"Yes, sir."

"I want you." He had a short way with Louisa.

After a brief delay, she came to the bedroom door.

"Run down to the King's Road and get me a cab," he said to her at the

door, as it were confidentially.

"Yes, sir." The woman was like a Christian slave.

"Here! Take the portmanteau down with you to the front door." He gave

her the portmanteau.

"Yes, sir."

She disappeared; and then there was the noise of the front door opening.

George picked up his hat and abruptly left the room. Hilda moved to and

fro nervously, stiff with having stood still so long. She wondered how

he, and how she, would comport themselves in the ordeal of adieu. In a

few moments a cab drove up--Louisa had probably encountered it on the

way. Hilda waited, tense. Then she heard the cab driving off again. She

rushed aghast to the window. She saw the roof of the disappearing cab,

and the unwieldy portmanteau on it.... He had gone! He had gone without

saying good-bye! That was his device for simplifying the situation. It

was drastic, but it was magnificent. He had gone out of the house and

out of her life. As she gazed at the dim swaying roof of the cab,

magically the roof was taken off, and she could see the ravaged and

stricken figure within, sitting grimly in the dark between the wheels

that rolled him away from her. The vision was intolerable. She moved

aside and wept passionately. How could he help doing all he had done?

She had possessed him--the memories of his embrace told her how utterly!

All that he had said was true; and this being so, who could blame his

conduct? He had only risked and lost.

Sarah Gailey suddenly appeared in the room, and shut the door like a

conspirator.

"Then--" she began, terror-struck.

And Hilda nodded, ceasing to cry.

"Oh! My poor dear!" Sarah Gailey moaned feebly, her head bobbing with

its unconscious nervous movements. The sight of her worn, saddened

features sharpened Hilda's appreciation of her own girlishness and

inexperience.

But despite the shock, despite her extreme misery, despite the anguish

and fear in her heart and the immense difficulty of the new situation

into which she was thus violently thrust, Hilda was not without

consolation. She felt none of the shame conventionally proper to a girl

deceived. On the contrary, deep within herself, she knew that the

catastrophe was a deliverance. She knew that fate had favoured her by

absolving her from the consequences of a tragic weakness and error.

These thoughts inflamed and rendered more beautiful the apprehensive

pity for the real victim--now affronted by a new danger, the menace of

the law.

* * * * *

BOOK VI

HER PUNISHMENT

CHAPTER I

EVENING AT BLEAKRIDGE

I

When Hilda's cab turned, perilously swaying, through the gate into the

dark garden of the Orgreaves, Hilda saw another cab already at the open

house door, and in the lighted porch stood figures distinguishable as

Janet and Alicia, all enwrapped for a journey, and Martha holding more

wraps. The long façade of the house was black, save for one window on

the first floor, which threw a faint radiance on the leafless branches

of elms, and thus intensified the upper mysteries of the nocturnal

garden. The arrival of the second cab caused excitement in the porch;

and Hilda, leaning out of the window into the November mist, shook with

apprehension, as her vehicle came to a halt behind the other one. She

was now to meet friends for the first time after her secret and unhappy

adventure. She feared that Janet, by some magic insight of affection,

would read at once in her face the whole history of the past year.

Janet had written to her, giving and asking for news, and urging a

visit, on the very day after the scene in which George Cannon admitted

his turpitude. Had the letter been sent a day or two sooner, reaching

Hilda on her honeymoon, she would certainly have replied to it with the

tremendous news of her marriage, and, her marriage, having been made

public in the Five Towns, her shame also would necessarily be public.

But chance had saved her from this humiliation. Nobody in the district

was aware of the marriage. By a characteristic instinct, she had been

determined not to announce it in any way until the honeymoon was over.

In answer to Janet, she had written very briefly, as was usual with her,

and said that she would come to Lane End House as soon as she could.

"Shall I tell her, or shan't I?" she had cogitated, and the decision had

been for postponement. But she strongly desired, nevertheless, to pay

the visit. She had had more than enough of Preston Street and of

Brighton, and longed to leave at any price.

And, at length, one dull morning, after George Cannon had sailed for

America, and all affairs were somehow arranged or had arranged

themselves, and Sarah Gailey was better and the autumn season smoothly

running with new servants, she had suddenly said to Sarah: "I have to go

to Bursley to-day, for a few days." And she had gone, upon the impulse,

without having previously warned Janet. Changing at Knype, she had got

into the wrong train, and had found herself at Shawport, at the far,

lower end of Bursley, instead of up at Bleakridge, close by the

Orgreaves! And there was, of course, no cab for her. But a cabman who

had brought a fare to the station, and was driving his young woman back,

had offered in a friendly way to take Hilda too. And she had sat in the

cab with the young woman, who was a paintress at Peel's great

manufactory at Shawport, and suffered from a weak chest; and they had

talked about the potters' strike which was then upheaving the district,

and the cab had overtaken a procession of thinly clad potters, wending

in the bitter mist to a mass meeting at Hanbridge; and Hilda had been

thereby much impressed and angered against all employers. And the young

woman had left the cab, half-way up Trafalgar Road, with a delicious

pink-and-white smile of adieu. And Hilda had thought how different all

this was from Brighton, and how much better and more homely and

understandable. And now she was in the garden of the Orgreaves.

Martha came peeping, to discover the explanation of this singular

concourse of cabs in the garden, and she cried joyously:

"Oh, Miss Janet, it's Miss Hilda--Miss Lessways, I mean!"

Alicia shrieked. The first cab drew forward to make room for Hilda's,

and Hilda stepped down into the glare of the porch, and was plainly

beheld by all three girls.

"Will they notice anything?" she asked herself, self-conscious, almost

trembling, as she thought of the terrific changes that had passed in her

since her previous visit.

But nobody noticed anything. Nobody observed that this was not the same

Hilda. Even in the intimacy of the affectionate kiss, for which she

lifted her veil, Janet seemed to have no suspicion whatever.

"We were just off to Hillport," said Janet. "How splendid of you to come

like this!"

"Don't let's go to Hillport!" said Alicia.

Janet hesitated, pulling down her veil.

"Of course you must go!" Hilda said positively.

"I'm afraid we shall have to go," said Janet, with reluctance. "You see,

it's the Marrions--Edie's cousins--and Edie will be there!"

"Who's Edie?"

"Why! Tom's fiancée! Surely I told you!"

"Yes," said Hilda; "only I didn't just remember the name. How nice!"

(She thought: "No sooner do I get here than I talk like they do! Fancy

me saying, 'How nice'!")

"Oh, it's all Edie nowadays!" said Alicia lightly. "We have to be

frightfully particular, or else Tom would cut our heads off. That's why

we're going in a cab! We should have walked,--shouldn't we, Janet?--only

it would never do for us to _walk_ to the Marrions' at night! 'The

Misses Lessways' carriage!'" she mimicked, and finicked about on her

toes.

Janet was precisely the same as ever, but the pig-tailed Alicia had

developed. Her childishness was now shot through with gestures and tones

of the young girl. She flushed and paled continuously, and was acutely

self-conscious and somewhat vain, but not offensively vain.

"I say, Jan," she exclaimed, "why shouldn't Hilda come with us?"

"To the Marrions'? Oh no, thanks!" said Hilda.

"But do, Hilda! I'm sure they'd be delighted!" Janet urged. "I never

thought of it."

Though she was flattered and, indeed, a little startled by the

extraordinary seriousness of Janet's insistence, Hilda shook her head.

"Where's Tom?" she inquired, to change the subject.

"Oh!" Alicia burst out again. "He's gone off _hours_ ago to escort his

ladylove from Hanbridge to Hillport."

"You wait till you're engaged, Alicia!" Janet suggested. But Janet's

eyes, too, twinkled the admission that Tom was just then providing much

innocent amusement to the family.

"You'll sleep in my room to-night, anyhow, dear," said Janet, when

Martha and Hilda's cabman had brought a trunk into the hall, and Hilda

had paid the cabman far more than his fare because he was such a

friendly young cabman and because he possessed a pulmonary sweetheart.

"Come along, dear!... Alicia, ask Swindells to wait a minute or two."

"Swindells," Alicia shouted to the original cabman, "just wait a jiff!"

"Yes, miss." The original cabman, being old and accustomed to evening-

party work in the Five Towns, knew the length of a jiff, and got down

from his seat to exercise both arms and legs. With sardonic pleasure he

watched the young cabman cut a black streak in the sodden lawn with his

near front-wheel as he clumsily turned to leave. Then Martha banged the

front door, and another servant appeared in the hall to help the trunk

on its way upstairs.

"No! I shall never be able to tell them!" thought Hilda, following the

trunk.

Alicia had scampered on in front of the trunk, to inform her parents of

the arrival. Mrs. Orgreave, Hilda learnt, was laid up with an attack of

asthma, and Osmond Orgreave was working in their bedroom.

II

Hilda stood in front of the fire in Janet's bedroom, and Janet was

unlocking her trunk.

"Why! What a pretty bodice!" said Janet, opening the trunk. She stood

up, and held forth the bodice to inspect it; and beneath Janet's cloak

Hilda could see the splendour of her evening dress. "Where did you get

it?"

"In London," Hilda was about to answer, but she took thought. "Oh!

Brighton." It was a lie.

She had a longing to say:

"No, not Brighton! What am I thinking of? I got it in London on my

honeymoon!"

What a unique sensation that one word would have caused! But she could

not find courage to utter it.

Alicia came importantly in.

"Mother's love, and you are to go into her room as soon as you're ready.

Martha will bring up a tray for you, and you'll eat there by the fire.

It's all arranged."

"And what about father's love?" Hilda demanded, with a sprightliness

that astonished herself. And she thought: "Why are these people so fond

of me? They don't even ask how it was I didn't write to tell them I was

coming. They just accept me and welcome me without questions.... No! I

can never tell them! It simply couldn't be told, here! If they find out,

so much the worse!"

"You must ask him!" Alicia answered, blushing.

"All right, Alicia. We'll be ready in a minute or two," said Janet in a

peculiar voice.

It was a gentle command to Alicia to leave her elders alone to their

adult confidences. And unwilling Alicia had to obey.

But there were no confidences. The talk, as it were, shivered on the

brink of a confidence, but never plunged.

"Does she guess?" Hilda reflected.

The conversation so halted that at length Janet was driven to the

banality of saying:

"I'm so sorry we have to go out!"

And Hilda protested with equal banality, and added: "I suppose you're

going out a lot just now?"

"Oh no!" said Janet. "We go out less and less, and we get quieter and

quieter. I mean _us_. The boys are always out, you know." She seemed

saddened. "I did think Edwin Clayhanger would come in sometimes, now

they're living next door--"

"They're in their new house, then!" said Hilda, with casualness.

"Oh, long ago! And I'm sure it's ages since he was here. I like

Maggie--his sister."

Hilda knelt to her trunk.

"Did he ever inquire after me?" she demanded, with an air of archness,

but hiding her face.

"As a matter of fact he _did_--once," said Janet, imitating Hilda's

manner.

"Well, that's something," said Hilda.

There was a sharp knock at the door.

