‘I don’t know,’ she said, with a certain weakness, still trying to be placidly bitter, and not now succeeding.
‘Where is the bailiff-johnny?’
‘He’s in the kitchen with one of his friends, drinking.’
Edwin with bravado flopped his hat down forcefully on a table, pushed a chair aside, and strode towards the door.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked in alarm, standing up.
‘Where do you suppose I’m going? I’m going to find out from that chap how much will settle it. If you can’t show any common sense for yourself, other folks must show some for you – that’s all. The brokers in the house! I never heard of such work!’
And indeed, to a respected and successful tradesman, the entrance of the bailiffs into a house did really seem to be the very depth of disaster and shame for the people of that house. Edwin could not remember that he had ever before seen a bailiff. To him a bailiff was like a bug – something heard of, something known to exist, but something not likely to enter the field of vision of an honest and circumspect man.
He would deal with the bailiff. He would have a short way with the bailiff. Secure in the confidence of his bankers, he was ready to bully the innocent bailiff. He would not reflect, would not pause. He had heated himself. His steam was up, and he would not let the pressure be weakened by argumentative hesitations. His emotion was not disagreeable.
When he was in the passage he heard the sound of a sob. Prudently, he had not banged the door after him. He stopped, and listened. Was it a sob? Then he heard another sob. He went back to the drawing-room.
IV
Yes! She stood in the middle of the room weeping. Save Clara, and possibly once or twice Maggie, he had never seen a woman cry – that is, in circumstances of intimacy; he had seen women crying in the street, and the spectacle usually pained him. On occasion he had very nearly made Maggie cry, and had felt exceedingly uncomfortable. But now, as he looked at the wet eyes and the shaken bosom of Hilda Cannon, he was aware of acute joy. Exquisite moment! Damn her! He could have taken her and beaten her in his sudden passion – a passion not of revenge, not of punishment! He could have made her scream with the pain that his love would inflict.
She tried to speak, and failed, in a storm of sobs. He had left the door open. Half blind with tears she dashed to the door and shut it, and then turned and fronted him, with her hands hovering near her face.
‘I can’t let you do it!’ she murmured imploringly, plaintively, and yet with that still obstinate bitterness in her broken voice.
‘Then who is to do it?’ he demanded, less bitterly than she had spoken, nevertheless not softly. ‘Who is to keep you if I don’t? Have you got any other friends who’ll stand by you?’
‘I’ve got the Orgreaves,’ she answered.
‘And do you think it would be better for the Orgreaves to keep you, or for me?’ As she made no response, he continued: ‘Anybody else besides the Orgreaves?’
‘No,’ she muttered sulkily. ‘I’m not the sort of woman that makes a lot of friends. I expect people don’t like me, as a rule.’
‘You’re the sort of woman that behaves like a blooming infant!’ he said. ‘Supposing I don’t help you? What then – I keep asking you? How shall you get money? You can only borrow it – and there’s nobody but Janet, and she’d have to ask her father for it. Of course, if you’d sooner borrow from Osmond Orgreave than from me …’
‘I don’t want to borrow from anyone,’ she protested.
‘Then you want to starve! And you want your boy to starve – or else to live on charity! Why don’t you look facts in the face? You’ll have to look them in the face sooner or later, and the sooner the better. You think you’re doing a fine thing by sitting tight and bearing it, and saying nothing, and keeping it all a secret, until you get pitched into the street! Let me tell you you aren’t.’
V
She dropped into a chair by the piano, and rested her elbows on the curved lid of the piano.
‘You’re frightfully cruel!’ she sobbed, hiding her face.
He fidgeted away to the larger of the two windows, which was bayed, so that the room could boast a view of the sea. On the floor he noticed an open book, pages downwards. He picked it up. It was the poems of Crashaw, an author he had never read but had always been intending to read. Outside, the driver of his cab was bunching up his head and shoulders together under a large umbrella upon which the rain spattered. The flanks of the resigned horse glistened with rain.
