Chapter XX: The Discovery (1)

I

Hilda showed her smiling, flattering face at the door of Edwin's private office at a few minutes to one on Saturday morning, and she said:

"I had to go to the dressmaker's after my shopping, so I thought I might as well call for you." She added with deference: "But I can wait if you're busy."

True that the question of mourning had taken her to the dressmaker's, and that the dressmaker lived in Shawport Lane, not four minutes from the works; but such accidents had nothing to do with her call, which, being part of a scheme of Hilda's, would have occurred in any case.

"I'm ready," said Edwin, pleased by the vision of his wife in the stylish wide-sleeved black jacket and black hat which she had bought in London. "What have you got in that parcel?"

"It's your new office-coat," Hilda replied, depositing on the desk the parcel which had been partly concealed behind her muff. "I've mended the sleeves."

"Aha!" Edwin lightly murmured. "Let's have a look at it."

His benevolent attitude towards the new office-coat surprised and charmed her. Before her journey to London with George he would have jealously resented any interfering hand among his apparel, but since her return he had been exquisitely amenable. She thought, proud of herself:

"It's really quite easy to manage him. I never used to go quite the right way about it."

Her new system, which was one of the results of contact with London and which had been inaugurated a week earlier on the platform of Knype station when she stepped down from the London train, consisted chiefly in smiles, voice-control, and other devices to make Edwin believe in any discussion that she fully appreciated his point of view. Often (she was startled to find) this simulation had the unexpected result of causing her actually to appreciate his point of view. Which was very curious.

London indeed had had its effect on Hilda. She had seen the Five Towns from a distance, and as something definitely provincial. Having lived for years at Brighton, which is almost a suburb of London, and also for a short time in London itself, she could not think of herself as a provincial, in the full sense in which Edwin, for example, was a provincial. She had gone to London with her son, not like a staring and intimidated provincial, but with the confidence of an initiate returning to the scene of initiation. And once she was there, all her old condescensions towards the dirty and primitive ingenuous Five Towns had very quickly revived. She discovered Charlie Orgreave, the fairly successful doctor in Ealing (a suburb rich in doctors), to be the perfect Londoner, and Janet, no longer useless and forlorn, scarcely less so. These two, indeed, had the air of having at length reached their proper home after being born in exile. The same was true of Johnnie Orgreave, now safely through the matrimonial court and married to his blonde Adela (formerly the ripping Mrs. Chris Hamson), whose money had bought him a junior partnership in an important architectural firm in Russell Square. Johnnie and Adela had come over from Bedford Park to Ealing to see Hilda, and Hilda had dined with them at Bedford Park at a table illuminated by crimson-shaded night-lights,--a repast utterly different in its appointments and atmosphere from anything conceivable in Trafalgar Road. The current Five Towns notion of Johnnie and his wife as two morally ruined creatures hiding for the rest of their lives in shame from an outraged public opinion, seemed merely comic in Ealing and Bedford Park. These people referred to the Five Towns with negligent affection, but with disdain, as to a community that, with all its good qualities, had not yet emerged from barbarism. They assumed that their attitude was also Hilda's, and Hilda, after a moment's secret resentment, had indeed made their attitude her own. When she mentioned that she hoped soon to move Edwin into a country house, they applauded and implied that no other course was possible. Withal, their respect, to say nothing of their regard, for Edwin, the astute and successful man of business, was obvious and genuine. The two brothers Orgreave, amid their possibly superficial splendours of professional men, hinted envy of the stability of Edwin's trade position. And both Janet and Adela, shopping with Hilda, showed her, by those inflections and eyebrow-liftings of which women possess the secret, that the wife of a solid and generous husband had quite as much economic importance in London as in the Five Towns.

Thus when Hilda got into the train at Euston, she had in her head a plan of campaign compared to which the schemes entertained by her on the afternoon of the disastrous servants episode seemed amateurish and incomplete. And also she was like a returning adventurer, carrying back to his savage land the sacred torch of civilisation. She had perceived, as never before, the superior value of the suave and refined social methods of the metropolitan middle-classes, compared with the manners of the Five Towns, and it seemed to her, in her new enthusiasm for the art of life, that if she had ever had a difficulty with Edwin, her own clumsiness was to blame. She saw Edwin as an instrument to be played upon, and herself as a virtuoso. In such an attitude was necessarily a condescension. Yet this condescension somehow did not in the least affect the tenderness and the fever of her longing for Edwin. Her excitement grew as the train passed across the dusky December plain towards him. She thought of the honesty of his handshake and of his wistful glance. She knew that he was better than any of the people she had left,--either more capable, or more reliable, or more charitable, or all three. She knew that most of the people she had left were at heart snobs. "Am I getting a snob?" she asked herself. She had asked herself the question before. "I don't care if it is snobbishness. I want certain things, and I will have them, and they can call it what they like." Like the majority of women, she was incapable of being frightened by the names of her desires. She might be snobbish in one part of her, but in another she had the fiercest scorn for all that Ealing stood for. And in Edwin she admired nothing more than the fact that success had not modified his politics, which were as downright as they had ever been; she could not honestly say the same for herself; and assuredly the Orgreaves could not say the same for themselves. In politics, Edwin was an inspiration to her.

