CHAPTER VII

THE NEXT MEETING

I

For several days the town of Bursley was to Hilda simply a place made

perilous and redoubtable by the apprehension of meeting Edwin Clayhanger

accidentally in the streets thereof. And the burden of her meditations

was: "What can he have thought of me?" She had said nothing to anybody

of the deliberately-sought adventure in the garden. And with the

strangest ingenuous confidence she assumed that Edwin Clayhanger, too,

would keep an absolute silence about it. She had therefore naught to

fear, except in the privacy of his own mind. She did not blame

herself--it never occurred to her to do so--but she rather wondered at

herself, inimically, prophesying that one day her impulsiveness would

throw her into some serious difficulty. The memory of the night

beautifully coloured her whole daily existence. In spite of her

avoidance of the town, due to her dread of seeing Clayhanger, she was

constantly thinking: "But this cannot continue for ever. One day I am

bound to meet him again." And she seemed to be waiting for that day.

It came with inevitable quickness. The last day but one of June was

appointed throughout the country for the celebration of the Centenary of

Sunday Schools. Neither Hilda nor any of the Orgreave children had ever

seen the inside of a Sunday School; and the tendency up at Lane End

House was to condescend towards the festival as towards a rejoicing of

the proletariat. But in face of the magnitude of the affair, looming

more enormous as it approached, this attitude could not be maintained.

The preparations for the Centenary filled newspapers and changed the

physiognomy of towns. And on the morning of the ceremonial service,

gloriously flattered by the sun, there was candid excitement at the

breakfast-table of the Orgreaves. Mr. Orgreave regretted that pressure

of work would prevent him from seeing the fun. Tom was going to see the

fun at Hanbridge. Jimmie and Johnnie were going to see the fun, but they

would not say where. The servants were going to see the fun. Charlie had

returned to London. Alicia wanted to go and see the fun, but as she was

flushed and feverish, Mrs. Orgreave forbade and decided to remain at

home with Alicia. Otherwise, even Mrs. Orgreave would have gone to see

the fun. Hilda and Janet apparently hesitated about going, but Mr.

Orgreave, pointing out that there could not under the most favourable

circumstance be another Centenary of Sunday Schools for at least a

hundred years, sarcastically urged them to set forth. The fact was, as

Janet teasingly told him while she hung on his neck, that he wished to

accentuate as much as possible his own martyrdom to industry. Were not

all the shops and offices of the Five Towns closed? Did not every member

of his family, save those detained by illness, attend the historic

spectacle of the Centenary? He alone had sacrificed pleasure to work.

Thus Janet's loving, ironic smiles foretold, would the father of the

brood discourse during the next few days.

II

Hilda and Janet accordingly went down a be-flagged and sunlit Trafalgar

Road together. Janet was wearing still another white dress, and Hilda,

to her marked relief, had abandoned black for a slate-coloured frock

made by a dressmaker in Bleakridge. It was Mrs. Orgreave herself who had

first counselled Hilda, if she hated black, as she said she did, to

abandon black. The entire family chorus had approved.

The risk of encountering Edwin Clayhanger on that day of multitudes was

surely infinitesimal. Nevertheless, in six minutes the improbable had

occurred. At the corner of Trafalgar Road and Duck Square Janet,

attracted by the sight of banners in the distance, turned to the left

along Wedgwood Street and past the front of Clayhanger's shop.

Theoretically shops were closed, but one shutter of Clayhanger's was

down, and in its place stood Edwin Clayhanger. Hilda felt her features

stiffening into a sort of wilful and insincere hostility as she shook

hands. Within the darkness of the shop she saw the figure of two dowdy

women--doubtless the sisters of whom Janet had told her; they

disappeared before Janet and Hilda entered.

"It has happened! I have seen him again!" Hilda said to herself as she

sat in the shop listening to Janet and to Edwin Clayhanger. It appeared

likely that Edwin Clayhanger would join them in the enterprise of

witnessing the historic spectacle.

A few minutes later everybody was startled by the gay apparition of

Osmond Orgreave swinging his cane. Curiosity had been too much for

industriousness, and Osmond Orgreave had yielded himself to the general

interest.

"Oh! Father!" cried Janet. "What a deceitful thing you are!"

"Only a day or two ago," Hilda was thinking, "I had never even heard of

him. And his shop seemed so strange and romantic to me. And now I am

sitting in his shop like an old friend. And nobody suspects that he and

I have had a secret meeting!" The shop itself seemed to be important and

prosperous.

Mr. Orgreave, having decided for pleasure, was anxious to find it at

once, and, under his impatience, they left the shop. Janet went out

first with her gay father. Edwin Clayhanger waited respectfully for

Hilda to pass. But just as she was about to step forth she caught sight

of George Cannon coming along the opposite side of Wedgwood Street in

the direction of Trafalgar Road; he was in close conversation with

another man. She kept within the shelter of the shop until the two had

gone by. She did not want to meet George Cannon, with whom she had not

had speech since the interview at the Cedars; he had written to her

about the property sales, and she had replied. There was no reason why

she should hesitate to meet him. But she wished not to complicate the

situation. She thought: "If he saw me, he'd come across and speak to me,

and I might have to introduce him to all these people, and goodness

knows what!" The contretemps caused her heart to beat.

When they emerged from the shop Janet, a few yards ahead with Mr.

Orgreave, was beckoning.

III

Hilda stood on a barrel by the side of Edwin Clayhanger on another

barrel. There, from the top of St. Luke's Square, they surveyed a vast

rectangular carpet of upturned faces that made a pattern of pale dots on

a coloured and black groundwork. Nearly all the children of Bursley,

thousands upon thousands, were massed in the Square, wedged in tight

together, so that there seemed not to be an inch of space anywhere

between the shuttered shop fronts on the east of the Square and the

shuttered shop fronts on the west of the Square. At the bottom of the

Square a row of railway lorries were crammed with tiny babes--or such

they appeared--toddlers too weak to walk in processions. At the top of

the Square a large platform full of bearded adults rose like an island

out of the unconscious sea of infants. And from every window of every

house adults looked down in safe ease upon that wavy ocean over which

banners gleamed in the dazzling and fierce sunshine.

She might have put up her sunshade. But she would not do so. She

thought: "If all those children can stand the sun without fainting, I

can!" She was extraordinarily affected by the mere sight of the immense

multitude of children; they were as helpless and as fatalistic as sheep,

utterly at the mercy of the adults who had herded them. There was about

them a collective wistfulness that cut the heart; to dwell on the idea

of it would have brought her to tears. And when the multitude sang, so

lustily, so willingly, so bravely, pouring forth with the brass

instruments a volume of tone enormous and majestic, she had a tightness

of the throat that was excrutiating. The Centenary of Sunday Schools was

quite other than she had expected; she had not bargained for these

emotions.

It was after the hymn "There is a fountain filled with blood," during

the quietude of a speech, that Edwin Clayhanger, taking up an

evangelistic phrase in the speech, whispered to her:

"More blood!"

"What?" she asked, amazed by his ironical accent, which jarred on her

mood, and also by his familiar manner of leaning towards her and

dropping the words in her ear.

"Well," he said. "Look at it! It only wants the Ganges at the bottom of

the Square!"

Evidently for Edwin Clayhanger all religions were equally heathenish!

She was quite startled out of her amazement, and her response was an

almost humble entreaty not to make fun. The next moment she regretted

that she had not answered him with sharp firmness. She was somewhat out

of humour with him. He had begun by losing sight of Mr. Orgreave and

Janet--and of course it was hopeless to seek for them in those thronging

streets around St. Luke's Square. Then he had said to her, in a most

peculiar tone: "I hope you didn't catch cold in the rain the other

night," and she had not liked that. She had regarded it as a fault in

tact, almost as a sexual disloyalty on his part to refer at all to the

scene in the garden. Finally, his way of negotiating with the barrel man

for the use of two barrels had been lacking, for Hilda, in the qualities

of largeness and masterfulness; any one of the Orgreave boys would, she

was sure, have carried the thing off in a more worldly manner.

The climax of the service came with the singing of "When I survey the

wondrous Cross." The physical effect of it on Hilda was nearly

overwhelming. The terrible and sublime words seemed to surge upon her

charged with all the multitudinous significance of the crowd. She was

profoundly stirred, and to prevent an outburst of tears she shook her

head.

"What's the matter?" said Edwin Clayhanger.

"Clumsy dolt!" she thought. "Haven't you got enough sense to leave me

alone?" And she said aloud, passionately transforming her weakness into

ferocity: "That's the most splendid religious verse ever written! You

can say what you like. It's worth while believing anything, if you can

sing words like that and mean them!"

He agreed that the hymn was fine.

"Do you know who wrote it?" she demanded threateningly.

He did not. She was delighted.

"Dr. Watts, of course!" she said, with a scornful sneer. What did Janet

mean by saying that he had read simply everything?

IV

An episode which supervened close to their barrels did a great deal to

intensify the hostility of her mood. On the edge of the crowd an old

man, who had been trying to force his way through it, was being guyed by

a gang of louts who had surrounded an ice-cream barrow. Suddenly she

recognized this old man. His name was Shushions; he was a familiar

figure of the streets of Turnhill, and he had the reputation of being

the oldest Sunday School teacher in the Five Towns. He was indeed

exceedingly old, foolish, and undignified in senility; and the louts

were odiously jeering at his defenceless dotage, and a young policeman

was obviously with the louts and against the aged, fatuous victim.

Hilda gave an exclamation of revolt, and called upon Edwin Clayhanger to

go to the rescue of Mr. Shushions. Not he, however, but she jumped down

first and pushed towards the barrow. She made the path, and he followed.

She protested to the policeman, and he too modestly seconded her. Yet

the policeman, ignoring her, addressed himself to Edwin Clayhanger.

Hilda was infuriated. It appeared that old Mr. Shushions had had a

ticket for the platform, but had lost it.

"He must be got on to the platform somehow!" she decided, with a fiery

glance.

But Edwin Clayhanger seemed to be incapable of an heroic action. He

hesitated. The policeman hesitated. Fortunately, the plight of the

doting oldest Sunday School teacher in the Five Towns had been observed

from the platform, and two fussy, rosetted officials bustled up and

offered to take charge of him. And Hilda, dissolving in painful pity,

bent over him softly and arranged his disordered clothes; she was

weeping.

"Shall we go back to our barrels?" Edwin Clayhanger rather sheepishly

suggested after Mr. Shushions had been dragged away.

But she would not go back to the barrels.

"I think it's time we set about to find Janet and Mr. Orgreave," she

replied coldly, and they drew out of the crowd. She was profoundly

deceived in Edwin Clayhanger, so famous for his presence of mind in

saving printing-shops from destruction! She did not know what he ought

to have done; she made no attempt to conceive what he ought to have

done. But that he ought to have done something--something decisive and

grandly masculine--she was sure.

V

Later, after sundry adventures, and having found Mr. Orgreave and Janet,

they stood at the tail of the steam-car, which Janet had decided should

carry her up to Bleakridge; and Edwin shook hands. Yes, Hilda was

profoundly deceived in him. Nevertheless, his wistful and honest glance,

as he parted from her, had its effect. If he had not one quality, he had

another. She tried hard to maintain her scorn of him, but it was

exceedingly difficult to do so.

Mr. Orgreave wiped his brow as the car jolted them out of the tumult of

the Centenary. It was hot, but he did not seem to be in the slightest

degree fatigued or dispirited, whereas Janet put back her head and shut

her eyes.

