And, further, Janet's bedroom was distinguished and made delicious for Hilda by its fire. It happened to be one of the very few bedrooms in the Five Towns at that date with a fire, as a regular feature of it. Mrs. Orgreave had a fire in the parental bedroom, when she could not reasonably do without it, but Osmond Orgreave suffered the fire rather than enjoyed it. As for Tom, though of a shivery disposition, he would have dithered to death before admitting that a bedroom fire might increase his comfort. Johnnie and Jimmie genuinely liked to be cold in their bedroom. Alicia pined for a fire, but Mrs. Orgreave, imitating the contrariety of fate, forbade a fire to Alicia, and one consequence of this was that Alicia sometimes undressed in Janet's bedroom, making afterwards a dash for the Pole. The idea of a bedroom was always, during nearly half the year, associated with the idea of discomfort in Hilda's mind. And now, in Janet's bedroom, impressed as she was by the strangeness of the fact that the prime reason for hurrying at top-speed into bed had been abolished, she yet positively could not linger, the force of habit being too strong for her. And she was in bed, despite efforts to dawdle, while Janet was still brushing her hair.

As she lay and watched Janet's complex unrobing, she acquired knowledge. And once more, she found herself desiring to be like Janet—not only in appearance, but in soft manner and tone. She thought: "How shall I dress to-morrow afternoon?" All the operations of her brain related themselves somehow to to-morrow afternoon. The anticipation of the visit to the printing-works burned in her heart like a steady lamp that shone through the brief, cloudy interests of the moment. And Edwin Clayhanger was precisely the topic which Janet seemed, as it were, expressly to avoid. Janet inquired concerning life at Brighton and the health of Sarah Gailey; Janet even mentioned George Cannon; Hilda steadied her voice in replying, though she was not really apprehensive, for Janet's questions, like the questions of the whole family, were invariably discreet and respectful of the individual's privacy. But of Edwin Clayhanger, whose visit nevertheless had been recounted to her in the drawing-room on her return, Janet said not a word.

And then, when she had extinguished the gas, and the oriental sleeve of her silk nightgown delicately brushed Hilda's face, as she got into bed, she remarked:

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

Hilda's cheek warmed.

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

Janet was taken aback.

"Really!" she exclaimed, unmistakably startled. She spoke a second too soon. If she had delayed only one second, she might have concealed from Hilda that which Hilda had most plainly perceived, to wit, anxiety and jealousy. Yes, jealousy, in this adorably benevolent creature's tone. Hilda's interest in to-morrow afternoon was intensified.

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

"What time?"

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

"I can't," said Janet dreamily, "because of that Musical Society meeting—you know—I told you, didn't I?"

In the faint light of the dying fire, Hilda made out little by little the mysterious, pale heaps of clothes, and all the details of the room strewn and disordered by reason of an additional occupant. The adventure was now of infinite complexity, and its complexity seemed to be symbolized by the suggestive feminine mysteriousness of what she saw and what she divined in the darkness of the chamber. She thought: "I am here on false pretences. I ought to tell my secret. That would be fair—I have no right to intrude between her and him." But she instinctively and powerfully resisted such ideas; with firmness she put them away, and yielded herself with a more exquisite apprehension to the anticipation of to-morrow.

II

The order of meals at Lane End was somewhat peculiar even then, and would now be almost unique. It was partly the natural expression of an instinctive and justified feeling of superiority, and partly due to a discretion which forbade the family to scandalize the professional classes of the district by dining at night. Dinner occurred in the middle of the day, and about nine in the evening was an informal but copious supper. Between those two meals, there came a tea which was neither high or low, and whose hour, six o'clock in theory, depended to a certain extent, in practice, on Mr. Orgreave's arrival from the office. Not seldom Mr. Orgreave was late; occasionally he was very late. The kitchen waited to infuse the tea until a command came from some woman, old or young, who attentively watched a window for a particular swinging of the long gate at the end of the garden, or listened, when it was dark, for the bang of the gate and a particular crunching of gravel.

On this Tuesday evening, Osmond Orgreave was very late, and the movement of the household was less smooth than usual, owing to Mrs. Orgreave's illness and to the absence of Janet at Hillport in connection with the projected Hillport Choral Society. (Had Janet been warned of Hilda's visit, she would not have accepted an invitation to a tea at Hillport as a preliminary to the meeting of the provisional committee.) Hilda was in a state of acute distress. The appointment with Edwin Clayhanger seemed to be absolutely sacred to her; to be late for it would amount to a crime: to miss it altogether would be a calamity inconceivable. The fingers of all the clocks in the house were revolving with the most extraordinary rapidity—she was helpless.

She was helpless, because she had said nothing all day of her appointment, and because Janet had not mentioned it either. Janet might have said before leaving: "Tea had better not wait too long—Hilda has to be down at Clayhanger's at half-past six." Janet's silence impressed Hilda: it was not merely strange—it was formidable: it affected the whole day. Hilda thought: "Is she determined not to speak of it unless I do?" Immediately Janet was gone, Hilda had run up to the bedroom. She was minded to change the black frock which she had been wearing, and which she hated, and to put on another skirt and bodice that Janet had praised. She longed to beautify herself, and yet she was still hesitating about it at half-past five in the evening as she had hesitated at eight in the morning. In the end she had decided not to change, an account of the rain. But the rain had naught to do with her decision. She would not change, because she was too proud to change. She would go just as she was! She could not accept the assistance of an attractive bodice!... Unfeminine, perhaps, but womanly.

At twenty-five minutes to seven, she went into Mrs. Orgreave's bedroom, rather like a child, and also rather like an adult creature in a distracting crisis. Tom Orgreave and Alicia were filling the entire house with the stormy noise of a piano duet based upon Rossini's William Tell.

"I think I'll miss tea, Mrs. Orgreave," she said. "Edwin Clayhanger invited me to go over the printing-works at half-past six, and it's twenty-five minutes to seven now."

"Oh, but, my dear," cried Mrs. Orgreave, "why ever didn't you tell them downstairs, or let me know earlier?"

And she pulled at the bell-rope that overhung the head of the bed. Not a trace of teasing archness in her manner! Hilda's appointment might have been of the most serious business interest, for anything Mrs. Orgreave's demeanor indicated to the contrary. Hilda stood mute and constrained.

"You run down and tell them to make tea at once, dear. I can't let you go without anything at all. I wonder what can have kept Osmond."

Almost at the same moment, Osmond Orgreave entered the bedroom. His arrival had been unnoticed amid the tremendous resounding of the duet.

"Oh, Osmond," said his wife. "Wherever have you been so late? Hilda wants to go—Edwin Clayhanger has invited her to go over the works."

Hilda, trembling at the door, more than half expected Mr. Orgreave to say: "You mean, she's invited herself." But Osmond received the information with exactly the same polite, apologetic seriousness as his wife, and, reassured, Hilda departed from the room.