And when the train entered the fiery zone of industry, and slackened speed amid the squalid twilit streets, and stopped at Knype station in front of a crowd of local lowering faces and mackintoshed and gaitered forms, and the damp chill of the Five Towns came in through the opened door of the compartment, her heart fell, and she regretted the elegance of Ealing. But simultaneously her heart was beating with ecstatic expectation. She saw Edwin's face. It was a local face. He wore mourning. He saw her; his eye lighted; his wistful smile appeared. "Yes," she thought, "he is the same as my image of him. He is better than any of them. I am safe. What a shame to have left him all alone! He was quite right--there was no need for it. But I am so impulsive. He must have suffered terribly with those Benbows, and shut out of his own house too." ... His hand thrilled her. In the terrible sincerity and outpouring of her kiss she sought to compensate him for all wrongs past and future. Her joy in being near him again made her tingle. His matter-of-fact calmness pleased her. She thought: "I know him, with his matter-of-fact calmness!" "Hello, kid," Edwin addressed George with man-to-man negligence. "Been looking after your mother?" George answered like a Londoner. She had them side by side. It was the fact that George had looked after her. London had matured him; he had picked up a little Ealing. He was past Edwin's shoulder. Indeed he was surprisingly near to being a man. She had both of them. On the platform they surrounded her with their masculine protection. George's secret deep respect for Edwin was not hidden from her.

And yet, all the time, in her joy, reliance, love, admiration, eating him with her eyes, she was condescending to Edwin,--because she had plans for his good. She knew better than he did what would be for his good. And he was a provincial and didn't suspect it. "My poor boy!" she had said gleefully in the cab, pulling suddenly at a loose button of the old grey coat which he wore surreptitiously under his new black overcoat. "My poor boy, what a state you are in!" implying in her tone of affectionate raillery that without her he was a lost man. Through this loose button, she was his mother, his good angel, his saviour. The trifle had led to a general visitation of his wardrobe, conducted by her with metropolitan skill in humouring his susceptibilities.

Edwin now tried on the new office-coat with the self-consciousness that none but an odious dandy can avoid on such occasions.

"It seems warmer than it used to be," he said, pleased to have her beholding him and interesting herself in him, especially in his office. Her presence there, unless it happened to arouse his jealousy for his business independence, always pleasurably excited him. Her muff on the desk had the air of being the muff of a woman who was amorously interested in him, but his relations with whom were not regularised by the law or the church.

"Yes," said she. "I've put some wash-leather inside the lining at the back."

"Why?"

"Well, didn't you say you felt the cold from the window, and it's bad for your liver?"

Her glance said:

"Am I not a clever woman?"

And his replied:

"You are."

"That's the end of that, I hope, darling," she remarked, picking up the old office-coat and dropping it with charming affected disgust into the waste-paper basket.

He shouted for the clerk, who entered with some letters for signature. Under the eyes of his wife Edwin signed them with the demeanour of a secretary of state signing the destiny of provinces, while the clerk respectfully waited.

"I've asked Maggie to come up for the week-end," said Hilda carelessly, when they were alone together, and Edwin was straightening the desk preparatory to departure.

Since her return she had become far more friendly with Maggie than ever before,--not because Maggie had revealed any new charm, but because she saw in Maggie a victim of injustice. Nothing during the week had more severely tested Hilda's new methods of intercourse with Edwin than the disclosure of the provisions of Auntie Hamps's will, which she had at once and definitely set down as monstrous. She simply could not comprehend Edwin's calm acceptance of them, and a month earlier she would have been bitter about it. It was not (she was convinced) that she coveted money, but that she hated unfairness. Why should the Benbows have all Auntie Hamps's possessions, and Edwin and Maggie, who had done a thousand times more for her than the Benbows, nothing? Hilda's conversation implied that the Benbows ought to be ashamed of themselves, and when Edwin pointed out that their good luck was not their fault, only a miracle of self-control had enabled her to say nicely: "That's quite true," instead of sneering: "That's you all over, Edwin!" When she learnt that Edwin would receive not a penny for his labours as executor and trustee for the Benbow children, she was speechless. Perceiving that he did not care for her to discourse upon what she considered to be the wrong done to him, she discoursed upon the wrong done to Maggie--Maggie who was already being deprived by the wicked Albert of interest due to her. And Edwin had to agree with her about Maggie's case. It appeared that Maggie also agreed with her about Maggie's case. As for the Benbows, Hilda had not deigned to say one word to them on the matter. A look, a tone, a silence, had sufficed to express the whole of Hilda's mind to those Benbows.

"Oh!" said Edwin. "So Maggie's coming for the week-end, is she? Well, that's not a bad scheme." He knew that Maggie had been very helpful about servants, and that, the second servant having not yet arrived, she would certainly do much more work in the house than she "made." He pictured her and Hilda becoming still more intimate as they turned sheets and blankets and shook pillows on opposite sides of beds, and he was glad.

"Yes," said Hilda. "I've called there this morning."

"And what's she doing with Minnie?"

"We've settled all that," said Hilda proudly. Edwin had told her in detail the whole story of Minnie, and she had behaved exactly as he had anticipated. Her championship of Minnie had been as passionate as her ruthless verdict upon Minnie's dead mistress. "The girl's aunt was there when I called. We've settled she is to go to Stone, and Maggie and I shall do something for her, and when it's all over I may take her on as housemaid. Maggie says she probably wouldn't make a bad housemaid. Anyhow it's all arranged for the present."

"Then Maggie'll be without a servant?"

"No, she won't. We shall manage that. Besides, I suppose Maggie won't stay on in that house all by herself for ever! ... It's just the right size, I see."

"Just!" said Edwin.

He was spreading over his desk a dust-sheet with a red scolloped edging which Hilda had presented to him three days earlier.

She gazed at him with composed and justifiable self-satisfaction, as if saying: "Leave absolutely to me everything in my department, and see how smooth your life will be!"

