Chapter XII: Book TWO: His Love (6)

His feelings were complex and contradictory, flitting about and crossing each other in his mind with astounding rapidity. He wished she had not come, because his father was there, and the thought of his father would intensify his self-consciousness. He wondered why he should care whether she came or not; after all she was only a young woman who wanted to see a printing works; at best she was not so agreeable as Janet, at worst she was appalling, and moreover he knew nothing about her. He had a glimpse of her face as, with a little tightening of the lips, she shut her umbrella. What was there in that face judged impartially? Why should he be to so absurd a degree curious about her? He thought how exquisitely delicious it would be to be walking with her by the shore of a lovely lake on a summer evening, pale hills in the distance. He had this momentary vision by reason of a coloured print of the "Silver Strand" of a Scottish loch which was leaning in a gilt frame against the artists' materials cabinet and was marked twelve-and-six. During the day he had imagined himself with her in all kinds of beautiful spots and situations. But the chief of his sensations was one of exquisite relief... She had come. He could wreak his hungry curiosity upon her.

Yes, she was alone. No Janet! No Alicia! How had she managed it? What had she said to the Orgreaves? That she should have come alone, and through the November rain, in the night, affected him deeply. It gave her the quality of a heroine of high adventure. It was as though she had set sail unaided, in a frail skiff, on a formidable ocean, to meet him. It was inexpressibly romantic and touching. She came towards him, her face sedately composed. She wore a small hat, a veil, and a mackintosh, and black gloves that were splashed with wet. Certainly she was a practical woman. She had said she would come, and she had come, sensibly, but how charmingly, protected against the shocking conditions of the journey. There is naught charming in a mackintosh. And yet there was, in this mackintosh! ... Something in the contrast between its harshness and her fragility... The veil was supremely charming. She had half lifted it, exposing her mouth; the upper part of her flushed face was caged behind the bars of the veil; behind those bars her eyes mysteriously gleamed... Spanish! ... No exaggeration in all this! He felt every bit of it honestly, as he stood at the counter in thrilled expectancy. By virtue of his impassioned curiosity, the terraces of Granada and the mantillas of _senoritas_ were not more romantic than he had made his father's shop and her dripping mackintosh. He tried to see her afresh; he tried to see her as though he had never seen her before; he tried desperately once again to comprehend what it was in her that piqued him. And he could not. He fell back from the attempt. Was she the most wondrous? Or was she commonplace? Was she deceiving him? Or did he alone possess the true insight? ... Useless! He was baffled. Far from piercing her soul, he could scarcely even see her at all; that is, with intelligence. And it was always so when he was with her: he was in a dream, a vapour; he had no helm, his faculties were not under control. She robbed him of judgement.

And then the clear tones of her voice fell on the listening shop: "Good evening, Mr Clayhanger. What a night, isn't it? I hope I'm not too late."

Firm, business-like syllables... And she straightened her shoulders. He suffered. He was not happy. Whatever his feelings, he was not happy in that instant. He was not happy because he was wrung between hope and fear, alike divine. But he would not have exchanged his sensations for the extremest felicity of any other person.

They shook hands. He suggested that she should remove her mackintosh. She consented. He had no idea that the effect of the removal of the mackintosh would be so startling as it was. She stood intimately revealed in her frock. The mackintosh was formal and defensive; the frock was intimate and acquiescent.

Darius blundered out of the cubicle and Edwin had a dreadful moment introducing her to Darius and explaining their purpose. Why had he not prepared the ground in advance? His pusillanimous cowardice again! However, the directing finger of God sent a customer into the shop, and Edwin escaped with his Hilda through the aperture in the counter.

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THREE.

The rickety building at the back of the premises, which was still the main theatre of printing activities, was empty save for Big James, the hour of seven being past. Big James was just beginning to roll his apron round his waist, in preparation for departure. This happened to be one of the habits of his advancing age. Up till a year or two previously he would have taken off his apron and left it in the workshop; but now he could not confide it to the workshop; he must carry it about him until he reached home and a place of safety for it. When he saw Edwin and a young lady appear in the doorway, he let the apron fall over his knees again. As the day was only the second of the industrial week, the apron was almost clean; and even the office towel, which hung on a roller somewhat conspicuously near the door, was not offensive. A single gas jet burned. The workshop was in the languor of repose after toil which had officially commenced at 8 a.m.

