He noticed that, though there was no relapse from the correctness of her accent, she was using just such phrases as she might have used had she never quitted her native Turnhill. He looked round the lamp at her furtively, and seemed to see in her shadowed face a particular local quality of sincerity and downrightness that appealed strongly to his admiration. (Yet ten years earlier he had considered her markedly foreign to the Five Towns.) That this quality should have survived in her was a proof to him that she was a woman unique. Unique she had been, and unique she still remained. He did not know that he had long ago lost for ever the power of seeing her with a normal vision. He imagined in his simplicity, which disguised itself as chill critical impartiality, that he was adding her up with clear-sighted shrewdness … And then she was a mother! That meant a mysterious, a mystic perfecting! For him, it was as if among all women she alone had been a mother – so special was his view of the influence of motherhood upon her. He drew together all the beauty of an experience almost universal, transcendentalized it, and centred it on one being. And he was disturbed, baffled, agitated by the effect of the secret workings of his own unsuspected emotion. He was made sad, and sadder. He wanted to right wrongs, to efface from hearts the memory of grief, to create bliss; and he knew that this could never be done. He now saw Hilda exclusively as a victim, whose misfortunes were innumerable. Imagine this creature, with her passion for Victor Hugo, obliged by circumstances to polish a brass door-plate surreptitiously at night! Imagine her solitary in the awful house – with the broker’s man! Imagine her forced to separate herself from her child! Imagine the succession of disasters that had soured her and transformed seriousness into harshness and acridity! … And within that envelope, what a soul must be burning!
‘And when he begins to grow – he’s scarcely begun to grow yet,’ Hilda continued about her offspring, ‘then he will need all his strength!’
‘Yes, he will,’ Edwin concurred heartily.
He wanted to ask her, ‘Why did you call him Edwin for his second name? Was it his father’s name, or your father’s, or did you insist on it yourself, because—?’ But he could not ask. He could ask nothing. He could not even ask why she had jilted him without a word. He knew naught, and evidently she was determined to give no information. She might at any rate have explained how she had come to meet Janet, and under what circumstances Janet had taken possession of the child. All was a mystery. Her face, when he avoided the lamp, shone in the midst of a huge dark cloud of impenetrable mystery. She was too proud to reveal anything whatever. The grand pride in her forbade her even to excuse her conduct to himself. A terrific woman!
IV
Silence fell. His constraint was excruciating. She, too, was nervous, tapping the table and creaking her chair. He could not speak.
‘Shall you be going back to Bursley soon?’ she demanded. In her voice was desperation.
‘Oh yes!’ he said, thankfully eager to follow up any subject. ‘On Monday, I expect.’
‘I wonder if you’d mind giving Janet a little parcel from me – some things of George’s? I meant to send it by post, but if you—’
‘Of course! With pleasure!’ He seemed to implore her.
‘It’s quite small,’ she said, rising and going to the sideboard, on which lay a little brown-paper parcel.
His eye followed her. She picked up the parcel, glanced at it, and offered it to him.
‘I’ll take it across on Monday night,’ he said fervently.
‘Thanks.’
She remained standing; he got up.
‘No message or anything?’ he suggested.
‘Oh!’ she said coldly, ‘I write, you know.’
‘Well—’ He made the gesture of departing. There was no alternative.
‘We’re having very rough weather, aren’t we?’ she said, with careless conventionality, as she took the lamp.
In the hall, when she held out her hand, he wanted tremendously to squeeze it, to give her through his hand the message of sympathy which his tongue, intimidated by her manner, dared not give. But his hand also refused to obey him. The clasp was strictly ceremonious. As she was drawing the heavy latch of the door he forced himself to say, ‘I’m in Brighton sometimes, off and on. Now I know where you are, I must look you up.’
She made no answer. She merely said good night as he passed out into the street and the wind. The door banged.