"Hot water, miss!" cried the voice of Martha.

The next instant Martha was arranging the ewer and the can and some

clean towels on the washstand. Her face was full of joy in the

unexpected arrival. She was as excited as if Hilda had been her own

friend instead of Janet's.

"Well, dear, shall you be all right now?" said Janet. "Perhaps I ought

to be going. You may depend on it I shall get back as early as ever I

can."

The two girls kissed, with even more freedom than in the hall. It seemed

astonishing to Hilda, as her face was close to Janet's, that Janet did

not exclaim: "Something has happened to you. What is it? You are not as

you used to be! You are not like me!" She felt herself an imposter.

"Why should I tell?" Hilda reflected. "What end will it serve? It's

nobody's business but mine. _He_ is gone. He'll never come back.

Everything's over.... And if it does get about, well, they'll only

praise me for my discretion. They can't do anything else."

Still, she longed timorously to confide in Janet. And when Janet had

departed she breathed relief because the danger of confiding in Janet

was withdrawn for the moment.

III

Later, as the invalid had ordained, Hilda, having eaten, sat by the fire

in the large, quiet bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Orgreave. The latter was

enjoying a period of ease, and lay, with head raised very high on

pillows, in her own half of the broad bed. The quilt extended over her

without a crease in its expanse; the sheet was turned down with

precision, making a level white border to the quilt; and Mrs. Orgreave

did not stir; not one of her grey locks stirred; she spoke occasionally

in a low voice. On the night-table stood a Godfrey's Chloride of Ammonia

Inhaler, with its glass cylinder and triple arrangement of tubes. There

was only this, and the dark lips and pale cheeks of the patient, to

remind the beholder that not long since the bed had been a scene of

agony. Mr. Orgreave, in bright carpet slippers, and elegant wristbands

blossoming out of the sleeves of his black house-jacket, stood bending

above a huge board that was laid horizontally on trestles to the left of

the fireplace. This board was covered by a wide length of bluish

transparent paper which at intervals he pulled towards him, making

billows of paper at his feet and gradually lessening a roll of it that

lay on the floor beyond the table. A specially arranged gas-bracket with

a green shade which threw a powerful light on the paper showed that

Osmond Orgreave's habit was to work in that spot of an evening.

"Astonishing I have to do this myself, isn't it?" he observed, stooping

to roll up the accumulated length of paper about his feet.

"What is it?" Hilda asked.

"It's a full-sized detail drawing. Simple!... But do you suppose I could

trust either of my ingenious sons to get the curves of the mouldings

right?"

"You'll never be able to trust them unless you begin to trust them,"

said Mrs. Orgreave sagely from the bed.

"Ha!" ejaculated Osmond Orgreave satirically. This remark was one of his

most effective counters to argument.

"The fact is he thoroughly enjoys it, doesn't he, Mrs. Orgreave?" said

Hilda.

"You're quite right, my dear," said Mrs. Orgreave.

"Ah!" from Mr. Orgreave.

He sketched with a pencil and rubbed out, vigorously. Then his eye

caught Hilda's, and they both smiled, very content. "They'd look nice if

I took to drink instead of to work, for a change!" he murmured, pausing

to caress his handsome hair.

There was a sharp knock at the door, and into this room also the

watchful Martha entered.

"Here's the _Signal_, sir. The boy's only just brought it."

"Give it to Miss Hilda," said Mr. Orgreave, without glancing up.

"Shall I take the tray away, 'm?" Martha inquired, looking towards the

bed, the supreme centre of domestic order and authority.

"Perhaps Miss Hilda hasn't finished?"

"Oh yes, I have, thanks."

Martha rearranged the vessels and cutlery upon the tray, with quick,

expert movements of the wrists. Her gaze was carefully fixed on the

tray. Endowed though she was with rare privileges, as a faithful

retainer, she would have been shocked and shamed had her gaze,

improperly wandering, encountered the gaze of the master or the guest.

Then she picked up the tray, and, pushing the small table into its

accustomed place with a deft twist of the foot, she sailed erect and

prim out of the room, and the door primly clicked on her neat-girded

waist and flying white ribbons.

"And what am I to do with this _Signal_" Hilda asked, fingering the

white, damp paper.

"I should like you to read us about the strike," said Mrs. Orgreave.

"It's a dreadful thing."

"I should thing it was!" Hilda agreed fervently. "Oh! Do you know, on

the way from Shawport, I saw a procession of the men, and anything more

terrible--"

"It's the children I think of!" said Mrs. Orgreave softly.

"Pity the men don't!" Mr. Orgreave murmured, without raising his head.

"Don't what?" Hilda asked defiantly.

"Think of the children."

Bridling, but silent, Hilda opened the sheet, and searched round and

about its columns with the embarrassed bewilderment of one unaccustomed

to the perusal of newspapers.

"Look on page three--first column," said Mr. Orgreave.

"That's all about racing," said Hilda.

"Oh dear, dear!" from the bed.

"Well, second column."

"The Potters' Strike. The men's leaders," she read the headlines. "There

isn't much of it."

"How beautifully clearly you read!" said Mrs. Orgreave, with mild

enthusiasm, when Hilda had read the meagre half-column.

"Do I?" Hilda flushed.

"Is that all there is about it?"

"Yes. They don't seem to think it's very important that half the people

are starving!" Hilda sneered.

"Whose fault is it if they do starve?" Osmond Orgreave glanced at her

with lowered head.

"I think it's a shame!" she exclaimed.

"Do you know that the men broke the last award, not so very long since?"

said Osmond Orgreave. "What can you do with such people?"

"Broke the last award?" She was checked.

"Broke the last award! Wouldn't stick by their own agreement, their own

words. I'll just tell you. A wise young woman like you oughtn't to be

carried away by the sight of a procession on a cold night."

He smiled; and she smiled, but awkwardly.

And then he told her something of the case for the employers.

"How hard you are on the men!" she protested, when he had done.

"Not at all! Not at all!" He stretched himself, and came round his

trestles to poke the fire. "You should hear Mr. Clayhanger on the men,

if you want to know what hard is."

"Mr. Clayhanger? You mean old Mr. Clayhanger?"

"Yes."

"But he isn't a manufacturer."

"No. But he's an employer of labour."

Hilda rose uneasily from her chair, and walked towards the distant,

shadowed dressing-table.

"I should like to go over a printing-works," she said abruptly.

"Very easy," said Mr. Orgreave, resuming his work with a great expulsion

of breath.

Hilda thought: "Why did I say that?" And, to cover her constraint, she

cried out: "Oh, what a lovely book!"

A small book, bound in full purple calf, lay half hidden in a nest of

fine tissue paper on the dressing-table.

"Yes, isn't it?" said Mrs. Orgreave. "Tom brought it in to show me,

before he went this afternoon. It's a birthday present for Edie. He's

had it specially bound. I must write myself, and ask Edie to come over

and meet you. I'm sure you'd like her. She's a dear girl. I think Tom's

very fortunate."

"No, you don't," Osmond Orgreave contradicted her, with a great rustling

of paper. "You think Edie's very fortunate."

Hilda looked round, and caught the architect's smile.

"I think they're both fortunate," said Mrs. Orgreave simply. She had

almost no sense of humour. "I'm sure she's a real good girl, and clever

too."

"Clever enough to get on the right side of her future mother-in-law,

anyway!" growled Mr. Orgreave.

"Anyone might think Osmond didn't like the girl," said Mrs. Orgreave,

"from the way he talks. And yet he adores her! And it's no use him

pretending he doesn't!"

"I only adore you!" said Osmond.

"You needn't try to turn it off!" his wife murmured, beaming on Hilda.

Tears came strangely into Hilda's eyes, and she turned again to the

dressing-table. And through a blur, she saw all the objects ranged in a

long row on the white cloth that covered the rosewood; and she thought:

"All this is beautiful." And she saw the pale blinds drawn down behind

the dressing-table, and the valance at the top, and the draped curtains;

and herself darkly in the glass. And she could feel the vista of the

large, calm, comfortable room behind her, and could hear the coals

falling together in the grate, and the rustling of the architect's

paper, and Mrs. Orgreave's slight cough. And, in her mind, she could see

all the other rooms in the spacious house, and the dim, misted garden

beyond. She thought: "All this house is beautiful. It is the most

beautiful thing I have ever known, or ever shall know. I'm happy here!"

And then her imagination followed each of the children. She imagined

Marian, the eldest, and her babies, in London; and Charlie, also in

London, practising medicine; and Tom and Janet and Alicia at the party

at Hillport; and Jimmie and Johnnie seeing life at Hanbridge; while the

parents remained in tranquillity in their bedroom. All these visions

were beautiful; even the vision of Jimmie and Johnnie flourishing

billiard-cues and glasses and pipes in the smoky atmosphere of a

club--even this was beautiful; it was as simply touching as the other

visions.... And she was at home with the parents, and so extremely

intimate with them that she could nearly conceive herself a genuine

member of the house. She was in bliss. Her immediate past dropped away

from her like an illusion, and she became almost the old Hilda: she was

almost born again into innocence. Only the tragic figure of George

Cannon hung vague in the far distance of memory, and the sight thereof

constricted her heart. Utterly her passion for him had expired: she was

exquisitely sad for him; she felt towards him kindly and guiltily, as

one feels towards an old error.... And, withal, the spell of the home of

the Orgreaves took away his reality.

She was fingering the book. Its title-page ran: _The English Poems of

Richard Crashaw_. Now she had never even heard of Richard Crashaw, and

she wondered who he might be. Turning the pages, she read:

All thy old woes shall now smile on thee,

And thy pains sit bright upon thee,

All thy sorrows here shall shine,

All thy sufferings be divine:

Tears shall take comfort, and turn gems,

And wrongs repent to diadems.

And she read again, as though the words had been too lovely to be real,

and she must assure herself of them:

Tears shall take comfort, and turn gems,

And wrongs repent to diadems.

She turned back to the beginning of the poem, and read the title of it:

"A Hymn, to the name and honour of the admirable Saint Teresa--Foundress

of the Reformation of the discalced Carmelites, both men and women: a

woman for angelical height of speculation, for masculine courage of

performance more than a woman: who yet a child outran maturity, and

durst plot a martyrdom."

The prose thrilled her even more intimately than the verse. She cried

within herself: "Why have I never heard of Richard Crashaw? Why did Tom

never tell me?" She became upon the instant a devotee of this Saint

Teresa. She thought inconsequently, with a pang that was also a

reassurance: "George Cannon would never have understood this. But

everyone here understands it." And with hands enfevered, she turned the

pages again, and, after several disappointments, read:

Oh, thou undaunted daughter of desires!

By all thy dower of lights and fires;

By all the eagle in thee, all the dove:

By all thy lives and deaths of love:

By thy large draughts of intellectual day;

And by thy thirsts of love more large than they:

By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire,

By this last morning's draught of liquid fire:

By the full kingdom of that final kiss----

She ceased to read. It was as if her soul was crying out: "I also am

Teresa. This is I! This is I!"

And then the door opened, and Martha appeared once more:

"If you please, sir, Mr. Edwin Clayhanger's called."

