He was more proud and agitated than happy. The romance of the affair,
and its secrecy, made him proud; the splendid qualities of Hilda made
him proud. It was her mysteriousness that agitated him, and her absence
rendered him unhappy in his triumph. During the whole of Friday he was
thinking: "To-morrow is Saturday and I shall have her address and a
letter from her." He decided that there was no hope of a letter by the
last post on Friday, but as the hour of the last post drew nigh he grew
excited, and was quite appreciably disappointed when it brought nothing.
The fear, which had always existed in little, then waxed into enormous
dread, that Saturday's post also would bring nothing. His manoeuvres in
the early twilight of Saturday morning were complicated by the fact that
it had not been arranged whether she should write to the shop or to the
house. However, he prepared for either event by having his breakfast at
seven o'clock, on the plea of special work in the shop. He had finished
it at half-past seven, and was waiting for the postman, whose route he
commanded from the dining-room window. The postman arrived. Edwin with
false calm walked into the hall, saying to himself that if the letter
was not in the box it would be at the shop. But the letter was in the
box. He recognised her sprawling hand on the envelope through the
wirework. He snatched the letter and slipped upstairs with it like a
fox with a chicken. It had come, then! The letter safely in his hands
he admitted more frankly that he had been very doubtful of its
promptitude.
"59 Preston Street, Brighton, 1 a.m.
"Dearest,--This is my address. I love you. Every bit of me is
absolutely yours. Write me.--H.L."
That was all. It was enough. Its tone enchanted him. Also it startled
him. But it reminded him of her lips. He had begun a letter to her.
He saw now that what he had written was too cold in the expression of
his feelings. Hilda's note suddenly and completely altered his views
upon the composition of love-letters. "Every bit of me is absolutely
yours." How fine, how untrammelled, how like Hilda! What other girl
could or would have written such a phrase? More than ever was he
convinced that she was unique. The thrill divine quickened in him
again, and he rose eagerly to her level of passion. The romance, the
secrecy, the mystery, the fever! He walked down Trafalgar Road with the
letter in his pocket, and once he pulled it out to read it in the
street. His discretion objected to this act, but Edwin was not his own
master. Stifford, hurrying in exactly at eight, was somewhat perturbed
to find his employer's son already installed in the cubicle, writing by
the light of gas, as the shutters were not removed. Edwin had finished
and stamped his first love-letter just as his father entered the
cubicle. Owing to dyspeptic accidents Darius had not set foot in the
cubicle since it had been sanctified by Hilda. Edwin, leaving it,
glanced at the old man's back and thought disdainfully: "Ah! You little
know, you rhinoceros, that less than two days ago, she and I, on that
very spot--"
As soon as his father had gone to pay the morning visit to the printing
shops, he ran out to post the letter himself. He could not be contented
until it was in the post. Now, when he saw men of about his own class
and age in the street, he would speculate upon their experiences in the
romance of women. And it did genuinely seem to him impossible that
anybody else in a town like Bursley could have passed through an episode
so exquisitely strange and beautiful as that through which he was
passing. Yet his reason told him that he must be wrong there. His
reason, however, left him tranquil in the assurance that no girl in
Bursley had ever written to her affianced: "I love you. Every bit of me
is absolutely yours."
Hilda's second letter did not arrive till the following Tuesday, by
which time he had become distracted by fears and doubts. Yes, doubts!
No rational being could have been more loyal than Edwin, but these
little doubts would keep shooting up and withering away. He could not
control them. The second letter was nearly as short as the first. It
told him nothing save her love and that she was very worried by her
friend's situation, and that his letters were a joy. She had had a
letter from him each day. In his reply to her second he gently implied,
between two lines, that her letters lacked quantity and frequency. She
answered: "I simply cannot write letters. It isn't in me. Can't you
tell that from my handwriting? Not even to you! You must take me as I
am." She wrote each day for three days. Edwin was one of those who
learn quickly, by the acceptance of facts. And he now learnt that
profound lesson that an individual must be taken or left in entirety,
and that you cannot change an object merely because you love it. Indeed
he saw in her phrase, "You must take me as I am," the accents of
original and fundamental wisdom, springing from the very roots of life.
And he submitted. At intervals he would say resentfully: "But surely
she could find five minutes each day to drop me a line! What's five
minutes?" But he submitted. Submission was made easier when he
co-ordinated with Hilda's idiosyncrasy the fact that Maggie, his own
unromantic sister, could never begin to write a letter with less than
from twelve to twenty-four hours' bracing of herself to the task.
Maggie would be saying and saying: "I really must write that letter...
Dear me! I haven't written that letter yet."
His whole life seemed to be lived in the post, and postmen were the
angels of the creative spirit. His unhappiness increased with the
deepening of the impression that the loved creature was treating him
with cruelty. Time dragged. At length he had been engaged a fortnight.
On Thursday a letter should have come. It came not. Nor on Friday nor
Saturday. On Sunday it must come. But it did not come on Sunday. He
determined to telegraph to her on the Monday morning. His loyalty,
though valorous, needed aid against all those pricking battalions of
ephemeral doubts. On the Sunday evening he suddenly had the idea of
strengthening himself by a process that resembled boat-burning. He
would speak to his father. His father's mentality was the core of a
difficulty that troubled him exceedingly, and he took it into his head
to attack the difficulty at once, on the spot.
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