VWhen Albert brought his head once more into the room he suddenly discovered the stuffiness of the atmosphere, and with the large, free gestures of a mountaineer and a sanitarian threw open both windows as wide as possible. The bleak wind from the moorlands surged in, fluttering curtains, and lowering the temperature at a run."Won't Rupert catch cold?" Hilda suggested, chilled."He's got to be hardened, Rupert has!" Albert replied easily. "Fresh air! Nothing like it! Does 'em good to feel it!"Hilda thought:"Pity you didn't think so a bit earlier!"Her countenance was too expressive. Albert divined some ironic thought in her brain, and turned on her with a sort of parrying jeer:"And how's the great man getting along?"In this phrase, which both he and Clara employed with increasing frequency, Albert let out not only his jealousy of, but his respect for, the head of the family. Hilda did not like it, but it flattered her on Edwin's behalf, and she never showed her resentment of the attitude which prompted it."Edwin? Oh, he's all right. He's working." She put a slight emphasis on the last pronoun, in order revengefully to contrast Edwin's industry with Albert's presence during business hours at a children's birthday party. "He said to me as he went out that he must go and earn something towards Maggie's rent." She laughed softly.Clara smiled cautiously; Maggie smiled and blushed a little; Albert did not commit himself; only Auntie Hamps laughed without reserve."Edwin will have his joke," said she.Although Hilda had audaciously gone forth that afternoon with the express intention of opening negotiations, on her own initiative, with Maggie for the purchase of the house, she had certainly not meant to discuss the matter in the presence of the entire family. But she was seized by one of her characteristic impulses, and she gave herself up to it with the usual mixture of glee and apprehension. She said:"I suppose you wouldn't care to sell us the house, would you, Maggie?"Everybody became alert, and as it grew apparent that the company was assisting at the actual birth of a family episode or incident, a peculiar feeling of eager pleasure spread through the room, and the appetite for history-making leapt up."Indeed I should!" Maggie answered, with a deepening flush, and all were astonished at her decisiveness, and at the warmth of her tone. "I never wanted the house. Only it was arranged that I should have it, so of course I took it." The long-silent victim was speaking. Money was useless to her, for she was incapable of turning it into happiness; but she had her views on finance and property, nevertheless; and though in all such matters she did as she was told, submissively accepting the decisions of brother or brother-in-law as decrees of fate, yet she was quite aware of the victimhood. The assemblage was surprised and even a little intimidated by her mild outburst."But you've got a very good tenant, Maggie," said Auntie Hamps enthusiastically."She's got a very good tenant, admitted!" Albert said judicially and almost sternly. "But she'd never have any difficulty in finding a very good tenant for that house. That's not the point. The point is that the investment really isn't remunerative. Maggie could do much better for herself than that. Very much better. Why, if she went the right way about it she could get ten per cent on her money! I know of things.... And I bet she doesn't get three and a half per cent clear from the house. Not three and a half." He glanced reproachfully at Hilda."Do you mean the rent's too low?" Hilda questioned boldly.He hesitated, losing courage."I don't say it's too low. But Maggie perhaps took the house over at too big a figure."Maggie looked up at her brother-in-law."And whose fault was that?" she asked sharply. The general surprise was intensified. No one could understand Maggie. No one had the wit to perceive that she had been truly annoyed by Auntie Hamps's negligence in regard to jam, and was momentarily capable of bitterness. "Whose fault was that?" she repeated. "You and Clara and Edwin settled it between you. You yourself said over and over again it was a fair figure.""I thought so at the time! I thought so at the time!" said Albert quickly. "We all acted for the best.""I'm sure you did," murmured Auntie Hamps."I should think so, indeed!" murmured Clara, seeking to disguise her constraint by attentions to the sleeping Rupert."Is Edwin thinking of buying, then?" Albert asked Hilda in a quiet, studiously careless voice."We've discussed it," responded Hilda."Because if he is, he ought to take it over at the price Mag took it at. She oughtn't to lose on it. That's only fair.""I'm sure Edwin would never do anything unfair," said Auntie Hamps.Hilda made no reply. She had already heard the argument from Edwin, and Albert now seemed to her more tedious and unprincipled than usual. Her reason admitted the force of the argument as regards Maggie, but instinct opposed it.Nevertheless she was conscious of sudden sympathy for Maggie, and of a weakening of her prejudice against her."Hadn't we better be going, Auntie?" Maggie curtly and reproachfully suggested. "You know quite well that jam stands a good chance of being ruined.""I suppose we had," Auntie Hamps concurred with a sigh, and rose."I shall be able to carry out my plan," thought Hilda, full of wisdom and triumph. And she saw Edwin, owner of the house, with his wild lithographic project scotched. And the realisation of her own sagacity thus exercised on behalf of those she loved, made her glad.At the same moment, just as Albert was recommencing his flow, the door opened and Edwin entered. He had glimpsed the children in the garden and had come into the house by the back way. There were cries of stupefaction and bliss. Both Albert and Clara were unmistakably startled and flattered. Indeed, several seconds elapsed before Albert could assume the proper grim, casual air. Auntie Hamps rejoiced and sat down again. Maggie disclosed no feeling, and she would not sit down again. Hilda had a serious qualm. She was obliged to persuade herself that in opening the negotiations for the house she had not committed an enormity. She felt less sagacious and less dominant. Who could have dreamt that Edwin would pop in just then? It was notorious, it was even a subject of complaint, that he never popped in. In reply to enquiries he stammered in his customary hesitating way that he happened to be in the neighbourhood on business and that it had occurred to him, etc., etc. In short, there he was."Aren't you coming, Auntie?" Maggie demanded."Let me have a look at Edwin, child," said Auntie Hamps, somewhat nettled. "How set you are!""Then I shall go alone," said Maggie."Yes. But what about this house business?" Albert tried to stop her.He could not stop her. Finance, houses, rents, were not real to her. She owned but did not possess such things. But the endangered jam was real to her. She did not own it, but she possessed it. She departed."What's amiss with her to-day?" murmured Mrs. Hamps. "I must go too, or I shall be catching it; my word I shall!""What house business?" Edwin asked."Well," said Albert. "I like that! Aren't you trying to buy her house from her? We've just been talking it over."Edwin glanced swiftly at Hilda, and Hilda knew from the peculiar constrained, almost shamefaced, expression on his features, that he was extremely annoyed. He gave a little nervous laugh."Oh! Have ye?" he muttered.VIAlthough Edwin discussed the purchase of the house quite calmly with Albert, and appeared to regard it as an affair practically settled, Hilda could perceive from a single gesture of his in the lobby as they were leaving, that his resentment against herself had not been diminished by the smooth course of talking. Nevertheless she was considerably startled by his outburst in the street."It's a pity Maggie went off like that," she said quietly. "You might have fixed everything up immediately."Then it was that he turned on her, glowering angrily."Why on earth did you go talking about it, without telling me first?" he demanded, furious."But it was understood, dear----" She smiled, affecting not to perceive his temper, and thereby aggravating it.He almost shouted:"Nothing of the kind! Nothing of the kind!""Maggie was there. I just happened to mention it." Hilda was still quite placid."You went down on purpose to tell her, so you needn't deny it. Do you take me for a fool?"Her placidity was undiminished."Of course I don't take you for a fool, dear. I assure you I hadn't the slightest idea you'd be annoyed.""Yes, you had. I could see it on your face when I came in. Don't try to stuff me up. You go blundering into a thing, without the least notion--without the least notion! I've told you before, and I tell you again--I won't have you interfering in my business affairs. You know nothing of business. You'll make my life impossible. All you women are the same. You will poke your noses in. There'll have to be a clear understanding between you and me on one or two points, before we go much further.""But you told me I could mention it to her.""No, I didn't.""You did, Edwin. Do be just.""I didn't say you could go and plunge right into it at once. These things have to be thought out. Houses aren't bought like that. A house isn't a pound of tea, and it isn't a hat.""I'm very sorry.""No, you aren't. And you know jolly well you aren't. Your scheme was simply to tie my hands."She knew the truth of this, and her smile became queer. Nevertheless the amiable calm which she maintained astonished even herself. She was not happy, but certainly she was not unhappy. She had got, or she was going to get, what she wanted; and here was the only fact important to her; the means by which she had got it, or was going to get it, were negligible now. It cost her very little to be magnanimous. She wondered at Edwin. Was this furious brute the timid, worshipping boy who had so marvellously kissed her a dozen years earlier--before she had fallen into the hands of a scoundrel? Were these scenes what the exquisite romance of marriage had come to? ... Well, and if it was so, what then? If she was not happy she was elated, and she was philosophic, and she had the terrific sense of realities of some of her sex. She was out of the Benbow house; she breathed free, she had triumphed, and she had her man to herself. He might be a brute--the Five Towns (she had noticed as a returned exile) were full of brutes whose passions surged and boiled beneath the phlegmatic surface--but he existed, and their love existed. And a peep into the depth of the cauldron was exciting.... The injustice or the justice of his behaviour did not make a live question.Moreover, she did not in truth seriously regard him as a brute. She regarded him as an unreasonable creature, something like a baby, to be humoured in the inessentials of a matter of which the essentials were now definitely in her favour. His