And it seemed incredible.
V
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 tomorrow. I shall write you before I go to bed, whether it’s tonight or tomorrow 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 ownership.
‘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.
21
The Marriage
I
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: ‘Tomorrow 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 manœuvres 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 recognized 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. No
w, 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.
II
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 utilizing 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.
It was the hallowed rite of reading ‘The Christian News’ that Edwin disturbed in his sudden and capricious resolve. Maggie and Mrs Nixon had gone to chapel, for Mrs Nixon, by reason of her years, bearing, mantle, and reputation, could walk down Trafalgar Road by the side of her mistress on a Sunday night without offence to the delicate instincts of the town. The niece, engaged to be married at an age absurdly youthful, had been permitted by Mrs Nixon the joy of attending evensong at the Bleakridge Church on the arm of a male, but under promise to be back at a quarter to eight to set supper. The house was perfectly still when Edwin came all on fire out of his bedroom and slid down the stairs. The gas burnt economically low within its stained-glass cage in the hall. The drawing-room door was unlatched. He hesitated a moment on the mat, and he could hear the calm ticking of the clock in the kitchen and see the red glint of the kitchen fire against the wall. Then he entered, looking and feeling apologetic.
His father was all curtained in; his slippered feet on the fender of the blazing hearth, his head cushioned to a nicety, the long paper-knife across his knees. And the room was really hot and in a glow of light. Darius turned and, lowering his face, gazed at Edwin over the top of his new gold-rimmed spectacles.
‘Not gone to chapel?’ he frowned.
‘No! … I say, father, I just wanted to speak to you.’
Darius made no reply, but shifted his glance from Edwin to the fire, and maintained his frown. He was displeased at the interruption. Edwin failed to shut the door at the first attempt, and then banged it in his nervousness. In spite of himself he felt like a criminal. Coming forward, he leaned his loose, slim frame against a corner of the old piano.
III
‘Well?’ Darius growled impatiently, even savagely. They saw each other, not once a week, but at nearly every hour of every day, and they were surfeited of the companionship.
‘Supposing I wanted to get married.’ This sentence shot out of Edwin’s mouth like a bolt. And as it flew, he blushed very red. In the privacy of his mind he was horribly swearing.
‘So that’s it, is it?’ Darius growled again. And he leaned forward and picked up the poker, not as a menace, but because he, too, was nervous. As an opposer of his son he had never had quite the same confidence in himself since Edwin’s historic fury at being suspected of theft, though apparently their relations had resumed the old basis of bullying and submission.
‘Well?—’ Edwin hesitated. He thought, ‘After all, people do get married. It won’t be a crime.’
‘Who’st been running after?’ Darius demanded inimically. Instead of being softened by this rumour of love, by this hint that his son had been passing through wondrous secret hours, he instinctively and without any reason hardened himself and transformed the news into an offence. He felt no sympathy, and it did not occur to him to recall that he, too, had once thought of marrying. He was a man whom life had brutalized about half a century earlier.
‘I was only thinking,’ said Edwin clumsily – the fool had not sense enough even to sit down – ‘I was only thinking, suppose I did want to get married.’
‘Who’st been running after?’
‘W
ell, I can’t rightly say there’s anything – what you may call settled. In fact, nothing was to be said about it at all at present. But it’s Miss Lessways, father – Hilda Lessways, you know.’
‘Her as came in the shop the other day?’
‘Yes.’
‘How long’s this been going on?’
Edwin thought of what Hilda had said. ‘Oh! Over a year.’ He could not possibly have said ‘four days.’ ‘Mind you, this is strictly q.t.! Nobody knows a word about it, nobody! But of course I thought I’d better tell you. You’ll say nothing.’ He tried wistfully to appeal as one loyal man to another. But he failed. There was no ray of response on his father’s gloomy features, and he slipped back insensibly into the boy whose right to an individual existence had never been formally admitted.
Something base in him – something of that baseness which occasionally actuates the oppressed – made him add: ‘She’s got an income of her own. Her father left money.’ He conceived that this would placate Darius.
‘I know all about her father,’ Darius sneered, with a short laugh. ‘And her father’s father! … Well, lad, ye’ll go your own road.’ He appeared to have no further interest in the affair. Edwin was not surprised, for Darius was seemingly never interested in anything except his business; but he thought how strange, how nigh to the incredible, the old man’s demeanour was.
‘But about money, I was thinking,’ he said, uneasily shifting his pose.
‘What about money?’
‘Well,’ said Edwin, endeavouring, and failing, to find courage to put a little sharpness into his tone, ‘I couldn’t marry on seventeen-and-six a week, could I?’
At the age of twenty-five, at the end of nine years’ experience in the management and the accountancy of a general printing and stationery business, Edwin was receiving seventeen shillings and sixpence for a sixty-five-hour week’s work, the explanation being that on his father’s death the whole enterprise would be his, and that all money saved was saved for him. Out of this sum he had to pay ten shillings a week to Maggie towards the cost of board and lodging, so that three half-crowns remained for his person and his soul. Thus he could expect no independence of any kind until his father’s death, and he had a direct and powerful interest in his father’s death. Moreover, all his future, and all unpaid reward of his labours in the past, hung hazardous on his father’s goodwill. If he quarrelled with him, he might lose everything. Edwin was one of a few odd-minded persons who did not regard this arrangement as perfectly just, proper, and in accordance with sound precedent. But he was helpless. His father would tell him, and did tell him, that he had fought no struggles, suffered no hardship, and no responsibility, and that he was simply coddled from head to foot in cotton-wool.