V
Edwin took a long breath. He had seen her! Yes, but the interview had been worse than his worst expectations. He had surpassed himself in futility, in fatuous lack of enterprise. He had behaved like a schoolboy. Now, as he plunged up the street with the wind, he could devise easily a dozen ways of animating and guiding and controlling the interview so that, even if sad, its sadness might have been agreeable. The interview had been hell, ineffable torture, a perfect crime of clumsiness. It had resulted in nothing. (Except, of course, that he had seen her – that fact was indisputable.) He blamed himself. He cursed himself with really extraordinary savageness.
‘Why did I go near her?’ he demanded. ‘Why couldn’t I keep away? I’ve simply made myself look a blasted fool! Creeping and crawling round her! … After all, she did throw me over! And now she asks me to take a parcel to her confounded kid! The whole thing’s ridiculous! And what’s going to happen to her in that hole? I don’t suppose she’s got the least notion of looking after herself. Impossible – the whole thing! If anybody had told me that I should – that she’d—’ Half of which talk was simple bluster. The parcel was bobbing on its loop against his side.
When he reached the top of the street he discovered that he had been going up it instead of down it. ‘What am I thinking of?’ he grumbled impatiently. However, he would not turn back. He adventured forward, climbing into latitudes whose geography was strange to him, and scarcely seeing a single fellow-wanderer beneath the gas-lamps. Presently, after a steep hill, he came to a churchyard, and then he redescended, and at last tumbled into a street alive with people who had emerged from a theatre, laughing, lighting cigarettes, linking arms. Their existence seemed shallow, purposeless, infantile, compared to his. He felt himself superior to them. What did they know about life? He would not change with any of them.
Recognizing the label on an omnibus, he followed its direction and arrived almost immediately in the vast square which contained his hotel, and which was illuminated by the brilliant façades of several hotels. The doors of the Royal Sussex were locked, because eleven o’clock had struck. He could not account for the period of nearly three hours which had passed since he left the hotel. The zealous porter, observing his shadow through the bars, had sprung to unfasten the door before he could ring.
VI
Within the hotel reigned gaiety, wine, and the dance. Small tables had been placed in the hall, and at these sat bald-headed men, smoking cigars and sharing champagne with ladies of every age. A white carpet had been laid in the large smoking-room, and through the curtained archway that separated it from the hall, Edwin could see couples revolving in obedience to the music of a piano and a violin. One of the Royal Sussex’s Saturday Cinderellas was in progress. The self-satisfied gestures of men inspecting their cigars or lifting glasses, of simpering women glancing on the sly at their jewels, and of youths pulling straight their white waistcoats as they strolled about with the air of Don Juans, invigorated his contempt for the average existence. The tinkle of the music appeared exquisitely tedious in its superficiality. He could not remain in the hall because of the incorrectness of his attire, and the staircase was blocked, to a timid man, by elegant couples apparently engaged in the act of flirtation. He turned, through a group of attendant waiters, into the passage leading to the small smoking-room which adjoined the discreetly situated bar. This smoking-room, like a club, warm and bright, was empty, but in passing he had caught sight of two mutually affectionate dandies drinking at the splendid mahogany of the bar. He lit a cigarette. Seated in the smoking-room he could hear their conversation; he was fo
rced to hear it.
‘I’m really a very quiet man, old chap, very quiet,’ said one, with a wavering drawl, ‘but when they get at me— I was at the Club at one o’clock. I wasn’t drunk, but I had a top on.’
‘You were just gay and cheerful,’ the other flatteringly and soothingly suggested, in an exactly similar wavering drawl.
‘Yes. I felt as if I wanted to go out somewhere and have another drink. So I went to Willis’s Rooms. I was in evening-dress. You know you have to get a domino for those things. Then, of course, you’re a mark at once. I also got a nose. A girl snatched it off me. I told her what I thought of her, and I got another nose. Then five fellows tried to snatch my domino off me. Then I did get angry. I landed out with my right at the nearest chap – right on his heart. Not his face. His heart. I lowered him. He asked me afterwards, “Was that your right?” “Yes,” I said, “and my left’s worse!” I couldn’t use my left because they were holding it. You see? You see?’