"Caught sight of a friend of yours this morning, Hilda!" he said

pleasantly.

"Oh!"

"Yes. Mr. Cannon. By the way, I forgot to tell you yesterday that his

famous newspaper--_yours_--has come to an end." He spoke, as it were,

with calm sympathy. "Yes! Well, it's not surprising, not surprising!

Nothing's ever stood up against the _Signal_ yet!"

Hilda was saddened. When they reached Lane End House, a few seconds in

front of the hurrying and apologetic servants, Mrs. Orgreave told her

that Mr. George Cannon had called to see her, and had left a note for

her. She ran up to her room with the note. It said merely that the

writer wished to have an interview with her at once.

* * * * *

BOOK III

HER BURDEN

CHAPTER I

HILDA INDISPENSABLE

I

Hilda made no response of any kind to George Cannon's request for an

immediate interview, allowing day after day to pass in inactivity, and

wondering the while how she might excuse or explain her singular conduct

when circumstances should bring the situation to a head. She knew that

she ought either to go over to Turnhill, or write him with an

appointment to see her at Lane End House; but she did nothing; nor did

she say a word of the matter to Janet in the bedroom at nights. All that

she could tell herself was that she did not want to see George Cannon;

she was not honestly persuaded that she feared to see him. In the

meantime, Edwin Clayhanger was invisible, though the removal of the

Clayhanger household to the new residence at Bleakridge had made a

considerable stir of straw and litter in Trafalgar Road.

On Tuesday in the following week she received a letter from Sarah

Gailey. It was brought up to her room early in the morning by a

half-dressed Alicia Orgreave, and she read it as she lay in bed. Sarah

Gailey, struggling with the complexities of the Cedars, away in Hornsey,

was unwell and gloomily desolate. She wrote that she suffered from

terrible headaches on waking, and that she was often feverish, and that

she had no energy whatever. "I am at a very trying age for a woman," she

said. "I don't know whether you understand, but I've come to a time of

life that really upsets one above a bit, and I'm fit for nothing." Hilda

understood; she was flattered, even touched, by this confidence; it made

her feel older, and more important in the world, and a whole generation

away from Alicia, who was drawing up the blind with the cries and

awkward gestures of a prattling infant. To the letter there was a

postscript: "Has George been to see you yet about me? He wrote me he

should, but I haven't heard since. In fact, I've been waiting to hear.

I'll say nothing about that yet. I'm ashamed you should be bothered.

It's so important for you to have a good holiday. Again, much love,

S.G." The prim handwriting got smaller and smaller towards the end of

the postscript and the end of the page, and the last lines were

perfectly parallel with the lower edge of the paper; all the others

sloped feebly downwards from left to right.

"Oh!" piped Alicia from the window. "Maggie Clayhanger has got her

curtains up in the drawing-room! Oh! Aren't they proud things! _Oh_!--I

do believe she's caught me staring at her!" And Alicia withdrew abruptly

into the room, blushing for her detected sin of ungenteel curiosity. She

bumped down on the bed. "Three days more," she said. "Not counting

to-day. Four, counting to-day."

"School?"

Alicia nodded, her finger in her mouth. "Isn't it horrid, going to

school on a day like this? I hear you and Janet are off up to Hillport

this afternoon again, to play tennis. You do have times!"

"No," said Hilda. "I've got to go to Turnhill this afternoon."

"But Janet told me you were--" Her glance fell on the letter. "Is it

business?"

"Yes."

The child was impressed, and her change of tone, her frank awe, gave

pleasure to Hilda's vanity. "Shall I go and tell Jane? She isn't near

dressed."

"Yes, do."

Off scampered Alicia, leaving the door unlatched behind her.

Hilda gazed at the letter, holding it limply in her left hand amid the

soft disorder of the counterpane. It had come to her, an intolerably

pathetic messenger and accuser, out of the exacerbating frowsiness of

the Cedars. Yesterday afternoon care-ridden Sarah Gailey was writing it,

with sighs, at the desk in her stuffy, uncomfortable bedroom. As Hilda

gazed at the formation of the words, she could see the unhappy Sarah

Gailey writing them, and the letter was like a bit of Sarah Gailey's

self, magically and disconcertingly projected into the spacious,

laughing home of the Orgreaves, and into the mysterious new happiness

that was forming around Hilda. The Orgreaves, so far as Hilda could

discover, had no real anxieties. They were a joyous lot, favoured alike

by temperament and by fortune. And she, Hilda--what real anxieties had

she? None! She was sure of a small but adequate income. Her grief for

her mother was assuaged. The problem of her soul no longer troubled: in

part it had been solved, and in part it had faded imperceptibly away.

Nor was she exercised about the future, about the 'new life.' Instead of

rushing ardently to meet the future, she felt content to wait for its

coming. Why disturb oneself? She was free. She was enjoying existence

with the Orgreaves. Yes, she was happy in this roseate passivity.

The letter shook her, arousing as it did the sharp sense of her

indebtedness to Sarah Gailey, who alone had succoured her in her long

period of despairing infelicity. Had she guessed that it was Sarah

Gailey's affair upon which George Cannon had desired to see her, she

would not have delayed an hour; no reluctance to meet George Cannon

would have caused her to tarry. But she had not guessed; the idea had

never occurred to her.

She rose, picked up the envelope from the carpet, carefully replaced the

letter in it, and laid it with love on the glittering dressing-table.

Through the unlatched door she heard a tramping of unshod masculine feet

in the passage, and the delightful curt greeting of Osmond Orgreave and

his sleepy son Jimmie--splendid powerful males. She glanced at the

garden, and at the garden of the Clayhangers, swimming in fresh

sunshine. She glanced in the mirror, and saw the deshabille of her black

hair and of her insecure nightgown, and thought: "Truly, I am not so

bad-looking! And how well I feel! How fond they all are of me! I'm just

at the right age. I'm young, but I'm mature. I've had a lot of

experience, and I'm not a fool. I'm strong--I could stand anything!" She

put her shoulders back, with a challenging gesture. The pride of life

was hers.

And then, this disturbing vision of Sarah Gailey, alone, unhappy,

unattractive, enfeebled, ageing--ageing! It seemed to her inexpressibly

cruel that people must grow old and weak and desolate; it seemed

monstrous. A pang, momentary but excruciating, smote her. She said to

herself: "Sarah Gailey has nothing to look forward to, except worry.

Sarah Gailey is at the end, instead of at the beginning!"

II

When she got off the train at Turnhill station, early that afternoon,

she had no qualm at the thought of meeting George Cannon; she was not

even concerned to invent a decent excuse for her silence in relation to

his urgent letter. She went to see him for the sake of Sarah Gailey, and

because she apparently might be of use in some affair of Sarah's--she

knew not what. She was proud that either Sarah or he thought that she

could be of use, or that it was worth while consulting her. She had a

grave air, as of one to whom esteem has brought responsibilities.

In Child Street, leading to High Street, she passed the office of

Godlimans, the auctioneers. And there, among a group of white posters

covering the large window, was a poster of the sale of "valuable

household furniture and effects removed from No. 15 Lessways Street."

And on the poster, in a very black line by itself, stood out saliently

the phrase: "Massive Bedroom Suite." Her mother's! Hers! She had to stop

and read the poster through, though she was curiously afraid of being

caught in the act. All the principal items were mentioned by the

faithful auctioneers; and the furniture, thus described, had a strange

aspect of special importance, as if it had been subtly better, more

solid, more desirable, than any other houseful of furniture in the

town,--Lessways' furniture! She sought for the date. The sale had taken

place on the previous night, at the very hour when she was lolling and

laughing in the drawing-room of Lane End House with the Orgreaves! The

furniture was sold, dispersed, gone! The house was empty! The past was

irremediably closed! The realization of this naturally affected her,

raising phantoms of her mother, and of the face of the cab-driver as he

remarked on the drawn blinds at the Cedars. But she was still more

affected by the thought that the poster was on the window, and the

furniture scattered, solely because she had willed it. She had said:

"Please sell all the furniture, and you needn't consult me about the

sale. I don't want to know. I prefer not to know. Just get it done." And

it had been done! How mysteriously romantic! Some girls would not have

sold the furniture, would not have dared to sell it, would have accepted

the furniture and the house as a solemn charge, and gone on living among

those relics, obedient to a tradition. But she had dared! She had

willed--and the solid furniture had vanished away! And she was

adventurously free!

She went forward. At the corner of Child Street and High Street the new

Town Hall was rising to the skies. Already its walls were higher than

the highest house in the vicinity. And workmen were crawling over it,

amid dust, and a load of crimson bricks was trembling and revolving

upwards on a thin rope that hung down from the blue. Glimpses of London

had modified old estimates of her native town. Nevertheless, the new

Town Hall still appeared extraordinarily large and important to her.

She saw the detested Arthur Dayson in the distance of the street, and

crossed hurriedly to the Square, looking fixedly at the storeys above

the ironmonger's so that Arthur Dayson could not possibly catch her eye.

There was no sign of the _Five Towns Chronicle_ in the bare windows of

the second storey. This did not surprise her; but she was startled by

the absence of the Karkeek wire-blinds from the first-floor windows,

equally bare with those of the second. When she got to the entrance she

was still more startled to observe that the Karkeek brass-plate had been

removed. She climbed the long stairs apprehensively.

III

"Anybody here?" she called out timidly. She was in the clerk's office,

which was empty; but she could hear movements in another room. The place

seemed in process of being dismantled.

Suddenly George Cannon appeared in a doorway, frowning.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Cannon!"

"Good afternoon, Miss Lessways." He spoke with stiff politeness. His

face looked weary.

After a slight hesitation he advanced, and they shook hands. Hilda was

nervous. Her neglect of his letter now presented itself to her as

inexcusable. She thought: "If he is vexed about it I shall have to

humour him. I really can't blame him. He must think me very queer."

"I was wondering what had become of you," he said, amply polite, but not

cordial.

"Well," she said, "every day I was expecting you to call again, or to

send me a note or something.... And what with one thing and another--"

"I dare say your time's been fully occupied," he filled up her pause.

And she fancied that he spoke in a peculiar tone. She absurdly fancied

that he was referring to the time which she had publicly spent with

Edwin Clayhanger at the Centenary. She conceived that he might have seen

her and Edwin Clayhanger together.

"I had a letter from Miss Gailey this morning," she said. "And it seems

that it's about her that you wanted--"

"Yes."

"I do wish I'd known. If I'd had the slightest idea I should have come

over instantly." She spoke with eager seriousness, and then added,

smiling as if in appeal to be favourably understood: "I thought it was

only about _my_ affairs--sale or what not. And as I'd asked you to

manage all these things exactly as you thought best, I didn't trouble--"

He laughed, and either forgave or forgot.

"Will you come this way?" he invited, in a new tone of friendliness.

"We're rather in a mess here."

"You're all alone, too," she said, following him into his room.

"Sowter's out," he answered laconically, waiting for her to precede him.

He said nothing as to the office-boy, nor as to Mr. Karkeek. Hilda was

now sure that something strange had happened.

"So you've heard from Sarah, have you?" he began, when they were both

seated in his own room. There were still a lot of papers, though fewer

than of old, on the broad desk; but the bookcase was quite empty, and

several of the shelves in it had supped from the horizontal; the front

part of the shelves was a pale yellow, and behind that, an irregular

dark band of dust indicated the varying depths of the vanished tomes.