taunt that she went blundering into a thing, and that she knew naught of business, amused her. She knew her own business, and knew it profoundly. The actual situation was a proof of that. As for abstract principles of business, the conventions and etiquette of it--her lips condescendingly curled. After all, what had she done to merit this fury? Nothing! Nothing! What could it matter whether the negotiations were begun instantly or in a week's or a month's time? (Edwin would have dilly-dallied probably for three months, or six). She had merely said a few harmless words, offered a suggestion. And now he desired to tear her limb from limb and eat her alive. It was comical! Impossible for her to be angry, in her triumph! It was too comical! She had married an astounding personage.... But she had married him. He was hers. She exulted in the possession of him. His absurd peculiarities did not lower him in her esteem. She had a perfect appreciation of his points, including his general wisdom. But she was convinced that she had a special and different and superior kind of wisdom."And a nice thing you've let Maggie in for!" Edwin broke out afresh after a spell of silent walking."Let Maggie in for?" she exclaimed lightly."Albert ought never to have known anything of it until it was all settled. He will be yarning away to her about how he can use her money for her, and what he gets hold of she'll never see again,--you may bet your boots on that. If you'd left it to me I could have fixed things up for her in advance. But no! In you must go! Up to the neck! And ruin everything!""Oh!" she said reassuringly. "You'll be able to look after Maggie all right."He sniffed, and settled down into embittered disgust, quickening somewhat his speed up the slope of Acre Lane."Please don't walk so fast, Edwin," she breathed, just like a nice little girl. "I can't keep up with you."In spite of his enormous anger he could not refuse such a request. She was getting the better of him again. He knew it; he could see through the devices. With an irritated swing of his body he slowed down to suit her.She had a glimpse of his set, gloomy, savage, ruthless face, the lower lip bulging out. Really it was grotesque! Were they grown up, he and she? She smiled almost self-consciously, fearing that passers-by might notice his preposterous condition. All the way up Acre Lane and across by St. Luke's Churchyard into Trafalgar Road they walked thus side by side in silence. By strange good luck they did not meet a single acquaintance, and as Edwin had a latchkey, no servant had to come and open the door and behold them.Edwin, throwing his hat on the stand, ran immediately upstairs. Hilda passed idly into the drawing-room. She was glad to be in her own drawing-room again. It was a distinguished apartment, after Clara's. There lay the Dvorak music on the piano.... The atmosphere seemed full of ozone. She rang for Ada and spoke to her with charming friendliness about Master George. Master George had returned from an informal cricket match in the Manor Fields, and was in the garden. Yes, Ada had seen to his school-clothes. Everything was in order for the new term shortly to commence. But Master George had received a blow from the cricket-ball on his shin, which was black and blue.... Had Ada done anything to the shin? No, Master George would not let her touch it, but she had been allowed to see it.... Very well, Ada.... There was something beatific about the state of being mistress of a house. Without the mistress, the house would simply crumble to pieces.Hilda went upstairs; she was apprehensive, but her apprehensiveness was agreeable to her.... No, Edwin was not in the bedroom.... She could hear him in the bathroom. She tried the door. It was bolted. He always bolted it."Edwin!""What is it?"He opened the door. He was in his shirt sleeves and had just finished with the towel. She entered, and shut the door and bolted it. And then she began to kiss him. She kissed him time after time, on his cheek so damp and fresh."Poor dear!" she murmured.She knew that he could not altogether resist those repeated kisses. They were more effective than the best arguments or the most graceful articulate surrenders. Thus she completed her triumph. But whether the virtue of the kisses lay in their sensuousness or in their sentiment, neither he nor she knew. And she did not care.... She did not kiss him with abandonment. There was a reserve in her kisses, and in her smile. Indeed she went on kissing him rather sternly. Her glance, when their eyes were very close together, was curious. It seemed to imply: "We are in love. And we love. I am yours. You are mine. Life is very fine after all. I am a happy woman. But still--each is for himself in this world, and that's the bedrock of marriage as of all other institutions." Her sense of realities again! And she went on kissing, irresistibly."Kiss me."And he had to kiss her.Whereupon she softened to him, and abandoned herself to the emanations of his charm, and her lips became almost liquid as she kissed him again; nevertheless there was still a slight reserve in her kisses.At tea she chattered like a magpie, as the saying is. Between her and George there seemed to be a secret instinctive understanding that Edwin had to be humoured, enlivened, drawn into talk,--for although he had kissed her, his mood was yet by no means restored to the normal. He would have liked to remain, majestic, within the tent of his soul. But they were too clever for him. Then, to achieve his discomfiture, entered Johnnie Orgreave, with a suggestion that they should all four--Edwin, Hilda, Janet, and himself--go to the theatre at Hanbridge that night. Hilda accepted the idea instantly. Since her marriage, her appetite for pleasure had developed enormously. At moments she was positively greedy for pleasure. She was incapable of being bored at the theatre, she would sooner be in the theatre of a night than out of it."Oh! Do let's go!" she cried.Edwin did not want to go, but he had to concur. He did not want to be pleasant to Johnnie Orgreave or to anybody, but he had to be pleasant."Be on the first car that goes up after seven fifteen," said Johnnie as he was departing.Edwin grunted."You understand, Teddy? The first car that goes up after seven fifteen.""All right! All right!"Blithely Hilda went to beautify herself. And when she had beautified herself and made herself into a queen of whom the haughtiest master-printer might be proud, she despatched Ada for Master George. And Master George had to come to her bedroom."Let me look at that leg," she said. "Sit down."Devious creature! During tea she had not even divulged that she had heard of the damaged shin. Master George was taken by surprise. He sat down. She knelt, and herself unloosed the stocking and exposed the little calf. The place was black and blue, but it had a healthy look."It's nothing," she said.And then, all in her splendid finery, she kissed the dirty discoloured shin. Strange! He was only two years old and just learning to talk."Now then, missis! Here's the tram!" Edwin yelled out loudly, roughly, from below. He would have given a sovereign to see her miss the car, but his inconvenient sense of justice forced him to warn her."Coming! Coming!"She kissed Master George on the mouth eagerly, and George seemed, unusually, to return the eagerness. She ran down the darkening stairs, ecstatic.In the dusky road, Edwin curtly signalled to the vast ascending steam-car, and it stopped. Those were in the old days, when people did what they liked with the cars, stopping them here and stopping them there according to their fancy. The era of electricity and fixed stopping-places, and soulless, conscienceless control from London had not set in. Edwin and Hilda mounted. Two hundred yards further on the steam-tram was once more arrested, and Johnnie and Janet joined them. Hilda was in the highest spirits. The great affair of the afternoon had not been a quarrel, but an animating experience which, though dangerous, intensified her self-confidence and her zest.CHAPTER IXTHE WEEK-ENDIThe events of the portentous week-end which included the musical evening began early on the Saturday, and the first one was a chance word uttered by George.Breakfast was nearly over in the Clayhanger dining-room. Hilda sat opposite to Edwin, and George between them. They had all eaten with appetite, and the disillusion which usually accompanies the satisfaction of desire was upon them. They had looked forward to breakfast, scenting with zest its pleasing odours, and breakfast was over, save perhaps for a final unnecessary piece of toast or half a cup of chilled coffee.Hilda did not want to move, because she did not care for the Saturday morning task of shopping and re-victualling and being bland with fellow-shoppers in the emporiums. The house-doors were too frequently open on Saturday mornings, and errand-boys thereat, and a wind blowing through the house, and it was the morning for specially cleaning the hall--detestable and damp operation--and servants seemed loose on Saturday morning, and dinner was apt to be late. But Hilda knew she would have to move. To postpone was only to aggravate. Destiny grasped her firm. George was not keen about moving, because he had no plan of campaign; the desolating prospect of resuming school on Monday had withered his energy; he was in a mood to be either a martyr or a villain. Edwin was lazily sardonic, partly because the leisure of breakfast was at an end, partly because he hated the wage-paying slackness of Saturday morning at the shop, and partly because his relations with Hilda had remained indefinite and disquieting, despite a thousand mutual urbanities and thoughtful refinements, and even some caresses. A sense of aimlessness dejected him; and in the central caves of his brain the question was mysteriously stirring: What is the use of all these things,--success, dignity, importance, luxury, love, sensuality, order, moral superiority? He foresaw thirty years of breakfasts, with plenty of the finest home-cured bacon and fresh eggs, but no romance.Before his marriage he used to read the paper honestly and rudely at breakfast. That is to say, he would prop it up squarely in front of him, hiding his sister Maggie, and anyhow ignoring her; and Maggie had to "like it or lump it"; she probably lumped it. But upon marriage he had become a chevalier; he had nobly decided that it was not correct to put a newspaper between yourself and a woman who had denied you nothing. Nevertheless, his appetite for newspapers being almost equal to his appetite for bacon, he would still take nips at the newspaper during breakfast, hold it in one hand, glance at it, drop it, pick it up, talk amiably while glancing at it, drop it, pick it up again. So long as the newspaper was held aside and did not touch the table, so long as he did not read more than ten lines at a time, he considered that