that moment Hilda came into the room, murmuring a carol that some children of Stockbrook had sung on the doorstep during dinner."Don't be afraid--I'm not going to interrupt. I know you're in the thick of it," said she archly, not guessing how exactly truthful she was.Ingpen, keeping his presence of mind in the most admirable manner, rejoined with irony:"You don't mean to say you've finished already explaining to Mrs. Dummer how she ought to run my house for me!""How soon do you mean to have this table cleared?" asked Hilda.The Christmas dinner, served by a raw girl in a large bluish-white pinafore, temporarily hired to assist Mrs. Dummer the housekeeper, had been a good one. Its only real fault was that it had had a little too much the air of being a special and mighty effort; and although it owed something to Hilda's parcels, Ingpen was justified in the self-satisfaction which he did not quite conceal as a bachelor host. But now, under Hilda's quizzing gaze, not merely the table but the room and the house sank to the tenth-rate. The coarse imperfections of the linen and the cutlery grew very apparent; the disorder of bottles and glasses and cups recalled the refectory of an inferior club. And the untidiness of the room, heaped with accumulations of newspapers, magazines, documents, books, boxes and musical-instrument cases, loudly accused the solitary despot whose daily caprices of arrangement were perpetuated and rendered sacred by the ukase that nothing was to be disturbed. Hilda's glinting eyes seemed to challenge each corner and dark place to confess its shameful dirt, and the malicious poise of her head mysteriously communicated the fact that in the past fortnight she had spied out every sinister secret in the whole graceless, primitive wigwam."This table," retorted Ingpen bravely, "is going to be cleared when it won't disturb me to have it cleared.""All right," said Hilda. "But Mrs. Dummer does want to get on with her washing-up.""Look here, madam," Ingpen replied. "You're a little ray of sunshine, and all that, and I'm the first to say so; but I'm not your husband." He made a warning gesture. "Now don't say you'd be sorry for any woman I was the husband of. Think of something more original." He burst out laughing.Hilda went to the window and looked out at the fading day."Please, I only popped in to say it's nearly a quarter to three, and George and I will go down to the inn and bring the dog-cart up here. I want a little walk. We shan't get home till dark as it is.""Oh! Chance it and stop for tea, and all will be forgiven.""Drive home in the dark? Not much!" Edwin murmured."He's afraid of my driving," said Hilda.When Edwin and Ingpen were alone together once more, Ingpen's expression changed back instantly to that which Hilda had disturbed, and Edwin's impatience, which had uneasily simmered during the interruption, began to boil."Her husband's in a lunatic asylum, I may tell you," said Ingpen."Whose?""The young woman's in question."For Edwin, it was as if a door had opened in a wall and disclosed a vast unsuspected garden of romance."Really!""Yes, my boy," Ingpen went on, quietly, with restraint, but not without a naïve and healthy pride in the sudden display of the marvellous garden. "And I didn't meet her at a concert, or on the Grand Canal, or anything of that sort. I met her in a mill at Oldham while I was doing my job. He was the boss of the mill; I walked into an office and he was lying on the floor on the flat of his back, and she was wiping her feet on his chest. He was saying in a very anxious tone: 'You aren't half wiping them. Harder! Harder!' That was his little weakness, you see. He happened to be convinced that he was a doormat. She had been hiding the thing for weeks, coming with him to the works, and so on, to calm him." Ingpen spoke more quickly and excitedly: "I never saw a more awful thing in my life! I never saw a more awful thing in my life! And coming across it suddenly, you see.... There was something absolutely odious in him lying down like that, and her trying to soothe him in the way he wanted. You should have seen the serious expression of his face, simply bursting with anxiety for her to wipe her boots properly on him. And her face when she caught sight of me. Oh! Dreadful! Dreadful!" Ingpen paused, and then continued calmly: "Of course I soon tumbled to it. For the matter of that, it didn't want much tumbling to. He went raving mad the same afternoon. And he's been more or less raving mad ever since.""What a ghastly business.... Any children?""No, thank God!" Ingpen answered with fresh emotion. "But don't you forget that she's still the wife of that lunatic, and he'll probably live for ever. She's tied up to him just as if she was tied up to a post. Those are our Divorce Laws! Isn't it appalling? Isn't it inconceivable? Just think of the situation of that woman!" Ingpen positively glared at Edwin in the intensity of his indignation."Awful!" Edwin murmured."Quite alone in the world, you know!" said Ingpen. "I'm hanged if I know what she'd have done without me. She hadn't a friend--at any rate she hadn't a friend with a grain of sense. Astonishing how solitary some couples are! ... It aged her frightfully. She's much younger than she looks. Happily there was a bit of money--enough in fact."Deeply as Edwin had been impressed by his romantic discovery of a woman in Ingpen's room at Hanbridge, he was still more impressed by it now. He saw the whole scene again, and saw it far more poetically. He accused himself of blindness, and also of a certain harshness of attitude towards the woman. He endowed her now with wondrous qualities. The adventure, in its tragicalness and its clandestine tenderness, was enchanting. How exquisite must be the relations between Ingpen and the woman if without warning she could go to his lair at night and wait confidently for his return! How divine the surprise for him, how ardent the welcome! He envied Ingpen. And also he admired him, for Ingpen had obviously conducted the affair with worthy expertise. And he had known how to win devotion.With an air of impartiality Ingpen proceeded:"You wouldn't see her quite at her best, I'm afraid. She's very shy--and naturally she'd be more shy than ever when you saw her. She's quite a different woman when the shyness has worn off. The first two or three times I met her I must say I didn't think she was anything more than a nice well-meaning creature,--you know what I mean. But she's much more than that. Can't play, but I believe she has a real feeling for music. She has time for reading, and she does read. And she has a more masculine understanding than nearly any other woman I've ever come across.""You wait a bit!" thought Edwin. This simplicity on the part of a notable man of the world pleased him and gave him a comfortable sense of superiority.Aloud he responded sympathetically:"Good! ... Do I understand she's living in the Five Towns now?""Yes," said Ingpen, after a hesitation. He spoke in a peculiar, significant voice, carefully modest. The single monosyllable conveyed to Edwin: "I cannot deny it. I was necessary to this woman, and in the end she followed me!"Edwin was impressed anew by the full revelation of romance which had concealed itself in the squalid dailiness of the Five Towns."In fact," said Ingpen, "you never know your luck. If she'd been free I might have been fool enough to get married.""Why do you say a thing like that?""Because I think I should be a fool to marry." Ingpen tapping his front teeth with his finger-nail, spoke reflectively, persuasively, and with calm detachment."Why?" asked Edwin, persuasively also, but nervously, as though the spirit of adventure in the search for truth was pushing him to fatal dangers."Marriage isn't worth the price--for me, that is. I daresay I'm peculiar." Ingpen said this quite seriously, prepared to consider impartially the proposition that he was peculiar. "The fact is, my boy, I think my freedom is worth a bit more than I could get out of any marriage.""That's all very well," said Edwin, trying to speak with the same dispassionate conviction as Ingpen, and scarcely succeeding. "But look what you miss! Look how you live!" Almost involuntarily he glanced with self-complacence round the unlovely, unseemly room, and his glance seemed to penetrate ceilings and walls, and to discover and condemn the whole charmless house from top to bottom."Why? What's the matter with it?" Ingpen replied uneasily; a slight flush came into his cheeks. "Nobody has a more comfortable bed or more comfortable boots than I have. How many women can make coffee as good as mine? No woman ever born can make first-class tea. I have all I want.""No, you don't. And what's the good of talking about coffee, and tea, and beds?""Well, what else is there I want that I haven't got? If you mean fancy cushions and draperies, no, thanks!""You know what I mean all right.... And then 'freedom' as you say. What do you mean by freedom?""I don't specially mean," said Ingpen, tranquil and benevolent, "what I may call physical freedom. I'd give that up. I like a certain amount of untidiness, for instance, and I don't think an absence of dust is the greatest thing in the world; but I wouldn't in the least mind giving all that up. It wouldn't really matter to me. What I won't give up is my intellectual freedom. Perhaps I mean intellectual honesty. I'd give up even my intellectual freedom if I could be deprived of it fairly and honestly. But I shouldn't be. There's almost no intellectual honesty in marriage. There can't be. The entire affair is a series of compromises, chiefly base on the part of the man. The alternative is absolute subjection of the woman, which is offensive. No woman not absolutely a slave ever hears the truth except in anger. You can't say the same about men, and you know it. I'm not blaming; I'm stating. Even assuming a married man gets a few advantages that I miss, they're all purely physical----""Oh no! Not at all.""My boy," Ingpen insisted, sitting up, and gazing earnestly at Edwin. "Analyse them down, and they're all physical--all! And I tell you I won't pay the price for them. I won't. I've no grievance against women; I can enjoy being with women as much as anybody, but I won't--I will not--live permanently on their level. That's why I say I might have been fool enough to get married. It's quite simple.""Hm!"Edwin, although indubitably one of those who had committed the vast folly of marriage, and therefore subject to Ingpen's indictment, felt not the least constraint, nor any need to offer an individual defence. Ingpen's demeanour seemed to have lifted the argument above the personal. His assumption that Edwin could not be offended was positively inspiring to Edwin. The fear of truth was exorcised. Freedom of thought existed in that room in England. Edwin reflected: "If he's right and I'm condemned accordingly,--well, I can't help it. Facts are facts, and they're extremely interesting."He also reflected:"Why on earth can't Hilda and I discuss like that?"He did not know why, but he profoundly and sadly knew that such discussion would be quite impossible with Hilda.The red-hot coals in the grate subsided together."And I'll tell you another thing----" Ingpen commenced.He was stopped by the entrance of Mrs. Dummer, a fat woman, with an old japanned tray. Mrs. Dummer came in like a desperate forlorn hope. Her aged, grim, and yet somewhat hysterical face seemed to say: "I'm going to clear this table and get on with my work, even if I die for it at the hands of a brutal tyrant." Her gestures as she made a space for the tray and set it down on the table were the formidable gestures of the persecuted at bay."Mrs. Dummer," said Ingpen, in a weak voice, leaning back in his chair, "would you mind fetching me my tonic off my dressing-table? I've forgotten it.""Bless us!" exclaimed Mrs. Dummer.As she had hurried out, Ingpen winked placidly at Edwin in the room in which the shadows were already falling.Nevertheless, when the dog-cart arrived at the front-door, Ingpen did seem to show some signs of exhaustion. Hilda would not get down. She sent word into the house by George that the departure must occur at once. Ingpen went out with Edwin, plaintively teased Hilda about the insufferable pride of those who sit in driving-seats, and took leave of her with the most punctilious and chivalrous ceremonial, while Hilda inscrutably smiling bent down to him with condescension from her perch."I'll sit behind going home, I think," said Edwin. "George, you can sit with your mother.""Tchik! Tchik!" Hilda signalled.The mare with a jerk started off down the misty and darkening road.IVThe second and major catastrophe occurred very soon after the arrival in Trafalgar Road. It was three-quarters of an hour after sunset and the street lamps were lighted. Unchpin, with gloomy fatalism, shivered obscurely in the dark porch, waiting to drive the dog-cart down to the stable. Hilda had requested his presence; it was she also who had got him to bring the equipage up to the house in the morning. She had implied, but not asserted, that to harness the mare and trot up to Bleakridge was the work of a few minutes, and that a few minutes' light labour could make no real difference to Unchpin's Christmas Day. Edwin, descrying Unchpin in the porch, saw merely a defenceless man who had been robbed of the most sacred holiday of the year in order to gratify the selfish caprice of an overbearing woman. When asked how long he had been in the porch, Unchpin