Ten minutes later, veiled and cloaked, she stepped out alone into the garden. And instantly her torment was assuaged, and she was happy. She waited at the corner of the street for the steam-car. But, when the car came thundering down, it was crammed to the step; with a melancholy gesture, the driver declined her signal. She set off down Trafalgar Road in the mist and the rain, glad that she had been compelled to walk. It seemed to her that she was on a secret and mystic errand. This was not surprising. The remarkable thing was that all the hurrying people she met seemed also each of them to be on a secret and mystic errand. The shining wet pavement was dotted with dark figures, suggestive and enigmatic, who glided over a floor that was pierced by perpendicular reflections.

III

In the Clayhanger shop, agitated and scarcely aware of what she did, she could, nevertheless, hear her voice greeting Edwin Clayhanger in firm, calm tones; and she soon perceived very clearly that he was even more acutely nervous than herself: which perception helped to restore her confidence, while, at the same time, it filled her with bliss. The young, fair man, with his awkward and constrained movements, took possession of her umbrella, and then suggested that she should remove her mackintosh. She obeyed, timid and glad. She stripped off her mackintosh, as though she were stripping off her modesty, and stood before him revealed. To complete the sacrifice, she raised her veil, and smiled up at him, as it were, asking: "What next?" Then a fat, untidy old man appeared in the doorway of a cubicle within the shop, and Edwin Clayhanger blushed.

"Father, this is Miss Lessways. Miss Lessways, my father.... She's—she's come to look over the place."

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

She shook hands with the tyrannic father, who was, however, despite his reputation, apparently just as nervous as the son. There followed a most sinister moment of silence. And, at last, the shop door opened, and the father turned to greet a customer. Hilda thought: "Suppose this fat old man is one day my father-in-law? Is it possible to imagine him as a father-in-law?" And she had a transient gleam of curiosity concerning the characters of the two Clayhanger sisters, and recalled with satisfaction that Janet liked the elder one.

Edwin Clayhanger, muttering, pointed to an aperture in the counter, and immediately she was going through it with him, and through a door at the back of the shop. They were alone, facing a rain-soaked yard. Edwin Clayhanger sneezed violently.

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

He glanced at her inquiringly and invitingly. They ran side by side across the yard to a roofed flight of steps that led to the printing- office. For a couple of seconds, the rain wet them, and then they were under cover again. It seemed to Hilda that they had escaped from the shop like fox-terriers—like two friendly dogs from the surveillance of an incalculable and dangerous old man. She felt a comfortable, friendly confidence in Edwin Clayhanger—a tranquil sentiment such as she had never experienced for George Cannon. After more than a year—and what a period of unforeseen happenings!—she thought again: "I like him." Not love, she thought, but liking! She liked being with him. She liked the sensation of putting confidence in him. She liked his youth, and her own. She was sorry because he had a cold and was not taking care of it.... Now they were climbing a sombre creaking staircase towards a new and remote world that was separated from the common world just quitted by the adventurous passage of the rainy yard.... And now they were amid oily odours in a large raftered workshop, full of machines.... The printing-works!... An enormous but very deferential man saluted them with majestic solemnity. He was the foreman, and labelled by his white apron as an artisan, but his gigantic bulk—he would have outweighed the pair of them—and his age set him somehow over them, so that they were a couple of striplings in his vasty presence. When Edwin Clayhanger employed, as it were, daringly, the accents of a master to this intimidating fellow, Hilda thrilled with pleasure at the piquancy of the spectacle, and she was admiringly proud of Edwin. The foreman's immense voice, explaining machines and tools, caused physical vibrations in her. But she understood nothing of what he said—nothing whatever. She was in a dream of oily odours and monstrous iron constructions, dominated by the grand foreman: and Edwin was in the dream. She began talking quite wildly of the four-hundredth anniversary of the inventor of printing, of which she had read in Cranswick's History... at Brighton! Brighton had sunk away over the verge of memory. Even Lane End House was lost somewhere in the vague past. All her previous life had faded. She reflected guiltily: "He's bound to think I've been reading about printing because I was interested in him I don't care! I hope he does think it!" She heard a suggestion that, as it was too late that night to see the largest machine in motion, she might call the next afternoon. She at once promised to come.... She impatiently desired now to leave the room where they were, and to see something else. And then she feared lest this might be all there was to see.... Edwin Clayhanger was edging towards the door.... They were alone on the stairway again.... The foreman had bowed at the top like a chamberlain.... She gathered, with delicious anticipation, that other and still more recondite interiors awaited their visit.

IV

They were in an attic which was used for the storage of reams upon reams of paper. By the light of a candle in a tin candlestick, they had passed alone together through corridors and up flights of stairs at the back of the shop. She had seen everything that was connected with the enterprise of steam-printing, and now they were at the top of the old house and at the end of the excursion.

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

She inquired about the work.

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

In the aperture of the window, amid piles of paper, stood a rickety old table, covered with dust.

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

"I know."

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

And he replied shortly, and with a slight charming affectation of pride: "I did without."

Her throat tightened, and she could feel the tears suddenly swim in her eyes. She was not touched by the vision of his hardships. It was the thought of all his youth that exquisitely saddened her—or all the years which were and would be for ever hidden from her. She knew that she alone of all human beings was gifted with the power to understand and fully sympathize with him. And so she grieved over the long wilderness of time during which he had been uncomprehended. She wanted, by some immense effort of tenderness, to recompense him for all that he had suffered. And she had a divine curiosity concerning the whole of his past life. She had never had this curiosity in relation to George Cannon—she had only wondered about his affairs with other women. Nor had George Cannon ever evoked the tenderness which sprang up in her from some secret and inexhaustible source at the mere sight of Edwin Clayhanger's wistful smile. Still, in that moment, standing close to Edwin in the high solitude of the shadowed attic, the souvenir of George Cannon gripped her painfully. She thought: "He loves me, and he is ruined, and he will never see me again! And I am here, bursting with hope renewed, and dizzy with joy!" And she pictured Janet, too, wearying herself at a committee meeting. And she thought, "And here am I...!" Her bliss was tragic.

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

They re-threaded the corridors, and in each lower room, as they passed, Edwin Clayhanger extinguished the gas which he had lit there on the way up, and Hilda waited for him. And then they were back in the crude glare of the shop. The fat, untidy old man was not visible. Edwin helped her with the mackintosh, and she liked him for the awkwardness of his efforts in doing so.

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

"This isn't the end of winter, it's the beginning," she warned him. Nobody else, she knew, would watch over him.

But he insisted on coming out.

They arranged a rendezvous for three o'clock on the morrow, and then they shook hands.