The perfection of Big James's attitude, an attitude symbolised by the letting down of his apron, helped to put Edwin at ease in the original and difficult circumstances. "Good evening, Mr Edwin. Good evening, miss," was all that the man actually said with his tongue, but the formality of his majestic gestures indicated in the most dignified way his recognition of a sharp difference of class and his exact comprehension of his own role in the affair. He stood waiting: he had been about to depart, but he was entirely at the disposal of the company.

"This is Mr Yarlett, our foreman," said Edwin, and to Big James: "Miss Lessways has just come to look round."

Hilda smiled. Big James suavely nodded his head.

"Here are some of the types," said Edwin, because a big case was the object nearest him, and he glanced at Big James.

In a moment the foreman was explaining to Hilda, in his superb voice, the use of the composing-stick, and he accompanied the theory by a beautiful exposition of the practice; Edwin could stand aside and watch. Hilda listened and looked with an extraordinary air of sympathetic interest. And she was so serious, so adult. But it was the quality of sympathy, he thought, that was her finest, her most attractive. It was either that or her proud independence, as of a person not accustomed to bend to the will of others or to go to others for advice. He could not be sure... No! Her finest quality was her mystery. Even now, as he gazed at her comfortably, she baffled him; all her exquisite little movements and intonations baffled him. Of one thing, however, he was convinced: that she was fundamentally different from other women. There was she, and there was the rest of the sex.

For appearance's sake he threw in short phrases now and then, to which Big James, by his mere deportment, gave the importance of the words of a master.

"I suppose you printers did something special among yourselves to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the invention of printing?" said Hilda suddenly, glancing from Edwin to Big James. And Big James and Edwin glanced at one another. Neither had ever heard of the four-hundredth anniversary of the invention of printing. In a couple of seconds Big James's downcast eye had made it clear that he regarded this portion of the episode as master's business.

"When was that?--let me see," Edwin foolishly blurted out.

"Oh! Some years ago. Two or three--perhaps four."

"I'm afraid we didn't," said Edwin, smiling.

"Oh!" said Hilda slowly. "I think they made a great fuss of it in London." She relented somewhat. "I don't really know much about it. But the other day I happened to be reading the new history of printing, you know--Cranswick's, isn't it?"

"Oh yes!" Edwin concurred, though he had never heard of Cranswick's new history of printing either.

He knew that he was not emerging creditably from this portion of the episode. But he did not care. The whole of his body went hot and then cold as his mind presented the simple question: "Why had she been reading the history of printing?" Could the reason be any other than her interest in himself? Or was she a prodigy among young women, who read histories of everything in addition to being passionate about verse? He said that it was ridiculous to suppose that she would read a history of printing solely from interest in himself. Nevertheless he was madly happy for a few moments, and as it were staggered with joy. He decided to read a history of printing at once.

Big James came to the end of his expositions of the craft. The stove was dying out, and the steam-boiler cold. Big James regretted that the larger machines could not be seen in action, and that the place was getting chilly. Edwin began to name various objects that were lying about, with their functions, but it was evident that the interest of the workshop was now nearly exhausted. Big James suggested that if Miss could make it convenient to call, say, on the next afternoon, she could see the large new Columbia in motion. Edwin seized the idea and beautified it. And on this he wavered towards the door, and she followed, and Big James in dignity bowed them forth to the elevated porch, and began to rewind his flowing apron once more. They pattered down the dark steps (now protected with felt roofing) and ran across six feet of exposed yard into what had once been Mrs Nixon's holy kitchen.

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FOUR.

After glancing at sundry minor workshops in delicious propinquity and solitude, they mounted to the first floor, where there was an account-book ruling and binding shop: the site of the old sitting-room and the girls' bedroom. In each chamber Edwin had to light a gas, and the corridors and stairways were traversed by the ray of matches. It was excitingly intricate. Then they went to the attics, because Edwin was determined that she should see all. There he found a forgotten candle.

"I used to work here," he said, holding high the candle. "There was no other place for me to work in."

They were in his old work attic, now piled with stocks of paper wrapped up in posters.

"Work? What sort of work?"

"Well--reading, drawing, you know... At that very table." To be sure, there the very table was, thick with dust! It had been too rickety to deserve removal to the heights of Bleakridge. He was touched by the sight of the table now, though he saw it at least once every week. His existence at the corner of Duck Square seemed now to have been beautiful and sad, seemed to be far off and historic. And the attic seemed unhappy in its present humiliation.

"But there's no fireplace," murmured Hilda.

"I know," said Edwin.

"But how did you do in winter?"

"I did without."