The forlornness of the bookcase gave a stricken air to the whole room.

"She's not well."

"Or she imagines she's not well."

"Oh no!" said Hilda warmly. "It isn't imagination. She really isn't

well."

"You think so?"

"I don't think--I know!" Hilda spoke proudly, but with the restraint

which absolute certainty permits. She crushed, rather than resented,

George Cannon's easy insinuation, full of the unjustified superiority of

the male. How could he judge--how could any man judge? She had never

before felt so sure of herself, so adult and experienced, as she felt

then.

"But it's nothing serious?" he suggested with deference.

"N--no--not what you'd call serious," said Hilda judicially,

mysteriously.

"Because she wants to give up the boarding-house business altogether--

that's all!"

Having delivered this dramatic blow, George Cannon smiled, as it were,

quizzically. And Hilda was reassured about him. She had been thinking:

"Is he ruined? If he is not ruined, what is the meaning of these

puzzling changes here?" And she had remembered her shrewd mother's

hints, and her own later fears, concerning the insecurity of his

position: and had studied his tired and worn face for an equivocal sign.

But this smile, self-confident and firm, was not the smile of a ruined

man; and his flashing glance seemed to be an omen of definite success.

"Wants to give it up?" exclaimed Hilda.

He nodded.

"But why? I thought she was doing rather well."

"So she is."

"Then why?"

"Ah!" George Cannon lifted his head with a gesture signifying enigma.

"That's just what I wanted to ask you. Hasn't she said anything to you?"

"As to giving it up? No!... So it was this that you wanted to see me

about?"

He nodded. "She wrote me a few days after you came away, and suggested I

should see you and ask you what you thought."

"But why me?"

"Well, she thinks the world of you, Sarah does."

Hilda thought: "How strange! She did nothing but look after me, and wait

on me hand and foot, and I never helped her in any way; and yet she

turns to me!" And she was extremely flattered and gratified, and was

aware of a delicious increase of self-respect.

"But supposing she does give it up?" Hilda said aloud. "What will she

do?"

"Exactly!" said George Cannon, and then, in a very confidential,

ingratiating manner: "I wish you'd write to her and put some reason into

her. She mustn't give it up. With her help--and you know in the

management she's simply wonderful--with her help, I think I shall be

able to bring something about that'll startle folks. Only, she mustn't

throw me over. And she mustn't get too crotchety with the boarders. I've

had some difficulty in that line, as it is. In fact, I've had to be

rather cross. You know about the Boutwoods, for instance! Well, I've

smoothed that over.... It's nothing, nothing--if she'll keep her head.

If she'll keep her head it's a gold mine--you'll see! Only--she wants a

bit of managing. If you'd write--"

"I shan't write," said Hilda. "I shall go and see her--at once. I should

have gone in any case, after her letter this morning saying how unwell

she is. She wants company. She was so kind to me I couldn't possibly

leave her in the lurch. I can't very well get away to-day, but I shall

go to-morrow, and I shall drop her a line to-night."

"It's very good of you, I'm sure," said George Cannon. Obviously he was

much relieved.

"Not at all!" Hilda protested. She felt very content and happy.

"The fact is," he went on, "there's nobody but you can do it. Your

mother was the only real friend she ever had. And this is the first time

she's been left alone up there, you see. I'm quite sure you can save the

situation."

He was frankly depending on her for something which he admitted he could

not accomplish himself. Those two people, George Cannon and Sarah

Gailey, had both instinctively turned to her in a crisis. None could do

what she could do. She, by the force of her individuality, could save

the situation. She was no longer a girl, but a mature and influential

being. Her ancient diffidence before George Cannon had completely gone;

she had no qualms, no foreboding, no dubious sensation of weakness.

Indeed, she felt herself in one respect his superior, for his confidence

in Sarah Gailey's housewifely skill, his conviction that it was unique

and would be irreplaceable, struck her as somewhat naif, as being yet

another example of the absurd family pride which she and her mother had

often noticed in the Five Towns. She was not happy at the prospect of so

abruptly quitting the delights of Lane End House and the vicinity of

Edwin Clayhanger; she was not happy at the prospect of postponing the

consideration of plans for her own existence; she was not happy at the

prospect of Sarah Gailey's pessimistic complainings. She was above

happiness. She was above even that thrill of sharp and intense vitality

which in times past had ennobled trouble and misery. She had the most

exquisite feeling of triumphant self-justification. She was splendidly

conscious of power. She was indispensable.

And the dismantled desolation of the echoing office, and the mystery of

George Cannon's personal position, somehow gave a strange poignancy to

her mood.

They talked of indifferent matters: her property, the Orgreaves, even

the defunct newspaper, as to which George Cannon shrugged his shoulders.

Then the conversation drooped.

"I shall go up by the four train to-morrow," she said, clinching the

interview, and rising.

"I may go up by that train myself," said George Cannon.

She started. "Oh! are you going to Hornsey, too?"

"No! Not Hornsey. I've other business."

CHAPTER II

SARAH'S BENEFACTOR

I

On the following afternoon Hilda travelled alone by the local train from

Bleakridge to Knype, the central station where all voyagers for London,

Birmingham, and Manchester had to foregather in order to take the fast

expresses that unwillingly halted there, and there only, in their

skimming flights across the district. It was a custom of Five Towns

hospitality that a departing guest should be accompanied as far as Knype

and stowed with personal attentions into the big train. But on this

occasion Hilda had wished otherwise. "I should _prefer_ nobody to go

with me to Knype," she had said, in a characteristic tone, to Janet. It

was enough. The family had wondered; but it was enough. The family knew

its singular, its mysterious Hilda. And instead of at Knype, the

leave-takings had occurred at the little wayside station of Bleakridge,

with wavy moorland behind, factory chimneys in front, and cinder and

shawd heaps all around. Hilda had told Janet: "Mr. Cannon may be meeting

me at Knype. He's probably going to London too." And the discreet Janet,

comprehending Hilda, had not even mentioned this fact to the rest of the

family.

George Cannon, in a light summer suit and straw hat, was already on the

platform at Knype. Hilda had feared that at Bleakridge he might be

looking out of the window of the local train, which started from

Turnhill; she had desired not to meet him in the presence of any of the

Orgreaves. But either he had caught the previous train to Knype, or he

had driven down. Holding a Gladstone bag and a stick in one hand, he

stood talking to another man of about his own age and height. The

conversation was vivacious, at any rate on George Cannon's part. Hilda

passed close by him amid the populous stir of the expectant platform. He

saw her, turned, and raised his hat, but in a perfunctory, preoccupied

manner; and instantly resumed the speech to his companion. Hilda

recognized the latter. It was 'young Lawton,' son and successor to 'old

Lawton,' the most famous lawyer in the Five Towns. Young Lawton had a

branch office at Turnhill, and lived in an important house half-way

between Turnhill and Bursley, where, behind the Town Hall, was the

historic principal office of the firm.

The express came loudly in, and Hilda, having climbed into a

second-class compartment, leaned out from it, to descry her porter and

bestow on him a threepenny bit. George Cannon and young Lawton were

still in argument, and apparently quite indifferent to the train. Young

Lawton's thin face had its usual faint, harsh smile; his limbs were

moveless in an exasperating and obstinate calm; Hilda detested the man

from his mere looks. But George Cannon was very obviously under

excitement. His face was flushed; he moved his free arm violently--even

the Gladstone bag swung to and fro; he punctuated his sentences with

sharp, angry nods of the head, insisting and protesting and insisting,

while the other, saying much less, maintained his damnable stupid

disdainful grin.

Would he let the train go, in his feverish preoccupation? Hilda was

seriously afraid that he would. The last trunks were flung into the

front van, the stationmaster in his tall hat waved curtly to the

glittering guard; the guard waved his flag, and whistled; a porter

banged the door of Hilda's compartment, ignoring her gestures; the

engine whistled. And at that moment George Cannon, throwing apparently a

last malediction at young Lawton, sprang towards the train, and, seeing

Hilda's face, rushed to the door which she strained to open again.

"I was afraid you'd be left behind," she said, as he dropped his bag on

the seat and the affronted stationmaster himself shut the door.

"Not quite!" ejaculated Cannon grimly.

The smooth, irresistible gliding of the train became apparent,

establishing a sudden aloof calm. Hilda perceived that all her muscles

were tense.

In the compartment was a middle-aged couple.

"What's this place?" asked the woman.

"Looks like Tamworth," said the man sleepily.

"Knype, sir!" George Cannon corrected him very sharply. He was so

wrought up that he had omitted even to shake hands with Hilda. Making no

effort to talk, and showing no curiosity about Hilda's welfare or

doings, he moved uneasily on his seat, and from time to time opened and

shut the Gladstone bag. Gradually the flush paled from his face.

At Lichfield the middle-aged couple took advice from a porter and

stumbled out of the train.

II

"We're fairly out of the smoke now," said Hilda, when the train began to

move again. As a fact, they had been fairly out of the smoke of the Five

Towns for more than half an hour; but Hilda spoke at random, timidly,

nervously, for the sake of speaking. And she was as apologetic as though

it was she herself who by some untimely discretion had annoyed George

Cannon.

"Yes, thank God!" he replied fiercely, blowing with pleasure upon the

embers of his resentment. "And I'll take good care I never go into it

again--to live, that is!"

"Really?" she murmured, struck into an extreme astonishment.

He produced a cigar and a match-box.

"May I?" he demanded carelessly, and accepted her affirmative as of

course.

"You've heard about my little affair?" he asked, after lighting the

cigar. And he gazed at her curiously.

"No."

"Do you mean to say that none of the Orgreaves have said anything this

last day or two?" He leaned forward. They were in opposite corners.

"No," she repeated stiffly. Nevertheless, she remembered a peculiar

glance of Tom's to his father on the previous day, when George Cannon's

name had been mentioned.

"Well," said he. "You surprise me! That's all!"

"But--" She stopped, full of misgivings.

"Never heard any gossip about me--never?" he persisted, as it were,

menacing her.

She shook her head.

"Never heard that I'm not really a solicitor?"

"Oh! well--I think mother once did say something--"

"I thought so."

"But I don't understand those things," she said simply. "Is anything the

matter? Is--"

"Nothing!" he replied, calm and convincing. "Only I've been done! Done!

You'll hear about it some day, I dare say.... Shall I tell you? Would

you like me to tell you?" He smiled rather boyishly and leaned back.

"Yes," she nodded.

His attitude was very familiar, recalling their former relation of

employer and employed. It seemed as natural to her as to him that he

should not too ceremoniously conceal his feelings or disguise his mood.

"Well, you see, I expect I know as much about law as any of 'em, but

I've never been admitted, and so--" He stopped, perceiving that she did

not comprehend the significance of such a word as 'admitted.' "If you

want to practise as a solicitor you have to pass examinations, and I

never have passed examinations. Very expensive, all that! And I couldn't

afford when I was young. It isn't the exams that are difficult--you may

tell that from the fellows that pass them. Lawton, for instance. But

after a certain age exams become a nuisance. However, I could do

everything else. I might have had half a dozen situations as managing

clerk in the Five Towns if I'd wanted. Only I didn't want! I wanted to

be on my own. I could get clients as quick as any of them. _And_

quicker! So I found Karkeek--the excellent Mr. Karkeek! Another of the

bright ones that could pass the exams! Oh! He'd passed the exams all

right! He'd spent five years and I don't know how many hundred pounds in

passing the exams, and with it all he couldn't get above a couple of

pounds a week. There are hundreds of real solicitors up and down the

country who aren't earning more. And they aren't worth more. But I gave

him more, and a lot more. Just to use his name on my door and my blinds.