He would never praise her, and she had a very healthy appetite for praise, which appetite always went hungry. But now, instead of resenting his niggardly reserve, she said to herself: "Poor boy! He can't bring himself to pay compliments; that's it. But his eyes are full of delicious compliments." She was happy, even if apprehensive for the immediate future. There she was, established and respected in his office, which was his church and the successful rival of her boudoir. Her plans were progressing.

She approached the real business of her call:

"I was thinking we might have gone over to see Ingpen this afternoon."

"Well, let's."

Ingpen, convalescent, had insisted, two days earlier, on being removed to his own house, near the village of Stockbrook, a few miles south of Axe. The departure was a surprising example of the mere power of volition on the part of a patient. The routine of hospital life had exasperated the recovering soul of this priest of freedom to such a point that doctor, matron, and friends had had to yield to a mere instinct.

"There's no decent train to go, and none at all to come back until nearly nine o'clock. And we can't cycle in this weather--at least I can't, especially in the dark."

"Well, what about Sunday?"

"The Sunday trains are worse."

"What a ghastly line!" said Edwin. "And they have the cheek to pay five per cent! I remember Ingpen telling me there was one fairish train into Knype in the morning, and one out in the afternoon. And there wouldn't be that if the Locomotive Superintendent didn't happen to live at Axe."

"It's a pity you haven't got a dog-cart, isn't it?" said Hilda, lightly smiling. "Because then we could use the works horse now and then, and it wouldn't really cost anything extra, would it?"

Her heart was beating perceptibly.

Edwin shook his head, agreeably, but with firmness.

"Can't mix up two different things like that!" he said.

She knew it. She was aware of the whole theory of horse-owning among the upper trading-class in the Five Towns. A butcher might use his cob for pleasure on Sundays--he never used it for pleasure on any other day--but traders on a higher plane than butchers drew between the works and the house a line which a works horse was not permitted to cross. One or two, perhaps,--but not the most solid--would put a carter into a livery overcoat and a shabby top-hat and describe him as a coachman while on rare afternoons he drove a landau or a victoria picked up cheap at Axe or Market Drayton. But the majority had no pretensions to the owning of private carriages. The community was not in fact a carriage community. Even the Orgreaves had never dreamed of a carriage. Old Darius Clayhanger would have been staggered into profanity by the suggestion of such a thing. Indeed, until some time after old Clayhanger's death the printing business had been content to deliver all its orders in a boy-pushed handcart. Only when Edwin discovered that, for instance, two thousand catalogues on faced clay paper could not be respectably delivered in a handcart, had he steeled himself to the prodigious move of setting up a stable. He had found an entirely trustworthy ostler-carter with the comfortable name of Unchpin, and, an animal and a tradesman's covered cart having been bought, he had left the affair to Unchpin. Naturally he had never essayed to drive the tradesman's cart. And Edwin Clayhanger could not be seen on the insecure box of a tradesman's cart. He had learnt nothing about horses except that a horse should be watered before, and not after, being fed, that shoeing cost a shilling a week and fodder a shilling a day, and that a horse driven over a hundred and fifty miles a week was likely to get "a bit over" at the knees. At home the horse and cart had always been regarded as being just as exclusively a works item as the printing-machines or the steam-engine.

"I suppose," said Hilda carefully, "you've got all the work one horse can do?"

"And more."

"Well, then, why don't you buy another one?" She tried to speak carelessly, without genuine interest.

"Yes, no doubt!" Edwin answered drily. "And build fresh stables, too."

"Haven't you got room for two?"

"Come along and look, and then perhaps you'll be satisfied."

Buzzers, syrens, and whistles began to sound in the neighbourhood. It was one o'clock.

"Shall I? ... Your overcoat collar's turned up behind. Let me do it."

She straightened the collar.

They went out, through the clerk's office. Edwin gave a sideways nod to Simpson. In the passage some girls and a few men were already hurrying forth. None of them took notice of Edwin and Hilda. They all plunged for the street as though the works had been on fire.

"They are in a hurry, my word!" Hilda murmured, with irony.

"And why shouldn't they be?" the employer protested almost angrily.

In the small yard stood the horseless cart, with "Edwin Clayhanger, Lithographer and Steam Printer, Bursley," on both its sides. The stable and cart-shed were in one penthouse, and to get to the stable it was necessary to pass through the cart-shed. Unchpin, a fat man of forty with a face marked by black seams, was bending over a chaff-cutter in the cart-shed. He ignored the intruders. The stable consisted of one large loose-box, in which a grey animal was restlessly moving.

"You see!" Edwin muttered curtly.

"Oh! What a beautiful horse! I've never seen him before."

"Her," Edwin corrected.

"Is it a mare?"

"So they say!"

"I never knew you'd got a fresh one."

"I haven't--yet. I've taken this one for a fortnight's trial, from Chawner.... How's she doing, Unchpin?" he called to the cart-shed.

Unchpin looked round and stared.

"Bit light," he growled and turned back to the chaff-cutter, which he seemed to be repairing.

"I thought so," said Edwin.

"But her's a good 'un," he added.

"But where's the old horse?" asked Hilda.

"With God," Edwin replied. "Dropped down dead last week."

"What of?"

Edwin shook his head.

"It's a privilege of horses to do that sort of thing," he said. "They're always doing it."

"You never told me."

"Well, you weren't here, for one thing."

The mare inquisitively but cautiously put her muzzle over the door of the box. Hilda stroked her. The animal's mysterious eyes, her beautiful coat, her broad back, her general bigness relatively to Hilda, the sound of her feet among the litter on the paving stones, the smell of the stable,--these things enchanted Hilda.