‘You needn’t talk about cruelty!’ he remarked, staring hard at the signboard of an optician opposite. He could hear the faint clanging of church bells.
After a pause she said, as if apologetically –
‘Keeping a boarding-house isn’t my line. But what could I do? My sister-in-law had it, and I was with her. And when she died … Besides, I dare say I can keep a boarding-house as well as plenty of other people. But – well, it’s no use going into that!’
Edwin abruptly sat down near her.
‘Come, now,’ he said less harshly, more persuasively. ‘How much do you owe?’
‘Oh!’ she cried, pouting, and shifting her feet. ‘It’s out of the question! They’ve distrained for seventy-five pounds.’
‘I don’t care if they’ve distrained for seven hundred and seventy-five pounds!’ She seemed just like a girl to him again now, in spite of her face and her figure. ‘If that was cleared off, you could carry on, couldn’t you? This is just the season. Could you get a servant in, in time for these three sisters?’
‘I could get a charwoman, anyhow,’ she said unwillingly.
‘Well, do you owe anything else?’
‘There’ll be the expenses.’
‘Of the distraint?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s nothing. I shall lend you a hundred pounds. It just happens that I’ve got fifty pounds on me in notes. That and a cheque’ll settle the bailiff person, and the rest of the hundred I’ll send you by post. It’ll be a bit of working capital.’
She rose and threaded between chairs and tables to the sofa, several feet from Edwin. With a vanquished and weary sigh, she threw herself on to the sofa.
‘I never knew there was anybody like you in the world,’ she breathed, flicking away some fluff from her breast. She seemed to be regarding him, not as a benefactor, but as a natural curiosity.
VI
He looked at her like a conqueror. He had taught her a thing or two. He had been a man. He was proud of himself. He was proud of all sorts of details in his conduct. The fifty pounds in notes, for example, was not an accident. Since the death of his father, he had formed the habit of never leaving his base of supplies without a provision far in excess of what he was likely to need. He was extravagant in nothing, but the humiliations of his penurious youth and early manhood had implanted in him a morbid fear of being short of money. He had fantastically surmised circumstances in which he might need a considerable sum at Brighton. And lo! the sequel had transformed his morbidity into prudence.
‘This time yesterday,’ he reflected, in his triumph, ‘I hadn’t even seen her, and didn’t know where she was. Last night I was a fool. Half an hour ago she herself hadn’t a notion that I was going to get the upper hand of her … Why, it isn’t two days yet since I left home! … And look where I am now!’
With pity and with joy he watched her slowly wiping her eyes. Thirty-four, perhaps; yet a child – compared to him! But if she did not give a natural ingenuous smile of relief, it was because she could not. If she acted foolishly it was because of her tremendous haughtiness. However, he had lowered that. He had shown her her master. He felt that she had been profoundly wronged by destiny, and that gentleness must be lavished upon her.
In a casual tone he began to talk about the most rapid means of getting rid of the bailiff. He could not tolerate the incubus of the bailiff a moment longer than was absolutely unavoidable. At intervals a misgiving shot like a thin flying needle through the s
olid satisfaction of his sensations: ‘She is a strange and an incalculable woman – why am I doing this?’ Shot, and was gone, almost before perceived!
6
The Rendezvous
I
IN THE AFTERNOON the weather cleared somewhat. Edwin, vaguely blissful, but with nothing to occupy him save reflection, sat in the lounge drinking tea at a Moorish table. An old Jew, who was likewise drinking tea at a Moorish table, had engaged him in conversation and was relating the history of a burglary in which he had lost from his flat in Bolton Street, Piccadilly, nineteen gold cigarette-cases and thirty-seven jewelled scarf-pins, tokens of esteem and regard offered to him by friends and colleagues at various crises of his life. The lounge was crowded, but not with tea-drinkers. Despite the horrid dismalness of the morning, hope had sent down from London trains full of people whose determination was to live and to see life in a grandiose manner. And all about the lounge of the Royal Sussex were groups of elegant youngish men and flaxen, uneasily stylish women, inviting the assistance of flattered waiters to decide what liqueurs they should have next. Edwin was humanly trying to publish in nonchalant gestures the scorn which he really felt for these nincompoops, but whose free expression was hindered by a layer of envy.