"Now, do go in," she entreated, as she hurried away. The rain had ceased. She fled triumphantly up Trafalgar Road, with her secret, guarding it. "He's in love with me!" If a scientific truth is a statement of which the contrary is inconceivable, then it was a scientific truth for her that she and Edwin must come together. She simply would not and could not conceive the future without him.... And this so soon, so precipitately soon, after her misfortune! But it was her very misfortune which pushed her violently forward. Her life had been convulsed and overthrown by the hazard of destiny, and she could have no peace now until she had repaired and re-established it. At no matter what risk, the thing must be accomplished quickly... quickly.



CHAPTER IV THE CALL FROM BRIGHTON

I

On the next afternoon, at a quarter-past two, Hilda and Janet were sitting together in the breakfast-room. The house was still. The men were either theoretically or practically at business. Alicia was at school. Mrs. Orgreave lay upstairs. The servants had cleared away and washed up the dinner-things, and had dined themselves. The kitchen had been cleansed and put in order, and every fire replenished. Two of the servants were in their own chambers, enfranchised for an hour: one only remained on duty. All six women had the feeling, which comes to most women at a certain moment in each day, that life had, for a time, deteriorated into the purposeless and the futile; and that it waited, as in a trance, until some external masculine event, expected or unforeseen, should renew its virtue and its energy.

Hilda was in half a mind to tell Janet the history of the past year. She had wakened up in the night, and perceived with dreadful clearness that trouble lay in front of her. The relations between herself and Edwin Clayhanger were developing with the most dizzy rapidity, and in a direction which she desired, but it would be impossible for her, if she fostered the relations, to continue to keep Edwin in ignorance of the fact that, having been known for about a fortnight as Mrs. George Cannon, she was not what he supposed her to be. With imagination on fire, she was anticipating the rendezvous at three o'clock. She reached forward to it in ecstasy; but she might not enjoy it, save at the price which her conscience exacted. She had to say to Edwin Clayhanger that she had been the victim of a bigamist. Could she say it to him? She had not been able to say it even to Janet Orgreave.... She would say it first to Janet. There, in the breakfast-room, she would say it. If it killed her to say it, she would say it. She must at any cost be able to respect herself, and, as matters stood, she could not respect herself.

Janet, on her knees, was idly arranging books on one of the lower bookshelves. In sheer nervousness, Hilda also dropped to her knees on the hearthrug, and began to worry the fire with the poker.

"I say, Janet," she began.

"Yes?" Janet did not look up.

Hilda, her heart beating, thought, with affrighted swiftness: "Why should I tell her? It is no business of anybody's except his. I will tell him, and him alone, and then act according to his wishes. After all, I am not to blame. I am quite innocent. But I won't tell him to-day. Not to-day! I must be more sure. It would be ridiculous to tell him to-day. If I told him it would be almost like inviting a proposal! But when the proper time comes,—then I will tell him, and he will understand! He is bound to understand perfectly. He's in love with me."

She dared not tell Janet. In that abode of joyful and successful propriety the words would not form themselves. And the argument that she was not to blame carried no weight whatever. She—she, Hilda—lacked courage to be candid.... This was extremely disconcerting to her self-esteem.... And even with Edwin Clayhanger she wished to temporize. She longed for nothing so much as to see him; and yet she feared to meet him.

"Yes?" Janet repeated.

A bell rang faintly in the distance of the house.

Hilda, suddenly choosing a course, said: "I forgot to tell you. I'm supposed to be going down to Clayhanger's at three to see a machine at work—it was too late last night. Do come with me. I hate going by myself." It was true: in that instant she did hate going by herself. She thought, knowing Janet to be at liberty and never dreaming that she would refuse: "I am saved—for the present."

But Janet answered self-consciously:

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

Hilda impetuously turned her head; their glances met for an instant, in suspicion, challenge, animosity. They had an immense mutual admiration the one for the other, these two; and yet now they were estranged. Esteem was nullified by instinct. Hilda thought with positive savagery: "It's all fiddlesticks about not leaving her mother! She's simply on her high horse!" The whole colour of existence was changed.

II

Martha entered the room. Neither of the girls moved. Beneath the deferential servant in Martha was a human girl, making a third in the room, who familiarly divined the moods of the other two and judged them as an equal; and the other two knew it, and therefore did not trouble to be spectacular in front of her.

"A letter, miss," said Martha, approaching Hilda. "The old postman says it was insufficiently addressed, or it 'ud ha' been here by first post."

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

"Yes, miss."

Hilda took the letter with apprehension, as she recognized the down-slanting calligraphy of Sarah Gailey. Yes, the address was imperfect—"Miss Lessways, c/o Osmond Orgreave, Esq., Lane End House, Knype-on-Trent," instead of "Bursley, Knype-on-Trent." On the back of the envelope had been written in pencil by an official, "Try Bursley." Sarah Gailey could not now be trusted to address an envelope correctly. The mere handwriting seemed to announce misfortune.

"From poor Sarah," Hilda murmured, with false, good-tempered tranquillity. "I wonder what sort of trouble she thinks she's got into!"

She thought: "If only I was married, I should be free of responsibility about Sarah. I should have to think of my husband first. But nothing else can free me. Unless I marry, I'm tied to Sarah Gailey as long as she lives.... And why?... I should like to know!" The answer was simple: habit had shackled her to Sarah Gailey.

She opened the letter by the flickering firelight, which was stronger on the hearthrug than the light of the dim November day. It began: "Dearest Hilda, I write at once to tell you that a lawyer called here this afternoon to inquire about your Hotel Continental shares. He told me there was going to be some difficulty with the Company, and, unless the independent shareholders formed a strong local committee to look after things, the trouble might be serious. He wanted to know if you would support a committee at the meeting. I gave him your address, and he's going to write to you. But I thought I would write to you as well. His name is Eustace Broughton, 124 East Street, in case. I do hope nothing will go wrong. It is like what must be, I am sure! It has been impossible for me to keep the charwoman. So I sent her off this morning. Can you remember the address of that Mrs. Catkin?..." Sarah Gailey continued to discuss boarding-house affairs, until she arrived at the end of the fourth page, and then, in a few cramped words, she finished with expressions of love.

"Oh dear!" Hilda exclaimed, rising, "I must write some letters at once." She sighed, as if in tedium. The fact that her fortune was vaguely threatened did not cause her anxiety: she scarcely realized it. What she saw was an opportunity to evade the immediate meeting with Edwin—the meeting which, a few minutes earlier, she had desired beyond everything.

"When? Now?"

Hilda nodded.

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

"I shan't be able to go," said Hilda carelessly, at the door. "It's of no consequence."

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

It was a reproof, from the young woman who always so thoughtfully studied the feelings of everybody.

"I'll just write a little note, then, thanks!" Hilda returned calmly, triumphing after all over Janet's superiority, and thinking, "Janet can be very peculiar, Janet can!"