"I should adore horses!" she breathed, half to herself, ecstatically; and wondered whether she would ever be able to work her will on Edwin in the matter of a dog-cart. She pictured herself driving the grey mare, who had learnt to love her, in a flashing dog-cart, Edwin by her side on the front-seat. Her mind went back enviously to Tavy Mansion and Dartmoor. But she felt that Edwin had not enough elasticity to comprehend the rapture of her dream. She foresaw nearly endless trouble and altercation and chicane before she could achieve her end. She was ready to despair, but she remembered her resolutions and took heart.

"I say, Unchpin," said Edwin. "I suppose this box couldn't be made into two stalls?"

Unchpin on his gaitered legs clumped towards the stable, and gazed gloomily into the box. When he had gazed for some time, he touched his cap to Hilda.

"It could," he announced.

"Could you get a trap into the shed as well as the cart?"

"Ay! If ye dropped th' shafts o' th' trap under th' cart. What of it, mester?"

"Nothing. Only missis is going to have this mare."

After a pause, Unchpin muttered:

"Missis, eh!"

Hilda had moved a little away into the yard. Edwin approached her, flushing slightly, and with a self-consciousness which he tried to dissipate with one wink. Hilda's face was set hard.

"I must just go back to the office," she said, in a queer voice.

She walked quickly, Edwin following. Simpson beheld their return with gentle surprise. In the private office Hilda shut the door. She then ran to the puzzled Edwin, and kissed him with the most startling vehemence, clasping her arms--in one hand she still held the muff--round his neck. She loved him for being exactly as he was. She preferred his strange, uncouth method of granting a request, of yielding, of flattering her caprice, to any politer, more conventional methods of the metropolis. She thought that no other man could be as deeply romantic as Edwin. She despised herself for ever having been misled by the surface of him. And even the surface of him she saw now as it were, through the prism of passionate affection, to be edged with the blending colours of the rainbow. And when they came again out of the office, after the sacred rite, and Edwin, as uplifted as she, glanced back nevertheless at the sheeted desk and the safe and the other objects in the room with the half-mechanical habitual solicitude of a man from whom the weight of responsibility is never lifted, she felt saddened because she could not enter utterly into his impenetrable soul, and live through all his emotions, and comprehend like a creator the always baffling wistfulness of his eyes. This sadness was joy; it was the aura of her tremendous satisfaction in his individuality and in her triumph and in the thought: "I alone stand between him and desolation."

II

"Wo!" exclaimed Hilda broadly, bringing the mare and the vehicle to a standstill in front of the "Live and Let Live" inn in the main street of the village of Stockbrook, which lay about a mile and a half off the high road from the Five Towns to Axe. And immediately the mare stopped she was enveloped in her own vapour.

"Ha!" exclaimed Edwin, with faint benevolent irony. "And no bones broken!"

A man came out from the stable-yard.

The village of Stockbrook gave the illusion that hundreds of English villages were giving that Christmas morning,--the illusion that its name was Arcadia, that finality had been reached, and that the forces of civilisation could go no further. More suave than a Dutch village, incomparably neater and cleaner and more delicately finished than a French village, it presented, in the still, complacent atmosphere of long tradition, a picturesque medley of tiny architectures nearly every aspect of which was beautiful. And if seven people of different ages and sexes lived in a two-roomed cottage under a thatched roof hollowed by the weight of years, without drains and without water, and also without freedom, the beholder was yet bound to conclude that by some mysterious virtue their existence must be gracious, happy, and in fact ideal--especially on Christmas Day, though Christmas Day was also Quarter Day--and that they would not on any account have it altered in the slightest degree. Who could believe that fathers of families drank away their children's bread in the quaint tap-room of that creeper-clad hostel--a public-house fit to produce ecstasy in the heart of every American traveller--"The Live and Let Live"? Who could have believed that the Wesleyan Methodists already singing a Christmas hymn inside the dwarf Georgian conventicle, and their fellow-Christians straggling under the lych into the church-yard, scorned one another with an immortal detestation, each claiming a monopoly in knowledge of the unknowable? But after all the illusion of Arcadia was not entirely an illusion. In this calm, rime-decked, Christmas-imbued village, with its motionless trees enchanted beneath a vast grey impenetrable cloud, a sort of relative finality had indeed been reached,--the end of an epoch that was awaiting dissolution.

Edwin had not easily agreed to the project of shutting up house for the day and eating the Christmas dinner with Tertius Ingpen. Although customarily regarding the ritual of Christmas, with its family visits, its exchange of presents, its feverish kitchen activity, its somewhat insincere gaiety, its hours of boredom, and its stomachic regrets, as an ordeal rather than a delight, he nevertheless abandoned it with reluctance and a sense of being disloyal to something sacred. But the situation of Ingpen, Hilda's strong desire and her teasing promise of a surprise, and the still continuing dearth of servants had been good arguments to persuade him.

And though he had left Trafalgar Road moody and captious, thinking all the time of the deserted and cold home, he had arrived in Stockbrook tingling and happy, and proud of Hilda,--proud of her verve, her persistency, and her success. She had carried him very far on the wave of her new enthusiasm for horse-traction. She had beguiled him into immediately spending mighty sums on a dog-cart, new harness, rugs, a driving-apron, and a fancy whip. She had exhausted Unchpin, upset the routine of the lithographic business, and gravely overworked the mare, in her determination to learn to drive. She had had the equipage out at night for her lessons. On the other hand she had not in the least troubled herself about the purchase of a second horse for mercantile purposes, and a second horse had not yet been bought.