‘Yes,’ said the other impatiently, and suddenly cantankerous. ‘I see that all right! Damned awful rot those Willis’s Rooms affairs are getting, if you ask me!’
‘Asses!’ Edwin exploded within himself. ‘Idiots!’ He could not tolerate their crassness. He had a hot prejudice against them because they were not as near the core of life as he was himself. It appeared to him that most people died without having lived. Willis’s Rooms! Girls! Nose! Heart! … Asses!
He surged again out of the small room, desolating the bar with one scornful glance as he went by. He braved the staircase, leaving those scenes of drivelling festivity. In his bedroom, with the wind crashing against the window, he regarded meditatively the parcel. After all, if she had meant to have nothing to do with him, she would not have charged him with the parcel. The parcel was a solid fact. The more he thought about it, the more significant a fact it seemed to him. His ears sang with the vibrating intensity of his secret existence, but from the wild confusion of his heart he could disentangle no constant idea.
5
The Bully
I
THE NEXT MORNING he was up early, preternaturally awake. When he descended the waiters were waiting for him, and the zealous porter stood ready to offer him a Sunday paper, just as though in the night they had refreshed themselves magically, without going to bed. No sign nor relic of the Cinderella remained. He breakfasted in an absent mind, and then went idly into the lounge, a room with one immense circular window, giving on the Square. Rain was falling heavily. Already from the porter, and in the very mien of the waiters, he had learnt that the Brighton Sunday was ruined. He left the window. On a round table in the middle of the room were ranged, with religious regularity, all the most esoteric examples of periodical literature in our language, from ‘The Iron-Trades Review’ to ‘The Animals’ Guardian.’ With one careless movement he destroyed the balanced perfection of a labour into which some menial had put his soul, and then dropped into a gigantic easy chair near the fire, whose thin flames were just rising through the interstices of great black lumps of coal.
The housekeeper, stiff with embroidered silk, swam majestically into the lounge, bowed with a certain frigid and deferential surprise to the early guest, and proceeded to an inquiry into dust. In a moment she called, sharp and low –
‘Arthur!’
And a page ran eagerly in, to whom, in the difficult corners of upholstery and of sculptured wood, she pointed out his sins of omission, lashing him with a restrained voice that Edwin could scarcely hear. Passing her hand carelessly along the beading of a door panel and then examining her fingers, she departed. The page fetched a duster.
‘I see why this hotel has such a name,’ said Edwin to himself. And suddenly the image of Hilda in that dark and frowzy tenement in Preston Street, on that wet Sunday morning, filled his heart with a revolt capricious and violent. He sprang to his feet, unreflecting, wilful, and strode into the hall.
‘Can I have a cab?’ he asked the porter.
‘Certainly, sir,’ said the porter, as if saying, ‘You ask me too little. Why will you not ask for a white elephant so that I may prove my devotion?’ And within five seconds the screech of a whistle sped through the air to the cabstand at the corner.
II
‘Why am I doing this?’ he once more asked himself, when he heard the bell ring, in answer to his pull, within the house in Preston Street. The desire for a tranquil life had always been one of his strongest instincts, and of late years the instinct had been satisfied, and so strengthened. Now he seemed to be obstinately searching for tumult; and he did not know why. He trembled at the sound of movement behind the door. ‘In a moment,’ he thought, ‘I shall be right in the thick of it!’
As he was expecting, she opened the door herself; but only a little, with the gesture habitual to women who live alone in apprehension, and she kept her hand on the latch.
‘Good morning,’ he said curtly. ‘Can I speak to you?’
His eye could not blaze like hers, but all his self-respect depended on his valour now, and with desperation he affronted her. She opened the door wider, and he stepped in, and at once began to wipe his boots on the mat with nervous particularity.
‘Frightful morning!’ he grinned.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Is that your cab outside?’
He admitted that it was.
‘Perhaps if we go upstairs,’ she suggested.