firmly answered that he had been there since three o'clock, the hour appointed by Mrs. Clayhanger. Edwin knew nothing of this appointment, and in it he saw more evidence of Hilda's thoughtless egotism. He perceived that he would be compelled to stop her from using his employees as her private servants, and that the prohibition would probably cause trouble. Hilda demanded curtly of Unchpin why he had not waited in the warm kitchen, according to instructions, instead of catching his death of cold in the porch. The reply was that he had rung and knocked fifteen times without getting a response.At this Hilda became angry, not only with Emmie, the defaulting servant, but with the entire servant class and with the world. Emmie, the new cook, and temporarily the sole resident servant, was to have gone to Maggie's for her Christmas dinner, and to have returned at half past two without fail in order to light the drawing-room fire and prepare for tea-making. But, Maggie at the last moment having decided to go to Clara's for the middle of the day, Emmie was told to go with her and be as useful as she could at Mrs. Benbow's until a quarter past two."I hope you've got your latch-key, Edwin," said Hilda threateningly, as if ready to assume that with characteristic and inexcusable negligence he had left his latch-key at home."I have," he said drily, drawing the key from his pocket."Oh!" she muttered, as if saying: "Well, after all, you're no better than you ought to be." And took the key.While she opened the door, Edwin surreptitiously gave half a crown to Unchpin, who was lighting the carriage-lamps.George, with the marvellous self-preserving instinct of a small animal unprotected against irritated prowling monsters, had become invisible.The front-doorway yawned black like the portal of a tomb. The place was a terrible negation of Christmas. Edwin felt for the radiator; it was as cold to the touch as a dead hand. He lit the hall-lamp, and the decorations of holly and mistletoe contrived by Hilda and George with smiles and laughter on Christmas Eve stood revealed as the very symbol of insincerity. Without taking off his hat and coat, he went into the unlighted glacial drawing-room, where Hilda was kneeling at the grate and striking matches. A fragment of newspaper blazed, and then the flame expired. The fire was badly laid."I'm sick of servants!" Hilda exclaimed with fury. "Sick! They're all alike!" Her tone furiously blamed Edwin and everybody.And Edwin knew that the day was a pyramid of which this moment was the dreadful apex. At intervals during the drive home Hilda had talked confidentially to George of the wondrous things he and she could do if they only resided in the country--things connected with flowers, vegetables, cocks, hens, ducks, cows, rabbits, horses. She had sketched out the life of a mistress of Ladderedge Hall, and she had sketched it out for the benefit of the dull, hard man sitting behind. Her voice, so persuasive and caressing to George, had been charged with all sorts of accusations against the silent fellow whose back now and then collided with hers. She had exasperated him. She had wilfully and deliberately exasperated him.... Her treatment of Unchpin, her childish outburst concerning servants, her acutely disagreeable demeanour, all combined now to exhaust the poor remainder of Edwin's patience. Not one word had been said about Ladderedge Hall, but Ladderedge Hall loomed always between them. Deadly war was imminent. Let it come! He would prefer war to a peace which meant for him nothing but insults and injustice. He would welcome war. He turned brusquely and lit the chandelier. On the table beneath it lay the writing-case that Hilda had given to George, and the edition of Matthew Arnold that she had given to Edwin, for a Christmas present. One of Edwin's Christmas presents to her, an ermine stole, she was wearing round her neck. Tragic absurdities, these false tokens of love.... There they were, both of them in full street attire, she kneeling at the grate and he standing at the table, in the dank drawing-room which now had no resemblance to a home.Edwin said with frigid and disdainful malevolence:"I wish you could control yourself, Hilda. The fact that a servant's a bit late on Christmas Day is no reason for you to behave like a spoilt child. You're offensive."His words, righteously and almost murderously resentful, seemed to startle and frighten the very furniture, which had the air of waiting, enchanted, for disaster.Hilda turned her head and glared at Edwin. She threw back her shoulders, and her thick eyebrows seemed to meet in a passionate frown."Yes," she said, with her clear, stinging articulation. "That's just like you, that is! I lend my servant to your sister. She doesn't send her back,--and it's my fault! I should have thought the Benbows twisted you round their little finger enough, without you having to insult me because of them. Goodness knows what tricks they didn't play to get your Aunt's money--every penny of it! And now they make you do all the work of the estate, for their benefit, and of course you do it like a lamb! You can never spare a minute from the works for me, but you can spare hours and hours for Auntie Hamps's estate and the Benbows! It's always like that." She paused and spoke more thickly: "But I don't see why you should insult me on the top of it!"Her features went awry. She sobbed."You make me ill!" said Edwin savagely.He walked out of the room and pulled the door to.George was descending the stairs."Where are you going to, uncle?" demanded George, as Edwin opened the front-door."I'm going down to see Auntie Maggie," Edwin answered, forcing himself to speak very gently. "Tell your mother if she asks." The boy guessed the situation. It was humiliating that he should guess it, and still more humiliating to be compelled to make use of him in the fatal affair.VHe walked at a moderate pace down Trafalgar Road. He did not know where he was going. Certainly he was not going to see Maggie. He had invented the visit to Maggie instantly in answer to George's question, and he could not understand why he had invented it. Maggie would be at Clara's; and, in a misfortune, he would never go to Clara's; only when he was successful and triumphant could he expose himself to the Benbows.The weather was damp and chill without rain. The chilliness was rather tonic and agreeable to his body, and he felt quite warm, though on getting down from the dog-cart a few minutes earlier he had been cold almost to the point of numbness. He could not remember how, nor when, the change had occurred.Every street lamp was the centre of a greenish-grey sphere, which presaged rain as though the street-lamp were the moon. The pavements were greasy with black slime, the road deep in lamp-reflecting mire through which the tram-lines ran straight and gleaming. Far down the slope a cage of light moving obscurely between the glittering avenue of lamps indicated the steam-tram as it lifted towards the further hill into the heart of the town. Where the lamps merged together and vanished, but a little to the left, the illuminated dial of the clock in the Town Hall tower glowed in the dark heavens. The street was deserted; noSignalboys, no ragged girls staring into sweet shops, no artisans returning from work, no rattling carts, no vehicles of any kind save the distant tram. All the little shops were shut; even the little greengrocer's shop, which never closed, was shut now, and its customary winter smell of oranges and apples withdrawn. The little inns, not yet open, showed through their lettered plate windows one watching jet of gas amid blue-and-red paper festoons and bunches of holly. The gloomy fronts of nearly all the houses were pierced with oblongs of light on which sometimes appeared transient shadows of human beings. A very few other human beings, equally mysterious, passed furtive and baffling up and down the slope. Melancholy, familiar, inexplicable, and piteous--the melancholy of existence itself--rose like a vapour out of the sodden ground, ennobling all the scene. The lofty disc of the Town Hall clock solitary in the sky was somehow so heart-rending, and the lives of the people both within and without the houses seemed to be so woven of futility and sorrow, that the menace of eternity grew intolerable.Edwin's brain throbbed and shook like an engine-house in which the machinery was his violent thoughts. He no longer saw his marriage as a chain of disconnected episodes; he saw it as a drama the true meaning of which was at last revealed by the climax now upon him. He had had many misgivings about it, and had put them away, and they all swept back presenting themselves as a series of signs that pointed to inevitable disaster. He had been blind, from wilfulness or cowardice. He now had vision. He had arrived at honesty. He said to himself, as millions of men and women have said to themselves, with awestruck calm: "My marriage was a mistake." And he began to face the consequences of the admission. He was not such a fool as to attach too much importance to the immediate quarrel, nor even to the half-suppressed but supreme dissension concerning a place of residence. He assumed, even, that the present difficulties would somehow, with more or less satisfaction, be adjusted. What, however, would not and could not be adjusted was the temperament that produced them. Those difficulties, which had been preceded by smaller difficulties, would be followed by greater. It was inevitable. To hope otherwise would be weakly sentimental, as his optimism during the vigil in Auntie Hamps's bedroom had been weakly sentimental. He must face the truth: "She won't alter her ways--and I shan't stand them." No matter what their relations might in future superficially appear to be, their union was over. Or, if it was not actually over, it soon would be over, for the forces to shatter it were uncontrollable and increasing in strength."Of course she can't help being herself!" he said impartially. "But what's that got to do with me?"His indictment of his wife was terrific and not to be answered. She had always been a queer girl. On the first night he ever saw her, she had run after him into his father's garden, and stood with him in the garden-porch that he had since done away with, and spoken to him in the strangest manner. She was abnormal. The dismal and perilous adventure with George Cannon could not have happened to a normal woman. She could not see reason, and her sense of justice was non-existent. If she wanted a thing she must have it. In reality she was a fierce and unscrupulous egotist, incapable of understanding a point of view other than her own. Imagine her bursting out like that about Auntie Hamps's will! It showed how her mind ran. That Auntie Hamps had an absolute right to dispose of her goods as she pleased; that there was a great deal to be said for Auntie Hamps's arrangements; that in any case the Benbows were not to blame; that jealousy was despicable and the mark of a mean mind; that the only dignified course for himself was to execute the trust imposed upon him without complaining,--these things were obvious; but not to her! No human skill could ever induce her to grant them. She did not argue,--she felt; and the disaster was that she did not feel rightly.... Imagine her trying to influence Ingpen's housekeeping, to worry the man,--she the guest and he the host! What would she say if anybody played the same game on her?...She could not be moderate. She expected every consideration from others, but she would yield none. She had desired a horse and trap. She had received it. And how had she used the gift? She had used it in defiance of the needs of the works. She had upset everybody and everything, and assuredly Unchpin had a very legitimate grievance.... She had said that she could not feel at home in her own house while the house belonged to Maggie. Edwin had obediently bought the house,--and now she wanted another house. She scorned her husband's convenience and preferences, and she wanted a house that was preposterously inaccessible. The satisfaction of her caprice for a dog-cart had not in the slightest degree appeased her egotism. On the contrary it had further excited her egotism and sharpened its aggressiveness. And by what strange infantile paths had she gone about the enterprise of shifting Edwin into the country! Not a frank word to Edwin of the house she had found and decided upon! Silly rumours of a "surprise!" And she had counted upon the presence of Ingpen to disarm Edwin and to tie his hands. The conspiracy was simply childish. And because Edwin had at once shown his distaste for her scheme, she had taken offence. Her acrimony had gradually increased throughout the day, hiding for a time under malicious silences and enigmatic demeanours, darting out in remarks to third persons and drawing back, and at last displaying itself openly, cruelly, monstrously. The injustice of it all passed belief. There was no excuse for Hilda, and there never would be any excuse for her. She was impossible; she would be still more impossible. He did not make her responsible; he admitted that she was not responsible. But at the same time, with a disdainful and cold resentment, he condemned and hated her.He recalled Ingpen's: "I won't pay the price.""And I won't!" he said. "The end has come!"He envied Ingpen.And there flitted through his mind the dream of liberty--not the liberty of ignorant youth, but liberty with experience and knowledge to