When she had announced that she would herself drive her husband and son over to Stockbrook, Edwin had absolutely negatived the idea; but Unchpin had been on her side; she had done the double journey with Unchpin, who judged her capable and the mare (eight years old) quite reliable, and who moreover wanted Christmas as much as possible to himself. And Hilda had triumphed. Walking the mare uphill--and also downhill--she had achieved Stockbrook in safety; and the conquering air with which she drew up at the "Live and Let Live" was delicious. The chit's happiness and pride radiated out from her. It seemed to Edwin that by the mere strength of violition she had actually created the dog-cart and its appointments, and the mare too! And he thought that he himself had not lived in vain if he could procure her such sensations as her glowing face then displayed. Her occasionally overbearing tenacity, and the little jars which good resolutions several weeks old had naturally not been powerful enough to prevent, were forgotten and forgiven. He would have given all his savings to please her caprice, and been glad. A horse and trap, or even a pair of horses and a landau, were a trifling price to pay for her girlish joy and for his own tranquillity in his beloved house and business.

"Catch me, both of you!" cried Hilda.

Edwin had got down, and walked round behind the vehicle to the footpath, where George stood grinning. The stableman, in classic attitude, was at the mare's head.

Hilda jumped rather wildly. It was Edwin who countered the shock of her descent. The edge of her velvet hat knocked against his forehead, disarranging his cap. He could smell the velvet, as for an instant he held his wife--strangely acquiescent and yielding--in his arms, and there was something intimately feminine in the faint odour. All Hilda's happiness seemed to pass into him, and that felicity sufficed for him. He did not desire any happiness personal to himself. He wanted only to live in her. His contentment was profound, complete, rapturous.

And yet in the same moment, reflecting that Hilda would certainly have neglected the well-being of the mare, he could say to the stableman:

"Put the rug over her, will you?"

"Hello! Here's Mr. Ingpen!" announced George, as he threw the coloured rug on the mare.

Ingpen, pale and thickly enveloped, came slowly round the bend of the road, waving and smiling. He had had a relapse, after a too early sortie, and was recovering from it.

"I made sure you'd be about here," he said, shaking hands. "Merry Christmas, all!"

"Ought you to be out, my lad?" Edwin asked heartily.

"Out? Yes. I'm as fit as a fiddle. And I've been ordered mild exercise." He squared off gaily against George and hit the stout adolescent in the chest.

"What about all your parcels, Hilda?" Edwin enquired.

"Oh! We'll call for them afterwards."

"Afterwards?"

"Yes. Come along--before you catch a chill." She winked openly at Ingpen, who returned the wink. "Come along, dear. It's not far. We have to walk across the fields."

"Put her up, sir?" the stableman demanded of Edwin.

"Yes. And give her a bit of a rub down," he replied absently, remembering various references of Hilda's to a surprise. His heart misgave him. Ingpen and Hilda looked like plotters, very intimate and mischievous. He had a notion that living with a woman was comparable to living with a volcano--you never knew when a dangerous eruption might not occur.

Within three minutes the first and minor catastrophe had occurred.

"Bit sticky, this field path of yours," said Edwin, uneasily.

They were all four slithering about in brown clay under a ragged hedge in which a few red berries glowed.

"It was as hard as iron the day before yesterday," said Hilda.

"Oh! So you were here the day before yesterday, were you? ... What's that house there?" Edwin turned to Ingpen.

"He's guessed it in one!" Ingpen murmured, and then went off into his characteristic crescendo laugh.

The upper part of a late eighteenth-century house, squat and square, with yellow walls, black uncurtained windows, high slim chimney, and a blue slate roof, showed like a gigantic and mysterious fruit in a clump of variegated trees, some of which were evergreen.

"Ladderedge Hall, my boy," said Ingpen. "Seat of the Beechinors for about a hundred years."

"'Seat', eh!" Edwin murmured sarcastically.

"It's been empty for two years," remarked Hilda brightly. "So we thought we'd have a look at it."

And Edwin said to himself that he had divined all along what the surprise was. It was astounding that a man could pass with such rapidity as Edwin from vivid joy to black and desolate gloom. She well knew that the idea of living in the country was extremely repugnant to him, and that nothing would ever induce him to consent to it. And yet she must needs lay this trap for him, prepare this infantile surprise, and thereby spoil his Christmas, she who a few moments earlier had been the embodiment of surrender in his arms! He said no word. He hummed a few notes and glanced airily to right and left with an effort after unconcern. The presence of Ingpen and the boy, and the fact of Christmas, forbade him to speak freely. He could not suddenly stop and drive his stick into the earth and say savagely:

"Now listen to me! Once for all, I won't have this country house idea! So let it be understood,--if you want a row, you know how to get it."

The appearance of amity--and the more high-spirited the better--must be kept up throughout the day. Nevertheless in his heart he challenged Hilda desperately. All her good qualities became insignificant, all his benevolent estimates of her seemed ridiculous. She was the impossible woman. He saw a tremendous vista of unpleasantness, for her obstinacy in warfare was known to him, together with her perfect lack of scruple, of commonsense, and of social decency. He had made her a present of a horse and trap--solely to please her--and this was his reward! The more rope you gave these creatures, the more they wanted! But he would give no more rope. Compromise was at an end. The battle would be joined that night.... In his grim and resolute dejection there was something almost voluptuous. He continued to glance airily about, and at intervals to hum a few notes.

Over a stile they dropped into a rutty side-road, and opposite was the worn iron gate of Ladderedge Hall, with a house-agent's board on it. A short curved gravel drive, filmed with green, led to the front-door of the house. In front were a lawn and a flower-garden, beyond a paddock, and behind a vegetable garden and a glimpse of stabling; a compact property! Ingpen drew a great key from his pocket. The plotters were all prepared; they took their victim for a simpleton, a ninny, a lamb!

