A very long time had elapsed before the letter arrived bearing the

rumour of Cannon's innocence. It had not immediately produced much

effect on her mind. She had said not a word to Edwin. The idea of

reviving the shames of that early episode in conversation with Edwin was

extremely repugnant to her. She would not do it. She had not the right

to do it. All her proud independence forbade her to do it. The episode

did not concern Edwin. The effect on her of the rumour came gradually.

It was increased when Mrs. Cannon wrote of evidence, a petition to the

Home Secretary, and employing a lawyer. Mrs. Cannon's attitude seemed

to say to Hilda: "You and I have shared this man, we alone in all the

world." Mrs. Cannon seemed to imagine that Hilda would be interested.

She was right. Hilda was interested. Her implacability relented. Her

vindictiveness forgave. She pondered with almost intolerable compassion

upon the vision of George Cannon suffering unjustly month after long

month interminably the horrors of a convict's existence. She read with

morbidity reports of Assizes, and picked up from papers and books and

from Mrs. Cannon pieces of information about prisons. When he was

transferred to Parkhurst in the Isle of Wight on account of ill-health,

she was glad, because she knew that Parkhurst was less awful than

Portland, and when from Parkhurst he was sent to Dartmoor she tried to

hope that the bracing air would do him good. She no longer thought of

him as a criminal at all, but simply as one victim of his passion for

herself; she, Hilda, had been the other victim. She raged in secret

against the British Judicature, its delays, its stoniness, its

stupidity. And when the principal witness in support of Cannon's

petition died, she raged against fate. The movement for Cannon's

release slackened for months. Of late it had been resumed, and with

hopefulness. One of Cannon's companions had emerged from confinement

(due to an unconnected crime), and was ready to swear affidavits.

Lastly, Mrs. Cannon had written stating that she was almost beggared,

and suggesting that Hilda should lend her ten pounds towards the

expenses of the affair. Hilda had not ten pounds. That very day Hilda,

seeing Janet in the Nursing Home, had demanded: "I say Jan, I suppose

you haven't got ten pounds you can let me have for about a day or so?"

And had laughed self-consciously. Janet, flushing with eager pleasure,

had replied: "Of course! I've still got that ten-pound note the poor

old dad gave me. I've always kept it in case the worst should happen."

Janet was far too affectionate to display curiosity. Hilda had posted

the bank-note late at night. The next day had come a telegram from Mrs.

Cannon: "Telegraph if you are sending money." Not for a great deal

would Hilda have despatched through the hands of the old postmaster at

Bursley--who had once been postmaster at Turnhill and known her

parents--a telegram such as hers addressed to anybody named "Cannon."

The fear of chatter and scandal was irrational, but it was a very

genuine fear. She had sent her faithful George with the telegram to

Hanbridge--it was just as easy.

Hilda now, after hesitation, put the packet of letters in her handbag,

to take with her. It was a precaution of secrecy which she admitted to

be unnecessary, for she was quite certain that Edwin never looked into

her drawers; much less would he try to open a locked drawer; his

incurious confidence in her was in some respects almost touching.

Certainly nobody else would invade the drawer. Still, she hid the

letters in her handbag. Then, in her fashion, she scribbled a

bold-charactered note to Mrs. Cannon, giving a temporary address, and

this also she put in the handbag.

Her attitude to Mrs. Cannon, like her attitude to the bigamist, had

slowly changed, and she thought of the old woman now with respect and

sympathetic sorrow. Mrs. Cannon, before she knew that Hilda was married

to Edwin, had addressed her first letter to Hilda, "Mrs. Cannon," when

she would have been justified in addressing it, "Miss Lessways." In the

days of her boarding-house it had been impossible, owing to business

reasons, for Hilda to drop the name to which she was not entitled and to

revert to her own. The authentic Mrs. Cannon, despite the violence of

her grievances, had respected Hilda's difficulty; the act showed kindly

forbearance and it had aroused Hilda's imaginative gratitude. Further,

Mrs. Cannon's pertinacity in the liberation proceedings, and her calm,

logical acceptance of all the frightful consequences of being the legal

wife of a convict, had little by little impressed Hilda, who had said to

herself: "There is something in this old woman." And Hilda nowadays

never thought of her as an old woman who had been perverse and shameless

in desire, but as a victim of passion like George Cannon. She said to

herself: "This old woman still loves George Cannon; her love was the

secret of her rancour against him, and it is also the secret of her

compassion." These constant reflections, by their magnanimity, and

their insistence upon the tremendous reality of love, did something to

ennoble the clandestine and demoralising life of the soul which for a

year Hilda had hidden from her husband and from everybody.

II

It still wanted twenty minutes to nine o'clock. She was too soon. The

night before, Edwin had abraded her sore nerves by warning her not to be

late--in a tone that implied habitual lateness on her part. Hilda was

convinced that she was an exact woman. She might be late--a little

late--six times together, but as there was a sound explanation of and

excuse for each shortcoming, her essential exactitude remained always

unimpaired in her own mind. But Edwin would not see this. He told her

now and then that she belonged to that large class of people who have

the illusion that a clock stands still at the last moment while last

things are being done. She resented the observation, as she resented

many of Edwin's assumptions concerning her. Edwin seemed to forget that

she had been one of the first women-stenographers in England, that she

had been a journalist-secretary and accustomed to correct the

negligences of men of business, and finally that she had been in

business by herself for a number of years. Edwin would sweep all that

away, and treat her like one of your mere brainless butterflies. At any

rate, on the present occasion she was not late. And she took pride,

instead of shame, in her exaggerated earliness. She had the air of

having performed a remarkable feat.

She left the boudoir to go upstairs and superintend Ada, though she had

told the impressed Ada that she should put full trust in her, and should

not superintend her. However, as she opened the door she heard the

sounds of Ada and George directing each other in the joint enterprise of

bringing a very large and unwieldy portmanteau out of the bedroom. The

hour for superintendence was therefore past. Hilda went into the

drawing-room, idly, nervously, to wait till the portmanteau should have

reached the hall. The French window was ajar, and a wet wind entered

from the garden. The garden was full of rain. Two workmen were in it,

employed by the new inhabitants of the home of the Orgreaves. Those

upstarts had decided that certain branches of the famous Orgreave elms

were dangerous and must be cut, and the workmen, shirt sleeved in the

rain, were staying one of the elms with a rope made fast to the swing in

the Clayhanger garden. Hilda was unreasonably but sincerely

antipathetic to her new neighbours. The white-ended stumps of great

elm-branches made her feel sick. Useless to insist to her on the

notorious treachery of elms! She had an affection for those elms, and,

to her, amputation was an outrage. The upstarts had committed other

sacrilege upon the house and grounds, not heeding that the abode had

been rendered holy by the sacraments of fate. Hilda stared and stared

at the rain. And the prospect of the long, jolting, acutely depressing

drive through the mud and the rain to Knype Vale, and of the

interminable train journey with a tragic convalescent, braced her.

"Mother!"

George stood behind her.

"Well, have you got the luggage down?" She frowned, but George knew her

nervous frown and could rightly interpret it.

He nodded.

"Ought I to put 'Dartmoor' on the luggage-label?"

She gave a negative sign.

Why should he ask such a question? She had never breathed the name of

Dartmoor. Why should he mention it? Edwin also had mentioned Dartmoor.

"What, on Dartmoor?" Edwin had said. Did Edwin suspect her

correspondence? No. Had he suspected he would have spoken. She knew

him. And even if Edwin had suspected, George could not conceivably have

had suspicions, of any sort.... There he stood, the son of a convict,

with no name of his own. He existed--because she and the convict had

been unable to keep apart; his ignorance of the past was appalling to

think of, the dangers incident to it dreadful; his easy confidence

before the world affected her almost intolerably. She felt that she

could never atone to him for having borne him.

A faint noise at the front-door reached the drawing-room.

"Here's Nunks," exclaimed George, and ran off eagerly.

This was his new name for his stepfather.

Hilda returned quickly to the boudoir. As she disappeared therein, she

heard George descanting to Edwin on the beauties of his luggage-label,

and Edwin rubbing his feet on the mat and removing his mackintosh.

She came back to the door of the boudoir.

"Edwin."

"Hello!"

"One moment."

He came into the boudoir, wiping the rain off his face.

"Shut the door, will you?"

Her earnest, self-conscious tone stirred into activity the dormant

secret antagonisms that seemed ever to lie between them. She saw them

animating his eyes, stiffening his pose.

Pointing to the cup and saucer on the desk, Edwin said, critically:

"That all you've had?"

"Can you let me have ten pounds?" she asked bluntly, ignoring his

implication that in the matter of nourishment she had not behaved

sensibly.

"Ten pounds? More?" He was on the defensive, as it were crouching

warily behind a screen of his suspicions.

She nodded, awkwardly. She wanted to be graceful, persuasive,

enveloping, but she could not. It was to repay Janet that she had need

of the money. She ought to have obtained it before, but she had

postponed the demand, and she had been wrong. Janet would not require

the money, she would have no immediate use for it, but Hilda could not

bear to be in debt to her; to leave the sum outstanding would seem so

strange, so sinister, so equivocal; it would mar all their intercourse.

"But look here, child," said Edwin, protesting, "I've given you about

forty times as much as you can possibly want already."

He had never squarely refused any demand of hers for money; he had

almost always acceded instantly and without enquiry to her demands.

Obviously he felt sympathy with the woman who by eternal custom is

forced to ask, and had a horror of behaving as the majority of husbands

notoriously behaved in such circumstances; obviously he was anxious not

to avail himself of the husband's overwhelming economic advantage.

Nevertheless the fact that he earned and she didn't was ever

mysteriously present in his relatively admirable attitude. And

sometimes--perhaps not without grounds, she admitted--he would hesitate

before a request, and in him a hesitation was as humiliating as a

refusal would have been from another man. And Hilda resented, not so

much his attitude, as the whole social convention upon which it was

unassailably based. He earned--she knew. She would not deny that he

was the unique source and that without him there would be naught. But

still she did not think that she ought to have to ask. On the other

hand she had no alternative plan to offer. Her criticism of the

convention was destructive, not constructive. And all Edwin's careful

regard for a woman's susceptibilities seemed only to intensify her

deep-hidden revolt. It was a mere chance that he was thus chivalrous.

And whether he was chivalrous or not, she was in his power; and she

chafed.

"I should be glad if you could let me have it," she said, grimly.

The appeal, besides being unpersuasive in manner, was too general; it

did not particularize. There was no frankness between them. She saw

his suspicions multiplying. What did he suspect? What could he

suspect? ... Ah! And why was she herself so timorous, so strangely

excited, about going even to the edge of Dartmoor? And why did she feel

guilty, why was her glance so constrained?

"Well, I can't," he answered. "Not now; but if anything unexpected

turns up, I can send you a cheque."

She was beaten.

The cab stopped at the front-door, well in advance of time.

"It's for Janet," she muttered to him, desperately.

Edwin's face changed.

"Why in thunder didn't you say so to start with?" he exclaimed. "I'll

see what I can do. Of course I've got a fiver in my pocket-book."

There were a number of men in the town who made a point of always having

a reserve five-pound note and a telegraph-form upon their persons. It

was the dandyism of well-off prudence.

He sprang out of the room. The door swung to behind him.

In a very few moments he returned.

"Here you are!" he said, taking the note from his pocket-book and adding

it to a collection of gold and silver.

Hilda was looking out of the window at the tail of the cab. She did not

move.

"I don't want it, thanks," she replied coldly. And she thought: "What a

fool I am!"

"Oh!" he murmured, with constraint.

"You'd do it for her!" said Hilda, chill and clear, "But you wouldn't do

it for me." And she thought: "Why do I say such a thing?"

He slapped all the money crossly down on the desk and left the room.

She could hear him instructing Ada and the cabman in the manipulation of

the great portmanteau.

"Now, mother!" cried George.

She gazed at the money, and, picking it up, shovelled it into her purse.

It was irresistible.

In the hall she kissed George, and nodded with a plaintive smile at Ada.