III

For more than twenty hours, Hilda was profoundly miserable. Towards the evening of the same day, she had made herself quite sure that Edwin Clayhanger would call that night. Her hope persisted until half-past nine: it then began to fade, and, at ten o'clock, was extinct. His name had been mentioned by nobody. She went to bed. Having now a room of her own, which overlooked the Clayhanger garden and house, she gazed forth, and, in the dark, beheld, with the most anxious sensations, the building in which Edwin existed and was concealed. "He is there," she said. "He is active about something at this very instant—perhaps he is reading. He is close by. If I shouted, he might hear...." And yet she was utterly cut off from him. Again, in the late dawn, she saw the same building, pale and clear, but just as secretive and enigmatic as in the night. "He is asleep yet," she thought. "Why did he not call? Is he hurt? Is he proud?"

She despaired, because she could devise no means of resuming communication with him.

Immediately after dinner on the next day, she went with Janet to Janet's room, to examine a new winter cloak which had been delivered. And, while Janet was trying it on, and posing coquettishly and yet without affectation in front of the glass, and while Hilda was reflecting jealously, "Why am I not like her? I know infinitely more than she knows. I am a woman, and she is a girl, and yet she seems far more a woman than I—" Alicia, contrary to all rules, took the room by storm. Alicia's excuse and salvation lay in a telegram, which she held in her hand.

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

Hilda reached to take the offered telegram, but her hand wavered around it instead of seizing it. Her eye fastened on a circular portion of the wall-paper pattern, and she felt that the whole room was revolving about her. Then she saw Janet's face transformed by an expression of alarm.

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

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

Hilda sat down.

"No, no," she said. "It was the pattern of the wall-paper that made me feel dizzy." And, for the moment, she did honestly believe that the pattern of the wall-paper had, in some inexplicable manner, upset her. "I'm all right now."

The dizziness passed as suddenly as it had supervened. Janet held some ineffectual salts to her nose.

"I'm perfectly well," insisted Hilda.

"How funny!" Alicia grinned.

Calmly Hilda opened the telegram, which read: "Please come at once.— GAILEY."

She gave the telegram to Janet in silence.

"What can be the matter?" Janet asked, with unreserved, loving solicitude. The cloud which had hung between the two enthusiastic friends was dissipated in a flash.

"I haven't an idea," said Hilda, touched. "Unless it's those shares!" She had briefly told Janet about the Hotel Continental Limited.

"Shall you go?"

Hilda nodded. Never again would she ignore an urgent telegram, though she did not believe that this telegram had any real importance. She attributed it to Sarah's increasing incompetence and hysterical foolishness.

"I wonder whether I can get on to Brighton to-night if I take the six train?" Hilda asked, and to herself: "Can it have anything to do with George?"

Alicia, endowed with authority, went in search of a Bradshaw. But the quest was fruitless. In the Five Towns the local time-table, showing the connections with London, suffices for the citizen, and the breast-pocket of no citizen is complete without it.

"Clayhangers are bound to have a Bradshaw," cried Alicia, breathless with running about the house.

"Of course they are," Janet agreed.

"I'll walk down there now," said Hilda, with extraordinary promptitude. "It won't take five minutes."

"I'd go," said Alicia, "only I should be late for school."

"Shall I send some one down?" Janet suggested. "You might be taken dizzy again."

"No, thanks," Hilda replied deliberately. "I'll go—myself. There's nothing wrong with me at all."

"You'll have to be sharp over it," said Alicia pertly. "Don't forget it's Thursday. They shut up at two, and it's not far off two now."

"I'm going this very minute," said Hilda.

"And I'm going this very second!" Alicia retorted.

They all three left Janet's bedroom; the new cloak cast over a chair- back, was degraded into a tedious banality—and ignored.

In less than a minute Hilda, hatted and jacketed and partially gloved, was crossing the garden. She felt most miraculously happy and hopeful, and she was full of irrational gratitude to Alicia, as though Alicia were a benefactor! The change in her mood seemed magic in its swiftness. If Janet, with calm, cryptic face, had not been watching her from the doorway, she might have danced on the gravel.



CHAPTER V THURSDAY AFTERNOON

I

She was walking with Edwin Clayhanger up Duck Bank on the way to Bursley railway station. A simple errand and promenade,—and yet she felt herself to be steeped in the romance of an adventure! The adventure had surprisingly followed upon the discovery that Alicia had been quite wrong. "Clayhangers are bound to have a Bradshaw," the confident Alicia had said. But Clayhangers happened not to have a Bradshaw. Edwin was alone in the stationery shop, save for the assistant. He said that his father was indisposed. And whereas the news that Clayhangers had no Bradshaw left Hilda perfectly indifferent, the news that old Darius Clayhanger was indisposed and absent produced in her a definite feeling of gladness. Edwin had decided that the most likely place to search for a Bradshaw was the station, and he had offered to escort her to the station. Nothing could have been more natural, and at the same time more miraculous.

The sun was palely shining upon dry, clean pavements and upon roads juicy with black mud. And in the sunshine Hilda was very happy. It was nothing to her that she was in quest of a Bradshaw because she had just received an ominous telegram urgently summoning her to Brighton. She was obliviously happy. Every phenomenon that attracted her notice contributed to her felicity. Thus she took an eager joy in the sun. And a marked improvement in Edwin's cold really delighted her. She was dominated by the intimate conviction: "He loves me!" Which conviction excited her dormant pride, and made her straighten her shoulders. She benevolently condescended towards Janet. After all Janet, with every circumstance in her favour, had not known how to conquer Edwin Clayhanger. After all she, Hilda, possessed some mysterious characteristic more potent than the elegance and the goodness of Janet Orgreave. She scorned her former self-deprecations, and reproached her own lack of faith: "I am I!" That was the summary of her mood. As for her attitude to Edwin Clayhanger, she could not explain it. Why did she like him and like being with him? He was not brilliant, nor masterful, nor handsome, nor well dressed, nor in any manner imposing. On the contrary, he was awkward and apologetic, and not a bit spectacular. Only the wistful gaze of his eyes, and his honest smile, and the appeal of his gestures...! A puzzling affair, an affair perfectly incomprehensible and enchanting.

They walked side by side in silence.

When they had turned into Moorthorne Road, half-way up whose slope lies the station, she asked a question about a large wooden building from whose interior came wild sounds of shouting and cheering, and learnt that the potters on strike were holding a meeting in the town theatre. At the open outer doors was a crowd of starving, shivering, dirty, ragged children, who romped and cursed, or stood unnaturally meditative in the rich mud, like fakirs fulfilling a vow. Hilda's throat was constricted by the sight. Pain and joy ran together in her, burning exquisitely; and she had a glimpse, obscure, of the mystical beauty of the children's suffering.

"I'd no idea there was a theatre in Bursley," she remarked idly, driven into a banality by the press of her sensations.

"They used to call it the Blood Tub," he replied. "Melodrama and murder and gore—you know."

She exclaimed in horror. "Why are people like that in the Five Towns?"