use it. Ravishing prospect! Marriage had advantages. But he could retain those advantages in freedom. He knew what a home ought to be; he had the instinct of the interior; he considered that he could keep house as well as any woman, and better than most; he was not, in that respect, at all like Ingpen, who suffered from his inability to produce and maintain comfort.... He remembered Ingpen's historic habitual phrase about the proper place for women,--"behind the veil." It was a phrase which intensely annoyed women; but nevertheless how true! And Ingpen had put it into practice. Ingpen, even in the banal Five Towns, had shown the way.... He saw the existence of males, with its rationality and its dependableness, its simplicity, its directness, its honesty, as something ideal. And as he pictured such an existence--with or without the romance of mysterious and interesting creatures ever modestly waiting for attention behind the veil--further souvenirs of Hilda's wilful naughtiness and injustice rushed into his mind by thousands; in formulating to himself his indictment against her, he had overlooked ninety per cent of them; they were endless, innumerable. He marshalled them again and again, with the fiercest virulence, the most sombre gloom, with sardonic, bitter pleasure.In the hollow where Trafalgar Road begins to be known as Duck Bank, he turned to the left and, crossing the foot of Woodisun Bank, arrived at one of the oldest quarters of the town, where St. Luke's Church stands in its churchyard amid a triangle of little ancient houses. By the light of a new and improved gas-lamp at the churchyard gates could be seen the dark silhouette of the Norman tower and the occasional white gleam of gravestones.One solitary couple, arm-in-arm, and bending slightly towards each other, came sauntering in the mud past the historic National Schools towards the illumination of the lamp. The man was a volunteer, with a brilliant vermilion tunic, white belt, and black trousers; he wore his hat jauntily and carried a diminutive cane; pride was his warm overcoat. The girl was stout and short, with a heavily flowered hat and a dark amorphous cloak; under her left arm she carried a parcel. They were absorbed in themselves. Edwin discerned first the man's face, in which was a gentle and harmless coxcombry, and then the girl's face, ecstatic, upward-gazing, seeing absolutely naught but the youth.... It was Emmie's face, as Edwin perceived after a momentary doubt due to his unfamiliarity with the inhabitants of his own house. Emmie, so impatiently and angrily awaited by her mistress, had lost her head about a uniform. Emmie, whose place was in the kitchen among saucepans and crockery, dish-clouts and brushes, had escaped into another realm, where time is not. That she had no immediate intention of returning to her kitchen was shown by the fact that she was moving deliberately in a direction away from it. She was not pretty, for Hilda had perforce long since ceased to insist upon physical charm in her servants. She was not even young,--she was probably older than the adored soldier. But her rapt ecstasy, her fearful bliss, made a marvellous sight, rendered touching by the girl's coarse gawkiness.It seemed lamentable, pathetic, to Edwin that destiny should not permit her to remain forever in that dream. "Can it be possible," he thought, "that a creature capable of such surpassing emotion is compelled to cook my bacon and black my boots?"The couple, wordless, strolled onwards, sticking close to the railings. The churchyard was locked, but Emmie and the soldier were doing the best they could to satisfy that instinct which in the Five Towns seems to drive lovers to graves for their pleasure. The little houses cast here and there a blind yellow eye on the silent and tranquil scene. Edwin turned abruptly back into Woodisun Bank, feeling that he was a disturber of the peace.Suddenly deciding to walk up to Hillport "for the sake of exercise," he quickened his pace. After a mile and a half, when he had crossed the railway at Shawport and was on the Hillport rise, and the Five Towns had begun to spread out in a map behind him, he noticed that he was perspiring. He very seldom perspired, and therefore he had the conviction that the walk was "doing him good." He felt exhilarated, and moved still faster.His mood was now changed. The spectacle of Emmie and the soldier had thrown him violently out of resentment into wonder. His indignation was somewhat exhausted, and though he tried again and again to flick it back into full heat and activity, he could not. He kept thinking of the moment in the morning when, standing ready to jump from the dog-cart, his wife had said: "Catch me, both of you," and he recalled vividly the sensation of her acquiescence, her momentary yielding--imperceptible yet unforgettable--as he supported her strongly in his arms; and with this memory was mingled the smell of velvet. Strange that a woman so harsh, selfish and overbearing, could thus contradict her whole character in an instant of surrender! Was she in that gesture confiding to him the deepest secret? ... Rubbish! But now he no longer looked down on her disdainfully. Honesty made him admit that it was puerile to affect disdain of an individuality so powerful and so mysterious. If she was a foe, she was at any rate a dangerous fighter, and not to be played with. And yet she could be a trifle, a wisp of fragile flesh in his arms!He saw the beatific face of Emmie against the churchyard gates under the lamp.... Why not humour Hilda? Why not let her plant their home according to her caprice? ... Certainly not! Never would he do it! Why should he? Time after time he angrily rejected the idea. Time after time it returned. What did it matter to Hilda where she lived? And had he not bought their present house solely in order to please her? The first consideration in choosing a home ought to be and must be the consideration of business convenience.... Yet, what did it matter to him where his home was? (He remembered a phrase of Ingpen's: "I don't live on that plane.") Could he not adapt himself? He dreamt of very rapid transit between Ladderedge Hall and the works. Motor-cars had just become lawful; but he had never happened to see one, though he had heard of several in the district, or passing through. His imagination could not rise so high as a motor-car. That he could ever use or possess one did not even occur to him. He thought only of a fast-trotting horse, and a trap with indiarubber tyres; himself the driver; sometimes Hilda the driver.... An equipage to earn renown in the district. "Clayhanger's trap,"--"He drives in from Ladderedge in thirty-five minutes. The horse simply won't walk; doesn't know how to!" And so on. He had heard such talk of others. Why should not others hear it of him? ... Then, the pleasure, the mere pleasure--call it sensual or what you like--of granting a caprice to the capricious creature! If a thing afforded her joy, why not give it? ... To see her in the rôle of mistress of a country-house, delicately horsey, excited about charitable schemes, protecting the poor, working her will upon gardeners and grooms, stamping her foot in the violence of her resolution to have her own way, offering sugar to a horse, nursing a sick dog! Amusing; Agreeable! ... And all that activity of hers a mere dependence of his own! Flattering to his pride! ... He could afford it easily, for he was richer even than his wife supposed. To let the present house ought not to be difficult. To sell it advantageously ought not to be impossible. In this connection, he thought, though not seriously, of Tom Swetman, who had at last got himself engaged to one of those Scandinavian women about whom he had been chaffed for years; Tom would be wanting an abode, and probably a good one.He was carried away by his own dream. To realise that dream he had only to yield, to nod negligently, to murmur with benevolent tolerance: "All right. Do as you please." He would have nothing to withdraw, for he had uttered no refusal. Not a word had passed between them as to Ladderedge Hall since they had quitted it. He had merely said that he did not like it,--"poured cold water on it" as the phrase was. True, his demeanour had plainly intimated that he was still opposed in principle to the entire project of living in the country; but a demeanour need not be formally retracted; it could be negatived without any humiliation....No, he would never yield, though yielding seemed to open up a pleasant, a delicious prospect. He could not yield. It would be wrong, and it would be dangerous, to yield. Had he not already quite clearly argued out with himself the whole position? And yet why not yield? ... He was afraid as before a temptation.He re-crossed the railway, and crossed Fowlea Brook, a boundary, back into the borough. The dark path lay parallel with the canal, but below it. He had gone right through Hillport and round Hillport Marsh and returned down the flank of the great ridge that protects the Five Towns on the West. He could not recollect the details of the walk; he only knew that he had done it all, that time and the miles had passed with miraculous rapidity, and that his boots were very muddy. A change in the consistency of the mud caused him to look up at the sky, which was clearing and showed patches of faint stars. A frost had set in, despite the rainy prophecy of street-lamps. In a few moments he had climbed the short steep curving slope on to the canal-bridge. He was breathless and very hot.He stopped and sat on the parapet. In his school-days he had crossed this bridge twice a day on the journey to and from Oldcastle. Many times he had lingered on it. But he had forgotten the little episodes of his schooldays, which seemed now almost to belong to another incarnation. He did, however, recall that as a boy he could not sit on the parapet unless he vaulted up to it. He thought he must have been ridiculously small and boyish. The lights of Bursley, Bleakridge, Hanbridge and Cauldon hung round the eastern horizon in an arc. To the north presided the clock of Bursley Town Hall, and to the south the clock of Cauldon Church; but both were much too far off to be deciphered. Below and around the Church clock the vague fires of Cauldon Bar Ironworks played, and the tremendous respiration of the blast-furnaces filled the evening. Beneath him gleamed the foul water of the canal.... He trembled with the fever that precedes a supreme decision. He trembled as though he was about to decide whether or not he would throw himself into the canal. Should he accept the country-house scheme? Ought he to accept it? The question was not simply that of a place of residence,--it concerned all his life.He admitted that marriage must be a mutual accommodation. He was, and always had been, ready to accommodate. But Hilda was unjust, monstrously unjust. Of that he was definitely convinced.... Well, perhaps not monstrously unjust, but very unjust. How could he excuse such injustice as hers? He obviously could not excuse it.... On previous occasions he had invented excuses for her conduct, but they were not convincing excuses. They were compromises between his intellectual honesty and his desire for peace. They were, at bottom, sentimentalism.And then there flashed into his mind, complete, the great discovery of all his career. It was banal; it was commonplace; it was what everyone knew. Yet it was the great discovery of all his career. If Hilda had not been unjust in the assertion of her own individuality, there could be no merit in yielding to her. To yield to a just claim was not meritorious, though to withstand it would be wicked. He was objecting to injustice as a child objects to rain on a holiday. Injustice was a tremendous actuality! It had to be faced and accepted. (He himself was unjust. At any rate he intellectually conceived that he must be unjust, though honestly he could remember no instance of injustice on his part.) To reconcile oneself to injustice was the master achievement. He had read it; he had been aware of it; but he had never really felt it till that moment on the dark canal-bridge. He was awed, thrilled by the realisation. He longed ardently to put it to the test. He did put it to the test. He yielded on the canal-bridge. And in yielding, it seemed to him that he was victorious.He thought confidently and joyously:"I'm not going to be beaten by Hilda! And I'm not going to be beaten by marriage. Dashed if I am! A nice thing if I had to admit that I wasn't clever enough to be a husband!"He was happy, but somewhat timorously so. He had the sense to suspect that his discovery would scarcely transform marriage into an everlasting Eden, and that serious trouble would not improbably recur. "Marriage keeps on all the time till you're dead!" he said to himself. But he profoundly knew that he had advanced a stage, that he had acquired new wisdom and new power, and that no danger in the future could equal the danger that was past.He thought:"I know where I am!"It had taken him years to discover where he was. Why should the discovery occur just then? He could only suppose that the cumulative battering of experience had at length knocked a hole through his thick head, and let saving wisdom in. The length of time necessary for the operation depended upon the thickness of the head. Some heads were impenetrable and their owners came necessarily to disaster. His head was probably of an average thickness.When he got into Trafalgar Road, at