"Oh... well, I'm nearly finished. Where is he?"

"In the breakfast-room, sir."

"Well, tell him I'll be down in a minute."

"Hilda," said Mrs. Orgreave, "will _you_ mind going and telling him?"

Hilda had replaced the book in its nest, and gone quickly back to her

chair. The entrance of the servant at that moment, to announce Edwin

Clayhanger, seemed to her startlingly dramatic. "What," she thought, "I

am just reading that and he comes!... He hasn't been here for ages, and,

on the very night that I come, he comes!"

"Certainly," she replied to Mrs. Orgreave. And she thought: "This is the

second time she has sent me with a message to Edwin Clayhanger."

Suddenly, she blushed in confusion before the mistress of the home. "Is

it possible," she asked herself,--"is it possible that Mrs. Orgreave

doesn't guess what has happened to me? Is it possible she can't see that

I'm different from what I used to be? If she knew... if they knew...

here!"

She left the room like a criminal. When she was going down the stairs,

she discovered that she held the _Signal_ in her hand. She had no

recollection of picking it up, and there was no object in taking it to

the breakfast-room! She thought: "What a state I must be in!"

CHAPTER II

A RENDEZVOUS

I

"I suppose you've never thought about me once since I've left!"

She was sitting on the sofa in the small, shelved breakfast-room, and

she shot these words at Edwin Clayhanger, who was standing near her. The

singular words were certainly uttered out of bravado: they were a

challenge to adventure. She thought: "It is madness for me to say such a

thing." But such a thing had, nevertheless, come quite glibly out of her

mouth, and she knew not why. If Edwin Clayhanger was startled, so was

she startled.

"Oh yes, I have!" he stammered--of course, she had put him out of

countenance.

She smiled, and said persuasively: "But you've never inquired after me."

"Yes, I have," he answered, with a hint of defiance, after a pause.

"Only once." She continued to smile.

"How do you know?" he demanded.

Then she told him very calmly, extinguishing the smile, that her source

of information was Janet.

"That's nothing to go by!" he exclaimed, with sudden roughness. "That's

nothing to go by--the number of _times_ I've inquired!"

II

She was silenced. She thought: "If I am thus intimate with him, it must

be because of the talk we had in the garden that night." And it seemed

to her that the scene in the garden had somehow bound them together for

ever in intimacy, that, even if they pretended to be only acquaintances,

they would constantly be breaking through the thin shell of formality

into some unguessed deep of intimacy. She regarded--surreptitiously--his

face, with a keen sense of pleasure. It was romantic, melancholy,

wistful, enigmatic--and, above all, honest. She knew that he had desired

to be an architect, and that his father had thwarted his desire, and

this fact endowed him for her with the charm of a victim. The idea that

all his life had been embittered and shadowed by the caprice of an old

man was beautiful to her in its sadness: she contemplated it with vague

bliss. At their last meeting, during the Sunday School Centenary, he had

annoyed her; he had even drawn her disdain, by his lack of initiative

and male force in the incident of the senile Sunday School teacher. He

had profoundly disappointed her. Now, she simply forgot this; the

sinister impression vanished from her mind. She recalled her first

vision of him in the lighted doorway of his father's shop. Her present

vision confirmed that sympathetic vision. She liked the feel of his

faithful hand, and the glance of his timid and yet bellicose eye. And

she reposed on his very apparent honesty as on a bed. She knew, with the

assurance of perfect faith, that he had nothing dubious to conceal, and

that no test could strain his magnanimity. And, while she so reflected,

she was thinking, too, of Janet's fine dress, and her elegance and

jewels, and wishing that she had changed the old black frock in which

she travelled. The perception that she could never be like Janet cast

her down. But, the next moment, she was saying to herself proudly: "What

does it matter? Why should I be like Janet?" And, the next moment after

that, she was saying, in another phase of her pride: "I _will_ be like

Janet!"

They began to discuss the strike. It was a topic which, during those

weeks, could not be avoided, either by the rich or by the poor.

"I suppose you're like all the rest--against the men?" she challenged

him again, inviting battle.

He replied bluntly: "What earthly right have you to suppose that I'm

like all the rest?"

She bent her head lower, so that she could only see him through the veil

of her eyelashes.

"I'm very sorry," she said, in a low, smiling, meditative voice. "I knew

all the time you weren't."

The thought shot through her mind like a lance: "It is incredible, and

horribly dangerous, that I should be sitting here with him, after all

that has happened to me, and him without the slightest suspicion!... And

yet what can stop it from coming out, sooner or later? Nothing can stop

it."

Edwin Clayhanger continued to talk of the strike, and she heard him

saying: "If you ask me, I'll tell you what I think--workmen on strike

are always in the right... you've only got to look at them in a crowd

together. They don't starve themselves for fun."

What he said thrilled her. There was nothing in it, but there was

everything in it. His generosity towards the oppressed was everything to

her. His whole attitude was utterly and mysteriously different from that

of any other man whom she had known.... And with that simple, wistful

expression of his!

They went on talking, and then, following in secret the train of her own

thoughts, she suddenly burst out:

"I never met anybody like you before." A pause ensued. "No, never!" she

added, with intense conviction.

"I might say the same of you," he replied, moved.

"Oh no! I'm nothing!" she breathed.

She glanced up, exquisitely flattered. His face was crimson. Exquisite

moment, in the familiarity of the breakfast-room, by the fire, she on

the sofa, with him standing over her, a delicious peril. The crimson

slowly paled.

III

Osmond Orgreave entered the room, quizzical, and at once began to tease

Clayhanger about the infrequency of his visits.

Turning to Hilda, he said: "He scarcely ever comes to see us, except

when you're here." It was just as if he had said: "I heard every word

you spoke before I came in, and I have read your hearts." Both Hilda and

Clayhanger were disconcerted--Clayhanger extremely so.

"Steady on!" he protested uncouthly. And then, with the most naïve

ingenuousness: "Mrs. Orgreave better?"

But Osmond Orgreave was not in a merciful mood. A moment later he was

saying:

"Has she told you she wants to go over a printing-works?"

"No," Clayhanger answered, with interest. "But I shall be very pleased

to show her over ours, any time."

Hilda struck into silence, made no response, and instantly Clayhanger

finished, in another tone: "Look here, I must be off. I only slipped in

for a minute--really."

And he went, declining Mr. Orgreave's request to give a date for his

next call. The bang of the front door resounded through the house.

Mr. Orgreave, having taken Clayhanger to the front door, did not return

immediately into the breakfast-room. Hilda jumped up from the sofa,

hesitant. She was disappointed; she was even resentful; assuredly she

was humiliated. "Oh no!" she thought. "He's weak and afraid.... I dare

say he went off because Janet wasn't here." She heard through the

half-open door Mr. Orgreave's slippers on the tiles of the passage

leading to the stairs.

Martha came into the room with a delighted, curious smile.

"If you please, miss, could you come into the hall a minute?... Some one

to speak to you."

Hilda blushed silently, and obeyed. Clayhanger was standing in the chill

hall, hat in hand. Her heart jumped.

"When will you come to look over our works?" he muttered rapidly and

very nervously, and yet with a dictatorial gruffness. "To-morrow? I

should like you to come."

He had put an enchantment upon her by this marvellous return. And to

conceal from him what he had done, she frowned and kept silent.

"What time?" she asked suddenly.

"Any time." His eagerness was thrilling.

"Oh no! You must fix the time."

"Say between half-past six and a quarter to seven. That do?"

She nodded. Their hands met. He said adieu. He pulled open the heavy

door. She saw his back for an instant against the pale gloom of the

garden, in which vapour was curling. And then she had shut the door, and

was standing alone in the confined hall. A miracle had occurred, and it

intimidated her. And, amid her wondrous fears, she was steeped in the

unique sense of adventure. "This morning I was in Brighton," she

thought. "Half an hour ago I had no notion of seeing him. And now!...

And to-morrow?" The tragic sequel to one adventure had not impaired her

instinct for experience. On the contrary, it had strengthened it. The

very failure of the one excited her towards another. The zest of living

was reborn in her. The morrow beckoned her, golden and miraculous. The

faculty of men and women to create their own lives seemed divine, and

the conception of it enfevered her.

CHAPTER III

AT THE WORKS

I

That night, late, Hilda and Janet shut themselves up in the bedroom

together. The door clicked softly under Janet's gentle push, and they

were as safe from invasion as if the door had been of iron, and locked

and double-locked and barred with bars of iron. Alicia alone might have

disturbed them, but Alicia was asleep. Hilda had a sense of entire

security in this room such as she had never had since she drove away

from Lessways Street, Turnhill, early one morning, with Florrie Bagster

in a cab. It was not that there had been the least real fear of any room

of hers being attacked: it was that this room seemed to have been

rendered mystically inviolate by long years of Janet's occupation.

"Janet's bedroom!"--the phrase had a sanction which could not possibly

have attached itself to, for instance, "Hilda's bedroom!" Nor even to

"mother's bedroom"--mother's bedroom being indeed at the mercy of any

profane and marauding member of the family, a sort of market-place for

the transaction of affairs.

And, further, Janet's bedroom was distinguished and made delicious for

Hilda by its fire. It happened to be one of the very few bedrooms in the

Five Towns at that date with a fire, as a regular feature of it. Mrs.

Orgreave had a fire in the parental bedroom, when she could not

reasonably do without it, but Osmond Orgreave suffered the fire rather

than enjoyed it. As for Tom, though of a shivery disposition, he would

have dithered to death before admitting that a bedroom fire might

increase his comfort. Johnnie and Jimmie genuinely liked to be cold in

their bedroom. Alicia pined for a fire, but Mrs. Orgreave, imitating the

contrariety of fate, forbade a fire to Alicia, and one consequence of

this was that Alicia sometimes undressed in Janet's bedroom, making

afterwards a dash for the Pole. The idea of a bedroom was always, during

nearly half the year, associated with the idea of discomfort in Hilda's

mind. And now, in Janet's bedroom, impressed as she was by the

strangeness of the fact that the prime reason for hurrying at top-speed

into bed had been abolished, she yet positively could not linger, the

force of habit being too strong for her. And she was in bed, despite

efforts to dawdle, while Janet was still brushing her hair.

As she lay and watched Janet's complex unrobing, she acquired knowledge.

And once more, she found herself desiring to be like Janet--not only in

appearance, but in soft manner and tone. She thought: "How shall I dress

to-morrow afternoon?" All the operations of her brain related themselves

somehow to to-morrow afternoon. The anticipation of the visit to the

printing-works burned in her heart like a steady lamp that shone through

the brief, cloudy interests of the moment. And Edwin Clayhanger was

precisely the topic which Janet seemed, as it were, expressly to avoid.

Janet inquired concerning life at Brighton and the health of Sarah

Gailey; Janet even mentioned George Cannon; Hilda steadied her voice in

replying, though she was not really apprehensive, for Janet's questions,

like the questions of the whole family, were invariably discreet and

respectful of the individual's privacy. But of Edwin Clayhanger, whose

visit nevertheless had been recounted to her in the drawing-room on her

return, Janet said not a word.

