"Well, that's an eye-opener, that is!" he murmured, and thereby
expressed the situation. "Of all the damned impudence!" He somewhat
overstated his feelings, because he was posing a little to himself: an
accident that sooner or later happens to every man! "And she'll go back
and make out to Master Tom that she's just had a stroll in the garden!
Garden, indeed! And yet they're all so fearfully stuck on her."
He nodded his head several times reflectively, as if saying, "Well,
well! What next?" And he murmured aloud: "So that's how they carry on,
is it!" He meant, of course, women... He was very genuinely astounded.
But the chief of all his acute sensations in that moment was pride:
sheer pride. He thought, what ninety-nine men out of a hundred would
have thought in such circumstances: "She's taken a fancy to me!"
Useless to call him a conceited coxcomb, from disgust that he did not
conform to a sentimentally idealistic standard! He thought: "She's
taken a fancy to me!" And he was not a conceited coxcomb. He exulted
in the thought. Nothing had ever before so startled and uplifted him.
It constituted the supreme experience of his career as a human being.
The delightful and stimulating experience of his evening in the house of
the Orgreaves sank into unimportance by the side of it. The new avenues
towards joy which had been revealed to him appeared now to be quite
unexciting paths; he took them for granted. And he forgot the high and
serious mood of complex emotion in which he had entered the new house.
Music and the exotic flavours of a foreign language seemed a little
thing, in comparison with the feverish hand-clasp of the girl whom he so
peculiarly disliked. The lifeless hand which he had taken in the
drawing-room of the Orgreaves could not be the same hand as that which
had closed intimately on his under the porch. She must have two right
hands!
And, even more base than his coxcombry, he despised her because it was
he, Edwin, to whom she had taken a fancy. He had not sufficient
self-confidence to justify her fancy in his own eyes. His argument
actually was that no girl worth having could have taken a fancy to him
at sight. Thus he condemned her for her faith in him. As for his
historic remark about belief,--well, there might or might not be
something in that; perhaps there was something in it. One instant he
admired it, and the next he judged it glib and superficial. Moreover,
he had conceivably absorbed it from a book. But even if it were an
original epigrammatic pearl--was that an adequate reason for her
following him to an empty house at dead of night? Of course, an
overwhelming passion _might_ justify such behaviour! He could recall
cases in literature... Yes, he had got so far as to envisage the
possibility of overwhelming passion... Then all these speculations
disconcertingly vanished, and Hilda presented herself to his mind as a
girl intensely religious, who would shrink from no unconventionality in
the pursuit of truth. He did not much care for this theory of Hilda,
nor did it convince him.
"Imagine marrying a girl like that!" he said to himself disdainfully.
And he made a catalogue of her defects of person and of character. She
was severe, satiric, merciless. "And I suppose--if I were to put my
finger up!" Thus ran on his despicable ideas. "Janet Orgreave, now!"
Janet had every quality that he could desire, that he could even think
of. Janet was balm.
"You needn't be afraid," that unpleasant girl had said. And he had only
been able to grin in reply!
Still, pride! Intense masculine pride!
There was one thing he had liked about her: that straightening of the
spine and setting back of the shoulders as she left him. She had in her
some tinge of the heroic.
He quitted the garden, and as soon as he was in the street he remembered
that he had not pulled-to the garden door of the house. "Dash the
confounded thing!" he exploded, returning. But he was not really
annoyed. He would not have been really annoyed even if he had had to
return from half-way down Trafalgar Road. Everything was a trifle save
that a girl had run after him under such romantic circumstances. The
circumstances were not strictly romantic, but they so seemed to him.
Going home, he did not meet a soul; only in the middle distance of one
of the lower side streets he espied a policeman. Trafalgar Road was a
solitude of bright and forlorn gas lamps and dark, excluding facades.
Suddenly he came to the corner of Wedgwood Street. He had started from
Bleakridge; he had arrived at home: the interval between these two
events was a perfect blank, save for the policeman. He could not recall
having walked all the way down the road. And as he put the key into the
door he was not in the least disturbed by the thought that his father
might not have gone to bed. He went upstairs with a certain swaggering
clatter, as who should say to all sleepers and bullies: "You be damned!
I don't care for any of you! Something's happened to me."
And he mused: "If anybody had told me this afternoon that before
midnight I should--"