IV
Amid the crowd, stamping, and tapping his way monotonously along with the assured obstinacy of a mendicant experienced and hardened, came a shabby man bearing on his breast a large label with these words: ‘Blind through boy throwing mortar. Discharged from four hospitals. Incurable.’ Edwin’s heart seemed to be constricted. He thought of the ragged snarling touts who had fawned to him at the station, and of the creatures locked in the cellars whence came beautiful odours of confectionery and soup through the pavement gratings, and of the slatternly women who kept thrusting flowers under his nose, and the half-clad infants who skimmed before the wind yelling the names of newspapers. All was not triumph! Where triumph was, there also must be the conquered.
She was there, she too! Somewhere, close to him. He recalled the exact tone of Janet’s voice as she had said: ‘The poor thing’s had a great deal of trouble.’ A widow, trying to run a boarding-house and not succeeding! Why, there were hundreds upon hundreds of boarding-houses, all large, all imposing, all busy at the end of October! Where was hers hidden away, her pathetic little boarding-house? Preston Street! He knew not where Preston Street was, and he had purposely refrained from inquiring. But he might encounter it at any moment. He was afraid to look too closely at the street-signs as he passed them; afraid!
‘What am I doing here?’ he asked himself curiously, and sometimes pettishly. ‘What’s my object? Where’s the sense of it? I’m nothing but a damned fool. I’ve got no plan. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ It was true. He had no plan, and he did not know what he was going to do. What he did most intimately know was that the idea of her nearness made him tremble.
‘I’d much better go back at once,’ he said.
He walked miles, until he came to immense and silent squares of huge palatial houses, and wide transversal avenues running far up into the land and into the dusk. In these vast avenues and across these vast squares infrequent carriages sped like mechanical toys guided by mannikins. The sound of the sea waxed. And then he saw the twinkle of lights, and then fire ran slowly along the promenade: until the whole map of it was drawn out in flame; and he perceived that though he had walked a very long way, the high rampart of houses continued still interminably beyond him. He turned. He was tired. His face caught the full strength of the rising wind. Foam gleamed on the rising tide. In the profound violet sky to the east stars shone and were wiped out, in fields; but to the west, silver tarried. He had not seen Preston Street, and it was too dark now to decipher the signs. He was glad. He went on and on, with rapidly increasing fatigue, disgust, impatience. The thronging multitudes had almost disappeared; but many illuminated vehicles were flitting to and fro, and the shops were brilliant. He was so exhausted by the pavements that he could scarcely walk. And Brighton became for him the most sorrowful city on earth.
‘What am I doing here?’ he asked himself savagely. However, by dint of sticking doggedly to it he did in the end reach the hotel.
V
After dinner, and wine, both of which, by their surprising and indeed unique excellence, fostered the prestige of Stifford as an authority upon hotels, Edwin was conscious of new strength and cheerfulness. He left the crowded and rose-lit dining-room early, because he was not at ease amid its ceremoniousness of attire and of service, and went into the Turkey-carpeted hall, whose porter suddenly sprang into propitiatory life on seeing him. He produced a cigarette, and with passionate haste the porter produced a match, and by his method of holding the flame to the cigarette, deferential and yet firm, proved that his young existence had not been wasted in idleness. When the cigarette was alight, the porter surveyed his work with a pleased smile.
‘Another rare storm blowing up, sir,’ said the porter.
‘Yes,’ said Edwin. ‘It’s been giving the window of my room a fine shake.’
The porter glanced at the clock. ‘High tide in half an hour, sir,’
‘I think I’ll go out and have a look at it,’ said Edwin.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘By the way,’ Edwin added, ‘I suppose you haven’t got a map of Brighton?’
‘Certainly, sir,’ said the porter, and with a rebirth of passion began to search among the pile of time-tables and other documents on a table behind him.
Edwin wished he had not asked for the map. He had not meant to ask for it. The words had said themselves. He gazed unseeing at the map for a few instants.
‘What particular street did you want, sir?’ the porter murmured.
In deciding how to answer, it seemed to Edwin that he was deciding the hazard of his life.
‘Preston Street.’
‘Oh! Preston Street!’ the porter repeated in a relieved tone, as if assuring Edwin that there was nothing very esoteric about Preston Street.’ ‘It’s just beyond the Metropole. You know Regency Square. Well, it’s the next street after that. There’s a club at the corner.’
In the afternoon, then, Edwin must have walked across the end of Preston Street twice. This thought made him tremble, as at the perception of a danger past but unperceived at the moment.
The porter gave his whole soul to the putting of Edwin’s overcoat on Edwin’s back; he offered the hat with an obeisance; and having ushered Edwin into the night so that the illustrious guest might view the storm, he turned with a sudden new mysterious supply of zeal to other guests who were now emerging from the dining-room.