And then, when she had extinguished the gas, and the oriental sleeve of

her silk nightgown delicately brushed Hilda's face, as she got into bed,

she remarked:

"Strange that Edwin Clayhanger should call just to-night!"

Hilda's cheek warmed.

"He asked me to go and look over their printing-works to-morrow," said

she quickly.

Janet was taken aback.

"Really!" she exclaimed, unmistakably startled. She spoke a second too

soon. If she had delayed only one second, she might have concealed from

Hilda that which Hilda had most plainly perceived, to wit, anxiety and

jealousy. Yes, jealousy, in this adorably benevolent creature's tone.

Hilda's interest in to-morrow afternoon was intensified.

"Shall you be able to come?" she asked.

"What time?"

"He said about half-past six, or a quarter to seven."

"I can't," said Janet dreamily, "because of that Musical Society

meeting--you know--I told you, didn't I?"

In the faint light of the dying fire, Hilda made out little by little

the mysterious, pale heaps of clothes, and all the details of the room

strewn and disordered by reason of an additional occupant. The adventure

was now of infinite complexity, and its complexity seemed to be

symbolized by the suggestive feminine mysteriousness of what she saw and

what she divined in the darkness of the chamber. She thought: "I am here

on false pretences. I ought to tell my secret. That would be fair--I

have no right to intrude between her and him." But she instinctively and

powerfully resisted such ideas; with firmness she put them away, and

yielded herself with a more exquisite apprehension to the anticipation

of to-morrow.

II

The order of meals at Lane End was somewhat peculiar even then, and

would now be almost unique. It was partly the natural expression of an

instinctive and justified feeling of superiority, and partly due to a

discretion which forbade the family to scandalize the professional

classes of the district by dining at night. Dinner occurred in the

middle of the day, and about nine in the evening was an informal but

copious supper. Between those two meals, there came a tea which was

neither high or low, and whose hour, six o'clock in theory, depended to

a certain extent, in practice, on Mr. Orgreave's arrival from the

office. Not seldom Mr. Orgreave was late; occasionally he was very late.

The kitchen waited to infuse the tea until a command came from some

woman, old or young, who attentively watched a window for a particular

swinging of the long gate at the end of the garden, or listened, when it

was dark, for the bang of the gate and a particular crunching of gravel.

On this Tuesday evening, Osmond Orgreave was very late, and the movement

of the household was less smooth than usual, owing to Mrs. Orgreave's

illness and to the absence of Janet at Hillport in connection with the

projected Hillport Choral Society. (Had Janet been warned of Hilda's

visit, she would not have accepted an invitation to a tea at Hillport as

a preliminary to the meeting of the provisional committee.) Hilda was in

a state of acute distress. The appointment with Edwin Clayhanger seemed

to be absolutely sacred to her; to be late for it would amount to a

crime: to miss it altogether would be a calamity inconceivable. The

fingers of all the clocks in the house were revolving with the most

extraordinary rapidity--she was helpless.

She was helpless, because she had said nothing all day of her

appointment, and because Janet had not mentioned it either. Janet might

have said before leaving: "Tea had better not wait too long--Hilda has

to be down at Clayhanger's at half-past six." Janet's silence impressed

Hilda: it was not merely strange--it was formidable: it affected the

whole day. Hilda thought: "Is she determined not to speak of it unless I

do?" Immediately Janet was gone, Hilda had run up to the bedroom. She

was minded to change the black frock which she had been wearing, and

which she hated, and to put on another skirt and bodice that Janet had

praised. She longed to beautify herself, and yet she was still

hesitating about it at half-past five in the evening as she had

hesitated at eight in the morning. In the end she had decided not to

change, an account of the rain. But the rain had naught to do with her

decision. She would not change, because she was too proud to change. She

would go just as she was! She could not accept the assistance of an

attractive bodice!... Unfeminine, perhaps, but womanly.

At twenty-five minutes to seven, she went into Mrs. Orgreave's bedroom,

rather like a child, and also rather like an adult creature in a

distracting crisis. Tom Orgreave and Alicia were filling the entire

house with the stormy noise of a piano duet based upon Rossini's

_William Tell_.

"I think I'll miss tea, Mrs. Orgreave," she said. "Edwin Clayhanger

invited me to go over the printing-works at half-past six, and it's

twenty-five minutes to seven now."

"Oh, but, my dear," cried Mrs. Orgreave, "why ever didn't you tell them

downstairs, or let me know earlier?"

And she pulled at the bell-rope that overhung the head of the bed. Not a

trace of teasing archness in her manner! Hilda's appointment might have

been of the most serious business interest, for anything Mrs. Orgreave's

demeanor indicated to the contrary. Hilda stood mute and constrained.

"You run down and tell them to make tea at once, dear. I can't let you

go without anything at all. I wonder what can have kept Osmond."

Almost at the same moment, Osmond Orgreave entered the bedroom. His

arrival had been unnoticed amid the tremendous resounding of the duet.

"Oh, Osmond," said his wife. "Wherever have you been so late? Hilda

wants to go--Edwin Clayhanger has invited her to go over the works."

Hilda, trembling at the door, more than half expected Mr. Orgreave to

say: "You mean, she's invited herself." But Osmond received the

information with exactly the same polite, apologetic seriousness as his

wife, and, reassured, Hilda departed from the room.

Ten minutes later, veiled and cloaked, she stepped out alone into the

garden. And instantly her torment was assuaged, and she was happy. She

waited at the corner of the street for the steam-car. But, when the car

came thundering down, it was crammed to the step; with a melancholy

gesture, the driver declined her signal. She set off down Trafalgar Road

in the mist and the rain, glad that she had been compelled to walk. It

seemed to her that she was on a secret and mystic errand. This was not

surprising. The remarkable thing was that all the hurrying people she

met seemed also each of them to be on a secret and mystic errand. The

shining wet pavement was dotted with dark figures, suggestive and

enigmatic, who glided over a floor that was pierced by perpendicular

reflections.

III

In the Clayhanger shop, agitated and scarcely aware of what she did, she

could, nevertheless, hear her voice greeting Edwin Clayhanger in firm,

calm tones; and she soon perceived very clearly that he was even more

acutely nervous than herself: which perception helped to restore her

confidence, while, at the same time, it filled her with bliss. The

young, fair man, with his awkward and constrained movements, took

possession of her umbrella, and then suggested that she should remove

her mackintosh. She obeyed, timid and glad. She stripped off her

mackintosh, as though she were stripping off her modesty, and stood

before him revealed. To complete the sacrifice, she raised her veil, and

smiled up at him, as it were, asking: "What next?" Then a fat, untidy

old man appeared in the doorway of a cubicle within the shop, and Edwin

Clayhanger blushed.

"Father, this is Miss Lessways. Miss Lessways, my father....

She's--she's come to look over the place."

"How-d'ye-do, miss?"

She shook hands with the tyrannic father, who was, however, despite his

reputation, apparently just as nervous as the son. There followed a most

sinister moment of silence. And, at last, the shop door opened, and the

father turned to greet a customer. Hilda thought: "Suppose this fat old

man is one day my father-in-law? Is it possible to imagine him as a

father-in-law?" And she had a transient gleam of curiosity concerning

the characters of the two Clayhanger sisters, and recalled with

satisfaction that Janet liked the elder one.

Edwin Clayhanger, muttering, pointed to an aperture in the counter, and

immediately she was going through it with him, and through a door at the

back of the shop. They were alone, facing a rain-soaked yard. Edwin

Clayhanger sneezed violently.

"It keeps on raining," Edwin murmured. "Better to have kept umbrella!

However--"

He glanced at her inquiringly and invitingly. They ran side by side

across the yard to a roofed flight of steps that led to the printing-

office. For a couple of seconds, the rain wet them, and then they were

under cover again. It seemed to Hilda that they had escaped from the

shop like fox-terriers--like two friendly dogs from the surveillance of

an incalculable and dangerous old man. She felt a comfortable, friendly

confidence in Edwin Clayhanger--a tranquil sentiment such as she had

never experienced for George Cannon. After more than a year--and what a

period of unforeseen happenings!--she thought again: "I _like him_." Not

love, she thought, but liking! She liked being with him. She liked the

sensation of putting confidence in him. She liked his youth, and her

own. She was sorry because he had a cold and was not taking care of

it.... Now they were climbing a sombre creaking staircase towards a new

and remote world that was separated from the common world just quitted

by the adventurous passage of the rainy yard.... And now they were amid

oily odours in a large raftered workshop, full of machines.... The

printing-works!... An enormous but very deferential man saluted them

with majestic solemnity. He was the foreman, and labelled by his white

apron as an artisan, but his gigantic bulk--he would have outweighed the

pair of them--and his age set him somehow over them, so that they were a

couple of striplings in his vasty presence. When Edwin Clayhanger

employed, as it were, daringly, the accents of a master to this

intimidating fellow, Hilda thrilled with pleasure at the piquancy of the

spectacle, and she was admiringly proud of Edwin. The foreman's immense

voice, explaining machines and tools, caused physical vibrations in her.

But she understood nothing of what he said--nothing whatever. She was in

a dream of oily odours and monstrous iron constructions, dominated by

the grand foreman: and Edwin was in the dream. She began talking quite

wildly of the four-hundredth anniversary of the inventor of printing, of

which she had read in Cranswick's History... at Brighton! Brighton had

sunk away over the verge of memory. Even Lane End House was lost

somewhere in the vague past. All her previous life had faded. She

reflected guiltily: "He's bound to think I've been reading about

printing because I was interested in _him_ I don't care! I hope he does

think it!" She heard a suggestion that, as it was too late that night to

see the largest machine in motion, she might call the next afternoon.

She at once promised to come.... She impatiently desired now to leave

the room where they were, and to see something else. And then she feared

lest this might be all there was to see.... Edwin Clayhanger was edging

towards the door.... They were alone on the stairway again.... The

foreman had bowed at the top like a chamberlain.... She gathered, with

delicious anticipation, that other and still more recondite interiors

awaited their visit.

IV

They were in an attic which was used for the storage of reams upon reams

of paper. By the light of a candle in a tin candlestick, they had passed

alone together through corridors and up flights of stairs at the back of

the shop. She had seen everything that was connected with the enterprise

of steam-printing, and now they were at the top of the old house and at

the end of the excursion.

"I used to work here," said Edwin Clayhanger.

She inquired about the work.

"Well," he drawled, "reading and writing, you know--at that very table."

In the aperture of the window, amid piles of paper, stood a rickety old

table, covered with dust.

"But there's no fireplace," she said, glancing round the room, and then

directly at him.

"I know."

"But how did you do in winter?" she eagerly appealed.

And he replied shortly, and with a slight charming affectation of pride:

"I did without."