He had in fact been less of a martyr than those three telling words would indicate. Nevertheless it appeared to him that he really had been a martyr; and he was glad. He could feel her sympathy and her quiet admiration vibrating through the air towards him. Had she not said that she had never met anybody like him? He turned and looked at her. Her eyes glittered in the candle-light with tears too proud to fall. Solemn and exquisite bliss! Profound anxiety and apprehension! He was an arena where all the sensations of which a human being is capable struggled in blind confusion.

Afterwards, he could recall her visit only in fragments. The next fragment that he recollected was the last. She stood outside the door in her mackintosh. The rain had ceased. She was going. Behind them he could feel his father in the cubicle, and Stifford arranging the toilette of the shop for the night.

"Please don't come out here," she enjoined, half in entreaty, half in command. Her solicitude thrilled him. He was on the step, she was on the pavement: so that he looked down at her, with the sodden, light-reflecting slope of Duck Square for a background to her.

"Oh! I'm all right. Well, you'll come to-morrow afternoon?"

"No, you aren't all right. You've got a cold and you'll make it worse, and this isn't the end of winter, it's the beginning; I think you're very liable to colds."

"N-no!" he said, enchanted, beside himself in an ecstasy of pleasure. "I shall expect you to-morrow about three."

"Thank you," she said simply. "I'll come."

They shook hands.

"Now do go in!"

She vanished round the corner.

All the evening he neither read nor spoke.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER NINETEEN.

A CATASTROPHE.

At half-past two on the following afternoon he was waiting for the future in order to recommence living. During this period, to a greater extent even than the average individual in average circumstances, he was incapable of living in the present. Continually he looked either forward or back. All that he had achieved, or that had been achieved for him--the new house with its brightness and its apparatus of luxury, his books, his learning, his friends, his experience: not long since regarded by him as the precious materials of happiness--all had become negligible trifles, nothings, devoid of import. The sole condition precedent to a tolerable existence was now to have sight and speech of Hilda Lessways. He was intensely unhappy in the long stretches of time which separated one contact with her from the next. And in the brief moments of their companionship he was far too distraught, too apprehensive, too desirous, too puzzled, to be able to call himself happy. Seeing her apparently did naught to assuage the pain of his curiosity about her--not his curiosity concerning the details of her life and of her person, for these scarcely interested him, but his curiosity concerning the very essence of her being. At seven o'clock on the previous day, he had esteemed her visit as possessing a decisive importance which covered the whole field of his wishes. The visit had occurred, and he was not a whit advanced; indeed he had retrograded, for he was less content and more confused, and more preoccupied. The medicine had aggravated the disease. Nevertheless, he awaited a second dose of it in the undestroyed illusion of its curative property.

In the interval he had behaved like a very sensible man. Without appetite, he had still forced himself to eat, lest his relatives should suspect. Short of sleep, he had been careful to avoid yawning at breakfast, and had spoken in a casual tone of Hilda's visit. He had even said to his father: "I suppose the big Columbia will be running off those overseer notices this afternoon?" And on the old man asking why he was thus interested, he had answered: "Because that girl, Miss Lessways, thought of coming down to see it. For some reason or other she's very keen on printing, and as she's such a friend of the Orgreaves--"

Nobody, he considered, could have done that better than he had done it.

And now that girl, Miss Lessways, was nearly due. He stood behind the counter again, waiting, waiting. He could not apply himself to anything; he could scarcely wait. He was in a state that approached fever, if not agony. To exist from half-past two to three o'clock equalled in anguish the dreadful inquietude that comes before a surgical operation.

He said to himself: "If I keep on like this I shall be in love with her one of these days." He would not and could not believe that he already was in love with her, though the possibility presented itself to him. "No," he said, "you don't fall in love in a couple of days. You mustn't tell me--" in a wise, superior, slightly scornful manner. "I dare say there's nothing in it at all," he said uncertainly, after having strongly denied throughout that there was anything in it.

The recollection of his original antipathy to Hilda troubled him. She was the same girl. She was the same girl who had followed him at night into his father's garden and merited his disdain. She was the same girl who had been so unpleasant, so sharp, so rudely disconcerting in her behaviour. And he dared not say that she had altered. And yet now he could not get her out of his head. And although he would not admit that he constantly admired her, he did admit that there were moments when he admired her passionately and deemed her unique and above all women. Whence the change in himself? How to justify it? The problem was insoluble, for he was intellectually too honest to say lightly that originally he had been mistaken.

He did not pretend to solve the problem. He looked at it with perturbation, and left it. The consoling thing was that the Orgreaves had always expressed high esteem for Hilda. He leaned on the Orgreaves.