In the damp echoing interior Edwin gazed without seeing, and heard as in a dream without listening. This was the hall, this the dining-room, this the drawing-room, this the morning-room.... White marble mantelpieces, pre-historic grates, wall-paper hanging in strips, cobwebs, uneven floors, scaly ceilings, the invisible vapour of human memories! This was the kitchen, enormous; then the larder, enormous, and the scullery still more enormous (with a pump-handle flanking the slopstone)! No water. No gas. And what was this room opening out of the kitchen? Oh! That must be the servants' hall.... Servants' hall indeed! Imagine Edwin Clayhanger living in a "Hall," with a servants' hall therein! Snobbishness unthinkable! He would not be able to look his friends in the face.... On the first floor, endless bedrooms, but no bath-room. Here, though, was a small bedroom that would make a splendid bath-room.... Ingpen, the ever expert, conceived a tank-room in the roof, and traced routes for plumbers' pipes. George, excited, and comprehending that he must conduct himself as behoved an architect, ran up to the attic floor to study on the spot the problem of the tank-room, and Ingpen followed. Edwin stared out of a window at the prospect of the Arcadian village lying a little below across the sloping fields.

"Come along, Edwin," Hilda coaxed.

Yes, she had pretended a deep concern for the welfare of the suffering feckless bachelor, Tertius Ingpen. She had paid visit after visit in order to watch over his convalescence. Choosing to ignore his scorn for all her sex, she had grown more friendly with him than even Edwin had ever been. Indeed by her sympathetic attentions she had made Edwin seem callous in comparison. And all the time she had merely been pursuing a private design--with what girlish deceitfulness.

In the emptiness of the house the voices of Ingpen and George echoed from above down the second flight of stairs.

"No good going to the attics," muttered Edwin, on the landing.

Hilda, half cajoling, half fretful, protested:

"Now, Edwin, don't be disagreeable."

He followed her on high, martyrised. The front wall of the house rose nearly to the top of the attic windows, screening and darkening them.

"Cheerful view!" Edwin growled.

He heard Ingpen saying that the place could be had on a repairing lease for sixty-five pounds a year, and that perhaps L1,200 would buy it. Dirt cheap.

"Ah!" Edwin murmured. "I know those repairing leases. L1,000 wouldn't make this barn fit to live in."

He knew that Ingpen and Hilda exchanged glances.

"It's larger than Tavy Mansion," said Hilda.

Tavy Mansion! There was the secret! Tavy Mansion was at the bottom of her scheme. Alicia Hesketh had a fine house, and Hilda must have a finer. She, Hilda, of all people, was a snob. He had long suspected it.

He rejoined sharply: "Of course it isn't larger than Tavy Mansion! It isn't as large."

"Oh! Edwin. How can you say such things!"

In the portico, as Ingpen was re-locking the door, the husband said negligently, superiorly, cheerfully:

"It's not so bad. I expect there's hundreds of places like this up and down the country--going cheap."

The walk back to the "Live and Let Live" was irked by constraint, against which everyone fought nobly, smiling, laughing, making remarks about cockrobins, the sky, the Christmas dinner.

"So I hear it's settled you're going to London when you leave school, kiddie," said Tertius Ingpen, to bridge over a fearful hiatus in the prittle-prattle.

George, so big now and so mannishly dressed as to be amused and not a bit hurt by the appellation "kiddie," confirmed the statement in his deepening voice.

Edwin thought:

"It's more than _I_ hear, anyway!"

Hilda had told him that during the visit to London the project for articling George to Johnnie Orgreave had been revived, but she had not said that a decision had been taken. Though Edwin from careful pride had not spoken freely--George being Hilda's affair and not his--he had shown no enthusiasm. Johnnie Orgreave had sunk permanently in his esteem--scarcely less so than Jimmie, whose conjugal eccentricities had scandalised the Five Towns and were achieving the ruin of the Orgreave practice; or than Tom, who was developing into a miser. Moreover, he did not at all care for George going to London. Why should it be thought necessary for George to go to London? The sagacious and successful provincial in Edwin was darkly jealous of London, as a rival superficial and brilliant. And now he learnt from Ingpen that George's destiny was fixed.... A matter of small importance, however!

Did "they" seriously expect him to travel from Ladderedge Hall to his works, and from his works to Ladderedge Hall every week-day of his life? He laughed sardonically to himself.

Out came the sun, which George greeted with a cheer. And Edwin, to his own surprise, began to feel hungry.

III

"I shan't take that house, you know," said Edwin, casually and yet confidentially, in a pause which followed a long analysis, by Ingpen, of Ingpen's sensations in hospital before he was out of danger.

They sat on opposite sides of a splendid extravagant fire in Ingpen's dining-room.

Ingpen, sprawling in a shabby, uncomfortable easychair, and flushed with the activity of digestion, raised his eyebrows, squinted down at the cigarette between his lips, and answered impartially:

"No. So I gather. Of course you must understand it was Hilda's plan to go up there. I merely fell in with it,--simplest thing to do in these cases!"

"Certainly."

Thus they both condescended to the feather-headed capricious woman, dismissed her, and felt a marked access of sincere intimacy on a plane of civilisation exclusively masculine.

In the succeeding silence of satisfaction and relief could be heard George, in the drawing-room above, practising again the piano part of a Haydn violin sonata which he had very nervously tried over with Ingpen while they were awaiting dinner.

Ingpen said suddenly:

"I say, old chap! Why have you never mentioned that you happened to meet a certain person in my room at Hanbridge that night you went over there for me?" He frowned.