punctilio was satisfied, and that he was not in fact reading the newspaper at all. But towards the end of breakfast, when the last food was disappearing, and he had lapped the cream off the news, he would hold the newspaper in both hands--and brazenly and conscientiously read. His chief interest, just then, was political. Like most members of his party, he was endeavouring to decipher the party programme and not succeeding, and he feared for his party and was a little ashamed for it. Grave events had occurred. The substructure of the state was rocking. A newly elected supporter of the Government, unaware that he was being admitted to the best club in London, had gone to the House of Commons in a tweed cap and preceded by a brass-band. Serious pillars of society knew that the time had come to invest their savings abroad. Edwin, with many another ardent liberal, was seeking to persuade himself that everything was all right after all. The domestic atmosphere--Hilda's baffling face, the emptied table, the shadow of business, repletion, early symptoms of indigestion, the sound of a slop-pail in the hall--did not aid him to optimism. In brief the morning was a fair specimen of a kind of morning that seemed likely to be for him an average morning."Can't I leave the table, mother?" asked George discontentedly.Hilda nodded.George gave a coarse sound of glee."George! ... That's so unlike you!" his mother frowned.Instead of going directly towards the door, he must needs pass right round the table, behind the chair of his occupied uncle. As he did so, he scanned the newspaper and read out loudly in passing for the benefit of the room:"'Local Divorce Case. Etches v. Etches. Painful details.'"The words meant nothing to George. They had happened to catch his eye. He read them as he might have read an extract from the books of Euclid, and noisily and ostentatiously departed, not without a further protest from Hilda.And Edwin and Hilda, left alone together, were self-conscious."Lively kid!" murmured Edwin self-consciously.And Hilda, self-consciously:"You never told me that case was on.""I didn't know till I saw it here.""What's the result?""Not finished.... Here you are, if you want to read it."He handed the sheet across the table. Despite his serious interest in politics he had read the report before anything else. Etches v. Etches, indeed, surpassed Gladstonian politics as an aid to the dubious prosperity of the very young morning newspaper, which represented the latest and most original attempt to challenge the journalistic monopoly of the afternoonStaffordshire Signal. It lived scarcely longer than the divorce case, for the proprietors, though Non-conformists and therefore astute, had failed to foresee that the Five Towns public would not wait for racing results until the next morning."Thanks," Hilda amiably and negligently murmured.Edwin hummed.Useless for Hilda to take that casual tone! Useless for Edwin to hum! The unconcealable thought in both their minds was--and each could divine the other's thought and almost hear its vibration:"We might end in the divorce court, too."Hence their self-consciousness.The thought was absurd, irrational, indefensible, shocking, it had no father and no mother, it sprang out of naught; but it existed, and it had force enough to make them uncomfortable.The Etches couple, belonging to the great, numerous, wealthy, and respectable family of Etches, had been married barely a year.Edwin rose and glanced at his well-tended fingernails. The pleasant animation of his skin caused by the bath was still perceptible. He could feel it in his back, and it helped his conviction of virtue. He chose a cigarette out of his silver case,--a good cigarette, a good case--and lit it, and waved the match into extinction, and puffed out much smoke, and regarded the correctness of the crease in his trousers (the vertical trouser-crease having recently been introduced into the district and insisted on by that tailor and artist and seeker after perfection, Shillitoe), and walked firmly to the door. But the self-consciousness remained.Just as he reached the door, his wife, gazing at the newspaper, stopped him:"Edwin.""What's up?"He did not move from the door, and she did not look up from the newspaper."Seen your friend Big James this morning?"Edwin usually went down to business before breakfast, so that his conscience might be free for a leisurely meal at nine o'clock. Big James was the oldest employee in the business. Originally he had been foreman compositor, and was still technically so described, but in fact he was general manager and Edwin's majestic vicegerent in all the printing-shops. "Ask Big James," was the watchword of the whole organism."No," said Edwin. "Why?""Oh, nothing! It doesn't matter."Edwin had made certain resolutions about his temper, but it seemed to him that such a reply justified annoyance, and he therefore permitted himself to be annoyed, failing to see that serenity is a positive virtue only when there is justification for annoyance. The nincompoop had not even begun to perceive that what is called "right-living" means the acceptance of injustice and the excusing of the inexcusable."Now then," he said, brusquely. "Out with it." But there was still a trace of rough tolerance in his voice."No. It's all right. I was wrong to mention it."Her admission of sin did not in the least placate him.He advanced towards the table."You haven't mentioned it," he said stiffly.Their eyes met, as Hilda's quitted the newspaper. He could not read hers. She seemed very calm. He thought as he looked at her: "How strange it is that I should be living with this woman! What is she to me? What do I know of her?"She said with tranquillity:"If you do see Big James you might tell him not to trouble himself about that programme.""Programme? What programme?" he asked, startled."Oh! Edwin!" She gave a little laugh. "The musical evening programme, of course. Aren't we having a musical evening to-morrow night?"More justification for annoyance! Why should she confuse the situation by pretending that he had forgotten the musical evening? The pretence was idiotic, deceiving no one. The musical evening was constantly being mentioned.Reports of assiduous practising had reached them; and on the previous night they had had quite a subdued altercation over a proposal of Hilda's for altering the furniture in the drawing-room."This is the first I've heard of any programme," said Edwin. "Do you mean a printed programme?"Of course she could mean nothing else. He was absolutely staggered at the idea that she had been down to his works, without a word to him, and given orders to Big James, or even talked to Big James, about a programme. She had no remorse. She had no sense of danger. Had she the slightest conception of what business was? Imagine Maggie attempting such a thing! It was simply not conceivable. A wife going to her husband's works, and behind his back giving orders----! It was as though a natural law had suspended its force."Why, Edwin," she said in extremely clear, somewhat surprised, and gently benevolent accents. "What ever's the matter with you? Thereisa programme of music, I suppose?" (There she was, ridiculously changing the meaning of the word programme! What infantile tactics!) "It occurred to me all of a sudden yesterday afternoon how nice it would be to have it printed on gilt-edged cards, so I ran down to the shop, but you weren't there. So I saw Big James.""You never said anything to me about it last night. Nor this morning.""Didn't I? ... Well, I forgot."Grotesque creature!"Well, what did Big James say?""Oh! Don't ask me. But if he treats all your customers as he treated me ... However, it doesn't matter now. I shall write the programme out myself.""What did he say?""It wasn't what he said.... But he's very rude, you know. Other people think so too.""What other people?""Oh! Never mind who! Of course,Iknow how to take it. And I know you believe in him blindly. But his airs are preposterous. And he's a dirty old man. And I say, Edwin, seeing how very particular you are about things at home, you really ought to see that the front shop is kept cleaner. It's no affair of mine, and I never interfere,--but really...!"Not a phrase of this speech but what was highly and deliberately provocative. Assuredly no other person had ever said that Big James was rude. (Buthadsomeone else said so, after all? Suppose, challenged, she gave a name!) Big James's airs were not preposterous; he was merely old and dignified. His apron and hands were dirty, naturally.... And then the implication that Big James was a fraud, and that he, Edwin, was simpleton enough to be victimised by the fraud, while the great all-seeing Hilda exposed it at a single glance! And the implication that he, Edwin, was fussy at home, and negligent at the shop! And the astounding assertion that she never interfered!He smothered up all his feelings, with difficulty, as a sailor smothers up a lowered sail in a high wind, and merely demanded, for the third time:"What did Big James say?""I was given to understand," said Hilda roguishly, "that it was quite, quite, quite impossible. But his majesty would see! ... Well, he needn't 'see.' I see how wrong I was to suggest it at all."Edwin moved away in silence."Are you going, Edwin?" she asked innocently."Yes," glumly."You haven't kissed me."She did not put him to the shame of returning to her. No, she jumped up blithely, radiant. Her make-believe that nothing had happened was maddening. She kissed him lovingly, with a smile, more than once. He did not kiss; he was kissed. Nevertheless somehow the kissing modified his mental position and he felt better after it."Don't work yourself up, darling," she counselled him, with kindness and concern, as he went out of the room. "You know how sensitive you are." It was a calculated insult, but an insult which had to be ignored. To notice it would have been a grave tactical error.IIWhen he reached the shop, he sat down at his old desk in the black-stained cubicle, and spied forth and around for the alleged dust which he would tolerate in business but would not tolerate at home. It was there. He could see places that had obviously not been touched for weeks, withdrawn places where the undisturbed mounds of stock and litter had the eternal character of Roman remains or vestiges of creation. The senior errand-boy was in the shop, snuffling over a blue-paper parcel."Boy," said Edwin. "What time do you come here in the morning?""'A' past seven, sir.""Well, on Monday morning you'll be here at seven and you'll move everything--there and there and there--and sweep and dust properly. This shop's like a pigstye. I believe you never dust anything but the counters."He was mild but firm. He knew himself for a just man; yet the fact that he was robbing this boy of half-an-hour's sleep and probably the boy's mother also, and upsetting the ancient order of the boy's