Edwin was in the porch. He held back; she held back. She knew from his

face that he would not offer to kiss her. The strange power that had

compelled her to alienate him refused to allow her to relent. She

passed down the steps out into the rain. They nodded, the theory for

George and Ada being that they had made their farewells in the boudoir.

But George and Ada none the less had their notions. It appeared to

Hilda that instead of going for a holiday with her closest friend, she

was going to some recondite disaster that involved the end of marriage.

And the fact that she and Edwin had not kissed outweighed all other

facts in the universe. Yet what was a kiss? Until the cab laboriously

started she hoped for a miracle. It did not happen. If only on the

previous night she had not absolutely insisted that nobody from the

house should accompany her to Knype! ... The porch slipped from her

vision.

CHAPTER XIV

TAVY MANSION

I

Hilda and Harry Hesketh stood together in the soft warm Devonshire

sunshine bending above the foot-high wire-netting that separated the

small ornamental pond from the lawn. By their side was a St. Bernard

dog with his great baptising tongue hanging out. Two swans, glittering

in the strong light, swam slowly to and fro; one had a black claw tucked

up on his back among downy white feathers; the other hissed at the dog,

who in his vast and shaggy good-nature simply could not understand this

malevolence on the part of a fellow-creature. Round about the elegant

haughtiness of the swans clustered a number of iridescent Muscovy ducks,

and a few white Aylesburys with gamboge beaks that intermittently

quacked, all restless and expectant of blessings to fall over the

wire-netting that eternally separated them from the heavenly

hunting-ground of the lawn. Across the pond, looking into a moored

dinghy, an enormous drake with a vermilion top-knot reposed on the

balustrade of the landing-steps. The water reflected everything in a

rippled medley--blue sky, rounded woolly clouds, birds, shrubs, flowers,

grasses, and browny-olive depths of the plantation beyond the pond,

where tiny children in white were tumbling and shrieking with a nurse in

white.

Harry was extraordinarily hospitable, kind, and agreeable to his guest.

Scarcely thirty, tall and slim, he carried himself with distinction.

His flannels were spotless; his white shirt was spotless; his tennis

shoes were spotless; but his blazer, cap and necktie (which all had the

same multicoloured pattern of stripes) were shabby, soiled, and without

shape; nevertheless their dilapidation seemed only to adorn his

dandyism, for they possessed a mysterious sacred quality. He had a

beautiful moustache, nice eyes, hands excitingly dark with hair, and no

affectations whatever. Although he had inherited Tavy Mansion and a

fortune from an aunt who had left Oldcastle and the smoke to marry a

Devonshire landowner, he was boyish, modest, and ingenuous. Nobody

could have guessed from his manner that he had children, nurses,

servants, gardeners, grooms, horses, carriages, a rent-roll, and a safe

margin at every year's end. He spoke of the Five Towns with a mild

affection. Hilda thought, looking at him: "He has everything, simply

everything! And yet he's quite unspoilt!" In spite of the fact that in

previous years he had seen Hilda only a few times--and that quite

casually at the Orgreaves'--he had assumed and established intimacy at

the very moment of meeting her and Janet at Tavistock station the night

before, and their friendship might now have been twenty years old

instead of twenty hours. Very obviously he belonged to a class superior

to Hilda's, but he was apparently quite unconscious of what was still

the most deeply-rooted and influential institution of English life. His

confiding confidential tone flattered her.

"How do you think Alicia's looking?" he asked.

"Magnificent," said Hilda, throwing a last piece of bread into the

water.

"So do I," said he. "But she's ruined for tennis, you know. This baby

business is spiffing, only it puts you right off your game. As a rule

she manages to be hors de combat bang in the middle of the season. She

has been able to play a bit this year, but she's not keen--that's what's

up with her ladyship--she's not keen now."

"Well," said Hilda. "Even you can't have everything."

"Why 'even' me?" He laughed.

She merely gazed at him with a mysterious smile. She perceived that he

was admiring her--probably for her enigmatic quality, so different from

Alicia's--and she felt a pleasing self-content.

"Edwin do much tennis nowadays?"

"Edwin?" She repeated the name in astonishment, as though it were the

name of somebody who could not possibly be connected with tennis. "Not

he! He's not touched a racket all this season. He's quite otherwise

employed."

"I hear he's a fearful pot in the Five Towns, anyway," said Harry

seriously. "Making money hand over fist."

Hilda raised her eyebrows and shook her head deprecatingly. But the

marked respectfulness of Harry's reference to Edwin was agreeable. She

thought: "I do believe I'm becoming a snob!"

"It's hard work making money, even in our small way, in Bursley," she

said--and seemed to indicate the expensive spaciousness of the gardens.

"I should like to see old Edwin again."

"I never knew you were friends."

"Well, I used to see him pretty often at Lane End House, after Alicia

and I were engaged. In fact once he jolly nearly beat me in a set."

"Edwin did?" she exclaimed.

"The same.... He had a way of saying things that a feller somehow

thought about afterwards."

"Oh! So you noticed that!"

"Does he still?"

"I--I don't know. But he used to."

"You ought to have brought him. In fact I quite thought he was coming.

Anyhow, I told Alicia to invite him, too, as soon as we knew you were

bringing old Jan down."

"She did mention it, Alicia did. But, oh! He wouldn't hear of it.

Works! Works! No holiday all summer."

"I'll tell you a scheme," said Harry roguishly. "Refuse to rejoin the

domestic hearth until he comes and fetches you."

She gave a little laugh. "Oh, he won't come to fetch me."

"Well," said Harry shortly and decisively, "we shall see what can be

done. I may tell you we're rather great at getting people down here....

I wonder where those girls are?" He turned round and Hilda turned

round.

The red Georgian house with its windows in octagonal panes, its large

pediment hiding the centre of the roof, and its white paint, showed

brilliantly across the hoop-studded green, between some cypresses and an

ilex; on either side were smooth walls of green--trimmed shrubs forming

long alleys whose floors were also green; and here and there a round or

oval flowerbed, and, at the edges of the garden, curved borders of

flowers. Everything was still, save the ship-like birds on the pond,

the distant children in the plantation, and the slow-moving, small

clouds overhead. The sun's warmth was like an endearment.

Janet and Alicia, their arms round each other's shoulders, sauntered

into view from behind the cypresses. On the more sheltered lawn nearest

the house they were engaged in a quiet but tremendous palaver; nobody

but themselves knew what they were talking about; it might have been the

affair of Johnnie and Mrs. Chris Hamson, as to which not a word had been

publicly said at Tavy Mansion since Janet and Hilda's arrival. Janet

still wore black, and now she carried a red sunshade belonging to

Alicia. Alicia was in white, not very clean white, and rather tousled.

She was only twenty-five. She had grown big and jolly and downright

(even to a certain shamelessness) and careless of herself. Her body had

the curves, and her face the emaciation, of the young mother. She used

abrupt, gawky, kind-hearted gestures. Her rough affectionateness

embraced not merely her children, but all young living things, and many

old. For her children she had a passion. And she would say openly, as

it were, defiantly, that she meant to be the mother of more

children--lots more.

"Hey, lass!" cried out Harry, using the broad Staffordshire accent for

the amusement of Hilda.

The sisters stopped and untwined their arms.

"Hey, lad!" Alicia loudly responded. But instead of looking at her

husband she was looking through him at the babies in the plantation

behind the pond.

Janet smiled, in her everlasting resignation. Hilda, smiling at her in

return from the distance, recalled the tone in which Harry had said 'old

Jan'--a tone at once affectionate and half-contemptuous. She was old

Jan, now; destined to be a burden upon somebody and of very little use

to anybody; no longer necessary. If she disappeared, life would

immediately close over her, and not a relative, not a friend, would be

inconvenienced. Some among them would remark: "Perhaps it's for the

best." And Janet knew it. In the years immediately preceding the death

of Mr. and Mrs. Orgreave, she had hardened a little from her earlier

soft, benevolent self--hardened to everybody save her father and mother,

whom she protected--and now she was utterly tender again, and her gentle

acquiescences seemed to say: "I am defenceless, and to-morrow I shall be

old."

"I'm going to telegraph to Edwin Clayhanger to come down for the

week-end," shouted Harry.

And Alicia shouted in reply:

"Oh! Spiffing!"

Hilda said nervously:

"You aren't, really?"

She had no intention of agreeing to the pleasant project. A breach

definitely existed between Edwin and herself, and the idea of either

maintaining it or ending it on foreign ground was inconceivable. Such

things could only be done at home. She had telegraphed a safe arrival,

but she had not yet written to him nor decided in what tone she should

write.

Two gardeners, one pushing a wheeled water-can, appeared from an alley

and began silently and assiduously to water a shaded flower-bed. Alicia

and Harry continued to shout enthusiastically to each other in a manner

sufficiently disturbing, but the gardeners gave no sign that anybody

except themselves lived in the garden. Alicia, followed by Janet, was

slowly advancing towards the croquet lawn, when a parlourmaid tripping

from the house overtook her, and with modest deference murmured

something to the bawling, jolly mistress. Alicia, still followed by

Janet, turned and went into the house, while the parlourmaid with bent

head waited discreetly to bring up the rear.

A sudden and terrific envy possessed Hilda as she contrasted the

circumstances of these people with her own. These people lived in

lovely and cleanly surroundings without a care beyond the apprehension

of nursery ailments. They had joyous and kindly dispositions. They

were well-bred, and they were attended by servants who, professionally,

were even better bred than themselves, and who were rendered happy by

smooth words and good pay. They lived at peace with everyone. Full of

health, they ate well and slept well. They suffered no strain. They

had absolutely no problems, and they did not seek problems. Nor had

they any duties, save agreeable ones to each other. Their world was

ideal. If you had asked them how their world could be improved for

them, they would not have found an easy reply. They could only have

demanded less taxes and more fine days.... Whereas Hilda and hers were

forced to live among a brutal populace, amid the most horrible

surroundings of smoke, dirt, and squalor. In Devonshire the Five Towns

was unthinkable; the whiteness of the window-curtains at Tavy Mansion

almost broke the heart of the housewife in Hilda. And compare--not

Hilda's handkerchief-garden, but even the old garden of the Orgreaves,

with this elysium, where nothing offended the eye and the soot nowhere

lay on the trees, blackening the shiny leaves and stunting the branches.

And compare the too mean planning and space-saving of the house in

Trafalgar Road with the lavish generosity of space inside Tavy

Mansion!...

Edwin in the Bursley sense was a successful man, and had consequence in

the town, but the most that he had accomplished or could accomplish

would not amount to the beginning of appreciable success according to

higher standards. Nobody in Bursley really knew the meaning of the word

success. And even such local success as Edwin had had--at what peril

and with what worry was it won! These Heskeths were safe forever. Ah!

She envied them, and she intensely depreciated everything that was hers.

She stood in the Tavy Mansion garden--it seemed to her--like an

impostor. Her husband was merely struggling upwards. And moreover she

had quarrelled with him, darkly and obscurely; and who could guess what

would be the end of marriage? Harry and Alicia never quarrelled; they

might have tiffs--nothing worse than that; they had no grounds for

quarrelling.... And supposing Harry and Alicia guessed the link

connecting her with Dartmoor prison! ... No, it could not be supposed.

Her envy melted into secret deep dejection amid the beautiful and

prosperous scene.

"Evidently some one's called," said Harry, of his wife's disappearance.

"I hope she's nice."

"Who?"

"Whoever's called. Shall we knock the balls about a bit?"

They began a mild game of croquet. But after a few minutes Hilda burst

out sharply:

"You aren't playing your best, Mr. Hesketh. I wish you would."

He was startled by her eyes and her tone.

"Honest Injun! I am," he fibbed in answer. "But I'll try to do better.

You must remember croquet isn't my game. Alicia floors me at it five

times out of six."

Then the parlourmaid and another maid came out to lay tea on two tables

under the ilex.

"Bowley," said Harry over his shoulder. "Bring me a telegraph-form next

time you come out, will you?"

"Yes, sir," said the parlourmaid.

Hilda protested:

"No, Mr. Hesketh! Really! I assure you--"

The telegraph-form came with the tea. Harry knocked a ball against a

coloured stick, and both he and Hilda sat down with relief.