He wondered how the affair would end? It could not indefinitely continue on its present footing. How indeed would it end? Marriage... He apologised to himself for the thought... But just for the sake of argument ... supposing... well, supposing the affair went so far that one day he told her ... men did such things, young men! No! ... Besides, she wouldn't... It was absurd... No such idea really! ... And then the frightful worry there would be with his father about money, and so on... And the telling of Clara, and of everybody. No! He simply could not imagine himself married, or about to be married. Marriage might happen to other young men, but not to him. His case was special, somehow... He shrank from such formidable enterprises. The mere notion of them made him tremble.

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TWO.

He brushed all that away impatiently, pettishly. The intense and terrible longing for her arrival persisted. It was now twenty-five to three. His father would be down soon from his after-dinner nap. Suddenly the door opened, and he saw the Orgreaves' servant, with a cloak over her white apron, and hands red with cold. And also he saw disaster like a ghostly figure following her. His heart sickeningly sank. Martha smiled and gave him a note, which he smilingly accepted. "Miss Lessways asked me to come down with this," she said confidentially. She was a little breathless, and she had absolutely the manner of a singing chambermaid in light opera. He opened the note, which said: "Dear Mr Clayhanger, so sorry I can't come to-day.--Yours, H.L." Nothing else. It was scrawled. "It's all right, thanks," he said, with an even brighter smile to the messenger, who nodded and departed.

It all occurred in an instant.

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THREE.

A catastrophe! He suffered then as he had never suffered.

His was no state approaching agony; it was agony itself, black and awful. She was not coming. She had not troubled herself to give a reason, nor to offer an excuse. She merely was not coming. She had showed no consideration for his feelings. It had not happened to her to reflect that she would be causing him disappointment. Disappointment was too mild a word. He had been building a marvellously beautiful castle, and with a thoughtless, careless stroke of the pen she had annihilated all his labour; she had almost annihilated him. Surely she owed him some reason, some explanation! Had she the right to play fast and loose with him like that? "What a shame!" he sobbed violently in his heart, with an excessive and righteous resentment. He was innocent; he was blameless; and she tortured him thus! He supposed that all women were like her... "What a shame!" He pitied himself for a victim. And there was no glint of hope anywhere. In half an hour he would have been near her, with her, guiding her to the workshop, discussing the machine with her; and savouring her uniqueness; feasting on her delicious and adorable personality! ... `So sorry I can't come to-day!' "She doesn't understand. She can't understand!" he said to himself. "No woman, however cruel, would ever knowingly be so cruel as she has been. It isn't possible!" Then he sought excuse for her, and then he cast the excuse away angrily. She was not coming. There was no ground beneath his feet. He was so exquisitely miserable that he could not face a future of even ten hours ahead. He could not look at what his existence would be till bedtime. The blow had deprived him of all force, all courage. It was a wanton blow. He wished savagely that he had never seen her... No! no! He could not call on the Orgreaves that night. He could not do it. She might be out. And then...

His father entered, and began to grumble. Both Edwin and Maggie had known since the beginning of dinner that Darius was quaking on the precipice of a bad bilious attack. Edwin listened to the rising storm of words. He had to resume the thread of his daily life. He knew what affliction was.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TWENTY.

THE MAN.

But he was young. Indeed to men of fifty, men just twice his age, he seemed a mere boy and incapable of grief. He was so slim, and his limbs were so loose, and his hair so fair, and his gestures often so naive, that few of the mature people who saw him daily striding up and down Trafalgar Road could have believed him to be acquainted with sorrow like their sorrows. The next morning, as it were in justification of these maturer people, his youth arose and fought with the malady in him, and, if it did not conquer, it was not defeated. On the previous night, after hours of hesitation, he had suddenly walked forth and gone down Oak Street, and pushed open the garden gates of the Orgreaves, and gazed at the facade of the house--not at her window, because that was at the side--and it was all dark. The Orgreaves had gone to bed: he had expected it. Even this perfectly futile reconnaissance had calmed him. While dressing in the bleak sunrise he had looked at the oval lawn of the Orgreaves' garden, and had seen Johnnie idly kicking a football on it. Johnnie had probably spent the evening with her; and it was nothing to Johnnie! She was there, somewhere between him and Johnnie, within fifty yards of both of them, mysterious and withdrawn as ever, busy at something or other. And it was naught to Johnnie! By the thought of all this the woe in him was strengthened and embittered. Nevertheless his youth, aided by the astringent quality of the clear dawn, still struggled sturdily against it. And he ate six times more breakfast than his suffering and insupportable father.