Thanking her, he followed her upwards into the gloom at the head of the narrow stairs, and then along a narrow passage. The house appeared quite as unfavourably by day as by night. It was shabby. All its tints had merged by use and by time into one tint, nondescript and unpleasant, in which yellow prospered. The drawing-room was larger than the dining-room by the poor width of the hall. It was a heaped, confused mass of chairs, sofas, small tables, draperies, embroideries, and valueless knick-knacks. There was no peace in it for the eye, neither on the walls nor on the floor. The gaze was driven from one ugliness to another without rest.
The fire-place was draped; the door was draped; the back of the piano was draped; and none of the dark suspicious stuffs showed a clear pattern. The faded chairs were hidden by faded antimacassars; the little futile tables concealed their rickets under vague needlework, on which were displayed in straw or tinsel frames pale portraits of dowdy people who had stood like sheep before fifteenth-rate photographers. The mantelpiece and the top of the piano were thickly strewn with fragments of coloured earthenware. At the windows hung heavy dark curtains from great rings that gleamed gilt near the ceiling; and lest the light which they admitted should be too powerful it was further screened by greyish white curtains within them. The carpet was covered in most places by small rugs or bits of other carpets, and in the deep shadows beneath sofas and chairs and behind the piano it seemed to slip altogether out of existence into black nothingness. The room lacked ventilation, but had the appearance of having been recently dusted.
III
Hilda closed the draped door with a mysterious, bitter cynical smile.
‘Sit down,’ she said coldly.
‘Last night,’ Edwin began, without sitting down, ‘when you mentioned the broker’s man, were you joking or did you mean it?’
She was taken aback.
‘Did I say “broker’s man”?’
‘Well,’ said Edwin, ‘you’ve not forgotten, I suppose.’
She sat down, with some precision of pose, on the principal sofa.
‘Yes,’ she said at length. ‘As you’re so curious. The landlords are in possession.’
‘The bailiffs still here?’
‘Yes.’
‘But what are you going to do?’
‘I’m expecting them to take the furniture away tomorrow, or Tuesday at the latest,’ she replied.
‘And then what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But haven’t you got any money?’
She took a purse from her pocket, and opened it with a show of impartial curiosity. ‘Two-and-seven,’ she
said.
‘Any servant in the house?’
‘What do you think?’ she replied. ‘Didn’t you see me cleaning the door-plate last night? I do like that to look nice at any rate!’
‘I don’t see much use in that looking nice, when you’ve got the bailiffs in, and no servant and no money,’ Edwin said roughly, and added, still more roughly: ‘What should you do if anyone came inquiring for rooms?’ He tried to guess her real mood, but her features would betray nothing.
‘I was expecting three old ladies – sisters – next week,’ she said. ‘I’d been hoping I could hold out till they came. They’re horrid women, though they don’t know it; but they’ve stayed a couple of months in this house every winter for I don’t know how many years, and they’re firmly convinced it’s the best house in Brighton. They’re quite enough to keep it going by themselves when they’re here. But I shall have to write and tell them not to come this time.’
‘Yes,’ said Edwin. ‘But I keep asking you – what then?’
‘And I keep saying I don’t know.’
‘You must have some plans?’
‘I haven’t.’ She put her lips together, and dimpled her chin, and again cynically smiled. At any rate she had not resented his inquisition.
‘I suppose you know you’re behaving like a perfect fool?’ he suggested angrily. She did not wince.
‘And what if I am? What’s that got to do with you?’ she asked, as if pleasantly puzzled.
‘You’ll starve. You can’t live for ever on two-and-seven.’
‘Well?’
‘And the boy? Is he going to starve?’
‘Oh,’ said Hilda, ‘Janet will look after him till something turns up. The fact is, that’s one reason why I allowed her to take him.’
‘“Something turns up,” “something turns up”!’ Edwin repeated deliberately, letting himself go. ‘You make me absolutely sick! It’s absolutely incredible how some people will let things slide! What in the name of God Almighty do you think will turn up?’