"Who's called, Bowley?"

"Mrs. Rotherwas, sir."

Harry counted the cups.

"Isn't she staying for tea?"

"No, sir. I think not, sir."

Hilda, humming, rose and walked about. At the same moment Alicia,

Janet, and a tall young woman in black and yellow emerged from the

house. Hilda moved behind a tree. She could hear good-byes. The group

vanished round the side of the house, and then came the sound of hoofs

and of wheels crunching. An instant later Alicia arrived at the ilex,

bounding and jolly; Janet moved more sedately. The St. Bernard, who had

been reposing near the pond, now smelt the tea and hot cakes and joined

the party. The wagging of his powerful tail knocked over a

wicker-chair, and Alicia gave a squeal. Then Alicia, putting her hands

to her mouth, shouted across the lawn and the pond:

"Nursey! Nursey! Take them in!"

And a faint reply came.

"What was the Rotherwas dame after?" asked Harry, sharpening a pencil,

when Alicia had ascertained the desires of her guests as to milk and

sugar.

"She was after you, of course," said Alicia. "Tennis party on Monday.

She wants you to balance young Truscott. I just told her so. We shall

all go. You'll go, Hilda. She'll be delighted. I should have brought

her along only she was in such a hurry."

Hilda enquired:

"Who is Mrs. Rotherwas?"

"Her husband's a big coal-owner at Cardiff. But she's a niece or

something of the governor of Dartmoor prison, and she's apparently

helping to keep house for dear uncle just now. They'll take us over the

prison before tennis. It's awfully interesting. Harry and I have been

once."

"Oh!" murmured Hilda, staggered.

"Now about this 'ere woire," said Harry. "What price this?" He handed

over the message which he had just composed. It was rather long, and on

the form was left space for only two more words.

Hilda could not decipher it. She saw the characters with her eyes, but

she was incapable of interpreting them. All the time she thought:

"I shall go to that prison. I can't help it. I shan't be able to keep

from going. I shall go to that prison. I must go. Who could have

imagined this? I am bound to go, and I shall go."

But instead of objecting totally to the despatch of the telegram, she

said in a strange voice:

"It's very nice of you."

"You fill up the rest of the form," said Harry, offering the pencil.

"What must I put?"

"Well, you'd better put 'Countersigned, Hilda.' That'll fix it."

"Will you write it?" she muttered.

He wrote the words.

"Let poor mummy see!" Alicia complained, seizing the telegraph-form.

Harry called out:

"Leeks!"

A shirt-sleeved gardener half hidden by foliage across the garden looked

up sharply, saw Harry's beckoning finger, and approached running.

"Have that sent off for me, will you? Tell Jos to take it," said Harry,

and gave Leeks the form and a florin.

"Why, Hilda, you aren't eating anything!" protested Alicia.

"I only want tea," said Hilda casually, wondering whether they had

noticed anything wrong in her face.

II

Edwin, looking curiously out of the carriage-window as the train from

Plymouth entered Tavistock station early on the Monday, was surprised to

perceive Harry Hesketh on the platform. While, in the heavenly air of

the September morning, the train was curving through Bickleigh Vale and

the Valley of the Plym and through the steeper valley of the Meavy up

towards the first fastnesses of the Moor, he had felt his body to be

almost miraculously well and his soul almost triumphant. But when he

saw Harry--the remembered figure, but a little stouter and coarser--he

saw a being easily more triumphant than himself.

Harry had great reason for triumph, for he had proved himself to possess

a genius for deductive psychological reasoning and for prophecy. Edwin

had been characteristically vague about the visit. First he had

telegraphed that he could not come, business preventing. Then he had

telegraphed that he would come, but only on Sunday, and he had given no

particulars of trains. They had all assured one another that this was

just like Edwin. "The man's mad!" said Harry with genial benevolence,

and had set himself to one of his favourite studies--Bradshaw. He

always handled Bradshaw like a master, accomplishing feats of

interpretation that amazed his wife. He had announced, after careful

connotations, that Edwin was perhaps after all not such a chump, but

that he was in fact a chump, in that, having chosen the Bristol-Plymouth

route, he had erred about the Sunday night train from Plymouth to

Tavistock. How did he know that Edwin would choose the Bristol-Plymouth

route? Well, his knowledge was derived from divination, based upon vast

experience of human nature. Edwin would "get stuck" at Plymouth. He

would sleep at Plymouth--staying at the Royal (he hoped)--and would come

on by the 8.1 a.m. on Monday, arriving at 8.59 a.m., where he would be

met by Harry in the dog-cart drawn by Joan. The telegraph was of course

closed after 10 a.m. on Sunday, but if it had been open and he had been

receiving hourly despatches about Edwin's tortuous progress through

England, Harry could not have been more sure of his position. And on

the Monday Harry had risen up in the very apogee of health, and had

driven Joan to the station. "Mark my words!" he had said. "I shall

bring him back with me for breakfast." He had offered to take Hilda to

the station to witness his triumph; but Hilda had not accepted.

And there Edwin was! Everything had happened according to Harry's

prediction, except that, from an unfortunate modesty, Edwin had gone to

the wrong hotel at Plymouth.

They shook hands in a glow of mutual pleasure.

"How on earth did you know?" Edwin began.

The careful-casual answer rounded off Harry's triumph. And Edwin

thought: "Why, he's just like a grown-up boy!" But he was

distinguished; his club-necktie in all its decay was still impressive;

and his expansive sincere goodwill was utterly delightful. Also the

station, neat, clean, solid--the negation of all gimcrackery--had an

aspect of goodwill to man; its advertisements did not flare; and it

seemed to be the expression of a sound and self-respecting race. The

silvern middle-aged guard greeted Harry with deferential heartiness and

saluted Edwin with even more warmth than he had used at Plymouth. On

the Sunday Edwin had noticed that in the western country guards were not

guards (as in other parts of England), but rather the cordial hosts of

their trains. As soon as the doors had banged in a fusillade and the

engine whistled, a young porter came and, having exchanged civilities

with Harry, picked up Edwin's bag. This porter's face and demeanour

showed perfect content. His slight yet eager smile and his quick

movements seemed to be saying: "It is natural and proper that I should

salute you and carry your bag while you walk free. You are gentlemen by

divine right, and by the same right I am a railway porter and happy."

To watch the man at his job gave positive pleasure, and it was

extraordinarily reassuring--reassuring about everything. Outside the

station, the groom stood at Joan's head, and a wonderful fox-terrier sat

alert under the dog-cart. Instantly the dog sprang out and began to

superintend the preparations for departure, rushing to and fro and

insisting all the time that delay would be monstrous, if not fatal. The

dog's excellence as a specimen of breeding was so superlative as to

accuse its breeder and owner of a lack of perspective in life. It was

as if the entire resources of civilization had been employed towards the

perfecting of the points of that dog.

"Balanced the cart, I suppose, Jos?" asked Harry, kindly.

"Yes, sir," was all that Jos articulated, but his bright face said:

"Sir, your assumption that I have already balanced the cart for three

and a bag is benevolent and justified. You trust me. I trust you, sir.

All is well."

The bag was stowed and the porter got threepence and was so happy in his

situation that apparently he could not bring himself to leave the scene.

Harry climbed up on the right, Edwin on the left. The dog gave one

short bark and flew madly forward. Jos loosed Joan's head, and at the

same moment Harry gave a click, and the machine started. It did not

wait for young Jos. Jos caught the back step as the machine swung by,

and levered himself dangerously to the groom's place. And when he had

done it he grinned, announcing to beholders that his mission in life was

to do just that, and that it was a grand life and he a lucky and

enviable fellow.

Harry drove across the Tavy, and through the small grey and brown town,

so picturesque, so clean, so solid, so respectable, so content in its

historicity. A policeman saluted amiably and firmly, as if saying: "I

am protecting all this,--what a treasure!" Then they passed the Town

Hall.

"Town Hall," said Harry.

"Oh!"

"The Dook's," said Harry.

He put on a certain facetiousness, but there nevertheless escaped from

him the conviction that the ownership of a town hall by a Duke was a

wondrous rare phenomenon and fine, showing the strength of grand English

institutions and traditions, and meet for honest English pride. (And

you could say what you liked about progress!) And Edwin had just the

same feeling. In another minute they were out of the town. The

countryside, though bleak, with its spare hedges and granite walls, was

exquisitely beautiful in the morning light; and it was tidy, tended,

mature; it was as though it had nothing to learn from the future.

Beyond rose the slopes of the moor, tonic and grim. An impression of

health, moral and physical, everywhere disengaged itself. The wayfarer,

sturdy and benign, invigorated by his mere greeting. The trot of the

horse on the smooth winding road, the bounding of the dog, the

resilience of the cart-springs, the sharp tang of the air on the cheek,

all helped to perfect Edwin's sense of pleasure in being alive. He

could not deny that he had stood in need of a change. He had been

worrying, perhaps through overwork. Overwork was a mistake. He now saw

that there was no reason why he should not be happy always, even with

Hilda. He had received a short but nice and almost apologetic letter

from Hilda. As for his apprehensions, what on earth did it matter about

Dartmoor being so near? Nothing! This district was marvellously

reassuring. He thought: "There simply is no social question down here!"

"Had your breakfast?" asked Harry.

"Yes, thanks."

"Well, you just haven't, then!" said Harry. "We shall be in the nick of

time for it."

"When do you have breakfast?"

"Nine thirty."

"Bit late, isn't it?"

"Oh no! It suits us.... I say!" Harry stared straight between the

horse's ears.

"What?"

Harry murmured:

"No more news about Johnnie, I suppose?"

(Edwin glanced half round at the groom behind. Harry with a gesture

indicated that the groom was negligible.)

"Not that I've heard. Bit stiff, isn't it?" Edwin answered.

"Bit stiff? I should rather say it was. Especially after Jimmie's

performance. Rather hard lines on Alicia, don't you think?"

"On all of 'em," said Edwin, not seeing why Johnnie's escapade should

press more on Alicia than, for example, on Janet.

"Yes, of course," Harry agreed, evidently seeing and accepting the

point. "The less said the better!"

"I'm with you," said Edwin.

Harry resumed his jolly tone:

"Well, you'd better peck a bit. We've planned a hard day for you."

"Oh!"

"Yes. Early lunch, and then we're going to drive over to Princetown.

Tennis with the Governor of the prison. He'll show us all over the

prison. It's worth seeing."

Impulsively Edwin exclaimed:

"All of you? Is Hilda going?"

"Certainly. Why not?" He raised the whip and pointed: "Behold our

noble towers."

Edwin, feeling really sick, thought:

"Hilda's mad. She's quite mad..... Morbid isn't the word!"

He was confounded.

III

At Tavy Mansion Edwin and Harry were told by a maid that Mrs. Hesketh

and Miss Orgreave were in the nursery and would be down in a moment, but

that Mrs. Clayhanger had a headache and was remaining in bed for

breakfast. The master of the house himself took Edwin to the door of

his wife's bedroom. Edwin's spirits had risen in an instant, as he

perceived the cleverness of Hilda's headache. There could be no doubt

that women were clever, though perhaps unscrupulously and crudely

clever, in a way beyond the skill of men. By the simple device of

suffering from a headache Hilda had avoided the ordeal of meeting a

somewhat estranged husband in public; she was also preparing an excuse

for not going to Princetown and the prison. Certainly it was better, in

the Dartmoor affair, to escape at the last moment than to have declined

the project from the start.

As he opened the bedroom-door, apprehensions and bright hope were

mingled in him. He had a weighty grievance against Hilda, whose

behaviour at parting had been, he considered, inexcusable; but the warm

tone of her curt private telegram to him and of her almost equally curt

letter, re-stating her passionate love, was really equivalent to an

apology, which he accepted with eagerness. Moreover he had done a lot

in coming to Devonshire, and for this great act he lauded himself and he

expected some gratitude. Nevertheless, despite the pacificism of his

feelings, he could not smile when entering the room. No, he could not!