At half-past one--it was Thursday, and the shop closed at two o'clock-- he had put on courage like a garment, and decided that he would see her that afternoon or night, `or perish in the attempt.' And as the remembered phrase of the Sunday passed through his mind, he inwardly smiled and thought of school; and felt old and sure.

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TWO.

At five minutes to two, as he stood behind the eternal counter in his eternal dream, he had the inexpressible and delectable shock of seeing her. He was shot by the vision of her as by a bullet. She came in, hurried and preoccupied, apparently full of purpose.

"Have you got a Bradshaw?" she inquired, after the briefest greeting, gazing at him across the counter through her veil, as though imploring him for Bradshaw.

"I'm afraid we haven't one left," he said. "You see it's getting on for the end of the month. I could-- No, I suppose you want it at once?"

"I want it now," she replied. "I'm going to London by the six express, and what I want to know is whether I can get on to Brighton to-night. They actually haven't a Bradshaw up there," half in scorn and half in levity, "and they said you'd probably have one here. So I ran down."

"They'd be certain to have one at the Tiger," he murmured, reflecting.

"The Tiger!" Evidently she did not care for the idea of the Tiger. "What about the railway station?"

"Yes, or the railway station. I'll go up there with you now if you like, and find out for you. I know the head porter. We're just closing. Father's at home. He's not very well."

She thanked him, relief in her voice.

In a minute he had put his hat and coat on and given instructions to Stifford, and he was climbing Duck Bank with Hilda at his side. He had forgiven her. Nay, he had forgotten her crime. The disaster, with all its despair, was sponged clean from his mind like writing off a slate, and as rapidly. It was effaced. He tried to collect his faculties and savour the new sensations. But he could not. Within him all was incoherent, wild, and distracting. Five minutes earlier, and he could not have conceived the bliss of walking with her to the station. Now he was walking with her to the station; and assuredly it was bliss, and yet he did not fully taste it. Though he would not have loosed her for a million pounds, her presence gave an even crueller edge to his anxiety and apprehension. London! Brighton! Would she be that night in Brighton? He felt helpless, and desperate. And beneath all this was the throbbing of a strange, bitter joy. She asked about his cold and about his father's indisposition. She said nothing of her failure to appear on the previous day, and he knew not how to introduce it neatly: he was not in control of his intelligence.

They passed Snaggs' Theatre, and from its green, wooden walls came the obscure sound of humanity in emotion. Before the mean and shabby portals stood a small crowd of ragged urchins. Posters printed by Darius Clayhanger made white squares on the front.

"It's a meeting of the men," said Edwin.

"They're losing, aren't they?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I expect they are."

She asked what the building was, and he explained.

"They used to call it the Blood Tub," he said.

She shivered. "The Blood Tub?"

"Yes. Melodrama and murder and gore--you know."

"How horrible!" she exclaimed. "Why are people like that in the Five Towns?"

"It's our form of poetry, I suppose," he muttered, smiling at the pavement, which was surprisingly dry and clean in the feeble sunshine.

"I suppose it _is!_" she agreed heartily, after a pause.

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

"Oh yes! I used to."

At the station the name of Bradshaw appeared to be quite unknown. But Hilda's urgency impelled them upwards from the head porter to the ticket clerk, and from the ticket clerk to the stationmaster; and at length they discovered, in a stuffy stove-heated room with a fine view of a shawd-ruck and a pithead, that on Thursday evenings there was a train from Victoria to Brighton at eleven-thirty. Hilda seemed to sigh relief, and her demeanour changed. But Edwin's uneasiness was only intensified. Brighton, which he had never seen, was in another hemisphere for him. It was mysterious, like her. It was part of her mystery. What could he do? His curse was that he had no initiative. Without her relentless force, he would never have penetrated even as far as the stuffy room where the unique Bradshaw lay. It was she who had taken him to the station, not he her. How could he hold her back from Brighton?

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THREE.

When they came again to the Blood Tub, she said--

"Couldn't we just go and look in? I've got plenty of time, now I know exactly how I stand."

She halted, and glanced across the road. He could only agree to the proposition. For himself, a peculiar sense of delicacy would have made it impossible for him to intrude his prosperity upon the deliberations of starving artisans on strike and stricken; and he wondered what the potters might think or say about the invasion by a woman. But he had to traverse the street with her and enter, and he had to do so with an air of masculine protectiveness. The urchins stood apart to let them in.