the summit of Bleakridge, he hesitated to enter his own house, on account of the acute social difficulties that awaited him there, and passed it like a beggar who is afraid. One by one he went by all the new little streets of cottages with drawing-rooms--Millett Street, Wilcox Street, Paul Street, Oak Street, Hulton Street,--and the two old little streets, already partly changed--Manor Street and Higginbotham Street. Those mysterious newcoming families from nowhere were driving him out--through the agency of his wife! The Orgreaves had gone, and been succeeded by excellent people with whom it was impossible to fraternise. There were rumours that in view of Tom Swetnam's imminent defection the Swetnam household might be broken up and the home abandoned. The Suttons, now that Beatrice Sutton had left the district, talked seriously of going. Only Dr. Sterling was left on that side of the road, and he stayed because he must. The once exclusive Terraces on the other side were losing their quality. Old Darius Clayhanger had risen out of the mass, but he was fiercely exceptional. Now the whole mass seemed to be rising, under the action of some strange leaven, and those few who by intelligence, by manners, or by money counted themselves select were fleeing as from an inundation.Edwin had not meant to join in the exodus. But he too would join it. Destiny had seized him. Let him be as democratic in spirit as he would, his fate was to be cut off from the democracy, with which, for the rest, he had very little of speech or thought or emotion in common, but in which, from an implacable sense of justice, he was religiously and unchangeably determined to put his trust.He braced himself, and, mounting the steps of the porch, felt in his pocket for his latchkey. It was not there. Hilda had taken it and not returned it. She never did return it when she borrowed it, and probably she never would. He had intended to slip quietly into the house, and prepare if possible an astute opening to minimise the difficulty of the scenes which must inevitably occur. For his dignity would need some protection. In the matter of his dignity, he wished that he had not said quite so certainly to Ingpen: "I shan't take that house."With every prim formality, Emmie answered his ring. She was wearing the mask and the black frock and the white apron and cap of her vocation. Not the slightest trace of the beatified woman in the flowered hat under the lamp at the gates of the churchyard! No sign of a heart or of passion or of ecstasy! Incredible creatures--they were all incredible!He thought, nervous:"I shall meet Hilda in half a second."George ran into the hall, wearing his new green shade over his eyes."Here he is, mother!" cried George. "I say, nunks, Emmie brought up a parcel for you from Uncle Albert, and Auntie Clara. Here it is. It wasn't addressed outside, so I opened it."He indicated the hall-table, on which, in a bed of tissue paper and brown paper, lay a dreadful flat ink-stand of blue glass and bronze, with a card: "Best wishes to Edwin from Albert and Clara."George and Edwin gazed at each other with understanding."Just my luck isn't it, sonny?" said Edwin. "It's worse than last year's.""You poor dear!" said Hilda, appearing, all smiles and caressing glances. She was in a pale grey dress. "Whatever shall you do with it? You know you'll have to put it on view when they come up. Emmie----" to the maid vanishing into the kitchen--"We'll have supper now.""Yes," said Edwin to himself, with light but sardonic tolerance. "Yes, my lady. You're all smiles because you're bent on getting Ladderedge Hall out of me. But you don't know what a near shave you've had of getting something else."He was elated. The welcome of his familiar home was beautiful to him. And the incalculable woman with a single gesture had most unexpectedly annihilated the unpleasant past and its consequences. He could yield upon the grand contention how and when he chose. He had his acquiescence waiting like a delightful surprise for Hilda. As he looked at her lovingly, with all her crimes of injustice thick upon her, he clearly realised that he saw her as no other person saw her, and that because it was so she in her entirety was indispensable to him. And when he tried to argue impartially and aloofly with himself about rights and wrongs, asinine reason was swamped by an entirely irrational and wise joy in the simple fact of the criminal's existence.
II
"Wo!" exclaimed Hilda broadly, bringing the mare and the vehicle to a standstill in front of the "Live and Let Live" inn in the main street of the village of Stockbrook, which lay about a mile and a half off the high road from the Five Towns to Axe. And immediately the mare stopped she was enveloped in her own vapour.
"Ha!" exclaimed Edwin, with faint benevolent irony. "And no bones broken!"
A man came out from the stable-yard.
The village of Stockbrook gave the illusion that hundreds of English villages were giving that Christmas morning,--the illusion that its name was Arcadia, that finality had been reached, and that the forces of civilisation could go no further. More suave than a Dutch village, incomparably neater and cleaner and more delicately finished than a French village, it presented, in the still, complacent atmosphere of long tradition, a picturesque medley of tiny architectures nearly every aspect of which was beautiful. And if seven people of different ages and sexes lived in a two-roomed cottage under a thatched roof hollowed by the weight of years, without drains and without water, and also without freedom, the beholder was yet bound to conclude that by some mysterious virtue their existence must be gracious, happy, and in fact ideal--especially on Christmas Day, though Christmas Day was also Quarter Day--and that they would not on any account have it altered in the slightest degree. Who could believe that fathers of families drank away their children's bread in the quaint tap-room of that creeper-clad hostel--a public-house fit to produce ecstasy in the heart of every American traveller--"The Live and Let Live"? Who could have believed that the Wesleyan Methodists already singing a Christmas hymn inside the dwarf Georgian conventicle, and their fellow-Christians straggling under the lych into the church-yard, scorned one another with an immortal detestation, each claiming a monopoly in knowledge of the unknowable? But after all the illusion of Arcadia was not entirely an illusion. In this calm, rime-decked, Christmas-imbued village, with its motionless trees enchanted beneath a vast grey impenetrable cloud, a sort of relative finality had indeed been reached,--the end of an epoch that was awaiting dissolution.
Edwin had not easily agreed to the project of shutting up house for the day and eating the Christmas dinner with Tertius Ingpen. Although customarily regarding the ritual of Christmas, with its family visits, its exchange of presents, its feverish kitchen activity, its somewhat insincere gaiety, its hours of boredom, and its stomachic regrets, as an ordeal rather than a delight, he nevertheless abandoned it with reluctance and a sense of being disloyal to something sacred. But the situation of Ingpen, Hilda's strong desire and her teasing promise of a surprise, and the still continuing dearth of servants had been good arguments to persuade him.
And though he had left Trafalgar Road moody and captious, thinking all the time of the deserted and cold home, he had arrived in Stockbrook tingling and happy, and proud of Hilda,--proud of her verve, her persistency, and her success. She had carried him very far on the wave of her new enthusiasm for horse-traction. She had beguiled him into immediately spending mighty sums on a dog-cart, new harness, rugs, a driving-apron, and a fancy whip. She had exhausted Unchpin, upset the routine of the lithographic business, and gravely overworked the mare, in her determination to learn to drive. She had had the equipage out at night for her lessons. On the other hand she had not in the least troubled herself about the purchase of a second horse for mercantile purposes, and a second horse had not yet been bought.
When she had announced that she would herself drive her husband and son over to Stockbrook, Edwin had absolutely negatived the idea; but Unchpin had been on her side; she had done the double journey with Unchpin, who judged her capable and the mare (eight years old) quite reliable, and who moreover wanted Christmas as much as possible to himself. And Hilda had triumphed. Walking the mare uphill--and also downhill--she had achieved Stockbrook in safety; and the conquering air with which she drew up at the "Live and Let Live" was delicious. The chit's happiness and pride radiated out from her. It seemed to Edwin that by the mere strength of violition she had actually created the dog-cart and its appointments, and the mare too! And he thought that he himself had not lived in vain if he could procure her such sensations as her glowing face then displayed. Her occasionally overbearing tenacity, and the little jars which good resolutions several weeks old had naturally not been powerful enough to prevent, were forgotten and forgiven. He would have given all his savings to please her caprice, and been glad. A horse and trap, or even a pair of horses and a landau, were a trifling price to pay for her girlish joy and for his own tranquillity in his beloved house and business.
"Catch me, both of you!" cried Hilda.
Edwin had got down, and walked round behind the vehicle to the footpath, where George stood grinning. The stableman, in classic attitude, was at the mare's head.
Hilda jumped rather wildly. It was Edwin who countered the shock of her descent. The edge of her velvet hat knocked against his forehead, disarranging his cap. He could smell the velvet, as for an instant he held his wife--strangely acquiescent and yielding--in his arms, and there was something intimately feminine in the faint odour. All Hilda's happiness seemed to pass into him, and that felicity sufficed for him. He did not desire any happiness personal to himself. He wanted only to live in her. His contentment was profound, complete, rapturous.
And yet in the same moment, reflecting that Hilda would certainly have neglected the well-being of the mare, he could say to the stableman:
"Put the rug over her, will you?"
"Hello! Here's Mr. Ingpen!" announced George, as he threw the coloured rug on the mare.
Ingpen, pale and thickly enveloped, came slowly round the bend of the road, waving and smiling. He had had a relapse, after a too early sortie, and was recovering from it.
"I made sure you'd be about here," he said, shaking hands. "Merry Christmas, all!"
"Ought you to be out, my lad?" Edwin asked heartily.
"Out? Yes. I'm as fit as a fiddle. And I've been ordered mild exercise." He squared off gaily against George and hit the stout adolescent in the chest.
"What about all your parcels, Hilda?" Edwin enquired.
"Oh! We'll call for them afterwards."
"Afterwards?"
"Yes. Come along--before you catch a chill." She winked openly at Ingpen, who returned the wink. "Come along, dear. It's not far. We have to walk across the fields."
"Put her up, sir?" the stableman demanded of Edwin.
"Yes. And give her a bit of a rub down," he replied absently, remembering various references of Hilda's to a surprise. His heart misgave him. Ingpen and Hilda looked like plotters, very intimate and mischievous. He had a notion that living with a woman was comparable to living with a volcano--you never knew when a dangerous eruption might not occur.
Within three minutes the first and minor catastrophe had occurred.
"Bit sticky, this field path of yours," said Edwin, uneasily.
They were all four slithering about in brown clay under a ragged hedge in which a few red berries glowed.
"It was as hard as iron the day before yesterday," said Hilda.
"Oh! So you were here the day before yesterday, were you? ... What's that house there?" Edwin turned to Ingpen.
"He's guessed it in one!" Ingpen murmured, and then went off into his characteristic crescendo laugh.
The upper part of a late eighteenth-century house, squat and square, with yellow walls, black uncurtained windows, high slim chimney, and a blue slate roof, showed like a gigantic and mysterious fruit in a clump of variegated trees, some of which were evergreen.
"Ladderedge Hall, my boy," said Ingpen. "Seat of the Beechinors for about a hundred years."
"'Seat', eh!" Edwin murmured sarcastically.
"It's been empty for two years," remarked Hilda brightly. "So we thought we'd have a look at it."
And Edwin said to himself that he had divined all along what the surprise was. It was astounding that a man could pass with such rapidity as Edwin from vivid joy to black and desolate gloom. She well knew that the idea of living in the country was extremely repugnant to him, and that nothing would ever induce him to consent to it. And yet she must needs lay this trap for him, prepare this infantile surprise, and thereby spoil his Christmas, she who a few moments earlier had been the embodiment of surrender in his arms! He said no word. He hummed a few notes and glanced airily to right and left with an effort after unconcern. The presence of Ingpen and the boy, and the fact of Christmas, forbade him to speak freely. He could not suddenly stop and drive his stick into the earth and say savagely:
"Now listen to me! Once for all, I won't have this country house idea! So let it be understood,--if you want a row, you know how to get it."