See? In theory I was his clerk, but in reality he was mine. It was all

quite clear. He understood--I should think he did, by Jove!" George

Cannon laughed shortly. "Every one understood. I got a practice together

in no time. _He_ didn't do it. He wouldn't have got a practice together

in a thousand years. I had the second-best practice in Turnhill, and I

should soon have had the best--if I hadn't been done."

"Yes?" said Hilda. The confidence flattered her.

"Well, Karkeek came into some money,--and he simply walked out of the

office! Simply walked out! Didn't give me time to turn round. I'd always

treated him properly. But he was jealous."

"What a shame!" Hilda's scorn shrivelled up Mr. Karkeek. There was

nothing that she detested so much as a disloyalty.

"Yes. I couldn't stop him, of course. No formal agreement between us.

Couldn't be, in a case like ours! So he had me. He'd taken my wages

quick enough as long as it suited him. Then he comes into money, and

behaves like that. Jealousy! They were all jealous,--always had been. I

was doing too well. So I had the whole gang down on me instantly like a

thousand of bricks. They knew I was helpless, and so they came on.

Special meeting of the committee of the North Staffordshire Law Society,

if you please! Rumours of prosecution--oh yes! I don't know what!... All

because I wouldn't take the trouble to pass their wretched exams....

Why, I could pass their exams on my head, if I hadn't anything better to

do. But I have. At first I thought I'd retire for five years and pass

their exams, and then come back and make 'em sit up. And wouldn't I have

made 'em sit up! But then I said to myself, 'No. It isn't good enough.'"

Hilda frowned. "What isn't?"

"What? The Five Towns isn't good enough! I can find something better

than the law, and I can find something better than the Five Towns!...

And here young Lawton has the impudence to begin to preach to me on

Knype platform, and to tell me I'm wise in going! He's the President of

the local Law Society, you know! No end of a President! And hasn't even

got gumption enough to keep his father's practice together! Stupid ass!

Well, I let him have it, and straight! He's no worse than the rest.

They've got no brains in this district. And they're so narrow--narrow

isn't the word! Thick-headed's the word. Stupid! Mean!... Mean!... What

did it matter to them? I kept to all their rules. There was a real

solicitor on the premises, and there'd soon have been another, if I'd

had time. No concern of theirs how the money was divided between me and

the real solicitor. But they were jealous--there you are! They don't

understand enterprise. They hate it. Nothing ever moves in the Five

Towns. And they've got no manners--I do believe that's the worst. Look

at Lawton's manners! Nothing but a boor! They aren't civilized

yet--that's what's the matter with them! That's what my father used to

say. Barbarians, he used to say. '_Ce sont des barbares!_'... Kids used

to throw stones at him because of his neck-tie. The grown-ups chuck a

brick at anything they don't quite fancy. That's their idea of wit."

Hilda was afraid of his tempestuous mood. But she enjoyed her fear, as

she might have enjoyed exposure to a dangerous storm. She enjoyed the

sensation of her fragility and helplessness there, cooped up with him in

the close intimacy of the compartment. She was glad that he did not

apologize to her for his lack of restraint, nor foolishly pretend that

he was boring her.

"It does seem a shame!" she murmured, her eyes candidly admitting that

she felt enormously flattered.

He sighed and laughed. "How often have I heard my father say that--'_Ce

sont des barbares_!' Peels only brought him over because they could find

nobody in the Five Towns civilized enough to do the work that he did....

I can imagine how he must have felt when he first came here!... My

God!... Environment!... I tell you what--it's only lately I've realized

how I loathe the provinces!"

The little interior in which they were, swept steadily and smoothly

across the central sunlit plain of England, passing canals and brooks

and cottages and churches--silent and stolid in that English stupidity

that he was criticizing. And Hilda saw of George Cannon all that was

French in him. She saw him quite anew, as something rather exotic and

entirely marvellous. She thought: "When I first met him, I said to

myself he was a most extraordinary man. And I was right. I was more

right than I ever imagined. No one down there has any idea of what he

really is. They're too stupid, as he says."

He imposed on her his scorn of the provincial. She had to share it. She

had a vision of the Five Towns as a smoky blotch on the remote

horizon,--negligible, crass, ridiculous in its heavy self-complacency.

The very Orgreaves themselves were tinged with this odious English

provincialism.

He smiled to himself, and then said, very quietly: "It isn't of the

least importance, you know. In fact I'm rather glad. I've never had any

difficulty in making money, and when I've settled up everything down

there I shan't be precisely without. And I shall have no excuse for not

branching out in a new line."

She meekly encouraged him to continue.

"Oh yes!" he went on. "The law isn't the only thing--not by a long way.

And besides, I'm sick of it. Do you know what the great thing of the

future is, I mean the really great thing--the smashing big thing?" He

smiled, kindly and confidential.

She too smiled, shaking her head.

"Well, I'll tell you. Hotels!"

"Hotels?" She was perfectly nonplussed.

"Hotels! There'll be more money and more fun to be got out of hotels,

soon, than out of any other kind of enterprise in the world. You should

see those hotels that are going up in London! They'd give you a start,

and no mistake! Yes, hotels! There aren't twenty people in England who

know what a hotel is! But I know!" He paused, and added reflectively, in

a comically naïve tone: "Curious how these things come to you, bit by

bit! Now, if it hadn't been for Sarah--and that boarding-house--"

He was using his straw hat as a fan. With an unexpected and almost

childlike gesture he suddenly threw the hat up on to the rack above his

head, "How's that?"

"What a boy he is, after all!" thought Hilda sympathetically, wondering

why in the midst of all her manifold astonishment she felt so

light-hearted and gay.

"Funny parcel you've got up there!" he idly observed, glancing from one

rack to the other.

The parcel contained Mrs. Orgreave's generous conception of a repast

proper to be eaten in a train in place of high tea. He helped her to eat

it.

As the train approached London he resumed his manhood. And he was

impeccably adult as he conducted her from Euston to King's Cross, and

put her into a train in a corner of the station that the summer twilight

had already taken possession of.

III

Late at night Hilda sat with Sarah Gailey in the landlady's small

bedroom at the Cedars. It was lighted by a lamp, because the builder of

the house, hating excess, had thought fit not to carry gas-pipes higher

than the first floor. A large but old bedstead filled half the floor

space. On the shabby dressing-table a pile of bills and various papers

lay near the lamp. Clothes were hung behind the door, and a vague wisp

of muslin moved slightly in the warm draught from the tiny open window.

There were two small cane-chairs, enamelled, on which the women sat,

close to each other, both incommoded by the unwholesome sultriness of

the only chamber that could be spared for the private use of the

house-mistress. This small bedroom was Sarah Gailey's home; its

amenities were the ultimate nightly reward of her labours. If George

Cannon had obtained possession of the Cedars as an occupation for Sarah,

this room and Sarah's pleasure therein were the sole justification of

the entire mansion.

As Hilda looked at Sarah Gailey's bowed head, but little greyed, beneath

the ray of the lamp, and at her shrivelled, neurotic, plaintive face in

shadow, and at her knotty hands loosely clasped, she contrasted her

companion and the scene with the youthfulness and the spaciousness and

the sturdy gay vigour of existence in the household of the Orgreaves.

She thought, with a renewed sense of the mysterious strangeness of life:

"Last night I was there, far away--all those scores of miles of fields

and towns are between!--and to-night I am here. Down there I was nothing

but an idler. Here I am the strongest. I am indispensable. I am the one

person on whom she depends. Without me everything will go to pieces."

And she thought of George Cannon's vast enigmatic projects concerning

grand hotels. In passing the immense pile of St. Pancras on the way from

Euston to King's Cross, George Cannon had waved his hand and said: "Look

at that! Look at that! It's something after that style that I want for a

toy! And I'll have it!" Yes, the lofty turrets of St. Pancras had not

intimidated him. He, fresh from little Turnhill and from defeats, could

rise at once to the height of them, and by the force of imagination make

them his own! He could turn abruptly from the law--to hotels! A

disconcerting man! And the mere tone in which he mentioned his

enterprise seemed, in a most surprising way, to dignify hotels, and even

boarding-houses; to give romance to the perfectly unromantic business of

lodging and catering!... And the seed from which he was to grow the

magic plant sat in the room there with Hilda: that bowed head! The

ambition and the dream resembled St. Pancras: the present reality was

the Cedars, and Sarah's poor, stuffy little bedroom in the Cedars.

Sarah began to cry, weakly.

"But what's the matter?" asked Hilda, the strong succourer.

"Nothing. Only it's such a relief to me you've come."

Hilda deprecated lightly. "I should have come sooner if I'd known. You

ought to have sent word before."

"No, I couldn't. After all, what is it? I'm only silly. There's nothing

really the matter. The minute you come I can see that. I can even stand

those Boutwoods if you're here. You know George made it up with them;

and I won't say he wasn't right. But I had to put my pride in my pocket.

And yesterday it nearly made me scream out to see Mrs. Boutwood stir her

tea."

"But why?"

"I don't know. It's nerves, that's what it is.... Well, I've got to go

through these." She fingered the papers on the dressing-table with her

left hand while drying her tears with the right. "He's very wishful for

proper accounts, George is. That's right enough. But--well--I think I

can make a shilling go as far as anyone, and choose flesh-meat with

anyone, too--that I will say--but these accounts...! George is always

wanting to know how much it costs a head a week for this that and the

other.... It's all very well for him, but if he had the servants to look

after and--"

"I'm going to keep your accounts for you," Hilda soothed her.

"But--"

"I'm going to keep your accounts for you," And she thought: "How exactly

like mother I was just then!"

It appeared to Hilda that she was making a promise, and shouldering a

responsibility, against her will, and perhaps against her common sense.

She might keep accounts at the Cedars for a week, a fortnight, a month.

But she could not keep accounts there indefinitely. She was sowing

complications for herself. Freedom and change and luxury were what she

deemed she desired; not a desk in a boarding-house. And yet something

within her compelled her to say in a firm, sure, kindly voice:

"Now give me all those papers, Miss Gailey."

And amid indefinite regret and foreboding, she was proud and happy in

her rôle of benefactor.

When Hilda at length rose to go to her own room, Sarah Gailey had to

move her chair so that she might pass. At the door both hesitated for an

instant, and then Hilda with a sudden gesture advanced her lips. It was

the first time she and Sarah had ever kissed. The contact with that

desiccated skin intensified to an extraordinary degree Hilda's emotional

sympathy for the ageing woman. She thought, poignantly: "Poor old

thing!"

And when she was on the dark little square landing under the roof,

Sarah, holding the lamp, called out in a whisper.

"Hilda!"

"Well?"

"Did he say anything to you about Brighton?"

"Brighton?" She perceived with certainty from Sarah's eager and yet

apologetic tone, that the question had been waiting for utterance

throughout the evening, and that Sarah had lacked courage for it until

the kiss had enheartened her. And also she perceived that Sarah was

suspecting her of being somehow in conspiracy with George Cannon.

"Yes," said Sarah. "He's got into his head that Brighton's the only

place for this boarding-house business if it's to be properly done."

"He never said a word to me about Brighton," Hilda whispered positively.