Snaggs', dimly lit by a few glazed apertures in the roof, was nearly crammed by men who sat on the low benches and leaned standing against the sidewalls. In the small and tawdry proscenium, behind a worn picture of the Bay of Naples, were silhouetted the figures of the men's leader and of several other officials. The leader was speaking in a quiet, mild voice, the other officials were seated on Windsor chairs. The smell of the place was nauseating, and yet the atmosphere was bitingly cold. The warm-wrapped visitors could see rows and rows of discoloured backs and elbows, and caps, and stringy kerchiefs. They could almost feel the contraction of thousands of muscles in an involuntary effort to squeeze out the chill from all these bodies; not a score of overcoats could be discerned in the whole theatre, and many of the jackets were thin and ragged; but the officials had overcoats. And the visitors could almost see, as it were in rays, the intense fixed glances darting from every part of the interior, and piercing the upright figure in the centre of the stage.

"Some method of compromise," the leader was saying in his persuasive tones.

A young man sprang up furiously from the middle benches.

"To hell wi' compromise!" he shouted in a tigerish passion. "Haven't us had forty pound from Ameriky?"

"Order! Order!" some protested fiercely. But one voice cried: "Pitch the bastard awt, neck and crop!"

Hands clawed at the interrupter and dragged him with extreme violence to the level of the bench, where he muttered like a dying volcano. Angry growls shot up here and there, snappish, menacing, and bestial.

"It is quite true," said the leader soothingly, "that our comrades at Trenton have collected forty pounds for us. But forty pounds would scarcely pay for a loaf of bread for one man in every ten on strike."

There was more interruption. The dangerous growls continued in running explosions along the benches. The leader, ignoring them, turned to consult with his neighbour, and then faced his audience and called out more loudly--

"The business of the meeting is at an end."

The entire multitude jumped up, and there was stretching of arms and stamping of feet. The men nearest to the door now perceived Edwin and Hilda, who moved backwards as before a flood. Edwin seized Hilda's arm to hasten her.

"Lads," bawled an old man's voice from near the stage, "Let's sing `Rock of Ages.'"

A frowning and hirsute fellow near the door, with the veins prominent on his red forehead, shouted hoarsely, "`Rock of Ages' be buggered!" and shifting his hands into his pockets he plunged for the street, head foremost and chin sticking out murderously. Edwin and Hilda escaped at speed and recrossed the road. The crowd came surging out of the narrow neck of the building and spread over the pavements like a sinister liquid. But from within the building came the lusty song of "Rock of Ages."

"It's terrible!" Hilda murmured, after a silence. "Just to see them is enough. I shall never forget what you said."

"What was that?" he inquired. He knew what it was, but he wished to prolong the taste of her appreciation.

"That you've only got to see the poor things to know they're in the right! Oh! I've lost my handkerchief, unless I've left it in your shop. It must have dropped out of my muff."

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FOUR.

The shop was closed. As with his latchkey he opened the private door and then stood on one side for her to precede him into the corridor that led to the back of the shop, he watched the stream of operatives scattering across Duck Bank and descending towards the Square. It was as if he and Hilda, being pursued, were escaping. And as Hilda, stopping an instant on the step, saw what he saw, her face took a troubled expression. They both went in and he shut the door.

"Turn to the left," he said, wondering whether the big Columbia machine would be running, for her to see if she chose.

"Oh! This takes you to the shop, does it? How funny to be behind the counter!"

He thought she spoke self-consciously, in the way of small talk: which was contrary to her habit.

"Here's my handkerchief!" she cried, with pleasure. It was on the counter, a little white wisp in the grey-sheeted gloom. Stifford must have found it on the floor and picked it up.

The idea flashed through Edwin's head: "Did she leave her handkerchief on purpose, so that we should have to come back here?"

The only illumination of the shop was from three or four diamond-shaped holes in the upper part of as many shutters. No object was at first quite distinct. The corners were very dark. All merchandise not in drawers or on shelves was hidden in pale dust cloths. A chair wrong side up was on the fancy-counter, its back hanging over the front of the counter. Hilda had wandered behind the other counter, and Edwin was in the middle of the shop. Her face in the twilight had become more mysterious than ever. He was in a state of emotion, but he did not know to what category the emotion belonged. They were alone. Stifford had gone for the half-holiday. Darius, sickly, would certainly not come near. The printers were working as usual in their place, and the clanking whirr of a treadle-machine overhead agitated the ceiling. But nobody would enter the shop. His excitement increased, but did not define itself. There was a sudden roar in Duck Square, and then cries.