Her throat tightened, and she could feel the tears suddenly swim in her

eyes. She was not touched by the vision of his hardships. It was the

thought of all his youth that exquisitely saddened her--or all the years

which were and would be for ever hidden from her. She knew that she

alone of all human beings was gifted with the power to understand and

fully sympathize with him. And so she grieved over the long wilderness

of time during which he had been uncomprehended. She wanted, by some

immense effort of tenderness, to recompense him for all that he had

suffered. And she had a divine curiosity concerning the whole of his

past life. She had never had this curiosity in relation to George

Cannon--she had only wondered about his affairs with other women. Nor

had George Cannon ever evoked the tenderness which sprang up in her from

some secret and inexhaustible source at the mere sight of Edwin

Clayhanger's wistful smile. Still, in that moment, standing close to

Edwin in the high solitude of the shadowed attic, the souvenir of George

Cannon gripped her painfully. She thought: "He loves me, and he is

ruined, and he will never see me again! And I am here, bursting with

hope renewed, and dizzy with joy!" And she pictured Janet, too, wearying

herself at a committee meeting. And she thought, "And here am I...!" Her

bliss was tragic.

"I think I ought to be going," she said softly.

They re-threaded the corridors, and in each lower room, as they passed,

Edwin Clayhanger extinguished the gas which he had lit there on the way

up, and Hilda waited for him. And then they were back in the crude glare

of the shop. The fat, untidy old man was not visible. Edwin helped her

with the mackintosh, and she liked him for the awkwardness of his

efforts in doing so.

At the door, she urged him not to come out, and referred to his cold.

"This isn't the end of winter, it's the beginning," she warned him.

Nobody else, she knew, would watch over him.

But he insisted on coming out.

They arranged a rendezvous for three o'clock on the morrow, and then

they shook hands.

"Now, do go in," she entreated, as she hurried away. The rain had

ceased. She fled triumphantly up Trafalgar Road, with her secret,

guarding it. "He's in love with me!" If a scientific truth is a

statement of which the contrary is inconceivable, then it was a

scientific truth for her that she and Edwin must come together. She

simply would not and could not conceive the future without him.... And

this so soon, so precipitately soon, after her misfortune! But it was

her very misfortune which pushed her violently forward. Her life had

been convulsed and overthrown by the hazard of destiny, and she could

have no peace now until she had repaired and re-established it. At no

matter what risk, the thing must be accomplished quickly... quickly.

CHAPTER IV

THE CALL FROM BRIGHTON

I

On the next afternoon, at a quarter-past two, Hilda and Janet were

sitting together in the breakfast-room. The house was still. The men

were either theoretically or practically at business. Alicia was at

school. Mrs. Orgreave lay upstairs. The servants had cleared away and

washed up the dinner-things, and had dined themselves. The kitchen had

been cleansed and put in order, and every fire replenished. Two of the

servants were in their own chambers, enfranchised for an hour: one only

remained on duty. All six women had the feeling, which comes to most

women at a certain moment in each day, that life had, for a time,

deteriorated into the purposeless and the futile; and that it waited, as

in a trance, until some external masculine event, expected or

unforeseen, should renew its virtue and its energy.

Hilda was in half a mind to tell Janet the history of the past year. She

had wakened up in the night, and perceived with dreadful clearness that

trouble lay in front of her. The relations between herself and Edwin

Clayhanger were developing with the most dizzy rapidity, and in a

direction which she desired, but it would be impossible for her, if she

fostered the relations, to continue to keep Edwin in ignorance of the

fact that, having been known for about a fortnight as Mrs. George

Cannon, she was not what he supposed her to be. With imagination on

fire, she was anticipating the rendezvous at three o'clock. She reached

forward to it in ecstasy; but she might not enjoy it, save at the price

which her conscience exacted. She had to say to Edwin Clayhanger that

she had been the victim of a bigamist. Could she say it to him? She had

not been able to say it even to Janet Orgreave.... She would say it

first to Janet. There, in the breakfast-room, she would say it. If it

killed her to say it, she would say it. She must at any cost be able to

respect herself, and, as matters stood, she could not respect herself.

Janet, on her knees, was idly arranging books on one of the lower

bookshelves. In sheer nervousness, Hilda also dropped to her knees on

the hearthrug, and began to worry the fire with the poker.

"I say, Janet," she began.

"Yes?" Janet did not look up.

Hilda, her heart beating, thought, with affrighted swiftness: "Why

should I tell her? It is no business of anybody's except _his_. I will

tell him, and him alone, and then act according to his wishes. After

all, I am not to blame. I am quite innocent. But I won't tell him

to-day. Not to-day! I must be more sure. It would be ridiculous to tell

him to-day. If I told him it would be almost like inviting a proposal!

But when the proper time comes,--then I will tell him, and he will

understand! He is bound to understand perfectly. He's in love with me."

She dared not tell Janet. In that abode of joyful and successful

propriety the words would not form themselves. And the argument that she

was not to blame carried no weight whatever. She--she, Hilda--lacked

courage to be candid.... This was extremely disconcerting to her

self-esteem.... And even with Edwin Clayhanger she wished to temporize.

She longed for nothing so much as to see him; and yet she feared to meet

him.

"Yes?" Janet repeated.

A bell rang faintly in the distance of the house.

Hilda, suddenly choosing a course, said: "I forgot to tell you. I'm

supposed to be going down to Clayhanger's at three to see a machine at

work--it was too late last night. Do come with me. I hate going by

myself." It was true: in that instant she did hate going by herself. She

thought, knowing Janet to be at liberty and never dreaming that she

would refuse: "I am saved--for the present."

But Janet answered self-consciously:

"I don't think I must leave mother. You'll be perfectly all right by

yourself."

Hilda impetuously turned her head; their glances met for an instant, in

suspicion, challenge, animosity. They had an immense mutual admiration

the one for the other, these two; and yet now they were estranged.

Esteem was nullified by instinct. Hilda thought with positive savagery:

"It's all fiddlesticks about not leaving her mother! She's simply on her

high horse!" The whole colour of existence was changed.

II

Martha entered the room. Neither of the girls moved. Beneath the

deferential servant in Martha was a human girl, making a third in the

room, who familiarly divined the moods of the other two and judged them

as an equal; and the other two knew it, and therefore did not trouble to

be spectacular in front of her.

"A letter, miss," said Martha, approaching Hilda. "The old postman says

it was insufficiently addressed, or it 'ud ha' been here by first post."

"Was that the postman who rang just now?" asked Janet.

"Yes, miss."

Hilda took the letter with apprehension, as she recognized the

down-slanting calligraphy of Sarah Gailey. Yes, the address was

imperfect--"Miss Lessways, c/o Osmond Orgreave, Esq., Lane End House,

Knype-on-Trent," instead of "Bursley, Knype-on-Trent." On the back of

the envelope had been written in pencil by an official, "Try Bursley."

Sarah Gailey could not now be trusted to address an envelope correctly.

The mere handwriting seemed to announce misfortune.

"From poor Sarah," Hilda murmured, with false, good-tempered

tranquillity. "I wonder what sort of trouble she thinks she's got into!"

She thought: "If only I was married, I should be free of responsibility

about Sarah. I should have to think of my husband first. But nothing

else can free me. Unless I marry, I'm tied to Sarah Gailey as long as

she lives.... And why?... I should like to know!" The answer was simple:

habit had shackled her to Sarah Gailey.

She opened the letter by the flickering firelight, which was stronger on

the hearthrug than the light of the dim November day. It began: "Dearest

Hilda, I write at once to tell you that a lawyer called here this

afternoon to inquire about your Hotel Continental shares. He told me

there was going to be some difficulty with the Company, and, unless the

independent shareholders formed a strong local committee to look after

things, the trouble might be serious. He wanted to know if you would

support a committee at the meeting. I gave him your address, and he's

going to write to you. But I thought I would write to you as well. His

name is Eustace Broughton, 124 East Street, in case. I do hope nothing

will go wrong. It is like what must be, I am sure! It has been

impossible for me to keep the charwoman. So I sent her off this morning.

Can you remember the address of that Mrs. Catkin?..." Sarah Gailey

continued to discuss boarding-house affairs, until she arrived at the

end of the fourth page, and then, in a few cramped words, she finished

with expressions of love.

"Oh dear!" Hilda exclaimed, rising, "I must write some letters at once."

She sighed, as if in tedium. The fact that her fortune was vaguely

threatened did not cause her anxiety: she scarcely realized it. What she

saw was an opportunity to evade the immediate meeting with Edwin--the

meeting which, a few minutes earlier, she had desired beyond everything.

"When? Now?"

Hilda nodded.

"But what about Master Edwin?" Janet asked, trying to be gay.

"I shan't be able to go," said Hilda carelessly, at the door. "It's of

no consequence."

"Martha has to go down town. If you like, she could call in there, and

just tell him."

It was a reproof, from the young woman who always so thoughtfully

studied the feelings of everybody.

"I'll just write a little note, then, thanks!" Hilda returned calmly,

triumphing after all over Janet's superiority, and thinking, "Janet can

be very peculiar, Janet can!"

III

For more than twenty hours, Hilda was profoundly miserable. Towards the

evening of the same day, she had made herself quite sure that Edwin

Clayhanger would call that night. Her hope persisted until half-past

nine: it then began to fade, and, at ten o'clock, was extinct. His name

had been mentioned by nobody. She went to bed. Having now a room of her

own, which overlooked the Clayhanger garden and house, she gazed forth,

and, in the dark, beheld, with the most anxious sensations, the building

in which Edwin existed and was concealed. "He is there," she said. "He

is active about something at this very instant--perhaps he is reading.

He is close by. If I shouted, he might hear...." And yet she was utterly

cut off from him. Again, in the late dawn, she saw the same building,

pale and clear, but just as secretive and enigmatic as in the night. "He

is asleep yet," she thought. "Why did he not call? Is he hurt? Is he

proud?"

She despaired, because she could devise no means of resuming

communication with him.

Immediately after dinner on the next day, she went with Janet to Janet's

room, to examine a new winter cloak which had been delivered. And, while

Janet was trying it on, and posing coquettishly and yet without

affectation in front of the glass, and while Hilda was reflecting

jealously, "Why am I not like her? I know infinitely more than she

knows. I am a woman, and she is a girl, and yet she seems far more a

woman than I--" Alicia, contrary to all rules, took the room by storm.

Alicia's excuse and salvation lay in a telegram, which she held in her

hand.

"For you, Hilda!" cried the child, excited. "I'm just off to school."

Hilda reached to take the offered telegram, but her hand wavered around

it instead of seizing it. Her eye fastened on a circular portion of the

wall-paper pattern, and she felt that the whole room was revolving about

her. Then she saw Janet's face transformed by an expression of alarm.

"Are you ill, Hilda?" Janet demanded. "Sit down."

"You're frightfully pale," said Alicia eagerly.

Hilda sat down.

"No, no," she said. "It was the pattern of the wall-paper that made me

feel dizzy." And, for the moment, she did honestly believe that the

pattern of the wall-paper had, in some inexplicable manner, upset her.

"I'm all right now."

The dizziness passed as suddenly as it had supervened. Janet held some

ineffectual salts to her nose.

"I'm perfectly well," insisted Hilda.

"How funny!" Alicia grinned.

Calmly Hilda opened the telegram, which read: "Please come at once.--

GAILEY."