The hall-porter appeared, and his eye ranged like a condor’s over the field until it discovered Edwin, whom he approached with a mien of joy and handed to him a letter.
Edwin took the letter with an air of custom, as if he was anxious to convince the company that his stay at the Royal Sussex was frequently punctuated by the arrival of special missives.
‘Who brought this?’ he asked.
‘An oldish man, sir,’ said the porter, and bowed and departed.
The handwriting was hers. Probably the broker’s man had offered to bring the letter. In the short colloquy with him in the morning, Edwin had liked the slatternly, coarse fellow. The bailiff could not, unauthorized, accept cheques, but his tone in suggesting an immediate visit to his employers had shown that he had bowels, that he sympathized with the difficulties of careless tenants in a harsh world of landlords. It was Hilda who, furnished with notes and cheque, had gone, in Edwin’s cab, to placate the higher powers. She had preferred to go herself, and to go alone. Edwin had not insisted. He had so mastered her that he could afford to yield to her in trifles.
II
The letter said exactly this: ‘Everything is all right and settled. I had no trouble at all. But I should like to speak to you this afternoon. Will you meet me on the West Pier at six? – H. C.’ No form of greeting! No thanks! The bare words necessary to convey a wish! On leaving her in the morning no arrangement had been made for a further interview. She had said nothing, and he had been too proud to ask – the terrible pride of the benefactor! It was only by chance that it had even occurred to him to say: ‘By the way, I am staying at the Royal Sussex.’ She had shown no curiosity whatever about him, his doings, his movements. She had not put to him a single question. He had intended to call at Preston Street on the Monday morning. And now a letter from her! Her handwriting had scarcely changed. He was to meet her on the pier. At her own request he now had a rendezvous with her on the pier! Why not at her house? Perhaps she was afraid of his power over her in the house. (Curious, how she, and she almost alone, roused the masculine force in him!) Perhaps she wanted to thank him in surroundings which would compel both of them to be calm. That would be like her! Essentially modest, restrained! And did she not know how to be meek, she who was so headstrong and independent!
He looked at the clock. The hour was not yet five. Nevertheless he felt obliged to go out, to bestir himself. On the misty, crowded, darkening promenade he abandoned himself afresh to indulgence in the souvenance of the great critical scene of the morning. Yes, he had done marvels; and Fate was astoundingly kind to him also. But there was one aspect of the affair that intrigued and puzzled him, and weakened his self-satisfaction. She had been defeated, yet he was baffled by her. She was a mystery within folds of mysteries. He was no nearer – he secretly felt – to the essential Her than he had been before the short struggle and his spectacular triumph. He wanted to reconstruct in his fancy all her emotional existence; he wanted to get at her – to possess her intimate mind – and lo! he could not even recall the expressions of her face from minute to minute during the battle. She hid herself from him. She eluded him … Strange creature! The polishing of the doorplate in the night! That volume of Crashaw – on the floor! Her cold, almost daemonic smile! Her sobs! Her sudden retreats! What was at the back of it all? He remembered her divine gesture over the fond Shushions. He remembered the ecstatic quality of her surrender in the shop. He remembered her first love-letter: ‘Every bit of me is absolutely yours.’ And yet the ground seemed to be unsure beneath his feet, and he wondered whether he had ever in reality known her, ever grasped firmly the secret of her personality, even for an instant.
He said to himself that he would be seeing her face to face in an hour, and that then he would, by the ardour of his gaze, get behind those enigmatic features to the arcana they concealed.