The appearance of amity--and the more high-spirited the better--must be kept up throughout the day. Nevertheless in his heart he challenged Hilda desperately. All her good qualities became insignificant, all his benevolent estimates of her seemed ridiculous. She was the impossible woman. He saw a tremendous vista of unpleasantness, for her obstinacy in warfare was known to him, together with her perfect lack of scruple, of commonsense, and of social decency. He had made her a present of a horse and trap--solely to please her--and this was his reward! The more rope you gave these creatures, the more they wanted! But he would give no more rope. Compromise was at an end. The battle would be joined that night.... In his grim and resolute dejection there was something almost voluptuous. He continued to glance airily about, and at intervals to hum a few notes.
Over a stile they dropped into a rutty side-road, and opposite was the worn iron gate of Ladderedge Hall, with a house-agent's board on it. A short curved gravel drive, filmed with green, led to the front-door of the house. In front were a lawn and a flower-garden, beyond a paddock, and behind a vegetable garden and a glimpse of stabling; a compact property! Ingpen drew a great key from his pocket. The plotters were all prepared; they took their victim for a simpleton, a ninny, a lamb!
In the damp echoing interior Edwin gazed without seeing, and heard as in a dream without listening. This was the hall, this the dining-room, this the drawing-room, this the morning-room.... White marble mantelpieces, pre-historic grates, wall-paper hanging in strips, cobwebs, uneven floors, scaly ceilings, the invisible vapour of human memories! This was the kitchen, enormous; then the larder, enormous, and the scullery still more enormous (with a pump-handle flanking the slopstone)! No water. No gas. And what was this room opening out of the kitchen? Oh! That must be the servants' hall.... Servants' hall indeed! Imagine Edwin Clayhanger living in a "Hall," with a servants' hall therein! Snobbishness unthinkable! He would not be able to look his friends in the face.... On the first floor, endless bedrooms, but no bath-room. Here, though, was a small bedroom that would make a splendid bath-room.... Ingpen, the ever expert, conceived a tank-room in the roof, and traced routes for plumbers' pipes. George, excited, and comprehending that he must conduct himself as behoved an architect, ran up to the attic floor to study on the spot the problem of the tank-room, and Ingpen followed. Edwin stared out of a window at the prospect of the Arcadian village lying a little below across the sloping fields.
"Come along, Edwin," Hilda coaxed.
Yes, she had pretended a deep concern for the welfare of the suffering feckless bachelor, Tertius Ingpen. She had paid visit after visit in order to watch over his convalescence. Choosing to ignore his scorn for all her sex, she had grown more friendly with him than even Edwin had ever been. Indeed by her sympathetic attentions she had made Edwin seem callous in comparison. And all the time she had merely been pursuing a private design--with what girlish deceitfulness.
In the emptiness of the house the voices of Ingpen and George echoed from above down the second flight of stairs.
"No good going to the attics," muttered Edwin, on the landing.
Hilda, half cajoling, half fretful, protested:
"Now, Edwin, don't be disagreeable."
He followed her on high, martyrised. The front wall of the house rose nearly to the top of the attic windows, screening and darkening them.
"Cheerful view!" Edwin growled.
He heard Ingpen saying that the place could be had on a repairing lease for sixty-five pounds a year, and that perhaps £1,200 would buy it. Dirt cheap.
"Ah!" Edwin murmured. "I know those repairing leases. £1,000 wouldn't make this barn fit to live in."
He knew that Ingpen and Hilda exchanged glances.
"It's larger than Tavy Mansion," said Hilda.
Tavy Mansion! There was the secret! Tavy Mansion was at the bottom of her scheme. Alicia Hesketh had a fine house, and Hilda must have a finer. She, Hilda, of all people, was a snob. He had long suspected it.
He rejoined sharply: "Of course it isn't larger than Tavy Mansion! It isn't as large."
"Oh! Edwin. How can you say such things!"
In the portico, as Ingpen was re-locking the door, the husband said negligently, superiorly, cheerfully:
"It's not so bad. I expect there's hundreds of places like this up and down the country--going cheap."
The walk back to the "Live and Let Live" was irked by constraint, against which everyone fought nobly, smiling, laughing, making remarks about cockrobins, the sky, the Christmas dinner.
"So I hear it's settled you're going to London when you leave school, kiddie," said Tertius Ingpen, to bridge over a fearful hiatus in the prittle-prattle.
George, so big now and so mannishly dressed as to be amused and not a bit hurt by the appellation "kiddie," confirmed the statement in his deepening voice.
Edwin thought:
"It's more thanIhear, anyway!"
Hilda had told him that during the visit to London the project for articling George to Johnnie Orgreave had been revived, but she had not said that a decision had been taken. Though Edwin from careful pride had not spoken freely--George being Hilda's affair and not his--he had shown no enthusiasm. Johnnie Orgreave had sunk permanently in his esteem--scarcely less so than Jimmie, whose conjugal eccentricities had scandalised the Five Towns and were achieving the ruin of the Orgreave practice; or than Tom, who was developing into a miser. Moreover, he did not at all care for George going to London. Why should it be thought necessary for George to go to London? The sagacious and successful provincial in Edwin was darkly jealous of London, as a rival superficial and brilliant. And now he learnt from Ingpen that George's destiny was fixed.... A matter of small importance, however!
Did "they" seriously expect him to travel from Ladderedge Hall to his works, and from his works to Ladderedge Hall every week-day of his life? He laughed sardonically to himself.
Out came the sun, which George greeted with a cheer. And Edwin, to his own surprise, began to feel hungry.
III
"I shan't take that house, you know," said Edwin, casually and yet confidentially, in a pause which followed a long analysis, by Ingpen, of Ingpen's sensations in hospital before he was out of danger.
They sat on opposite sides of a splendid extravagant fire in Ingpen's dining-room.
Ingpen, sprawling in a shabby, uncomfortable easychair, and flushed with the activity of digestion, raised his eyebrows, squinted down at the cigarette between his lips, and answered impartially:
"No. So I gather. Of course you must understand it was Hilda's plan to go up there. I merely fell in with it,--simplest thing to do in these cases!"
"Certainly."
Thus they both condescended to the feather-headed capricious woman, dismissed her, and felt a marked access of sincere intimacy on a plane of civilisation exclusively masculine.
In the succeeding silence of satisfaction and relief could be heard George, in the drawing-room above, practising again the piano part of a Haydn violin sonata which he had very nervously tried over with Ingpen while they were awaiting dinner.
Ingpen said suddenly:
"I say, old chap! Why have you never mentioned that you happened to meet a certain person in my room at Hanbridge that night you went over there for me?" He frowned.
Edwin had a thrill, pleasurable and apprehensive, at the prospect of a supreme confidence.
"It was no earthly business of mine," he answered lightly. But his tone conveyed: "You surely ought to be aware that my loyalty and my discretion are complete."
And Ingpen, replying to Edwin's tone, said with a simple directness that flattered Edwin to the heart:
"Naturally I knew I was quite safe in your hands.... I've reassured the lady." Ingpen smiled slightly.
Edwin was too proud to tell Ingpen that he had not said a word to Hilda, and Ingpen was too proud to tell Edwin that he assumed as much.
At that moment Hilda came into the room, murmuring a carol that some children of Stockbrook had sung on the doorstep during dinner.
"Don't be afraid--I'm not going to interrupt. I know you're in the thick of it," said she archly, not guessing how exactly truthful she was.
Ingpen, keeping his presence of mind in the most admirable manner, rejoined with irony:
"You don't mean to say you've finished already explaining to Mrs. Dummer how she ought to run my house for me!"
"How soon do you mean to have this table cleared?" asked Hilda.
The Christmas dinner, served by a raw girl in a large bluish-white pinafore, temporarily hired to assist Mrs. Dummer the housekeeper, had been a good one. Its only real fault was that it had had a little too much the air of being a special and mighty effort; and although it owed something to Hilda's parcels, Ingpen was justified in the self-satisfaction which he did not quite conceal as a bachelor host. But now, under Hilda's quizzing gaze, not merely the table but the room and the house sank to the tenth-rate. The coarse imperfections of the linen and the cutlery grew very apparent; the disorder of bottles and glasses and cups recalled the refectory of an inferior club. And the untidiness of the room, heaped with accumulations of newspapers, magazines, documents, books, boxes and musical-instrument cases, loudly accused the solitary despot whose daily caprices of arrangement were perpetuated and rendered sacred by the ukase that nothing was to be disturbed. Hilda's glinting eyes seemed to challenge each corner and dark place to confess its shameful dirt, and the malicious poise of her head mysteriously communicated the fact that in the past fortnight she had spied out every sinister secret in the whole graceless, primitive wigwam.
"This table," retorted Ingpen bravely, "is going to be cleared when it won't disturb me to have it cleared."
"All right," said Hilda. "But Mrs. Dummer does want to get on with her washing-up."
"Look here, madam," Ingpen replied. "You're a little ray of sunshine, and all that, and I'm the first to say so; but I'm not your husband." He made a warning gesture. "Now don't say you'd be sorry for any woman I was the husband of. Think of something more original." He burst out laughing.
Hilda went to the window and looked out at the fading day.
"Please, I only popped in to say it's nearly a quarter to three, and George and I will go down to the inn and bring the dog-cart up here. I want a little walk. We shan't get home till dark as it is."
"Oh! Chance it and stop for tea, and all will be forgiven."
"Drive home in the dark? Not much!" Edwin murmured.
"He's afraid of my driving," said Hilda.
When Edwin and Ingpen were alone together once more, Ingpen's expression changed back instantly to that which Hilda had disturbed, and Edwin's impatience, which had uneasily simmered during the interruption, began to boil.
"Her husband's in a lunatic asylum, I may tell you," said Ingpen.
"Whose?"
"The young woman's in question."
For Edwin, it was as if a door had opened in a wall and disclosed a vast unsuspected garden of romance.
"Really!"
"Yes, my boy," Ingpen went on, quietly, with restraint, but not without a naïve and healthy pride in the sudden display of the marvellous garden. "And I didn't meet her at a concert, or on the Grand Canal, or anything of that sort. I met her in a mill at Oldham while I was doing my job. He was the boss of the mill; I walked into an office and he was lying on the floor on the flat of his back, and she was wiping her feet on his chest. He was saying in a very anxious tone: 'You aren't half wiping them. Harder! Harder!' That was his little weakness, you see. He happened to be convinced that he was a doormat. She had been hiding the thing for weeks, coming with him to the works, and so on, to calm him." Ingpen spoke more quickly and excitedly: "I never saw a more awful thing in my life! I never saw a more awful thing in my life! And coming across it suddenly, you see.... There was something absolutely odious in him lying down like that, and her trying to soothe him in the way he wanted. You should have seen the serious expression of his face, simply bursting with anxiety for her to wipe her boots properly on him. And her face when she caught sight of me. Oh! Dreadful! Dreadful!" Ingpen paused, and then continued calmly: "Of course I soon tumbled to it. For the matter of that, it didn't want much tumbling to. He went raving mad the same afternoon. And he's been more or less raving mad ever since."
"What a ghastly business.... Any children?"