Edwin had a thrill, pleasurable and apprehensive, at the prospect of a supreme confidence.

"It was no earthly business of mine," he answered lightly. But his tone conveyed: "You surely ought to be aware that my loyalty and my discretion are complete."

And Ingpen, replying to Edwin's tone, said with a simple directness that flattered Edwin to the heart:

"Naturally I knew I was quite safe in your hands.... I've reassured the lady." Ingpen smiled slightly.

Edwin was too proud to tell Ingpen that he had not said a word to Hilda, and Ingpen was too proud to tell Edwin that he assumed as much.

At that moment Hilda came into the room, murmuring a carol that some children of Stockbrook had sung on the doorstep during dinner.

"Don't be afraid--I'm not going to interrupt. I know you're in the thick of it," said she archly, not guessing how exactly truthful she was.

Ingpen, keeping his presence of mind in the most admirable manner, rejoined with irony:

"You don't mean to say you've finished already explaining to Mrs. Dummer how she ought to run my house for me!"

"How soon do you mean to have this table cleared?" asked Hilda.

The Christmas dinner, served by a raw girl in a large bluish-white pinafore, temporarily hired to assist Mrs. Dummer the housekeeper, had been a good one. Its only real fault was that it had had a little too much the air of being a special and mighty effort; and although it owed something to Hilda's parcels, Ingpen was justified in the self-satisfaction which he did not quite conceal as a bachelor host. But now, under Hilda's quizzing gaze, not merely the table but the room and the house sank to the tenth-rate. The coarse imperfections of the linen and the cutlery grew very apparent; the disorder of bottles and glasses and cups recalled the refectory of an inferior club. And the untidiness of the room, heaped with accumulations of newspapers, magazines, documents, books, boxes and musical-instrument cases, loudly accused the solitary despot whose daily caprices of arrangement were perpetuated and rendered sacred by the ukase that nothing was to be disturbed. Hilda's glinting eyes seemed to challenge each corner and dark place to confess its shameful dirt, and the malicious poise of her head mysteriously communicated the fact that in the past fortnight she had spied out every sinister secret in the whole graceless, primitive wigwam.

"This table," retorted Ingpen bravely, "is going to be cleared when it won't disturb me to have it cleared."

"All right," said Hilda. "But Mrs. Dummer does want to get on with her washing-up."

"Look here, madam," Ingpen replied. "You're a little ray of sunshine, and all that, and I'm the first to say so; but I'm not your husband." He made a warning gesture. "Now don't say you'd be sorry for any woman I was the husband of. Think of something more original." He burst out laughing.

Hilda went to the window and looked out at the fading day.

"Please, I only popped in to say it's nearly a quarter to three, and George and I will go down to the inn and bring the dog-cart up here. I want a little walk. We shan't get home till dark as it is."

"Oh! Chance it and stop for tea, and all will be forgiven."

"Drive home in the dark? Not much!" Edwin murmured.

"He's afraid of my driving," said Hilda.

When Edwin and Ingpen were alone together once more, Ingpen's expression changed back instantly to that which Hilda had disturbed, and Edwin's impatience, which had uneasily simmered during the interruption, began to boil.

"Her husband's in a lunatic asylum, I may tell you," said Ingpen.

"Whose?"

"The young woman's in question."

For Edwin, it was as if a door had opened in a wall and disclosed a vast unsuspected garden of romance.

"Really!"

"Yes, my boy," Ingpen went on, quietly, with restraint, but not without a naive and healthy pride in the sudden display of the marvellous garden. "And I didn't meet her at a concert, or on the Grand Canal, or anything of that sort. I met her in a mill at Oldham while I was doing my job. He was the boss of the mill; I walked into an office and he was lying on the floor on the flat of his back, and she was wiping her feet on his chest. He was saying in a very anxious tone: 'You aren't half wiping them. Harder! Harder!' That was his little weakness, you see. He happened to be convinced that he was a doormat. She had been hiding the thing for weeks, coming with him to the works, and so on, to calm him." Ingpen spoke more quickly and excitedly: "I never saw a more awful thing in my life! I never saw a more awful thing in my life! And coming across it suddenly, you see.... There was something absolutely odious in him lying down like that, and her trying to soothe him in the way he wanted. You should have seen the serious expression of his face, simply bursting with anxiety for her to wipe her boots properly on him. And her face when she caught sight of me. Oh! Dreadful! Dreadful!" Ingpen paused, and then continued calmly: "Of course I soon tumbled to it. For the matter of that, it didn't want much tumbling to. He went raving mad the same afternoon. And he's been more or less raving mad ever since."

"What a ghastly business.... Any children?"

"No, thank God!" Ingpen answered with fresh emotion. "But don't you forget that she's still the wife of that lunatic, and he'll probably live for ever. She's tied up to him just as if she was tied up to a post. Those are our Divorce Laws! Isn't it appalling? Isn't it inconceivable? Just think of the situation of that woman!" Ingpen positively glared at Edwin in the intensity of his indignation.

"Awful!" Edwin murmured.

"Quite alone in the world, you know!" said Ingpen. "I'm hanged if I know what she'd have done without me. She hadn't a friend--at any rate she hadn't a friend with a grain of sense. Astonishing how solitary some couples are! ... It aged her frightfully. She's much younger than she looks. Happily there was a bit of money--enough in fact."