She gave the telegram to Janet in silence.

"What can be the matter?" Janet asked, with unreserved, loving

solicitude. The cloud which had hung between the two enthusiastic

friends was dissipated in a flash.

"I haven't an idea," said Hilda, touched. "Unless it's those shares!"

She had briefly told Janet about the Hotel Continental Limited.

"Shall you go?"

Hilda nodded. Never again would she ignore an urgent telegram, though

she did not believe that this telegram had any real importance. She

attributed it to Sarah's increasing incompetence and hysterical

foolishness.

"I wonder whether I can get on to Brighton to-night if I take the six

train?" Hilda asked, and to herself: "Can it have anything to do with

George?"

Alicia, endowed with authority, went in search of a Bradshaw. But the

quest was fruitless. In the Five Towns the local time-table, showing the

connections with London, suffices for the citizen, and the breast-pocket

of no citizen is complete without it.

"Clayhangers are bound to have a Bradshaw," cried Alicia, breathless

with running about the house.

"Of course they are," Janet agreed.

"I'll walk down there now," said Hilda, with extraordinary promptitude.

"It won't take five minutes."

"I'd go," said Alicia, "only I should be late for school."

"Shall I send some one down?" Janet suggested. "You might be taken dizzy

again."

"No, thanks," Hilda replied deliberately. "I'll go--myself. There's

nothing wrong with me at all."

"You'll have to be sharp over it," said Alicia pertly. "Don't forget

it's Thursday. They shut up at two, and it's not far off two now."

"I'm going this very minute," said Hilda.

"And I'm going this very second!" Alicia retorted.

They all three left Janet's bedroom; the new cloak cast over a chair-

back, was degraded into a tedious banality--and ignored.

In less than a minute Hilda, hatted and jacketed and partially gloved,

was crossing the garden. She felt most miraculously happy and hopeful,

and she was full of irrational gratitude to Alicia, as though Alicia

were a benefactor! The change in her mood seemed magic in its swiftness.

If Janet, with calm, cryptic face, had not been watching her from the

doorway, she might have danced on the gravel.

CHAPTER V

THURSDAY AFTERNOON

I

She was walking with Edwin Clayhanger up Duck Bank on the way to Bursley

railway station. A simple errand and promenade,--and yet she felt

herself to be steeped in the romance of an adventure! The adventure had

surprisingly followed upon the discovery that Alicia had been quite

wrong. "Clayhangers are bound to have a Bradshaw," the confident Alicia

had said. But Clayhangers happened not to have a Bradshaw. Edwin was

alone in the stationery shop, save for the assistant. He said that his

father was indisposed. And whereas the news that Clayhangers had no

Bradshaw left Hilda perfectly indifferent, the news that old Darius

Clayhanger was indisposed and absent produced in her a definite feeling

of gladness. Edwin had decided that the most likely place to search for

a Bradshaw was the station, and he had offered to escort her to the

station. Nothing could have been more natural, and at the same time more

miraculous.

The sun was palely shining upon dry, clean pavements and upon roads

juicy with black mud. And in the sunshine Hilda was very happy. It was

nothing to her that she was in quest of a Bradshaw because she had just

received an ominous telegram urgently summoning her to Brighton. She was

obliviously happy. Every phenomenon that attracted her notice

contributed to her felicity. Thus she took an eager joy in the sun. And

a marked improvement in Edwin's cold really delighted her. She was

dominated by the intimate conviction: "He loves me!" Which conviction

excited her dormant pride, and made her straighten her shoulders. She

benevolently condescended towards Janet. After all Janet, with every

circumstance in her favour, had not known how to conquer Edwin

Clayhanger. After all she, Hilda, possessed some mysterious

characteristic more potent than the elegance and the goodness of Janet

Orgreave. She scorned her former self-deprecations, and reproached her

own lack of faith: "I am I!" That was the summary of her mood. As for

her attitude to Edwin Clayhanger, she could not explain it. Why did she

like him and like being with him? He was not brilliant, nor masterful,

nor handsome, nor well dressed, nor in any manner imposing. On the

contrary, he was awkward and apologetic, and not a bit spectacular. Only

the wistful gaze of his eyes, and his honest smile, and the appeal of

his gestures...! A puzzling affair, an affair perfectly incomprehensible

and enchanting.

They walked side by side in silence.

When they had turned into Moorthorne Road, half-way up whose slope lies

the station, she asked a question about a large wooden building from

whose interior came wild sounds of shouting and cheering, and learnt

that the potters on strike were holding a meeting in the town theatre.

At the open outer doors was a crowd of starving, shivering, dirty,

ragged children, who romped and cursed, or stood unnaturally meditative

in the rich mud, like fakirs fulfilling a vow. Hilda's throat was

constricted by the sight. Pain and joy ran together in her, burning

exquisitely; and she had a glimpse, obscure, of the mystical beauty of

the children's suffering.

"I'd no idea there was a theatre in Bursley," she remarked idly, driven

into a banality by the press of her sensations.

"They used to call it the Blood Tub," he replied. "Melodrama and murder

and gore--you know."

She exclaimed in horror. "Why are people like that in the Five Towns?"

"It's our form of poetry, I suppose," said he.

She started, sensitively. It seemed to her that she had never understood

the secret inner spirit of the Five Towns, and that by a single phrase

he had made her understand it.... 'Our form of poetry'! Who but he could

have said a thing at once so illuminating and so simple?

Apparently perplexed by the obvious effect on her of his remark, he

said:

"But you belong to the Five Towns, don't you?"

She answered quietly that she did. But her heart was saying: "I do

_now_. You have initiated me. I never felt the Five Towns before. You

have made me feel them."

II

At the station the head porter received their inquiry for a Bradshaw

with a dull stare and a shake of the head. No such thing had ever been

asked for at Bursley Station before, and the man's imagination could not

go beyond the soiled time-tables loosely pinned and pasted up on the

walls of the booking-office. Hilda suggested that the ticket-clerk

should be interrogated, but the aperture of communication with him was

shut. She saw Edwin Clayhanger brace himself and rap on the wood; and

instead of deploring his diffidence she liked it and found it full of

charm. The partition clicked aside, and the ticket-clerk's peering,

suspicious head showed in its place, mutely demanding a reason for this

extraordinary disturbance of the dream in which the station slumbered

between two half-hourly trains. With a characteristic peculiar slanting

motion Edwin nodded.

"Oh, how-d'ye-do, Mr. Brooks?" said Edwin hastily, as if startled by the

sudden inexplicable apparition of the head.

But the ticket-clerk had no Bradshaw either. He considered it probable,

however, that the stationmaster would have a Bradshaw. Edwin had to

brace himself again, for an assault upon the fastness of the

stationmaster.

And in the incredibly small and incredibly dirty fastness of the

stationmaster, they indeed found a Bradshaw. Hilda precipitately took it

and opened it on the stationmaster's table. She looked for Brighton in

it as she might have looked for a particular individual in a city. Then

Edwin was bending over it, with his ear close to her ear, and the sleeve

of his overcoat touching her sleeve. She was physically aware of him,

for the first time. She thought, disconcerted: "But he is an utter

stranger to me! What do I know of him?" And then she thought: "For more

than a year he must have carried my image in his heart!"

"Here," said Edwin brusquely, and with a certain superiority, "you might

just let me have a look at it myself."

She yielded, tacitly admitting that a woman was no match for Bradshaw.

After a few moments' frowning Edwin said:

"Yes, there's a train to Brighton at eleven-thirty to-night!"

"May I look?"

"Certainly," said he, subtly condescending.

She examined the page, with a serious deliberation.

"But what does this '_f_' mean?" she asked. "Did you notice this '_f_'?"

"Yes. It means Thursdays and Saturdays only," said Edwin, his eyes

twinkling. It was as if he had said: "You think yourself very clever,

but do you suppose that I can't read the notes in a time-table?"

"Well--" She hesitated.

"To-day's Thursday, you see," he remarked curtly.

She was ravished by his tone and his manner. And she became humble

before him, for in the space of a few seconds he had grown mysteriously

and powerfully masculine to her. But with all his masculinity there

remained the same wistful, honest, boyish look in his eyes. And she

thought: "If I marry him it will be for the look in his eyes."

"I'm all right, then," she said aloud, and smiled.

With hands nervously working within her muff, she suddenly missed the

handkerchief which she had placed there.

"I believe I must have dropped my handkerchief in your shop!" she was

about to say. The phrase was actually on her tongue; but by a strange

instinctive, defensive discretion she shut her mouth on it and kept

silence. She thought: "Perhaps I had better not go into his shop again

to-day."

III

They descended the hill from the station. Hilda was very ill at ease.

She kept saying to herself: "This adventure is over now. I cannot

prolong it. There is nothing to do but to go back to the Orgreaves, and

pack my things and depart to Brighton, and face whatever annoyance is

awaiting me at Brighton." The prospect desolated her. She could not bear

to leave Edwin Clayhanger without some definition of their relations,

and yet she knew that it was hopeless and absurd to expect to arrive

immediately at any such definition: she knew that the impetuosity of her

temperament could not be justified. Also, she feared horribly the risk

of being caught again in the net of Brighton. As they got lower and

lower down the hill, her wretchedness and disquiet became acute, to the

point of a wild despair. Merely to temporize, she said, as they drew

opposite the wooden theatre:

"Couldn't we just go and look in? I've got plenty of time."

A strange request--to penetrate into a meeting of artisans on strike!

She felt its strangeness: she felt that Edwin Clayhanger objected, but

she was driven to an extremity. She had to do something, and she did

what she could.

They crossed the road, and entered the huge shanty, and stood

apologetically near the door. The contrast between the open street and

the enclosed stuffiness of the dim and crowded interior was

overwhelming. Hundreds of ragged and shabby men sat in serried rows,

leaning forward with elbows out and heads protruding as they listened to

a speech from the gimcrack stage. They seemed to be waiting to spring,

like famished and ferocious tigers. Interrupting, they growled, snarled,

yapped, and swore with appalling sincerity. Imprecations burst forth in

volleys and in running fires. The arousing of the fundamental instincts

of these human beings had, indeed, enormously emphasized the animal in

them. They had swung back a hundred centuries towards original crude

life. The sophistication which embroiders the will-to-live had been

stripped clean off. These men helped you to understand the state of mind

which puts a city to the sack, and makes victims especially of the

innocent and the defenceless. Hilda was strangely excited. She was

afraid, and enjoyed being afraid. And it was as if she, too, had been

returned to savagery and to the primeval. In the midst of peril, she was

a female under the protection of a male, and nothing but that. And she

was far closer, emotionally, to her male than she had ever been before.

Suddenly, the meeting came to an end. In an instant, the mass of

humanity was afoot and rounding upon them, an active menace. Hilda and

Edwin rushed fleeing into the street, violently urged by a common

impulse. The stream of embittered men pursued them like an inundation.

When they were safe, and breathing the free air, Hilda was drenched with

a sense of pity. The tragedy of existence presented itself in its true

aspect, as noble and majestic and intimidating.

"It's terrible!" she breathed.