III
Before six o’clock it was quite dark. He thought it a strange notion, to fix a rendezvous at such an hour, on a day in autumn, in the open air. But perhaps she was very busy, doing servant’s work in the preparation of her house for visitors. When he reached the pier gates at five minutes to six, they were closed, and the obscure vista of the pier as deserted as some northern pier in mid-winter. Naturally it was closed! There was a notice prominently displayed that the pier would close that evening at dusk. What did she mean? The truth was, he decided, that she lived in the clouds, ordering her existence by means of sudden and capricious decisions in which facts were neglected – and herein probably lay the explanation of her misfortunes. He was very philosophical; rather amused than disturbed, because her house was scarcely a stone’s-throw away: she could not escape him.
He glanced up and down the lighted promenade, and across the broad muddy road towards the opening of Preston Street. The crowds had disappeared; only scattered groups and couples, and now and then a solitary, passed quickly in the gloom. The hotels were brilliant, and carriages with their flitting lamps were continually stopping in front of them; but the blackness of the shop-fronts produced the sensation of melancholy proper to the day even in Brighton, and the renewed sound of church bells intensified this arid melancholy.
Suddenly he saw her, coming not across the road from Preston Street, but from the direction of Hove. He saw her before she saw him. Under the multiplicity of lamps her face was white and clear. He had a chance to read in it. But he could read nothing in it save her sadness, save that she had suffered. She seemed querulous, preoccupied, worried, and afflicted. She had the look of one who is never free from apprehension. Yet for him that look of hers had a quality unique, a quality that he had never found in another, but which he was completely unable to define. He wanted acutely to explain to himself what it was, and he could not.
‘You are frightfully cruel,’ she had said. And he admitted that he had been. Yes, he had bullied her, her who, he was convinced, had always been the victim. In spite of her vigorous individuality she was destined to be a victim. He was sure that she had never deserved anything but sympathy and respect and affection. He was sure that she was the very incarnation of honesty – possibly she was too honest for the actual world. Did not the Orgreaves worship her? And could he himself have been deceived in his estimate of her character?
She recognized him only when she was close upon him. A faint, transient, wistful smile lightened her brooding face, pale and stern.
IV
‘Oh! There you are!’ she exclaimed, in her clear voice. ‘Did I say six, or five, in my note?’
‘Six.’
‘I was afraid I had done, when I came here at five and didn’t find you. I’m so sorry.’
‘No!’ he said. ‘I think I ought to be sorry. It’s you who’ve had the waiting to do. The pier’s closed now.’ r />
‘It was just closing at five,’ she answered. ‘I ought to have known. But I didn’t. The fact is, I scarcely ever go out. I remembered once seeing the pier open at night, and I thought it was always open.’ She shrugged her shoulders as if stopping a shiver.
‘I hope you haven’t caught cold,’ he said. ‘Suppose we walk along a bit.’
They walked westwards in silence. He felt as though he were by the side of a stranger, so far was he from having pierced the secret of that face.
As they approached one of the new glazed shelters, she said –
‘Can’t we sit down a moment. I – I can’t talk standing up. I must sit down.’
They sat down, in an enclosed seat designed to hold four And Edwin could feel the wind on his calves, which stretched beyond the screened side of the structure Odd people passed dimly to and fro in front of them, glanced at them with nonchalant curiosity, and glanced away. On the previous evening he had observed couples in those shelters, and had wondered what could be the circumstances or the preferences which led them to accept such a situation. Certainly he could not have dreamed that within twenty-four hours he would be sitting in one of them with her, by her appointment, at her request. He thrilled with excitement – with delicious anxieties.
‘Janet told you I was a widow,’ Hilda began, gazing at the ferrule of her umbrella, which gleamed on the ground.
‘Yes.’ Again she was surprising him.
‘Well, we arranged she should tell every one that. But I think you ought to know that I’m not.’