"It's our form of poetry, I suppose," said he.

She started, sensitively. It seemed to her that she had never understood the secret inner spirit of the Five Towns, and that by a single phrase he had made her understand it.... 'Our form of poetry'! Who but he could have said a thing at once so illuminating and so simple?

Apparently perplexed by the obvious effect on her of his remark, he said:

"But you belong to the Five Towns, don't you?"

She answered quietly that she did. But her heart was saying: "I do now. You have initiated me. I never felt the Five Towns before. You have made me feel them."

II

At the station the head porter received their inquiry for a Bradshaw with a dull stare and a shake of the head. No such thing had ever been asked for at Bursley Station before, and the man's imagination could not go beyond the soiled time-tables loosely pinned and pasted up on the walls of the booking-office. Hilda suggested that the ticket-clerk should be interrogated, but the aperture of communication with him was shut. She saw Edwin Clayhanger brace himself and rap on the wood; and instead of deploring his diffidence she liked it and found it full of charm. The partition clicked aside, and the ticket-clerk's peering, suspicious head showed in its place, mutely demanding a reason for this extraordinary disturbance of the dream in which the station slumbered between two half-hourly trains. With a characteristic peculiar slanting motion Edwin nodded.

"Oh, how-d'ye-do, Mr. Brooks?" said Edwin hastily, as if startled by the sudden inexplicable apparition of the head.

But the ticket-clerk had no Bradshaw either. He considered it probable, however, that the stationmaster would have a Bradshaw. Edwin had to brace himself again, for an assault upon the fastness of the stationmaster.

And in the incredibly small and incredibly dirty fastness of the stationmaster, they indeed found a Bradshaw. Hilda precipitately took it and opened it on the stationmaster's table. She looked for Brighton in it as she might have looked for a particular individual in a city. Then Edwin was bending over it, with his ear close to her ear, and the sleeve of his overcoat touching her sleeve. She was physically aware of him, for the first time. She thought, disconcerted: "But he is an utter stranger to me! What do I know of him?" And then she thought: "For more than a year he must have carried my image in his heart!"

"Here," said Edwin brusquely, and with a certain superiority, "you might just let me have a look at it myself."

She yielded, tacitly admitting that a woman was no match for Bradshaw.

After a few moments' frowning Edwin said:

"Yes, there's a train to Brighton at eleven-thirty to-night!"

"May I look?"

"Certainly," said he, subtly condescending.

She examined the page, with a serious deliberation.

"But what does this 'f' mean?" she asked. "Did you notice this 'f'?"

"Yes. It means Thursdays and Saturdays only," said Edwin, his eyes twinkling. It was as if he had said: "You think yourself very clever, but do you suppose that I can't read the notes in a time-table?"

"Well—" She hesitated.

"To-day's Thursday, you see," he remarked curtly.

She was ravished by his tone and his manner. And she became humble before him, for in the space of a few seconds he had grown mysteriously and powerfully masculine to her. But with all his masculinity there remained the same wistful, honest, boyish look in his eyes. And she thought: "If I marry him it will be for the look in his eyes."

"I'm all right, then," she said aloud, and smiled.

With hands nervously working within her muff, she suddenly missed the handkerchief which she had placed there.

"I believe I must have dropped my handkerchief in your shop!" she was about to say. The phrase was actually on her tongue; but by a strange instinctive, defensive discretion she shut her mouth on it and kept silence. She thought: "Perhaps I had better not go into his shop again to-day."

III

They descended the hill from the station. Hilda was very ill at ease. She kept saying to herself: "This adventure is over now. I cannot prolong it. There is nothing to do but to go back to the Orgreaves, and pack my things and depart to Brighton, and face whatever annoyance is awaiting me at Brighton." The prospect desolated her. She could not bear to leave Edwin Clayhanger without some definition of their relations, and yet she knew that it was hopeless and absurd to expect to arrive immediately at any such definition: she knew that the impetuosity of her temperament could not be justified. Also, she feared horribly the risk of being caught again in the net of Brighton. As they got lower and lower down the hill, her wretchedness and disquiet became acute, to the point of a wild despair. Merely to temporize, she said, as they drew opposite the wooden theatre:

"Couldn't we just go and look in? I've got plenty of time."

A strange request—to penetrate into a meeting of artisans on strike! She felt its strangeness: she felt that Edwin Clayhanger objected, but she was driven to an extremity. She had to do something, and she did what she could.

They crossed the road, and entered the huge shanty, and stood apologetically near the door. The contrast between the open street and the enclosed stuffiness of the dim and crowded interior was overwhelming. Hundreds of ragged and shabby men sat in serried rows, leaning forward with elbows out and heads protruding as they listened to a speech from the gimcrack stage. They seemed to be waiting to spring, like famished and ferocious tigers. Interrupting, they growled, snarled, yapped, and swore with appalling sincerity. Imprecations burst forth in volleys and in running fires. The arousing of the fundamental instincts of these human beings had, indeed, enormously emphasized the animal in them. They had swung back a hundred centuries towards original crude life. The sophistication which embroiders the will-to-live had been stripped clean off. These men helped you to understand the state of mind which puts a city to the sack, and makes victims especially of the innocent and the defenceless. Hilda was strangely excited. She was afraid, and enjoyed being afraid. And it was as if she, too, had been returned to savagery and to the primeval. In the midst of peril, she was a female under the protection of a male, and nothing but that. And she was far closer, emotionally, to her male than she had ever been before.

Suddenly, the meeting came to an end. In an instant, the mass of humanity was afoot and rounding upon them, an active menace. Hilda and Edwin rushed fleeing into the street, violently urged by a common impulse. The stream of embittered men pursued them like an inundation. When they were safe, and breathing the free air, Hilda was drenched with a sense of pity. The tragedy of existence presented itself in its true aspect, as noble and majestic and intimidating.

"It's terrible!" she breathed.

She thought: "No! In this mood, it is impossible for me to leave him! I cannot do it! I cannot!" The danger of re-entering the shop, which would be closed now, utterly fascinated her. Supposing that she re-entered the shop with him, would she have the courage to tell him that she was in his society under false pretences? Could she bring herself to relate her misfortune? She recoiled before the mere idea of telling him. And yet the danger of the shop glittered in front of her like a lure.

The future might be depending solely on her own act. If she told him of the lost handkerchief, the future might be one thing: if she did not tell him, it might be another.

The dread of choosing seized her, and put her into a tremble of apprehension. And then, as it were mechanically, she murmured (but very clearly), tacking the words without a pause on to a sentence about the strikes: "Oh, I've lost my handkerchief, unless I've left it in your shop! It must have dropped out of my muff."

She sighed in relief, because she had chosen. But her agitation was intensified.