household, did not trouble him, did not even occur to him. For him the boy had no mother and no household, but was a patent self-causing boy that came miraculously into existence on the shop doorstep every morning and achieved annihilation thereon every night.The boy was a fatalist, but his fatalism had limits, because he well knew that the demand for errand-boys was greater than the supply. Though the limits of his fatalism had not yet been reached, he was scarcely pleased."If I come at seven who'll gi' me th' kays, sir?" he demanded rather surlily, wiping his nose on his sleeve."I'll see that you have the keys," said Edwin, with divine assurance, though he had not thought of the difficulty of the keys.The boy left the shop, his body thrown out of the perpendicular by the weight of the blue-paper parcel."You ought to keep an eye on this place," said Edwin quietly to the young man who combined the function of clerk with that of salesman to the rare retail customers. "I can't see to everything. Here, check these wages for me." He indicated small piles of money."Yes, sir," said the clerk with self-respect, but admitting the justice of the animadversion.Edwin seldom had difficulty with his employees. Serious friction was unknown in the establishment.He went out by the back-entrance, thinking:"It's no affair whatever of hers. Moreover the shop's as clean as shops are, and a damned sight cleaner than most. A shop isn't a drawing-room.... And now there's the infernal programme."He would have liked to bury and forget the matter of the programme. But he could not. His conscience, or her fussiness, would force him to examine into it. There was no doubt that Big James was getting an old man, with peculiar pompous mannerisms and a disposition towards impossibilism. Big James ought to have remembered, in speaking to Hilda, that he was speaking to the wife of his employer. That Hilda should give an order, or even make a request, direct was perhaps unusual, but--dash it!--you knew what women were, and if that old josser of a bachelor, Big James, didn't know what women were, so much the worse for him. He should just give Big James a hint. He could not have Big James making mischief between himself and Hilda.But the coward would not go straight to Big James. He went first up to what had come to be called "the litho room," partly in order to postpone Big James, but partly also because he had quite an affectionate proud interest in the litho room. In Edwin's childhood this room, now stripped and soiled into a workshop, had been the drawing-room of the Clayhanger family; and it still showed the defect which it had always shown; the window was too small and too near the corner of the room. No transformation could render it satisfactory save a change in the window. Old Darius Clayhanger had vaguely talked of altering the window. Edwin had thought seriously of it. But nothing had been done. Edwin was continuing the very policy of his father which had so roused his disdain when he was young: the policy of "making things do." Instead of entering upon lithography in a manner bold, logical, and decisive, he had nervously and half-heartedly slithered into it. Thus at the back of the yard was a second-hand "Newsom" machine in quarters too small for it, and the apparatus for the preliminary polishing of the stones; while up here in the ex-drawing-room were grotesquely mingled the final polishing process and the artistic department.The artist who drew the designs on the stone was a German, with short fair hair and moustache, a thick neck and a changeless expression. Edwin had surprisingly found him in Hanbridge. He was very skilled in judging the amount of "work" necessary on the stone to produce a desired result on the paper, and very laborious. Without him the nascent lithographic trade could not have prospered. His wages were extremely moderate, but they were what he had asked, and in exchange for them he gave his existence. Edwin liked to watch him drawing, slavishly, meticulously, endlessly. He was absolutely without imagination, artistic feeling, charm, urbanity, or elasticity of any sort,--a miracle of sheer gruff positiveness. He lived somewhere in Hanbridge, and had once been seen by Edwin on a Sunday afternoon, wheeling a perambulator and smiling at a young enceinte woman who held his free arm. An astounding sight, which forced Edwin to adjust his estimates! He grimly called himself an Englishman, and was legally entitled to do so. On this morning he was drawing a ewer and basin, for the illustrated catalogue of an earthenware manufacturer."Not a very good light to-day," murmured Edwin."Eh?""Not a very good light.""No," said Karl sourly and indifferently, bent over the stone, and breathing with calm regularity. "My eyesight is being de-stroit."Behind, a young man in a smock was industriously polishing a stone.Edwin beheld with pleasure. It was a joy to think that here was the sole lithography in Bursley, and that his own enterprise had started it. Nevertheless he was ashamed too,--ashamed of his hesitations, his half-measures, his timidity, and of Karl's impaired eyesight. There was no reason why he should not build a proper works, and every reason why he should; the operation would be remunerative; it would set an example; it would increase his prestige. He grew resolute. On the day of the party at the Benbows' he had been and carefully inspected the plot of land at Shawport, and yesterday he had made a very low offer for it. If the offer was refused, he would raise it. He swore to himself he would have his works.Then Big James came into the litho room."I was seeking ye, sir," said Big James majestically, with a mysterious expression.Edwin tried to look at him anew, as it were with Hilda's eyes. Certainly his bigness amounted now to an enormity, for proportionately his girth more than matched his excessive height. His apron descended from the semicircle of his paunch like a vast grey wall. The apron was dirty, this being Saturday, but it was at any rate intact; in old days Big James and others at critical moments of machining used to tear strips off their aprons for machine-rags.... Yes, he was conceivably a grotesque figure, with his spectacles, which did not suit him, his heavy breathing, his mannerisms, and his grandiose air of Atlas supporting the moral world. A woman might be excused for seeing the comic side of him. But surely he was honest and loyal. Surely he was not the adder that Hilda with an intonation had suggested!"I'm coming," said Edwin, rather curtly.He felt just in the humour for putting Big James "straight." Still his reply had not been too curt, for to his staff he was the opposite of a bully; he always scorned to take a facile advantage of his power, often tried even to conceal his power in the fiction that the employee was one man and himself merely another. He would be far more devastating to his wife and his sister than to any employee. But at intervals a bad or careless workman had to meet the blaze of his eye and accept the lash of his speech."It's about that little job for the mistress, sir," said Big James in a soft voice, when they were out on the landing.Edwin gave a start. The ageing man's tones were so eager, so anxiously loyal! His emphasis on the word 'mistress' conveyed so clearly that the mistress was a high and glorious personage to serve whom was an honour and a fearful honour! The ageing man had almost whispered, like a boy, glancing with jealous distrust at the shut door of the room that contained the German."Oh!" muttered Edwin, taken aback."I set it up myself," said Big James, and holding his head very high looked down at Edwin under his spectacles."Why!" said Edwin cautiously. "I thought you'd given Mrs. Clayhanger the idea it couldn't be done in time.""Bless ye, sir! Not if I know it! I intimated to her the situation in which we were placed, with urgent jobs on hand, as in duty bound, sir, she being the mistress. Ye know how slow I am to give a promise, sir. But not to do it--such was not my intention. And as I have said already, sir, I've set it up myself, and here's a rough pull."He produced a piece of paper.Edwin's ancient affection for Big James grew indignant. The old fellow was the very mirror of loyalty. He might be somewhat grotesque and mannered upon occasion, but he was the soul of the Clayhanger business. He had taught Edwin most of what he knew about both typesetting and machining. It seemed not long since that he used to call Edwin "young sir," and to enter into tacit leagues with him against the dangerous obstinacies of his decaying father. Big James had genuinely admired Darius Clayhanger. Assuredly he admired Darius's son not less. His fidelity to the dynasty was touching; it was wistful. The order from the mistress had tremendously excited and flattered him in his secret heart.... And yet Hilda must call him names, must insinuate against his superb integrity, must grossly misrepresent his attitude to herself. Whatever in his pompous old way he might have said, she could not possibly have mistaken his anxiety to please her. No, she had given a false account of their interview,--and Edwin had believed it! Edwin now swerved violently back to his own original view. He firmly believed Big James against his wife. He reflected: "How simple I was to swallow all Hilda said without confirmation! I might have known!" And that he should think such a thought shocked him tremendously.The programme was not satisfactorily set up. Apart from several mistakes in the spelling of proper names, the thing with its fancy types, curious centring, and superabundance of full-stops, resembled more the libretto of a Primitive Methodist Tea-meeting than a programme of classical music offered to refined dilettanti on a Sunday night. Though Edwin had endeavoured to modernise Big James, he had failed. It was perhaps well that he had failed. For the majority of customers preferred Big James's taste in printing to Edwin's. He corrected the misspellings and removed a few full-stops, and then said:"It's all right. But I doubt if Mrs. Clayhanger'll care for all these fancy founts," implying that it was a pity, of course, that Big James's fancy founts would not be appreciated at their true value, but women were women. "I should almost be inclined to set it all again in old-face. I'm sure she'd prefer it. Do you mind?""With the greatest of pleasure, sir," Big James heartily concurred, looking at his watch. "But I must be lively."He conveyed his immense bulk neatly and importantly down the narrow stairs.
V
When Albert brought his head once more into the room he suddenly discovered the stuffiness of the atmosphere, and with the large, free gestures of a mountaineer and a sanitarian threw open both windows as wide as possible. The bleak wind from the moorlands surged in, fluttering curtains, and lowering the temperature at a run.
"Won't Rupert catch cold?" Hilda suggested, chilled.