Hilda was lying in the middle of a very wide bed, and her dark hair was

spread abroad upon the pillow. On the pedestal was a tea-tray. Squatted

comfortably at Hilda's side, with her left arm as a support, was a baby

about a year old, dressed for the day. This was Cecil, born the day

after his grandparents' funeral. Cecil, with mouth open and

outstretched pink hands, of which the fingers were spread like the rays

of half a starfish, from wide eyes gazed at Edwin with a peculiar

expression of bland irony. Hilda smiled lovingly; she smiled without

reserve. And as soon as she smiled, Edwin could smile, and his heart

was suddenly quite light.

Hilda thought:

"That wistful look in his eyes has never changed, and it never will.

Imagine him travelling on Sunday, when the silly old thing might just as

well have come on Saturday, if he'd had anybody to decide him! He's

been travelling for twenty-four hours or more, and now he's here! What

a shame for me to have dragged him down here in spite of himself! But

he would do it for me! He has done it.... I had to have him, for this

afternoon! ... After all he must be very good at business. Everyone

respects him, even here. We may end by being really rich. Have I ever

really appreciated him? ... And now of course he's going to be annoyed

again. Poor boy!"

"Hello! Who's this?" cried Edwin.

"This is Cecil. His mummy's left him, here with his Auntie Hilda," said

Hilda.

"Another clever dodge of hers!" thought Edwin. He liked the baby being

there.

He approached the bed, and, staring nervously about, saw that his bag

had already mysteriously reached the bedroom.

"Well, my poor boy! What a journey!" Hilda murmured compassionately.

She could not help showing that she was his mother in wisdom and sense.

"Oh no!" he amiably dismissed this view.

He was standing over her by the bedside. She looked straight up at him

timid and expectant. He bent and kissed her. Under his kiss she

shifted slightly in the bed, and her arms clung round his neck, and by

her arms she lifted herself a little towards him.

She shut her eyes. She would not loose him. She seemed again to be

drawing the life out of him. At last she let him go, and gave a great

sigh. All the past which did not agree with that kiss and that sigh of

content was annihilated, and an immense reassurance filled Edwin's mind.

"So you've got a headache?"

She gave a succession of little nods, smiling happily.

"I'm so glad you've come, dearest," she said, after a pause. She was

just like a young girl, like a child, in her relieved satisfaction.

"What about George?"

"Well, as it was left to me to decide, I thought I'd better ask Maggie

to come and stay in the house. Much better than packing him off to

Auntie Hamps's."

"And she came?"

"Oh yes!" said Edwin, indifferently, as if to say: "Of course she came."

"Then you did get my letter in time?"

"I shouldn't have got it in time if I'd left Saturday morning as you

wanted. Oh! And here's a letter for _you_."

He pulled a letter from his pocket. The envelope was of the peculiar

tinted paper with which he had already been familiarised. Hilda became

self-conscious as she took the letter and opened it. Edwin too was

self-conscious. To lighten the situation, he put his little finger in

the baby's mouth. Cecil much appreciated this form of humour, and as

soon as the finger was withdrawn from his toothless gums, he made a

bubbling whirring noise, and waved his arms to indicate that the game

must continue. Hilda, frowning, read the letter. Edwin sat down,

ledging himself cautiously on the brink of the bed, and leaned back a

little so as to be able to get at the baby and tickle it among its

frills. From the distance, beyond walls, he could hear the powerful

happy cries of older babies, beings fully aware of themselves, who knew

their own sentiments and could express them. And he glanced round the

long low room with its two small open windows showing sunlit yellow

cornfields and high trees, and its monumental furniture, and the

disorder of Hilda's clothes and implements humanising it and

individualising it and making it her abode, her lair. And he glanced

prudently at Hilda over the letter-paper. She had no headache; it was

obvious that she had no headache. Yet in the most innocent touching way

she had nodded an affirmative to his question about the headache. He

could not possibly have said to her: "Look here, you know you haven't

got a headache." She would not have tolerated the truth. The truth

would have made her transform herself instantly into a martyr, and him

into a brute. She would have stuck to it, even if the seat of eternal

judgment had suddenly been installed at the brassy foot of the bed, that

she had a headache.

It was with this mentality (he reflected, assuming that his own

mentality never loved anything as well as truth) that he had to live

till one of them expired. He reminded himself wisely that the woman's

code is different from the man's. But the honesty of his intelligence

rejected such an explanation, such an excuse. It was not that the woman

had a different code,--she had no code except the code of the utter

opportunist. To live with her was like living with a marvellous wild

animal, full of grace, of cunning, of magnificent passionate gestures,

of terrific affection, and of cruelty. She was at once indispensable and

intolerable. He felt that to match her he had need of all his force,

all his prescience, all his duplicity. The mystery that had lain

between him and Hilda for a year was in the letter within two feet of

his nose. He could watch her as she read, study her face; he knew that

he was the wiser of the two; she was at a disadvantage; as regards the

letter, she was fighting on ground chosen by him; and yet he could not

in the least foresee the next ten minutes,--whether she would advance,

retreat, feint, or surrender.

"Did you bring your dress-clothes?" she murmured, while she was reading.

She had instructed him in her letter on this point.

"Of course," he said, manfully, striving to imply the immense untruth

that he never stirred from home without his dress-clothes.

She continued to read, frowning, and drawing her heavy eyebrows still

closer together. Then she said:

"Here!"

And passed him the letter. He could see now that she was becoming

excited.

The letter was from the legitimate Mrs. George Cannon, and it said that,

though nothing official was announced or even breathed, her solicitor

had gathered from a permanent and important underling of the Home Office

that George Cannon's innocence was supposed to be established, and that

the Queen's pardon would, at some time or other, be issued. It was an

affecting letter. Edwin, totally ignorant of all that had preceded it,

did not immediately understand its significance. At first he did not

even grasp what it was about. When he did begin to comprehend he had

the sensation of being deprived momentarily of his bearings. He had

expected everything but this. That is to say, he had absolutely not

known what to expect. The shock was severe.

"_What_ is it? _What_ is it?" he questioned, as if impatient.

Hilda replied:

"It's about George Cannon. It seems he was quite innocent in that

bank-note affair. It's his wife who's been writing to me about it. I

don't know why she should. But she did, and of course I had to reply."

"You never said anything to me about it."

"I didn't want to worry you, dearest. I knew you'd quite enough on your

mind with the works. Besides, I'd no right to worry you with a thing

like _that_. But of course I can show you all her letters,--I've kept

them."

Unanswerable! Unanswerable! Insincere, concocted, but unanswerable!

The implications in her spoken defence were of the simplest and deepest

ingenuity, and withal they hurt him. For example, the implication that

the strain of the new works was breaking him! As if he could not

support it, and had not supported it, easily! As if the new works meant

that he could not fulfil all his duties as a helpmeet! And then the

devilishly adroit plea that her concealment was morally necessary since

he ought not to be troubled with any result of her pre-conjugal life!

And finally the implication that he would be jealous of the

correspondence and might exact the production of it! ... He now

callously ignored Cecil's signals for attention.... He knew that he

would receive no further enlightenment as to the long secrecy of the

past twelve months. His fears and apprehensions and infelicity were to

be dismissed with those few words. They would never be paid for,

redeemed, atoned. The grand scenic explanation and submission which was

his right would never come. Sentimentally, he was cheated, and had no

redress. And, as a climax, he had to assume, to pretend, that justice

still prevailed on earth.

"Isn't it awful!" Hilda muttered. "Him in prison all this time!"

He saw that her eyes were wet, and her emotion increasing.

He nodded in sympathy.

He thought:

"She'll want some handling,--I can see that!"

He too, as well as she, imaginatively comprehended the dreadful tragedy

of George Cannon's false imprisonment. He had heart enough to be very

glad that the innocent man (innocent at any rate of that one thing) was

to be released. But at the same time he could not stifle a base

foreboding and regret. Looking at his wife, he feared the moment when

George Cannon, with all the enormous prestige of a victim in a woman's

eyes, should be at large. Yes, the lover in him would have preferred

George Cannon to be incarcerated forever. Had he not heard, had he not

read, had he not seen on the stage, that a woman never forgets the first

man? Nonsense, all that! Invented theatrical psychology! And yet--if

it was true! ... Look at her eyes!

"I suppose he _is_ innocent?" he said gruffly, for he mistrusted, or

affected to mistrust, the doings of these two women together,--Cannon's

wife and Cannon's victim. Might they not somehow have been hoodwinked?

He knew nothing, no useful detail, naught that was convincing--and he

never would know! Was it not astounding that the bigamist should have

both these women on his side, either working for him, or weeping over

his woes?

"He must be innocent," Hilda answered, thoughtfully, in a breaking

voice.

"Where is he now,--up yon?"

He indicated the unvisited heights of Dartmoor.

"I believe so."

"I thought they always shifted 'em back to London before they released

'em."

"I expect they will do. They may have moved him already."

His mood grew soft, indulgent. He conceded that her emotion was

natural. She had been bound up with the man. Cannon's admitted guilt

on the one count, together with all that she had suffered through it,

only intensified the poignancy of his innocence on the other count.

Contrary to the general assumption, you must be sorrier for an

unfortunate rascal than for an unfortunate good man. He could feel all

that. He, Edwin, was to be pitied; but nobody save himself would

perceive that he was to be pitied. His role would be difficult, but all

his pride and self-reliance commanded him to play it well, using every

resource of his masculine skill, and so prove that he was that which he

believed himself to be. The future would be all right, because he would

be equal to the emergency. Why should it not be all right? His heart

in kindliness and tenderness drew nearer to Hilda's, and he saw, or

fancied he saw, that all their guerilla had been leading up to this, had

perhaps been caused by this, and would be nobly ended by it.

Just then a mysterious noise penetrated the room, growing and growing

until it became a huge deafening din, and slowly died away.

"I expect that's breakfast," said Edwin in a casual tone.

The organism of the English household was functioning. Even in the

withdrawn calm of the bedroom they could feel it irresistibly

functioning. The gong had a physical effect on Cecil; all his

disappointment and his sense of being neglected were gathered up in his

throat and exploded in a yell. Hilda took him in her right arm and

soothed him and called him silly names.

Edwin rose from the bed, and as he did so, Hilda retained him with her

left hand, and pulled him very gently towards her, inviting a kiss. He

kissed her. She held to him. He could see at a distance of two inches

all the dark swimming colour of her wet eyes half veiled by the long

lashes. And he could feel the soft limbs of the snuffling baby

somewhere close to his head.

"You'd better stick where you are," he advised her in a casual tone.

Hilda thought:

"Now the time's come. He'll be furious. But I can't help it."

She said:

"Oh no. I shall be quite all right soon. I'm going to get up in about

half an hour."

"But then how shall you get out of going to Princetown?"

"Oh! Edwin! I must go. I told them I should go."

He was astounded. There was no end to her incalculability,--no end!

His resentment was violent. He stood right away from her.

"'Told them you should go'!" he exclaimed. "What in the name of heaven

does that matter? Are you absolutely mad?"

She stiffened. Her features hardened. In the midst of her terrible

relief as to the fate of George Cannon and of her equal terrible

excitement under the enigmatic and irresistible mesmerism of Dartmoor

prison, she was desperate, and resentment against Edwin kindled deep

within her. She felt the brute in him. She felt that he would never

really understand. She felt all her weakness and all his strength, but

she was determined. At bottom she knew well that her weakness was the

stronger.

"I must go!" she repeated.

"It's nothing but morbidness!" he said savagely. "Morbidness! ... Well,

I shan't have it. I shan't let you go. And that's flat."

She kept silent. Frightfully disturbed, cursing women, forgetting

utterly in a moment his sublime resolves, Edwin descended to breakfast

in the large, strange house. Existence was monstrous.

And before the middle of the morning Hilda came into the garden where

everyone else was idling. And Alicia and Janet fondly kissed her. She

said her headache had vanished.

"Sure you feel equal to going this afternoon, dearest?" asked Janet.

"Oh yes!" Hilda replied lightly. "It will do me good."

Edwin was helpless. He thought, recalling with vexation his last firm

forbidding words to Hilda in the bedroom:

"Nobody _could_ be equal to this emergency."