VI
The hotel fronted north on an old sheltered square where no storm raged, but simultaneously with Edwin’s first glimpse of the sea the wind struck him a tremendous blow, and continued to strike. He had the peculiar grim joy of the Midlander and Northerner in defying an element. All the lamps of the promenade were insecurely flickering. Grouped opposite a small jetty was a crowd of sightseers. The dim extremity of the jetty was wreathed in spray, and the waves ran along its side, making curved lines on the masonry like curved lines of a rope shaken from one end. The wet floor of the jetty shone like a mirror. Edwin approached the crowd, and, peeping over black shoulders, could see down into the hollow of the corner between the jetty and the sea-wall, where boys on the steps dared the spent waves, amid jeering laughter. The crowd had the air of being a family intimately united. Farther on was another similar crowd, near an irregular high fountain of spray that glittered in the dark. On the beach below, at vague distances were curious rows of apparently tiny people silhouetted like the edge of a black saw against an excessive whiteness. This whiteness was the sheet of foam that the sea made. It stretched everywhere, until the eye lost it seawards. Edwin descended to the beach, adding another tooth to the saw. The tide ran up absolutely white in wide chords of a circle, and then, to the raw noise of disturbed shingle, the chord vanished; and in a moment was re-created. This play went on endlessly, hypnotizing the spectators who, beaten by the wind and deafened by sound, stared and stared, safe, at the mysterious and menacing world of spray and foam and darkness. Before, was the open malignant sea. Close behind, on their eminence, the hotels rose in vast cubes of yellow light, moveless, secure, strangely confident that nothing sinister could happen to them.
Edwin was aware of emotion. The feel of his overcoat-collar upturned against the chin was friendly to him amid that onset of the pathos of the human world. He climbed back to the promenade. Always at the bottom of his mind, the foundation of all the shifting structures in his mind, was the consciousness of his exact geographical relation to Preston Street. He walked westwards along the promenade.’Why am I doing this?’ he asked himself again and again. ‘Why don’t I go home? I must be mad to be doing this.’ Still his legs carried him on, past lamp-post after lamp-post of the wind-driven promenade, now almost deserted. And presently the high lighted windows of the grandest hotels were to be seen, cut like square holes in the sky; and then the pier, which had flung a string of lanterns over the waves into the storm; and opposite the pier a dark empty space and a rectangle of gas-lamps: Regency Square. He crossed over, and passed up the Square, and out of it by a t
iny side-street, at hazard, and lo! he was in Preston Street. He went hot and cold.
VII
Well, and what then? Preston Street was dark and lonely. The wind charged furiously through it, panting towards the downs. He was in Preston Street, but what could he do? She was behind the black walls of one of those houses. But what then? Could he knock at the door in the night and say: ‘I’ve come. I don’t know why?’
He said: ‘I shall walk up and down this street once, and then I shall go back to the hotel. That’s the only thing to do. I’ve gone off my head, that’s what’s the matter with me! I ought to have written to her. Why in the name of God didn’t I begin by writing to her? … Of course I might write to her from the hotel … send the letter by messenger tonight … or early tomorrow. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.’
He set himself to make the perambulation of the street. Many of the numbers were painted on the fanlights over the doors and showed plain against illumination. Suddenly he saw the large figures ‘59.’ He was profoundly stirred. He had said that the matter with him was that he had gone off his head; but now, staring at that number on the opposite side of the street, he really did not know what was the matter with him. He might have been dying. The front of the house was dark save for the fanlight. He crossed over and peered down into the area and at the black door. A brass plate:’Cannon’s Boarding-House,’ he could read. He perspired. It seemed to him that he could see her within the house, mysteriously moving at her feminine tasks. Or did she lie in bed? He had come from Bursley to London, from London to Brighton, and now he had found her portal; it existed. The adventure seemed incredible in its result. Enough for the present! He could stand no more. He walked away, meaning not to return.
When he returned, five minutes later, the fanlight was dark. Had she, in the meantime, come into the hall of the house and extinguished the gas? Strange, that all lights should be out in a boarding establishment before ten o’clock! He stood hesitant quite near the house, holding himself against the wind. Then the door opened a little, as it were stealthily, and a hand and arm crept out and with a cloth polished the face of the brass plate. He thought, in his excited fancy, that it was her hand and arm. Within, he seemed to distinguish a dim figure. He did not move; could not. The door opened wider, and the figure stood revealed, a woman’s. Surely it was she! She gazed at him suspiciously, duster in hand.
‘What are you standing there for?’ she questioned inimically. ‘We’ve had enough of loiterers in this street. Please go away.’
She took him for a knave expectant of some chance to maraud. She was not fearful, however. It was she. It was her voice.
4
In Preston Street
I
HE SAID, ‘I happened to be in Brighton, so I thought I’d just call, and – I thought I’d just call.’
She stared at him, frowning, in the dim diffused light of the street.
‘I’ve been seeing your little boy,’ he said. ‘I thought perhaps as I was here you’d like to know how he was getting on.’
‘Why,’ she exclaimed, with seeming bitterness, ‘you’ve grown a beard!’
‘Yes,’ he admitted foolishly, apologetically.
‘We can’t stand here in this wind,’ she said, angry with the wind, which was indeed blowing her hair about, and her skirts and her duster.