"No, thank God!" Ingpen answered with fresh emotion. "But don't you forget that she's still the wife of that lunatic, and he'll probably live for ever. She's tied up to him just as if she was tied up to a post. Those are our Divorce Laws! Isn't it appalling? Isn't it inconceivable? Just think of the situation of that woman!" Ingpen positively glared at Edwin in the intensity of his indignation.
"Awful!" Edwin murmured.
"Quite alone in the world, you know!" said Ingpen. "I'm hanged if I know what she'd have done without me. She hadn't a friend--at any rate she hadn't a friend with a grain of sense. Astonishing how solitary some couples are! ... It aged her frightfully. She's much younger than she looks. Happily there was a bit of money--enough in fact."
Deeply as Edwin had been impressed by his romantic discovery of a woman in Ingpen's room at Hanbridge, he was still more impressed by it now. He saw the whole scene again, and saw it far more poetically. He accused himself of blindness, and also of a certain harshness of attitude towards the woman. He endowed her now with wondrous qualities. The adventure, in its tragicalness and its clandestine tenderness, was enchanting. How exquisite must be the relations between Ingpen and the woman if without warning she could go to his lair at night and wait confidently for his return! How divine the surprise for him, how ardent the welcome! He envied Ingpen. And also he admired him, for Ingpen had obviously conducted the affair with worthy expertise. And he had known how to win devotion.
With an air of impartiality Ingpen proceeded:
"You wouldn't see her quite at her best, I'm afraid. She's very shy--and naturally she'd be more shy than ever when you saw her. She's quite a different woman when the shyness has worn off. The first two or three times I met her I must say I didn't think she was anything more than a nice well-meaning creature,--you know what I mean. But she's much more than that. Can't play, but I believe she has a real feeling for music. She has time for reading, and she does read. And she has a more masculine understanding than nearly any other woman I've ever come across."
"You wait a bit!" thought Edwin. This simplicity on the part of a notable man of the world pleased him and gave him a comfortable sense of superiority.
Aloud he responded sympathetically:
"Good! ... Do I understand she's living in the Five Towns now?"
"Yes," said Ingpen, after a hesitation. He spoke in a peculiar, significant voice, carefully modest. The single monosyllable conveyed to Edwin: "I cannot deny it. I was necessary to this woman, and in the end she followed me!"
Edwin was impressed anew by the full revelation of romance which had concealed itself in the squalid dailiness of the Five Towns.
"In fact," said Ingpen, "you never know your luck. If she'd been free I might have been fool enough to get married."
"Why do you say a thing like that?"
"Because I think I should be a fool to marry." Ingpen tapping his front teeth with his finger-nail, spoke reflectively, persuasively, and with calm detachment.
"Why?" asked Edwin, persuasively also, but nervously, as though the spirit of adventure in the search for truth was pushing him to fatal dangers.
"Marriage isn't worth the price--for me, that is. I daresay I'm peculiar." Ingpen said this quite seriously, prepared to consider impartially the proposition that he was peculiar. "The fact is, my boy, I think my freedom is worth a bit more than I could get out of any marriage."
"That's all very well," said Edwin, trying to speak with the same dispassionate conviction as Ingpen, and scarcely succeeding. "But look what you miss! Look how you live!" Almost involuntarily he glanced with self-complacence round the unlovely, unseemly room, and his glance seemed to penetrate ceilings and walls, and to discover and condemn the whole charmless house from top to bottom.
"Why? What's the matter with it?" Ingpen replied uneasily; a slight flush came into his cheeks. "Nobody has a more comfortable bed or more comfortable boots than I have. How many women can make coffee as good as mine? No woman ever born can make first-class tea. I have all I want."
"No, you don't. And what's the good of talking about coffee, and tea, and beds?"
"Well, what else is there I want that I haven't got? If you mean fancy cushions and draperies, no, thanks!"
"You know what I mean all right.... And then 'freedom' as you say. What do you mean by freedom?"
"I don't specially mean," said Ingpen, tranquil and benevolent, "what I may call physical freedom. I'd give that up. I like a certain amount of untidiness, for instance, and I don't think an absence of dust is the greatest thing in the world; but I wouldn't in the least mind giving all that up. It wouldn't really matter to me. What I won't give up is my intellectual freedom. Perhaps I mean intellectual honesty. I'd give up even my intellectual freedom if I could be deprived of it fairly and honestly. But I shouldn't be. There's almost no intellectual honesty in marriage. There can't be. The entire affair is a series of compromises, chiefly base on the part of the man. The alternative is absolute subjection of the woman, which is offensive. No woman not absolutely a slave ever hears the truth except in anger. You can't say the same about men, and you know it. I'm not blaming; I'm stating. Even assuming a married man gets a few advantages that I miss, they're all purely physical----"
"Oh no! Not at all."
"My boy," Ingpen insisted, sitting up, and gazing earnestly at Edwin. "Analyse them down, and they're all physical--all! And I tell you I won't pay the price for them. I won't. I've no grievance against women; I can enjoy being with women as much as anybody, but I won't--I will not--live permanently on their level. That's why I say I might have been fool enough to get married. It's quite simple."
"Hm!"
Edwin, although indubitably one of those who had committed the vast folly of marriage, and therefore subject to Ingpen's indictment, felt not the least constraint, nor any need to offer an individual defence. Ingpen's demeanour seemed to have lifted the argument above the personal. His assumption that Edwin could not be offended was positively inspiring to Edwin. The fear of truth was exorcised. Freedom of thought existed in that room in England. Edwin reflected: "If he's right and I'm condemned accordingly,--well, I can't help it. Facts are facts, and they're extremely interesting."
He also reflected:
"Why on earth can't Hilda and I discuss like that?"
He did not know why, but he profoundly and sadly knew that such discussion would be quite impossible with Hilda.
The red-hot coals in the grate subsided together.
"And I'll tell you another thing----" Ingpen commenced.
He was stopped by the entrance of Mrs. Dummer, a fat woman, with an old japanned tray. Mrs. Dummer came in like a desperate forlorn hope. Her aged, grim, and yet somewhat hysterical face seemed to say: "I'm going to clear this table and get on with my work, even if I die for it at the hands of a brutal tyrant." Her gestures as she made a space for the tray and set it down on the table were the formidable gestures of the persecuted at bay.
"Mrs. Dummer," said Ingpen, in a weak voice, leaning back in his chair, "would you mind fetching me my tonic off my dressing-table? I've forgotten it."
"Bless us!" exclaimed Mrs. Dummer.
As she had hurried out, Ingpen winked placidly at Edwin in the room in which the shadows were already falling.
Nevertheless, when the dog-cart arrived at the front-door, Ingpen did seem to show some signs of exhaustion. Hilda would not get down. She sent word into the house by George that the departure must occur at once. Ingpen went out with Edwin, plaintively teased Hilda about the insufferable pride of those who sit in driving-seats, and took leave of her with the most punctilious and chivalrous ceremonial, while Hilda inscrutably smiling bent down to him with condescension from her perch.
"I'll sit behind going home, I think," said Edwin. "George, you can sit with your mother."
"Tchik! Tchik!" Hilda signalled.
The mare with a jerk started off down the misty and darkening road.
IV
The second and major catastrophe occurred very soon after the arrival in Trafalgar Road. It was three-quarters of an hour after sunset and the street lamps were lighted. Unchpin, with gloomy fatalism, shivered obscurely in the dark porch, waiting to drive the dog-cart down to the stable. Hilda had requested his presence; it was she also who had got him to bring the equipage up to the house in the morning. She had implied, but not asserted, that to harness the mare and trot up to Bleakridge was the work of a few minutes, and that a few minutes' light labour could make no real difference to Unchpin's Christmas Day. Edwin, descrying Unchpin in the porch, saw merely a defenceless man who had been robbed of the most sacred holiday of the year in order to gratify the selfish caprice of an overbearing woman. When asked how long he had been in the porch, Unchpin firmly answered that he had been there since three o'clock, the hour appointed by Mrs. Clayhanger. Edwin knew nothing of this appointment, and in it he saw more evidence of Hilda's thoughtless egotism. He perceived that he would be compelled to stop her from using his employees as her private servants, and that the prohibition would probably cause trouble. Hilda demanded curtly of Unchpin why he had not waited in the warm kitchen, according to instructions, instead of catching his death of cold in the porch. The reply was that he had rung and knocked fifteen times without getting a response.
At this Hilda became angry, not only with Emmie, the defaulting servant, but with the entire servant class and with the world. Emmie, the new cook, and temporarily the sole resident servant, was to have gone to Maggie's for her Christmas dinner, and to have returned at half past two without fail in order to light the drawing-room fire and prepare for tea-making. But, Maggie at the last moment having decided to go to Clara's for the middle of the day, Emmie was told to go with her and be as useful as she could at Mrs. Benbow's until a quarter past two.
"I hope you've got your latch-key, Edwin," said Hilda threateningly, as if ready to assume that with characteristic and inexcusable negligence he had left his latch-key at home.
"I have," he said drily, drawing the key from his pocket.
"Oh!" she muttered, as if saying: "Well, after all, you're no better than you ought to be." And took the key.
While she opened the door, Edwin surreptitiously gave half a crown to Unchpin, who was lighting the carriage-lamps.
George, with the marvellous self-preserving instinct of a small animal unprotected against irritated prowling monsters, had become invisible.
The front-doorway yawned black like the portal of a tomb. The place was a terrible negation of Christmas. Edwin felt for the radiator; it was as cold to the touch as a dead hand. He lit the hall-lamp, and the decorations of holly and mistletoe contrived by Hilda and George with smiles and laughter on Christmas Eve stood revealed as the very symbol of insincerity. Without taking off his hat and coat, he went into the unlighted glacial drawing-room, where Hilda was kneeling at the grate and striking matches. A fragment of newspaper blazed, and then the flame expired. The fire was badly laid.
"I'm sick of servants!" Hilda exclaimed with fury. "Sick! They're all alike!" Her tone furiously blamed Edwin and everybody.
And Edwin knew that the day was a pyramid of which this moment was the dreadful apex. At intervals during the drive home Hilda had talked confidentially to George of the wondrous things he and she could do if they only resided in the country--things connected with flowers, vegetables, cocks, hens, ducks, cows, rabbits, horses. She had sketched out the life of a mistress of Ladderedge Hall, and she had sketched it out for the benefit of the dull, hard man sitting behind. Her voice, so persuasive and caressing to George, had been charged with all sorts of accusations against the silent fellow whose back now and then collided with hers. She had exasperated him. She had wilfully and deliberately exasperated him.... Her treatment of Unchpin, her childish outburst concerning servants, her acutely disagreeable demeanour, all combined now to exhaust the poor remainder of Edwin's patience. Not one word had been said about Ladderedge Hall, but Ladderedge Hall loomed always between them. Deadly war was imminent. Let it come! He would prefer war to a peace which meant for him nothing but insults and injustice. He would welcome war. He turned brusquely and lit the chandelier. On the table beneath it lay the writing-case that Hilda had given to George, and the edition of Matthew Arnold that she had given to Edwin, for a Christmas present. One of Edwin's Christmas presents to her, an ermine stole, she was wearing round her neck. Tragic absurdities, these false tokens of love.... There they were, both of them in full street attire, she kneeling at the grate and he standing at the table, in the dank drawing-room which now had no resemblance to a home.
