On the following evening, when from the windows of the
London-to-Manchester express he saw in the gloom the high-leaping flames
of the blast-furnaces that seem to guard eternally the southern frontier
of the Five Towns, he felt that he had returned into daily reality out
of an impossible world. Waiting for the loop-line train in the familiar
tedium of Knype platform, staring at the bookstall, every item on which
he knew by heart and despised, surrounded once more by local
physiognomies, gestures, and accent, he thought to himself: "_This_ is my
lot. And if I get messing about, it only shows what a damned fool I
am!" He called himself a damned fool because Hilda had proved to have a
husband; because of that he condemned the whole expedition to Brighton
as a piece of idiocy. His dejection was profound and bitter. At first,
after Hilda had quitted him on the Sunday night, he had tried to be
cheerful, had persuaded himself indeed that he was cheerful; but
gradually his spirit had sunk, beaten and miserable. He had not called
at Preston Street again. Pride forbade, and the terror of being
misunderstood.
And when he sat at his own table, in his own dining-room, and watched
the calm incurious Maggie dispensing to him his elaborate tea-supper
with slightly more fuss and more devotion than usual, his thoughts, had
they been somewhat less vague, might have been summed up thus: "The
right sort of women don't get landed as the wives of convicts. Can you
imagine such a thing happening to Maggie, for instance? Or Janet?"
(And yet Janet was in the secret! This disturbed the flow of his
reflections.) Hilda was too mysterious. Now she had half disclosed yet
another mystery. But what? "Why was her husband a convict? Under what
circumstances? For what crime? Where? Since when?" He knew the
answer to none of these questions. More deeply than ever was that woman
embedded in enigmas.
"What's this parcel on the sideboard?" Maggie inquired.
"Oh! I want you to send it in to Janet. It's from her particular
friend, Mrs Cannon--something for the kid, I believe. I ran across her
in Brighton, and she asked me if I'd bring the parcel along."
The innocence of his manner was perfectly acted. He wondered that he
could do it so well. But really there was no danger. Nobody in
Bursley, or in the world, had the least suspicion of his past relations
with Hilda. The only conceivable danger would have been in hiding the
fact that he had met her in Brighton.
"Of course," said Maggie, mildly interested. "I was forgetting she
lived at Brighton. Well?" and she put a few casual questions, to which
Edwin casually replied.
"You look tired," she said later.
He astonished her by admitting that he was. According to all precedent
her statement ought to have drawn forth a quick contradiction.
The sad image of Hilda would not be dismissed. He had to carry it about
with him everywhere, and it was heavy enough to fatigue a stronger than
Edwin Clayhanger. The pathos of her situation overwhelmed him, argue as
he might about the immunity of `the right sort of women' from a certain
sort of disaster. On the Tuesday he sent her a post-office order for
twenty pounds. It rather more than made up the agreed sum of a hundred
pounds. She returned it, saying she did not need it. "Little fool!" he
said. He was not surprised. He was, however, very much surprised, a
few weeks later, to receive from Hilda her own cheque for eighty pounds
odd! More mystery! An absolutely incredible woman! Whence had she
obtained that eighty pounds? Needless to say, she offered no
explanation. He abandoned all conjecture. But he could not abandon the
image. And first Auntie Hamps said, and then Clara, and then even
Maggie admitted, that Edwin was sticking too close to business and
needed a change, needed rousing. Auntie Hamps urged openly that a wife
ought to be found for him. But in a few days the great talkers of the
family, Auntie Hamps and Clara, had grown accustomed to Edwin's state,
and some new topic supervened.