She did not in words invite him to enter, but she held the door more widely open and drew back for him to pass. He went in. She closed the door with a bang and rattle of large old-fashioned latches, locks, and chains, and the storm was excluded. They were in the dark of the hall. ‘Wait till I put my hand on the matches,’ she said. Then she struck a match, which revealed a common oil-lamp, with a reservoir of yellow glass and a paper shade. She raised the chimney and lit the lamp, and regulated the wick.
Edwin kept silence. The terrible constraint which had half paralysed him when Janet first mentioned Hilda, seized him again. He stood near the woman who without a word of explanation or regret had jilted, outraged, and ruined him ten years before; this was their first meeting after their kisses in his father’s shop. And yet she was not on her knees, nor in tears, nor stammering an appeal for forgiveness. It was rather he who was apologetic, who sought excuses. He felt somehow like a criminal, or at least like one who commits an enormous indiscretion.
The harsh curves of her hair were the same. Her thick eyebrows were the same. Her blazing glance was the same. Her intensely clear intonation was the same. But she was a profoundly changed woman. Even in his extreme perturbation he could be sure of that. As, bending under the lampshade to arrange the wick, she exposed her features to the bright light, Edwin saw a face marred by anxiety and grief and time, the face of a mature woman, with no lingering pretension to girlishness. She was thirty-four, and she looked older than Maggie, and much older than Janet. She was embittered. Her black dress was shabby and untidy, her finger-nails irregular, discoloured, and damaged. The aspect of her pained Edwin acutely. It seemed to him a poignant shame that time and sorrow and misfortune could not pass over a young girl’s face and leave no mark. When he recalled what she had been, comparing the woman with the delicious wistful freshness of the girl that lived unaltered in his memory, he was obliged to clear his throat. The contrast was too pathetic to be dwelt on. Only with the woman before him did he fully appreciate the exquisite innocent simplicity of the girl. In the day of his passion Hilda had not seemed to him very young, very simple, very wistful. On the contrary she had seemed to have much of the knowledge and the temper of a woman.
Having at length subjugated the wick, she straightened her back, with a gesture that he knew, and for one instant she was a girl again.
II
‘Will you come this way?’ she said coldly, holding the lamp in front of her, and opening a door.
At the same moment another door opened at the far end of the hall; there was a heavy footstep; a great hand and arm showed, and then Edwin had a glimpse of a man’s head and shoulders emerging from an oblong flickering firelight.
Hilda paused. ‘All right,’ she called to the man, who at once disappeared, shutting the door and leaving darkness where he had been. The large shadows cast by Hilda’s lamp now had the gaunt hall to themselves again.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ she laughed harshly. ‘It’s only the broker’s man.’
Edwin was tongue-tied. If Hilda were joking, what answer could be made to such a pleasantry in such a situation? And if she were speaking the truth, if the bailiffs really were in possession …! His life seemed to him once again astoundingly romantic. He had loved this woman, conquered her. And now she was a mere acquaintance, and he was following her stiffly into the recesses of a strange and sinister abode peopled by mysterious men. Was this a Brighton boarding-house? It resembled nothing reputable in his experience. All was incomprehensible.
The room into which she led him was evidently the dining-room. Not spacious, perhaps not quite so large as his own dining-room, it was nearly filled by one long bare table. Eight or ten monotonous chairs were ranged round the grey walls. In the embrasure of the window was a wicker stand with a withered plant on its summit, and at the other end of the room a walnut sideboard in the most horrible taste. The mantelpiece was draped with dark knotted and rosetted cloth; within the fender stood a small paper screen. The walls were hung with ancient and with fairly modern engravings, some big, others little, some coloured, others in black-and-white, but all distressing in their fatuous ugliness. The ceiling seemed black. The whole room fulfilled pretty accurately the scornful scrupulous housewife’s notion of a lodging-house interior. It was suspect. And in Edwin there was a good deal of the housewife. He was appalled. Obviously the house was small – he had known that from the outside – and the entire enterprise insignificant. This establishment was not in the King’s Road, nor on the Marine Parade, nor at Hove; no doubt hundreds of such little places existed precariously in a vast town like Brighton. Widows, of course, were often in straits. And Janet had told him …
Nevertheless he was appalled, and completely at a loss to reconcile Hilda with her environment. And then – ‘the broker’s man’!
At her bidding he sat down, in his overcoat, with his hat insecure on his knee, and observed, under the lamp, the dust on the surface of the long table. Hilda seated herself opposite, so that the lamp was between them, hiding him from her by its circle of light. He wondered what Maggie would have thought, and what Clara would have said, could they have seen him in that obscurity.
III
‘So you’ve seen my boy?’ she began, with no softening of tone.
‘Yes, Janet Orgreave brought him in one morning – the other day. He didn’t seem to me to be so ill as all that.’
‘Ill!’ she exclaimed. ‘He certainly wasn’t ill when he left here. But he had been. And the doctor said that this air didn’t suit him – it never had suited him. It doesn’t suit some folks, you know – people can say what they like.’
‘Anyhow, he’s a lively piece – no mistake about that!’
‘When he’s well, he’s very well,’ said George’s mother. ‘But he’s up and down in a minute. And on the whole he’s been on the poorly side.’