"He's got to be hardened, Rupert has!" Albert replied easily. "Fresh air! Nothing like it! Does 'em good to feel it!"
Hilda thought:
"Pity you didn't think so a bit earlier!"
Her countenance was too expressive. Albert divined some ironic thought in her brain, and turned on her with a sort of parrying jeer:
"And how's the great man getting along?"
In this phrase, which both he and Clara employed with increasing frequency, Albert let out not only his jealousy of, but his respect for, the head of the family. Hilda did not like it, but it flattered her on Edwin's behalf, and she never showed her resentment of the attitude which prompted it.
"Edwin? Oh, he's all right. He's working." She put a slight emphasis on the last pronoun, in order revengefully to contrast Edwin's industry with Albert's presence during business hours at a children's birthday party. "He said to me as he went out that he must go and earn something towards Maggie's rent." She laughed softly.
Clara smiled cautiously; Maggie smiled and blushed a little; Albert did not commit himself; only Auntie Hamps laughed without reserve.
"Edwin will have his joke," said she.
Although Hilda had audaciously gone forth that afternoon with the express intention of opening negotiations, on her own initiative, with Maggie for the purchase of the house, she had certainly not meant to discuss the matter in the presence of the entire family. But she was seized by one of her characteristic impulses, and she gave herself up to it with the usual mixture of glee and apprehension. She said:
"I suppose you wouldn't care to sell us the house, would you, Maggie?"
Everybody became alert, and as it grew apparent that the company was assisting at the actual birth of a family episode or incident, a peculiar feeling of eager pleasure spread through the room, and the appetite for history-making leapt up.
"Indeed I should!" Maggie answered, with a deepening flush, and all were astonished at her decisiveness, and at the warmth of her tone. "I never wanted the house. Only it was arranged that I should have it, so of course I took it." The long-silent victim was speaking. Money was useless to her, for she was incapable of turning it into happiness; but she had her views on finance and property, nevertheless; and though in all such matters she did as she was told, submissively accepting the decisions of brother or brother-in-law as decrees of fate, yet she was quite aware of the victimhood. The assemblage was surprised and even a little intimidated by her mild outburst.
"But you've got a very good tenant, Maggie," said Auntie Hamps enthusiastically.
"She's got a very good tenant, admitted!" Albert said judicially and almost sternly. "But she'd never have any difficulty in finding a very good tenant for that house. That's not the point. The point is that the investment really isn't remunerative. Maggie could do much better for herself than that. Very much better. Why, if she went the right way about it she could get ten per cent on her money! I know of things.... And I bet she doesn't get three and a half per cent clear from the house. Not three and a half." He glanced reproachfully at Hilda.
"Do you mean the rent's too low?" Hilda questioned boldly.
He hesitated, losing courage.
"I don't say it's too low. But Maggie perhaps took the house over at too big a figure."
Maggie looked up at her brother-in-law.
"And whose fault was that?" she asked sharply. The general surprise was intensified. No one could understand Maggie. No one had the wit to perceive that she had been truly annoyed by Auntie Hamps's negligence in regard to jam, and was momentarily capable of bitterness. "Whose fault was that?" she repeated. "You and Clara and Edwin settled it between you. You yourself said over and over again it was a fair figure."
"I thought so at the time! I thought so at the time!" said Albert quickly. "We all acted for the best."
"I'm sure you did," murmured Auntie Hamps.
"I should think so, indeed!" murmured Clara, seeking to disguise her constraint by attentions to the sleeping Rupert.
"Is Edwin thinking of buying, then?" Albert asked Hilda in a quiet, studiously careless voice.
"We've discussed it," responded Hilda.
"Because if he is, he ought to take it over at the price Mag took it at. She oughtn't to lose on it. That's only fair."
"I'm sure Edwin would never do anything unfair," said Auntie Hamps.
Hilda made no reply. She had already heard the argument from Edwin, and Albert now seemed to her more tedious and unprincipled than usual. Her reason admitted the force of the argument as regards Maggie, but instinct opposed it.
Nevertheless she was conscious of sudden sympathy for Maggie, and of a weakening of her prejudice against her.
"Hadn't we better be going, Auntie?" Maggie curtly and reproachfully suggested. "You know quite well that jam stands a good chance of being ruined."
"I suppose we had," Auntie Hamps concurred with a sigh, and rose.
"I shall be able to carry out my plan," thought Hilda, full of wisdom and triumph. And she saw Edwin, owner of the house, with his wild lithographic project scotched. And the realisation of her own sagacity thus exercised on behalf of those she loved, made her glad.
At the same moment, just as Albert was recommencing his flow, the door opened and Edwin entered. He had glimpsed the children in the garden and had come into the house by the back way. There were cries of stupefaction and bliss. Both Albert and Clara were unmistakably startled and flattered. Indeed, several seconds elapsed before Albert could assume the proper grim, casual air. Auntie Hamps rejoiced and sat down again. Maggie disclosed no feeling, and she would not sit down again. Hilda had a serious qualm. She was obliged to persuade herself that in opening the negotiations for the house she had not committed an enormity. She felt less sagacious and less dominant. Who could have dreamt that Edwin would pop in just then? It was notorious, it was even a subject of complaint, that he never popped in. In reply to enquiries he stammered in his customary hesitating way that he happened to be in the neighbourhood on business and that it had occurred to him, etc., etc. In short, there he was.
"Aren't you coming, Auntie?" Maggie demanded.
"Let me have a look at Edwin, child," said Auntie Hamps, somewhat nettled. "How set you are!"
"Then I shall go alone," said Maggie.
"Yes. But what about this house business?" Albert tried to stop her.
He could not stop her. Finance, houses, rents, were not real to her. She owned but did not possess such things. But the endangered jam was real to her. She did not own it, but she possessed it. She departed.
"What's amiss with her to-day?" murmured Mrs. Hamps. "I must go too, or I shall be catching it; my word I shall!"
"What house business?" Edwin asked.
"Well," said Albert. "I like that! Aren't you trying to buy her house from her? We've just been talking it over."
Edwin glanced swiftly at Hilda, and Hilda knew from the peculiar constrained, almost shamefaced, expression on his features, that he was extremely annoyed. He gave a little nervous laugh.
"Oh! Have ye?" he muttered.
VI
Although Edwin discussed the purchase of the house quite calmly with Albert, and appeared to regard it as an affair practically settled, Hilda could perceive from a single gesture of his in the lobby as they were leaving, that his resentment against herself had not been diminished by the smooth course of talking. Nevertheless she was considerably startled by his outburst in the street.
"It's a pity Maggie went off like that," she said quietly. "You might have fixed everything up immediately."
Then it was that he turned on her, glowering angrily.
"Why on earth did you go talking about it, without telling me first?" he demanded, furious.
"But it was understood, dear----" She smiled, affecting not to perceive his temper, and thereby aggravating it.
He almost shouted:
"Nothing of the kind! Nothing of the kind!"
"Maggie was there. I just happened to mention it." Hilda was still quite placid.
"You went down on purpose to tell her, so you needn't deny it. Do you take me for a fool?"
Her placidity was undiminished.
"Of course I don't take you for a fool, dear. I assure you I hadn't the slightest idea you'd be annoyed."
"Yes, you had. I could see it on your face when I came in. Don't try to stuff me up. You go blundering into a thing, without the least notion--without the least notion! I've told you before, and I tell you again--I won't have you interfering in my business affairs. You know nothing of business. You'll make my life impossible. All you women are the same. You will poke your noses in. There'll have to be a clear understanding between you and me on one or two points, before we go much further."
"But you told me I could mention it to her."
"No, I didn't."
"You did, Edwin. Do be just."
"I didn't say you could go and plunge right into it at once. These things have to be thought out. Houses aren't bought like that. A house isn't a pound of tea, and it isn't a hat."
"I'm very sorry."
"No, you aren't. And you know jolly well you aren't. Your scheme was simply to tie my hands."
She knew the truth of this, and her smile became queer. Nevertheless the amiable calm which she maintained astonished even herself. She was not happy, but certainly she was not unhappy. She had got, or she was going to get, what she wanted; and here was the only fact important to her; the means by which she had got it, or was going to get it, were negligible now. It cost her very little to be magnanimous. She wondered at Edwin. Was this furious brute the timid, worshipping boy who had so marvellously kissed her a dozen years earlier--before she had fallen into the hands of a scoundrel? Were these scenes what the exquisite romance of marriage had come to? ... Well, and if it was so, what then? If she was not happy she was elated, and she was philosophic, and she had the terrific sense of realities of some of her sex. She was out of the Benbow house; she breathed free, she had triumphed, and she had her man to herself. He might be a brute--the Five Towns (she had noticed as a returned exile) were full of brutes whose passions surged and boiled beneath the phlegmatic surface--but he existed, and their love existed. And a peep into the depth of the cauldron was exciting.... The injustice or the justice of his behaviour did not make a live question.
