MR. CANNON
I
A little later Hilda came downstairs dressed to go out. Her mother was
lighting a glimmer of gas in the lobby. Ere Mrs. Lessways could descend
from her tiptoes to her heels and turn round Hilda said quickly,
forestalling curiosity:
"I'm going to get that thread you want. Just give me some money, will
you?"
Nobody could have guessed from her placid tone and indifferent demeanour
that she was in a state of extreme agitation. But so it was. Suddenly,
after kissing her mother in the kitchen, she had formed a tremendous
resolve. And in a moment the resolve had possessed her, sending her
flying upstairs, and burning her into a fever, as with the assured
movements of familiarity she put on her bonnet, mantle, 'fall,' and
gloves in the darkness of the chamber. She held herself in leash while
her mother lifted a skirt and found a large loaded pocket within and a
purse in the pocket and a sixpence in the purse. But when she had shut
the door on all that interior haunted by her mother's restlessness, when
she was safe in the porch and in the windy obscurity of the street, she
yielded with voluptuous apprehension to a thrill that shook her.
"I might have tidied my hair," she thought. "Pooh! What does my hair
matter?"
Her mind was full of an adventure through which she had passed seven
years previously, when she was thirteen and a little girl at school. For
several days, then, she had been ruthlessly mortifying her mother by
complaints about the meals. Her fastidious appetite could not be suited.
At last, one noon when the child had refused the whole of a plenteous
dinner, Mrs. Lessways had burst into tears and, slapping four pennies
down on the table, had cried, "Here! I fairly give you up! Go out and
buy your own dinner! Then perhaps you'll get what you want!" And the
child, without an instant's hesitation, had seized the coins and gone
out, hatless, and bought food at a little tripe-shop that was also an
eating-house, and consumed it there; and then in grim silence returned
home. Both mother and daughter had been stupefied and frightened by the
boldness of the daughter's initiative, by her amazing, flaunting
disregard of filial decency. Mrs. Lessways would not have related the
episode to anybody upon any consideration whatever. It was a shameful
secret, never even referred to. But Mrs. Lessways had unmistakably
though indirectly referred to it when in anger she had said to her
daughter aged twenty: "I suppose her ladyship will be consulting her own
lawyer next!" Hilda had understood, and that was why she had blushed.
And now, as she turned from Lessways Street into the Oldcastle Road, on
her way to the centre of the town, she experienced almost exactly the
intense excitement of the reckless and supercilious child in quest of
its dinner. The only difference was that the recent reconciliation had
inspired her with a certain negligent compassion for her mother, with a
curious tenderness that caused her to wonder at herself.
II
The Market Square of Turnhill was very large for the size of the town.
The diminutive town hall, which in reality was nothing but a
watch-house, seemed to be a mere incident on its irregular expanse, to
which the two-storey shops and dwellings made a low border. Behind this
crimson, blue-slated border rose the loftier forms of a church and a
large chapel, situate in adjacent streets. The square was calm and
almost deserted in the gloom. It typified the slow tranquillity of the
bailiwick, which was removed from the central life of the Five Towns,
and unconnected therewith by even a tram or an omnibus. Only within
recent years had Turnhill got so much as a railway station--rail-head of
a branch line. Turnhill was the extremity of civilization in those
parts. Go northwards out of this Market Square, and you would soon find
yourself amid the wild and hilly moorlands, sprinkled with iron-and-coal
villages whose red-flaming furnaces illustrated the eternal damnation
which was the chief article of their devout religious belief. And in the
Market Square not even the late edition of the _Staffordshire Signal_
was cried, though it was discreetly on sale with its excellent sporting
news in a few shops. In the hot and malodorous candle-lit factories,
where the real strenuous life of the town would remain cooped up for
another half-hour of the evening, men and women had yet scarcely taken
to horse-racing; they would gamble upon rabbits, cocks, pigeons, and
their own fists, without the mediation of the _Signal_. The one noise in
the Market Square was the bell of a hawker selling warm pikelets at a
penny each for the high tea of the tradesmen. The hawker was a deathless
institution, a living proof that withdrawn Turnhill would continue
always to be exactly what it always had been. Still, to the east of the
Square, across the High Street, a vast space was being cleared of hovels
for the erection of a new town hall daringly magnificent.
Hilda crossed the Square, scorning it.