CHAPTER XV

THE PRISON

I

Harry had two stout and fast cobs in a light wagonette. He drove

himself, and Hilda sat by his side. The driver's boast was that he

should accomplish the ten miles, with a rise of a thousand feet, in an

hour and a quarter. A hired carriage would have spent two hours over

the journey.

It was when they had cleared the town, and were on the long straight

rise across the moor towards Longford, that the horses began to prove

the faith that was in them, eager, magnanimous, conceiving grandly the

splendour of their task in life, and irrepressibly performing it with

glory. The stones on the loose-surfaced road flew from under the

striding of their hoofs into the soft, dark ling on either hand.

Harry's whip hovered in affection over their twin backs, never touching

them, and Harry smiled mysteriously to himself. He did not wish to talk.

Nor did Hilda. The movement braced and intoxicated her, and rendered

thought impossible. She brimmed with emotion, like a vase with some

liquid unanalysable and perilous. She was not happy, she was not

unhappy; the sensation of her vitality and of the kindred vitality of

the earth and the air was overwhelming. She would have prolonged the

journey indefinitely, and yet she intensely desired the goal, whatever

terrors it might hold for her. At intervals she pulled up the

embroidered and monogrammed apron that slipped slowly down over her

skirt and over Harry's tennis-flannels, disclosing two rackets in a

press that lay between them. Perhaps Harry was thinking of certain

strokes at tennis.

"Longford!" ejaculated Harry, turning his head slightly towards the body

of the vehicle, as they rattled by a hamlet.

Soon afterwards the road mounted steeply,--five hundred feet in little

more than a mile, and the horses walked, but they walked in haste,

fiercely, clawing at the road with their forefeet and thrusting it

behind them. And some of the large tors emerged clearly into view--Cox

Tor, the Staple Tors, and Great Mis lifting its granite above them and

beyond.

They were now in the midst of the moor, trotting fast again. Behind and

before them, and on either side, there was nothing but moor and sky.

The sky, a vast hemisphere of cloud and blue and sunshine, with a

complex and ever elusive geography of its own, discovered all the tints

of heath and granite. It was one of those days when every tint was

divided into ten thousand shades, and each is richer and more softly

beautiful than the others. On the shoulder of Great Mis rain fell,

while little Vixen Tor glittered with mica points in the sun. Nothing

could be seen over the whole moor save here and there a long-tailed

pony, or a tiny cottage set apart in solitude. And the yellowish road

stretched forward, wavily, narrowing, disappeared for a space,

reappeared still narrower, disappeared once more, reappeared like a thin

meandering line, and was lost on the final verge. It was an endless

road. Impossible that the perseverance of horses should cover it yard

by yard! But the horses strained onward, seeing naught but the macadam

under their noses. Harry checked them at a descent.

"Walkham River!" he announced.

They crossed a pebbly stream by a granite bridge.

"Hut-circles!" said Harry laconically.

They were climbing again.

Edwin, in the body of the wagonette with Janet and Alicia, looked for

hut-circles and saw none; but he did not care. He was content with the

knowledge that prehistoric hut-circles were somewhere there. He had

never seen wild England before, and its primeval sanity awoke in him the

primeval man. The healthiness and simplicity and grandiose beauty of it

created the sublime illusion that civilisation was worthy to be

abandoned. The Five Towns seemed intolerable by their dirt and

ugliness, and by the tedious intricacy of their existence.

Lithography,--you had but to think of the word to perceive the

paltriness of the thing! Riches, properties, proprieties, all the

safeties,--futile! He could have lived alone with Hilda on the moor,

begetting children by her, watching with satisfaction the growing curves

of her fecundity--his work, and seeing her with her brood, all their

faces beaten by wind and rain and browned with sun. He had a

tremendous, a painful longing for such a life. His imagination played

round the idea of it with voluptuous and pure pleasure, and he wondered

that he had never thought of it before. He felt that he had never

before peered into the depths of existence. And though he knew that the

dream of such an arcadian career was absurd, yet he seemed to guess that

beneath the tiresome surfaces of life in the Five Towns the essence of

it might be mystically lived. And he thought that Hilda would be

capable of sharing it with him,--nay, he knew she would!

His mood became gravely elated, even optimistic. He saw that he had

worried himself about nothing. If she wanted to visit the prison, let

her visit it! Why not? At any rate he should not visit it. He had an

aversion for morbidity almost as strong as his aversion for

sentimentality. But her morbidity could do no harm. She could not

possibly meet George Cannon. The chances were utterly against such an

encounter. Her morbidity would cure itself. He pitied her, cherished

her, and in thought enveloped her fondly with his sympathetic and

protective wisdom.

"North Hessary," said Harry, pointing with his whip to a jutting tor on

the right hand. "We go round by the foot of it. There in a jiff!"

Soon afterwards they swerved away from the main road, obeying a signpost

marked "Princetown."

"Glorious, isn't it?" murmured Janet, after a long silence which had

succeeded the light chatter of herself and Alicia about children,

servants, tennis, laundries.

He nodded, with a lively responsive smile, and glanced at Hilda's

mysterious back. Only once during the journey had she looked round.

Alicia with her coarse kind voice and laugh began to rally him, saying

he had dozed.

A town, more granite than the moor itself, gradually revealed its roofs

in the heart of the moor. The horses, indefatigable, quickened their

speed. Villas, a school, a chapel, a heavy church-tower followed in

succession; there were pavements; a brake full of excursionists had

halted in front of a hotel; holiday-makers--simple folk who disliked to

live in flocks--wandered in ecstatic idleness. Concealed within the

warmth of the mountain air, there pricked a certain sharpness. All

about, beyond the little town, the tors raised their shaggy flanks

surmounted by colossal masses of stone that recalled the youth of the

planet. The feel of the world was stimulating like a tremendous tonic.

Then the wagonette passed a thick grove of trees, hiding a house, and in

a moment, like magic, appeared a huge gated archway of brick and stone,

and over it the incised words:

PARCERE SUBJECTIS

"Stop! Stop! Harry," cried Alicia shrilly. "What are you doing?

You'll have to go to the house first."

"Shall I?" said Harry. "All right. Two thirty-five, be it noted."

The vehicle came to a standstill, and instantly clouds of vapour rose

from the horses.

"Virgil!" thought Edwin, gazing at the archway, which filled him with

sudden horror, like an obscenity misplaced.

II

Less than ten minutes later, he and Hilda and Alicia, together with

three strange men, stood under the archway. Events had followed one

another quickly, to Edwin's undoing. When the wagonette drew up in the

grounds of the Governor's house, Harry Hesketh had politely indicated

that for his horses he preferred the stables of a certain inn down the

road to any stables that hospitality might offer; and he had driven off,

Mrs. Rotherwas urging him to return without any delay so that tennis

might begin. The Governor had been called from home, and in his absence

a high official of the prison was deputed to show the visitors through

the establishment. This official was the first of the three strange

men; the other two were visitors. Janet had said that she would not go

over the prison, because she meant to play tennis and wished not to tire

herself. Alicia said kindly that she at any rate would go with

Hilda,--though she had seen it all before, it was interesting enough to

see again.

Edwin had thereupon said that he should remain with Janet. But

immediately Mrs. Rotherwas, whose reception of him had been full of the

most friendly charm, had shown surprise, if not pain. What,--come to

Princetown without inspecting the wonderful prison, when the chance was

there? Inconceivable! Edwin might in his blunt Five Towns way have

withstood Mrs. Rotherwas, but he could not withstand Hilda, who,

frowning, seemed almost ready to risk a public altercation in order to

secure his attendance. He had to yield. To make a scene, even a very

little one, in the garden full of light dresses and polite suave voices

would have been monstrous. He thought of all that he had ever heard of

the subjection of men to women. He thought of Johnnie and of Mrs. Chris

Hamson, who was known for her steely caprices. And he thought also of

Jimmie and of the undesirable Mrs. Jimmie, who, it was said, had

threatened to love Jimmie no more unless he took her once a week without

fail to the theatre, whatever the piece, and played cards with her and

two of her friends on all the other nights of the week. He thought of

men as a sex conquered by the unscrupulous and the implacable, and in

this mood, superimposed on his mood of disgust at the mere sight of the

archway, he followed the high official and his train. Mrs. Rotherwas's

last words were that they were not to be long. But the official said

privately to the group that they must at any rate approach the precincts

of the prison with all ceremony, and he led them proudly, with an air of

ownership, round to the main entrance where the wagonette had first

stopped.

A turnkey on the other side of the immense gates, using a theatrical

gesture, jangled a great bouquet of keys; the portal opened, increasing

the pride of the official, and the next moment they were interned in the

outer courtyard. The moor and all that it meant lay unattainably beyond

that portal. As the group slowly crossed the enclosed space, with the

grim facades of yellow-brown buildings on each side and vistas of

further gates and buildings in front, the official and the two male

visitors began to talk together over the heads of Alicia and Hilda. The

women held close to each other, and the official kept upon them a

chivalrous eye; the two visitors were friends; Edwin was left out of the

social scheme, and lagged somewhat behind, like one who is not wanted

but who cannot be abandoned. He walked self-conscious, miserable,

resentful, and darkly angry. In one instant the three men had estimated

him, decided that he was not of their clan nor of any related clan, and

ignored him. Whereas the official and the two male visitors, who had

never met before, grew more and more friendly each minute. One said

that he did not know So-and-So of the Scots Greys, but he knew his

cousin Trevor of the Hussars, who had in fact married a niece of his

own. And then another question about somebody else was asked, and

immediately they were engaged in following clues, as explorers will

follow the intricate mouths of a great delta and so unite in the main

stream. They were happy.

Edwin did not seriously mind that; but what he did mind was their

accent--in those days termed throughout the Midlands "lah-di-dah" (an

onomatopoeic description), which, falsifying every vowel sound in the

language, and several consonants, magically created around them an aura

of utter superiority to the rest of the world. He quite unreasonably

hated them, and he also envied them, because this accent was their

native tongue, and because their clothes were not cut like his, and

because they were entirely at their ease. Useless for the official to

throw him an urbane word now and then; neither his hate nor his

constraint would consent to be alleviated; the urbane words grew less

frequent. Also Edwin despised them because they were seemingly

insensible to the tremendous horror of the jail set there like an

outrage in the midst of primitive and sane Dartmoor. "Yes," their

attitude said. "This is a prison, one of the institutions necessary to

the well being of society, like a workhouse or an opera house,--an

interesting sight!"

A second pair of iron gates were opened with the same elaborate

theatricality as the first, and while the operation was being done the

official, invigorated by the fawning of turnkeys, conversed with Alicia,

who during her short married life had acquired some shallow acquaintance

with the clans, and he even drew a reluctant phrase from Hilda. Then,

after another open space, came a third pair of iron gates, final and

terrific, and at length the party was under cover, and even the sky of

the moor was lost. Edwin, bored, disgusted, shamed, and stricken,

yielded himself proudly and submissively to the horror of the

experience.

III

Hilda had only one thought--would she catch sight of the innocent

prisoner? The party was now deeply engaged in a system of corridors and

stairways. The official had said that as the tour of inspection was to

be short he would display to them chiefly the modern part of the prison.

So far not a prisoner had been seen, and scarcely a warder. The two

male visitors were scientifically interested in the question of escapes.

Did prisoners ever escape?

"Never!" said the official, with satisfaction.

"Impossible, I suppose. Even when they're working out on the moor?

Warders are pretty good shots, eh?"

"Practically impossible," said the official. "But there is one way."

He looked up the stairway on whose landing they stood, and down the

stairway, and cautiously lowered his voice. "Of course what I tell you

is confidential. If one of our Dartmoor fogs came on suddenly, and kind

friends outside had hidden a stock of clothes and food in an arranged

spot, then theoretically--I say, theoretically--a man might get away.

But nobody ever has done."

"I suppose you still have the silent system?"

The official nodded.

"Absolutely?"

"Absolutely."

"How awful it must be!" said Alicia, with a nervous laugh.

The official shrugged his shoulders, and the other two males murmured

reassuring axioms about discipline.

They emerged from the stairway into a colossal and resounding iron hall.