"Oh!"

Hilda descended the stairs, groping. Brighton? What next?

CHAPTER III

AT BRIGHTON

I

She thought vividly, one afternoon about three months later, of that

final scrap of conversation. Just as she had sat opposite George Cannon

in a second-class compartment, so now she was sitting opposite Sarah

Gailey in a second-class compartment. The train, having passed Lewes,

was within a few minutes of Brighton. And following behind them,

somewhere at the tail of the train, were certain trunks containing all

that she possessed and all that Sarah Gailey possessed of personal

property--their sole chattels and paraphernalia on earth. George Cannon

had willed it and brought it about. He was to receive them on the

platform of Brighton Station. She had not seen very much of him in the

interval, for he had been continually on the move between Brighton and

Turnhill. "In a moment we shall all be together again," she reflected.

"This meeting also will happen, as everything else has happened, and a

new period will definitely have begun." And she sat and stared at the

closed eyes of the desiccated Sarah Gailey, and waited for the instant

of arrival apprehensively and as it were incredulously--not with fear,

not with pleasure, but with the foreboding of adventure and a curious

idea that the instant of arrival never would come.

For thirteen weeks, which had gone very quickly, she had devoted herself

to Sarah Gailey, acting as George Cannon's precursor, prophet, and

expounder. While the summer cooled into autumn, and the boarding-house

season slackened and once more feebly brightened, she had daily

conversed with Sarah about George's plans, making them palatable to her,

softening the shocks of them, and voluntarily promising not to quit her

until the crisis was past. She had had to discourse on the unique

advantages of Brighton as a field for George's enterprise, and on

George's common sense and on Sarah's common sense, and the

interdependence of the two. When the news came that George had acquired

down there a house in going order, she had had to prove that it was not

the end of the world that was announced. When the news came that George

had re-sold the Cedars to its original occupier, she had had to prove

that the transaction did not signify a mysterious but mortal insult to

Sarah. When the news came that the Cedars must be vacated before noon on

a given Saturday, she had had to begin all her demonstrations afresh,

and in addition attempt to persuade Sarah that George was not utterly

mad--buying and selling boarding-house tenancies all over the South of

England!--and that the exit from the Cedars would not be the ruin of

dignity and peace, and the commencement of fatal disasters. In the hour

when Sarah Gailey learnt the immutable Saturday of departure, the

Cedars, which had been her hell, promised to become, on that very

Saturday, a paradise.

On the whole, the three months had constituted a quarter of exceeding

difficulty and delicacy. The first month had been rendered memorable by

Sarah's astonishing behaviour when Hilda had desired to pay, as before,

for her board and lodging. The mere offer of the money had made plain to

Sarah--what she then said she had always suspected--that Hilda was her

enemy in disguise and (like the rest) bent on humiliating her, and

outraging her most sacred feelings. In that encounter, but in no other,

Sarah had won. The opportune withdrawal of the Boutwoods from the

boarding-house had assisted the establishment of peace. When the

Boutwoods left, Miss Gailey seemed to breathe the drawing-room air as

though it were ozone of the mountains. But her joy had been quickly

dissipated, for to dissipate joy was her chief recreation. A fortnight

before the migration to Brighton Hilda, contemplating all that had to be

done, had thought, aghast: "I shall never he able to humour her into

doing it all!" Closing of accounts, dismissals, inventories, bills,

receipts, packing, decision concerning trains, reception of the former

proprietor (especially that!), good-byes, superintending the stowage of

luggage on the cab...! George Cannon had not once appeared in the last

sensitive weeks, and he had therein been wise. And all that had to be

done had been done--not by Hilda, but by Sarah Gailey the touchy and the

competent. Hilda had done little but the humouring.

II

And there sat Sarah Gailey, deracinated and captive, to prove how

influential a person Hilda was! With the eyes shut, Sarah's worn face

under her black bonnet had precisely the aspect of a corpse--and the

corpse of somebody who had expired under the weight of all the world's

woe! Hilda thought: "When she is dead she will look just like that!...

And one day, sooner or later, she will be dead." Strange that Sarah

Gailey, with no malady except her chronic rheumatism, and no material

anxiety, and every prospect of security in old age, could not be

content, could not at any rate refrain from being miserable! But she

could not. She was an exhaustless fount of worry and misery. "I suppose

I like her," thought Hilda. "But why do I like her? She isn't agreeable.

She isn't amusing. She isn't pretty. She isn't even kind, now. She's

only depressing and tedious. As soon as she's fixed up here, I shall go.

I shall leave her. I've done enough, and I've had enough. I must attend

to my own affairs a bit. After all--" And then Hilda's conscience

interrupted: "But can you leave her altogether? Without you, what will

happen to her? She's getting older and worse every day. Perhaps in a few

years she won't even be competent. Already she isn't perhaps quite,

quite as competent as she was." And Hilda said: "Well, of course, I

shall have to keep an eye on her; come and see her sometimes--often."

And she knew that as long as they both lived she could never be free

from a sense of responsibility towards Sarah Gailey. Useless to argue:

"It's George Cannon's affair, not mine!" Useless to ask: "_Why_ should I

feel responsible?" Only after she had laid Sarah Gailey in the tomb

would she be free. "And that day too will come!" she thought again. "I

shall have to go through it, and I shall go through it!"

The poignant romance of existence enveloped her in its beautiful veils.

And through these veils she saw, vague and diminished, the far vista of

the hours which she had spent with the Orgreaves. She saw the night of

Edwin Clayhanger's visit, and herself and him together in the porch,

and she remembered the shock of his words, "There's no virtue in

believing." The vision was like that of another and quite separate life.

Would she ever go back to it? Janet was her friend, in theory her one

intimate friend: she had seen her once in London,--beautiful, agreeable,

affectionate, intelligent; all the Orgreaves were lovable. The glance of

Edwin Clayhanger, and the sincerity of his smile, had affected her in a

manner absolutely unique.... But would she ever go back? It seemed to

her fantastic, impossible, that she should ever go back. It seemed to

her that she was netted by destiny. In any case she knew that she could

not, meanwhile, give to that group in Bursley even a part of herself.

Hilda could never give a part of herself. Moreover, she was a bad

letter-writer. And so, if among themselves the group at Bursley charged

her with inconstancy, she must accept the accusation, to which she was

inevitably exposed by the very ardour of her temperament.

The putting-on of brakes took her unawares. The train was in Brighton,

sliding over the outskirts of the town. Miss Gailey opened her

apprehensive eyes. Hilda saw steep streets of houses that sprawled on

the hilly mounds of the great town like ladders: reminiscent of certain

streets of her native district, yet quite different, a physiognomy

utterly foreign to her. This then, was Brighton. That which had been a

postmark became suddenly a reality, shattering her preconceptions of it,

and disappointing her she knew not why. She glanced forward, through the

window, and saw the cavern of the station. In a few seconds they would

have arrived, and her formal mission would be over. She was very

agitated and very nervous. George Cannon had promised to meet them.

Would he meet them?

The next instant she saw the platform. She saw George Cannon,

conspicuous and debonair in a new suit, swinging his ebony stick. The

train stopped. He descried them.

"There he is!" she said, bravely pretending to be gay. And she thought:

"I could not believe that this moment would come, but it has come."

She had anticipated relief from this moment, but she was aware of no

relief. On the contrary, she felt most uncomfortably apologetic to Sarah

Gailey for George Cannon, and to George Cannon for Sarah Gailey. She had

the constraint of a sinner. And, by the side of George Cannon on the

platform, she was aware of her shabbiness and of her girlish fragility.

Nevertheless, she put her shoulders back with a gesture like his own,

thinking proudly, and trying to make her eyes speak: "Well, here is

Sarah Gailey,--thanks to me!"

As Sarah greeted him, Hilda observed, with some dismay, a curious, very

slight stiffening of her demeanour--familiar phenomenon, which denoted

that Sarah was in the grip of a secret grievance. "Poor old thing!" she

thought ruefully. "I'd imagined she'd forgiven him for bringing her

here; but she hasn't."

III

They drove down from the station in an open carriage, unencumbered by

the trunks, which George Cannon had separately disposed of. He sat with

his back to the horse, opposite the two women, and talked at intervals

about the weather, the prospects of the season, and the town. His

familiarity with the town was apparently such that he seemed to be a

native of it, and even in some mysterious way to have assisted in its

creation and development; so that he took pride in its qualities and

accepted responsibility for its defects. When he ceremoniously saluted

two women who went by in another carriage, Hilda felt sharply the

inferiority of an ignorant stranger in presence of one for whom the

place had no secrets.

Her first disappointment changed slowly into expectant and hopeful

curiosity. The quaint irregularities of the architecture, and the

vastness of the thronged perspectives, made promises to her romantic

sense. The town seemed to be endless as London. There were hotels,

churches, chapels, libraries, and music-shops on every hand. The more

ordinary features of main streets--the marts of jewellery, drapery, and

tobacco--had an air of grandiose respectability; while the narrow alleys

that curved enigmatically away between the lofty buildings of these fine

thoroughfares beckoned darkly to the fancy. The multiplicity of beggars,

louts, and organ-grinders was alone a proof of Brighton's success in the

world; the organ-grinders, often a man and a woman yoked together, were

extraordinarily English, genteel, and prosperous as they trudged in

their neat, middle-class raiment through the gritty mud of the macadam,

stolidly ignoring the menace of high-stepping horses and disdainful

glittering wheels. Brighton was evidently a city apart. Nevertheless,

Hilda did not as yet understand why George Cannon should have considered

it to be the sole field worthy of his enterprise.

Then the carriage rounded into King's Road, and suddenly she saw the

incredible frontage of hotels, and _pensions_ and apartments, and she

saw the broad and boundless promenade alive with all its processions of

pleasure, and she saw the ocean. And everything that she had seen up to

that moment fell to the insignificance of a background. She understood.

After a blusterous but mild autumn day the scarlet sun was setting

calmly between a saffron sky and saffron water; it flashed upon waves

and sails and flags, and upon the puddles in the road, and upon

bow-windows and flowered balconies, giving glory to human pride. The

carriage, merged in a phalanx of carriages, rolled past innumerable

splendid houses, and every house without exception was a hostel and an

invitation. Some were higher than any she had ever seen; and one

terrific building, in course of construction, had already far overtopped

the highest of its neighbours. She glanced at George Cannon, who, by a

carefully casual demeanour, was trying not to take the credit of the

entire spectacle; and she admitted that he was indeed wonderful.

"Of course, Sarah," he said, as the carriage shortly afterwards turned

up Preston Street, where the dying wind roughly caught them, "we aren't

beginning with anything as big as all that, so you needn't shiver in

your shoes. You know what my notion is"--he included Hilda in his

address--"my notion is to get some experience first in a smaller house.

We must pay for our experience, and my notion is to pay as little as

possible. I can tell you there's quite a lot of things that have to be

picked up before you've got the hang of a town like this--quite a lot."

Sarah grimly nodded. She had scarcely spoken.

"We're beginning rather well. I've told you all about the Watchett

sisters, haven't I? They're an income, a positive income! And then

Boutwood and his wife have decided to come--did I tell you?"

"Bou--"

The syllable escaped explosively from Sarah Gailey's mouth, overcoming

her stern guard. Instantly, by a tremendous effort, she checked the

flow. But the violent shock of the news had convulsed her whole being.

The look on her face was changed to desperation. Hilda trembled, and

even the splendid and ever-resurgent George Cannon was discountenanced.