She said to herself: "I'd better get the thing over before I buy the
thread. I should never be able to stand Miss Dayson's finicking! I
should scream out!" But the next instant, with her passion for proving
to herself how strong she could be, she added: "Well, I just _will_ buy
the thread first!" And she went straight into Dayson's little fancy
shop, which was full of counter and cardboard boxes and Miss Dayson, and
stayed therein for at least five minutes, emerging with a miraculously
achieved leisureliness. A few doors away was a somewhat new building, of
three storeys--the highest in the Square. The ground floor was an
ironmongery; it comprised also a side entrance, of which the door was
always open. This side entrance showed a brass-plate, "Q. Karkeek,
Solicitor." And the wire-blinds of the two windows of the first floor
also bore the words: "Q. Karkeek, Solicitor. Q. Karkeek, Solicitor." The
queerness of the name had attracted Hilda's attention several years
earlier, when the signs were fresh. It was an accident that she had
noticed it; she had not noticed the door-plates or the wire-blinds of
other solicitors. She did not know Mr. Q. Karkeek by sight, nor even
whether he was old or young, married or single, agreeable or repulsive.
The side entrance gave directly on to a long flight of naked stairs, and
up these stairs Hilda climbed into the unknown, towards the redoubtable
and the perilous. "I'm bound to be seen," she said to herself, "but I
don't care, and I _don't_ care!" At the top of the stairs was a passage,
at right angles, and then a glazed door with the legend in black
letters, "Q. Karkeek, Solicitor," and two other doors mysteriously
labelled "Private." She opened the glazed door, and saw a dirty
middle-aged man on a stool, and she said at once to him, in a harsh,
clear, deliberate voice, without giving herself time to reflect:
"I want to see Mr. Karkeek."
The man stared at her sourly, as if bewildered.
She said to herself: "I shan't be able to stand this excitement much
longer."
"You can't see Mr. Karkeek," said the man. "Mr. Karkeek's detained at
Hanbridge County Court. But if you're in such a hurry like, you'd better
see Mr. Cannon. It's Mr. Cannon as they generally do see. Who d'ye come
from, miss?"
"Come from?" Hilda repeated, unnerved.
"What name?"
She had not expected this. "I suppose I shall have to tell him!" she
said to herself, and aloud: "Lessways."
"Oh! Ah!" exclaimed the man. "Bless us! Yes!" It was as if he had said:
"Of course it's Lessways! And don't I know all about _you!_" And Hilda
was overwhelmed by the sense of the enormity of the folly which she was
committing.
The man swung half round on his stool, and seized the end of an
india-rubber tube which hung at the side of the battered and littered
desk, just under a gas-jet. He spoke low, like a conspirator, into the
mouthpiece of the tube. "Miss Lessways--to see you, sir." Then very
quickly he clapped the tube to his ear and listened. And then he put it
to his mouth again and repeated: "Lessways." Hilda was agonized.
"I'll ask ye to step this way, miss," said the man, slipping off his
stool. At the same time he put a long inky penholder, which he had been
holding in his wrinkled right hand, between his teeth.
"Never," thought Hilda as she followed the clerk, in a whirl of horrible
misgivings, "never have I done anything as mad as this before! I'm under
twenty-one!"
III
There she was at last, seated in front of a lawyer in a lawyer's
office--her ladyship consulting her own lawyer! It seemed incredible! A
few minutes ago she had been at home, and now she was in a world
unfamiliar and alarming. Perhaps it was a pity that her mother had
unsuspectingly put the scheme into her head!
However, the deed was done. Hilda generally acted first and reflected
afterwards. She was frightened, but rather by the unknown than by
anything she could define.
"You've come about the property?" said Mr. Cannon amiably, in a
matter-of-fact tone.
He had deep black eyes, and black hair, like Hilda's; good, regular
teeth, and a clear complexion; perhaps his nose was rather large, but it
was straight. With his large pale hands he occasionally stroked his long
soft moustache; the chin was blue. He was smartly dressed in dark blue;
he had a beautiful neck-tie, and the genuine whiteness of his wristbands
was remarkable in a district where starched linen was usually either
grey or bluish. He was not a dandy, but he respected his person; he
evidently gave careful attention to his body; and this trait alone set
him apart among the citizens of Turnhill.