IV

In search of a lost handkerchief, they regained the Clayhanger premises by an unfamiliar side door. She preceded him along a passage and then, taking a door on the left, found herself surprisingly in the shop, behind a counter. The shop was lighted only by a few diamond-shaped holes in the central shutters, and it had a troubling aspect of portent, with its merchandise mysteriously enveloped in pale sheets, and its chairs wrong side up, and its deep-shadowed corners. Destiny might have been lurking in one of those baffling corners. From above, through the ceiling, came the vibration of some machine at work, and the machine might have been the loom of time. Hilda was exquisitely apprehensive. She thought: "I am here. The moment of my departure will come. When it comes, shall I have told him my misfortune? What will have happened?" She waited, nervous, restless, shaking like a victim who can do naught but wait.

"Here's my handkerchief!" she cried, in a tone of unnatural childish glee, that was one of the effects of her secret panic.

The handkerchief glimmered on the counter, more white than anything else in that grey dusk. She guessed that the shop-assistant must have found it, and placed it conspicuously on the counter.

They were alone: they were their own prisoners, secure from the street and from all interruption. Hilda, once more and in a higher degree, realized the miraculous human power to make experience out of nothing. They had nothing but themselves, and they could, if they chose, create all their future by a single gesture.

Suddenly, there came a tremendous shouting from Duck Square, in front of the shop. The strikers had poured down from Moorthorne Road into Duck Bank and Duck Square.

Edwin, who was in the middle of the shop, went to the glazed inner doors, and, passing through into the porch, lifted the letter-flap in a shutter, and, stooping, looked forth. He called to her, without moving his face from the aperture, that a fight was in progress. Hilda gazed at his back, through the glass, and then, coming round the end of the counter, approached quietly, and stood immediately behind him, between the glazed doors and the shutters. The two were in a space so small that they could scarcely have moved without touching.

"Let me look," she stammered, unable any longer to tolerate the inaction.

Edwin Clayhanger stepped aside, and held up the letter-flap for her with his finger. She bent her head to the oblong glimpse of the street, and saw the strikers engaged in the final internecine folly of strikers: they had turned their exasperated wrath upon each other. Within a public-house at the top of the little Square, other strikers were drinking. One policeman regarded them.

"What a shame!" she cried angrily, dropping the flap, and then withdrew quickly into the shop, whither Edwin had gone. As she came near him, her mood changed. She smiled gently. She summoned all her charm; and she knew that she charmed him.

"Do you know," she said, "you've quite altered my notion of poetry—what you said as we were going up to the station!"

"Really?" He flushed.

Yes, she had enchanted and entranced him. She had only to smile and to use a particular tone, soft and breaking.... She knew that.

"But you do alter my notions," she continued, and her clear voice was poured out like a liquid. "I don't know how it is..." She stopped. And then, in half-playful accents: "So this is your little office!"

Her hand was on the knob of the open door of the cubicle, a black erection within the shop, where Edwin and his father kept the accounts and wrote letters.

"Yes. Go in and have a look at it."

She murmured kindly: "Shall I?" and went in. He followed.

For a moment, she was extremely afraid, and she whispered, scared: "I must hurry off now."

He ignored this remark.

"Shall you be at Brighton long?" he demanded. And he was so friendly and simple and timorous and honest-eyed, and his features had such an extraordinary anxious expression that her own fear seemed to leave her. She thought, as if surprised by the discovery: "He is a good friend."

"Oh, I can't tell," she answered him. "It depends."

"How soon shall you be down our way again?" His voice was thickening. She shook her head, speechless. She was afraid again now. His face altered. He was standing almost over her. She thought: "I am lost! I have let it come to this!" He was no longer a good friend.

He began to speak, in detached bits of phrases:

"I say—you know—"

"Good-bye, good-bye," she murmured anxiously. "I must go. Thanks very much."

And foolishly, she held out her hand, which he seized. He bent passionately, and kissed her like a fresh boy, like a schoolboy. And she gave back the kiss strongly, with all the profound sincerity of her nature. His agitation appeared to be extreme; but she was calm; she was divinely calm. She savoured the moment as though she had been a watcher, and not an actor in the scene. She thought, with a secret sigh of bliss: "Yes, it is real, this moment! And I have had it. Am I astonished that it has come so soon, or did I know it was coming?" Her eyes drank up the face and the hands and the gestures of her lover. She felt tired, and sat down in the office chair, and he leaned on the desk, and the walls of the cubicle folded them in, even from the inanimate scrutiny of the shop.

V

They were talking together, half-fearfully, and yet with the confidence of deep mutual trust, in the quick-gathering darkness of the cubicle. And while they were talking, Hilda, in her head, was writing a fervent letter to him: "... You see it was so sudden. I had had no chance to tell you. I did so want to tell you, but how could I? And I hadn't told anybody! I'm sure you will agree with me that it is best to tell some things as little as possible. And when you had kissed me, how could I tell you then—at once? I could not. It would have spoilt everything. Surely you understand. I know you do, because you understand everything. If I was wrong, tell me where. You don't guess how humble I am! When I think of you, I am the humblest girl you can imagine. Forgive me, if there is anything to forgive. I don't need to tell you that I have suffered."

And she kept writing the letter again and again, slightly altering the phrases so as to improve them, so as to express herself better and more honestly and more appealingly.

"I shall send you the address to-morrow," she was saying to him. "I shall write you before I go to bed, whether it's to-night or to-morrow morning." She put the fire of her love into the assurance. She smiled to entrance him, and saw on his face that he was beside himself with joy in her. She was a queen, surpassing in her prerogative a thousand elegant Janets. She smiled; she proudly straightened her shoulders (she the humblest!), and her boy was enslaved.

"I wonder what people will say," he murmured.

She said, with a pang of misgiving about his reception of her letter:

"Please tell no one!" She pleaded that for the present he should tell no one. "Later on, it won't seem so sudden," she added plausibly. "People are so silly."

The sound of another battle in Duck Square awoke them. The shop was very chilly, and quite dark. Their faces were only pale ovals in the blackness. She shivered.

"I must go! I have to pack."

He clasped her: and she was innocently content: she was a young girl again.

"I'll walk up with you," he said protectively.

But she would not allow him to walk up with her, and he yielded. He struck a match. They stumbled out, and, in the midnight of the passage, he took leave of her.

Walking up Trafalgar Road, alone, she was so happy, so amazed, so relieved, so sure of him and of his fineness and of the future, that she could scarcely bear her felicity. It was too intense.... At last her life was settled and mapped out. Destiny had been kind, and she meant to be worthy of her fate. She could have swooned, so intoxicant was her wonder and her solemn joy and her yearning after righteousness in love.



CHAPTER VI MISCHANCE

I

Twelve days later, in the evening, Hilda stood by the bedside of Sarah Gailey in the basement room of No. 59 Preston Street. There was a bright fire in the grate, and in front of the fire a middle-aged doctor was cleansing the instrument which he had just employed to inject morphia into Sarah's exhausted body. Hilda's assumption that the ageing woman had telegraphed for her on inadequate grounds had proved to be quite wrong.