Edwin said with frigid and disdainful malevolence:
"I wish you could control yourself, Hilda. The fact that a servant's a bit late on Christmas Day is no reason for you to behave like a spoilt child. You're offensive."
His words, righteously and almost murderously resentful, seemed to startle and frighten the very furniture, which had the air of waiting, enchanted, for disaster.
Hilda turned her head and glared at Edwin. She threw back her shoulders, and her thick eyebrows seemed to meet in a passionate frown.
"Yes," she said, with her clear, stinging articulation. "That's just like you, that is! I lend my servant to your sister. She doesn't send her back,--and it's my fault! I should have thought the Benbows twisted you round their little finger enough, without you having to insult me because of them. Goodness knows what tricks they didn't play to get your Aunt's money--every penny of it! And now they make you do all the work of the estate, for their benefit, and of course you do it like a lamb! You can never spare a minute from the works for me, but you can spare hours and hours for Auntie Hamps's estate and the Benbows! It's always like that." She paused and spoke more thickly: "But I don't see why you should insult me on the top of it!"
Her features went awry. She sobbed.
"You make me ill!" said Edwin savagely.
He walked out of the room and pulled the door to.
George was descending the stairs.
"Where are you going to, uncle?" demanded George, as Edwin opened the front-door.
"I'm going down to see Auntie Maggie," Edwin answered, forcing himself to speak very gently. "Tell your mother if she asks." The boy guessed the situation. It was humiliating that he should guess it, and still more humiliating to be compelled to make use of him in the fatal affair.
V
He walked at a moderate pace down Trafalgar Road. He did not know where he was going. Certainly he was not going to see Maggie. He had invented the visit to Maggie instantly in answer to George's question, and he could not understand why he had invented it. Maggie would be at Clara's; and, in a misfortune, he would never go to Clara's; only when he was successful and triumphant could he expose himself to the Benbows.
The weather was damp and chill without rain. The chilliness was rather tonic and agreeable to his body, and he felt quite warm, though on getting down from the dog-cart a few minutes earlier he had been cold almost to the point of numbness. He could not remember how, nor when, the change had occurred.
Every street lamp was the centre of a greenish-grey sphere, which presaged rain as though the street-lamp were the moon. The pavements were greasy with black slime, the road deep in lamp-reflecting mire through which the tram-lines ran straight and gleaming. Far down the slope a cage of light moving obscurely between the glittering avenue of lamps indicated the steam-tram as it lifted towards the further hill into the heart of the town. Where the lamps merged together and vanished, but a little to the left, the illuminated dial of the clock in the Town Hall tower glowed in the dark heavens. The street was deserted; noSignalboys, no ragged girls staring into sweet shops, no artisans returning from work, no rattling carts, no vehicles of any kind save the distant tram. All the little shops were shut; even the little greengrocer's shop, which never closed, was shut now, and its customary winter smell of oranges and apples withdrawn. The little inns, not yet open, showed through their lettered plate windows one watching jet of gas amid blue-and-red paper festoons and bunches of holly. The gloomy fronts of nearly all the houses were pierced with oblongs of light on which sometimes appeared transient shadows of human beings. A very few other human beings, equally mysterious, passed furtive and baffling up and down the slope. Melancholy, familiar, inexplicable, and piteous--the melancholy of existence itself--rose like a vapour out of the sodden ground, ennobling all the scene. The lofty disc of the Town Hall clock solitary in the sky was somehow so heart-rending, and the lives of the people both within and without the houses seemed to be so woven of futility and sorrow, that the menace of eternity grew intolerable.
Edwin's brain throbbed and shook like an engine-house in which the machinery was his violent thoughts. He no longer saw his marriage as a chain of disconnected episodes; he saw it as a drama the true meaning of which was at last revealed by the climax now upon him. He had had many misgivings about it, and had put them away, and they all swept back presenting themselves as a series of signs that pointed to inevitable disaster. He had been blind, from wilfulness or cowardice. He now had vision. He had arrived at honesty. He said to himself, as millions of men and women have said to themselves, with awestruck calm: "My marriage was a mistake." And he began to face the consequences of the admission. He was not such a fool as to attach too much importance to the immediate quarrel, nor even to the half-suppressed but supreme dissension concerning a place of residence. He assumed, even, that the present difficulties would somehow, with more or less satisfaction, be adjusted. What, however, would not and could not be adjusted was the temperament that produced them. Those difficulties, which had been preceded by smaller difficulties, would be followed by greater. It was inevitable. To hope otherwise would be weakly sentimental, as his optimism during the vigil in Auntie Hamps's bedroom had been weakly sentimental. He must face the truth: "She won't alter her ways--and I shan't stand them." No matter what their relations might in future superficially appear to be, their union was over. Or, if it was not actually over, it soon would be over, for the forces to shatter it were uncontrollable and increasing in strength.
"Of course she can't help being herself!" he said impartially. "But what's that got to do with me?"
His indictment of his wife was terrific and not to be answered. She had always been a queer girl. On the first night he ever saw her, she had run after him into his father's garden, and stood with him in the garden-porch that he had since done away with, and spoken to him in the strangest manner. She was abnormal. The dismal and perilous adventure with George Cannon could not have happened to a normal woman. She could not see reason, and her sense of justice was non-existent. If she wanted a thing she must have it. In reality she was a fierce and unscrupulous egotist, incapable of understanding a point of view other than her own. Imagine her bursting out like that about Auntie Hamps's will! It showed how her mind ran. That Auntie Hamps had an absolute right to dispose of her goods as she pleased; that there was a great deal to be said for Auntie Hamps's arrangements; that in any case the Benbows were not to blame; that jealousy was despicable and the mark of a mean mind; that the only dignified course for himself was to execute the trust imposed upon him without complaining,--these things were obvious; but not to her! No human skill could ever induce her to grant them. She did not argue,--she felt; and the disaster was that she did not feel rightly.... Imagine her trying to influence Ingpen's housekeeping, to worry the man,--she the guest and he the host! What would she say if anybody played the same game on her?...
She could not be moderate. She expected every consideration from others, but she would yield none. She had desired a horse and trap. She had received it. And how had she used the gift? She had used it in defiance of the needs of the works. She had upset everybody and everything, and assuredly Unchpin had a very legitimate grievance.... She had said that she could not feel at home in her own house while the house belonged to Maggie. Edwin had obediently bought the house,--and now she wanted another house. She scorned her husband's convenience and preferences, and she wanted a house that was preposterously inaccessible. The satisfaction of her caprice for a dog-cart had not in the slightest degree appeased her egotism. On the contrary it had further excited her egotism and sharpened its aggressiveness. And by what strange infantile paths had she gone about the enterprise of shifting Edwin into the country! Not a frank word to Edwin of the house she had found and decided upon! Silly rumours of a "surprise!" And she had counted upon the presence of Ingpen to disarm Edwin and to tie his hands. The conspiracy was simply childish. And because Edwin had at once shown his distaste for her scheme, she had taken offence. Her acrimony had gradually increased throughout the day, hiding for a time under malicious silences and enigmatic demeanours, darting out in remarks to third persons and drawing back, and at last displaying itself openly, cruelly, monstrously. The injustice of it all passed belief. There was no excuse for Hilda, and there never would be any excuse for her. She was impossible; she would be still more impossible. He did not make her responsible; he admitted that she was not responsible. But at the same time, with a disdainful and cold resentment, he condemned and hated her.
He recalled Ingpen's: "I won't pay the price."
"And I won't!" he said. "The end has come!"
He envied Ingpen.
And there flitted through his mind the dream of liberty--not the liberty of ignorant youth, but liberty with experience and knowledge to use it. Ravishing prospect! Marriage had advantages. But he could retain those advantages in freedom. He knew what a home ought to be; he had the instinct of the interior; he considered that he could keep house as well as any woman, and better than most; he was not, in that respect, at all like Ingpen, who suffered from his inability to produce and maintain comfort.... He remembered Ingpen's historic habitual phrase about the proper place for women,--"behind the veil." It was a phrase which intensely annoyed women; but nevertheless how true! And Ingpen had put it into practice. Ingpen, even in the banal Five Towns, had shown the way.... He saw the existence of males, with its rationality and its dependableness, its simplicity, its directness, its honesty, as something ideal. And as he pictured such an existence--with or without the romance of mysterious and interesting creatures ever modestly waiting for attention behind the veil--further souvenirs of Hilda's wilful naughtiness and injustice rushed into his mind by thousands; in formulating to himself his indictment against her, he had overlooked ninety per cent of them; they were endless, innumerable. He marshalled them again and again, with the fiercest virulence, the most sombre gloom, with sardonic, bitter pleasure.
In the hollow where Trafalgar Road begins to be known as Duck Bank, he turned to the left and, crossing the foot of Woodisun Bank, arrived at one of the oldest quarters of the town, where St. Luke's Church stands in its churchyard amid a triangle of little ancient houses. By the light of a new and improved gas-lamp at the churchyard gates could be seen the dark silhouette of the Norman tower and the occasional white gleam of gravestones.
One solitary couple, arm-in-arm, and bending slightly towards each other, came sauntering in the mud past the historic National Schools towards the illumination of the lamp. The man was a volunteer, with a brilliant vermilion tunic, white belt, and black trousers; he wore his hat jauntily and carried a diminutive cane; pride was his warm overcoat. The girl was stout and short, with a heavily flowered hat and a dark amorphous cloak; under her left arm she carried a parcel. They were absorbed in themselves. Edwin discerned first the man's face, in which was a gentle and harmless coxcombry, and then the girl's face, ecstatic, upward-gazing, seeing absolutely naught but the youth.... It was Emmie's face, as Edwin perceived after a momentary doubt due to his unfamiliarity with the inhabitants of his own house. Emmie, so impatiently and angrily awaited by her mistress, had lost her head about a uniform. Emmie, whose place was in the kitchen among saucepans and crockery, dish-clouts and brushes, had escaped into another realm, where time is not. That she had no immediate intention of returning to her kitchen was shown by the fact that she was moving deliberately in a direction away from it. She was not pretty, for Hilda had perforce long since ceased to insist upon physical charm in her servants. She was not even young,--she was probably older than the adored soldier. But her rapt ecstasy, her fearful bliss, made a marvellous sight, rendered touching by the girl's coarse gawkiness.
It seemed lamentable, pathetic, to Edwin that destiny should not permit her to remain forever in that dream. "Can it be possible," he thought, "that a creature capable of such surpassing emotion is compelled to cook my bacon and black my boots?"
The couple, wordless, strolled onwards, sticking close to the railings. The churchyard was locked, but Emmie and the soldier were doing the best they could to satisfy that instinct which in the Five Towns seems to drive lovers to graves for their pleasure. The little houses cast here and there a blind yellow eye on the silent and tranquil scene. Edwin turned abruptly back into Woodisun Bank, feeling that he was a disturber of the peace.
Suddenly deciding to walk up to Hillport "for the sake of exercise," he quickened his pace. After a mile and a half, when he had crossed the railway at Shawport and was on the Hillport rise, and the Five Towns had begun to spread out in a map behind him, he noticed that he was perspiring. He very seldom perspired, and therefore he had the conviction that the walk was "doing him good." He felt exhilarated, and moved still faster.