Round the emptiness of this interior ran galleries of perforated iron

protected from the abyss by iron balustrades. The group stood on the

second of the galleries from the stony floor, and there were two

galleries above them. Far away, opposite, a glint of sunshine had

feloniously slipped in, transpiercing the gloom, and it lighted a series

of doors. There was a row of these doors along every gallery. Each had

a peep-hole, a key-hole and a number. The longer Hilda regarded, the

more nightmarishly numerous seemed the doors. The place was like a huge

rabbit-hutch designed for the claustration of countless rabbits. Across

the whole width and length of the hall, and at the level of the lowest

gallery, was stretched a great net.

"To provide against suicides?" suggested one of the men.

"Yes," said the official.

"A good idea."

When the reverberation of the words had ceased, a little silence ensued.

The ear listened vainly for the slightest sound. In the silence the

implacability of granite walls and iron reticulations reigned over the

accursed vision, stultifying the soul.

"Are these cells occupied?" asked Alicia timidly.

"Not yet, Mrs. Hesketh. It's too soon. A few are."

Hilda thought:

"He may be here,--behind one of those doors." Her heart was liquid with

compassion and revolt. "No," she assured herself. "They must have

taken him away already. It's impossible he should be here. He's

innocent."

"Perhaps you would like to see one of the cells?" the official

suggested.

A warder appeared, and, with the inescapable jangle of keys, opened a

door. The party entered the cell, ladies first, then the official and

his new acquaintances; then Edwin, trailing. The cell was long and

narrow, fairly lofty, bluish-white colour, very dimly lighted by a tiny

grimed window high up in a wall of extreme thickness. The bed lay next

the long wall; except the bed, a stool, a shelf, and some utensils,

there was nothing to furnish the horrible nakedness of the cell. One of

the visitors picked up an old book from the shelf. It was a Greek

Testament. The party seemed astonished at this evidence of culture

among prisoners, of the height from which a criminal may have fallen.

The official smiled.

"They often ask for such things on purpose," said he. "They think it's

effective. They're very naive, you know, at bottom."

"This very cell may be his cell," thought Hilda. "He may have been here

all these months, years, knowing he was innocent. He may have thought

about me in this cell." She glanced cautiously at Edwin, but Edwin

would not catch her eye.

They left. On the way to the workshops, they had a glimpse of the old

parts of the prison, used during the Napoleonic wars, incredibly dark,

frowsy, like catacombs.

"We don't use this part--unless we're very full up," said the official,

and he contrasted it with the bright, spacious, healthy excellences of

the hall which they had just quitted, to prove that civilisation never

stood still.

And then suddenly, at the end of a passage, a door opened and they were

in the tailors' shop, a large irregular apartment full of a strong

stench and of squatted and grotesque human beings. The human beings,

for the most part, were clothed in a peculiar brown stuff, covered with

broad arrows. The dress consisted of a short jacket, baggy

knickerbockers, black stockings, and coloured shoes. Their hair was cut

so short that they had the appearance of being bald, and their great

ears protruded at a startling angle from the sides of those smooth

heads. They were of every age, yet they all looked alike, ridiculous,

pantomimic, appalling. Some gazed with indifference at the visitors;

others seemed oblivious of the entry. They all stitched on their

haunches, in the stench, under the surveillance of eight armed warders

in blue.

"How many?" asked the official mechanically.

"Forty-nine, sir," said a warder.

And Hilda searched their loathsome and vapid faces for the face of

George Cannon. He was not there. She trembled,--whether with relief or

with disappointment she knew not. She was agonised, but in her torture

she exulted that she had come.

No comment had been made in the workshop, the official having hinted

that silence was usual on such occasions. But in a kind of

antechamber--one of those amorphous spaces, serving no purpose and

resembling nothing, which are sometimes to be found between definable

rooms and corridors in a vast building imperfectly planned--the party

halted in the midst of a discussion as to discipline. The male

visitors, except Edwin, showed marked intelligence and detachment; they

seemed to understand immediately how it was that forty-nine ruffians

could be trusted to squat on their thighs and stitch industriously and

use scissors and other weapons for hours without being chained to the

ground; they certainly knew something of the handling of men. The

official, triumphant, stated that every prisoner had the right of

personal appeal to the Governor every day.

"They come with their stories of grievances," said he, tolerant and

derisive.

"Which often aren't true?"

"Which are never true," said the official quietly. "Never! They are

always lies--always! ... Shows the material we have to deal with!" He

gave a short laugh.

"Really!" said one of the men, rather pleased and excited by this report

of universal lying.

"I suppose," Edwin blurted out, "you can tell for certain when they

aren't speaking the truth?"

Everybody looked at him surprised, as though the dumb had spoken. The

official's glance showed some suspicion of sarcasm and a tendency to

resent it.

"We can," he answered shortly, commanding his features to a faint smile.

"And now I wonder what Mrs. Rotherwas will be saying if I don't restore

you to her." It was agreed that regard must be had for Mrs. Rotherwas's

hospitable arrangements, though the prison was really very interesting

and would repay study.

They entered a wide corridor--one of two that met at right-angles in the

amorphous space--leading in the direction of the chief entrance. From

the end of this corridor a file of convicts was approaching in charge of

two warders with guns. The official offered no remark, but held on.

Hilda, falling back near to Edwin in the procession, was divided between

a dreadful fear and a hope equally dreadful. Except in the tailors'

shop, these were the only prisoners they had seen, and they appeared out

of place in the half-freedom of the corridor; for nobody could conceive

a prisoner save in a cell or shop, and these were moving in a public

corridor, unshackled.

Then she distinguished George Cannon among them. He was the third from

the last. She knew him by his nose and the shape of his chin, and by

his walk, though there was little left of his proud walk in the

desolating, hopeless prison-shuffle which was the gait of all six

convicts. His hair was iron-grey. All these details she could see and

be sure of in the distance of the dim corridor. She no longer had a

stomach; it had gone, and yet she felt a horrible nausea.

She cried out to herself:

"Why did I come? Why did I come? I am always doing these mad things.

Edwin was right. Why do I not listen to him?"

The party of visitors led by the high official, and the file of convicts

in charge of armed warders, were gradually approaching one another in

the wide corridor. It seemed to Hilda that a fearful collision was

imminent, and that something ought to be done. But nobody among the

visitors did anything or seemed to be disturbed. Only they had all

fallen silent; and in the echoing corridor could be heard the firm steps

of the male visitors accompanying the delicate tripping of the women,

and the military tramp of the warders with the confused shuffling of the

convicts.

"Has he recognised me?" thought Hilda, wildly.

She hoped that he had and that he had not. She recalled with the most

poignant sorrow the few days of their union, their hours of intimacy,

his kisses, her secret realisation of her power over him, and of his

passion. She wanted to scream:

"That man there is as innocent as any of you, and soon the whole world

will know it! He never committed any crime except that of loving me too

much. He could not do without me, and so I was his ruin. It is horrible

that he should be here in this hell. He must be set free at once. The

Home Secretary knows he is innocent, but they are so slow. How can

anyone bear that he should stop here one instant longer?"

But she made no sound. The tremendous force of an ancient and organised

society kept her lips closed and her feet in a line with the others.

She thought in despair:

"We are getting nearer, and I cannot meet him. I shall drop." She

glanced at Edwin, as if for help, but Edwin was looking straight ahead.

Then a warder, stopping, ejaculated with the harsh brevity of a

drill-serjeant:

"Halt!"

The file halted.

"Right turn!"

The six captives turned, with their faces close against the wall of the

corridor, obedient, humiliated, spiritless, limp, stooping. Their backs

presented the most ridiculous aspect; all the calculated grotesquerie of

the surpassingly ugly prison uniform was accentuated as they stood thus,

a row of living scarecrows, who knew that they had not the right even to

look upon free men. Every one of them except George Cannon had large

protuberant ears that completed the monstrosity of their appearance.

The official gave his new acquaintances a satisfied glance, as if

saying:

"That is the rule by which we manage these chance encounters."

The visitors went by in silence, instinctively edging away from the

captives. And as she passed, Hilda lurched very heavily against Edwin,

and recovered herself. Edwin seized her arm near the shoulder, and saw

that she was pale. The others were in front.

Behind them they could hear the warder:

"Left turn! March!"

And the shuffling and the tramping recommenced.

IV

In the garden of the Governor's house tennis had already begun when the

official brought back his convoy. Young Truscott and Mrs. Rotherwas

were pitted against Harry Hesketh and a girl of eighteen who possessed a

good wrist but could not keep her head. Harry was watching over his

partner, quietly advising her upon the ruses of the enemy, taking the

more difficult strokes for her, and generally imparting to her the

quality which she lacked. Harry was fully engaged; the whole of his

brain and body was at strain; he let nothing go by; he missed no chance,

and within the laws of the game he hesitated at no stratagem. And he was

beating young Truscott and Mrs. Rotherwas, while an increasing and

polite audience looked on. To the entering party, the withdrawn scene,

lit by sunshine, appeared as perfect as a stage-show, with its trees,

lawn, flowers, toilettes, the flying balls, the grace of the players,

and the grey solidity of the governor's house in the background.

Alicia ran gawkily to Janet, who had got a box of chocolates from

somewhere, and one of the men followed her, laughing. Hilda sat apart;

she was less pale. Edwin remained cautiously near her. He had not left

her side since she lurched against him in the corridor. He knew; he had

divined that that which he most feared had come to pass,--the supreme

punishment of Hilda's morbidity. He had not definitely recognised

George Cannon, for he was not acquainted with him, and in the past had

only once or twice by chance caught sight of him in the streets of

Bursley or Turnhill. But he had seen among the six captives one who

might be he, and who certainly had something of the Five Towns look.

Hilda's lurch told him that by vindictiveness of fate George Cannon was

close to them.

He had ignored his own emotion. The sudden transient weight of Hilda's

body had had a strange moral effect upon him. "This," he thought, "is

the burden I have to bear. This, and not lithography, nor riches, is my

chief concern. She depends on me. I am all she has to stand by." The

burden with its immense and complex responsibilities was sweet to his

inmost being; and it braced him and destroyed his resentment against her

morbidity. His pity was pure. He felt that he must live more

nobly--yes, more heroically--than he had been living; that all irritable

pettiness must drop away from him, and that his existence in her regard

must have simplicity and grandeur. The sensation of her actual weight

stayed with him. He had not spoken to her; he dared not; he had

scarcely met her eyes; but he was ready for any emergency. Every now and

then, in the garden, Hilda glanced over her shoulder at the house, as

though her gaze could pierce the house and see the sinister prison

beyond.

The set ended, to Harry Hesketh's satisfaction; and, another set being

arranged, he and Mrs. Rotherwas, athletic in a short skirt and simple

blouse, came walking, rather flushed and breathless, round the garden

with one or two others, including Harry's late partner. The

conversation turned upon the great South Wales colliery strike against a

proposed reduction of wages. Mrs. Rotherwas' husband was a colliery

proprietor near Monmouth, and she had just received a letter from him.

Everyone sympathised with her and her husband, and nobody could

comprehend the wrongheadedness of the miners, except upon the

supposition that they had been led away by mischievous demagogues. As

the group approached, the timid young girl, having regained her nerve,

was exclaiming with honest indignation: "The leaders ought to be shot,

and the men who won't go down the pits ought to be forced to go down and

made to work." And she picked at fluff on her yellow frock. Edwin

feared an uprising from Hilda, but naught happened. Mrs. Rotherwas

spoke about tea, though it was rather early, and they all, Hilda as

well, wandered to a large yew tree under which was a table; through the

pendant branches of the tree the tennis could be watched as through a

screen.

The prison clock tolled the hour over the roofs of the house, and Mrs.

Rotherwas gave the definite signal for refreshments.

"You're exhausted," she said teasingly to Harry.

"You'll see," said Harry.

"No," Mrs. Rotherwas delightfully relented. "You're a dear, and I love

to watch you play. I'm sure you could give Mr. Truscott half fifteen."

"Think so?" said Harry, pleased, and very conscious that he was living

fully.

"You see what it is to have an object in life, Hesketh," Edwin remarked

suddenly.