Not till then had Hilda realized with what intense bitterness the

souvenir of the Boutwoods festered in Sarah Gailey's unreasoning heart.

IV

"Here we are!" said George Cannon jauntily, as the carriage stopped in

front of No. 59 Preston Street. But his jauntiness seemed factitious.

The demeanour of all three was diffident and unnatural, for now had

arrived the moment when George Cannon had to submit his going concern to

the ordeal of inspection by the women, and especially by Sarah Gailey.

There the house stood, a physical fact, forcing George to justify it,

and beseeching clemency from the two women. The occasion was critical;

therefore everybody had to pretend that it was a perfectly ordinary

occasion, well knowing the futility of the pretence. And the inevitable

constraint was acutely aggravated by Sarah's silent and terrible

reception of the news concerning the Boutwoods.

While George Cannon was paying the driver, Sarah and Hilda hesitated

awkwardly on the pavement, their hands occupied with small belongings.

They had the sensation of being foreigners to the house; they could not

even mount the steps without his protection; scarcely might they in

decency examine the frontage of the house. They could not, however,

avoid seeing that a workman was fixing a new and splendid brass-plate at

the entrance, and that this plate bore the words, "Cannon's Boarding-

house." Hilda thought, startled: "At last he is using his own name!"

He turned to them.

"You have a view of the sea from the bow-window of the drawing-room--on

the first floor," he remarked.

Neither Hilda nor Sarah responded.

"And of course from the other bow-window higher up," he added, almost

pitifully, in his careful casualness.

Hilda felt sorry for him, and she could not understand why she felt

sorry, why it seemed a shame that he should be mysteriously compelled

thus to defend the house before it had been attacked.

"Oh yes!" she murmured foolishly, almost fatuously.

The street and the house were disappointing. After the grandeur of the

promenade, the street appeared shabby and third-rate; it had the

characteristics of a side street; it was the retreat of those who could

not afford anything better, and its base inhabitants walked out on to

the promenade and swaggeringly feigned to be the equals of their

superiors. The house also was shabby and third-rate--with its poor

little glimpse of the sea. Although larger than the Cedars, it was

noticeably smaller and meaner than any house on the promenade, and

whereas the Cedars was detached, No. 59 was not even semi-detached, but

one of a gaunt, tall row of stuccoed and single-fronted dwellings. It

looked like a boarding-house (which the Cedars did not), and not all the

style of George Cannon's suit and cane and manner, as he mounted the

steps, nor the polish of his new brass-plate, could redeem it from the

disgrace of being a very ordinary boarding-house.

George Cannon had made a serious mistake in bringing the carriage round

by the promenade. True, he had exhibited the glory of Brighton, but he

had done so to the detriment of his new enterprise. That No. 59 ought to

be regarded as merely an inexpensive field for the acquiring of

preliminary experience did not influence the judgment of the women in

the slightest degree. For them it was a house that rightly apologized

for itself, and whose apologetic air deserved only a condescending

tolerance.

The front door stood open for the convenience of the artisan who was

screwing at the brass-plate. He moved aside, with the servility that

always characterizes the worker in a city of idlers, and the party

passed into a long narrow hall, whose walls were papered to imitate

impossible blocks of mustard-coloured marble. The party was now at home.

"Here we are!" said Hilda, with a gaiety that absolutely desolated

herself, and in the same instant she remembered that George Cannon had

preceded her in saying 'Here we are!' She looked from the awful glumness

of Sarah Gailey to the equally awful alacrity of George Cannon, and felt

as though she had committed some crime whose nature she could not guess.

A middle-aged maid appeared, like a suspicious scout, at the far end of

the hall, beyond the stairs, having opened a door which showed a glimpse

of a kitchen.

"That tea ready?" asked George Cannon.

"No, sir," said the maid plumply.

"Well, let it be got ready."

"Yes, sir." The maid vanished, flouncing.

Sarah Gailey, with a heavy sigh, dropped her small belongings on to a

narrow bare table that stood against the wall near the foot of the

stairs. Daylight was fading.

"Well," said George Cannon, balancing his hat on his cane, "your luggage

will be here directly. This is the dining-room." He pushed at a

yellow-grained door.

The women followed him into the dining-room, and stared at the dining-

room in silence.

"There's a bedroom behind," he said, as they came out, and he displayed

the bedroom behind. "That's the kitchen." He pointed to the adjoining

door.

"The drawing-room's larger," he said. "It includes the width of the

hall."

They climbed the narrow stairs after him wearily. The door of the

drawing-room was ajar, and the chatter of thin feminine voices could be

heard within. George Cannon gave a soundless warning whisper: "The

Watchetts." And Sarah Gailey frowned back the information that she did

not wish to meet the Watchetts just then. With every precaution against

noise, George Cannon opened two other doors, showing bedrooms. And then,

as it were, hypnotized by him, the women climbed another flight of

narrow stairs, darkening, and saw more rooms, and then still another

flight, and still more rooms, and finally the boasted view of the sea!

After all, Hilda was obliged to admit to herself that the house was more

impressive than she had at first supposed. Although single-fronted, it

was deep, and there were two bedrooms on the first floor, and four

each--two large and two small--on the second and third. Eleven in all,

they had seen, of which three were occupied by the Watchetts, and one,

temporarily, by George Cannon. The rest were empty; but the season had

scarcely begun, and the Boutwoods were coming. George Cannon had said

grandly that Hilda must choose her room; she chose the smallest on the

top floor. The furniture, if shabby and old-fashioned, was everywhere

ample.

They descended, and not a word had been said about Sarah's room.

On the first-floor landing, where indeed the danger was acutest, they

were trapped by two of the Watchetts. These elderly ladies shot almost

roguishly out of the drawing-room, and by their smiles struck the

descending party into immobility.

"Oh! We saw you arrive, Mr. Cannon!" said the elder, shaking her head.

"So this is Miss Gailey! Good afternoon, Miss Gailey! So pleased to make

your acquaintance!"

There was handshaking. Then it was Hilda's turn.

"We're so sorry our eldest sister isn't here to welcome you to No. 59,"

said the younger. "She's had to go to London for the day. We're very

fond of No. 59. There's no place quite like it, to our minds. And we're

quite sure we shall be quite as comfortable with dear Miss Gailey as we

were with dear Mrs. Granville, poor thing. It was quite a wrench when we

had to say good-bye to her last night. Do come into the drawing-room,

please! There's a beautiful view of the sea!"

Sarah Gailey hesitated. A noise of bumping came from the hall below.

"I think that's the luggage," she said. The smile with which she forced

herself to respond to the fixed simper of the Watchetts seemed to cause

her horrible torment. She motioned nervously to George Cannon, who was

nearest the stairs.

"A little later, then! A little later, then!" said both the Watchetts,

bowing the party away with the most singular grimaces.

In the hall, a lad, perspiring and breathing quickly, stood behind the

trunks.

"Wait a moment," George Cannon said to him, and murmured to Sarah: "This

is the basement, here."

The middle-aged maid appeared at the kitchen door with a large loaded

tray. "Come along with that tea, Louisa," he added pleasantly.

He went first, Sarah next, and Hilda last, cautiously down a short, dark

flight of stone steps beneath the stairs; the servant followed. At the

foot a gas-jet burned.

"Those Watchetts might be the landladies!" muttered Sarah, strangely

ignoring the propinquity of the maid; and sniffed.

Hilda gave a short, uneasy laugh. She had a desire to laugh loudly and

wildly, and by so doing to snap the nervous tension, which seemed to

grow tighter and tighter every minute. Her wretchedness had become so

exquisite that she could begin to enjoy it, to savour it like a

pleasure.

And she thought, with conscious and satisfied grimness:

"So this is Brighton!"

CHAPTER IV

THE SEA

I

In the evening Hilda, returning from a short solitary walk as far as the

West Pier, found Sarah Gailey stooping over her open trunks in the

bedroom which had been assigned to her. There were two quite excellent

though low-ceiled rooms, of which this was one, in the basement; the

other was to be used as a private parlour by the managers of the house.

At night, with the gas lighted and the yellow blind drawn and the loose

bundle of strips paper gleaming in the grate, the bedroom seemed very

cozy and habitable in its shabbiness; like the rest of the house it had

an ample supply of furniture, and especially of those trifling articles,

useful or useless, which collect only by slow degrees, and which are a

proof of long humanizing habitation. In that room Sarah Gailey was

indeed merely the successor of the regretted Mrs. Granville, the

landlady who had mysteriously receded into the unknown before the advent

of Sarah and Hilda, but with whom George Cannon must have had many

interviews. No doubt the room was an epitome of the character of Mrs.

Granville, presumably a fussy and precise celibate, with a place for

everything and everything in its place, and an indiscriminating tendency

to hoard.

Sarah Gailey was at that stage of unpacking when, trunks being nearly

empty and drawers having scarcely begun to fill, bed, table, and chairs

are encumbered with confused masses of goods apparently far exceeding

the cubical contents of the trunks.

"Can I do anything for you?" asked Hilda.

The new landlady raised her watery and dejected eyes. "If you wouldn't

mind taking every single one of those knick-knacks off the mantelpiece

and putting them away on the top shelf of the cupboard--"

Hilda smiled. "It's a bit crowded, isn't it?"

"Crowded!" By her intonation of this one word Sarah Gailey condemned

Mrs. Granville's whole life.

"Can I empty this chair? I shall want something to stand on," said

Hilda.

"Better see if the shelf's dusty," Sarah gloomily warned her.

"Well," murmured Hilda, on the chair. "If my feather doesn't actually

touch the ceiling!" Sarah Gailey made no response to this

light-heartedness, and Hilda, with her hands full of vain gewgaws, tried

again: "I wonder what Mrs. Granville would say if she saw me!... My

word, it's quite hot up here!"

A resonant, very amiable voice came from beyond the door: "Is she

there?"

"Who?" demanded Sarah, grievous.

"Miss Lessways." It was George Cannon.

"Yes."

"I just want to speak to her if she's at liberty," said George Cannon.

Hilda cried from the ceiling: "I'll come as soon as I've--"

"Please go now," Sarah interrupted in tense accents. Hilda glanced down

at her, astonished, and saw in her eyes an almost childish appeal, weak

and passionate, which gripped the heart painfully.

She jumped from the chair. Sarah Gailey was now sitting on the bed. Yes,

in her worn face of a woman who has definitely passed the climacteric,

and in the abandoned pose of those thin arms, there was the look and

gesture of a young girl desperately beseeching. Hilda was puzzled and

intimidated. She had meant to be jocular, and to insist on staying till

the task was finished. But she kept silence and obeyed the supplication,

from a motive of prudence.

"I wouldn't keep you from him for anything," murmured Sarah Gailey

tragically, as Hilda opened the door and left her sitting forlorn among

all her skirts and linen.

II

"I'm here," George Cannon called out from the parlour when he heard the

sound of the door. He was looking from the window up at the street; the

blind had not been drawn. He turned as Hilda entered.

"You've been out!" he said, observing that she was in street attire.

"What is it?" she asked nervously, fearing that some altercation had

already occurred between brother and sister.

"It's about your private affairs--that's all," he said easily, and

half-humourously. "If you'll just come in."

"Oh!" she smiled her relief; but nevertheless she was still preoccupied

by the image of the woman in the next room.