Moreover, she did not in truth seriously regard him as a brute. She regarded him as an unreasonable creature, something like a baby, to be humoured in the inessentials of a matter of which the essentials were now definitely in her favour. His taunt that she went blundering into a thing, and that she knew naught of business, amused her. She knew her own business, and knew it profoundly. The actual situation was a proof of that. As for abstract principles of business, the conventions and etiquette of it--her lips condescendingly curled. After all, what had she done to merit this fury? Nothing! Nothing! What could it matter whether the negotiations were begun instantly or in a week's or a month's time? (Edwin would have dilly-dallied probably for three months, or six). She had merely said a few harmless words, offered a suggestion. And now he desired to tear her limb from limb and eat her alive. It was comical! Impossible for her to be angry, in her triumph! It was too comical! She had married an astounding personage.... But she had married him. He was hers. She exulted in the possession of him. His absurd peculiarities did not lower him in her esteem. She had a perfect appreciation of his points, including his general wisdom. But she was convinced that she had a special and different and superior kind of wisdom.
"And a nice thing you've let Maggie in for!" Edwin broke out afresh after a spell of silent walking.
"Let Maggie in for?" she exclaimed lightly.
"Albert ought never to have known anything of it until it was all settled. He will be yarning away to her about how he can use her money for her, and what he gets hold of she'll never see again,--you may bet your boots on that. If you'd left it to me I could have fixed things up for her in advance. But no! In you must go! Up to the neck! And ruin everything!"
"Oh!" she said reassuringly. "You'll be able to look after Maggie all right."
He sniffed, and settled down into embittered disgust, quickening somewhat his speed up the slope of Acre Lane.
"Please don't walk so fast, Edwin," she breathed, just like a nice little girl. "I can't keep up with you."
In spite of his enormous anger he could not refuse such a request. She was getting the better of him again. He knew it; he could see through the devices. With an irritated swing of his body he slowed down to suit her.
She had a glimpse of his set, gloomy, savage, ruthless face, the lower lip bulging out. Really it was grotesque! Were they grown up, he and she? She smiled almost self-consciously, fearing that passers-by might notice his preposterous condition. All the way up Acre Lane and across by St. Luke's Churchyard into Trafalgar Road they walked thus side by side in silence. By strange good luck they did not meet a single acquaintance, and as Edwin had a latchkey, no servant had to come and open the door and behold them.
Edwin, throwing his hat on the stand, ran immediately upstairs. Hilda passed idly into the drawing-room. She was glad to be in her own drawing-room again. It was a distinguished apartment, after Clara's. There lay the Dvorak music on the piano.... The atmosphere seemed full of ozone. She rang for Ada and spoke to her with charming friendliness about Master George. Master George had returned from an informal cricket match in the Manor Fields, and was in the garden. Yes, Ada had seen to his school-clothes. Everything was in order for the new term shortly to commence. But Master George had received a blow from the cricket-ball on his shin, which was black and blue.... Had Ada done anything to the shin? No, Master George would not let her touch it, but she had been allowed to see it.... Very well, Ada.... There was something beatific about the state of being mistress of a house. Without the mistress, the house would simply crumble to pieces.
Hilda went upstairs; she was apprehensive, but her apprehensiveness was agreeable to her.... No, Edwin was not in the bedroom.... She could hear him in the bathroom. She tried the door. It was bolted. He always bolted it.
"Edwin!"
"What is it?"
He opened the door. He was in his shirt sleeves and had just finished with the towel. She entered, and shut the door and bolted it. And then she began to kiss him. She kissed him time after time, on his cheek so damp and fresh.
"Poor dear!" she murmured.
She knew that he could not altogether resist those repeated kisses. They were more effective than the best arguments or the most graceful articulate surrenders. Thus she completed her triumph. But whether the virtue of the kisses lay in their sensuousness or in their sentiment, neither he nor she knew. And she did not care.... She did not kiss him with abandonment. There was a reserve in her kisses, and in her smile. Indeed she went on kissing him rather sternly. Her glance, when their eyes were very close together, was curious. It seemed to imply: "We are in love. And we love. I am yours. You are mine. Life is very fine after all. I am a happy woman. But still--each is for himself in this world, and that's the bedrock of marriage as of all other institutions." Her sense of realities again! And she went on kissing, irresistibly.
"Kiss me."
And he had to kiss her.
Whereupon she softened to him, and abandoned herself to the emanations of his charm, and her lips became almost liquid as she kissed him again; nevertheless there was still a slight reserve in her kisses.
At tea she chattered like a magpie, as the saying is. Between her and George there seemed to be a secret instinctive understanding that Edwin had to be humoured, enlivened, drawn into talk,--for although he had kissed her, his mood was yet by no means restored to the normal. He would have liked to remain, majestic, within the tent of his soul. But they were too clever for him. Then, to achieve his discomfiture, entered Johnnie Orgreave, with a suggestion that they should all four--Edwin, Hilda, Janet, and himself--go to the theatre at Hanbridge that night. Hilda accepted the idea instantly. Since her marriage, her appetite for pleasure had developed enormously. At moments she was positively greedy for pleasure. She was incapable of being bored at the theatre, she would sooner be in the theatre of a night than out of it.
"Oh! Do let's go!" she cried.
Edwin did not want to go, but he had to concur. He did not want to be pleasant to Johnnie Orgreave or to anybody, but he had to be pleasant.
"Be on the first car that goes up after seven fifteen," said Johnnie as he was departing.
Edwin grunted.
"You understand, Teddy? The first car that goes up after seven fifteen."
"All right! All right!"
Blithely Hilda went to beautify herself. And when she had beautified herself and made herself into a queen of whom the haughtiest master-printer might be proud, she despatched Ada for Master George. And Master George had to come to her bedroom.
"Let me look at that leg," she said. "Sit down."
Devious creature! During tea she had not even divulged that she had heard of the damaged shin. Master George was taken by surprise. He sat down. She knelt, and herself unloosed the stocking and exposed the little calf. The place was black and blue, but it had a healthy look.
"It's nothing," she said.
And then, all in her splendid finery, she kissed the dirty discoloured shin. Strange! He was only two years old and just learning to talk.
"Now then, missis! Here's the tram!" Edwin yelled out loudly, roughly, from below. He would have given a sovereign to see her miss the car, but his inconvenient sense of justice forced him to warn her.
"Coming! Coming!"
She kissed Master George on the mouth eagerly, and George seemed, unusually, to return the eagerness. She ran down the darkening stairs, ecstatic.
In the dusky road, Edwin curtly signalled to the vast ascending steam-car, and it stopped. Those were in the old days, when people did what they liked with the cars, stopping them here and stopping them there according to their fancy. The era of electricity and fixed stopping-places, and soulless, conscienceless control from London had not set in. Edwin and Hilda mounted. Two hundred yards further on the steam-tram was once more arrested, and Johnnie and Janet joined them. Hilda was in the highest spirits. The great affair of the afternoon had not been a quarrel, but an animating experience which, though dangerous, intensified her self-confidence and her zest.
CHAPTER IX
THE WEEK-END
I
The events of the portentous week-end which included the musical evening began early on the Saturday, and the first one was a chance word uttered by George.
Breakfast was nearly over in the Clayhanger dining-room. Hilda sat opposite to Edwin, and George between them. They had all eaten with appetite, and the disillusion which usually accompanies the satisfaction of desire was upon them. They had looked forward to breakfast, scenting with zest its pleasing odours, and breakfast was over, save perhaps for a final unnecessary piece of toast or half a cup of chilled coffee.
Hilda did not want to move, because she did not care for the Saturday morning task of shopping and re-victualling and being bland with fellow-shoppers in the emporiums. The house-doors were too frequently open on Saturday mornings, and errand-boys thereat, and a wind blowing through the house, and it was the morning for specially cleaning the hall--detestable and damp operation--and servants seemed loose on Saturday morning, and dinner was apt to be late. But Hilda knew she would have to move. To postpone was only to aggravate. Destiny grasped her firm. George was not keen about moving, because he had no plan of campaign; the desolating prospect of resuming school on Monday had withered his energy; he was in a mood to be either a martyr or a villain. Edwin was lazily sardonic, partly because the leisure of breakfast was at an end, partly because he hated the wage-paying slackness of Saturday morning at the shop, and partly because his relations with Hilda had remained indefinite and disquieting, despite a thousand mutual urbanities and thoughtful refinements, and even some caresses. A sense of aimlessness dejected him; and in the central caves of his brain the question was mysteriously stirring: What is the use of all these things,--success, dignity, importance, luxury, love, sensuality, order, moral superiority? He foresaw thirty years of breakfasts, with plenty of the finest home-cured bacon and fresh eggs, but no romance.