Harry glanced at him doubtfully, and yet with a certain ingenuous

admiration. At the same time a white ball rolled near the tree. He

ducked under the trailing branches, returned the ball, and moved slowly

towards the court.

"Alicia tells me you're very old friends of theirs," said Mrs.

Rotherwas, agreeably, to Hilda.

Hilda smiled quietly.

"Yes, we are, both of us."

Who could have guessed, now, that her condition was not absolutely

normal?

"Charming people, aren't they, the Heskeths?" said Mrs. Rotherwas.

"Perfectly charming. They're an ideal couple. And I do like their

house, it's so deliciously quaint, isn't it, Mary?"

"Lovely," agreed the young girl.

It was an ideal world, full of ideal beings.

Soon after tea the irresistible magnetism of Alicia's babies drew Alicia

off the moor, and with her the champion player, Janet, Hilda and Edwin.

Mrs. Rotherwas let them go with regret, adorably expressed. Harry would

have liked to stay, but on the other hand he was delightfully ready to

yield to Alicia.

V

On arriving at Tavy Mansion Hilda announced that she should lie down.

She told Edwin, in an exhausted but friendly voice, that she needed only

rest, and he comprehended, rightly, that he was to leave her. Not a

word was said between them as to the events within the prison. He left

her, and spent the time before dinner with Harry Hesketh, who had the

idea of occupying their leisure with a short game of bowls, for which it

was necessary to remove the croquet hoops.

Hilda undressed and got into bed. Soon afterwards both Alicia, with an

infant, and Janet came to see her. Had Janet been alone, Hilda might

conceivably in her weakness have surrendered the secret to her in

exchange for that soft and persuasive sympathy of which Janet was the

mistress, but the presence of Alicia made a confidence impossible, and

Hilda was glad. She plausibly fibbed to both sisters, and immediately

afterwards the household knew that Hilda would not appear at dinner.

There was not the slightest alarm or apprehension, for the affair

explained itself in the simplest way,--Hilda had had a headache in the

morning, and had been wrong to go out; she was now merely paying for the

indiscretion. She would be quite recovered the next day. Alicia

whispered a word to her husband, who, besides, was not apt easily to get

nervous about anything except his form at games. Edwin also, with his

Five Towns habit of mind, soberly belittled the indisposition. The

household remained natural and gay. When Edwin went upstairs to prepare

for dinner, moving very quietly, his wife had her face towards the wall

and away from the light. He came round the bed to look at her.

"I'm all right," she murmured.

"Want nothing at all?" he asked, with nervous gruffness.

She shook her head.

Very impatiently she awaited his departure, exasperated more than she

had ever been by his precise deliberation over certain details of his

toilet. As soon as he was gone she began to cry; but the tears came so

gently from her eyes that the weeping was as passive, as independent of

volition, as the escape of blood from a wound.

She had a grievance against Edwin. At the crisis in the prison she had

blamed herself for not submitting to his guidance, but now she had

reacted against all such accusations, and her grievance amounted to just

an indictment of his commonsense, his quietude, his talent for keeping

out of harm's way, his lack of violent impulses, his formidable

respectability. She was a rebel; he was not. He would never do

anything wrong, or even perilous. Never, never would he find himself in

need of a friend's help. He would always direct his course so that

society would protect him. He was a firm part of the structure of

society; he was the enemy of impulses. When he foresaw a danger, the

danger was always realised: she had noticed that, and she resented it.

He was infinitely above the George Cannons of the world. He would be

incapable of bigamy, incapable of being caught in circumstances which

could bring upon him suspicion of any crime whatever. Yet for her the

George Cannons had a quality which he lacked, which he could never

possess, and which would have impossibly perfected him--a quality

heroic, foolish, martyr-like! She was almost ready to decide that his

complete social security was due to cowardice and resulted in

self-righteousness! ... Could he really feel pity as she felt it, for

the despised and rejected, and a hatred of injustice equal to hers?

These two emotions were burning her up. Again and again, ceaselessly,

her mind ran round the circle of George Cannon's torture and the

callousness of society. He had sinned, and she had loathed him; but

both his sin and her loathing were the fruit of passion. He had been a

proud man, and she had shared his pride; now he was broken, unutterably

humiliated, and she partook of his humiliation. The grotesque and

beaten animal in the corridor was all that society had left of him who

had once inspired her to acts of devotion, who could make her blush, and

to satisfy whom she would recklessly spend herself. The situation was

intolerable, and yet it had to be borne. But surely it must be ended!

Surely at the latest on the morrow the prisoner must be released, and

soothed and reinstated! ... Pardoned? No! A pardon was an insult,

worse than an insult. She would not listen to the word. Society might

use it for its own purposes; but she would never use it. Pardon a man

after deliberately and fiendishly achieving his ruin? She could have

laughed.

Exhaustion followed, tempering emotion and reducing it to a profound

despairing melancholy that was stirred at intervals by frantic revolt.

The light failed. The windows became vague silver squares. Outside

fowls clucked, a horse's hoof clattered on stones; servants spoke to

each other in their rough, good-natured voices. The peace of the world

had its effect on her, unwilling though she was. Then there was a faint

tap at the door. She made no reply, and shut her eyes. The door gently

opened, and someone tripped delicately in. She heard movements at the

washstand.... One of the maids. A match was struck. The blinds were

stealthily lowered, the curtains drawn; garments were gathered together,

and at last the door closed again.

She opened her eyes. The room was very dimly illuminated. A

night-light, under a glass hemisphere of pale rose, stood on the

dressing-table. By magic, order had been restored; a glinting copper

ewer of hot water stood in the whiteness of the basin with a towel over

it; the blue blinds, revealed by the narrowness of the red curtains,

stirred in the depths of the windows; each detail of the chamber was

gradually disclosed, and the chamber was steeped in the first

tranquillity of the night. Not a sound could be heard. Through the

depths of her bitterness, there rose slowly the sensation of the beauty

of existence even in its sadness....

A long time afterwards it occurred to her in the obscurity that the bed

was tumbled. She must have turned over and over. The bed must be

arranged before Edwin came. He had to share it. After all, he had

committed no fault; he was entirely innocent. She and fate between them

had inflicted these difficulties and these solicitudes upon him. He had

said little or nothing, but he was sympathetic. When she had stumbled

against him she had felt his upholding masculine strength. He was

dependable, and would be dependable to the last. The bed must be

creaseless when he came; this was the least she could do. She arose.

Very faintly she could descry her image in the mirror of the great

wardrobe--a dishevelled image. Forgetting the bed, she bathed her face,

and, unusually, took care to leave the washstand as tidy as the maid had

left it. Then, having arranged her hair, she set about the bed. It was

not easy for one person unaided to make a wide bed. Before she had

finished she heard footsteps outside the door. She stood still. Then

she heard Edwin's voice:

"Don't trouble, thanks. I'll take it in myself."

He entered, carrying a tray, and shut the door, and instantly she busied

herself once more with the bed.

"My poor girl," he said with quiet kindliness, "what are you doing?"

"I'm just putting the bed to rights," she answered, and almost with a

single movement she slid back into the bed. "What have you got there?"

"I thought I'd ask for some tea for you," he said. "Nearly the whole

blessed household wanted to come and see you, but I wouldn't have it."

She could not say: "It's very nice of you." But she said, simply to

please him: "I should like some tea."

He put the tray on the dressing-table; then lit three candles, two on

the dressing-table and one on the night-table, and brought the tray to

the night-table.

He himself poured out the tea, and offered the cup. She raised herself

on an elbow.

"Did you recognise him?" she muttered suddenly, after she had blown on

the tea to cool it.

Under ordinary conditions Edwin would have replied to such an unprepared

question with another, petulant and impatient: "Recognise who?"

pretending that he did not understand the allusion. But now he made no

pretences.

"Not quite," he said. "But I knew at once. I could see which of them

it must be."

The subject at last opened between them, Hilda felt an extraordinary

solace and relief. He stood by the bedside, in black, with a great

breastplate of white, his hair rough, his hands in his pockets. She

thought he had a fine face; she thought of him as, at such a time, her

superior; she wanted powerfully to adopt his attitude, to believe in

everything he said. They were talking together in safety, quietly,

gravely, amicably, withdrawn and safe in the strange house--he

benevolent and assuaging and comprehending, she desiring the balm which

he could give. It seemed to her that they had never talked to each

other in such tones.

"Isn't it awful--awful?" she exclaimed.

"It is," said Edwin, and added carefully, tenderly: "I suppose he _is_

innocent."

She might have flown at him: "That's just like you--to assume he isn't!"

But she replied:

"I'm quite sure of it. I say--I want you to read all the letters I've

had from Mrs. Cannon. I've got them here. They're in my bag there.

Read them now. Of course I always meant to show them to you."

"All right," he agreed, drew a chair to the dressing-table where the bag

was, found the letters, and read them. She waited, as he read one

letter, put it down, read another, laid it precisely upon the first one,

with his terrible exactitude and orderliness, and so on through the

whole packet.

"Yes," said he at the end, "I should say he's innocent this time, right

enough."

"But something ought to be done!" she cried. "Don't you think something

ought to be done, Edwin?"

"Something has been done. Something is being done."

"But something else!"

He got up and walked about the room.

"There's only one thing to be done," he said.

He came towards her, and stood over her again, and the candle on the

night-table lighted his chin and the space between his eyelashes and his

eyebrows. He timidly touched her hair, caressing it. They were

absolutely at their ease together in the intimacy of the bedroom. In

her brief relations with George Cannon there had not been time to

establish anything like such intimacy. With George Cannon she had

always had the tremors of the fawn.

"What is it?"

"Wait. That's all. It's not the slightest use trying to hurry these

public departments. You can't do it. You only get annoyed for nothing

at all. You can take that from me, my child."

He spoke with such delicate persuasiveness, such an evident desire to be

helpful, that Hilda was convinced and grew resigned. It did not occur

to her that he had made a tremendous resolve which had raised him above

the Edwin she knew. She thought she had hitherto misjudged and

underrated him.

"I wanted to explain to you about that ten pounds," she said.

"That's all right--that's all right," said he hastily.

"But I _must_ tell you. You saw Mrs. Cannon's letter asking me for

money. Well, I borrowed the ten pounds from Janet. So of course I had

to pay it back, hadn't I?"

"How is Janet?" he asked in a new, lighter tone.

"She seems to be going on splendidly, don't you think so?"

"Well then, we'll go home to-morrow."

"Shall we?"

She lifted her arms and he bent. She was crying. In a moment she was

sobbing. She gave him violent kisses amid her sobs, and held him close

to her until the fit passed. Then she said, in her voice reduced to

that of a child:

"What time's the train?"

CHAPTER XVI

THE GHOST

I

It was six-thirty. The autumn dusk had already begun to fade; and in

the damp air, cold, grimy, and vaporous, men with scarves round their

necks and girls with shawls over their heads, or hatted and even gloved,

were going home from work past the petty shops where sweets, tobacco,

fried fish, chitterlings, groceries, and novelettes were sold among

enamelled advertisements of magic soaps. In the feeble and patchy

illumination of the footpaths, which left the middle of the streets and

the upper air all obscure, the chilled, preoccupied people passed each

other rapidly like phantoms, emerging out of one mystery and

disappearing into another. Everywhere, behind the fanlights and shaded

windows of cottages, domesticity was preparing the warm relaxations of

the night. Amid the streets of little buildings the lithographic

establishment, with a yellow oblong here and there illuminated in its

dark facades, stood up high, larger than reality, more important and

tyrannic, one of the barracks, one of the prisons, one of the

money-works where a single man or a small group of men by brains and

vigour and rigour exploited the populace.

Edwin, sitting late in his private office behind those facades, was not

unaware of the sensation of being an exploiter. By his side on the

large flat desk lay a copy of the afternoon's _Signal_ containing an

account of the breaking up by police of an open-air meeting of confessed

anarchists on the previous day at Manchester. Manchester was, and is

still, physically and morally, very close to the Five Towns, which

respect it more than they respect London. An anarchist meeting at

Manchester was indeed an uncomfortable portent for the Five Towns.