"What can that be?" Hilda asked, low.

"Some of the strikers," he answered, and went through the doors to the letter-hole in the central shutter, lifted the flap, and looked through.

A struggle was in progress at the entrance to the Duck Inn. One man was apparently drunk; others were jeering on the skirts of the lean crowd.

"It's some sort of a fight among them," said Edwin loudly, so that she could hear in the shop. But at the same instant he felt the wind of the door swinging behind him, and Hilda was silently at his elbow.

"Let me look," she said.

Assuredly her voice was trembling. He moved, as little as possible, and held the flap up for her. She bent and gazed. He could hear various noises in the Square, but she described nothing to him. After a long while she withdrew from the hole.

"A lot of them have gone into the public-house," she said. "The others seem to be moving away. There's a policeman. What a shame," she burst out passionately, "that they have to drink to forget their trouble!" She made no remark upon the strangeness of starving workmen being able to pay for beer sufficient to intoxicate themselves. Nor did she comment, as a woman, on the misery of the wives and children at home in the slums and the cheap cottage-rows. She merely compassionated the men in that they were driven to brutishness. Her features showed painful pity masking disgust.

She stepped back into the shop.

"Do you know," she began, in a new tone, "you've quite altered my notion of poetry--what you said as we were going up to the station."

"Really!" He smiled nervously. He was very pleased. He would have been astounded by this speech from her, a professed devotee of poetry, if in those instants the capacity for astonishment had remained to him.

"Yes," she said, and continued, frowning and picking at her muff: "But you _do_ alter my notions, I don't know how it is... So this is your little office!"

The door of the cubicle was open.

"Yes, go in and have a look at it."

"Shall I?" She went in.

He followed her.

And no sooner was she in than she muttered, "I must hurry off now." Yet a moment before she seemed to have infinite leisure.

"Shall you be at Brighton long?" he demanded, and scarcely recognised his own accents.

"Oh! I can't tell! I've no idea. It depends."

"How soon shall you be down our way again?"

She only shook her head.

"I say--you know--" he protested.

"Good-bye," she said, quavering. "Thanks very much." She held out her hand.

"But--" He took her hand.

His suffering was intolerable. It was torture of the most exquisite kind. Her hand pressed his. Something snapped in him. His left hand hovered shaking over her shoulder, and then touched her shoulder, and he could feel her left hand on his arm. The embrace was clumsy in its instinctive and unskilled violence, but its clumsiness was redeemed by all his sincerity and all hers. His eyes were within six inches of her eyes, full of delicious shame, anxiety, and surrender. They kissed... He had amorously kissed a woman. All his past life sank away, and he began a new life on the impetus of that supreme and final emotion. It was an emotion that in its freshness, agitating and divine, could never be renewed. He had felt the virgin answer of her lips on his. She had told him everything, she had yielded up her mystery, in a second of time. Her courage in responding to his caress ravished and amazed him. She was so unaffected, so simple, so heroic. And the cool, delicate purity of those lips! And the faint feminine odour of her flesh and even of her stuffs! Dreams and visions were surpassed. He said to himself, in the flood-tide of masculinity--

"My God! She's mine."

And it seemed incredible.

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FIVE.

She was sitting in the office chair; he on the desk. She said in a trembling voice--

"I should never have come to the Five Towns again, if you hadn't--"

"Why not?"

"I couldn't have stood it. I couldn't." She spoke almost bitterly, with a peculiar smile on her twitching lips.

To him it seemed that she had resumed her mystery, that he had only really known her for one instant, that he was bound to a woman entrancing, noble, but impenetrable. And this, in spite of the fact that he was close to her, touching her, tingling to her in the confined, crepuscular intimacy of the cubicle. He could trace every movement of her breast as she breathed, and yet she escaped the inward searching of his gaze. But he was happy. He was happy enough to repel all anxieties and inquietudes about the future. He was steeped in the bliss of the miracle. This was but the fourth day, and they were vowed.

"It was only Monday," he began.

"Monday!" she exclaimed. "I have thought of you for over a year." She leaned towards him. "Didn't you know? Of course you did! ... You couldn't bear me at first."

He denied this, blushing, but she insisted.

"You don't know how awful it was for me yesterday when you didn't come!" he murmured.

"Was it?" she said, under her breath. "I had some very important letters to write." She clasped his hand.

There it was again! She spoke just like a man of business, immersed in secret schemes.

"It's awfully funny," he said. "I scarcely know anything about you, and yet--"

"I'm Janet's friend!" she answered. Perhaps it was the delicatest reproof of imagined distrust.