She thought: "No! In this mood, it is impossible for me to leave him! I

cannot do it! I cannot!" The danger of re-entering the shop, which would

be closed now, utterly fascinated her. Supposing that she re-entered the

shop with him, would she have the courage to tell him that she was in

his society under false pretences? Could she bring herself to relate her

misfortune? She recoiled before the mere idea of telling him. And yet

the danger of the shop glittered in front of her like a lure.

The future might be depending solely on her own act. If she told him of

the lost handkerchief, the future might be one thing: if she did not

tell him, it might be another.

The dread of choosing seized her, and put her into a tremble of

apprehension. And then, as it were mechanically, she murmured (but very

clearly), tacking the words without a pause on to a sentence about the

strikes: "Oh, I've lost my handkerchief, unless I've left it in your

shop! It must have dropped out of my muff."

She sighed in relief, because she had chosen. But her agitation was

intensified.

IV

In search of a lost handkerchief, they regained the Clayhanger premises

by an unfamiliar side door. She preceded him along a passage and then,

taking a door on the left, found herself surprisingly in the shop,

behind a counter. The shop was lighted only by a few diamond-shaped

holes in the central shutters, and it had a troubling aspect of portent,

with its merchandise mysteriously enveloped in pale sheets, and its

chairs wrong side up, and its deep-shadowed corners. Destiny might have

been lurking in one of those baffling corners. From above, through the

ceiling, came the vibration of some machine at work, and the machine

might have been the loom of time. Hilda was exquisitely apprehensive.

She thought: "I am here. The moment of my departure will come. When it

comes, shall I have told him my misfortune? What will have happened?"

She waited, nervous, restless, shaking like a victim who can do naught

but wait.

"Here's my handkerchief!" she cried, in a tone of unnatural childish

glee, that was one of the effects of her secret panic.

The handkerchief glimmered on the counter, more white than anything else

in that grey dusk. She guessed that the shop-assistant must have found

it, and placed it conspicuously on the counter.

They were alone: they were their own prisoners, secure from the street

and from all interruption. Hilda, once more and in a higher degree,

realized the miraculous human power to make experience out of nothing.

They had nothing but themselves, and they could, if they chose, create

all their future by a single gesture.

Suddenly, there came a tremendous shouting from Duck Square, in front of

the shop. The strikers had poured down from Moorthorne Road into Duck

Bank and Duck Square.

Edwin, who was in the middle of the shop, went to the glazed inner

doors, and, passing through into the porch, lifted the letter-flap in a

shutter, and, stooping, looked forth. He called to her, without moving

his face from the aperture, that a fight was in progress. Hilda gazed at

his back, through the glass, and then, coming round the end of the

counter, approached quietly, and stood immediately behind him, between

the glazed doors and the shutters. The two were in a space so small that

they could scarcely have moved without touching.

"Let me look," she stammered, unable any longer to tolerate the

inaction.

Edwin Clayhanger stepped aside, and held up the letter-flap for her with

his finger. She bent her head to the oblong glimpse of the street, and

saw the strikers engaged in the final internecine folly of strikers:

they had turned their exasperated wrath upon each other. Within a

public-house at the top of the little Square, other strikers were

drinking. One policeman regarded them.

"What a shame!" she cried angrily, dropping the flap, and then withdrew

quickly into the shop, whither Edwin had gone. As she came near him, her

mood changed. She smiled gently. She summoned all her charm; and she

knew that she charmed him.

"Do you know," she said, "you've quite altered my notion of poetry--what

you said as we were going up to the station!"

"Really?" He flushed.

Yes, she had enchanted and entranced him. She had only to smile and to

use a particular tone, soft and breaking.... She knew that.

"But you _do_ alter my notions," she continued, and her clear voice was

poured out like a liquid. "I don't know how it is..." She stopped. And

then, in half-playful accents: "So this is your little office!"

Her hand was on the knob of the open door of the cubicle, a black

erection within the shop, where Edwin and his father kept the accounts

and wrote letters.

"Yes. Go in and have a look at it."

She murmured kindly: "Shall I?" and went in. He followed.

For a moment, she was extremely afraid, and she whispered, scared: "I

must hurry off now."

He ignored this remark.

"Shall you be at Brighton long?" he demanded. And he was so friendly and

simple and timorous and honest-eyed, and his features had such an

extraordinary anxious expression that her own fear seemed to leave her.

She thought, as if surprised by the discovery: "He is a good friend."

"Oh, I can't tell," she answered him. "It depends."

"How soon shall you be down our way again?" His voice was thickening.

She shook her head, speechless. She was afraid again now. His face

altered. He was standing almost over her. She thought: "I am lost! I

have let it come to this!" He was no longer a good friend.

He began to speak, in detached bits of phrases:

"I say--you know--"

"Good-bye, good-bye," she murmured anxiously. "I must go. Thanks very

much."

And foolishly, she held out her hand, which he seized. He bent

passionately, and kissed her like a fresh boy, like a schoolboy. And she

gave back the kiss strongly, with all the profound sincerity of her

nature. His agitation appeared to be extreme; but she was calm; she was

divinely calm. She savoured the moment as though she had been a watcher,

and not an actor in the scene. She thought, with a secret sigh of bliss:

"Yes, it is real, this moment! And I have had it. Am I astonished that

it has come so soon, or did I know it was coming?" Her eyes drank up the

face and the hands and the gestures of her lover. She felt tired, and

sat down in the office chair, and he leaned on the desk, and the walls

of the cubicle folded them in, even from the inanimate scrutiny of the

shop.

V

They were talking together, half-fearfully, and yet with the confidence

of deep mutual trust, in the quick-gathering darkness of the cubicle.

And while they were talking, Hilda, in her head, was writing a fervent

letter to him: "... You see it was so sudden. I had had no chance to

tell you. I did so want to tell you, but how could I? And I hadn't told

anybody! I'm sure you will agree with me that it is best to tell some

things as little as possible. And when you had kissed me, how could I

tell you then--at once? I could not. It would have spoilt everything.

Surely you understand. I know you do, because you understand everything.

If I was wrong, tell me where. You don't guess how humble I am! When I

think of you, I am the humblest girl you can imagine. Forgive me, if

there is anything to forgive. I don't need to tell you that I have

suffered."

And she kept writing the letter again and again, slightly altering the

phrases so as to improve them, so as to express herself better and more

honestly and more appealingly.

"I shall send you the address to-morrow," she was saying to him. "I

shall write you before I go to bed, whether it's to-night or to-morrow

morning." She put the fire of her love into the assurance. She smiled to

entrance him, and saw on his face that he was beside himself with joy in

her. She was a queen, surpassing in her prerogative a thousand elegant

Janets. She smiled; she proudly straightened her shoulders (she the

humblest!), and her boy was enslaved.

"I wonder what people will say," he murmured.

She said, with a pang of misgiving about his reception of her letter:

"Please tell no one!" She pleaded that for the present he should tell no

one. "Later on, it won't seem so sudden," she added plausibly. "People

are so silly."

The sound of another battle in Duck Square awoke them. The shop was very

chilly, and quite dark. Their faces were only pale ovals in the

blackness. She shivered.

"I must go! I have to pack."

He clasped her: and she was innocently content: she was a young girl

again.

"I'll walk up with you," he said protectively.

But she would not allow him to walk up with her, and he yielded. He

struck a match. They stumbled out, and, in the midnight of the passage,

he took leave of her.

Walking up Trafalgar Road, alone, she was so happy, so amazed, so

relieved, so sure of him and of his fineness and of the future, that she

could scarcely bear her felicity. It was too intense.... At last her

life was settled and mapped out. Destiny had been kind, and she meant to

be worthy of her fate. She could have swooned, so intoxicant was her

wonder and her solemn joy and her yearning after righteousness in love.

CHAPTER VI

MISCHANCE

I

Twelve days later, in the evening, Hilda stood by the bedside of Sarah

Gailey in the basement room of No. 59 Preston Street. There was a bright

fire in the grate, and in front of the fire a middle-aged doctor was

cleansing the instrument which he had just employed to inject morphia

into Sarah's exhausted body. Hilda's assumption that the ageing woman

had telegraphed for her on inadequate grounds had proved to be quite

wrong.

Upon entering the house on that Thursday night, Hilda, despite the

anxious pale face of the new servant who had waited up for her and who

entreated her to see Sarah Gailey instantly, had gone first to her own

room and scrawled passionately a note to Edwin, which ran: "DEAREST,--

This is my address. I love you. Every bit of me is absolutely yours.

Write me.--H. L." She gave the letter to the servant to post at once.

And as she gave it she had a vision of it travelling in post office,

railway vans, and being sorted, and sealed up in a bag, and recovered

from the bag, and scanned by the postman at Bursley, and borne up

Trafalgar Road by the postman, and dropped into the letter-box at

Edwin's house, and finally seized by Edwin; and of it pleasing him

intensely,--for it was a good letter, and she was proud of it because

she knew that it was characteristic.

And then, with her mind freed, she had opened the door of Sarah's

bedroom. Sarah was unquestionably very ill. Sarah had been quite right

in telegraphing so peremptorily to Hilda; and if she had not so

telegraphed she would have been quite wrong. On the previous day she had

been sitting on the cold new oilcloth of the topmost stairs, minutely

instructing a maid in the craft of polishing banisters. And the next

morning an attack of acute sciatica had supervened. For a trifling

indiscretion Sarah was thus condemned to extreme physical torture. Hilda

had found her rigid on the bed. She suffered the severest pain in the

small of the back and all down the left leg. Her left knee was supported

on pillows, and the bed-clothes were raised away from it, for it could

tolerate no weight whatever. The doctor, who had been and gone, had

arranged a system of fomentation and hot-water bottles surpassing

anything in even Sarah's experience. And there Sarah lay, not feverish

but sweating with agony, terrified to move, terrified to take a deep

breath, lest the disturbance of the muscles might produce consequences

beyond her strength to endure. She was in no danger of death. She could

talk. She could eat and drink. Her pulse was scarcely quickened. But she

was degraded and humiliated by mere physical anguish to the condition of

a brute. This was her lot in life. All through that first night Hilda

stayed with her, trying to pretend that Sarah was a woman, and in the

morning she had assumed control of the house.

She had her secret to console her. It remained a secret because there

was no one to whom she could relate it. Sarah had no ear for news

unconnected with her malady. And indeed to tell Sarah, as Sarah was,

would have been to carry callousness to the point of insult. And so

Hilda, amid her enormous labours and fatigue, had lived with her secret,

which, from being a perfumed delight, turned in two days to something

subtly horrible, to something that by its horror prevented her from

writing to Edwin aught but the briefest missives. She had existed from

hour to hour, from one minute apprehensively to the next, day and night,

hardly sleeping, devoured inwardly by a fear at once monstrous and

simple, at once convincing and incredible. As for the letter which

mentally she had composed a hundred times to Edwin, and which she owed

to him, it had become fantastic and then inconceivable to her.