Enormous strikes, like civil wars at stalemate, characterised the autumn

as they had characterised the spring, affecting directly or indirectly

every industry, and weakening the prestige of government, conventions,

wealth, and success. Edwin was successful. It was because he was

successful that he was staying late and that a clerk in the outer office

was staying late and that windows were illuminated here and there in the

facades. Holding in his hand the wage-book, he glanced down the long

column of names and amounts. Some names conveyed nothing to him; but

most of them raised definite images in his mind--of big men, roughs,

decent clerks with wristbands, undersized pale machinists, intensely

respectable skilled artisans and daughtsmen, thin ragged lads, greasy,

slatternly, pale girls, and one or two fat women,--all dirty, and

working with indifference in dirt. Most of them kowtowed to him; some

did not; some scowled askance. But they were all dependent on him. Not

one of them but would be prodigiously alarmed and inconvenienced--to say

nothing of going hungry--if it he did not pay wages the next morning.

The fact was he could distribute ruin with a gesture and nobody could

bring him to book....

Something wrong! Under the influence of strikes and anarchist meetings

he felt with foreboding and even with a little personal alarm that

something was wrong. Those greasy, slatternly girls, for instance, with

their coarse charm and their sexuality,--they were underpaid. They

received as much as other girls, on pot-banks, perhaps more, but they

were underpaid. What chance had they? He was getting richer every day,

and safer (except for the vague menace); yet he could not appreciably

improve their lot, partly for business reasons, partly because any

attempt to do so would bring the community about his ears and he would

be labelled as a doctrinaire and a fool, and partly because his own

commonsense was against such a move. Not those girls, not his works, not

this industry and that, was wrong. All was wrong. And it was

impossible to imagine any future period when all would not be wrong.

Perfection was a desolating thought. Nevertheless the struggle towards

it was instinctive and had to go on. The danger was (in Edwin's eyes)

of letting that particular struggle monopolise one's energy. Well, he

would not let it. He did a little here and a little there, and he voted

democratically and in his heart was most destructively sarcastic about

toryism; and for the rest he relished the adventure of existence, and

took the best he conscientiously could, and thought pretty well of

himself as a lover of his fellowmen. If he was born to be a master, he

would be one, and not spend his days in trying to overthrow mastery. He

was tired that evening, he had a slight headache, he certainly had

worries; but he was not unhappy on the throbbing, tossing steamer of

humanity. Nobody could seem less adventurous than he seemed, with his

timidities and his love of moderation, comfort, regularity and security.

Yet his nostrils would sniff to the supreme and all-embracing adventure.

He heard Hilda's clear voice in the outer office: "Mr. Clayhanger in

there?" and the clerk's somewhat nervously agitated reply, repeating

several times in eager affirmative. And he himself, the master, though

still all alone in the sanctum, at once pretended to be very busy.

Her presence would thus often produce an excitation in the organism of

the business. She was so foreign to it, so unsoiled by it, so aloof

from it, so much more gracious, civilised, enigmatic than anything that

the business could show! And, fundamentally, she was the cause of the

business; it was all for her; it existed with its dirt, noise, crudity,

strain, and eternal effort so that she might exist in her elegance, her

disturbing femininity, her restricted and deep affections, her

irrational capriciousness, and her strange, brusque commonsense. The

clerks and some of the women felt this; Big James certainly felt it; and

Edwin felt it, and denied it to himself, more than anybody. There was

no economic justice in the arrangement. She would come in veiled, her

face mysterious behind the veil, and after a few minutes she would

delicately lift her gloved fingers to the veil, and raise it, and her

dark, pale, vivacious face would be disclosed. "Here I am!" And the

balance was even, her debt paid! That was how it was.

In the month that had passed since the visit to Dartmoor, Edwin, despite

his resolve to live heroically and philosophically, had sometimes been

forced into the secret attitude: "This woman will kill me, but without

her I shouldn't be interested enough to live." He was sometimes morally

above her to the point of priggishness, and sometimes incredibly below

her; but for the most part living in a different dimension. She had

heard nothing further from Mrs. Cannon; she knew nothing of the

bigamist's fate, though more than once she had written for news. Her

moods were unpredictable and disconcerting, and as her moods constituted

the chief object of Edwin's study the effect on him was not

tranquillising. At the start he had risen to the difficulty of the

situation; but he could not permanently remain at that height, and the

situation had apparently become stationary. His exasperations, both

concealed and open, were not merely unworthy of a philosopher, they were

unworthy of a common man. "Why be annoyed?" he would say to himself.

But he was annoyed. "The tone--the right tone!" he would remind

himself. Surely he could remember to command his voice to the right

tone? But no! He could not. He could infallibly remember to wind up

his watch, but he could not remember that. Moreover, he felt, as he had

felt before, on occasions, that no amount of right tone would keep their

relations smooth, for the reason that principles were opposed. Could

she not see? ... Well, she could not. There she was, entire,

unalterable--impossible to chip inconvenient pieces off her--you must

take her or leave her; and she could not see, or she would not--which in

practice was the same thing.

And yet some of the most exquisite moments of their union had occurred

during that feverish and unquiet month--moments of absolute surrender

and devotion on her part, of protective love on his; and also long

moments of peace. With the early commencement of autumn, all the family

had resumed the pursuit of letters with a certain ardour. A startling

feminist writer, and the writer whose parentage and whose very name lay

in the Five Towns, who had re-created the East and whose vogue was a

passion among the lettered--both these had published books whose success

was extreme and genuine. And in the curtained gas-lit drawing-room of a

night Hilda would sit rejoicing over the triumphant satire of the

woman-novelist, and Edwin and George would lounge in impossible

postures, each mesmerised by a story of the Anglo-Indian; and between

chapters Edwin might rouse himself from the enchantment sufficiently to

reflect: "How indescribably agreeable these evenings are!" And ten to

one he would say aloud, with false severity: "George! Bed!" And George,

a fine judge of genuineness in severity, would murmur carelessly: "All

right! I'm going!" And not go.

And now Edwin in the office thought:

"She's come to fetch me away."

He was gratified. But he must not seem to be gratified. The sanctity

of business from invasion had to be upheld. He frowned, feigning more

diligently than ever to be occupied. She came in, with that air at once

apologetic and defiant that wives have in affronting the sacred

fastness. Nobody could have guessed that she had ever been a business

woman, arriving regularly at just such an office every morning,

shorthand-writing, twisting a copying-press, filing, making

appointments. Nobody could have guessed that she had ever been in

business for herself, and had known how sixpence was added to sixpence

and a week's profit lost in an hour. All such knowledge had apparently

dropped from her like an excrescence, had vanished like a temporary

disfigurement, and she looked upon commerce with the uncomprehending,

careless, and yet impressed eyes of a young girl.

"Hello, missis!" he exclaimed casually.

Then George came in. Since the visit to Dartmoor Hilda had much

increased her intimacy with George, spending a lot of time with him,

walking with him, and exploring in a sisterly and reassuring manner his

most private life. George liked it, but it occasionally irked him and

he would give a hint to Edwin that mother needed to be handled at times.

"You needn't come in here, George," said Hilda.

"Well, can I go into the engine-house?" George suggested. Edwin had

always expected that he would prefer the machine-room. But the

engine-house was his haunt, probably because it was dirty, fiery, and

stuffy.

"No, you can't," said Edwin. "Pratt's gone by this, and it's shut up."

"No, it isn't. Pratt's there."

"All right."

"Shut the door, dear," said Hilda.

"Hooray!" George ran off and banged the glass door.

Hilda, glancing by habit at the unsightly details of the deteriorating

room, walked round the desk. With apprehension Edwin saw resolve and

perturbation in her face. He was about to say: "Look here, infant, I'm

supposed to be busy." But he refrained.

Holding out a letter which she nervously snatched from her bag, Hilda

said:

"I've just had this--by the afternoon post. Read it."

He recognised at once the sloping handwriting; but the paper was

different; it was a mere torn half-sheet of very cheap notepaper. He

read: "Dear Mrs. Clayhanger. Just a line to say that my husband is at

last discharged. It has been weary waiting. We are together, and I am

looking after him. With renewed thanks for your sympathy and help.

Believe me, Sincerely yours, Charlotte M. Cannon." The signature was

scarcely legible. There was no address, no date.

Edwin's first flitting despicable masculine thought was: "She doesn't

say anything about that ten pounds!" It fled. He was happy in an

intense relief that affected all his being. He said to himself: "Now

that's over, we can begin again."

"Well," he murmured. "That's all right. Didn't I always tell you it

would take some time? ... That's all right."

He gazed at the paper, waving it in his hand as he held it by one

corner. He perceived that it was the letter of a jealous woman, who had

got what she wanted and meant to hold it, and entirely to herself; and

his mood became somewhat sardonic.

"Very curt, isn't it?" said Hilda strangely. "And after all this time,

too!"

He looked up at her, turning his head sideways to catch her eyes.

"That letter," he said in a voice as strange as Hilda's, "that letter is

exactly what it ought to be. It could not possibly have been better

turned.... You don't want to keep it, I suppose, do you?"

"No," she muttered.

He tore it into very small pieces, and dropped them into the

waste-paper-basket beneath the desk.

"And burn all the others," he said, in a low tone.

"Edwin," after a pause.

"Yes?"

"Don't you think George ought to know? Don't you think one of us ought

to tell him,--either you or me? You might tell him?"

"Tell him what?" Edwin demanded sharply, pushing back his chair.

"Well, everything!"

He glowered. He could feel himself glowering. He could feel the

justifiable anger animating him.

"Certainly not!" he enunciated resentfully, masterfully, overpoweringly.

"Certainly not!"

"But supposing he hears from outsiders?"

"You needn't begin supposing."

"But he's bound to have to know sometime."

"Possibly. But he isn't going to know now, any road! Not with my

consent. The thing's absolute madness."

Hilda almost whispered:

"Very well, dear. If you think so."

"I do think so."

He suddenly felt very sorry for her. He was ready to excuse her

astounding morbidity as a consequence of extreme spiritual tribulation.

He added with brusque good-nature:

"And so will you, in the morning, my child."

"Shall you be long?"

"No. I told you I should be late. If you'll run off, my chuck, I'll

undertake to be after you in half an hour."

"Is your headache better?"

"No. On the other hand, it isn't worse."

He gazed fiercely at the wages-book.

She bent down.

"Kiss me," she murmured tearfully.

As he kissed her, and as she pressed against him, he absorbed and

understood all the emotions through which she had passed and was

passing, and from him to her was transmitted an unimaginable tenderness

that shamed and atoned for the inclemency of his refusals. He was very

happy. He knew that he would not do another stroke of work that night,

but still he must pretend to do some. Playfully, without rising, he

drew down her veil, smacked her gently on the back, and indicated the

door.

"I have to call at Clara's about that wool for Maggie," she said, with

courage. His fingering of her veil had given her extreme pleasure.

"I'll bring the kid up," he said.

"Will you?"

She departed, leaving the door unlatched.

II

A draught from the outer door swung wide-open the unlatched door of

Edwin's room.

"What are doors for?" he muttered, pleasantly impatient; then he called

aloud:

"Simpson. Shut the outer door--and this one, too."

There was no answer. He arose and went to the outer office. Hilda had

passed through it like an arrow. Simpson was not there. But a man

stood leaning against the mantelpiece; he held at full spread a copy of

the _Signal_, which concealed all the upper part of him except his

fingers and the crown of his head. Though the gas had been lighted in

the middle of the room, it must have been impossible for him to read by

it, since it shone through the paper. He lowered the newspaper with a

rustle and looked at Edwin. He was a big, well-dressed man, wearing a

dark grey suit, a blue Melton overcoat, and a quite new glossy

"boiler-end" felt hat. He had a straight, prominent nose, and dark,

restless eyes, set back; his short hair was getting grey, but not his

short black moustache.

"Were you waiting to see me?" Edwin said, in a defensive, half-hostile

tone. The man might be a belated commercial traveller of a big

house--some of those fellows considered themselves above all laws; on

the other hand he might be a new; customer in a hurry.

"Yes," was the reply, in a deep, full and yet uncertain voice. "The

clerk said you couldn't be disturbed, and asked me to wait. Then he

went out."