Upon entering the house on that Thursday night, Hilda, despite the anxious pale face of the new servant who had waited up for her and who entreated her to see Sarah Gailey instantly, had gone first to her own room and scrawled passionately a note to Edwin, which ran: "DEAREST,— This is my address. I love you. Every bit of me is absolutely yours. Write me.—H. L." She gave the letter to the servant to post at once. And as she gave it she had a vision of it travelling in post office, railway vans, and being sorted, and sealed up in a bag, and recovered from the bag, and scanned by the postman at Bursley, and borne up Trafalgar Road by the postman, and dropped into the letter-box at Edwin's house, and finally seized by Edwin; and of it pleasing him intensely,—for it was a good letter, and she was proud of it because she knew that it was characteristic.

And then, with her mind freed, she had opened the door of Sarah's bedroom. Sarah was unquestionably very ill. Sarah had been quite right in telegraphing so peremptorily to Hilda; and if she had not so telegraphed she would have been quite wrong. On the previous day she had been sitting on the cold new oilcloth of the topmost stairs, minutely instructing a maid in the craft of polishing banisters. And the next morning an attack of acute sciatica had supervened. For a trifling indiscretion Sarah was thus condemned to extreme physical torture. Hilda had found her rigid on the bed. She suffered the severest pain in the small of the back and all down the left leg. Her left knee was supported on pillows, and the bed-clothes were raised away from it, for it could tolerate no weight whatever. The doctor, who had been and gone, had arranged a system of fomentation and hot-water bottles surpassing anything in even Sarah's experience. And there Sarah lay, not feverish but sweating with agony, terrified to move, terrified to take a deep breath, lest the disturbance of the muscles might produce consequences beyond her strength to endure. She was in no danger of death. She could talk. She could eat and drink. Her pulse was scarcely quickened. But she was degraded and humiliated by mere physical anguish to the condition of a brute. This was her lot in life. All through that first night Hilda stayed with her, trying to pretend that Sarah was a woman, and in the morning she had assumed control of the house.

She had her secret to console her. It remained a secret because there was no one to whom she could relate it. Sarah had no ear for news unconnected with her malady. And indeed to tell Sarah, as Sarah was, would have been to carry callousness to the point of insult. And so Hilda, amid her enormous labours and fatigue, had lived with her secret, which, from being a perfumed delight, turned in two days to something subtly horrible, to something that by its horror prevented her from writing to Edwin aught but the briefest missives. She had existed from hour to hour, from one minute apprehensively to the next, day and night, hardly sleeping, devoured inwardly by a fear at once monstrous and simple, at once convincing and incredible. As for the letter which mentally she had composed a hundred times to Edwin, and which she owed to him, it had become fantastic and then inconceivable to her.

II

One of the new servants entered the room and handed a letter to Hilda, and left the room and shut the door. The envelope was addressed "Miss Lessways, 59 Preston Street, Brighton," in Edwin Clayhanger's beautiful handwriting. Every evening came thus a letter, which he had posted in Bursley on the previous day. Hilda thought: "Will this contain another reproach at my irregularity? I can't bear it, if it does." And she gazed at the handwriting, and in particular at her own name, and her own name seemed to be the name of somebody else, of some strange young woman. She felt dizzy.... The door of Sarah's wardrobe was ajar, and, in the mirror of it, Hilda could see herself obscurely, a black-robed strange young woman, with untidy hair and white cheeks and huge, dark, staring heavy eyes, with pouches beneath them. The image wavered in the mirror. She thought: "Here it is again, this awful feeling! Surely I am not going to faint!" She could hear Sarah's sighing breath: she could hear the singing of the shaded gas-flame. She turned her gaze away from the mirror, and saw Sarah's grey head inadvertently nodding, as it always nodded. Then the letter slipped out of her hand. She glanced down at the floor, in pursuit of it: the floor was darkly revolving. She thought: "Am I really fainting this time? I mustn't faint. I've got to arrange about that bacon to-night and—oh, lots of things! Sarah is not a bit better. And I must sit with her until she gets off to sleep." Her legs trembled, and she was terrorized by extraordinary novel sensations of insecurity. "Oh!" she murmured weakly.

III

"You've only fainted," said the doctor in a low voice.

She perceived, little by little, that she was lying flat on the floor at the foot of Sarah's bed, and that he was kneeling beside her. The bed threw a shadow on them both, but she could see his benevolent face, anxious and yet reassuring, rather clearly.

"What?" she whispered, in feeble despair. She felt that her resistance was definitely broken.

From higher up, at the level of the hidden bed, came the regular plaintive respiration of Sarah Gailey.

"You must take care of yourself better than this," said the doctor. "Perhaps this is a day when you ought to be resting."

She answered, resigned.

"No, it's not that. I believe I'm going to have a child. You must..." She stopped.

"Oh," said the doctor, with discretion. "Is that it?"

Strange, how the direct words would create a new situation! She had not told the doctor that she had been through the ceremony of marriage, and had been victimized. She had told him nothing but the central and final thought in her mind. And lo! the new situation was brought into being, and the doctor was accepting it! He was not emitting astounded 'buts—!' Her directness had made all possible 'buts' seem ridiculous and futile, and had made the expression of curiosity seem offensive.

She lay on the floor impassive. She was no longer horrified by expectancy.

"Well," said the doctor, "we must see. I think you can sit up now, can't you?"

Three-quarters of an hour afterwards, she went into Sarah's room alone. She was aware of no emotion whatever. She merely desired, as a professional nurse might have desired, to see if Sarah slept. Sarah was not sleeping. She moaned, as she moaned continually when awake. Hilda bent over her trembling head whose right side pressed upon the pillow.

"How queer," thought Hilda, "how awful, that she didn't even hear what I said to him! It will almost kill her when she does know."

Sarah's eyes blinked. Without stirring, without shifting her horizontal, preoccupied gaze from the wall, she muttered peevishly:

"What's that you were saying about going to have a child?"

Startled, Hilda moved back a little from the bed.

"The doctor says there's no doubt I am," Hilda answered coldly.

"How queer!" Sarah said. "I quite thought—but of course a girl like you are couldn't be sure. I should like another biscuit. But I don't want the Osbornes—the others." She resumed her moaning.