His mood was now changed. The spectacle of Emmie and the soldier had thrown him violently out of resentment into wonder. His indignation was somewhat exhausted, and though he tried again and again to flick it back into full heat and activity, he could not. He kept thinking of the moment in the morning when, standing ready to jump from the dog-cart, his wife had said: "Catch me, both of you," and he recalled vividly the sensation of her acquiescence, her momentary yielding--imperceptible yet unforgettable--as he supported her strongly in his arms; and with this memory was mingled the smell of velvet. Strange that a woman so harsh, selfish and overbearing, could thus contradict her whole character in an instant of surrender! Was she in that gesture confiding to him the deepest secret? ... Rubbish! But now he no longer looked down on her disdainfully. Honesty made him admit that it was puerile to affect disdain of an individuality so powerful and so mysterious. If she was a foe, she was at any rate a dangerous fighter, and not to be played with. And yet she could be a trifle, a wisp of fragile flesh in his arms!
He saw the beatific face of Emmie against the churchyard gates under the lamp.... Why not humour Hilda? Why not let her plant their home according to her caprice? ... Certainly not! Never would he do it! Why should he? Time after time he angrily rejected the idea. Time after time it returned. What did it matter to Hilda where she lived? And had he not bought their present house solely in order to please her? The first consideration in choosing a home ought to be and must be the consideration of business convenience.... Yet, what did it matter to him where his home was? (He remembered a phrase of Ingpen's: "I don't live on that plane.") Could he not adapt himself? He dreamt of very rapid transit between Ladderedge Hall and the works. Motor-cars had just become lawful; but he had never happened to see one, though he had heard of several in the district, or passing through. His imagination could not rise so high as a motor-car. That he could ever use or possess one did not even occur to him. He thought only of a fast-trotting horse, and a trap with indiarubber tyres; himself the driver; sometimes Hilda the driver.... An equipage to earn renown in the district. "Clayhanger's trap,"--"He drives in from Ladderedge in thirty-five minutes. The horse simply won't walk; doesn't know how to!" And so on. He had heard such talk of others. Why should not others hear it of him? ... Then, the pleasure, the mere pleasure--call it sensual or what you like--of granting a caprice to the capricious creature! If a thing afforded her joy, why not give it? ... To see her in the rôle of mistress of a country-house, delicately horsey, excited about charitable schemes, protecting the poor, working her will upon gardeners and grooms, stamping her foot in the violence of her resolution to have her own way, offering sugar to a horse, nursing a sick dog! Amusing; Agreeable! ... And all that activity of hers a mere dependence of his own! Flattering to his pride! ... He could afford it easily, for he was richer even than his wife supposed. To let the present house ought not to be difficult. To sell it advantageously ought not to be impossible. In this connection, he thought, though not seriously, of Tom Swetman, who had at last got himself engaged to one of those Scandinavian women about whom he had been chaffed for years; Tom would be wanting an abode, and probably a good one.
He was carried away by his own dream. To realise that dream he had only to yield, to nod negligently, to murmur with benevolent tolerance: "All right. Do as you please." He would have nothing to withdraw, for he had uttered no refusal. Not a word had passed between them as to Ladderedge Hall since they had quitted it. He had merely said that he did not like it,--"poured cold water on it" as the phrase was. True, his demeanour had plainly intimated that he was still opposed in principle to the entire project of living in the country; but a demeanour need not be formally retracted; it could be negatived without any humiliation....
No, he would never yield, though yielding seemed to open up a pleasant, a delicious prospect. He could not yield. It would be wrong, and it would be dangerous, to yield. Had he not already quite clearly argued out with himself the whole position? And yet why not yield? ... He was afraid as before a temptation.
He re-crossed the railway, and crossed Fowlea Brook, a boundary, back into the borough. The dark path lay parallel with the canal, but below it. He had gone right through Hillport and round Hillport Marsh and returned down the flank of the great ridge that protects the Five Towns on the West. He could not recollect the details of the walk; he only knew that he had done it all, that time and the miles had passed with miraculous rapidity, and that his boots were very muddy. A change in the consistency of the mud caused him to look up at the sky, which was clearing and showed patches of faint stars. A frost had set in, despite the rainy prophecy of street-lamps. In a few moments he had climbed the short steep curving slope on to the canal-bridge. He was breathless and very hot.
He stopped and sat on the parapet. In his school-days he had crossed this bridge twice a day on the journey to and from Oldcastle. Many times he had lingered on it. But he had forgotten the little episodes of his schooldays, which seemed now almost to belong to another incarnation. He did, however, recall that as a boy he could not sit on the parapet unless he vaulted up to it. He thought he must have been ridiculously small and boyish. The lights of Bursley, Bleakridge, Hanbridge and Cauldon hung round the eastern horizon in an arc. To the north presided the clock of Bursley Town Hall, and to the south the clock of Cauldon Church; but both were much too far off to be deciphered. Below and around the Church clock the vague fires of Cauldon Bar Ironworks played, and the tremendous respiration of the blast-furnaces filled the evening. Beneath him gleamed the foul water of the canal.... He trembled with the fever that precedes a supreme decision. He trembled as though he was about to decide whether or not he would throw himself into the canal. Should he accept the country-house scheme? Ought he to accept it? The question was not simply that of a place of residence,--it concerned all his life.
He admitted that marriage must be a mutual accommodation. He was, and always had been, ready to accommodate. But Hilda was unjust, monstrously unjust. Of that he was definitely convinced.... Well, perhaps not monstrously unjust, but very unjust. How could he excuse such injustice as hers? He obviously could not excuse it.... On previous occasions he had invented excuses for her conduct, but they were not convincing excuses. They were compromises between his intellectual honesty and his desire for peace. They were, at bottom, sentimentalism.
And then there flashed into his mind, complete, the great discovery of all his career. It was banal; it was commonplace; it was what everyone knew. Yet it was the great discovery of all his career. If Hilda had not been unjust in the assertion of her own individuality, there could be no merit in yielding to her. To yield to a just claim was not meritorious, though to withstand it would be wicked. He was objecting to injustice as a child objects to rain on a holiday. Injustice was a tremendous actuality! It had to be faced and accepted. (He himself was unjust. At any rate he intellectually conceived that he must be unjust, though honestly he could remember no instance of injustice on his part.) To reconcile oneself to injustice was the master achievement. He had read it; he had been aware of it; but he had never really felt it till that moment on the dark canal-bridge. He was awed, thrilled by the realisation. He longed ardently to put it to the test. He did put it to the test. He yielded on the canal-bridge. And in yielding, it seemed to him that he was victorious.
He thought confidently and joyously:
"I'm not going to be beaten by Hilda! And I'm not going to be beaten by marriage. Dashed if I am! A nice thing if I had to admit that I wasn't clever enough to be a husband!"
He was happy, but somewhat timorously so. He had the sense to suspect that his discovery would scarcely transform marriage into an everlasting Eden, and that serious trouble would not improbably recur. "Marriage keeps on all the time till you're dead!" he said to himself. But he profoundly knew that he had advanced a stage, that he had acquired new wisdom and new power, and that no danger in the future could equal the danger that was past.
He thought:
"I know where I am!"
It had taken him years to discover where he was. Why should the discovery occur just then? He could only suppose that the cumulative battering of experience had at length knocked a hole through his thick head, and let saving wisdom in. The length of time necessary for the operation depended upon the thickness of the head. Some heads were impenetrable and their owners came necessarily to disaster. His head was probably of an average thickness.
When he got into Trafalgar Road, at the summit of Bleakridge, he hesitated to enter his own house, on account of the acute social difficulties that awaited him there, and passed it like a beggar who is afraid. One by one he went by all the new little streets of cottages with drawing-rooms--Millett Street, Wilcox Street, Paul Street, Oak Street, Hulton Street,--and the two old little streets, already partly changed--Manor Street and Higginbotham Street. Those mysterious newcoming families from nowhere were driving him out--through the agency of his wife! The Orgreaves had gone, and been succeeded by excellent people with whom it was impossible to fraternise. There were rumours that in view of Tom Swetnam's imminent defection the Swetnam household might be broken up and the home abandoned. The Suttons, now that Beatrice Sutton had left the district, talked seriously of going. Only Dr. Sterling was left on that side of the road, and he stayed because he must. The once exclusive Terraces on the other side were losing their quality. Old Darius Clayhanger had risen out of the mass, but he was fiercely exceptional. Now the whole mass seemed to be rising, under the action of some strange leaven, and those few who by intelligence, by manners, or by money counted themselves select were fleeing as from an inundation.
Edwin had not meant to join in the exodus. But he too would join it. Destiny had seized him. Let him be as democratic in spirit as he would, his fate was to be cut off from the democracy, with which, for the rest, he had very little of speech or thought or emotion in common, but in which, from an implacable sense of justice, he was religiously and unchangeably determined to put his trust.
He braced himself, and, mounting the steps of the porch, felt in his pocket for his latchkey. It was not there. Hilda had taken it and not returned it. She never did return it when she borrowed it, and probably she never would. He had intended to slip quietly into the house, and prepare if possible an astute opening to minimise the difficulty of the scenes which must inevitably occur. For his dignity would need some protection. In the matter of his dignity, he wished that he had not said quite so certainly to Ingpen: "I shan't take that house."
With every prim formality, Emmie answered his ring. She was wearing the mask and the black frock and the white apron and cap of her vocation. Not the slightest trace of the beatified woman in the flowered hat under the lamp at the gates of the churchyard! No sign of a heart or of passion or of ecstasy! Incredible creatures--they were all incredible!
He thought, nervous:
"I shall meet Hilda in half a second."
George ran into the hall, wearing his new green shade over his eyes.
"Here he is, mother!" cried George. "I say, nunks, Emmie brought up a parcel for you from Uncle Albert, and Auntie Clara. Here it is. It wasn't addressed outside, so I opened it."
He indicated the hall-table, on which, in a bed of tissue paper and brown paper, lay a dreadful flat ink-stand of blue glass and bronze, with a card: "Best wishes to Edwin from Albert and Clara."
George and Edwin gazed at each other with understanding.
"Just my luck isn't it, sonny?" said Edwin. "It's worse than last year's."
"You poor dear!" said Hilda, appearing, all smiles and caressing glances. She was in a pale grey dress. "Whatever shall you do with it? You know you'll have to put it on view when they come up. Emmie----" to the maid vanishing into the kitchen--"We'll have supper now."
"Yes," said Edwin to himself, with light but sardonic tolerance. "Yes, my lady. You're all smiles because you're bent on getting Ladderedge Hall out of me. But you don't know what a near shave you've had of getting something else."
He was elated. The welcome of his familiar home was beautiful to him. And the incalculable woman with a single gesture had most unexpectedly annihilated the unpleasant past and its consequences. He could yield upon the grand contention how and when he chose. He had his acquiescence waiting like a delightful surprise for Hilda. As he looked at her lovingly, with all her crimes of injustice thick upon her, he clearly realised that he saw her as no other person saw her, and that because it was so she in her entirety was indispensable to him. And when he tried to argue impartially and aloofly with himself about rights and wrongs, asinine reason was swamped by an entirely irrational and wise joy in the simple fact of the criminal's existence.