"Yes," said Hilda. She thought: "He's a very handsome man! How strange I
don't remember seeing him in the streets!" She was in awe of him. He was
indefinitely older than herself; and she felt like a child, out of place
in the easy-chair.
"I suppose it's about the rent-collecting?" he pursued.
"Yes--it is," she answered, astonished that he could thus divine her
purpose. "I mean--"
"What does your mother want to do?"
"Oh!" said Hilda, speaking low. "It's not mother. I've come to consult
you myself. Mother doesn't know. I'm nearly twenty-one, and it's really
my property, you know!" She blushed with shame.
"Ah!" he exclaimed. He tried to disguise his astonishment in an easy,
friendly smile. But he was most obviously startled. He looked at Hilda
in a different way, with a much intensified curiosity.
"Yes," she resumed. He now seemed to her more like a fellow-creature,
and less like a member of the inimical older generation.
"So you're nearly twenty-one?"
"In December," she said. "And I think under my father's will--" She
stopped, at a loss. "The fact is, I don't think mother will be quite
able to look after the property properly, and I'm afraid--you see, now
that Mr. Skellorn has had this stroke--"
"Yes," said Mr. Cannon, "I heard about that, and I was thinking perhaps
Mrs. Lessways had sent you.... We collect rents, you know."
"I see!" Hilda murmured. "Well, the truth is, mother hasn't the
slightest idea I'm here. Not the slightest! And I wouldn't hurt her
feelings for anything." He nodded sympathetically. "But I thought
something ought to be done. She's decided to collect our Calder Street
rents herself, and she isn't fitted to do it. And then there's the
question of the repairs.... I know the rents are going down. I expect
it's all mother's for life, but I want there to be something left for me
when she's gone, you see! And if--I've never seen the will. I suppose
there's no way of seeing a copy of it, somewhere?... I can't very well
ask mother again."
"I know all about the will," said Mr. Cannon.
"You do?"
Wondrous, magical man!
"Yes," he explained. "I used to be at Toms and Scoles's. I was there
when it was made. I copied it."
"Really!" She felt that he would save her, not only from any possible
unpleasant consequences of her escapade, but also from suffering
ultimate loss by reason of her mother's foolishness.
"You're quite right," he continued. "I remember it perfectly. Your
mother is what we call tenant-for-life; everything goes to you in the
end."
"Well," Hilda asked abruptly. "All I want to know is, what I can do."
"Of course, without upsetting your mother?"
He glanced at her. She blushed again.
"Naturally," she said coldly.
"You say you think the property is going down--it _is_, everybody knows
that--and your mother thinks of collecting the rents herself.... Well,
young lady, it's very difficult, very difficult, your mother being the
trustee and executor."
"Yes, that's what she's always saying--she's the trustee and executor."
"You'd better let me think it over for a day or two."
"And shall I call in again?"
"You might slip in if you're passing. I'll see what can be done. Of
course it would never do for you to have any difficulty with your
mother."
"Oh no!" she concurred vehemently. "Anything would be better than that.
But I thought there was no harm in me--"
"Certainly not."
She had a profound confidence in him. And she was very content so far
with the result of her adventure.
"I hope nobody will find out I've been here," she said timidly. "Because
if it _did_ get to mother's ears--"
"Nobody will find out," he reassured her.
Assuredly his influence was tranquillizing. Even while he insisted on
the difficulties of the situation, he seemed to be smoothing them away.
She was convinced that he would devise some means of changing her
mother's absurd purpose and of strengthening her own position. But when,
at the end of the interview, he came round the large table which
separated them, and she rose and looked up at him, close, she was
suddenly very afraid of him. He was a tall and muscular man, and he
stood like a monarch, and she stood like a child. And his gesture seemed
to say: "Yes, I know you are afraid. And I rather like you to be afraid.
But I am benevolent in the exercise of my power." Under his gaze, her
gaze fastened on the wire-blind and the dark window, and she read off
the reversed letters on the blind.
Like a mouse she escaped to the stairs. She was happy and fearful and
expectant.... It was done! She had consulted a lawyer! She was astounded
at herself.
In the Market Square it was now black night. She looked shyly up at the
lighted wire-blinds over the ironmongery. "I was there!" she said. "He
is still there." The whole town, the whole future, seemed to be drenched
now in romance. Nevertheless, the causes of her immense discontent had
not apparently been removed nor in any way modified.