Deeply as Edwin had been impressed by his romantic discovery of a woman in Ingpen's room at Hanbridge, he was still more impressed by it now. He saw the whole scene again, and saw it far more poetically. He accused himself of blindness, and also of a certain harshness of attitude towards the woman. He endowed her now with wondrous qualities. The adventure, in its tragicalness and its clandestine tenderness, was enchanting. How exquisite must be the relations between Ingpen and the woman if without warning she could go to his lair at night and wait confidently for his return! How divine the surprise for him, how ardent the welcome! He envied Ingpen. And also he admired him, for Ingpen had obviously conducted the affair with worthy expertise. And he had known how to win devotion.

With an air of impartiality Ingpen proceeded:

"You wouldn't see her quite at her best, I'm afraid. She's very shy--and naturally she'd be more shy than ever when you saw her. She's quite a different woman when the shyness has worn off. The first two or three times I met her I must say I didn't think she was anything more than a nice well-meaning creature,--you know what I mean. But she's much more than that. Can't play, but I believe she has a real feeling for music. She has time for reading, and she does read. And she has a more masculine understanding than nearly any other woman I've ever come across."

"You wait a bit!" thought Edwin. This simplicity on the part of a notable man of the world pleased him and gave him a comfortable sense of superiority.

Aloud he responded sympathetically:

"Good! ... Do I understand she's living in the Five Towns now?"

"Yes," said Ingpen, after a hesitation. He spoke in a peculiar, significant voice, carefully modest. The single monosyllable conveyed to Edwin: "I cannot deny it. I was necessary to this woman, and in the end she followed me!"

Edwin was impressed anew by the full revelation of romance which had concealed itself in the squalid dailiness of the Five Towns.

"In fact," said Ingpen, "you never know your luck. If she'd been free I might have been fool enough to get married."

"Why do you say a thing like that?"

"Because I think I should be a fool to marry." Ingpen tapping his front teeth with his finger-nail, spoke reflectively, persuasively, and with calm detachment.

"Why?" asked Edwin, persuasively also, but nervously, as though the spirit of adventure in the search for truth was pushing him to fatal dangers.

"Marriage isn't worth the price--for me, that is. I daresay I'm peculiar." Ingpen said this quite seriously, prepared to consider impartially the proposition that he was peculiar. "The fact is, my boy, I think my freedom is worth a bit more than I could get out of any marriage."

"That's all very well," said Edwin, trying to speak with the same dispassionate conviction as Ingpen, and scarcely succeeding. "But look what you miss! Look how you live!" Almost involuntarily he glanced with self-complacence round the unlovely, unseemly room, and his glance seemed to penetrate ceilings and walls, and to discover and condemn the whole charmless house from top to bottom.

"Why? What's the matter with it?" Ingpen replied uneasily; a slight flush came into his cheeks. "Nobody has a more comfortable bed or more comfortable boots than I have. How many women can make coffee as good as mine? No woman ever born can make first-class tea. I have all I want."

"No, you don't. And what's the good of talking about coffee, and tea, and beds?"

"Well, what else is there I want that I haven't got? If you mean fancy cushions and draperies, no, thanks!"

"You know what I mean all right.... And then 'freedom' as you say. What do you mean by freedom?"

"I don't specially mean," said Ingpen, tranquil and benevolent, "what I may call physical freedom. I'd give that up. I like a certain amount of untidiness, for instance, and I don't think an absence of dust is the greatest thing in the world; but I wouldn't in the least mind giving all that up. It wouldn't really matter to me. What I won't give up is my intellectual freedom. Perhaps I mean intellectual honesty. I'd give up even my intellectual freedom if I could be deprived of it fairly and honestly. But I shouldn't be. There's almost no intellectual honesty in marriage. There can't be. The entire affair is a series of compromises, chiefly base on the part of the man. The alternative is absolute subjection of the woman, which is offensive. No woman not absolutely a slave ever hears the truth except in anger. You can't say the same about men, and you know it. I'm not blaming; I'm stating. Even assuming a married man gets a few advantages that I miss, they're all purely physical----"

"Oh no! Not at all."

"My boy," Ingpen insisted, sitting up, and gazing earnestly at Edwin. "Analyse them down, and they're all physical--all! And I tell you I won't pay the price for them. I won't. I've no grievance against women; I can enjoy being with women as much as anybody, but I won't--I will not--live permanently on their level. That's why I say I might have been fool enough to get married. It's quite simple."

"Hm!"

Edwin, although indubitably one of those who had committed the vast folly of marriage, and therefore subject to Ingpen's indictment, felt not the least constraint, nor any need to offer an individual defence. Ingpen's demeanour seemed to have lifted the argument above the personal. His assumption that Edwin could not be offended was positively inspiring to Edwin. The fear of truth was exorcised. Freedom of thought existed in that room in England. Edwin reflected: "If he's right and I'm condemned accordingly,--well, I can't help it. Facts are facts, and they're extremely interesting."

He also reflected:

"Why on earth can't Hilda and I discuss like that?"

He did not know why, but he profoundly and sadly knew that such discussion would be quite impossible with Hilda.

The red-hot coals in the grate subsided together.

"And I'll tell you another thing----" Ingpen commenced.

He was stopped by the entrance of Mrs. Dummer, a fat woman, with an old japanned tray. Mrs. Dummer came in like a desperate forlorn hope. Her aged, grim, and yet somewhat hysterical face seemed to say: "I'm going to clear this table and get on with my work, even if I die for it at the hands of a brutal tyrant." Her gestures as she made a space for the tray and set it down on the table were the formidable gestures of the persecuted at bay.

"Mrs. Dummer," said Ingpen, in a weak voice, leaning back in his chair, "would you mind fetching me my tonic off my dressing-table? I've forgotten it."

"Bless us!" exclaimed Mrs. Dummer.