II

One of the new servants entered the room and handed a letter to Hilda,

and left the room and shut the door. The envelope was addressed "Miss

Lessways, 59 Preston Street, Brighton," in Edwin Clayhanger's beautiful

handwriting. Every evening came thus a letter, which he had posted in

Bursley on the previous day. Hilda thought: "Will this contain another

reproach at my irregularity? I can't bear it, if it does." And she gazed

at the handwriting, and in particular at her own name, and her own name

seemed to be the name of somebody else, of some strange young woman. She

felt dizzy.... The door of Sarah's wardrobe was ajar, and, in the mirror

of it, Hilda could see herself obscurely, a black-robed strange young

woman, with untidy hair and white cheeks and huge, dark, staring heavy

eyes, with pouches beneath them. The image wavered in the mirror. She

thought: "Here it is again, this awful feeling! Surely I am not going to

faint!" She could hear Sarah's sighing breath: she could hear the

singing of the shaded gas-flame. She turned her gaze away from the

mirror, and saw Sarah's grey head inadvertently nodding, as it always

nodded. Then the letter slipped out of her hand. She glanced down at the

floor, in pursuit of it: the floor was darkly revolving. She thought:

"Am I really fainting this time? I mustn't faint. I've got to arrange

about that bacon to-night and--oh, lots of things! Sarah is not a bit

better. And I must sit with her until she gets off to sleep." Her legs

trembled, and she was terrorized by extraordinary novel sensations of

insecurity. "Oh!" she murmured weakly.

III

"You've only fainted," said the doctor in a low voice.

She perceived, little by little, that she was lying flat on the floor at

the foot of Sarah's bed, and that he was kneeling beside her. The bed

threw a shadow on them both, but she could see his benevolent face,

anxious and yet reassuring, rather clearly.

"What?" she whispered, in feeble despair. She felt that her resistance

was definitely broken.

From higher up, at the level of the hidden bed, came the regular

plaintive respiration of Sarah Gailey.

"You must take care of yourself better than this," said the doctor.

"Perhaps this is a day when you ought to be resting."

She answered, resigned.

"No, it's not that. I believe I'm going to have a child. You must..."

She stopped.

"Oh," said the doctor, with discretion. "Is that it?"

Strange, how the direct words would create a new situation! She had not

told the doctor that she had been through the ceremony of marriage, and

had been victimized. She had told him nothing but the central and final

thought in her mind. And lo! the new situation was brought into being,

and the doctor was accepting it! He was not emitting astounded 'buts--!'

Her directness had made all possible 'buts' seem ridiculous and futile,

and had made the expression of curiosity seem offensive.

She lay on the floor impassive. She was no longer horrified by

expectancy.

"Well," said the doctor, "we must see. I think you can sit up now, can't

you?"

Three-quarters of an hour afterwards, she went into Sarah's room alone.

She was aware of no emotion whatever. She merely desired, as a

professional nurse might have desired, to see if Sarah slept. Sarah was

not sleeping. She moaned, as she moaned continually when awake. Hilda

bent over her trembling head whose right side pressed upon the pillow.

"How queer," thought Hilda, "how awful, that she didn't even hear what I

said to him! It will almost kill her when she does know."

Sarah's eyes blinked. Without stirring, without shifting her horizontal,

preoccupied gaze from the wall, she muttered peevishly:

"What's that you were saying about going to have a child?"

Startled, Hilda moved back a little from the bed.

"The doctor says there's no doubt I am," Hilda answered coldly.

"How queer!" Sarah said. "I quite thought--but of course a girl like you

are couldn't be sure. I should like another biscuit. But I don't want

the Osbornes--the others." She resumed her moaning.

IV

On the following Saturday morning--rather more than a fortnight after

her engagement to Edwin Clayhanger--Hilda came out of the kitchen of

No. 59 Preston Street, and shut the door on a nauseating, malodorous

mess of broken food and greasy plates, in the midst of which two

servants were noisily gobbling down their late breakfast, and disputing.

With a frown of disgust on her face, she looked into Sarah Gailey's

bedroom. Sarah, though vaguely better, was still in constant acute pain,

and her knee still reposed on a pillow, and was protected from the upper

bed-clothes, and she still could not move. Hilda put on a smile for

Sarah Gailey, who nodded morosely, and then, extinguishing the smile, as

if it had been expensive gas burning to no purpose, she passed into the

basement sitting-room, and slaked the fire there. With a gesture of

irresolution, she lifted the lid of the desk in the corner, and gazed

first at a little pile of four unopened letters addressed to her in

Edwin's handwriting, and then at a volume of Crashaw, which the

enthusiastic Tom Orgreave had sent to her as a reward for her

appreciation of Crashaw's poems. She released the lid suddenly, and went

upstairs to her bedroom, chatting sugarily for an instant on the way

with the second Miss Watchett. In the bedroom, she donned her street

things, and then she descended. She had to go to the Registry Office in

North Street about a new cook. She stopped at the front door, and then

surprisingly went down once more into the basement sitting-room.

Standing up at the desk, she wrote this letter: "DARLING JANET,--I am

now married to George Cannon. The marriage is not quite public, but I

tell you before anybody, and you might tell Edwin Clayhanger.--Your

loving H. L." Least said soonest mended! And the conciseness would

discourage questioning. She inserted the letter into an envelope, which

she addressed and stamped, and then she fled with it from the house, and

in two minutes it was in a letter-box, and she was walking slowly along

the King's Road past the shops.

The letter was the swift and desperate sequel to several days'

absolutely sterile reflection. It said enough for the moment. Later, she

could explain that her husband had left her. She could not write to

Edwin. She could not bring herself to write anything to him. She could

not confess, nor beg for forgiveness nor even for sympathetic

understanding. She could not admit the uninstructed rashness which had

led her to assume positively, on inadequate grounds, that her union with

George Cannon had been fruitless. She must suffer, and he also must

suffer. Rather than let him know, in any conceivable manner, that, all

unwitting, she was bearing the child of another at the moment of her

betrothal to himself, she preferred to be regarded as a jilt of the very

worst kind. Strange that she should choose the rôle of deceiver instead

of the rôle of victim! Strange that she would sooner be hated and

scorned than pitied! Strange that she would not even give Edwin the

opportunity of treating her as a widow! But so it was! For her, the one

possible attitude towards Edwin was the attitude of silence. In the

silence of the grave her love for him existed.

As she walked along the chill promenade she looked with discreet

curiosity at every woman she met, to see her condition. This matter,

which before she had never thought of, now obsessed her; and all women

were divided for her into two classes, the expectant and the others.

Also her self-consciousness was extreme, more so even than it had been

after her mother's death. She was not frightened--yet. She was assuredly

not panic-struck. Rather her mood was grim, harsh, and calmly bitter.

She thought: "I suppose George must be informed." It affected her

queerly that if she took it into her head she need never go back to

Preston Street. She was free. She owed nothing to anybody. And yet she

would go back. She would require a home, soon. And she would require a

livelihood, for the shares of the Brighton Hotel Continental Limited

promised to be sterile and were already unsaleable. But apart from these

considerations, she would have gone back for Sarah Gailey--because Sarah

Gailey was entirely dependent on her. She detested Sarah, despite

Sarah's sufferings, and yet by her conscience she was for ever bound to

her.

The future loomed appalling. Sarah's career was finished. She could not

be anything but a burden and a torment; her last years would probably be

dreadful, both for herself and for others. The prospects of the

boarding-house were not radiant. Hilda could direct the enterprise, but

not well. She could work, but she had not the art of making others work.

Already the place was slightly at sixes and sevens. And she loathed it.

She loathed the whole business of catering. Along the entire length of

the King's Road, the smells of basement kitchens ascended to the

pavement and offended the nose. And Hilda saw all Brighton as a colossal

and disgusting enlargement of the kitchen at No. 59. She saw the

background and the pits of Brighton--that which underlies and hides

behind, and is not seen. The grandeur of the King's Road was naught to

her. Her glance pierced it and it faded to a hallucination. Beyond it

she envisaged the years to come, the messy and endless struggle, the

necessary avarice and trickeries incidental to it,--and perhaps the

ultimate failure. She would never make money--she felt that! She was not

born to make money--especially by dodges and false politeness, out of

idle, empty-noddled boarders. She would lose it and lose it. And she

pictured what she would be in ten years: the hard-driven landlady, up to

every subterfuge,--with a child to feed and educate, and perhaps a

bedridden, querulous invalid to support. And there was no alternative to

the tableau.

She went by the Chichester, which towered with all its stories above her

head. Who would take it now? George Cannon would have made it pay. He

would have made anything pay. How?... She was definitely cut off from

the magnificence of the King's Road. The side street was her destiny;

the side street and shabbiness. And it was all George's fault--and hers!

The poverty, if it came, would be George's fault alone. For he had

squandered her money in a speculation. It astounded her that George, so

shrewd and well balanced, should have made an investment so foolish. She

did not realize that a passion for a business enterprise, as for a

woman, is capable of destroying the balance of any man. And George

Cannon had had both passions.

And then she saw Florrie Bagster, on the other side of the street,

walking leisurely by the sea-wall, alone. If Mr. Boutwood had had a more

generous and wild disposition he might have allowed Florrie to ruin him

in six months of furs and carriages and champagne. But Mr. Boutwood,

though a dog, was a careful dog, especially at those moments when the

conventional dog can refuse nothing. Florrie was well and warmly

dressed,--no more; and she was on foot. Hilda's gaze fastened on her,

and immediately divined from the cut and fall of the coat that Florrie

had something to conceal from every one but her Mr. Boutwood. And

whereas Florrie trod the pavement with a charming little air that

wavered between impudence and modesty, between timid meekness and

conceit, Hilda blushed with shame and pity. She on one footpath and

Florrie on the other!

"Soon," she thought, "I shall not be able to walk along this road!"

She had sinned. She admitted that she had sinned against some quality in

herself. But how innocently and how ignorantly! And what a tremendous

punishment for so transient a weakness! And new consequences, still more

disastrous than any she had foreseen, presented themselves one after

another. George had escaped, but a word of open scandal, a single

whisper in the ear of the old creature down at Torquay, might actuate

machinery that would reach out after him and drag him back, and plant

him in jail. George, the father of her child, in jail! It was all a

matter of chance; sheer chance! She began to perceive what life really

was, and the immense importance of hazard therein. Nevertheless, without

frailty, without defection, what could chance have done? She began to

perceive that this that she was living through was life. She bit her

lips. Grief! Shame! Disillusion! Hardship! Peril! Catastrophe! Exile!

Above all, exile! These had to be faced, and they would be faced. She

recalled the firiest verse of Crashaw and she set her shoulders back.

There was the stuff of a woman in her.... Only a little while, and she

had seen before her a beloved boy entranced by her charm. She had now no

charm. Where now was the soft virgin?... And yet, somehow, magically,

miraculously, the soft virgin was still there! And the invincible vague

hope of youth, and the irrepressible consciousness of power, were almost

ready to flame up afresh, contrary to all reason, and irradiate her

starless soul.

NOTE:--_The later history of Hilda Lessways and Edwin Clayhanger will

form the theme of another novel._

Footnote 1: See the author's novel, _Clayhanger_.