Before his marriage he used to read the paper honestly and rudely at breakfast. That is to say, he would prop it up squarely in front of him, hiding his sister Maggie, and anyhow ignoring her; and Maggie had to "like it or lump it"; she probably lumped it. But upon marriage he had become a chevalier; he had nobly decided that it was not correct to put a newspaper between yourself and a woman who had denied you nothing. Nevertheless, his appetite for newspapers being almost equal to his appetite for bacon, he would still take nips at the newspaper during breakfast, hold it in one hand, glance at it, drop it, pick it up, talk amiably while glancing at it, drop it, pick it up again. So long as the newspaper was held aside and did not touch the table, so long as he did not read more than ten lines at a time, he considered that punctilio was satisfied, and that he was not in fact reading the newspaper at all. But towards the end of breakfast, when the last food was disappearing, and he had lapped the cream off the news, he would hold the newspaper in both hands--and brazenly and conscientiously read. His chief interest, just then, was political. Like most members of his party, he was endeavouring to decipher the party programme and not succeeding, and he feared for his party and was a little ashamed for it. Grave events had occurred. The substructure of the state was rocking. A newly elected supporter of the Government, unaware that he was being admitted to the best club in London, had gone to the House of Commons in a tweed cap and preceded by a brass-band. Serious pillars of society knew that the time had come to invest their savings abroad. Edwin, with many another ardent liberal, was seeking to persuade himself that everything was all right after all. The domestic atmosphere--Hilda's baffling face, the emptied table, the shadow of business, repletion, early symptoms of indigestion, the sound of a slop-pail in the hall--did not aid him to optimism. In brief the morning was a fair specimen of a kind of morning that seemed likely to be for him an average morning.
"Can't I leave the table, mother?" asked George discontentedly.
Hilda nodded.
George gave a coarse sound of glee.
"George! ... That's so unlike you!" his mother frowned.
Instead of going directly towards the door, he must needs pass right round the table, behind the chair of his occupied uncle. As he did so, he scanned the newspaper and read out loudly in passing for the benefit of the room:
"'Local Divorce Case. Etches v. Etches. Painful details.'"
The words meant nothing to George. They had happened to catch his eye. He read them as he might have read an extract from the books of Euclid, and noisily and ostentatiously departed, not without a further protest from Hilda.
And Edwin and Hilda, left alone together, were self-conscious.
"Lively kid!" murmured Edwin self-consciously.
And Hilda, self-consciously:
"You never told me that case was on."
"I didn't know till I saw it here."
"What's the result?"
"Not finished.... Here you are, if you want to read it."
He handed the sheet across the table. Despite his serious interest in politics he had read the report before anything else. Etches v. Etches, indeed, surpassed Gladstonian politics as an aid to the dubious prosperity of the very young morning newspaper, which represented the latest and most original attempt to challenge the journalistic monopoly of the afternoonStaffordshire Signal. It lived scarcely longer than the divorce case, for the proprietors, though Non-conformists and therefore astute, had failed to foresee that the Five Towns public would not wait for racing results until the next morning.
"Thanks," Hilda amiably and negligently murmured.
Edwin hummed.
Useless for Hilda to take that casual tone! Useless for Edwin to hum! The unconcealable thought in both their minds was--and each could divine the other's thought and almost hear its vibration:
"We might end in the divorce court, too."
Hence their self-consciousness.
The thought was absurd, irrational, indefensible, shocking, it had no father and no mother, it sprang out of naught; but it existed, and it had force enough to make them uncomfortable.
The Etches couple, belonging to the great, numerous, wealthy, and respectable family of Etches, had been married barely a year.
Edwin rose and glanced at his well-tended fingernails. The pleasant animation of his skin caused by the bath was still perceptible. He could feel it in his back, and it helped his conviction of virtue. He chose a cigarette out of his silver case,--a good cigarette, a good case--and lit it, and waved the match into extinction, and puffed out much smoke, and regarded the correctness of the crease in his trousers (the vertical trouser-crease having recently been introduced into the district and insisted on by that tailor and artist and seeker after perfection, Shillitoe), and walked firmly to the door. But the self-consciousness remained.
Just as he reached the door, his wife, gazing at the newspaper, stopped him:
"Edwin."
"What's up?"
He did not move from the door, and she did not look up from the newspaper.
"Seen your friend Big James this morning?"
Edwin usually went down to business before breakfast, so that his conscience might be free for a leisurely meal at nine o'clock. Big James was the oldest employee in the business. Originally he had been foreman compositor, and was still technically so described, but in fact he was general manager and Edwin's majestic vicegerent in all the printing-shops. "Ask Big James," was the watchword of the whole organism.
"No," said Edwin. "Why?"
"Oh, nothing! It doesn't matter."
Edwin had made certain resolutions about his temper, but it seemed to him that such a reply justified annoyance, and he therefore permitted himself to be annoyed, failing to see that serenity is a positive virtue only when there is justification for annoyance. The nincompoop had not even begun to perceive that what is called "right-living" means the acceptance of injustice and the excusing of the inexcusable.
"Now then," he said, brusquely. "Out with it." But there was still a trace of rough tolerance in his voice.
"No. It's all right. I was wrong to mention it."
Her admission of sin did not in the least placate him.
He advanced towards the table.
"You haven't mentioned it," he said stiffly.
Their eyes met, as Hilda's quitted the newspaper. He could not read hers. She seemed very calm. He thought as he looked at her: "How strange it is that I should be living with this woman! What is she to me? What do I know of her?"
She said with tranquillity:
"If you do see Big James you might tell him not to trouble himself about that programme."
"Programme? What programme?" he asked, startled.
"Oh! Edwin!" She gave a little laugh. "The musical evening programme, of course. Aren't we having a musical evening to-morrow night?"
More justification for annoyance! Why should she confuse the situation by pretending that he had forgotten the musical evening? The pretence was idiotic, deceiving no one. The musical evening was constantly being mentioned.
Reports of assiduous practising had reached them; and on the previous night they had had quite a subdued altercation over a proposal of Hilda's for altering the furniture in the drawing-room.
"This is the first I've heard of any programme," said Edwin. "Do you mean a printed programme?"
Of course she could mean nothing else. He was absolutely staggered at the idea that she had been down to his works, without a word to him, and given orders to Big James, or even talked to Big James, about a programme. She had no remorse. She had no sense of danger. Had she the slightest conception of what business was? Imagine Maggie attempting such a thing! It was simply not conceivable. A wife going to her husband's works, and behind his back giving orders----! It was as though a natural law had suspended its force.
"Why, Edwin," she said in extremely clear, somewhat surprised, and gently benevolent accents. "What ever's the matter with you? Thereisa programme of music, I suppose?" (There she was, ridiculously changing the meaning of the word programme! What infantile tactics!) "It occurred to me all of a sudden yesterday afternoon how nice it would be to have it printed on gilt-edged cards, so I ran down to the shop, but you weren't there. So I saw Big James."
"You never said anything to me about it last night. Nor this morning."
"Didn't I? ... Well, I forgot."
Grotesque creature!
"Well, what did Big James say?"
"Oh! Don't ask me. But if he treats all your customers as he treated me ... However, it doesn't matter now. I shall write the programme out myself."
"What did he say?"
"It wasn't what he said.... But he's very rude, you know. Other people think so too."
"What other people?"
"Oh! Never mind who! Of course,Iknow how to take it. And I know you believe in him blindly. But his airs are preposterous. And he's a dirty old man. And I say, Edwin, seeing how very particular you are about things at home, you really ought to see that the front shop is kept cleaner. It's no affair of mine, and I never interfere,--but really...!"
Not a phrase of this speech but what was highly and deliberately provocative. Assuredly no other person had ever said that Big James was rude. (Buthadsomeone else said so, after all? Suppose, challenged, she gave a name!) Big James's airs were not preposterous; he was merely old and dignified. His apron and hands were dirty, naturally.... And then the implication that Big James was a fraud, and that he, Edwin, was simpleton enough to be victimised by the fraud, while the great all-seeing Hilda exposed it at a single glance! And the implication that he, Edwin, was fussy at home, and negligent at the shop! And the astounding assertion that she never interfered!
He smothered up all his feelings, with difficulty, as a sailor smothers up a lowered sail in a high wind, and merely demanded, for the third time:
"What did Big James say?"
"I was given to understand," said Hilda roguishly, "that it was quite, quite, quite impossible. But his majesty would see! ... Well, he needn't 'see.' I see how wrong I was to suggest it at all."
Edwin moved away in silence.
"Are you going, Edwin?" she asked innocently.
"Yes," glumly.
"You haven't kissed me."
She did not put him to the shame of returning to her. No, she jumped up blithely, radiant. Her make-believe that nothing had happened was maddening. She kissed him lovingly, with a smile, more than once. He did not kiss; he was kissed. Nevertheless somehow the kissing modified his mental position and he felt better after it.
"Don't work yourself up, darling," she counselled him, with kindness and concern, as he went out of the room. "You know how sensitive you are." It was a calculated insult, but an insult which had to be ignored. To notice it would have been a grave tactical error.
II
When he reached the shop, he sat down at his old desk in the black-stained cubicle, and spied forth and around for the alleged dust which he would tolerate in business but would not tolerate at home. It was there. He could see places that had obviously not been touched for weeks, withdrawn places where the undisturbed mounds of stock and litter had the eternal character of Roman remains or vestiges of creation. The senior errand-boy was in the shop, snuffling over a blue-paper parcel.
"Boy," said Edwin. "What time do you come here in the morning?"
"'A' past seven, sir."