"They've been dragging on quite long enough," said George Cannon, as he

stooped to poke the morsel of fire in the old-fashioned grate, which had

a hob on either side. On one of these hobs was a glass of milk. Hilda

had learnt that day for the first time that at a certain hour every

evening George Cannon drank a glass of warm milk, and that this glass of

warm milk was an important factor in his daily comfort. He now took the

glass and drank it off. And Hilda had a peculiar sensation of being more

intimate with him than she had ever been before.

They sat down to the square table in the middle of the room crowded with

oddments of furniture, including a desk which George Cannon had

appropriated to his own exclusive use. This desk was open and a portion

of its contents were spread abroad on the crimson cloth of the table.

Among them Hilda noticed, with her accustomed clerkly eye, two numbers

of _The Hotel-Keeper and Boarding-House Review_, several sheets of

advertisement-scales, and a many-paged document with the heading,

"Inventory of Furniture at No. 59 Preston Street"; also a large legal

envelope inscribed, "Lessways Estate."

From the latter George Cannon drew forth an engraved and flourished

paper, which he silently placed in front of her. It was a receipt signed

by the manager of the Brighton branch of the Southern Counties Bank for

the sum of three thousand four hundred and forty-five pounds deposited

at call by Miss Hilda Lessways.

"Everything is now settled up," he said. "Here are all the figures," and

he handed her another paper showing the whole of the figures for the

realization of her real property and of her furniture. "It's in your

name, and nobody can touch it but you."

She glanced at the figures vaguely, not attempting to comprehend them.

As for the receipt, it fascinated her. The fragile scrap represented her

livelihood, her future, her salvation. It alone stood between her and

unimagined terrors. And she was surprised to see it, surprised by its

assurance that no accident had happened to her possessions during the

process of transformation carried out by George Cannon. For, though he

had throughout been almost worryingly meticulous in his business

formalities and his promptitudes--never had any interest or rent been a

day late!--she admitted to herself now that she had been afraid... that,

in fact, she had not utterly trusted him.

"And what's got to be done with this?" she asked simply, fingering the

receipt.

He smiled at her, with a touch of protective and yet sardonic

condescension, without saying a word.

And suddenly it struck her that ages had elapsed since her first

interview with him in the office over the ironmonger's at Turnhill, and

that both of them were extraordinarily changed. (She was reminded of

that interview not by his face and look, nor by their relative positions

at the table, but by a very faint odour of gas-fumes, for at Turnhill

also a gas-jet had been between them.) After an interval of anxiety and

depression he had regained exactly the triumphant self-sure air which

was her earliest recollection of him. He was not appreciably older. But

for her he was no longer the same man, because she saw him differently;

knowing much more of him, she read in his features a thousand minor

significances to which before she had been blind. The dominating

impression was not now the impression of his masculinity; there was no

clearly dominating impression. He had lost, for her, the romantic

allurement of the strange and the unknown.

Still, she liked and admired him. And she felt an awe, which was

agreeable to her, of his tremendous enterprise and his obstinate

volition. That faculty which he possessed, of uprooting himself and

uprooting others, put her in fear of him. He had willed to be

established as a caterer in Brighton--he who but yesterday (as it

seemed) was a lawyer in Turnhill--and, on this very night, he was

established in Brighton, and his sister with him, and she with his

sister! The enormous affair had been accomplished. This thought had been

obsessing Hilda all the afternoon and evening.

When she reflected upon the change in herself, the untravelled Hilda of

Turnhill appeared a stranger to her, and a simpleton!; no more!

As George Cannon offered no answer to her question, she said:

"I suppose it will have to be invested, all this?"

He nodded.

"Well, considering it's only been bringing in one per cent. per annum

for the last week... Of course I needn't have put it on deposit, but I

always prefer that way. It's more satisfactory."

Hilda could hear faintly, through the thin wooden partition, the

movements of Sarah Gailey in the next room. And the image of the

mournful woman returned to disquiet her. What could be the meaning of

that hysteric appeal and glance? Then she heard the door of the bedroom

open violently, and the figure of Sarah Gailey passed like a flash

across the doorway of the parlour. And the footsteps of Sarah Gailey

pattered up the stone stairs; and the front door banged; and the skirts

and feet of Sarah Gailey intercepted for an instant the light of the

street-lamp that shone on the basement-window of the parlour.

"Excuse me a minute," muttered Hilda, frowning. By one of her swift and

unreflecting impulses she abandoned George Cannon and her private

affairs, and scurried by the area steps into the street.

III

Bareheaded, and with no jacket or mantle, Sarah Gailey was walking

quickly down Preston Street towards the promenade, and Hilda, afraid but

courageous, followed her at a distance of thirty or forty yards. Hilda

could not decide why she was afraid, nor why it should be necessary, in

so simple an undertaking as a walk down Preston Street, to call upon her

courage. Assuming even that Sarah Gailey turned round and caught

her--what then? The consequences could not be very terrible. But Sarah

Gailey did not turn round. She went straight forward, as though on a

definite errand in a town with which she was perfectly familiar, and,

having arrived at the corner of Preston Street and the promenade,

unhesitatingly crossed the muddy roadway of the promenade, and, after a

moment's halt, vanished down the steps in the sea-wall to the left-hand

of the pier. The pier, a double rope of twinkling lamps, hung magically

over the invisible sea, and at the end of it, constant and grave, a red

globe burned menacingly in the wind-haunted waste of the night. And

Hilda thought, as she hastened with gathering terror across the

promenade: "Out there, at the end of the pier, the water is splashing

and beating against the piles!"

She stopped at the parapet of the sea-wall, and looked behind her, like

a thief. The wrought-iron entrance to the pier was highly illuminated,

but except for a man's head and shoulders caged in the ticket-box of the

turnstile, there was no life there; the man seemed to be waiting

solitary with everlasting patience in the web of wavering flame beneath

the huge dark sky. Scores of posters, large and small, showed that

Robertson's "School" was being performed in the theatre away over the

sea at the extremity of the pier. The promenade, save for one gigantic

policeman, and a few distant carriages, was apparently deserted, and the

line of dimly lighted hotels, stretching vaguely east and west, had an

air grim and forlorn at that hour.

Hilda ran down the steps; at the bottom another row of lamps defined the

shore, and now she could hear the tide lapping ceaselessly amid the

supporting ironwork of the pier. She at once descried the figure of

Sarah Gailey in the gloom. The woman was moving towards the faintly

white edge of the sea. Hilda started to run after her, first across

smooth asphalt, and then over some sails stretched out to dry; and then

her feet sank at each step into descending ridges of loose shingle, and

she nearly fell. At length she came to firm sand, and stood still.

Sarah Gailey was now silhouetted against the pale shallows of foam that

in ever-renewed curves divided the shore from the sea. After a time, she

bent down, rose again, moved towards the water, and drew back. Hilda did

not stir. She could not bring herself to approach the lonely figure. She

felt that to go and accost Sarah Gailey would be indelicate and

inexcusable. She felt as if she were basely spying. She was completely

at a loss, and knew not how to act. But presently she discerned that the

white foam was circling round Sarah's feet, and that Sarah was standing

careless in the midst of it. And at last, timid and shaking with

agitation, she ventured nearer and nearer. And Sarah heard her on the

sand, and looked behind.

"Miss Gailey!" she appealed in a trembling voice.

Sarah made no response of any kind, and Hilda reached the edge of the

foam.

"Please, please don't stand there! You'll catch a dreadful cold, and

you've got nothing on your shoulders, either!"

"I want to make a hole in the water," said Sarah miserably. "I wanted to

make a hole in the water!"

"Please do come back with me!" Hilda implored; but she spoke

mechanically, as though saying something which she was bound to say, but

which she did not feel.

The foam capriciously receded, and Hilda, still without any effort of

her own will, stepped across the glistening, yielding sand and took

Sarah Gailey's arm. There was no resistance.

"I wanted to make a hole in the water," Sarah repeated. "But I made a

mistake. I ought to have gone to that groin over there. I knew there was

a groin near here, only it's so long since I was here. I'd forgotten

just the place."

"But what's the matter?" Hilda asked, leading her away from the sea.

She was not extremely surprised. But she was shocked into a most solemn

awe as she pressed the arm of the poor tragic woman who, but for an

accident, might have plunged off the end of the groin into water deep

enough for drowning. She did really feel humble before this creature who

had deliberately invited death; she in no way criticized her; she did

not even presume to condescend towards the hasty clumsiness of Sarah

Gailey's scheme to die. She was overwhelmed by the woman's utterly

unconscious impressiveness, which exceeded that of a criminal reprieved

on the scaffold, for the woman had dared an experience that only the

fierce and sublime courage of desperation can affront. She had a feeling

that she ought to apologize profoundly to Sarah Gailey for all that

Sarah must have suffered. And as she heard the ceaseless, cruel play of

the water amid the dark jungle of ironwork under the pier, and the soft

creeping of the foam-curves behind, and the vague stirrings of the

night-wind round about--these phenomena combined mysteriously with the

immensity of the dome above and with the baffling strangeness of the

town, and with the grandeur of the beaten woman by her side; and

communicated to Hilda a thrill that was divine in its unexampled

poignancy.

The great figure of the policeman, suspicious, was descending from the

promenade discreetly towards them. To avoid any encounter with him Hilda

guided her companion towards the pier, and they sheltered there under

the resounding floor of the pier. By the light of one of the lower lamps

Hilda could now clearly see Sarah Gailey's face. It showed no sign of

terror. It was calm enough in its worn, resigned woe. It had the girlish

look again, beneath the marks of age. Hilda could distinguish the young

girl that Sarah had once been.

"Come home, will you?" she entreated.

Sarah Gailey sighed terribly. "I give it up," she said, with weariness.

"I could never do it! I could never do it--now!"

Hilda pulled gently at her unwilling arm. She could not speak. She could

not ask her again: "What's the matter?"

"It isn't that the house is too large," Sarah Gailey went on half

meditatively; "though just think of all those stairs, and not a tap on

any of the upper floors! No! And it isn't that I'm not ready enough to

oblige him. No! I know as well as anybody there's only him between me

and starvation. No! It isn't that he doesn't consider me! No! But when

he goes and settles behind my back with those Boutwoods--" She began to

weep. "And when I can hear you and him discussing me in the next room,

and plotting against me--it's--it's more--" The tears gradually drowned

her voice, and she ceased.

"I assure you, you're quite mistaken," Hilda burst out, with passionate

and indignant persuasiveness. "We never mentioned you. He wanted to talk

to me about my money. And if you feel like that over the Boutwoods, I'm

certain he'll tell them they mustn't come."

Sarah Gailey shook her head blankly.

"I'm certain he will!" Hilda persisted. "Please--"

The other began to walk away, dragging Hilda with her. The policeman,

inspecting them from a distance, coughed and withdrew. They climbed a

flight of steps on the far side of the pier, crossed the promenade, and

went up Preston Street in silence.

"I should prefer not to be seen going in with you," said Sarah Gailey

suddenly. "It might--" she freed her arm.

"Go down the area steps," said Hilda, "and I'll wait a moment and then

go in at the front door."

Sarah Gailey hurried forward alone.

Hilda, watching her, and observing the wet footmarks which she left on

the pavement, was appalled by the sense of her own responsibility as to

the future of Sarah Gailey. Till this hour, even at her most

conscientious, she had under-estimated the seriousness of Sarah Gailey's

case. Everybody had under-estimated the seriousness of Sarah Gailey's

case.