IV

On the following Saturday morning—rather more than a fortnight after her engagement to Edwin Clayhanger—Hilda came out of the kitchen of No. 59 Preston Street, and shut the door on a nauseating, malodorous mess of broken food and greasy plates, in the midst of which two servants were noisily gobbling down their late breakfast, and disputing. With a frown of disgust on her face, she looked into Sarah Gailey's bedroom. Sarah, though vaguely better, was still in constant acute pain, and her knee still reposed on a pillow, and was protected from the upper bed-clothes, and she still could not move. Hilda put on a smile for Sarah Gailey, who nodded morosely, and then, extinguishing the smile, as if it had been expensive gas burning to no purpose, she passed into the basement sitting-room, and slaked the fire there. With a gesture of irresolution, she lifted the lid of the desk in the corner, and gazed first at a little pile of four unopened letters addressed to her in Edwin's handwriting, and then at a volume of Crashaw, which the enthusiastic Tom Orgreave had sent to her as a reward for her appreciation of Crashaw's poems. She released the lid suddenly, and went upstairs to her bedroom, chatting sugarily for an instant on the way with the second Miss Watchett. In the bedroom, she donned her street things, and then she descended. She had to go to the Registry Office in North Street about a new cook. She stopped at the front door, and then surprisingly went down once more into the basement sitting-room. Standing up at the desk, she wrote this letter: "DARLING JANET,—I am now married to George Cannon. The marriage is not quite public, but I tell you before anybody, and you might tell Edwin Clayhanger.—Your loving H. L." Least said soonest mended! And the conciseness would discourage questioning. She inserted the letter into an envelope, which she addressed and stamped, and then she fled with it from the house, and in two minutes it was in a letter-box, and she was walking slowly along the King's Road past the shops.

The letter was the swift and desperate sequel to several days' absolutely sterile reflection. It said enough for the moment. Later, she could explain that her husband had left her. She could not write to Edwin. She could not bring herself to write anything to him. She could not confess, nor beg for forgiveness nor even for sympathetic understanding. She could not admit the uninstructed rashness which had led her to assume positively, on inadequate grounds, that her union with George Cannon had been fruitless. She must suffer, and he also must suffer. Rather than let him know, in any conceivable manner, that, all unwitting, she was bearing the child of another at the moment of her betrothal to himself, she preferred to be regarded as a jilt of the very worst kind. Strange that she should choose the role of deceiver instead of the role of victim! Strange that she would sooner be hated and scorned than pitied! Strange that she would not even give Edwin the opportunity of treating her as a widow! But so it was! For her, the one possible attitude towards Edwin was the attitude of silence. In the silence of the grave her love for him existed.

As she walked along the chill promenade she looked with discreet curiosity at every woman she met, to see her condition. This matter, which before she had never thought of, now obsessed her; and all women were divided for her into two classes, the expectant and the others. Also her self-consciousness was extreme, more so even than it had been after her mother's death. She was not frightened—yet. She was assuredly not panic-struck. Rather her mood was grim, harsh, and calmly bitter. She thought: "I suppose George must be informed." It affected her queerly that if she took it into her head she need never go back to Preston Street. She was free. She owed nothing to anybody. And yet she would go back. She would require a home, soon. And she would require a livelihood, for the shares of the Brighton Hotel Continental Limited promised to be sterile and were already unsaleable. But apart from these considerations, she would have gone back for Sarah Gailey—because Sarah Gailey was entirely dependent on her. She detested Sarah, despite Sarah's sufferings, and yet by her conscience she was for ever bound to her.

The future loomed appalling. Sarah's career was finished. She could not be anything but a burden and a torment; her last years would probably be dreadful, both for herself and for others. The prospects of the boarding-house were not radiant. Hilda could direct the enterprise, but not well. She could work, but she had not the art of making others work. Already the place was slightly at sixes and sevens. And she loathed it. She loathed the whole business of catering. Along the entire length of the King's Road, the smells of basement kitchens ascended to the pavement and offended the nose. And Hilda saw all Brighton as a colossal and disgusting enlargement of the kitchen at No. 59. She saw the background and the pits of Brighton—that which underlies and hides behind, and is not seen. The grandeur of the King's Road was naught to her. Her glance pierced it and it faded to a hallucination. Beyond it she envisaged the years to come, the messy and endless struggle, the necessary avarice and trickeries incidental to it,—and perhaps the ultimate failure. She would never make money—she felt that! She was not born to make money—especially by dodges and false politeness, out of idle, empty-noddled boarders. She would lose it and lose it. And she pictured what she would be in ten years: the hard-driven landlady, up to every subterfuge,—with a child to feed and educate, and perhaps a bedridden, querulous invalid to support. And there was no alternative to the tableau.

She went by the Chichester, which towered with all its stories above her head. Who would take it now? George Cannon would have made it pay. He would have made anything pay. How?... She was definitely cut off from the magnificence of the King's Road. The side street was her destiny; the side street and shabbiness. And it was all George's fault—and hers! The poverty, if it came, would be George's fault alone. For he had squandered her money in a speculation. It astounded her that George, so shrewd and well balanced, should have made an investment so foolish. She did not realize that a passion for a business enterprise, as for a woman, is capable of destroying the balance of any man. And George Cannon had had both passions.

And then she saw Florrie Bagster, on the other side of the street, walking leisurely by the sea-wall, alone. If Mr. Boutwood had had a more generous and wild disposition he might have allowed Florrie to ruin him in six months of furs and carriages and champagne. But Mr. Boutwood, though a dog, was a careful dog, especially at those moments when the conventional dog can refuse nothing. Florrie was well and warmly dressed,—no more; and she was on foot. Hilda's gaze fastened on her, and immediately divined from the cut and fall of the coat that Florrie had something to conceal from every one but her Mr. Boutwood. And whereas Florrie trod the pavement with a charming little air that wavered between impudence and modesty, between timid meekness and conceit, Hilda blushed with shame and pity. She on one footpath and Florrie on the other!

"Soon," she thought, "I shall not be able to walk along this road!"

She had sinned. She admitted that she had sinned against some quality in herself. But how innocently and how ignorantly! And what a tremendous punishment for so transient a weakness! And new consequences, still more disastrous than any she had foreseen, presented themselves one after another. George had escaped, but a word of open scandal, a single whisper in the ear of the old creature down at Torquay, might actuate machinery that would reach out after him and drag him back, and plant him in jail. George, the father of her child, in jail! It was all a matter of chance; sheer chance! She began to perceive what life really was, and the immense importance of hazard therein. Nevertheless, without frailty, without defection, what could chance have done? She began to perceive that this that she was living through was life. She bit her lips. Grief! Shame! Disillusion! Hardship! Peril! Catastrophe! Exile! Above all, exile! These had to be faced, and they would be faced. She recalled the firiest verse of Crashaw and she set her shoulders back. There was the stuff of a woman in her.... Only a little while, and she had seen before her a beloved boy entranced by her charm. She had now no charm. Where now was the soft virgin?... And yet, somehow, magically, miraculously, the soft virgin was still there! And the invincible vague hope of youth, and the irrepressible consciousness of power, were almost ready to flame up afresh, contrary to all reason, and irradiate her starless soul.

NOTE:—The later history of Hilda Lessways and Edwin Clayhanger will form the theme of another novel.



Footnote 1: See the author's novel, Clayhanger.

THE END