"And I don't want to," he went on. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-four," she answered sweetly, acknowledging his right to put such questions.

"I thought you were."

"I suppose you know I've got no relatives," she said, as if relenting from her attitude of reproof. "Fortunately, father left just enough money for me to live on."

"Must you go to Brighton?"

She nodded.

"Where can I write to?"

"It will depend," she said. "But I shall send you the address to-morrow. I shall write you before I go to bed whether it's to-night or to-morrow morning."

"I wonder what people will say!"

"Please tell no one, yet," she pleaded. "Really, I should prefer not! Later on, it won't seem so sudden; people are so silly."

"But shan't you tell Janet?"

She hesitated. "No! Let's keep it to ourselves till I come back."

"When shall you come back?"

"Oh! Very soon. I hope in a few days, now. But I must go to this friend at Brighton. She's relying on me."

It was enough for him, and indeed he liked the idea of a secret. "Yes, yes," he agreed eagerly.

There was the sound of another uproar in Duck Square. It appeared to roll to and fro thunderously.

She shivered. The fire was dead out in the stove, and the chill of night crept in from the street.

"It's nearly dark," she said. "I must go! I have to pack... Oh dear, dear--those poor men! Somebody will be hurt!"

"I'll walk up with you," he whispered, holding her, in owner ship.

"No. It will be better not. Let me out."

"Really?"

"Really!"

"But who'll take you to Knype Station?"

"Janet will go with me."

She rose reluctantly. In the darkness they were now only dim forms to each other. He struck a match, that blinded them and expired as they reached the passage...

When she had gone, he stood hatless at the open side door. Right at the top of Duck Bank, he could discern, under the big lamp there, a knot of gesticulating and shouting strikers, menacing two policemen; and farther off, in the direction of Moorthorne Road, other strikers were running. The yellow-lit blinds of the Duck Inn across the Square seemed to screen a house of impenetrable conspiracies and debaucheries. And all that grim, perilous background only gave to his emotions a further intensity, troubling them to still stranger ecstasy. He thought: "It has happened to me, too, now--this thing that is at the bottom of everybody's mind! I've kissed her! I've got her! She's marvellous, marvellous! I couldn't have believed it. But is it true? Has it happened?" It passed his credence... "By Jove! I absolutely forgot about the ring! That's a nice how d'ye do!" ... He saw himself married. He thought of Clara's grotesque antics with her tedious babe. And he thought of his father and of vexations. But that night he was a man. She, Hilda, with her independence and her mystery, had inspired him with a full pride of manhood. And he discovered that one of the chief attributes of a man is an immense tenderness.

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

THE MARRIAGE.

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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TWO.

For years past Darius Clayhanger had not gone to chapel on Sunday evening. In the morning he still went fairly regularly, but in the evening he would now sit in the drawing-room, generally alone, to read. On weekdays he never used the drawing-room, where indeed there was seldom a fire. He had been accustomed to only one living-room, and save on Sunday, when he cared to bend the major part of his mind to the matter, he scorned to complicate existence by utilising all the resources of the house which he had built. His children might do so; but not he. He was proud enough to see to it that his house had a drawing-room, and too proud to employ the drawing-room except on the ceremonious day. After tea, at about a quarter to six, when chapel-goers were hurriedly pulling gloves on, he would begin to establish himself in a saddle-backed, ear-flapped easy-chair with "The Christian News" and an ivory paper-knife as long and nearly as deadly as a scimitar. "The Christian News" was a religious weekly of a new type. It belonged to a Mr James Bott, and it gave to God and to the mysteries of religious experience a bright and breezy actuality. Darius's children had damned it for ever on its first issue, in which Clara had found, in a report of a very important charitable meeting, the following words: "Among those present were the Prince of Wales and Mr James Bott." Such is the hasty and unjudicial nature of children that this single sentence finished the career of "The Christian News" with the younger generation. But Darius liked it, and continued to like it. He enjoyed it. He would spend an hour and a half in reading it. And further, he enjoyed cutting open the morsel. Once when Edwin, in hope of more laughter, had cut the pages on a Saturday afternoon, and his father had found himself unable to use the paper-knife on Sunday evening, there had been a formidable inquiry: "Who's been meddling with my paper?" Darius saved the paper even from himself until Sunday evening; not till then would he touch it. This habit had flourished for several years. It appeared never to lose its charm. And Edwin did not cease to marvel at his father's pleasure in a tedious monotony.