She became aware of some one hurrying cautiously up the street on the

other side. It was George Cannon. As soon as Sarah had disappeared

within the house he crossed over.

"What's the matter?" he inquired anxiously.

"Well--"

"She hasn't been trying to drown herself, has she?"

Hilda nodded, and, speechless, moved towards the house. He turned

abruptly away.

The front door of No. 59 was still open. Hilda passed through the silent

hall, and went timorously down the steps to the basement. The gas was

still burning, and the clothes were still strewn about in Sarah Gailey's

bedroom, just as though naught had happened. Sarah stood between her two

trunks in the middle of the floor.

"Where's George?" she asked, in a harsh, perfectly ordinary voice.

"I don't think he's in the parlour," Hilda prevaricated.

"Promise me you won't tell him!"

"Of course I won't!" said Hilda kindly. "Do get into bed, and let me

make you some tea."

Sarah Gailey rushed at her and embraced her.

"I know I'm all wrong! I know it's all my own fault!" she murmured, with

plaintive, feeble contrition, crying again. "But you've no idea how I

try! If it wasn't for you--"

IV

That night Hilda, in her small bedroom at the top of the house, was

listlessly arranging, at the back of the dressing-table, the few volumes

which had clung to her, or to which she had clung, throughout the

convulsive disturbances following her mother's death. Among them was one

which she did not wish to keep, _The Girls' Week-day Book,_ and also the

whole set of Victor Hugo, which did not belong to her. George Cannon had

lent her the latter in instalments, and she had omitted to return it.

She was saying to herself that the opportunity to return it had at

length arrived, when she heard a low, conspiratorial tapping at the

door. All her skin crept as, after a second's startled hesitation, she

moved to open the door.

George Cannon, holding a candle, stood on the landing. She had not seen

him since the brief colloquy between them outside the house. Having

satisfied herself that Sarah Gailey was safe, and to a certain extent

tranquillized, for the night, she had awaited George Cannon's

reappearance a long time in vain, and had then retired upstairs.

"You aren't gone to bed!" he whispered very cautiously. Within a few

feet of them was an airless kennel where Louisa, the chambermaid, slept.

"No! I'm just--I stayed up for you I don't know how long."

"Is she all right?"

"Well--she's in bed."

"I wish you'd come to one of these other rooms," he continued to

whisper. All the sibilants in his words seemed to detach themselves,

hissing, from the rest of the sounds.

She gave a gesture of assent. He tiptoed over the traitorous boards of

the landing, and slowly turned the knob of a door in the end wall. The

door exploded like the firing of a pistol; frowning, he grimly pushed it

open. Hilda followed him, noiselessly creeping. He held the door for

her. She entered, and he shut the door on the inside. They were in a

small bedroom similar to Hilda's own; but the bed was stripped, the

square of carpet rolled, the blind undrawn, and the curtains looped up

from the floor. He put the candle on the tiny iron mantelpiece, and sat

on the bed, his hands in his pockets.

"You don't mean to say she was wanting to commit suicide?" he said,

after a short reflective silence, with his head bent but his eyes raised

peeringly to Hilda's.

The crudity of the word, 'suicide,' affected Hilda painfully.

"If you ask me," said she, standing with her back rubbing against the

small wardrobe, "she didn't know quite what she was doing; but there's

no doubt that was what she went out for."

"You overtook her? I saw you coming up from the beach."

Hilda related what had happened.

"But had you any notion--before--"

"Me? No! Why?"

"Nothing! Only the way you rushed out like that!"

"Well--it struck me all of a sudden!... You've not seen her since you

came in?"

He shook his head. "I thought I'd better keep out of the way. I thought

I'd better leave it all to you. It's appalling, simply appalling!...

Just when everything was shaping so well!"

Hilda thought, bewildered: 'Shaping so well?' With her glance she took

in the little cheerless bedroom, and herself and George Cannon within

it, overwhelmed. In imagination she saw all the other bedrooms, dark,

forlorn, and inanimate, waiting through long nights and empty days until

some human creature as pathetic as themselves should come and feebly

vitalize them into a spurious transient homeliness; and she saw George

Cannon's bedroom--the harsh bedroom of the bachelor who had never had a

home; and the bedrooms of those fearsome mummies, the Watchetts, each

bed with its grisly face on the pillow in the dark; and the kennels of

the unclean servants; and so, descending through the floors, to Sarah

Gailey's bedroom in the very earth, and the sleepless form on that bed,

beneath the whole! And the organism of the boarding-house seemed

absolutely tragic to her, compact of the stuff of sorrow itself! And yet

George Cannon had said, 'Shaping so well!'

"What's to be done?" he inquired plaintively.

"Nothing that I can see!" she said. She had a tremendous desire to

escape from the responsibility thrust on her by the situation; but she

knew that she could never escape from it; that she was immovably pinned

down by it.

"I can't see anything either," said he, quietly responsive, and speaking

now in a gentle voice. "Supposing I tell her that she can go, and that

I'll make her an allowance? What could she do, then? It would be madness

for her to live alone any more. She's the very last person who ought to

live alone. Moreover, she wouldn't accept the allowance. Well, then, she

must stay with me--here. And if she stays here she must work, otherwise

she'd never stay--not she! And she must be the mistress. She wouldn't

stand having anyone above her, or even equal with her, that's a

certainty! Besides, she's so good at her job. She hasn't got a great

deal of system, so far as I can see, but she can get the work out of the

servants without too much fuss, and she's so mighty economical in her

catering! Of course she can't get on the right side of a boarder--but

then I _can_! And that's the whole point! With me on the spot to _run_

the place, she'd be perfect--perfect! Couldn't wish for anything better!

And now she--I assure you I'm doing the best I can do for her. I do

honestly assure you! If anybody can suggest to me anything else that I

can do--I'll do it like a shot." He threw up his arms.

Hilda was touched by the benevolence of his tone. Nevertheless, it only

intensified her helpless perplexity. Sarah Gailey was inexpressibly to

be pitied, but George Cannon was not to be blamed. She had a feeling

that for any piteous disaster some one ought to be definitely blamable.

"Do you think she'll settle down?" George Cannon asked, in a new voice.

"Oh yes!" said Hilda. "I think she will. It was just a sort of--attack

she had, I think."

"She's not vexed with me?"

Hilda could not find courage to say: "She thinks you and I are plotting

against her." And yet she wondered why she should hesitate to say it.

After a pause she murmured, as casually as possible: "She doesn't like

the Boutwoods coming back."

"I knew you were going to say that!" he frowned.

"If you could manage to stop them--"

"No, no!" He interrupted--nervous, impatient. "It wouldn't do, that

wouldn't! It'd never do! A boarding-house can't be run on those lines.

It isn't that I care so much as all that about losing a couple of

boarders, and I'm not specially keen on the Boutwoods. But it wouldn't

do! It's the wrong principle. You haven't got to let customers get on

your nerves, so long as they pay and behave respectably. If I gave way,

the very first thing Sarah would do would be to find a grievance against

some other boarder, and there'd be no end to it. The fact is she wants a

grievance, she must have a grievance--whether it's the Boutwoods or

somebody else makes no matter!... Oh no!" He repeated softly, gently,

"Oh no!"

She knew that his argument was unanswerable. She was perfectly aware

that she ought to yield to it. Nevertheless, the one impulse of her

being in that moment was to fight blindly and irrationally against it.

Her instinct said: "I don't care for arguments. The Boutwoods must be

stopped from coming. If they aren't stopped, I don't know what I shall

do! I can't bear to think of that poor woman meeting them again! I can't

bear it." She drew breath sharply. Startling hot tears came into her

eyes; and she stepped forward on her left foot.

"Please!" she entreated, "please don't let them come!"

There was a silence. In the agonizing silence she felt acutely her

girlishness, her helplessness, her unreason, confronted by his strong

and shrewd masculinity. At the bottom of her soul she knew how wrong she

was. But she was ready to do anything to save Sarah Gailey from the

distress of one particular humiliation. With the whole of her volition

she wanted to win.

"Oh well!" he said. "Of course, if you take it so much to heart--"

A peculiar bright glance shot from his eyes--the old glance that at once

negligently asserted his power over her, and reassured her against his

power. Her being was suffused with gladness and pride. She had won. She

had won in defiance of reason. She had appealed and she had conquered.

And she enjoyed his glance. She gloried in it. She blushed. A spasm of

exquisite fear shot through her, and she savoured it deliciously. The

deep organic sadness of the house presented itself to her in a new

light. It was still sadness, but it was beautiful in the background. Her

sympathy for Sarah Gailey was as keen as ever, but it had a different

quality--an anguish less desolating. And the fact that a joint

responsibility for Sarah Gailey's welfare bound herself and George

Cannon together in spite of themselves--this fact seemed to her

grandiose and romantic, no longer oppressive. To be alone with him in

the secrecy of the small upper room seemed to endow her with a splendid

worldly importance. And yet all the time a scarce-heard voice was saying

clearly within her: "This appeal and this abandonment are unworthy. No

matter if this man is kind and sincere and admirable! This appeal and

this abandonment are unworthy!" But she did not care. She ignored the

voice.

"I'll tell Sarah in the morning," he said.

"Please don't!" she begged. "You might pretend later on that you've had

a letter from the Boutwoods and they can't come. If you tell her

to-morrow, she'll guess at once I've been talking to you; and you're not

supposed to know anything at all about what happened to-night. She made

me promise. But of course she didn't know that you'd found out for

yourself, you see!"

George Cannon walked away to the window, and then to the mantelpiece,

from which he took up the candle.

"I'm very much obliged to you," he said simply, putting a faint emphasis

on the last word. She knew that he meant it, without any reserves. But

in his urbane tone there was a chill tranquillity that astonished and

vaguely disappointed her.

* * * * *

BOOK IV

HER FALL

CHAPTER I

THE GOING CONCERN

I

On a Saturday afternoon of the following August, Hilda was sitting at a

book in the basement parlour of "Cannon's Boarding-house" in Preston

Street. She heard, through the open window, several pairs of feet

mounting wearily to the front door, and then the long remote tinkling of

the bell. Within the house there was no responsive sound; but from the

porch came a clearing of throats, a muttering, impatient and yet

resigned, and a vague shuffling. After a long pause the bell rang again;

and then the gas globe over Hilda's head vibrated for a moment to

footsteps in the hall, and the front door was unlatched. She could not

catch the precise question; but the reply of Louisa, the chambermaid--

haughty, scornful, and negligently pitying--was quite clear:

"Sorry, sir. We're full up. We've had to refuse several this very

day.... No! I couldn't rightly tell you where.... You might try No. 51,

'Homeleigh' as they call it; but we're full up. Good afternoon, sir, 'd

afternoon 'm."

The door banged arrogantly. The feet redescended to the pavement, and

Hilda, throwing a careless glance at the window, saw two men and a woman

pass melancholy down the hot street with their hand-luggage.

And although she condemned and despised the flunkey-souled Louisa, who

would have abased herself with sickly smiles and sweet phrases before

the applicants, if the house had needed custom; although in her mind she

was saying curtly to the mature Louisa: "It's a good thing Mr. Cannon

didn't hear you using that tone to customers, my girl;" nevertheless,

she could not help feeling somewhat as Louisa felt. It was indubitably

agreeable to hear a prosperous door closed on dusty and disappointed

holiday-makers, and to realize, in her tranquil retreat, that she was

part of a very thriving and successful concern.

II