"Well, on Monday morning you'll be here at seven and you'll move everything--there and there and there--and sweep and dust properly. This shop's like a pigstye. I believe you never dust anything but the counters."
He was mild but firm. He knew himself for a just man; yet the fact that he was robbing this boy of half-an-hour's sleep and probably the boy's mother also, and upsetting the ancient order of the boy's household, did not trouble him, did not even occur to him. For him the boy had no mother and no household, but was a patent self-causing boy that came miraculously into existence on the shop doorstep every morning and achieved annihilation thereon every night.
The boy was a fatalist, but his fatalism had limits, because he well knew that the demand for errand-boys was greater than the supply. Though the limits of his fatalism had not yet been reached, he was scarcely pleased.
"If I come at seven who'll gi' me th' kays, sir?" he demanded rather surlily, wiping his nose on his sleeve.
"I'll see that you have the keys," said Edwin, with divine assurance, though he had not thought of the difficulty of the keys.
The boy left the shop, his body thrown out of the perpendicular by the weight of the blue-paper parcel.
"You ought to keep an eye on this place," said Edwin quietly to the young man who combined the function of clerk with that of salesman to the rare retail customers. "I can't see to everything. Here, check these wages for me." He indicated small piles of money.
"Yes, sir," said the clerk with self-respect, but admitting the justice of the animadversion.
Edwin seldom had difficulty with his employees. Serious friction was unknown in the establishment.
He went out by the back-entrance, thinking:
"It's no affair whatever of hers. Moreover the shop's as clean as shops are, and a damned sight cleaner than most. A shop isn't a drawing-room.... And now there's the infernal programme."
He would have liked to bury and forget the matter of the programme. But he could not. His conscience, or her fussiness, would force him to examine into it. There was no doubt that Big James was getting an old man, with peculiar pompous mannerisms and a disposition towards impossibilism. Big James ought to have remembered, in speaking to Hilda, that he was speaking to the wife of his employer. That Hilda should give an order, or even make a request, direct was perhaps unusual, but--dash it!--you knew what women were, and if that old josser of a bachelor, Big James, didn't know what women were, so much the worse for him. He should just give Big James a hint. He could not have Big James making mischief between himself and Hilda.
But the coward would not go straight to Big James. He went first up to what had come to be called "the litho room," partly in order to postpone Big James, but partly also because he had quite an affectionate proud interest in the litho room. In Edwin's childhood this room, now stripped and soiled into a workshop, had been the drawing-room of the Clayhanger family; and it still showed the defect which it had always shown; the window was too small and too near the corner of the room. No transformation could render it satisfactory save a change in the window. Old Darius Clayhanger had vaguely talked of altering the window. Edwin had thought seriously of it. But nothing had been done. Edwin was continuing the very policy of his father which had so roused his disdain when he was young: the policy of "making things do." Instead of entering upon lithography in a manner bold, logical, and decisive, he had nervously and half-heartedly slithered into it. Thus at the back of the yard was a second-hand "Newsom" machine in quarters too small for it, and the apparatus for the preliminary polishing of the stones; while up here in the ex-drawing-room were grotesquely mingled the final polishing process and the artistic department.
The artist who drew the designs on the stone was a German, with short fair hair and moustache, a thick neck and a changeless expression. Edwin had surprisingly found him in Hanbridge. He was very skilled in judging the amount of "work" necessary on the stone to produce a desired result on the paper, and very laborious. Without him the nascent lithographic trade could not have prospered. His wages were extremely moderate, but they were what he had asked, and in exchange for them he gave his existence. Edwin liked to watch him drawing, slavishly, meticulously, endlessly. He was absolutely without imagination, artistic feeling, charm, urbanity, or elasticity of any sort,--a miracle of sheer gruff positiveness. He lived somewhere in Hanbridge, and had once been seen by Edwin on a Sunday afternoon, wheeling a perambulator and smiling at a young enceinte woman who held his free arm. An astounding sight, which forced Edwin to adjust his estimates! He grimly called himself an Englishman, and was legally entitled to do so. On this morning he was drawing a ewer and basin, for the illustrated catalogue of an earthenware manufacturer.
"Not a very good light to-day," murmured Edwin.
"Eh?"
"Not a very good light."
"No," said Karl sourly and indifferently, bent over the stone, and breathing with calm regularity. "My eyesight is being de-stroit."
Behind, a young man in a smock was industriously polishing a stone.
Edwin beheld with pleasure. It was a joy to think that here was the sole lithography in Bursley, and that his own enterprise had started it. Nevertheless he was ashamed too,--ashamed of his hesitations, his half-measures, his timidity, and of Karl's impaired eyesight. There was no reason why he should not build a proper works, and every reason why he should; the operation would be remunerative; it would set an example; it would increase his prestige. He grew resolute. On the day of the party at the Benbows' he had been and carefully inspected the plot of land at Shawport, and yesterday he had made a very low offer for it. If the offer was refused, he would raise it. He swore to himself he would have his works.
Then Big James came into the litho room.
"I was seeking ye, sir," said Big James majestically, with a mysterious expression.
Edwin tried to look at him anew, as it were with Hilda's eyes. Certainly his bigness amounted now to an enormity, for proportionately his girth more than matched his excessive height. His apron descended from the semicircle of his paunch like a vast grey wall. The apron was dirty, this being Saturday, but it was at any rate intact; in old days Big James and others at critical moments of machining used to tear strips off their aprons for machine-rags.... Yes, he was conceivably a grotesque figure, with his spectacles, which did not suit him, his heavy breathing, his mannerisms, and his grandiose air of Atlas supporting the moral world. A woman might be excused for seeing the comic side of him. But surely he was honest and loyal. Surely he was not the adder that Hilda with an intonation had suggested!
"I'm coming," said Edwin, rather curtly.
He felt just in the humour for putting Big James "straight." Still his reply had not been too curt, for to his staff he was the opposite of a bully; he always scorned to take a facile advantage of his power, often tried even to conceal his power in the fiction that the employee was one man and himself merely another. He would be far more devastating to his wife and his sister than to any employee. But at intervals a bad or careless workman had to meet the blaze of his eye and accept the lash of his speech.
"It's about that little job for the mistress, sir," said Big James in a soft voice, when they were out on the landing.
Edwin gave a start. The ageing man's tones were so eager, so anxiously loyal! His emphasis on the word 'mistress' conveyed so clearly that the mistress was a high and glorious personage to serve whom was an honour and a fearful honour! The ageing man had almost whispered, like a boy, glancing with jealous distrust at the shut door of the room that contained the German.
"Oh!" muttered Edwin, taken aback.
"I set it up myself," said Big James, and holding his head very high looked down at Edwin under his spectacles.
"Why!" said Edwin cautiously. "I thought you'd given Mrs. Clayhanger the idea it couldn't be done in time."
"Bless ye, sir! Not if I know it! I intimated to her the situation in which we were placed, with urgent jobs on hand, as in duty bound, sir, she being the mistress. Ye know how slow I am to give a promise, sir. But not to do it--such was not my intention. And as I have said already, sir, I've set it up myself, and here's a rough pull."
He produced a piece of paper.
Edwin's ancient affection for Big James grew indignant. The old fellow was the very mirror of loyalty. He might be somewhat grotesque and mannered upon occasion, but he was the soul of the Clayhanger business. He had taught Edwin most of what he knew about both typesetting and machining. It seemed not long since that he used to call Edwin "young sir," and to enter into tacit leagues with him against the dangerous obstinacies of his decaying father. Big James had genuinely admired Darius Clayhanger. Assuredly he admired Darius's son not less. His fidelity to the dynasty was touching; it was wistful. The order from the mistress had tremendously excited and flattered him in his secret heart.... And yet Hilda must call him names, must insinuate against his superb integrity, must grossly misrepresent his attitude to herself. Whatever in his pompous old way he might have said, she could not possibly have mistaken his anxiety to please her. No, she had given a false account of their interview,--and Edwin had believed it! Edwin now swerved violently back to his own original view. He firmly believed Big James against his wife. He reflected: "How simple I was to swallow all Hilda said without confirmation! I might have known!" And that he should think such a thought shocked him tremendously.
The programme was not satisfactorily set up. Apart from several mistakes in the spelling of proper names, the thing with its fancy types, curious centring, and superabundance of full-stops, resembled more the libretto of a Primitive Methodist Tea-meeting than a programme of classical music offered to refined dilettanti on a Sunday night. Though Edwin had endeavoured to modernise Big James, he had failed. It was perhaps well that he had failed. For the majority of customers preferred Big James's taste in printing to Edwin's. He corrected the misspellings and removed a few full-stops, and then said:
"It's all right. But I doubt if Mrs. Clayhanger'll care for all these fancy founts," implying that it was a pity, of course, that Big James's fancy founts would not be appreciated at their true value, but women were women. "I should almost be inclined to set it all again in old-face. I'm sure she'd prefer it. Do you mind?"
"With the greatest of pleasure, sir," Big James heartily concurred, looking at his watch. "But I must be lively."
He conveyed his immense bulk neatly and importantly down the narrow stairs.